Ugh the complete obsession with Gottlieb and Geiszler was a big part of my turnoff with PacRim fandom, together with the second movie being kind of a trash fire. The treatment of Pentecost as opposed to Geizler is a textbook example of fandom falling over itself to project marginalized identities onto white characters while ignoring nonwhite, especially Black, characters who canonically are disabled etc.

Also agreed, fuck fans having to do the work of representation for media companies especially when amazing works that have great representation actually exist, e.g. Broken Earth. But oh wait, when fandom talks about wanting trans representation they mean yet more skinny cis white boys they can imagine as trans, not canonical trans lesbians of color! Gotcha gotcha.

(I'm not being strictly fair here, since stuff like, say, Marvel movies have vastly different levels of exposure than even Hugo Award-winning science fiction novels, and I certainly don't want to turn into one of those "how dare you sleep on this" killjoys. But then again queer white people are eminently capable of racism and I am tired of giving fandom a pass as inherently progressive just because they are fandom. A much fairer comparison is what you have done here of course, between characters that appear in the same work.)