I’m afraid I’m quite outside this debate. As I understand, Vanessa was Hermann’s “pregnant model wife” in Travis Beacham’s original imagining of the character and she only exists in any public form (outside his notes) in the novelization. Whether the novel mentions if she’s a WOC I wouldn’t know as I have not read it. 

This is as good a place as any to mention it though. I was not part of the original Pacific Rim fandom. It really was Uprising that got me into the fandom, and in fact I disliked the original film when I first saw it. I found it too intense and scary, and kept the fandom deliberately at arm’s length as a result. What brought me into it at all was the Precursor Newt plotline. 

I bring this up only because, for me, Uprising eliminates any extraneous fanon or quasi-canon left in the air after the original film. For example, Burn Gorman said he didn’t know about Vanessa and therefore her existence played no part in his portrayal of Hermann, and her presence is nowhere to be seen in Uprising either, which to me translates as her not existing in the film universe.  I come from the Tolkien fandom, I’m very accustomed to saying “This is book canon, this is movie canon, this is quasi-canon from some author letter, etc.” If the actor isn’t portraying Hermann as a married man, I don’t consider him one when I write because I’m writing movie canon, where actor and director quasi-canon is more important than novelization quasi-canon. Similarly, though perhaps more controversially, I don’t consider Hermann or Newt to be German in upbringing, especially after Uprising where even traces of the possibility vanish (Charlie Day is very New England in his flavor of American, and Burn doubles down on the English-ness in that film too). Their parents might be German, but in my head Hermann was raised in England and Newt was raised in Boston, and they identify as such, because neither of the actors made any (visible) effort to portray their characters as German and are very clearly English and American respectively (Burn might have tried to add some German intonation in PR1 but… honey… oh honey, no, it’s not at all apparent). 

Basically, I just take what I see in the films and borrow maybe a little from the Year Zero comic, and that’s about it. I have no wider awareness or interest in the Vanessa question. There’s some great writers who do explore the various possible forms of “Vanessa” but honestly this person in the tag strikes me as the usual Tumblr drama which is thinly disguised bullying over trivial matters like whether a fictional character “exists” or not. Those who engage in it are, to me, generally speaking people who have a sadistic or bullying streak who like to cause drama and grief for others, usually because they feel a lack of control in other aspects of their life, so they try to police the enjoyment of others. My recommendation would be block, and pay them no further mind.