Thans for your participation.
I am sure WotC doesn't want only to be polite and respecful but its wish is to conquer the Asian market, and not only one country. Its dream is Asian players broadcasting their own OA video game-live shows or fans publishing their web-manga using the D&D mythology.
OA has got some tropes, but they aren't racist steriotypes, at least not intentionally, but a reflection of many tropes we can see in the Asian speculative fiction (manga-anime, manwha, manhua) by and for Asians.
WotC's goal is to publish a "xuanhuan" D&D who otaku community love. The first step is to create the right pieces, and later to dare to sell your own building. And we should start with the PC races. Theses need a right power balance about racial traits, of course, but also an interesting lore.
- I imagine korobokuru (based in creatures from ainu folklore) not as jungle gnomes (like the happy little people from a 80's children cartoon) but as survivors who lived in a fallen empire withing the kami/spirit kingdom. Sometimes some korobokuru return to this cursed land to recover pieces of their lost past.
- My vision of the shen/spirit folk is of children of lungs (imperial dragons) or petitioners from the spirit realm allowed to come back to the mortal world (or planar traverlers who visited the spirit realm). Their position is not comfortable, too noble to be ordinary commoners, too low to be treated as members of the noblest castes. Then they try to find their own path. They are neither arrogante nor ambitious because they notice
"the tallest poppy what stand out from the rest is the first to be wanted to be cut". Or they were normal humans for a previous life and rewarded (or punished) with a "failed reincarnation", something like
the devas(aasimars) from 4th Ed or the samsarans, the PC race of Pathfinder.
- Vanara are perfect to roleplay the stranger who messes up because he doesn't know the local customs.
- Would be possible wood or metal genasies?
