Basic Trope: Someone can't tell people of a different race apart.
- Straight:
- Bob cannot tell Lee (Chinese) and Nakamura (Japanese) apart.
- Lee, who is Chinese, cannot tell the difference between Jack the Englishman and Jacques the Frenchman.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob often confuses his best friend Lee (who has very distinct Delinquent Hair) with random Asian guys.
- Bob is a white man, and thinks every non-whites look exactly the same.
- Bob, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant American man, confuses every ethnicity but his own, even other white groups like Jan the Dutchman and Jacques the Frenchman too.
- Downplayed:
- Bob can't tell the Chinese Lee and the Japanese Nakamura apart but he can tell Lee apart from the Thai Niran.
- Bob can tell the Chinese Lee and the Japanese Nakamura apart but he can't tell Nakamura apart from another Japanese Suzuki.
- Bob can normally tell Lee and Nakamura apart, but not when they are wearing identical dust masks and shower caps.
- Bob can tell the Chinese Lee and the Japanese Nakamura apart, but he can't tell Lee, who is Chinese American, apart from Li who comes from Mainland China.
- Lee can't tell Jack (Englishman) apart from Jacques (Frenchman) but he tell Javier (Spaniard) apart from the other two.
- Justified:
- Bob came from an isolated community with little Asian contact.
- Lee and Nakamura happen to have very similar faces and personal styles.
- Inverted: Bob is able to distinguish the features between every known ethnicity except his own.
- Subverted: Bob finally learns the difference between Chinese and Japanese features, and finally stops confusing Lee and Nakamura with each other.
- Double Subverted:
- ...But it turns out to be a lucky guess and he really still can't tell them apart.
- But He is only able to distinguish the difference between Chinese and Japanese, otherwise, he still confuses Lee with random Chinese guys.
- Parodied:
- Lee and Nakamura look ridiculously obviously Chinese and Japanese respectively, but even then Bob cannot tell them apart.
- All Asian characters are depicted as Inexplicably Identical Individuals.
- ... And to make things "worse", Lee and Nakamura cannot tell themselves apart most of times!
Lee: Hey! How did I managed to get across the street? Oh, well! Hi me, have a nice day! - Zig Zagged: Sometimes Bob can tell them apart, sometimes he cannot.
- Averted: Bob can differentiate between Asian characters.
- Enforced:
- An acting troupe is forced to cast the same person as Lee and Nakamura due to their small size.
- The Only Six Faces artwork style applies to all characters of a certain race.
- Lampshaded: "I can't tell who you are!"
- Invoked:
- In a Cold War spy thriller, Chinese, North Korean or Vietnamese agents pretend to be Japanese to infiltrate the US, counting on the ignorance of the average non-Asian American to smooth over any potential discrepancies.
- Lee and Nakamura pretend they're related.
- Due to strict Asian beauty standards, all Asian characters decide to get surgery to give themselves identical facial features and body types.
- Exploited:
- In the face of anti-Chinese sentiment, Lee insists that someone is mistaking him for another Asian.
- Nakamura disguises himself as Lee with less effort because they already look alike in the eyes of Bob.
- Bob's Betty and Veronica love triangle consists of Cosplay Otaku Girl Sakura and K-Pop Idol Singer Sarang, after they know that Bob can't tell them apart, they start imitating each other whenever Bob has a sign of leaning toward their opposition.
- Defied: Bob does his research to avoid making this sort of mistake again.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Bob's confusion gets him in trouble with ultra-nationalists and ethnic gangs who think he's mocking them.
- Reconstructed: But then they see Bob going out of his way to actually learn about them and give it a pass.
- Played For Laughs: A show has multiple Asian characters all played by the same actor. (yes, ALL of them, including the women)
- Played For Drama:
- The work is a World War II drama where Chinese immigrants to America have to contend with racism due to being constantly mistaken as Japanese.
- The work is set in Singapore and focuses on a non-Chinese protagonist's view of the Culture Clash between China Chinese migrants and Singaporean Chinese natives.
- The work is a crime drama where a crook lacking East Asian ancestry gets caught up in tensions between the Yakuza, The Triads and the Tongs, and Korean gangs, with all the danger inherent to the problem of getting the ethnic groups mixed up that implies.
- The work focuses on a nonwhite criminal learning the hard way that between the The Irish Mob, London Gangsters, The Mafia, The Mafiya and more, the "white" underworld is more dangerously diverse than he'd been expecting.
- Implied: Bob misnames Lee and Nakamura more frequently than white people.
- Untwisted: Lee forgets his glasses and is mistaken for Nakamura by Bob, making him realize that wearing glasses was the only way Bob could tell them apart.
Back to Racial Face Blindness
