Supposedly Asian characters with blonde hair and blue eyes.

I can't be the only one who finds this weird, right? And then there's always that "honorary Aryans" thing that runs through my head whenever I see one...

When you consider the fate of the world being decided by children's card games or that tennis can cause the extinction of the dinosaurs that happened thousands of years ago and that's not even to mention human can have naturally purple hair let alone Asians having blonde hair, well.........

edited 11th Jan '11 2:33:20 AM by PsychoFreaX

I don't know, it's just that Phenotype Stereotype goes into my head whenever I see a character with blonde hair and blue eyes. I can accept like...everything else normally. Even Asians with naturally purple hair. Or people with rainbow eye color. Whatever. The only time it doesn't count is when it is specifically said that the hair is dyed and the eye color is due to contacts or something.

edited 11th Jan '11 1:14:27 AM by Edmania

Sometimes if it would make sense for them to have lightened hair ('cause they're...into fashion? I don't know), I can see the blondness as just an exaggeration of that, but I agree about the blue eyes.

I'm mostly thinking of Kirino here, by the way. And her friend Kanako. And Kuroneko with her grey/blue eyes but black hair.

I'm actually fine if it was like blonde hair and green eyes (for some reason) or something like blue eyes and brown hair, it's just this specific combination.

edited 11th Jan '11 1:23:41 AM by Edmania

Well, just don't be affected too much by stereotypes then. I mean, being informed of stereotypes can be helpful. But don't let it control you, like your judgment or whatever.

Oh and I forgot to mention that 'God' can be caught in a capsule by a little kid and bossed around. Added that last one in for lulz .

edited 11th Jan '11 1:26:59 AM by PsychoFreaX

That's probably because the asians racial stereotypes aren't based on eyes and hair color.

When everyone else around you has black hair, it goes without saying, that drawn characters of any hair color are just unrealistically drawn, like the ones with blue hair.

True and character designing such as hair and eye color are mixed and matched to the artist's liking all the time. A lot of them, unrealistically. Blonde with blue eyes is probably just a combination those artists believed looks good.

edited 11th Jan '11 1:54:39 AM by PsychoFreaX

It's funny but I usually try and find myself rationalizing blonde hair as dyed... At least until their parents show up and it turns out to be hereditary.

And I thought I was beyond holding fiction to reality.

By that logic, it might still just be that they are a kind of family that likes to dye their hair. If it was long lost father and son however though......

edited 11th Jan '11 2:38:06 AM by PsychoFreaX

If I go that route it usually stretches my disbelief anyway, partly because I've never come across a family who all dye their hair the same, but mostly because it means I'm seriously in danger of overthinking a work rather than enjoying it.

It annoys me more when blond hair is always the sign of someone being a foreigner even when there are pink and green hair haired characters. What, is blond just that special? People can't have unnaturally yellow hair? That strikes me as being much sillier.

I don't recall blond hair by itself automatically meaning foreigner in any of the ones i've watched, at least.

Plenty of blonde hair with blue eyes as foreigner though, which is probably why I have this reaction when characters with those traits are Asian.

Well, off the top of my head, Negima has orange, blue and purple hair, yet blond Ayaka is called 'half' because clearly Japanese can't have blond hair. There's also a Visual Novel called Canvas 2 with orange, purple, pink and green hair, yet the blond girl is still obviously not fully Japanese. To me that's just absurd. If it wasn't from Japan, it'd be more acceptable and make more sense. After all, there's no reason that a certain hair color must naturally appear everywhere, but as a country that doesn't have blonds to still make it somehow special in so many cases seems rather silly to me.

edited 11th Jan '11 3:44:09 AM by Arha

That's probably because it falls on a middle ground: It's quite uncommon for Japanese people to be naturally blonde, but it's not uncommon enough (read: impossible) for it to be taken as an artistic license.

And then there's always that "honorary Aryans" thing that runs through my head whenever I see one...

When all the Asian characters look like this it isn't really a problem, but when the Japanese characters look less Asian than the Chinese and Korean ones it makes me raise my eyebrows a bit.

Interestingly, Mahou Sensei Negima mostly avoids this problem by having a Chinese character with blond hair, although a Martian character with black hair is considered Chinese-looking.

I wasn't sure whether to pothole to Oneshot Revisionism or Voodoo Shark. I chose the latter because I'm feeling snarky today.

orange, purple, pink and green hair

I can sort of get that. All of the above are... Damnit, what's the term for it? tone-shifts of other colours (orange and pink are tone-shifts of reddish/brown, green and purple are tone-shifts of black) I mostly just mentally translate them to red/black respectively (the same way I do with Viconia's skin colour)

I can accept that with orange and dark blue. Bright purple? Green? Light blue? Nope. Negima has all of those, and Canvas 2 had similar. Another example I thought of was Tsukihime, but the hair colors there really do just seem to be so you can tell characters apart easier; Ciel is referred to as black haired.

I did ask that question on why "asian" characters have these weird colors at the VIZ booth back in the 90's. The answer was simply it's a way to make the characters look different from each other.

@Eternal September: There are plenty of Asian people with merely brown hair, and dying isn't all that uncommon.

On-topic: This is what Mukokuseki is.

For comparison, draw a smiley face. You'll almost always imagine that the smiley face, despite not even being remotely human looking, is the "default", which is unsurprisingly your race. To make it a member of a race other than yours, you would add secondary racial features.

edited 11th Jan '11 9:51:25 AM by Scardoll

I keep hearing this "Japanese look less Asian then other Asians in Fiction thing" yet I have never seen it actually happen, like ever.

^ I can't think of any other examples either, but I think I might be able to explain this perception...

Cartoons, japanese or not, have a tendency of portraying other races with a certain degree of stereotypes, while they portray their own kind as perfectly normal.

So in a hypothetical anime, all the japanese characters will look completely normal and wear plain normal clothes. Foreigners will be shown with some stereotypes attached to them, like fat loud americans. But when a non-japanese asian character appears, like say...Chinese, that character will posess certain stereotypical chinese traits, such as a chinese sounding name or chinese clothes, or be master martial artists. Hence why they appear more "asian" than the japanese characters.

Also, when the hypothetical anime gets dubbed. The dubbers want all the characters to act as natural as possible. If the country is a white country, they will make them sound like whats natural for white people. But what about the characters who are supposed to be foreign? Give them accents of course! Have them sound like a chinese trying to speak english!  ^*

edited 16th Jan '11 9:17:08 PM by Signed

Not familiar with either of these, but here's two examples noted on the No Koreans In Japan page.

• Manga Kenkanryu: An infamous political manga about the relations between Japan and South Korea and a response to the rising popularity of Korean entertainment in Japan. The Japanese are depicted as standard Mukoku Seki while the South Koreans look very "Asian" and ugly. Not only that, they are aggressive, are hateful towards Japan and pretend that most Japanese cultural landmarks originate from Korea. The truth is that many "Japanese cultural landmarks" do originate in other countries, including Korea.

• In Ayako a minor character is a fat Korean-Japanese called Gosei Kinjo who is revealed to be The Mole in a subplot involving a CIA agent, and is killed in the end. He looks very "Asian" compared to the other Mukoku Seki Japanese, including his manner of speaking.

I've also noticed that in Darker Than Black and Black Lagoon, Chinese characters look more Asian than Japanese ones, although in both cases, the Chinese protagonist character looks as "white" as the Japanese ones (it's only the non-protagonist Chinese that look this way)

Because being Asian is about wearing traditional clothing and learning martial arts.

The only time I've seen Chinese characters have "Chinese traits" is either a china dress or hair buns, and quite frankly hair buns is just a hair style a lot of people wear and the only time I've seen china dresses are in super-fantastical shows where the china dress is not the problem. And of course the Chinese guy is going to have a Chinese name he's Chinese it'd be weirder if he didn't.

I don't mean dress (although Chinese People is kind of an interesting visual shorthand). These examples are more to the effect that (to put it somewhat bluntly) "non-Japanese have slanted eyes and Japanese characters don't".