Supposedly Asian characters with blonde hair and blue eyes.

^ Actually "man" is a bit more complicated. It's not that "Man" means "male", "man" originally meant "person, human", it's just that the prefix for "male human" (in anglosaxon that would be wer-, see eg. Werewolf) fell away rather early on.

edited 20th Jan '11 2:49:12 AM by Arilou

True, but that was a looong time ago.

I think this is partly about how in Western countries white is the default race, but another part of the confusion stems from the fact that every group sees its own members as unique, and sees other groups as generic and similar, categorised by only a few things.

Thus, Japanese people have no problem showing themselves as having a variety of body types, whereas they pidgeonhole Americans as being blonde and blue-eyed.

And if Americans are pigeonholed, smaller places, likesayforexample Australia have no hope of being portrayed in a balanced way.

Although, sometimes you actually seem to avoid stereotypes by picking small places that can fly under the trope radar.

Like you said earlier most Japanese people have dark brown or black hair, and for the most part many Americans can be described that way as well.

The problem here is that the subtle facial differences in people which allow us to distinguish them are too expensive and impractical to reproduce on a weekly schedule, remember Hei? He just has black hair and pale skin, that could stand for pretty much anything as long as you change his name. And what about shows like Baccano which have an American setting? Ennis has a reddish-brown color popular among the youth for dye color, change her name to Eri and put her in modern clothes is it that hard to think she's Japanese? Or how about Czeslaw? Put him in elementary school and call him Koma and he can pass for one too.

How about a different show like Durarara? Change Saki to Sarah and it's not that hard to think she's American, change Mikado to Michael and put him in a British boarding school, is it unreasonable to say he's British? The thing is while hair colors can appear in different ratios they are not racially exclusive and colors like dark brown are near universal.

This is why every American has either the blond/blue combo or given features like height or a different face like Issac, sure it may be stereotypical but otherwise they're going to have to go off of name only which really isn't that great an indicator as not everyone knows all the name origins. It's like if Willie in the Simpsons had dark hair and no accent, how else would you be able to tell he's Irish and not just a grumpy old man?

Actually, I totally agree with that post. Except for the obvious Phenotype Stereotype characters, many others could fit a lot of different backgrounds depending on what name the creator gave them.

Incidentally, one reason why I realized Hei isn't the greatest example is that in-series, he uses a Korean identity at one point, and so he's probably supposed to have somewhat ambiguous features anyway.

Yeah, there's no real reason to assume Hei is actually Chinese. Yin is a Chinese name, but she's actually Finnish, and unlike with her we never find out Hei's birth name. I mean, obviously he looks Chinese enough that he can pretend to be Li Shengshun convincingly, but other than that, who knows?

Indeed. The only problem arises if race is evident to characters in a different way than it is evident to us (the audience).

Mami Tomoe?

edited 1st Oct '13 3:37:56 PM by destructorn

Doesn't Mami have yellow eyes?

Yes, yes she does.◊

edited 1st Oct '13 4:56:30 PM by Willbyr