split: Dark Skinned Blond

So, there's two basic tropes here from my understanding. One of them involves a blonde who gets a tan, the other is a Japanese visual stereo type of Indian people. I think this needs a split, and we should probably turn it into a disambiguation.

I'm thinking Tanned Blonde for one, not sure what to do with the Indian stereotype.

Apparently, there's a third one: black person with blonde hair. Simon Phoenix from Demolition Man is cited in the Film examples, but there's also Rosey from the Wing Commander movie (who, unlike Simon, is a protagonist, and not evil).

In anime its not so much "person from India" as "character who is from a purposefully unspecified Southeast Asian country"

That's when the work uses actual countries, alot are from fictional continent X on a fictional world Y. Doesn't stop people arguing over what earth race people think they are.

1. Light skinned character with a tan, hair could be naturally light or bleached. Appearance usually comes from the characters lifestyle.

2. Dark skinned character with light hair, could be genetic or bleached. Usually a or half foreigner, everyone where they come from could look like this.

edited 10th Aug '11 3:18:56 AM by No9

This is the first thing I've heard about this, but if this colouring is used for South East Asian characters, those examples should be split out.

It's not always used for South-East Asian characters. Bikky from FAKE is just half Caucasian-American and half African.

edited 10th Aug '11 7:05:10 AM by shimaspawn

I always thought it was some kind of variant of You Gotta Have Blue Hair or aesthetic.

It's basically more of an aesthetic, like Dark Skinned Redhead. In both cases you usually (key word) don't find out where the person is actually from. It's a visual aesthetic that's designed to say "exotic" since it doesn't show up very often in real life.

Just eyeballing it there doesn't seem to be any particular pattern of using it just for south east Asian characters, in fact it usually seems to imply some African ancestry. There also aren't all that many examples where it's just a blond person with a tan, probably not enough for a subpage. (I think it's also potentially insulting to group characters who have naturally dark skin with lighter-skinned people who just tan a lot)

We could maybe split the page into sub-examples if we want, but I don't think we should create separate pages.

edited 10th Aug '11 12:06:21 PM by Katsuhagi

Tropical pacific or Indian would be the word I put to where Darkskinned blondes in anime are from. Indonesia, India, Southern China, some unpronounceable southern pacific island. (Africa is extremely rare.) almost always have some kind of Ditzy, not the smartest cup of tea, or Genki Girl quality to them as well.

Dark Skinned Redhead I have problems with too though.

its just seemingly random elements matching skintone with hair, most are Red-Headed Hero (with a bit of a outdoorsy bouncy, energetic maybe Genki Boy thing going on) while the girls are the Heroes Want Redheads (with a bit of that same personality thing) which are in most of the anime examples in "a he stands out" kinda way since there is never another darkskinned person around them (usually) And paired with an The Ojou proper type, the rest are just dark skinned with Red hair.

Also that one seems to have alot of dark skinned and dark colored Just Got To Have Blue Hair examples that are completely inverse of the personality.

Vs say Black and White Beauty in which its treated as a beauty standard and Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette which is.... well eerie.

edited 10th Aug '11 1:15:49 PM by Raso

I don't think it should matter too much if it's a tan or their normal skin color...as long as it isn't that fake icky orange. But I think it should be changed to blonde, because "blond" doesn't look right.

No, "blond" is correct, since that's the male form of the adjective (and thus, by extension, the unisex one). If it were "blonde", that would make it Always Female.

I agree that this could be kept as a general aesthetic trope. It's a bit strange to have Bikky and Lindsay Lohan on the same page, but you can't argue that they both have lighter hair than skin (at least part of the time, in Lohan's case). It doesn't really matter how, as long as it's part of their "look" for whatever reason.

These are unconnected looks. And two of them probably aren't tropes at all. We should restrict this article to the anime trope and rename it accordingly.

What about Ganguro? [1]◊ [2]◊ [3]◊. They are tanned, bleached blonde, so it kinda fits the description. If it doesn't need a trope on its own, what about a Useful Notes?

Agreed on useful notes, it has a very rich history as a fashion and music movement in Japan for it's short history (It's like 15 years old). I've been into the style for a longtime and know a lot about it's history, motives and changes.

Also I'd say the usefulnotes page should be for the Gyaru movement as a whole though not just Ganguro, Ganguro was a subsection of the movement that was big in the late 90's and had a recent resurgence in the last year but it was almost dead in Japan for close to 7 or 8 years, replaced by other subsection of the Gyaru fashion. Almost all forms of Gyaru have the Dark Skinned Blond look except for Hime-Gyaru.

edited 26th Oct '11 3:41:31 PM by Vyctorian

There's also Dennis Rodman in Double Team

edited 27th Oct '11 8:27:53 AM by samuraiweasel

Wait, why does this need to be split at all? They are all dark skinned blonds(blondes?). Who cares about what the ethnicity is supposed to be, its a visual standout trope since they're kind of rare in real life.

Soft split at best, lest we do ambiguously browns who fake tan, browns who are brown for no reason and browns who are "mixed race".

I've seen a lot of these kinds of characters, and most of the time nothing is said about where they came from. Gorobei from Samurai7 is never said to be another race, and the setting implies he's Japanese like everyone else.

I think a better description would fix this.

Bump?

Is it at all useful to know that Some Australian Aboriginals are dark brown with blond hair? It's relatively common in central Australia, or at least it was before the Europeans invaded. So it doesn't even have to be a matter of mixed-race ancestry.

Bump.

Also, we might need to determine whether dark-skinned characters with strawberry blond hair count as both Dark Skinned Blond and Dark Skinned Redhead on basis of strawberry blond being a mix of blond and red hair colors, or only counts as one of the two tropes.

edited 10th Jan '12 4:54:21 AM by MarqFJA

Bump.