The big thing about this trope is there are usually no signs of what their background is and IMO it should be for non-live action works ONLY as an actor's ethnicity is a reason.
Compare and contrast it to Mukokuseki which is about everyone not showing any signs of their ethnicity in anime, usually due to monotone skin colors across the board and You Gotta Have Blue Hair. This effect leads to the Default Human Being Concept as both Japanese and most Westerners to identify them as whatever they are.
Edited by Memers on Apr 18th 2019 at 8:56:26 AM
If a character is non-lightskinned and does not have an ethnic identity in-universe, it counts. I think examples where the character does have an ethnic identity but are frequently subject to Mistaken Nationality In-Universe would count as some sort of Played With example. This trope is a very close cousin of Non-Specifically Foreign.
If they do have a racial/ethnic identity and are dark-skinned, it's not an example. Instances in some kind of Far Future/speculative fiction setting where everyone/most people are dark skinned due to technology or widespread ethnic mixing also probably wouldn't count even though the characters might not have ethnicities in the way we think about them.
Can you list some examples that you think are over-broad applications?
"It's just a show; I should really just relax"My problem with that take on the trope is there's a lot of situations where there's just no plot relevant reason to actually info dump the characters ethnicity so that leads to a trope that's basically every POC character that doesn't have their race explicitly mentioned in the work.
Also veers into Viewers Are Morons territory to assume they can't figure out a character isn't white without being explicitly told.
Edited by CryptidProductions on Apr 18th 2019 at 8:45:24 AM
It's one of those tropes that requires a lot of context, and so pretty much guaranteed some amount of Trope Decay.
Ambiguously Brown is basically a character whose exact ethnicity is not obvious in the established setting, and often has In-Universe or meta-contextual examples (some characters use that ambiguity for espionage, since they can blend in to many locales). As such even in a fantasy/otherworldly setting it can still count if everyone has a Fantasy Counterpart Culture but one person seems indistinct in comparison. And that is where many examples falter, as it becomes more about a Token Minority whose brown skin isn't explained and putting the emphasis on audience confusion rather than being a creative choice. Audience confusion should be secondary to other more obvious factors.
From this paragraph
- An ambiguously brown character is one with a skin tone that's definitely not Northern European, but it's not entirely clear what ethnicity they are supposed to be. It's used to avoid Monochrome Casting, but for some characters, you have no clue what ethnicity or race they are just by looking at them. Are they a light-skinned black person? Latin American? Native American? Romani? Mediterranean? Arab? South or Southeast Asian? Polynesian? Mixed? Or judging by most anime character design styles, even tanned white or tanned East Asian? Their facial features don't correspond to any particular race either, as is often the case in highly stylized animation, so it's unknown. They're just brown.
It's a character that's definitely not white but what their race actually is aside from dark skinned can't be inferred by the audience even with best attempts to read context clues or other character traits.
Problem there is that there's so much room for subjective opinion actually troping it is a crapshoot because one person might be damn sure the character is Native American, another damn sure they're Black, and a third damn sure it's this trope and there's no clear answer.
Edited by CryptidProductions on Apr 20th 2019 at 1:42:25 AM
That is the Default Human Being Concept effect, 'People see what they are or what they have been exposed to'. The problem I have is real life it is not a thing as we know what the actor's backgrounds are.
In drawn works many times we don't know and have no signs of anything other than dark skin. Which has lead to stereotypes created such as the Dark Skinned Blond from Oceania or India and various Dark Skinned Redhead stereotypes.
(x6)
Grabbing random example from the Main page:
- Chris, the Master's girlfriend, is portrayed this way in The Brave Little Toaster. Is she light-skinned black? Indigenous? Tanned?
- In Storm Hawks, Piper's race isn't stated, but she is the only dark-skinned human in the Storm Hawks.
- Whyatt from Super Why! has olive skin, and it's unclear if he is Caucasian or Latino. It's possible he's biracial, since his mother has fair skin and his father has olive skin.
- Jasper Jones of Littlest Pet Shop (2012) has brownish skin, dark-brown hair and brown eyes, but has visible freckles (a trait that only occurs in people of fairer complexion), a white dialect and facial features, a Persian-originating given name and an English surname that was adopted by numerous freed African slaves from their estate managers and owners.
Some characters are probably intentionally depicted as ambiguous, but I don't know if these count.
Edited by CryptidProductions on Apr 20th 2019 at 5:58:08 AM
I've noticed that some characters from the same franchise get listed as Ambiguously Brown but others don't, even when they're all ambiguous. For example, Iris from Pokemon is considered Ambiguously Brown but Nessa isn't.
Edited by Pichu-kun on Apr 16th 2020 at 12:33:26 PM
In that nobody thought to add her yet, or the example was removed?
@ 2: I'm of the opposite opinion I misread, I thought the post said non-live action only, and I agree — I think this should be more about drawn media. There is also Plays Great Ethnics for ethnically ambiguous actors, and if a character's ethnicity does not come into play during the story one can usually assume Actor-Shared Background (unless it's a constructed world). The exception is if the characters are considered ethnically ambiguous in-universe.
Edited by Synchronicity on Apr 19th 2020 at 4:42:52 AM
I think it's because a lot of people have Nessa as being black when she is in the same boat as the other ambiguously brown characters in the franchise.
Macron's notesBefore, I felt like I had an idea as to what this was, but actually sitting down, looking at it, and re-reading the description, I'm not really sure.
What doesn't help is that the first few paragraphs don't seem notable to me at all. I don't think there's anything tropeworthy about "you don't know this character's ethnicity", especially when that doesn't apply, for no given reason, to characters with lighter skin tones (as if there aren't a variety of ethnicities that can have lighter skin tones).
If you don't get a character's backstory or origin, you're probably not going to know their ethnicity for certain. That's just normal for a story.
Where this starts to sound more tropeworthy is when you get to the numbered list in the description.
The idea of "a character whose skin color sets them apart from every other (or at least a large majority of) characters in the setting, and this stands out in context, but it's never explained" starts to feel like something.
So, for example, in a stereotypical Medieval European Fantasy, everyone's light skinned. But then there's one very dark-skinned character. They're not from a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of any countries and they might even definitely be from the same country as the rest of the characters. However, it's never really acknowledged and never addressed. It might be there for the diversity and not the story, but that might even be hard to say without Word of God.
Yoruichi, the page image, is still a good example of this focus. Based on their names, most characters in the series are presumably Japanese and their skin tones don't vary too much. Even in the afterlife, where you might not be surprised that characters could come from a variety of sources, the names are still Japanese. So when you suddenly have this very dark-skinned character appear, still with a Japanese name, they stand out and makes the audience wonder what the explanation is. Are they just a particularly dark-skinned Japanese person? Are they mixed race? Are they not Japanese at all?
It doesn't really matter in the long run still, but it's something that elicits a reaction from the audience.
EDIT: I think this might need to go to TRS and get a better description at the very least. Scrolling through the Anime and Manga examples doesn't look promising to me though. So many seem to be just "this series has one or two dark-skinned characters without a stated origin" and I really don't get what's tropeworthy about that. Many of them even offer an explanation, like "they come from a dark-skinned tribe, just one that isn't shown" or "the creator said Usopp would be African in real life which might be why he and his globetrotting father have certain features", which really doesn't seem tropeworthy.
Edited by Jokubas on Apr 18th 2020 at 10:31:24 AM
I'm not fond of the trope as is, because its usage amounts to "you need to explain why you're brown".
I've been using it only for cases where I feel the question rolls from the context (and the potential explanations are more complicated than two strong contenders), and in that sense I could use the trope not being about "brown" specifically. Sometimes, it's a character that is light-skinned that leaves you wondering, while at other times it's a design that you can tell was meant to be (ambiguous) dark-skinned but got lightened up during production. And sometimes you're dealing with a light-skinned and a dark-skinned set of twins. Ambiguous Ethnicity would work better, I think.
I prefer Ambiguous Ethnicity myself.
Technically speaking, "ambiguously brown" can have "ambiguously tanned" as part of the trope's meat. As in, "is he really dark skinned, or is he just tanned/spent a lot of time under the sun?"
We can never truly eradicate the coronavirus, but we can suppress its threat like influenzaMistaken Nationality is the closest to an "ambiguous ethnicity" supertrope.
Writing a post-post apocalypse LitRPG on RR. Also fanfic stuff.Ambiguous Ethnicity indeed seems like a clearer name.
What about characters who were just 'brown' at first but their ethnicity is later clarified? Like this example from Steven Universe — Lars Barriga:
- His skin is darker than most of the clearly Caucasian members of the cast, and his pilot character design
was considerably darker with dark brown/black hair. Initially, the only thing any of the crew specified
is that Lars is not white. It was eventually shown (and confirmed by that same crew member
) that Lars is mixed race and of Filipino heritage: His father has brown hair and darker skin, his full name is "Dante Barriga", and Lars mentions a family ube
recipe. Lars's mother has his same orange-ish hair and lighter skin.
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Oh, that 'tanned' specification... I once removed an entry from Miraculous Ladybug: Adrien Agreste (who is very clearly white, all things considered) because it claimed he had a 'light tan'.
Edited by Synchronicity on Apr 19th 2020 at 10:24:03 AM
My First Girlfriend Is a Gal lists a character as Ambiguously Brown in that she appears as a tanned gyaru in the present day and in a flashback circa 10+ years prior. This, of course, assumes that she would not have been able to tan herself at that age.
Contains 20% less fat than the leading value brand!I'm tempted to do a wick check... this might be a misuse/ZCE magnet. I have seen it listed several times as "Alice is a bit browner than everyone else."
What about this example, where it's not so much that there are no hints, but rather many hints that don't line up with any one country?
- Tamako Market: The people that Dela works for. They have dark tan skin, their names are Choi and Mecha Mochimazzi,note they wear outfits whose colorful patterns are not especially emblematic of a particular culture, appear to live on a tropical island, and belong to a monarchy. "Choi" itself is a Chinese/Korean surname, and the food she prepares in episode nine looks Vietnamese. Given all this, "Southeast Asian" may be a good guess, but it's never made clear.
Edited by Synchronicity on Apr 19th 2020 at 4:41:57 AM
I'm not sure how tropeworthy "unexplained ethnic character" is unless it's extremely unusual given the setting (like a dark-skinned Japanese character in an otherwise-pale Japanese work set in Japan) or if the vague ethnicity is remarked upon/lampshaded but unresolved, like Ann Perkins in Parks and Recreation always being noted by Leslie to be beautiful and also ethnically ambiguous. I think there just need to be more clear lines and definitions, because then you drift into things like Poe Dameron being cited as an example because he's played by a Guatemalan actor when modern Star Wars shows people of many species and ethnicities and it's not the same universe, anyway. Related to that, I am very leery about this trope being applied to universes that don't use real-world racial concepts. And yeah, it is sometimes weird how this trope can result from "why is this character not white?" questions. That's why I'd vote for it to refer to isolated or lampshaded cases within a work, rather than, say, Pokémon, which has enough incidental brown characters that it hardly feels notable or worth prying into them.
tl;dr: To avoid "why aren't they white?" entries, I think a character's vague race should either be lampshaded or so conspicuous that it genuinely feels weird for the sense of the story when the work doesn't address it.
Edited by 8BrickMario on Apr 19th 2020 at 7:04:12 AM
I think fantasy stuff should go too. Suppose there's yellow aliens, blue aliens, and red aliens and our protag team has some of all but also a purple one. The work never explains nor gives any hints towards what the purple one is; half-red half-blue, a yellow one's opposite clone, or a separate species altogether? That ought to merit inclusion.
I also think that Ambiguous Ethnicity is something that depends on the current status of the work and takes Word of God into account. If a character's ethnicity was once ambiguous and has since been clarified, the trope no longer applies. Likewise, if it seemed clearcut at one point and new information has since made it not clearcut (Looking at you, Elfquest and your latter half shitfest worldbuilding), then the trope does apply.
I'll look into a test rewrite of the description this weekend.

Maybe it's gone through Trope Decay or maybe I'm misunderstanding it, but Ambiguously Brown seems pretty broad. Is a character dark skinned and is their ethnicity never touched upon? Then they're Ambiguously Brown. Even if the other characters also don't have their backgrounds touched upon, this one character still stands out.
Ambiguously Brown seems to get used for almost every character who is not light-skinned. It's near-omnipresent. I don't think it's a rare trope, but maybe it's being troped too much?
Can it also apply to people who aren't ambiguously brown but are ambiguously raced either way?