To-do list:
- Remove Real Life examples, characters that have a defined but fictional race, and examples that are just "actor has brown skin." Progress for wicks is being kept track of using Sandbox.Ambiguously Brown Wick Cleaning, and the description and on-page examples are being cleaned up using Sandbox.Ambiguously Brown.
Original post
So—-I know this has been to TRS, several times previously, but I have a specific thing I would like to discuss
I'm not going to touch the definition for drawing and cartoon characters, but the live action and real life sections are a mess. Real people are not ambiguously brown. My suggestion is to add a strict standard for characters played by real life people—
Characters in Live Action media are assumed to be the same race as the actor unless there is reason to think otherwise. Some possible reasons include:
- Two actors of different races play blood relatives
- A character's name, accent or clothing strongly indicates a different ethnicity than the actor
- The actors race would be impossible or highly implausible for the character (such as a Native American actor in ancient Rome)
- The actor is wearing some kind of Brownface or otherwise changing their features, but it's not clear what they're changing them to.
A character could also be ambiguously brown In-Universe if the other characters cannot tell what race they are
While I have this up for discussion, I would also like to suggest rewriting the definition, as it's currently 9 paragraphs long and has a lot of "note, this is actually..." "but don't forget..." which all kinda indicates being added on piece by piece. I think it could be a lot more concise and easier to follow with a rewrite, (not actually a definition change just a rewording)
Wick Check for Live Action TV and Film
- Dance Moms Kalani and Kira definitely aren't white, but they're not exactly black ether...
- Token Trio: Fenwick (sole black kid), CJ (Ambiguously Brown sole girl of the group), and Crispo (white kid)
- Ambiguously Brown: * The mugger (and implied rapist) whom Catwoman cuts up with her claws in the alley.
- The Series 3 finale introduces Zaf, an Ambiguously Brown Token Minority. The same episode kills off Danny, who was the show's dark-skinned Token Minority. In the Series 6 premiere, Zaf is injuried and Put on a Bus. Halfway into the same series, Ben Kaplan, an Ambiguously Brown journalist, is introduced.
- Ambiguously Brown: Laura, played by Amelia Warner who curiously has white parents but is quite dark skinned herself.
- Spicy Latina: Penny, although she's more Ambiguously Brown. probably? low context
- Ambiguously Brown: Kim, the picture of her father is black and white, never zoomed in, and his name is never said so one never knows what his ethnicity is. again... probably?
- Ambiguously Brown: Anja has dark skin and seems like she might be part Black from her features. Her mother is White and we don't see her father, leaving it unknown if he's Black or not.
- Ambiguously Brown: Typical for a rich school in the Philippines, there are a lot of mixed and/or racially ambiguous and/or light-skinned students. Chuck Santos is played by a half-white actor with an Anglo surname, Markus Paterson.
- Adaptational Diversity: The first incarnation of the Angels where all three of them are minorities: Jane is black, Elena is Ambiguously Brown (both Ella Balinska and Naomi Scott are biracial), and Sabina (the only white woman in the trio) is Ambiguously Bi.
- He promptly instructs a blond boy to fake an Australian accent and agree with him no matter what he says, an Ambiguously Brown passenger to disagree with him, and a female passenger to be morally outraged, filling (what he perceives are) the roles of Chase, Foreman and Cameron respectively.
- Equal-Opportunity Evil: The bad guys are led by a Tunisian, with an albino (according to the Bey) as the second in command, with a German woman (though Conrad claims she's faking it), three black guys, two gay lovers, an eastern European, and several white and Ambiguously Brown men.
- Ambiguously Brown: Beck. His actor, Avan Jogia, is half Indian, but the only thing we know about Beck's heritage is that he's part Canadian.
- Token Minority Couple: Paula, who's Ambiguously Brown, is secretly with Native Hawaiian Kai.
- Minority Police Officer: Gueacutedira is of north African descent, and Belkacem is Ambiguously Brown (the actress, Shirine Boutella, is from Algeria).
- Twofer Token Minority: Pilar is the only woman of color in the cast, as a supporting character. She's Ambiguously Brown, with a name that's also ambiguous (played by a British Indian actress).
- Ambiguously Brown: Ryan has very dark features, slightly tanned skin and green eyes. His actor Thomas Fitzgerald is Irish with some English and Italian roots.
- Ambiguously Brown: The real O'Brien is white and Irish, but is played in the show by a British actor of partial Indian and Tunisian descent (though the character, in childhood flashbacks, is also from Callan, Ireland, and those sequences are conveniently desaturated or color-shifted so we can't quite tell his parents' skin colors). In the second episode, we learn about his sister Megan, who is portrayed as an adult by Camille Guaty, an olive-skinned Cuban/Puerto Rican actress. However, in Season 2 we finally see their parents, who are white.
- Ambiguously Brown: Rainin Wild, who was played by a black American in-costume in his debut episode, but was replaced by a tanned Japanese man in subsequent appearances.
- Ambiguously Brown: Mads, her actress' heritage is a mess of ethnicities/races, which is confusing as her father and brother are white.
- Ambiguously Brown: Jezzie Pipkin is played by Cuban-American actress Elizabeth Peña. It's unclear whether Jezzie was meant to be Hispanic despite her surname.
- Ambiguously Brown: Billie is played by Sarah Shahi, who's of Iranian and Spanish descent. Though the actor who plays Billie's dad appears vaguely Middle Eastern and also has an accent, while her character's mother's White, what ethnicity she was meant to be isn't clear. Their last name, Mann, is no help.
- Ambiguously Brown: Bakuto. He has a Japanese-sounding name, but Ramon Rodriguez, who plays him, is Puerto Rican. His childhood boogeyman being the Sack Man
implies Latino or Brazilian heritage. In the comics, Bakuto runs a South American faction of the Hand. Of course, as The Defenders reveals, he, like Davos, hails from K'un-L'un.
- Ground Floor People assume Threepeat is Chinese, but he's actually Filipinonote .
- Spun Out Ambiguously Brown: Beckett invokes this about Nelson while they yell insults at each other.
"I'd make a joke about your nationality, but I don't know what it is!"
- Ambiguously Brown: There's a scene where Precious and Miss Weiss are talking, and Precious can't tell what ethnicity she is, and asks if she's "Italian, or black, or some type of Spanish." Not to mention that "Weiss" is usually an Ashkenazic Jewish surname and Jews of mixed race descent aren't completely unheard of. If Miss Weiss is anything like her actress, she should be bi-racial.
- Ambiguously Brown: Jamie. Justified as her mother cannot remember what ethnicity her absentee father was; possibilities include Greek, Russian, Hispanic and Middle-Eastern. note
- Ambiguously Brown: Woody uses his vague ethnicity to pretend to be people from all over the world (Kayvan Novak is of mixed British and Iranian decent).
- Ambiguously Brown: Key, who is biracial. He uses it to his advantage, just like he did on MADtv. In fact, both Key and Peele were born from biracial families (half-black, half-white), but generally Peele tends to just play black characters, while Key has a wider range.note
- Ambiguously Brown: Zan, the internet personality trolling Paper Boi. Lampshading this becomes a Running Gag in the episode "The Streisand Effect"; every time he's mentioned, characters ask something along the lines of "Isn't he Dominican?", "Is he Asian?", or (after he casually uses the N-word) "Are you even black?"
- Ambiguously Brown: Stu at first assumes that Vic is white, then hazards a number of guesses at his ethnicity, including Puerto Rican and Chinese. Vic shakes his head at all of Stu's guesses. In real life, Dave Bautista is Greek and Filipino.
- Ambiguously Brown: Nichols has brown skin and dark curly hair. This allows him to pass himself off as Jesus (Middle Eastern) and the real Brandon Nichols (Native American).
- Ambiguously Brown: Leslie often remarks on Ann's unclear ethnicity, which is never revealed in the show, though Rashida Jones is herself half African-American and half Ashkenazi Jew.
- Ambiguously Brown: Zach asks Rashida Jones what race she is.
- Ambiguously Brown: This is a plot point. Daphne is revealed to be mixed race, "a creole mother and white father" which lets her pass as white. She has a black half brother who's familial connection she hides.
- Ambiguously Brown: Karen, to Michael at least ("Wow, you look very exotic. Was your dad a GI?"). Her last name (Filipelli) and dialogue suggest she is Italian-American. Rashida Jones is half-Black, half-Jewish.
- Ambiguously Brown: Rex notes Lori's ambiguous ethnicity, hazarding that she's Baltic or Czech. Kunis was born in Ukraine to Jewish parents.
- Ambiguously Brown: Schmidt's impression of Cece, before she states that her parents are Indian. Hannah Simone, who plays her, is a mixture of Indian, German, Italian, Cypriot, and Greek.
- Jerkass: The Senator who gets his car stolen by Xander near the beginning. We even get his racism demonstrated when he assumes Xander is Mexican, so we know he's a jerk.
- Ambiguously Brown: Lauren. She's brought up an uncle in Syria and being in the Middle East when she was younger. Everyone had different theories.
Lauren: I'm from Long Island!Simon: But you're our diversity hire! If anyone asks, just say you're "other." *
- Ambiguously Brown: So Elena is supposed to be Russian??
- Ambiguously Brown - Ray, and Tina, but their child together is clearly white.
- Ambiguously Brown: Bryce, Tyler, and Taryn.
- At this point in the show, every named character who's black or Ambiguously Brown (except for Anthony, Anne, and Diego,) has been killed. Being black on this show is like wearing a Red Shirt.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The first season was trying to find its legs. Florence wasn't initially a Servile Snarker (but thanks to Louise's permission, she became one), and Allan went from being Ambiguously Brown to straight up Caucasian.
- Ambiguously White: The nun named Janet, as far as her features go.
- Subverted with Nataly Green. An implicitly French nun as seen from the montage that implied she gets off from an Air France airplane and her name (though she bears an English surname), but the actress that played her didn't look rather convincing. The actress that played Janet (who is even credited as Marie-Antoinette) would've pulled it off better. this example is confusing and probably outright misuse
- Ambiguously Brown: Averted with siblings Sue and Johnny Storm, played by Caucasian actress Kate Mara and actor Michael B Jordan. Justified since they are adoptive siblings. do we really need averted examples?
- Ambiguously Brown: Many characters are some form of mestizo, which is Truth in Television, given how Filipinos generally tend to be mixed to various degrees. Antonio Luna himself was apparently one of the less mixed ones (a point of contention with his older brother, Juan, the artist, who was acquitted of the murders of his wife and mother-in-law in Paris on effectively racist grounds—i.e., that his indio (native) race was predisposed to such anyway). if they are specifically mixed in universe theyre not ambiguous...
- Jesus, however, looks incredibly Caucasian, thought He may have a tan or be Ambiguously Brown. It's hard to tell with the lighting. im not sur where to put this
Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 29th 2022 at 6:40:51 AM
Cake's just a shot away. (he/him)
I prefer not to clock starred threads, but since this thread hasn't gone anywhere, I'll give it a while to see if the description will get rewritten so cleanup can start, otherwise I could see this thread continuing to go nowhere.
Edit: For clarification, I clocked the thread because the description needs to be rewritten to match the definition that was voted on, and that's keeping wick cleanup from starting. If the description isn't rewritten by the time the clock runs out, I'm closing the thread.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 23rd 2022 at 8:12:42 AM
You can't always get what you want.
reconsidering
I had been gone for a bit sorry but i will write up a description for this tonight
reconsidering
Thoughts—
- In addition to the spinoff for "ambigious in-universe", there may also be room for a spin-off/subtrope for "entire cast are various shades of brown with no connection to the real world", for example
Heres a draft, suggestions welcome
An Ambiguously Brown character is a character with a darker skin tone that clearly stands out from most of the cast, but it's not entirely clear what race they are actually meant to be. Their heritage is never mentioned, and their facial features don't correspond to any particular race either, so it's unknown. They're just brown.
Generally this is primarily a trope in drawn media— most live-action characters are assumed to be the same race as the actor by default, although it could apply if there is some reason to wonder about this character specifically. For actors who are ethnically ambiguous, see Plays Great Ethnics. It also does not apply if the character has a defined race or ethnicity, even if that race does not exist in the real world.
This can be considered an easy way to add visual diversity to a work when the author doesn't want to deal with real world racial issues, although it could also be considered to lack real representation.
Oftentimes, this is the result of to trying avoid Monochrome Casting while having Only Six Faces— everyone looks the same except for coloring, anyway, it's just that this one has darker skin. Compounding this issue, while some features such as blue eyes or extremely tight curls are more racially distinctive, light brown skin + dark brown hair is found everywhere around the world, which can make it difficult to narrow down. Can also be the result of unusual skin and hair combinations, such as Dark Skinned Blond and Dark Skinned Redhead.
Cultural differences can come into play here as well— Compare Mukokuseki: in principle anime characters who are supposed to be "stateless". Other times, western viewers may not realise that fully Jaanese people can have a fairly wide range of skin tones— often the characters are meant to be fully Japanese and recognized as such in the Japanese fanbase, with the ambiguous part only coming from the point of view of non-Japanese viewers who don't realize that fully Japanese people can have dark skin. In older European works, where the population is predominantly white the word "dark" is often used to mean someone white, with dark hair and dark eyes.
If most of the cast is various shades of brown in a future world, it may be In the Future, Humans Will Be One Race. For an even more extreme version, see Amazing Technicolor Population
See also But Not Too Foreign, of which this is a sub-trope, But Not Too White, and Mixed Ancestry Is Attractive, for when a multiracial character (who may or may not be ethnically ambiguous) is seen as attractive and intriguing.
Edited by Tremmor19 on Apr 1st 2022 at 1:44:57 PM
Cake's just a shot away. (he/him)
I'll go over the sandbox later, but for now I can shut off the clock since we have a working draft now.
You can't always get what you want.
reconsidering
Thanks! So, I don't want to force this point, and I will drop it after this, but
The crowner included this option "limit to drawn media", which failed, and i can see why, as there are cases where i think live action characters have some ambiguity
However I did want to include in the descrition something to distinguish "character is ambiguous" versus "actor just happens to not be white".
I included this paragraph:
Generally this is primarily a trope in drawn media— most live-action characters are assumed to be the same race as the actor by default, although it could apply if there is some reason to wonder about this character specifically. For actors who are ethnically ambiguous, see Plays Great Ethnics.
Is this ok, or would it require additional votes to include?
Edited by Tremmor19 on Mar 26th 2022 at 12:06:01 PM
Cake's just a shot away. (he/him)
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I think we can still say it's primarily seen in drawn media even if we didn't have consensus to make it exclusive to it. Adding that wouldn't be changing the definition; it would just be stating how the trope commonly appears.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 26th 2022 at 11:28:19 AM
You can't always get what you want.
reconsidering
Okay— in that case i have finished up and got a working definition— if people like it, or have corrections theyd like made, we can get that put in and start cleanup
Ill start as soon as i have a general agreement on the definition
Basically we would need to remove the following
- characters that have a defined but fictional race
- real life examples
- examples that are just "actor has brown skin"
Any others i missed?
(she/her)
^ I think that's all we need to remove but I could be wrong because I haven't been following this thread closely.
As for the proposed rewrite, it looks fine to me.
Macron's notes
Cake's just a shot away. (he/him)
I agree that the rewrite looks fine.
You can't always get what you want.
(she/her)
So, since there weren't any objections, I guess we just go forward with the rewrite and sort out the examples in Sandbox.Ambiguously Brown?
Macron's notes
Cake's just a shot away. (he/him)
Yeah, I see no reason to delay it further since no objections were raised.
(she/her)
I swapped it in. I guess we can use the criteria Tremmor 19 mentioned earlier:
- characters that have a defined but fictional race
- real life examples
- examples that are just "actor has brown skin"
Edited by MacronNotes on Apr 22nd 2022 at 8:19:44 AM
Macron's notes
Just stoic wisdom.
Has there been movement on this recently? Is it something worth putting on the projects page?
Vehicle-Based Characterization | Grief-Induced Split | Locker Mail
(she/her)
No one has been working on it. As for putting it on the Wick Cleaning Projects, that's up to you.
Macron's notes
Just stoic wisdom.
I like adding every project to the cleaning page so I can keep tabs on wick counts. I just really like keeping tabs on things! 
reconsidering
Yeah, sorry, i haven't used TV Tropes much in the past couple months! I will start work on this tonight so it can get cleared out
reconsidering
Have got the main page cleaned from Anime thru literature folders, will keep updating
Followup— what is the general view on "this character was ambiguously brown for a long time but was eventually established to be X race"? because a lot of examples fit that pattern. I left them in for the time being
Edited by Tremmor19 on Jun 16th 2022 at 3:06:00 PM
You'll never find out who I am
Would Lex Luthor count as an example?
Check out my forum game: Rate the above YMMV.
the Retromancer
Could have contextualized the question further.
Edited by Amonimus on Aug 16th 2022 at 5:34:54 PM
TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup
I don't think this is the topic at hand right now, but this trope seems to have a possibly-distinct Sister Trope that it's being misused to cover.
Right now, the ambiguous aspect of the trope is key to how it's described. It's about racial ambiguity.
But it's sometimes used to describe fantasy characters whose ethic background is not ambiguous—it just doesn't neatly correspond to a real-world ethnicity.
For example: The characters from Earthsea is not ambiguously brown. Ged's background is not unclear or ambiguously—he's from Gont. We know this, fullstop. He doesn't neatly correspond to a specific real-world ethnicity—I'm not sure how I'd cast him if I were charged with making a live-action adaptation—but that doesn't make it ambiguous, it just makes it fictional.
Maybe this is a Sister Trope that should be carved out?
Edited by Eievie on Aug 20th 2022 at 4:09:44 AM
Bonnie's Artistic Cousin
That's a bit complicated since I can see two sides to it. One is the in-universe "he's this, and that's that" thing. The other is the real-life racial coding that could be going on, which is something people latch onto even if it isn't made obvious or even intentional.
Either way, that's just misuse, I don't know if it's a concept that can be split off.
Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 20th 2022 at 7:06:37 AM
Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
Just cleaning up the Trope’s description and what exactly it entails and prerequisites would fix this page up.
Waffle Cat (she/her)
I think much of the misuse problems with this trope are born from the way the US (and Canada, I guess) view race and ethnicity. One-drop rule, I'm looking at you. Especially notorious with examples that go "this character is black but has mentioned having Slavic ancestry".
Race is on the phenotype level, i.e., the physical appearance, that is then associated with X social meanings (stereotypes). Meanwhile, at the genetic level (the genotype), there are no such distinctions. Ethnicity, on the other hand, is a person's culture.
My race is white but my ethnicity is Latina. If I was a fictional character, I would not be ambiguously brown since my skin is white, not milk white but definitely not tanned or brown or whatever. However, under the American view of race (the one-drop rule), I'm... a Native American (on my grandfather's side). But that is not my culture, not exactly. Yes, there are certain traditions that have been passed down to me, but I'm fairly removed from its core (so to speak).
By mixing up ethnicity with race, they would be classifying me as Ambiguously Brown when I'm clearly not. And that applies to a black person with European ancestry.
Therefore, I suggest we included this difference in the description (or, at least, the analysis page). That the Ambiguously Brown trope is only about race, not ethnicity. Because ethnicity is culture and a person can have inherited more than one culture or be descended from people with different cultures and not have inherited them.
I think that would really help avoid the majority of the misuse.
Here there be cats.
Cake's just a shot away. (he/him)
I made a to-do list and made Sandbox.Ambiguously Brown Wick Cleaning to keep track of what has already been sorted through, and I linked to it in the to-do list.
You can't always get what you want.
~Synchronicity Do you still plan on rewriting the description?
Macron's notes