The redirects to: Mukokuseki

"Caucasian Asian" "Anglo Japanese" etc.

I suggest a rename if we're going to go by such a route. I'm not seeing ambiguity there, i'm seeing "LOL THIS GUY LOOKS WHITE EVEN THOUGH THEY CLAIM HES ASIAN" in redirects.

Or hell, maybe even a mixed-race guy. The examples don't seem to be getting confused as far as the description goes either.

edited 20th Dec '10 10:28:43 AM by Edmania

Why does it need a rename?

It would need a rename if it were to go by the route of Caucasian Asian and such.

I would prefer it if such redirects were destroyed instead, but I don't know how many people want that.

What are the searchable terms you'd like to replace it with then?

"Ambiguous Race", "No Racial Features", etc. should be fine.

These have both been added.

...so how often are the other redirects used anyway? (Caucasian Asian, Anglo Japanese, European Japanese, European Asian)

I feel as though keeping those unless they are in very wide use may lead to misleading results.

edited 21st Dec '10 5:51:39 AM by Edmania

That's listed on the "related to" pages. Caucasian Asian has 4, the rest have 0.

In this case, the redirects are more for searchability than for alternate use as the trope name.

I don't think we should keep a rather misleading redirect like that if it's used so little.

Edmania, the redirects are to enable people who don't know the Japanese term to find the trope using English words they are likely to search on. That's the whole point behind "searchable" redirects. And the "related to" count doesn't include search engine results.

edited 21st Dec '10 7:28:01 PM by Madrugada

I dislike both references to European, that makes it seem like a nationality thing.

But it's one of the more common ways for people to think about it.

Why don't we brainstorm some nonmissleading redirects then before we cut the existing ones? Something like Looks Like A Different Nationality. They can be a bit on the long side because they're just there for the search engine.

It's not that they look like a different nationality, it's that anime characters are frequently drawn with no ethnological  ^*

I use Caucasian Asian because I can't spell. Plus, the Japanese in question use the ethnic-neutral design [lord help me].

It's not that they look like a different nationality, it's that anime characters are frequently drawn with no ethnological facial features.

YMMV. Some people think these characters look Caucasian-ish.

Then we need a redirect that says that the character have no distinctive racial features and can easily be seen as whatever race instead of the race they're supposed to be.

That's why Caucasian Asian is a redirect.

But that doesn't sound like this trope at all. I don't see how it would help anyone find it. That sounds like someone who is either mixed race, Russian, or a white person who thinks they're Asian.

Ethnically Ambiguous Appearance, trying to think of the terms I'd be most likely to use on a search engine.

Search terms aren't always a phrase — the trick to making a searchable redirect is to figure out what the most likely search terms are, then figure out how to use them in a name.

edited 22nd Dec '10 10:24:49 PM by Madrugada

I like that one. I also don't see why this needs to be confined to anime and manga though. It's a pretty common feature of a lot of animation and comics. People are just drawn rather stylized and people-like and we're told their ethnicities.

It does seem to be more pronounced in anime and manga that in Western comic books and animation, to me. If a comic book character is supposed to be Asian, or Native American, or a Pacific Islander, or whatever, there are usually some visual clues to it. And in Western cartoons, the ethnicity of a character is rarely made very much of, and if it is, again, there are usually some visual hints to it (They may be simply Ambiguously Brown, but there's something to indicate "not a Caucasian of Western European ancestry").

Saying that it's limited to anime and manga is probably over restricting it, but saying that it is common in those forms and rarer in Western forms seems like a decent balance. The key to this trope, I think, is that the character is clearly stated to be of a given ethnicity, but in appearance they are a neutralized could-be-almost-anything.

edited 22nd Dec '10 10:37:09 PM by Madrugada

Ethnically Ambiguous Appearance works well as a redirect in that case. Doug is the one western appearance that pops out at me off the top of my head. We're told about character's races, but they're coloured almost at random.

edited 22nd Dec '10 11:45:21 PM by shimaspawn

The reason this trope pops up at all is mostly because of comparative features. The rest of Lights' family in Death Note have dark hair and more narrow features, while he has light brown hair (supposedly natural, I don't think there is any indication of a dye job). As a contrast, while some people may think the human characters in Inuyasha may have "white" features, they are clearly intended as Japanese and they uniformly have dark hair.

I think Mukokuseki is an official term used, and truthfully Caucasian Asian is generally what the confusion is about even though it means stateless. Black Asian or Hispanic Asian doesn't really come up.