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
(she/her)
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
Opening. Personally, I think this should be limited to drawn works.
Edit: Ninja'd.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 1st 2022 at 6:51:12 AM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
reconsidering
^ that would work for me too (with allowance for in universe live action examples)
![[down]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_down.png "[down]"){kind=icon}
ok, thank you. I will do so in the future
Edited by Tremmor19 on Jan 1st 2022 at 8:02:29 AM
He/Him
BTW, it's helpful to include the page where you found the wick with the examples in wick checks. Just posting the straight example without showing where it came from can be confusing. Though it might just be a bugbear of mine.
My troper wall
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
I should probably state that when I said drawn, I meant anything that isn't live-action, so 3D animated works (including video games) would still count.
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
As the person who did the wick check for the last TRS that fizzled out, I'm delighted this is back here.
My view on the problem was:
As an anecdotal example, I removed an example from Dash & Lily where the character is visibly a man of color, but then says he's going back to Puerto Rico and mentions an abuela, so clearly he is meant to be Puerto Rican or at least Latino. Plenty of examples are like that ("Alice is brown but her mother mentions a koshary recipe, what could she be?")
Here are the proposed fixes I had mentioned in the previous thread. The OP's proposal covers the first and last, and the second can be done independently, but I think the third is worth examining as well.
- An Ambiguous Ethnicity trope for characters whose ethnic ambiguity is lampshaded or at least acknowledged within the work (eg. Rashida Jones in Parks and Recreation, whose 'ambiguous ethnic blend perfectly represents the American melting pot' or something like that). It is not stated in the OP but quite a few examples are of this sort, and an old TLP draft that goes this way.
- A Viewer Ethnicity Confusion YMMV item for audience confusion about a character's background.
- Removing settings that are clearly not comparable to Earth or don't view race and ethnicity the same way we do. (eg. Oscar Isaac in Star Wars — can we assume that his character is Latino when they are all in space?)
- Limiting this to drawn media, since in live-action you can probably at least fall back on the setting/plot or assume Actor-Shared Background.
Edited by Synchronicity on Jan 1st 2022 at 8:35:44 AM
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I think those proposals sound fine.
I think splitting this between Ambiguous Ethnicity and Viewer Ethnicity Confusion would be comparable to how we split Vendor Trash into the objective Shop Fodder and the Audience Reaction Better Off Sold (not in terms of subject, but in terms of execution).
Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 1st 2022 at 9:28:06 AM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
Lord Something, Forgetter of Cool Titles
I liked the idea of disambiguating the trope in a broader ambiguous ethnicity and the audience being confused by a characters ethnicity.
Being honest, I never understood why the trope has such a focus on brown skin; granted, in animation, a brown-skinned person could be indian, mixed, middle-eastern,romani etc., but it's not like people keep wondering if a white character is supposed to be of anglo-saxon, slavic, germanic, iberian, greek, scandinavian, mixed ascendence etc, neither black characters being thought to be of Yoruba, Ibo, Amhara, Zulu, Mursi ascendance and so on and so forth. It seems the trope came from Anime discussions, right?
Edited by good-morning on Jan 1st 2022 at 3:32:00 PM
oh hey how are you doing?
reconsidering
&
I would also say there is another trope covered here— the concept of sort of "nonspecific diversity", when different skin and hair colors are used to add visual diversity without going into any cultural diversity by defining the characters as specfific ethnicities. Again, only applies to drawn media, of course
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
To be fair, what you're listing are ethnicities rather than races, which is what this trope appears to be mostly aiming for. It's harder to tell what race a non-specific brown person is because there's more options, where a white character is only ever going to be white. What ethnicity of white they are is less relevant to people, especially when it comes to American works where most people come from pretty diverse backgrounds anyway.
This should be split as proposed. Right now, it looks more like the audience not knowing what race the character is, as opposed to anything in-story. Also, "ambiguous race" does not necessarily mean "brown".
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
Would these be our options for a crowner? (It's not quite time to make one; I'm asking ahead of time.)
- Define as an objective trope for characters whose ethnic ambiguity is lampshaded or at least acknowledged within the work
- Define as an Audience Reaction for audience confusion about a character's background
- Split between an objective trope for characters whose ethnic ambiguity is lampshaded or at least acknowledged within the work and an Audience Reaction for audience confusion about a character's background, and disambiguate Ambiguously Brown between the two (the new pages' names would be decided with new crowners)
- Remove examples from settings that are clearly not comparable to Earth or don't view race and ethnicity the same way we do
- Limit to drawn media
- Rename the trope if it is not split
Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 3rd 2022 at 12:32:10 PM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
reconsidering
I do very much like the idea of splitting off "Ambiguous Race In Universe"
Currently wick check only covers live action, though—
EDIT: I had forgotten that there was an older wick check from 2020 here, so that may work, not sure what the rules are on that
Edited by Tremmor19 on Jan 4th 2022 at 3:32:55 PM
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
I forgot that the wick check only covered live-action media. I'll hold off on making a crowner that broad unless someone checks examples from other works.
I suppose we could limit the crowner to the following due to the lack of a full wick check:
- Remove examples from settings that are clearly not comparable to Earth or don't view race and ethnicity the same way we do
- Limit to drawn media
reconsidering
I had forgotten there was already a wick check in 2020 which covered more of the wicks—
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=1588735255085492600 don't know if that is enough or we would want another one
That said, if you do make a crowner I would personally like "Split off YMMV trope Viewer Ethnicity Confusion" and "Split off In-Universe Ambiguous Ethnicity" to be separate options on the crowner, not reliant on turning Ambiguously Brown into a disambig. Splitting those off + removing live action examples is not inherently in conflict with keeping Ambiguously Brown as a trope
Edited by Tremmor19 on Jan 4th 2022 at 3:42:35 PM
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
I'd still list options for how to define this trope regardless of a split because the previous TRS thread showed that it has an identity crisis when it comes to how it's already used and defined. Choosing one of those or splitting it into objective and YMMV concepts would help clarify the meaning.
That, and the description is badly written due to all the Word Cruft, which you already mentioned in your OP.
Edit: Oh, I see what you're referring to regarding the definition. The first listing in the original wick check shows the intended definition (a character's skin color being unexplained). That said, as was mentioned in the previous thread, that might be People Sit on Chairs like a lot of other appearance tropes.
I might still hold off on making a crowner and maybe defer to another mod on this one, because I'm tired and I've been sick since the middle of last month, so I don't currently feel up to making a crowner for this trope since its case looks kind of complex. Maybe I could read last year's thread for now.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 4th 2022 at 2:56:39 PM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
I might as well page ~Synchronicity since she worked on the previous thread and would probably have a better idea for how to handle this than I do.
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
Courtesy link to my late-2020 wick check: Sandbox.Ambiguously Brown WC
I think Gaston's options are actually OK, I would just probably just add an option to reaffirm the current definition ("a darker-skinned character in a cast of fairer-skinned characters whose ethnicity is ambiguous and unexplained") and clean misuse. I think it's necessary because so many examples setting context, or actually hint at their backgrounds.
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
I've slept since my previous post, so let me see if I can come up with a setup for a crowner:
- Define as an objective trope for characters whose ethnic ambiguity is lampshaded or at least acknowledged within the work
- Define as an Audience Reaction for audience confusion about a character's background
- Define as an objective trope for a darker-skinned character in a cast of fairer-skinned characters whose ethnicity is ambiguous and unexplained
- Remove examples from settings that are clearly not comparable to Earth or don't view race and ethnicity the same way we do
- If more than one definition option has enough consensus, define this trope as the one with the most consensus, and split off the rest
- Limit to drawn media
- Rename (if the trope is split, this would lead to the original name becoming a disambiguation page)
Do these sound good? If the trope is not split, but more the one definition option is within consensus range, we'd use the definition with the most consensus.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 4th 2022 at 11:45:56 AM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
reconsidering
^ that looks good to me
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
All right then, hooked now that everything's sorted out (plus my head is clearer than it previously was).
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
Why would "darker-skinned character in a cast of lighter-skinned characters" be an option, but not the other way around?
That's the current definition, and what most of the usage is kinda going for. This is a really old page; at the time it was made I totally see why most usage would swing for "random brown person in a cast of white people" or "random brown person in a cast of Japanese anime characters". It makes no sense to define it as the rarer inversion.
Editing to add that I'm definitely willing to sponsor "lampshaded ethnic ambiguity", so if that doesn't get consensus those examples will still have a home.
Edited by Synchronicity on Jan 7th 2022 at 12:25:17 PM
Lord Something, Forgetter of Cool Titles
Do you think it was a trope even then? I don't watch many anime, so I don't know if it characters with darker skin whose ancestrality wasn't touched upon was that much of a thing or if it was blown out of proportion
oh hey how are you doing?
To-do list:
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:
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
Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 29th 2022 at 6:40:51 AM