Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Unclear Description
, started by Ghilz on May 6th 2020 at 5:17:48 AM
There are quite a few anime examples that are simply Japanese and the skin color is just decorative. Just because Western people can't wrap their heads around it...
Also, I personally like the idea that it's not necessary to state a character's ethnicity... it's one of those things where it's supposedly anti-racist to ask for it to be cleared up, but if there's a light-skinned, dark-haired character, you don't ask what portion of their genes are North European vs. Mediterranean vs. East Asian vs. whatever else... so dark-skinned people should be given the same respect. Unless you think all dark-skinned people would rather be Captain Ethnic.
I made this Idolized Julius Kingsley icon back when Akito first came out, and now that the crossover is actually happening, I don't care. Hide / Show Replies
I kind of want to remove the 999 entry under visual novels for this reason but not sure what to do.
Removed the Avatar: the Last Airbender and Punch-Out!!! examples
None of the nations in Avatar the Last Airbender are ambiguous but are examples of Fantasy Counterpart Culture
And Little mac has already been confirmed as Italian-American by the guy who played him in Nintendo's own TV adverts for the 2009 remake.
Where does Erick Avari go? The dude's played over two dozen nationalities, including an extraterrestrial human descendant of ancient Egyptians. If that doesn't qualify as ambiguous, what does?
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People in real life don't have ambiguous ethnicities unless they forgot 'em, so nowhere. (FYI, he's of Indian descent.)
- raises hand* I identify as ambiguously brown.
I can see this trope being reasonably justified in some settings; like if the setting is more fantasy, and one could hardly bother to identify the specific ethnicity of "white" characters.
EDIT: To clarify, why doesn't anyone make such a fuss over light-skinned characters?
Edited by Stoogebie Hide / Show Replies
Agreed. Why does it even matter, anyway? To begin with, this seems to describe more the fandom's attempt at categorizing people by skin colour, not something that drives the plot on its own like a trope should.
Edited by enistoja Trying to be better than I was before
Yeah, I don't really get it. Americans in particular seem to be really interested in cataloguing people's ethnic heritages back to the nth generation — as far as I can tell it's based on an idea that ethnicity = cultural background (though that doesn't explain why the whole of Africa and the Caribbean is considered to be one race for such purposes).
I suppose making a character brown without explanation smacks of tokenism to some people, but that attitude just continues the idea that whiteness is the "unmarked" state and any other ethnicity is an unusual thing worthy of special attention.
Edited by johnnye
Well, it's also that whites generally play white characters and blacks generally play black characters, but it's common to see other 'mid-toned' ethnicities/races play each other on the idea that they look about the same (Yul Brynner as a SE Asian, Jason Scott Lee as an Indian, etc).
Isn't that Plays Great Ethnics?
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You Give Me Fever
Black and Puerto Rican have never been two mutually exclusive conditions. Carlito Colón, a native Puerto Rican fathered by a native Puerto Rican who identified himself as black, identifies as "half" black. Does anyone have any citation or even just remember a time when Homicide said he wasn't black? I know Konnan has alluded to the fact he wasn't but I will laugh in my screen if that's evidence Cubans can't be black.
If Homicide doesn't identify as black, that's his business, I would not hold it against and never thought he looked the part anyway but that's not even the issue at this point.
edit:And I'm really sorry for bringing this to the discussion tab. Maybe I should have just posted on the forums but Wrestling related topics tend to move at a Glacier's pace there and all my attempts to contact Paul Sebert have been unsuccessful.
Edited by 69.47.43.173 That's why he wants you to have the money. Not so you can buy 14 Cadillacs but so you can help build up the wastes
This is how most small white children experience brown people at first. The amount of exposure and so on influences how fast they learn to draw distinctions, but to start it's inevitably going to be 'darkish-colored person.' My first kiss was a (pale) black neighbor boy at eight or nine, whom I didn't see much of from then on after alarming my grandmother that way, and it was ten years later a chance remark at a family dinner about possibly having seen him around town informed be of his race. I was barely aware such a thing as race existed at that age, and have mild prosopagnosia, so though I recalled him as 'dark' he could've been a rather tanned Pole for all I knew.
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Black History Month when I was about six and my mom asked me if I knew any black people. I said no. Mom pointed out our neighbor two doors down who babysat me. I go, "She's not black, she's brown!"
How's Italian an ethnicity? and how're they brown at all? You must have never seen an Italian person if you'd colour them brown.
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It isn't an ethnicity, but it is an ethic group. I live in a very Italian part of Boston and there are several people who have pretty dark complexions and are full-blooded Italians, and I knew a girl whose was Italian but could easily pass for Hispanic or Middle Eastern. The Italians here probably aren't as dark as some others on account of it being New England, but they're also not a uniform group and there are significant variations.
Face the past and you'll fly ass first into the future. - My Dad
Mediterranean complexions tend on the whole to be significantly darker than those of Germanic and Nordic and Celtic and the majority of Slavic persons. Some very much so.
I'm Italian. 99% of the Italians I know don't look brown in the slightest. Some Italians do have a darker complexion than people from Northern Europe (or rather, people from Northern Europe tend to be even more fair-skinned than average), but not enough to label them brown. I think their inclusion is kinda misleading since most of the time you couldn't tell them apart from any other European
Edited the page a bit to mentioned that debates like things tend to be purely fan things. Presumably if the status of a character is at all relevant to a story, it would come up.
Tho I'm more troubled by the idea. Is there any specific reason fandom seems be more obsessed with identifying the unknown-status/statelessness of a dark-skinned character more than a light skinned one?
Removed:
- This exchange from Archer:
Archer: You're black ... -ish.
Lana: -ISH?!
Archer: Well what's the word for it, Lana? You freaked out when I said quadroon.
Because Lana's ethnicity isn't ambiguous: she's mixed race black and white (the show hasn't explored her family, but she clearly self-identifies as black while not correcting anyone who points out that she's part white). In the quote, Archer isn't referring to not knowing what her ethnicity is, he just doesn't know a word for it that doesn't offend Lana ("quadroon" being a fairly archaic and offensive term for someone with one white parent and one parent of mixed black and white heritage).
Edited by LoserTakesAll
"She looks like she would actually be Roma, instead of the blonde princess that lives amongst the Roma." I would really like to introduce the one who posted that to a whole lot of blonde and sometimes blue-eyed Roma. There are a LOT of them. Roma aren't your dirty= brown-brown-brown stereotype. Our outward appearances are just as various as our religions - there are orthodox, catholic and muslim Roma, and some smaller traditional folk beliefs here and there. Please do your homework before being snippy and offending other people.
Should the ancient Egyptians get some sort of mention here? 19th-century Eurocentric anthropologists said they were Caucasian, various black nationalist groups have said that they were black, and I'm sure other claims have been made. Given that their civilization lasted thousands of years and they were invaded by foreign nations multiple times, saying that they were any one ethnicity is probably inaccurate. Their portrayals of themselves doesn't help matters, because they would do things like consistently portray women as much paler than men, so they probably weren't concerned with painting literal representations of what they looked like. But I'm not sure what category this would fall under, or even if it belongs on the page. What do you guys think?
"Brazilian" is not an ethnicity or race.It's just a nationality (Brazilian people have very different skin colors and physical traits). The same is probably valid to other "ethnicities" listed there. That should be corrected.
Edited by 189.58.243.150 Hide / Show Replies
Then go right ahead and correct it. I don't think anyone is stopping you.
Face the past and you'll fly ass first into the future. - My Dad
Can we get rid of the Real Life bit (c.f. Proud Warrior Race Guys)? It just seems to be a listing of actors and celebrities who tropers know are mixed race, especially ones who frequently play Ambiguously Brown. It's kind of not the business of tropers to be all, "I don't know what race Keisha Castle-Hughes is, therefore she's ambiguously brown!" Just because these people (mostly actors) commonly *play* people who are Ambiguously Brown, doesn't mean there's anything about them that is ambiguous.
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I would say kill that section and certain live-action bits. It's a trope rooted in animation.
I took that out and added a disclaimer up top. Should be keep the Live-Action TV bit as well?
Face the past and you'll fly ass first into the future. - My Dad
At least one of the live action examples is a puppet (LazyTown's Mayor Meanswell), so the section has to stay even if you zap the rest of the examples. I'd personally argue that while real people aren't truly 'ambiguous' (since you can always ask/look it up/mind your own business), a live action character can be, as something of a subtrope of Fake Nationality. Lana Lang is ambiguous, as she's supposed to be white in-story despite being clearly not, while Teyla and Ronon's ethnicities are known, just not Terran.
I'd be okay with keeping the Live Action Tv section under that rationale.
Face the past and you'll fly ass first into the future. - My Dad
this page needs another image. This one is Just A Face And A Caption.
Tyler Durden is my bitch. Hide / Show Replies
I think it works in this case, since let's face it, pretty much any image we do for this trope is gonna be Just A Face And A Caption.
Face the past and you'll fly ass first into the future. - My Dad
Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Not Tropeworthy
, started by captainpat on Jun 9th 2012 at 12:29:26 AM
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