Lightknight said:
Gorrath said:
Right, she doesn't, but that was my point. She doesn't look white at all, we just perceive her as white because of the culture portrayed in the show. We see the Simpsons as white because they are portrayed culturally as being white Americans. That's precisely what I was saying about anime. The characters don't look like actual humans of any race any more than the Simpsons do. If you look at characters which are explicitly supposed to be American in anime, they can get pretty out there compared to the non-white, non-american characters, just like how the Simpsons don't look white but they don't look Asian either, especially in comparison to the characters in the show which are explicitly Asian.
No, what I'm saying is that this isn't equivalent. People aren't saying that Marge looks white. People are saying that Anime characters frequently do even when they're supposed to be Japanese. See the difference there? The assumption is that Marge is white because of the context but not because she looks that way whereas people see some anime characters and think they look aesthetically white.
And yet there's also lots of people who say that they look aesthetically Japanese too. This is why I'm saying that from a purely aesthetic point of view, sans any context, the characters may simply be of an indistinguishable race, in which case we get an idea about what they are supposed to represent from the culture portrayed in the show or from their own culture. I don't think anime characters look like white people any more than I think Marge looks like a white person, other people will say they look like white people and still others will say they look Japanese or Asian in general. This merely points to the conclusion that it's a subjective response.
This is the fault of the artist. You can make a drawing look like a thing. There totally are Asian anime characters that look Asian.
Well again, fault seems to assume there's some worthwhile problem to be solved, and I don't think there is. So what if some Western people think anime characters look white?
I would never have guessed they were meant to be Japanese people either. Then again, if you showed me a picture of the Simpsons, sans any context, I'd also have no idea they were supposed to be white Americans. Cultural context in the shows is where we get our clues as to the artist's intention, not the aesthetic of the characters themselves, which was exactly the point I was making. In light of a totally alien looking character, we perceive their race based on culture, not aesthetics. You seem to agree with this based on what you said about the Simpsons.
No, I disagree that we perceive them as anything just because of culture. If literally every Simpsons character was the same color Yellow I wouldn't think of them as any race. Just Cartoon characters. I don't watch Gumball or Aqua Teen Hunger force and think "white". The concept of race doesn't even come up unless the attempt to make them a race is apparent.
I've never watched Gumball but there's some apples and oranges going on in your comparison with Aqua Teen. People don't assume those characters represent people of any race because those characters don't even represent people. Marge may look a bit alien compared to an actual human but she doesn't resemble a giant talking box of fries either lol. I respect you too much to think you're bullshitting me so I take your word that if the characters from the Simpsons were all the same shade of yellow you'd think of them as no race. I have big doubts as to whether others wouldn't assume, based on the context of what's in the show, or their own culture in comparison, that they are meant to be white people. I remember seeing them back when they first came out on the Tracy Ullman show. I thought they were white people even back then before there were any other characters to contrast them with. Which means either it's a subjective phenomenon or I'm some kind of crazy outlier. I'm inclined to think the former is true.
The assumption thing only makes sense when the idea is unknown. For example, assuming an English speaking character is American when they are actually Canadian. But if they have a deep southern accent then you aren't making the assumption based on culture you are making the conclusion based off of observed data. The same is true for people who think a non-trivial number of Anime characters look like Western demographics.
But accent and dialect are a part of culture. I don't see how you are differentiating between "making the conclusion off of observed data" and "making the assumption off of culture" when the culture being presented is a subset of observed data. The former is by definition a part of the latter.
I think doing an empirical comparison is quite moot because we are talking about subjective interpretations of art. The eyes of anime characters don't look like what many western people might think of as Asian looking but to me, they sure don't look like Western people either. They are hugely exaggerated for effect. Even being affected, clearly and historically, by western art doesn't mean that people should or do think the characters in said art are of any specific race or ethnicity.
Looking like a certain race or ethnicity isn't just subjective. We're talking biologically expressed alleles here. Phenotypes that you can see and distinguish from other phenotypes. Sure, there are some white kids that just have narrower eyes and sure, there are Japanese people with less slanted eyes. But overall we can visually distinguish objectively based on a range of traits.
Sorry but I'm also not seeing the distinguishing factor here either. There are biological reasons why many people very much prefer the color green but that doesn't mean color choice isn't a subjective thing. You may be right in saying it isn't just subjective but so what, in the sense you're suggesting, literally nothing is just subjective. That so many Japanese people see the characters as Asian suggests that it is quite subjective. That I don't see them, sans context, as any race at all also suggests that. Am I immune to the biological clarion call of the phenotype?
No, not everyone is a perfect individual flower. I have a red beard and dark brown, almost black hair and hazel eyes because of my ancestry. You're not going to confuse me with an Indian or African or a Japanese individual. The same is true in reverse. As bloodlines mix that will change, sure. But by and large we still have pretty clear and distinctly different phenotypes. One group's isn't better than another, but they are different.
Sure, I agree, it'd be silly for me not to and if Japanese people consistently thought the anime characters looked like Western people too, I'd be heavily inclined to believe that this is a compelling argument.
Agreed that opinions of how the characters look don't affect the history of the influences but I'm not sure why that matters. The fact of historical influence is also moot with regard to subjective views of what race a person might think a character resembles.
Pre-WWII, very Asian specific art. Post-WWII, the characters start looking Western. I'm saying that we can see a fairly demonstrable impact of Western aesthetics and art on Japanese art and one of those things are more Western looking characters with round eyes.
Yeah, again, but so what. As I pointed out with armor in fantasy anime, the stuff is obviously inspired by European armor but is also distinctly and in many ways nothing like European armor. Yes, you can see the obvious influences on the art from western art but that doesn't mean those influences mean that the people or objects portrayed in the anime look western either.
I think it's fair to say that artists will have their own ideas about what makes a character look like a certain ethnicity and that it will vary from artist to artist, though we will also see some strong trends across a broad style like anime. The human characters in Gate may look more or less Japanese depending on the perception of the viewer but toss in the characters that are explicitly not Asian and you can see how the artist is differentiating between the two.
My point here is that it doesn't matter what the artist's thoughts are. If their goal was to draw someone who is ethnically Japanese and they came up with someone like the brother's from Full Metal Alchemist (I believe they were actually supposed to be the equivalent of German), then the artist 'dun fucked up'. Not the people who see it and think the character is western. The mass is usually right here and right now the mass generally thinks that anime characters frequently look Western and white rather than Eastern and Japanese. They're not wrong.
Of course they're not wrong, because it's subjective! If the artist is creating a bunch of characters for a primarily Japanese audience and the Japanese audience thinks the characters look Japanese, the artist has not dun' fucked up. The fact that you and a mass of other Western people think the characters look Western should be of no great concern to the artist since they aren't the target audience of the anime. I know you've already covered that you think this is merely because the Japanese folks are watching a Japanese production aimed at Japanese people, so of course they think they look Japanese to them but unless you could demonstrate this, I can only accept that the Japanese audience really does think the characters look Japanese. Why should I accept that Westerners are seeing Western traits in the character's designs and therefore saying the characters look like white people but not accept that Japanese people who say they see traits in the characters that make them look Japanese just don't know what they are talking about or somehow have tainted opinions? Is it not wholly possible for a Japanese person to see a character with blonde hair and still think they look Japanese? If not then we should have dumped hair dye on Hiroshima and let them descend into civil war. (I kid, I kid!)
<youtube=Qus34ySIbyI>
I think the youtuber makes a good point. The problem here lies on the shoulders of the animators and not on the masses. You can draw a thing to look like a thing. If people think it looks like a different thing then that's your problem, not theirs.
Agreed totally! Though I'd say it's not even really a "problem" as such. Is it really a big deal if we think anime characters look white and Japanese people think they look Asian? I don't think it's a problem, I'd just caution against asserting that our interpretation of the character's looks is the correct interpretation. I sort of get the feeling you might have read more into my original statements than I actually meant.
Westerners would be empirically correct in several circumstances in claiming that anime characters have more phenotypes in common with Westerners than Asians. This isn't a relative truth bit. Genes are a thing and phenotypes are a thing and those things differ from region to region in a way that makes people from one region distinguishable from people from another region.
Do Westerners have Giant-ass big round eyes? No, but they do have eyes that are rounder than the Japanese to the point where that's a slur they through our way. Are WASPs whiter than Japanese people? Yes. Do Westerners more frequently have blonde or brown hair with blue or green eyes? Yes.
And calling Asians yellow people is a slur but that doesn't mean a Japanese person looking at Marge should think that she's meant to be an Asian character because she has yellow skin. There's also a lot of Japanese people that have pale skin, paler than even a lot of "white" westerners so asserting the paleness of the character's skin as being more like "white" people than Japanese people seems a big stretch. Hell, just google Japanese people and look at the pictures, the skin tone there seems to generally fall into the same range as your typical German-American to your typical Italian-American. If all you had was a close up picture of skin, I have little doubt most people would not be able to distinguish between a Japanese person and a white American just from that. They might do better with someone from, say, Vietnam or Thailand but lots of Japanese people are every bit as white as we are.
As for hair color, hair dye is a big, big thing, especially in a culture where a boat ton of people dye their hair. You see lots and lots of anime characters with blue or green hair along side that blonde or red. You also see things like violet or red eyes along side that blue or green. If a Western person is assuming that an anime character is meant to look western because she has blue eyes, what assumptions are they making about the one with blue hair and red eyes? These are all colors not typically seen naturally in the Japanese population and are used for artistic effect. Are Japanese people who dye their hair blonde trying to look like white western people or are they just trying to dye their hair a color because they think it looks cool?
Tell me, for all the tea in China, what ethnicity would you bet Naruto is?
http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/naruto/images/3/36/Naruto_Uzumaki.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/300?cb=20160107083821
Because he actually IS Japanese. According to the Author. But the Author claims he just decided to add Western features to him, despite him being Japanese. Herein lies the reason why people are claiming these characters that are supposed to be Japanese look Western. Because artists are making them look that way. Either on purpose or because western looking Anime characters is now a tradition they grew up with.
I get that that's the reason people are saying the characters look western. I've not anywhere claimed anything different, I've only claimed that the fact that a mass of Western people saying they look like Western white people and a mass of Japanese people saying they look Japanese suggests that this is a subjective matter informed by culture. For all the tea in China (and stand on me, do I love my tea) I would say he looks like a white guy. But so what, that's just like, my opinion man. If a Japanese guy looks at Naruto and says he looks Japanese, who am I to tell him he's wrong?
It is unfair to dismiss someone like me looking at Naruto and seeing "white kid" as somehow being culturally informed. It's not like the same artists don't know how to make a character look Asian or Japanese specifically.
No no no, I think you've got me all wrong and are crossing up some of my points. You wouldn't look at Naruto and say that his looking like a white kid is informed because of YOUR culture. My whole argument about telling a character's intended race being informed by culture is from the culture of the character, not the viewer. That's why I mentioned the Simpsons. If you sat me down and said, "What race are these characters" with no context, I'd have no idea. Give me a few episodes of the show and I would say they are intended to be white Americans because of the way the culture they are showed having in the show not because of my culture.
And really, how could you think I would dismiss your statement that the character looks white when my position is that the answers are subjective? Surely if I think it's a subjective matter I won't be dismissing opinions as wrong, will I?
http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/34300000/itachi-naruto-shippuuden-34355045-640-480.png
They are making a willful choice to do this. To make some characters look clearly Western and other characters look more Eastern. A lot of times they fall somewhere in between where a person has darker eyes and black/dark brown hair but their eyes are still round, skin is still pale, and no other traditional phenotypes of the ethnicity.
There is nothing wrong with this. It's just trite to call people out who see a drawing of a character that has all Western phenotypes and say they look Western. It is dismissive to claim that they're just seeing that because of their culture and not actually making judgments we make every day.
I didn't call anyone out or dismiss anyone's opinion. I merely stated that different cultures will perceive the characters in different ways. Many people in our Western culture see the characters as looking like white people and many people in Eastern cultures see them as looking Asian. Hell, I explicitly stated to the guy I originally responded to that my statements were not a takedown of what he was saying. Does that not suggest that I am in no way dismissing people's opinions or calling them out?
It is not at all dismissive to suggest that people see things in a way that's informed by their culture. In our culture, we see people all the time with natural blonde hair, so it's no surprise that if we see an anime character with blonde hair, we'll see them as looking like us. It's also not dismissive to suggest that a Japanese person seeing a character with blonde hair will still see them as Japanese because of their culture, a culture in which there's lots of changing of hair colors, blonde being a rather popular choice.
Lastly, I want to draw your attention to two things you've said:
"Anime is so common to the Japanese culture that of course the Japanese will view them as Japanese."
"It is dismissive to claim that they're just seeing that because of their culture and not actually making judgments we make every day."
Can you square those two statements? Are you not, by your own standard, being dismissive of Japanese people who claim that the characters look Japanese by claiming that they are only saying that because of their culture? Because I actually agree with your first statement, that culture influences how we see the ethnicity of the people in the show (Not to be confused with my other statement that one might draw a conclusion about a character's race/ethnicity from the culture of the character in the show.)
I say again though that I really do think you've read a lot into my statements that I did not intend to convey, especially since you seem to think I'm being dismissive of you. I promise that is not in any way the case.