This does not deal directly with the story in question but it does deal
directly with a recommendation given for the story (which recommendation
I disagree with) and for all anime fanfiction as a whole (which
recommendation I disagree with). As the recommendation was given
publicly and has previously been given publicly, and has bearing on
almost every series for which fanfiction is written on the FFML, it
makes sense for the arguments against such a recommendation to be public.
On Tuesday, August 27, 2002, at 07:59 AM, Gary Kleppe wrote:
In the middle of the clearing sat a girl meditating in the lotus
position. She was an exotic beauty; unbound purple hair cascading
I strongly suggest you avoid using goofy hair colors in a prose story.
In anime, you can have details that everybody understands are just eye
candy. In prose, details are expected to matter. If you described a
character as having abnormally huge eyeballs, the readers would wonder
how and why they got that way, and would expect people looking at
those
eyeballs to at least view them as strange (unless such eyeballs are
the
norm in your world, in which case you've got even more explaining to
do.)
If such eyeballs are the norm in a fictional world, you have absolutely
no explaining to do, since from the characters' point of view it's
perfectly normal, and you'd have no reason to mention it. The same goes
If an author tells me that most of the people in his world are the same
as the real one, except for the fact that everybody has huge eyeballs,
I'd expect him or her to eventually show some sort of consequence for
this. To introduce a difference and then not have it matter would be, at
least for me, rather unsatisfying.
I already said "If such eyeballs are the norm in a fictional world, you
have absolutely no explaining to do, since from the characters' point of
view it's perfectly normal, and you'd have no reason to mention it."
Notice I say you'd have no reason to mention it. Things that are
perfectly normal from a character's point of view do not bear remarking
upon. Take, for example, Asimov's "Nightfall." It happens on a clearly
alien world with non-human characters, but we're never given a
description of what the people look like, so most readers might assume
that they're human. The characters look normal to each other and it
doesn't matter to the purposes of the story what they look like, so
there's no reason to describe them as being different. It doesn't matter
whether or not anime characters have big eyes for the purposes of most
any story and a good writer would see no reason to make mention of it.
Japanese people also may or may not be shorter on average than the
largely American audience of the FFML, yet there's never any reason to
mention this in a story (unless Americans become involved somehow). It's
a difference that doesn't matter.
for hair colors. Anime characters HAVE goofy-colored hair, and if you
are writing about anime characters, it's silly to avoid giving them
goofy-colored hair in some attempt at lending "legitimacy" to your
prose.
They're DRAWN with goofy-colored hair. They're also drawn with huge
eyeballs, as well as (at times) volcanos exploding inside their heads.
To me these are examples of three distinct things: differences in
universe, aspects of art style, and visual exaggerations for effect.
Eye size is an aspect of the art style, and most of the characters in a
manga share this aspect.
Volcanos in heads, huge hanging sweatdrops, and bulging forehead veins
are temporary exaggerated effects to indicate non-visual things such as
moods, though people may actually sweat or have throbbing veins to a
much less visually pronounced extent.
I put goofy-colored hair in the universe difference category. This
category includes other things such as vastly varied character size:
Happosai's and Cologne's diminutive height, the dojo destroyer's
hugeness. You could say these are exaggerations, but they're there all
the time, and should not be automatically classed with the temporary
effects in the previous category. Some manga/anime are clearer in the
distinction than others: in Trigun, for example, the Nebraska family (or
whatever the name was) had a huge person two or three stories tall, with
his father riding on one shoulder. Was this merely an exaggeration? I
don't think so. We're expected to believe that the character actually
was that size. Why? Who knows? That's just the way the manga author made
them. You can try to find a reason for it, but if you don't attempt to
do so and simply write them as that size there's nothing wrong with
that. Magic and martial arts skills such as ki blasts also fall in this
category. More on this below.
I strongly recommend using goofy hair colors in anime fanfiction.
I'm not really saying that the shows' creators really do expect you to
believe that everyone has huge eyes and black lines along the front
edge
of their noses. But hair color I do not put in the same category.
You might as well say that characters don't really glow blue or green
or
red when they're emotional, or that they don't actually pull mallets or
microphones or out of nowhere, or that they don't actually have
transformation sequences or long attack phrases, or that they don't
really bound across rooftops or crash through solid walls and get up to
fight again, because people in the real world and in standard prose
stories never do such things. But these things are possible and
expected
in anime settings, and so are goofy hair colors. (And in fact a lot of
Actually, I *would* call most of those things visual metaphors. The
transformation sequences, for example, can't possibly be as long as
they're shown to be in anime, or the villains would stomp the heroes in
the middle of them. They're extended in order to underscore their
significance. (And maybe to save on animation costs by using more stock
footage. I dunno.) In prose, you don't need to do this. You can write a
longer *description* of the effect without actually having it *take*
longer in the story, just as you can come up with metaphoric text
descriptions for the other stuff above that actually treats them as
metaphors.
It's rather like the Bionic Man being shown running in slow motion.
Would you actually describe him in prose as "running in slow motion"?
those things, *including* goofy hair colors at times for various
reasons, are not unknown in non-anime prose genres.)
For various reasons, yes. But for *no* reason?
What's the reason for drawing them with goofy-colored hair? You said
earlier that it was merely eye candy. Now THAT is a very unsatisfactory
answer. There are plenty of blonde Japanese characters in anime too, and
that's no less impossible than blue hair.
Is it a visual metaphor then? For what? On an individual basis it may
be, like how in Ai Yori Aoshi, Aoi's hair is blue. But that could easily
be the other way around: they named her Aoi when she was born, because
her hair came out blue. Anime worlds have all sorts of stuff that are
impossible in the real world, and I don't see why hair color should be
any harder to accept than ki blasts. Why separate what happens on screen
(or on the page) from what really must be happening? It makes no sense
to me to think "oh, that character who has green hair and that character
who has blonde hair don't really have hair that color, it's really black
but it looks goofily-colored that way when they show it in anime." Okay,
sometimes accepting the surface reality will make zero sense (the Utena
movie), but this is just hair color. The hair is that color because the
character was designed that way. If you change the color to something
else (black), then it's not the same character.
Actually, I have no problem with redesigning characters, whether look or
personality, to fit the needs of the story. But there is no overwhelming
need to change a character in all written stories so that hair color is
not goofy. Changing it will stand out to the target audience, because
the standard anime fan expects hair colors to be certain ways.
It's one thing to say "I recommend following the non-colored Ranma manga
pages when basing fiction off the manga and referring to hair color, as
the color pages are inconsistent in what colors characters' hair appears
as." It's another thing to recommend against odd colors entirely. If a
writer has a Tsukino Usagi who is not blonde, then a reader might expect
some explanation of why her hair color isn't "normal." Not the other way
around. If Tsukino Usagi is blonde, that's just the way she is. Is her
hair color unsatisfying?
I agree that transformation sequences aren't as long as they're shown in
the animes. That's a question of adjusting film speed for a specific
duration. My point was that magic is as impossible as goofy hair colors.
Not that the sequence takes too long.
Perhaps some manga authors do intend hair colors merely to make the
manga look pretty. Takahashi does seem to follow this line with Ranma
1/2 since the hair colors have no consistency. But I don't think that's
the case for most other manga authors: from what I've seen, most of them
stay consistent. And yes, they even say in dialogue sometimes that their
hair is goofy colors. "Bleach" by Kubotite (why he uses this pseudonym I
have no idea) shows Ichigo with orange hair in the first colored pages.
In his character rundown it says his hair is orange, and in chapter 2 a
character says his hair is a weird color. What are we meant to assume?
That his hair isn't actually orange, but that it's just a visual
metaphor for something? I think it's quite clear that his hair is
actually orange. Why? I have no idea. But it's orange, and if I write a
story where it's not orange, then that's going to look wrong to people
familiar with the series.
That anime characters have weird hair colors is an established and
accepted practice, and I can find no convincing reason to automatically
go against this practice in prose. On a case-by-case basis there can be
reasons, such as if the tone of the story is much more realistic than
might be standard for a particular series, or if it involves crossovers
with a universe which does not have odd hair colors. Simply saying
"don't use goofy hair colors in prose" is unnecessarily limiting.
On the unrelated issue, I was mistaken on the /x/ <-> /sh/ issue in
pinyin. I knew /x/ existed and wrongly assumed it to be used for the
sounds you might use /sh/ for.
Peter
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