At 08:16 PM 8/27/2002 -0400, you wrote:

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.

I've actually used this before, on, fittingly enough, an Utena fic, where, 
having left Ohtori, the characters were now in "the real world", which 
didn't have any of these fantastic things. I deliberately gave characters 
black or brown hair to show that they weren't in the world they were 
before. The fact of the matter is that when we write these characters, 
unless we're taking them out of it, we're writing them as being in their 
world. In their world, hair colors like purple, blue, blonde, crimson, 
aren't only normal, they're usually not even worth commenting on.
The point is, they're shown with these hair colors, those hair colors and 
styles are part of their defining characteristics. That's the REASON they 
have wild hair colors and styles, to make them easily recognizable when the 
art style might make things like facial features not very good at picking 
them apart. I can't be the only person that's noticed that if you take away 
Ryoga's bandanna and don't let him show a fang, he could probably pass for 
Ranma. (In fact, I know I'm not.)
Shampoo has purple hair. That is a facet of her character, it is an 
identifying characteristic. It would be akin to trying to dance around 
identifying the ethnicity of a black character to avoid making it seem as 
if everyone's not the same.
If you don't want to write about things that have built-in 
"impossibilities" like natural hair color that runs the full spectrum, or 
transformation sequences, or glowing ki... why write anime? Or at least, 
why write these particular anime? There are a couple out there, not many, 
but some that don't have any of this stuff in them. If you don't like 
seeing this stuff in fic, either write fic of those series, don't read the 
fic of the other series, whatever.
'Cause, I mean, what? You take away the weird hair color, you take away the 
sweatdrops, you take away the battle auras, and... what are we writing, 
here? It's not anime fanfic, anymore, that's for sure.
Godzilla: "Wait a second... I'm physically impossible! Oh no!" *bones 
shatter under the weight of his own flesh*

-Rann


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