About the name Blaise. There was a cartoon that ran in Britain for many years, called Modesty Blaise. She was a girl who was found with no memory and was called Modesty. She chose the name Blaise herself later, after the tutor of Merlin in the Arthurian legends. (Yes, the wikipedia entry linked above taught me that bon mot).

I wonder if it was this which led to many fans believing that Blaise was a girl's name. It could be that people assumed Modesty Blaise was like, say, Kangaroo Jack and that Blaise was her first name.

Just a thought.

There was a female character named Blaise on the cartoon Beverly Hills Teens.

[quote="Reepicheep-chan"]

Sakurelf wrote:

Err, that is all pretty tangental... I just find anime interesting because it is easy to see the characters as being white when most of them are not. I tend to assign races to characters now based on a set of visual cues I had to learn when I first started watch anime in Jr. High. When I first started watching it was a mix of non-assigning race due to visual and contextual confusion or tending to think of the characters as white because characters who looked the same way in a western cartoon would be considered white.

The huge eyes come from the art style, which comes way back from Tezuka (and, by extension, Disney). The Japanese don't need to assign stereotypical 'racial' features to themselves in their own cartoons because they already see themselves as the default.

^ Ummm, that is not quite what I meant.

Oh, mostly that is just musing out loud. Personal theory based on observation, some from time I sent in Japan, some from watching anime/ reading manga from a diverse collection of genres and time frames, etc. I mean, the part about Japanese people being paler and bigger-eyes than most other asians (well, east asians I guess I am not really thinking about all of asia) is true, except for maybe Koreans sometimes? And I read that the green and purple and blue hair in Urasai Yatsura and Ranma were the results of colorists wanting to differentiate between different characters with black hair, no idea if that is the case in any other manga/anime.

But yeah, mostly just musing, not, like, teaching, haha. I know that the whole big-eye thing is an art style and that a great deal of cartoon have bigger-than-normal eyes and the main reason for that is it just make expressions easier to convey, HOWEVER Japanese comics and animation tends to take it to an extreme that is not common in stuff like Disney, which seems a little ironic. I was just sort of throwing out why I thought that may be because I thought maybe it would make for interesting conversation.

Quote:

Yeah all of that was very interesting, but... you sure you didn't just make all that shit up from watching too much anime? I mean, I have a friend whose brain has been so thoroughly saturated with the stuff that he couldn't tell anyone apart in the Lord of the Rings movies.

To be honest I prefer western animation and comics as a general rule. I think the only anime I have followed at all since my freshman year of college is Shin-chan. I was really let down by Trigun and I get cannot get into that whole genre anymore.

Hey, don't forget:

White hair: Supernatrual in some way. Possibly wise beyond their years.