shoorm:

The East Asian women + colored hair trope

(An extension of extraextraex’s post.)

Looking at the pictures above, it’s pretty easy to find the similarities. East Asian women with dyed purple/blue/red hair, usually in a streak. No matter how you look at this, this is an uncomfortably specific trend in media. Yeah, it looks cute, but after seeing this over and over again, it becomes a boring, racist trope. This originated from a variety of possibilities: the creators trying to “Americanize” the East Asian character, make them more “exotic”, or to show how unique this character is. She’s not a giggling schoolgirl or a delicate lotus flower, she’s different! See, she has a streak of purple hair (god forbid she dyes it any other color), look how radical that is, look at our modern Dragon Lady!

And yes, Knives dyed her hair to look like Ramona, and yes, Somni-451’s hair is like that to mark her as a clone, but these characters do not exist in a vacuum. You can justify why a character has a specific appearance, but in the end, this character was created, and contributes to stereotypes no matter the intent.



So the moral of this story is that your Asian character with a strip of purple hair isn’t original. It isn’t unique. No matter how innocent this appears to be, it can be detrimental to East Asian girls, since the characters that look like them have the same exact traits. It’s time to explore different ways of designing East Asian characters, instead of just slapping on some purple and calling it a day.