Code Geass, Avatar, and racial coding in animation.

[nenena]

Went to the bookstore today. Hooray!

I picked up Ah! My Goddess volume 38, with Chrono on the cover. In the manga canon, I guess she's officially strawberry blonde, now.

So I guess Crono is important enough to rank among Rind, Chihiro, and other supporting characters who have gotten their own volume covers. I'm... not sure how I feel about that. I mean, Crono is just so... stupid. But oh well. There are enough better characters in the cast that I really don't care whether Crono deserves her moment in the sun, or not.

The big surprise was an announcement in the back of the book: the Ah! My Goddess "Total Illustration Artbook 1998 ~ 2008" hits the shelves on Christmas Day! Holy crap!! I can't believe that date wasn't announced in last month's Afternoon. Uh, way to advertise your release dates well in advance, guys. Or not.

Speaking of release dates... How to Make Deathscythe was supposed to hit the shelves today, too. But of course, Squeenix has yet to ship any copies to any bookstores in the southern Nagano area. Of course. This always happens, argh! But that's what I get for living in a backwater.

Oh hey, and since I do live in a backwater, today was the first day that I found a copy of Mutuality on the bookstore shelf. Of course I immediately bought it. ;) Yes, yes, I know, the book has been out for three weeks already. But hey, backwater living! Gotta love it.

Anyway, for those of you unfamiliar, Mutuality is the big giant artbook collection of all of CLAMP's illustrations for Code Geass. And it is, absolutely, in a word, stunning. Worth every single penny. Say what you will about Code Geass - and you know I'm not shy about repeatedly stating that I think that it's utter shite, albeit extremely entertaining shite - but it's impossible to deny that CLAMP's artwork for the series, both production designs and promotional materials, really do represent the pinnacle of modern manga artistry. (If you can stand how overwrought they are, that is.)

Anyway, the book is gorgeous, almost mind-blowingly so, and contains many paintings so visually complicated that I could stare at them for hours and still not be able to appreciate every single detail. The best part of the book, however, is an extensive section of all of the early, rejected character designs that CLAMP churned out. Some of them are outright LOLarious. And some of them are extremely... telling. I know that I've written about this phenomenon before, when the original Lelouch and Suzaku character designs were first revealed in an issue of Newtype. But it still *fascinates* me to observe the process that CLAMP applied to evolving those two character designs from their rough versions to their final versions.

In their original designs, CLAMP clearly intended to emphasize the respective ethnicities of Suzaku and Lelouch, as Code Geass starts and ends with a race war and, well, the ethnicity of each character is super-important to the plot. Hence, Suzaku was given spiky black hair, narrow black eyes, and sharp, angular, "Asian"-looking features. Lelouch, on the other hand, was given blonde curly hair, and round blue eyes. Because he's Brittanian royalty, and therefore SUPER!Caucasian, of course.

The problem, however, is that these character designs wouldn't work in the anime medium. The reason is that anime audiences are used to a visual language of character design that codes characters in terms of their personality and role in the story, NOT in terms of their race.

Hence, the final version of Suzaku ends up with curly, lighter-colored brown hair, and round, green eyes. These features emphasize his purity and moral goodness. Lelouch, on the other hand, ends up with spiky black hair, narrow eyes, and sharp, angular features - to emphasize the fact that he's a cunning, amoral manipulator. The facts that Suzaku is Japanese and Lelouch is Brittanian don't need to be coded into their character designs, because the actual story (and heck, even the names of the characters) emphasize that plenty enough for us. Heck, practically every episode has Suzaku reminding the audience that he is SUPER!Japanese, whereas Lelouch is constantly reminding viewers that he's ZOMG!Brittanian. The race of these two character isn't exactly handled in a subtle fashion. In fact, their respective racial backgrounds become so vital to the plot that, like I said, they're mentioned several times in nearly every episode.


Left: Suzaku's original character design. Note: Spiky black hair, angular black eyes, sharp little nose.
Right: Lelouch's original character design. Note: Softer hair shape and color, round blue eyes, rounder nose.


Lelouch's final character design, sans colors.
Translated from CLAMP's notes: "Once we decided that Lelouch's theme color was 'black' and Suzaku's
was 'white,' we of course had to give Lelouch pitch-black hair, despite the fact that he wasn't Japanese."


Suzaku's final character design, sans colors.
Translated from CLAMP's notes: "His hair just started getting curlier and curlier..."


Final designs, with colors. There's only one Asian character in this picture... And he's on the far left, dressed in white.

And that's how anime works. It's not that race is never coded visually. I'm sure we can all think of examples of Caucasian anime character saddled with blonde hair and big noses, or God, a thousand times worse, characters of African descent stuck with big noses and big lips. BUT those visual racial codings are usually only allowed to happen if they don't conflict with the visual personality codings.

Japanese audiences might not have accepted a Suzaku with narrow black eyes and an angular face. That's because in the usual anime shorthand, features like "narrow black eyes" and "angular facial features" are meant to indicate deviousness, cunning intellect, and general untrustworthiness. Suzaku is none of these things; he's meant to be the White Knight, the polar OPPOSITE of all of the above. Hence, if he had been designed to have angular "Asian" features, his visual cues would have conflicted with his character's personality. So CLAMP ditched their attempt to visually code Suzaku's race, and instead embraced a character design that reflected his personality in a visual shorthand. And that, in short, is what anime viewers are used to.


Which one is Japanese? Which one is a British prince?

When I think of examples of characters who do look coded racially, particularly in Code Geass, it often happens to be a coincidence of that character's personality matching up with the appropriate quote-unquote "racial" codings. (Which really aren't.) I.E., Todou, who is like even more SUPER!Japanese than Suzaku, gets the spiky black hair, the narrow black eyes, and the angular face. But that's because he's a hardass, not necessarily because he's SUPER!Japanese. (Other SUPER!Japanese characters, like Kaguya, have round features and big eyes. Because it all comes down to personality, not race, remember?) And most of Lelouche's Ashford friends have big eyes and round faces, but that's because they're all sunshine and rainbow sparkles. Not because we're meant to be reading them visually as "Caucasian." It's because we're meant to be reading them visually as friendly, sunny people. Or shy and demure, as in the case of Nina. And on the other hand, the more devious/intellectual Caucasian characters, such as Deithard or Cornelia, end up with narrow eyes and angular faces. And as for hair color, well, forget about it being an indicator of race: some Brittanian characters have black hair (Lelouch, Nina, Marianne, and even Rivalz in CLAMP's illustrations), while plenty of Japanese and/or Chinese characters have rainbow-colored hair. If anything, once again, we can maaaaaaaybe point to black hair as indicating SMARTS and/or hardassness, whereas more light-colored hair tends to be assigned to the more pure, innocent, or just plain stupid characters. Regardless of race. Although there are notable exceptions. Schniezel and Rivalz, much? (Rivalz was ultimately given lighter-colored blue hair in the anime, but that may have been done simply to visually contrast him to Lelouch, rather than as a reflection of his happy-go-lucky personality.) Anyway, I think the exceptions just serve to further prove the point that a character's hair color may or may not have anything to do with his or her race.


One of these characters is SUPER!Japanese. The other is blue-blooded British royalty. Guess which is which.

In terms of coding personality over genetics, I think it's interesting to look at Lelouch's character design when compared to that of his sister Nunally, too. Lelouch has plenty of half-siblings, but only one real sibling-sibling, his sister Nunally. And yet Lelouch and Nunally look nothing alike. I remember when Code Geass first started airing, and plenty of English-speaking fans commented on the fact that Nunally looked more like she was related to Suzaku than to Lelouch. In fact, I think I remember a conspiracy theory or two being sprouted from the simple fact of that uncanny resemblance. However, it turns out that Nunally and Suzaku aren't related after all. The reason that they look so similar is that they have similar personalities. And likewise, because Suzaku has a personality that's almost the polar opposite of Lelouch, and Nunally also has a personality that's almost the polar opposite of Lelouch... Well, you can see where this is going.

Lelouch, on the other hand, bears much more of a visual resemblence to his more devious/intellectual half-siblings, than he does to his full-blooded sister. Once again, this is because the visual language that codes personality types is more important, at least to CLAMP, than representing genetic family resemblance in their character designs.

We don't need to visually "see" that Lelouch and Nunally are related; the story emphasizes that plenty enough for us. And either way. in the penultimate episode, when Nunally's eyes are revealed for the first time, it turns out that she DOES have the same eye color as Lelouch. As eyes happen to be incredibly significant for this particular pair of siblings, that's probably the only family resemblance that could possibly matter, in terms of *having* to be coded visually.

I guess the point of all of this is, I still find it really, really fascinating, the way that anime uses visual tropes to code for things like a character's personality, to the extent that visually coding for other things - such as a character's race - must take a backseat to the more important personality-based considerations. And that's clearly the concern that was driving CLAMP as they designed and then re-designed Lelouch and Suzaku.

This is also, by the way, the reason that it infuriates me every time somebody criticizes anime by saying that all of the characters look white. Um, NO. Visual features like 'big eyes' and 'curly blonde hair' might very well have nothing to do with a character's race. They're meant to indicate something about a character's personality. Especially when said features are present on a character named, say, Takara Miyuki, it should be obvious that said character isn't meant to be white, and to argue otherwise is pretty much asinine.

Insert standard "WHITE IS NOT THE DEFAULT VISUAL MODE IN ANIME" argument here.

The same is true in spades for Avatar. Dumbass Western viewers argue that Aang looks "white" because he has big blue eyes and, um, no hair. I guess. But that's an argument from the assumption that "white" is the default state in the Avatar universe. IT'S NOT. The "default" character design in the Avatar universe is vaguely Eastern Asian. (Other races, such as the Kiyoshi island people and the polar water bending tribes, are clearly marked by either skin color or specific dress.) So the assumption, then, is that Aang is Asian. He's given big blue eyes as a visual shorthand for his purity and innocence. It has nothing to do with his race, because the animators assumed that the audiences would be smart enough to figure out that Aang was Asian (specifically pseudo-Tibetan), without them having to code it visually. Aang's name, dress, culture, behavior, mannerisms, and everything else about him takes care of that racial coding quite thoroughly.

So Aang, like Suzaku, ended up with a character design meant to reflect his personality, not his race. Even if it can be said that race (or more specifically, culture?) plays a large role in both Suzaku's story and Aang's story, they both STILL ended up with big shimmering blue/green eyes, because the animators were utilizing a visual language that emphasized personality over ethnicity.

The same is true for other Avatar characters as well. Katara and Ty Lee have big round eyes because said big round eyes provide visual clues about their personalities - namely, that Katara is optimistic and pure-hearted, and Ty Lee is... well, Ty Lee has a sunshine-and-rainbows personality on the surface. Likewise, grumpypuss characters like Zuko and Mai get narrow eyes and more angular facial features. Azula gets pointy eyes and a narrow face because she's cunning and manipulative - another visual trope that Avatar has borrowed from anime. And yet! Ty Lee, Zuko, Mai, and Azula are clearly meant to all be part of the same race. But they look different. That's because we're assumed to KNOW that they're of the same race without having to be visually told, hence, the character designers gave them varying physical features to reflect their varying personalities. Neat how that works, huh? And likewise, despite the fact that they are different races, Suki and Katara have similar eye shapes and facial shapes, because those features are meant to code similar traits in their personalities. Once again, because visual design features aren't coding race here, they're coding something else!


Same race, different personalities, therefore different character designs.

It's a shame that so many Avatar viewers are too dumb to see past Aang's big, shimmering blue eyes. Aang, like Suzaku, has those round shimmering colorful eyes because he's young and pure-hearted. Not because he's white. Because Aang ain't white!

Edited to add: Now with visuals! Hooray!

Edit again: Another thing just occurred to me. I originally wrote this post with the intent to debunk the "Aang looks white" meme, but there's a more insidious meme out there that can be addressed here as well. That would be the "Avatar characters are raceless" meme. The most common justification for which seems to be the idea that because the main Avatar characters have such varied facial features, they aren't meant to all be of the same race! Mai and Ty Lee look so completely different, that they couldn't possibly both be of the same race, right? WRONG! This is a stupid idea, because it assumes that there's never any physical variations between people of the same race. It is an insidious packaging of the same old racist belief that a) only white people have varied facial features and b) all Asian people look exactly the same. Oh, barf. The character designs in most anime series, as well as in Avatar, directly defy that idea. But, you know. Viewers are still people, and people are still stupid.

Edit the Third: Just added a bunch more images, including scans of CLAMP's original character designs for Lelouch and Suzaku.

Edit the Fourth: Ampersand links an old essay by Matt Thorn about the same dealio, and a fascinating discussion ensues in the comments.