The true identity of men without hats in xkcd

[sqbr]

Something I never really thought about until it was pointed out to me but have been noticing more and more is who goes "unmarked" in cartoon depictions. One of the more obvious examples is stick figures: white male characters just get the default stick figure, while female/black etc ones will be marked as such explicitly. One consequence is that characters whose ethnicity/gender is not made explicit (eg most of them) are assumed to be white/male/etc.(*)

xkcd is not immune from this, the female characters pretty much always have long hair while the default/male ones hair tends not to be drawn at all.

But see Understocked. The "marked" quantities are having a beard/glasses and being a police officer, but not being black.

"Awesome" I thought "He hasn't felt the need to make non-white ethnicity a marked quantity, which in turn means his unmarked characters can be read as POC as easily as they can as white."

And then I thought "Wait, Obama isn't marked at all. He looks just like the generic protagonist(s). What if all the unmarked characters are Barack Obama?"

So that's how I'm going to read the comic from now on :D This is definitely him.

(*)This effect confuses westerners about anime/manga, since japanese people see themselves as the default and draw non-japanese people as the funny looking marked other. Unlike western animation, characters with features/colouring etc never seen in real life who don't fit preconceived stereotypes of foreigners (eg white people have big noses) are always assumed to be japanese.

Comments

[leecetheartist]

Kingdom of Loathing seems to think long hair is a good way to distinguish female from male stick characters.

If you switch options on the character creation page you'll see what I mean. Scroll down a bit to get to the bit I'm talking about.

http://www.kingdomofloathing.com/createplayer.php?

[sqbr]

Huh. Indeed.

[sami]

This also came up for dicussion when there was that one about defaulting to sexual experimentation, and someone in the comments on the LJ feed was all BUT THEY'RE BOTH DUDES and discussion ensued along the lines of "o rly what makes you so sure" and "so what if they are" and various lines of snark.

[sqbr]

When of course in fact they're both Barack Obama (kinky!)

[trouble]

Barack me like a hurricane. ;)

[furikku.livejournal.com]

Pictures for Sad Children has a comic that plays with this (http://www.picturesforsadchildren.com/index.php?comicID=64), too.

(For reference- the one guy is "Paul, who is a ghost," who normally wears a sheet for the look of it. The other is his trainee.)

[sqbr]

Heh, cool.

[nixwilliams]

oh, i hadn't seen that one!

[xerxes]

I like to think this one is Obama.

(xerxes = lj-capnoblivious)

[sqbr]

Actually I'm pretty sure that one is Randall Munroe :) (From the "my")

[xerxes]

Ah, but you could read it as a character's "my" rather than the author's "my". That way, you get to apply your rule and say it's Obama.

(TBH, I just hit "random" to see how generalisable your rule was. That was the first one that came up, and it worked for me.)

[sqbr]

I don't read it that way but it makes as much sense as my reading :)

*clicks "random" to check it myself*
*Gets Porn*
teehee

[nixwilliams]

i *like* your reading a lot! XD