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udon_teaOriginally posted on Tumblr [2023.07.28]
Since I've seen a few people talking about this subject (including @cerealandchoccymilk who made very good points), I thought I'd share my own two cents on how the (western side of the) Trigun fandom treats Wolfwood's race/ethnicity.
This is mostly copied from a 2am rant on my friends' discord server and cleaned up a bit, so apologies if it's a bit disjointed. Full post under the readmore.
The way the English-speaking Trigun fandom treats Wolfwood is... a bit weird.
He doesn’t have a canon ethnicity, and unlike Rem, Nightow hasn't given his extra-textual personal opinion on the subject. His appearance was modeled off a Japanese man — Tortoise Matsumoto, the lead singer of the band Ulfuls (ウルフルズ), which is also where the name Wolfwood (ウルフウッド) comes from. Fun fact!
Because of Wolfwood's tan skin and the childhood nickname Nico*, many fans in the West take it for granted that he is of some sort of unspecified Latino, mestizo origin. I would say it's almost reached the level of fanon at this point.
*since Nico is the most common Spanish nickname for Nicholas/Nicolás. As support for a Latino Wolfwood headcanon, it's very cute! However, it's most likely not a deliberate hint from Nightow. "Niko" (ニコ) just happens to also be the way you'd shorten Nicholas (ニコラス) in Japanese.
The prevalence of this interpretation in the anglophone side of the fandom is almost definitely a result of US bias: for most USAmericans, the first ethnic group to come to mind that is generally thought of having black, straight-ish hair and tan skin is probably going to be Mexicans and other Latinamericans.
However, most of the people in the fandom are not Latine themselves, and don’t know much about any Latinamerican culture. So they have their Latino Wolfwood headcanons, but they can’t give him any specificity or flavor beyond “speaks Spanish”, which not all Latines do!
US/European fans know enough to criticize the “suave Latin lover” stereotype* that is sometimes applied to him, but generally don’t know enough about actual Latine people to assign him anything beyond other stereotypes or superficial characteristics.
So they just scramble in a cycle of calling each other out but being too uninformed to avoid the very thing they’re criticizing (which wouldn’t even be a problem if they didn’t have this Latino headcanon in the first place).
* of course, it's not inherently bad to write a Latino character as being suave and seductive — Trigun 98's Wolfwood in particular is considered to be such, so it makes sense to portray him that way! But if you're making that his only personality trait because you headcanon him as Latino, it's pretty clear that you're just falling back onto a stereotype.
Some fans kind of get around this by headcanoning him as Latino but not going into detail about his heritage, which is honestly fine by me! Not everyone is gonna want to do in-depth cultural research just for their anime character headcanon, and children of a diaspora frequently tend to be distanced from their ancestors' culture. But if you're going to write him speaking Spanish, or being close to his immigrant family, or making Mexican food... I promise you, putting some effort into researching those topics will save you a lot of embarrassment, and will make your writing far more interesting.
A great deal of non-Latinamericans also don’t seem to be aware that not all Latines are mestizo (mix of white European and indigenous). Latine is not a race, and we can be of any race — including white! — yet people assume that we're racially homogeneous.
Not to mention that even the term "mestizo" has different cultural and political connotations throughout Latin America depending on where, when, and in what context you're using it. In some places, it's quite controversial because of its association with political movements that promote a homogenized view of Latin American countries and erase their cultural diversity, particularly of indigenous cultures.
I myself am Brazilian (and therefore speak Brazilian Portuguese) with mostly Japanese ancestry. My life experience is very different from that of white, black, and other non-Asian Brazilians, let alone other Latinamericans.
I love seeing Latine Trigun fans have fun with art and headcanons that reflect things they love about their own culture (like this adorable artwork by awacatin of Wolfwood wearing a Mexican apron and making pozole for Vash), but it’s such a stark contrast with the rest of the fandom who largely only use it in a very tokenistic way and as a way to virtue signal.
Same with his skin tone. A lot of artists draw him with very dark skin (as a stylistic/personal choice, but also to avoid accusations of whitewashing), and they frequently end up making him look grey and ashy, or give him weird bright pink blushes. Basically not using references or researching how to paint darker skin.
[incoming tangent about skin tone]
I have somewhat mixed feelings about fanartists drawing characters with much darker skin than canon (and by this I don’t mean racebending, I mean just darkening the skin tone but changing nothing else). It’s obviously not comparable to whitewashing, and it can be very positive for those of us who are dark-skinned to see our skin tone portrayed and appreciated in fanart, but it does create a little bit of a… false expectation? I've heard from multiple people that, after looking at a lot of Wolfwood fanart, his skin tone in the source material looks too light in comparison.
Obviously, people have wildly varying opinions on this, and the context of what character is being depicted matters a lot too. I know many POC who hate this phenomenon because they feel it sends the message that only people with a certain skin tone "count" as a given ethnicity, or that skin tone is the only feature that matters; others have the philosophy of doing whatever you want as long as you don't ever lighten a character's skin tone.
Whitewashing darker skinned characters is a huge problem everywhere, and it's a rampant problem in anime — seriously, the trend over the past few decades has been to make every character's skin super pale and washed out. But it does bug me when people take a screenshot of Wolfwood in a really brightly lit scene from Trigun Stampede, color pick it, and go “eww he has no melanin”. All the jokes about his “melanin” in general are kind of played out and annoying, in my opinion.
People usually point to this particular (very brightly lit) screenshot to show how pale he supposedly is — and yeah, it doesn't look good in these shots. But if you look at other scenes with different lighting, he’s only slightly paler than in the 98 anime, and has roughly the same skin tone as the manga volume covers.
[tangent over]
The popularity of Latino Wolfwood in the fandom and how that affects the way he's treated by fans is kind of a personal topic to me because I’m both mestiço Latino and Japanese, but people tend to see that as a contradiction. They don’t think a Japanese person can have darker skin or a larger nose — despite many of us doing so naturally, including my family and I — or that a Latino person can be anything other than “unspecified homogeneously mestizo”.
The same people see an anime character born on a desert planet with 2 suns and 5 moons, see his darker skin (which is not even that dark, let's be honest), and their interpretation of him immediately flattens to a stereotype.
And that makes me a little sad, y'know? Wolfwood is such an interesting character with a rich personality.
As for my own personal opinion: I still can’t help seeing Wolfwood as Japanese. It's a holdover from watching the 98 anime as a kid, where the only things I had to go by were his general appearance (not dissimilar from people in my own family) and his Osaka dialect (which I didn’t know was a stand-in for some unspecified, distinct American accent/dialect).
Plus, the fact that he was modeled after Tortoise Matsumoto makes it so that some of Wolfwood's features come across as distinctly Japanese to me, namely his eyes and hair. They are most noticeable in his first appearance in the manga (Trigun v.1 ch.6).
I've even seen drawing tutorials that specifically point out his eye shape!
However! I must stress! I am NOT trying to argue that Japanese Wolfwood is the correct interpretation! It is merely my own personal interpretation, heavily influenced by sentimentalism!
Besides, everyone knows that the correct interpretation is that every anime character is gay and Brazilian (← joke (but also do watch this music video it's amazing)).
I merely want to show people that other interpretations are possible and there isn't a single answer. Even the aforementioned eye shape (with an epicanthic fold) is not a feature exclusive of east Asians or indigenous Americans. I want to show people that you can't look at someone with black hair and tan skin and say for certain that he is Mexican. He could just as easily be Central Asian, or Sami, or anything, really.
Because, and I reiterate, he doesn't have any confirmed race, ethnicity, or information about his birth family in the source material, just an English name: Nicholas D. Wolfwood.
So what you cannot do is take for granted in your meta, analysis, etc. that he is for certain any specific race or ethnicity!!
Yes, please do have your own headcanons and interpretations, as vague or as specific as your heart desires. And please do talk about colorism and stereotypes and how people's race headcanons affect the way they treat characters. But don't treat these headcanons as if they are canon, or assume that everyone has the same interpretation of the character as you do.
Since I've seen a few people talking about this subject (including @cerealandchoccymilk who made very good points), I thought I'd share my own two cents on how the (western side of the) Trigun fandom treats Wolfwood's race/ethnicity.
This is mostly copied from a 2am rant on my friends' discord server and cleaned up a bit, so apologies if it's a bit disjointed. Full post under the readmore.
The way the English-speaking Trigun fandom treats Wolfwood is... a bit weird.
He doesn’t have a canon ethnicity, and unlike Rem, Nightow hasn't given his extra-textual personal opinion on the subject. His appearance was modeled off a Japanese man — Tortoise Matsumoto, the lead singer of the band Ulfuls (ウルフルズ), which is also where the name Wolfwood (ウルフウッド) comes from. Fun fact!
He really is a handsome fellow, isn't he?
Because of Wolfwood's tan skin and the childhood nickname Nico*, many fans in the West take it for granted that he is of some sort of unspecified Latino, mestizo origin. I would say it's almost reached the level of fanon at this point.
*since Nico is the most common Spanish nickname for Nicholas/Nicolás. As support for a Latino Wolfwood headcanon, it's very cute! However, it's most likely not a deliberate hint from Nightow. "Niko" (ニコ) just happens to also be the way you'd shorten Nicholas (ニコラス) in Japanese.
The prevalence of this interpretation in the anglophone side of the fandom is almost definitely a result of US bias: for most USAmericans, the first ethnic group to come to mind that is generally thought of having black, straight-ish hair and tan skin is probably going to be Mexicans and other Latinamericans.
However, most of the people in the fandom are not Latine themselves, and don’t know much about any Latinamerican culture. So they have their Latino Wolfwood headcanons, but they can’t give him any specificity or flavor beyond “speaks Spanish”, which not all Latines do!
US/European fans know enough to criticize the “suave Latin lover” stereotype* that is sometimes applied to him, but generally don’t know enough about actual Latine people to assign him anything beyond other stereotypes or superficial characteristics.
So they just scramble in a cycle of calling each other out but being too uninformed to avoid the very thing they’re criticizing (which wouldn’t even be a problem if they didn’t have this Latino headcanon in the first place).
* of course, it's not inherently bad to write a Latino character as being suave and seductive — Trigun 98's Wolfwood in particular is considered to be such, so it makes sense to portray him that way! But if you're making that his only personality trait because you headcanon him as Latino, it's pretty clear that you're just falling back onto a stereotype.
Some fans kind of get around this by headcanoning him as Latino but not going into detail about his heritage, which is honestly fine by me! Not everyone is gonna want to do in-depth cultural research just for their anime character headcanon, and children of a diaspora frequently tend to be distanced from their ancestors' culture. But if you're going to write him speaking Spanish, or being close to his immigrant family, or making Mexican food... I promise you, putting some effort into researching those topics will save you a lot of embarrassment, and will make your writing far more interesting.
A great deal of non-Latinamericans also don’t seem to be aware that not all Latines are mestizo (mix of white European and indigenous). Latine is not a race, and we can be of any race — including white! — yet people assume that we're racially homogeneous.
Not to mention that even the term "mestizo" has different cultural and political connotations throughout Latin America depending on where, when, and in what context you're using it. In some places, it's quite controversial because of its association with political movements that promote a homogenized view of Latin American countries and erase their cultural diversity, particularly of indigenous cultures.
I myself am Brazilian (and therefore speak Brazilian Portuguese) with mostly Japanese ancestry. My life experience is very different from that of white, black, and other non-Asian Brazilians, let alone other Latinamericans.
I love seeing Latine Trigun fans have fun with art and headcanons that reflect things they love about their own culture (like this adorable artwork by awacatin of Wolfwood wearing a Mexican apron and making pozole for Vash), but it’s such a stark contrast with the rest of the fandom who largely only use it in a very tokenistic way and as a way to virtue signal.
Same with his skin tone. A lot of artists draw him with very dark skin (as a stylistic/personal choice, but also to avoid accusations of whitewashing), and they frequently end up making him look grey and ashy, or give him weird bright pink blushes. Basically not using references or researching how to paint darker skin.
[incoming tangent about skin tone]
I have somewhat mixed feelings about fanartists drawing characters with much darker skin than canon (and by this I don’t mean racebending, I mean just darkening the skin tone but changing nothing else). It’s obviously not comparable to whitewashing, and it can be very positive for those of us who are dark-skinned to see our skin tone portrayed and appreciated in fanart, but it does create a little bit of a… false expectation? I've heard from multiple people that, after looking at a lot of Wolfwood fanart, his skin tone in the source material looks too light in comparison.
Obviously, people have wildly varying opinions on this, and the context of what character is being depicted matters a lot too. I know many POC who hate this phenomenon because they feel it sends the message that only people with a certain skin tone "count" as a given ethnicity, or that skin tone is the only feature that matters; others have the philosophy of doing whatever you want as long as you don't ever lighten a character's skin tone.
Whitewashing darker skinned characters is a huge problem everywhere, and it's a rampant problem in anime — seriously, the trend over the past few decades has been to make every character's skin super pale and washed out. But it does bug me when people take a screenshot of Wolfwood in a really brightly lit scene from Trigun Stampede, color pick it, and go “eww he has no melanin”. All the jokes about his “melanin” in general are kind of played out and annoying, in my opinion.
People usually point to this particular (very brightly lit) screenshot to show how pale he supposedly is — and yeah, it doesn't look good in these shots. But if you look at other scenes with different lighting, he’s only slightly paler than in the 98 anime, and has roughly the same skin tone as the manga volume covers.
Here is a quick comparison between the Trimax v.2 cover, the 98 anime, and Tristamp.
The real offender is the 2010 movie, Badlands Rumble, where he has practically the same skin tone as Vash. The whole movie looks bright and washed out as hell, with bloom turned up to 11.
Besides, if you're looking for a victim of whitewashing in Tristamp... Legato not only shrunk in the wash like a wool sweater, they also made him deathly pale.
[tangent over]
The popularity of Latino Wolfwood in the fandom and how that affects the way he's treated by fans is kind of a personal topic to me because I’m both mestiço Latino and Japanese, but people tend to see that as a contradiction. They don’t think a Japanese person can have darker skin or a larger nose — despite many of us doing so naturally, including my family and I — or that a Latino person can be anything other than “unspecified homogeneously mestizo”.
The same people see an anime character born on a desert planet with 2 suns and 5 moons, see his darker skin (which is not even that dark, let's be honest), and their interpretation of him immediately flattens to a stereotype.
And that makes me a little sad, y'know? Wolfwood is such an interesting character with a rich personality.
As for my own personal opinion: I still can’t help seeing Wolfwood as Japanese. It's a holdover from watching the 98 anime as a kid, where the only things I had to go by were his general appearance (not dissimilar from people in my own family) and his Osaka dialect (which I didn’t know was a stand-in for some unspecified, distinct American accent/dialect).
Plus, the fact that he was modeled after Tortoise Matsumoto makes it so that some of Wolfwood's features come across as distinctly Japanese to me, namely his eyes and hair. They are most noticeable in his first appearance in the manga (Trigun v.1 ch.6).
I've even seen drawing tutorials that specifically point out his eye shape!
However! I must stress! I am NOT trying to argue that Japanese Wolfwood is the correct interpretation! It is merely my own personal interpretation, heavily influenced by sentimentalism!
Besides, everyone knows that the correct interpretation is that every anime character is gay and Brazilian (← joke (but also do watch this music video it's amazing)).
I merely want to show people that other interpretations are possible and there isn't a single answer. Even the aforementioned eye shape (with an epicanthic fold) is not a feature exclusive of east Asians or indigenous Americans. I want to show people that you can't look at someone with black hair and tan skin and say for certain that he is Mexican. He could just as easily be Central Asian, or Sami, or anything, really.
Because, and I reiterate, he doesn't have any confirmed race, ethnicity, or information about his birth family in the source material, just an English name: Nicholas D. Wolfwood.
So what you cannot do is take for granted in your meta, analysis, etc. that he is for certain any specific race or ethnicity!!
Yes, please do have your own headcanons and interpretations, as vague or as specific as your heart desires. And please do talk about colorism and stereotypes and how people's race headcanons affect the way they treat characters. But don't treat these headcanons as if they are canon, or assume that everyone has the same interpretation of the character as you do.
I made a lighthearted joke about this on twitter, but it is an (admittedly silly) example of how a simplistic idea about racial dynamics quickly falls apart if you add any nuance or alternative interpretations to it.
And while we're at it, don't assume that racial relations and politics are exactly the same everywhere as they are in the US, please. I don't mean this in a "there's no racism/antiblackness/etc. outside of America" sense, there absolutely is and there are usually more commonalities than differences, but there are nuances and specificity to each country and region that people outside of them are often not aware of.
I personally haven't seen how the Japanese side of the Trigun fandom interprets Wolfwood's race/ethnicity, except some (positive) reactions to Latino Wolfwood art and writing made by western fans, so I can't comment on that. I am curious about it, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people's take over there is just "yeah, he is from Osaka".
[Edit] Yep that seems to be the case for the vast majority of Japanese fans, which is not surprising since he is literally based off an Osakan man and speaks Osaka-ben.
[Edit 2023.07.29] Additions in the tags from @cerealandchoccymilk:
I personally haven't seen how the Japanese side of the Trigun fandom interprets Wolfwood's race/ethnicity, except some (positive) reactions to Latino Wolfwood art and writing made by western fans, so I can't comment on that. I am curious about it, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people's take over there is just "yeah, he is from Osaka".
[Edit] Yep that seems to be the case for the vast majority of Japanese fans, which is not surprising since he is literally based off an Osakan man and speaks Osaka-ben.
[Edit 2023.07.29] Additions in the tags from @cerealandchoccymilk:
#(grabbing every non-jp trigun fan by the collar /j) read this. #im eating this tf up thank youuu #literally everything ive been thinking about except 100x more graceful and informed lol #completely forgot about him being based off of tortoise matsumoto.....and im an ulfuls fan.........orz #(awacatin art lets go!!!!!!!!! i love their stuff so much)
Thank you so much! This had been stewing in my head for a while, so I just needed an excuse to open the floodgates lmao
#i think its notable that ww has traits associated with osaka/kansai japanese ppl #like narrower/upturned eyes and being stingy (latter was added in stampede i think)
omg I forgot that being stingy is associated with Osaka/Kansai people... I grew up around mostly people from Kanto region (except my grandpa, who was from Shikoku) and was always confused as to why they had so many negative stereotypes about people from Osaka. I was a very sensitive child.
#as for the jp fandom views (as someone who stays away from eng twitter lol): #ive also seen some positive observations abt the eng fandom's latino ww hc #(for example @nozawa_800 's art from 2023/4/15) #but thats almost exclusive to ppl familiar with english fandom culture already (often via american comics etc) #most of jp fandom is isolated and i dont think they even know abt the concept of race hcs at all...
Oh yeah, I've also noticed the tendencies they're pointing out. A lot of western artists borrow heavily from Trimax/98 Ww even when drawing Tristamp Ww. I think it's at least partly out of nostalgia — Trigun 98 was a super phenomenon in the US and it's the "definitive" version of the series for a lot of americans — but there is also the art style difference and different ethnicity interpretation that they pointed out.
#also there was a recent (early june?) trend called ご当地ウルフウッド (local ww) #where fanartists make him speak in their local regional dialect rather than his canon osaka dialect #(nozawa_800 also did one for hakata-ben i think lol)(have you noticed theyre my fave jp trigun artist...)
That's so cool! Sadly my japanese is too ヘタクソ to fully appreciate it but it's very sweet. There is also a trend among LatAm Trigun fans of drawing Ww as their nationality and using their local dialect/slang but I don't think there's any hashtag for it.
tbh shoutout to nozawa-san, their stuff is incredible and anyone who hasn't yet should go check them out.
#anyways the VAST majority sees wolfwood as just from osaka (sometimes even adding extra osaka traits like. idk. intense takoyaki opinions) #regardless of his actual race #I WROTE A LOT MORE THAN PLANNED WHOOPS. #anyways excellent post!!! #save for later
That's pretty much what I guessed! Now that I think of it, I have seen a lot of this (even the example of strong food opinions), but it barely registers in my mind because my brain just sees it as the "default" interpretation :P
Thank you so much again!
