wan changing angelzai to have blonde hair and light eyes is a microaggressive dogwhistle to colorism and white supremacy.
(hear me out, i have 2 english literature degrees and i wrote my master's on bungou stray dogs + eurocentrism).
now, to be fair, the anime episode is based off of a specific chapter in the wan manga, so bones studios was just adapting the source material. here's what they looked like in volume twelve chapter 174:
(still, however, no blondezai in the original. he just has lighter hair and lighter eyes, which doesn't necessarily mean blonde. that's important). additionally, angelzai and demonzai first appear on a special congratulations art neco kanai made to celebrate the manga's success all the way back after the third volume of the anthology was released:
in their original designs, dazai keeps the dark hair and dark eyes as both angel and demon. so why make him blonde at all? why change the original design? even if there wasn't any particular reason behind it, why did it even happen to begin with? and, even if it is a straight adaptation, why did bones studios go for blonde hair instead of just plain white hair like in the neco kanai art? why specifically blonde?
in the original art, even as angel or demon, dazai retains his dark eyes + dark hair. his physical characteristics do not change on account of how "angelic" or how "devilish" he is, the same way you can't tell whether a person is more "good" or "bad" based on just physical appearances, which are constantly changing and thus cannot concretely indicate anything substantial about personality, character, or background. generally speaking, a bad person will always be bad even if they have a halo floating above their head, whereas a good person will always be good even if they're wearing devil horns. if you suck as a person, getting a new haircut or wearing designer clothes doesn't cover up the ugliness inside, and the vice versa is the same if you're a decent fellow with terrible fashion taste like bsd atsushi. (ahem . . . ). anyway, indeed, looks can be and often are deceiving: this is a fact we all know to be true, but we're conditioned to associate certain morals (goodness, purity, compassion, cleanliness vs badness, impurity, cruelty, dirtiness, etc.) with certain colors and shades -- mainly the classic white vs black, light vs dark.
humans have used this type of symbolic contrasting since the dawn of time across civilizations, cultures, religions, etc., yes, but there is a well-established dichotomy of good vs. evil being the same as white vs. black in our modern era. (an era largely dominated by western imperialism, white hegemony, and judeo-christian influence). i do not need to get into how racial and identity politics exploits this notion to justify things like white supremacy. even if we ourselves don't personally subscribe to these portrayals, we cannot escape the ingrained idea that whiteness (white skin) is close to godliness, so darkness (aka dark skin) must therefore be close to satanism.
i doubt bsd wan and neco kanai were thinking about these discourses when making angelzai blonde, but intention doesn't always take precedent over impact. just because they didn't intentionally dogwhistle white supremacy, that doesn't mean the (harmful) effect of it doesn't land. while not overtly racist or malicious, as a poc person who constantly has it shoved down my throat that "whiteness" is good and dark/black/brown is bad, this change left a gross taste in my mouth. it reminded me of all the times poc characters were whitewashed or stripped of their ethnic features to appeal to toxic eurocentric beauty standards and white supremacist hegemony.
true, neither the angel nor demon dazais are particularly "angelic" themselves (hence where the bulk of the comedy comes from in this wan episode), but, regardless of that, the implication here is that angel = white = blonde and devil = black = dark, which sets off alarm bells in people's heads regardless of whether they fully understand the racial politics at play here. (that's why people are so upset over blondezai but can't exactly explain why; it's that uneasy, uncanny feeling i often get when i feel something's off -- something's wrong, i need to get out of here -- but i have no solid proof besides my gut and what i know). at best, blondezai is problematic, and i believe thats why so many people are upset over it but can't exactly pinpoint why.
i think it's even made worse because dazai is a person of color -- specifically a japanese person inexorably tied with japanese national identity because he's inspired by the japanese author Dazai Osamu. in fact, even though most of the characters in bsd are quite flashy and have outrageous color schemes, fashion designs, body proportions, etc. that you typically find in modern animanga (we have characters with pink hair, heterochromia, and literal eldricht horrors, to name a few), i always appreciated that dazai has what's typically seen as "plain" features yet is still presented as handsome and desirable.
there's an entire history behind making anime characters "look more white" because of the stereotype that (east) asian features (i.e. "almond-shaped" eyes, dark/black hair, dark brown/black eyes, etc.) are "boring" or "interchangeable," so to make your characters truly stand out you need to "de-asian" them. this, of course, takes for granted that the "default" race -- that the "normal" race -- of humans is white. (it goes without saying that that's objectively wrong and rooted in white supremacy).
in fact, there are a lot of animanga characters that people claim are "without race" or "basically white" bc they have typically white features like light-colored hair, small lips, blue eyes, etc. for example, many people claim that naruto uzumaki (from naruto, duh) is white because he's blonde with blue eyes -- even though his name is fucking naruto uzumaki and he comes from fucking japan.
however, bsd dazai (and the rest of the bsd cast, really) is a hard case to sell as "without race" because the series is fundamentally built on japan's national literature, as well as the sociopolitics and history intertwined with the texts it represents and alludes to. this is why f. scott fitzgerald -- the epitome of american capitalism, whiteness, and foreign western powers forcing themselves into japan -- has pale blond hair and pale blue eyes. even compared to characters with similar features like higuchi (blonde hair) or kyouka (blue eyes), fitzgerald is explicitly a white person, and it's meant to be most evident when he fights against the mostly japanese main cast.
yet, another thing to consider is that there are a lot of unimaginative, boring, and lifeless character designs in anime who have the dark hair/dark eyes combo (usually the mary sue male protagonist in a lot of seinen/shonen anime because it's written by below average men who want to project onto their below average self-inserts, but i digress). there's been a lot of complaints about how generic and lifeless they look, and, from an artistic standpoint, it's valid to point out how so many male protagonists look exactly the same. and there are misogynistic, patriarchal, and heteronormative reasons for that that i shan't get into here.
so there's that to consider, of course, but bsd dazai isn't the main character, nor is he presented as a "dull" contrast to the magical world he inhabits. despite being one of the only characters in bsd to have what's the closest thing we regard as "asian features," dazai is ironically considered as beautiful (or even more beautiful) in comparison to more generically attractive/bold designs. for example, atsushi, despite being very colorful and alternative design-wise, hence a character that "pops out," nevertheless firmly considers and acknowledges dazai as more attractive. and it's confirmed in-universe that atsushi isn't alone in finding him beautiful. i think that's really interesting.
most of the time, the dark-haired, dark-eyed character is meant to offset the vibrancy and desirability of the more colorful characters. to an extent dazai does fulfill that role, but it's crucial to note that he is not considered average by any means. i was always grateful to asagiri and harukawa for that: for keeping their token "pretty boy" character so unapologetically dark-haired and dark-eyed (in the manga and light novels he has explicitly black hair and eyes, not just brown like in the manga). (harukawa even tends to draw bsd characters with darker, less colorful features and brown eyes, which i really appreciate).
so, yeah, i hate blondezai. i'm sorry. he pretty much ruins everything simple, elegant, and classy about dazai's character design and its ties to japanese literary history. i want black-haired, black-eyed japanese angelzai back! the blonde hair was just an unpleasant visual reminder of the inherent racism and anglo-christian moralism we prescribe to seemingly neutral objects and symbols, so even if it wasn't intentionally meant to be racist, i'd say the change subtly reveals at least some of the bsd creators' personally internalized prejudices about what's "good" vs what's "bad" as manifested through colors and shades -- but, of course, we all, to some degree, also carry the same subjective pretenses within us as well. we're only human, after all.
to end: i know it isn't a huge deal and that wan shouldn't be taken that seriously. i know that bringing this up and pulling out race theory is spoiling the fun and killing the vibe. but its important to be able to enjoy the things we like while still being able to criticize the factors (whether conscious or subconsciously implemented) that result in its production. to avoid context (or, i suppose in this case, subtext) for the sake of maintaining "fun" is an exercise in illiteracy, and, frankly, also a kind of disservice to the media in and of itself.
i do most of my bsd analyses and literature major nonsense on twitter: @eu_gi_oh
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