Quote:
Originally Posted by ChainLegacy
Apparently, in the world of anime, a massive swath of the American population has light blonde hair...  |
This has everything to do with the simplification of anime character designs. Character designs in animation and illustration starts with making familiar face types as the borderline (i.e. relatively featureless), and adding features to more foreign face types. As anime faces are really basic to begin with, any additional features can look weird and detract from the impression that a particular character is supposed to give, and so character designers go for hair color. And it doesn't just apply to Americans either - German, British and French characters tend to be predominantly blond as well. A similar idea is used for Chinese/non-Japanese Asian characters - either clothing or speech cues are used to denote foreigness.
You can look at shows like Monster or Psycho-Pass to see how other nationalities will look if the character designer went for a feature-based approach. It should be pretty clear that most anime are purposefully staying away from this effect.