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_All Out!!_ is a sports series about high school rugby. The teams are large,
so there are many characters. I understand that the mangaka and character
designers want to make each character stand out. They do a great job here. But
a few stand out much more than others, due to what I think of as _fantasy
hair_ :

[![4 All Out!! characters with "fantasy
hair"](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AwXiT.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AwXiT.jpg)

  * (ULC) Oharanu Etsugo -- "antennae hair", two small hair groups sticking straight up
  * (URC) Ebumi Masaru -- "anchor hair", two somewhat bigger hair groups sticking left and right from bottom of his head. He also stands out due to eyes often wild and almost constantly angry expressions.
  * (LLC) Ise Natsuki -- "horn-hair", they even manage to stick out of his helmet! (Rugby helmets have holes; his holes must be magically located.)
  * (LRC) Sekisan Takuya -- "ribbon hair", curly ribbons of hair at various angles

**Are any of these styles something a Japanese teenager would actually wear?**
(Are some of them even possible?) Except for someone from another team
commenting that Sekisan has really wild hair, these fantasy styles are treated
as normal looks. The styles definitely help the characters stand out. With
three tall blonds on the team, it is nice that two of them have unique
appearances. **Is blond hair fairly common among Japanese teenagers?**

The strange thing is that the series is reality based; no-one has a beyond-
human-capability ability or genius move. For example, another series might
have a character grow up on a dairy farm, and now he has an unbreakable grip
on the rugby ball due to 10 years of milking a dozen cows twice daily by hand.
In _All Out!!_ there is nothing but tough training and a great coach.

It is just ... it's just ... the fantasy hair, man.

related: [Name of hair style with one strand sticking
upwards](https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/5650/name-of-hair-style-
with-one-strand-sticking-upwards) and [Is there a reason for the "Hair of
Death" hair style?](https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/22498/is-there-
a-reason-for-the-hair-of-death-hair-style)


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tropes all-out
What's with the fantasy hair?


I would wager that these hair styles have no basis in reality, and are meant
to give the viewer an opportunity to _remember_ these characters as they
factor into this anime. In that vein, I'd say it's worked; you can identify
each of these characters by name, and they stick out in your mind.


CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-02-25T23:14:16.173
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This is nothing unique to all-out. This is infact so common in Anime that Tv
Tropes has a page dedicated to it.

You've been warned, TV Tropes link - [Anime
Hair](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnimeHair). Take a look at
the image of Yugi from Yu-Gi-Oh.  
[![Yep, Thats his real
hair](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vLwnG.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vLwnG.jpg)

Find below the excerpt from TV Tropes

> Usually, the most important characters of the story will have wild spikes or
> a cool-looking hairdo in order to stand out among the crowd. It also helps
> to create a distinctive silhouette that will stand out in branding, media,
> and merchandise. It may be one or more different colors that don't appear
> naturally in real humans (blue is a popular choice). Sometimes the hair
> appears semi-transparent, with the character's eyes visible through it,
> although this presumably represents hair fine enough that it isn't
> completely obscuring, rather than anything outré. Anime Hair is very common
> among protagonists of anime/manga for the Shōnen (Demographic), although the
> trend seems to be headed to more plausible styles: compare Son Goku's hair
> to Ichigo's.


CC BY-SA 3.0
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