Reading fanfic that describe Marinette as “blue-haired” is always wild to me because, as a French person, I know it’s not.
Now, you might think “OP, are you color blind? her hair is clearly bue-colored” or “OP, how the heck is your nationality relevant to Marinette’s hair color?” and the answer to both these questions is animation techniques
Once upon a time, in the 2000s, when I was watching French cartoons on TV and TVs where still Cathod-ray tubes, animators and colorists could not rely on 16 million colors, black hair was the worst thing ever.
Why? Because in order to show strands and depth and movement in hair, you use lighter and darker shades of the base color. Nowadays, for black hair, we use dull blacks and rich blacks and it works. Past animators had no such thing. Hence, several schools found their own solutions: anime went with black and screw depth anyway, I think I remember cartoons doing the same (check Bruce and Dick’s hair in BTAS) and French people decided to use dark blue instead of black, so they could use black for dark accents and slightly less dark blue for light accents.
Or, well, more acurately, smooth, shiny black hair was made in blue and dull black hair was drak brown or actual black.
Thus, two/three generations of French people learned to see blue hair and interpret it as black. Not even logically, like I explained to you, but just instinctively, the way we see scribbles and think “there is text but the contents don’t matter” or see too-big eyes and don’t think “it’s an alien”.
I don’t know why it’s still used, but I guess it’s because it’s in the culture now anyway, and it might still be easier than fighting with dull and rich blacks?
Long story short, Marinette’s hair is black (to be more precise, it’s the very straight black hair that kinda reflects the light that is typical for people with chinese origins, you know, like Marinette) it was never a question for us French, and also if you don’t believe me Adrien says so in Le Patineur (actually, in the French version, he says “brown” because the French language and culture didn’t differientiate between black-haired and brown-haired people for the longest time, and even today not everybody does it everytime)
ruinedchildhood