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Fiery Redhead

Hot Blooded, hot tempered, and all-around hot.

"With my long, red hair flying as I beat them half to death, I got a new nickname: The Bloody Habanero."
— Kushina Uzumaki, Naruto

In Hollywood, you have your Dumb Blondes, your Brainy Brunettes... and your Fiery Redheads.

A Fiery Redhead is a red-haired character who is strong, passionate, outgoing, usually outspoken, and (if a love interest) often female. She has a big personality and she's not afraid to use it. Whatever you do, don't get on her bad side, or there will be hell to pay. (Especially if Personality Powers are present: she likes Playing with Fire.) She will be unladylike unless it's the case of a redheaded Spirited Young Lady. She might be One of the Boys, a tomboy, or a lad-ette. Heroes do like redheads after all.

This hair-color stereotype probably developed since red hair was associated with the Irish and Scottish (and before this, Vikings) for a long time, and they ended up being stereotyped as loud, strong, and passionate. Maureen O'Hara was practically the embodiment of this stereotype and probably did a lot to spread it. On the other hand, it's even found in Eastern Europe where any association would have been with Russians or Swedes, nationalities not generally stereotyped as hotheaded.

In addition to this, it extends even into ancient texts from Babylonian and Scandinavian Oral Historian. In the Prose Edda, Odin is depicted as blonde, green-eyed, cool, and calculating - while his son, Thor, is a redheaded, blue-eyed (something of an omen of war/perfection in Scandinavian culture) fire-breathing stereotypical Viking (the raiding kind) who treats Earth as a giant freshman mixer. Gilgamesh is also a Fiery Redhead with blue eyes whose duties include...well...being a good precursor to Thor, for the most part - though with more reservation and a cooling trend near the end of his life (this makes both an eerie paradigm of Fiery Redheads at the creation of their respective peoples' writings). The whole "red-haired, blue-eyed" thing is usually split in Japan between two people.

Although real redheads can have Green Eyes, this association is exaggerated in fiction.

Compare Heroes Want Redheads, Dark-Skinned Redhead, Evil Redheads, Rose-Haired Girl, Red-Headed Stepchild, and Red-Headed Hero. In anime, could be a Shana Clone. If you have a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead in close proximity (i.e. in the main cast), it's Blonde, Brunette, Redhead. Contrast Shy Blue-Haired Girl for Red Oni, Blue Oni and Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette for the realistic opposite hair color and personality.

Please do not confuse this with a redhead being literally fiery, although the two tropes sometimes overlap.

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Tabletop Games

Magic: The Gathering gives us Chandra Nalaar, a young and impulsive pyromancer who is as short-tempered as she is dangerous. This makes her, both figuratively and literally, a fiery redhead. And on two levels—both in that her powers involve fire and in that, in most of her official art, her hair is actually on fire.
Star Trek: The Next Generation Tabletop RPG (Last Unicorn Games) supplement "Planetary Adventures". The adventure "The Enemy You Know" has a redheaded female engineer, who "can be hot-tempered and impulsive" and has a "tendency to charge into situations". She overhears a Vulcan woman speak a phrase in Romulan and confronts her, calling her a "dirty Romulan spy".
The redhead Helena Daphnotarthius, a cleric of the Immortal Valerias, in the Dungeons & Dragons Dawn of the Emperors boxed set. She was "fiery in anger, in romance, in the pursuit of things she wants." She wanted to live "life to its fullest and promote the questionable virtues of reckless abandon and thoughtless enjoyment".
Warhammer 40000 has Angron, Primarch of the World Eaters. After he becomes a Daemon Prince, he's a literal redhead.

Visual Novels

Rena Ryuuguu from Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni keeps her fire well-concealed for the most part, but it's there.
Rena: When Keiichi-san is angry, he's twice [as scary as Oryou].
Keiichi: However, when Rena is angry she's twice as scary again.
Battler Ushiromiya from Umineko No Naku Koro Ni.
- His half-sister Ange is also a subversion of this trope.
Aoko and Akiha from Tsukihime and Melty Blood. Aoko's hair is probably dyed, as it was brown when she was younger. Aoko is one of the strongest mages in the world who enjoys messing with people and blowing stuff up. Akiha's hair is normally a severe black, as befitting an ojou, but it Turns Red when she consciously or unconsciously calls upon her demonic blood to power up. She fits this trope well, since she gets redder the more fiery she gets, and gets more fiery the redder she gets. She's still in control until the point that her eyes turn red too, which is the sign that she's gone insane.
- Akiha once claimed that the redness was her "true" hair color, but only in the sense that her "true" nature was demonic — she was being rather negative at the time. Her cousin, Kouma, has more demon blood than she does and still normally has black hair, and he's not the kind of guy who would bother with disguises.