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When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice, I think she'll know
—Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit.
Alice is a pretty cool name (eh goes down rabbit holes and doesn't afraid of anything). It's not very common, yet not very rare; not considered plain, yet not far-out enough to be weird.
Then there's Alice In Wonderland: the work can be associated with world-crossing fantasy, drug imagery, lolita fashion and other aspects of Victorian England, political satire, and who knows what else. No wonder it shows up a lot in anime, shock horror (it's a frequent target of Grimmification, usually with lots of blood), and emo teen novels. (You know the kind — usually involving vampires, eating disorders, or vampires with eating disorders.)
The name "Alice" therefore tends to be used for fantastical, ethereal characters or concepts. This is almost always a reference to the book ( Alice And Bob is a common exception), especially when most of the cast is Japanese, and that goes double if her last name is a variation on Carroll or Liddell.
Adaptations of Alice In Wonderland are not part of this trope. Allusions, however, are.
Compare Jack Attack for a male name that gets used a lot for many different types of characters.
Not to be confused with the book supposedly the actual diary of a teenage girl who died of a drug overdose.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Alice McCoy, the mysterious, possibly dead Deus Ex Machina of Digimon Tamers. She's also a blonde gothloli, for extra points.
- In Gakuen Alice, the gift that gives people supernatural powers is called Alice. This is deliberately supposed to invoke Alice in Wonderland, as the currency is called "rabbits" and the main character is trapped at a Wizarding School chasing someone who's evading her.
- Fujisaki Arisu of Kidou Tenshi Angelic Layer names her Angel, Alice, after herself. This does not explain why the Angel is dressed as a classic lolita
 with blonde hair and white bunny ears.
- The Alice Game from Rozen Maiden, the deadly tournament and reason for being of
seven eight beautifully made Victorian dolls.
- Pandora Hearts has a rabbit character named Alice along with some other Alice In Wonderland-related imagery.
- Alice 19th, where the protagonist (who has magical powers, of course) is called Alice and her guide/teacher takes the form of a white rabbit. The magic system? Based on wordplay...
- Oh, and Alice Mizuki from Serial Experiments Lain. Alice McCoy was partially named after her, as the series had the same director.
- An episode of Yu-Gi-Oh GX has a creepy doll named Alice.
- "Arusu (Aluce?)", from Tweeny Witches.
- Ellis, in at least one translation.
- Alice Carroll from ARIA — look at her full name, even.
- The first episode of the Petshop of Horrors anime (she doesn't show up until later in the manga) features a white rabbit (or is it?) named Alice, who is given to a pair of grieving parents whose only daughter died of a drug overdose. The "new" Alice also ends up dying, in a truly horrific way.
- The hentai manga Alice First and its sequel, Alice Second, star a character named Alice whose adventures are a heavily eroticized retelling of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass.
- Arisu Sakaguchi from Please Save My Earth is named after Alice from Alice in Wonderland, but her parents actually made up kanji to spell it with rather than using katakana.
- Arisu, the Time Traveler and Mysterious Waif that Joe befriends in an episode of Cyborg 009
- Project ARMS has all ARMS named after characters from the Alice books. Later, it is revealed that one of the Egrigori team members and experimental child is a blonde girl named Alice (she even reads Alice in Wonderland to the other children at one point). after she is absorbed by an alien life form, she refers to the world she creates as Wonderland.
- The Ending Theme for Vampire Knight, "Still Doll", starts off with the lyrics "Hi, Miss Alice" in English, with the rest of the lyrics seeming to be about a melancholy young girl. The song is sung by Kanon Wakeshima, an Elegant Gothic Lolita, and the Music Video is full of spooky Victorian atmosphere.
- King Of Thorn has a Mysterious Waif named Alice. Naturally, when she needs a protector, she creates one in the form of a giant white rabbit.
Comic Books
- The main character in Lullaby is named Alice, and dresses as you might expect. The series begins with her parents dying in a car accident after swerving to avoid a white rabbit in the road.
- Lullaby somewhat blurs the line between allusion and adaptation though due to its crossover nature.
- Alice in Sunderland is a brilliant exploration of the history of the character of Alice, among many other subject, by Bryan Talbot.
Film
Literature
- Go Ask Alice, a controversial 1971 book about drug abuse that is considered a classic of American young adult literature. (Its title is, of course, taken from the lyrics of the Jefferson Airplane song quoted above.) The book purports to be the actual diary of an anonymous teenage girl who died of a drug overdose in the late 1960s and is therefore presented as a testimony against drug use. Alice is not the protagonist's name; the diarist's name is never given in the book. Although the book is against drug use, the American Library Association listed Go Ask Alice as number 23 on its list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of the 1990s, as conservative parents and activists have often sought to remove it from school libraries. It was written by Beatrice Sparks, who wrote several cautionary tales books all supposedly based on true stories, but which were really Based On A Great Big Lie.
- A major character in Stephen King's Cell is Alice Maxwell, a 15-year-old who turns out to be one of the more level-headed of the survivors (aside from that weird attachment to a baby sneaker).
- Alice Cullen is a pretty popular character in the fandom, and even the hatedom, of the Twilight books.
- In the second book she finds out that Alice was actually her middle name as a human. (Her first name was Mary.)
- Just like me— and now I may never sleep.
- Alice Samara of Michelle Latiolais' A Proper Knowledge is known for her intriguingly unconventional floral sculptures and becomes the Manic Pixie Dream Girl for Luke, the brooding male protagonist.
- In the series The Last Apprentice, there's Alice Deane. Over the course of the current five books, she has remained something of a mystery, with her past being alluded to fairly frequently but never actually clarified. Like most things in this series, the plan seems to be to reveal it very very slowly in a dramatic fashion. Seriously though, the mysterious past of the main character's MOTHER is easier to figure out.
- The main character of Frank Beddor's The Looking Glass Wars is Alyss Heart, princess of Wonderland. In the book, Alyss is forced to flee to Earth when her evil aunt Redd murders her parents and seizes control of Wonderland. On Earth, she is adopted into the Liddell family. No one believes Alyss when she tells them about Wonderland, until she meets Reverend Dodgson, who promises to write her story down as a book. Alyss is shocked when the book he writes is nonsense and he even manages to misspell her name, publishing the book under the title "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and using the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.
- Neil Gaiman's short story Keepsakes and Treasures, as well as The Monarch of the Glade contains a Mr. Alice.
- There's a book called Go Ask Alice, the title clearly based on a similar one. It's an epistalatory novel of what Faith's life may have been like well before she shows up in the show.
Music
- Partial lyrics of Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit are the page quote. Singer Grace Slick has always said that White Rabbit was intended as a slap toward parents who read their children stories such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (in which Alice uses several drug-like substances in order to change herself) and then wondered why their children grew up to do drugs. For Grace and others in the '60s, drugs were an inevitable part of mind-expanding and social experimentation.
- "Alice? Who the Fuck is Alice?" ... courtesy of Smokey... and Roy Chubby Brown, who made it so much worse.
- "You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant." An eighteen-minute song/monologue by Arlo Guthrie. Oh yes.
- Alice Cooper. He even wears a big top hat, like the Mad Hatter.
- Vocaloid... there are countless songs based on Alice In Wonderland; the most famous example being Hitobashira Alice/Alice Human Sacrifice.
- Arika Takarano from ALI Project used to wear this image quite often. "Megalopolice-ALICE", "Atashi ga ALICE datta Koro", etc.
- Alice In Videoland
Live Action TV
- Alice DeRaey, the protagonist on the appropriately-titled This Is Wonderland, which also started its opening credits with Lewis Caroll's poem "You Are Old, Father William". Other characters included a Stepford Smiler with a heart-motif coffeecup, a perpetually grinning and capricious judge, a man who loses track of time and runs away, a tea-drinking man who wears a big hat sometimes, and a scruffy, over-excitable March Hare type. A few of these connections may be Fan Wank, however. Unlike most Alices, she was a Deadpan Snarker who swore under her breath.
- A new series (as of September 2008) produced by HBO Latin America is named Alice. The namesake protagonist is a 26-year old woman who goes from her small town to the big city to solve some inheritance affairs, and then she decides to stay and become a party girl, or something. It seems there is no actual Wonderland symbolism in the series, but since it's just beginning it's too soon to be sure.
- In Heroes, Angela Petrelli's sister, who has powers and supposedly died as a teenager, but actually survived... as a crazy hermit is named Alice. Her favorite book was Alice In Wonderland.
- Wonderfalls
- Alice Pieszecki of The L Word
- Alice Carter of Torchwood.
- Alice In Wonderland shows up on Warehouse13 after she gets out of the mirror. Only the real Alice is an Ax Crazy villainess.
- Subverted in The Honeymooners. Alice was more practical and down to earth than her husband, Ralph.
Video Games
- In Persona 3, Alice is one of the highest-leveled Death-type personas... second-highest, if my memory serves. Furthermore, she's the ONLY one who learns the most potent Darkness-type attack: Die For Me!! According to the description, she's 'the ghost of an English girl who died in 18-something'... and she looks sorta like the traditional depiction of Alice.
- Add on top of that that the animation for the attack Die For Me! involves card soldiers falling out of the sky...
- In actual fact, Alice was a character in the original Shin Megami Tensei game. The fusion is a reference to her (the Persona shares her exact appearance), who in turn was a reference to Alice In Wonderland. The "Die For Me!" spell is also a reference to how the two devils guarding Alice in the original game would sacrifice innocent people for the sake of her happiness.
- In Persona 4, Teddy dresses up as a fairly convincing Alice in a beauty pageant.
- Alice is also available as a Persona.
- In the Bloody Roar series of fighting games, where every character has a furry Super Mode, Alice can turn into a white rabbit.
- Alice Carrol (not the one from ARIA) of the Rage of the Dragons fighting game looks almost exactly like the traditional depiction of Alice, except more... moody. She's an obvious reference to the character, though, despite her dark backstory and personality.
- Alice Margatroid's Extra Stage in her PC-98 incarnation had most of the Mooks be card soldiers, and the BGM for the stage was even titled Alice in Wonderland.
- Not to mention the creative team's (kind of, it's only one person) name is Shanghai Alice.
- Alice Elliot in Shadow Hearts is a good example of the loli interpretation. While she herself isn't particularly gothy, the surreal nature of the entire rest of the game makes up for it. Plus she dies in the end.
- If you fail to read the new tomb stone in Yuri's graveyard. Reading it get's you the good ending.
- Alice Hazel, a young girl psychic in Metal Gear Acid
- Cutesy sadist Alice from the Tales Of Symphonia sequel. Her colour scheme is inverted (white and pink) but the style of her clothing is unmistakably gothic loli flavoured. Also, she had at one point a Deal With The Devil to control monsters, until the heroes defeated the demon... and she's since relegated to torturing them with Mind Control Devices instead. The contrast between her almost doll-like appearance and her sociopathy is extremely unnerving.
- The online game trilogy Something Amiss is about a girl named Alice who finds herself at the center of a mystery and keeps on wandering into places where things don't match up.
- In the online multiplayer pc game Ragnarok Online, there's a mission gravitating around the story of Kiel Hyre. He's a genius robot maker who fell in love with a woman named Allysia, then accidentally killed her. Then he went on to make a robot looking and called after her, which poses as her secretary, and four more robots (whom attack you as monsters), Alice, Aliza, Alicel and Aliot (though Aliot is a guy).
Web Original
- Alice Jones, the shy, introverted (and later in the game, decidedly creepy) Survival Of The Fittest version 3 character.
- Anti Villain of The Descendants , Vorpal, has an Alice in Wonderland motif. On top of her name, her friend Mr. Voice calls her Alice because he either doesn't know her real name, or is avoiding saying it.
Western Animation
- The Penguins Of Madagascar has the zookeeper Alice, who may partly avert this trope. She's surrounded by unique and unusual animals, but is about as far away from a fanciful character as you can get. While mildly interested in proving the penguins are strange, for the most part she just hates her job and treats it like boring drudgery.
Real Life
- This Troper was genuinely stunned when running a tabletop RPG that the players hadn't expected the NPC named Alice to be able to travel through mirrors. Despite the giant mansion they met her in being filled with them. And her constantly asking about them.
- This troper produced a comic strip back in high school simply called "Alice", after it's main character. I had picked the name simply because I didn't know anyone named Alice, but once people started reading it they kept asking about the deeper meaning of the name
- And who could forget the gorgeous Snorg Tees model known as Alice. Not exactly mystical but hey...
- The Virtue server of City Of Heroes is currently home to a player character who calls herself "Carroll Lewis", but whose biography and costume make it clear she's actually Alice of Alice in Wonderland not quite making it back home as easily as she left.
- Subversion: Alice And Bob.
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