"Listen man! You can threaten me all you like, but lets get one thing straight. Nobody, but nobody *bleep* with the hair!"
This could be seen as a subtrope of
Hates Being Touched, but it's usually used to convey a completely different message about the character. Whereas a character who
Hates Being Touched is generally a very reserved or shy character, a character who tells others
Nobody Touches The Hair is in general the opposite - the point here is to convey pride and vanity. As
Traumatic Haircut explains, the hair is often seen as similar to a peacock's tail - a display - and so it is a very easy symbol for vanity in general. Also, whereas
Hates Being Touched is probably about 50/50 comedy to drama, this trope is
overwhelmingly comic.
Frequently these characters will have very outlandish styles that may verge on
Anime Hair and may serve as a
Nice Hat minus the, well, hat.
If it
is Played for Drama, expect
sexual molestation and/or assault to be a major element in their backstory. In this case, it may be resolved with an
Intimate Haircut.
Examples:
Anime & Manga
- Himeko from Kannazuki no Miko, as a result of Domestic Abuse in her childhood.
- Matt from Digimon Adventure says this in a throwaway line. Like a lot of stuff in the dub, it sort of disappears into the ether after that.
- Brook in One Piece will try to prevent enemy combatants from contact with his hair at any cost. This is because being a skeleton, he considers it his only visible trait still the same from when he was still alive, and it won't grow back if it gets cut off again(and considering his sole purpose now is to meet up with Laboon again, he kinda needs Laboon to still be able to recognize him somehow). He protects it to such an extent that he loses his very first real fight in the series in order to avoid damage to his hair.
Film
- Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever.
- Ace Ventura. "Don't... mess... with the 'do!!"
- Undercover Brother: Undercover Brother is very protective of his Afro, including telling Sista Girl, "Don't touch the hair!"; telling Conspiracy Brother, "Don't touch the 'fro!", and beating up Mr. Feather when he cuts off a piece of it: "You mess with the 'fro, you got to go."
- Charles Xavier in X-Men: First Class uses this trope. This is an in-joke to fans, since anyone who is familiar with the series knows that he goes completely bald.
- Princess Vespa refuses to make herself useful when escaping from the Spaceballs ship until one Mook's stray blaster fire singes her hair, then she picks up a blaster rifle and guns down all of 'em.
Literature
- Soto the History Monk from Thief of Time. The book says that even the most restrained mind has a conditional clause somewhere, and Soto's is, "But not the hair. Don't touch the hair, all right?" He gets around the monastery's shaved-head rules by insisting that the hair is actually a separate creature which makes its home atop his dutifully shaven head.
Live-Action TV
- Played for Drama in Inspector Rex, where molested children in an orphanage freak out when their hair is being touched.
- Fonzie in Happy Days.
- Uncle Jessie says this on Full House, to the point where it borders on being a catch phrase.
- On Angel, Spike imagines Angel doing this while mockingly impersonating him.
- Jay-Don is a very loud (as in flashy) vampire who has two main rules: never touch the hair or the glasses. Angel stakes him to get into a heist by impersonating him. He gets rid of the sunglasses quickly but keeps up the fuss about the hair.
- Barbarino on Welcome Back, Kotter was like this.
- In one episode of Brotherly Love, Lloyd waxes nostalgic about how he and Joe's dad used to horse around together, and makes to muss up Joe's hair. Joe darts away and tells him not to do that. It's a long quote, ending in "Shoot me in the knee caps, that's good clean fun! But the hair is off limits."
Video Games
Western Animation
