Plenty of Blondes

Maybe they all heard gentlemen prefer them.
Image by Lars MS, used under CC BY 2.0 license.

Hades: Well, you ladies know what new royalty means.
Gothel: More blondes? As if the House of Mouse were lacking blondes.

— A Beautiful Stranger

Where characters with fair hair can be seen more frequently than expected for what should be a melting pot population. Specifically, you can see a disproportionate number of blondes for the setting when a show has no fewer than half of the female white cast being blonde. It can include the whole white cast — and sometimes more than that, too. Similar to Blonde, Brunette, Redhead, but on the other end of the scale. The thing is that film casters believe the audience finds blond hair to be beautiful, so if you want to be a movie star, it helps to look good with fair hair. It doesn't help that natural blonde tends to be darker with streaks of brown; even when blonde hair is naturally light, it's more pale and silvery or reddish. Meanwhile, these ladies will have heads full of golden yellow hair that clearly came out of a bottle. This situation can be perfectly justifiable - a family drama where most family members have blonde hair - but usually is not.

Any combination of the sweet, malicious, or dumb blondes becomes Plenty of Blondes because you can't contrast something with itself. Each can be Everyone Loves Blondes. Compare Monochrome Casting if it's one race in what should be a melting pot population, and Phenotype Stereotype when non-white media believes this is true of white people. This may be justified if some of them explicitly dye their hair. May or may not be involved in Mukokuseki works.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Plenty of characters in Hetalia: Axis Powers that aren't of Asian or African descent are blond — justified as most of the characters are European. This is actually in keeping with both actual percentages of blond hair in Europe◊ and national stereotypes — the Nordics, for example, are all blond.
• The Claymores, an elite group of super humans from the Claymore all of them are blondes, due the fact that their demon-infused powers give them that coloration and Icy Blue Eyes. Also, Raki.
• Pokémon the Series: XY features three blond characters (though Serena's hair is nearly brown), making Ash the only person in his group who isn't blond.
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Justified as it's based on the Germanic Empire.
• Saint Seiya: In the manga, aside from Deathmask, Shura and Dohko who are brunets and Camus who is a redhead, all the other Gold Saints have blond hair.◊ The anime changed most of the hair color for a better color balance, but oddly enough, some members ended up having blue hair.

Comic Books

• DC Comics:
  • Peter David poked fun at it by proposing a team up of two of the Supergirls and Power Girl called "Blonde Justice". Highly ironic since Peter David wrote the Young Justice series in which all of the female teammates (Arrowette, Wondergirl, Secret) were blondes.
  • Birds of Prey also had three blondes at one point (Black Canary bleaches her hair, but that's beside the point) and Dove's hair was change to white to better differentiate her. The reboot version of the team is a complete inversion since the team only has one blonde (the aforementioned Black Canary, who's not even natural) and in fact has two redheads instead.
  • At one point Supergirl, Batgirl and Wonder Girl were all blondes. Originally the three characters were a Blonde, Brunette, Redhead group, and then for a while Batgirl was the black-haired, half-Asian Cassandra Cain, but when she retired from the position more than a few people noticed the Unfortunate Implications of having her be replaced by the white, blonde Stephanie Brown. After the New 52 reboot, Batgirl is again the red-haired Barbara Gordon. Wonder Girl originally had black hair until her successor Cassandra Sandsmark was a blonde.
• This picture◊ summarizes the prevalence of blondes in DC and Marvel.
• Sistah Spooky's Freudian Excuse in Empowered came about when she was cruelly tormented by every blond at her school.

Fan Works

• Poked fun at in the Disney oneshot A Beautiful Stranger. Gothel references how there are a fair amount of blonde Disney Princess characters.

Films — Live-Action

• White Oleander has the daughter and three out of six mothers.
• In The Holiday, both leading ladies count during the film despite Kate Winslet's brown hair in the poster.
• Alfred Hitchcock definitely had a thing for blondes, which is why most of his leading ladies are blonde. These include Tippi Hedren (from The Birds and Marnie),Janet Leigh, Vera Miles (both in Psycho), Kim Novak (Vertigo), Eva Marie Saint (North By Northwest) and Grace Kelly (Rear Window).
  "Blondes make the best victims."
• Uptown Girls is filled with blondes.
• In Soul Surfer, every woman with a speaking part is a blonde (and maybe then some) except the native Hawaiian Malina Birch, Bethany's fierce rival.
• Inverted in The World's End, as all the important female characters are blonde (except one redhead), whereas most of the extras are brunette in order to help them stand out.
• Batman (1989) and its sequels. It changes Vicki Vale, Barbara Gordon and Selina Kyle to blondes (in the comics the first two are redheads, the latter brunette), and Canon Foreigner Chase Meridian is a strawberry blonde.

Literature

• In A Brother's Price, families, for some reason, seem to more often than not all share the same hair colour. This leads to the royal family being all red-haired, and some noble family being all blondes. With family sizes of up to fifty people or so, that is lots of red-haired and blonde people for a Fantasy Americana setting. Though the royal family might have achieved the red hair by inbreeding: They don't marry cousins, but they also don't marry commoners, leading to a small pool of marriageable noblemen for the princesses to choose from.
• In Animorphs, two of the five human protagonists (Rachel and Tobias) are blond, as are Melissa and David, two of the few recurring human characters who aren't related to an Animorph. Loren is also blonde, but then, she is Tobias' mother.
  • The graphic novels make Rachel's sister Jordan blonde, though she has brown hair in the books.
• In Flowers in the Attic all of the Dollangangers have flaxen-blonde hair and they're our five main characters. The only character who doesn't have blonde hair is revealed to be wearing a grey-haired wig (though the movie gives her red hair). In this case it's something of a plot point since the two parents are actually brother and sister. To be more precise, Christopher Dollanganger, the father of the four Dollanganger children, is the child of Malcolm Foxworth (the grandfather in Flowers in the Attic) who raped Alicia Foxworth, his young stepmother, while Corinne Dollanganger, the children's mother, is also the child of Malcolm and Alicia. However, the two grow up believing that Christopher is the son of Garland Foxworth, Malcolm's father, and therefore Malcolm's half-brother while Corinne is the daughter of Malcolm and Olivia Foxworth, making Christopher half-uncle to Corinne, rather than them being full brother and sister.
• The Babysitters Club: Three members of the titular club (Dawn, Stacey, and Shannon) are blonde, as are their families. Dawn believes that literally everyone from Southern California is blonde, which seems to be supported by the text. The entire "We <3 Kids Club" is blonde, along with Dawn's favorite California sitting charges and any Californians who happen to visit Stoneybrook.

Live-Action TV

• The Suite Life of Zack & Cody has four character in the younger generation. Two boys with shaggy blonde hair, Maddie with her wavy blonde locks, and an Asian. Their mother Carey has blonde hair in the first two seasons but dyes it brown midway through season 2.
• Kyle XY has half of the female cast being applicable. It becomes more than half if you add Andy and her dark golden locks.
• Six of the eight white women from Heroes, season three, are applicable. Four have bright blond hair and the two others have goldenrod hair. Lampshaded In-Universe by Meredith when she reunites with her ex, Nathan, and sees that he's accompanied by Tracy, who's also blonde. This also successfully hides the fact that Nathan and Meredith are Claire's biological parents because she's blonde as well.
• Degrassi: The Next Generation counts when you include the guys.
• Emma, Rikki, Miriam, Byron, Bella, Will, and Lewis all from H₂O: Just Add Water. Hell, it must be that Cleo is loved despite not being a blonde.
• An absurdly extreme majority of named female characters in Supernatural are blonde. Starting with Mary and Jessica and including Jo and Ellen and the first Ruby. Notably excluding Lisa. Also an improbable percentage of the random victims, and females in general. There are no redheads besides Anna.
• Averted in White Collar as there are no blondes, at least any that get any air time/act as a romantic play. Alex Hunter is the closest, but far from blonde. Even random women that Neil flirts with always have black hair with the exception of Bridgette from 'The Portrait' and that was for the job.
• Not all at once but most of Angel's love interests/ Ship Tease women have been blonde. The main ones have been Buffy, Darla and Nina while Cordelia and his relationship didn't really hit it off until after she'd dyed her hair blonde towards the end of season 3. There's also a handful of one-episode characters. It's actually lampshaded in one episode where Angel has been the victim of a "Freaky Friday" Flip as well as being what clues the cast in about it.
  Cordelia: It is so like Angel to make out with a cheap blonde on his desk.
  Fred: It was a brunette.^note The guy in Angel's body made a pass at Lilah Morgan
  Cordelia: (beat) You're right, that's not like Angel.
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch and her two aunts are all blonde haired (this trope is averted in the comics as Sabrina is traditionally a platinum blonde while her aunts have green hair and red hair). Oddly enough her father (their brother) is brunette and the third Aunt Vesta is redhead. It's parodied in one episode where a potion turns Salem's fur blonde.
  Salem: I'm blonde! My IQ just dropped 20%!
  Zelda: (points to herself) Blonde, (points to Hilda) Blonde, (points to Sabrina) Blonde, (points to Salem) Dead!
• The producers of Charmed seemed to love making the normally brunette Halliwell sisters blonde at several points during the series. Each of them has been at one point. Piper wore a blonde wig to dress up as Glinda (who is red-haired in the movie) for Halloween. Prue's future self was blonde in "Morality Bites". Paige wore a blonde disguise in "Baby's First Demon" and had strawberry blonde hair for the majority of season 6. Phoebe meanwhile dyed her hair blonde in season 3 and also got it magically when she was turned into a Banshee, Love Goddess and Genie, and finally when she dressed up as Lady Godiva. Oddly enough we didn't get a blonde main character until season 8.
• Bridget in 8 Simple Rules (who is blonde herself) invokes this in an episode where she's working as a life guard. She only pays attention to the blonde-haired girls in her swimming class while ignoring a lone brunette girl.
• When Ferris Bueller's Day Off was adapted into a godawful teen sitcom in 1990, the three brunette leads became blondes. (This may or may not have had something to do with changing the setting from Chicago to Southern California.) To carry the reversal further, Jeannie Bueller, who had dark honey-blonde hair in the film, was made a dark brunette.
• The Brittas Empire: Whilst none of the male cast members have Blonde hair, three of the five female characters (Angie, Linda, and Helen) have it at the beginning. This becomes more prominent as the show goes on - Angie's replacement Julie is also a blonde, previously Brainy Brunette Laura's hair becomes more of a dirty blonde in Series 4 and 5, and her replacement Penny is more clearly blonde. By the end, the only female character who remained a non-blonde is the dark-haired Carole.

Music

• S Club 7 started out with three blondes in the group, but moved up to five by the time they split up, which had downsized to six members by then.
• Atomic Kitten went from the Blonde, Brunette, Redhead tandem to having all three members as blondes for two of their albums. They definitely fit the trope in the video for "It's OK".

Pinballs

• Everyone in Centigrade 37 (That's it, two characters.) is a blonde white woman.

Pro Wrestling

• The WWE "Divas" always have a large number of blondes on the roster. While the women are very ethnically diverse, almost all the white women will be blonde. The brunettes actually outnumber them but most of them are from ethnic minorities.
• Wrestlicious has an absurd amount of blondes on the roster - Kandi Kisses, Autumn Frost, Amber Lively, Lacey Von Erich, Marley Sebastian, Charlotte and Savannah, Cousin Cassie, Tyler Texas, Boot Camp Bailey, Juvi Hall, Malibu McKenzie, Charity, Alexandra The Great and Kickstart Katie.
• Starting with the Diva Search competitions, most of the non-blondes were from other races (with the exception of Fiery Redhead Christy Hemme, who is actually a natural blonde). It's pretty rare in WWE for there to be a brunette white woman. They've even started favouring non-white blondes as well since black Alicia Fox and mixed-race Layla temporarily went blonde and Latina Eva Marie was asked to dye her hair blonde (but opted to red haired instead).

Toys

• Barbie has a large amount of blond characters, starting with the original doll herself. Some characters are at least related to Barbie.

Video Games

• Big Boss's timeline in the Metal Gear Solid series has a ridiculously large proportion of plot-significant blondes — EVA, Volgin, Ocelot, The Boss, Elisa, Gene, Roy, Kaz, Paz, Cécile... Stretches plausibility when the blond, blue-eyed Kaz is half-Japanese and identifies as more Japanese than American, and Paz is depicted with blonde hair despite being Costa Rican and at one point mentioning in her dialogue that she has a darker complexion than "pale-skinned Anglo-Saxons". Since Big Boss has Unresolved Sexual Tension with most of these characters, the fandom just likes to joke that he's really into blondes.
• Blondes seem to comprise a good third or so of Touhou Project's named characters.
• In Barbie Super Model, most of the NPCs are blondes with a few people with light brown hair scattered here and there. And of course, Barbie, a pretty iconic blonde, is the main character.
• Final Fantasy VI is almost entirely populated by people with light hair of some variety, although given the limited graphics it's not always clear whether it's blonde or brown. Even Terra's green hair is as light as most of the blondes' (and is also a blonde in much of her official artwork). Pretty much the only named character in the game with actually dark hair is Cyan (and no, he does 'not' have cyan coloured hair).
• Final Fantasy XII sure likes blondes, regardless of gender. Four out of six permanent members of your Player Party are some shade of blond: Ashe is a silvery-brownish ash-blond, Vaan is near platinum-blond, Penelo is golden-blond, and Basch is reddish-blond. A fifth party member, Fran, is dark-skinned with Mystical White Hair. Only Balthier has brown hair.
• Yellow is by far the most common hair color in Final Fantasy Tactics. How common? The only generic units with uncovered non-blond hair are male Monks. And of the human plot characters you get in the original game, six out of ten (Ramza, Agrias, Mustadio, Beowulf, Reis, and Cloud) are blondes, while Orlandeau is old enough to have graying hair and Meliadoul wears a hood, leaving only Rapha and Marach as clear non-blondes.
• Six of the eleven characters in the original Fatal Fury were blond: Terry and Andy Bogard, Duck King, Raiden, Billy Kane, and Geese Howard.
• If you think about it, a very large portion of the Mega Man Zero series cast has blonde hair, especially the main characters. It starts with the protagonist Zero himself, Ciel, the female lead, Aloutte and with Elpizo and Omega even two of four main villains. Justified by the fact that all but Ciel are Robots (one of them even being a copy of another one) and their appearance isn't limited by biology (scientists of this universe clearly love Blondes). The other Reploids and humans you later meet have more common hair colors like red or brown. Or blue.
• Of Street Fighter V's cast of 46 characters a whopping 17 of them, over a third, are blondes: Ken, Guile, Cammy, Charlie Nash, Alex, Cody, Vega, Birdie, R. Mika, Karin, Kolin, Ed, Falke, G, Lucia, Gill and, Luke. It's worth pointing out that Karin and R. Mika are both full-blooded Japanese despite having blonde hair and blue eyes (though in Mika's case it could be assumed she simply dyes her hair and wears contact lenses, given her flamboyant puroresu^note Japanese Pro Wrestling gimmick; Karin has no such excuse, however) and the Spanish Vega flip-flops between being blonde and brunette from game to game. There's even been some backlash from the fanbase over the overabundance of blondes.

Visual Novels

• Lampshaded in Missing Stars when Erik wonders if the school is full of tall, attractive blondes. Four out of the seven potential love interests are blonde (two of them being sisters). The school is predominantly made of Europeans, but still.

Web Comics

• Most of the main group of friends in the BDSM webcomic Sunstone are redheads, prompting Lisa (also a redhead) to call them the "Red Legion" when they are first introduced.
• Nearly half of the white cast members in Rhapsodies are blonde. This is mainly due to most of them being from the same predominantly Scandinavian neighborhood.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent is set in an After the End world where the populations of Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland have been cut off from the rest of the world for ninety years at best and all that's left of humanity at worst. Non-blonde people are understandably a relatively rare sight.

Western Animation

• Half of the season one members of the Avengers in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes had blonde hair. The Ant-Man in the comics also had blonde hair, but here he had only light brown. When Ms. Marvel joins in season 2, she adds another yellow head to the mix.
• The Loud House has Rita, Lori, Leni, possibly Lucy, Lana, Lola and Lily Loud. Justified due to genetics, since Rita's a blond and Lynn Sr. is a brunette, which accounts for all the hair colors in the family ^note Lucy's hair color is flip-flopped: It's suggested to be dyed in one episode, but later ones has her always having black hair and inheriting it from an ancestor except for Lincoln's white hair, although it's said that inherited it from his maternal grandfather.

Real Life

• Blondness as an inherited trait is caused by a cluster of mutations that all trace to Northern Europe. There are populations in Europe (particularly parts of Scandinavia) where the proportion of light-haired phenotypes comprises upwards of 80% of the population. This map shows where they are and also how this mutation has spread from its evolutionary epicenter.

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