Ambiguous Name: White Haired Pretty Boy

A pretty villain is even less meaningful though. The trope is trying to say that it's a stock character trope like Fiery Redhead.

I now think this could be split into at least two more distinctive tropes: Shy White Haired Pretty Boy (e.g. Near, Ryo Bakura) and White Hair Of Unholy Power (e.g. Ghaleon, Sephiroth, Alucard, Dark Bakura). Are either of these worth taking to YKTTW?

See Fiery Redhead, Blondes Are Evil, Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette... we have lots of tropes associating appearances with particular types of personality or behaviour. This one as it stands doesn't, though.

I'm not convinced of it either. There needs to be something more than just pretty and morally ambiguous/outright evil. I simply oppose expanding the trope to being about pretty villains.

Yeah, a villain being pretty isn't a trope. Tons of villains are pretty and have no real common personality trait. The white-hair is a big part of it since it conveys certain traits to the audience just by looking at them.

It's just like Fiery Redhead. When the audience sees someone with red-hair, they'll likely assume traits like them being passionate and outgoing because many red-headed characters are like that.

Similerly, when the audience sees a white-haired pretty boy, they'll likely assume traits like being dark and mysterious, maybe creepy, or even out-right villainous and sinister.

Okay, cool. What is it, then? What is analogous to Fiery Redhead for White Haired______?

If you ask me, the examples I do know (I remembered a few) all seem kind of vicious. Even the antihero example I can think of got his start slaughtering thousands of girls for some project and after he became a good guy he still applies lethal and brutal force in most situations while a much weaker and more traditionally heroic guy manages to win without injuring the opponent too badly. I think they'll probably be rather arrogant as well. Other people have been interpreting the trope more leniently though.

So if we were playing fill in the blank it would be White Haired Psycho.

edited 22nd Feb '13 8:21:57 PM by Arha

There's not a one-word descriptor for "white-haired", is there?

Personally, I would say the trope is less about them being villainous or psychotic, and more about them seeming "otherworldly", especially in way that makes them seem darkly mysterious and/or creepy.

I was looking at the caption to the picture and realized that it's about darkness. A white-haired male is thought to have a dark personality. "There's an eerie specificity to the use of white hair" because of the contrast. You expect an eerie character to be Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette and fair hair to be Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold but this is very light hair on a creepy person.

edited 22nd Feb '13 8:54:25 PM by lexicon

Like White Hair Black Soul?

Maybe it could be White Haired And________ I dunno. White Haired And Egregious?

The page also mentions an association between white and death.

White Haired And Sinister ?

I mean it would only get misused as White-Haired + Sinister the same way the current name attracts misuse as White-Haired + Pretty + Boy.

Do we even have agreement on what the trope means yet? White haired morally ambiguous person seems a little lacking.

edited 22nd Feb '13 9:28:30 PM by Arha

Yeah, there doesn't seem to be a trope here. People see lots of white haired pretty boy characters. It doesn't really mean anything, it just happens a lot. They're pretty.

edited 22nd Feb '13 10:00:38 PM by FastEddie

I definitely think there's a trope here. It's just a little hard to define.

I still think there are two tropes conflated here - Sinister White Hair and Otherworldly White Hair.

Well, those at least assign some value to the hair. Wouldn't say "sinister" and "otherworldly" are mutually exclusive, though.

Overlap can probably be expected in this case; there's no reason a writer can't use it to mean both.

...which I guess then becomes a Lumpers Vs Splitters argument.

Also realised: this is almost certainly related to Skunk Stripe, Locked into Strangeness, and Disease Bleach, only without the implications of the hair having started out as a normal colour and become white at some point due to otherworldly effects.

The otherworldly one isn't really gender specific. It can occur in both men and women but it generally requires the possessor to be young. There's something unnatural about prematurely white hair and that gives the character those same supernatural connotations. I think that's why the archetype is generally associated with "pretty" people because it makes them look younger.

The extracted Sinister White Hair and Otherworldly White Hair are about hair. We've eliminated "pretty" and "boy," looks like. Which is a good thing. It has never really been about a character type, but about a character attribute.

edited 22nd Feb '13 11:12:04 PM by FastEddie

If we're changing White-Haired Pretty Boy, should we also change White-Haired Pretty Girl? I'd suggest fusing them together under the otherworldly white-hair (white hair on a girl pretty much never shows sinister-ness).

edited 22nd Feb '13 11:11:16 PM by KuroBaraHime

, That makes sense. So we could merge (that aspect of) White-Haired Pretty Boy and White-Haired Pretty Girl, right?

...clearly I'm not the only one who thinks so. :P

edited 22nd Feb '13 11:12:23 PM by Noaqiyeum