Needs Help: Heroes Want Redheads

• It was decided to deprecate Heroes Want Redheads in favor of a new trope called Redheads Are Ravishing. In addition, the former was turned into a disambiguation page.
  • Transplant and crosswick any Heroes Want Redheads examples that fit Redheads Are Ravishing, and either remove any that don't fit, or move any that fit another trope (if there is one).

Wick check:

Potholes in bold, my comments in bolded gold

Results:

• Protagonist/hero has a redheaded love interest: 7/50 = 14%
• Character has a redheaded love interest: 15/50 = 30%
• Character is a redhead, no context for love interest: 11/50 = 22%
• Character is a love interest, no context for redhead: 10/50=20%
• No-context-at-all ZCE: 6/50=12%
• Other: 1/50 = 2%

Wicks checked:

Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 2nd 2023 at 4:47:39 AM

Paging ~Synchronicity and ~Hello83433 as requested. I'll take a closer look at this later; I don't feel up to commenting at the moment.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 28th 2023 at 9:38:49 AM

Yeah, I don't think there's anything about the specificity of "interested in redheads" that deserves its own particular trope. I think examples in terms of character preferences can just be relegated to Has a Type, while the (misapplied) tropes applying to the redhead in question should be disambiguated to Significant Green-Eyed Redhead or Fiery Redhead if applicable.

I concur.

Red Hair Is Hot could work out, but now wonder if the idea is exclusive to red color (any specific color could be hot) or to hair (Red is a color of passion in general).

I could have sworn we had "red hair as a sex symbol" as a trope. It may have become "this character has red hair, no other context."

Original YKTTW, oldest Internet Archive copy, archived discussion including concern raised at one point that the page just listed love interests that happened to be redheads. The impression that I get is that this never had much more thought put into it than being a Trope in Aggregate about love interests being disproportionately likely to be redheads.

Any individual can find any hair color attractive, but due to a combo of rarity and general associations of red, female redheads in general get disproportionately (relative to both all portrayals in media and their low actual presence in the population) hit with it. This is a well-documented stereotype, for example:

• Trope video essayists The Take on how redheads are either sexualized or ostracized in media. We have tropes for the latter, like Redheads Are Uncool or Redheaded Stepchild.
• Slate with a similar take, and a tie in to Evil Redhead, because sexuality is often portrayed as in lockstep with evil
  Why do we see redheaded women as rubies and redheaded men as rusted? Perhaps because the rarity of the shade—redheads benefit (or suffer) from two doses of a recessive gene that causes a mutation in the protein that regulates melanin—has inspired a historical association with difference and deviance. [...]The result? Red is now the shade of choice for contemporary femme fatales, from Jessica Rabbit to Joan Holloway.
• Huffpost opinion piece, citing other contemporary online pubs and examples of sexualized redheads:
  One red-haired Bustle writer tried to make light of these icky undertones: [...]In Vice, an Irish redheaded writer noted that Kiss a Ginger Day is really just an excuse to sexually assault redheads instead of physically attack them. [...]
  These undertones are particularly troubling when you consider the long and storied history of said sexual perversion aimed at redheads, and in particular redheaded women. The myth of the hyper-sexualized redhead rears its head just about everywhere, from the Bible to pop culture: Adam's first wife — Lilith — became a promiscuous wanderer after demanding sexual equality with her husband, while Jessica Rabbit — the impossibly-shaped sex icon — battles her harlot reputation the entire length of the film.
  In literature, too, the red-haired vixen vamps on, sexually carnivorous: In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift wrote: It is observed that the red-haired of both sexes are more libidinous and mischievous than the rest, whom yet they much exceed in strength and activity."
• ArtUK with the art history perspective, citing several historical redheaded beauties and how painters portrayed them.

That's why I imagined it in relation to Everyone Loves Blondes — a good-looking person or love interest who happens to have blonde hair is one thing, statements like "I want to date a blonde bombshell" are another.

Fiery Redhead can accommodate some of the usage since there is some association with feistiness and sexuality, but it still seems like more of a Sister Trope to this concept (e.g.a hypothetical cool redheaded Femme Fatale Veronica to the sweet, wholesome, blonde Girl Next Door would not be Fiery Redhead, but associates sexuality with red hair). I would hesitate to move usage to Significant Greeneyed Redhead because that trope's scope is being questioned, and would unnecessarily lock out non-greeneyed-examples.

Yes, I was also surprised we don't. [advertising pointing] But with YOUR help, this can be that trope

Edited by Synchronicity on Oct 29th 2023 at 9:31:38 AM

I thought that's what THIS was supposed to be. But yeah, this seems better suited to TIA.

Edit: Retracted what was originally here.

If Sandbox.Red Hair Is Hot already has enough examples to be made directly via this thread, I think we could do that and disambiguate Heroes Want Redheads between that trope, Has a Type, and the various redhead tropes that were mentioned in previous posts. In addition, I feel that Red Hair Is Hot should be IUEO.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 29th 2023 at 11:12:42 AM

I'm good with those options.

Seconded.

Thirded. To a lesser extent, I'm good with the first proposed solution in the OP.

How related is Flames of Love? Since Fire Is Red and Fiery Redhead and all.

There might be overlap if a redheaded character's hair color is due to the character being associated with fire, but otherwise they wouldn't overlap because "hot" is used in the sense of attractiveness and rather than the literal heat-related meaning. In addition, Fiery Redhead is itself using "fiery" to refer to personality instead of actual fire.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 30th 2023 at 2:39:33 PM

I want to come up with a name that plays off the "red=fire=hot" association, but we already have Fiery Redhead and it's difficult to come up with a name that wouldn't be mixed up with that, and Hot Redhead would run into all the same problems as the old "Hot X" tropes had.

The problem with making a witty name is that "hot" would be an example of Multiple Reference Pun, and ambiguity would lead to people thinking it's just a Elemental Hair Colors.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ardent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_red

Ha! "Lust" is a shade of red!

Ardent Lusty Haired Maiden!

Edited by Malady on Oct 30th 2023 at 5:33:37 AM

People usually don't use "lust" to refer to a color, so it's unlikely anyone will find that meaning in the wild unless they're looking at a thesaurus.

Anyway, maybe we could have a crowner to decide the name of the page if there's anything that's preferable to Red Hair Is Hot, but we ought to try to follow the Clear, Concise, Witty guideline if we can.

Edit: I kind of wonder if Red Hair Is Attractive would be a better name if using "hot" runs the risk of causing confusion over which definition of "hot" is being used. That, and it sounds less like it's related to Fiery Redhead and fire-based Elemental Hair Colors (which examples could potentially overlap with, but not necessarily).

Edit: Maybe Redhead Chaser could be an option if we want to get across the part about red hair being considered attractive without having to deal with possible confusion over the definition of "hot".

Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 30th 2023 at 8:12:26 AM

With post #9 suggestion

In the spirit of Clear, Concise, Witty, I think Fetishized Redhead could work.

(Not married to Red Hair Is Hot name btw, just something pithy I thought of in the moment. Sexualized Redhead is probably clearer than "Fetishized" tho)

For the potential retool, is the proposed scope on the sandbox ok?

Edited by Synchronicity on Oct 30th 2023 at 12:52:23 PM

I agree that "Sexualized" would probably be better than "Fethishized".

Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 30th 2023 at 11:08:34 AM

Redhead Chaser would be a trope applying to the character who's attracted to redheads, not the character being portrayed as attractive. Some examples of one might not be examples of the other.

Would Red Hot Hair run the risk of being mistaken for a trope about a character whose hair consists of actual flames?

Fair enough on Redhead Chaser, but I do think Red Hot Hair would have the potential to cause confusion. I think the original suggestion of Red Hair Is Hot is worded more clearly even if it's not the name we go with, plus Red Hot Hair doesn't make it as clear that the trope is about in-universe reactions.

Edit: Now that I think of it, maybe one option would be to tweak the suggestions with "Hot" in them by replacing "Hot" with "Sexy" (such as Red Hair Is Sexy) if the possibility of "hot" being misinterpreted is the main concern. Plus, using "Sexy" would keep the name shorter than if we went with "Attractive".

Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 31st 2023 at 2:58:13 PM

pretty much