Telcontar
MOD
Since: Feb, 2012
Candi
Sorcerer in training
Since: Aug, 2012
Sorcerer in training
Dec 14th 2012 at 5:50:04 AM
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Would The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry fit this trope? I'm not completely sure myself. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Prince)
He is illustrated as blond, and his color scheme carried over to the TV series, but I'm not sure he fits the emotional/mental aspects of the trope.
captainpat
Since: Sep, 2010
Jun 6th 2012 at 2:04:51 PM
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Edited by captainpat
Ok, some serious issues with the example section of this trope. We have zero context examples, shoehorned examples and quite a few falling under both. Please remember, this is a sweet, Innocent, and kind young woman with blonde hair. This is not just a good character with blonde hair nor is it about blonde hair being desirable.
If you see a zero context example here that does fit this trope please re-add it with some context that at least says something about the character's personality.
Anime & Manga
- The titular Candy in Candy Candy.
- Sailor Moon and Sailor Venus.
- Princess Fala, in Go Lion (dubbed as Princess Allura in Voltron)
- Urara Kasugano, also known as Cure Lemonade, from Yes Precure 5.
- Izumi/Zoe Orimoto of Digimon Frontier.
- Kotori Monou in X1999.
- Several girls from Mahou Sensei Negima qualify, most notably Evangeline and Arika, Negi's mother.
- All kirin in the series The Twelve Kingdoms, with one notable pale-skinned and dark-haired exception. But even the exception fits the trope's personality.
- Rebecca Hawkins and Joey Wheeler from Yu-Gi-Oh.
- Belldandy of Oh My Goddess! fits the personality aspects of Hair of Gold very well— though she's more of a dirty-blonde and began the original manga with silvery hair.
- Fullmetal Alchemist's Edward Elric is a male example - although he can be a jerk at times, he has a heart of gold, absolutely refuses to kill people or to use Philosopher's Stones, and is a Chaste Hero. His brother Al fits the personality type even better.
- Girls' Love series often favor this trope for the Uke role:
- Resine from Shiroi Heya No Futari
- Reina from Mayas Funeral Procession
- Nanako from Oniisama E
- Himeko from Kannazuki No Miko
Ballads
- Many Child Ballads describe the hero or heroine as having "yellow hair", at least in some variants:
- The Twa Sisters — it is, in fact, used to string the harp.
- The Lass of Roch Royal.
- Walter Lesley belies his yellow hair; the heroine knows he married her for her money and wishes he had not "for a' his yellow hair".
- Fair Janet in Tam Lin
- In Sir Patrick Spens, the ladies may wait "Kembing down their yellow hair".
- The Twa Sisters
- In some variants of Famous Flower of Serving Men, both the heroine's loves: the murdered husband ("And don't you think that her heart was sore as she laid the mould on his yellow hair") and the king ("they tangled all in his yellow hair").
Comics
- Susan Storm Richards of the Fantastic Four.
- Both versions of Supergirl.
- Justice Society Of America: Stargirl certainly fits the bill.
- Power Girl, who uses different hair styles to obscure her double identity from the public.
- Flare and her younger sister, Sparkplug.
- Blond hair is very common in Marvel Comics due to inking — the easiest colors were blond (just use yellow), black, and red. Red hair tended to go to female love interests; black hair was somewhat more likely to go to bystanders and villains; brown hair, as it involved mixed inks, was fairly rare. Naturally, by now, this isn't an issue, but characters who've been around since the 1960s keep their old colors.
- DC Comics (see below) averted this trope big time with the Big Two (Superman and Batman both have black hair), but it got a bit out of hand with the Justice Society of America: the Golden Age Hawkman (Carter Hall), Doctor Fate (Kent Nelson), and Green Lantern (Alan Scott) were all blond, as were Johnny Thunder and later members Dr. Mid-Nite (Charles McNider) and Mr. Terrific (Terry Sloane). Interestingly, the Golden Age Flash (Jay Garrick) has (almost) always been one of the rare brown-haired characters.
- Consider The Avengers: out of the early roster, Hank Pym, Thor, and Captain America were all blonds. In Cap's case, this trope fully applies: he's wholesome, is a good man, and blushes at praise, but in others, it really makes little difference.
- It's older than Marvel. The hair color problem has been around for as long as four-color "funny papers".
- You forgot Hawkeye, Clint Barton, who showed off his blond hair when he became Goliath for a while. Of course, Clint's a former villain, a wiseass, and always saying he could lead better than Cap, so he's an inversion of the trope.
- Clint Barton is addicted to Clairol. His hair has been every color from platinum blond to jet black.
- Speaking of the Avengers, the Sentry also has Hair of Gold and keeps it long, in order to stand out amongst the other blond heroes (except for Thor, but he was dead at the time...).
- Betty Cooper in Archie Comics.
- Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, has sunny blond hair. None of his descendants share that color; his children are redheads◊ (is that possible?)*]]., his granddaughter is a dark brunette◊, and his grandson has auburn hair◊.
- In the Marvel comic book adaptation of Robert E. Howard's Conan The Barbarian story "A Witch Shall Be Born", Queen Tamaris fits this trope. Her identical twin sister, the witch Salome, fits the Blondes Are Evil trope.
- Ginger Fox.
- Cookie Bumstead, if not Blondie herself.
- Honi in Hagar The Horrible.
Fairy Tales
- The Fair Folk found blond hair so attractive that both babies and women with this color of hair were much more likely to be taken.
- Occasional, fairy tales explicitly describe the heroines as blonde in the text, such as "The Myrtle", "The Goose Girl", and "Fair Goldilocks". But Victorian illustrators would depict them as blonde except when they were explicitly described as not blond in the text. Which is to say, "Snow White" didn't get drawn as blond (and, sometimes, even she does).
- The Bulgarian folk fairy tale "The Golden Girl" has the main blonde heroine turn all golden.
- The Bulgarian folk fairy tale "The Golden Girl
Films — Animation
- Disney is often accused of favoring blondes, even though the majority of Disney heroines are brunettes and, between 1959 and 2010, Disney never had a blond female lead.
- Aurora from Sleeping Beauty is a straight example, her golden hair being a gift from a fairy.
- Cinderella was actually titian haired in the original film, but merchandise usually makes her hair bright yellow.
- Tinker Bell, but only in the Disney Fairies franchise. In Peter Pan, she is definitely not innocent.
- Princess Eilonwy, in the film adaptation of The Black Cauldron, is given almost washed-out blond hair...despite the source material stating explicitly (and repeatedly) that she's a redhead.
- Princess Melisande of The Flight Of Dragons is a rather Disneyfied version of the trope.
- Odette from The Swan Princess.
Films — Live-Action
- Captain James T. Kirk in the new Star Trek films.
- Alfred Hitchcock tended to cast blond women as the heroines of his films, as he thought audiences would be more suspicious of brunettes.
- Buttercup in The Princess Bride fills both this role and that of the Dumb Blonde (but is even stupider in the book).
- Westley is this trope in male form.
- Achilles and Patroclus in Troy.
- Edie, the noble sister of Joey Doyle, in On The Waterfront.
- Sonja Henie is like this in her films.
- Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors. Her counterpart in the 1960 original, on the other hand, is a brunette.
- Princess Jehnna in Conan The Destroyer.
- In King Kong, it was beauty that killed the beast.
- Any character played by Olivia Newton-John.
- Thor is the male action-hero version of this, especially once he gets some Character Development and goes from Jerkass to The Wise Prince.
- William from A Knight's Tale.
- Knox in Dead Poets Society says this outright in his poem about the girl he loves, Chris.
Literature
- And let's not forget about the Vanyar in general.
- Jane Bennet and Georgiana Darcy, from Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice, both fit this trope to a T.
- Princess Goodness, from The Dragon Hoard, is said to have hair that is "just the colour of summer sunlight" in the first chapter and "bright golden as a buttercup" in the last.
- Derek Huntsman, The Hero of the web-novel Domina, pairs this with Innocent Blue Eyes.
- In Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Monster Men, Virginia.
- Both Vlad Tepes and Elizabeth Bathory as children in Count and Countess. And then they grow up.
- In White as Snow Coira imagines her real mother is the goddess Demetra (Demeter) and looks like this. She wonders if the queen hates her because she is really that woman's baby.
- Dorothea Griscomb in Sorcery and Cecelia, to the point that Cecelia and Kate, while loving her dearly, find her lacking in spirit.
- Played straight with Antonia and initially with Matilda as well. This is emphasized by a portrait of the Virgin Mary that was painted using Matilda as the model.
- The Hunger Games gives us Peeta, Prim, Madge, and a couple others. Most of the other blondes in the story are not so nice.
- In Gene Stratton Porter's Freckles, Angel.
Her soft, waving hair clung around her face from the heat, and curled over her shoulders. It was all of one piece with the gold of the sun that filtered between the branches.
- Also the child in The Song of the Cardinal.
- In PG Wodehouse's Jill the Reckless, Jill.
- In George Eliot's Silas Marner, Silas finds Eppie, a little blond girl, asleep on his hearth. At first, he mistakes her blond hair for gold stolen from him, and this plays into his decision that he will raise her.
- The title character of Pollyanna is usually portrayed as a blonde.
- In Gosick, Victoria's hair is mentioned a lot. It's blond.
- In the His Dark Materials series, the mostly evil Mrs Coulter has black hair and the always good witch Serafina Pekkala has blond hair. This was reversed in the film.
- Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass illustrations show Alice as blond, over Lewis Carroll's objections, as the original Alice actually was dark-haired.
- Amusingly, American McGee got this one right in his Darker and Edgier video game.
- Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess invokes this. The heroine's convinced that she's unattractive ("I am one of the ugliest children I ever saw"), because she doesn't have dimples and golden curls, even though the narrator assures us that she is "a slim, supple little creature" and has "big, wonderful eyes with long black lashes".
- Which makes it pretty ironic that, in one of the movie versions, she was played by Shirley Temple.
- In Dan Abnett's Gaunts Ghosts novel Ghostmaker, the benevolent if not nice angel (or hallucination) that appears to Larkins has Hair of Gold.
her silver-gold tresses fell to waist length
- Les Miserables: "For her dowry, Fantine had gold and she had pearls, but the gold was on her head and the pearls were in her mouth."
- Oh, Lucie Manette from A Tale Of Two Cities. Just...Lucie. Heck, Charles Dickens makes it a symbol!
- Jane of Dick And Jane, the baby sister Sally, and Mother all had blond hair.
- Queen Ehlana, ruler of Elenia in David Eddings' Elenium novels, is described has having a "wealth" of golden hair. The trope is inverted in the same series by her aunt, Princess Arissa, who has equally blond hair and is The Vamp.
- Elayne Trakand from the Wheel Of Time series has a mass of "sunburst" curls.
- Danamorescia, Princess of Coccinus in The Purple Widow.
- Lady Amalthea, in The Last Unicorn, has white-blond hair. Justified, however, in that she's the human form of the titular last unicorn, who is white.
- Dragaera's Empress Zerika has golden hair.
Vlad Taltos: ... and if I'd meant "blond" I would have said "blond".
- Speculation backed by substantial evidence suggests Zerika's House's official color is gold.
- Speculation backed by substantial evidence
- Pelléas and Mélisande: Mélisande has golden hair so long that, from a tower window, it reaches the earth.
- This is very common for the heroines of Roman-era Greek novels, including the female lead of Theagenes and Chariclea, despite the fact that she's an Ethiopian princess.
- In Jim Butcher's Dresden Files novel Grave Peril, two vampires' dangerousness is contrasted with their Hair of Gold, their Blue Eyes, and their tennis whites.
- Both Laurana and Goldmoon in the Dragonlance books are beautiful blond princessess (elf and barbarian human, respectively). The former was naive and self absorbed to the point of being an airhead while the latter was a haughty ice queen worshipped as a goddess by her tribe. They both grew out of it into an Action Girl and The Messiah, respectively.
- In James Swallow's Warhammer 40000 novel Deus Encarmine, Arkio's blond hair makes him look like their primarch, along with his courage and his leadership, which is part and parcel of why they accept him as the Reborn Angel, a Chaos-inspired lie.
- In Sonnet 68, William Shakespeare speaks of the Good Old Ways, as it used to be:
Before the golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,
To live a second life on second head; - Harry Potter has Luna with her long, tangled blond Cloudcuckoolander hair.
- The original novel Phantom Of The Opera describes Christine as fair-haired and blue-eyed. Adaptations tend to make her dark-haired.
Video Games
- Final Fantasy XII has both Vaan and Penelo. Balthier, Ashe, and Basch are blonde as well but Ashe is a bit of a bitch, Balthier is very mischievous, and Basch is The Stoic.
- Rikku from Final Fantasy X, though this gets Flanderized into Dumb Blonde in the sequel.
- Princess Peach, as a playable character in the following games:
- Super Mario Bros. 2.
- Mario Party series.
- Mario sports games.
- Super Princess Peach.
- Many portrayals of Link and Zelda have blond hair.
- So do Link's sister and childhood-friend Aryll and Ilia, who are both incarnations of innocence and kindness.
- Thyra the Valkyrie in Gauntlet.
- Also. the Red Valkyrie, Red Archer, and Red Sorceress in Gauntlet Dark Legacy.
- Angel Trainee Flonne from Disgaea.
- Princess Rozalin from Disgaea2 as well.
- From the Mega Man metaseries comes the following:
- Mega Man: Roll and Kalinka (from 4).
- Mega Man X: Zero and Alia.
- Mega Man Legends: Roll Caskett.
- Mega Man Battle Network: Roll.EXE and Yai Ayano.
- Mega Man Zero: Zero, Ciel, and Alouette.
- Mega Man ZX: Prairie and Girouette.
- Mega Man Star Force: Luna Platz and Harp Note.
- Although several Soul Calibur characters have blonde hair, Siegfried, Sophitia, and, to a lesser extent, Cassandra (who is more of a Dumb Blonde) fit this trope perfectly.
- Paz in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker fits this trope perfectly until she reveals her true personality. It's particularly strange, since she's supposed to be Costa Rican and even has a line in her diary which implies she's not a white Anglo-Saxon, suggesting the blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes are for the audience's benefit.
- Annie, Ashley, and Sidney from Backyard Sports fit this trope. Reese and Gretchen are blonde, but don't fit this trope.
- Ana in Mother.
- Paula and Jeff in Earth Bound.
- Lucas from Mother 3 has gold hair, an innocent personality, a pure mind, and, unlike Claus, stays good. Claus' hair, orange, could possibly be that way because of red (evil) mixing with blonde (purity).
- Kings Quest's Rosella of Daventry. Her mom, though, is a redhead.
- Polka from Eternal Sonata.
- Kaguya and Waka from Ōkami. Apparently, it's a trait of the Moon Tribe.
- Rina from the Fading Hearts visual novel has long blonde hair.
- The princess you have to rescue in Shining In The Darkness.
- Crazy Sue.
- Jill of the Jungle.
- Giana in The Great Giana Sisters.
- Yukari Yakumo and Marisa Kirisame from Touhou, to name a few.
- Sexy Silvia.
- Jill in Resident Evil 5.
- Sweet, goofy, virginal woobie Alistair of Dragon Age is a strawberry-blond male example. But subverted for his fellow Love Interest Anders in the sequel; Anders is a romantic idealist selflessly devoted to healing the poor of the Kirkwall slums, but he's also rude, snarky, and self-righteous toward most other people...and a demon-possessed abomination who eventually loses his inner battle against the demon and becomes a terrorist.
- Aideen from Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu is the embodiment of this trope. Claude and Corple are male examples.
- Lucius from The Blazing Sword is another male example.
- Princess Guinevere from The Sealed Sword.
Western Animation
- Gadget from Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers.
- Bubbles from The Powerpuff Girls.
- And her Spear Counterpart, while a villain, is the Dark Chick of the three boys, being more clueless and naive than his brothers.
- Nazz from Ed Edd N Eddy.
- In the SpongeBob SquarePants Episode "Original Frycook", Squidward showed in the flashbacks that he had beautiful blond hair.
- Penny from Inspector Gadget.
- Hanna Barbera gave us The Perils Of Penelope Pitstop, Jana of the Jungle, Sarah Cavanaugh/Princess Sarah from Wildfire, Callie Briggs from SWAT Kats, and the animated feature Heidi's Song.
- And Tarra in The Herculoids.
- She-Ra: Princess of Power.
- Rainbow Brite.
- Lady Lovely Locks.
- Goldie Gold of Goldie Gold And Action Jack.
- Mainframe from COPS.
- Fin McCloud, from Stoked.
- Bridgette from Total Drama Island.
- Linka from Captain Planet And The Planeteers.
- Alice and the princess from The Care Bears Adventure In Wonderland.
- Larke Tanner on Beverly Hills Teens.
- Parodied on The Fairly Odd Parents with Golden Locks, a pure-hearted superhero.
- Evangelyne, The Archer from Wakfu.
- Tex Tinstar on The Schnookums And Meat Funny Cartoon Show.
- Queen Skyla and Angelica from Sky Dancers.
- Butters on South Park.
- Gwenevere (or Starla) in Princess Gwenevere And The Jewel Riders
- Terra in the television adaption of Teen Titans.
- Finn from Adventure Time doesn't normally show his hair beneath his Nice Hat, but, on occasion, he has been known to show off his rather beautiful golden hair, which ends up a plot element in an episode. For the most part, it's kept compressed beneath his hat with occasional peaks at it.
- Stella of Winx Club.
baskervillechow
Since: Dec, 1969
Jan 9th 2011 at 8:07:34 AM
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Can somebody get rid of that Carpenters song quote? I hate the Carpenters, and for obvious reasons!
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MadCormorant
Since: Feb, 2011
Nov 5th 2011 at 5:50:33 PM
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I don't particularly hate them or love them, but the song seems to be misquoted, and would not fit the trope itself at all. I think the last two lines actually go "So they sprinkled moondust in your hair/ and golden starlight in your eyes of blue"...
So, did we have to rename another trope because everyone kept listing pretty much any blond character who wasn't totally freaking evil?
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