Red-Headed Stepchild

"I'm gonna beat you like a redheaded stepchild."

— Lyle, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Redheads who are bullied, picked on, beaten, or just plain hated for no reason other than having red hair. Sadly, this is not a Discredited Trope.

The expression is from mixed Italian-Irish families in the late 19th century. The red-haired stepchildren would be seen as evil. Also, red hair would underscore that the child is not related to the stepparent, as seen by the physical difference — and, alas, the Wicked Stepmother (and father, too) is not a Fairy Tale.

See also Wicked Stepmother, Hilariously Abusive Childhood, and The Unfavorite. If the redhead is made fun of for more than just her hair color it falls under Redheads Are Uncool.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Saiyuki, Gojyo is his family's literal version, raised by his stepmother who hated the color red because it reminded her of him, and thus of her husband's affair. The red hair and eyes are proof that he's a half-breed; these are considered an abomination and extremely unlucky.
• Kyo Sohma from Fruits Basket is fully Japanese, but he has naturally orange hair due to being possessed by the spirit of the Cat (an animal who never officially became part of the Eastern Zodiac due to being tricked by the Rat). He's treated as the pariah of the Sohma clan because of this status, and people who don't know the about Sohma clan's Zodiac curse have made fun of him since they assume his hair is dyed.
• In Naruto, the titular character's mother, Kushina Uzumaki went through this as a child (red hair is later revealed to be symbolic of her clan). She grew to hate her hair color until her future husband complimented it.
• In the anime adaptation of Elfen Lied, all diclonius have pink hair (in the original manga, only Lucy/Nyu does). Nobody else does, including the parents of diclonius, so red hair must be some kind of diclonius trait.

Comic Books

• Caitlin Fairchild of Gen13 is literally a red-headed stepchild. This was lampshaded at one point:
  Antagonist of the Day: Come back here so I can beat you like a red-headed stepchild.
  Freefall: She is a red-headed stepchild, you jerk!
• Several characters from the Knights of the Dinner Table use this phrase to mean a severe beating which is completely one-sided.
• As shown above, Annie from Little Orphan Annie suffered mockery for her curly red hair. The Setting Update film Annie (2014) race lifts Annie into being a little black girl with curly hair for a similar effect in modern culture.

Fairy Tales

• In some picture books, Cinderella is illustrated as a red-head, thus she would be a literal example of this trope. Even the Disney version has slightly reddish hair, although it's a more yellow blond in merchandise.

Fan Fiction

• Aideen from Keepers of the Elements was this when she was younger, at least until she moved from Scotland all the way across the Atlantic to Canada with her family.
• Played for Laughs in Like a Red-Headed Stepchild. In this world, Harry inherited his mother's red hair instead of his father's black. As a result, everyone just assumes he's a Weasley, and the Weasleys, for their part, just kind of go along with it.
• This is inverted in the Discworld fics of A.A. Pessimal. The Smith-Rhodes family has, over the years, unconsciously selected for red hair. Red hair and freckles have therefore become the family's dominant gene. Every so often, a family member might marry somebody without red hair. But red is still dominant. There are occasional exceptions: Johanna Smith-Rhodes-Maaijande, the daughter of a red-blonde mother and a blonde father, has hair that is mainly blonde with a hint of red - the classic strawberry-blonde look. And no freckles. This makes her stand out in the wider family.^note This also causes further headaches to the traditional enemy of White Howondaland, who realise the latest Smith-Rhodes Assassin has combat skills as good as her two aunts - but lacks their red hair, and therefore cannot be called The Red Death. The Zulu Empire is stuck on a name for her: The Pink Death is held not to cut it in terms of gravitas. And the person who suggested The Raspberry Ripple Death has been dealt with for not taking it seriously. Young Johanna exploits this uncertainty by deliberately adding stylish pink-dyed streaks to her hair, just to make the point. Her cousin Ruth Smith-Rhodes-Stibbons is the younger sister of two striking redheads who take after their mother. But Ruth takes her look from her father, wizard Ponder Stibbons. She is therefore slight and has her father's very dark brown, almost black, hair. People do not immediately register she is the daughter of respected Assassin Johanna Smith-Rhodes. Ruth herself wonders why she is so physically unalike to her two sisters and wishes she had their red hair...
• Women of Eden: While Eve remained Adam's wife for the rest of her life, she was secretly in a polyamorous relationship with Lilith and Lucifer, Abel being the result of that affair.

Film -– Animated

• The titular character of Oliver & Company is an orange-furred tabby kitten and plays a subtle version of this, being abandoned in the rain after all his (non-orange) siblings are adopted.

Film –- Live-Action

• Radio Flyer has a literal red-headed stepchild who is routinely beaten until he and his older brother concoct a way for him to escape.
• Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) has Mark, the redhead with glasses who got his nickname FedEx because his siblings tease him by saying the FedEx truck dropped him off.

Literature

• Besides being plot-important, The Prisoner of Zenda has a good explanation for the prejudice. The hero has fiery red hair, the result of an affair between one of the traditionally red-headed kings of Ruritania and a female member of his traditionally dark-haired family. Thus, his appearance is a reminder that the family's current claim to their title is illegitimate.
• Averted with Rand Al'Thor of The Wheel of Time. His red hair and light coloration in a village of brunettes are assumed to be inherited from his outlander mother, and he's never treated differently because of them. Even after it turns out he's a literal stepchild, he's Happily Adopted and considers the man who raised him to be his true father.
• Occurs, obviously, in Jaye Wells' Red-Headed Stepchild. In this universe, all vampires have red hair, related to the myth about the mark of Cain, while all mages have black hair. Sabina's red and black striped hair is a constant reminder of her half-breed status, and it doesn't take dye.
• Italian verist writer Giovanni Verga's "Rosso malpelo"^note literally: redhead with evil hair is made of this trope. And tears. Lots of tears.
• Anne Shirley is treated this way by every family and orphanage she goes through before finally ending up at Green Gables. Even then, she gets this reaction from various members of the community. It goes a long way toward explaining why she so vehemently longs for hair that isn't red.
• Francois of Poil de Carotte is a full biological member of his family, but that doesn't prevent his father from ignoring him and his mother and older siblings from abusing him...until the child is nearly Driven to Suicide.
• Referenced in The Tulip Touch, where the narrator uses a phrase that Tulip picked up from her abusive father: "He'll thrash her like a red-headed stepchild! He'll whip her till her freckles sing!"
• 1632: Subverted Trope: Gwaihir "Gerry" Stone is red-headed, and the only one of Tom Stone's sons who is most certainly not his father's biological son. However, the Stone brothers stick together like nothing else, and Tom Stone is the kindest and most loving father to ever exist.
• In As I Lay Dying, Jewel's red hair is one clue to the fact that he's not really Anse's son. Played With, though: a few family members realize this and the information threatens to split the family apart, but ultimately is not revealed. It also seems to make Jewel his mother's favorite.
• Mallory Pike, the Butt-Monkey of The Baby-Sitters Club, is also the only red-head in the group. Interestingly, she didn't start out as a red-head (the early descriptions of her describe her hair as a fairly uninteresting chestnut brown), but a combination of this trope and the fact that the cover artist always depicted her as having reddish hair eventually turned her into a ginger.
• In Ben Elton's novel Past Mortem the protagonist Ed Newson is a ginger who had problems being bullied as a child due to it.
• The phrase is referenced in Kim Newman's The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School when Desdemona House (the schoolhouse with the Differently Powered Individuals) are called the "red-headed stepchildren" of the school. (This also ties into a gag where the other houses are defined as "sporty", "scary", "babies" and "posh" - they're the "ginger" house.)
• "Freckled and Fourteen" by Viola Rowe. Rosalind "Rusty" Eastman is the only daughter in a family with four sons. She is a ginger; they all have dark hair. When she discovers that she was adopted, she suspects herself to be this.
• Claire Stanfield from Baccano! is a literal redheaded stepchild of the Gandor Family. Mind you, the other three aren't exactly on the straight path either, but at least they are not batshit frickin' insane. However, none of the Gandor brothers treat Claire with anything other than fraternal bonhomie, though they are admittedly wary and befuddled by his behavior.
• Yoko Nakajima of The Twelve Kingdoms is a natural redhead, which, in Japan, truly makes her stand out; other people think she dyes it and her mother nags her to dye it black. She's also literally a stepchild: an unborn child of the Twelve Kingdoms who was implanted in a human woman through some bizarre Applied Phlebotinum.

Live-Action TV

• Chicago Med has an episode where a childhood bully of Dr. Halstead's comes to the hospital. Despite now being in his thirties and literally on his deathbed, he still mocks Halstead for being a redhead.
• Doctor Who: Nicely subverted in "The Christmas Invasion", when a newly regenerated Doctor asks if his hair is ginger, prompting groans from redheads all over the UK at the expected usual dig at redheads, only for him to be disappointed that it's brown and lament that he always wanted to be ginger. The same was asked by the 4th, 6th, 7th, and 11th Doctors when they regenerated, so it's a Continuity Nod. There are occasional newspaper-led social justice outrages in the UK about why there hasn't been a ginger Doctor yet because the stereotype is alive and well and particularly affects red-haired children. When Tom Baker was asked in an interview if he thought there would ever be a ginger Doctor, he insisted he'd been ginger — "or maybe I was auburn" ^note He was neither of those things. But he did have noticeably red sideburns..
• An episode of The Kids in the Hall has Queen Elizabeth walking and talking with a prepubescent girl with long red hair. The Queen compliments her on it: "You have such lovely hair for a demon." She later attempts to get the child to jump off a pier holding a stack of rocks. The Elizabeth in the "Kids" sketch is II, the brunette one we have now, played by Scott Thompson.
• Parodied in a series of Nick at Nite commercials from 1998, which showed scenes of "Phoebe the Lost Brady", who was The Brady Bunch's lesser-known redheaded stepchild. Phoebe was a meanspirited character who caused all the problems (like Bobby's ball breaking the vase—that was actually Phoebe, folks!), and who was eventually edited out of reruns due to unpopularity with viewers. (All a joke, of course.)
• Elliot in Scrubs hates redheads to the point where she can't touch anything that a redhead has touched.
• Referenced a few times on World's Dumbest..., usually involving Danny Bonaduce.
  Mike Trainor: Oho, Danny! He's beating you literally like a red-headed stepchild!
• Rhydian Roberts, who was second in the UK series 4 of The X Factor, apparently bleached his hair blond to avoid this bullying.

Music

• This is the topic of Tim Minchin's Taboo. It's terrible the way we treat people who look different, and we never like to talk about that word with a couple of G's, an E, an R, an I and an N...
• M.I.A.'s video "Born Free" is about the horrible treatment redheads get, taken to the extremes. It opens with a SWAT team raiding an apartment to capture one redheaded young man and goes downward from there.
• Nicola Roberts of Girls Aloud was constantly derided by the British press as the "ugly ginger one" simply because she's a pale-skinned redhead. In her song "Sticks and Stones", she would beg the band's driver to buy her alcohol so she could attempt to drink herself to death because the media just assumed that she wouldn't care about being called "ugly".

Theatre

• The Talisman by Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy revolves around this, playing it straight, exaggerating, subverting, and parodying it.

Video Games

• The Sandman (2014): The game's protagonist, a red-head insomniac named Sophie, is teased by the resident Girl Posse for her red hair - noting how strange it is - which is kind of hypocritcal, considering one of them has bubblegum pink hair. During the best ending, Sophie finally stands up for herself and threateningly tells the girls not to insult her mother's red hair ever again.
• The titular protagonist of Cinders gains points for being both a re-imagining of Cinderella and a literal red-headed stepdaughter. Her nickname was specifically given to her because of the color of her hair.

Webcomics

• Averted and then inverted in Phobs's Mongol comics. Temujin is red-haired with dark-haired brothers, which goes unremarked upon. Three of his sons are also depicted as redheads, while Jochi, the only one whose paternity is in question, has dark hair.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal takes occasional potshots at red-haired men, such as the artist. Red-haired women, on the other hand, tend more toward the kind heroes want.
• In Wilde Life, Cliff is a literal example: he's a ginger (and some of the other wolves make cracks about that) and has a strained relationship with his stepfather. He's really close to his mother and brother, though. (His brother is adopted and black, incidentally, so it's not like Cliff is the one who stands out in this family.)
  • Discussed and Subverted here:
    Oscar: And you're not popular?
    Clifford: Uh. I'm ginger.
    Oscar: Have you considered the real problem is that you're kind of mean sometimes?
    Clifford: Hey! Fuck you! I'm not mean! Asshole.
• Rocky in Our Little Adventure gets some flak over his red hair, especially from Angelika.
• Princess Tamaura of Blindsprings is conspicuously the only redheaded in her dark-haired family, and a flashback shows people at court muttering behind her back about her being a bastard, strongly implying she didn't have the same father as her other sisters. Her sister Aliana also resented her for taking her position as priestess, adding more to this trope.

Web Original

• Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Cell refers to Android 16 (who is actually a redhead) as the red-headed stepchild of their little "family", as unlike their "siblings" 17 and 18, 16 wasn't activated in the original Bad Future (which Cell comes from), is purely mechanical (unlike 17 and 18 (cyborgs) or Cell (biomechanical)), and wasn't intended to be absorbed by Cell like 17 and 18 were.
  • 18 considered making a "soulless machine" joke when she saw that 16 had red hair. She decided that such a joke was beneath her.

Western Animation

• South Park:
  • According to Cartman, ginger children do not have souls and are likened to the undead. The parents of three ginger children act terrified when the boys talk to them about it and imply they may be changelings. Kyle, though, is also a redhead. (Cartman calls him a "Daywalker," on the grounds that his hair makes him "half-ginger.")
  • Later, it turns out that Cartman actually has a ginger biological father, which horrifies and depresses him. However, his dad was also on the Denver Broncos, so that at least cheers him up.
• My Gym Partner's a Monkey: While Adam's status as a social outcast is mostly because he's the only human at a middle school of animals, people do make fun of his bright red hair and pasty skin.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: Pud'n is Endsville's resident Butt-Monkey and Chew Toy.

Real Life

• A little Brit-o-centric clarification may be in order. Dying your hair to a deep, sultry red is not the same as being born ginger. The color is different, and so is the tendency to be heavily freckled, paler of skin, and unable to tan easily. The genetics are rather complicated, but the gene that causes red hair does so because it prevents a certain pigment from being made. This gene also affects other things such as skin tone and generally results in having paler skin than you would have otherwise, causing you to burn more easily.
• It's also worth bearing in mind that, way back in Medieval England, having ginger hair would mark a person as likely from (or descended from) Celts^note with partial accuracy - it is a bit more common with them, but it exists just fine with the Germanic peoples, hence the old Chinese name for the Dutch: 'red-headed barbarians' - that is to say, not English, not native. The general attitude of the English (and especially the Norman aristocracy) was to look down on those from Oop North beyond Hadrian's Wall as generally inferior. The racism may be (mostly) gone today, but the aesthetic stereotyping of gingers remains.
• In some cases, "ginger" has occasionally been known to be used as derogatory slang for homosexual (cockney rhyming slang - ginger beer = queer), but this is not common, especially outside of that hotbed of cockney rhyming slang, the East End of London. In the 20s.
• Subversion: the prejudice against redheaded people in England doesn't seem to stop them from acknowledging the exceptional contributions made by members of the royal House of Tudor, including Henry VIII and Elizabeth I — both of whom were very redheaded. (And, given the number of wives Henry had, Elizabeth was a literal redheaded stepchild to four different women!) This was because they were of Welsh descent (see above), proud of it, and willing to beat up any Englishmen who had a problem with that. Mind you, England also had several red-haired rulers who weren't Welsh, including William II (nick-named 'Rufus' for his red hair), who was Norman, Henry II (who was Angevin), Richard I Coeur de Lion ("between red and blond"), John ("dark red"), Richard II...
• There's also the myth that red hair is the mark of Cain, which serves to very visibly brand redheads as his descendants. Like redheads didn't already have enough problems. Although that does pose the question of whether or not all of a redheads' ancestors who didn't have red hair happened to be of Cain's lineage and, if they aren't, how the hell that works. Perhaps all redheads are actually adopted.
• An erythristic seal pup was abandoned by its mother because of its unusual coloring, which gave it ginger-colored fur. Luckily, there's a happy ending: it was rescued and taken back to a dolphinarium.
• This sort of discrimination isn't limited to Western Europe - in the Balkans, it's traditionally thought that red hair is one of the marks of vampirism.
  • Similarly, red hair was believed to be the mark of witches in Medieval times.
• Red hair was stereotypically linked to Jews in Europe before the 20th century. (See Oliver Twist and its depiction of Fagin as a ginger.) It is true that Jews have a higher incidence of red hair, and not just Ashkenazi Jews, either (it's reasonably common in Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews). It's a recessive gene and Jews are highly endogamous.
• So red hair only happens if both your parents have a gene. A family with the gene can go generations without red hair occurring due to no one having babies with someone who also has the genes. Now imagine you're back when this stuff wasn't known, and you or your wife has a child with red hair, despite neither you nor your wife having red hair, and she swears to god on her life she did not cheat on you. What do you assume has happened? Probably that the child's a demon or has been replaced with a fairy.

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