Not Tropeworthy: You Gotta Have Blue Hair

We can cut the Playing With page when this is, presumably, disambiguated, and move the quotes on the Quotes page to other, better-fitting tropes.

Yeah, we can disambiguate this (as opposed to redirecting it) when the drafts that have been mentioned have been launched.

And yes, the playing with page would be cut regardless of whether we redirected or disambiguated this.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 9th 2022 at 5:19:29 AM

Any *Natural* unrealistic hair color is a trope, it breaks the laws of reality and is immediately a fantasy work. And that is very much a trope.

No one's saying that's not true (that's why World of Technicolor Hair is being suggested, and TBH I might also TLP it myself), but if you look through the wick check, examples like "single character has blue/purple/whatever hair" are the majority of usage. There's no context if this is a genetic accident, normal in the work, or dyed. That's why people just want to start over with better concepts.

I also wouldn't say "(character) has an unnatural hair color" by itself is a trope.

Now if there is an explanation, or everyone has it, or there is some reason or purpose behind it, I'd say it fits as a trope, but otherwise it's just a ZCE magnet

I already said this but it's the same situation with Purple Eyes. I agree that impossible hair and eye colors aren't chairs, but it's not useful to have a trope that's just a list of characters that have those physical attributes when we already have enough tropes that each specific meaning can go under.

There are many many reasons why they might be that color, from

• making standouts for Only Six Faces
• Using Purple Is the New Black
• Having every mainish character having a unique hair color which is especially good in groups shots for promo art and such.
• having a meaningful color (Like gray hair means blank slate).
• Having robots or aliens be the only ones to use non-natural hair colors.

In Japanese school works its easy... if they went with real life, every single character would have roughly the same shade of brown as schools there force people who have other colors of hair to dye theirs brown to make them conform.

And probably a few more but those are not always stated, the one thing we know for sure is the Character designer saw a need to use em and that's important. Character Designer choices are tropes its no different from say Rummage Sale Reject, just cause its easy to describe and pothole doesn't mean its not a trope.

If anything though I could see a rename so that it isn't so easy to pothole 'You Gotta Have Green Hair' and get the entire point across with just said pothole.

Memers, again, those are all valid points. But did you actually look at the usage? The examples don't say "her blue hair distinguishes her from the other characters". They just say "she has blue hair". That's a partial-context example at best. A human guy who has blue hair because he lives in a stylized universe is different from a guy whose blue hair indicates alien heritage is different from a guy who dyes his hair blue to hide his identity. You cannot infer any of that from "has blue hair" alone.

I'm drafting World of Technicolor Hair right now and will put it up on TLP if consensus swings that way. But You Gotta Have Blue Hair as it's currently used is a nothingburger.

Edited by Synchronicity on Feb 9th 2022 at 10:37:05 AM

Memers, what matters is not how something works in theory. What matters is how it works in practice, and in practice, this trope is used by the troperbase just to say "this character has blue hair", with no indication what significance blue hair has, is it dyed or natural, and et cetera etc. It's used by tropers as ZCE magnet, and by not taking major action, it would just continue being a ZCE magnet.

If you think these definitions are tropable, then TLP is your friend. Feel free to start the new drafts about these concepts. But, like said before, You Gotta Have Blue Hair by itself cannot be saved. Concepts can be salvaged, but the trope cannot be saved. Blame the troperbase for that.

It's looking more and more like I'm going to adopt Color-Coded Hair as individual (meaningful) examples counterpart to the ensemble-proposed World of Technicolor Hair.

Give me a day or two to get it up to snuff.

Yeah, this is another case of "tropeworthy in theory, chairs in practice".

I agree that this should be a work-wide trope, not a character trope. The one distinction that comes to mind is for works where the main cast have unnatural hair colours while the unnamed masses have natural ones.

Might be covered by Flashy Protagonists, Bland Extras.

And unfortunately, it's not always feasible to make practice conform with theory, even if we may sometimes wish it were.

Huh, I didn't know we had that one.

Actually, how about making this trope definition-only?

Definition-Only usually only works for pre-existing terms and this... isn't.

Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 11th 2022 at 11:05:01 AM

Well, it's not a phrase we came up with, but at the same time, it's a line from part of a Homestar Runner joke instead of a Fan Speak term.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 12th 2022 at 11:29:21 AM

I just wanna note that this is one of the oldest tropes on the website and to straight up kill it would be a massive blow to the site… 36k inbounds and 9 thousand wicks.

I don't think old tropes should be kept around solely because they're old tropes. A bad trope is a bad trope, and it hurts the site more than it helps it if we keep letting it fester. The only way to stop it from festering is to get rid of it, especially in the state it's in now and if the title will forever be associated with "colored hair exists".

Plus the disambiguation means the inbounds can stay.

I cutlisted all of You Gotta Have Blue Hair's subpages and moved the only video it had to Hair Color Dissonance because it was actually an example of that trope. I also tagged the discussion page.

I dumped the old contents of You Gotta Have Blue Hair into a sandbox for examples sorting purposes and analysis. I left the now orphaned subpages alone for the same reasons.

9609 wicks to clean. Hair Colors itself has several wicks using it as a trope but that can be dealt with later.

Edited by MacronNotes on Feb 15th 2022 at 7:08:37 AM

I changed You Gotta Have Blue Hair's redirects to point to Hair Colors so they wouldn't be double redirects.

Started a draft for World of Technicolor Hair

There's a lot of "only one or a few characters that have technicolor hair and it makes them stand out" examples. I said that those could go to Distinctive Appearances (the ones that don't fit Flashy Protagonists, Bland Extras...which is a decent amount actually). I am wondering this worth splitting off to its own trope or not.

Edited by MacronNotes on Feb 17th 2022 at 12:13:59 PM