12 Days of Aniblogging, Day 7Hair is an important attribute! It’s something I focus on disproportionally in people, and this applies to anime as well. Most of the times my favorite character in a show will also be the one who I think has the best haircut. So let’s do some good old fashioned symbol analysis on this topic.In a realistic show, most of the characters are going to have either black, brown, or blonde hair. These aren’t chosen at random – there’s sets of implications that come with each, to be adhered to or defied. (I’m really only looking at female characters here, because boys aren’t real) Brunettes are coded as “normal”. They make good impressionable main characters and even better supportive best friends. Often times they seem have shorter hair than others, possibly to show their ability to grow. Black hair, on the other hand, signifies maturity and often elegance. Most characters grow it long, to represent some sort of composure. Of course, this coded setup is ripe for a takedown, which is why these are often the characters with deep anxiety or dark nested secrets. Blondes are the wildcard. They’re often flirtier or at least more bubbly than the rest, and their hair length could be anything. These are common tropes that aren’t particularly exciting, but I’m just getting them out of the way so I can get to the more anime-specific stuff! Like the Rayearth Trio.I’m not sure if there’s a more standard fan name for it, but a Rayearth Trio is any group of three characters whose primary colors (usually hair) are red, blue, and yellow. Named after the CLAMP work Magic Knight Rayearth where it’s painfully obvious, these trios are pretty common in fantasy animes where hair colors tend to be more vibrant. Because of color connotations, the brash red one tends to be the leader, although in some stories the quieter blue one possess those qualities. And the yellow one is once again, miscellaneous. I swear I had more examples than Magic Knight Rayearth, most Precures, and the western visual novel We Know The Devil, but they’re really not coming to me, so I’m jumping ship. This section’s for you to justify with your own examples, sorry! in a pinch if you want to stretch this trope you can swap yellow with greenShows with gay girls get their own special trope – the Pink/Black Lesbian Dyad. As the yuri counterpart to Red Gay/Blue Gay, it’s pretty straightforward: one girl is coded with the color black (or dark purple), and the other is coded with pink. This is a surprisingly common yuri setup! Madoka and Homura, Utena and Anthy, Yuu and Nanami, Sakura and Tomoyo – the list goes on. This even extends to western cartoons a bit with Princess Bubblegum and Marceline. Like blonde/brunette/black and red/blue/yellow, there seems to be some personality coding, where the pink one is generally more social and helps the other open up. But there are definitely lots of exceptions, and yuri writers generally seem pretty interested in inverting these tropes. Hair length carries a lot of power connotations too. Think about Madoka’s hair at the end of her show, or series Anthy versus movie Anthy. If the power dynamic of the couple ever flips, so does the hair length! But this still doesn’t explain why pink and black are so common in the first place. Are all these shows upholding a common yuri ancestor, or did all of these shows separately arrive at the thought “hey, black and pink are nice contrasting feminine colors, let’s use those”? Probably the latter, but if it’s the former I’d love to know what that original show was.One last stray topic. One of the key elements of any magical girl transformation is her hair growing longer. This maps with the implications I was talking about earlier, she’s becoming more graceful and competent and long hair maps very directly with that. These tropes are normally subverted at least somewhere though. Despite this, I’ve been hard-pressed to find examples of magical girl shows where the girl’s hair specifically gets shorter after transforming. That would be a really cool thing to do! I’m always down for tropes getting burnt down. This appears to be a completely untapped idea, EXCEPT for the very first magical girl show, Cutie Honey! Honey’s hair does specifically get way shorter. Given that this was possibly the very first transformation sequence, I’m surprised more magical girl designers didn’t go down that route as well. Anyways that’s it for hair musings! Enjoy the Utena GIF I tried to make for this post that came out so broken..
Dec 20, 2018 • Subscribe
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