And In Other News, I Still Hate Twispawn

Twispawn (|ˈtwīˌspôn|): Young Adult novels of similar quality (or lack thereof), storyline (or lack thereof), characterisation (or lack thereof), and standard (or lack thereof) to Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, likely being written or published as a result of the popularity of said series. Currently choking the Young Adult section to death with their boring protagonists, abusive love-interests, pointless plots, abysmal prose, and dark broody covers that make it impossible to tell one from the other.

I have many a rant to address this phenomenon, but this is mainly a definition post that Pippa and I will link back to on RuR when using this term. But I would like to have a mini-rant about hair colour, if don't mind, because this type of thing has annoyed the shit out of me literally since I was seven.

Barbie is blonde, and in my life that is where this whole fiasco started. It probably goes back right to the start of visual media, but my first experience with hair bias was the Barbie film Barbie in Swan Lake.

This is Odette in Barbie in Swan Lake:

This is Odile:

Now, it's a fairly common thing in kids' stories to have the good guys be pretty and the bad guys be ugly (I just realised how Asian Odile looks there, OMG Barbie is so racist :P ) but the hair thing is weird. Brunettes and blondes aren't technically prettier either way, but there was a point in children's animation where blondes were awesome and brunettes were evil. It annoyed me so much because if there was a double agent, or a secret enemy or whatever, you could always tell by their hair. That kind, intelligent character who has no reason to hate the protagonist? Yeah, she's going to turn evil about halfway through. Wanna know why? She has black hair.

 Nobody believed the whole blondes = good, brunettes = evil thing applied to real life (I hope) but it seems a lot of people took offense and eventually they took a stand by... doing the exact same thing except in reverse.

See, if you look into Twispawn these days, you'll find that while the love interests have varied hair colours ("bronze", "chestnut", and "raven", to name a few), the protagonists are almost always brunettes, and being female and blonde automatically makes any character "bitchy", "shallow", and "a massive slut". I put those traits in quotes because that is what the characters are called. They are rarely shown to be any of these, and when they do act bitchy or shallow, they are quickly outstripped by the horrid protagonist who disregards the feelings of everyone but herself and occasionally her boyfriend and bases their entire "True Love" on how hot he is.

And we're meant to empathise and support these characters. Right.

Point is, Twispawn authors seem to think it's good enough to just say they're a blonde and therefore evil and everyone will believe them. It's part of a bigger problem of telling and not showing, but may I remind you who else is blonde in popular culture beyond your standard Regina George?

And that's just three of dozens of fabulous, world-saving blonde heroines.

 So you can take your paper-thin characterisation and shove it – these blondes will kick your Bella-clone's ass any day that ends with Y.