In defense of the blonde: one Marilyn's plea.

Mary Robinette Kowal—who is fantastic and awesome and incidentally, the person reading the Toby Daye audio books, which means hers is a voice I'm going to be hearing quite a lot of—made a blog post previewing the upcoming fantasy movies of 2010. It's a good post, which is no surprise, since she's a good author and a great lady. But one line, talking about Disney's upcoming Rapunzel, sort of hit me the wrong way:

"Hey! Disney's doing another classic fairy tale. While I could wish that the princess here weren't your cliche blond, I also have to acknowledge that this is true to the Brothers Grimm story."

I'm blonde. This is a choice now, since I'm old enough to dye my hair, but when I was first forming my self-image, it was just a biological reality. I've spent my entire life being bombarded with Barbie and bimbo stereotypes, from Kelly Bundy on Married...With Children to an endless procession of evil stepmothers and nasty girlfriends on the silver screen. That wasn't always the case; "America's sweethearts" used to be almost exclusively blonde girls, who might not be smart or independent, but they were plucky and beautiful and they got the guy, so hey, let's rock with that, okay? But the age of the blonde as leading lady ended before I was born, and except for Barbie—who seems to be basically unkillable—it hasn't really shown much sign of coming back. Gwen Stacy was replaced by Mary Jane. Supergirl's comic got canceled on a regular basis. Maybe it's because all the science fiction I watched was supposed to be about the male hero, so they didn't want to make the women too "flashy," but all the smart, interesting, active women on television seemed to be brunette...unless they were all about their sexy hot bodies of sexy hotness, in which case, they could be blonde, but don't forget, unless you're hot and blonde, you don't count.

Growing up, I was able to find exactly three smart, blonde, accessible fictional characters to idolize as role models: Marilyn Munster from The Munsters, Sue Richards of the Fantastic Four, and Terra of the Teen Titans. Terra eventually turned out to be totally evil (and hence got dropped from the list), only to be replaced by Illyana Rasputin, who...promptly died. Whoops. Marilyn and Sue endured, and even if Sue was occasionally a soccer mom, they remained blonde and awesome. (Marilyn was also the first firm indication I got that it was okay to like monsters and frilly pink dresses. I owe a lot to Marilyn Munster.) Like every kid, I wanted some reassurance that I was okay the way I was, and a lot of what I got from the media was that I would only be okay if I either suffered severe head trauma or dyed my hair.

This? Sucked.

The ongoing transition of the blonde from girl-next-door and America's sweetheart has continued, and now she's not just the bimbo, she's the bad guy. I started making lists of movies and television shows with blonde characters, and nine times out of ten, if you have a blonde at all, she's evil. If she's not evil, the bad guy? Is also blonde. Movies that break this trend: Legally Blonde (where all the blondes are presented as well-meaning ditzes who are smart despite the satin-finish manicures, or dumb but sweet), and Jennifer's Body (where Needy is Hollywood ugly-pretty, and plays the foil to an evil brunette sexpot). There are more blondes on television (thank you, Veronica Mars, thank you), but they're still very rare in-genre, and there, they're usually cannon fodder.

And then there are the princesses. See, the reason this comment bothered me in the first place is that I've heard it before, many times. "Oh, at least Disney's new princess isn't blonde." "Oh, it looks insipid, but at least the princess isn't blonde." Well, excluding animals (so Nala doesn't count), there have been four blonde Disney protagonists: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Alice, and Eilonwy. Oh, and Tinker Bell, who sort of exists in her own little bubble. The most recent of these characters, Eilonwy, was created in 1985, when The Black Cauldron flopped at a theater near you. Prior to that, we had Sleeping Beauty in 1959. Princesses/protagonists in the last twenty years have been brunette (Belle, Jane), black haired (Jasmine, Pocahontas, Esmerelda, Mulan, Lilo, Nani, Tiana), redheads (Megara), or white haired (Kida). (Ariel just misses this cut, as The Little Mermaid came out in 1989. Redheads are really under-represented, by the way, unless you count Giselle from Enchanted and Penny from Bolt, and then they just wind up in the boat with the blondes.)

Blonde girls deserve a smart, savvy, modern Disney princess with agency. We didn't use up all our princesses when we got Cinderella and Aurora, and the fact that they left Alice blonde doesn't make up for turning Dorothy brunette. So instead of wishing this princess weren't blonde, how about we say "yay, about time," and keep making it okay for blonde girls to be smart, just like everybody else?