So maybe I haven’t left my house in over a month…Maybe it’s doing things to my brain and I’m latching onto any random little thing for intellectual entertainment. That could be the case. I’m just human after all. But it’s totally not the case for this post! This one is solid! And based on like the three show’s I’ve seen…
I think that in anime the girl with the long hair always gets the guy…
Admittedly I don’t watch many romance animes and love triangles tend to be one of my least favourite tropes so I haven’t seen that many shows where the male lead has multiple love interests and actually ends up with someone. Or at least shows an undeniable interest in one of the characters.
Off the top of my head, the ones I can think of are Toradora, Steins;Gate, Re:Zero, Yamada-kun and the seven witches, To Love Ru and In/Spectre. O.k. so In/Spectre is a bit of a stretch for this but both Saki and Kotoko do show a romantic interest in Kuro and he dated Saki until she cut her hair even shorter than Kotoko and now bam, he’s with the blonde even though he acts like she’s nothing but a pain in his rear end!
It’s difficult to blame Okabe for being smitten by Kurisu. I get it, most people would get it. But poor short haired Mayuri didn’t even stand a chance! Kurisu’s hair goes down past her…. cough…hips. Maybe if Faris took out her pigtails she could be of some competition but I’m not sure.
I’m not sure how many people have seen Yamada-kun. For what it’s worth I thought it was an entertaining enough harem show. Now Yamada has possibly the most extensive harem with his pick of a whole array of girls yet he only has eyes for Urara and she happens to have beautiful long blonde hair. There are other girls with long hair in the show mind you but the only ones with even remotely as important a role, and therefore that could be potential rivals, all have considerably shorter hair than her.
You could argue that To Love Ru doesn’t actually have a canon couples resolution but c’mon, we all know Lala steals the show. To Love Ru and Toradora are actually the shows that really made me realize that something fishy was going on here. Because in both of these shows, the protagonist already had a love interest. In fact, in both cases, he was deeply smitten by a classmate he had known for some time (as such the relationship was built on more than passing fancy, and was trying hard to pursue a romance with that character. And in both cases, the young lady in question seemed potentially opened to those advances. The young short haired lady…. And then BAM, another girl with a fiery personality and a habit of putting our protagonist in physical pain swoops in and steals his heart. Another girl with very long hair!
I haven’t seen either but both leading ladies in Your Lie in April and Sword Art online have romantic character arcs and very long hair so I’m just going to go right ahead and assume they also prove my point.
Now you could just say it’s a romance trope. Romance heroines have had long flowing hair since the dawn of the genre. It’s sort of prerequisite. Anime is just following along with a formula. And it’s also what fans want out of their leading romantic ladies. That’s how clichés happen, it’s cause the public responds to them!
Well ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you my last piece of evidence: Rem! Rem is a fan favourite. I mean Beatrice is queen and we should all bow to her, but there’s no denying that powerful yet fragile Rem captured the audiences imagination. Countless fan artists have devoted hours to trying to do her justice. I don’t know if it’s the fact that she has a twin sister or the ultra sexy maid outfits she wears… we may never know the secret of her popularity but at the very least, all the polls I found put her squarely ahead of Emilia.
To add to that, Rem actually has feeling for Subaru. She might be the only character in all of these shows to have actually confessed and she did so after getting to know the young man and after saving him a number of times. Honestly there is no reason for Subaru not to choose to be with Rem. There is ample reason for him to agree. except of course, Emilia has much longer hair!
See! SEEEEEEEE!?!
It’s not the will of the public and it’s not for the sake of narrative integrity. In many cases it doesn’t make any sort of obvious logical sense for the protagonists to turn down one girl in favour of another. These are all different shows with different genres, themes and intended audience and yet they all have one thing in common! The hair!!! And if it’s not just a question of we have ingrained troglodyte instincts that make us see long hair as romantically desirable in women (because again Rem is beloved and if that fan art is anything to go by, a lot of people see her very…cough…romantically, indeed), then there’s really only one answer. Illuminati!
OK, maybe not the actual Illuminati, those don’t exist (please don’t come for me). But clearly there is an underground shadow organization controlling the anime industry to have long haired ladies get the guy. I’m not entirely sure if we want the guy though. In a lot of those cases the guys are sort of not as impressive as the girls. I’m not sure if the point is to make ladies want to have long hair. I think it may be to make people want to be and/or be with ladies with long hair. And who would profit from that?
You guessed it, the wig industry!
The big shot Wig Lobby has gotten their hooks into our beloved anime industry and are trying to brainwash us all. There is no such thing as a short wig… And it’s working! I’m looking up wigs on another tab right now! We can’t let this happen. We do people have to fight back against this injustice!By continuing to create really amazing fan art of short haired anime ladies, and possibly sending it to me. Because that’s uhm..how we win. Yeah, that sounds about right.
I think I’ve made my point. If I disappear in the coming days, you know who did it. Do not trust your local wig salesman. Keep fighting the good fight, together we’ll get them!
