Why does Plenty Of Blondes only count the female cast?

According to the page for Plenty of Blondes, the requirement for the trope is that at least half of the white female cast is blonde. I don't see why male characters aren't counted, I guess the logic is that due to blondes being seen as attractive and how Most Writers Are Male driven by the Male Gaze, they will focus more on giving female characters an attractive appearance than male ones. But there are other reasons a work might have a lot of blonde people (and even just talking about attractiveness, the amount of people online I see talking about how they obsess over and have crushes on specifically blond male characters suggests there is demand in that front too). Especially given that there are some works that don't have many female characters. I really feel like the criteria should be changed to "at least half of the white female cast OR at least half of the white cast in general".

I agree. There's not really a gender/trope divide between blond women and blond men, so it seems rather arbitrary. If this trope is worth keeping, it should be expanded. Besides, many examples are just about OTHER hair colors, so having a gender divide when wicks don't even pay attention to the blond requirement is ridiculous.

Edited by fullmusicbard on Feb 20th 2024 at 3:40:38 AM

This doesn't remotely seem tropeworthy.

It doesn't even have a laconic and yes, I agree, it doesn't seem to tropeworthy at all.

Glancing at the discussion tab, it seems even back in 2011 folks didn't think this was a trope.

The original description is kind of rambling and contradictory enough that I wonder if the "female-only" part was actually intended to be a requirement, depending on how you read the opening three sentences:

Don't see a trope as it stands. I expect this wouldn't pass TLP without some work.

I'd use the Trope in Aggregate defense (blonde hair is the easiest hair color to Hand Wave with the fact that the hair for a Dumb Blonde is often dyed, genetics can go either way, etc), but that only works for so long before the actual warning signs appear. Like it seems every single on-page example is just "this character is blonde", and it's occasionally arbitrarily justified even though this has a circular definition similar to Blondes Are Evil (X character is blonde, though it's justified because they're related to other blonde characters/they're evil). I'm only seeing chairs.

I could see this potentially getting reworked into "in a setting that is a real world place, there are way more blondes than real life demographics would suggest", but as it stands here the trope would include even things like a Constructed World or real places where blondes really are that common.

Guess we should add it to the TRS queue.

Edited by MasterN on Mar 6th 2024 at 8:56:51 AM