Blondes Are Evil

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

The girl with the curls is the real vampire. I found that out when I was in the chorus. It was the blond cutie that did all the damage to the front row.

—Nita Naldi (dark-haired actress typecast as a villainess)

This is the female version of Blond Guys Are Evil. It sometimes overlaps with Evil Is Sexy.

These are blondes from societies where the hair color occurs naturally. The characterization differs when the blond hair is a clue that the character is an evil foreigner.

Often contrasted with a dark-haired heroine—as the Femme Fatale or Alpha Bitch compared to the Girl Next Door, The Vamp rather than the Damsel in Distress, the City Mouse rather than the Country Mouse.

She is not too likely to be the Dumb Blonde, but can be, with her plotting being run more on animal cunning than cleverness, and many evil blondes have exploited the Dumb Blonde stereotype.

This hair color can be dyed and often is. In the City Mouse, this is part of the luxuries of the city. For the Femme Fatale or The Vamp, it is a calculated part of her scheming. And it can, for any evil blonde, be a symbol of her deception or her lack of simplicity. Indeed, this may drive this trope's interchange with Hair of Gold, a deeply Cyclic Trope.

When blondes are natural, blondness does correlate with youth (and, presumably, innocence) and so is attractive. Women therefore dye their hair blond. But after a critical mass of blondes have dyed hair, it no longer correlates with youth. And it certainly doesn't correlate with innocence; the honest brunette who does not dye her hair, perhaps because she is not scheming to get a man, appears more innocent. Therefore, blond hair dye falls out of fashion and then blondes are once again mostly natural blondes and so the correlation reoccurs—restarting the cycle.

All inversions belong in Hair of Gold. Compare Blondes Are Witches (showcasing the prevalence of giving magical women blonde hair)

Examples of Blondes Are Evil include:

Anime and Manga


Comic Books

  • A Flare story arc featured Marian Press, a plain-looking legal secretary who was transformed into a fair-haired Person of Mass Destruction.
  • Before her Heel Face Turn, Emma Frost was one of the X-Men's most dangerous and sophisticated enemies. Her supervillain past continues to be referenced to this day.
    • She's still considered the Token Evil Teammate by a number of her actual teammates, as well as much of the Super Community at large.
    • Her backstory reveals both that Emma is a natural brunette and that her whole family is largely responsible for turning her evil.
      • Which is still playing the trope very much straight: once she turns good, she's suddenly been a brunette all along, just really, really meticulous in touching up her roots.
  • A disproportionate number of the female villains of Hack Slash are blondes (Laura, Miss America, Acid Angel), although they also have an odd tendency to get it permanently burned off.
  • Amora the Enchantress is a powerful and recurring enemy of The Avengers.
  • In Empowered, Sistah Spooky's belief in this trope is the reason she keeps tormenting the heroine.
  • The original Terra on the Teen Titans at first seems to be a spunky new member but then turns out to be a psychotic double agent working for Deathstroke the Terminator. She betrays the Titans and tries to kill them.
  • Moonstone of the Masters of Evil, Thunderbolts, and the Dark Avengers in Marvel Comics.


Fan Works


Film

  • In Undercover Brother, a blonde [White She Devil] tries to seduce the hero. The movie goes into some detail on the evil temptations of white straight-haired blonde girls (Black Man's Kryptonite).
  • Rebecca De Mornay pulled a textbook example in the 1990s classic The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, as an ice-cold, vengeful but seemingly sweet and inoffensive au pair out for the blood of the woman who got her obstetrician husband charged with sexually molesting his patients (by way of her family). Also doubles as a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing.
  • Michelle Pfeiffer played a blond Catwoman in Batman Returns.
    • Subverted in Batman Returns. She wasn't evil, she just became...more honest about herself.
  • Michelle Pfeiffer also played Velma Von Tussle in the 2007 version of Hairspray. Velma also happened to be blond.
  • In Mean Girls, we have a good redhead (Cady) and a good brunette (Janis), a not-so-good brunette (Gretchen) and two not-so-good blondes (Regina and Karen). Though in fairness, to call the rather sympathetic Regina actually evil is much too strong.
    • Karen was more the other type of blonde. Regina, on the other hand, embodies this trope, prior to her sort-of redemption, anyway.
  • Marisa Coulter from The Golden Compass movie. In the book, she has black hair.
  • Heathers also has two bad blondes and a bad brunette...and a heroine, who, while not actually good, is brunette.
  • In the 1983 film The Man Who Wasn't There, Morgan Hart played Amanda Worth, alias "Mr. Tendyck", a blond Woman in Black who became briefly invisible by drinking a green potion which she planned to monopolize. The film's other invisible blonde, Cindy Worth, was played by Lisa Langlois.
  • Sharpay from High School Musical (well, at the start, anyway.)
  • In the 1991 film Vice Academy 3, Julia Parton (Dolly's cousin) played Malathion, a prison fugitive whose blond hair was turned green when she ran through a cloud of insecticide.
  • Suzanne Stone in To Die For.
  • Subverted in The Mask.
  • Rose (Marilyn Monroe) in Niagara
  • Miriam Blaylock in The Hunger
  • Rebecca Romijn in Femme Fatale
  • Adrienne Foster (Alicia Silverstone) in The Crush
  • Alice Wakefield in Lost Highway
  • Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) in Fatal Attraction, though she was arguably more ill than evil.
  • Jude (Miranda Richardson) in The Crying Game, though she changes her hair to a black bob halfway through the film.
  • Mirage from The Incredibles. She's more of a White-Haired Pretty Girl, though, and has a Heel Face Turn.
  • Kelly from the bitch trio in The Final, though she sort of gets better.
  • Basic Instinct has two evil blondes, Catherine and Roxy. Catherine is one of the most iconic blondes in cinema.
  • The White Witch from the film adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia.
  • Helga from Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Interestingly enough, the film's heroine is a Dark Skinned White-Haired Pretty Girl with Blue Eyes.
  • Dr. Elsa Schneider in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. While not completely "evil", she does side with the Nazis to find the Holy Grail, and even suffers a Disney Villain Death when she tries to keep said Grail for herself.
  • Averted mostly in Sydney White. Rachel Witchburn is the only blond who is rude and mean to everyone around her. The rest of the blond Kappa girls, especially Dinky, are friendly and quite nice.

Literature

  • The Lady of the Green Kirtle, though not described at all in terms of hair color, is drawn as a blonde by Pauline Baynes in The Silver Chair.
  • Stephenie Meyer apparently has some issues with blond women. In the whole Twilight series, there is not a single blonde woman who is neither evil nor nasty. The most sympathetic one is Rosalie, who is depicted as being pathetically jealous, shallow, and vindictive, and who was gang-raped because she was so hot.
  • Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series also takes countless potshots at blond women, apparently for no reason except that Anita is a brunette. Any blond woman is immediately dismissed as weak, shallow, and both slutty and sexually frigid.
    • It didn't help that the author's ex-husband admitted that tall, thin blondes were his "type", and has since married a blonde.
      • Given how much effort she's spent portraying the character based on her ex-husband as being an utter bastard following their breakup, that's hardly coincidence.
  • Milady de Winter in The Three Musketeers.
  • A major villain from Fingerprints is a blonde. She's mentioned be dying her hair.
  • Queen Cersei Lannister from A Song of Ice and Fire has pretty much single-handedly run the Seven Kingdoms into the ground. Well, with a little help from her equally blond son, Joffrey.
    • Averted with Cersei's blonde daughter Myrcella, who is anything but evil. You could also make a case for an aversion in the case of Daenerys Targaryen, though it would probably be more accurate to describe her as a White-Haired Pretty Girl.
  • Senna, the Manipulative Bastard witch from the book series Everworld.
  • Life-in-Death from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, written in 1797.

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
 Her locks were yellow as gold;
 Her skin was white as leprosy,
 The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
 Who thicks man's blood with cold.

  • More self-centered than outright malicious, there's Amy from Little Women, the one who throws tantrums, particularly when she burns the years worth of Jo's unfinished novel out of revenge for not being allowed to accompany Jo and Laurie to the theater and was so vain she tried to fix the shape of her nose with a clothespin.
  • In Tortall's Song of the Lioness, the blonde Princess Josiane of the Copper Isles, Jon's mother's hopeful betrothal for her son, is a traitor conspiring with Duke Roger to take over the kingdom.
  • Alva, the bratty fourteen-year old from Sisters? No Way. Her older sister Aishling is an aversion.
  • Princess Arissa from David Eddings's The Elenium. This trope is averted with her niece, Queen Ehlana, however.
  • In Dork Diaries, the character MacKenzie Hollister is often described as a blonde with icy-blue eyes by Nikki Maxwell's diary.
  • In the Fairytale Novels by Regina Doman, evil blondes pop up a lot - during the first three installments, there's about one per book. One of them gets a Heel Face Turn, though.


Live-Action TV

  • There's an episode of Charmed called "The Power of Three Blondes". It's about three criminal witches, named the Stillman Sisters, who are all blondes, and their characterization is largely built around their blondness. They are an Evil Counterpart to the Halliwell Sisters, who are all brunettes, though Paige was actually strawberry blonde at that point. Only one of the witches actually fit the trope as the other two were more Dumb Blondes who happened to be evil.
  • Nicole Wallace from Law & Order.
  • Shell Dockley, Natalie Buxton, and Snowball Merriman in Bad Girls
  • Tatiana Taylor from Auf Wiedersehen, Pet
  • Kim Tate and Sadie King from Emmerdale
  • Xena: Warrior Princess has Callisto, Mavican, Krafstar, Najara, and Hope.
  • Mandatory Buffy the Vampire Slayer example: Glory, the Hellgod Big Bad of Season 5. Of course, Buffy herself is an aversion.
    • Also, Darla, as portrayed by Julie Benz.
    • Darla aside, Buffy played this completely inverted at first when it came to the main characters. Buffy was the heroic blonde and Cordelia was the catty, shallow brunette. Both evolved over time, of course.
      • Sunday from season 4 as well
      • Harmony as well, though she is more of a Harmless Villain
  • This is a rather common trope in Telenovelas, or Spanish-language Soap Operas. It's a bit complicated to explain, but it seems to come from the fact that blondes in Latin America tend to come from richer families.
    • Patricia Fernández in Yo Soy Betty, la Fea, although her hair is actually dyed (in fact, her nickname among the employees of Ecomoda is "La Peliteñida", the Hairbleached), and her evilness is mostly ineffectual, which seems to be a Lampshade Hanging of this trope.
    • Parodied along with every other trope of the genre in an episode of My Name Is Earl where Catalina writes a soap based on her life. The evil blonde is, of course, Joy.
  • Burn Notice has Carla, Michael's rather bloodthirsty handler. She's even described at one point as "tall, blonde, and evil." For comparison, Michael's exes are both brunettes.
  • Elle Bishop from Heroes is one evil blonde...but this is only because of the Company experimentation with her abilities at the hands of her own father, though she doesn't recall any of it.
  • Sarah Corvus from The Bionic Woman, an obvious antipode to the short, immature brunet heroine.
  • The seductive Six on Battlestar Galactica. At least at first.
  • Nellie Oleson from Little House On the Prairie.
  • The Sentinel has Alex Barnes. Toward the end, she's more nuts than evil, but she did kill Blair, so she quailfies as evil in most fans' eyes.
  • Every main blond character on Glee is evil: Sue, the glee club's arch-enemy, Will's wife, Terri, who doubles as a Dumb Blonde, and Alpha Bitch, Quinn. Even Brittany, who is such a ditz that it's a miracle she can compose sentences, is an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain as a spy for Sue.
    • However, Quinn does a Heel Face Turn after becoming pregnant and getting kicked out of the Cheerios. She realizes that they were much nicer and kinder to her than her previous friends and stays with them, even standing up for them against Sue.
    • Similarly, Brittany is just too sweet-natured (and far too slow) to really count as evil.
  • While maybe not evil in the typical sense, Lily in Privileged is blonde, and is shown to steal, take drugs, and generally provide a messed-up counterpart to good girl Megan. On a smaller scale, there's Jordanna, one of the twins' school friends who, among other things, spikes Sage's drink as revenge for the twins sabotaging her party by throwing their own on the same day.
  • Legend of the Seeker, particularly in the second season, contrasts blond, morally ambiguous villain/antihero Cara with pure, moralistic, dark-haired Kahlan. This is also at least a partial subversion, because it turns out that Cara is a tragic figure of corrupted innocence while Kahlan becomes something of an uptight bitch.
    • There's also Sister Nicci, who is blond after coming Back from the Dead, and also contrasted with Kahlan in the episode "Bound". This is also something of a subversion, as Nicci has a similar Dark and Troubled Past as Cara and eventually turns on the Keeper.
  • Vera, the only blonde in the regular cast of Queen of Swords, is a treacherous, manipulative, adulterous bitch who gets hot and bothered watching executions.
  • Laurie in That '70s Show.
  • Amber on House was such a cut-throat bitch that the characters nicknamed her "Cut-throat Bitch". Then she became Wilson's girlfriend and died.
  • Sam on iCarly, occasionally (especially if you're Freddie)!
  • If a woman on NCIS has short blond hair, especially if it's dyed, you can be pretty sure she's the killer. Several episodes have had women fitting that description as the killer (in one early episode, there were two of them).
  • Nicole and Mary Cherry from Popular fit this trope incredibly well, particularly Nicole. Brooke was a bit of a subversion, though.
  • Morgause, played by Joan Allen in The Mists of Avalon. Along with dark-haired Anjelica Huston playing the good sister Viviane. It's a case of Playing Against Type for both.
  • The Blade series featured a blonde Australian woman as The Dragon for the Big Bad.


Music

  • Lottie, the teenage serial killer of Nick Cave's song "The Curse of Millhaven": "My hair is yellow and I'm always a-combin'."


Theatre


Video Games

  • Scarlet of Final Fantasy VII. Her list of atrocities, at least in the main game, include:
    • Issuing the order to burn down Barret's hometown, killing nearly everyone he knows and loves.
    • Shooting an arm off of Barret while he's trying to save his best friend from falling to his death.
    • Causing said dropped friend to be driven insane by the burning of his hometown and become a murderous psychopath.
    • Trying to publically execute Tifa in a gas chamber (and slapping her while she was tied down, just to add insult to injury).
    • Attempting to kill the entire party with the Proud Clod Proudclad.
  • Jihl Nabaat of Final Fantasy XIII.
  • Beatrice from Umineko no Naku Koro ni.
  • Subverted in Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, where Selena Fluorspar is a blonde, an enemy unit...and an incredibly sympathetic Dark Magical Girl.
  • The Resident Evil series has Annette Birkin and Alexia Ashford, though the former isn't so much evil as she is obsessed with getting revenge on the people who wronged her husband.
    • In Resident Evil 5, Jill Valentine, usually a brunette, has her hair turn blond during her Brainwashed and Crazy period, it lost all the pigment because the virus was constantly being pumped into her bloodstream.
  • In Kingdom Hearts, the Organization has Larxene. Kicks Sora twice, bitch-slaps Namine, and is perhaps the most outwardly evil of the Organization, with only fellow sadist Xaldin (who has black hair) rivaling her in that area, though normally stoic blue-haired Saix can outdo them both whenever he feels like it.
  • Subverted with Leblanc in Final Fantasy X-2. She starts off as an antagonist to YRP by trying to steal their spheres at every turn, but eventually pulls a Heel Face Turn when she realizes her "lover", Nooj, is working to fight a greater threat, and befriends Yuna in her fight to aid him and save Spira once more.
  • Jeanne from Bayonetta, at least when she was Brainwashed and Crazy.
  • Windy from Suikoden I, Elza from Suikoden II, Sarah from Suikoden III, and Maha Sparna from Suikoden V.
  • Marjoly from Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure.
  • Mildred Avalon from Arcana Heart.
  • Pink Monkey from Ape Escape is a straight-up example.
  • Mitsuki Konishi from The World Ends With You definitely qualifies.
  • Blonde. Sweet Lolita dress motif. A drunkard. A serial killer with a baseball bat (and alcohol for lighting it up). Batshit fuckin' insane. So numb to killing people that at least one of her opponents voices his disgust. That's Bad Girl for you.
  • Dead Space seems to have a thing for evil blondes (not to mention ineffectual blondes, weak-willed blondes, mentally unstable blondes, and ineffectual, weak-willed, and mentally unstable blondes who then turn into Necromorphs).
  • Lucrezia Borgia plays this straight until Cesare breaks her heart and she reveals his location to Ezio.
  • Meredith from Dragon Age II turns homicidally insane and paranoid in Act III thanks to the influence of her new red lyrium sword. A similarly corrupted Bartrand says that "she glittered like the sun, but her heart was like ice."
  • Menardi may have had noble intentions after all, but she still murdered people, including civilians and elderly scholars, to get them fulfilled, rather than explaining herself.
  • Touhou has several straightforward examples: Marisa Kirisame (main character!), Rumia, Flandre Scarlet, and especially Yukari Yakumo.
    • Subversion: Ran Yakumo.
    • Subterranean Animism adds Parsee to the list of evil blondes and Yamame to the list of subversions. Nobody's sure where Yuugi's alignment lies.
  • The Tales (series), which loves evil blondes!
    • Legretta in Tales of the Abyss is arguably The Dragon, and is therefore evil and makes no attempt to hide it.
    • Zig-zagged in Tales of Destiny 2. Elraine and Barbatos are the main antagonists, but the person behind them, Fortuna, is blonde.
    • You can argue Muse in Tales of Xillia fits this...but if anything, her hair is more Green than blonde...but it looks blonde.
    • When Shirley turns evil, she becomes this trope.
  • Olga from Asura's Wrath is Platinum Blonde. Bombing a village full of innocent normal humans definitely makes her evil.


Webcomics

  • Mistress Butterfly in Collar 6. Later subverted, since her true identity of Evita Kappel has black hair, so the blond hair was evidently a wig.
  • Franken becomes this when he unleashes his Super-Powered Evil Side. In fact, he was definitely one in his past because of his Mad Scientist tendency. Yuri plays this far straighter, but in more Affably Evil sense.
  • Shmeerm and Mac in Voodoo Walrus are prime examples of this.
  • Girl Genius has Lucrezia and her niece Zola.

Web Original


Western Animation

  • Batman the Animated Series had three: Catwoman, who mentioned at one point in a comic that she dyed her hair, Harley Quinn, who also denied being a real blonde, and Mary Louise "Baby Doll" Dahl.
    • There's odd inconsistency with Catwoman — her hair colour changed between seasons, and this was explained with her stopping dyeing her hair with animal-tested products, but back in the episode Tyger, Tyger, she was transformed into a Half-Human Hybrid, yet had fur the identical shade to her then-blonde hair.
  • May Kanker in Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy. Though it is worth noting she is usually portrayed as the most sympathetic of the three sisters.
  • On Captain Planet and the Planeteers, the Mad Scientist Dr. Barbara Blight almost offsets the good Linka.
  • Darla Dimple, the child star villainess of Cats Don't Dance.
  • The Queen Hornet on Dynomutt Dog Wonder.
  • There is a deliberate subversion of this trope in As Told by Ginger, as while one would assume that Courtney is a Alpha Bitch, the episode "Wicked Game" showed that Courtney is probably the best friend Ginger ever had. There's also Hope Rodgers, who is a nice person too.
  • Suzy Johnson on Phineas and Ferb, though this stands in contrast to her also-blond-but-much-nicer brother Jeremy.
  • Mandy, the token Enfante Terrible from The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy.
  • Inverted by Smurfette in The Smurfs. Originally an evil female smurf created by Gargamel, she started as a brunette, but was turned into a blonde when she became good.
  • Ax Crazy muscle moll, Stefenie Demeanor, from COPS.
  • Averted/arguably inverted on Total Drama Island, where Bridgette is arguably the nicest character and Lindsay is Spoiled Sweet (though she dyes). The female "villains" of the series, meanwhile, are Heather and Courtney, both brunettes.
    • The third season did introduce an evil blonde (though, like Lindsay, she dyes) - Blaineley, who is basically Bridgette's Evil Counterpart.
      • But it's not certain whether Blaineley dyes or not. The lyrics say "She's a nasty fake blonde schemer", and it can be interpreted that she's a fake blonde as well as a fake and a blonde.
  • Gilotina, a member of the Female Furies in Superman/Batman: Apocalypse.
  • Heloise on Jimmy Two-Shoes, though it can be hard to tell, since it's dirty blonde.
  • Interesting case on American Dad with the character Lindsey Coolidge, who fits this trope quite nicely and is often the Alpha Bitch of the story, yet her best friend is the incredibly unattractive and unpopular girl Jewel.
  • American Dragon: Jake Long: Rose (a.k.a. Huntsgirl), like everyone in the Huntsclan, is considered evil by the magical creatures. That is, before her Heel Face Turn when she learned the boy she loved and the dragon she wanted to slay were one and the same. Later, the "evil blonde" role fell into The Cheerleader Stacey.
  • Regular Show has a group of blondes with whom Mordecai hangs out after dyeing his hair in a bet with Rigby that turns out to be a Blonde Superiority Cult that believes themselves to be the best hair color, to the point where their initiation ceremonies consist of forcibly dyeing an outsider to death with boiling hair dye.
  • In one episode of Challenge of the Superfriends, Cheetah, a foe of Wonder Woman, revealed herself to be a blonde.
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