when did princess toadstool – or “peach” as she’s now called – become blonde? she experimented with colors quite a bit back in the day: the original super mario bros. and the japanese super mario bros. 2 have her as a redhead, the american super mario bros. 2 and super mario bros. 3 have her as a brunette. at what point did the princess’s nebulous appearance solidify into this perpetually O-mouthed blondie?
i dwell on her hair because, as angela carter points out in her book, the sadeian woman and the ideology of pornography, hair color has become a kind of sexual shorthand, in western popular culture at least. in the case of desade’s justine and juliette, the blonde is innocent and submissive, the brunette is feisty. not just the tone of the princess’s hair but the style too has solidified into a perfect chestnut of bangs. patrick alexader has noted, “researching” princess peach fanart, that “everyone gets her hair exactly right. the reason for that, perhaps, is that if you remove her dress (as many fanartists do), peach’s hairstyle is the only thing that identifies her.”
probably the princess’s transformation had to do with lessening technical limitations and the fact that character palettes of more than three colors meant that hair color didn’t have to serve double duty as outlines or shadows, but that doesn’t explain why she ended up blonde.
there was a time – those of us who are growing up with videogames as a given may not realize this – when the minute details of the appearance and identity of the characters who inhabit our videogames were not etched out and trademarked, and each of us had room to fill in the ambiguities between a character’s pixels. this is why i think projects like i am 8-bit are so important: they reassert that each of us as players own an image of our favorite game’s characters that may be different than their author’s, because nintendo doesn’t own our experiences. this is part of the reason why the cast of the “8-bit era” resonates so much with us: because we define them, much more so than the talking, hyper-detailed characters of so many contemporary games.
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Dess I would like you to play my new game for the tigsource compo it is at http://zarat.us/tra/offline-games/eversion.html
there was a research thign done, a girl dyed her hair blonde and she was let in front of lines at clubs and got a lot more positive male attention, and when she dyed her hair brown/black/red she was pretty much ignored, like it made no difference at all what her hair color was unless it was blonde
to argure what you say, the brunette is boring, when the blonde is sexually adventurous fun
it has nothign tod ow ith submission
and with dying my hair brown/blonde/black all sorts of colors
ive been much more attractive blonde, spunky when i dye it non-natural colors (purple pink blue) like hey htis girl is fun lemme talk to her/hang out with her/start soemthing with her and largely ignored with other natural colors
after i read the article i was like OH GOD HAVE TO TRY IT becuase i couldnt believe a girl got preference based on hair color
but its totally true
its why i want to dye my hair blonde again pretty much, the attention is reallyt nice
ksldjgklsdg this robabgly doesnt make muc sense its saturday adn i just got in but i mean you dont reply to my comments nayway ask if you have a question
although i miss the attention is holud dye my hair blonde again
look im fucking PISS DRUNk and i can word this better tomorrow but
blonde = adventurous/outgoing (willing to try anything in bed)
brown/black – boring as fuck (not going to do anyhting in bed, missionary)
unnatural pink blue purple – braeking feamle stereotypes, probably going to be kinky or crazy in bed
more ghirls need to read your blog
i dont know what this will look like in the mornign but whatever im right
this entry kind of makes me angry but i wont talk about it here
On the topic of the ambiguity of low resolution sprites, when I first played Cave Story I thought the main character was female, in fact I thought I was playing as the ‘Sue’ being described in the intro.
Looking back, I think I preferred the main character when I only had vague ideas about who they were. Having a main character’s features left to the imagination can be a good thing, I guess.
Hi,
Funny thing is that if you consider the Tomb Raider character, she’s got brown hair. When you check out fan art (e.g. *”tomb raider” fanart* request on google image), you get illustration that do match exactly her hair color.
I’m no ethnologist but i would be quite interested in stastistics regarding brunette vs. blonde female character picked by actual male player, e.g. in games such as WoW. Indeed, i’ve always been wondering of the trade-off between personification and pleasure-of-the-eyes in tomb raider (*).
batou.
(thanks for the great blog and videogame experience, by the way :-) )
(*) Lara Croft father has its own opinion on this: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000720/gard_01.htm
zaratustra your game is the first thing i played after i finished my ludum dare entry. i like the part where the player is forced to go a layer “deeper” even though it’s become obvious at that point that things are just going to get worse and worse.
i was disappointed by how few of the games in the lovecraft competition seem to attempt to be genuinely creepy and unsettling.
Have you ever read Marina Warner’s “From the Beast to the Blonde”? She’s another Carter-esque writer who also writes a lot about the significance of hair and feminine beauty in myths & fairy tales. I’d recommend it if you like Carter’s take on the same sort of material.
As for the whole 8-bit v modern graphics thing, the division between them is essentially the same as the divide between “cool” and “hot” media: low definition and high audience participation versus high definition and low audience participation.
Also, regarding the Tomb Raider games that Batou brought up, they – and many other games – illustrate the ambiguity (endemic to most videogames) between identification with and observation of the protagonist, especially when it comes to protagonists and the notion of the “male gaze” (yes, I know I’m thinking about games in filmic terms now, but it seems apt considering I’m only talking about the visual element of the games).
*Breathes in* Whoo. Sorry to vent all over your comments section like that, this post just made my mind race. I should probably get around to all of these issues separately myself at some point.
I have been thinking a lot about hair-as-iconography this week and last, and especially in terms of avatars. Several people had messaged me on Live to say how uncanny my NXE avatar’s likeness really was. Another friend remarked on my avatar’s strong likeness at a party.
“But I haven’t actually worn my hair that way in a year,” I reminded him. He seemed really startled. No, for over a year, I’ve worn my hair long and nondescript. But long hair doesn’t quite suit my avatar-as-icon, and so even though it contradicts real life, my avatars all still have shaggy (or pokey) hair.
There was an online game-project, three or four years ago, that was all about word association. You were shown an image, or photograph, or graphic, and you needed to type the words that came to mind. Your goal was to type the same words you thought everyone else had assigned to each image. Of course, the project was not a game at all — the idea was to get real humans to tag photos and make them human-searchable rather than robo-searchable. Here’s what they found out, instead: any time somebody saw a photograph of a woman — any woman! — they would type “hair.” It is, especially for a man, the most salient thing about a woman’s appearance. It immediately and conveniently pares her visual identity down into a simple icon. More broadly, I think we do the same with race, eyeglasses, wheelchairs, braces. I am not sure what this means.
Oh, and one more thing. There’s definitely something to Daphny’s hair colour/bedroom antics observation. I never even got a second look before I bleached my hair and dyed it bright blue.
Hair is, like, the most salient thing about ANYONE’S appearance for me. But women are more likely to do different things with theirs.
I’m trying to figure out this one quote that said “she had bleached her hair blonde, the animal sign of femininity”
I dig (and married one though it didn’t last) butch bottle blonde dyke-ish types.
Pixel art of Peach facesitting toad?
more like facesittign birdo
I always knew Peach was a slut. Nice to see Toad munching out. Hehee.
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