I am writing this to link to from the description and news post of Earthbound, blonde girls to brunette, once I have that up, because it's still going to be a while before I have a video up to contextualize certain things (for one thing, there are a couple of things I would like to include from late in Mother 3, which I don't have
any footage of yet).
I have mentioned before that, while two generic NPCs could not be cleanly brunified without changing their dresses brown as well (a necklace is all I chose to recolor besides hair), I have also chosen to leave Lardna, the zombie lady in Threed, the Topolla Theater manager, and the Extra Cranky Lady battle sprite all blonde because, as weird as this may sound out of context, sleaze is generally not what brown hair represents to me (and I don't mean products of real-life misogyny, like War Nurse's outfit (despite some actual transgressions I have
already addressed before)). A big part of why brunette girls appeal to me so much has to do with Saga, the kind and cheerful human protagonist of A Little Snow Fairy Sugar. While people of any hair color do come in all stripes, someone like Miu from Strawberry Marshmallow is a perfect example of a brunette girl I don’t like, because of how she treats her friends. Admittedly, my tastes are more complex than that (for example, I do somehow find Julie's antics in Scott Pilgrim Takes Off pretty amusing), but Lardna and Miss Fake, unlike Paula, are still not people I would want to end up lumping together with Saga Bergman, Yui Hirasawa, or Sakura Kinomoto.
As for what made Saga so special in the first place, back in 2008, directly following The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Sugar was the second show I started renting on DVD from Netflix, which was what had finally given me some initial momentum to check out anime much more actively than before. Up until then, for all my appreciation of anime as a type of art style, I never really went out of my way to check out actual anime series ever since I got bored with my first two anime in life over 2002 (those being Pokemon and Digimon; the remaining show I was watching then, Mon Colle Knights, simply stopped airing and took me a few years to find unsubbed Japanese DVDs of). Even knowing since ’03 about a site like Robert’s Anime Corner Store, Netflix’s rental service at the time provided a much more cost-effective and convenient means to start checking stuff out through than paying in full for each series or individual volume, especially if I were to end up not liking something, once I caught wind of such a business model. (And yes, almost everything was available for free at the time on YouTube, which was how I watched Ultimate Girls (will be mentioned again soon), but we didn’t yet have Roku to access that through our TV, I didn’t have a laptop, and with our only desktop at the time, my only real seating option for it was in a confined office chair, which would be much less comfortable than on our couch or even my bedroom floor in front of my gaming TV (my bedroom's overall setup actually changed every few months or years).)
While I didn’t think much about Haruhi herself since watching her show’s one season at the time, Saga gradually went on after I finished Sugar to form a common denominator with three other characters, despite fading to the sidelines and then the background until the show’s long-planned turn in July 2024 in a line of anime I started showing my mother late in ‘21.
One of those girls, Mai Tsurugino, was the first main character in a short-lived franchise known as Makeruna! Makendou that I had already been obsessed with by that point. At that time, I had googled multiple times for the OVA (not on YouTube yet; found almost a year later on a site called MegaUploads), and was also trying for months to figure out how to run the PC-FX-exclusive third game on an emulator called Mednafen (decided several later just to order the actual system on eBay), hoping to eventually begin a full-franchise fandub.
The other two, the unused female PC of Pokemon generation I and May of gen III, along with the black-haired male PC from gen II, were previously the planned lead characters of some barely executed fanfic ideas of a friend of mine at the time, whom I then decided upon as the lead characters for what would become one of my main fanfic projects for a decade despite never panning out either. Late in 2005, I had posted a request to a designated board on AdultFanFiction.net, and that was when someone asking to be called Jake met me on AIM to discuss an idea he had involving the gen I PC he decided to name Ellen. Over the next two years, we would discuss one similar idea each involving the other two characters, and then the summer of '08, at some point after I already started watching Sugar, was when I would watch Ultimate Girls and tie all three characters together for one common story I eventually titled Parasitic Trio and then Unwilling Service.
https://dmxrated.dreamwidth.org/2008/07/26/ (The original idea behind it did draw upon UG, but would also line up pretty well with Inukami and this ebook called The Tribulations of Omega Girl. However, it didn't take long for me instead to focus more on how I would turn the whole thing into a game for myself, as a way of reliving the games on my terms, and especially the Pal Park in Sinnoh and both of the Battle Frontiers, two of those each at a point at which the lake guardians would no longer need the protagonists as some sort of "battery". Jake eventually came to hate the whole thing, and I have a tag called "The end with Jake", chronicling what led us to eventually fall out in 2018 (beta-writing was his idea from late in '11), and I grew bored with it myself by '19. Nor does a reboot seem all that likely, due to how much more I've got going on in stark contrast to the circumstances that led me to revive it in the summer of '16 after I originally wrote it off more than a year earlier.)
(Just to address this while I'm on the topic of such a friendship that, actually, should have ended months before I'd conceive of US, while I didn't understand narcissism so much as I do now thanks to YouTube, how I allowed him to remain in my life early in '08 after he pulled some of the same old bullshit I had called him out on just a month earlier, and how justified what he actually said seemed at the time in response to something I said about The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (something I only read about in Nintendo Power years earlier) looking more like a pirate game than the medieval aesthetic Zelda is known for, is something I have
recently addressed on Reddit after figuring out in much more detail in a notebook. You'd think I would've just been done with him after that, but after the respect I had also lost from people on a forum among other things, it just seemed perfectionistic by that point to demand respect from people in general even whenever I say the wrong thing.)
So, yeah... Ellen, May, Mai, Saga... Their simultaneous roles in my life during the summer of '08 are what led me to favor brown hair in particular on cute anime girls. While I didn't originally mind it on jerkasses or villains (for example, Kirika Kure, Sasa Yuuki, and Ayase/Luca Souju were once three of my favorite magical girls in the Puella Magi franchise, to imagine as "Cibi" for
my reimagining of the Puellaverse), that changed when I read Ben's entry from Tales From the Cryptkeeper on TV Tropes: Complete Monster: Western Animation (the franchise now has its own page for that trope), decided to look him up, and found myself turned off by one of the furthest things from a cute anime girl, and especially from someone like Saga, having such a feature I normally associate with those (how I failed to notice that before on grown asshole men in other western cartoons such as Bob's Burgers, who knows, maybe I was just watching along). And really, I am not much more fond of Naoko Yamamoto, Calamity Mary's human form from Magical Girl Raising Project, even though she's a female anime character.
Hence why I skipped over three certain characters back in Earthbound.
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