re-watching Star Trek Voyager, and I’m suddenly reminded by the degree to which “no nonsense reddish-haired woman of Celtic ancestry” was just a standard female character archetype in late ‘80s through very early 2000s nerd fiction. What was up with that? Seemed to also be a major thing in romance novels, although I haven’t read more than one of those, being a man and all. Every so often it seems like I should, get some insights onto what women are into these days.
To be clear, I’m not complaining, in many ways I grew up with a 80s-90s media diet, despite not being in that generation. I still prefer a lot of the nerd culture stuff of those days to modern SF/Fantasy, if I’m being honest. It’s just funny that the celtic women thing was so ubiquitous that I hadn’t really even noticed it was a trend until it stopped happening. Probably the reason for my dating history and deep affection for petite women with big personalities, tbh, although sadly I’m not much of a Space Fabio myself.
amusing aside, much of my life as a little kid and teenager I had this kinda low-grade fixation on wanting to be jacked n stacked, and I’m pretty sure it was from seeing romance novel covers at the grocery store. Never bring this up with the other dudes at the gym, but my fitness origin story was being 8 and wanting to be like that cool guy on those weird books I wasn’t supposed to look lmao
The use and position of redheads in older media seems to have been replaced by Blacks, and in some cases redhead characters are been changed to Black in more recent renditions of properties (eg. Annie).
The Celtic women archetypes in that era were one facet of the wider culture moment that Celtic stuff was getting and Caucasian curly hair was having a moment too. And all that was about the position of Irish Americans, and the internality of those Americans, and also probably a bit encouraged by the IRA or its supporters in retrospect.
