Arrested development

There was this She-Ra the Princess of Power episode in which Glimmer, a pink-haired friend to She-Ra and herself a princess, the queen’s daughter, etc, was set to meet this prince from a faraway land; she so wanted to impress the guy she rebelled against her mom and dyed her pink hair dark purple and had it all, I dunno, spiked up (I’ve just thought of the word, I think, by the way; can you spike up your hair? Because it really is the best term to describe what was going on with the girl).
So, she got herself this really cool New-Wave hairdo, it was the 1980s, and despite it all being a trap set up by the evil Hordak to… I don’t know, rule the world or thereabouts… Glimmer-with-the-purple-hair became the most beautif… no, scratch that, she was the sexiest girl I’d ever seen and what do you know, a cartoon character.

[In the end there was this silly moral that Glimmer shouldn’t have changed her looks for somebody else, blahblahblah we should learn to admire and respect ourselves for what we are, crap crap crap- At least GI Joe had the “Knowing is half the battle” thing, which supposedly taught you useful stuff.]

Still, in a very weird kind of way I think it established a basic archetype in my mind, then and there, of the perfect girl, of the femme fatale, of looks being able to kill, of well, sex per se, I guess, up to the point that I think all my (further) choices in girls from puberty on to adulthood were severely influenced by it.

…By Glimmer with the purple hair and the bad-girl attitude, from an early-1980s He-Man spinoff.