Granola Girl

Apparently Earth Mother Gaia isn't opposed to capris and generic smoothies.

"She's like... a dirty hippy. Without the dirt."

—Strong Bad

An overtly comical liberal or left-wing character, usually with a penchant for tie-dyes, crystals, veganism, free love, oneness with nature and anything that is 'all-natural'. This character will commonly not be very well grounded, but cheerful; flighty, but not scatter-brained enough to qualify as The Ditz, yet the character is often associated with being book smart, and will have a tendency to make her opinions known whenever possible. She will love any kind of alternative medicine and will refer to actual real doctors as "allopaths" and "greedy". Of course, she will never actually have a health problem worth seeing a doctor about it, because any problem she has will be all in her head.

Male versions of this character (granola guys) are exceedingly rare, and are mainly depicted as aging 50- or 60-year-old hippies, either Tommy Chong-esque Erudite Stoners or balding guys with ponytails who haven't yet accepted the end of the 1960s. Very occasionally you will see young men who fall under this trope, and who are if anything treated as being even more ridiculous than the female version. Expect them to play the guitar very badly. However, such characters (regardless of gender) are almost always portrayed as sincere and well-meaning.

Compare Bourgeois Bohemian, Soapbox Sadie.

Examples of Granola Girl include:

Advertising

  • A series of home insurance adverts for UK insurer Direct Line, featuring a potential customer who misses their offers because she's worried about feng shui, or accidentally drops a heavy crystal on the salesman's foot. Occasionally used for Hypocritical Humor, such as the one where she claims not to need insurance because she's moved beyond material goods, and then can't find her handbag.

Customer: It's got all my things in it! It's got all my money!!


Fan Works

  • Terra Caldwell from Convergent Paths (a Pokémon fanfic), who dislikes shoes and likes meditating, up to the point of switching between normal state and meditative state (in which she speaks "like a wise elder of a village").


Film

  • John Tucker Must Die: Sophia Bush's character.
  • Children of Men: Michael Caine's character Jasper is an aging Granola Guy, living in the woods naturally with his wife, growing a new immensely popular variety of pot that has a strawberry flavor. It is implied that he was left without a choice but to withdraw from society after his wife was tortured by the government.
  • Pirates of Silicon Valley: Steve Jobs's girlfriend, who had a daughter with him named Lisa. His first reaction when she breaks up with him is to fire the entire Apple Lisa dev team.
  • Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: Seann William Scott played a rare young male example.
  • Black Sheep: Experience. She claims to be able to see auras, carries around an aromatherapy candle, and at some point learned something about acupuncture.
  • Mars Attacks!: Brutally parodied in Tim Burton's film Annette Bening's character Barbara is a Granola Girl who sets up New Age crystals as she watches the Martians land, believing that they are the saviors of the human race, here to enlighten us. They aren't. She's one of the few people to survive the massacre that follows. Afterward, Barbara claims that they have come to punish humanity for destroying the Earth.
  • Hocus Pocus: Max is a bit of one, at least as described by The Nostalgia Chick, but with one notorious exception:

Max is from California, where people wear tie-dye, play drums, and just love tie-dye! 'Cause California has hippies, and hippies love tie-dye! But the thing about hippies is that hippies actually have sex. Free love is one of the main characteristics of Hippie-dome. But Max is a [thunderclap, dramatic pause, dramatic whisper] virgin!


Literature

Lords and Ladies mitigates this somewhat, however-Magrat's cottage has traditionally housed thoughtful witches who carefully researched things and wanted to know, for example, when a spell calls for eye of newt, does left or right make a difference? Granny is a better witch because she knows it doesn't matter, but she nonetheless goes to Magrat for help when someone is poisoned because she knows that Magrat's beliefs do make her a better doctor.

  • Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: One of David Foster Wallace's short stories involved a man relating the story of a hook-up with a "granola cruncher" that turned into a most peculiar tale about her managing to get a rapist to not rape her in a truly bizarre manner.
  • Macrobiotic, of the Whateley Universe. I mean, she gave herself the codename 'Macrobiotic', what more do you need?
  • American Gods: Samantha Black Crow delivers a beautiful speech of all the (sometimes contradictory) things she believes in, which could well be a summary of the beliefs of many of these characters. In a subversion, this is a universe where all this might well be true, at the same time.
  • Nola, Phoebe's hippy friend in Oh. My. Gods. Nola is actually a nickname for her name, which is Granola.

Live Action TV

  • Mokey in Fraggle Rock. If she were human, you could easily picture her listening to sitar music and polishing crystals.
  • Boy Meets World: Topanga in the first season. She was intended as a one-shot character, but the actress made such an impression that she was invited back as a regular. The novelty wore thin pretty quickly, so when the show re-tooled in the second season, they changed her into a Hollywood Nerd (Type 2), essentially sacrificing the one who was already part of the cast (poor Minkus, Type 1) to do it.
  • Phoebe from Friends. Slightly less so in later seasons when she ended up a little less hippy and a little more edgy.
  • Janice from The Muppet Show, who apparently had a discussion with her mother at some point about living on the beach and walking around naked. (The Great Muppet Caper)
  • Dharma and Greg: Dharma and her parents.
  • The Wonder Years: The trope is played straight—the series is set in the late 1960s.
  • Amy Jellicoe in Enlightened, although her sincerity is sometimes questioned.
  • The Monkees: Peter Tork (on the TV show and in real life) was more of a Granola Guy rather than a New Age Retro Hippie (although he displays many of these characteristics as well. See also: Erudite Stoner.). He was undoubtedly the peace-loving “hippie” of the group, donning groovy 60's fashion (moccasins, beads, henna, flowers), and very openly displaying his dislike of violence onscreen.
    • *Which may explain why he was cast as Topanga’s father Jedidiah in early episodes of Boy Meets World.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer featured the literally short-lived Principal Flutie as another male version of the trope. After some possessed students ate him (he finally found the gumption to threaten them with detention just before dying), he was replaced by the better-known Principal Snyder, who utters the immortal, 'That's the kind of woolly-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten,' (as opposed to what eventually happens to him).

Flutie's immediate characterization paints him as aspiring to this archetype rather than succeeding in it. He wants to give Buffy a fresh start, tears up her transcript, and then, horrified, tapes it back together after glancing over the specifics, and tells Buffy the kids know they can call him by his first name but then adds, "but they don't." He was a nice guy though, a sort of hypocritical but well-meaning Reasonable Authority Figure, as opposed to Snyder who openly has it in for Buffy from day one.

  • Dollhouse: Caroline of is a fine example of the trope. Her heart is arguably in the right place, but her pushy attitude and reckless lack of planning result in her boyfriend's death as well as the maiming of her friend's arm. One gets the impression that she's intended to come across as far more sympathetic than she actually does.
  • Leo from That '70s Show could be an example of this because he's an older hippy stoner who refuses to grow up, although the fact that the show is set in the 70's makes this a moot point. Though it helps that this character is played by Tommy Chong!
  • The OC: Che, Summer's uni friend from the fourth season.
    • And, to a lesser extent, Summer herself at times.
  • Barney from How I Met Your Mother was a Granola Guy who wanted to join the peace corps. Then his girlfriend dumped him for a jerk in a suit and Barney became LEGEN-wait for it...DARY.
    • Similarly, Ted's high school/sometimes college girlfriend Karen was a particularly insufferable example.
  • Jane on Coupling is one, although some positions she claims to have are not completely true (her supposed lesbianism and vegetarianism).
  • Maddy, from The Suite Life of Zack and Cody is a mild version of this.
  • Chelsea Daniels from That's So Raven.
  • Hannah Montana: Sarah, who once went to work in Rico's snack shack and ended up getting rid of paper plates and cups under the excuse that they would all asphyxiate if they didn't quit using them. While she's right, it is kind of extreme.
  • True Blood: For the extreme version of this trope, there's Amy Burley. She may kidnap and torture vampires for a high, but it doesn't matter because being a Granola Girl makes her a good person, dammit.

Amy (talking to kidnapped vampire): I am an organic vegan and my carbon footprint is miniscule.

  • Britta on Community. But not half as much as Vaughn.
  • Lindsay on Arrested Development tries to present herself as this at times, but utterly fails at it in practice. Once to prove herself a real activist she joined a volunteer group to clean up the Wetlands. She ended up getting a taxi there because she didn't want to take the bus, skewered a frog with her trash spike, got lost, and "I think I maced a crane." She also has ostrich skin boots.
  • The Thick of It: Stewart Pearson from is a Rare Male Example, and an unusual one in that he is neither an aging hippy nor a sympathetic character. He drinks herbal tea, cycles everywhere and is possibly far too PC for the centre-Right political party which employs him as a spin doctor. His colleagues generally find him irrational and irritating: MP Peter Mannion was less than impressed when Stewart made him install a wind turbine on the roof of his home. For PR purposes, naturally: underneath it all he's as ruthless as a spin doctor needs to be.
  • Emma from Degrassi the Next Generation .
  • In Eureka, Jack Carter's sister Lexi is an excellent example, while Tess is a somewhat more low-key version.
  • In Project Runway season two, the designers were given an assignment to create a new look for each other. Santino said that he was going to make Kara Janx look like less of a "granola hippie".
  • Jerry from Raising the Bar is a fairly realistic example, played straight as an idealistic lawyer.
  • Jessie Spano in Saved by the Bell the show's resident know-it-all crusader.
  • Lisa in Six Feet Under qualifies : " (Lisa) I don't go to the movies. Film is processed with gelatin. Gelatin comes from horses' hooves. (Claire) I didn't know that. (Lisa) Most people don't. Hence the global slavery of animals."


Music

  • As described by Beck in "Nitemare Hippy Girl":

She's spazzing out on a cosmic level
And she's meditating with the devil
She's cooking salad for breakfast
She's got tofu the size of Texas

  • Mary Moon, the eponymous "New Age Girl" from the song by Deadeye Dick, featured in Dumb and Dumber.
  • Tim Minchin's nine-minute beat poem "Storm" describes his encounter with and ensuing verbal smackdown of a Granola Girl called Storm.

Newspaper Comics

  • Dykes to Watch Out For: Most of the main characters (with the distinct exception of Sydney) are distinctly on this end of the spectrum compared to mainstream Middle America, with Sparrow starting off as the most so. Ironically, in the strip's latter days the biggest Granola Girl is the main male character, Stuart.
  • Sky from Chelsea Boys is a Granola Boy full stop. Vegetarian, idealist, does his yoga every day, raised on a hippie commune in Canada, the list goes on...
  • Roxanne from Candorville is this Gone Horribly Wrong—for instance, she loudly lectures anyone who eats meat, but has no problem with wearing fur to "preserve [the animal's] beauty forever." There are indications that she's psychotic several times over. Given that she wants to Take Over the World and might actually pull it off, this is really bad.
  • Opus' fiancée in Bloom County was even named Lola Granola.
  • Andrea "Andy" Fox from FoxTrot is an exaggerated version of this making things like Eggplant brownies.


Professional Wrestling

  • By all accounts, Bryan Danielson is a Real Life male example. WWE commentator Michael Cole has made many snide references to Bryan's veganism, while Bryan responded to Cole's remarks with a rant on WWE's image-obsessed hiring practices.

Theatre

Video Game


Webcomics

Western Animation

  • Hey Arnold!: Sheena, who is a health-nut and hates violence of any kind. Helga even lampshades it at one point: "That's it granola girl, you're dismissed!"
  • Family Guy: Satirized mercilessly in the episode where Death is attracted to a girl who works at the pet store. When he finally asks her out, he discovers to his horror that she says inane things like "you can't hug a child with nuclear arms" and, well, he's The Grim Reaper, what do you think he does? Followed by a Check, Please!.
  • Mission Hill: Posey. Often subverted for comedic value such as in "Kevin Vs. the SAT" (or "Nocturnal Admissions), in which she heals a semi-paralyzed pimp precisely so that he can fully feel the pain of landing after having been pushed off the roof.
  • Mr Van Driessen from Beavis and Butthead was a male example, nobly trying and failing to get the boys to read self-help books instead of just giving them detention.
  • Daria: Mr. O' Neill. He is an Expy of Mr. Van Driessen from Beavis and Butthead made by different creators set in nominally the same universe.
  • The Goode Family: Almost everybody.
  • Zoop from Iggy Arbuckle.
  • O'Grady: Beth, as well as her mother. Subverted by her employer, Jazmine, who runs The Enchanted Soybean ("A Healthful Life Encounter!"). After returning from an illness to find a radically changed product line including soda and candy bars, she yells at Beth's friend Abby for "polluting" her store and promptly fires her. Ironically, just before the credits we see her locking the store and hiding in the back room so she can eat potato chips, diet cola, candy bars, and read gossip magazines.
  • South Park: An occasionally recurring character is the "Aging Hippy Liberal Douche". Wendy tends to fit this as of late, too.
  • Skye Blue from Carl Squared.
  • Miracle from Sit Down, Shut Up.
  • Alice from Wait Till Your Father Gets Home. (And Chet, for that matter.)

Alice: I hate smog. People shouldn't travel anywhere except on foot. Or bicycle.
[A car horn sounds outside]
Alice: Oh! Gotta go, there's my ride.
Harry: If you're so concerned about air pollution, why don't you ride your bike there?
Alice: But it's over three blocks!

  • Lisa from The Simpsons : she's vegetarian, Buddhist, ecologically aware, into homeopathy and maybe not as smart as she thinks she is. She is one-upped by a White-Haired Pretty Boy who is everything Lisa is and then some. According to him, he is a "9th level vegan: does not eat anything that casts a shadow."
  • Sam from Danny Phantom, whom she's self-labeled herself as an "Ultra-Recyclo Vegetarian." Who's Gothic! What?
    • She's a wannabe-goth. But that's just my former goth talking.
  • Reanne from Girl Stuff/Boy Stuff.
  • Starfire from Teen Titans shows signs of this, though she's still getting used to our planet and doesn't really have the finer points down.
    • She doesn't quite have the diet part down though; known for eating many a bizarre food, when they actually go to Tamaran she's shown to have the same level of table manners as the rest of her people (none) and much of their food appears to still be alive.
  • Dexter's Laboratory: Oceanbird, Mandark's Mom.
    • His dad, too.
  • Haley from American Dad is usually a more cynical version. The trope can be played quite straight, too.
  • Starr from 6teen
  • Mimi's mom from What About Mimi?, to the point where she forbids her husband and kids from eating meat and they have to resort to eating it behind her back.
  • Didi from Rugrats would be this sometimes. Usually when cooking or when it put her at odds with Betty.
  • On Birdz, Eddie's big sister, Steffy, is a staunch environmentalist. The first episode has her throwing paint on models wearing fuzzy caterpillar coats, and another has her boycotting a singer because he uses shampoo with the extract of an endangered plant (even though she had been begging to go to one of his concerts).
  • Male example with TCFM on Jimmy Two-Shoes, who happened to look similar to Beezy.
  • Recess: Miss Grotke, through and through
  • Cadpig from 101 Dalmatians: The Series
  • Jenny from Phineas and Ferb.


Web Animation

  • Homestar Runner: Marzipan whose "dirty hippie" quotient varies—although the Strong Bad Email coloring painted her as a frightening political-correctness freak. The Christmas 2010 'toon suggests she may be farther on the dark side of the trope than we realize; she's got smug superiority written into her every line.
  • Storm, who is shot down with prejudice by the viewpoint character in Storm The Animated Movie.

Narrator, quoting Storm: Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy! They promote drug dependency at the cost of the natural remedies that are all our bodies need! [...] I think it's time we took another turn to live with natural medical alternatives!

Web Original and Fan Works

  • Christine from Demonic Symphony has touches of this.
  • Monster High: Draculaura is a Vegetarian Vampire.
  • DC Nation: Aurora "Fauna" Andersen is still a left-wing activist for a variety of causes, with her activist work sometimes just as dangerous as her missions as a Titan. She keeps her superheroing a secret because the people she works with disapprove of caped vigilantes.
  • The character of The Nostalgia Chick deconstructs this one. She's a misanthropic, uncaring Straw Feminist who talks about the environment and progressive causes, but would rather lie around in her house, drink beer and bitch about nostalgic crap.
    • Played literally in one review where she can be seen munching on granola.
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