Strange Girl

SHE CONQUERED THE MIGHTY MOON SNAIL!
"Live people ignore the strange and unusual. I myself am strange and unusual."
—Lydia, Beetlejuice

She's not normal, that's for sure. The only thing you can pin down about the Strange Girl is that she's hard to pin down (when she isn't doing the pinning, that is). She's visually distinct from her normal peer group, typically in both physical appearance (she's likely to be an Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette/Raven Hair, Ivory Skin) and dress, but sometimes only one of the two. As far as demeanor is concerned, she can be anything from The Wonka, a Cloudcuckoolander, The Stoic, a world conqueror, The Messiah, The Ophelia, an Emotionless Girl, Haruhi... or quiet, sensible and even friendly. Anything goes as long as it stands out from the series' norm.

The unifying trait of all Strange Girls is that they are protagonists and most importantly, are different from their peers (though rarely will she be completely friendless). Her family or home life will be... interesting to say the least. Usually she is in touch with the supernatural aspects of her setting, even if she doesn't have powers herself. Because of this tendency to experience strange and supernatural adventures, it's not uncommon for their social clique to grow into a veritable Monster Mash of friends they've helped in various adventures, though they'll likely start out the series with at least one or two Unfazed Everymen as completely human friends. Before long she's likely to have seen so much weirdness little if anything will faze her.

This character is very likely to be a Goth or show noticeable Goth influences, both in style of dress and in personality. The Goth subculture is particularly well-suited to this character type because it's made up of people who enjoy strange, morbid things, on top of the fact that being different from the mainstream is one of the things that defines all countercultural subcultures. That last part means that it would also be quite reasonable for a Strange Girl to be a member of the punk or Emo[1] subcultures, among others.

Compare Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Rei Ayanami Expy, or The Ophelia. Contrast The Snark Knight.

Examples of Strange Girl include:

Anime


Comic Books

  • Lenore the Cute Little Dead Girl is one of the stranger Strange Girls. She was embalmed between 1905 and 1910, and has been "alive" since then. While she's not necessarily evil, Lenore lacks tact, "doesn't do guilt" and frequently, accidentally massacres innocent bystanders.
  • Emily The Strange of Hot Topic fame is actually a cynical anarchist who doesn't like other people and sincerely wants to take over the world one day. She doesn't exactly have any plans for it, and kind of assumes that it'll happen through sheer force of attitude.
    • And judging from some recent news, she may be a partial copy of Rosamond mentioned below.
  • Little Gloomy, of the comic of the same name. Kind of. She's the only non-monster in Frightsylvania, which is pretty freaking bizarre. But she's also completely off in a few other ways (she has nails in her house, but no hammer. She needed the nails... but not a hammer.)
  • Serenity Rose, one of only 50 witches in the world and a borderline MacGuffin Girl in her own series.
  • Courtney Crumrin, also with her own series.
  • Supergirl in Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade, who has fantasies about herself as the successful and beloved Moon Supergirl (who stops the Moon Beagle Boys from stealing moon money), insists her nostrils are petite, and treats keeping ice cream cold with her ice breath like a dire responsibility.
  • Delirium of the Endless of course, from Sandman. Notable because she manages to be a strange outsider, not only when she travels amongst mortals, but even amongst the other Endless who all are mighty peculiar themselves. The only one who sort of kind of still has a connection to her is Dream, presumably because dreams can get all kinds of weird and non sequitur-ish as well.
  • Wonder Woman not only fills these criteria in-universe, but is sometimes deemed too strange for many writers to get a firm grasp on.


Fan Works

Film


Literature

  • The residents of Wonderland consider Alice a very strange little girl, while ironically they are far more strange than her.
    • However, she is very strange by real world standards. She pretends to be multiple people, talks to herself, spent several minutes pondering whether cats eat bats or bats eat cats, gives herself advice and ignores it, plays chess with her cats, tries to get her kitten to pose like a chess picece, and once BOXED HER OWN EARS after cheating in a game AGAINST HERSELF.
      • By real world standards, giving yourself advice and ignoring it is technically known as "being human" (as anyone who's tried to give up smoking, drinking, eating junk food or crystal meth knows only too well.) Gahan Wilson said that "sensible Alice" was the only thing about Lewis Carroll's fiction that wasn't utterly terrifying.
  • How could anyone forget Angela? She wants to prove that toads don't exist, knows every poison and potion known to man, and always knows what the next big event is, where it is, and somehow always manages to get there on time. Isn't that just the least bit strange?
  • Pippi Longstocking a.k.a. Pippilotta Victualia Rullgardina Krusmynta Efraimsdotter Långstrump. Friendly? Yes. Strange? Oh hell yes.
  • Nate the Great's friend Rosamond, something of a cross between Cloudcuckoolander and Perky Goth.
  • Luna Lovegood. Tonks, too, a little bit.
  • Anne of Anne of Green Gables is thought to be a Strange Girl when she first arrives at Avonlea but she is just a girl with a vivid imagination that the Avonlea residents aren't used to.
  • Coraline, the protagonist of Neil Gaiman's novel of the same name.
  • Mary Katherine (Merricat), the protagonist of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in The Castle.

"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead."

  • Tithe is about one whose strangeness is explained; it turns out she's actually a changling pixie, and fairies tend to generate a weirdness aura. She's not entirely sure whether this is awesome or annoying.
  • Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli, has the titular Stargirl. Her real name is Susan Caraway, but she decided that Stargirl suits her better. She'll go to school in a kimono, knows everyone's birthday and takes a ukulele to sing Happy Birthday to them in the cafeteria, meditates to be at one with the universe, attends funerals where no one knows her, and follows random people around to watch their lives. No one knows what to make of her.
  • Olivia Kidney, who talks to dead people. The cute pink cover on Ellen Potter's book is misleading; the book is reminiscent of Coraline and similar creepfests.
  • The titular character of Daisy Miller is Europe's local freaky, bizarre American girl.
  • Isabella Swan in Twilight . She is The Stoic, the Straight Man, and The Quiet One all at once, hangs around sparkly vampires and American Indian werewolves, and has both magical blood that attracts magical creatures toward her and a magical mental shield power and a vampire boyfriend that keeps her safe from harm.
  • Susan Sto Helit in Discworld is an interesting variation. Goth look? Check. Unusual home life? Check. Connection to the supernatural? Big check. However, she Just Wants To Be Normal, and usually tries to ignore the weirdness that's attracted to her in the hope that it will take the hint and go away.
    • Tiffany Aching is a straighter example, except that she looks like a perfectly ordinary milkmaid, which seriously irritates her.
  • The semi-autobiographical Diana Wynne Jones short story "The Jones Girl" paints the author herself as this, as a child.
  • The three Baudelaire orphans are most definitely strange children.
  • Perdita Wiguiggan from "Walking Naked" by Alyssa Brugman. She has above-average intelligence, but isn't exactly good with people and frequently acts in a very childlike manner. She is aware of her strangeness, and makes no attempt to conceal it.
  • Rachael Elizabeth Dare from Percy Jackson and The Olympians. One of the main reasons for her strangeness is she is a "clear-sighted" mortal, meaning she can see through the Mist, seeing the true world - monsters, greek gods and all - clearer than even demigods. Also, in The Last Olympian, we learn she is fated to be the next Oracle.
  • Maggie in How NOT to Be Popular by Jennifer Ziegler is like this, only not supernatural. Her parents are hippies who move anywhere they want to and don't really believe in material possessions. She has been to 10 high schools, and when she gets to her 10th she decides she's had enough and pretends to be weird so that nobody will like her and she won't have to worry about leaving behind friends when she moves.
  • Lydia of Caught In The Act by Peter Moore.
  • Raven of Vampire Kisses.


Live Action TV


Music

  • The very creepy young girl who lipsynches in the video for Portishead's All mine"
  • The girl being sung of in Lonestar's "Unusually Unusual".

"She had a tattoo above her ankle of a Trident submarine
She says it symbolizes awesome power hidden deep within our dreams
And I knew the shoes she wasn't wearing, they fit her just right
And she said, 'Hey man, did you know, we used to be brothers in some past life?'"

  • Cameo (the "Word Up" guys) have a song called "She's Strange".

In room 123, she's elusive you see
Like the invisible man in drag
And when you come to meet her, you'll never greet her
She'll be waving her skirt as a flag!


Newspaper Comics

  • Dethany Dendrobia from On the Fastrack
  • Nemi, a goth environmentalist who gets severe brain-damage around hot guys and has childlike glee when it actually snows enough to go sledding.


Video Games

  • The female Malkavian of Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines is by far one of the most bizarre of any Strange Girl characters. Since her lines are unvoiced, the player is left to fill in the sound from their own imagination, yet she simultaneously gives the impression of complete silence. Not only is the content of her lines head-spinningly insane, these impressions of muteness and derangement combine to make it seems as if the voices in her head are communicating with everyone else, an impression supported by other characters' reactions to her.
  • Persona 3 - It's unclear what, exactly, Elizabeth is (the closest we get to an answer is "Resident"), but she doesn't seem to operate by most human rules. Probably because she doesn't know what they are.
    • Her older sister Margaret from Persona 4 is similarly strange, though perhaps not quite so much so.
  • Lute from Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones. A very skilled Black Magician Girl who destroys monsters "with love", locks herself in the local library, meets those who go recruit her by check on them to see if they're monsters, etc. Lampshaded if she gets married to Cultured Badass Kyle, with their common ending saying that Kyle's friends were VERY weirded out by his choice in brides.
    • Also Sara from Thracia 776, a cute White Magician Girl who asks Leaf if she can join him by saying that she can hear his voice in her head and speaks very nonchalantly about how she hates her grandfather Manfloy for killing her dad before she was even born. Even her caretakers in the Lopto Sect regard her as being weird!

"Did she say something to you? Please forget it. She mumbles strange things from time to time. She can be an odd girl at times."


Visual Novels

  • Miku in A Profile, contrasting the very normal Miou and the slightly clingy Rizu. While those two are basically normal, Miku has a way of flipping between extremely shy and very cold and dismissive. While this is typical Sugar and Ice Personality behavior, it really stands out in this context.
  • Kotomi Ichinose from Clannad. Extremely smart but has virtually no social skills, to the point where she doesn't even acknowledge people talking to her.
  • Toko and Stella in Kara no Shoujo. The former has a kind of twisted way of thinking and is sort of bewitching which stands in great contrast to the mostly zombie like student body at her school. The latter is a spacey foreigner both in speech and in the way she doesn't seem entirely grounded.
  • Ririko in Sharin no Kuni is weird. I... she just... Ahem. Her 'interactions' with Touka when she was a child, her apparent liking of 'teasing' Kenichi, difficulty holding a train of though together and other random bizarre attributes are just the start of it.
    • To underscore how weird (and Badass) she is, for years she undergoes a punishment that is intended to essentially drive people insane and into suicide. You'd think, at the very least, her personality would be severely twisted by what she went through, like some of the other heroines, right? Heh, nope. Ririko goes back to acting pretty much the same way she always has after one day more or less deciding she's not gonna put up with it anymore.
  • Arcueid from Tsukihime. Sure, all the girls here seem to have superpowers or secret tragic pasts, but she's different in that she doesn't actually seem to care. Plus a Cloudcuckoolander and a bit of a ditz. Why is the vampire Tyke Bomb the one that's usually the least crazy?
  • Rin from Katawa Shoujo, who paints strange murals which even she can't explain, speaks in a cryptic manner, and usually has her head in the clouds. She was also born without arms, but since the game takes place in an academy for disabled students, this isn't seen as that unusual.


Webcomics

Web Original

  • Now even Survival of the Fittest has one, of all places! Version 4's Anna Chase is... a little off. To get an idea, she is an Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette with some level of Perky Goth to her, that is obsessed with horror movies, and is a massive Cloudcuckoolander. At one point (in her introductory thread in pre-game) she tells her best friend not to eat her brains (It Makes Sense in Context... sort of). And that's not even going into some of her other personality traits. Overall, she is generally seen as somewhat eccentric by other characters.
    • And then there's Lily Ainsworth, also from v4. She's even more of a Cloudcuckoolander. Her father was a historian, which caused her to grow up in a British castle most of her life due to his work, and she herself has a tendency to ramble off certain facts as an attempt at conversation, while generally having No Social Skills. Add in her odd dress sense and her perky nature, and most characters also see her as a little odd.
  • Endling gives us his beloved Lilith, who is indeed, quite strange, though Ree certainly is strange, she's not at Lilith-esque levels.
  • The Nostalgia Chick is a Cute but Psycho Woman Child. And even when she's not in that mental state, she's still pretty freakish.
  • Homestuck's Jade Harley is pretty much constantly upbeat and energetic, and is her friends all seem to think she is a normal, if slightly excitable, girl. She lives on an uncharted island in the somewhere in the Pacific, which was discovered by her grandfather, a business tycoon and noted polymath. After his death, she taxidermied his body, as is the Harley family tradition, and mounted his corpse in the foyer. She is a narcoleptic, and frequently has visions in her sleep. She is currently cared for by Becquerel, her Big Friendly Badass God Dog.
    • And to a lesser extent, Rose Lalonde, what with her general stoicism and love of psychoanalysis, wizard fanfiction, overly elaborate diction and the zoologically dubious.
    • Any of the female trolls would qualify as a Strange Girl were it not for how weird all of the trolls are and how Troperiffic Homestuck is in general, but Aradia and Vriska stand out. Aradia spends most of the story as an Emotionless Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl who sets the trolls' side of the plot in motion because the voices of the dead told her to. Vriska's a filthy-rich serial killer with a fixation on spiders and a Complexity Addiction who manages to scare most of the other trolls despite them being a race of bloodthirsty Jerkasses. The two of them also have the strongest Psychic Powers of all the trolls, not to mention being the only two trolls to make it to god tier.
      • There's also Kanaya, who is extremely strange within Troll society. Not only can she stand sunlight, but she actually enjoys it; she is one of the only trolls that actually cares about fashion and even makes her own clothes; she famously wields a chainsaw disguised as a tube of lipstick. Even her blood is strange, as her particular shade of green is probably rarer than any other troll in the cast save Feferi and Karkat. As it turns out, her role in the trolls' session is analogous to Jade's, so being a strange girl might be a qualifying characteristic for Heroes of Space. She's actually a Rainbow Drinker, which explains a lot of the strangeness.
  • Jade Sinclair (Generator) of the Whateley Universe. Petite, of Japanese descent, and looking only about ten even though she is fourteen or so. She is also Jinn Sinclair (it's complicated) who claims to be Jade's dead older sister. She is also a cabbit and a Hello Kitty compact and a living lawn mower blade. Like I said, it's complicated. Even the other members of Team Kimba think she's wacky.
  • Penny Polendina of RWBY, when she first appears toward the end of Volume 1, comes across as profoundly odd. It turns out that it's because she's a Robot Girl experiencing the world outside the facility where she was built -- and meeting non-military people -- for the first time. She actually ends up learning from the experience and becoming more human in her behavior by Volume 2.

Western Animation

  • Mandy of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy is like Emily, planning on world conquest. She's ruthless, not entirely without compassion or standards, but cross her and you will suffer.
  • Growing Up Creepie has Creepie, an orphan raised by insects. All things considered, her down to earth attitude is either a flying contrast to her upbringing or a completely logical result.
  • Ruby Gloom fits this trope perfectly, being bright, cheerful and friendly in every situation. The only thing that can get her down is bright colors. The strange thing is that the merchandise on which the show was based kind of gave Ruby a very melancholic feel, but whatever.
  • Izzy from Total Drama Island fits this trope rather well and is a popular character because it.
    • Revenge Of The Island's Dawn is on the mellow end of the scale.
  • Gaz from Invader Zim.
  • Pi is a rare male example from Sabrina the Animated Series. He always wears a hat that covers his eyes and seems obsessed with aliens and paranormal.
  • Lilo, whose classmates reject her for being weird...The creepy homemade doll, making voodoo on her hula halau-mates using spoons and pickle jars ("My friends need to be punished"), Elvis obsession, and worship of a fish (who apparently controls the weather) don't help her case. Fortunately, Lilo has good friends in a bunch of aliens who came to Earth. And a hovercraft!
    • Hell, one could even say that's the main reason none of the islanders give a rats ass about there being a shitload of aliens all over the place. After some of the weird stuff Lilo has gotten into in the past, they are just used to strange shit happening on a regular basis.
    • Well, that and they're Hawaiians, whether by birth or by locale, and Hawaiians tend to have "hang loose" embedded in their DNA somewhere.
  • Heloise on Jimmy Two-Shoes. A Mad Scientist Enfante Terrible who works for Satan.
  • Daria is pretty strange, and also may be considered an Emotionless Girl.
  • Ellen from Edgar and Ellen. Her twin brother Edgar would qualify as a male version, as he is just as strange.
  • Increasingly as a result of Sanity Slippage, Meg from Family Guy.
  1. ↑ The actual subculture, not the caricature of it that named the Emo Teen trope.
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