Externalise This

Once again, I ran into another article criticising the film Frozen.  Whatever you thought of the movie, I take issue with the idea that the character's 'makeover' after she unleashes her ice superpowers is 'un-feminist'. (The idea that a woman changing her appearance towards a sexier or more conventionally attractive aesthetic is inherently un-feminist is a separate can of worms, to be addressed in another post).

But my main point is that having a character change their physical presentation after a big emotional shift is a time-honored trope in visual media, regardless of character gender-- TVTropes has a whole series of them for hair alone. While a novel allows us to get inside of a character's head and explore their emotional lives in depth, media such as TV, movies, and graphic novels/comic books rely on the visuals to get nuance across. The audience picks up cues from the character's body language, clothing, and general presentation to fill in information about their internal life. This can also be true of secondary characters in novels, who are described only through the eyes of a viewpoint character, but once again we still have that character as an interpretive filter.

For visual media, character development has to be shown on the outside, and one way to do this is to have the character subtly or dramatically change their appearance. I've also argued before that characters can be seen to be consciously or subconsciously to messages in their society about how they are 'supposed' to look, or the subtext conveyed by certain choices concerning their appearance. The representation needs to be judged on how well it conveys the interior life of the character.