Android 18 and Evie Prove Short Hair Never Made a Woman Less Hot

Short hair never made a woman less hot. Android 18 has spent the better part of forty years proving it, blonde bob and all, and not one person has ever looked at her and decided the haircut was the problem. She is, by a comfortable margin, the most wanted woman ever drawn, and she got there with hair that stops at her jaw.

So before we get to the new girl the whole internet is yelling about, let's be honest about what is actually happening when a man looks at a woman and decides she is attractive.

It was never the length

We clock the face first. Then the figure. Then the way she carries both, which in 18's case is a cold stare that says she could end your bloodline without setting down her drink. Hair is in there somewhere, sure, but it is a footnote, not the headline. Long, short, pinned up, it does not matter. A real face and a real shape do not stop working because a woman walked into a salon.

Same goes for a few of the other things people treat as dealbreakers and aren't. A little softer, a little leaner, within reason, none of it sinks a woman who has the face and the frame. We already argued that one all the way out in our piece on whether a thicker 18 still wins, so there is no need to run it back here. Hair length sits even lower on that list than weight does, and weight already wasn't the killer everyone assumed.

Forty years later, the exact same argument is back, this time over a woman who does not technically exist yet.

The game, for the unaware

Stellar Blade: Blood Rain is the sequel to 2024's Stellar Blade, and Shift Up revealed it on June 5 at Summer Game Fest. The studio is self-publishing this one, and the lead is a new character named Evie, a successor to the original game's Eve. Eve had long, elegant hair. Evie has a short auburn bob. That single swap is most of what the fight is about.

The complaint, and the fair part of it

The internet took one look at the bob and decided it was a problem. Some of that is the usual noise. Some of it is fair enough: Eve was glamorous and statuesque, Evie is scrappier and more stripped down, and fans who wanted another Eve are allowed to miss Eve. What does not follow is the jump from she looks different to she stopped being attractive. Those are not the same sentence, and people keep treating them like they are.

And for the record, the reveal trailer was not subtle about her figure, physics and all, so nobody has to pretend the studio was aiming for anything other than easy to look at. That part landed exactly as intended, and I am not going to be a hypocrite about noticing.

Long to short, still hot

Here is the tell. Take Evie's design and drop Eve's long hair back onto it, and most of the complaints just evaporate. Same face, same figure, same everything else. The only variable that changed is length, and length was never load-bearing. We know that because Android 18 ran the identical experiment decades ago and won it walking away. Short hair on a woman who already has the goods is not a downgrade. It is a haircut.

Now, because nobody reads the Headquarters to watch us go soft, here is the other half of the take. Short hair is fine. Short hair is not a free pass.

Where it actually goes wrong

There is a line, and it is less about length than severity. A bob works. A chin-length cut works. A tasteful short style works. What does not work is the full chop: the pixie, the buzzed-down boy cut, the haircut that strips out every soft line a face was leaning on. The enemy was never short hair. The enemy is the severe hack job that erases the femininity instead of framing it.

Exhibit A: Videl

Videl is the cautionary tale. She started with long hair, cut it down to a short crop, and a good chunk of the fandom has been quietly mourning ever since. The shorter it got, the more it flattened a face that was doing just fine before. Sorry, Videl. The long hair was the move, and somewhere a stylist owes you an apology.

Exhibit B: Bulma in Super

Bulma is the other one. Across the whole franchise she has cycled through a hundred looks, and most of them worked because she kept some length and some shape to play with. The shorter Dragon Ball Super cut is the weakest of the bunch. It is not a disaster, it just swaps her usual flair for something flatter and more practical, and flat was never Bulma's setting.

The official position

So here is where the Headquarters lands, and it is simple. Short hair never made a woman less hot, and anyone telling you Android 18 or Evie got worse the second the hair got shorter is grading on a curve nobody uses in real life. There is exactly one rule: keep a shape to the cut, and keep the femininity in frame. A bob does that. A pixie usually doesn't.

Android 18 has worn that bob since before half the people complaining about Evie were born, and she has not surrendered the crown for a single day of it. The Headquarters has weighed in: short hair stays, the pixie cut can go, and Evie is going to be just fine.