The Cut of Courage

Sometimes all it takes is a symbolic gesture to prove your resolve, and your desire or need to change who you are. Since most video game characters aren't adept at shapeshifting or creating fake IDs (with the obvious exception of that one guy from Papers, Please), most do this with a haircut: they grab a knife, chop off a grand majority of their hair and re-emerge as a new person, with a new character portrait even.

This doesn't always happen in-game, but it's frequently a common turning point in a character's ongoing development and proof that they're leaving their past behind and are now taking things seriously. Well, as seriously as an impromptu stylish new bob can suggest, at least.

(Sorry, this might be a bit spoiler-heavy. Skip past a game if you intend to play it and haven't yet.)

List items

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  1. Tales of the Abyss

  Spoiled rich kid Luke fon Fabre goes through quite a lot of traumatizing business around a third of the way through Namco Bandai's seventy-fourth official Tales game, but because he'd been a dick to pretty much everyone and refused to take the blame for dropping a whole town into an apocalyptic morass, he decides it's high time to change his ways. Off goes his leonine hairstyle signifying his nobility, though he still seems to have plenty left afterwards.

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  2. Final Fantasy IX

  Garnet lops off her royal hairdo in order to go incognito with Zidane and his crew. It's also a sign that she's done being her despotic mother's accomplice, and is symbolically cutting ties with the country she loves for the time being. She decides to name herself after the dagger that facilitated the change in its honor, or maybe the player just names her Doodyface. It's still a powerful moment either way.

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  3. The Walking Dead

  Clementine's haircut is necessitated by pure survival, but even so it's a vital stage in removing the last vestiges of her innocence if she's going to live in this world of shambling corpses. Well, at least for another few months until they putrefy beyond the ability to ambulate and everything is fine. Zombies, eh?

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  4. Jeanne d'Arc

  Jeanne doesn't take long to cut off her feminine long hair and go full warrior maiden when her village is torched. Her sudden change into a bloodthirsty general remains a sore point for the friends she all but leaves behind in her quest for vengeance.

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  5. Wild Arms

  Cecilia is another princess who decides she needs to look a little more common in order to fit in with the adventuring party. Her resolve is sorely tested by quite a few important plot deaths, though, so it's not like she simply decided to slum it for a while.

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  6. Dragon Age: Origins

  Leliana has a chaste bob for the entirety of Dragon Age: Origins, as per her role as a Chantry maiden. Hints about her background as an Orlesian bard and spy paint her as something more of a pansexual femme fatale, with a long beguiling hairstyle and any number of revealing dresses built for court intrigue.

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  7. Assassin's Creed III

  Connor's haircut isn't so much a humility thing as it is an attempt to be more intimidating, as he shaves his long hair into a warlike Mohican once it becomes clear that he cannot depend on the white man to help his case any longer. It's a badass moment, and a shame most players will have turned the game off by that point.

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  8. BioShock Infinite

  Something happens to Elizabeth, a real "loss of innocence" thing to put it lightly, and she (or the writer, at least) feels a haircut and costume change better reflects the change in her character. She also has a lot more cleavage on display, but we all deal with trauma in our own unique way.

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  9. Katawa Shoujo

  What VGK said. In the comments. I'm not playing another salacious visual novel so soon after the last one.