>>8552592That's such an interesting pattern I never thought of before, Anon. Really got me interested in doing some digging. It seems that short hair is more associated with maturity and adulthood compared to longer hair in the Japanese media sphere. Longer hair is associated with youth. It's also why it's common to see female characters in Japanese media cutting their long hair into a very short haircut as a dramatic maturing moment and character shift, taking the hair it no doubt took a long time to grow to that long and take care of for something totally different and trying something that they might have only done once if at all in their entire life for their hair to be that long.
There is likely some blind spot factor that isn't being considered here, but my hypothesis is that shorter hair might be a design shorthand for the Japanese audience to see this girl as already mature, likely by means of taking care of her father when her mother is busy, away, dead, or having divorced him, and the father's not being predatory or emotionally exploitative/manipulative and the girl is mature enough to know what she's getting into.
Notably, I've read several father-daughter *rape* doujins where the daughter does have long hair, and while that's anecdotal, it's more evidence in favor of my case.
