Pippi Longstocking, short for Pippilotta, is a Swedish 1980’s character who goes on adventures. As a nine-year-old girl with an eccentric personality and a carefree sense of expression, she moves into a purple villa house with her horse and monkey. Her dad is a pirate captain, and her mom passed away, and she makes friends with her neighbor’s kids, Tommy and Annika. She makes for quite a unique character.

All the more fitting, she lives completely outside of any socially constructed expectations or norms. Her appearance, first and foremost, is wildly abnormal in comparison to the prim and proper people around her town. With bright orange pig-tailed braids that stick out almost horizontally from her head and a heavily freckled face, Pippi struts around with brightly colored, mix-matched long stockings and raggy yet comfy clothes. 

Some more of Pippi’s defining characteristics include her super strength and secret wealth. She is an outrageously strong girl that can lift her horse above her head with ease. In addition to the fearful respect that this instills into the town commoners, her wealth also keeps her afloat in the area. Though she lives quite differently from the richer members of her town, Pippi has a whole trunk suitcase full of gold coins from her pirate father.

In terms of behavior, Pippi is quite strange and unconventional. She rejects typical pleasantries and politeness, which is clearly displayed when she interacts with most adults. In one film of hers, she visits Tommy and Annika’s neighboring house for tea and shows up in her regular informal clothes, eating as much of the pastries as she pleases rather than restraining her appetite to appear as reserved and proper. The women in the tea room, and most adults in that town, view her as outrageously unsupervised and generally preposterous. Yet, the way that she views their qualms with such neutrality and insignificance is a wonderfully stark contrast to how most children’s shows portray responses to social expectations.

As any nine-year-old with complete and total freedom would be, Pippi is absolutely content with her imaginative actions and spur-of-the-moment escapades. She makes the most of her days with no regard to social expectations, completely immune to the judgmental perspectives of adult townspeople. Some of her specific antics include buying tons of candy from a candy store to hand out to the towns’ kids, running away from her hometown for an impromptu trip across the countryside, wearing scrubs as sliding shoes to clean her floors, hopping on a hot air balloon ride, sleeping at the foot of her bed entirely beneath the covers, sailing across seas to save her father from enemy pirate jail, and much more. As socially unorthodox as her life is, all of these adventures serve as unique experiences for all of the people that Pippi interacts with, thus developing her character as a beacon of unconventional playfulness and carefree enjoyment and lightheartedness.