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City Slicker - TV Tropes

  • ️Fri Dec 05 2008

City Slicker (trope)

A person, new to The Wild West, who's seen as an acceptable target by the locals. By stereotype, this trope is flashily dressed in big-city fashions, thinks rural folks are idiots, and is unused to manual labor.

The name comes from "slicker" being slang for a newborn calf, indicating how naive the newcomer is about the ways of the West. Yep, it's a subtrope of Naïve Newcomer and has a strong overlap with City Mouse.

If the city slicker is well-meaning, after a couple of pranks and some honest labor they'll toughen up and learn the new rules. But if they're dishonest folks trying to bilk the locals of their hard-earned cash or land, all bets are off as to their final fate. Note that some confident tricksters will pretend to be city slickers to make themselves seem easy targets.

One act of adolescent rebellion sometimes seen in Westerns is "dressing like a city slicker."

Actually, the Old West had many terms for newcomers, and we'll list a few and their distinguishing features here until they merit their own pages.

Dude: A tourist. (As used in the term "dude ranch".) Just here to soak up some Western flavor and see the sights. Plans to be going back East in a few weeks. Generally not malevolent, but can be pushy and inadvertently offensive.

Greenhorn: Less emphasis on the flashiness and snobbery, more emphasis on the naivete. The Greenhorn wants to do the right thing but doesn't know the ropes yet. Usually grows into a hardened veteran of the West.

Tenderfoot: The emphasis here is on the soft skin and weak muscles that city life cause. Expect this character to get blisters and be exhausted after even the least demanding chore. Like the Greenhorn, he'll soon toughen up and learn the value of hard work.

Tinhorn: Almost always paired with the word "gambler." The Tinhorn plays down the naivete and emphasizes the flash and surface wealth. Generally a malevolent figure, though easily vanquished.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga 

  • Jujutsu Kaisen: Saori, who's an old friend of Nobara, moved from the city to a village where she and the rest of her family were demonized and ostracized for allegedly being "outsiders who thought lowly of the locals" until they were forced to return to Tokyo.

Comic Books 

  • The title character in Tenderfoot (French title Le Pied-tendre), from the Lucky Luke comic book series. Waldo Badmington is an English aristocrat who inherits a ranch in the Wild West. The book's prologue sets the stage by giving funny examples of the notions of tenderfoot, greenhorn and dude, but the locals discover that their habitual hazing of newcomers fails in the face of an Imperturbable Englishman's education. By the end Waldo has gotten a bit better about it, going as far as to join the hazing of a fellow newly arrived Englishman who holds his golf clubs wrong.

Films — Animation 

Films — Live-Action 

Literature 

  • Winnetou: In one form or another, this is what Old Shatterhand repeatedly gets mistaken for as a plot point even long after he's become famous in the West under that name. Mostly because he actually does buy clean new clothes and the like every so often, uses his nom du guerre only when he means to impress (and his plain old German given name otherwise), isn't above sometimes coming up with a quick fib about his identity for various reasons, and of course for all the fame attached to his name most people still simply don't know what the actual man behind it actually looks like. And what he looks like is actually not very impressive — an unassuming, average-sized, friendly, and polite young man, with hands that seem to be "as delicate as a woman's" does not exactly lead a seasoned westman to believe this is Old Shatterhand, who everybody imagines to be at least a 7-foot-tall mass of muscles. (He also explicitly begins his future career in the West as a "greenhorn" — using that very word — in Winnetou I.)

Live-Action TV 

  • Amos Garrett in Deadwood is a perfect example of the first type. He is even literally referred to as "The Dude".
  • Simon in Firefly. One of the things unfortunately cut short was his potential to develop from this trope into a conman able to use his familiarity with the Alliance, respectable appearance, and intelligence to pull jobs the border-dwelling rest of the crew couldn't otherwise pull off (for example, the hospital job in Ariel).
  • Randy Discher, in the episode of Monk where he quits the force to take over his uncle's farm.
  • Yellowstone:
    • Dan Jenkins is a rich businessman from California who goes to Montana for a business opportunity and finds himself both completely out of his element in the rough-and-tumble world of rural Montana and completely outclassed in virtually every contest with the locals.
    • Just about every minor character from the coasts or a big city gets one-upped, humiliated, or put in their place by a local Montanan. Californians are a favorite target.

Music 

  • The song "Buttons and Bows," in which the singer laments having chosen the West over the East and wants to go back home.
  • The cowboy song "Zebra Dun" is about someone mistaken for this. In it, a well-dressed fancy-talkin' man approaches a cowboy camp asking if he can borrow a horse. The cowboys give him the titular Zebra Dun as a prank, it being the worst bronco anyone's ever seen. The newcomer rides him like he was on a palfrey going to town, even letting go of the reins to roll a cigarette while the horse bucks. The impressed foreman immediately offers him a job.

Video Games 

  • In Red Dead Redemption, John comes across a writer from the East named Jimmy Saints, who's writing stories about the West. He's later encountered several times inexplicably captured by gangs of outlaws. Eventually he decides to just go back home and write about something else (presumably something that won't get him killed).
  • Tales from the Borderlands: When entering Prosperity Junction for the first time, Rhys may be of the Tinhorn variety depending on the player's dialogue choices, while Vaughn is more of a Tenderfoot.

Web Comics 

Western Animation 

  • Hilda: The Woodman calls Hilda a City Girl upon meeting her again, and claims the old Hilda never would have gotten lost. Hilda objects these claims, stating the wilderness will always be her home. At the end of the episode, she decides Trolberg really is her home now, but the Woodman encourages her that she was right about the wilderness always being a part of her.