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Gender-Inverted Trope - TV Tropes

  • ️Fri Jan 28 2011

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenderInvertedTrope

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"Oh, poppycock! Female bandits? What next? Rubbish!"

An Always Female, or Always Male, trope that is applied to the opposite gender.

While it's not always possible to pull this off, since some tropes are automatically seen in a different light when gender-inverted (like the Mama Bear and the Papa Wolf), making them an entirely different trope, others are only based on certain generic concepts associated with the gender, with nothing stopping the writers from playing with them, and even tropes where the gender specificity is due to involving certain sex-specific biological features can still be gender-inverted if Transgender characters are involved.

It might be Played for Drama, Played for Laughs as a character's unique quirk, or even not intended at all: For example, maybe a writer simply thought that Romani men are hot, and didn't even realize that Hot Gypsy Woman is a lot more common trope.

Conversely, it can be our own fault, due to Values Dissonance, as our trope definitions are largely based on Western and Japanese works, so it is possible that for example an Indian or Latin American show's characters can be only described with our vocabulary as "Like this trope, but male", even though it could be considered a different trope over there, but none of us knows enough about the culture to make a page for it. If the two tropes are indeed separate, they can have separate pages created.

In trope lists, it is often referred to as Rare Male Example and Rare Female Example.

Compare Distaff Counterpart, Unisex Tropes.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga 

Comic Books 

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Films — Animation 

Films — Live-Action 

Literature 

Live-Action TV 

Music 

Puppet Shows 

Religion and Mythology 

Tabletop Games 

Theatre 

Video Games 

Webcomics 

Web Original 

Western Animation 

Real Life 

  • It has been suggested that the Mr. Fanservice appeal of many male soccer player uniforms, which involves a small area of bare thigh between the socks and the shorts, might be based on the same principle as the female Zettai Ryouiki trope.
  • Frank Butler gender inverted Quitting to Get Married when he retired from performing shortly after marrying Annie Oakley.
  • If the United States ever elects a female or gay male president, then (unless the president is unmarried) the nation would have a first gentleman instead of a first lady, the title bestowed on the president's spouse who often takes a largely ceremonial role as one of the nation's leading socialites and influencers. Oddly enough, one of the two closest times the U.S. ever came to having a first gentleman involved Bill Clinton, a former president himself, when his wife Hillary ran for president in 2016, leading to a lot of jokes about a role reversal should she have won the election. It's not as much of an oddity at the state level, though, where many states have had female governors and, by extension, first gentlemen (as well as in Colorado, where Gov. Jared Polis became the first governor to be married to a same-sex spouse while in office in 2021), to the point where Wikipedia simply uses "first spouse".
    • When Kamala Harris was elected as the first female vice president in 2020, her husband was given the title "second gentleman".

King Magnifico

While he presents himself as a benign granter of wishes, he only puts up a front as Hope Bringer and only selects wishes that would benefit him directly. When he starts using dark magic, his mask starts to slip and he actively starts manipulating the wishes to suit his needs, granting Simon's wish — to become a Knight in Shining Armor — with the added caveat of mind control-induced loyalty to him.

Example of:
Fairy Devilmother

Alternative Title(s): Rare Male Example, Rare Female Example, Gender Inverted Example, Gender Inverted