Line #4 PlayingWith/GIRL


1	'''Basic Trope''': A character meets a female online, only for them to end up being male
2	* '''Straight''': Bob meets Alice online. Unfortunately for Bob, Alice's real name is Carlos and she is male.
3	* '''Exaggerated''': Every single girl Bob has ever met online is male in real life.
4	* '''Downplayed''': Bob meets Alice online. Turns out Alice is a lot more of a {{Tomboy}} than she appeared online.
5	** Carlos never properly discloses their gender, but Bob assumes Carlos to be a female because of their feminine talking style and profile. Carlos is nonbinary.
6	* '''Justified''':
7	** Carlos, or rather Carla, is transgender and currently is in the closet. She can be herself online.
8	** Or Carlos has been brainwashed to believe he really is Alice when online.
9	** Carlos DoesNotLikeMen.
10	** Carlos is InTouchWithHisFeminineSide, and wants to experiment with roleplaying as a female.
11	** Carlos may be a man, but he's a {{troll}} who finds it funny to pretend he's a girl and then [[UnsettlingGenderreveal drop the Bridget]] when Bob has something invested in him actually being Alice.
12	** Carlos is an epic scale {{Munchkin}}, and he has discovered a powerful GameBreaker dynamic that allows him to [[LeetSpeak PWN n00bs]] with extreme ease. However, it only works if playing a particular female-only class.
13	** "If I'm going to be staring at someone's butt all day, it's going to be a girl's."
14	** Carlos is a cop pretending to be a prepubscent girl as part of a sting operation.
15	** You can be whoever you want to be online, and Carlos wants to pretend to be a woman, dammit.
16	** The entire game [[ImprobablyFemaleCast only has female characters to choose]].
17	* '''Inverted''':
18	** Alice meets Bob online, and he turns out to be her (female) best friend Danielle in real life.[[note]]The opposite of a G.I.R.L. - Girl in Real Life[[/note]]
19	** Alice pretends to be a guy online, which is kind of awkward for Bob when they try to hang out off the web.
20	** Carlos pretends to be a woman in real life, but can act as his real male self online.
21	* '''Subverted''':
22	** When they finally meet Bob is relieved to see that Alice is a girl in real life.
23	** When Bob goes to meet Alice, he sees someone in a suit standing where she said she'd be, and expects that it'll turn out to be a guy... But Alice just turns out to be [[{{Bifauxnen}} a girl in guy's clothing.]]
24	** Alice claims to be male in real life, but when Bob meets him/her, it turns out Alice was lying.
25	* '''Double Subverted''':
26	** But she is really Carlos' sister, whom he sent to meet Bob to avoid having his cover blown.
27	%%(unclear whether needs cutting or moving to Subverted)** Alice is a girl. [[LadyLooksLikeADude She just doesn't look like one.]]
28	* '''Parodied''': A virtual world is used to represent the future's version of the Internet, inhabited almost entirely by fat men in women's clothing.
29	* '''Zig Zagged''': Bob is starting to suspect that Alice is really a guy, but when they meet in real life, she definitely looks like a girl... And then she turns out to be [[WholesomeCrossdresser a very feminine guy in girl's clothes.]] But then, it turns out she sent her brother/friend/boyfriend/etc. there to just mess with his head.
30	* '''Averted''':
31	** Alice is a girl in real life, and the thought that she might have been male had never crossed Bob's mind.
32	** Or Carlos is a guy in real life who has a female screen name but doesn't pretend to be a girl aside from the name, and answers readily and sincerely when asked whether he is a guy or a girl in real life.
33	* '''Enforced''': The writer has had the exact situation occur to him, so he uses it for material.
34	* '''Lampshaded''': "You sure you want to meet Alice in real life, Bob? What if she turns out to be a guy?"
35	* '''Invoked''': Bob is depressed at the state of his romantic life, so Carlos creates a female online alter-ego, Alice, for the purpose of cheering Bob up.
36	* '''Exploited''': Carlos catfishes people for profit.
37	* '''Defied''': Every time Bob gets involved with a girl online he asks for pictures and a way to contact her to make sure she's not a guy in real life.
38	* '''Discussed''': "That's the seventh time Bob has met a girl online only for her to turn out to be a guy, he really should have learned by now."
39	* '''Conversed''': "Let's hope this season they don't have Bob meet ''another'' G.I.R.L. That joke's wearing pretty thin."
40	* '''Deconstructed''': Carlos goes online as Alice to meet guys. Unfortunately, he ends up hitting on an undercover investigator pretending to be underage who believes he is a pedophile and arrests him.
41	* '''Reconstructed''': The investigator is surprised to learn that Alice is actually Carlos, who points out that the investigator used photos of a guy who looks like he's in his early twenties.
42	* '''Played For Laughs''': Carlos pretends to be a girl but is so bad at it it's a PaperThinDisguise. Everyone believes him anyway.
43	* '''Played For Drama''': Carlos is actually a very lonely individual so he invented Alice as an [[InventedIndividual Imaginary Girlfriend]] so he could be less lonely. Over time, however, his ImaginaryFriend began to take on a personality of her own as he used the internet to flesh her out, even having AIM conversations with her and signing her up for [=YouTube=] and other social media sites. Unfortunately, though, he spends too much time giving her a "real" personality [[GoneHorriblyRight to the point that]] his [[ImaginaryFriend Imaginary Girlfriend]] Alice and him have a fight and break up. He's so invested in this imaginary friend that he creates a dating profile site for her and the OhCrap realization doesn't hit him until the last minute. Carlos has to invent a story about how Alice is his girlfriend and he went there to try to meet her and patch things up.
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45	Go back to {{GIRL}}
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47	%% Optional items, added after Conversed, at your discretion:
48	%%
49	%%* '''Implied''':

Context PlayingWith / GIRL