Characters / It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Dee Reynolds

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Main Character Index
The Gang (Dennis Reynolds, Dee Reynolds, Charlie Kelly, Mac, Frank Reynolds) | The Gang's Families | Recurring Characters | Other Characters

Deandra "Dee/Sweet Dee" Reynolds

"You light one bitch on fire and everybody freaks out!"

Played By: Kaitlin Olson, Harley Graham (young, "A Very Sunny Christmas"), Danielle Parker (young, "Pop-Pop: The Final Solution"), Leslie Miller (dream, "The Gang Turns Black")

Debut: "The Gang Gets Racist"

"You guys, you always emotionally batter me, and I'm fine with it. I don't care about it, I'm getting good at it now."

Dennis' twin sister, the head bartender at Paddy's Pub and the show's main female character. Dee dreams of becoming an actress although she lacks any apparent talent and occasionally suffers from debilitating stage fright. She wore a back brace in high school, leaving her with the nickname "Aluminum Monster". Dee lives in an apartment alone, although she had a cat at one point until it became trapped in her wall.

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A-F

• Addled Addict: Her and Dennis when they get hooked on crack in "Dennis and Dee Go On Welfare". And again in Season 11.
• Affectionate Nickname: Dennis will call her “baby” or “baby girl” when they’re both in a good mood.
• The Alleged Expert: In Season 15 she starts an acting class where her instructions basically amount to never listening to the director and shouting lines at the top of their lungs.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Dee was mocked in school for her back-brace, and was given the Embarrassing Nickname of "Aluminum Monster".
• Alone Among the Couples: A platonic variant, highlighted in "Mac and Dennis Break Up"; Dee is the only member of the Gang who doesn't have a "sidekick" to "get her out of jams" and ends up stuck inside the wall of her apartment as a result.
• Ambiguous Gender Identity: She really hates being a woman, and openly admits to she would like a penis to feel powerful.
• Ambiguously Bi: In her fantasy, the robber turns out to be a woman, and she goes from crying in fear to definite interest.
• Ambition Is Evil: Less her Tragic Dream of acting, and more the acting class she puts on in season fifteen, that is essentially just about getting money, wanting her own Casting Couch, and sadistically messing with a troubled girl.
• Artifact Name: Her nickname "Sweet Dee", as revealed in "The Gang Buys a Roller Rink". Dee used to be a genuinely nice person before she Took a Level in Jerkass due to a head injury.
• Animal Motifs:
  • Is often compared to a giant bird due to having a skinny, gangly and fragile body.
  Mac: Dennis, I was thinking fish recently.
  • In "The Gang Group Dates", she and Dennis make a few allusions to her being like a spider, catching "flies" in her web.
• Attention Whore: Dee desperately craves approval, affection and attention. She has trouble gaining approval and affection, so she's happy enough to settle for (usually negative) attention.
• Ax-Crazy: More so as the series goes on, raping Charlie because she wanted a body to get off with, a deep willingness to commit murder, getting a hook-up to accidentally grind on his daughter as revenge, and raging about people not forgetting she set someone on fire.
• Back from the Dead: After Mac, Charlie and Dee fake their own deaths, they hide in the office of Paddy's. When Frank and Dennis come in, they run out — carrying sparklers — and Sweet Dee yells "Surprise, bitches! We're alive and it's blowing your MINDS right now!"
• Badass Boast: Before a game of “Chardee MacDennis”, she gleefully announces that she’s going to slit throats.
• Bastard Bastard: The illegitimate daughter of Bruce Mathis, and as the rest of this page shows, quite the bastard.
• Batter Up!: Uses one to beat up a masturbating bum in "Bums: Making A Mess All Over the City". In "Charlie and Dee Find Love", it's shown that Dee carries the same bat around in her car to attack people who piss her off.
  Dee: If you don't have car insurance, then you better have dental, because I am going to smash your teeth into dust!
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. Dee tends to get made to look hideous and disheveled just as much as (if not more) any other member of the Gang.
• Been There, Shaped History:
  • In "The Gang Wins the Big Game", she's revealed to have helped the Eagles win the Super Bowl by inadvertently giving Tom Brady pink eye, causing him to get strip sacked in the final moments of the game.
  • She and Charlie gave the Jan 6 rioters their iconic costumes.
• The Blind Leading the Blind: In Season 15, she teaches an acting workshop despite being an utter failure of an actress with almost no experience herself.
• Blood Knight: One of the more violent members of the Gang, Dee is excited to slit throats in a game of "Chardee MacDennis" and has set her college roommate on fire before.
• Borrowed Catchphrase:
  • In "The Gang Texts", she turns the group's usual "Shut up, bird!" on herself, much to their collective delight — except for Mac, who is annoyed that Dee beat him to the punch.
  • In "The Gang Gets New Wheels", she calls herself a "Golden Goddess" similarly to how Dennis does.
• Brief Accent Imitation: Her impression of a "religious stuttering army carnie." It's predictably not very good, though Mac and Charlie are, surprisingly enough, impressed.
  Charlie: You just earned your spot at the head of the suit, Dee.
• Broken Bird: Several episodes depict Dee as being emotionally numb from years of the Gang's abuse. On rare occassions, however, it catches up to her and she becomes extremely depressed. The ultimate example has to be the opening moments of "The Gang Broke Dee", which show her completely miserable, unkempt, eating trash cake, smoking a cigarette, and spending minutes doing nothing but breathing into the mic while performing stand-up.
• Bullied into Depression: As a Deconstructive Parody of the Butt-Monkey, Dee being bullied by her family (Barbara and Frank seem to have made it their mission to break her spirit, while Dennis was psychotically clingy even then), bullied in high school (having to wear that back brace) and having her only friends being the Gang who abuse her constantly, has made her a suicidally depressed, angry sadist who abuses back or others to get some kicks.
• Bungled Suicide: While offscreen, it’s implied multiple times that she’s attempted and failed at killing herself. Mac and Charlie tell Frank that she once took too many pills.
• Butt-Monkey: Even in a group of losers such as the Gang, Dee is regularly made out to be the biggest loser of them all, due to her status as The Scapegoat and The Friend Nobody Likes.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: She can’t remember at all that she convinced Cricket to abandon the church, assuming he means Charlie ruined his life.
• Cannot Spit It Out: Word of Kaitlin and Glenn is that Dee and Dennis are secretly in love with each other, and while he openly says it (in between being shitty to her), she shows her love in different ways. In “The Gang Goes To Hell” he tells he loves her and is hurt by her “whatever”, but when underwater she holds his hand to her chest and smiles at him.
• Cannot Tell a Joke: The attempts Dee makes to get her standup career off the ground inevitably fall into this. Most of the time, she starts retching out of stage fright halfway through her first joke. When she can get one in, it's inevitably rambling observational humor or references to her vagina, delivered either in a halfhearted drawl or while stammering profusely. Yet somehow, it's still better than her non-standup "character work."
• Catchphrase: Has a tendency to call men "boners". She also yells "God damn it!" more frequently than any of the guys.
• Celeb Crush: In "The Gang Buys a Roller Rink", she says that when she goes to Hollywood she is "probably gonna marry Scott Wolf".
• Celebrity Paradox: Coyote Ugly is referenced by Artemis in an early episode. Kaitlin Olson had a small role in that film.
• Change the Uncomfortable Subject: When the guys catch on to Dee implying she has attempted suicide in the past, she immediately backtracks and tries to claim she was only talking about the man on the roof of Paddy's, calling his behavior a "pathetic attention grab."
• Character Development: Negative kind, as she goes from believing what she does to men isn’t rape because she’s a woman (while still having no intention of stopping), to nodding happily when Mac calls her a rapist.
• Character Tics:
  • Kicks in the air when she's angry. Stems from Frank asking to be a part of The Gang, and Dee threatening to "kick the pillars [of Paddy's] in" while kicking at Frank.
  • She also tends to do a sideways smirk when she thinks she's being witty or clever. Key word is thinks.
• Characterization Marches On:
  • Sweet Dee's character was originally written to be the voice of reason or the "useless chick". Kaitlin Olson described the dialogue as "Charlie says something hilarious. Mac says something hilarious. Dennis says something awesome. And Sweet Dee goes 'You guys! That won't work!' " By the end of the first season, Kaitlin had Dee become just as deranged and depraved as the guys.
  • The first episode has Dee tell her brother and the Gang as a whole that she "loves" them, which certainly wouldn't be the case in later episodes.
  • The first season she had a new boyfriend almost every episode, and someone would say to Dennis "Your sister is a slut." Still sometimes used as a plot device but nowhere near as often.
• The Chew Toy: She's guaranteed to most likely suffer in a lot of episodes.
• Childhood Brain Damage: Well, early adulthood, but "The Gang Buys a Roller Rink" reveals that Dee's vulgar and abrasive personality is the result of a head injury that caused her to immediately abandon her previously sweet and compassionate nature.
• Chronically Crashed Car: Almost all of Dee's cars have been crashed/totaled at some point, due to the rest of the Gang's shenanigans. Due to her status within the group, it usually gets glossed over or played for laughs. In "The Gang Hits the Road", Dee's recently bought car was stolen by a young hitchhiker, but this one was partially on her because she picked him up and let him drive the car at ease so she could play a drinking game with Mac and Frank (that, and he was probably so fed up with The Gang's bullshit that he bailed with the car and without them the second he had a chance).
• Combat Sadomasochist: She loves her sadism, but she also has Safety in Indifference when it comes to emotional battery, as she’s come to expect it because they always batter her.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: She thinks rape and Domestic Abuse are funny, roofies herself when horny like it’s nothing, doesn’t really get why Charlie wouldn’t want to be alone with her after she assaults him, and decidedly doesn’t want to think about what’s messed her up enough (although heavily implied to be Frank and his thoughtless lack of boundaries) to think setting up life-ruining Surprise Incest as Disproportionate Retribution was a good idea.
• Commander Contrarian: Having originally started out as the Straight Man of the group, the trope would later twist into this, usually being the first to question a plan and quickly abandon it mid-execution and do her own idea to predictable effect.
• Con Woman: Dee is always more sly with her money schemes than the usual Gold Digger trope, and Frank is always delighted watching it.
• Cooldown Hug: A deleted scene has her easily calming Dennis down by applying pressure on his hand, in a way that comes off as she’s done this before and it works for them (given that it makes him moan, works in more than one way). She also touches him a lot to give him some comfort, like vice versa.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass:
  • Gets a small moment of badass in "The Gang Goes to the Jersey Shore" when she puts some sand in the eye of a criminal who was about to kill her and Dennis after they'd finished burying the body of a man he shot in cold blood. This allows the two to narrowly escape with their lives.
  • In "Dee Day," Dee plays Xanatos Speed Chess against the Gang throughout the entire episode, correctly guessing at everything they're doing and always being two steps ahead. It culminates with her tricking them into insulting her before midnight, which, according to the rules the Gang set up, means that she gets a second Day where they have to do whatever she wants.
  • In "Risk E. Rat's Pizza and Amusement Center", she succeeds in wrestling a man into unconsciousness by putting him in a chokehold, something Mac notably failed to do in Season 10 with Charlie.
• Deadpan Snarker: Probably the biggest one of the Gang. Of course, that comes with having to put up with the boys' shit.
• Death Seeker: She’s thought about suicide a lot, and admits it would feel like a relief to "get off this merry go round."
• Delusions of Eloquence: She's nowhere near as classy as she thinks she is.
• Desperately Craves Affection: Due to being abused and neglected by her mother, Dee craves validation and approval from the other members of the Gang. She even tries to get it from her therapist at one point, repeatedly ordering the woman to "tell me I'm good."
• Determinator: One of Dee's few positive qualities is her absolute refusal to give up on things she's passionate about. Granted, most of those passions are mean-spirited and self-serving, but she still sticks it out regardless of how hard she has to try. Specific examples include:
  • "Frank Reynolds's Little Beauties" reveals that Dee was an extremely successful child beauty pageant contestant, winning several shows—even though both of her parents did nothing but belittle her and say she was ugly. Frank gives her props for sticking it out in spite of this.
  • In "The Gang Escapes," Dee sets up an escape room challenge for the Gang in Dennis and Mac's apartment, secretly playing the puzzle herself first so she can impress them by knowing all the answers. The guys don't want her to be the leader, though, and so lock her in Dennis's bedroom, which is a custom-made sex parlor (complete with a soundproof and unbreakable door). Despite being trapped, Dee eventually breaks out through a window and climbs along the side of the building to get back into the living room. Even the guys are impressed and declare Dee a "true alpha" for getting out; Dennis is particularly insistent that she's the only woman who's ever been able to escape his bedroom.
  • Despite her total lack of talent and horrific personality, Dee hasn't given up on her dreams of being an actress and even manages to land a few small parts here and there. Similarly, despite being The Friend Nobody Likes, she still hangs out with the Gang and works tirelessly to be truly accepted by them.
  • Dee worked hard to become a proficient bowler and eventually got good enough to become captain of the girls' bowling team.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Very much so, and best shown in "PTSDee." Sure, Mike the Stripper was a Jerkass to her, but manipulating him into stripping in front of and on his estranged daughter is pretty extreme.
• Distaff Counterpart: Revealed to have her own gender-reversed equivalent of Dennis' infamous "implication" in later episodes, wherein she threatens men into sleeping with her by claiming that she'd lie about them raping her if they did otherwise. Becomes even more apparent as the series goes on, as years of abuse from the Gang have made her steadily more cold-hearted and indifferent to the point where by later seasons she is almost a female Dennis.
• Does Not Know Her Own Strength: Most notably in "The Gang Goes on Family Fight". Where she attempts to buzz in the answer but accidentally destroys the buzzer with her own bare hands.
  Grant: Are your hands made of anvils?!
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Discussed and defied. She has abused and forced several men to sleep with her but states that she doesn't consider what she's doing rape because she's a woman. Then, after several seasons worth of Sanity Slippage, she eventually happily admits to being a rapist. It's played for the bleakest comedy, but the show doesn't gloss over how much of a terrible nutjob she is.
• The Dog Bites Back: "Dee Day". She has the Gang to dress up as her racist characters, forces Dennis and Charlie to passionately kiss, destroys Dennis' self-esteem by making him flirt with a woman without his make-up, and finally engineers it so that she gets a second day by tricking the guys into insulting her before the 24 hours of the first day is up.
• Driven to Suicide: Dee is all but outright stated to have considered suicide. In "Paddy's Has a Jumper" she reveals an intimate knowledge of how to slash one's wrist and has surprising insight into the mental state of a man threatening to jump off the roof of Paddy's. The guys just think it's pathetic.
• Drunk with Power: Thanks to usually being the Butt-Monkey and all the abuse she’s suffered in her life, a common theme with Dee is getting hold of a little power and then just being completely awful with it.
• Dumb Blonde: While Dee can be genuinely smart and rational, she's also very reckless and boisterous. Her pettiness and immaturity sometimes causes her to fail at schemes as she does tend to go overboard like publicly punching a woman in the face just for sitting in her spot.
• Dying Declaration of Hate: In contrast to Dennis telling Dee he loves her when he thinks they are about to die in "The Gang Goes to Hell, Part 2", Dee (likely remembering all the shit she's had to put up with from him throughout the series) simply scoffs and tells him, "Whatever." Nevertheless, she does hold hands with her brother and father as they wait to drown.
• Eats Babies: Or, at least claims to in "Hundred Dollar Baby."
• Emotional Regression: It doesn’t take much for her to act like a bratty preteen again, pointing like the other person (usually Charlie) has cooties and crowing about orchestrating Surprise Incest because she got rejected.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • She's as depraved as the rest of the Gang, make no mistake, but she tends to at least attempt to be more socially conscious than the rest of them (although she accidentally fails in that with her racist characters, just to name one example), and she calls the rest of them out when they (usually Frank) do something that's explicitly racist.
  • Also, while she has zero compunctions with getting men to sleep with her by insinuating that she may make a False Rape Accusation if they don't, even she is disgusted when she learns that Dennis rigged up his bedroom as a soundproofed rape dungeon in "The Gang Escapes".
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: She might not say she loves him, mostly because he’s awful to her whenever she shows vulnerability, but she really does care for her twin - being the closest thing he has to “mommy”, feeling bad when he gets upset over her teasing of him having no feelings, taking him to the hospital despite him trying to kill her under COVID, letting him cling to her when he’s freaked out, and needing him around when she gives birth.
• Everyone's Baby Sister: In direct contrast to her present-day status as the Gang's Butt-Monkey, a flashback in "The Gang Buys a Roller Rink" depicts Dee as being a Morality Pet for the Gang in the late 90s. Mac and Charlie unironically call her a funny and good-hearted person, and Dennis even thanks them for not making fun of the size of his sister's feet. Notable in that Mac, Charlie, and Dennis are shown to be Vitriolic Best Buds at this point (albeit to not as great a degree as they are in the 2000s), but they're nothing but kind and affectionate towards Dee.
• Excessive Evil Eyeshadow: She’s a terrible person, and has a tendency for very thick eyeliner and lashings of dark eyeshadow.
• Expository Hairstyle Change: When she’s trying to be nice and Everyone's Baby Sister in her early twenties, she exclusively wears cutesy hair clips that she would think were disgusting any other time.
• Fag Hag: In "The Gang Gets Racist" the man she is interested in is gay. In turn, he is very interested in Dennis. She's also well versed in gay culture and slang.
• Faking the Dead: In "Mac and Charlie Die Part 2", Dee leads Dennis to believe she has been murdered. And unlike with Charlie and Mac (who Dennis overheard talking in the vents), Dennis casually admits he thought that Dee may have actually been killed.
• False Rape Accusation: She admits that she sometimes blackmails guys into having sex with her by insinuating that it would be a shame if she called the police and her account of what happened was different from theirs. In the extended version for the script, she claims she would never do it, they just need to believe that she would. “Because of the insinuation.”
• Female Groin Invincibility: Averted in the "Charlie and Dee Find Love" episode. Dee and Mac are wrestling for Trevor's amusement. Mac throws Dee to the floor, proclaiming his victory, only for Dee to sucker-punch his dick, taking him down, when Dee stands up to gloat Mac retaliates and she falls over in pain.
• Female Misogynist: Dee generally gets along very poorly with other women, and almost always attempts to instigate some kind of rivalry with any that she spends any significant amount of time with. In "Make Paddy's Great Again", she admits that she prefers being the only woman in the group because it makes her feel special. In "Thunder Gun 4: Maximum Cool", she's opposed to the titular film's inclusion of a capable female character because it makes her feel insecure about herself. In "A Woman's Right to Chop", she defends women getting short haircuts while openly berating how it looks on them to their faces. In "The Gang Goes to Ireland", she blames a director unwilling to sleep with her for a role on his show as the work of "feminists ruining everything." It's gotten to the point that she resents having been born a woman and wishes she had a penis to feel powerful.
  Dee: Women are alcoholics who hate their kids.
• Femininity Failure: Played with - Dee has no trouble looking feminine, but whenever she tries to act like a lady, the results are bound to be disastrous.
• Fetish: She’s eaten out ass, and likes doing it, but she’s far more of a Covert Pervert about it than Dennis, who’ll brag to a whole restaurant.
• Flanderization: Originally the voice of reason, Dee's insecurity, shrillness, alcoholism, Hair-Trigger Temper, and Butt-Monkey status are increasingly played up in later seasons.
• Freudian Excuse: Like Dennis, she had Frank as a father and her mother criticized everything about her and verbally abused her, called Dee a "mistake", favored Dennis over her (despite them being fraternal twins) and would often say, "Worst is first," because Dee was the first one of them to be born. This has given her very poor self-esteem (not helped by her having to spend most of her teenage years walking with heavy back braces due to Scoliosis), a laundry list of neuroses and some pretty bad anger management problems. On top of all of that, the Gang considers it their duty to beat her down emotionally on a daily basis.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: The Gang are always criticizing everything about her; from her appearance, to her voice, to her sense of humor. At one point, their treatment of Dee finally gets to her and she becomes extremely depressed. They appear to feel bad about what they did, but most of it is all a part of their plan to sink her even lower then before to show her that "things could be worse." Outside of the Gang her two "best friends" are the Waitress, who hates her guts, and Artemis, who is willing to sell her out in a second when it benefits her. To be fair to them, she only ever spends time with them when she has an ulterior motive. "The Gang Misses The Boat" reveals that Charlie does value her friendship and only rips on her because he knows that if he doesn't, they'll do it to him.

G-N

• Gamer Chick: In "Charlie Rules the World", she spends days addicted to an online game called "TechPocalypse". "The Gang Gets Cursed" shows her gaming against a teenager in a flashback.
• Gasshole: Burps and gags quite a lot when drunk, and occasionally when sober. According to Dennis, everything she eats makes her fart "a shit-ton". She also brings a fart keychain with her in The Gang Goes On Family Fight, eventually passing out on stage accompanied by a barrage of farts.
  "That's about as lowbrow as it gets."
• Giftedly Bad: She fancies herself a performer, and throws herself into acting, stand-up comedy and def poetry with passionate abandon. Too bad she's not particularly good at any of those things. In "The Gang Broke Dee", her stand-up "routine" consists entirely of awkward sound effects and references to her vagina and lack of hygiene.
• Glass Cannon: She's one of the strongest members of the Gang, but also one of the most brittle. Dennis outright compares her bones to glass.
• A God Am I: She yells that she’s the Golden Goddess when feeling slighted, and appropriately enough, sleeps with a high schooler.
• Going Cold Turkey: Dennis and Dee get addicted to crack in a Season 2 episode, and then go cold turkey to get back to normal.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: She is violent, aggressive and often angry or at the very least annoyed.
• Handsome Lech: Female version. She’s very hot, and has a lot of consensual one night stands, but there’s also a lot of men who are put off by her personality, and she enjoys browbeating men (or using the insinuation) into sex.
• Hates Being Alone: To the point where she will keep on trying to impress a group of manchildren who are terrible to her (and will take every chance she can to be horrible back) than actually do anything in her life. The Gang do love each other, but it’s warped as hell. Even when she’s desperate for just a few days away, she always comes back.
• Hates Their Parent: Like Dennis, she resented growing up with Frank for a father and has no problem letting him know. She also despised her mother, though she never actually told Barbara to her face before she died.
• Her Own Worst Enemy: Every time she gets a measure of success, she’ll self sabotage it by flying too close to the sun, ramping up the jerkass or just full-on stress vomiting. She explains this in the Family Fight episode by saying her worst fear is failure. She also torpedoes a relatively nice and healthy friendship with Charlie by sexually assaulting him.
• Hidden Depths:
  • "The Gang Beats Boggs: Ladies Reboot" shows that she has a knack for mental arithmetic, being able to quickly convert Bogg's 70 beers into the equivalent amount of wine needed to complete the challenge.
    Waitress: Nerd.
  • "Frank Reynolds's Little Beauties" shows that Dee was a champion child beauty pageant contestant in her youth who took home several prizes. It's doubly impressive because Frank and Barbara were incredibly neglectful and verbally abusive to her, meaning that she had to do everything herself.
  • A few later-season episodes show that despite failing out of her psychology major in college, Dee does have some genuine skill at reading people and knowing exactly how to manipulate them into doing what she wants. In "The Gang Escapes," she's able to match wits with Dennis and escape his bedroom/sex dungeon; in "Dee Day," she's able to put the guys through a whole day of psychological torment by deliberately exploiting all of their weaknesses, then nets herself a second Dee Day when she tricks them into insulting her before the first one is officially over.
• High Hopes, Zero Talent: While all the Gang are guilty of this, Dee is probably the most serial offender in terms of her desire to be a big star while never showing an inkling of the talent. Her Imagine Spot in "The Gang Saves the Day" has her going into witness protection and so flawlessly playing the part of a butler that she gets to play herself in a TV series about her own witness protection period, which then spins into being the star of an action film that grosses $900 million in presales alone. In reality, her biggest roles were a dead body and "Obnoxious American MILF #1" — and she got fired from both due to ruining multiple takes via overacting, showing up late, and/or being a Prima Donna.
• Hollywood Thin: Mac obviously still thinks she’s too fat in season twelve, but in a rare moment of fatherly concern Frank tells her she’s already too skinny if she’s trying to lose weight.
• Huge Schoolgirl: A grown-up version of this trope. Dee is tall (5'8") and lanky, with size 13 feet, and very uncoordinated as a result.
• Hypocrite:
  • Although Dee considers herself to be a compassionate liberal, in truth she is incredibly greedy and manipulative and can sometimes be just as biased as the rest of the Gang. She tries to out The Lawyer as being Jewish to discredit him, and when Charlie asks what the fuck, she backtracks saying the bad is him “embarrassed about being Jewish”.
  • Dee is the quickest and most frequent critic of the morality of rest of the Gang's schemes... Right up until she finds a way to benefit from them herself.
  • She also is often the first one to point out that Dennis is either a borderline/actual rapist... then she admits she rapes men herself in "The Gang Goes to Hell," and later assaults Charlie. She also points out how psychotic he is (not that he disproves her by threatening to slice her into a million pieces and putting her on display) but she’s just as Ax-Crazy, and has a recurring fantasy of keeping him in the basement, plus gets him to have a forced make out session with Charlie for her pleasure.
  • She calls out Mac and Dennis for being co-dependent, when she and Dennis are just as bad with each other, which even that episode’s commentary points out. He calls himself the perfect select for her and she would follow him anywhere no matter what.
• Hypocritical Heartwarming: She can call Dennis psychotic and a rapist all she wants, but when he’s a person of interest in Maureen’s death she’s the only one who defends him (and also really wants to play his ex-wife), and when she’s grossed out in his rape dungeon she calls out the other woman who deems it creepy. Even when she thinks it’s clear he probably did kill Maureen, she has no issue with it. He’s a psycho but he’s her psycho.
• Hysterical Woman: Irony being that she is actually rage-filled, but the Gang only ever acts like she’s overly emotional when she’s making a point or just existing.
• I Coulda Been a Contender!: In the current day she regularly attends acting classes and attempts an open mic night, even though her acting is all over the place and her stand up material nonexistent. This turns out to be largely rooted in getting a little bit of praise in high school from an acting teacher, and convinced herself she must have some talent and has to find it.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: Her desire for acceptance among the Gang is so strong that she's content to be included in the Gang's plans even if it involves her working at a fish factory. She's also the only main character who goes out of her way to cultivate friendships outside of the Gang (namely, The Waitress and Artemis, both of whom admittedly dislike her).
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: While Dee likes to talk herself up as a multi-talented, elegant and hilarious humanitarian, it doesn't take much for her to break down and admit her extreme self-loathing. She even keeps a nightly video diary that basically consists entirely of her talking about how much she hates herself.
• Informed Deformity: The Gang constantly insult her appearance despite the fact that she is actually quite pretty. This has less to do with her genuine looks than it does with the Gang being dicks, as she has managed to entice quite a few attractive men before driving them away with her awful personality. Lampshaded in "Chardee MacDennis 2" when Andy (an outsider) questions why Dennis and Mac are so disgusted at having to keep a hand on Dee's body.
  Andy: What is so hard about keeping one hand on this woman? [...] She's a very, very pretty woman.
  Dennis: Ugh. Don't sexualize her, dude.
• Inheritance Murder: In "The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis", Dee inadvertently reveals she was planning on having Dennis and Frank killed for a shot at her late mother's inheritance.
• In Love with Your Carnage: Sometimes Dennis is too much for her, but she wants to Game Of Thrones him, loves getting his approval, has a fond smile when the guys are talking about him teabagging Cricket, and has made her own system and version of the implication, looks horny when he grabs a gun or can handle a dart in his hand, and when he’s created a cult just to prey on Mac’s insecurities, catfished Mac to get him out of the house, or came up with a sexual harassment seminar to “advise” to not be sloppy, she’s very impressed.
• Insufferable Imbecile: Dee believes herself to be a high-class lady but is really a vulgar, self-serving, immature and aggressive jerk who often reacts to minor slights with physical violence and is completely callous to the suffering of others, even dismissing the fact that she set her roommate on fire. Likewise, while being somewhat more sensible than the others, she'll do anything for praise regardless of how dangerous or stupid it may be. She tells blatantly untrue stories about herself (such as claiming that she was the first choice to be the lead actress in The Notebook), contradicts herself at the drop of a hat, and still believes people will fall for it.
• Iron Butt Monkey: Rammed headfirst into the side of a car, fell a couple dozen feet off a catwalk, fell several stories while scaling the side of Mac and Dennis' apartment building, struck by a car twice... Only Charlie has clocked as much physical injury as she has.
• Ironic Nickname: She's anything but sweet. "The Gang Buys a Roller Rink" reveals the nickname apparently did once have some significance, as Dee used to be a kind-hearted and considerate individual prior to getting a severe head injury caused by Charlie tampering with her roller skates.
• Is That Cute Kid Yours?: After finding a baby in the Dumpster behind Paddy's, she and Mac decide to raise it and put it into showbiz. When a passerby asks his name, Mac replies with D.B. — which is short for Dumpster Baby.
• Ivy League for Everyone: She majored in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania but failed her classes.
• Kick the Dog: She's never Nice to the Waiter, addressing a flight attendant (who turns out to be the Waiter himself) as “servant” and “drink slave”. It fucks her over in “The Gang Solves Global Warming”, as the rideshare guy she verbally abused gets her account suspended and Charlie gets back at her by filming all the times she’s horrible to service workers.
• The Klutz: Dee is incredibly uncoordinated, resulting in a lot of physical comedy for the character. Early episodes actually portrayed her as being reasonably athletic, but she began to be written as uncoordinated after Kaitlin Olson realized the comedic potential in making her clumsy.
• The Lad-ette: She chugs beer and swears like a sailor like the rest of the boys, though she still pretends she is a fine lady.
• Lady Swears-a-Lot: Dee is easily the most foul-mouthed member of the Gang, which is saying something.
  Dee: Your mom doesn't know dick. She's a dumb, fat cow, and your sister — she is a stupid little shit-mouthed bitch, isn't she?
  Justine: You just said a lot of bad words.
• Lame Comeback: Dee will often parry an insult by repeating it back: e.g. when Mac calls Dee's new car a "piece of shit car", Dee responds with "You're a piece of shit... car".
• Like Mother, Like Daughter: She hates her mother, but like her she’s a cruel, skinny Manipulative Bitch who thinks she’s high class. “Frank vs Russia” adds in another element that they both love Dennis the same way, though Dee is partly like that because Dennis conditioned it in her.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Kaitlin confirmed that Dennis is the only thing keeping Dee in the group and really wants his love and approval. When he leaves for a year and a half, Dee deludes herself into thinking that she got him to stay.
• Longing for Fictionland: Her therapist points out that she would rather lie that she was the first choice for The Notebook then acknowledge her daddy issues.
• Made of Iron: In "The Gang Goes to Ireland", she gets hit full-on by a speeding car twice, and both times walks away without any serious physical injury.
• The Maiden Name Debate: As much as she hates her family, she’s still planning to keep her last name.
• Malicious Misnaming: In "Mac and Charlie Join a Cult", Dee refers to the titular group, Ass Kickers United, as "Ass Blasters Incorporated".
• Manipulative Bitch:
  • We find out in "Dee Gives Birth" that she emotionally abuses men into sleeping with her (which mirrors the behavior of her brother). Poor Ben is reduced to tears just talking about it.
  • In high school, she would dupe Cricket into doing her math homework by being The Tease and promising she would kiss him. When she’s pretending to be in love with him and confessing that she was awful and she’s sorry, she actually shows signs of being a really good actress.
  • Like vice versa, she knows her brother better than anyone, and also knows just what to say to either wreck his self-esteem, have an attention craving breakdown, or starve himself for three days just because she called his face fat.
  • She laughs off Mac’s attempts at manipulating her, because she is far better at it than he is.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: With her brother Dennis. Dee is The Lad-ette, and is the more uncouth, uncultured and overtly aggressive of the two. Also, she's fairly fit and athletic, especially in comparison to her Non-Action Guy brother.
• Mistaken for Murderer: In "Mac is a Serial Killer" Dee and Dennis pretend to be serial killers and stalk the Waitress.
• Mistaken for Pedophile: In "The Nightman Cometh", Dee is cast as the Love Interest to the protagonist. The problem is, the protagonist is referred to as the "Little Boy" and wears a costume consisting of footie pajamas, overall making him seem as though he's supposed to be a child (Charlie insists that he's a young man). Dee spends the entire episode worried that people will assume she's a pedophile because of this, and goes as far as to ad lib a new verse to her musical number that consists of assuring the audience that she is not attracted to children.
• More Deadly Than the Male: She’s notably the first of the Gang to openly admit to trying to kill one of the other members of the group. She also has a more checkered history of violence than the male members, including attempted murder of her college roommate and threatening to poison everyone in the bar with Anthrax (it was only powdered sugar, but Dee didn’t know that at the time).
• Motive Decay: While this is nothing new for the Gang, she really takes it to a whole new level in "PTSDee". At the beginning of the episode she finds out from her latest fling, a stripper named Mike, that he considers sleeping with Dee to be his lowest point in a downward spiral that, among other things, involves his daughter refusing to even speak with him. Dee then tries, in her own selfish, egotistical way, to help Mike get his life back on track by taking him to a support group for veterans, to prove that she really does make men's lives better. After this fails, she decides to take it upon herself to reunite Mike with his daughter — by inviting said daughter to the stripper show they’ve set up at Paddy’s and having Mike unwittingly grind on her in front of everyone, completely destroying any chance of reconcilation purely For the Evulz.
• Mrs. Robinson: When trying to cuck a Rich Bitch by sleeping with her boytoy, she ends up sleeping with her seventeen year old son instead.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: In “The Gang Gets Trapped”, she’s willing to choke out the mother in order to escape the closet.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: Very skinny, but also very strong. In Season 15, when the Gang minus Dee are carrying the corpse of Charlie's father up a mountain, Mac begrudgingly admits the body is a lot heavier without Dee shouldering some of the weight. Dennis chalks it up to years of scoliosis hardening Dee's spine into "petrified wood".
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • In "PTSDee", she seems to recognize how extreme her actions against Mike were and mentions that she "doesn't want to talk about it."
  • While trying to “cuck a bitch”, she sleeps with a seventeen year old and, to her very small credit, she is horrified until Dennis encourages her to move past it.
• My Girl Is a Slut: On two occasions, Mac and Charlie are begrudgingly impressed with the amount of action she gets.
• Narcissist: Her biggest fantasy is to be told she’s perfect in every way and can easily think she’s some sort of god, while is also deeply insecure and scared that everyone around her is actually right about her.
• Never Be Hurt Again: She admits to Charlie that a lot of the shitty and impulsive things she does are to ensure it doesn’t happen to her first, and insecure rage drives most of her actions.
• Never My Fault: The only time she ever admits fault with Cricket and how badly she’s treated him is when she’s manipulating him again. Lampshaded in “PTSDee”, where she tells herself she makes men’s lives better, and he comes in right on cue.
• Nightmare Fetishist:
  • Not to Serial Killer levels, but she’s interested in seeing what would happen if she stabbed someone over and over. While Dennis gets off on it sexually, she seems to find murder victims and the poses they’re left in really funny.
  • While watching Frank choke, she looks gleefully fascinated, almost aroused.
  • The book has her knowing a lot about how to poison people but not kill them, at worst do permanent liver damage, and she has fantasies about fucking Dennis to death, drowning Charlie in sewage and shoving a red hot poker up Mac’s ass.
• No Sense of Personal Space: She hates her brother for a very good reason, but still takes every opportunity to be as close to him as possible. Lampshaded in season 11, where Frank is gleeful about it looking like they want to fuck each other.
• Not Good with Rejection: She responds to a hook-up calling her his rock bottom by engineering him giving a lapdance to his estranged daughter, ruining their relationship for good.
• Not Like Other Girls: Fully wants to be, as she can’t stand other women. She even hates female characters with agency, and would rather “bed them and dead them”, because the former makes her feel bad about herself.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: “Charlie Got Molested” and “Dee Made A Smut Film” show that she genuinely thinks a way to help a CSA victim is to tell everyone and let them support so said victim can heal. Both Charlie and Dennis just feel humiliated after.
• No, You: Her go-to insult comeback is to just return the insult back at the insulter, no matter how little sense it makes. In "Mac is a Serial Killer", she gets called "a female Larry Bird" by Dennis, to which she very smugly retorts "you're Larry Bird" (which backfires completely because Bird is very manly). In "The Gang Hits the Road", Mac says she purchased a "piece of shit car", which leads to her angrily calling Mac a car.
• Not So Above It All:
  • For all of her outward disgust at her brother's date rapist tendencies, it's been shown on more than one occasion that she employs similar tactics of emotional manipulation and coercion to get men to sleep with her, as well as deliberately getting them too drunk to consent. In the Season 11 finale, she brags to Dennis about her own version of his "implication": threatening guys who seem less than eager with a False Rape Accusation.
  • Season 13 also reveals she sexually assaulted Charlie, who doesn’t want to be alone with her after it’s admitted. By Season 16, she happily admits to being a rapist.

O-Z

• Obfuscating Disability: Pretends to be mentally disabled in an attempt to get on welfare in "Dennis and Dee Go on Welfare". And physically disabled in "Charlie gets Crippled" for male attention.
• Odd Friendship: She actually gets along comparatively well with Charlie, to the point where he could be considered the only member of the group who is actually her friend. This is most notable in "The Gang Misses the Boat." When the Gang breaks up, she and Charlie spend the time bonding, encouraging each other, and eventually making out/sleeping together. Sadly she self-sabotages this one by raping him, and he’s notably less keen on hanging out with her after.
• One of the Boys: She is The Lad-ette who hangs out only with guys, and is just as loud and crude as they are. However despite being very much "one of the boys", she's the Gang's resident Butt-Monkey and The Friend Nobody Likes.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: The only ones who call her by her real name are Barbara and Frank.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Not that she’s always aware of it, and he wants the official line to be that she’s always under his control, but on multiple occasions she’s the only woman that will ever show Dennis up or make him submit. She’s definitely the one out of the Gang least scared of his crazy, and is never shown to be wrong when she says she knows him better than anyone else. In “The Gang Chokes”, she dismisses Mac’s “make Dennis depend on me by poisoning him” plan as “cute”.
• Only Sane Woman: In the first season. By Season 2 they made her just as depraved as everyone else, because otherwise there would be no reason why she would even associate with the rest of the Gang. That said, she still has a fairly high tendency of playing Straight Man in any given scene.
• Operation: Jealousy: Tells the Waitress that the best way to get Dennis’s attention is to make him feel like he’s sexually worth less than a random dude. Obviously that’s a con, but she sure loves bragging to her brother about her various “catching a fly” or having her guts pumped, and he comes off so jealous that she slept with (raped) Charlie.
• Opportunistic Bastard: In the sexual harassment seminar, she’s actually delighted by Mac lifting her up by her crotch until she gets told it counts as sexual assault and wants to see Mac sweat.
• Out of Focus:
  • She has noticeably fewer independent storylines in Season 14 than in previous seasons. Specifically, despite "Dee Day" centering around her she has the least screen time of any of the cast.
  • Season 16 is easily the season where Dee is the most Out of Focus, with "The Gang Goes Bowling" being her only real spotlight episode. "Celebrity Booze Grab" has her on a plane with Frank for the entirety of the episode, and "Dennis Takes A Mental Health Day" is an Indulgent Fantasy Segue where she's sidelined along with the rest of the Gang save for Dennis himself.
• Parental Incest: She and Frank pose as an engaged couple, and even go as far as getting married. Although Frank isn't Sweet Dee's biological father, it's still creepy.
• Parental Sexuality Squick: She knows far too much about Frank’s sexual tastes than she could ever want, not helped by him telling her if he’s got a cock ring or not. A bit of Hypocritical Humor going on too, as she tends to cheerfully point out whenever Dennis has a boner.
• Performance Anxiety: Dee suffers from debilitating stage fright which cause her to dry heave while performing in front of a crowd.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Her pregnancy turns out to be from her being the surrogate for Carmen and her husband Nick. While it was likely motivated by the financial compensation she received, it was still very kind of her.
  • She also generally has a soft spot for cats, even almost getting set on fire (by Frank) twice in the process of saving some.
  • In the background of “The Gang Exploits A Miracle”, she feeds Dennis nuts from the bowl after feeling like her revenge (calling him fat because he called her face blotchy) has gone far enough and he’s about to pass out.
  • Considering her usual belief that men can’t be raped by women and her own tendencies for wanting to take advantage, her adamant frustration that what happened with Dennis and the librarian was rape, even showing pictures of her brother at that age to hammer home how creepy it was, is good of her. She also implies she suspected this long before he not-admits it, and didn’t want to sing something where she’s another older woman molesting a child.
  • While she has plenty of graphic fantasies about killing the guys, she doesn’t actually want any of them dead.
• Phrase Catcher:
  • "Dee, you bitch!" in the more recent seasons, usually said by Dennis.
  • "Shut up bird" is also commonly thrown her way.
• Poison Is Evil: When Mac is making Dennis feel sick with soda and pizza shakes, she deems that adorable and already knows how to make the latter depend on her for real, while also planning to actually poison him. Also has some The Dog Bites Back and Mirror Character, as Dennis poisoned her at least twice, and brags about conditioning her.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: All of Dee's 'crazy characters' that she's created are outrageously racist, despite the fact that she considers herself a sensible liberal. One of them even uses Brownface. Also Charlie has expressed some dismay upon seeing her Asian character. Also, in "The Gang Goes to Hell: Part 2," while doing impressions to pass the time, her impression of Obama is very "hood." Additionally, she dumped Li'l Kev when she thought he was a "retard" and called a bar critic a "faggot" for ordering a white wine.
• Potty Emergency: A Running Gag for Dee. It's actually a plot point in "The Gang Hits the Road" and "Dee Day", the latter of which involves her successfully scheming to get a public urination vote approved because she really can't hold her pee.
• The Prima Donna: On the rare occasions where her career as a performer takes off she quickly turns into this.
• Progressively Prettier: While Dee has always cleaned up nicely, earlier seasons made an effort to give her a much more trashy appearance in her day-to-day life. Later seasons have her in nicer outfits and with more flattering hairstyles, making her look a lot more polished.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: Next to Charlie, she is easily the most emotionally underdeveloped member of the Gang, as her pathological emotional neediness and insecurity, insatiable need for attention, and Not Like Other Girls tendencies and irrational hostility and competitiveness towards other women make her come off as an overgrown teenage girl. She also has the "psychopathic" part down pat, being selfish, vindictive and unscrupulous, as well as extremely and unpredictably violent and quick to anger.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: In "Bums: Making a Mess All Over the City", she completely loses it when a homeless man masturbates (in plain sight) behind Paddy's while smiling at her:
  Dee: You know what, asshole?! [beats the bum with a baseball bat] You like that, bitch?! I am not your little pinup girl for you to [picks up a trash can lid and strikes him repeatedly with it] TUG! YOUR ROTTEN! PECKER AT!
• Rape by Proxy: Downplayed for “Dee Day”, as for punishment/entertainment Dee forces Dennis and Charlie to make out, and praises them for being hotter than she expected. Ironically Charlie is the only member of the Gang that Dennis has no sexual feelings for, and Charlie next episode is reminded of her actually raping him. She also wants Mac to give Frank a Happy-Ending Massage, though that’s not shown.
• Really Gets Around: Dee has casual sex pretty frequently. At one point she sleeps with over a dozen guys in a short amount of time to try and empower herself by giving them all a low rating on a dating website. She also has a lot of potential baby daddies when the Gang try to find out who got her pregnant in Season 6.
• Recovered Addict: She claims she’s over crack, and compared to Charlie with his glue she’s doing well, but she’s still sorely tempted when anyone else is doing it, and goes right back to it in season 11.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Red to Dennis' Blue, being the more belligerent and impulsive of the two Reynolds siblings.
• The Resenter: She despises Ingrid Nelson for bettering herself and actually making something of her life after high school.
• Rich Kid Turned Social Activist: She wants to be seen as a left wing liberal, but even when she’s for a good cause she mostly just wants to shame everyone else, and she’s horribly racist and sexist.
• Sadist: Dee is shown at times to truly enjoy the misery and suffering of others, implied to be because her self-esteem is so low it's the only way she can get her kicks anymore. In Season 14 she gets excited watching Frank nearly die, and in Season 15 she gets a rush out of manipulating an emotionally unstable young woman in her scam acting class.
• Sanity Slippage: Dee has grown steadily more unhinged, petty, and callous as the series has progressed.
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: She does this in her stand-up routine in "The Gang Broke Dee".
• The Scapegoat: When in doubt, blame Dee. It's pretty much the Gang's unofficial motto. It was also the dynamic when she was a child, as Barbara would twist a way to blame her for everything, and isolate her that way. Her therapist even sticks her with the dishes!
  Dennis: Facebook is connecting everyone these days. People are showing up to a bar that doesn't even have a sign and serves only one old-timey, disgusting drink that nobody likes! Goddamn, I hate gin! Dee, you bitch!
• Security Cling: Less so than vice versa, but if she’s nervous or they’re in a distressing situation, she’ll grab Dennis’s hand.
• Self-Serving Memory: Her therapist calls her out on constant lying, and Dee would rather take from fiction than discuss her daddy issues. Or her mommy issues, considering she’s desperate for the older therapist to just "tell her [she’s] good."
• Serial Rapist:
  • In “The Gang Group Dates”, she meets with a guy who doesn’t like drinking, so she gets him paralytic and brags she caught herself a fly.
  • In “The Gang Goes To Hell”, if she’s bought a guy home and he’s iffy about it, she insinuates that she’s going to call the cops and say he tried to rape her. Apparently it works.
  • It's revealed that she emotionally berates and forces men (including Ben, Rex, and Charlie) into sleeping with her, though she doesn't consider it rape because she's a woman.
  • In “Frank vs Russia”, she calls roofies “mommy’s magic beans” and sees no issue banging while using them.
• Seven Deadly Sins: Wrath and Envy.
  • Wrath. She is notable for having a Hair-Trigger Temper and is much more prone to violence than the rest of the Gang (especially towards other women), having been put on a list that bars her from legally purchasing guns for setting her roommate on fire and violently assaults a woman that took a lounge bench she claimed hours earlier.
  • Envy. Many of the Comically Lopsided Rivalries she makes towards most women the Gang associate themselves with are usually a product of her own insecurities (like how her fellow high school outcast Ingrid "Fatty Magoo" Nelson lost all of her weight and became a successful business woman while Dee herself is stuck in the past, forced to endure the Gang and their put-downs and unable to fulfill her dreams of stardom).
• Sex for Services: Very willing to offer sex if it increases her chances of getting what she wants.
• Sex for Solace: Mac asks her if she wants to feel okay about herself, why doesn’t she just bang a bunch of guys like she did in the good old days.
• Sexual Extortion: In the book, in addition to Gainer and the English teacher, she and “Dr. Andrews” ‘played a game’ where he threatened to flunk her if she didn’t sleep with him again.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: While Dee is always good-looking, her strong aversion to the Beauty Is Never Tarnished trope and general tendency to dress down often conceals this. On the occasions where she dresses up for a special occasion, her looks become much more apparent. This is frequently zig-zagged, however, as Dee often falls victim to her most unsightly and humiliating slapstick when she's at her most done up.
• She's All Grown Up: Played With. She had to wear an unflattering back brace throughout high school and was thus incredibly unpopular. Whenever she encounters one of her former schoolmates they're quick to point out how good-looking she's become, only to realize that while she's outwardly much better than in high school, inwardly she has remained stunted and has only become more twisted over time.
• Ship Tease:
  • With Charlie, surprisingly enough. They actually kiss when the Gang is being held hostage by the McPoyles and Dee is genuinely disappointed when Charlie doesn't give her a valentine after she made one for him in "The Gang Tends Bar". "The Gang Misses the Boat" shows how well the two click when away from the group's influence and they spend most of the episode hanging out and being very supportive of one another, which culminates in them making out and sleeping together. However, Season 13 reveals that the sex was actually non-consensual on Charlie's end, possibly turning this into a case of Ship Sinking. Considering that Dennis is Dee's brother, Mac is gay and hates her guts and Frank is Dee's legal father, Charlie's really the only viable member of the group for her to have any kind of romantic chemistry with.
  • "Charlie Has Cancer" shows a cutaway to the previous Christmas/New Years party where Dee sneaks up behind Mac with mistletoe, only to be brutally elbowed in the face when he reflexes out of panic. She also wears a very devious smirk watching him squirm over having to kiss her for their wedding scene in "The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 6."
  • According to Kaitlin Olsen, the creators were trying to come up with a way to have Dee and Dennis sleep together, and just about everyone can see it, with him bragging how much he controls her, her playing him like a violin when it comes to sexual humiliation, and their mutual No Sense of Personal Space.
• Shoe Size Angst: Has size 13 feet. The clerk at the shoe store suggests her try a Big n' Tall store when she learns Dee's shoe size.
• Show Some Leg: On more than one occasion, Dee dresses as a prostitute.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss:
  • Invoked in "The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award", where Dennis forces her and Mac to have this dynamic to draw in customers a la Sam and Diane. Unfortunately, rather than flirty sexual tension, Mac and Dee's tension is much more aggressive, violent and founded on mutual hatred rather than any sort of attraction.
    Dennis: "This isn't 'will they or won't they.' This is 'I know they won't and I know I don't want them to.'"
  • In "The Gang Gets Held Hostage," Charlie literally slaps her twice and then kisses her (and then slaps her again).
• Small Name, Big Ego: She thinks she's lady-like and compassionate. But in reality, she's crude, rude, and trashy. She also thinks she's more talented at acting than she actually is.
• The Smurfette Principle: She's the only female member of the Gang. Justified in that none of the guys seem to have any interest in women beyond sex and only hang around Dee because A) they're forced to since she works with them, and B) they like to use her as a personal punching bag. It's invoked in "The Gang Makes Paddy's Great Again" where Cindy asks Dee why she'd pick Dennis over her when it would just lead to the guys constantly shitting on her all over again and that it would be more advantageous to stick together as women. Dee replies that she kind of likes being the only female in the group and that it makes her feel special.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: Dee's usually loud and aggressive, but when she plans to manipulate a student in her acting class her voice drops down to uncomfortably creepy Dennis levels.
• So Unfunny, It's Funny: Her stand-up comedy falls right into this, when she can get more than five sentences into her routine without vomiting from stage fright.
• Squee: If she’s excited about an actually harmless hobby and not about causing pain, the guys call it “the most irritating sound on earth”.
• Stalker with a Crush: She was forcibly institutionalized for stalking her roommate, copying her clothes and then setting her on fire.
• Start of Darkness: A Season 15 Retcon shows that Dee's vulgar personality is the result of Charlie sabotaging her roller skates before the start of a dance routine. This caused her to suffer a head injury that resulted in her entire personality turning on a dime.
• Statuesque Stunner: The guys all act like she’s hideous (though Charlie has several moments of Ship Tease with her) but she’s still quite attractive, as well as tall (5'8").
• Stepford Smiler: Not usually, she is often the closest one to understanding that as awful as she is she’s had a horrible life, but in her nice era during the roller rink, it does come off like she’s trying way too hard to pretend that everything is fine.
• STD Immunity: Averted.
  Dee: It seems like I have a rash in a place where a sexually active person can have a rash.
• Sticky Fingers: She steals a guy’s watch from a one night stand so he’d come and see her again, and deludes herself that it's a relationship.
• Stopped Caring:
  • In Season 1, she at least tries to be a good granddaughter and goes to visit her and Dennis' ailing Pop-Pop in the hospital. In Season 8, it's shown that Frank is the one who's been taking care of him for the last six years and Dee is totally apathetic (even more than Dennis) when it's left to them to decide whether to take their grandfather off life support. Although this shift could be chalked up to Characterization Marches On, as Dee was still a somewhat decent person in Season 1. Either that, or finding out Pop-Pop used to be a Nazi understandably tainted her view of the man.
  • Come Season 14, she's actually started to take a lot of the Gang's mockery in stride. She uses bird noises as a form of secret communication with Mac, and later turns the usual "Shut up bird!" on herself by beating Mac to the punch and one-upping him over the Gang's group text. She again calls herself a "big dumb flightless bird" when boasting about her landing an acting gig in Season 15.
  • She gradually stops having any genuine objection to Dennis’ rapey behaviour, and admits she has her own version of the implication. In Season 16, she doesn't object when Mac calls her a "rapist and a thief." In fact, she nods.
  • She goes from being the Commander Contrarian to taking part in the Gang's ridiculous schemes without objection. She also takes a page from Frank's book and starts engaging in hedonistic behavior just for the hell of it, like in "Frank vs. Russia" where she happily admits to roofying herself before she went over to her date's house hoping to bang.
• Straw Feminist: Drifts into this at her worst moments. Most glaringly, she openly admits that she has done things to men that classify as sexual assault because she thinks only men are capable of molestation or rape. Her examples of feminism also include emasculating men whose attention she wants, thinks actual feminist men are “soy boy beta cucks”, and copying male drinking records (while not giving a shit about the women’s march) because “when women abuse alcohol it’s just sad”.
  Dee: The only way to beat men is by competing against other women.
• Sucks at Dancing: Mac compares her "P. Diddy boat dance" to an inflatable tube man at a used car lot.
• Surrounded by Idiots: How she feels in regards to the rest of the Gang.
  Dee: I hate my life.
• Sweet Polly Oliver: Dressed as a man named Cole, she infiltrates the tryouts for the Philadelphia Eagles to prove that she is more athletic than Mac and Dennis. The coach buys it and she actually manages to kick the football farther than anyone. However, after revealing her disguise, she then immediately injures her leg trying to kick the ball a second time, also killing whatever shot she had at making the team.
• Tank-Top Tomboy: Often seen wearing tank tops, befitting her ladette nature.
• Teacher/Student Romance: With Dr Gainer, and in the IASIP book an English teacher and Dr Andrews. While she claims she wasn’t taken advantage of, just has a thing for authority figures, she’s not really believed.
• The Team Wannabe: Despite claiming to hate them, it's clear what Dee wants more than anything is for the guys to consider her a true member of the Gang. It's bizarrely sad seeing her clamoring for scraps of the guys' approval in several episodes, specifically "The Gang Reignites the Rivalry" and "The Gang Spies Like U.S."
• The Tease: Back in high school, she would make Cricket believe that she would kiss him if he ate shit and then refuse to do anything with him.
• Terrible Artist: Her attempts at designing dresses in "The Aluminum Monster vs. Fatty Magoo" result in stick-figure sketches that Dennis and Charlie mistake for a boat, a cup with a straw, and a raincoat.
• Territorial Smurfette: She likes being the Gang's only woman because it makes her feel "special". Dennis has to stop her from nearly killing “new Dee”, who she’s pissed off with for stealing her nickname.
• Then Let Me Be Evil:
  • Early on, Barbara accuses her of stealing and if she didn’t do so then maybe she could be attractive enough for a man. Later Dee will have a “move” of stealing from her one night stands so they could see her again.
  • While she was a little monster in high school, she was still capable of having friends and being nice until a head injury. Then she just rotted, the joke being according to Olson that she doesn’t remember being nice or her dream scenario of the guys being kind to her.
• This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: Punctuates many of her remarks with the word "bitch".
• Thrill Seeker: Becomes one in "The Gang Chokes" after realizing that watching Frank almost choke to death and nearly getting hit by an Uber excited her.
• Throw the Dog a Bone:
  • Being the biggest Butt-Monkey of the main cast, Dee will occasionally receive some kind of sympathetic treatment, usually in the form of praise from the rest of the Gang. Notable examples include the endings of "The Gang Dines Out" and "The Gang Escapes", as well as "Dee Day" (in which she finally scores a legitimate win over the guys after more than ten seasons of putting up with their crap).
  • In “Thundergun 4: Maximum Cool”, after an episode of the guys claiming she doesn’t get comedy, she has the idea to destroy the movie by pirating it, and they all laugh at her “five tickets for the price of none” joke.
  • Out of all the guys, she wants Dennis’s love, attention and approval the most, and even aside from Pet the Dog moments and Incest Subtext, there are a lot of episodes when they’re a Sibling Team completely on the same side.
• Token Good Teammate: In Season 1, she was easily the most morally sound and rational member of the Gang. Beyond that she regularly displays despicable and idiotic behavior, and by season 16 is unrepentant about being a rapist.
• Tough Love: Of course her “technically Dennis was raped” video is tactless and lets everyone know about it and it pisses him off, but she’s trying to get through to him that he was a child and hurt by a Dirty Old Woman. According to PTSDee, it gets the rest of the Gang trying to convince him as well. It’s a warped way of showing she cares.
• Tomboy with a Girly Streak: She is an aggressive and sometimes violent ladette who drinks, swears, and hangs out only with guys, but she is also an aspiring actress and is seen to be concerned about her appearance.
• Took a Level in Dumbass:
  • In Season 1 she's fairly sensible and the Only Sane Woman; from Season 2 onwards she becomes sillier, stupider, and more irrational.
  • She loses a bit more common sense as the show goes on, such as in "Frank vs. Russia" where she fails to realize that the SINNED System is actually the DENNIS System backwards and is blown away when Dennis reveals it to her.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Also due to Characterization Marches On. While she shows glimmers of a nastier side in Season 1, it's not until Season 2 that she truly becomes a wretched human being on par with the boys. She gets worse as the series goes on, with her actions in "PTSDee" reaching a new low even by the standards of this show. By the later seasons, she's developed a nasty sadistic streak and crossed the line into knowingly predatory behavior that includes raping Charlie and non-consensually giving her date a handjob under the table.
• Tragic Dream: What Dee wants more than anything is to become a successful actress. Unfortunately, she lacks both the talent and the dedication to get it done, not to mention she's stuck in an endless cycle of abuse perpetrated by both the Gang and her own refusal to let go of the past.
• Trauma Button: Twice in season two she has to tell a father figure to just stop touching her already.
• Treated Worse than the Pet: Already The Unfavorite compared to her brother Dennis, Dee's mother treats Dee even worse than her little dog. Her first comment is to mock Dee for being fat (she's extremely skinny), doesn't ask about why Dee is wearing a neck brace (from the previous episode's shenanigans), and then steals the food Dee is actively eating to feed to her dog.
• Troubled Abuser: She sexually assaults Charlie and coerces men through a combination of False Rape Accusation, roofies and insulting them, but she’s also a deeply insecure Broken Bird who has been abused by almost everyone in her life. Most of the time she just tries to deal with it, but she’s also thought about suicide, tried more than once and suffers from depression.
• Undying Loyalty: As much as she hates him, wants to kill him, wants to humiliate him, mothers him to get what she wants, even Frank points out that it’s a given Dee will always side with Dennis. It’s a sad fact in their dynamic, as Dennis assumes the only way to keep her loyalty is to torture her, but he controls her less than he thinks he does because she does actually love her idiot brother.
• The Unfavorite: Her mother thought Dennis could do nothing wrong and she could do nothing right. In terms of Frank, they’re both continually treated like shit in comparison to Charlie, who he wants to be better for. He deflects on his own shortcomings by insulting her and diverting the attention away from himself.
• The Unfettered: And becoming less fettered as the series goes on. Bruce calls her out on being willing to marry the man who raised her just to get money.
• Unusual Euphemism:
  • "Frank vs. Russia" has her refer to roofies as "Mommy's Magic Beans" and sex as "getting her guts pumped."
  • The guys have no clue what she means when she metaphors “slitting your wrists the right way” as “the old north south”.
• Urine Trouble: Tying into Potty Emergency above, she's also gotten Mac covered in piss twice.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: "The Gang Buys a Roller Rink" reveals that Sweet Dee actually used to be legitimately, well, sweet. Then Charlie unintentionally sabotaged her roller skates and caused her to sustain a head injury that led to a shift in personality. Though Self-Serving Memory might also be in play, considering how the rest of the series (post-Season 2) has established Dee as being an all-around terrible person since high school.
• Vanity Plate: When she buys a scooter in "The Gang Gets Audited", its license plate says "$CAMMIN".
• Weakness Turns Her On: In “The Gang Escapes”, she fully admits to wanting to emasculate a man if she’s seeking his attention. She also gets off from raping Charlie, and her main type of man are sweet, dumb, and beefy.
• Weight Woe: She’s very skinny, but her go-to insult is calling someone fat, and there’s some projection going on. In "The Gang Goes on Family Fight", she’s starves herself for three days so she doesn’t look puffy on TV. She also has no problem throwing up food, and her mom constantly called her overweight.
• Wet Blanket Wife: In “Charlie Rules The World”, Charlie’s emotional beatdown makes her an Extreme Doormat desperate to please. Even Mac and Frank are a little uneasy with how much he’s annihilated her.
• What, Exactly, Is His Job?: She tends to flit somewhere between "bartender" and "waitress", and all indications are that she barely does either. She considers "can open a beer bottle" to be enough of a skillset for tending, and it's indicated that she not only cannot make mixed drinks, but thinks people who would want one are pretentious.
• White Sheep: She sees herself as the Token Good Teammate martyr replacement mother of her family. That’s probably not true (or not after a while), but she was the resident scapegoat, Treated Worse than the Pet, and Frank is kind of impressed that she fought the abuse so hard.
• Who's Your Daddy?: The boys spend most of a season trying to figure out who got her pregnant. Turns out she was the surrogate for Mac's ex-girlfriend Carmen and her husband Nick.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: She has a phobia of old people, thinking they’re creepy, scary and gross, and having a full blown panic attack when visiting a nursing home. Pop Pop perving on her doesn’t help.
• Woman Scorned:
  • She tricks Mike the stripper into grinding on his daughter because he called Dee his "rock bottom". Even the other members of the Gang are horrified by this.
  • Though she and Charlie are not a couple, she becomes extremely annoyed when he doesn't get her a Valentine after she made one for him in "The Gang Tends Bar". She outright threatens to murder everyone with Anthrax if he doesn't return the favor.
• Women Are Wiser: She usually tends to be the most logical schemer of the Gang. Unfortunately for her, that's only in comparison to the rest of them.
• Wounded Gazelle Warcry: Much like Dennis genuinely loves and means it when he praises Dee, he just saves it until he’s desperate or can use it to control her, Dennis is the only one that Dee is willing to mother or take care of, she just also uses it to keep him dependent on her.
• Yank the Dog's Chain:
  • A truly staggering example in "The Gang Broke Dee". She overcomes her depression to become a successful local comedian, eventually getting offered a gig on Conan. Turns out the whole thing was a Xanatos Gambit by Mac, Charlie and Frank, just to show that it could get worse.
  • In Season 15, she finally succeeds in impressing a casting director and lands a role as "Obnoxious American MILF #1" on an Irish television show. Then she gets hit by a car and runs late to set, causing her to lose the job to the Waitress, who is conveniently visiting Ireland at the time. The director offers her a second, dramatic role as an alternative... and not minutes after exiting the studio, Dee gets hit by a car driven by a sick Dennis, causing her to get knocked unconscious and miss that production as well.
• Yaoi Fangirl: In "Dee Day", she gets Dennis and Charlie to have a full make-out session for her entertainment.
• Yandere: Luckily the anthrax is fake, but she doesn’t know that at the time, and she’s willing to kill everyone in the bar if Charlie (who she’s raped by this point and is uneasy with her) doesn’t give her a valentine.
• You Are What You Hate: She detests Dennis for being a power-hungry creep when, in truth, she's every bit the same as her brother.
• You Go, Girl!: In "The Gang gets Invincible", Dee dresses as a man and takes part in an open audition for the Philadelphia Eagles along with Mac and Dennis, in order to prove that girls can play football. She does, in fact, get farther than the very unfit Mac and Dennis, in part due to her excellent kicking abilities. Too bad she breaks her foot, rendering her chances null.

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"Later, boners."