She's a brick... house! She's mighty mighty, just lettin' it all hang out She's a brick... house! The lady's stacked and that's a fact, ain't holding nothing back.
—The Commodores
They say No Guy Wants an Amazon: that no guy wants a woman stronger than he is.
These women are different.
Basically, the Amazonian Beauty is what happens when Ms. Fanservicehulks out.
Often times, such as in fighting video games like Street Fighter, a lot of beautiful women are jacked but no one comments on it, since to the characters it is the norm for them to see characters like that, despite the fact that they are still Ms Fanservices who go above and beyond the call of duty in some cases.
A quick litmus test for this trope is:
Is the female character in question muscular?
Is her muscularity emphasized (pointed out in-universe or by flexing) or noticeably large?
Is her muscle the integral and dominant physical trait of her bare skin due to large mass or definition? (Is most of the skin sculpted or bulky instead of smooth? Fairchild at right is an excellent example of both "sculpted" skin and muscle mass.) Of course, this can be Depending on the Artist.
If the answer to all four above is "yes," the character qualifies for this trope.
This character can take her muscularity to Heroic Build levels. Sometimes starts out as a Super Strong Child, and usually (if not almost always) is an Action Girl. Almost always has large breasts. Her smaller (and equally dangerous) cousin is the Cute Bruiser. Given that these girls are often tall to further enhance their presentation of strength, romances with them are likely to result in Tiny Guy, Huge Girl and Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy.
Compare Amazon Chaser where a character finds a woman attractive because of her fighting skills. If he's attracted to her muscles, she's an Amazonian Beauty. Of course, both tropes can be in play at the same time if he's attracted to both.
Contrast Brawn Hilda and Big Beautiful Woman. Some of these characters also double as Statuesque Stunners. When the female in question worries about the slippery slope between this trope and Brawn Hilda, it usually results in Muscle Angst.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
Tania from Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, a literal Amazon. She is truly gigantic, towering over nearly every character in the show. Naturally, she completely blows Bastion's mind and he becomes hopelessly smitten with her (even staying with her in her home dimension later).
Houmei from Aiki. As the series progresses, however, it turns out that her efforts to keep up with her opponents by pumping up actually hampers her fighting ability, so Houmei slims down a bit to remain competitive. Akemi Kageyasu shows also a very toned build and her clothing reveals her well defined abs.
Most Claymores begin to qualify for this trope when they tap into their Yoma power, as they start Hulking Out with their Superpowered Evil Side (at the cost of some oftheir beauty). This creates a slippery slope between their "Amazon-ness" and "Sexiness", except for one Claymore in particular: Undine, who plays this trope straight. Until it's revealed that she's using her Youma power to fake having such huge muscles and they're part of a bluff she puts on to psyche herself up and overcome her own fear.
Not to mention she carries the exact same amount of bulk and and muscle mass and the titular character Louie, who himself is one of the biggest characters in the series.
In a few of Go Nagai's works (Iron Muscle and Mazinger Angels), there's a recurring character named Sakurako Honou (see here). Very muscular (especially in the arms and abs) and veryfanservicey (up to and including a few naked shots in volume 3 of Iron Muscle).
Casca from Berserk is quite well-toned from her career as a mercenary and even admitted that she was embarrassed to wear a shoulder-revealing ball gown because of her muscles (of course this did not stop love interest Guts from totally gawking at her). After the trauma she suffered from the Eclipse, however, Casca loses a considerable amount of muscle.
Valmet from Jormungand is most assuredly this. Most evident during the requisite swimsuit scene in episode 9. The woman is ripped.◊
Later volumes of Baccano! have Aging, a roughly seven-foot-tall woman with a physique resembling Michelangelo's David, only with Boobs of Steel and 50% more muscle definition. While she intimidates the hell out of most men (it's somewhat reasonable to be afraid of a woman who uses a minigun as a one-handed firearm), the text makes it clear that the muscle makes her no less attractive.
Card Games
The majority of the Amazoness series of cards in Yu-Gi-Oh! are a clan of attractive women who are at least athletically built/toned. Their revealing attire doesn't exactly hurt in this regard either.
Comedy
The former comedy duo Idan Alterman and Avi Grainik used to perform as a pair of characters named Tsakhi and Meir, respectively, in various skit shows, and between 2001-2003 they hosted a talk show named The Neighbourhood Starsnote כּוֹכְבֵי הַשְּׁכוּנָה, Kokhvei haShkhuna; for some reason this show doesn’t appear on IMDb. At one point they had a segment on the show featuring the attempts to find a wife for Tsakhi, featuring videos sent by women from all over Israel who tried to win Tsakhi's affections. One of them was a prime example of this trope: a well-built and fairly attractive woman speaking to the camera while lifting weights and talking about training with Tsakhi. Meir wasn't too thrilled with her, but Tsakhi seemed to be more open to her, and even remarked it could be nice to say, "Watch out, or I'll call my wife on ya!" (Eventually he married another famous comedy character, though.)
Comic Books
She-Hulk is definitely this in a lot of depictions.
Heck, the current images for Amazon Chaser and Shulkie's own page give you a good look at a well-muscled yet gorgeous She-Hulk.
Power Girl has always been desirable and has the Most Common Superpower IN SPADES. But she also often has the muscle to actually hold them up.
Even moreso as Power Woman◊ in Alex Ross' Kingdom Come. Ross' bio for Power Woman even notes, "It is my contention that she has aged, but not terribly so, and that her physical stature has swelled to impressive bodybuilder-like proportions so that she represents the most aggressive superhuman attitudes from the female side."
Wonder Woman. She's usually tall and lithe, but some depictions are quite buff as well. For bonus points, she's a literal Amazon.
As pictured atop the page, Caitlin Fairchild (formerly of the now-defunct Gen 13 and now a supporting character of Superboy) wouldn't quite fit at first glance, but when her powers kick in, Caitlin tends to gain a good deal of muscle (in addition to other perks). The Movie (yes, one existed), provides a pretty good example starting at the 2:10 mark. On top of that, she grows all the way up to 6'4". She's also considered extremely beautiful in-universe; her teammate Freefall has a long-standing inferiority complex because she feels she can't measure up to Fairchild's ridiculous beauty, for instance.
Fairchild's build definitely a case of Depending on the Artist. She goes from "muscular powerhouse" to "a bit ripped" to "skinny supermodel" depending on who's drawing today.
Lyman Dally tends to like drawing muscular physiques for women seeing as he was a former bodybuilder himself. In one series of his, Max Rep, there's Quadra-Blu,◊ the most successful female bodybuilder in the galaxy and an on-again, off-again lover of the titular character (himself a bodybuilder). However, at one point◊ she does consider slimming down and going into fitness because she finds herself to be a bit too bulky. Max does not enjoy this news.
Recently, Dally launched a prequel webcomic (somewhat NSFW at times), Steroids 'n' Asteroids with Quadra-Blu, chronicling Quadra (who is drawn with softer facial features due to Art Evolution) before she met Max. A prominent supporting character of Quadra's is Bumbl-Bee, her physique trainer.
Lady Roider, another one of Dally's creations (as seen here), fits the bill.
Big Barda, a former member of Darkseid's Female Furies, is a bruiser who makes Supeslook like a midget in comparison. She's considered extremely beautiful in-universe, despite her humongous size and muscle tone.
Frank Cho seems to like employing this trope with most women he draws. Most women have some sort of exposed musculature while still maintaining feminine proportions such as large breasts and rears. He also tends to employ Male Gaze to highlight these points.
Like Big Barda above, Knockout, a supporting character of both Superboy and the Secret Six, fits this trope quite well. Her main characterization is as a Blood Knight who enjoys an Interplay of Sex and Violence and once attempted put Superboy through a long sequence of Corrupt the Cutie to be her perfect lover.
Orca, a member of Batman's Rogues Gallery, counts, with Beastess, Animorphism, and Petting Zoo People thrown into the mix. Thanks to a chemical formula devised from an Orca whale she studied at the Gotham Aquarium, Dr. Grace Balin transforms into a large and muscular Orca-human hybrid.
The second Fourplay of Bloodstrike is a sultry goth sexpot with strength-enhancing density powers and really sculpted arms, especially when drawn by her creator Tim Seeley. She loves revealing clothes and vamping on her male co-workers, and has a costume modeled after a dominatrix outfit.
The Pony POV Series has this with Dark World!Rarity. In addition to spending a thousand years as one of Discord's brainwashed Co-Dragons before being redeemed, she also spent it lugging around Tom and tons of rocks. As a result, she's ripped, but she's still...well, Rarity. Twilight even comments that Rarity looks graceful and lovely as ever. Spike also still considers her beautiful, and they finally end up an Official Couple.
Film
In Aces: Iron Eagle III, this trope accurately describes the female co-lead, Anna Morales: the beautiful, muscular woman who showed herself as also a determinator and a badass in her first scene by, while chained, pulling herself up by grabbing those chains, cutting through her wrists, then pulling herself between the ceiling and the rafter, to break them before climbing up to choke a prison guard with it on the way down.
In the movie Skin Deep, John Ritter, a guy who basically hasn't met a woman he hasn't wanted (or in many cases tried) to bang, picks up a hot looking babe and goes home with her. When they get naked, he discovers she's a really dedicated bodybuilder, muscles and all. When she asks him what he thinks of her, he says, "I feel like Mrs. Arnold Schwarzenegger." Said woman was played by Real Life female bodybuilder Raye Hollitt, better known to fans of American Gladiators as Zap.
In the film, My Lucky Stars featuring Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, the Japanese model who turned out to be a muscular martial artist when she took off her robe, during her Designated Girl Fight. Said woman was played by Real Life Amazonian Beauty/Hot Mom Michiko Nishiwaki, who's also a stuntwoman.
There's a whole genre of films based on this trope. Most of them feature some girl or other flexing, beating up men, and sometimes wrestling with another girl. They generally run from about PG-13 to softcore porn (there are a few who do hardcore porn, however), depending on the girls participating and what their limits were. Some notable examples are Yvette Bova, Renita Harris, Denise Masino, and Autumn Raby.
Pretty much the entire point of Haywire was to showcase real life MMA fighter Gina Carano beat up all the other guys in the movie. Especially in the hotel fight she is in a cocktail dress while doing so, with her arms and legs exposed while doing some rather intense choke holds.
Literature
Beth Halpern from the Michael Crichton novel The Sphere, was a very attractive weightlifter. One of the other characters described her as "Mother Nature with muscles".
Junapur from Cerberon is large, well-muscled, and beautiful. She is also a Little Bit Beastly, but George sees her as strong, swift and beautiful as the Amazonian ideal.
The tall, muscular, and pretty Monica Figuerola from the The Millennium Trilogy is described as this by the author and Blomkvist.
Meta
Occasionally, an ad on this wiki will appear showcasing Jillian Michaels, a woman with some impressive guns and some impressive... er, guns.
Music
Spoofed mercilessly by Soda Stereo's song "Mi novia tiene biceps" ("My girlfriend's got biceps"), in which the narrator is rather cynical in regards to his girlfriend's obsession with becoming one of these.
Beth Phoenix embodies this trope. She's nicknamed "The Glamazon."
Although Chyna started out as a sometimes portrayed as a Brawn Hilda, she quickly became perceived this trope for many fans, and this increased after several plastic surgeries (a set of breast implants and having her jaw reconstructed) and as D-Generation X turned Face. At the height of her popularity she posed for Playboy, and that issue set records for sales.
Trish Stratus and Torrie Wilson were both rather famous fitness models before getting involved in pro wrestling.
Nitro Girl Fyre (Teri Byrne) was a fitness competitor before joining the Nitro Girls and had light but noticeable muscles. She also worked fitness competition moves like straddle lifts and one-armed pushups into her dance routines.
When your really get down to it, most of the WWE Divas fit this to a certain degree. While they're frequently criticized for being all looks and no talent, a lot of people noticed when actress and TV host Maria Menounos appeared in the ring, she looked downright sickly standing next to the likes of Gail Kim, Alicia Fox, and Kelly Kelly. Even though none of them are known for being exceptionally buff, they were obviously more muscular and athletic than Menounos was, and no less sexy for it.
Video Games
Street Fighter gives us Chun-Li, mainly due to her famous legs that fluctuate from simply well-toned to two massive pillars of muscle in most Capcom games. While her clothing tends to be fairly modest, the official art gets around that by putting her legs front and center. However, it should be noted that she was depicted with muscular arms and abs in Alpha.
Other characters like Cammy (somewhat hard to notice at times, considering that the camera tends to focus on her other side) and Juri (mainly her midriff, although her arms are pretty well-built as well) also fit this trope as they're both extremely toned.
Vanessa Lewis from Virtua Fighter. Her outfits always show off a lot skin, but especially emphasize her washboard abs and tree-trunk thighs. This was most noticeable in Virtua Fighter 4. Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown makes it optional; players can customize her with a skin texture that greatly increases her muscle tone.
Sarah also had a bit of this going on in 4, too, in the form of biceps. Like Vanessa, she was slimmed down in 5, and muscle tone and definition vanished.
From SNK, we have Blue Mary, who is a borderline example thanks to defined biceps (this applies almost exclusively to her appearances in The King Of Fighters).
Shina from Bloody Roar tends to be buffer than her fellow ladies but still quite attractive.
In F-Zero X, a grand total of 26 characters were added to the original four to bump the roster number up to a grand total of 30. One of the three females introduced in this game, Mrs. Arrow, had a noticeably muscular build.◊ GX shows that she's an ardent bodybuilder through her Idle Animations at the Settings screen, her post-race interviews, and her ending, but she's also quite curvy. Characters like Jody and Kate are of an athletic body type, but it's nowhere close to that of Mrs. Arrow's.
Akiko Daimon. She appeared in Taisen Hot Gimmick Forever, an obscure game about mahjong. Despite this, she has many followers of her muscular physique.
Ayla from Chrono Trigger just about qualifies for this trope. Even though she doesn't look that muscular in the game (probably a result of the art style; Akira Toriyama tends to only draw male characters as muscular), she's certainly described as such, and is exceptional at fighting without any weapons or magic. Interestingly, some of her "magic" abilities revolve around her accompanying attractiveness, with techniques like Kiss, Charm, and Cat Attack.
Almost every MMORPG or High FantasyRole-Playing Game that features female orcs as a playable characters will usually depict them in the concept art as extremely muscular, usually busty, and wearing more or less (usually less) clothing than their human counterparts. The downside being that they usually have faces that may detract some people. The prominent examples come from World of Warcraft (see here) and Lineage 2 (see here).
To a lesser degree, female night elves also qualify for this trope. Given that the night elven Sentinel armies are mostly comprised of women.
Concept art of Dragon Age II depicts females of the Qunari (a group of mainly Kossith who follow the Qun, or a strict code of honor and stoicism) as this. In story, there are two main groups of them, and the mainstream group uses the Qun to prevent women from being warriors and have something of a Stay in the Kitchen dogma where females are not considered warriors, while the other faction may allow female warriors. Bioware fans are naturally rather curious to see if they'll include a female qunari warrior from the latter faction in the party at some point during the franchise.
Mark of the Assassin reveals that the Qunari do have female members in the Ben-Hassrath, the religious enforcers of the Qun.
There's also Aveline Vallen, who fills the role nicely. Unfortunately, you only get to see her feminine figure during the prologue.
This is a common interpretation of Yuugi Hoshiguma, one of Touhou's two prominent onis, in fanwork.
Several games that allow for a Create-A-Character feature usually provide players with the option to create Amazonian Beauties of their own.
For example, Rumble Roses XX has a character editor that allows the player to determine parameters such as weight by performing certain actions in a match. One of these sliders allowed you to muscle up the girls.
In Final Fantasy VII, when Cloud cross-dresses, he is mistaken for one of these by a couple background NPCs. In the words of one of them: "Ooh, hard! You work out?"
In Slimy Thief there's the tall, muscular, Chainmail Bikini-wearing Amazon who's a recurring character. Later on in a Crossover arc, the character Red is introduced. She's another tall, muscular female warrior, but goes even further by being bare-breasted the whole time.
This trope is actually deconstructed in the case of Tetsuko and Satin Steele. Despite being the titular characters and Ms. Fanservice of their respective comics, not everyone finds either protagonist very attractive, especially their love interests. Tetsuko's boyfriend threatens to leave her because she's more muscular than him, while Satin's boyfriend likens having sex with her to "fucking a man with tits." Though, it's common in the genre to cast the first boyfriend as a Straw Critic who doesn't find women with muscles appealing.
Zuzana Spears aka "The Bodyrock Chick." While her clothing style isn't outside the realm of athletic gear, you'd be hard pressed to find her wearing anything that doesn't show off her abs and sizable cleavage and that isn't extremely snug from the waist down. Couple that with the provactive angles all of her videos are shot in.
Hippolyta of the Whateley Universe wears tight, skimpy outfits even though she doesn't like guys ogling her. (She does, however like girls ogling her. That's why she is in Poe cottage.)
Theepisode "Beef" from Dave The Barbarian has Princess Candy trying to woo away a potential suitor from the tall and muscular Bicepia the Warrior Woman by eating magic broccoli to gain a similar figure. However, this begins to go out the window as Candy digests more and more broccoli; she grows more and more buff, but her beauty and brains quickly get thrown onto the backburner.
In Futurama the Amazonians, from the planet Amazonia, are a of race gigantic, muscular, scantily clad tribal women. There were male Amazonians but they all died out due to crushed pelvises from sex, or, as they call it, snu-snu. Both Fry and Zapp were equally horrified and turned on when they received the sentence of death by snu-snu.
In a situation similar to, but distinct from the below "Strong Arms of the Ma," "The Butterjunk Effect" has Leela and Amy getting huge on a natural (but still illegal) steroid substitute known as Nectar after a disappointing several first matches of competing in the Butterfly Derby (essentially ultraviolent cat fights featuring women in skimpy, winged outfits). Leela and Amy aren't the only competitors who get juiced on Nectar, but most of the other women are more "toned" than "built," barring Leela and Amy's rivals, Tank and Truck of the Murderflies (who still aren't quite as big or defined; this is in spite of them buying out the remainder of the Nectar and consuming it to get a leg up on Leela and Amy). None of the Butterfly Derby competitors are seen as ugly per se (early on, Professor Farnsworth even matter-of-factly remarks, "I love a stalwart female physique as much as the next guy, but..."); the turn-off for the men (Fry and Kiff in particular) seems to be the ladies' heightened aggression and more masculine personalities moreso than their increased muscle mass. Fry himself gets over this when he's accidentally sprayed with the pheromones of a male butterfly, making him irresistible to anyone who ingested Nectar (which contains female butterfly hormones).
In The Simpsons, Homer buys a valuable weight-lifting set from a garage sale, and Marge develops anxiety problems due to an encounter with a mugger. Marge eventually starts using the weight-lifting set and gains not only her confidence back, but also a nice muscular body. Homer approves of it at first ("It's like I'm married to Shaft!"), but then Marge gets hooked on steroids and grows obsessed with getting stronger, turning her into a violent Brawn Hilda.
"Strong Arms of the Ma" goes both ways with this. Most, if not all of the other FBBs shown in the episode are portrayed in a mostly favorable light and regarded as attractive, in spite of the anti-steroid message. Marge's old neighbor Ruth Powers (the one who convinces Marge to get roided up) has her physique admired by Marge and in turn tells Marge, "Y'know, another four inches on your neck, and you'd look pretty hot." At the bodybuilding competition, the women (referred to as "Iron Maidens") earn applause and wild cheers from the audience while group posing (although the announcer quips beforehand that the competition's doctors have assured the panel the contestants are indeed women). Two other FBBs elicit similar positive responses: a woman in a flattering pink dress and matching white evening gloves and heels who lifts up and smashes a piano instead of playing it, then telling the onlookers to "Support the arts!"; and a woman dressed as cowgirl who sings a rendition of Gene Pitney's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (and ruffles Professor Fink's hair) during the talent portion of the competition. The only time in the episode anyone seems to detest the idea of a muscular woman (outside of Marge's growing mean streak and steroid abuse) is when a none too thrilled Bart exclaims, "Ay, caramba! I'm off women forever" in response to seeing the aforementioned "Iron Maidens."
In Eek The Cat, Sharky has a crush on a muscular female "Patriotic Warrior" named "Platinum."
Alex from Totally Spies! becomes one, but then gets more muscle and becomes to much of a good thing by the end.
A segment for The Justice Friends ("Krunk's Date") has The Infraggable Krunk assuming a Dating Catwoman relationship with She-Thing (not to be confused with the alias of Marvel character Sharon Ventura), his physical and intellectual equal. Sadly, between being on opposite sides of the law and a few broken nails, it was never meant to be.
COPS featured the villainous Miss Demeanor, a serious Butterface with superhuman strength. While it's not as obvious in her normal attire, she spends several whole episodes in tight-fitting workout gear that emphasizes her impressively muscular physique. Men don't show much interest in her, though, because of the "Butterface" thing and the fact that she's kind of a bitch.
Korra is particularly notable among animated Action Girls and other examples of this trope for having a realistically proportioned athlete's build; she does not have ridiculously long legs, an absurd example of the Most Common Superpower or an Impossible Hourglass Figure to complement her muscles (which are also of a plausible size and shape), and overall she looks realistically stocky (especially by animated standards). None of this prevents her being considered attractive both by viewers and other characters.
