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alt title(s): The Casanova

Gentlemen, I'm sure we can sort this out amicably. Look at it this way: if you could do what I could do, you'd do it too! But you can't. I can. And I have. And I'll do it again. So you should be happy for me, just a little tiny bit, don't you think?
David Tennant as Casanova in the 2005 BBC adaptation.

The sexual predator — a character who relentlessly pursues, lands, loves and then abandons members of the opposite sex. Sometimes played for laughs, sometimes portrayed as a monster, but always successful in his or her endeavors, leaving behind a string of broken hearts and (occasionally) vows of revenge. Casanova's only motivation is indulging his personal lusts and desires, and sating them with the bodies of his conquests.

Contrast with the much less successful Leisure Suit Larry and Handsome Lech, and the the more sympathetic type who's only Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places, and compare with the Kavorka Man. A guy who gets the girls like a Casanova, but unintentionally, is a Chick Magnet. If kind-hearted, may overlap with Chivalrous Pervert.

The trope is named for Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (1725-1798), a soldier, spy, diplomat and adventurer whose extensive but unreliable autobiography established his eternal fame as a lover. (It should be noted that the historical Casanova was actually something closer to a Chivalrous Pervert who really was looking for love... just with women who were locked in loveless political marriages, that's all.)

Many films, TV movies and TV mini-series are called and based on that person. The most known are Fellini's 1976 film, the 2005 film starring Heath Ledger, and the 2005 BBC drama mini-series starring David Tennant.

For the juvenile version — the above without the sex — see Kid Anova. For the female version see The Vamp and Femme Fatale. If the guy is actually only rumored to be a Casanova and has no evidence onscreen, it's the Urban Legend Love Life. If he develops feelings for one of his conquests (or someone who refuses him), he's a Ladykiller In Love. See Mambo Intimacy 5 for when the mechanics of a game encourage the player character to act this way.

Examples:

Anime
  • George from Paradise Kiss before he falls for Yukari.
  • Guiche from Zero No Tsukaima. Possibly Julio as well, although he tends to have girls pursuing him.
  • Dio Brando from Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure is so charismatic and good-looking that he managed to father four children. With four different women.
  • Akio and Touga from Revolutionary Girl Utena use, manipulate and abuse women and men alike using in great part their sex appeal for More Than Mind Control effect. Then Akio does it to Touga, establishing him as a sort of Alpha Casanova.
  • Makoto from School Days is flanderized into this about halfway into the story. In the anime and at least one game ending, this comes back to bite him in the ass when he is murdered by one of his spurned lovers.
  • Aoshima in Ah! My Goddess, who is explicitly referred to as a "casanova." Fortunately, when he's not busy being a slimy excuse for a human being, he tends to be the Buttmonkey.
  • Takeo Tsurumaru in Naru Taru.
  • Paptimus Scirrocco from Zeta Gundam is a very evil version of this. He's basically what happens when you combine a Casanova with a Magnificent Bastard and give him the psychic powers of a Newtype. Generally the kind that uses his charms more to use woman as tools than just as sexual objects, though.
  • Karin's brother, Ren, sucks the blood of stressed out women every night. He says they're usually quite grateful afterwards, but tend to keep bugging him afterward.
  • General Cross from D.Gray-Man
  • Ryou from Strawberry Shake Sweet, in a Girls Love example, has bedded about a thousand girls and that's only the known minimum.
  • Explored to an extent in Golgo 13. The title character tends to have sex before a job, and does have good luck at getting women to join him in bed. However, he just as often hires prostitutes, and due to his notorious blank expression not changing, a number of readers have theorized he doesn't actually enjoy it.

Comic Books
  • Jack from Fables and his spinoff comic Jack of Fables.
    • Also the entire point of Prince Charming. The reason he's in so many stories is because he constantly marries and abandons various princesses. This leads to him originally being less than popular in Fabletown.
  • Starfox of The Avengers. It's revealed in She Hulk that he's an inadvertant rapist who unconsciously uses his psychic powers to get women into bed, but the canonicity of She Hulk is sometimes dubious.
  • For your consideration ladies and gentlemen, the Incredible Hercules. Pulls about as much tail as James Bond.

Film
  • Dare I say, Casanova from the film Casanova?
  • Telly, the HIV-infected, utterly unfeeling "Virgin Surgeon" in Kids.
  • James Bond, of course. Partially subverted in that in some cases, he pursues the woman not for sex/conquest for its own sake, but to win her as an ally/defector for purposes of his mission objective.
  • Tony Stark in the Iron Man movie. Clams to have gone 12-for-13 in one year with Maxim cover girls. Loves and dumps Christine Everheart in the movie, and his assistant indicates she's "taken out the trash" before.
    • In fact, this trope is often part of the Rich Idiot With No Day Job's cover.
    • 12-for-12 - he couldn't make his schedule work with March, but December was twins. Give the man SOME credit, people!
  • Dorian Gray, not only in The Picture of Dorian Gray but even moreso in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie.
  • Pavi Largo from Repo! The Genetic Opera is close to being the epitome of this trope. As he says himself in 'Mark It Up':
    Ask a Gentern who they prefer—ten out of nine will say the Pavi!
  • Duke of Rochester from The Libertine.
    • And Don Juan de Marco, as well.

Literature
  • Valmont and Madame Merteuil of Les Liaisons dangereuses are classic literary examples.
  • Mr. Wednesday from American Gods is a lecherous old man with supernatural charm, a penchant for virgins, and no respect for age-of-consent laws. The book's protagonist, Shadow, reluctantly finds himself witnessing the seduction of a teenage waitress, deciding it was "like watching an old wolf stalking a fawn too young to know that if it did not run, and run now, it would wind up in a distant glade with its bones picked clean by the ravens." In fact, this is exactly how Shadow got conceived.
  • Casanunda the dwarf from Discworld is a parody of this trope.
  • Anatole Kuragin from War And Peace. He's a well-known womanizer whose first interaction with a semi-main character is mademoiselle Bourienne, a maid at Prince Bolkonsky's house, while Anatole was there to court the prince's daughter Marya. He later marries the daughter of a Polish farmer in exchange for room and board during one military campaign, and then, just for fun, sets out to marry-and-kidnap Natasha Rostov.
  • Lude from House Of Leaves, who actually keeps a list of his conquests, their prominent features, and how he had sex with them.
  • A character in Don Quixote is also portrayed like this in the male villager's stories about her. We later find out these injuries were imagined, she was just being chaste and as she wisely points out, she can't help being beautiful.
  • James Bond again. This is brought out most clearly in the last paragraph of the series, effectively describing how he can never settle down with one woman.
  • In Dan Abnett's Gaunts Ghosts novel Necropolis, Gaunt after a wartime fling thinks of his mentor Otkar who had left a trail of tearful women behind him and warned Gaunt not to get involved, as it would weaken him. Gaunt realizes that although as soon as the war is over, their social classes would separate them (which she knows too), he would now fight to the end to save this woman, and that his emotional investment in the Ghosts has in reality kept him on the job.
  • Larry Douglas in The Other Side of Midnight. The first "book" of the novel tells the life stories of two of his many conquests, Catherine Alexander and Noelle Page, via alternating chapters. The former marries him, unaware of his true nature; the latter, whom he abandoned years before he met Catherine, devotes her life to destroying him. The remainder of the story is about what happens when Noelle manipulates events to bring Larry back into her life.

Live Action TV
  • Christian Troy on Nip/Tuck.
  • Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who and Torchwood - bisexual, promiscuous, but benign.
  • Brian in Seacht.
  • Patrick of Coupling behaves like a cold hearted seducer, unable to see women as anything but potential conquests, dumping his girlfriends almost immediately, and compiling a vast collection of sex tapes of his conquests. Interestingly, he avoids being loathsome, as he's portrayed as stupid rather than deliberately malicious.
  • Barney from How I Met Your Mother. There's barely been an episode in the series where he hasn't hit on at least one woman, and uses a number of bizarre means to seduce them (which are surprisingly successful).
    • Slightly deconstructed — for the most part, he only does well with bimbos and desperate women.
    Ted: Does that ever work for you? (referring to one of Barney's numerous pick up lines and schemes)
    Barney: Ted, the question is do they ever not work for me? Either way the answer is about half the time.
    • In a recent episode Barney was revealed to have slept with 200 women (and counting). Marshall, while disgusted, decided to crunch the numbers based on the number of women Barney hits on on average every week and calculated (albeit with quite a bit of leeway) that based on that information and his years of sexual activity, Barney's success rate with women works out at a little over 1%. There's no telling if that is anywhere near accurate though.
  • Hank Moody on Californication.
  • Brian Kinney from Queer As Folk almost nightly indulges in one night stands.
  • Joey on Friends.
  • Occasionally, Jerry and George from Seinfeld.
  • Charley on Empty Nest
  • Brian in Wings
  • Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H, although he occasionally takes a break to get his heart stepped on.
  • Napoleon Solo in The Man From UNCLE cuts a wide swathe through various femmes fatale, female innocents, and the UNCLE secretarial pool.
  • Chuck Bass in Gossip Girl.
  • Charlie Harper (Charlie Sheen) in Two And A Half Men.
  • Dr. Sloane in Greys Anatomy.
  • Dean Winchester on Supernatural.
  • Connor from Trust Me seems to be edging into this trope.
  • Kenny Beckett on Daves Worlds
  • Otoya Kurenai in Kamen Rider Kiva.
  • Latka's alter ego Vic Ferrari from Taxi, introduced at the end of Season 3 and the catalyst for a Split Personality problem that unfolded over much of the following season. This climaxed when he had to win back his old girlfriend Simka from Vic (whom he referred to as "a two-bit bossa nova"). Once he managed to convince her that Vic wouldn't actually love her, she was able to convince Vic to leave for good.
  • Bulldog from Frasier
    Bulldog: [on the phone] Come on now. No tears. I’ll never forget you either, Sandy. Linda? Really? I thought I was talking to your sister. Oh well, tell her same goes.
  • Samantha of Sex And The City arguably is more of a female version of this than The Vamp or Femme Fatale, as her motivations are lust rather than being a "bad girl".
  • Al Mundy of It Takes A Thief seems to pick up a new woman every episode, and even the ones who are initially frosty are charmed by him in the end. He doesn't seem to get much actual sex, though, because Noah always puts a stop to things just when the woman is softening up.
  • An episode of The Equalizer had a handsome chronic womaniser get kidnapped by industrial spies who keep insisting that "she said she gave it to you" and refuse to believe his claims of innocence. Realising he's going to be tortured he quickly "confesses" and promises to get "it" to them in 24 hours — he then has to hire the Equalizer to help him sort though the multitude of women he's dated to find the right one. "It" turns out to be a microdot on a matchbook handed to him with a girl's phone number written on the inside.

Tabletop Games

Theater
  • Even older than the original Casanova was the character Don Juan, whose first recorded appearance was in the 17th century Spanish play The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest.
    • Don Juan was the subject of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni (of which we see an excerpt, and a vaudeville parody, in Amadeus).
    • In psychology, a person who displays a need to dominate and have multiple sexual relationships with woman is said to have Don Juanism.
  • Into The Woods has an amazing parody of this in the songs 'Agony' and the reprise by the two princes.
  • The Duke in Rigoletto certainly qualifies, and is a Karma Houdini to boot.

Video Games
  • Panther Caruso from Star Fox relentlessly pursues Krystal, and is described more than once by Nintendo as being a self-proclaimed ladies' man. He could, however, be a slight subversion in the sense that he never really gets anywhere with Krystal (who shares a mutual affection with Fox McCloud), and once he actually does get her in Command, he is incredibly devoted to her.
  • Gannayev of Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer regularly abuses his Spirit Shaman powers for the sake of jumping into the fantasies of innocent young farmgirls and having hot dream-sex. One sidequest deals with a girl with latent powers that wasn't satisfied with just a one-night stand and ended up creating her own Gannayev in her head. Real Gann wasn't amused.
  • Goto, from Mana Khemia 2, is seen going on dates with various students in groups (as well as some one on one time with the Chairman). When the main cast doubt his claims of natural desirability they take a school-wide poll, only to find out that 100% of the girls want him as well as 1/3 of the guys, and the only reason the members of Ulrika's workshop aren't effected is he's purposefully toning down his charm around them. Then things get a bit complicated when the son of one of his old flings shows up looking for revenge...
  • Assassins Creed 2 has beat-up missions, which usually revolve around a woman looking for a random dude to beat up their cheating bastard husband. Hilarity Ensues when they are caught with their lovers, then beaten the shit out of.
    • You also meet Casanova himself who has you deliver love letters to two women at the same time.

Webcomics
  • Adam Terrence from the webcomic Loserz. As seen here.
  • Vlad, the Make-Out King, from Achewood. (Or so he claims)
  • Joe Rosenthal in It's Walky! takes this to the point of practically being another super-power: he managed to have sex with an astonishing 2030+ women before settling down with Rachel. This is all the more astonishing given his somewhat kavorka-ish horndog attitude: one time, he set out intentionally to sleep with 30 women in one day (to 'get the gay off of me' after having his head shoved in Walky's crotch in an attempt to obscure his face), and succeeded.
    • While he stands out, he is hardly the only Abductee who is highly successful in bed, either - which is rather ominous given that the Aliens and Linda Walkerton apparently meant to breed the Abductees to make the next generation of their Super Soldier army.
  • El Chupecabre ("Chuy") from Girly is irresistably attractive to women. He took this as his calling and left a string of naked, immensely-satisfied women in his wake until Winter and Otra helped him to mend his ways.
  • Rayne Summers of Least I Could Do even down to the extreme callousness. He's getting better, though.
  • Zach, of Girls With Slingshots is arguably a subversion. Sure, he's slept with hundreds of women, but he sees it as a community service thing. He gives virgins a good first time and helps service the elderly to make them feel loved again.
  • Tip from Skin Horse. The other characters refer to it as his "superpower". Even more remarkable because he likes wearing women's clothing in public. Borders on a Kavorka Man, in fact, despite being utterly charming- his success record is just too supernatural.
  • Ian, of What Birds Know, is the town Casanova, making bets with his friends about how quickly he can date and bed girls. He's also oblivious to the crush his sister's friend Elia has on him.

Web Original
  • Don Sebastiano, at the Super Hero School Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe. The Don (as he is also known) is a major campus supervillain, and enjoys romancing women. Once he's gotten what he's after he likes to dump them with as much public humiliation as he can arrange. He seems to enjoy the 'hurting them' part more than the 'boinking them' part, which makes this more like a Kavorka Man activity.
  • Hugh Griffin, president of the *USA in Decades Of Darkness. As the author writes, his wife knows when to look away.
  • Shadow Hawk from Epic Tales.

Western Animation
  • Boomhauer from King Of The Hill. Despite the fact that most of his conquests don't seem to mind, he gets a cruel comuppance when the tables are turned on him: the one woman who he does fall in love with turns out to not even be able to get his name right, and tells him, to his face, in the arms of another man, while he's on his knees after proposing to her, that whenever he talks, she just nods and smiles until his pants come off. Ouch.
  • Mayor Joe Quimby from The Simpsons, who is an exaggerated, evil-mirror-universe parody of Edward F. Kennedy.
  • Glenn Quagmire from Family Guy. He is a step forward from being just a regular Casanova - he is a pervert, victimizer, and potential rapist as well.
  • Bender from Futurama, although he usually goes after hookerbots, and does fall in love occasionally.
  • Juandissimo Magnifico on The Fairly Oddparents, who has every female fairy swooning over him (except Wanda, his TRUE and ONLY LOVE INTEREST).
  • J.F.Kennedy from Clone High.
  • Prince Naveen (of Maldonia!) from The Princess And The Frog is like this at first.

Real Life
  • Anthony Quinn. Three marriages, ten legitimate children, three acknowledged illegitimate children, and a string of acknowledged and confirmed sexual conquests stretching across four continents.
  • Screamin' Jay Hawkins estimated he had about 57 children by different women— and the number could have in fact been as high as 75 (!!!).
  • Gene Simmons of KISS fame, who has the pictures to prove it. Though his claims are still probably exaggerated. In fact, could be applied to many rock stars to some degree.
  • Wilt Chamberlain famously claimed to have slept with "20,000 women" in his autobiography. This, however, is all but disbelieved by anyone with a brain. Dennis Rodman, no paragon of monogamy himself, wrote: "Wilt Chamberlain lied out of his ass and made some money. He said he slept with 20,000 women. Think about it. That's three or four women a day every day for fifteen to twenty years. I defy anyone to keep up that kind of pace."
    • Cracked's calculations are a little different, but no less unlikely.
  • Hugh Hefner. That is all.
  • Warren Beatty, until he got married.

The Care TakerStock CharactersThe Charmer
Bread And CircusesGenerally Recognised TropesCharacters
Cake EaterAlways MaleKid Anova
Black WidowThis Index Is Full Of PervertsChivalrous Pervert