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Hideous Babes-Ho!
Some girls like
To dress like a witch
Some girls like to dress like a queen
Best way a girl
Can dress for me
Is in a Goblin suit
(They look so cute...)
I dig her batrachian 1 "Froglike", if anyone cares. lips
Her bulbous eyes and scaly hips.
— The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, "The Innsmouth Look"
Any "exotic" being (alien, monster, robot, demon, ghost, etc.) bearing a strong resemblance to an attractive human female, sometimes when she doesn't necessarily have to.
This trope comes in several varieties:
1. The result of a common form of Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism in fiction, in which the female members of a nonhuman species are much more attractive/less monstrous than the males.
2. A "cute" female version of a previously-existing monster, sometimes with the original monster having been female to start with (see Gorgeous Gorgons).
3. An original creation lacking male counterparts, subject to the same visual conventions as above.
Female One Gender Races are typically these. Very rarely, you will get a Cute Monster Guy, and assume that if there is an ensemble of various supernatural creatures, the few female member(s) will be Cute Monster Girls.
Cute Monster Girls are seen as somewhat troubling by some, since they imply (especially Type 1) that the males of an intelligent species can look like whatever they want, but the females must always be attractive to male humans (because Men Need Martians!). Beyond that it suggests that male monsters should be killed, while the females should be felled in a different way.
Cute Monster Girls are often the mothers of Half Human Hybrids, while monstrous females rarely are. May be a subset of Stripperiffic, and may therefore contribute to the alienation of some women from genre fandom.
Related to Moe Anthropomorphism and Gijinka in Fan Art circles. Often subject to Fantastic Arousal. Compare Green Skinned Space Babe and Petting Zoo People. See also Yokai.
Examples
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- Lum from Urusei Yatsura looks like a cute teenaged girl with green hair and little horns, but is explained as being an alien whose race is the inspiration for Japanese ogres. Her being such is actually lifted straight from Japanese mythology, where Oni woman are supernaturally beautiful, but capable of assuming fearsome visages when angry or jealous.
- Then there's Lum's friend Oyuki (a yuki-no-onna- although these ghosts are usually portrayed as attractive anyway) and secondary character Kurama (crow tengu- her servants look like anthropomorphic crows, while she's a pretty girl with small crow wings on her head). One might tenatively incorporate Ran (loosely based on the Gaki, a life-draining ghost) and Benten (a punk biker version of the Goddess of Knowledge, Art and Beauty) into this category as well.
- Mink from Dragon Half, though granted, she's half human herself; her mother was a dragon. Her mother usually transforms into a humanoid form unless she becomes angry.
- There is also a half-dragon Mink in the webcomic Darken. Pretty, too.
- The series Petopeto-San is entirely devoted to the concept of cute monster girls (some of which are half human).
- Evangeline from Mahou Sensei Negima.
- The series also has the Cute Ghost Girl Sayo, the robotic Chachamaru along with numerous Cute Monster Girls in Magicus Mundus, most prominently Fate's underlings, several of whom have horns.
- Heck, half of Mundus Magicus is inhabited by Cute Monster Girls. And if a recent revelation is true, then Mars is full of them, too. Who knew?
- Not to mention Setsuna, a half-tengu and self-proclaimed monster. Not that anybody cares...
- Hazuki from Tsukuyomi Moon Phase. Anyone unfamiliar with the story and character would NEVER assume she's a monster! The opening theme doesn't help.
- Karin from the eponymous Karin (a.k.a, "Chibi Vampire")
- A fair amount of the female cast of sola.
- Seth Nightroad from Trinity Blood.
- The anime Magical Pokaan (pictured above) gives us four Cute Monster Girls - a werewolf, a vampire, a witch, and an android from left to right, top to bottom.
- The Bugrom of El Hazard The Magnificent World mostly resembled giant neon cockroaches, with the exception of their queen, who resembled a normal attractive human female with antennae.
- Mayu of Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun. For a succubus, she's cute, busty, and Does Not Like Men. She's training to work on the last part, though. Later, her friend and love rival Reika is revealed to be a succubus as well, albeit without the Androphobia, instead having a healthy dose of Cannot Spit It Out.
- A major part of Rosario To Vampire.
- Demonbane takes this to the logical extreme: female books look like cute girls. Yes, books. And since no characters in the series are stated to be male books and there are books that don't look like cute girls, it can be safely assumed that male books look like regular books.
- Borders on crossing over into the DANGER ZONE but Bagi
 ◊ of Bagi the Monster of Mighty Nature. Though as the movie progresses she begins to regress towards her half-animal side and eventually loses speech and coherent thought by the end.
- Fran Madaraki of Franken Fran is basically Moe Frankensteins Monster. She does veer into "creepy" on occasion - for example, the first time we meet her, one of her eyeballs falls into her tea.
- The most frightening thing about her however is... well you will have to see for yourself. All that can be said is that she fits the Mad Scientist AND Mad Doctor persona to a tic.
- There is a whole sub-genre for redrawing mecha as girls wearing the machine as armour. It has gone so far as the Destroid Monster! But perhaps the ultimate mecha example is the Valsion's◊ entirely canon sister unit, the Valsione◊.
- A list of female creatures for many a Mon series will include plenty of Cute Monster Girls as well as slightly less conventional female monsters.
- The Wind warriors from Digimon Frontier explicitly embody this trope - when Zoe obtains the Beast Wind spirit, not only does it resemble nothing other than a lingerie model with avian wings, but unlike every other Beast spirit, it doesn't even have the destructive impulses that took other characters up to three episodes to get under control. This is slightly more excusable with the other Wind warriors, as one of them is supposed to be human, another is supposed to be half-human, and the last has no real requirements - but each form distinctly fails in the "Monster" part of "Digital Monster".
- Let's not forget the earlier Angewomon, LadyDevimon, Lilymon and Rosemon. The Bishonen Line means most female Digimon are gonna end up like this at some point.
- Though the Zentradi from Macross and Robotech are Human Aliens, the males range in appearance from ugly to average to handsome, with the occasional odd skin tone and/or cybernetic aspect, while the female Zentradi are always depicted as beautiful. The Zentradi designs in The Movie, Do You Remember Love?, are probably the strongest examples of this trope.
- Averted in Death Note: Rem has a few stereotypically feminine traits, but is overall grotesque and was initially mistaken for male. The manga guide How to Read 13 also revealed that the following shinigami were female: fat and salamander-like Midora, rotted-looking Daril Ghiroza, monstrous Kinddara Guivelostain, and Nu, who resembles a rock with eyes.
- Tons of them in YuYu Hakusho, especially during the tournament which features a catgirl announcer and a dragongirl referee (in baggy knee-high socks, droooool).
- Monster Boys too, (Yoko) Kurama probably being the main one.
- Almost every member of the Unwanted Harem in Omamori Himari. There's a Cat Girl with Gag Boobs, a Foreign Fanservice Meido tea-cup spirit with even bigger Gag Boobs, a Token Loli water-snake spirit Emotionless Girl, and a blood-thirsty (literally) Yandere forest spirit.
- Niche from Tegami Bachi counts. While her cuteness depends on who you ask, she certainly fills the monster and girl roles.
- Miiru from the second volume of Fushigi Yuugi. She is actually a servant of Tenkou who became such because she and her brother were killed for incest and wanted Tenkou's help to find a place where they could be happy. In the manga, her shadow is shown as a demon.
- Monster Soul has a few, with two of them being a mummy and a golem respectfully.
- Gainax's various merchandise for Neon Genesis Evangelion includes the "Apostle XX" line of figurines, which takes several of the Angels and turns them into Cute Monster Girls. Behold Lilith, Sachiel, Shamshel, Sahaquiel, Zeruel, Arael, Armisael and Tabris.
- All of the female mermaids in Seto No Hanayome. The males tend to be less "cute" and more "Manly". Except Masa.
- Certy from Durarara is a Dullahan that looks like a beautiful, though deathly pale, woman from the neck down. From the neck up? Well, she has no head.
- Gold Digger goes both ways; cute monster girls along with cute monster guys.
- From the same publisher, Twilight X has an interesting variant in which the human men are drawn with fairly unattractive faces, not to mention blank, inhuman eyes, while the women are all drawn in the classic sexy anime girl style.
- Marvel comics' Skrull would often fit, with the males being bug eyed and inhuman, while their princess was quite fetching, and even bereft of the skrull chin ripple. Later artworks shows the males as more human-looking, and the females having unusually large eyes. (But there was still some gap in attractiveness)
- Since they're a whole species of shapeshifters, they can look however they want. As Runaways shows, they can even switch genders at will (appearance-wise, at least, if not functionally.)
- While the regular Hulk is generally seen as a berserk, hideously muscular, unintelligent monster when in Hulk form, She-Hulk is basically just a somewhat larger, stronger, greener version of her human counterpart. The whole thing doesn't seem like too big a deal, and many would even consider her monster form sexier, in a cave girl sort of way (if cave girls dress like a New York fashion plate, that is).
- It's common in comics, especially X-Men comics, especially Generation X; most of the more monstrous mutations will be male, while the women are always sexy.
- Beauty Equals Goodness is often going on there. For example, when she first showed up, Marrow had bones sticking out all over, including on her face. Later, she joined the X-Men, and it wasn't long before she was made more attractive, with most of the protrusions gone and those that remained looking like they could merely be part of her costume (her prettification at least wasn't overnight for no reason other than being one of the good guys, story-wise). There are other examples, but she's probably the most obvious.
- The X-books' resident girl werewolf, Wolfsbane, has gone from having a odd/cute 'wolfweregirl' transitional form, to a 'The Howling'-style monstrous appearance.
- Fantasia Faust, from the erotic fantasy comic Ironwood, started out as a very bulky non-gendered iron golem designed to kill fae. Then her creator figured that the golem would be more effective if he made it really attractive and disguised the fact that it was made of iron. Then, once the fae were dealt with, he realized he had a super-strong, super-sexy non-human babe hanging around, and decided to explore a few fetishes of his.
- Lampshaded in an issue of Namor The Sub-Mariner, were all the women are akin to Green Skinned Space Babe while all Atlantean males are blue brutes, except for Prince Namor of course.
- Delphyne Gorgon is a Cute Medusa from Incredible Hercules. The fact that she wears a Goth-styled School Girl Uniform just makes it better.
Fan Works
- There's an entire subgenre of Fan Art involving giving monsters from various sources the Cute Monster Girl treatment. It's not uncommon for them to also be shown "doing their thing", in order to bring the Grotesque Cute.
- Three Words: The Monster Girl Encyclopedia: The English Translated Version (with the latest artwork by the original artist). It's a field guide to a world where all the monster races (comprising virtually all the popular monster species in global fiction) have been reduced to One Gender Race's of, you guess it, nubile nymphomaniacs who prey on human males/convert human females, to the point where actual extinction of the human race is now feared.
- New monster species are being added all the time by the original creator, and so the list linked above is not complete yet. Just go to either Danbooru or Gelbooru for the newest additions to the list (WARNING: The -booru sites contain NSFW material!).
- Another much-smaller attempt at an Encyclopedia from apparently the same artist (must have been a previous early attempt), containing some species not found in the other much-larger series.
- One Japanese adult anime artist drew a series of filthy but cute comics featuring the relationships between the identical octoplet human brothers and their monstrous girlfriends, with startling tenderness - a slime-girl, a spider-girl, a ghostly knight girl, a centaur, a minotaur/cow-girl, a mermaid, a snake-girl, and a harpy.
- These are called the "My Life With X-chan" i.e. English: " Living with Monster Girls (Slime-chan, spider-chan, harpy-chan, etc)" series. They were posted anonymously to the Cute Monster Girl fansite (Not Safe For Work). The artist has mentioned that he is planning on doing 8 of them (for the 8 reoccurring characters on the site and its forums), but recent additions to the lineup of regulars may affect this. Possible future updates include kappa-chan (a water-demoness), invisi-chan (an invisible girl wearing a theater mask, blond wig, and gloves), drider-chan (drow/spider "centaur").
- There is no escape, not even for the ''Cloverfield'' monster.
- The Moemon ROM Hack for Pokemon FireRed/LeafGreen. Your Mons become, well, Moe Mons. And oh god, they're Moe.
- The Kaiju Girls of Twisted Kaiju Theater.
- There's a short (6-pages or so) hentai work in which the "Cute" Monster Girl's lower half was that of... something resembling a barnacle(?). She has tentacles and crab claws coming from under her skirt. Cute to some, but Your Mileage May Vary. The same artist (Dowman Sayman) did a manga called Toge Toge, in which the girl has enormous clawed hands and finds a sick teenage boy passed out one day in her neck of the sewer. Things go well until, well... *sniff* excuse me, I've got Sand In My Eyes.
- This editor has seen a "cute girl" version of a Shriekmaw from Magic The Gathering, complete with a legless salamander tail, neck-tentacles, and extra eyes on her chin. 0_o
- A throughly creepy version of this trope arises in the 2001 version of Planet of the Apes. All of the characters playing apes were made to look like gorillas, chimps, etc. Helena Bonham Carter, on the other hand, looked... well, like Helena Bonham Carter in chimp make-up, eyeshadow, and lipstick. She and the other female chimps (including one played by Tim Burton's ladyfriend Lisa Marie) even had humanlike eyebrows, which was thoroughly bizarre to see on a chimpanzee face. In attempting to make the female apes more attractive, they only made them more disturbing. Contributing to the weirdness of the situation, she spent the entire movie flirting with the male human lead, played by Mark Wahlberg.
- In Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, the title character is a cadaver that has been rotting long enough for parts of her anatomy to be entirely skeletal. However, none of her more "feminine" features (face, breasts, hair) have gone through more than token decomposition.
- In Star Wars while the male◊ Twi'leks are fairly human like, the females◊ are blatantly designed to look sexy. Deconstructed in the Star Wars universe itself by having them be famous for beauty to the extent that many of them end up as enslaved dancing girls to crimelords like Jabba the Hutt.
- The difference between male and female Devaronians is even larger. The males are horned and demon-like, but the females are furred, have pointy ears and only small, vestigial horns and are generally much more attractive to members of other species than the males.
- Some of the EU - the New Essential Guide to Alien Species, namely - says that both male and female Twi'leks appear very comely to humans. When they're young. An old and ugly Twi'lek woman did try to flirt with a teenaged Han Solo in the novels, but honestly, looking at the rest of the EU, you'd think that Twi'lek women don't live to get old.
- Cathar tend to have a huge gap. Male Cathar are basically very tall tailless anthro big cats with wide shoulders, big claws, thick necks and muzzles. Female Cathar? Cat Girls. Small Cat Girls. In their species's first comics appearance Sylvar and her mate Crado were about as different as two humans, both of them basically Rubber Forehead Aliens.
- Though in all fairness, it seems that no two artists can decide just how anthro Cathar are, drawing both genders as being everything between the two exteemes.
- The Legacy comic has made allmost a running gag of "prettying up" females of various alien races - contrast Nakia, a female Anzat with a Typical male example◊ of the same species.
- Surely Angelina Jolie as Grendel's Mother in the 2007 film Beowulf qualifies here (she has high heels...and doesn't wear shoes), though it's implied to be Shape Shifting: reflected bits of her true form are visible during her time with Grendel, and a keen observer will see her posing as a part of her treasure-hoard when Beowulf first comes to confront her, looking like a very fishy, naga sort of creature.
- Her action figure is the above reptilian naga-like creature... and brings new levels of Squick with it!
- A rare male example comes up in the film Labyrinth. All the goblins are diminutive, monstrous creatures with wart infested skin and bizarre bone structures... except for their king, Jareth, who just looks like David Bowie with make up on.
- David Bowie with make up on and very tight pants.
- However, "Goblin King" might just mean "King Who Rules Over Goblins," not "King Who Is Also a Goblin."
- Subverted in Mars Attacks!: the Martian Girl looks like a wide-eyed woman with a beehive hairdo, but it turns out that she's only wearing a costume, implying that the Martians are sex dysmorphic.
- Fiona of Shrek is still fairly pretty for an ogress, despite indulging in the usual icky ogre habits.
- Ginormica from Monsters Vs Aliens. Your basic White Haired Pretty Girl, super-economy size.
- The Ju-On ghost might qualify.
- The females of Chaka's people might qualify. The males look like they did in the series (i.e. like humanoid chimps). The females are Nubile Savages.
- Averted in The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers. Apparently, the only visible difference between male and female dwarves is the males have beards.
- Actually its the opposite. The big reason humans and elves sometimes think there are no dwarf women is BECAUSE they have beards.
- In the books it wasn't that female dwarves naturally had beards, it's just that for some reason whenever a dwarf female went out among non-dwarves she would put on a fake beard and pretend to be a man.
- A case of Life Imitates Art for convenience's sake?
- In Piers Anthony's Xanth novels, female goblins are described as being far more attractive than male goblins. On the other hand, male harpies are handsome while the females are almost always ugly. A war was nearly started once when a female goblin and male harpy figured this out and started dating. And way far back in history, a war was started when the harpy males preferred the goblin females. And Castle Roogna was stuck in the middle.
- Female harpies in Xanth get unusually ugly when they have to mate with humans and vultures to reproduce their species. All harpies produced by crossing harpies with humans or vultures are female, and so the cycle became vicious on several levels. It probably took Time Travel to fix that mess.
- Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures series includes a dimension called Trollia where the males are all hulking monsters and the females are all drop-dead sexy. The explanation: The males are Trolls, and the females are Trollops.
- In Norse Mythology, the jotuns (giants) were typically pretty bug-ugly, but the female jotuns were comely enough that a lot of the Aesir married one (or nine). Hence, making this Older Than Dirt.
- Loki is somewhat an exception to this rule, being handsome despite giant ancestry (it's not clear whether he is a full or half giant), although perhaps in his case this skipped a generation as his children were mostly horrible monsters.
- Huldra also count, being nymphs with cow or fox tails. And, optionally, hollow backs, like a tree trunk.
- Possibly subverted, possibly just avoided by Lois McMaster Bujold's Sgt. Taura, of the Vorkosigan books: a human/animal hybrid superwarrior who happens to be eight feet tall, fanged and clawed, and built like a brick firehouse. (Miles Vorkosigan, her sometime lover, is literally half her size at most.) She's described as striking and even attractive in her own way, but hardly the bikini model in face-paint one might have expected.
- In the Discworld books, female Igors, known as Igorinas, are every bit as svelte and beautiful as their male counterparts are deformed, hunchbacked, and misshapen.
- Handwaved by the fact that Igors of both sexes are crazy-talented at all forms of surgery, including plastic. Apparently, male Igors don't have any interest in looking handsome. They are still popular with ladies (hint hint).
- Most likely, they look like that because the assistants of mad scientists are expected to look like that - it's that kind of series.
- Igors in general are proud upholders of Tradition!
- It's also worth noting that Pratchett's female dwarves subvert the trope by being short, bearded, axe-wielding, beer-quaffing, armour-wearing, gold-obsessed warriors...just like the males. Admittedly, the issue is muddied, as some of the dwarf ladies have lately been discovering make-up and high heels (but not razors), and some of the dwarf gentlemen very much object.
- Some dwarf males ALSO discovered make-up and high heels.
- A big part of traditional dwarven courtship consists of, very carefully and delicately, attempting to find out the gender of the person you might-or-might-not be interested in.
- And a few couples avoid it altogether, operating under the opinion that Love Is Love (and Gold Is Gold) and the details can all be worked out later.
- Avoided entirely in H.P. Lovecraft's fiction, in which the females of a monstrous species are always as hideous as the males, if the species even has sexual divisions. The quote at the top of the page is not an example of the trope, since the song is based on The Shadow over Innsmouth, which features the notoriously grotesque Deep Ones and their half-human (for a while, anyway) spawn.
- The Asura in Buddhist cosmology, where all the males are ugly and all the females are beautiful. And both are very violent.
- From the Seekers Of Truth, Natalie Beckett aka Golem. Fairly attractive if you can ignore the stone skin. And apparently her boyfriend, Timothy Landerman aka Echidna, can. It helps that he's basically a venomous lobster-man.
- Used as a major plot device in the Neil Gaiman short story 'Talking to Girls at Parties', where a bunch of atractive adolescent girls turn out to be odd extraterestrial visitors.
- While it isn't true, Billy Kong and Minerva Paradiso, the human antagonists of the fifth Artemis Fowl book honestly seem to believe that the elf Holly Short, a Hot Amazon who can pass for a short human with her ears covered, the juvenile demon No. 1, slightly larger and described in a later book as looking rather like a cross between a rhino and a gargoyle, and the adult demon Abbot, who is several feet taller and pretty monstrous, are the same species. Probably because of the ubiquity of this trope.
- Subverted in the Codex Alera. Her Imperial Bugginess the Vord Queen tries, but mostly just manages to give everyone the creeps by combining a "green Kitai with Rapunzel Hair" look with a few too many insectile features and a frightening lack of understanding of human emotion.
- In the Doctor Who episode "The Age Of Steel", all the Cybermen, whether constructed from men or women, looked exactly the same. But that didn't stop the spin-off Torchwood from featuring a "sexy" half-transformed Cyberwoman.
- Thankfully Torchwood have yet to give us a sexy Dalek, but I'm sure it's one drunken tone meeting away.
- Though most Borg of either sex don't look particularly appealing, the Borg queen is decidedly sexier looking than any of her drones. Also, Seven of Nine is quite attractive but only once most of her more Borg like physical attributes are removed via surgery.
- It was implied though that her appearance was mainly, if not entirely, the Doctor's doing. "I'm quite pleased with my work," as he put it.
- They did expressly say the character has implants...
- The Vidiians suffer from a disfiguring disease called the Phage, but strangely the Doctor's love interest Denara Pel still retains some of her facial good looks. At least more than any other Vidiian we see.
- Has anyone reading this page looked at a female Cardassian lately?
- Averted, perhaps even inverted, in the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "A Matter of Honor," wherein the female crewmembers of a Klingon vessel were somewhat repulsive-looking (in order to make Commander Riker uncomfortable when they hit on him). In general, however, full-blooded Klingon females have been shown to be more attractive, though the sexiest Klingon women have generally been hybrids with humans or Romulans.
- Played straight in Star Trek VI, where Rosanna De Soto's Klingon character had much less pronounced brow ridges than most of the male Klingons. But then, so did Christopher Plummer.
- Klingons fall into this trope even in Star Trek The Original Series. In the episode "Day of the Dove" we get to see both Klingon men and women. The men all have brutish expressions concealed under thick Blackface makeup while the women have spray on tans, and garish blue eye shadow.
- Farscape: War Minister Ahkna is noticeably more attractive and shorter than the rest of the Scarran species; most of whom that have been seen are male (we think). She's still quite reptilian, but it's a smoother, sleeker, sexier kind of reptilian than most Scarrans we've seen.
- Marilyn Munster. Occasionally, others in her family mention how homely she is.
- In Lexx, Zev Bellringer, part cluster lizard, part love slave. - Ron
- Lamie. Or, as American viewers know her, Scorpina.
- Actually a common trope with Super Sentai and Power Rangers villainesses, who are generally attractive women surrounded by hideous monsters.
- Frankie Stein from Wizards Of Waverly Place who's basically a cute, if very tall, girl with a rubber forehead attachment.
- Even Finnish monster rock band Lordi isn't immune to this trope. Their first pianist, Enary, was a blonde valkyrie, who was still gorgeous despite having an extra mouth. They've since subverted it with their new pianist, Awa, a ghostly witch who's as creepy as they come (although still arguably cuter than most of the male monsters.)
- Dungeons And Dragons is simply filled with humanoid monsters, a number of which consistently have good charisma scores (therefore attractive), almost all of which have females of their species, and a few of which are even exclusively female. A quick paging through any Monster Manual makes this quite clear.
- You Fail Logic Forever. A female of an attractive species (never mind the fact that Charisma is mostly mental) will obviously be attractive, but that says nothing about sexual dimorphism. Monstrous races such as Kobolds, Goblins, Bugbears and Gnolls, just to name a few, almost always have equally monstrous females.
- The supplement Elder Evils has an inversion with the Hulks of Zoretha. The four female hulks resemble bulky, stony giants of no discernible gender. On the other hand the singular male, while roughly the same twenty feet in height as the female hulks, is a slender and beautiful winged humanoid.
- Used to its fullest in the Talislanta game-setting with the Batrean race, whose females are green-haired space babes with seductive pheremones, and whose males are gangling hairy ogres. Technically also true of the singular race of Gnorls (female) and Wierdlings (male) ... although probably not for the usual reasons, as Gnorls look like someone's 80-year-old grandma (which is still prettier than the Wierdlings, who look like anorexic Yodas in their skivvies).
- Kate Monster from Avenue Q was going to have a lot of fuzz, similar to Trekkie Monster, but was shaved before production so she would look better with a male love interest.
- In World Of Warcraft, the female members of "monstrous" races look like models with paint jobs and funny hairdos, while the male members are considerably fuglier. (This is especially blatant on the Horde side, but the Alliance races—even humans, to some degree—are not exempt.) They also tend to be rather well endowed. The minotaur-like Tauren are arguably an exception, but the females still have a smoother, "cleaner" look and are designed to look cute. And even the female Forsaken—who are undead of the "revenant" variety—look just like goths with the bones showing in their elbows and knees. Of course their chests are unrotted.
- The Forsaken put a rather... disturbing Lampshade Hanging on the idea with one flirt macro: "Yes, they're real. They're not mine, but they're real." Feel the Squick yet?
- Darkspear trolls. The men are lanky, hunched over, and have very prominent tusks. The women could easily be mistaken for tall human females with blue skin, tiny nub tusks, and really weird hairdos.
- There was apparently some controversy over this subject with one of the other original playable races, the Night Elves. Especially the female Night Elf "dance" emote, which is very risque to say the least. When the Burning Crusade expansion was released and the new Draenei playable race was introduced, the controversy re-erupted. Draenei males are toweringly tall, with massive chests and shoulders, tentacle-like beards/facial hair/whatever they are, tails and stern looking expressions. The females on the other hand are quite svelte, and with the exception of blue skin, cloven feet, (much less noticable) tails and the horns on the head would resemble tall, well-endowed human women. Massively inverted with the Blood Elves - the other playable race introduced in the expansion. Blood Elf females are slender, pretty and have long, flowing hair, whereas the Blood Elf males are ... well ... quite slender, pretty and have long, flowing hair. One of the Blood Elf male joke lines is "Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?" (And another mentions how he "needs a Scrunchy".) You have to wonder if Blizzard knew exactly what they were doing with the two new races...
- Andrea Rubenstein does not a controversy make.
- This really is one place where humans count for this trope. The males look like deformed bodybuilders with faces carved inexpertly out of wood; the females look normal.
- Done again in Cataclysm, with the female Worgen◊. However female Goblins are mostly an◊ aversion. Other then a bit more hair on their heads, they're not that◊ different from the male goblins.◊
- Seeing as the Worgen are just humans who can turn into werewolves, it makes sense that there's a bit of sexual dimorphism. It'd be confusing if the male and female Worgen resembled each other and the male and female humans... did not.
- The Shura in the free MMO Dream Of Mirror Online fit - the males are big hulking walls of flesh, with short, fleshy tails, and a (fleshy) horn on their forehead. The females are catgirls.
- Female vampires, demonesses, cyborg girls, and of course catgirls are very common in the City of Heroes/City of Villains games. The character creator includes options such as horns, pointy ears, tails, hooved/clawed feet, etc. Even one of the NPC heroines is a catgirl.
- Also applies to NPC enemies. Most of the various demons the you can fight are grotesque monsters, except for the succubi.
- A large number of the enemies and villains in Shantae are Cute Monster Girls. Among them: Cute Scorpion-Girls, Cute Water Lobster Thing Girls, Cute Snake Girls, and even Cute Zombie Girls.
- Despite the hard-to-impossible difficulty of the Touhou games, a massive fandom has arisen around its mystical, destructive, and cute denizens.
- Most, if not all, the female demons & deities in the Shin Megami Tensei series of games, especially Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne, as even the ones who are officially supposed to be hideous still manage to look really sexy (with perhaps the only exception definitely being the "Old Hag" type of demoness)!
- Many of the monsters in the Castlevania games are also Cute Monster Girls, such as the Succubus, and the Perspherone, a demonic maid who happens to know Kung-Fu.
- And using the vacuum cleaner soul near them in Dawn of Sorrow makes them embarrassedly hold their dress down.
- Yeto of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is a big, hulking yeti with a face that one would expect a yeti to have. His wife Yeta, on the other hand, is a walking ball of fur with a much cuter face. At least when she's not possessed by the dungeon boss, then her face goes all scary-like...
- The eponymous Twilight Princess: regular twilight citizens aren't so much ugly as featureless (most of them being black mannequin-like when not under Zant's curse) she's absolutely gorgeous and looks mostly like a woman with a weird skin-tone.
- The Zora race in this game's incarnation exhibit sexual dimorphism, where the females resemble humans by having clearly human faces and body shapes, while the males are distinctively more piscean-looking.
- Most monsters in the Disgaea games seem to be male, with, of course, the exceptions of the Succubus and the Nekomata, which are all female.
- The Succubus and the Nekomata are also noteworthy because they brought in the artist who did the earlier games in the Marl series (La Pucelle and Rhapsody being the only 2 that hit US shores) to do their art, because he does girls with more... va va voom.
- However, it does turn out that Dratti, a large dragon and one of Laharl's vassals, is actually female when she mentions it in a throwaway conversation. Disgaea 2 also features a Flora Beast (something similar to a Nymph) named Bridget, with all of the traits you would expect from that Bridget.
- Planescape Torment features a number of odd NPCs you can add to your party. Only two are female, and both of them are conventionally very attractive, with some add-ons (a tail in the case of Annah and wings in the case of Fall-From-Grace). With Grace it's expected; she is a demon, and a succubus at that. However, Annah is a tiefling; that is, someone descended from a fiendish grandparent (possibly with a few "greats" thrown in), and most fiends in Dungeons And Dragons, even female ones, aren't very attractive.
- Annah also wears a leather version of a Breast Plate, including hooker boots. The PC can hang a lampshade on this by suggesting she strip it down further, adding a few more slashes, to distract her marks. She gets flustered by this remark, and he comments he thought that's what it was for in the first place. She claims she gets hot, and "suspects it's the fiend blood in me".
- This seems to the entire hat of the tiefling race. Male, female, whatever. They all seem to be cute monster people versions of fiends. Case in point: not just Annah but Valen and Neeshka as well (and, depending who you ask, I would imagine Haer'Dalis). It's also explicitly mentioned in the 4e writeup of the race in the Player's Handbook.
- That tends to be for PC tieflings, though. NP Cs are far more likely to get hit with the weirder side of the stick. In fact, Annah was actually promoted to the "spunky redhead with pointed ears and a tail" version seen in the finished game. The original version had six fingers on each hand, slits of skin instead of ears, an unusually large mouth framed with thin black lips and filled with a jumble of squared off teeth and pointed fangs, beige skin, curly white hair, and lavender eyes with slitted pupils.
- The aforementioned Lineage II: The Chaotic Throne. Male dwarves look like their counterparts in WoW and similar games... but female dwarves look like baby-faced teenage jockettes, scaled down to size. (They also narrowly skirt the Uncanny Valley.)
- Subverted in Earthworm Jim. Jim's girlfriend, Princess What's-Her-Name, is big-eyed, wasp-waisted (and an insect, haha), and extremely well proportioned. On her homeworld, she's considered hideously deformed. Her sister, Queen Pulsating, Bloated, Festering, Sweaty, Pus-Filled, Malformed Slug-For-A-Butt, who looks something like a giant termite queen, is the pinnacle of beauty to her people.
- The Pixie species from Monster Rancher is an entire race of cute, impish girls with demon horns, wings, tails, and Cute Little Fangs. It's implied in some games that they are Always Female, but the names bestowed on some Pixie NPC monsters seems to suggest that there are some males—they just look exactly the same as the females.
- Brutally averted in Gears Of War, where the biggest, meanest, toughest, and most hideous soldiers in the Locust Horde are the screaming, psychotic Berserkers... which are identified as female.
- Played straight in Gears of War 2, to the surprise of pretty much everyone (including Delta squad, with Cole saying: "I thought she was supposed to be butt ugly."), with the Locust Queen, who appears almost exactly like a human woman (albeit wearing a squid on her back and a kinda grey skin tone).
- Averted in Requiem: Bloodymare, as far as the oddly attractive sexual dimorphism part. The Male Kruxena are slimy or scaly-looking monsters with one arm being an insectoid claw twice the length of the other, and both feet being similar insectoid claws. The females are... about the same, just of a more slight, feminine build. Though, in both cases, the part of them that isn't monstrously insectoid is what most people would call attractive, making it not a total aversion of the concept.
- Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer gives us a rare male example in Gannayev. Gannayev (nicknamed Gann) is a Hagspawn, which are male Hag/Human hybrids and typically look something like this◊. Gann, on the hand, looks like this◊. Most people in the fandom adamantly refused to believe that this was the official character portrait of Gann because, really, there was absolutely no justifiable way a Hagspawn could look that pretty until actually playing the game, where it was revealed that his looks resulted from the love his parents had for each other.
- Similarly, the tiefling Valen of the Hordes of the Underdark expansion to the original Neverwinter Nights is another male example, being uncharacteristically attractive for a fiend.
- The enemies in the Hentai Game series Lighting Warrior Raidy consists only or almost only of cute monster girls.
- Darkstalkers, any female character but most blatantly an undead girl (Hsien Ko).
- Mass Effect follows this trope, where only one gender of each species (except humans) is ever seen in the game. It's somewhat justified in that it's stated in-game that the salarians keep their females at home, the Asari are all female and there is only one (female) Quarian in the game. An in-game sexual relationship is possible with the asari and the quarian has a big fan following. No mention is made of gender distinctions among the elcor, hanar, or volus, but they all have male speaking voices.
- Terra of Final Fantasy VI is half-human and half-Esper. She appears pretty much human, but even when she morphs into Esper form, she still looks pretty feminine and non-monstrous.
- It helps that her father, Maduin, is one of the more normal-looking, humanoid Espers to begin with.
- In Dissidia: Final Fantasy, her esper form is given more detail. She has claws at the end of her fingers and toes and fur coming out of her elbows, but she still looks much more cute than repusive.
- The Vieras and the Grias from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and its sequel, the former being a tanned, white haired race of warrior women with bunny ears, and the latter incredibly cute female dragon humanoids.
- In the first Shadow Hearts game male Harmonixer Yuri Hyuga transforms into almost completely inhuman monstrosities when he fuses with a monster soul- he'll usually still have 2 arms and 2 legs (usually), but only Seraphic Radiance/Dark Seraphim looks even remotely human- and it still has eerie pale skin and giant black wings. On the other hand, in Shadow Hearts: From the New World, hot female harmonixer Shania transforms into beautiful non-human creatures which are still abundantly female and wearing even less than she usually does. Yuri hits the middle ground, however, with his Level 1 Fusions in Shadow Hearts: Covenant, which are generally attractive male non-human creatures wearing less than Yuri usually does.
- The kid-friendly Shin Megami Tensei spinoff Demi Kids takes this to an utterly ridiculous degree with some of its designs. Some are sort of logical, but others, like the Banshee and Harpy, are a bit of stretch. They even managed to turn Dullahan (basically, a headless horseman who rides on a similarly headless horse and functions as an omen of death) into one of them. Take a look.
- Even in M-rate main series, various female demons are fit in this trope.
- In Grandia II, a large, ugly, male beastman named Marag joins your party early on. This isn't so bad until you visit his village later in the game and find out that, apparently, the rest of his species is comprised of cute and/or hot Cat Girls.
- Similarly, from the original Grandia, a character named Milda joins your team. She's an older (beast)woman who, though not necessarily cute, has curves in all the right places and is marred only by having horns, sharp teeth, and a tufted tail. Eventually you reach the village where her tribe lives and get to see the men— all of whom are BIPEDAL COWS.
- Pokemon has Gardevoir. Which, it should be noted, looks the same regardless if it is male or female. The same is true of Lopunny.
- One could argue that Gallade could be a male version of Gardevoir, if one ignores the fact that male Gardevoir exist.
- Goombella from Paper Mario isn't a cute girl who happens to be a monster so much as a cute monster that happens to be a girl.
- Fenia from Tales of Symphonia Dawn of the New World; the best mage monster in the game, talks, and plays this trope perfectly straight.
- In Neo Steam, the male Beast races are huge hulking wolf-men or bear-men, depending on faction. Their female counter-part race are small, slender, curvy catgirls with cute stubby tails.
- Male members of the Blacksmith Clan in Breath Of Fire are hulking minotaur-like strongmen. Their women look like ordinary humans with horns. Although apparently the women are just as strong, despite this...
- Boktai's Black Django — the hero's vampiric form — has pointed ears, fangs, blue skin, and bat wings... making him a Cute Monster Boy.
- Presumably subverted in Tsukihime with the demon races. Akiha is pretty cute, yes, but people with more demon blood tend to look... well, demonic. Breeding with demons is done for power, not love. Played straight with Arcueid, which doesn't count really since she's a vampire, and Nanako, a half human half unicorn spirit that's the Moe Anthropomorphism of the Seventh Scripture.
- The House Of The Dead EX has Zobiko, a Cute Zombie Girl. She's also one of the main characters.
- The MMORPG Perfect World has the race called the Untamed. Basically, the males are big muscular furries, entirely hairy and with animal heads, and the females slender CatGirls (or fox-, demon-, etc.), with tails and a second set of ears or something similar on the sides of their heads, but otherwise as humans.
- Phantasy Star has this in spades. PSII had Nei, PSIV had Rika, and by PSO, Numans were a full-fledged minority within the population of Pioneer 2.
Web Original
- The flash cartoon series Primal War is notorious/loved by teenage boys for its cartoony, monstrous males being drastically different to their more human-like and realistically proportioned (yeah, right) females of both the beast and dino races.
- The Spider Cliff Mysteries: Crystal (demon) and Annabelle (zombie)
- Pokegirls. That is all.
- As mentioned further up the page, The Monster Girl Encyclopedia.
- The art gallery of Fredrik K T Andersson has plenty of cute and/or sexy monster girls.
- Grace Sciuridae/Shade Tail in El Goonish Shive is a genetically engineered shapeshifting assassin created to fight the Big Bad Damien. However, she proves to be a pacifist by nature except under the worst provocation. Her brothers are less human-looking in their hybrid forms, though they can appear human (and quite good-looking) when they choose.
- The Wotch has Ti'el, a cute green-haired alien with tentacle hands, and Myrrh, Lord Sykos' half-liquid maid. Due to the Shape Shifting that goes on, many characters have been a Cute Monster Girl at least once or twice.
- The demon heroine Raven in Demonology 101 is a cute teenage girl whose only demonic attributes are reddish eyes and oddly shaped ears.
- Order of the Stick has Therkla, a half-orc ninja. While the males of the orcs we see aren't exactly any more ugly, mishappen, or inhuman than the females, this could be a limitation of the art style...
- I didn't think Therkla was ever portrayed as particularly sexy. The orc cheiftan was attracted to her, but got squicked that she was half-human, implying that she looks more like an orc than a human. All Elan really says on the subject is that "she'd have been a pretty cool girlfriend", which could simply be based on personality and ninja skills. On the other hand, Therkla's mother probably qualifies for this trope, since at least one human found her very attractive...
- Actually, Elan himself admits that Therkla is "sorta cute" in this strip
- In Drowtales all of the main characters, including males, and, from the other characters' perspective, humans, are basically cute monsters....
- Tolkienian Elves are traditionally described as ethereally attractive humans rather than monsters, though.
- And likewise in this Krakow strip.
- Nerf Now has Cute Zerg Girls. As in, the Zerg from Starcraft. Sarah Kerrigan, transformed into the Queen of Blades, probably qualifies.
- Goblins has Saves-a-Fox. Admitted the actually, she wears a wig, but still...
- Sluggy Freelance parodies this in the Years of Yarncraft storyline, especially in this strip.
- Aylee's current form also counts, with most of her previous forms being aversions.
- Aylee adopts her forms to defend against specific dangers (such as developing mind-shielding with a telepathic foe around). The current form was taken because she feared what humans would do unless she could fit in among them better. In other words, she (subconsciously) made herself into a Cute Monster Girl to gain acceptance.
- Mentioned occasionally in Schlock Mercenary.
- Molly in The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob is an extremely cute pink furry monster. Princess Voluptua still manages to be pretty attractive even in her insect form, as well.
- Ferretina the Evil Weasel Queen from the Girl Genius side-story "Revenge of the Weasel Queen". Also Mamma Gkika; "cute" and "girl" definitely aren't the words for her, but she fits all the same. Nobody's really sure what the Geisterdamen are, other than creepy, but they're also kinda hot.
- Maxim and Oggie fall under the heading of Cute Monster Boys.
- Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire has Hyraxx D'mofiti as well as some of the girls employed at the Velvet Fist.
- The Creo in Terinu start out as petite and cute when they're young, but upon reaching adulthood they gain the same bulky musculature as a male. Ferin does and bucks, on the other hand, retain disturbingly small and cute their entire lives, even as they sported spiky horns and tails.
- Nitrina of Flaky Pastry is a small, cute humanlooking young woman with green hair and lips. She is also a goblin and has some rather classical male goblins hanging around.
- All orcs in Dominic Deegan look close enough to humans to be mutually attractive once you get past the Cute Little Fangs (played straight with Luna, who is fully human and has fangs) and, yes, the green skin. This applies to both male and female orcs, however, so it's partly justified.
- Pretty much all of the main characters in School Bites are cute vampire (or werecat) girls.
- Ambrosia Verdandi from Fetch Quest: Saga of the Twelve Artifacts. She's also a doctor wannabe!
- Keychain Of Creation has both Marena (Lunar Exalted, literally 'foxy', and arguably the Ms Fanservice of the strip) and Secret (Abyssal Exalted and thus effectively a kind of undead, but undeniably cute). And if a Genius Ditz robotic mad scientist who can turn into a giant robot cat is more your thing, there's always Elegant Nova of Progression.
- All of the female Gargoyles shown in the original TV series are sexy winged humanoids, except for Una, who resembles an anthropomorphic unicorn and is thus still "cute", while male gargoyles have many other types. However, the comic continuation eventually introduced Constance (Coco), a heavyset female who resembles a wild sow, and Brooklyn's mate at the end of his Timedance, Katana, has a face that includes a beautiful beak.
- In the Duck Dodgers series we meet other members of Marvin the Martian's species for the first time. Seems that while the males are short and cartoony the females, particularly Queen Tyr'ahnee are, well, this◊.
- Also, one episode of Duck Dodgers had the hero crash-land onto a planet made up of attractive bug-like women...until the sun goes down.
- Both averted and played straight in Transformers and its infinite spin-offs. The earliest female robots were indeed curvy and sexy, but more diverse female Transformer designs have been introduced, whether they were original characters, or new characters based on previously-male toys. However, "sexy" female Transformers are still the primary type.
- For a particular Aversion Strika. Yes, she is a girl.
- Kitten in the Teen Titans episode "Date with Destiny" looks like a cute, normal human girl. Her father, Killer Moth, appears to be some kind of moth man and her boyfriend, Fang, is a guy with a giant spider for a head (not a spider head, an entire spider). It turns out that Killer Moth is actually a regular guy in a costume, but despite the metallic voice and non-moving mouth you might not realize that just by watching the episode (since he wears his costume even under the most mundane circumstances).
- And among the main characters there's Dark Magical Girl Raven, the daughter of an Eldritch Abomination and a Human Alien. Most of the time, she looks like a cute human girl, save for her pale skin and purple eyes and hair (and in their anime'esque world, it's hard to say just how unusual even those traits are). The angrier she gets, though, the more her father's monstrous traits start showing: when she has four glowing red eyes and an elongated body, it's time to start running.
- Leela, a beautiful one-eyed woman descended from a race inflicted with all kinds of Body Horror, is a particularly justified example: her parents and people are formerly human, subterranian mutants and the fact that she happened to be born looking almost human is why they were able to pass her off as a Human Alien and send her to the surface world for a better life than they could give her.
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