alt title(s): Guy In Real Life
Acronym for
Guy In Real Life
Based on the belief that "
there are no such things as girls on the Internet". Some forums, particularly male-dominated ones, will be the victim of a special breed of
Troll who will
pretend to be a girl just to rile up the boy
nerds in the community. They display obvious
Cam Whore traits and may even steal photos of attractive girls off
My Space or
Facebook or porn sites and claim that they are them.
In other cases they may copy photos of their sisters/daughters/nieces/female cousins off photo cd's or the like, especially if said females are of, or close to, the age of the online persona.
Female forum goers have a habit of getting a lot more attention, just by nature of being girls, so many male attention whores use this to their advantage so that they get the attention they crave. They will play and flirt with the male members who may become tickled pink that a girl is talking to them this way. Sad, but true.
Will ultimately lead to
a reveal where they show their true colours as blokes and laugh at the incensed regulars. Or, a Regular will wise up to his shenanigans and unmask him causing everyone to point and laugh at him as he slinks away with his tail between his legs. Could also be a practical joke played by a Regular to which everyone will simply have a good laugh. Most cases tend to end in the second case, which brings up the question of why such trolls even bother doing it since the risk of being exposed far outweighs the potential gain.
Note that not everyone who's biologically male who presents as female online is trolling; see
Cross Player,
Transsexual.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
Comic Books
- In the Ultimate Marvel version of X-Men Beast gets into a relationship with a girl on a chatroom...who is actually the Blob, one of Magneto's henchmen, pretending to be a girl
for kicks to play him for information (a mutant genius supermodel, no less). Then Henry accidentally blabs about how Xavier brainwashed Magneto. Oops.
Film
- In the film Closer, Dan tricks Larry into thinking he's a girl, and they have cybersex.
- In Surrogates, the operator of the seductive female surrogate at the nightclub that got fried happens to be a man. The characters don't treat this "revelation" as unusual or noteworthy in any way.
Literature
- Trilby and the Ghost
, a short story by Yahtzee taking place in the Chzo Mythos 'verse, involves Trilby discovering a ghost who can't pass on to other realms because he's never met his japanese girlfriend Nariko face-to-face. Predictably enough, 'Nariko' is actually a southern gentleman named Frank, which only makes Trilby's job more complicated.
- Inverted in Otherland, where Salome Fredericks pretends to be a guy online in order to avoid No Girls On The Net reactions.
Live Action TV
- Psych: Shawn and Gus pretend to be a woman in an online poker chatroom and arrange to meet one of the other players. The guy from the chatroom laments, "Man, all hot women on the Internet are guys! Only you're two guys, which is weird."
- In an episode of NCIS, McGee develops an online relationship with a girl who turns out to be Di Nozzo playing a prank.
- At the end of the episode, McGee reveals to Ziva David that he has been aware his "chatroom girl" is Di Nozzo for some time.
- Subverted in the 1990s Jerry Springer parody Night Stand, where two straight guys met online pretending to be lesbians revealed themselves to each other... and decided to date anyway.
- Stargate Atlantis
- In an early Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode, Xander expresses suspicions about Willow's new cyber-pal.
Xander: I mean, sure he says he's a high school student, but I can say I'm a high school student.
Buffy: You are.
Xander: Okay, but I can also say that I'm an elderly Dutch woman. Get me? I mean, who's to say I'm not if I'm in the elderly Dutch chat room?
Music
- This is the idea behind Frogg Marlowe's song "Ain't No Women":
Video Games
- Overheard in a city chat on World Of Warcraft: "Welcome to the internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents."
Web Comics
- Francis from PvP plays a female character named Catfight in City Of Heroes. When asked why, he says, "If I'm going to be staring at an ass in tights all day, it might as well be a nice ass."
- Much earlier in the story, Francis also pretends to be a girl called Sasha online.
- It's not the trope, but it might be worth mentioning at this point that in a PVP strip published in Dragon Magazine, Francis also has a female character when tabletop roleplaying.
- This troper doesn't know if it's intentional or not, but little trivia note — before the first Tomb Raider video game came out, the main developer gave that as the reason why the main character was made female. Of course, he's British, so he said 'bum' instead of 'ass,' but that's what happened.
- In Megatokyo, this is used - in a rather twisted fashion - during a flashback. Piro plays an MMO with a male character, starts chatting with him outside the game, and eventually starts to wonder if 'he' isn't actually a girl... eventually, he seizes on an opportunity to ask him for a picture. He gets it, and sure enough, 'he' is a cute girl, whom he starts to fall in love with. Then she dumps him by revealing that she's actually a guy, the picture was fake, and she was just playing with him for kicks. The twist? The picture was real, and she really IS a girl. Exactly why she pretended to be a GIRL is, as yet, unknown, but Piro is still pissed at her for pulling that stunt...
- Also, Piro himself is cross playing, and out of the flashbacks, Miho tells him that she sometimes believed he was really a girl.
- Both inverted and played straight in Something Positive. Branwen manages to convince an entire forum that she's a man, causing all the female forum-goers to fall in love with her. Upon learning of this, Davan decides to further troll the forum by pretending to be female and posing as Branwen's male persona's lover.
- This strip in The Noob has quite a few of them.
- in Goblins, Drowbabe is one according to Minmax.
