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The Lad-ette
aka: Ladette

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"Yeah, it's Bud. No, I don't give a fuck about how it tastes. Piss off."

"All right, I drink more than you
I party harder than you do
And my car's faster than yours too"
P!nk, "Cuz I Can"

She likes sports, beer, cars, swearing, fighting, and sex in a stereotypically masculine way. She is crude, rude, often hygienically challenged, and cheerfully ignorant and aggressive. If you are a guy, she'll probably challenge you to a fight or a drinking competition, win both and then take an aggressive lead in anything sexual that happens, before kicking you out the front door the following morning or teasing you mercilessly if she lets you stay some more.

In short, she is a young woman with the personality of a Fratbro. She is the Lad-ette.

Despite (or perhaps because of) their masculine personalities, Lad-ettes are generally heavily sexualised and are not likely to let any males in the company forget they are female. They usually disdain the hassle of highly elaborately feminine clothing/hair/makeup, but don't often dress in a truly cross-dressing way; Tank-Top Tomboy is a common Lad-ette style. They are also generally attractive in an Unkempt Beauty kind of way; a genuinely ugly Lad-ette is very unusual. She may occasionally invoke Blemished Beauty: a nose that has obviously been broken at least once or a well-placed scar may be part of her charms. Male characters may well be sexually interested in Lad-ettes for various reasons, whether it's an appreciation of their masculine personality and interests because they don't disapprove of laddish behaviour, because Lad-ettes have lower body modesty and a more practical attitude than more "ladylike" women and hence show more skin, or simply because of their assumed openness to the idea of casual sex. Or heck, some guys just like a girl who is going to take charge. In turn, a Lad-ette can be utterly shameless in exploiting male sexual interest for her own personal advantage.

Sometimes, this woman's personality is explained by her having grown up with brothers or been raised as a boy. Sometimes many of her friends were boys, or are from rough, unhappy, flawed backgrounds. Feminine and masculine behavior are culturally defined, so another common reason for this trope is that the woman in question comes from a wildly different time or place.

Note that this trope is not usually Truth in Television. Real people (yes, even frat boys) don't act like this all the time. In fact, usually, this sort of behavior is to some extent an affectation. People usually act aggressively because they feel they have something to protect: their ego, another person, a secret, etc. Lack of good hygiene can be a sign of depression or anxiety, or else a rebellion against an oppressive authority figure. Crudeness is a common trait of teenagers, since they have just discovered crude language and sexuality: so they are experimenting with it. Teenage girls just tend to do this experimentation when adults and boys aren't around, the Lad-ette is simply the girl who doesn't care. Someone who acts like this frequently may still have a softer side. Conversely, women who act more femininely most of the time may display this kind of behavior sometimes. As with many other tropes that are about women, this one is rather reductive.

Also note that The Lad-ette in fiction not uncommonly winds up dropping her lifestyle in favour of something more conventional. Even if she doesn't, though, it's likely that she'll at least get a chance to fake being a regular, pretty Girly Girl — maybe on a dare, for a bet, or to attract a guy. If so, she may turn out to actually be surprisingly good with feminine things, or she may not. If the Lad-ette is attracted to women then she's a Butch Lesbian.

Compare and contrast with other tropes about women who look or behave in a traditionally "masculine" way: Bifauxnen (where the girl can effectively pass as a male — though ironically while lacking most of the 'masculine' behaviour of the Ladette); her ancestor, the Pirate Girl; and her great-grandmother, who shares some of her mannerisms and points of view, but retains a more feminine image: The Flapper. If that hot girl is acting like a guy because she's not 100% girl, it's a case of Everybody Wants the Hermaphrodite. Sometimes, especially in anime and manga, one of these gets teamed up with a more-refined masculine-acting character.

Also compare her female drinking mates, the Hard-Drinking Party Girl and the Lady Drunk. And, for the ideologies for and against her, see Real Women Don't Wear Dresses and Vasquez Always Dies. The Squadette may also be a Lad-ette, but it's not a job requirement. Compare and Contrast the Sweet Polly Oliver who may share some traits with this woman, or may even be this as well: but is actually trying to hide her gender.

A Gender Bender plot (especially via a "Freaky Friday" Flip) can often result in a girl with a literal masculine personality who acts much like a Lad-ette.

Contrast with Yamato Nadeshiko and Proper Lady; two ideals of feminine beauty (Eastern Asia and Western Europe, respectively.) Also contrast with the Iron Lady, a similarly masculine woman with a very different personality.

Due to the "frat boy in a girl's body" nature of this trope, the Lad-ette is the most likely to be a female Gasshole. She's also likely to be One of the Boys.

For rough ethnic counterparts to this trope, see The Whitest Black Guy and Pretty Fly for a White Guy. The Spear Counterparts to this trope would be In Touch with His Feminine Side, Camp Straight, and Camp Gay; if the Lad-ette befriends or teams up with one of those men, see Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy.


Examples:

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    Advertising 
  • The star of this beer commercial.

  • The female character in this Foster's Beer ad seems to be a downplayed example: While she doesn't act particularly loud or rowdy overall, she does casually scrunch a beer can on her forehead.

    Anime & Manga 
  • ARIA: Akira is an interesting case; she definitely used to be this way in her childhood (to the point where Akatsuki briefly suspects she is actually a transvestite), but her public personality could hardly be more feminine. When not taking customers, however, aspects of this shine through. She's tough-as-nails as an instructor, and prone to competitiveness, but ironically she doesn't drink as much as Alicia (in the manga, anyways). The sex part is unconfirmable, though, due to No Hugging, No Kissing.
  • Black Clover: Mereoleona Vermillion is an aggressive, powerful warrior with a love for sake. Unlike most mages, she fights using her fists by focusing an incredible amount of magical power in her arm. She spends most of the year in the wilderness hunting wild animals because she hates the stuffiness of the Royal Capital.
  • Black Lagoon: Revy has elements of this, minus the sex — at least as far as we know. Eda is an even better example, while not as much as a hardass like Revy, she drinks more then Revy, sleeps around more (as in a little) than Revy, and still kicks copious amounts of ass. Revy's lad-ette nature is quite explicitly due to her, frankly, rather messed up psyche and a reaction to the vicious, soul-crushing life she's led. Eda, however, is just naturally that way.
  • Bleach: Kuukaku Shiba, to the point where she uses the assertive masculine pronoun "ore" when referring to herself.
  • Nearly every girl in Chainsaw Man, but most of all Power, who dresses sloppily, never showers, pays no mind to etiquette when speaking, and only cares about her appearance for using her attractiveness to get what she wants out of her male teammates.
  • City Hunter has Kaori Makimura, whose fashion sense and language are distinctly masculine.
  • Code Geass: Kallen Kozuki is a great example of this. She pilots a Knightmare Frame in the first episode, can hold her own against opponents even when not wearing any clothing, and she even beats up someone while wearing a dress.
  • Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School: Aoi Asahina was already one in previous installments (see below), but she takes it further in this sequel where she has developed fighting skills, is pretty much a bodyguard for Naegi for the entire season and she ends up in a typical Short Tank outfit early on. She ditches her ruined suit top and her unstained tights and runs around in a sleeveless top and her trademark shorts she's wearing since the beginning while also carrying a guy on her back. And since the anime tends to make boobs look even bigger than they are, Asahina's already gigantic pair are much more prominent once she's wearing that top.
  • Denki-gai no Honya-san: Sensei is the most serious and dedicated of the girls about work and manga, lives like a complete slob, prefers a tracksuit and sweats to any other outfit, and is the most comfortable when talking about sexual situations, though she still blushes fairly easily. She actually doesn't like that she's so incredibly unfeminine, and worries that it'll affect her chances of getting a boyfriend.
  • Detroit Metal City: The band's manager is a violent leather-clad, chain-smoking, hard-drinking thug who constantly beats them up and vocally rates all their work by how much it sexually arouses her.
  • Dirty Pair: Kei loves to drink, fights in underground fighting rings, and is more sexually aggressive than her partner Yuri.
  • In Dragon Quest: Your Story, Bianca Whitaker is quite rowdy and even more outgoing and adventurous than the Hero is.
  • There are several in Food Wars!, but the cake is undoubtedly taken by Mito Ikumi, who, ironically, manages to be The Ojou as well. She's the heiress to a major meatpacking corporation, and her masculine traits were cultivated by her father, who was grooming her to survive in the frat-houselike atmosphere of the meat industry.
  • Galaxy Angel: Forte is an obsessive Gun Nut, frequently chugs alcohol, and is in general one of the toughest, roughest, and least girly crew members. She's a Celibate Hero, though, because she's secretly only interested in guys who are even stronger than she is.
  • Ghost in the Shell: Major Kusanagi fits this trope perfectly when she's not working. She likes beer, drives very aggressively, likes girls, loves to scare the shit out of people, and is well known to the owners of some less reputable bars. She's also living with her boyfriend, who's also a cop. At one point, Batou even asks her if she'd ever consider switching to a male cybernetic body (which she winds up doing at the end of the original manga, even though it's a Dude Looks Like a Lady body).
  • In Great Pretender, Abigail "Abbie" Jones is a strong and taciturn con woman who is skilled in many kinds of combat, has an angry way of speaking, and whose "catchphrase" is Flipping the Bird at whoever's pissing her off.
  • Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun: Seo is not very feminine, is incredibly blunt and abrasive, and she constantly has teachers running after her for some kind of trouble she caused. Members from the boys' basketball team are also in constant fear over how aggressively she plays.
  • In Neon Genesis Evangelion, Misato Katsuragi owns a sports car she's quite fond of, is a Captain in a special military force, enjoys beer enough to have a fridge full, and is indisputably the alpha male — in this case female — of the entire show. She even nails the poor hygiene down, given the state of her apartment when Shinji first arrives. She is also a Cool Big Sis figure for Shinji and Asuka. As with Kitara (see Literature), it's strongly implied that this is just an expression of her inherently messed up psyche, caused by the mental scars she received on the day of Second Impact.
  • One Piece:
    • Nami skirts the edge of this trope. She's very feminine in her dress, cute in her mannerisms (when she wants something), and knows how to manipulate men (read: Sanji, not that that takes much) with her looks. On the other hand, she can out-drink Zoro, who is a bit of an alcoholic, drops the sweet talk when she isn't trying to scam you out of your money going for insults instead, and shows no fear playing hardball with men much stronger than her (even if she's just doing the negotiations, and intends to step back and let the stronger crew members do the actual beating). Of all the pirates, she probably comes the closest to "raping, pillaging and stealing." Zoro often comments that Sanji's attentions to her (and Robin, but whatever) are ridiculous taking into account that Nami is usually more of a man than the cook himself. Even if she does like to look pretty.
    • Jewelry Bonney is a straighter example. She is a glutton on par with the main protagonist, uses rude and vulgar language (even Nami's manner of speech is still very feminine), and holds the view that pirates should be selfish and ruthless.
  • PandoraHearts:
    • Alice the B-rabbit is not only the most powerful Chain in the Abyss, she also insults everyone she meets, likes to eat meat and fight, can win arm-wrestling matches. Her idea of greeting someone is by "biting" them on the cheek, and she loves to fight. When she was human, she was also this. She liked to wear dark dresses as opposed to her sister, who is lady-like in every way. She also likes to sit down on and beat up her plushies.
    • Lacie is also this too. She sneaks out of her tower at every opportunity, does whatever the heck she wants, and even runs away to PISS her brother off when he lets her win a match.
  • Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: At first glance, Panty appears fairly feminine given her occasional choice of clothing and accessories, but is depicted as a promiscuous and dominating sex partner who at one point set the ambitious goal of having sex with a thousand men before returning to Heaven. Panty is also a pottymouth with a rude demeanor, and is a slob at home, a trait which Stocking points out to contrast her more orderly lifestyle.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Kyouko Sakura is the poster child for this in a Magical Girl Warrior series. She eats food without manners and at a fast rate, curses constantly, and loves to start fights. This is in contrast with the other Tomboy of the series, Sayaka Miki, who has her moments of girlishness.
  • RahXephon has Elvy Hadhiyat. Not only is she an Ace Pilot and the leader of TERRA's airforce, but she also loves to get drunk and she even attempts to seduce Ayato while drunk despite being over 10 years his senior.
    Elvy: You wanna lock on? Dogfight 'til morning, cutey?
  • School Rumble has Mikoto Suo, who's basically 'the guy' in her group of friends. Not only is she the most athletic girl at their school, she's been studying Kenpo alongside Hannai, since childhood, and they spar regularly. She's also a drinker, though she only does it in moderation.
  • Tenchi Muyo!: Ryoko develops a taste for alcohol and space piracy sometime after escaping from her mother, Washu's, laboratory. But the way she carries on, you'd think she's been doing it all her life. She's also a shameless flirt (especially when drunk) and very aggressive in her pursuit of Tenchi.
  • Tomo-chan Is a Girl! has Tomo, much to Jun's chagrin, who sees her as more of a dude than a girl and becomes extremely confused and flustered when her femininity surfaces. It really doesn't help that she's as physically strong as Jun and can beat him in a fight if he drops his guard.
  • Urusei Yatsura plays the trope straight with Benten and zigzags it with Ryuunosuke Fujinami.
    • Benten is an aggressive, blunt-spoken alien girl whose biggest hobbies are fighting and riding her spacefaring anti-gravity bike. Although she's based on the "biker babe" archetype, she's as much a Boisterous Bruiser as she is sexy, and she displays no interest in guys, preferring instead to focus on picking fights and tinkering with her space-bike. Her macho antics, combined with her strong loyalty to Lum and her friendship with Ryuunosuke, have lead to fans speculating about her sexual preferences.
    • Ryuunozuke is a hard-as-nails, foul-mouthed and highly scrappy fighter who doesn't hesitate to brutally beat down people who get her angry and once tried to rip off Shinobu's clothes so she could steal the other girl's bra for herself. However, the zigzagging comes in two forms. Firstly, Ryuunosuke is normally a very polite and well-mannered individual — still "boyish", but not in the crude sense of the traditional lad-ete. Secondly, Ryuunosuke resents her masculine attributes, which are the result of being Raised as the Opposite Gender by her psychotic father, and actively wants to become more conventionally feminine. Unfortunately, between her father's campaign to sabotage her efforts and the meddling of Ataru Moroboshi and Shutaro Mendou, who hope to exploit this drive for their own perverse ends, her efforts are doomed to failure.
  • Variable Geo: Jun Kobuta is an avid motorcycle enthusiast and spends time knockin' back brewskies like a pro. But she loves a good scrap, more than anything, which is part of the reason she's competing in the VG tournament.

    Comic Books 
  • The Authority's Jenny Sparks: chain-smokes, drinks like a fish, has lots of casual sex, kicks a lot of ass, yells, and takes charge a lot.
  • Battle Chasers: Red Monika is a tall, leggy, cartoonishly well-endowed, beer-drinkin', hard-livin' air pirate. "Sexy" doesn't begin to describe her.
  • Birds of Prey: Technically the whole team; Oracle just narrowly avoids it due to being a touch more feminine than the others.
    • Dinah Laurel Lance a.k.a. Black Canary is a leather jacket-wearing, Hard-Drinking Party Girl Blood Knight and Ethical Slut who feels far more at home in a bar fight than she would playing house, and even in casual scenarios she tends to prefer wearing jeans and leather pants than skirts and dresses Depending on the Artist. As time has gone on, this has evolved to the point her costume has become Civvie Spandex, amounting to her dressing like a Shorttank with a jacket on top.
    • Zinda Blake a.k.a. Lady Blackhawk, resident pilot. She knows how to order beer in 30 different languages, is a gifted driver and pilot, has a fondness for firearms, and pretty forward with her sexual desires. The only 'girly' thing about her is she's fond of wearing a skirt.
    • Though Helena Bertinelli a.k.a. Huntress plays Girly Girl to Dinah's Tomboy, it's only really by default; she's just as willing to get into a fight, get a drink, and get laid as Dinah is, it's just that in casual dress she's more comfortable wearing feminine and fashionable clothes, and has interests in opera and similar tastes.
    • From the 2011 relaunch, Starling a.k.a. Ev Crawford is a tattooed, gun-toting woman with an implied shady past.
  • Castle Waiting has the inappropriately-named Peaceful, who even retains some of the personality elements after she becomes a nun. Although the Solicitines' concept of appropriately nun-like behaviour is extremely lax.
  • In Cerebus the Aardvark, Mary Ernestway is (depending on how generously you interpret Dave Sim's intentions, given his... unusual thoughts on feminism) either a mean-spirited exaggeration or particularly vicious deconstruction. Sim generally hates this trope, and saw Mary Hemingwaynote  as a prime example based on her diaries of their African safari, which he used as notes for writing her and Ernest as Mary and Ham Ernestway in the comic's Form and Void arc. Thus, Mary is loud, unnecessarily profane, tends to put exaggerated emphasis on every third word, coughs up and spits loogies like it's a sport, and is all-in-all a boorish buffoon. She also seems to take pride in the fact that she has out-"manned" Ham, who is little more than a shell of his former self and has what little personality he has left crushed whenever he's around Mary. Mary's also a terrible shot, and leads the group around in circles on their travels, leaving Cerebus and Jaka stranded in the forest in the wake of a blizzard when they flee after Ham kills himself.
  • Outlaw from Deadpool, Agency X and Domino. She's a Cowgirl mutant with Super-Strength who enjoys shooting shit, getting hammered, and typically plays the Tomboy in a Tomboy and Girly Girl scenario. When she became friends with Domino, she even played that to Dom herself, who's pretty much this herself.
  • The Flash: Linda Park loves beer, hockey, most other sports, and video games, traditionally masculine hobbies that her husband, Wally West, doesn't quite get the appeal of (though he'll indulge in them for her sake). Depending on the Artist, she's often depicted with Boyish Short Hair as well.
  • Grendel: Susan Veraghen is a Samurai Biker Lad-ette in an age of Samurai Biker Lads.
  • Hack/Slash: Cassie. Although she constantly looks like a stripper, she's tough, cold, and quite prone to delivering a Cluster F-Bomb. She really hates it when she drools in her sleep, though. Her diary is also bright pink (bloodstains aside...) and has a unicorn sticker on it, she even wears pink panties with hearts as seen when Bomb Queen pulled her skirt in the 1st crossover.
    Bomb Queen: Your type gets me all perky. Hardcore on the outide. Pink on the Inside.
    • The Resurrection series intensified this, as the now twentysomething Cassie has much fewer inhibitions about casual sex than when she was a teenager.
  • Harley Quinn is like this in the more recent comics. When "off-duty", she likes full contact sports like roller derby and kickboxing, and, as an Anti-Hero, seems to relish melee combat, especially using blunt weapons. She also tends to eat a lot and have a pretty crude sense of humor.
  • Jem and the Holograms (IDW): Jetta is one of these. Her bio says it all. She likes pubs, bacon sandwiches, boxing, and she gets into fistfights a lot.
  • Jonah Hex: Tallulah Black is a Wild West variant.
  • Manhunter (DC Comics): Kate Spencer smokes, drinks and works as a federal prosecutor for her day job, and in her off hours she takes out Karma Houdini criminals and does not abide by the Thou Shall Not Kill rule most heroes follow.
  • Queen and Country: Tara is a foul mouthed, hard drinking and smoking Action Girl, though she does mellow out a bit while she is pregnant.
  • Rat Queens: All four protagonists, and several other female characters, are female Standard Fantasy Setting adventurers who are into booze, drugs, casual sex, and extreme violence, in no particular order of preference.
  • Red Sonja — everything but the sex. And that's only because having sex will strip her of her divinely gifted prowess as a swordswoman.note  The very first scene of Gail Simone's run on the book has Sonja being annoyed at being woken up with a severe hangover. Certain writers, such as Simone, have retconned away the notion that sex will strip her of her prowess — to the point when she hears of a swordsman with a similar vow, she thinks it insane. Post-retcon she adds sex to her list of vices.
  • Robin (1993):
    • While she wasn't old enough to drink yet, Callie Evans was very obviously shaping into one the last time she was seen, being slightly crude while wolfishly telling her guy friends what outfits look hot on guys, sitting in a stereotypically boyish stance with an arm slung across the back of the bench, loving basketball, chopping her bob-cut into a pixie and ditching her feminine sweaters and v-necks for t-shirts and leather jackets.
    • Stephanie Brown/Spoiler, later Batgirl, was a tomboy who often dressed in baggy army jackets and flannel shirts, was far more forward with romantic desires, and seemed to match all of Tim's interests. It's notable that the brief run where she got a Girliness Upgrade was considered an Audience-Alienating Era, particularly as it led to her (temporary) death.
  • Secret Six: Scandal, to point that she sleeps in boxers.
  • She-Hulk:
    • She-Hulk, a.k.a. Jennifer Walters, when she's hulked out and less emotionally inhibited.
    • Red She-Hulk fits this trope even more, making Jen look like a girly girl in comparison.
  • Supergirl (2011): Siobhan Smythe, the New 52 version of the Silver Banshee, is a punk girl who lives in a messy apartment, sings in a bar, talks very crudely (at one point telling an army officer to "shove it up yer rifle barrel"), and likes to brawl.
  • Superman: Lois Lane became this by the Turn of the Millennium. She was always a bold working woman willing to get into dangerous situations, but by the 2000s, while she still doesn't mind wearing an elegant dress to a formal occasion every now and then, both the comics and various adaptations have her longue around at home in tomboy-ish attire or sometimes in Clark Kent's old high school football jersey. And whether she's at home or out in Metropolis, Lois unabashedly loves a good pizza, a good beer, and keeping up with sports scores. Oh, and she knows how to brawl and can fight off most (non-superpowered) attackers, thanks to growing up in a military family.
  • Tank Girl — she lives in a tank, consumes more alcohol than would be possible in a world that obeyed conventional laws of physics, gleefully kills people on a daily basis, and has a large collection of insanely overpowered weapons.
  • Ultimate Spider-Man: Compared to most girls in Peter's life, Gwen seems most comfortable being with the guys as she willingly sat with Peter and guys as if it were no big deal.
  • Wonder Woman (1942): Etta Candy's Beta Kappa sorority is a bunch of feminine female Frat Bros who like beating up Nazis and singing Bawdy Songs about their sexual desire for men.
  • X-Wing Rogue Squadron: Plourr Ilo is chaste but otherwise this to the hilt, a hard-drinking big woman with short hair and a muscular build who's more masculine than many male characters, loving a good fight. She can be soft-spoken, nice, and diplomatic — she just generally doesn't see the need. She also turns out to be a princess and manages to balance what she was raised to be with what she made herself into pretty well.

    Comic Strips 

    Fan Works 
  • Captain Kanril Eleya from Bait and Switch has traits of this. She's a Starfleet captain now and was a Bajoran Militia sergeant before that. She's a drinker (though not to excess, usually), she swears a lot, she pays attention to pro sports on Bajor, and she wasn't averse to casual sex before she fell in love with Gaarra (they met when she picked him up in a bar) and likes to take the lead.
  • The Child of Love: Misato is not particularly feminine but is loud, likes driving fast, and drinking a lot (as she proved in Asuka's birthday party).
  • Child of the Storm has Carol, who's not very traditionally feminine; she's loud, brash, a junk food fiend, and favours her hair in a short cut. She's also sporty (being the captain of her school's football/soccer team) and generally athletic, beating her school's entire American Football team at arm-wrestling, aspires to be a military pilot like her uncle Jack O'Neill, or a SHIELD Agent like her cousin Sharon Carter and grandmother Alison Carter and great-grandparents, Peggy Carter and Steve Rogers. However, she also doesn't mind (and actually quite likes) fancy dresses every now and then, usually being her uncle Jack's plus one at parties after his divorce — what bothers her more is the behaviour that some, primarily her Stay in the Kitchen father (who wants her to be more of a Proper Lady), try to force on her.
  • In The Chosen Six, Diane uses the term thinking about her own personality. Sirius appreciates this about her.
  • In the Discworld of A.A. Pessimal, at various points there is Shauna O'Hennigan, career Thief Steffi Gibbet, and a rising star might be Famke Smith-Rhodes-Stibbons, a girl who aspired to pose as a boy and play scrum-half in a fifteen-a-side team. And, of course, a lot of the younger witch-pilots in the Air Watch, who fly hard and party harder.
  • It was hinted at in Harry Potter canon, and Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness makes it explicit — Ginny Weasley:
    "I'm the only girl in a family of seven! I could belch the entire Chudley Cannons fight song by the time I was four, but Katie Bell had to tell me when I needed a bra and show me how to put the effing thing on, so don't act like I'm supposed to be some sheltered little flower about how boys are put together."
  • Evangelion 303:
    • Misato is the commanding officer of the "Evangelion" Air Force squad. She is an experienced soldier and an Ace Pilot. She is also a slob who likes partying (sometimes with her subordinates), drinking heavily, and having sex.
    • Kelly Wallis is a soldier who likes warplanes, drinking, playing rough sports (such as rugby), and is pretty sexually active.
  • Becky Lynch in The Horsewomen Of Las Vegas. She curses like a drunken sailor, can drink almost anyone under the table, will kill you without a second thought and can do it easily, and delights in infuriating anyone around her. The only time she tries to "be girly" is when she and one of her Co-Dragons, Brooke Tessmacher, seduced two EMT's so they could steal an ambulance as part of a bigger plan.
  • Guys Being Dudes: Candela is described by Arlo as a "jockbro", has Hard-Drinking Party Girl tendencies, mercilessly teases her coworkers and enemies alike, and invokes The Bro Code by name in reference to her issues with Spark dating her ex.
  • Last Child of Krypton: Misato enjoys eating junk food, drinking heavily and being loud, uncouth and slovenly. It's so bad that Asuka identifies her apartment automatically when she smells the beer and curry. Shinji was disturbed by it, so he took surreptitious steps to talk her into cutting down the booze and junk food.
  • The minotaur Bossa Nova in Manehattan's Lone Guardian falls under this trope when she's not busy being a grouch. She considers arm wrestling to be serious business, hollers when she wins, and loudly encourages her fans to cheer for her opponent if they gave her a good match. She prefers having a job where she can use her strength, and while she's good at her clothing-related job, she only puts up with it for the sake of getting by financially.
  • The Night Unfurls has two examples without the "sexually active" part.
    • Maia, Queen of Mercenaries, is the technical ruler of Ansur who used to be a fellow mercenary who fought alongside the Black Dogs, an all-male PMC group. She is outgoing, speaks in an informal, "dude-ish" way, and likes to hit the bar for an ale (to her, wine is a "prissy" drink). Later subverted as she develops into a melancholic Broken Bird over time, something that is Played for Drama.
    • Sanakan may not be an adult, but she is crude, tactless, aggressive, quite vulgar, and eats with her mouth open. In combat, she charges towards the enemy while swinging a large hammer or BFS.

    Films — Animation 
  • Brave: Merida is the biggest example among the Disney Princesses, if not the only one. She is loud, crude, unruly, Hot-Blooded, more interested in archery, riding horses, or training with her father, and completely lacking in good manners or elegance. It provides the contrast between her and Elinor, who wants Merida to be a Proper Lady.
  • Mebh from Wolfwalkers is a more G-rated example due to her young age; she's a fun-loving, brash, boisterous and rebellious tomboy who has no problems getting into fights when challenged. She also has questionable hygiene and even belches loudly after downing an entire bottle of milk by herself.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Aliens: Vasquez is a tough and masculine Marine. Her character introduction is one of the guys asking if she's ever been mistaken for a man. She icily replies "No, have you?"
  • Magnolia "Dusty" Clydesdale from The Apple Dumpling Gang. Just see what she does to Donovan after discovering he bought the big brass bed in the general store.note 
  • Bad Moms has Carla, who swears, drinks, smokes pot and has sex with random guys in a very frat bro way, as well as giving minimal effort regarding raising her son. A Bad Moms Christmas reveals her mother is more or less the same way.
  • Bumblebee: Charlie, minus the more 'adult' aspects of this trope. Charlie collects model cars and is big into car repair, and dresses in a very tomboyish manner: jeans, band shirts, boxers, shorts.
  • Bridesmaids/ Megan — sexually forward, not exactly a dainty eater and she even enthusiastically suggests setting up a female fight club for the bachelorette party.
  • Charlie's Angels (2019): Sabina embodies this trope, with her boyish short hair, potty mouth, fairly masculine clothing while not on the job (undercover she dolls it up when required) and cheerful, frat boy-like personality. It's also implied she's lesbian or bisexual, as she flirts often with women and gets distracted when attractive ones are nearby.
  • Carmen in The Color of Money is a light version of this. She keeps herself looking nice, but she spends her time hanging around pool halls, smoking and drinking with the guys. She is also a lot more Street Smart than her boyfriend, Vincent.
  • Conan the Destroyer: Zula is a lean, muscular warrior woman who acts even fiercer than the male warriors, and her advice on how to get a man seems outright parodic of the uber-masculine stereotype, while she's a Screaming Warrior too and bares her teeth when she fights.
    Jehnna: How do you attract a man? What I mean is, suppose you set your heart on somebody. What would you do to get him?
    Zula: Grab him! And take him!
  • Dope: Diggy acts and dresses just like a boy, to the point that she's mistaken for one repeatedly and only hangs out with her male best friends, whose interests she shares (including girls, being a Butch Lesbian).
  • Effects: Celeste, the gaffer, is a woman who favours a more butch fashion sense, has a taste for Scotch whisky, and can handle herself in a bar fight.
  • Feds: DeWitt (played by Rebecca De Mornay) is from a family of law enforcement, to the point that she's extremely uncomfortable doing anything feminine.
  • Frances, the protagonist of Float Like A Butterfly, smokes, swears, fights, isn't grossed out by skinning animals, and above all wants to be a boxer.
  • Girlfight: Diana is a hot-tempered, violent tomboy who swears freely and in general acts more like a stereotypical Latino tough guy. She propositions her boyfriend, then is disappointed when he turns her down, since he'd promised her father not to. Once she becomes a boxer, this gets enforced even more, with her beating two men in the ring.
  • Grease: Rizzo. She's a tough and sharp-tongued girl who robustly smokes, drinks, and has a One of the Boys demeanor when interacting with the T-Birds. She refers to herself as a lady at one point in the film, to which a T-Bird responds, "Lady? I don't see a lady".
  • Melissa McCarthy plays Shannon Mullins in The Heat, a tough-as-nails female cop who's far more intimidating than her male coworkers and about as unfeminine as you can get, yet she has a very active sex life.
  • Rose Hildridge, the fast-shooting, hard-drinking, hard-cussing Bounty Hunter in High Plains Invaders.
  • Idle Hands: Debi LeCure (played by Vivica A. Fox).
    (after the hand is defeated) "Time for the ritualistic sex!"
  • Kate, the female blacksmith from A Knight's Tale is a medieval version of this trope. The end of the film has her winning a flatulence contest with the other men.
  • Miss Congeniality: Gracie Hart starts out as one but the fun starts when she has to enter a beauty pageant. Hiding her Ladette tendencies among the other models is not easy.
  • Princess of Thieves: Gwyn is a total tomboy who much prefers to go off riding and have adventures, displaying her skill at archery disguised as a man, with a very masculine attitude which lets her fit in perfectly. Philip lampshades this by saying she wants be a man. Gwyn has no interest in female things (according to what's expected then) but still has obvious attraction to Philip that he fully reciprocates.
  • Raiders of the Lost Ark: Marion Ravenwood. She can even drink men twice her size under the table.
  • Riddick: Dahl is not to be messed with. When Santana insults her in Spanish she brutally punches his face multiple times. Santana is so confused and surprised he doesn't know how to react. She's also a crack shot.
  • Repli Kate: The titular character is a clone who has been educated by guys into being pretty much the ultimate Ladette.
  • Some Kind of Wonderful: Watts. Before the Practice Kiss, she even says to Keith: "Pretend I'm a girl" since she acts more like a stereotypical teenage boy, with her boyish short hair and masculine attire (including wearing boxers) to boot.
  • Sorority Row: Chugs. She's a very heavy drinker (hence the nickname), is sexually very aggressive and seemingly none too obsessed with personal hygiene ("you taste like vomit", as one boy told her after she stuck her tongue down his throat). Her answering machine also instructs callers to "leave a message after the *BURP*."
  • Dizzy Flores from Starship Troopers is the toughest female character in the movie. She can beat most men in armed combat and arm wrestling, loves playing rough sports, enjoys drinking with her male friends, and engages in sex with Johnny Rico.
  • McCoy from Streets of Fire. Her character was originally written as a man, and her lines weren't changed all that much after the gender flip.
  • There's Something About Mary: The titular Mary has elements of this; she loves "guy" stuff like golf, baseball, and beer while still remaining perfectly feminine.
  • Rafaela from To Rob a Thief is this. She is presented fixing an engine car, is crude, agressive and does not embrace at all her feminine traits (until it is demanded by The Plan).
  • The Trouble with Angels: A 1966 film where Hayley Mills plays a girl named Mary Clancy in a Catholic boarding school who shows traits of this. Since it's a family film in the 1960s, it was pretty tame but the indications were all there. She's a smoker, likes breaking rules for the sake of it, doesn't seem to care about being punished, and the school's Mother Superior describes her as having "a will of iron".
  • Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnarok is the Asgardian version of this. She's very fond of drinking and fighting, and can be very aggressive and forceful, especially when pushed. A Deleted Scene also showed a woman leaving her bedroom, implying she sleeps around (she's bisexual according to the director and actress).
  • Yukio demonstrates traits of this in The Wolverine, with her tough-as-nails attitude and apparent lack of organization (notice her car is a complete mess when Wolverine arrives, and she doesn't seem bothered in the least with it).

    Jokes 
  • Two women are talking.
    Alice: I just broke up with my boyfriend.
    Betty: Why?
    Alice: Could you live with an unemployed chain smoker who swore a lot?
    Betty: No way.
    Alice: He couldn't either.

    Literature 
  • Agnes Grey: Matilda Murray embodies this trope back in Victorian England, and needless to say this does not go over well at all.
  • Anita Blake, and how. Particularly pronounced as the series went on and all women except the titular character became characterized as weak, jealous, or otherwise not in contention for Anita's enormous reverse harem. Anita Blake is the distaff version of a male fantasy — where the titular character raises the dead, works for the police but also plays vigilante, and let's not forget the harem. Thirty or so men, with at least six regulars, and at least one new flavour per book. She's the biggest swinging dick in the series, and she makes sure you know it.
  • In The Bridge Kingdom Archives Aren's twin sister, princess Ahnna, Commander of the Southwatch. Always dressed to fight (although once she tries on a gown belonging to her brother's wife Lara — out of curiosity, as she explains), likes to drink, uses foul language, and is a very capable warrior. By the end of book one, she also sports a big scar on her face. The same goes for Lia, Aren's former lover and a member of his personal guard.
  • Magdalena Swärd in "De skandalösa" isn't quite as tomboyish as Beatrice, but still, she has a feisty proto-feminist attitude (and she's happy to not have to wear a corset during a costume party), that could make her qualify as a 17th-century version of this trope. And just like Beatrice, she is careful to not ruin her reputation by being promiscuous, but she still starts a highly sexual affair with her love interest (Gabriel) before they are married.
  • The Discworld novel Monstrous Regiment explores this. Many of the characters have been keeping up the Sweet Polly Oliver act for so long that, at one point in the story, they have a hard time passing for female.
    • After centuries of being indistinguishable from the men, Dwarf women in Ankh-Morpork are experimenting with femininity and mostly hitting this point.
      • Namely, they started wearing leather or mail skirts with their armor and sometimes wear make-up, or slight heels on their iron-shod, hobnailed boots. Beards, armor, helmets, axes, drinking, singing about gold, etc.—stays the same. That being said, they don't drink beer so much anymore.
  • Dragonlance has Kitiara Uth Matar, the love interest of Tanis Half-Elven and the Blue Dragonlord. Kit is has been shown to drink with her (mostly male) soldiers, happily engage in random battle, and has no qualms about using her sexuality to further her goals or just to satisfy her boredom.
    • Her showing these traits and her lack of inhibitions are what attracted Tanis (and indeed several other major players in the Dragonlance universe) in the first place.
      • This may be deconstructed in that it's implied such actions have to do with her author-stated Evil alignment and below-average Wisdom; they're how she expresses the Majere self-destructive tendencies (Like Caramon's alcoholism and codepencies, Raistlin's all-consuming ambition, and their mother's detachment from the physical world).
  • Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe: Idgie Threadgood (and Eva Bates to a lesser extent). Idgie overlaps with the Butch Lesbian and Eva with the Good Bad Girl.
    • Interestingly enough, Eva does enjoy some aspects of femininity — the book mentions that she even wears lipstick and beads to go fishing — but her fondness for beer, sex, and ungenteel company is pretty Lad-ette-ish for the 1930s South.
  • Full Metal Panic!: Melissa Mao, depicted in the picture at the top of the page. She is a Sergeant Major in Mithril, drinks way too much beer, smokes a lot, is a Big Eater, and says very crude, foul language. Her hygiene is also pretty poor, as it's once shown that she left a bunch of cigarettes and at least 20 cans of beer on Tessa's coffee table. She even ran away from an arranged marriage to join the Marines (while still wearing her wedding dress). As for the sex part, she's very open about talking about it (as seen when she ruthlessly teases Sousuke and gets exasperated that he doesn't know what condoms are for). She also apparently likes it a lot, as is revealed when she finally enters into a relationship with Kurz (they engage in sex multiple times a day).
  • Gone Girl deconstructs this by highlighting the elements of male wish-fulfillment behind it, portraying this character type (referred to as the "Cool Girl") as popular among men because she flatters their interests and biases instead of calling out their boorishness or pressuring them to get their acts together like an often-scorned Wet Blanket Wife would. The pressure to live up to the idea of the Cool Girl is partially what caused Amy to snap, fake her death, and frame her husband Nick for her murder. The full passage can be read on the Quotes page.
    • Within the book, there's a specific example in the character of Margot "Go" Dunne, Nick's sister/Amy's sister-in-law. She's the opposite of Amy in many ways, enjoys "masculine" things such as hard liquor and dirty jokes while disliking traditionally feminine things, and is the brutally honest Only Sane Woman. However, she's also a deconstruction — it's heavily implied that growing up with an abusive and rabidly misogynistic father made Go reluctant to be seen as stereotypically feminine out of fear of being insulted and belittled by her father like her mother was.
  • The In Death series has Eve, who can't understand the appeal of anything feminine or frilly. In fact, she was downright panicked the time she had to host a bridal shower.
  • Teres from Kane Series' Bloodstone is the only child of lord Malchion, ruler of Breimen, and his heir. To gain respect of male nobles and increase her chances of becoming the future ruler, she tries to become one of them: she is a competent fighter, wears masculine garb hiding her figure, drinks, swears and brawls alongside men — and even gets into a knife-throwing contest with her own father over who will spend the first night with their new female slave.
  • Toras Redone, from the Kharkanas Trilogy, is a battlefield-experienced commander in the Hust Legion, is never seen in anything other than sweat-stained leathers and prefers to spend time with her legion rather than at court. She also drinks profusely.
  • The Kinsey Millhone series. The titular character, although she softens a bit in the later books.
  • Much Ado About Grubstake: Dude Magnet Saloon Owner Everdene can "lift a keg of beer over her head, break up a fight between belligerent drunks, and outdraw every man in town[.]"
  • Beatrice Löwenström in Överenskommelser is pretty much a 19th century version of this trope. She's a tomboyish (but also bookish) proto-feminist, who competes with men in ice-skating and horse-riding. But despite that, and even though she's described as not that good-looking, she can also attract men if she wants to. And even though she never has casual sex, because that would have been unacceptable for a girl from her social class in that era, she has an affair with Seth before getting married to him, and that's enough for her own uncle to call her a slut.
  • A Song of Ice and Fire: Asha Greyjoy, to a degree because Ironman culture has Testosterone Poisoning, Asha is essentially required to be a Lad-ette if she is to get any respect from the men under her command. This is not to say she doesn't enjoy it.
  • Tales of an Mazing Girl is more of a nerd than a pure Ladette — but she will still get drunk and fool around — only she does it at Warhammer 40,000 tournament, not a bar.
  • The Temeraire series.
    • Captain Jane Roland might be an example of a Manette — which is to say, she has traits of The Lad-ette, but rather than acting like a stereotypical young man acts like an adult man, showing an easy emotional maturity most Lad-ettes don't. She smokes, drinks hard liquor, plays cards, speaks plainly, wears pants, sleeps with men she likes, and oh yeah, is in command of one of the deadliest dragons in the British Aerial Corps. All this in the early 19th century. She usually has or rather had, before being named a Peer and Admiral of the Air to fake ladylike appearance and dress outside of the coverts where the Aerial Corps spend most of their time, it is just that a certain strategically-critical breed of dragon will only accept female captains and so leeway must be granted resulting in a unique subculture.
    • Her daughter Emily is showing every sign of taking after her, to no-one's surprise.
  • In Thud!, the girls of the City Watch elect to go out on the town with Nobby's inexplicably hot new girlfriend Tawneee. The rather conservative Sergeant Colon describes the ladette behaviour of the policewomen with the very apt pun minge-drinking.
  • Cigarette in Under Two Flags by Ouida is a "camp-follower" of a French army unit who is hard-riding, sharp-shooting, sexually promiscuous, and really wants to be a soldier herself.
  • Naomi Landsman of The Yiddish Policemen's Union, a small-craft pilot and Determinator, who describes herself as a Butch Lesbian "in everything but sexual preference." Oh and she's dead before the beginning of the novel.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Battlestar Galactica: Kara "Starbuck" Thrace can literally drink a Cylon her husband under the table and gets into brawls on a fairly regular basis. The coed but macho military means that a number of other female characters have some elements of this, especially Kat.
  • Betty: Kirt acts and dresses like a frat bro, with an exaggerated boyish style. She fits right in while instructing a bunch of boys on how to treat women better.
  • Penny from The Big Bang Theory. At first glance she's a girly girl, wearing bright tops and loving Romantic Comedies; however, it's very quickly revealed she was in Junior Rodeo, knows how to use a gun, often lounges around in sweats, is pretty much a slob, a hard drinker, when she cares about a video game enough she's freakin' amazing at it and she's very much the the masculine girl to Leonard's feminine guy. Three guesses who the guys go to when they need a lesson on how to gut a fish or need someone to kill a spider in their apartment.
  • The Broad City episode "Hurricane Wanda" has Matthew Bevers' older sister Marla, who's short-haired, loud, aggressive, and fond of gross-out humor.
  • Detective Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn Nine-Nine is very foul-tempered, sexually confident, and violent, loves motorcycles, and owns a ridiculous amount of weapons. Her idea of a perfect first date is, "Cheap dinner, watch basketball, bone down."
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Faith, the sexual and violent Slayer. She loves a good meal of burgers and fries and can chug beer like a champion.
  • Burn Notice: Fiona Glenanne, guns and explosives-loving ex-terrorist.
  • The Catherine Tate Show has Tate's best-known character, Lauren Cooper. She's extremely crass, rude, and disrespectful, openly insulting her teachers with stereotypes and refusing to listen to authority in any given situation. In a special sketch for Red Nose Day, she mocked then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, who turned her own catchphrase ("Am I bovvered?") back on her as he teased her. But Tate's performance as Lauren during the Royal Variety Performance topped it all. Who did she make fun of on that occasion? Queen Elizabeth II...while Her Majesty was sitting in the audience. Tate-as-Lauren even insulted her directly ("Is One bovvered? Who's watchin' the Corgis?"). Unsurprisingly (given her status as a Cool Old Lady), Queen Elizabeth laughed along with the rest of the crowd.
  • Carla from Cheers is abrasive and crass, likes watching sports games and playing poker with the guys, loves to listen in on tales of the guys' sex lives, and Really Gets Around. On multiple occasions, male characters imply or outright say that Carla "doesn't count" as a woman.
  • One episode of Cold Case focused on an extreme version of one of these. This being 1963 and a crime procedural, it ended in tragedy.
  • In Cougar Town, Bobby hangs out with a tomboy named Riggs, whom Travis points out is basically a female Bobby.
  • Deadloch: Detective Eddie Redcliffe is a brash, foul-mouthed woman who drinks heavily and dresses like a middle-aged man on holiday.
  • Degrassi: The Next Generation offers a few examples, the first being Jane who needs coaching on how to be a friend, as most of her social circle is hanging out with the guys (and being really good at football). Bianca's profile suggests she'll be right at home with this trope too.
  • Dexter: Deb. At one point, wearing a dress to her brother's wedding, she remarks that she feels like a transvestite.
  • Doctor Who: Dorothy Gale "Ace" McShane. Companion to the Seventh Doctor. A juvenile delinquent who whipped up improvised explosives in her spare time, favored Doc Marten boots and Victorian menswear, and took out two Daleks single-handedly — one with a rocket launcher and one with a enhanced baseball bat. It took an age-up and the novels for her to fully embrace the heavy drinking and casual hookups part, though the series guide says she did have a fling with space pirate Glitz while in her teens.
  • Farscape:
    • Chiana fled her oppressive culture specifically so that she could wander around stealing stuff, getting drunk, and having casual sex. On one memorable occasion she turned up to defend a friend in court while absolutely off her head on speed.
    • Aeryn has a few of the characteristics but is too essentially stoical and gloomy to count. As a Peacekeeper this is expected, they mostly ignore gender except for breeding.
  • Frasier has Roz, who is tough-talking, very openly sexual, and definitely the more masculine in her and Frasier's friendship. In one episode, Martin invites Roz to join his weekly poker game with his drinking buddies—something he'd never even done with his own sons.
  • Game of Thrones:
    • Theon Greyjoy's sister, Yara Greyjoy hands down. Any woman seeking to rule over the Ironborn pretty much has to be one to stand a chance. Unlike most however it turns out she's a Butch Lesbian too.
    • Maege Mormont wears mail and fights alongside men and leads men, which means that she is quite comfortable with the typical "masculine" banter of the soldiers and other bannermen, and has similar attitudes, laughing loudly at their jokes.
  • On The George Lopez Show, Benny is a good example of this trope. It is also lampshaded many times in the series.
  • In The Good Place, Eleanor is a hypersexual, alcoholic, foul-mouthed, strong-willed and uncouth woman, and in many ways is written like a stereotypical uncouth man. In fact, when she and Chidi shared a house together in episode 5, they acted like a stereotypical husband and wife but with the stereotypical gender role expectations reversed, where Chidi complains that he has to do all the chores while Eleanor is a slob.
  • Hightown: Jackie is a blunt, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking promiscuous woman who's very masculine and much like her straight male friends (she's also lesbian).
  • How I Met Your Mother:
    • Robin, her dad having actually raised her as his son. Her full legal name is Robin Charles Scherbatsky Junior. Her being Canadian often comes up in relation to this, usually for laughs. Her doppelganger is also a Butch Lesbian.
    • Lily also has some elements of The Lad-ette, participating in farting contests and speed-eating hot dogs, but is generally more girly than Robin. She also has a very strong sex drive that isn't just used to sexualize her — it's part of her personality and the source of several gender-flipped versions of jokes invoking the All Men Are Perverts trope. This is also in part justified because her mom was a hardcore feminist who didn't want Lily to conform to any traditional feminine roles, but she is still at heart a girly girl.
    • Quite appropriate, since Ted and Marshall are In Touch with Their Feminine Sides, and Barney gets a manicure once a week.
  • iCarly: Sam Puckett is this minus the sex and drinking (at least onscreen) because, well, it's a kid show, kinda.
  • Dee Reynolds in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia can be sometimes as gross and sleazy as the male trio, yet still believe that her living style is on par with the Sex and the City crowd.
  • Atalanta in the Hallmark adaptation of Jason and the Argonauts. Played for a bit of drama since she is in love with Jason but he considers them Like Brother and Sister (though he actually says "brother").
  • Jessica Jones (2015) has the titular character, who is abrasive and crass, cusses the most out of everyone in the series, is very willing to use her Super-Strength to get what she wants, and could drink any given man under the table.
  • Kamen Rider Agito's Sumiko Ozawa is exceedingly blunt, making it a point to slag off anyone she has a problem with to their face. She's also a heavy drinker; in one episode, she had no less than seven pints of beer in one sitting, and she didn't come off as even slightly drunk afterwards. Then you add the fact that she's got some aspects of Wrench Wench, with her being the creator of the G3 System and all.
  • Ladette To Lady, a Reality Show. As the name suggests the contestants are, of course, this. They have been sent to a Finishing School to make them more "ladylike" (though in one case there was a contestant who was actually more of a kindhearted tomboy than a Lad-ette).
  • Las Vegas has Sam Marquez. Though she doesn't look the part she certainly acts it.
  • The Little Drummer Girl: Charlie has a tomboyish name to start with (it's a nickname for Charmian), she's also brash, very plain-spoken, a hard drinker, chain smoker and fairly masculine in a lot of her looks/attitude. She's also unabashedly sexual and has had sex with a lot of men. However, she has a gentler side and is deeply affected due to her spy work (of course, that would wear on most people).
  • In Married... with Children, Marci's Identical Cousin is this trope in all but sexual preference; Al even falls for her.
  • My Boys: PJ fits many of these traits. She's a sportswriter, can drink many of her male friends under the table, and usually associates more with men than other women.
  • Sarah from Orphan Black is a tomboyish Hell-Bent for Leather Hustler, with some substance abuse issues and little to no qualms when it comes to emotionless casual sex.
  • Paper Girls: Mac acts much like a stereotypical cool boy from The '80s, with short hair and also loving to wear a leather jacket. She likes stereotypical boy activities, such as roughhousing and breaking stuff for recreation (Mac went to the scrap yard for this with her older brother Dylan a lot). Mac expresses admiration for people who stand up to superior odds, including a boy she knew and adult Erin. She herself is a very tough tomboy. Being twelve, she doesn't do the more adult activities stereotypical of the trope (e.g. sex and drinking like a guy) though Mac otherwise fits. She has no problem befriending other girls though, unlike the One of the Boys way most are. Mac does come from a rough background however, growing up in poverty with an abusive father along with her brother.
  • Foul-mouthed, untidy, promiscuous Dana Klein from the Israeli series Prisoners of War.
  • Red Dwarf: The female Deb Lister is exactly the same as her male counterpart—the different chromosome apparently only affected her anatomy—and even beats Dave at beer-drinking (by spitting it in his face).
    • Helped by the fact she's from a parallel dimension where male and female roles are basically swapped around. In short, women act like men and men act like women — men are even the ones who fall pregnant. Doing things like belching Yankee Doodle Dandy is still gross and slobbish, but it just makes Deb Lister a disgusting woman, in her world, the way doing things like that makes Dave Lister a disgusting man in his — it's lowbrow and crude, but quite acceptable amongst the equally lowbrow and crude.
  • One closing gag on Roseanne revealed that Roseanne and Jackie's mother Bev was secretly this. Around most people, she was incredibly shrill, condescending, and controlling, but when she was alone with Fred (Jackie's husband), the two bonded over beer, sports, and general slovenliness. Bev even said that she deliberately puts on her annoying persona just to amuse herself.
  • On Saturday Night Live Will Ferrell's portrayal of former Attorney General Janet Reno is hyper-aggressive and masculine but still with a bit of a sensitive side. Just the casting of a man as big as Ferrell to play this role makes it this trope.
  • Saving Grace has Grace Hanadarko. Pretty much exemplifies this trope and then some.
  • Scrubs:
    • Denise Mahony, a.k.a. Joe, an intern introduced in season 8. (Also, Dr. Cox loves this kind of woman).
    • One Imagine Spot gag featured JD rooming with a combined Elliot and Turk who was this. Normal Elliot also has shades of this — she has brothers and it's implied that her father wanted another son, although she is rather girly.
      Elliturk: [while playing a video game with J.D.] Let me kill you and you can fondle my boobs.
  • In an episode of 7th Heaven, Ruthie wanted to be like Simon and "the guys" which included nothing but being rude and crude.
  • Smallville: Lois Lane is a tough fighter and a heavy drinker. (The latter being the reason she was expelled from Metropolis University). After meeting her Clark describes her as talkative and rude. She describes herself as independent and self-sufficient.
  • Square One TV: One of the actresses, Cynthia Darlow, displayed a good PBS Kids version of a Lad-ette.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: Tasha Yar falls into this trope as well, though she wasn't on the show long enough to fully explore her character. What we see of her definitely counts, though. She wears her hair short in a quasi-military organization where it's not required, seems more than eager to jump into a fight if needed, speaks with a strong contralto voice, and when she was intoxicated by polywater, she was more than willing to take the aggressive lead in her sexual encounters with other crew members.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Jadzia Dax belongs to the Trill species who can fuse with an intelligent worm-like symbiont. The symbiont is very long-lived and when the humanoid body dies it is implanted into a new body, carrying all the memories and identities of all previous hosts. This creates a new individual who has lived as both men and women several times over. Jadzia (The name of the Trill, Dax is the symbiont) is usually a disciplined, intelligent, and very-well mannered officer, but off-duty can get a little bit wild — sometimes meeting up with her old Klingon friends for a night of starting drunken bar fights. Sisko also calls her "Old Man", having been friends with Dax's previous host.
  • Still Standing had Judy Miller, who was just as willing to crack open a beer and watch a Chicago Bears game as her husband Bill. She often tried to claim that she was the more "intellectual" and cultured of the pair, but often ended up getting into just as much trouble as he did. One episode even lampshaded it: Tina, the family's youngest daughter, has a spider in her room, and runs to her mother to kill it, which upsets Bill and sends him on a quest to prove his status as the "man of the house."
  • S.W.A.T. (2017): Chris is shown by her quite masculine fashion sense alongside being a female cop working in a male-dominated environment who's more than capable of keeping up with her male coworkers.
  • That '70s Show:
    • Donna Pinciotti. Eric first fell for her after she punched him in the gut.
    • Rhonda Tate aka "Big Rhonda" goes even further, being fond of hard drinking and hot dog eating contests. In "Red And Stacey", Donna and Jackie give her a makeover before her date with Fez, but in the end, Fez prefers the less ladylike Rhonda.
  • On Two and a Half Men, Charlie's daughter Jenny is more or less him; she loves drinking, partying and sex (with women).
  • Pretty much the entire female cast of Girl Code walk the line between this and Hard-Drinking Party Girl. Several girls comment on how they get along better with guys.
  • Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps: Janet Keogh has many elements of this, although she does have her "girly" moments as well.
  • The West Wing: C.J. Cregg, although only to the same extent as her male colleagues, who are rather far removed from stereotypically male behavior themselves.
  • Wings: Alex Lambert was like this. While it initially made her more attractive to Joe and Brian, once she and Brian started dating, he gradually grew more frustrated by it.
  • In the British Series Wish Me Luck, British Agent Mattie Firman is, unusually for the time, a forthright, athletic woman who doesn't mince words, swears a lot—her catchphrase is "oh, SOD!"—is always willing to have a drink at the pub with the male cadets (and whup their asses in combat practice), and has one night stands, none of which are behaviors people approved of in women at the time. Even her Love Interest Colin/Cyrano is a bit thrown when after they sleep together, she says matter of factly "We don't have to make anything of it" and mentions picking up a guy at the movies for a fling the day before she shipped out.
  • Wizards of Waverly Place: Alex's grandmother, Magdalena, seems to be a more elderly version of this:
    Magdalena: "If I see one scratch on that bike, someone's gonna eat spokes."
  • Yellowstone: Avery is a former stripper and skilled horsewoman who takes a job among the manly ranch hands. She fearlessly volunteers to sleep in the same bunkhouse as the other men and engages in all the same past times as they do.

    Music 
  • "Bad Girlfriend" by Theory of a Deadman.
  • Bowling for Soup: "Girl All the Bad Guys Want" is about an awkward guy crushing on a ladette and trying to seem tough to attract her.
  • Garth Brooks. "That Girl is a Cowboy."
  • The Coasters' "Lady Like" is a song about a girl who isn't.
  • The Donnas's music is full of partying, drinking, drug use, sex, and tough girl attitude For example, "Take it Off" is about the singer getting drunk and aggressively demanding sex. Other songs include; "40 Boys in 40 Nights", "It's on the Rocks" "Smoke You Out", and "Take Me to the Backseat"
  • Evelyn Evelyn. The title character from this (unofficial) video.
  • Wanda Jackson's Fujiyama Mama.
  • Jessie J's "Do It Like a Dude" seems to have been created for the purpose of being The Lad-ette's anthem.
  • Kaiser Chiefs' video for "The Angry Mob" centers on rival lad-ette hen-parties.
  • Toby Keith's "Whiskey Girl."
  • Marina & the Diamonds Girls.
  • Maybe "Guys do it All the Time" by Mindy McCready (the final verse suggests that she may be putting it on to try to get her boyfriend to see how she feels when he acts like this)
  • Natalie Portman in a Saturday Night Live digital skit.
  • Paradiso Girls' ""Patron Tequila."
  • P!nk about half the time, if not more. "Get the Party Started", "Trouble", "Cuz I Can", "So What", "Bad Influence"...
  • The Prodigy's video for "Smack My Bitch Up": the main character.
  • Rihanna, her actions after Good Girl Gone Bad indicate this, but Gangasta 4 Life proves it a fact.
  • All of Shampoo's work. Especially "Girl Power", which invented the phrase before the Spice Girls hijacked it and took the threat out.
  • Ashlee Simpson: "Autobiography" and "Rule Breaker" helps her cause.
  • Gretchen Wilson's "Redneck Woman."
  • Miley Cyrus adopted this persona around the Bangerz period of her career, initiated by "We Can't Stop" and its Surreal Music Video.
  • Rodgers and Hart's The Lady is a Tramp is essentially an anthem for this type of character.
  • Snow tha Product. Most of her lyrics wouldn't be out of place coming from a dude, nor are they out of place when she says them. It helps that, unlike certain other female rappers, she doesn't force her voice to sound squeakier or higher.
  • Swedish heavy metal band Sister Sin has a number of songs on this subject. Probably the best example is In It For Life, which is an unapologetic declaration of intent to continue partying all the time and having an endless succession of one-night-stands instead of settling down to a normal career and trying a long term relationship.
  • Reverend Horton Heat's "Hardscrabble Woman". The animated video actually has her age from a young(ish) woman to a Cool Old Lady.
  • "Good Girls" by Elle King ("What good girls don't, I do"), with a hint of Broken Bird as well.

    Pro Wrestling 
  • Jacqueline as manager to the Acolyte Protection Agency, America's Most Wanted and Beer Money Incorporated. Two beer-drinking poker-playing Hired Guns, two beer-drinking cowboys, and a beer-drinking cowboy with a man who imagined himself a corporate executive...Bobby Roode was the odd shoe in all this, Jacqueline fit in just in fine, though at times was exasperated by just how quickly James Storm could go through AMW's liquor reserves. But only at times, as he liked to party with her when she was drunk.
  • TNA loudly flaunts that the TNA Knockouts (read: women wrestlers) are not the typical "divas", they went ahead and gave us the exact opposite of a diva just to prove the point, in the form of ODB, who fit this trope like a glove. Built like a brick shithouse, given to smoking, drinking, and violence, and unlikely to win a beauty contest, her name stands for "One Dirty Bitch". It was unsurprising when TNA then turned her and Jacqueline into a tag team.
  • TNA had another less extreme example in "The Hardcore Knockout" Roxxi. She's not constantly getting liquored up and cracking dirty jokes like ODB, but her punk look and Garbage Wrestler style definitely set her apart from the more feminine members of the roster.
  • Thea Trinidad in real life. She is a Gamer Chick, drops Cluster F Bombs, and hates getting dolled up.

    Roleplay 

    Theatre 
  • Princess Winnifred the Woebegone in Once Upon a Mattress. Among other things, she gets to the prince's castle by swimming through the moat, wrestles, lifts weights, and performs all of her songs in a loud, raucous manner. In fact, her preferred nickname isn't "Winnie"- it's Fred. Her brash and masculine behaviors are part of why many disapprove of her and Prince Dauntless as a couple.
  • Anybodys in West Side Story is a girl who desperately wants to be one of the Jets and dresses and acts like one of the boys. She is the only girl not to wear a dress to the dance.

    Toys 

    Video Games 
  • Jun Kubota from Advanced Variable Geo is a former Olympic-level wrestler who drinks lots of beer, rides a motorcycle, uses the Japanese Pronoun "ore" for herself, and has a reputation for being a merciless opponent. She does, however, have a Guilty Pleasure for stuffed animals and is quite the Genius Bruiser.
  • Karlach from Baldur's Gate III. She's a barbarian bruiser from the infernal plane and has a cheery, "one of the boys" personality, but is still conventionally attractive with a feminine figure and face.
  • Kazooie of... Banjo-Kazooie. Since it's a kids' game (for the most part), the "sex, beer, and swearing" bits are out, but she does love fighting, being rude, and insulting everything that moves.
  • In Bug Fables, the Ant and Bee Kingdoms are, as in real life, almost entirely female. Soldier ants in particular tend to be Top Heavy Gals who wear lots of armor, are gruff, and who love to get into scraps. Soldier bees, meanwhile, tend to be very dedicated to their jobs.
  • Iysayana from Byteria Saga, an elf who is culturally human, is a cross between this, a Hard-Drinking Party Girl and the village bicycle. She cares about her feminine appearance but behaves like a stereotypical guy otherwise.
  • Chrono Trigger Ayla is very much like this. Lucca is too, but only when she's drunk (and she denies having acted so when she's sober).
  • Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled has the Nitro Squad member/former trophy girl Ami retooled into one. Besides being really enthusiastic about racing and acting less dainty than the other girls, she has a raspy voice and an athletic build that she likes to show off at any opportunity.
  • Cyberpunk 2077: V has the same personality regardless of gender, meaning that a female V is a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, car-obsessed, trigger-happy hedonist. To top it all off, Cherami Leigh gives her a Tomboyish Voice for extra impact.
  • Donkey Kong 64 has Tiny Kong, who's rather eager to kick reptile butt.
  • Dragon Age:
    • In Dragon Age: Origins the female Warden of the Dwarf Noble and Human Noble origins tends to lean into this trope. If the Warden is a female Noble Human and classed as a fighter, her mother with express some chagrin that she spends so much time sparring, sweating like a mule. During their final confrontation, Arl Howe mocks the Female Human Noble Warden for her unladylike behaviour.
      Arl Howe: Well, well... Bryce Cousland's little spitfire? All grown up and still playing the man!
    • Dragon Age II:
      • Aveline can hold her own in a fight rather better than most, is stubborn to a fault, and is rather masculine in temperament; she's rather more mature and less comfortable with courtship than most examples of this trope but she certainly behaves a lot more like a male character in a fantasy game than a female one. She's also described, despite being rather calm and reserved, as being so physically strong she's terrifying. Isabela is a much better example: she enjoys her fights, drinks, gambling, big boats, and casual sex encounters, and she's not rude but loves to tease people with innuendo.
      • A Female Hawke with the sarcastic personality definitely falls into this category, being a witty, irreverent Fight Magnet. At the end of the day she'd much prefer to head down to Lowtown and have a few drinks at The Hanged Man, instead of attending formal balls and banquets with the nobility. Likewise, their mother is exasperated that her hopes of finding a "proper" husband are scuppered because her chosen romantic partners are either an ex-Warden Apostate, a Dalish Blood-Mage, a Pirate or an Elven ex-slave.
  • In Fable II, Hammer is one large, hard-drinking, loud, violent dude of a woman.
  • Fallout:
    • Fallout 3: Sydney is a merc who modifies her own guns, and, at the end of the day, uses the money she's made to get stinking drunk. The game is full of these, actually, such as Riley and Brick of Riley's Rangers, Sarah Lyons, and female Raiders and Slavers. About the only conventionally feminine women in the game are Vault-dwellers, scientists, the women of Andale, and one crazy woman in Arefu who thinks it's pre-war time and you're there to deliver her catalogues.
    • In Fallout: New Vegas, Rose of Sharon Cassidy, a.k.a. Cass is a fairly pure embodiment of this trope: a hard-drinking, dick-joke cracking, unabashedly sexual woman.
    • Fallout 4 has Cait, a self-serving hard-drinking hard-fighting chem-huffing Irish-born pit fighter. While she ditches the chems in her personal quest, she never loses her bloodlust.
  • The Fatal Fury and The King of Fighters series. The pirate and treasure hunter Bonne Jenet. Interestingly, she's a complete Lad-ette personality-wise (one of her intros in Fatal Fury has her gulping down a pint of beer along with her all-male crew), but looks-wise she's very Stripperiffic (low-cut dresses, heels, sex appeal, etc.).
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Final Fantasy V: Pirate captain Faris to the point of initially being mistaken for a man. Even after her gender is revealed Bartz and Galuf have a hard time thinking of her as female.
    • Final Fantasy XIII has Fang, one of if not the most manliest person in any Final Fantasy game.
  • Fire Emblem:
  • Subverted in the case of Forte in Galaxy Angel. While she does like guns and shooting, she is firmly into dancing and is very much refined and cultured. Firmly established since the first game, where Tact, the main character, remarks on the supposed oddness of her using perfume. In his words:
    Tact: I thought you'd say something like "The scent of gunpowder is my cologne!" or something.
    Forte: Evidently, you read too many novels.
  • Baiken of Guilty Gear is one of her world's greatest swordsmen, ever ready for a fight, and is similarly unrefined and brash in her behavior, down to her use of masculine pronouns in Japanese.
  • Pretty hilariously, Kyu from HuniePop. Why hilarious? Because Kyu is also a fairy.
    Kyu: [after eating pizza] Mmmmmm, fuck, that's good! Yo, I'm about to bust a nut over here!
    • Of the game's human characters, Aiko Yumi also qualifies. She's very swear-happy, has a high sex drive and speaks very casually about what she likes in bed, will burp loudly and laugh about it if you try to give her food when she's full, and is one of the few characters who'll take alcohol at any time of day.
      Aiko: That was a pussy drink! Hit me with something stronger!
  • The Izuna games have Ichika, who is out searching for a guy who can cook and clean for her. By the end of the game, she finds one in Sakichi, and in the second game, they get married.
  • Syrenne from The Last Story is a textbook example. Lowell actually comments that she doesn't count as a woman at one point, and gets knocked out with a bar stool for his trouble.
  • League of Legends:
  • Mass Effect:
    • The female Commander Shepard can definitely fall here. She has a rough contralto voice, doesn't wear makeup for the most part (granted, not much point when you spend more time blasting things than dating), is just as much of a badass as her male counterpart, and can definitely hold her liquor (especially after dying and being rebuilt in Mass Effect 2). Helped by the fact that the motion capture for both male and female Shepards is largely the same, leading to a few humorous moments where if in a dress Shepard sits in a very unladylike manner.
      • This comes up in Citadel, the final DLC for Mass Effect 3, where she meets up with Miranda Lawson. After talking about how abnormal their lives are, they try to act more "normal" by attempting to converse about more feminine things. They can't even make a full sentence about any subject. It's also lampshaded by Kasumi when she decides to raid Shepard's drawers during the party.
      Kasumi: Hmm, girlier than I expected. I kinda thought they would have a camo pattern.
    • Ash is a bit of a Cultured Badass, who talks of going for walks on the beach with her Boomstick and enjoys reading Tennyson. She's a third-generation Space Marine.
    • Jack from Mass Effect 2 is foul-mouthed, violent, and all that.
    • Matriach Aethyta is also this, which she says is the result of her father being a Krogan.
    • Also Mel, a Marine who can be heard in Purgatory in Mass Effect 3 who wants to get drunk and watch asari dancers. Leads to an intervention when her male squadmates are mostly weirded out by it. Except for the one who writes her love poetry. They're going to talk to him about that next.
  • Mega Man ZX Advent
  • Metroid: Samus Aran is famous for being a female character in a very masculine protagonist role where she gets to kick major ass. She wears a very bulky and intimidating suit of Powered Armor, is rather un-feminine apart from her physical appearance (to a certain extent), and can even be seen hanging out at a bar in one ending of Metroid: Zero Mission.
  • Mitsumete Knight has Gene Petromolla, a tough-as-nails Red Sonja-type coachwoman with a rough masculine speech and first-person pronouns pattern, who likes wine, is good friends with one of the local punks, and enjoys the company of strong-willed manly men.
  • Mother 3: Rebellious Princess Kumatora is so brash and unfeminine, she gets mistaken for a boy by a few citizens of Tazmily Village.
  • 2B from NieR: Automata. Don't let her looks fool you; stoic, calculated, cold, dutiful, and able to kick robot ass with the rest of the guys, she definitely has a masculine-leaning personality for these reasons and more, one of the many reasons fans admire her character.
    • A2 as well, arguably even moreso due to possessing a foul-mouthed, bitter, angry, and aggressive attitude in contrast.
  • Amiri from Pathfinder: Kingmaker is an aggressive and loud barbarian woman with a potty mouth, a huge sword, and always in the mood for a good scrap with monsters.
  • Persona:
    • Deconstructed with Chie Satonaka from Persona 4. She's a Tomboy who loves sports, beef, and fighting, and easily gets along with the guys, but secretly harbors a deep resentment towards her best friend Yukiko, who's both more feminine and more popular with the boys than she is. Her social link focuses on reconstructing the trope and in the epilogue of Persona 4 Golden, Chie sports a more feminine look, without compromising her tomboyish character.
    • Before Chie, Persona 2: Eternal Punishment deconstructs Ulala Serizawa, Maya Amano's roommate. While she doesn't fully look or even act the part (she does all the cooking for herself and Maya, wears thick makeup and a lacy dress, and even handles all of Maya's wardrobe, as revealed in Innocent Sin), she is abrasive, foul-mouthed, loves alcohol, and is an avid boxer. As time passes, we learn that it's all a cover for her low self-esteem; despite having a lot of skills under her belt, she's stuck at a dead-end job and has been swindled by a number of past boyfriends, whereas Maya has a prolific editing job and is constantly fawned on by men. This jealousy and fear that her life has no meaning comes to a head when she drunk-dials JOKER, as calling him allows the caller to kill whomever they wish, and she nearly turns into a Joker herself. Character Development helps her out with this.
  • Iselmyr from Pillars of Eternity, a loud, violent, crude, and borderline psychotic woman with an incredibly thick Hylspeak accent who enjoys starting fights, finishing fights, and occasionally flirting with pretty women. Of course, she can't get into too much trouble, seeing as she's a previous reincarnation turned Split Personality to the quiet, Comically Serious, and male wizard Aloth.
  • In Rune Factory 4, Forte is a downplayed example. She's a tough lady knight who defends the townsfolk, is highly dedicated to her training, and is much more formal than the other girls. She's also set up as an obvious foil to her younger brother Kiel, who has traditionally feminine interests like romance novels and housework. However, she's actually very polite, and she has a few girly traits (such as a love of sweets) she keeps to herself.
  • In Sakura Wars, Kanna Kirishima has some rather crude language (though she averts using masculine pronouns). She's given a heavy masculine-sounding Brooklyn accent in the TV series.
  • Samurai Shodown: Darli Dagger is a tall, muscular woman who chugs rum by the barrel (which she opens by punching with her bare fist), builds ships for a living, and uses a fighting style based on demolishing her foes with brute-force attacks in a series where most female characters a small and depend on agility and fast poking attacks or magic to fight. Though unlike most Ladette characters, she has a very stripperific outfit (the better to show off her rock-hard abs and biceps).
  • In the Splatoon games, not only do the Inkling girls fight just as hard as the boys, Callie takes it a step further with "Bomb Rush Blush", a song about the joys of wreaking havoc with her favorite ink-dispensing weapon.
  • In Sunset Overdrive, female player characters behave just like their male counterparts; only differing in their body shape and voice. Although they apparently aren't too happy about this, since switching genders sometimes causes them to complain about the writers being too lazy to give them different personalities.
  • Undyne from Undertale is loud, rude, loves fighting with a passion... And then there's her tendency to involve projectile vomiting in her puzzle ideas.
  • Touhou Project: Suika and Yuugi both share this trait (along with Hard-Drinking Party Girl and Cute Bruiser), and it is implied to be common to all female oni in the series. Notably, the bifauxnen characters of the series are relatively more feminine.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • Female orcs have something of such a vibe if you listen to their jokes.
    • Actually, the females of most of the less conventionally attractive races tend towards this. Troll girls get to the heart through the ribcage rather than the stomach, and dwarf ladies boast about bending steel with their thighs. And worgen, well...
    • Face it, given the focus on liquor in the game, all female characters qualify.
  • Yakuza: Like a Dragon: Saeko is a downplayed example, in that she is is quite feminine in how she dresses and presents herself, but she still smokes like a chimney, snarks like a champion, is always up for a scrap, uses vocabulary that would make an old sailor blush and cheerfully drinks all the boys (including Adachi, who is a certified hard drinker and about twice her size) under the table.

    Visual Novels 
  • Ascension (2013): Aida is this, as she swears in every other sentence she speaks, fights with a pair of daggers, eats like a pig, takes part in drinking contests, and is a kleptomaniac.
  • Danganronpa:
    • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: Aoi Asahina has some cute girl qualities, but she's very tomboyish, eats a lot, is the only girl of the franchise who is known to wear shorts on a regular basis, is very athletic, and she can be very brash. And she has very big boobs, and due to her talent as a swimmer, official art often depicts her in swimsuits, and there's plenty of eye candy from her. There's also an alternate bad ending where at least two male students end up having kids with hernote . She also used to go out on her balcony completely naked and rub a towel over her body every morning, not seeing anything wrong with this.
    • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: Akane Owari is an Ore Onna and basically a Distaff Counterpart of Son Goku in terms of personality. She has barely any female traits when it comes to her character, but she's very sexualized, which includes sexual harassment in her backstory. Her boobs are even bigger than Asahina's, she'd rather swim naked than wear a School Swimsuit (finding it much too embarrassing to wear) and shows off more skin than most female characters. She is also simultaneously an Innocent Fanservice Girl and a Shameless Fanservice Girl at the same time. She doesn't understand why everyone else thinks her swimming naked would be bad, or that the aforementioned sexual harassment in her backstory was actually a lot worse than the mild annoyance she treats it as. Nor does she care.
    • Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: Miu Iruma has a much more feminine outfit than Asahina and Owari, but her personality does speak for it. She's also an Ore Onna like Owari, but she takes it further with using "ore-sama". Iruma is overly confident, has a big ego, insults people a lot, and uses a lot of sex jokes. Although, her arrogance seems more like a mask than anything to compensate for her lack of confidence. She's a Gadgeteer Genius, which makes her talent less feminine than Asahina's and Owari's, but she's very proud of her beauty, notably her giant breasts (that even surpasses Owari's) that are second only to Oogami's. She also has a sexual fetish for being insulted and degraded (with Slut-Shaming clearly being her favorite form of insult to have thrown at her), so it's possible she only acts the way she does purely to provoke people into insulting her.
  • Katawa Shoujo has Akira Satou, Bifauxnen older sister to one of the potential love interests. One route shows her with a beer, and she mentions that she's "more of a beer person" after bringing wine to minors on another route. This stands out in stark contrast to her younger sister, who is the most Girly Girl of the five love interests.

    Web Animation 

    Webcomics 
  • Moonlight Spritzer from Apricot Cookie(s)! has a general "gangster" feel, with a surgical mask at most times, a motorcycle when she transforms, and a secret boyfriend with whom she doesn't quite meet the Luminary of Light's definition of "virginity".
  • Camille, Shannon's sister from Bloody Urban takes the "Generally Attractive" part and subverts it.
  • Bomango: Gogo is a Nigh-Invulnerable tall muscle-bound Boisterous Bruiser and Big Eater. One time she is shown joining an all-male rugby team.
  • In Drowtales, the females of the drowolath species as a whole could be considered examples, since their sexual dimorphism is the opposite of humans and their drowussu cousins with females being the social, military and political leaders. While more conventionally feminine women certainly exist drow militaries especially seem to be full of this trope.
    • Kiel exhibits many of the characteristics of this trope, but at 24 years old, she's still a minor for her long-lived race. Even more so after a 15-year timeskip.
    • An adult example is Sil'lice's daughter Kadara (the one with blue facial tattoos) whose foul mouth and butch appearance caused quite a bit of Viewer Gender Confusion until Sil'lice called her "daughter" and settled the question.
  • In El Goonish Shive, Ellen often acts like this, especially her early characterization when she relished being considered "one of the guys".
  • Frigg of Guilded Age. Swears, drinks, loves fighting and is a messy eater.
  • The appeal of these characters to men is discussed in Irregular Webcomic!, with reference to The Lord of the Rings:
    Ophelia: What is it about Éowyn, anyway? I would have thought guys would rather go for Arwen.
    Mercutio: Arwen's cute and all, but she'd only be into elfy things, like gardening and embroidery. Whereas Éowyn is equally hot, but would also knock back a beer and play Quake Deathmatch with you.
  • Questionable Content:
    • Faye is like this, to a certain extent. Subverted in that she is recognized as being an alcoholic and, at times, a total bitch. Plus, you know, the daddy issues.
    • A straighter example would be Natasha (a.k.a. Nat). No love for hygiene, rude, crude, and often inappropriate. And once passed out topless on the copying machine at her workplace.
    • May is also a good example. She's crude, tomboyish, and wants to be a fighter jet.
  • Rumors of War Illyra likes to party and have fun — which can include Conversational Troping and trashing bozos. She thinks the rest of her adventuring party (including the devil-may-care Anti-Hero) need to lighten up. She gets the closest to vice she can in a setting that doesn't acknowledge drinking, swearing, or sex. Not a straight example, however, since she wears a dress and actually has a good deal of cunning.
  • Sire features the Hyde-Child, Susan. She murders. Gropes. Swears... and is generally a jerkass. But a very Lad-ette jerkass.
  • Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki Otsana, Justified as she is a real live cavewoman. Her introductory bio states "She likes smashing things and meat."
  • From Unsounded there's Knock-Me-Down Frummagem. At first, it was hinted at but it was confirmed when the comic's creator described Knock's ideal date:
    Ashley: Enormous meal, lots of booze, hit up the playhouse, or a wrestlin' tourney, or an execution, get the blood pumpin', have some laughs, then messy sex somewhere filthy. She gets to be on top.

    Web Original 
  • Foul Bachelorette Frog
  • Bunny has some shades of this and is a more downplayed example. It is mentioned on her profile that she enjoys beer and guns and the first story she appears in has her swearing, generally being unladylike, mostly justified in that she is in her twenties. She phases out of it later on, though, but she still likes beer and guns.

    Web Videos 
  • Miranda Sings: The Ballinger Girls. Rachel has an athletic body, enjoys working out, and has a more "masculine" fashion sense, while Colleen, seemingly the more feminine of the two, is a Gasshole with a crude sense of humour.
  • The Nostalgia Chick. When she's not reviewing, she'll be dressed in messy clothes with her hair down and no make-up on. In the beginning of Kickassia, she spends most of her time drinking beer and disinterestedly going along with the crowd — and it's quite clear, once the Critic becomes N. Bison, that her submissive little conservative woman persona is, aside from a dig at Sarah Palin, an act to get herself more power. She was also known by the username "The Dudette" when she joined That Guy With the Glasses.
  • In the Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time episode Cookie Cataclysm, one is being served. Even the chef has to quickly run away in fear.

    Western Animation 
  • Adventure Time: Marceline is portrayed this way, mostly due to her willingness to fight everyone and everything, as well as the sheer joy she experiences from doing so. Not to mention fitting the hygiene part too, as displayed in episodes (most notably in "Marceline's Closet") where she is seen not washing her hands after using the bathroom and remarking that her armpits stink.
  • American Dad!: Francine has her moments. Mostly as flashbacks when she's reminiscing about her wild life in the days before she met Stan.
  • Pam from Archer is a heavy drinker and often goes to the bathroom with the door open. She also loves to brawl, takes a punch like a champ, and drift races in her spare time.
  • Arthur: Binky's friend Molly skateboards, speaks in a semi-aggressive tone a lot of the time, wears denim, listens to heavy rock and is also a former member of Lakewood's resident gang of bullies, the Tough Customers. However, she does occasionally show a softer side, such as giving out handy advice to other kids and being very protective of her younger brother James.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender has two, one major character and one minor.
    • Toph Beifong is a larval/prepubescent version of this. She's introduced fighting in the Earthbending equivalent of a Professional Wrestling tournament, deliberately has bad matters in rebellion against her coddling wealthy parents, and is glad that she doesn't have to worry about her appearance because she's blind. In a play based on her group's adventures, she's cast as a very large, muscular man. She is ecstatic.
    • June. She spends her days hunting people and roughing them up. At night she hangs out in bars drinking and arm wrestling (she usually wins).
    • And in the Sequel Series, The Legend of Korra, Korra herself is also definitely a Lad-ette. It's probably best demonstrated when she goes out to dinner with Bolin and they engage in a Burping Contest that she wins. Also, age has only made Toph even crustier.
  • Ed, Edd n Eddy: The Kanker Sisters are a trio of tough, aggressive Lower-Class Lout bullies who live in a trailer park. They love fighting and sexually harassing the protagonists.
  • Exo Squad: Sgt. Rita Torres, the resident tough girl of Able Squad. Given that Exosquad is military-based series, a lot of the girls may occasionally classify, but Torres surpasses all of them. When off-duty, she passes the time kicking her team's asses and occasionally playing the Mama Bear with a troop of boy-scout in Power Armor.
  • Family Guy:
    • Lois sometimes acts this way.
    • One episode depicts Joan of Arc as an annoying version of this trope.
  • Futurama: Chief O'Manahan from the episode "Law and Oracle".
    O'Manahan: I'll make this short and sweet because I'm PMS-ing like a lumberjack.
  • Garfield and Friends Lanolin is a cross between Joan Jett and Lamb Chop.
  • Wendy from Gravity Falls is a Fiery Redhead who has a bunch of brothers, a father who's infamous (and named) for being manly, usually wields an axe as her signature weapon, is very attractive, and mostly acts like One of the Boys. She loves a good brawl, sits with her legs apart, gives friendly arm punches, and in "Weirdmageddon: Part 1", is thrilled at the prospect of driving a tank.
  • Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi: Yumi Yoshimura enjoys ninjas, monster trucks, car crushers, R-rated action movies, and anything else rough and tough.
  • Iron Man: Armored Adventures has Pepper Potts, who loves guns, explosions, and dreams of being a police officer or secret agent when she grows up. She's also always seen wearing things like neckties and cuts her hair short, has been shown to be a Big Eater, and has claimed she can recite the entire alphabet and name all 50 states of America in a single burp.
  • In Jackie Chan Adventures, Jade is a good example of a young lad-ette. Heck, her future self grew up to be the leader of Section 13, a top-secret organization!
  • On Justice League, Shayera Hol (A.K.A. Hawkgirl). Hobbies include smashing things, chugging Gargle Blasters, eating gross foods, and starting intergalactic Bar Brawls.
  • KaBlam! has June, as close as a 10-year-old girl can get.
  • The Legend of Vox Machina: Pike Trickfoot is crass, short-tempered, and loves alcohol. She once swiped three champagne flutes off a tray at a fancy dinner, drank one like a shot, and smashed the glass on the floor. When the team finds Brimscythe's hoard, she celebrates with Grog that they could be "drunk for weeks". This becomes Played for Drama as she believes it's unbecoming of a follower of the Everlight, it being revealed that her doubt is the main reason why her connection is severed. However, after receiving the Everlight's blessing and astral-projecting into Whitestone to help fight off the undead, she's back to being an enthusiastic bruiser.
  • The Loud House:
    • Lana Loud, in contrast to her twin sister Lola, is as close as any girl under the age of 10 can get due to her affinity for playing in the dirt. Downplayed since she's also one of the nicer characters who rarely gets aggressive.
    • Lynn is Lincoln's Passionate Sports Girl sister who often bullies him by giving him Dutch ovens and is very uncontrollable in general. She burps, picks her nose, takes pride in the fact that she can clog the toilet and mess up the bathroom, and loves to engage in all kinds of rough competitions. It's to the point that her alternate universe Gender Bender version is essentially the same person.
    • Ronnie Anne is a bullish, skateboarding girl that Lincoln considers rude and gross, and she constantly pranks on him. She's also a Loving Bully and his on-off girlfriend.
  • The Mask: Eve the alter ego of Evelyn is a wild party animal who though dresses up like a lady acts aggressively towards Stanley Ipkiss the man she genuinely cares about and, who she also loves as well though only at first since after throwing him through a ceiling she goes a lot easy with him after that happened feeling guilty about what she did.
  • Megas XLR: Duchess of the S-Force becomes one thanks to Coop, turning her into a slob and a Gass Hole.
  • The Mr. Peabody & Sherman Show features Cleopatra as one of these. Peabody spends quite some time trying to make her more refined so she can impress Caesar, only for him to be an Amazon Chaser.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • Rainbow Dash and Applejack. Of the mane six characters, these two are the most athletic, are always ready to get dirty, and almost always prefer direct action over introspection during times of crisis. Rainbow Dash loudly boasts of her athletic feats and is prone to being socially insensitive, while Applejack tends to get down and dirty more. Also, both of them tend to cringe at anything feminine and cute, with Applejack even eating the cucumbers on her mud-mask, a particularly unfeminine thing to do. That said, Applejack doesn't fit the role as well as Rainbow Dash in that she's actually quite mature and sensible overall.
      [From the "Finding a Pet" song in "May the Best Pet Win!"]
      Fluttershy: How about a bunny? They're cutesy and wutesy and quick as can be.
      Rainbow Dash: Cutesy? Wutesy? Have you even met me?
    • Applejack's little sister, Apple Bloom, shows signs of this, particularly with her disgusting table manners in "Sisterhooves Social" that culminates in a burp gross enough that Applejack herself thinks is a perfect example of "uncouth" behaviour, though she doesn't seem to mind Apple Bloom doing it.
      Applejack: Rarity thinks everything's uncouth.
      Apple Bloom: (finishes eating an apple with a mighty slurp, wipes her mouth with one hoof) What's "uncouth"?
      Applejack: It means uncivilized. You know, bad-mannered.
      Apple Bloom: BEEEEELLCH!
      Applejack: Ex-actly!
    • Scootaloo tries to evoke this, since she idolizes and tries to emulate Rainbow Dash, but is actually a subversion: Her focus episodes show she is actually quite self-conscious and vulnerable.
    • The accepted fanon personality of DJ Pon-3/Vinyl Scratch is the more adult version of this.
    • The movie introduces Tempest Shadow, a hardened bounty hunter unicorn turned military commander. Upon her return to her old home, she despises Equestria's sugary and cute aesthetics, and in the comics expresses that she would rather replace the royal titles of princesses of love and friendship with princesses of hoof-to-hoof combat and explosions. Given her track record, she could fit either of those suggestions.
  • In the Rainbow Magic movie, Inky/Izzy the Indigo Fairy is a tomboy who's the first to fight against Jack Frost.
  • Spinelli from Recess fights, spits, can make music via armpit farting, and is considered the toughest kid on the playground.
  • Rugrats:
    • Betty De Ville, whereas her husband is more delicately behaved.
    • From All Grown Up!, Lil tries to act like a girly-girl to fit in with everyone else, but a few episodes show she's a Ladette at heart. Her friend from the soccer team Wally is one as well.
  • The Simpsons:
    • Although Marge is not an example, Homer once described being married to her as "Like having a best friend, and he lets me feel his boobs", summarizing this trope to a T.
    • Her friend Ruth Powers would fit this more minus the frequent sex; she smokes, drinks, curses, fights with men, and likes guns. Also, when she comes back from prison in one episode, Ruth has become a bodybuilder.
    • Mindy Simmons. She has Homer's personality in the body of an attractive woman. And she rides a motorcycle to work.
  • Janna from Star vs. the Forces of Evil, who's into gross stuff and the occult. Literally, her first line in the series is looking at Marco's tentacle arm and saying, "I want it to be my boyfriend!".
  • Amethyst from Steven Universe picks her nose a lot, shapeshifts as a male wrestler for the heck of it, pees in the ocean, and eats without any table manners. This is just half of her normal behaviour.
  • Fin from Stōked. She doesn't do "girly". In "Heartbreak Hotel", she easily out-machoes all of the guys during their "Manly Dude Weekend", to the point that the guys have gone way past the point of being emasculated and start being scared that she's going to get them all killed. Hilariously, to make her go away, they give her a taste of her own medicine. They know they can't be manlier than she is, but they can be girlier, so they start drinking tea, knitting, and gossiping. Given that she wanted to come on the Manly Dude Weekend specifically to get away from the girls and such behaviour, she gets fed up with them pretty quickly.
  • Total Drama introduced Jo in the fourth season, an overly-competitive tomboy in the extreme who wears "men's prison sweats". She even taunts the male contestants over the fact that she's a girl who's just as (if not more) athletic and tough as the boys. The one time she had to put on make-up, she insisted "It's not make-up, it's war paint." Combined with her Tomboyish Name and Brawn Hilda appearance, it's enough to make fellow contestant Lightning think she actually is a boy, leading to an amusing Mistaken for Gay scenario when in a life-threatening situation she laments that she is going to die without ever having kissed a boy.


 
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Alternative Title(s): Ladette, Fem Bro

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''Hero's Duty''

''Hero's Duty'' is a Fictional Video Game where Space Marines fight robotic beetles called "Cy-Bugs".

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