Each different uniform color is a
separate department.* We got, from right to left, "help with office work", "costumes", "personnel", "cooking", "administrative", "secretary", "technology", "financial", "security", "information", and "health"; not shown here is the "Personal Care" department. Oh, and
they later create a.
]]
A well-off person may have a maid or two in his house. Likewise, a truly wealthy person may have half a dozen or so, taking care of his
understandably spacious home. And of course, it wouldn't be extraordinary for filthy rich people to have a dozen or two of domestic workers to handle the housework of a
really Big Fancy House. It also would be expected for aristocratic/monarchic families with large estates, major hotels, cruise ships and the like to have a ~100-strong domestic worker staff.
Compared to this trope, those guys are
pikers.
A Maid Corps is an army of
multiple hundreds of servants — sometimes apparently thousands — that typically are either too many for just handling the domestic chores (2-3 times minimum),
or in addition to the "traditional" housekeepers and personal attendants, there are an equal (or even
greater) number of "maids" who perform decidedly "non-domestic" work, which may run the gamut from
qualified medical doctors and nurses, to
computer specialists, to
scientists and
mechanics, to
personal bodyguards, and even a
private paramilitary force. Bonus points if
both variants are combined.
Oh, and they
all wear
Meido /
French Maid uniforms. Yes, even the ones whose duties would normally require a completely different dress code. Such is the power of
Fanservice.
Some of the
truly huge Maid Corps may leave one wondering how their employer's finances haven't collapsed yet from attempting to employ so many maids for so many (often
high-
budget) "responsibilities"; thus, having a Maid Corps usually designates a character as
obscenely filthy rich.
Note that while the implementation of the first two traits (numbers and "responsibilities") can be somewhat variable (though at least one of them
must be used in some form), unless the plot demands it at a certain point (after which it is often conveniently never brought up again), the third (finances) is a practically universal aspect of the trope; a typical
Maid Corps should be a financial and bureaucratic nightmare to manage in
Real Life.
Normally an
all-female trope, though the rare
Gender Flip does occur.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- The title group of Hanaukyo Maid Tai, and the Trope Namer (tai means "team, corps") and co-Trope Codifier. It also depicts the gender-flipped version (Ryuuka's menservants).
- Gravion: The staff of Klein Sandman's castle, excluding his Battle Butler, are the co-Trope Codifier. To quote the Meido entry: "Servant maids, Guard maids, commando maids, hacker maids, mechanic maids, and even one member of the central robotics team. Who of course turns out to be a Robot Maid". See for yourselves
◊.
- Najica Blitz Tactics: Najica's first mission involves a rich woman who is served by such maid-bodyguards.
- Evangeline from Mahou Sensei Negima! has an army-sized collection of Robot Maids living in her bottle-sized villa. Ayaka Yukihiro has the more "traditional" sort.
- Girls Bravo: Fukunaga's Bodyguard Babes Maid Corps are expressly for Fanservice (namely, his own).
- Fireball: Drossel has thousands of robotic servants made by her Posthumous Character father. However, they're all invisible and programmed to stay out of her way, so for God knows how long she wasn't aware they existed. And then Gedächtnis told her about them.
- In Sacred Seven, the Aiba Foundation has a literal army of maids. Not only do they take care of the typical house chores, but they also act as Mission Control, use weapons, and pilot support vehicles and generally act as backup for the main characters during battles.
Literature
Video Games
- Touhou: Remilia Scarlet has several hundred maids. This seems to be more of an attempt to invoke this trope than anything else as, excepting Sakuya, they're all fairies, making them completely useless.
- Megaman Battle Network: Yaito has a veritable army of maids, who in the Animated Adaptation can be seen in montages throughout several episodes doing random chores across the city.
- Judging by the number of mooks in maid outfits throwing kitchen knives that show up when everyone in Valestine Castle that wasn't a named character got turned into a monster, Count MacGuire of Ys: The Oath in Felghana had one of these.
Film
- The Chinese Emperor in Curse Of The Golden Flower has literally squadrons of elegantly attired maids. The opening sequences features them getting up, washing, dressing each other, eating breakfast etc. to the sound of a clapper.
