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Everybody ought to have a maid,
Everybody ought to have a serving-girl,
A loyal and unswerving girl,
To putter around the house.
-A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Occasionally, a maid is actually a kindly middle-aged or elderly woman.
In anime, the housekeeper in question will be much younger and wear a ribbon or bowed French maid outfit of variable taste. In seinen, the main difference is how much shorter and more outlandish the skirt will be.
Humorous maids are usually very (violently) dedicated to their jobs and (willfully) oblivious to whomever they look after. Others will have crushes on their bosses, who they usually call goshujin-sama or ojou-sama.
Sometimes a female character will inexplicably wear an outfit which vaguely resembles a maid outfit, with no explanation. The chance of this increases dramatically if she is shown doing any housework. Also, more and more often, a maid is also a Robot Girl.
If the meido in question happens to be an Action Girl, as well, she gets instantly promoted to Ninja Maid.
Maids are a quick and semi-plausible excuse to introduce a character into a household, domestic experience notwithstanding.
Meido are of particular interest, insofar as they and nurses are among the very few Moe Moe items that attract both Japanese and Westerners.
Examples:
- Mother 3 has Ms. Marshmallow
 , a robotic maid who takes care of Porky Minch's toy room in Thunder Tower.
- Pani Poni Dash's Media is a prime example of this, seen wearing an maid outfit in just about every one of her appearances during the series.
- Hisui of Tsukihime (pictured above) has a crush on Shiki, more or less obvious depending on what path is chosen. There's also Kohaku, who is seemingly very devoted to her job, and has a scary obsession with...guess who...Shiki!
- One of the Happy Lesson teachers usually wears a maid-like outfit at home, and naturally does much of the domestic chores.
- Kannazuki No Miko's resident maid had a crush on Chikane.
- The lead girls in Magikano and FLCL posing as maids clearly have no experience doing; it's an excuse for free room and board.
- Kamen No Maid Guy subverts, parodies and basically dials the concept of "maid" up to 11. As the title says, Kogarashi is a Maid Guy - a crossdressing Heroic Sociopath. The series also includes Shizuku and Tsurara, who are Ninja Maids.
- The more straight version of this trope, Fubiki, who only subverts this in two ways: first, she has a tendency to beat Kogarashi with a giant spiked club when he misbehaves; second, she sometimes goes overboard with her maid duties, even becoming embarrassed when the other cast members catch her in normal clothes.
- After a (relatively) humorous breakdown, Motoko in Love Hina tries her hand at being domestic, including full maid regalia. Considering her unusual size, it's a bit confusing where she got the outfit.
- In the manga she stole it from Kitsune, in the anime Haruka apparently had a maid outfit lying around.
- Ken Akamatsu then went on to make the girls of his next series Mahou Sensei Negima wear maid outfits for sometimes no reason at all; primarily with the, as is common, Robot Girl Chachamaru (the rest of the cast once broke into her wardrobe).
- For Chachamaru there's justification, she is Evangeline's servant. The other girls, well the excuse was that thay'd just taken a bath and wanted clean clothes (they were in Evangeline's resort at the time).
- Then later, while half the cast was Trapped In Another World, she dressed up several of the remaining classmates because she was bored. Evangeline seems to just have a thing for the Maid/Gothloli look.
- Victorian Romance Emma is a rather straight take on the idea, down to Emma's mundane outfit (for Victorian England, anyway).
- Mai-Otome was originally going to be called "Mai-Maid" (based on Fumi's role in Mai-HiME). The series actually has a meido proper in royal court servant Aoi.
- The female cast of the anime He Is My Master are maids with fanservicey-outfits◊. Mind you, not exactly by choice, and all three hold their master in some degree of contempt.
- Very nearly the entire cast of Hanaukyo Maid Tai are maids.
- Hand Maid May is a Robot Girl maid called a Cyberdoll.
- Samantha of Killer7 is bith an example, and an aversion, due to a Split Personality. One is a typical maid, and the other is...less than ideal.
- There's an entire army of Catgirl maids in UFO Princess Valkyrie
- Chobits has a character who also has a cadre of Robot Girl Persocom maids.
- Mahoromatic features a Robot Girl battle android who has one year remaining to live, and choses to spend it as the maid of her late Commander's son.
- Roberta of Black Lagoon is currently employed as a maid but occasionally has need of her other skillset as an ex-Cuban-trained assassin par excellance. Her equipment is of both worlds and includes such interesting combination items as a shotgun-umbrella, incendiary grenade-bustle, and an armored portmanteau with integrated machinegun. However, she's not a very good maid.
- Fabiola Iglesias is a younger, more comic-relief maid working for the same family as Roberta. She still is a master of guns, grenades, blades, and martial arts though. Revy actually wonders if the entire Lovelace Plantation was a Bad Ass maid force could storm the Iranian embassy, if they wanted to. (All portents point to "Yes.") Fabiola then answered that only she and Roberta habitually carried guns, and was effectively Roberta's protege. Oh, and she really is a housemaid.
- Taeko in Ai Yori Aoshi.
- Minto in Tokyo Mew Mew has her own squad of more traditional maids.
- Mia Clementis in Yoake Mae Yori Ruriiro Na.
- Noel in Triangle Heart 3 Sweet Songs Forever is also a Robot Girl. She appears in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha with a sister, another maid.
- Ayanokouji Yaito of Rockman.EXE has, in the anime, a personal army of twenty-odd maids in full French maid regalia, all attractive and with varying hairstyles. In any later episode featuring her, the viewer is usually treated to a montage of various maids about the town doing whatever task she's set them.
- Kasumi from Ranma 1/2 wears a maid-like apron at all times, and is generally sweet, domestic, and clueless. She is also the only person in the entire dojo capable of cooking anything edible.
- Mikuru, the Moe-blob from Suzumiya Haruhi, is picked by Haruhi as the SOS Brigade's maid.
- Wilhelmina in Shakugan No Shana ~de arimasu.
- Nene in Touka Gettan. There's a bunch of other Meido shown, but none of them are named.
- In Gravion, the entire staff of Klein Sandman's castle other than his Battle Butler is composed of maids. Servant maids, Guard maids, commando maids, hacker maids, mechanic maids, and even one member of the central Super Robot team. Who of course turns out to be a Robot Maid
- One random NPC in The World Ends With You in more-or-less Present Day Shibuya, Japan wonders to himself if a girl he saw dressed up as a Maid was working at a Cosplay bar. This lead to him wondering if there are any maids who dress that way to actually clean houses.
- Fiore from Chrono Crusade fits this trope to a T.
- Lynette from Soulcalibur III is dressed like this, but sells clothing at various stores instead of cleaning houses.
- The Lamperouge household's maid Sayoko from Code Geass does housework, looks after the Ill Girl and occasionally battles cyborg assassins with ninja martial arts.
- Sakuya Izayoi from Touhou Project, as the head maid of a vampire's mansion, leads a small army of (pretty incompetent) fairy maids. I heard that she used to hunt demons and vampires before that.
- Reimu Hakurei in the PC-98 games also had a robot maid, although since it is a PC-98 game, we have no idea what happened to the nuclear-powered maid who only showed herself in one scene.
- Then there's 2 other maids, also from the PC-98 games that no one seems to care...
- Sent up in Lucky Star, where one character wishes she had a Meido to do her chores so she could spend more time watching anime...that's specifically a Meido, not a housekeeper. There's a difference!
- Volume 1 of Van Von Hunter features a psychopathic Cockney maid named Miriam who cleans floors with a knife.
- Daniella in Haunting Ground is an Ax Crazy homonculus maid. 'Nuff said.
- Iroha from Samurai Shodown.
- The Japanese Tabletop Game Maid RPG needs to be mentioned ... Or So I Heard.
- Persephone is a rather infamous Cute Monster Girl appearing in the DS Castlevanias. Described in the bestiary as "a demonic maid in the employ of an earthly baron", Persephone resembles a traditionally-uniformed, frilly-capped little lady that will politely bow down before you and then will attacke you with some kung fu moves.
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