The Red Sonja - Television Tropes & Idioms

"So, the only man that can have you is one who's already tried to kill you. That's logic."

—Kalidor, Red Sonja

Dirk: You know I made three pictures for Cecil B. De Mille and he once said to me: "If you want to get hold of a woman, don't talk to her—get hold of her—pick her up and carry her away." I thought to myself: "This man is a jerk." (With a glance toward heaven.) Cecil, forgive me.

—Mary, Mary

A woman that can/will only fall in love with a man that can “conquer” her. This can be either someone who bests her in combat (this obviously only applies to warrior women), or a man that takes charge and shows her that he is the one who is making decisions.

Compare All Amazons Want Hercules. See also Rape Is Love.

Examples

Anime

Shampoo and the rest of her Amazon tribe in Ranma 1/2.
- Also indirectly (and to her immense annoyance) Akane, after Kuno proclaimed that only he who could defeat her in combat was worthy of dating her. Cue the morning routine in which half the student body at Furinkan High (the male half) went out to fight her.
- Amusingly enough, Kuno applies this trope to himself, claiming that if the Pigtailed Girl (Ranma) can defeat him, he shall allow her to date with him. (And if he wins, he gets to date her. Convenient, in a Heads I Win Tails You Lose sort of way.)
- Another variation is Akari Unryuu, whose grandfather wanted her to only marry a boy strong enough to defeat her giant sumo pig.
Miriya in Macross/Robotech is a borderline case. She fell in love with Max after he beat her, but there was never an explicit "rule" about it. (There was to be a female pilot in the never-produced Robotech II: The Sentinels who idolised Miriya and in an in-universe version of Misaimed Fandom vowed only to marry a man who beat her.)
Saint Seiya contains a variation; each and every female saint had to use a mask and never let any man see her face. If one ever did she only had two options: a) Kill him b)Love him. This only applies to Athena Saints. (And some fans even joked that the true reason was that Athena couldn't stand not being the hottest chick in the whole place.)
- Doesn't seem to be the case in The Lost Canvas, though it's uncertain if it's canon or not.
Inverted in Steel Fist Riku: After she beats Chikara Toudou, Riku learns that he is now forbidden from setting foot on his family's property until he either defeats or marries her.
A less extreme version of this trope can be found in Bakuman, where Iwase, the smartest girl in school, believes that she and Takagi are now a couple when he gets better grades than her. Too bad he thinks she was just making a friendly competition out of it.
In Mahou Sensei Negima it was recently revealed that Ku Fei has imposed this policy on herself.
- Note that Ku Fei doesn't require that the combat actually take place, she can tell that Negi could defeat her in an actual match, and that being able to defeat her is a necessary but not sufficient criteria. She's not romantically interested in Negi. Not yet, anyway.
  - Of course, he just beat her at arm wrestling (to minimize damage) and she joked that now they had to get married... and then Chamo started wondering why Negi's great-something-granddaughter looked so Chinese. Awkward timing there, huh?
Kumiko pulls this trope in Gokusen to get out of an attempted arranged marriage. However her tactics only make the prospective groom fall more in love with her and determined to win the fight and her hand.

Comic Books

The Trope Namer here is Red Sonja, originally(-ish) from the Conan The Barbarian comics (and later a movie starring Brigitte Nielsen). Red Sonja lived with her family in a humble house in the Western Hyrkanian steppes (modern Ukraine/Russia). When she had just turned 17 years old, a group of mercenaries killed her family and burned down their house. Sonja survived but she had been brutally raped by the leader of the group, leaving her in shame. Answering her cry for revenge, the red goddess Scathach appeared to her, and instilled in her incredible skill in the handling of swords and other weapons on the condition that she would never lie with a man unless he defeated her in fair combat.
- Peter David commented that this essentially means that the only man she can ever love is one capable of replicating the most traumatic experience of her life.
- Conan managed to beat her in the last story of Roy Thomas's original run. He could tell she was reluctant and he had just lost Belit recently, so he didn't do anything with her.
  - At the end of the same issue, Sonja confessed her feelings for Conan and her fears of what might happen if she didn't put some distance between them.
  - Interestingly enough, in a What If? story where Wolverine became lost in time and wound up in Hyboria at the same time this story took place, Wolverine was able to beat Sonja in battle and went on to become King of Aquilonia instead of Conan, with Sonja as his queen.
- In the movie, she and Kalidor fight to a standstill. At the end, Kalidor inverts this by saying he makes it a rule never to marry a woman unless she can beat him in a fair fight. The pair exchange a couple of sword strokes before kissing.
- In issue 15 of the current series, she and two friends take on a god—a weakened god, but still a quasi-deity at least. He quite naturally trounces them. Whether that counts as a fair fight, which is what has to be waged for it to work, is somewhat moot: he doesn't invoke the trope—she does. Because, the writer said, she was using the loophole wherein someone who's beaten her isn't necessarily someone who has to have sex with her, or whom she even has to let, but whom she can allow to do so if she wants...and the writer decided she did want, some time after the fight was over and they were allies. It's notable that in the new series, at least, the portrayal seems to be romantic love with someone who hasn't beaten her isn't forbidden—just physical affection.
- This was further spelled out in issue #31, where it is revealed that Sonja did share a romantic, but non-physical relationship with a king who hired her as his bodyguard and grew to want her as his queen. Sonja refused, fearful of killing the man she loved if he pressed the issue of being able to consummate their love and challenged her to single combat. Seeking guidance from her goddess, Sonja was told that she could abandon her oath but that she would lose the superior skills she had been blessed with. Deciding this was acceptable, Sonja went to the King's bed chamber to tell him her decision, just as a group of assassins with magical weapons showed up. Sonja was able to repel the assassins but knew the only reason she was able to do so was because of her blessed skills. Her sense of responsibility to hold to her oath to fight evil at the expense of a normal life held and she resigned her post the next day.
- It's worth noting that the traditional interpretation of Sonja's blessing/curse may have missed the mark. The reality appears to be that Goddess granted Sonja powers that she could only lose by voluntarily lying with a man. The "unless he defeats you in combat" may simply be a rape exception, so that Sonja doesn't lose her powers if she is defeated and taken advantage of.
Parodied by the character Blue Opal in the Phil Foglio comic XXXenophile, for whom this was more a curse than an oath. After the sexually-frustrated warrior out-drinks and out-fights every man in the bar, the only one left is a meek man who invites her to play a strategy game with him. The curse is lifted after he beats her at the game—which, as they realize later, has a name that translates as "Battle". Joyful sex ensues.
Subverted in furry parody comic series, Red Shetland. At one point, the titular character and a chivalrous and handsome stag knight end sharing blankets on a wintry night in a cave. The setting created too much temptation for Red to resist and she has passionate sex with her new lover. Later, Red is convinced that her goddess has removed her boons because of this and is despondent, until the Stag proves to her that she has lost nothing once she regains her confidence.
Viciously parodied in Wonder Woman vol.3 #24, where the producers of a Wonder Woman movie have her make this vow, and get defeated by Hercules. The real Wonder Woman is not impressed. Not least because in the DCU, Hercules raped Wonder Woman's mother.
- Earlier, Power of Shazam had an inversion: Billy Batson has a dream about arm-wrestling Wonder Woman in which he throws the match because the Wisdom of Solomon tells him she needs to defeat him before they can "get together".

Film

In Curse of the Ring, Queen Brunhilde wears a magical belt that makes her stronger than just about any man. She will only wed the man who can outpower her or best her in combat. There is one such man, but he is not interested in her due to a spell put on him. But he is the only one she wants, and is after his love.

Literature

Britomart for Edmund Spenser's poem The Faerie Queene is another example, with pretty much the same vow as Red Sonja's if for completely different reasons. She is an allegorical figure of the virgin Knight of Chastity.
There is a PG Wodehouse short golf story parodying this, where a milquetoast young man falls for a brash, strong willed female explorer who has never married because she wants the type of man who'll drag women around by their hair. He can't bring himself to act like that and gives up all hope of winning her and focuses on golf. When he's in some tournament she stops on the fairway to tie her shoe and he strikes her with the ball. This causes him to tie rather than win and when he find out it was her and not a sheep (his glasses were missing) he throws his putter in a fit of anger. It hits her on the shin quite by chance and as she rushes to kill him he rushes forward to apologize and winds up biffing her in the eye on accident. She's now convinced that they can't both have been coincidences and falls into his arms. He has the sense not to correct her and she ends up his doting and submissive wife.
Arguably Dagny Taggart from the novel Atlas Shrugged is a modernized version of this.
- And Dominique from The Fountainhead, though it comes off more as Rape Is Love.
  - Both this and Rape Is Love were Ayn Rand's fetishes in general. Naturally, this being Ayn Rand, she considered it a moral imperative for women to submit completely to their ideal masculine partners.
  - Whilst Rand clearly did have a thing for bodice-ripping ravishment-type sex, she did not consider it a moral imperative for women to be submissive to their ideal man. The statement from her that is usually cited as an example of her advocating male dominance also explicitly states that "For a woman qua woman, the essence of femininity is hero-worship - the desire to look up to man. "To look up" does not mean dependence, obedience, or anything implying inferiority (Rand (1968, About a Woman President, emphasis mine)). This Objectivist troper, as well as the vast majority of Objectivists, agree Rand's views on gender are outdated (as well as contradictory to her own technical philosophy), however it is not the case that Rand believed female submission to the ideal man (Your Mileage May Vary depending on your definition of 'submission') was a moral imperative. As for "complete submission" this is patently untrue; even if it is conceded that Rand advocated female submission and male dominance sexually, she did not believe it should extend beyond the bedroom (except possibly in the field of politics, but again, no modern-day Objectivist would accept Rand's view of gender roles without a lot of modification).
- Also used in the Illuminatus trilogy's Rand parody Telemachus Sneezed.
Gender-swapped in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, maybe: One character notes that the only person Ace Pilot Jag Fel would ever have a relationship with would be one who could out-fly him. The jury's still out on whether he'll ever, ever get with the girl who did, much as he might want to.
The Dragaera book Five Hundred Years After mentions a gender inversion (which makes sense since most female Dragaeran characters are Action Girls). Rollondar e'Drien, who was the Warlord (commander of all military forces) fell in love with his wife after she defeated him in combat. It's noted that he receives a lot of ribbing in the barracks because of this.
The plot of The Sheikh by Edith Maude Hull is all about this trope. A sheikh "tames" a woman who doesn't believe in marriage by very questionable means. There's also a movie adaptation which is apparently considered rather romantic.
Older Than Print example: Chaucer's Wife of Bath describes having several husbands whom she doesn't seem to care for in the slightest; that is, until she marries Jankyn, the first man who seems to have an ounce of power over her.
- Of course, given the content of the Wife of bath's tale and the fact that she asks that Jankyn give her mastery over him/their relationship this may be more of a desire for a challenge than a desire to be "conquered."

Live Action TV

Saffron from Firefly tried to con Mal at the end of the episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds" by pretending to be this type, but Mal didn't fall for it and responded with a Dramatic Gun Cock instead.
The Quantum Leap episode "How the Tess Was Won".
In Dark Kingdom The Dragon King (a.k.a. The Ring of the Nibelungs) Kristanna Loken plays Brunhilde the Queen who will lose all her strength if she marries a man who has not defeated her in battle.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer dabbled in this trope with its eponymous heroine. Buffy's three major romantic interests in the series - Angel, Riley and Spike - were all hardcore superhuman fighters, and two of them actively tried to kill her at least once. Whilst each of these characters had many other facets to them, its notable that the otherwise-progressive series never considered pairing Buffy with someone who was perfectly comfortable supporting her, rather than being her equal / superior.

Myth And Legend

Common in Greek Mythology, making it Older Than Dirt:
- Amazon Queen Hippolyta and Heracles.
- Atalanta, who would only marry a man who could defeat her in a foot race. The losers were executed. Eventually, Aphrodite got sick of Atalanta's attitude and gave the next competitor three golden apples - every time Atalanta got ahead, he threw one out in front of her and broke for the lead while she was distracted, giving him the win.
- Peleus winning Thetis after overcoming her Shapeshifter Swan Song. Perhaps less sexist in this case given that Thetis' father, Proteus, also had to be subdued by anyone wanting information from him.
This happened in the Nibelungenlied and was the source of all the bloodshed after that.
The idea for Red Sonja herself was taken from Aoife of Irish mythology via a William Butler Yeats play, though as noted there are examples considerably older with this.

Real Life

Can sometimes be Truth In Television. This (male) troper has several female friends who are smart, strong, talented, capable and highly independent people, and who will freely admit that what they look for in a romantic partner is someone taller and richer than them who will take charge.

Tabletop Games

A set of Dungeons And Dragons trading cards from the mid-90s included a variation, with a Lawful Good priestess who was prophecised to leave the sisterhood in order to wed a great hero, and vowed only to marry a man whose virtues exceeded her own.

Theatre

Shakespeare's A Midsummer Nights Dream had the Amazon Queen Hippolyta marrying Theseus, the Duke of Athens, after he defeated her forces.
Partial Example: Katarina vs. Petruchio in The Taming Of The Shrew.

Webcomics

In the webcomic Captain SNES, the wife of Cid from Final Fantasy IV is said to be this.
Rylede from Get Medieval.
Yatta-Ta is convinced that the title character of The Challenges of Zona is this and so far, no amount of evidence to the contrary will convince him otherwise.

Western Animation

Maxima in Superman The Animated Series dragged Superman off to her home planet to be her mate after he defeated her in a fight. Of course, when Lobo shows up, it's "Superman who?" Note that in the comics, Maxima merely wanted Supes because his genes went well with her royal bloodline of warriors.
Male example: Brock Samson from The Venture Brothers fell in love with Molotov Cocktease when, the first time they met, she tied him to the bed and set the building on fire.
Azula from Avatar The Last Airbender showed Red Sonja potential in The Beach. Initially, she was attracted to this boy named Chan and even kissed him on his balcony. Soon, however, it became apparent that Chan was weak and unworthy when Azula showed unveiled her true ambitions of world domination and firebending potential(claiming she and Chan would become the world's strongest couple). Needless to say, the unimpressed Azula trashed his home later on with her friends.
- I think this was more to show that Azula couldn't talk to guys, not that she rejected them for lack of strength. Azula does not trash the house because Chan is shown to be weak, but because her crazy talk freaks him out and he makes it clear he wants nothing to do with Azula and liked her cute friend, Ty Lee better all along.
Queen Hippsodeth in the Aladdin series, with the unexpected result that she falls in love with the sultan of Agrabah after he defeats her for kidnapping Jasmine.