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Huh. Never thought I would be envious of a wrench.
"I just said that you're pretty. Even when you're covered in...engine grease, you're... No, especially, especially when you're covered in engine grease."
There's something even better than a hot girl: a hot girl all covered in dust and sweat, climbing down a ladder, asking for a Fluke tester * If it works, it's a Fluke! and some UTP CAT-6 cable.
You only have Plenum CAT-5? Aww, you're cute - but no, not unless everyone is going to die in a minute.
Girls interested in machines seem like an ideal fantasy for guys into motor-powered things. By default, Wrench Wenches manage to combine the fact Nerds Are Sexy and tomboys are Moe Moe. This can sometimes extend to pure electronic devices, but a Wrench Wench is more likely to be found with a blowtorch and ratchet set. She will always be confident about her own work, but because she's technically an otaku she sometimes has trouble with other things.
She must have a good supply of exfoliating pads and moisturisers, that's for sure.
Usually too self confident to ever need a Beautiful All Along plot, but very likely to have at least one She Cleans Up Nicely moment.
When a Wrench Wench's talents go above and beyond the practical or realistic, she's also a Gadgeteer Genius.
Related to Unkempt Beauty, when a woman is hot whether fixing cars, or they just got up. Compare with female versions of The Blacksmith or Mr Fixit; the appeal is similar. Also compare to Hood Ornament Hottie, where the woman may be dressed or posed as if she was the mechanic, but actually isn't.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Winry Rockbell (Pictured) in Full Metal Alchemist. She even uses a wrench as her weapon of choice.
- Ikuyo in Hanaukyo Maid Tai.
- Several of the girls in Ah My Goddess, most prominently Chihiro Fujimi.
- Although the lead character Keiichi's little sister, Megumi Morisato, gets more screentime, and seems to fit this trope just as well.
- Miyuki Kobayakawa of Youre Under Arrest practically built her mini patrol car from the ground up, and maintains Natsumi's motorcycles.
- Lavie Head in Last Exile.
- Morinas in Simoun.
- Bulma in Dragon Ball, especially in Dragonball Z.
- Ritsuko in Neon Genesis Evangelion is both this and the Hot Scientist
- Kana in Haibane Renmei.
- Parfet Balblair from Vandread.
- Fio from Porco Rosso - who turns out to be the heiress of four generations of female aircraft builders. (Her great-grandmother wields a mean tinsmithing hammer.) The entire workforce of Piccolo Aviation are women, since the men are all abroad looking for work.
- Miss Yuki from Idaten Jump.
- Alto of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha is a mechanic in addition to a helicopter pilot. The post-StrikerS Time Skip reveals that she spends her spare time restoring vintage cars.
- Leona Ozaki of Dominion Tank Police. Built her mini-tank, "Bonaparte" from the wreckage of the squad leader's Awesome But Impractical super-tank.
- Kururu from Air Gear. For that matter, the Tool Toul To team is completely made of Wrench Wenches.
- Rain Mikamura from G Gundam.
- Rally Vincent in Gunsmith Cats.
- Reite from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.
- Kuroe Ayaka from Strike Witches
- Nae Aki in Medarot Spirits; she never was anything near fanservicey, but, in another hand, had Ikki slightly fawning over her. Justified by the fact that she's the granddaughter of Dr. Aki, the modern Medarot inventor. Thing is, if you considers the series' existence at all.
- Miyuki Ayukawa from Basquash.
- Hilde Schbeiker from Gundam Wing, who has her own scrapyard and is quite proficient with computers.
- Handa Suzu in Transistor Teaset
- Lavie Head in Last Exile
Comic Books
- Betty Cooper, from Archie Comics, can be considered one in some comics.
- Agent Boysenberry in Donald Duck comic books (the "Tamers of Nonhuman Threats" subseries featured in Gemstone's Donald Duck Adventures).
- "Ma" Hunkel, the original Red Tornado from the Golden Age of The DCU, worked as a riveter during WWII. All that heavy labor probably helped with her right hook.
- Maggie Chascarrillo, a.k.a. Maggie the Mechanic, from Jaime Hernandez's half of Love and Rockets
- P.J., who ran her own garage in Y the Last Man
- Kat Pryde in Exiles, even more so than her X-Men counterpart.
Film
- Mikaela (Megan Fox) in the live-action Transformers.
- Stacy Ferguson plays a lesbian Wrench Wench in Planet Terror. Then her brain gets eaten.
- And now the zombies know how to fix cars.
- And orally pleasure a woman.
- Another Robert Rodriguez example: In Sin City, Nancy tells John Hartigan "Nobody but me can keep this heap running".
- Jet Girl from Tank Girl (both film and comic).
- Alex (Jennifer Beals), the main character from Flashdance. She works part time as a welder in a steel mill.
- Monique in Better Off Dead, who fixed Lane's Camaro that would otherwise keep catching rust.
- Audrey from Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
- Lisa from My Cousin Vinny, whose insane (or rather dead-on-balls accurate) knowledge of cars saves the defendants in the murder trial.
- Clear from the first Final Destination movie.
- Michelle Rodriguez tends to play this character. See her page image for a good reason why.
- Kate the blacksmith from A Knights Tale is the 14th-century version.
Literature
- Cord in Anathem.
- To an extent, Rosalie in Twilight.
- The main character of C. E. Murphy's Urban Shaman trilogy is one of these, being a dedicated car enthusiast who restored a 1969 Mustang all by herself, and worked as a mechanic for the Seattle Police Dept. She even continues to use the idea of fixing a car to work her healing magics (fixing a broken windshield, replacing a flat tire, using windshield wipers to clear her vision, etc.).
- Nadia Chernyshevski of the Red Mars Trilogy was a nuclear engineer in Siberia before her job building mankind's first base on Mars. Her skills in solving technological problems earned her the nickname "Universal Solvent".
- Mercedes the VW Mechanic
- Samella Connel from Douglas Hill's ColSec Trilogy, although her particular talent seems to be mostly with computer hardware.
- The eponymus Tinker of Wen Spencer's book
Live Action TV
- Mac on Veronica Mars
- Kaylee of Firefly and Serenity, as quoted above. She actually joined the crew because the captain walked in on her having sex with the ship's mechanic in the engine room. She diagnosed the engine's problem while in the act, and fixed it on the spot when Mal showed up. He fired his mechanic and hired her as she was getting dressed.
- There are numerous hints (including dialog by the first ship's mechanic) that her major motivation in having sex with him there was to get up close and personal with the ship's engine room and grok it, she being a technophilic homebody / ground-pounder up to that point.
Bester: Engine make her hot, you know?
(Later, after Kaylee fixes the engine in two seconds flat:)
Bester: What'd you do?
Mal: She fixed it! Where'd you learn to do that, miss?
Kaylee: Just do it, is all. My daddy says I got natural talent.
Mal: You work for your daddy, do you?
Kaylee: You offering me a job?
Bester: What?
Mal: Believe I just did.
- The same scene also implies that Mal's decision to replace Bester with Kaylee wasn't so much a savvy decision, as a necessary undo of the completely boneheaded one to hire the first guy to begin with.
- Betty Jo Bradley (the youngest daughter) from Petticoat Junction.
- Gilina Renaez from Farscape.
- B'Elanna Torres from Star Trek: Voyager. Although Star Trek engines tends to be rather clean, she does still manage to get covered in dirt and grease on a fairly regular basis.
- Bonnie and April in Knight Rider.
- Cally on Battlestar Galactica would qualify, if her personality didn't make her The Scrappy of the series. And she didn't smell like boiled cabbage.
- Theora Jones of Max Headroom is of the high-tech variety rather than the grease-monkey variety.
- Heather from Jericho.
Heather: Mind if I pitch in?
Jake: Do you know how to strip wires?
Heather: Ever since junior high.
(Jake stares at her)
Heather: Yeah, I was that popular.
- In CSI, both Sara and Catherine have their moments doing experiments or processing a car. It actually became something of a Running Gag in Television Without Pity that Sara delighted in tearing vehicles apart.
- Charlene in Neighbours. Played by Kylie Minogue, no less.
- And later Steph Scully in Neighbours. Then Janae Timmons took up the mantle.
- Bella Banks in Young Americans. She is a high school student who works as a mechanic at her dad's auto repair shop.
- The series has had several Hot Scientists down the years, but it wasn't until Power Rangers Operation Overdrive's Ronny that it got a Wrench Wench to balance things out. Her tendency for practically fondling new weaponry with an awed smile on her face makes one wonder how the show stayed TV-Y7.
- In the That 70s Show episode "Career Day", Jackie shows unlikely skill in fixing cars.
- Barbara in The Good Life
Professional Wrestling
- WOW, a short-lived women's wrestling promotion populated largely with goofy Fetish Fuel gimmicks, had Wendi Wheels to fill this role.
Video Games
- Li Kohran in Sakura Taisen.
- Roll Casket (and Tron Bonne) in the Mega Man Legends series.
- And then you have Geo Stelar in the second Star Force game, even though the character is a boy.
- Jessie from Final Fantasy VII, who also displays a fascination with explosives.
- Led Campbell from Septerra Core.
- It should be noted that the wrench part applies literally in her case. Her primary means of tinkering, along with beating people up, is a giant, meter long wrench.
- From Wing Commander:
- Maureen Corley from Full Throttle.
- Tali from Mass Effect is a fairly non-sexual example. We never even find out what she looks like under the containment suit. Still, her personality is possibly more pleasant than either Optional Sexual Encounter available to a male PC.
- A recently-released Mass Effect 2 video seems to imply she's a romance option in the sequel.
- She is. The focus of the relationship is on her personality, though, and not so much on her sexuality. Though she isn't bad looking. Most likely.
- Alyx from Half-Life 2 is a Wrench Wench and an Action Girl combined in one. Not only she's a good mechanic, she's also a godly hacker. Where she learned the latter (even touching a Combine computer is punished by summary execution), this troper doesn't know.
- Keira from the Jak And Daxter trilogy. Tess is one as well, only her specialty is weaponry, not vehicles.
- The kappa Nitori Kawashiro from the Touhou Project series; an earlier example is/are Rika | Rikako Asakura.
- Valkyria Chronicles has Isara Gunther, who is also Squad 7's main tank driver and second idea person.
- Lucca from Chrono Trigger, according to some.
- Luca from Final Fantasy IV The After Years. A little portly (she's a dwarf, and amazingly, one who mostly defies Our Dwarves Are All The Same), but otherwise fits.
- Rikku from Final Fantasy X.
- Eva Navarro of Mercenaries 2: World In Flames. She'll build any number of custom PMC vehicles for you, for a price.
- The original Ann from Harvest Moon and her Magical Melody incarnation.
Webcomics
- Ash Upton from Misfile. But there's more about her than meets the eye...
- There's also Missi Fuller, and Emily McArthur is starting to pick up some of the tendencies.
- Commented on
 in a Mac Hall comic.
- Lith from It's Walky!
- One has recently been released in Schlock Mercenary.
- Don't forget Elf's prowess with the fabbers...
- Aby from Kevin And Kell; going so far that she is actually Married To The Job.
- Alice from I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space
- Wrench from Antihero For Hire.
- Florence from Freefall.
- Kestrel from Tales Of The Questor
- Pop's Autos from Nip And Tuck. The main drawing feature are the Pop's girls, all working on your car in daisy dukes.
- Lin 47223b, the main character in Slipshine's Linburger.
- Kammi from Inhuman. She doesn't exactly fit "gearhead fantasy", seeing as most of the other characters are terrified of her.
- "You let Jet drive you and you live with a homicidal madman, but you're afraid of Kammi?"
- Sasha the Ensemble Dark Horse from SluggyFreelance
- Good gravy, how has anyone not mentioned Agatha Clay Heterodyne yet?
- The women Sparks in Girl Genius are essentially made of this trope, but it's best exemplified here
- How about Robyn from 1977 The Comic?
- Engineer-tan from Nerf NOW!!, of course.
- KK built and maintains her own steam copter amongst other toys FreakAngels oh and has wicked PsychicPowers
- Kat, from Gunnerkrigg Court, almost fits this trope, although she's too young for the sex appeal part. Robots fancy her, though.
- Molly and Galatea from The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob.
- Pella the dwarf, from [1]. She fashions Rayd a replacement arm after the Black Dwarves dismember him while torturing. Rayd then uses it to "keep a promise" that he made them in a subsequent battle with the Black Dwarves.
Web Original
Western Animation
Real Life
- Rosie the Riveter from the USA World War Two propaganda.
- Kari Byron and Scottie Chapman from MythBusters. And now, Jessi Combs. Pattern, much?
- Victoria Pendleton. Just... Victoria Pendleton.◊
- Back in the day, Her Royal Highness Princess Elizabeth (now Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second) was one. She was trained as an army mechanic during World War Two; she served as an ambulance driver, but British vehicles being what they are she had to be trained as a mechanic too.
- Rosie's Girls is a day camp for preteen girls that teaches, among other things, welding, carpentry, wiring, engineering, and presumably advanced badassness.
- Photographer Dave Perry has made an entire career out of shooting models working on hot rods. He admits in the introduction that his inspiration was a young woman working in a desert junkyard.
- Marilyn Monroe was discovered working in a factory. Marilyn Fucking Monroe.
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