Basic Trope: A female character falls in love with or feels very attracted to a "bad guy" (i.e. a male character with dysfunctional, aggressive or outright criminal character traits), usually choosing him over a "Nice Guy".
- Straight: Alice falls in love with Bob, a convicted criminal.
- Exaggerated:
- Monster Fangirl
- You Sexy Beast
- Alice falls in love with Satan.
- A female who's In Love with Your Carnage.
- Fetishized Abuser
- ...even the lesbians.
- Downplayed:
- She rejects Charles, a consummate Nice Guy, for being too boring in favour of a Jerkass, for a while, at least.
- A girl prefers an outwardly sarcastic or belligerent guy who isn't really "bad" over a conventional gentlemanly Nice Guy.
- Alice is interested in a Bomb Throwing Anarchist because she agrees with his cause and ignores his personal problems.
- Justified:
- She fell in love with him because her father abused her, thus resulting in a cycle of attraction to abusive men.
- She's hardly a paragon herself; Birds of a Feather flock together.
- Alice believes she can "fix" her boyfriend with the Power of Love and mold him into The Perfect Guy over time; in other words, she's Loving a Shadow.
- Alice and Bob are Childhood Friends, so Alice knows that, despite Bob's reputation, he's not all bad.
- Bob is an obvious Justified Criminal who gained something of a mean streak due to the way society treats ex-cons; he's nice to Alice because she's nice to him.
- Alice is a very narcissistic and completely delusional girl who wants to be loved by a horrible man because she wants to feel "ultra special" and wants to make other girls envious of her. She's also persuaded criminals make the best protectors.
- Alice has incredibly low self-esteem and thinks she deserves Bob's abuse.
- Alice has repressed aggressive tendencies herself, and she tries to live them out through Bob.
- Alice suspects that all men are cruel and hateful, and she prefers ones who are upfront about it.
- Inverted:
- Dogged Nice Guy
- Single Woman Seeks Good Man
- Villainesses Want Heroes or Villainous Crush, for an exaggerated inversion.
- A woman falls in love with an insufferably righteous Knight Templar.
- Turned Off By The Jerkass
- Alice constantly attracts bad boys even though she doesn't have any particular interest in them.
- Gender-Inverted:
- Bob the hero falls in love with Alice the villainess.
- Good Boy Loves Cold Girl.
- The Nice Guy is only a Chick Magnet for Bad Girls.
- Alice treats Bob like a slave, and Bob madly falls for her.
- Be a Whore to Get Your Man
- Subverted:
- The woman seems to have fallen for the bad boy... but she's actually into the Nice Guy, he was misinterpreting all the signs.
- The man was a Hero with Bad Publicity.
- The so called "nice guy" sees the guy as worse than he really is.
- Her Love Interest is a bad boy, but she appreciates his good qualities more than his dark ones.
- The woman is initially attracted to the bad boy until his more negative qualities get more visible. At that point, she breaks up with him.
- Double Subverted:
- ...but, later, she falls for him anyway.
- Bob is a Jerk with a Heart of Jerk.
- It turns out that the guy, telling us that the "nice" guy was an Unreliable Narrator, is the true Unreliable Narrator!
- Alice was trying to make him sound better for her parents. She's truly only interested in his bad qualities.
- Parodied:
- A woman falls in love with a man because he forgot to pay a parking ticket (or some other similarly minor "bad" trait), this making him a "bad boy" in her eyes.
- A man goes to ludicrously extreme lengths to present himself as a "bad boy" in order to attract a woman's interest. This includes kicking babies in the face, setting kitties on fire, blowing up buses full of nuns, and playing whiny protest songs from the '60s. It works!
- There's an entire dating app entirely devoted to women who want to date criminals.
- Zig Zagged:
- Alice has an obvious crush on her friend Bob, the bad boy of the school (he has yet to tell anyone but Alice that he just likes the fashion), but then Bob's put into a situation that is out of the law's hands. Alice is against all of this, seeing that it's changing him, and abandons him. Later, she gets attracted to him anyway. She's also attracted to Charles and Bob gets a new friend, Diane. Charles has his eyes more on Diane than on Alice. The Creators try to get the Yaoi demographic by introducing Eddy who's involved in a Ho Yay Love Triangle with Bob and Charles. Alice and Diane also have their own Les Yay going on.
- Alice is in love with Bob the Jerkass, but then it turns out Charles the so-called "nice" guy is an Unreliable Narrator who is in love with Alice. It turns out the person who called Charles out was the real Unreliable Narrator all along. However they weren't lying about Charles making up all that stuff up about Bob. Then it turns outs he wasn't making all that stuff up, Bob was just picking on Charles because he hates his guts.
- Averted:
- There is no single "bad boy" character; the woman's romantic options are between flawed, but decent men.
- Alternatively: No one chooses Bob due to how mean he is.
- Alice is that rare anomaly who actually hates bad boys. She truly wants Nice Guys, albeit ones who are not too "boring" or overly deferential.
- Enforced:
- "We need to soften this criminal character up, so he has a reason to clean up his act. Maybe make one of the supporting female characters fall for him?"
- "Hmm, this show needs more drama... I know! Why don't we have one of the female characters fall in love with this criminal?"
- "Don't the fangirls always love the bad-boy/good-girl romance?" "Yeah!" "So let's do that!"
- Lampshaded: "Of course she loves him; everyone knows bad boys are sexy!"
- Invoked:
- A guy tries to build up a bad boy image to get a girl to like him.
- Dating What Daddy Hates/Shock Value Relationship
- Exploited: Reformed Rakes
- Defied:
- "What, you think your attitude turns me on? No, thanks, unlike the girls that fawn on you, I have self-respect AND standards."
- "Sorry, a nice girl like you shouldn't be with a guy like me."
- Discussed: "It's weird, isn't it, how women seem to be really attracted to bad guys?"
- Conversed: "That character is dreamy! He's such a rebel!"
- Implied:
- "My first boyfriend was a real jerk... so was my second... and the ones after that. Hmmm."
- Alice constantly rebuffs every Nice Guy she meets as "boring", but it's not clear what kind of guy she actually wants.
- Deconstructed:
- A woman falls in love with a bad boy and starts a relationship with him. He then treats her just as badly as he treats anyone. At best he exploits her infatuation to get what he wants, be it sex, money, favors, etc. At worst he's abusive, and/or his antics put Alice's safety and legal status at risk.
- The bad boy turns out to be an Ax-Crazy sociopath who has an obscene outlook on life. The woman's very safety is jeopardized.
- Reconstructed: A woman falls in love with a bad boy and starts a relationship with him, because he treats everyone except her badly. In fact, he's pretty sweet on her.
- Played For Laughs: Alice becomes a Monster Fangirl of the town's convicts to the point of becoming an Abhorrent Admirer that they all try to avoid as she stalks them constantly in hopes of having sex with any of them.
- Played For Drama:
- A woman can't resist getting into abusive relationships due to having an abusive father growing up. Her desires reflect her need to be loved by the cruel men in her life.
- As Alice keeps on going out with Bob, it awakens a dormant criminal streak in her that would have never manifested if she had stayed clear from him. Alice becomes a consummate criminal herself and remains so all her life long and raises her children into being criminals too, even her daughters.
- Alice inadvertently becomes caught in Bob's criminal escapades and either gets hurt by his rivals or arrested as an accessory to his crimes. Bonus points if she gets arrested and he doesn't.
Back to All Girls Want Bad Boys.
