Teutonic Tomboy T-Girl
This trope is about gendered roles (i.e., a character played as the opposite sex), not "gender roles" (e.g., where men and women switch social functions in some fashion.)
These examples don't pertain to Gender Flip, but are pretty good examples of something - some might fit Pink Boy, Blue Girl, for instance. So I moved them to Discussion in case anyone wants to do something with them.
- One issue of the old Weird Science comic featured an America where gender roles were switched, ostensibly after a woman took the presidency and then influenced big business. While the story could have had potential, it was undermined by being very heavy-handed; rather than having, for instance, the women use female viewpoints and opinions in their new social positions, they assume roles and behaviors almost identical to males; men become meek, retiring 'househusbands', while working women kick back at the strip bar (with rather unattractive male strippers), and so on. The only aversions made are usually wholly inappropriate, such as a group of female miners forming a strike for the right to have a powder room (to fix their makeup) on each level of the mine. The story ends with the male narrator, in a hospital, rushed off to the Paternity Ward...
- An episode of Sliders had the same idea, and carried it off reasonably well. Women, having been in charge for generations, have become self-indulgent and arrogant in more or less the same way as extremely patriarchal men, but people there also have slightly different ideals and priorities than people in our own world. The female politician Arturo ends up running against in an election believes that men are unfit for positions of power because they aren't as good at cooperation and peaceful negotiation as women, and Arturo's attempt to throw the election by pretending that a debate has hurt his feelings (which he assumes will make the voters regard him as being overly sensitive) instead causes him to win, because he comes off as human and relatable.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation did something similar. The Enterprise visited a planet where the women ran the show and the men were in subservient positions. The women acted as stereotypical men and vice versa. The only really interesting thing to note is that the men actually did look smaller and frailer and the women looked bigger and tougher than is typical.
- It also helped that the women dressed like samurai while the men dressed like ballet dancers.
Another "social role" example cut:
- This shows up in a The Stainless Steel Rat story from Harry Harrison. The Adventure Town planet he has to rescue happens to have a very matriarchal structure. The male lead ends up in the standard uniform of the invaded planet's army for a while. For some reason, if memory serves, the heels weren't quite the same as you see on normal combat boots.
Lots of "social" examples in Live TV
- The X Files gets part of its peculiar feel from the male lead and female lead taking on the aspects usually given to the other gender: Mulder is intuitive and ready to believe, while Scully is hard-nosed and science-minded. Mulder was right.
- Similarly, in Stargate SG-1 Carter is the one who can identify leptons by mass. Daniel Jackson is the one who believes aliens built the pyramids. (In Daniel's defense... they did.) It goes much deeper than that, however. Carter is also shown as the second most proficient fighter, with the current team leader being the most proficient. Especially in the early episodes Dr. Jackson is shown as barely knowing how to hold a gun, much less use it, while Carter mows down bad guys and calls tactics. Stargate, in general, has been on the good side of this trope, Teyla in Stargate Atlantis is also shown to be an extremely capable fighter, able to teach the guys a thing or two, while McKay is even worse than Jackson.
- Hot Amazon Zoe and pilot Wash in Firefly are a case similar to Redlance and Nightfall from Elfquest listed above.
- Pamela Anderson sitcom Stacked was basically a Gender Flip version of the Sam & Diane relationship in Cheers with the Book Dumb popular extrovert (Skyler) being female and the socially inept academic (Gavin) being male.
- Speaking of which, Barb Wire is a Gender Flip version of Casablanca.
- One episode of Flight Of The Conchords had Bret in a relationship in which all the male and female clichés were reversed (Bret wanted a long-term relationship, while the woman he was with just wanted sex, and pretended she was getting shipped out to Iraq).
- A similar gag was used in Scrubs when Elliot was dating a male nurse. And to a lesser extent with her relationship with Keith.
Dr Kelso: You were having an argument, but it was like he's the chick and you're the guy.
- A similar gag was used in Scrubs when Elliot was dating a male nurse. And to a lesser extent with her relationship with Keith.
- In Star Trek The Next Generation, the crew lands on a planet not yet affiliated with the Federation where the women are chauvanistic amazons and the men are meek and don't even have the right to vote, which probably explains why they aren't members yet. The male survivors of a wrecked freighter form a tiny La Résistance which includes the leader's right-hand-woman. The gender roles are further enforced by the costumes: the women dress like samurai while the men wear chest-baring ballet outfits.
- Both perpetuated and subverted in Remington Steele. The woman is actually the brains behind the detective agency, but a con man plays the part of the private eye. However, while he's a lead, she's still the boss.
- Robin and Ted's relationship in How I Met Your Mother had this feel — Ted wanted to settle down and have kids, while Robin shied away from commitment.
- When Ted tells the story of how he lost his virginity, it seems very conventional. He later confesses that he switched the roles—actually, the girl was the lying cad, and he was the naive kid with a crush.
- Chuck is the gender-flipped version of the toughened, emotionless spy (Sarah) falling for the sensitive, caring normal guy (Chuck) she's protecting. The series also plays with gender-flipping with Ellie and Awesome's relationship; in one episode, when the couple are buying engagement gifts, Ellie chooses the wide-screen TV while Awesome goes for the washing machine.
- All That Glitters was a soap opera/sitcom in 1977, created by Norman Lear. The series depicted an alternate world where the women are dominant corporate executives, and the men are househusbands and secretaries. Despite stirring up quite a reaction from critics and cramming 65 episodes into its 13-week run, not a single one has yet made it to DVD, VHS, bootleg, You Tube, or reruns.
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, like Aliens, features tough girls fighting monsters.
And Video Game non-examples:
- The entire point behind Super Princess Peach was to give Peach a starring role where she saves the Mario Bros. from Bowser for a change. With... Flowers, hearts, and magical mood swing powers.
- Well, Mario uses flowers himself. The mood swings kinda veered toward Unfortunate Implications, however.
- The "For Girl" versions of Harvest Moon and Tokimeki Memorial games. (Most of the former received official-if-flawed localizations. As of July 2010, one of the latter Nintendo DS games finally has a partial Fan Translation.)
- Order Of The Stick; Lampshaded in this strip
.
- Kim Possible has female Kim playing the competent, repressed, easily-embarrassed, uncertain hero in need of reassurance; and male Ron playing the intuitive, accepting, undiscriminating, adoring, clumsy 'girl friday', who suffers clothing damage regularly.
- Monsters Vs Aliens features a parody of the cliche old B-movie scene where two teenagers pull into "Lover's Lane" only to stumble across supernatural weirdness, with the gender roles reversed: the girl makes the first move and wants to investigate the crashed alien ship, while the guy is nervous about Their First Time, chickens out, and twists his ankle (read: practically snaps it off).
Restored both the video game examples; I don't see how they don't fit. (And I removed Samus Aran; even though Samus Is a Girl, Metroid isn't really a Gender Flip of any previous story.)
I may have made a mistake with the Harvest Moon one, as I'm not familiar with the game. But the Peach one seems clear, unless I'm missing something. It's about Peach being "the hero" and Mario being the one in need of rescue... but Peach doesn't literally don a plumber's outfit and mustache and call herself "Mario" in the game, I'm assuming, and Mario doesn't wear a dress and call himself a princess? That would be Gender Flip. As described, it's more Pink Boy, Blue Girl.
Jet-a-Reeno!
I don't see how Gender Flip would imply crossdressing in any example. (I moved one crossdressing example to Bosom Buddies.)
Pink Boy, Blue Girl also seems to be not the trope you think it means.
Edited by Prfnoff
It's not about crossdressing... let me try to explain it better.
It sounds like the Peach game simply puts Peach (who is otherwise unchanged) in the traditional "Video Game Hero" role, while Mario (also otherwise unchanged) is the Distressed Damsel character.
A Gender Flip of the traditional Mario scenario would be something like: "Maria, an Action Girl plumber, has to rescue her handsome but powerless boyfriend, Prince Peach, while a giant monkey throws barrels at her."
The game scenario sounds like something tropeable (perhaps not Pink Boy, Blue Girl, but that one sounds close to me), just not Gender Flip.
Jet-a-Reeno!
Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Split, started by EternalSeptember on Oct 12th 2010 at 10:17:28 PM
Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Differentiate between this YKTTW and, started by SalFishFin on Jul 6th 2011 at 11:00:51 PM
Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Ambiguous Name, started by pidget_spinner on Jun 9th 2020 at 4:35:42 AM
Liv and Maddie features an in-universe example with the main protagonist of Space Werewolf, or whatever the comic series was called.
Imperial Court Mage
"Played with in Doki Doki Literature Girls. Natsuki is a pre-op transgirl in the comic where as in the original game, she is a girl in both biology and gender indentification, making her a case of gender flipping only in terms of biology."
Ummmm don't know how to feel about this because a part of me this is going all kinds of "yikes" because biological sex doesn't really work that way and is more complicated. Sure I get what OP was trying to say ,but the way they word it makes them come across as just a bit lowkey transphobic whether they intended to or not. But that was just my takeaway.
Edit: Tried to include a link but discussions have nightmare formatting on here
Edited by Sakubara "Life's like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending."-Jim Henson
Wizzard
Pulled these as being "about 'gender roles' in the generic sense":
- In The Light Fantastic Cohen the barbarian attempts to free the virgin girl sacrifice from the deadly druid priesthood. He goes through the priests like a chainsaw through butter, but Cohen is about 90 years old at this point, and his back goes out. He ends up fleeing the temple, slung over the shoulder of the virgin girl.
- In Monstrous Regiment the whole point of the story is that the 'Male Only' military is really half female.
- In Lords And Ladies, it's a woman who gets up in armour to save the captured prince. (This is partly a straight version of Tam Lin and Janet, but she didn't wear armour.)
- The Powerpuff Girls episode "Superfriends" contains a gender flip of the version of the Loved I Not Honor More problem that usually only male heroes deal with, but with a new friend instead.
Bubbles: Hey, Robyn, we're sorry...Buttercup: ... we left you behind all the time.Blossom: It was never because we didn't like you, it's just...Robyn: I know — that's your job.
And some more:
- The raunchy doujin series-turned-serialization Teisou Gyakuten Sekainote has its protagonists stumble into a world where the toleration of sexual attitudes for men and women are flipped. The girls are mainly genderflips of perverted teenage boy characters with virginity issues, and the main character himself flips common hentai tropes to see if they still work the same (with a mental genderflip of himself demonstrating, even). The serialization is cleaned up a bit, but its female protagonist still makes note of the flips between her world and this new one.
- Teppu is structured like a typical Shounen martial arts or sports series, but in this case, both The Hero and The Rival / Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy are teenage girls. In fact, a significant portion of the cast fit common Shounen archetypes, just with women filling the roles instead of men.
- In the A Different World episode "The Little Mister", which spoofed the then-upcoming 1992 elections, following a battle of the sexes argument with Whitley, Dwayne falls asleep and dreams of a world where women are the ones in power, holding and running for high-ranking political office, while men are the ones treated like nothing but accessories whose opinions don't matter.
- The Lifetime series Strong Medicine gave viewers a male Hello Nurse surrounded by smart, distinguished female doctors, rather that what is typically seen. Additionally, Andy's (one of the doctors in question) husband was the stay-at-home spouse and primary caretaker of their two girls who had spent their marriage packing up and moving to follow her military career.
"In Homestuck, this is played with. The Scratched Universe introduces 4 new main characters: Jane, a gender-flipped John, Roxy, a gender-flipped Dave, Dirk, a gender-flipped Rose, and Jake, a gender-flipped Jade. Justified, as they are all the biological parents of the pre-Scratch Kids, and as such share similar appearances and personalities."
Roxy and Dirk are not gender-flipped versions of Dave and Rose. Roxy is Rose's mom, and Dirk is Dave's bro, nothing more.
Spinnerette is not a genderflip of Spider-Man. She's just a woman who got spider-powers and happened to be a fan of Spider-Man. But she isn't in high school, quickly joins a team, bears no physical resemblance to Peter Parker, and has powers that while spider-themed, are different and rather less impressive than those of Spider-Man.
Does anyone have a source for Christopher Lee's quote at the top of this page?
promoting the soriku agenda since 2010