This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: One Gender Monster Mooks: From YKTTW
Citizen: ..."monogender"? We have stuff like One-Gender Race (and that brings up another issue), and you use that?
Ununnilium: And what's wrong with "monogender"? O.o
Earnest: It alliterates! That makes everything better! ^_^ That said, if you can think of a catchier name I'm all ears.
Citizen: Monogender isn't a word, really, and sounds odd anyway. I would have rather had One Gender Monsters. It sounds better and parallels One-Gender Race.
random surfer: Is it weird to anyone else that this is listed in both Always Female and Always Male categories?
Earnest: Heh, I do consider it funny, but it's not really weird. The monsters are either always female or always male... hopefully never both at once.
Nentuaby: I removed the Asari entry... They're not monsters, of the week or otherwise. They're an NPC species. There are other tropes for that.
Nornagest: Pertaining to this —
- This troper would like to note that many of the most feared monsters in Graeco-Roman mythology were female: Medusa and her sisters, harpies, Scylla and Charybdis, and the Furies. No word of any of them having species-equivalent boyfriends.
Many Greek monsters were unique, or at least created in small batches like the Gorgons; they're often the products of a curse, or hold a distinct demigod-like role. I don't think this trope should apply to unique monsters, or to triple figures like the Furies, the sirens, and the (male) Hecatonchires.
On the other hand, there's also the Nereids and the lamiae. On the male side there's the Cyclopes and the Gigantes, or at least all the named ones. Also the satyrs and centaurs, but only in earlier periods — the idea of Cute Monster Girls isn't a strictly modern one.
Your Obedient Serpent wonders if Charmed doesn't count as an inversion of this one. I seem to recall most of adversaries of the female protagonists being male.
YFLeo: In real life males compete mostly with other males, and females compete mostly with other females, in pretty much any mammal species. A good storyteller wants the hero or heroine to face obstacles that are analogous to obstacles in the viewer's life. And the minds of nearly all viewers, those obstacles are same-sex. The same-sex monster might represent a same-sex parent (to be slain by Oedipus or Electra), a peer, or an evil tendency in the viewer himself. There are some primal dramas that work with opposite-sex monsters, but they're less common and more complicated.
