A true Chick Magnet.
'Cause I'm a bird of action
I don't just talk the talk
One thing about ol' Foghorn, son...
I'm the Cock of the Walk!
I don't just talk the talk
One thing about ol' Foghorn, son...
I'm the Cock of the Walk!
Chickens are usually seen as silly, comical birds, as symbols of cowardice, or as a source of delicious food.
However, there is one exception to that rule: adult male chickens, also known as "roosters", "cockerels" or "cocks" depending where you come from (although the latter term is gradually falling out of use due to its other meaning). Roosters are stereotyped as fierce and boisterous animals, and are closely associated with masculinity and machoism. They are commonly depicted as horny Casanovas who constantly flirt with and/or harass hens (in line with the latter characteristic and term), or bullies who pick on smaller fowl. Due to their more flamboyant appearance compared to hens and their habit of perching high above the ground, roosters are also associated with pompousness and Attention Whore tendencies, and are often depicted as having a smug, snobbish attitude.
There is some Truth in Television to the trope: much of this derives from roosters usually having a high testosterone level, which makes them highly aggressive and territorial to the point of fighting with other roosters and even charging straight at humans, which is why they are often used in cockfighting. They are also polygamous and often peck at subordinate chickens to ensure their dominance.
For truly monstrous creatures that are often part rooster, see Basilisk and Cockatrice. See also Cock-a-Doodle Dawn, another stereotype associated with roosters. Compare Foul Waterfowl, for when ducks and geese are portrayed with similar personalities. See Virile Stallion for another animal heavily associated with masculinity.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Rooster Fighter: Keiji the rooster can be extremely prideful, and him holding grudges often gets in the way.
Comic Books
- In the Asterix comic book Asterix and the Class Act, Chanticleerix, the village rooster of the gauls gets A Day in the Limelight. He acts far more cocky than the other village chickens, though it’s mostly since he sees it as his duty to defend them from the Roman Imperial Eagle.
Chanticleerix: Shut your big beak or you'll feel mine in short pecking order!
- In Red Soul, at the height of the Red Scare and Cold War-era nuclear paranoia, the Blacksad universe's equivalent of Senator Joe McCarthy is a a beady-eyed cockerel with a huge comb named Senator Gallonote .
Comic Strips
- Roy the Rooster from U.S. Acres is The Bully who tends to play mean-spirited pranks on the other farm animals, such as waking them up with his loud horn. However, he sometimes gets his just deserts by the hand of his Sitcom Archnemesis, Lanolin Sheep.
Films — Animation
- Buck Cluck, the title character's father in Chicken Little, is a bit of a Jerk Jock who is very disappointed that his son is an unpopular nerd.
- In Chicken Run, there are two main rooster characters. Fowler, the elderly resident rooster fits the stereotype better, being a Grumpy Old Man and a military veteran. Rocky, the rooster who lands on the farm from the outside, is a bit of a braggart but not particularly mean or arrogant. He does fit the other half of the stereotype as a shameless flirt always wanting to bask in the hens' attention.
- Master Chicken in Kung Fu Panda 3 is a brave and powerful kung-fu warrior. Although his plumage is not particularly rooster-like (i.e. his tail feathers are relatively short), he's referred to by male pronouns.
- Mavka: The Forest Song: The rooster of the farm of Lukash and his uncle seems to really hate Frol (the Big Bad's assistant) and attacks him any chance he gets, possibly seeing a rival in him due to how flamboyantly dressed Frol is rather than merely seeing him as an intruder.
- Moana: During production, Hei-Hei the rooster was originally designed as cranky and obsessed with maintaining good behavior from Moana. However, test viewings found him to be unlikable that way, so his personality was changed in the final film from "bossy jerk" to "really stupid friend".
- Gender-flipped in Disney's Robin Hood: Lady Kluck, a hen, is Maid Marian's boisterous, loud-mouthed lady-in-waiting, whereas Alan-A-Dale, a rooster, is a friendly minstrel who narrates the story.
- Panchito Pistoles, the Mexican rooster that debuted in The Three Caballeros and has appeared in various Disney media, is generally a Nice Guy, but has a sanguine, energetic personality, and at least in his early appearances he was quite the Gun Nut.
Literature
- The Book of the Dun Cow: The protagonist, Chauntecleer, is a rooster who has a proud and arrogant personality to match, though he proves heroic despite his foibles.
- Ogden Nash wrote "The Rooster" as part of a collection of short poems connected to Camille Saint-Saens's "Carnival Of The Animals":
The rooster is a roistering hoodlum,
Its battlecry is Cockadoodlum.
Hands in his pockets, cap over eye,
He whistles at pullets passing by. - In Beware of Chicken the rooster Big D/Bi De starts out as this, before undergoing some Break the Haughty induced Character Development.
Myths & Religion
- According the Eastern Zodiac, those who are born in the year of the Rooster have traits such as being loyal, observant, honest to the point of being blunt, arrogant, miserly, and fanatical at their worst.
- The national animal of France is the "Gallic rooster
", symbolizing their boisterousness and pompousness. Many a French Jerk character will be represented as this, if not frogs or poodles.
- The Sarimanok of Filipino mythology is essentially a rooster mixed with The Phoenix—a mystical bird associated with fire and known to be of all colors of the rainbow.
Video Games
- Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number has Richard, a mysterious figure who wears a rooster mask. Richard is enigmatic and always appears to characters who will die in the next chapter of their story. It's never explained what Richard is and how he always appears.
- Burn Rooster from Mega Man X8 is a rather aggressive and hot-tempered rooster maverick. In his defence, he's somewhat justifiably angry towards the Maverick Hunters for labeling reploids as Maverick (rightfully or not) and subsequently retiring them.
- Popla Cocapetri of Mega Man Zero 4 is an arrogant, high-tempered rooster Reploid who's proud of his hacking abilities and is a tricky opponent in battle due to his nonstandard tactics.
- Pokémon:
- The Torchic line, one of the starting Pokemon in Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, is based on chickens, and is dual-typed Fire/Fighting, both associated with aggressiveness and strong attacks. The middle evolution Combusken has a permanent Death Glare.
- From the same game, Latios is a downplayed example. He vaguely resembles a chicken, and he is generally a docile Pokémon, but being a Dragon/Psychic-type Legendary Pokémon, he can be outright a dangerous foe to his opponents. His female counterpart Latias can veer into this trope as well, though less often.
- Tapu-Koko from Pokémon Sun and Moon is a Fairy/Electric-type Legendary Pokémon, being a Blood Knight Jerkass God resembling a rooster, and is very capricious and fickle to the fact not everyone can be saved from conflicts.
- Monster Hunter: The Yian Garuga, introduced in Monster Hunter Freedom is a venomous Bird Wyvern bearing several similarities to a giant rooster, but with big ears instead of a comb and scales instead of feathers. It's also extremely aggressive, fighting anything in the area for the hell of it (including you) and being so tenacious that it can make a Deviljho give up in frustration.
- The gamefowl from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice are human-sized roosters which were bred for cockfighting and are violent and ferocious towards Wolf, the protagonist.
- Far Cry 6 has Chicharron, a rooster bred for cockfighting with massive plumage, a spiked collar and a taste for the blood of humans that can be recruited to fight alongside the player.
- One of the villains in Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves is General Tsao, a Chinese rooster and a warlord who fights with both Supernatural Martial Arts and black magic. He's also a misogynistic Hate Sink who plans on marrying Jing King by force, in line with the "overly macho Casanova Wannabe" side of this trope.
Web Animation
- Asmodeus from Helluva Boss. He's an incredibly boisterous and masculine demon with an animal motif of a rooster.
Western Animation
- Scratch from Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog is a robotic example. He is a robot rooster who is a member of the Super Special Sonic Search and Smash Squad, and always tries to ensure that he is Dr. Robotnik's favorite lackey, often getting into arguments with his non-identical twin brother, Grounder. He is also known for his signature laugh, "Bwahahaha!", and is the twelfth and semi-final opponent in the Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine video game, wherein the Sega Genesis version of the game, he makes a lot of chicken jokes to taunt the player.
- The titular Chicken of Cow and Chicken splits the difference between this archetype and that of the goofy chicken. He's an unlucky loser who needs constant rescuing... because he's a tough-talking, arrogant know-it-all who likes to provoke people much bigger than he is.
- Steelbeak from Darkwing Duck is a secret agent working for the villainous organization F.O.W.L.; he's an evil mastermind with a smug, arrogant attitude, who is usually cowardly, but can weaponize his steel beak when necessary.
- DuckTales (2017) features a different version of Steelbeak, who's far less intelligent and more of a bad-tempered Dumb Muscle. He shares his original counterpart's smugness and arrogance, though.
- Ernie the Giant Chicken is a recurring antagonist in Family Guy. He's a human-sized yellow rooster who often gets into violent brawls with Peter Griffin for no apparent reason.
- Foghorn Leghorn of Looney Tunes fame is quite a mean-spirited prankster, and also has a loud-mouthed, arrogant attitude.
- "Each Dawn I Crow," a Looney Tunes film from 1949, stars John Rooster, a cock-o'-the-walk who gets influenced by the cartoon's narrator that maybe his goose is cooked.
- "Boulevardier From the Bronx" (1936) stars Dizzy Dan, rooster and star pitcher for the Giants who are visiting Hickville to play an exhibition game against them. He's a consummate cock-o'-the-walk who gets his his ego totally destroyed when in the ninth inning and leading 3-0, he walks the bases loaded just so he can strike out Hickville's Claude who ends up hitting a grand slam.
- In the Nickelodeon animated short, Jerk Chicken and Fish Out of Water in: Cop-A-Doodle-Doo, Jerk Chicken is an egotistical rooster who uses his position as a police officer to boss people around, including Fish. However, when it comes to dealing with actual criminals, Jerk Chicken pretends not to notice they're around.
- :Silly Symphonies:
- The short "Cock O'The Walk" is about a fight between a burly black rooster and a scrawnier brown one over a pretty hen. The black rooster fits this trope to a T as a showy, bullying, macho, cigar-chomping boxing champion; the brown rooster is more of an underdog with a hopeless romantic personality, but he has a fierce temper, as he's the one initiating the fight, and becomes an invincible fighting machine after getting kissed by the hen.
- The short "Farmyard Symphony" features a rooster that angrily crows at a flock of sleeping hens to wake them up, and then lecherously chases after a pretty white hen.
- In the Terrytoons cartoon "The Orphan Egg", Dinky Duck attempts to smuggle the titular eggs under a hen, but the hen's husband, a rooster, angrily picks up the egg and throws it out from the chicken coop. When the egg hatches, the rooster also attacks the chick with a pitchfork; then, when a fox attacks the farm, he tries to fight it off unsuccessfully.
- Fowlmouth from Tiny Toon Adventures is Foghorn Leghorn's Junior Counterpart. In his debut appearance, "To Bleep or Not to Bleep" (part of "Test Stressed"), he has an obvious crush on Shirley and would love to ask her to a dance, but his swearing habit drives her away, and he enlists Buster's help to cure him of it. When Buster discovers that Fowlmouth refuses to swear in front of little children, he uses that to his advantage, and brings the three babies they passed by in the sandbox, so he can pull them out when it seems like Fowlmouth is about to swear. His plan works, as Fowlmouth doesn't even swear when Shirley tells him that she promised Plucky she'd go to the dance with him. In the Direct to Video movie, "How I Spent My Vacation", while Fowlmouth is a lot less profane, he's still very pushy and rude, particularly in movie theaters, proven when he and Shirley go see Skunknophobia, a movie that Fowlmouth has seen 100 times before, and will not shut up through. Eventually, it's not just the movie-goers who are sick of Fowlmouth's constant talking, but the actors of Skunknophobia as well when the movie-goers toss Fowlmouth into the movie itself.
- Tuca & Bertie: Dirk is an anthropomorphic rooster and a misogynistic jerk who sexually harrasses his coworkers, including Bertie.
