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Gender-Inverted Trope
aka: Gender Inverted

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"Oh, poppycock! Female bandits? What next? Rubbish!"
Prince John, Robin Hood (1973)

An Always Female, or Always Male, trope that is applied to the opposite gender.

While it's not possible to pull off with many of these tropes, due to some of them requiring certain biological features, and others are automatically seen in a different light when gender-inverted, (like the Mama Bear and the Papa Wolf), making them an entirely different trope, others are only based on certain generic concepts associated with the gender, and nothing stops the writers from playing with them.

It might be Played for Drama, Played for Laughs as a character's unique quirk, or even not intended at all: For example, maybe a writer simply thought that Romani men are hot, and didn't even realize that Hot Gypsy Woman is a lot more common trope.

Conversely, it can be our own fault, due to Values Dissonance, as our trope definitions are largely based on Western and Japanese works, so it is possible that for example an Indian or Latin American show's characters can be only described with our vocabulary as "Like this trope, but male", even though it could be considered a different trope over there, but none of us knows enough about the culture to make a page for it. If the two tropes are indeed separate, they can have separate pages created.

In trope lists, it is often referred to as Rare Male Example and Rare Female Example.

Compare Distaff Counterpart, Unisex Tropes.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime and Manga 

    Comic Books 
  • Superhero's dads/paternal figures tend to be an example of Disposable Men.
    • Batman: During his lifetime, Thomas Wayne tries to turn the corrupted Gotham City into a better place to live. His son Bruce Wayne, tries to do the same, but in a less diplomatic way. Despite some works casting doubt on how morally correct Thomas was, most of them represent him as The Good King who always did the right thing in favour of his city despite his failures, and his death by the hands of the crime he used to fight is the principal motivation why Batman exists.
    • Spider-Man: Uncle Ben is the main reason why Peter Parker is a hero. It's not surprising why the sentence "with great power comes great responsibility" note  is associated with the character, and he also serves as a reminder of why Spider-man doesn't follow his selfish desires and instead become an altruist who tries to do the right thing for others.
  • Superman: In Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, Pete Ross suffers a male version of Stuffed into the Fridge.
  • Plastic Man: Plastic Man is a male version of a Navel-Deep Neckline.
  • Battle Couple Green Arrow and Black Canary often gender flip Guys Smash, Girls Shoot, with Canary being the hand-to-hand expert and Arrow being, obviously, an archer, though they are both highly proficient in their opposing skill as well.
  • Secret Wars (2015) has a male example of The Smurfette Principle — the Mighty Defenders team is made up almost entirely of female superheroes, with Spider-Man (a.k.a. Spider-Hero) as the only male on the team.
  • In The Gatherers Saga, Proctor is an example of Man Scorned. In his world, he married Sersi, but when she lost interest in him, he killed her, and now wants to kill all Sersis from all alternate universes.
  • In Al's Baby, Al becomes a male Pregnant Badass, and Al Jr. is a male Daddy's Little Villain.
  • Sabretooth is a rare case of a manly character who's Pretty in Mink.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animated 

    Films — Live-Action 

    Literature 

    Live-Action TV 

    Music 

    Puppet Shows 

    Religion and Mythology 

    Tabletop Games 

    Theatre 

    Video Games 

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 

    Real Life 
  • It has been suggested that the Mr. Fanservice appeal of many male soccer player uniforms, which involves a small area of bare thigh between the socks and the shorts, might be based on the same principle as the female Zettai Ryouiki trope.
  • Frank Butler gender inverted Quitting to Get Married when he retired from performing shortly after marrying Annie Oakley.
  • If the United States ever elects a female or gay male president, then (unless the president is unmarried) the nation would have a first gentleman instead of a first lady, the title bestowed on the president's spouse who often takes a largely ceremonial role as one of the nation's leading socialites and influencers. Oddly enough, the closest the U.S. ever came to having a first gentleman was Bill Clinton, a former president himself, when his wife Hillary ran for president in 2016, leading to a lot of jokes about a role reversal should she have won the election. It's not as much of an oddity at the state level, though, where many states have had female governors and, by extension, first gentlemen (as well as in Colorado, where Gov. Jared Polis became the first governor to be married to a same-sex spouse while in office in 2021), to the point where Wikipedia simply uses "first spouse".
    • When Kamala Harris was elected as the first female vice president in 2020, her husband was given the title "second gentleman".

 
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Video Example(s):

Alternative Title(s): Rare Male Example, Rare Female Example, Gender Inverted Example, Gender Inverted

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King Magnifico

While he presents himself as a benign granter of wishes, he only puts up a front as Hope Bringer and only selects wishes that would benefit him directly. When he starts using dark magic, his mask starts to slip and he actively starts manipulating the wishes to suit his needs, granting Simon's wish — to become a Knight in Shining Armor — with the added caveat of mind control-induced loyalty to him.

How well does it match the trope?

4.6 (5 votes)

Example of:

Main / FairyDevilmother

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