When a male character known for bedding countless female partners is now raising a daughter.
Casanovas like to spend their time frolicking about with any good-looking woman they find, bed them, then part ways with them for good with as little drama as possible. After all, to them, it's just supposed to be a one-time fling — a fleeting moment, a drop in the ocean of their life. Except when their former lover shows up with a little girl in hand: Now after spending his years moving from one woman to the next without getting to know them as people, this character now has to raise a member of the opposite sex with all the love and care he never showed those partners. Since womanizing is seen as a negative trait for men to have, giving one a daughter can be a way to make him more sympathetic, to show that he's grown up after "sowing his wild oats" — though if the character has a reputation among the audience as a misogynist, storytellers can use this to say "See? He can't be a misogynist, he has a daughter!"
Besides the sweet irony, this trope arises from the contrast between how the Playboy used to live/behave and how they do now that they have to dedicate themselves to a relationship to a member of the opposite sex after avoiding that for so long. This trope can be shown from either end as the daughter's role can be utilized in two ways: If we're meant to see the Playboy's journey from irresponsible, hedonistic libertine to mature, responsible family man, she'll be the catalyst that sets him on that path. Alternatively, we can see the playboy's journey where he becomes a better person over the course of the story, and seeing him with a daughter after a Time Skip, as a way to show that he had to grow up first before being ready for the responsibility of raising a child. Downplayed versions will just show him with her with the narrative omitting his transformation entirely, content to imply it happened offscreen, though the journey itself isn't required for the soul of this trope; the daughter can just as well be a marker for how far her father's come since the story began. Whether she starts it or marks it, the point is he's not that guy anymore.
Compare Children Raise You. This can also be a justification for a Boyfriend-Blocking Dad if he assumes that his daughter's potential boyfriends are as chauvinistic as he was in his youth.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Fairy Tail's Gildarts Clive is a womanizer who has numerous flings with the women he meets throughout his travels and one of them sired a daughter, Cana. When she tells him that she is his daughter for the first time, he names at least 13 different women he's slept with trying to figure out who the mother is, before finally realizing that she's the daughter of the only woman he truly loved, Cornelia. Afterwards, he becomes a Doting Parent towards her.
- Played with in Soul Eater: Maka's father, Spirit Albarn, didn't give up his playboy ways after he and his wife had Maka, and Maka's mother ended up leaving him for his infidelity. Despite this, Spirit really wants to be a part of Maka's life, but unfortunately for him, Maka can't stand him.
- Played With in Yurika's Campus Life: Yurika's Disappeared Dad was an infamous gigolo, and some of it has apparently rubbed off on his daughter, who is incredibly popular with women despite being ostensibly straight. After getting her into an expensive all-girls college, however, his business goes bust and he runs off to hide from his creditors, so he doesn't factor into the story until almost the very end.
Comic Books
- Subverted in Jimmys Bastards: Jimmy Regent (a James Bond parody) is revealed to have had innumerable bastard children from his Girl of the Week habit, and the Big Bad convinced them to join up and work to bring him down precisely because he wasn't there to help raise them. Part of the plan to give him a Heroic BSoD is The Reveal that many of his daughters slept with him... and it works. It's up to fellow secret agent Nancy to save the day... and of course she's his daughter too. His first one, in fact, and her birth mother is now comic-Boris Johnson's wife.
Films — Live-Action
- My Favorite Year. Swashbuckling Errol Flynn Expy Alan Swann is a drunken philanderer, but he also has a teenage daughter he avoids out of shame; the daughter just wants a father, however.
- Forever My Girl based on the novel by Heidi McLaughlin is this trope in movie form. Protagonist singer Liam Page returns to his hometown after the death of his best friend and learns that he had a daughter, Billie, with his ex-fiancée that he never knew about. Having a relationship with his daughter inspires him to change from his stereotypical groupie ways and become a better man, eventually giving him the chance to reconnect and be the father that Billie needs in her life.
- Throughout his twenty-five films and counting, James Bond has always been a serial womanizer, never thinking twice about using women if it meant getting the mission done. But in No Time to Die, when he reunites with Madeleine Swan at her childhood home and meets their daughter Mathilde, he takes to her quickly: He cuts her an apple to eat when she's hungry, begs the film's villain Safin to not hurt her when he has her in his clutches, covers her with his coat to keep her warm before sending her and Madelaine away from the island, and right before he confronts the villain for the final time and gets infected with Heracles, he picks up her lost stuffed toy with a smile on his face, clearly anticipating giving it back to her.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe: Tony Stark is shown to have a daughter, Morgan, with Pepper Potts after the five-year Time Skip in Avengers: Endgame. She, along with his quiet house by a lakeside, contrast with his former life of philandering in his isolated bachelor pad. Downplayed, since his transformation had already started before Morgan came along.
- The titular baby in Three Men and a Baby was the daughter of Jack, the biggest womanizer of the three dads. But taking in the baby (who is a seven-year-old girl in the sequel) forces them to give up their Confirmed Bachelor ways.
- The Hunters: Specifically, an estranged daughter. Middle-aged Bataa and his younger friend Bayaraa are tag-team babe hounds and womanizers who act as each other's Romantic Wingmen when picking up girls. They get along well, until a horrified Bataa discovers that Bayaraa is dating Bataa's daughter Nandin.
Literature
- One of Jean de La Fontaine's libertine works has a pair of womanizers learn a woman they both slept with gave birth to a daughter, each one claiming to be the father. But after years pass and she grows up, suddenly each man is eager to claim the other is the father so they can sleep with her.
- Early in the novel Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler makes it clear to Scarlett O'Hara that he "isn't the marrying kind". Rumors abound that he owns the local brothel and even lives with the madam (a major scandal, given the time period). Even when he does propose to Scarlett, he gives her the impression that it's because he wants her rather than loves her and can't get her any other way. But the moment she gives birth to their daughter Bonnie, he's an utterly devoted father to her, even working overtime to regain respectability in the community so that she'll be accepted too, and when she dies in a tragic riding accident, is utterly devastated.
- Gary Karkofsky AKA Merciless the Supervillain without MercyTM in The Supervillainy Saga starts off married and in a monogamous relationship but gradually moves to Polyamory with multiple regular lovers. This results in a pair of daughters from two different women that he dotes on.
Live-Action TV
- In CW's Arrow Oliver Queen pre-series and early series was a wild, indiscriminate playboy. One of his early series conflicts is him cheating on his girlfriend Laurel with her younger sister, Sarah. Around the same time, he had a fling with Samantha Clayton, the mother of Oliver's son, William. Through the first half of the series, it was not uncommon for any female villain to have a previous romantic connection with Oliver. In the final two seasons, it's revealed that Oliver and Felicity have a daughter named Mia. Unfortunately, according to Mia, Oliver went missing when she was a baby and never returned. So, the time where they're trying to figure out the weird hoodoo that brought adult Mia and William twenty years into the past is all the time they'll get together. Oliver tries to make up for his future absence as much as he can in the time that they do have together.
- Castle:
- Zig-Zagged with Richard Castle. Subverted, on the one hand, since he begins the series a playboy and the single father to a teenage daughter by a previous marriage, so taking care of Alexis didn't make him give up his ways entirely. However, played straight with Alexis acting as his Morality Pet in early seasons — the fact that he is a good, responsible, sometimes overprotective father to his daughter shows his Hidden Depths to Kate Beckett and the audience, pre-Character Development.
- Plays a major part in the episode "Death Gone Wild": the Victim of the Week, the founder of a Girls Gone Wild Expy, had discovered one of his one-night stands was pregnant with his child, prompting him to make several lifestyle changes in order to be someone the child-to-be could look upon with pride. Unfortunately, one of those changes were plans to shut down the company, which his partner took umbrage to. Violently. The mother reveals at the end of the episode that the child is a girl.
- In the Ghosts episode "Pete's Wife", Trevor, a ghost who proudly went Out with a Bang, learns that an old flame has a daughter born at roughly the right time to possibly be his and makes an effort to be more respectful to women right up until he learns that he isn't actually the father at which point he reverts to his previous ways.
- How I Met Your Mother:
- Gender Inverted with Barney's mother Loretta Stinson, a woman who once slept around a lot and settled down to raise her two sons by separate fathers, Barney and James.
- In the series finale, Barney himself, the biggest playboy of the series, falls into this when, after divorcing Robin, he falls back into his serial womanizing ways and has sex with a girl a day for an entire month. The girl he sleeps with on the final day gets pregnant. The moment he holds his daughter Ellie in his arms, he declares her the love of his life and finally gives up being a playboy for good to happily raise her. The spinoff How I Met Your Father downplays this in his cameo appearance. While Barney meeting his daughter still prompted him to change, it wasn't an immediate fix — as of 2023, he is currently part of a Womanizers Anonymous group and undergoing shock therapy so he can stop compulsively hitting on women.
- Kaamelott: Arthur has half a dozen mistresses and who knows how many flings (but he won't touch the queen, both because he doesn't like her and because of an oath he swore to the true love of his life), but not one child to his name, at least officially. In the final season he starts going around Britain looking for said flings in case they had children, but learning not one of them survived infancy sends him deeper into depression (pushed along by the Big Bad) and his eventual attempted suicide.
- Lucifer: Part of the main plot of the final season is a half-angel who shows up claiming to be Lucifer's daughter. Lucifer scrambles to figure out who the mother could possibly be, given that prior to falling in love with Chloe he had an astounding number of partners. It turns out that Chloe is her mother, as she's from the future and has the ability to travel through time as her angel ability.
- The short-lived 1987 NBC musical series Rags to Riches has Nick Foley as the playboy who becomes the adoptive father of five girlsnote as part of journey to becoming a good father.
- Deconstructed in Season 2 of Ted Lasso, where Rupert has a daughter after his wife Rebecca divorced him for cheating on her with countless other women. When he runs into Rebecca's best friend Sassy, Rupert claims that he's changed because of his daughter although he doesn't actually demonstrate any improved behavior. Sassy angrily tells him that having a daughter doesn't erase his awful treatment of women throughout his life, which is proven by the fact Rebecca still struggles to move on from the pain he caused her and that his seemingly-generous gesture of giving back his new wife's shares of AFC Richmond actually allowed him to buy a rival club.
- This trope happens to Michael Kelso in That '70s Show's later seasons, forcing him to grow from shallow and oversexed into a responsible adult who respects women. He even refused to grope Donna's breasts when given the opportunity. To drive this point home, earlier episodes have shown him to be quite eager to even glimpse Donna's breasts.
- ER's womanizing Doug Ross becomes the father of two daughters (his and Carol Hathaway's twins) and although we never see him onscreen with them, fanfic and dialogue from their cameo in the final season make it clear that he's devoted to them.
Music
- Kanye West's "Violent Crimes" is a rumination on his changing perspective towards women, motivated by the birth of his children. Through the song, he confesses to his past of sexualizing and being generally reckless towards women, and that as he watches his daughters grow up, he fears that the karma of his actions will haunt him as they become increasingly vulnerable to a toxic, predatory culture he once celebrated, praying to God that they're not consumed by it.
Video Games
- Mortal Kombat: Johnny Cage was an arrogant, showboating womanizer in his youth before being mellowed out considerably by the events of the Mortal Kombat Tournament, and subsequent invasion of Earthrealm in the reboot. He then goes on to have a daughter, Cassie, who he grows to be a loving and supportive father to. Thanks to a Time Crash, this goes as far as Johnny kicking his own past self's ass for not giving their daughter the respect she deserves and generally being an unlikeable prick he's long since outgrown.
Web Videos
- Critical Role: Kaylie reveals herself to be the Casanova Wannabe Quirky Bard Scanlan's daughter from a casual fling. He's deeply distraught to have been a Disappeared Dad for so long and makes a serious effort through the rest of the story to become a worthy father.
Scanlan: I didn't know you existed, and my heart is breaking a hundred times now for not knowing it. Every year that you've been alive is a year I could have been a better person and known someone who could have made me a better person, and I'm only sorry that I didn't know it.
Western Animation
- In the Season Five finale of Archer, the eponymous spy — a man-whore to end all man-whores — is introduced to his daughter by his long-time Love Interest Lana. Upon being introduced to her, Archer is incredibly dedicated to being a worthy father, such as by threatening to beat her kidnapper to death, and trying to make sure AJ doesn't face the same bullying he did should she be enrolled in his old school.
- Played with in Season Four of BoJack Horseman, where after months of self-imposed exile at his family's old house, BoJack returns home to meet Hollyhock, who believes herself to be his daughter and, while Happily Adopted, wants his help to locate her birth mother. While it ultimately turns out that she's actually his half-sister (the product of an extramarital affair between his dad and his mother's maid), his erstwhile belief that he's a father actually gets him to clean up his act for once. Alas, eventually, she finds out about his previous bad behavior and cuts him out of her life for good, and he finally hits the Despair Event Horizon.
- Family Guy:
- In the episode "Quagmire's Daughter", after finding an infant has been left on his doorstep from a one-night-stand, Quagmire discovers that the child is his and he must learn to face the challenges of single parenthood. It doesn't work out and he puts her up for adoption.
- A later episode, "No Giggity, No Doubt", has Quagmire discovering that an 18-year-old girl who he nearly has sex with is actually his daughter from yet another one-night-stand. The rest of the episode has him trying to make a serious effort to embrace parenting.
- The Legend of Vox Machina: Adapted from Critical Role, when Scanlan discovers Kaylie is his daughter in this version, he bungles his apology to her by calling her mother the wrong name. But he's still distraught to have been a Disappeared Dad for so long, prompting him to stop running away from danger and actually do some good to make up for all the philandering he's done and become someone worthy of building a relationship with his daughter.
