Basic Trope: A protagonist woman gives birth to boy/girl twins during the story.
- Straight: The main protagonists are a couple named Alice and Bob, and Alice gets pregnant and gives birth to twins named Charles and Diane.
- Exaggerated: There's a whole group of protagonists, all of whom hook up and have boy/girl twins.
- Downplayed: Alice, Bob, Charles, and Diane are non-human beings who are born androgynous, and their genders are set later in life.
- Justified: Two of Alice's ova were fertilised at the time of conception and one of the sperm had an X chromosome, while the other had a Y.
- Inverted:
- Charles and Diane already exist, and they die.
- Charles and Diane are the protagonists, not Alice and Bob.
- Subverted:
- The doctors think Alice is carrying a boy and a girl, but it turns out they were wrong and Alice gives birth to Charles and David.
- Diane is stillborn.
- Alice and Bob walk home carrying one baby in pink swaddling clothes and another in blue swaddling clothes. It seems like Pink Girl, Blue Boy is at play, but instead, it's Charles wearing pink.
- "Diane" turns out to be a trans boy and renames himself David.
- Double Subverted:
- Then, "David" turns out to be a trans girl and renames herself Diane.
- Correction— Diane is born unconscious, but she recovers.
- It turns out that Charles is wearing pink, but the baby in blue turns out to be a girl.
- But then "Charles" turns out to be a trans girl and renames herself Charlotte.
- For any of the subversion, Alice gets pregnant again and has a son and a daughter.
- Parodied: Alice and Bob are seen carrying the twins and Charles has a "male" symbol embroidered on his swaddling blanket, while Diane has a "female" symbol on hers.
- Zigzagged: Alice and Bob give birth to Charles and Diane, but then Diane turns out to be a trans boy named David, however, Alice is pregnant again and is seen carrying a baby in a pink blanket and a baby in a blue blanket, but it turns out that Edward was wrapped in pink.
- Averted:
- Alice and Bob don't have twins.
- Alice and Bob have twins of the same sex.
- Enforced: The writers want to have as many males as females and vice versa, and they didn't want to have the son older than the daughter or vice versa for fear of people calling sexism because one kid's in authority.
- Lampshaded: "It's a boy! It's a girl!"
- Invoked:
- Exploited:
- Defied:
- Bob wears a condom.
- Alice takes birth control.
- Alice and Bob stay celibate.
- Alice has an abortion.
- Discussed: "What if it's twins? How about Charles and Diane if it's a boy and a girl?"
- Conversed: "Have you noticed that twin brothers are hardly ever born in fiction, and even rarer are twin sisters born. It's always a boy and a girl."
- Implied:
- Deconstructed:
- Reconstructed:
- Played for Laughs: The twins' birth is followed by gags like Charles peeing on Alice, Bob doing a goofy dance to get Diane to sleep, etc.
- Played for Drama: Alice and Bob have trouble affording to look after the twins.
Back to Unto Us a Son and Daughter Are Born.
