This example was removed based on bad example indentation on the page, and it doesn't clarify how many male members were in each group. Remember that there should be at least four males and only one female in an ensemble/cast.
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So, the female characters just need to interact with one another, though not necessarily Action Girls, right?
Edited by Gargoyle_Kid Hide / Show Replies
Female characters do not have to interact for The Smurfette Principle. In fact, unless there is only one female, it isn't an example. Interaction would mean more than one female, so it would usually be averted.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
"On Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Olivia Benson is very noticeably the only female detective, which, in a squad which deals with rape victims daily, seems somewhat impractical."
Can someone explain how it is impractical? Maybe I'm missing something.
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Most reported cases of rape involve a female victim, which means that one victim sees many men trying to ask her what she "did wrong" to become raped.
(note; the characters do not assume she is at fault, but for the female victims, they are likely to be in a self-destructive spiral of self-hatred at the time, which wrongly colours her perspective of their questions)
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
Very Manly Muppet
That description is huge and opinionated. Honestly? Sometimes there just aren't many girls. It happens.
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True, sometimes it just happens. It's the fact that it's a pervasive element that applies to all forms of media and can be traced back to the earliest written works that makes it the trope it is.
Believe it or not, the description used to be even *longer* before a lot of the stuff was moved to the Analysis page. Maybe some more could afford to be put there.
Someone
Question: If there's only one female character in the main cast, but she's the lead, is it this trope?
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I would say it's even more this trope than usual, since one would expect that female character to seek out other females at some point.
I'd call that a subversion. A simple litmus test for this: remove the lone female. How big is the impact on the plot / story / series? If the impact is nominal, she's a Smurfette. If the impact is devastating, she's an anti-Smurfette, which is a subversion.
I'm not sure. The trope, as is currently described, is merely about works in which only one member of the cast is female. As it's defined now, it doesn't really seem to matter whether this sole female is a minor or major character... Though I admit having her be *the* lead would certainly be an unusual case for this trope!
I don't think it makes her an "anti-Smurfette", though. There's no such thing as an anti-Smurfette. A Smurfette is defined by being the lone female character in the main cast. The only anti-Smurfette would be... a whole bunch of female characters present in the cast.
Also, how common would this be? My gut instinct is that if a show goes so far as to make the *main character* female, it's unlikely to have *no* other females in the regular cast at all...
Usually the Trope Namer is listed first in whatever section they qualify as. But I couldn't even find the Smurfs under Western Animation here.
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The Ditz
"Gundam 00 has at least a high frequency of female members, but none is a pilot (depending on your opinion on Tieria, that is). At least one is a high ranking officer and one is a capable pilot. "
I think, this should be edited, as there are female pilots - Soma Peries/Marie Parfacy, Nena Trinity und Louise Halevy definitely count in my opinion.
I think we should drop examples of one female versus two males. Arguably a group of three (where there are exactly two ways of having both genders) is too small for the Smurfette principle to be involved.
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Agreed; I removed a couple of the examples a while back (like Team Rocket from Pokemon), but still there is some work to be done.
Reworking some of the removed examples. To cut the number of inversions and aversions is fair, but a fair few where simply examples where there was more than one woman (i.e Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest). It's the ratio that matters most, not the exact number—even the picture has two women in it.
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I pulled the Andre Norton reference because it gives a distorted impression of her work. Whenever she possibly could, she included women and children - human and otherwise (the one time we see a Zacathan family is in the very early Star Rangers/The Last Planet). The women are often strong-willed and positively drawn,no matter how brief their appearances. And even the little girls may be crucially important to the story (e.g. Dessie in The Stars Are Ours!)
As soon as she had broken the unwritten taboo against having non-EuroAmerican lead characters (in 1955, with Star Guard), she started subverting the one against female leads, finally taking that one down good and hard in 1964 (Ordeal in Otherwhere).
Edited by Maven
Let me share a relevant observation I made the other day at the shopping mall. A toy store had a shelf with a few Mario Kart figurines: Wario, Yoshi, and five or six Peaches. I walked by a few days later and only the Peach figurines were left.
While I abhor Executive Meddling as much as any other troper, I have to wonder if their concerns aren't justified when I see the only female character in a toy line turning into such an epic shelfwarmer. Aren't we (the consumers) to blame as well for failing to put our money where our mouths are?
Anyway, I couldn't find a good spot to add this example (if it fits at all), so I'll just leave it here.
Regarding the Tales Of Symphonia example, how is Raine not a Staff Chick? She wields a staff— poorly. Most staves grant a hefty Intelligence bonus. Most of her spells are healing or buffing magic. Her two attack spells use the Light element; one is single-target, and the other is hard to aim and will probably hit an individual enemy no more than once.
Gonna get a little wordy here:
Just putting this out there. Isn't this trope subverted by every single harem anime/anime based on an eroge/dating sim out there, especially if it isn't about quality of female characters and just quantity, you know? The target the demographic is certainly male, but more often than that the entire cast will basically be female with the exception of the protagonist, and one or two "best friend" types that appear in 1/4 of the series. If not just a general mention as an example of subversion. If for some special exceptional reason TSP doesn't apply to this genre, it should be added to the description since it's not obvious to everyone, yeah?
Actually what shows like Lucky Star, A-Channel, Nichijou, and a good portion of magical girl shows with almost an all female cast AND a female protagonist but are still aimed at male (albeit otaku) audiences? They could be "exceptional" examples but these types of manga/anime and the mentioned above harem genre pretty much make up about half of the new anime that has been coming out every season.
The Bubble needs to be disambiguated- it redirects to an Israeli movie, but since it's put under Live Action TV, I'm thinking that's not the medium the troper was thinking of. I just don't want to delete it, since I don't know what they meant to do.
Someone might want to trim down the Death Note section. It looks a bit wordy and is certainly moves into a major tangent.
I thought this trope was about the number of females in the cast, not what the women actually did in the story. Why do so many examples seem to include that?
Basically canon
Someone tell me why this is on the "NSFW" part of the wiki again? Rolling over one SmileyCentral ad is enough to infuriate me.
pearlina brainrot affects millions of people worldwide. if you or a loved one are suffering from pearlina brainrot, call 1-800-GAY-NERDS
Removed this:
- Sometimes used straight, sometimes subverted in The Matrix trilogy. Trinity goes back and forth being a prominent and effective Lancer and Action Girl to simply being relegated to the Love Interest. That doesn't mean she doesn't get a couple of her own outstanding scenes. Same thing with Niobe. Too bad the really important characters of the story are all still male.
- On that last note, there are many, many Matrix fans who consider Trinity to be the most interesting character, and they have argued that the series would have been much more interesting if she had been The One.
This trope is more about number than quality. Each of The Matrix movies has several female characters of at least moderate importance, eg Trinity, Switch, the Oracle, Niobe and Zee.
- All American film adaptations of The Island of Doctor Moreau have only one notable female character among the animals:
- The Panthera Woman in 1932's Island of Lost Souls (Kathleen Burke)
- Maria (Barbara Carrera) in 1977's The Island Of Doctor Moreau
- Catgirl Aissa (Fairuza Balk) in 1996's The Island Of Doctor Moreau. In the 1996 movie some other female mutants are implied in the background but have near to nothing importance other than extras.
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