A Lady on Each Arm/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A man is shown with each arm around a woman

  • Straight: Bob walks into a club with his left arm around Alice and his right arm round Carol.
  • Exaggerated:
    • Bob has long arms and can get three women on each arm.
    • Bob has a girl on each leg as well.
  • Justified: Bob is a professional escort, guiding VIP twins through a club.
  • Inverted: Alice walks into a club with her arms around Bob and Charlie.
  • Subverted:
    • Bob walks in with his arms round two women... then one of them shrugs him off in disgust and the other elbows him in the gut. His waiting friend Emma is in fits of laughter at his Casanova Wannabe bumbling.
    • Bob walks in with his arms around two women, later it turns out they're both men.
  • Double Subverted: ...but then two similar looking bimbos show up behind him and ask why he wandered off. Alice facepalms.
  • Parodied:
    • Bob walks into a club with two 80-year-old women, one on each arm.
    • Alternatively, Bob's hands have been sewn to two women, one for each hand.
  • Deconstructed:
    • A few of the women who have been seen with Bob have become pregnant with Bob's children. Bob, now paying child support, no longer has the money necessary to afford this kind of lifestyle.
    • Bob, suspecting that women will want to be with him if they see him with two women, hires two women to let him walk them to a club. Upon arriving, all the women are repulsed by this behavior and Bob never gets a date again.
  • Reconstructed: The girls are revealed to be Platonic Prostitutes Bob hires to keep up his Rich Idiot With No Day Job persona - his secret True Love knows all about it and enjoys the anonymity it allows her.
  • Zig Zagged: Bob regularly switches off the women on his arms. He eventually gets married, then divorced, only to find his true love for Older women
  • Averted: Bob, despite usually being seen with a different woman each night, only ever has one woman with him - he may be many things but he's not a cheat.
  • Enforced: "Bob is a player. He needs to be shown with two women at a time."
  • Lampshaded: "Two women at once? That Bob must sure be something."
  • Invoked: Bob feels like everyone ignores him at parties, and decides this is the way to get noticed, so he persuades his platonic friends Alice and Carol to make him look good.
  • Defied: Bob doesn't want people to be too jealous of him, so he intentionally avoids having more than one woman at an arm and the other free.
  • Discussed: "Here comes Bob. 50 quid says he walks through that door with his arms round two incredibly hot women."
  • Conversed: "It may happen in real life, but just how obviously fake would that look if some stereotype gamer showed up with two hot women like that?"
  • Played for Laughs:
    • James can't even keep the names of the women on his arms straight.
    • Lover Tug of War
  • Played for Drama: James, Sharon, and Claire are federal agents using this to infiltrate a mob boss's club, hoping they don't meet up with anyone they know.

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