All Guys Want Cheerleaders/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: One or more male characters are infatuated with a popular girl, possibly a cheerleader.

  • Played Straight:
    • The hero has a crush on a cheerleader.
    • Alternately; the entire male student body has a crush on one or more of the cheerleaders.
  • Exaggerated: An ugly girl (think King Kong) is unpopular, until she joins the cheerleading squad; then, without changing anything about her appearance or even actually participating in the cheerleading squad, the entire male student body falls head over heels in love with her.
  • Justified:
    • The cheerleader's uniform is kind of skimpy, and thus catches the boys' attention better than regular clothes.
    • Or it's such a small school that almost all of the girls are cheerleaders.
  • Inverted:
    • None of the guys want cheerleaders.
    • Gender Flip: A guy joins the cheer squad, and the girls all fall for him.
  • Subverted: The Hero has a crush on a girl, but doesn't want her to know, so he pretends to have a crush on one of the cheerleaders.
  • Double Subverted: (Continued from above). He starts going out with the cheerleader to throw his crush off, and ends up really liking the cheerleader and forgetting his previous crush.
  • Subverted: All of the guys have a crush on a cheerleader except The Hero.
  • Parodied: A guy becomes a cheerleader, and suddenly starts causing Stupid Sexy Flanders for the other guys.
  • Deconstructed:
    • The girls who are not cheerleaders are annoyed by the fact that the guys prefer the cheerleaders to them, and never get boyfriends, leaving everyone except the cheerleaders and the football players single.
    • No one wants to join the cheerleading squad because they're always sexually objectified.
    • Along with All Girls Want Bad Boys, if this continues, people will live in a world where people judge you for your physical appearance.
  • Reconstructed: Girls decide to at least give the guys a chance, and after a few dates, the guys start liking who they're dating more.
  • Averted: The series does not take place at a school, or does not have any single men, or does not have any prominently featured cheerleaders.
    • Alternatively: Cheerleaders are featured, but guys are not seen to be more attracted to them than to any other female character.
  • Enforced: "We need our hero to have a foil for his main love interest. Let's introduce a cheerleader, because she will be believably sexy to distract him."
  • Lampshaded: "Oh, God, she's wearing a cheerleader outfit. Nothing gets a guy more than a cheerleader outfit."
  • Invoked: A girl becomes a cheerleader to get a boy to notice/like her.
  • Defied: Alice quits the cheerleading squad because she's sick of boys only liking her because of it.
  • Discussed: "Dude, you have a crush on Alice? She's just normal!" "This isn't some high school drama. I'm allowed to be attracted to more than the cheerleaders."
  • Conversed: "So they give us another romance subplot, and it's with the cheerleaders again? Poor Susan's never gotten a love interest, since she's not on the squad. What a shame; she's my favorite character, too."

Back to All Guys Want Cheerleaders

Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/All_Guys_Want_Cheerleaders/Playing_With?oldid=29033"