Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Difference between revisions
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Women and girls are action and adventure heroes nowadays, just like men and boys are. They get into dangerous situations, face menacing villains, get captured, and even get into fights.
But even when they're portrayed as equally able to get into danger, something is a little different for the girls. While guys get their clothes messed up a lot or torn, girls tend not to (unless it's [[Fan Service|that kind]] of [[Clothing Damage]]). Guys show visible bruises and cuts from their fights, but girls don't suffer these things. Heck, girls don't even get their hair disheveled most times! It's as if nature itself [[Wouldn't Hit a Girl]], not to mention there's often a [[Dirt Forcefield]] (perhaps affected by being [[Stripperific]]
Likewise, girls are almost ''never'' used in slapstick comedy (but she can get a [[Pie in the Face]]) – the times when this is averted are rare enough to have [[Slapstick Knows No Gender|their own trope]]. They never become [[The Chew Toy]]. This is less common with independent artwork actually created by women, who apparently don't have hang-ups about hitting a girl (for obvious reasons), but don't expect to see too many women suffering [[Amusing Injuries]] on TV or in much of anything published.
Possibly this is because girls are supposed to be beautiful, and the actual [[Scars Are Forever|scars that an adventure would realistically bring]] tend to detract from their beauty. Fierce hand-to-hand fights are cool, [[Cat Fight|even sexy,]] but the broken noses and black eyes they cause are not. Since [[Most Writers Are Male]], they only want to see males getting hurt, whether humorously or through exciting action sequences.
This version of the trope may be less common nowadays, possibly because more people, of both genders, want a "cool" [[Action Girl]] who proves she can handle tough situations by showing the scars for having done so, and because mild scars don't necessarily detract from beauty in everyone's opinion. Plus, having one's hair
Still a heroine will (almost) never suffer a ''[[Scars Are Forever|permanent]]'' injury such as the loss of a limb or eye, no matter how much punishment she goes through. It's fairly rare for heroes too, but much, much, much rarer for heroines. In fact, it might be considered the ''second'' most common super-power. [[Most Common Superpower|(The first being, well, you know.)]] In the case of heroes, they usually go from [[Beauty to Beast]]. Several variations of this include [[She Fu]] and [[Waif Fu]].
The other version of this trope concerns a different form of beauty: inner beauty. Guys fart, burp, etc.; but girls aren't shown doing it anywhere near as often. Gross-out jokes tend to always involve guys, not girls. After all, girls are never gross, don't you know? And, since [[Most Writers Are Male]], they tend not to want them to be gross.
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* In the ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]'' franchise, seeing one of the good guys lose a duel isn’t all that uncommon, but the way Zuzu loses to Sergi in the Friendship Cup arc in ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V]]'' isn't the typical loss. As three urchins describe it to her (she blacked out and doesn’t remember what happened), she "blew up a skyscraper, demolished a runner, and fell about 40 stories" (then they admit they were being nice; it was ''much'' worse than that). Most members of the cast were, at the time, under the impression [[No One Could Have Survived That]], yet not only does she survive, she doesn’t have a single bruise, her clothes are not torn and still clean, and her hair isn’t so much as mussed.
* The anime for ''[[The Irregular at Magic High School]]'' has Tatsuya wondering why his friend is asking that he take his companions home after a battle; the scene then pans to the three girls with torn pantyhose, carrying the implication that they're in no shape to fight any further... [[Fridge Logic|despite there being no actual wounds visible.]]<!--Someone who's watched can probably better elaborate on this scene, I'm going off the following link: https://twitter.com/PunishedHag/status/1333009717572952065-->
* In the fourth episode of ''[[Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury]]'' [[Tsundere|Chuchu]] gets tired of the two [[No Name Given]] [[Girl Posse]] sabotaging her exam and gets into a fistfight with them, knocking out one of them in a single punch and getting into an extend back in forth with the other that leaves both Chuchu and the other girl with horribly bruised faces, only for any mark on Chuchu to disappear '''entirely''' from her the next scene transition (the other girl isn't shown), set mere hours later. The bystander who accidentally gets hit ''once'' trying to push the two of them apart actually comes off looking ''worse'' than Chuchu, getting a [[Pointless Band-Aid|comedic bandage on her chin]].
=== [[Fan Works]] ===
* Male example: While earlier fics kept him pretty even through abuse, the [[That Guy With The Glasses]] [[Kink Meme]] has been averting this with a vengeance for [[The Nostalgia Critic]] lately{{when}}. He's been mutilated, snuffed, cut up, had his eyes gouged out, beaten while gang-raped, bitten clean through his tongue when he was beheaded in public... you name whatever torture, it's been done to the poor guy.
* ''[[Ultimate SpiderWoman: Change With the Light]]'': Mary Jane Watson has been smashed into walls, zapped with electrical bolts, slashed by razor bats, burned with flame, and been punched square in the face, but she's never suffered any permanent scars or blemishes. Her injuries tend to heal rather quickly by themselves once she gets some rest, although she [[Cut Himself Shaving|still sometimes has to explain how she got hurt in the first place.]] She typically claims that she was caught up in a supervillain attack, which is more plausible than you might think because of how many supervillains are causing mayhem in New York at any given time.
* In the 52nd chapter of the ''[[The Teraverse|Teraverse]]'' story ''[https://www.tthfanfic.org/Story-32071-52/DianeCastle+The+Secret+Collocation+of+Alex+Mack.htm The Secret Collocation of Alex Mack]'', there are multiple mentions of how Alex "Terawatt" Mack manages to stay apparently untouched by a wet, muddy fight that leaves the other dozen or so people on her side completely bloody and filthy:
{{quote|''Stormburst had gotten blasted off maybe to Mount Shasta. We'd all been knocked over and smacked around. And Terawatt was still kicking demon ass. While looking immaculate. Did she just constantly use a big chunk of her telekinesis to keep herself clean and dry?''}}
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* ''[[Tomb Raider]]'': Lara Croft can die in fashions most people would see in a Mature rated game, but the worst that comes out of it is blood loss, if any. Starting to be averted with the 2011 reboot, in which the game's trailers have shown Lara getting progressively messier and more injured as the games' plot progresses.
* ''[[Dead Space 2]]''. {{spoiler|Ellie's eye gets poked out by Stross. You don't actually see this, but you do later see Stross standing there with an eyeball on the end of his screwdriver. Ellie is still alive and very much kicking ("You owe me an eye you bastard!"). Normally, this would be bad enough to cause a very specific (look in description) aversion, but later on you as the player are asked to guide a needle into Isaac's eye. If you miss and fail, instead of carefully going into his eyeball (disturbing enough in and of itself), the entire needle and the machine behind it gets jammed into his eye and sprays blood everywhere, in full and close up view of the player. }}
* ''[[Final Fantasy VII]]'' nothing can so much as smudge Tifa or Aerith's makeup or muss their hair, not battles with [[Killer Robot]]s, ugly toad monsters, or slimy fish monsters. Same goes for Cloud's boyish good looks, not a single blemish after the most brutal of fights. Even more apparent in the remakes.
* ''[[Pokémon]]'':
** If you play a female protagonist, her hair and clothes never get so much as a smudge no matter where she goes; forests, sandstorm-filled deserts, ash-strewn volcanic mountains, or even muddy swamps where she might find a [[Battle in the Rain]]. Though this applies to the male protagonists too, who admittedly have a less crazy [[Anime Hair]].
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* ''[[My Little Pony]] and Friends'' episode "The Glass Princess" sees three of the ponies [[Important Haircut|get shaved bald]]. It grows back instantly, with a [[Hand Wave]] about it being magical.
** In ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic]]'', Rarity cuts off her own tail at one point, reassuring the others that it will grow back. It gets restored by the end of that episode via a different [[Hand Wave]], when {{spoiler|Rarity gains the reawakened Element of Harmony, Generosity}}.
* A shared trait of the [[Badass Princess]] heroines in ''[[She-Ra and the Princesses of Power]]''. There's even one episode where [[Our Mermaids Are Different|Mermista]] infiltrates the Fright Zone by swimming through a sewer pipe (something she did ''not'' want to do) and still comes out looking springtime fresh.
* Zigzagged in ''[[DC Super Hero Girls]]''; the eponymous team tends to be bruised, battered, and otherwise visibly hurt a lot, but these wounds rarely last longer than whatever scene where they got them.
== Examples and exceptions of the second (gross-out oriented) kind ==
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:The Beautiful Tropes]]
[[Category:Rule of Glamorous]]
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[[Category:Gender and Sexuality Tropes]]
[[Category:Double Standard]]
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