Fundamentally Female Cast/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Cast consisting almost entirely of female characters in a setting where it doesn't make sense.

  • Played Straight: A class in a co-educative school consists of 24 girls and 2 boys.
  • Exaggerated: Male characters are implied to exist, but they aren't seen anywhere. The main characters, supporting cast, extras and even every single person in the background "just happens" to be female. Even groups which are usually heavily male-dominated, like construction crews, military units or street gangs, consist entirely of women without any reasonable justification.
  • Inverted: A Cast Full of Pretty Boys in feminine occupations.
  • Subverted: In the pilot of a show a large number of female and just a few male characters are introduced, but the following episodes focus solely on the character development of the male characters while demoting the female characters to extras.
  • Double Subverted: The main plot of said shows turns out to revolve around the guys having contest who can get most of the girls to fall in love with them. First hilarities ensue but then the Shallow Love Interests develop personalities and a serious Love Dodecahedron unfolds around the guys.
  • Justified: A plague or similar grand-scale disaster killed almost everyone except females under the age of 20, so the world is populated mostly by girls and young women.
  • Deconstructed: The women in said world realize that there are too few men around for all of them and start fighting bloody wars over them, not because they are afraid of not getting this man but because they have justified fears of not getting any man to father their children.
    • Many female fans complain about all the Yuri Fans of the show.
  • Reconstructed: grand-scale in-vitro fertilization solves the conflict, a feminist Straw Utopia is created and the show ends with a Broken Aesop about how women are better off without men.
    • Alternatively, people start practicing Polyamory.
  • Zig Zagged: The main cast shifts between all-female and all-male at the end of every episode.
  • Averted: The creators always seem to make sure to keep a 50:50 balance between number, depth and screen time of male and female characters.
  • Enforced: Market research found out that merchandising of female characters sells better and decided to remove or gender-flip some of the male characters from the adapted source material.
  • Lampshaded: "Don't you find it one bit odd that the school administration put that many girls and just us two boys in a single class?"
  • Invoked: A group consisting only of young women is isolated as part of a sociological experiment.
  • Defied: A mixed group is separated into subgroups by lot. One group happens to consist only of women. The person doing the lot decides to reshuffle the groups to avoid this.
  • Discussed: "Jeez, are there any guys in here?!" "There's one over there!"
  • Conversed: "So, is every adult male in this show a draft dodger, or...?" Beat "Yeah, the viewers just like their lesbians."
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