Nubile Savage

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
(Redirected from Jungle Girl)
No healthy, adult cavewoman ever looked like this.

Three figures stepped into his line of vision. They were obviously female. They were abundantly female. They were not wearing a great deal of clothing and seemed to be altogether too fresh-from-the-hairdressers for people who have just been paddling a large war canoe, but this is often the case with beautiful Amazonian warriors.

The life of a Noble Savage can be pretty hard, what with all the dirt, parasites, lack of proper medicine, sanitation, nutrition, etc. It's not surprising that a good number of cavemen are nasty, brutish, and short. But their women more than make up for it. Your average cavewoman has the body of a pinup model, with long legs, shapely hips, a flat stomach, thin arms, and an impressive set of bam-bams, all nicely framed by a few scraps of animal hide, regardless of the weather. For extra bling, she may even wear a Feather Boa Constrictor. Her skin is clear and fresh; her teeth are perfect; her hair is no more than artfully tousled. She has no body hair whatsoever, and no cuts on her legs despite shaving with what could only be a jagged rock. Her features often look suspiciously like she's wearing expertly applied modern cosmetics rather than, say, clay and crushed berries. It's enough to make you wonder why we crawled out of the Stone Age.

When a woman or girl from prehistory or from an uncivilized clime is depicted as a ravishingly sexy bombshell, she is a Nubile Savage.[1] Savage men can also be examples of this one, especially if they're impressively muscled and garbed in a leopard-skin loincloth. Or less.

Of course, if you'll watch a National Geographic-type documentary, you'll quickly see that women in cultures removed from civilization, while often topless, do not generally resemble Hollywood models. To start, well, Duh, wherever you're looking they're going to have the splay of mainly average-looking people. To the last point, that's from our perspective, anyway (they have rather different standards of beauty, after all). They are also real people, and thus not pre-approved for attractiveness and nudity by a casting director.

The standard look for The Chief's Daughter and Jungle Princess. Less standard but still common for the Indian Maiden and female Barbarian Hero.

Contrast National Geographic Nudity.

Examples of Nubile Savage include:

Anime and Manga

  • Quell from Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito.
  • In Jungle de Ikou!, the main character Natsumi can transform into the extremely busty Nubile Savage Mii by doing a Fan Service-y dance. Take one look at her [dead link], and you won't be surprised to learn that Mii is a goddess of fertility and reproduction.
  • San from Princess Mononoke is quite pretty and well groomed for somebody Raised by Wolves, aside from the fact that her face is often smeared with blood. It may have something to do with the fact that the wolves that raised her are also magical Shinto demigods.
  • This applies to both men and women in Wild Rock who all look far too perfect for the setting.
  • Rocket Girls: The first time we see Matsuri, she's shown as a Nubile Savage. She quickly catches on to modern life, but never completely lets go of her roots.
  • Tania from Yu-Gi-Oh! GX; it is hinted - but not confirmed - that she is a Duel Spirit and member of the Amazoness tribe, much like the mons in her deck.

Comic Books

  • Most caveman/amazon-themed superheroes adopt the Nubile Savage look.
  • Shakira from The Warlord. (Tara at least hails from the mightiest city in all of Skartaris.)
  • Panther Woman, Juliette Burber's alter ego in 9 Chickweed Lane
  • Cavewoman might be the most exaggerated example, especially when drawn by creator Budd Root—he really has a thing for huge breasts. Even though she's not an actual cavewoman, she lived as one for most of her life and still manages to look hotter than most supermodels. Plus her body was "hardened" as a result of time traveling.
  • Shanna The She-Devil, especially when drawn by Frank Cho in her relaunch.
  • The eponymous heroine of Jungle Girl, for the same exact reason.
  • The Savage Land in the Marvel Universe. The entire place. The ONLY reason for the existance of a tropical region in the middle of the Antarctic is so that residents and visitors can fit this trope.
  • Navis in the first issue of Sillage.

Fan Works

Film

Literature

  • Though not scantily clad, Ayla the Cro-Magnon heroine of Jean Auel's Earth's Children series fits this trope. Auel goes to great lengths to justify this - Ayla learns to brush her hair with a teasel pod, swims and bathes regularly, eats a varied diet, and even wears a leather band around her explicitly large and perky breasts. Darryl Hannah from the movie qualifies on both counts.
  • Eudena from H. G. Wells' The Idler wasn't scantily clad insomuch as completely free of clothing whatsoever. Nice.
  • Any pre-technological female in an Edgar Rice Burroughs book will qualify, though they frequently don't bother with the Fur Bikini. Men from the same civilizations are almost invariably described as ugly.
  • Lin Carter's works, like Edgar Rice Burroughs', tend to show females from pre-technological tribes this way.
  • Tarzan. Unlike the apes who raised him, he loved water, and swam and bathed regularly. When puberty hit, he taught himself to shave with a knife he found in his father's cabin. He taught himself to only shave the face while leaving his scalp alone, too.
  • Rincewind of the Discworld series came into contact with a tribe of these after spending a very long time alone on a deserted island. Unfortunately, the long solitude and monotonous diet had left him a bit addled and had left a few of his desires severely crossed... he thought that the beautiful young women who wanted him to help them continue their bloodlines wanted to give him potatoes. It probably didn't help that Discworld wizards are required to be celibate; he already had half a lifetime's worth of experience suppressing his desires - and a fairly horrific memory of what happens when wizards do reproduce to give him a bit more impetus to keep those desires firmly fixated on innocuous root vegetables.
  • Mowgli from The Jungle Books, especially as a young teenager in the second book. Looks more mature than his years because "hard exercise, the best of good eating, and baths whenever he felt in the least hot or dusty, had given him strength and growth far beyond his age". And he too doesn't bother with clothing at all when there are no humans around to make him.
  • Stealing a page from Edgar Rice Burroughs (as did pretty much the entire book), the Gura males in Robert E. Howard's novel Almuric look like Neanderthals while the females look like fashion models.

Live-Action TV

  • Cavegirl - Cavegirl herself from the children's BBC series of the same name. A large proportion of the cast in fact.
  • Leela from Doctor Who. (Although after her first episode, she's living in the TARDIS, which presumably offers better sanitation and hygiene facilities.)
    • Not quite fitting the trope, as she was a descendant of a survey team that had degenerated. They also had some technological access.
    • More obscurely, Nanina from wiped Hartnell serial "The Savages."
    • It could be argued that the kangs from "Paradise Towers" are an urban jungle example, though better dressed.
  • Veronica Layton from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World.
  • Star Trek
    • Spock and McCoy meet one of these in "All Our Yesterdays" in the original series. It turns out she's from the planet's future, and was exiled to the distant past via a time machine by a dictator.
    • The series' penchant for Green-Skinned Space Babes and various Anvilicious messages about tolerance led to quite a few Nubile Savages, but a notable one is in "The Paradise Syndrome", where Kirk gets Amnesia and is believed to be divine by a group of Native Americans In Space. He is promptly married to The Chief's Daughter, Miramanee, who plays the Nubile Savage role to a T.
  • There's one of these in the 1991 Land of the Lost series.
  • Cole from Power Rangers Wild Force although not his Sentai counterpart.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • In the episode "Beer Bad", a cursed batch of beer turns a bunch of frat boys into cavemen, with crooked teeth, heavy brow ridges, plenty of extra hair - and Buffy, who had plenty to drink, just looks like Buffy with sexy-unkempt hair.
    • Also true of Sineya, the first Slayer.

Music

  • The classic Was (Not Was) music video for "Walk The Dinosaur" features four such women dancing to the song.

Tabletop Games

Toys

Video Games

  • Ayla, in Chrono Trigger, as well as the generic adult cavewomen. Kino is also pretty, well-groomed and clean shaven.
  • Lilika of Rogue Galaxy.
  • Can you say Shaak Ti from The Force Unleashed? Or her sassy young apprentice, Maris Brood.
  • You can play one in Fallout 2. Many characters find the fact that you are a "tribal" quite attractive.
  • Krystal from the Star Fox series. At least for her first appearance.
  • Mariana Mamba, the first super-agent you rile up in Evil Genius is one of these, being the "tamed" last of her Amazon tribe and everything. Even her special power is an exotic allure that dramatically drains the Loyalty stat of any nearby minions.
  • Zhu Rong from Dynasty Warriors.
  • Sheva's tribal costume in Resident Evil 5.
  • Elena from Street Fighter III.
  • Most of the cavegirls from the Joe and Mac series.
  • Crazed Natives and Amazons in the original Might and Magic.
  • Tyrus Flare the Amazon from Golden Axe.

Web Comics

Western Animation

  • Futurama has an entire planet of Amazonian women. Amy briefly dressed like one.
  • Maybe three-quarters of all the women on The Flintstones would count. The men, not so much.
  • From the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode “Hunting the Least Dangerous Game”, the Dulainians are similar to the Edo, but more concerned with health than passion, their skimpy outfits meant to show off their tanned, muscular bodies. They are very nubile, however, kissing instead of shaking hands (with tongue!). Unfortunately, their views on justice are also similar to the Edo, as Billups and Rutherford learn the hard way when discovering that they consider it a blasphemy to enter one of their temples without a midriff-baring shirt…
  1. For those that don't know, Nubile refers to a young woman who is ready or suitable for marriage by virtue of her age or maturity. In recent times it has also been used to refer to a sexually attractive young woman.