Mono-Gender Monsters: Difference between revisions

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'''There's really two reasons this happens:'''
# It's a lot easier on the costume/animation department if everything is fairly uniform across the board for the generic cannon fodder and slightly less generic [[Monster of the Week]]. There's also an easy story justification when monsters are involved: simply put, they are all modified forms of one design, pressed from a single mold, created by the same spell or, in the case of the first generation of [[Star Wars|Imperial Storm Troopers]], [[Cloning Blues|cloned]] from the same guy.
# In the case of where the single gender protagonist(s) fight single gender monsters, this is probably to avoid [[Unfortunate Implications]]. Violence of men against men and women against women isn't viewed with the same sort of sensitivity as men against women. By reserving the men against women for developed characters (where you can develop very good reasons why they need to fight each other) and not having it for the [[Exclusively Evil]] [[Mook|Mooks]]s that get steamrolled every episode, you can avoid accusations of the piece being inherently misogynistic or misandristic.
 
See also [[One-Gender Race]], [[Designated Girl Fight]]. Contrast [[Female Monster Surprise]].
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* The ''[[Lord of the Rings]]'' movies had only guy orcs. Possibly justified since they're asexually reproducing (though [[Word of God]] would disagree, maybe; Tolkien wasn't known for being specific about the [[Brain Bleach|sexual predilections of orcs]])...yech.
** This is true for the movie version; however, Tolkien had written that "Orcs multiply after the fashion of the Children of Illuvatar", i.e. elves and men. (Written here because there's no Literature section on this page.)
** In just about any fantasy setting, it is rare for female goblins, orcs, trolls, ogres, or giants to be mentioned. There are of course exceptions (such as [[Xanth]], [[Shrek]], and tabletop games run by particularly forward-minded [[Game Master|Game Masters]]s), but they tend to be rare.
** Though, in the final movie, there are two orcs that appear to be strikingly female, like the one who orders for the catapults during the Minas Tirith battle.
** Some orcs (such as the one who inspects a freshly born Uruk-Hai in ''Fellowship'') were played by women, but whether they were meant to ''be'' orc women, who knows...
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== Tabletop RPG ==
* ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]'' has a few female orcs in the fiction (there is one particular in the latest few Drizzt books). There are rules for them, in that orcs and many other humanoid monsters have tribal rules in their monster entries, covering how many females/elders/infants/so forth should be part of any group of Monster X. Somewhere between the inattention to detail of most games, the vague distaste for genocide, and the fact they don't provide much in the way of XP, they tend to get ignored.
** For orcs, it's justified that you don't often fight females--thefemales—the males usually treat them as [[Stay in the Kitchen|breeding stock whose place is in the home]], so in any scenario where conflict with female orcs is possible there's also probably orc kids and babies around, and any sane DM would probably advise players of non-evil characters to tread very lightly...
*** The Forgotten Realms novel Evermeet quotes an Orc proverb "If Gruumsh had intended females to lead, he would have given them bigger muscles."
** And for trolls it's averted, since they're matriarchal.
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