The Casanova
"Gentlemen, I'm sure we can sort this out amicably. Look at it this way: if you could do what I could do, you'd do it too! But you can't. I can. And I have. And I'll do it again. So you should be happy for me, just a little tiny bit, don't you think?" —Casanova, Casanova
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The sexual predator — a character who relentlessly pursues, lands, loves and then abandons members of the opposite sex. Sometimes comic, sometimes a monster, always successful this character leaves behind a string of broken hearts and (occasional) vows of Revenge. Casanova's only motivation is indulging his Lust and desire, sating them with the bodies of his conquests.
Contrast with the unsuccessful Casanova Wannabe. Compare with the inexplicable Kavorka Man. A guy who gets the girls like a Casanova, but unintentionally, is a Chick Magnet. If kind-hearted, may overlap with Chivalrous Pervert. The Charmer is equally charming but less sex-obsessed. If they really get around but want to settle down it's Looking for Love In All the Wrong Places. A Handsome Lech has more negative connotations and a sparser scorecard than the Cassanova.
The trope is named for Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (1725-1798), a soldier, spy, diplomat and adventurer whose extensive but unreliable autobiography established his eternal fame as a lover. It should be noted that the historical Casanova was closer to a Chivalrous Pervert who really was looking for love... just with women who were locked in loveless political marriages - and also gained his successes famously ugly. (Definitely he was no Heath Ledger.) Interesting and prone to be noted for his modern wannabes, he was one of the few 18th century men who bathed almost daily and asked the same thing from his partners.
Many films, TV movies and TV mini-series are named for and based on that person. The best known are Fellini's 1976 film, the 2005 film starring Heath Ledger, and the 2005 BBC drama mini-series starring David Tennant. The latter is considered one of the more faithful adaptations of Casanova's memoirs, while Fellini's... wasn't.
For the juvenile version—all of the above without the sex—see Kidanova. Contrast the Serial Romeo. If the guy is actually only rumored to be a Casanova and has no evidence onscreen, it's the Urban Legend Love Life. If he develops feelings for one of his conquests (or someone who refuses him), he's a Ladykiller in Love. See More Friends, More Benefits for when the mechanics of a game encourage the player character to act this way.
The comparatively rarer female version is traditionally called a Man Eater.
Note: It should be mentioned that even after the affairs were over, most of Casanova's ex-lovers still liked him. This trope would probably fit (the fictional) Don Juan better.
Anime and Manga
- George from Paradise Kiss.
- Guiche from The Familiar of Zero. Possibly Julio as well, although he tends to have girls pursuing him.
- Dio Brando from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is so charismatic and good-looking that he managed to father four children. With four different women.
- Akio and Touga from Revolutionary Girl Utena use, manipulate and abuse women and men alike using in great part their sex appeal for More Than Mind Control effect. Then Akio does it to Touga, establishing him as a sort of Alpha Casanova.
- Saionji gets in on the fun too, though he's the least successful of the three. Though, since Touga seduces/manipulates Saionji, and he himself is seduced/manipulated by Akio, it becomes a sort of a Casanova Conga.
- Makoto from School Days is flanderized into this about halfway into the story. In the anime and at least one game ending, this comes back to bite him in the ass when he is murdered by one of his spurned lovers.
- Really, the anime version acts a Deconstruction of the more malicious version of this trope: Makoto is skilled at bedding women almost to the point of straining credibility enough to push him into Kavorka Man territory considering his (not outstanding) looks and Jerkass attitude, but this shouldn't obscure the fact that when it comes to anything deeper and more lasting than this, Makoto is an absolute idiot who doesn't understand the female heart at all, and indeed only turns to his life of serial affairs because he was too impatient and thick-headed to win the heart of the girl he had a crush on in the first place.
- Aoshima in Ah! My Goddess, who is explicitly referred to as a "casanova." Fortunately, when he's not busy being a slimy excuse for a human being, he tends to be the Butt Monkey.
- Takeo Tsurumaru in Narutaru.
- Paptimus Scirrocco from Zeta Gundam is a very evil version of this. He's basically what happens when you combine a Casanova with a Magnificent Bastard and give him the psychic powers of a Newtype. Generally the kind that uses his charms more to use woman as tools than just as sexual objects, though.
- Scirocco's more like Rasputin
- Karin's brother, Ren, sucks the blood of stressed out women every night. He says they're usually quite grateful afterwards, but tend to keep bugging him afterward.
- Ryou from Strawberry Shake Sweet, in a Girls Love example, has bedded about a thousand girls and that's only the known minimum.
- Explored to an extent in Golgo 13. The title character tends to have sex before a job, and does have good luck at getting women to join him in bed. However, he just as often hires prostitutes, and due to his notorious blank expression not changing, a number of readers have theorized he doesn't actually enjoy it.
- Light Yagami from Death Note. Though apparently uninterested in sex for his own sake, he manipulates awestruck and gorgeous young women to do his killing for him.
- Sabato Rokudo from RIN-NE
- Ryoji Kaji from Neon Genesis Evangelion is implied to be this. The only people he doesn't hit on are the underage ones (much to Asuka's chagrin), leading to the derogatory Fan Nickname "man-whore". That doesn't stop him from teasing Shinji about him living at Misato's.
- Lord Aleister Chamber of Black Butler is implied to be this.
- Agon of Eyeshield 21 has this trait tacked on to his already unpleasant personality. It's not especially relevant to the story, it's just another extension of his Jerk Jock personality and serves as yet another reason for the heroes to dislike him ("Down with guys who have girlfriends!").
- The titular character in Space Adventure Cobra.
- Gildartz!!! from Fairy Tail.
- Mamotte Shugogetten: Izumo Miyauchi.
Comic Books
- Different versions of Batman have either portrayed him as being with many women or as avoiding most women. A common feature to most versions is that he ends up alone.
- Jack from Fables and his spinoff comic Jack of Fables.
- Also the entire point of Prince Charming. The reason he's in so many stories is because he constantly marries and abandons various princesses. This leads to him originally being less than popular in Fabletown.
- Starfox of The Avengers. It's revealed in She Hulk that he's an inadvertant rapist who unconsciously uses his psychic powers to get women into bed, but the canonicity of She Hulk is sometimes dubious.
- It's been firmly established what his powers are and how much control he has over them. She Hulk just pointed out Unfortunate Implications that already existed.
- For your consideration ladies and gentlemen, the Incredible Hercules. Pulls about as much tail as James Bond.
- The aptly named Casanova Quinn.
- Tony Stark.
- Lampshaded in Extremis:
Tony Stark: I have my own fleet of satellites in geosynchronous orbit. |
- Another Marvel example is Gambit, who is largely considered to be a reformed example, having given up his whoring ways since meeting Rogue. Until they broke up anyway.
- Exaggerated in one of Gambit's stand alone comics. He breaks into an old girlfriend's house in the middle of the night to request a favor and both are confused by the lack of sex.
- The Hulk. No, really! Have you seen how many children he has with multiple women? Three, so far, with a suspected fourth running around.
- As Red She-Hulk who is actually Betty Ross Banner commented after learning the Hulk had been married to not one, but two hot alien warrior queens;
Red She-Hulk: You really got around, huh? |
Film
- Dare I say, Casanova from the film Casanova?
- The great seducer has been portrayed many times on film:
- Heath Ledger in the 2005 version
- Richard Chamberlain in a made-for-TV film in 1987
- Donald Sutherland in Federico Fellini's 1977 version
- Ivan Mozzhukhin in a 1927 Dutch silent movie
- Tony Curtis in another 1977 film version
- In fact, IMDB has no less than 85 movies or TV shows with the word "Casanova" in the title, and most of them feature the gentleman himself in a leading or supporting role.
- The great seducer has been portrayed many times on film:
- Telly, the HIV-infected, utterly unfeeling "Virgin Surgeon" in Kids.
- James Bond, of course. Partially subverted in that in some cases, he pursues the woman not for sex/conquest for its own sake, but to win her as an ally/defector for purposes of his mission objective.
- However, he does feel genuinely bad if a woman he had slept with ends up being killed by the villain.
- Or a non-villain does it
- It should be noted with the above example that, contrary to the stereotype that Bond regularly kills the women he sleeps with (invoked by the "kiss kiss bang bang" catchphrase of the 1960s), in truth this has happened exactly three times in the history of the movie franchise ( Fiona in Thunderball, Fatima in Never Say Never Again, and the above example of Elektra in The World is Not Enough. And in the case of Fiona it's debatable whether Bond intentionally uses her as a human shield.).
- Or a non-villain does it
- However, he does feel genuinely bad if a woman he had slept with ends up being killed by the villain.
- Tony Stark in the Iron Man movie. Claims to have gone 12-for-13 in one year with Maxim cover girls (he couldn't make his schedule work with March, but December was twins). Seduces Christine Everhart, leaves her to wake up alone in his bed, and while showing Everhart the door, Stark's assistant Pepper Potts says that she's "taken out the trash" before.
- A deleted scene set right before the Golmira scenes has Tony seducing and leading a woman off to bed... and picking up another in the hallway along the way. He then gives a lame excuse to bail on the apparently inebriated women. "I'm going to get ice for the champagne" or something like that. In the distance, we see Iron Man taking off.
- In fact, this trope is often part of the Rich Idiot With No Day Job's cover.
- Dorian Gray, not only in The Picture of Dorian Gray but even moreso in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie.
- Pavi Largo from Repo! The Genetic Opera is close to being the epitome of this trope. As he says himself in 'Mark It Up':
Ask a Gentern who they prefer--ten out of nine will say the Pavi! |
- Duke of Rochester from The Libertine.
- And Don Juan de Marco, as well.
- Stuart Townsend's character Adam in the Irish film About Adam. He beds/romances with no difficulty three very different sisters, their brother's uptight girlfriend - and almost the brother as well.
- Timothy, the slinky, knife-throwing terrorist from 1996's The Long Kiss Goodnight.
- Subverted in the movie and book Kiss the Girls where the kidnapping/rapist/murderer bad guy takes the alias "Casanova". After he drugs and attempts to murder one of his victims a character remarks "Yeah, he's cunning, but he doesn't know his history: The real Casanova would never have approved."
- Wickham in Bride and Prejudice.
- What's New, Pussycat? stars Peter O'Toole as a man who just can't say no to women. He sees a psychiatrist to help him swear them off and be faithful to his fiancee, but the doctor is a deranged lech himself.
Literature
- My Uncle Oswald shames Casanova!
- Oswald Cornelius makes Casanova seem positively undersexed.
- Valmont and Madame Merteuil of Les Liaisons Dangereuses are classic literary examples.
- Mr. Wednesday from American Gods is a lecherous old man with supernatural charm, a penchant for virgins, and no respect for age-of-consent laws. The book's protagonist, Shadow, reluctantly finds himself witnessing the seduction of a teenage waitress, deciding it was "like watching an old wolf stalking a fawn too young to know that if it did not run, and run now, it would wind up in a distant glade with its bones picked clean by the ravens." In fact, this is exactly how Shadow got conceived.
- Casanunda the dwarf from Discworld is a parody of this trope.
- But we can't really be sure, since he is also a self-proclaimed Outrageous Liar.
- Well, it worked on Nanny Ogg. Of course, expressing a vague interest would work on Nanny Ogg...
- The odds are that he's not lying about this one, at least. He's proven it to other women as well.
- Anatole Kuragin from War and Peace. He's a well-known womanizer whose first interaction with a semi-main character is mademoiselle Bourienne, a maid at Prince Bolkonsky's house, while Anatole was there to court the prince's daughter Marya. He later marries the daughter of a Polish farmer in exchange for room and board during one military campaign, and then, just for fun, sets out to marry-and-kidnap Natasha Rostov.
- Lude from House of Leaves, who actually keeps a list of his conquests, their prominent features, and how he had sex with them.
- A character in Don Quixote is also portrayed like this in the male villager's stories about her. We later find out these injuries were imagined, she was just being chaste and as she wisely points out, she can't help being beautiful.
- Fictional comedian Monti Tree from My Screwups fit this trope to a T, losing his virginity at 13, to bedding supermodels well into adulthood. However that all comes to a complete stop when he finds out he had a son he didn't know about.
- James Bond again. This is brought out most clearly in the last paragraph of the series, effectively describing how he can never settle down with one woman.
- In the books it's a little more Byronic. For example, in Moonraker he expects to automatically be rewarded for his efforts by sex with Gala Brand, only for Brand to reveal that she wasn't kidding about being engaged.
- In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel Necropolis, Gaunt after a wartime fling thinks of his mentor Otkar who had left a trail of tearful women behind him and warned Gaunt not to get involved, as it would weaken him. Gaunt realizes that although as soon as the war is over, their social classes would separate them (which she knows too), he would now fight to the end to save this woman, and that his emotional investment in the Ghosts has in reality kept him on the job.
- Larry Douglas in The Other Side of Midnight. The first "book" of the novel tells the life stories of two of his many conquests, Catherine Alexander and Noelle Page, via alternating chapters. The former marries him, unaware of his true nature; the latter, whom he abandoned years before he met Catherine, devotes her life to destroying him. The remainder of the story is about what happens when Noelle manipulates events to bring Larry back into her life.
- Never trust these characters in Jane Austen:
- Willoughby of Sense and Sensibility (abandoned the last girl he slept with and dumps one of the heroines for someone richer)
- Wickham of Pride and Prejudice (tried to seduce The Hero's younger sister and succeeds in seducing the heroine's younger sister)
- Henry Crawford of Mansfield Park (has every woman in the world —including ours!— wrapped around his finger... except the heroine, which he cannot take lying down...)
- Mr. Knightley fears Frank Churchill may be this in Emma, given the mixed signals he keeps sending both to Emma and Jane Fairfax. It turns out he's just an innocent if sometimes foolish Chick Magnet in a committed, Secret Relationship with Jane Fairfax.
- Spyros Stavaronas, the attractive young shrimp fisherman in Alexandra by Scott O'Dell. At first, he uses his charms to distract Alexandra so his henchmen can smuggle cocaine on her boat. When Alexandra finds out, he further tries to seduce her into keeping his secret and not turning them into the cops.
- Pretty common among the main male characters of the Sword of Truth series. Nathan Rahl, the prophet, often badgers the Sisters of the Light to send women to his rooms while he is in his Gilded Cage, and can often be seen with a woman on each arm after getting out. Zedd is implied to have interactions with several women over the course of the series. Richard himself, while more content to just have his one significant other, still manages to end up married to three different women and have several more who want him. The male villains are darker versions of this.
- Finnick in the sequel of The Hunger Games
- Although, as revealed in Mockingjay, this may actually be a subversion. He does love one single woman, Annie, and was forced into becoming a sex slave by the Capitol to protect her.
- Jimmy (Snowman) in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, is this and also a harbors a years-long romantic obsession with the same girl (then woman) as his sociopathic genius best friend, which leads to trouble
- In Aaron Allston's Galatea in 2-D, Paris makes a move on Elsie as soon as he is drawn from the painting.
- Neil Stauss's The Game is about becoming this. And the book is full of them... only thing is that they are all Cloud Cuckoo Landers.
- In a rare example of one in children's literature, The Roman Mysteries features Publius Pollus Felix, who is revealed as a Casanova in The Sirens of Surrentum.
- Murillio of the Malazan Book of the Fallen specializes in seducing and bedding married women. He notes that all the students of the man who trained him in dueling ended up pursuing some vice; his was just a bit less dangerous. Ended up quitting after a younger woman seduced him and he nearly died when her suitor defended her "honor".
- Crowfeather from Warrior Cats. Three mates and Four kits.
- Ivan Vorpatril in the Vorkosigan Saga.
Live-Action TV
- Lord Flashheart from Blackadder.
- David Tennant in the BBC series Casanova.
- Frank Finlay as the title character in yet another TV miniseries in 1971.
- Face, on The A-Team.
- Christian Troy on Nip Tuck.
- Tony Dinozzo on NCIS.
- Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who and Torchwood - bisexual, promiscuous, but benign.
- Brian in Seacht.
- Patrick of Coupling behaves like a cold hearted seducer, unable to see women as anything but potential conquests, dumping his girlfriends almost immediately, and compiling a vast collection of sex tapes of his conquests. Interestingly, he avoids being loathsome, as he's portrayed as stupid rather than deliberately malicious.
- Barney from How I Met Your Mother. There's barely been an episode in the series where he hasn't hit on at least one woman, and uses a number of bizarre means to seduce them (which are surprisingly successful).
- Slightly deconstructed—for the most part, he only does well with bimbos and desperate women.
Ted: Does that ever work for you? (referring to one of Barney's numerous pick up lines and schemes) |
- In a recent episode Barney was revealed to have slept with 200 women (and counting). Marshall, while disgusted, decided to crunch the numbers based on the number of women Barney hits on on average every week and calculated (albeit with quite a bit of leeway) that based on that information and his years of sexual activity, Barney's success rate with women works out at a little over 1%. There's no telling if that is anywhere near accurate though.
- The problem is that we almost never actually see Barney strike out. In one episode he successfully nails seven different girls in seven days, most of whom leave the bar with him within seconds of being hit on.
- Hank Moody on Californication.
- Brian Kinney from Queer as Folk almost nightly indulges in one night stands.
- Stuart in the UK version and in the ending montage Nathan becomes the new Stuart after Stuart gets into a long-term relationship with Vince and they travel together.
- Joey on Friends.
- Occasionally, Jerry and George from Seinfeld.
- Charley on Empty Nest
- Brian in Wings
- Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H (television), although he occasionally takes a break to get his heart stepped on.
- Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. cuts a wide swathe through various femmes fatale, female innocents, and the UNCLE secretarial pool.
- Chuck Bass in Gossip Girl.
- Charlie Harper (Charlie Sheen) in Two and A Half Men.
- Dr. Sloane in Grey's Anatomy.
- Dean Winchester on Supernatural.
- Connor from Trust Me seems to be edging into this trope.
- Kenny Beckett on Daves Worlds
- Kamen Rider franchise:
- Urataros from Kamen Rider Den-O.
- Otoya Kurenai in Kamen Rider Kiva.
- Latka's alter ego Vic Ferrari from Taxi, introduced at the end of Season 3 and the catalyst for a Split Personality problem that unfolded over much of the following season. This climaxed when he had to win back his old girlfriend Simka from Vic (whom he referred to as "a two-bit bossa nova"). Once he managed to convince her that Vic wouldn't actually love her, she was able to convince Vic to leave for good.
- Sam Malone of Cheers.
Norm: Ah, Sammy, watching you get ready for a date is like watching a great matador prepare for a bullfight. |
- Bulldog from Frasier.
Bulldog: [on the phone] Come on now. No tears. I'll never forget you either, Sandy. Linda? Really? I thought I was talking to your sister. Oh well, tell her same goes. |
- Roz Doyle was always played as a female version of this trope in particular, rather than just Really Gets Around. While the characters often cracked jokes about her promiscuity, they nearly always implied a predatory and perpetually lustful person who loved the chase and would jump through ridiculous hoops (including construct elaborate lies and hook her friends into facilitating hook-ups) in order to get laid, rather than misogynistic jokes indicative of a cheap slut, as would be expected in a comedy featuring a promiscuous woman. Also, Roz was always portrayed in a far better light than Bulldog because while Roz would sleep with loads of guys, she also had very clear standards that she rarely compromised (which is perhaps the reason her dates were so often men who required her to come up with hilarious schemes in order to get them to put out).
- Samantha of Sex and the City arguably is more of a female version of this than The Vamp or Femme Fatale, as her motivations are lust rather than being a "bad girl".
- Al Mundy of It Takes a Thief seems to pick up a new woman every episode, and even the ones who are initially frosty are charmed by him in the end. He doesn't seem to get much actual sex, though, because Noah always puts a stop to things just when the woman is softening up.
- An episode of The Equalizer had a handsome chronic womaniser get kidnapped by industrial spies who keep insisting that "she said she gave it to you" and refuse to believe his claims of innocence. Realizing he's going to be tortured he quickly "confesses" and promises to get "it" to them in 24 hours—he then has to hire the Equalizer to help him sort though the multitude of women he's dated to find the right one. "It" turns out to be a microdot on a matchbook handed to him with a girl's phone number written on the inside.
- Before Nathan of One Tree Hill fell in love with Haley, he was most definitely one of these, even if he was taken at the time. Haley is not happy when, in Season 4, after they are married and pregnant, she finds out that Nathan made a sex tape with their friend Brooke (though it was before he even knew her).
Nathan: You want me to write a list of every single girl I've ever... |
- Sam Axe of Burn Notice seems to make his living "sponging off every rich divorcee in the greater Miami area."
- Danny Blue on Hustle and Eliot Spencer on Leverage both manage this.
- Al from Quantum Leap.
- Gaius Frakking Baltar on the reimagined Battlestar Galactica.
- Star Trek's Captain James T. "Jim" Kirk and The Next Generation's Commander William T. Riker.
- A YouTube user's summary of Kirk's philosophy of life:
When in doubt, seduce the woman. |
- Jake Doyle from Republic of Doyle.
- Dan Fielding of Night Court.
- Dr Guy Secretan from Green Wing.
- Dr. Simon Hill from Combat Hospital. In the middle of Afghanistan on a military base as a civilian, to boot.
- Dr. Doug Ross starts out this way in ER
- Don Draper in Mad Men is probably the most prominent illustration of this trope nowadays on TV
- this video demonstrates succinctly "How to pick up women like Don Draper"
Tabletop Games
- The male vampires of the Daeva clan from Vampire: The Requiem fits, the evil version, to a T.
- Ma Ha Suchi from Exalted was one of these in the First Age. Every character in Exalted has a guiding Motivation. His was, "Sleep with every Celestial Exalted in Creation." It didn't hurt that he was ridiculously Bishonen. Then the Wyld happened to him...
Music
- "Cowboy Casanova" by Carrie Underwood.
He's a good time, a cowboy casanova leaning up against the record machine, |
- Supertramp's "Lover Boy"
- Selena Gomez "Outlaw"
Never stay very long anywhere |
Mythology
- Older Than Feudalism: Zeus, king of the Greek pantheon, is depicted this way in Classical Mythology. They had very different values from modern Westerners, but note that in actual Greek religion, he wasn't viewed as this.
Theater
- In Spring Awakening, handsome, creepy, and arrogant Hanschen Rilow is mostly played for laughs, though it's a little sad when he seduces his classmate Ernst. The scene they share is tragically unbalanced, given all the power Hanschen has over Ernst:
Ernst: I love you, Hanscen, as I have never loved anyone. |
- Even older than the original Casanova was the character Don Juan, whose first recorded appearance was in the 17th century Spanish play The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest.
- Don Juan was the subject of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni (of which we see an excerpt, and a vaudeville parody, in Amadeus).
- In psychology, a person who displays a need to dominate and have multiple sexual relationships with woman is said to have Don Juanism.
- Into the Woods has an amazing parody of this in the songs 'Agony' and the reprise by the two princes.
- The Duke in Rigoletto certainly qualifies, and is a Karma Houdini to boot.
- Willmore from The Rover by Aphra Behn is definitely this, his name literally means 'Wills for more sex',and he comes complete with Karma Houdini
- Aldolpho from The Drowsy Chaperone. He is the King of Romance, so he kisses a lot.
- "Dear Van De Graff bride, I must make love to you, and transport you to the place of ecstacy. Sooner is better than later. Signed, Aldolpho."
Videogames
- Panther Caruso from Star FOX relentlessly pursues Krystal, and is described more than once by Nintendo as being a self-proclaimed ladies' man. He could, however, be a slight subversion in the sense that he never really gets anywhere with Krystal (who shares a mutual affection with Fox McCloud), whom tends to either ignore, humour or outright reject his advances in Assault and their cameo appearances in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The only game where he does seem to succeed in any way with her is Command, and whilst he is depicted as devoted to her, it's very much implied the only reason she's with him is because Fox kicked her off the Star Fox team (for her own safety, though she didn't take it that way) and that she joined Star Wolf as a means to get back at him rather than falling for Panther's charms. That, and Command seems to be a case of Canon Discontinuity if the current status quo is any indication.
- Gannayev of Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer regularly abuses his Spirit Shaman powers for the sake of jumping into the fantasies of innocent young farmgirls and having hot dream-sex. One sidequest deals with a girl with latent powers that wasn't satisfied with just a one-night stand and ended up creating her own Gannayev in her head. Real Gann wasn't amused.
- Goto, from Mana Khemia 2, is seen going on dates with various students in groups (as well as some one on one time with the Chairman). When the main cast doubt his claims of natural desirability they take a school-wide poll, only to find out that 100% of the girls want him as well as 1/3 of the guys, and the only reason the members of Ulrika's workshop aren't effected is he's purposefully toning down his charm around them. Then things get a bit complicated when the son of one of his old flings shows up looking for revenge...
- To some extent, the protagonists in Persona 3 and Persona 4 can be this, depending on the player's decisions. If you're dating more than one girl and they discover what's happening, chances are you'll have to deal with some VERY pissed off girls and generally put the situation right. This is less so in Persona 4 where you won't be penalised as much, but you can still date/flirt with nearly every girl in the game (except for Hanako and Nanako, thankfully), AND you even get called an emotional heartbreaker during the cross-dressing pageant:
MC/Presenter: "She" has made more girls cry than there are stars in the sky! Presenting our transfer student who's been breaking hearts in the second year Class 2, character name! |
- Assassin's Creed 2 has beat-up missions, which usually revolve around a woman looking for a random dude to beat up their cheating bastard husband. Hilarity Ensues when they are caught with their lovers, then beaten the shit out of.
- You also meet Casanova himself who has you deliver love letters to two women at the same time.
- Plus Ezio himself, who gets compliments from every woman in Italy.
- In the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC for Mass Effect 2, The Illusive Man is revealed to have slept with six Playboy-caliber women in the past week. One of them came back for seconds.
- Zelos Wilder from Tales of Symphonia. Yeah he doesn't get anywhere with Tsundere Sheena, but any other woman in the game he addresses IMMEDIATELY fawns over him.
- At the beginning of The Sims 2, Don Lothario is engaged to Cassandra Goth, despite having a total of four lovers simultaneously.
- Any Romance Sim, for that matter.
- Good God, Rance. If there's a cute girl around, he WILL have sex with her. Whether she wants to or not. And these women will eventually fall in love with him if you put any effort into it. The only times he hesitates are with those who look too young, the Soulbinder (and he still wanted to despite the fact it would turn him into a zombie) and people already openly in love with him.
Webcomics
- Adam Terrence from the webcomic Loserz. As seen here.
- Vlad, the Make-Out King, from Achewood. (Or so he claims)
- Joe Rosenthal in It's Walky! takes this to the point of practically being another super-power: he managed to have sex with an astonishing 2030+ women before settling down with Rachel. This is all the more astonishing given his somewhat kavorka-ish horndog attitude: one time, he set out intentionally to sleep with 30 women in one day (to 'get the gay off of me' after having his head shoved in Walky's crotch in an attempt to obscure his face), and succeeded.
- While he stands out, he is hardly the only Abductee who is highly successful in bed, either - which is rather ominous given that the Aliens and Linda Walkerton apparently meant to breed the Abductees to make the next generation of their Super Soldier army.
- El Chupecabre ("Chuy") from Girly is irresistably attractive to women. He took this as his calling and left a string of naked, immensely-satisfied women in his wake until Winter and Otra helped him to mend his ways.
- Rayne Summers of Least I Could Do even down to the extreme callousness. He's getting better, though.
- Zach, of Girls with Slingshots is arguably a subversion. Sure, he's slept with hundreds of women, but he sees it as a community service thing. He gives virgins a good first time and helps service the elderly to make them feel loved again.
- Tip Wilkin from Skin Horse. The other characters refer to it as his "superpower". Even more remarkable because he likes wearing women's clothing in public. Borders on a Kavorka Man, in fact, despite being utterly charming- his success record is just too supernatural.
"I'm also sure she's slept with Agent Wilkin, but that's true of anything with two X chromosomes that comes within 500 feet of Agent Wilkin." |
- When Tip was turned into a wolf in one story arc, all the genetically engineered battledogs who were female were suddenly drastically attracted to him.
- Ian, of What Birds Know, is the town Casanova, making bets with his friends about how quickly he can date and bed girls. He's also oblivious to the crush his sister's friend Elia has on him.
- Sven of Questionable Content, at least until his fling with Faye.
- Zii from Ménage à 3 has a borderline superpower to seduce (presumably) straight women into sleeping with her and is pretty much single-handedly responsible for everyone being bi. The only girl she's tried and failed to get with so far is DiDi, but Zii still managed to convince her that she might be bi as well. Of course, Zii has also slept with a lot of men as well, but it's not exactly difficult to do that.
- Thomas the bard from Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic is such a master at the game of love that he can have any woman he wants, even one who wants to clobber him. Take this comic for example, in which he demonstrates his prowess to Clover the halfling. He tips a waitress by flicking a coin into her cleavage, causing it to fall through the bottom of her dress and roll away. As she bends down to pick it up he smacks her on the rear. She understandably prepares to kick his ass, but he whispers something in her ear that has her making out with him immediately afterward. All Clover can say after witnessing this is "Wow... you're good."
- Nolan from Regular Guy: Women seem to find his beard irresistible, and he had his "thingy" declared a work of art. He's pretty modest about it, though.
- Ted from Greg, is constantly the target of women's scorned hatred. While he is not avoiding ex-lovers, he is seeking out new women to love and leave.
Web Originals
- Don Sebastiano, at the Super-Hero School Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe. The Don (as he is also known) is a major campus supervillain, and enjoys romancing women. Once he's gotten what he's after he likes to dump them with as much public humiliation as he can arrange. He seems to enjoy the 'hurting them' part more than the 'boinking them' part, which makes this more like a Kavorka Man activity.
- Hugh Griffin, president of the *USA in Decades of Darkness. As the author writes, his wife knows when to look away.
- Jake from the Booty Call set of Flash games.
- Shadow Hawk from Epic Tales.
- Dustin Royal from Survival of the Fittest Version four. That is all.
- Zander, an Original Character from Nepeta Quest 2011, has quite the charm with the female trolls.
- Ask That Guy With The Glasses might be a Nightmare Fetishist rapist, but he's managed to get a lot of consensual male and female tail too.
Western Animation
- Boomhauer from King of the Hill. Despite the fact that most of his conquests don't seem to mind, he gets a cruel comeuppance when the tables are turned on him: the one woman who he does fall in love with turns out to not even be able to get his name right, and tells him, to his face, in the arms of another man, while he's on his knees after proposing to her, that whenever he talks, she just nods and smiles until his pants come off. Ouch.
- Mayor Joe Quimby from The Simpsons, who is an exaggerated, evil-mirror-universe parody of Edward F. Kennedy.
- Glenn Quagmire from Family Guy. He is a step forward from being just a regular Casanova - he is a pervert, victimizer, and a rapist as well.
- Mime from Happy Tree Friends, as seen in the episode "Easy Comb, Easy Go"
- Bender from Futurama, although he usually goes after hookerbots, and does fall in love occasionally.
- Juandissimo Magnifico on The Fairly OddParents, who has every female fairy swooning over him (except Wanda, his TRUE and ONLY LOVE INTEREST).
- To a lesser (and less parodied) extent, Dr. Rip Studwell, Author Avatar and Author Appeal of Butch Hartman.
- JFK from Clone High.
- Prince Naveen (of Maldonia!) from The Princess and the Frog is like this at first.
- TCFM on Jimmy Two-Shoes. His introductory scene has a three bodied Miseryvillian walk out of his home, the implications clear.
Real Life
Note: All The Tropes is not a gossip site. As per this discussion, if you add a historical Real Life example, please keep in mind All The Tropes:No Lewdness, No Prudishness when adding examples to this section and ensure it's documented. Please do not add current Real Life examples at all.
- Anthony Quinn. Three marriages, ten legitimate children, three acknowledged illegitimate children, and a string of acknowledged and confirmed sexual conquests stretching across four continents.
- Errol Flynn. He was such an accomplished and charming seducer that when he got into legal trouble in the early 1940's about having an affair with a teenager, he not only charmed the mostly-female jury into acquitting him, but ended up marrying the L.A. country sheriff's daughter, who was running a concession stand in the courthouse during the trial. The slang expression "in like Flynn" reportedly was coined as a result of that particular scandal. (This may also be an expression of Values Dissonance, in that Flynn would probably have had his career wrecked today, charm or no charm.)
- David Niven, in one of his autobiographies, recounts a practical joke he and a couple of Flynn's other buddies once pulled. They hired a beautiful young prostitute to play the role of an innocent teenager. Just as Flynn was about to consummate his seduction of the girl, another sexy streetwalker, playing the girl's aunt, walked in. Much Hilarity Ensued as the other woman roundly scolded both Flynn and the girl and ordered her "niece" out of the room. When the girl had left, the older woman asked Flynn, "Do you know why I did that?" Errol said no, and the woman said, "Well, Mr. Flynn, it's because...I wanted some of that myself!!" and jumped him.
- Screamin' Jay Hawkins estimated he had about 57 children by different women — and the number could have in fact been as high as 75 (!!!).
- Gene Simmons of Kiss fame, who has the pictures to prove it. Though his claims are still probably exaggerated. In fact, could be applied to many rock stars to some degree.
- One is well-advised to take some of his wilder claims with a grain of salt, since he's been "happily unmarried" to former Playboy playmate Shannon Tweed for over 2 decades and has had two children with her. Then again, his reputation certainly doesn't seem to bother her all that much...
- Wilt Chamberlain famously claimed to have slept with "20,000 women" in his autobiography. This, however, is all but disbelieved by anyone with a brain. Dennis Rodman, no paragon of monogamy himself, wrote: "Wilt Chamberlain lied out of his ass and made some money. He said he slept with 20,000 women. Think about it. That's three or four women a day every day for fifteen to twenty years. I defy anyone to keep up that kind of pace."
- Cracked's calculations are a little different, but no less unlikely.
- Hugh Hefner. That is all.
- Anthony Kiedis of Red Hot Chili Peppers is infamous for this, in his book Scar Tissue it appears he is with a different girl in every chapter or so. However, he averts this trope somewhat in that he only has one child who was born fairly recently.
- Bryan Ferry likes to cultivate this image both in his music and in real life. He has regularly been in relationships with women considerably younger than him (in one case, 35 Years younger). He was however happily married for 21 years (from 1982 to 2003) and had several children, ironically his wife wanted the divorce because she was having an affair herself.
- Warren Beatty, until he got married.
- John F. Kennedy. He did famously joke, though, that if he'd slept with all the women he was rumored to have gone to bed with, he'd be in a jar at Harvard.
- Most of the moguls of the Golden Age of Hollywood thought they were this.
- There is a story that during World War II, Stalin received a report about one of the military commanders (usually stated to be Rokossovsky) being that, and was asked "What shall we do"? His answer? "We shall envy"!
- Stalin himself was that, at least in his younger years. Probably explains his attitude to the above.
- Clint Eastwood. Seriously, just look at his Other Wiki entry. To quote: Eastwood told biographer Richard Schickel that he lost his virginity at age 14. He has fathered at least seven children by five different women and been described as a "serial womanizer". According to biographers Marc Eliot and Patrick Mc Gilligan, Eastwood always had a strong sexual appetite and had many affairs with women through the years, including actresses Catherine Deneuve, Jean Seberg, Peggy Lipton, Kay Lenz, Jamie Rose, Inger Stevens, Jo Ann Harris, Jane Brolin, Jill Banner, script analyst Megan Rose, and swimming champion Anita Lhoest. Biographers claim he has also fathered at least four children that have been aborted, and another who was given up for adoption in 1953. Biographers and friend Paul Lippman have claimed that Eastwood was particularly sexually active and promiscuous in the 1970s and that he used his apartment close to the Hog's Breath Inn which he purchased in Carmel in the early 1970s to meet young ladies for "nooners" and "five in the afternooners". According to Lippman, "Eastwood seemed to get a bang out of this kinkier side to himself and rarely concealed it, often gloated about it".
- Neil Stauss wrote a book about it. See Literature.
- Chico Marx was known by his friends (and fellow Marx brothers) for his uncanny ability to attract women. According to one anecdote, he could wink at a lady in the car next to him at a red light, and within ten minutes they'd be in a hotel room together. (In fact, his name is actually pronounced "Chick-o", due to the fact that he was a "chick-chaser").
- Cao Cao could count as this. 25 sons from different women, and unknown number for daughter. No less than 14 wives (or concubines).
- Benjamin Franklin
- Mostly in France. Saved America by turning French salons in America's favor.
- David Bowie.
- If Real Life was fiction, than Prince Felix zu Schwarzenburg would be a very dark take on this trope, possibly verging on deconstruction. A major ladies man in his younger days, Felix slept, drugged, and drank his way across every major court in Europe, and scored with some of the most sought after women of the time period. And by the time he was forty, he was so burned out that people who knew him said that there was nothing left, save cold, icy ambition (for his country, not himself). Becoming Foreign-Minister of Austria in 1848, Felix served as advisor and mentor to Emperor Franz-Josef advocating a pragmatic, cynical foreign policy based on what was best for Austria. When asked if Franz-Josef should show mercy to the rebels of 1848, Felix responded that "Mercy is a fine quality, but first, we must have some hangings." He later stated that Austria would "shock the world by the depth of its ingratitude." He died prematurely in 1852 of a stroke, mourned in Austria, and hated everywhere else. In London, his duplicity and his womanising actually earned him the nickname "The Prince of Cadland."
- Felix reportedly got a woman pregnant, than proceeded to end the affair and inform her husband of what had occured, getting her thrown out in the street. The woman in question was well-known for her inability to keep her legs closed (she was in fact famous in the tabloids for sleeping around), but Felix's behaviour was so callous that the press actually sided with her.
- Mick Jagger.
- Olympic skier Suzy Chaffee's a female version of this. She insists that throughout her skiing career, she had sex every night during competitions and she also boasts of her numerous one night stands and flings with many different men and that she never recorded her number. For all her blatant flirting though, Ms. Chaffee has never been the aggressor in her sexual encounters explaining "I give men assertive training out of bed and they give me more assertive training in bed.".