The Chick

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
If you're traveling with a cowboy and a farmboy, you'd better bring a princess.

Sally: Why am I "The Woman"?

Dick: [after a Beat] Because you lost.
3rd Rock from the Sun Pilot "Brains and Eggs"

The "feminine", "spiritual", and "heart", aspect of the Five-Man Band.

It's the people she gathers and keeps at her side who'll do a lot of the heavy lifting. She'll encourage loyalty and teamwork, give them the courage or hope to unlock their true potential, be a Token Good Teammate that keeps her friends from Jumping Off the Slippery Slope. She's usually a Nice Girl, but her demeanor can go anywhere from shy and demure, to brave and adventurous. She is rarely The Heroine of a story.

Her functional role will often be The Heart, the social influence of the group. Sometimes this means she'll serve as the Team Mom, taking care of the smaller details, both within the group and in the world outside. She looks after innocents, delivers The Aesop, mediates the arguments, and slaps some sanity on The Lancer before he ends up getting too dark. It's not the coolest job in the world, but it's helpful.

Yes, we understand that a role very like this could be filled by a male, but this is a trope is component of a Five-Man Band, which is specifically four guys and a girl. Examples of male characters acting in this way can be found in The Heart.

Never to be confused with Jack Chick.

Examples of The Chick include:

Examples of the standard Chick

Anime and Manga


Comic Books


Film


Literature

  • While Animorphs fans have had some trouble agreeing on who's actually The Chick, Rachel has never been a contender. She's beautiful, her hobby is gymnastics, and she loves both shopping and her boyfriend, but she's The Big Guy, an Action Girl who becomes a Blood Knight.
  • Being The Chick may be all that is consistent in Trillian across all versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams admitted that he didn't write her as a well-rounded character because he never really understood women.
  • In Enid Blyton's Famous Five books Anne is so much of The Chick she verges on a Yamato Nadeshiko. Oddly though it is Dick though that takes the role of The Heart.
  • Journey to the West features a very... odd subversion of this trope - the monk Xuangzang is so perfect an example of The Chick he's (note the masculine) sometimes even portrayed as such. This, of course, leads to tons of Ho Yay with the other main character of the story, Sun Wukong. Given his overall uselessness, stupidity, and propensity to be captured by anything under the sun, it's no wonder why most everyone who reads the story kinda really hates him. In a double subversion, it's also as become common to protray Wukong as the girl, just to make him (her?) seem more awesome.
  • There are a variety of psychology/morality puzzles that involve four people who get themselves into a situation where a series of events occur, usually culminating in tragedy, and the listener is charged with putting the characters in order from who acted the most "right" and who acted the most "wrong". Of the four, only one will ever be female, she will always be The Chick, and usually she's the one who suffers the tragedy. Where the listener places her in the morality spectrum represents their views on women, regardless of what she does in the puzzle story; the other three usually represent specific virtues or behaviors, but the female represents only women as a whole. With most of these puzzles, putting the female character at anything lower than the Most Right (or, less often, Second Most Right) will label you a misogynist.
  • Jacyl from Black Dogs is extremely fond of clothes and beauty products, and one character remarked that she was found while her house was burning down, and that she was trying to rescue her wardrobe. Naturally she's one of the more levelheaded and pacifistic characters in the book.
  • Willa from Kingdom Keepers.
  • Jenna Heap from Septimus Heap. She is usually the one who cares about people and prevents the others from ignoring them in their actions.


Live Action TV


Radio

  • Robin Quivers of The Howard Stern Show. Her official position is to deliver the news, yet often she's the heart of the show.


Video Games

  • Princess Peach from the Super Mario Bros. games. Even in her solo game, Super Princess Peach, her abilities are very stereotypically feminine. More evident in Super Smash Bros. - in The Subspace Emissary she makes herself useful by breaking up fights and turning potential enemies into friends, mysteriously producing tea, in contrast with the Action Girls Samus and Sheik.
  • Rika of Phantasy Star IV is The Chick for most of the game once all of the permanent, non-optional members are in—she's even briefly The Chick in a Power Trio. However, she's much more well-balanced than the typical RPG example: all of her magic-- all of it—is healing or status magic, but she's a powerful melee fighter and her physical attacks are second only in damage output to Chaz once he gets the Elsydeon. Before that, they're about equal.
  • Flonne plays this trope straight. Yukimaru subverts it by having better combat skill than most chicks.
  • Curly Brace from Cave Story is both this and Action Girl. In-battle, she's only slightly less dangerous than the protagonist (on-screen at least). Outside of battle, she adopts orphaned Mimigas, and a kind word from her is enough to make a member of the Quirky Miniboss Squad completely forget (if only briefly) that he's supposed to kill her.


Webcomics


Western Animation


Web Animation

  • Shandala, the one main female character from Broken Saints. And yet it still doesn't come off as ridiculous, silly, or sexist.
  • Jenny in Park Bench, although she's not part of a Five-Man Band.

Examples of The Chick who doubles as another member

Anime and Manga

  • Hiro in Wa ga na wa Umishi. Technically a full member of Nanba Salvage, her main duties seem to be cooking, bitching at the guys, walking around in her underwear and, occasionally, data collection.
  • Sailor Moon:
    • Sailor Moon herself is pretty firmly The Chick, despite being the main character and The Messiah. She acts as the team's moral and emotional pillar, and is least often the one to take frontal assault duties when fighting various enemies, generally doing her best to simply survive until she has a chance to whip out a Finishing Move. This also makes sense when you consider that Sailor Venus was originally the leader in some incarnations.
    • Also, Ami aka Sailor Mercury, is sweet, shy, bookish and has defensive abilities based on water and ice, so you'd expect her to be a secondary Chick after Moon. Instead, she's The Smart Guy, since she also happens to be a Teen Genius.
  • Cyborg 009, Francoise aka 003 generally senses danger so the big strong men can deal with it, holds the psychic baby and is usually the one who bemoans the fact that their duty as cyborgs keeps herself and the others from living peaceful lives. Yet she always joins the team in battle when they need her abilities no matter what horrible things she has to see or sense to aid them, keeps her cool when it's needed, gives the bratty Lancer of the group verbal beatdowns more than once without flinching, is Dr. Gilmore's most reliable assistant, and when necessary she proves that she is fully capable of defending herself and even occasionally saving the day singlehandedly. Thus, she doubles as The Chick and The Smart Guy, with some dashes of The Lancer when on her boldest.


Video Games

  • Sapphire from the Disgaea series is a rare Ax Crazy chick. Has elements of The Big Guy.
  • Amy Rose starts out playing the trope straight, but starting with Sonic Heroes has become an Action Girl, gaining elements of The Big Guy like Sapphire above.
  • In Mass Effect, both Tali and Liara serve as both The Chick and The Smart Guy. In the sequel, Tali and Kasumi both serve as Smart Guys, Miranda serves as The Lancer and a bit of The Smart Guy and Jack serves as one of The Big Guys.


Western Animation