This is most definitely a trope. Copying from elsewhere:
Splash — Madison
Star Trek — numerous characters
How to Talk to Girls at Parties — Zan
The Fifth Element — Leeloo
Enchanted — Giselle
My Stepmother is an Alien — Celeste
Tron: Legacy — Quorra
The Little Mermaid — Ariel
And apparently many animes do it a lot too.
I immediately thought of Mantis (GotG) and princess Nia (Gurren Lagann)
Then while typing this, I thought of that cavewoman from the first Planet of the Apes movie that Charlton Heston gets with (HUH??? AM I REMEMBERING CORRECTLY?????)
The movie makes it pretty clear that Drax and Mantis’ bond is closer to like a surrogate father and daughter thing. He says Mantis reminds him of his daughter, and there’s[a scene that makes pretty clear there’s nothing romantic between them](https://youtu.be/G0n4l8N51nw?si=UNF7P_mk83GKzqQa)
> [the young porn corrupted mind cannot comprehend relationships other than those sexual in nature](https://soypai.tumblr.com/post/98640850168/whats-the-word-for-horny-but-not-in-a-sexual-way)
She's autistic-coded but a lot of people automatically read that as infantilization because people just can't be fucking normal about autistic people existing as adults.
Neither of those two are examples.
Mantis is just sheltered, her being alien is justified by the fact that she is *literally* an alien, most of the cast is, and she never gets in a relationship with anyone.
Nia is unnaturally born but she lived and grew regularly and is also just sheltered and naive. Simon isn't weird about her either, and they met when they were the same age.
They had a pretty standard amount of ooga booba scenes for an anime of that period. Nothing egregious between Simon and Nia iirc. Most of the booba scenes were centered around Yoko. Simon also went from scared dweeb to Chad drilling holes in the universe. Man was an inspiration to young dweebs like me everywhere.
Yeah iirc Nia wasn’t just a baby that Simon “took” immediately, she existed to help show him that there’s more to life than the despair of losing a friend
Nia doesn't fall into this trope, Simon doesn't act weird when it comes to women and she isn't sexualized. But she doesn't understand social cues all that well (Even rejecting Simon's marriage proposal years later, which was quite funny) so I will give you that
Mr. Handy bots (or Miss Nannies and Mr.Gutsys) have personality chips, not sentience like the Institute Synths. Pre-synth Curie would be like dating an actual robot and dating synth Curie feels like the trope in original meme. (Especially with her intelligence dropping in half)
Wasn't she modified as a robot to be sentient and all that?
The Curie we meet as a robot is already aware of her own existence, capable of reasoning and acting independently, capable of experiencing emotions, etc..
That's the personality chip! General Atomics International sure is something, huh?
(Also to add: it's why they're usually susceptible to going bonkers like the ones at the galleria before you do a software reboot)
No curie was custom built by a scientist working on artificial intelligence. Learning programs. There is a direct line between her as a robot and her as a human. If she was just a specific chip, the transfer couldn't have worked.
She has no social awareness, her only relationship prior to you was with her father/creator and her quest is her coping that she has the emotions to mourn him now, sonething that wasnt posssible as a robot.
She is having a crisis over feeling empathy and personal connection for the first time in her 200 years of existence and the player character insists "that's just love baby".
If you could form a friendship with her and then romance later it would feel better but as it stands now it feels like you are manipulating her into thinking any empathic feeling is romantic or sexual.
Hey come on Fifth Element isn't fair, he wasn't weird towards women, he was weird to *everyone* because he was just being Bruce Willis
Also Ariel wasn't infantalized, she was just a literal child
The entire trope appeals to a creepy male fantasy, it doesn't matter if the male character is creepy to everyone, the trope is written for a creepy male audience
I know voyager did this early on
TNG ran for 7 seasons so I don't remember,
haven't watched TOS,
DS9 I'm pretty sure never did this.
Enterprise might've. It's been a bit.
Discovery is ass and you shouldn't watch it.
Strange new worlds has not. In fact I don't think SNW has had a terrible episode yet.
Edit: the animated series and prodigy I forgot existed. Haven't watched them.
Neelix was a mistake.
Lower decks is a little too self aware to do the trope completely straight.
TOS is so sexist lol
Most of the women in the crew but Uhura are assistants. They have a job called "yeoman" which is just captain's personal assistant. The ones which aren't some kind of assistant usually only show up because the plot requests it. And by plot, I mean, there's a male character who's going to romance her.
They are usually written as tradwives with barely any personality just waiting to fall for the first macho to speak to them.
One even gets seduced by a guy who beat her up and disrespects her and she also knows he's a fascist and war criminal (but that's part of his charm, I guess... /j).
Sometimes the plot is straight up justifying them as being there for reproductive purposes lol.
Fun fact: The actress who played Yeoman Janice Rand was forced to strip and dance on the desk of an unnamed executive at the studio, he then sexually assaulted her. When she developed PTSD from this, she was fired for being an "alcoholic". Unnamed executive was likely Roddenberry. Hmm that fact wasn't fun at all.
TOS is an uncomfortable watch now as a woman even cutting it breaks for the era it was made in but I get why people still love it, hell I love TNG and that has milder but still there problems with sexism. So did Voyager. The best show for representation was DS9, but TNG has nostalgia value to me and Voyager is trash but my trash.
>The actress who played Yeoman Janice Rand was forced to strip and dance on the desk of an unnamed executive at the studio, he then sexually assaulted her. When she developed PTSD from this, she was fired for being an "alcoholic". Unnamed executive was likely Roddenberry.
Not surprised by any of this.
I love TNG so bad.
Jessie Gender has done long videos on sex and sexuality in TOS and TNG both sides of the camera, and I think will be doing DS9 next. When she reads the account of the assault of Grace Lee Whitney from her autobiography it's done starkly and needs all of the trigger warnings. Leonard Nimoy was his usually gigachad self, providing her a shoulder to cry on and the love from fans helped her make peace with what happened. They are good videos, Jessie's love for Riker is so very endearing.
Oh my god my gf and I just watched the Khan episode and I thought we were both going to have an aneurysm watching it. I love watching TOS but man is it rough when it comes to women
TOS is really weird because it's like, the Genesis of star trek and is super formative for the show and the culture around it, but it's just so hard to watch.
I started out watching TNG, and I think because of that Early exposure to later star trek a lot of TOS is very hard to watch for me, and I've never been able to get into it like I did with TNG, Enterprise, and DS9.
A good chunk of season 1 is bad but season 2 is actually good if you can look past the sexism.
I watched a few episodes of a few older shows as a kid then really started to enjoy it when I became old enough to understand what was happening on the screen with Enterprise, then I watched the shows and movies that came after, then came back to TNG and now TOS and I'm rewatching TNG again at the same time.
Also I watch TOS at x1.5 lol.
Yeah, DS9 had pretty strong female characters throughout. There may be some examples I'm not thinking of that prove me wrong, but that's my memory if it. The other series you mentioned definitely have some problems
It's a shame that the actor for jadzia got bullied off the show by Rick Berman. Who also until discovery was involved with some the worst star trek media ever.
If you can't tell I absolutely despise discovery.
Rick Berman is a complicated character and though he was extremely influential, if all his ideas came to fruition Star Trek would have never taken off. And yeah, Discovery is hot garbage. No argument on either of those points
I wouldn't say Ariel. I'd say a lot of it was more "star struck curiosity" if anything.
Also I'd say the trope relies more on a fantasy of being the superior stronger smarter one while the woman is the young naive girl who's just there to be dumb, look hot and talk about how great the guy is.
Ariel is definitely not that. She is sheltered, sure but that's more of a product of her environment and her being 16 than the trope in motion. She actually got used to life on the surface pretty fast and the love feels like actual love rather than "I'm just an accessory for you for the male audience to project themselves onto"
Agreed, and it should especially be emphasised that the story revolves around Ariel's pov. As you say, the point of the trope is to project yourself onto the man*; the woman's* naivety is there to create a power imbalance he wouldn't have with almost anyone else (EDIT: without a significant age gap), and him taking advantage of this is presented as caring and/or funny instead of creepy. The audience isn't invited to emphasise with the woman in these scenes; instead we're expected to join the man in enjoying her confusion.
One side of a romance being a fish out of water (lmao) isn't sufficient to make it this trope, it's just a prerequisite.
*I'm sure this trope could be done with gay or competent-woman-naive-man couples; I've gendered it this way for brevity because all of the examples I've seen discussed are like this.
>\*I'm sure this trope could be done with gay or competent-woman-naive-man couples; I've gendered it this way for brevity because all of the examples I've seen discussed are like this.
The video where this trope I think originates touched on this and that when inverted to having a male character be the one inexperienced or naive it's played off for comedy, and any romance with said character is in spite of the inexperience and not because of it.
At least you could watch Elfen Lied for the legitimately messed up gore and like Lucy as an entirely separately individual facing both a tragic future and dealing with a terrible past.
Chobits is just... smh.
Is Quorra born/built yesterday? Like didnt Clu enact his genocide on the ISOs when Kevin Flynn was still fairly young and his son was still a kid? Or am I confusing my lore?
no, you're right. Quorra has actually existed for longer than Kevin was missing, and because of the discrepancy between the passage of time on the Grid and in the real world ("hours in here were just minutes back home"), she has been living for what has likely felt like more than two thousand years. she is limited by her circumstances: she can only learn as much about the outside world as Kevin has been willing and able to tell or show her, and she's been living in isolation for, again, virtually over two millennia.
Sam isn't weird with women, either. the only legitimately cringy thing he ever does in the movie in that scope is the little look he gives the armory programs as they step out of their pods. the romance with Quorra is developed over a few scenes in a bog standard way, and in the only other prolonged interaction with a woman the movie shows - him accompanying Gem to the End of Line Club - nothing even remotely romantic in nature happens. he's singularly focused on finding Zuse.
a lot of these are deeply surface level. if you wanted a genuine example of this trope from a TRON movie, it exists - Kevin kissing Laura's program on the Game Grid in the original to work out his feelings about having lost her in the real world is a short but perfect example.
Xenoblade chronicles 2 - Poppi
is unironically the worst I can think of. No preschooler coded character should have a "blushy crushy" mode for their "masterpon"
Prince Eric isn’t like weird toward women though. Ariel is innocent and doesn’t understand human culture but the trope from OOP implies the man is taking advantage of the other character’s innocence in order to be shitty to her because no other woman would bother.
Yea, i know fucking none of these very spesific sounding shows other then star trek which literally does the exact opposite with spock and human women…
The debate about Kes rages in the Star Trek community to this day. We're pretty fucking degenerate but we feel like we have to draw the line somewhere.
Quorra is a terrible example of this trope. She is by and large self-sufficent, is not stupid nor lacks social abilities, and does not have a romantic relationship with the main character of Tron: Legacy. Seriously, Leeloo from the fifth element is basically the exact picture of this trope and a great example, and the difference between those two characters are night and day. Sorry, weird nerd rant, there was some youtube essay that put Tron Legacy in this box, and it always annoyed me.
"acting like this is some kind of widely known trope" I mean they literally explained it for the benefit of the people who don't know about it?
Tweeters and Redditors are incapable of normal social interactions like "Interesting observation, can you provide examples?"
It's like that XKCD of average familiarity (https://xkcd.com/2501/). People who watch a lot of films and try to critique them (like myself, I just watched the pure kino experience that is Sonic the Hedgehog 2) are aware of examples of this trope or have seen the YouTube essay about it and assume that because it appears in big budget films that the average person has probably heard of it or seen examples themselves.
I feel like this trope is pretty present in anime/manga. Like you’ve got a guy whose either a loser or just boring (sometimes both) who meets an angel/demon/monster girl who is completely infatuated with him for no reason, and is also very clueless and thus dependent on him for most things
Yeah. It comes from the same anxiety that causes some guys fetisise virginity.
(If she dosent know about the society, sex or relationships enough to compare me to them it means that she dosent know how bad I'm at all of those things)
Which is a worse trope, that or an experienced, smart woman for some reason who knows all about society, sex, and relationships and still being in love with a guy who’s bad at those things for some reason?
So how do you get someone like that to fall in love with you if there’s a lot of things you’re not good at?
I’ve never really been in a romantic relationship before, so it’s still hard to understand love as being that “irrational.”
It’s not that irrational to fall for an adorkable guy who tries his best.
Someone can be earnest, morally good, and absolutely hopeless at human interaction and life skills, and that can be adorable.
Lots of people find golden retriever boyfriends cute, this is just that but scruffy mutt boyfriend instead.
For a wholesome version of this trope where the girl is not infantilized or immediately attracted to the guy, read [Kumika no Mikaku](https://mangadex.org/title/2a941f75-195b-48b7-ab89-6a3dccf6dac9/kumika-no-mikaku)
> who meets an angel/demon/monster girl who is completely infatuated with him for no reason, and is also very clueless and thus dependent on him for most things
However a lot of the time the girl in question could kill him if she wanted to.
Like I legit believe a lot of anime romances are female-led relationships.
The Fifth Element is the most famous and literal example, but this is absolutely a common trope. Sexy adult-looking female doesn't know how the world works and relies on awkward man to function. Doesn't need to be literally born yesterday, could be from another planet or even another time. The important part is that the (usually) female character is dependent on the (usually) older male character.
Oddly enough, at first, the guy is usually not romantically interested. The girl starts having feelings because he's literally the first person to help her. I guess it scratches the itch of having someone fully depend on you for some people.
I strongly believe that this trope stems from the desire to be validated without competition against others. Basically, the loyalty of your partner is guaranteed by external circumstances, and can't be threatened by your own shortcomings/the value of others. It's definitely a very unhealthy way of representing that idea, but I think it's a little bit sad that it stems from what's basically a feeling of vulnerability in the extremely competitive masculine world.
I wouldn't call him awkward and unlovable at all, I was more referring to Leeloo as the most recognizable trope. She looks weird, acts weird, she's an alien fish out of water and she's very sexualized.
I mean he's not a troll either to be fair. Especially when he was younger and not as schlubby he was decent looking. I will defend Sandler's movies till the day I die though. They may have some dated humor but like all of them come down to "be a good guy, have growth as a person, appreciate your talents (like humor) and you'll find people to befriend and/or love". There's so much positivity in his movies beneath the goofy dumbness, and also Sandler himself seems like a solid dude. He makes sure all his friends have good paychecks and get to visit nice locations.
Edit: Adam Sandler actually *did* voice a troll at some point I think though but I can't figure out what it was
I think a lot of the hate is just how saturated the 2000s were with Sandler movies. I tried googling how many movies he's made, and the official answer by Google was "At least 80". Wikipedia claims he made 69 feature films, 23 television series and 4 documentaries.
I get it. If you aren't his target demographic it'd be pretty annoying, especially if friends/family enjoy watching them. My family loved picking random Sandler movies for movie night. It'd be like hating marvel in the 2010s lol.
I can only think of 50 First Dates but even then she was just an adult with intense memory issues. Are there examples of this in Sandler movies? I mean maybe the love interest in Waterboy now that I think about it, but he was also a downright moron in that movie so I don’t know if that counts either.
Also helps that Poor Things establishes it’s fairy tale-esque tone that makes it clear you aren’t meant to be taking everything too literally/seriously.
I understood that the movie was critiquing the men, but I still couldn't shake how uncomfortable I was for the entire movie. I did not like the movie even though everyone else seems to love it
Same the entire movie felt incredibly uncomfortable to me, especially how the movie was portraying these man taking advantage of her as not a big deal, and how the extreme sexuality in the later part of the film was supposed to read as “empowering”??? Its a well documented thing that sexually abused children overcompensate with extreme sexual behaviors later in life and I hated how the movie was portraying that as positive somehow? The whole movie was massive ick for me
I get that it can look predatory, but at the same time it feels a bit limiting to label this trope as only pedo bait.
A lot of the aspects that make a female character "born yesterday" are just neurodivergent stuff. Not being able to read social clues ✅ exceptionally skilled at one thing but bad at normal tasks ✅ awkward in new situations and people ✅
"Banning" this trope (banning in quote because I understand this is twitter discourse which has literally 0 influence on people who touch grass) would mean that neurodivergent female characters would be banned from having relationships with neurotypical dudes. This feels a bit shitty imho.
Male characters get to be really weird and awkward and still be attractive (which is good because weird guys are hot AF), it's unfair to label this trope as only predatory.
I've seen the pop culture detective video on it, which has a ton of problems shared with a lot of his other videos, but in particular this one badly suffered his "I analyze media with the POV of a straight male and ONLY a straight male POV"
I think the problem usually comes more from how this trope is used to infantilize the girl and make her seem like a child, and to reinforce the power imbalance between her and the man where she's completely dependent on him and can't do much without him.
I think you can still use those character traits for a romance, but you'd just have to make sure to not infantilize the girl and let her be an equal to the other person. I think so at least, I'm still looking at discussion
Edit: the person who posted the tweet said they tried to rework the trope with their own autistic coded robot character, saying that they're given agency and treated with respect, even with their more "childish" traits, and are in a romantic/sexual relationship without their autistic traits being sexualized. So I do think the problem is more when the power imbalance is there and it's used to be all "look at this girl she's like a helpless child but also sexy", or to otherwise let the man be the "guiding figure" that teaches her stuff and knows better
Agreed. The people calling this trope disgusting make me so upset, the robot description is literally me (except I’m ftm and NOT sexy) and I already have the idea in my head that I’m too childish to be loved. I don’t need to hear that someone loving me is inherently gross or bad. The person responding to the tweet probably doesn’t think the trope exists because they may have only seen the trope as Autism + autism(or just a non-typical dude) relationship.
Well to be concise because else I would go on forever, he has the same "surface level analysis" problem Anita Sarkeesian had in her days (which is unsurprising considering they were dating).
You know how terfs say that drags shows are mysoginistic because they equate being a woman with makeup? Stupid AF, I know, but it's easy to see why they would say that. It's a condition of having the bare minimum amount of social justice knowledge (aka "makeup = bad") but without any further analysis or reflection.
It's the same mechanics that make some bigots say that BDSM is rapey because there's force and sex combined, without thinking that someone might be doing it for fun.
As an example, he, I kid you not, made a video about videogames where he denigrated ALL of them for being violent fantasy. Apart from the ludicrous statement that every video game is about violence (night in the woods, a short hike, literally fucking peggle exist) his main reasoning was nothing more than "violence is bad".
Again, yes I know violence is bad just as forcing women to put on makeup is, but the situation is way more nuanced than that.
To give you a gut feeling about him. You know those conservatives comics that strawman progressive people as idiots who scream "mysoginy! Racism! Homophobia!" at completely unrelated shit to make them sound bad. Like that comic of the girl saying "ermh actually, planes are sexist because they keep air condition too cold for women!".
The first you learn when you join leftism is that these people only exist in conservatives' mind, the second thing you learn is that they are real but are thankfully relegated on twitter. Pop Culture Detective is one of them.
The problem with the trope is how it *almost* always really lays into the power imbalance in the relationship. I have autism and feel pretty confident saying that people with autism are not completely incompetent outside of one specific area. There’s already enough media that shows us a savants in one area while being unable to function at all everywhere else.
Can we instead allow people to share criticisms they have of the media they like instead of telling everybody to distance themselves from everything they don't unconditionally love?
100% he is thousands of years old, she is 18 and he is shit at relationships and constantly pushes her boundaries, like when she was blackout drunk so he took her to his home, took a shower while thinking about how hot she is
It's more like he gets to be mature and has a bunch of control over her while she is young and naive and has little agency in the story. Her lack of maturity and his control over her is fetishized. She enters the underworld with barely any knowledge about how things work, her uncle who runs the place becomes her boss and gives her special treatment which she doesn't realize. I haven't caught up with lore Olympus and I don't really feel the need to, so maybe the situation has changed, idk.
So I definitely get how the trope is gross because it's fetishizing the power imbalance of a naive girl and a "smart" guy that can take advantage of her. My question is how to go about writing naive characters without it being gross like this. Like it it enough to just not put the character in that predatory relationship, or is the character type itself inherently an issue
I mean I don't think there is anything wrong with the character type, lots of stories rely on naive and uninformed main characters so we can learn and grow alongside them. But usually they're not just reliant on one person. A naive protagonist who meets lots of different people who they can learn from and rely on might be one of the most common tropes in storytelling. And just because a character is naive doesn't mean they don't have agency. In this trope all agency is taken away from them and they basically become children that have to be taken care of by this one guy they just met. I think as long as you don't infantilize them and treat them as their own person and not just a prop you should be good.
That definitely makes a lot of sense, and I even saw the OP of the tweet say they do a similar thing in giving their autistic coded character agency and respect to avoid this trope. Thanks for replying 👍
I think the trope is more about how one character is sheltered and doesn't know about the world so they are totally dependent on the other, which creates a weird power imbalance in the relationship dynamic. EDI is already a highly competent "adult" AI, she just gets a physical body later in her existence. Joker and EDI work together as equals to keep the Normandy safe.
This is an entire genre of anime, surprisingly the only people I know irl who enjoy it are all women
Also that post was definitely about Chobits though
The first I can think of that I am currently Playing is Persona 3 Reload. Though the degree of terribleness of the main character is mostly up to the player in regard to interactions
I fucking hate this trope in manga and anime. Anyone else notice in fantasy settings that the main character always buys a slave girl and then romances her or something like that, it fucking pisses me off
This is most definitely a trope. Copying from elsewhere: Splash — Madison Star Trek — numerous characters How to Talk to Girls at Parties — Zan The Fifth Element — Leeloo Enchanted — Giselle My Stepmother is an Alien — Celeste Tron: Legacy — Quorra The Little Mermaid — Ariel And apparently many animes do it a lot too.
I immediately thought of Mantis (GotG) and princess Nia (Gurren Lagann) Then while typing this, I thought of that cavewoman from the first Planet of the Apes movie that Charlton Heston gets with (HUH??? AM I REMEMBERING CORRECTLY?????)
since when is mantis in any relationship with anyone
Her and Drax were almost a thing but he's also stupid so it worked
The movie makes it pretty clear that Drax and Mantis’ bond is closer to like a surrogate father and daughter thing. He says Mantis reminds him of his daughter, and there’s[a scene that makes pretty clear there’s nothing romantic between them](https://youtu.be/G0n4l8N51nw?si=UNF7P_mk83GKzqQa)
the young porn corrupted mind cannot comprehend relationships other than those sexual in nature
This read like a sentece Drax would say and made me laugh
> [the young porn corrupted mind cannot comprehend relationships other than those sexual in nature](https://soypai.tumblr.com/post/98640850168/whats-the-word-for-horny-but-not-in-a-sexual-way)
My favorite part of this is the fact someone *did* fuck a pumpkin on Halloween
She’s a queen 👸🏼
👆 It works when neither party is sufficiently on-the-ball to make it exploitative or asymmetrical.
mantis isn't infantilized shes just autistic
She's autistic-coded but a lot of people automatically read that as infantilization because people just can't be fucking normal about autistic people existing as adults.
Mantis and Drax are both the ideal autistic representation.
Neither of those two are examples. Mantis is just sheltered, her being alien is justified by the fact that she is *literally* an alien, most of the cast is, and she never gets in a relationship with anyone. Nia is unnaturally born but she lived and grew regularly and is also just sheltered and naive. Simon isn't weird about her either, and they met when they were the same age.
I don’t think Simon was weird towards women(?) been a while since ive watched tho
Don't believe in your memories, believe in the me that believes in your memories
They had a pretty standard amount of ooga booba scenes for an anime of that period. Nothing egregious between Simon and Nia iirc. Most of the booba scenes were centered around Yoko. Simon also went from scared dweeb to Chad drilling holes in the universe. Man was an inspiration to young dweebs like me everywhere.
Yeah iirc Nia wasn’t just a baby that Simon “took” immediately, she existed to help show him that there’s more to life than the despair of losing a friend
I will not tolerate Drax and Mantis slander like this
Simon isn't weird towards women though. And I don't remember nia not getting social cues, although it's been a while so I could be wrong.
Yeah i watched last year and she doesn't have any of that
Nia doesn't fall into this trope, Simon doesn't act weird when it comes to women and she isn't sexualized. But she doesn't understand social cues all that well (Even rejecting Simon's marriage proposal years later, which was quite funny) so I will give you that
Simon isn't weird with women
Mantis flirts a bit with drax but never enters a relationship
I don’t remember Simon being particularly weird towards women. Even if he was he was also like, 14, so you know he’s got puberty and stuff going on.
Iirc mantis wasn’t “born yesterday “ tho?
Curie from Fallout 4 to some extent. It feels creepy to romance her.
Why? She's been conscious and presumably sapient for centuries
Mr. Handy bots (or Miss Nannies and Mr.Gutsys) have personality chips, not sentience like the Institute Synths. Pre-synth Curie would be like dating an actual robot and dating synth Curie feels like the trope in original meme. (Especially with her intelligence dropping in half)
Wasn't she modified as a robot to be sentient and all that? The Curie we meet as a robot is already aware of her own existence, capable of reasoning and acting independently, capable of experiencing emotions, etc..
That's the personality chip! General Atomics International sure is something, huh? (Also to add: it's why they're usually susceptible to going bonkers like the ones at the galleria before you do a software reboot)
No curie was custom built by a scientist working on artificial intelligence. Learning programs. There is a direct line between her as a robot and her as a human. If she was just a specific chip, the transfer couldn't have worked.
She has no social awareness, her only relationship prior to you was with her father/creator and her quest is her coping that she has the emotions to mourn him now, sonething that wasnt posssible as a robot. She is having a crisis over feeling empathy and personal connection for the first time in her 200 years of existence and the player character insists "that's just love baby". If you could form a friendship with her and then romance later it would feel better but as it stands now it feels like you are manipulating her into thinking any empathic feeling is romantic or sexual.
>you are manipulating her into thinking any empathic feeling is romantic or sexual. ...by describing her feelings for her dead father as "love"?
Fine if you do the friendship route, creepy af when you do the romance route.
Fair enough.
Hey come on Fifth Element isn't fair, he wasn't weird towards women, he was weird to *everyone* because he was just being Bruce Willis Also Ariel wasn't infantalized, she was just a literal child
The entire trope appeals to a creepy male fantasy, it doesn't matter if the male character is creepy to everyone, the trope is written for a creepy male audience
Also was the guy weird towards women? He was normal right?
Counterpoint: he was a taxi driver
Fifth element is absolutely fair when you look at who Luc Besson is as a person
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0thpEyEwi80
Without clicking, is that Pop Culture Detective? Edit: 😎
Chobits
her on button is *where?*
That was the bit that made me realize it's not for me.
Also potentially erasing her memories and who she is it totes worth it for a single fuck. Weird..
I know voyager did this early on TNG ran for 7 seasons so I don't remember, haven't watched TOS, DS9 I'm pretty sure never did this. Enterprise might've. It's been a bit. Discovery is ass and you shouldn't watch it. Strange new worlds has not. In fact I don't think SNW has had a terrible episode yet. Edit: the animated series and prodigy I forgot existed. Haven't watched them. Neelix was a mistake. Lower decks is a little too self aware to do the trope completely straight.
TOS is so sexist lol Most of the women in the crew but Uhura are assistants. They have a job called "yeoman" which is just captain's personal assistant. The ones which aren't some kind of assistant usually only show up because the plot requests it. And by plot, I mean, there's a male character who's going to romance her. They are usually written as tradwives with barely any personality just waiting to fall for the first macho to speak to them. One even gets seduced by a guy who beat her up and disrespects her and she also knows he's a fascist and war criminal (but that's part of his charm, I guess... /j). Sometimes the plot is straight up justifying them as being there for reproductive purposes lol.
Fun fact: The actress who played Yeoman Janice Rand was forced to strip and dance on the desk of an unnamed executive at the studio, he then sexually assaulted her. When she developed PTSD from this, she was fired for being an "alcoholic". Unnamed executive was likely Roddenberry. Hmm that fact wasn't fun at all. TOS is an uncomfortable watch now as a woman even cutting it breaks for the era it was made in but I get why people still love it, hell I love TNG and that has milder but still there problems with sexism. So did Voyager. The best show for representation was DS9, but TNG has nostalgia value to me and Voyager is trash but my trash.
>The actress who played Yeoman Janice Rand was forced to strip and dance on the desk of an unnamed executive at the studio, he then sexually assaulted her. When she developed PTSD from this, she was fired for being an "alcoholic". Unnamed executive was likely Roddenberry. Not surprised by any of this. I love TNG so bad.
Jessie Gender has done long videos on sex and sexuality in TOS and TNG both sides of the camera, and I think will be doing DS9 next. When she reads the account of the assault of Grace Lee Whitney from her autobiography it's done starkly and needs all of the trigger warnings. Leonard Nimoy was his usually gigachad self, providing her a shoulder to cry on and the love from fans helped her make peace with what happened. They are good videos, Jessie's love for Riker is so very endearing.
Oh my god my gf and I just watched the Khan episode and I thought we were both going to have an aneurysm watching it. I love watching TOS but man is it rough when it comes to women
Haha. I still love TOS. The season 2 is much better than the first. There are some funny ones too.
TOS is really weird because it's like, the Genesis of star trek and is super formative for the show and the culture around it, but it's just so hard to watch. I started out watching TNG, and I think because of that Early exposure to later star trek a lot of TOS is very hard to watch for me, and I've never been able to get into it like I did with TNG, Enterprise, and DS9.
A good chunk of season 1 is bad but season 2 is actually good if you can look past the sexism. I watched a few episodes of a few older shows as a kid then really started to enjoy it when I became old enough to understand what was happening on the screen with Enterprise, then I watched the shows and movies that came after, then came back to TNG and now TOS and I'm rewatching TNG again at the same time. Also I watch TOS at x1.5 lol.
Yeah, DS9 had pretty strong female characters throughout. There may be some examples I'm not thinking of that prove me wrong, but that's my memory if it. The other series you mentioned definitely have some problems
It's a shame that the actor for jadzia got bullied off the show by Rick Berman. Who also until discovery was involved with some the worst star trek media ever. If you can't tell I absolutely despise discovery.
Rick Berman is a complicated character and though he was extremely influential, if all his ideas came to fruition Star Trek would have never taken off. And yeah, Discovery is hot garbage. No argument on either of those points
I wouldn't say Ariel. I'd say a lot of it was more "star struck curiosity" if anything. Also I'd say the trope relies more on a fantasy of being the superior stronger smarter one while the woman is the young naive girl who's just there to be dumb, look hot and talk about how great the guy is. Ariel is definitely not that. She is sheltered, sure but that's more of a product of her environment and her being 16 than the trope in motion. She actually got used to life on the surface pretty fast and the love feels like actual love rather than "I'm just an accessory for you for the male audience to project themselves onto"
Agreed, and it should especially be emphasised that the story revolves around Ariel's pov. As you say, the point of the trope is to project yourself onto the man*; the woman's* naivety is there to create a power imbalance he wouldn't have with almost anyone else (EDIT: without a significant age gap), and him taking advantage of this is presented as caring and/or funny instead of creepy. The audience isn't invited to emphasise with the woman in these scenes; instead we're expected to join the man in enjoying her confusion. One side of a romance being a fish out of water (lmao) isn't sufficient to make it this trope, it's just a prerequisite. *I'm sure this trope could be done with gay or competent-woman-naive-man couples; I've gendered it this way for brevity because all of the examples I've seen discussed are like this.
>\*I'm sure this trope could be done with gay or competent-woman-naive-man couples; I've gendered it this way for brevity because all of the examples I've seen discussed are like this. The video where this trope I think originates touched on this and that when inverted to having a male character be the one inexperienced or naive it's played off for comedy, and any romance with said character is in spite of the inexperience and not because of it.
hmm weird that anime would do this. I wonder why
Meh, Quorra wasn't really infantilized and Sam wasn't really weird to human women, so that's not too bad imo.
agree, and they were hardly, if at all, shipped together. i can only think of two scenes, and it would not be hard to claim those as platonic.
Elfenlied also
At least you could watch Elfen Lied for the legitimately messed up gore and like Lucy as an entirely separately individual facing both a tragic future and dealing with a terrible past. Chobits is just... smh.
Poor Things (even though it feels more like a critique on the trope)
Is Quorra born/built yesterday? Like didnt Clu enact his genocide on the ISOs when Kevin Flynn was still fairly young and his son was still a kid? Or am I confusing my lore?
no, you're right. Quorra has actually existed for longer than Kevin was missing, and because of the discrepancy between the passage of time on the Grid and in the real world ("hours in here were just minutes back home"), she has been living for what has likely felt like more than two thousand years. she is limited by her circumstances: she can only learn as much about the outside world as Kevin has been willing and able to tell or show her, and she's been living in isolation for, again, virtually over two millennia. Sam isn't weird with women, either. the only legitimately cringy thing he ever does in the movie in that scope is the little look he gives the armory programs as they step out of their pods. the romance with Quorra is developed over a few scenes in a bog standard way, and in the only other prolonged interaction with a woman the movie shows - him accompanying Gem to the End of Line Club - nothing even remotely romantic in nature happens. he's singularly focused on finding Zuse. a lot of these are deeply surface level. if you wanted a genuine example of this trope from a TRON movie, it exists - Kevin kissing Laura's program on the Game Grid in the original to work out his feelings about having lost her in the real world is a short but perfect example.
Hang on, the little Mermaid? The prince is weird towards women??
Xenoblade chronicles 2 - Poppi is unironically the worst I can think of. No preschooler coded character should have a "blushy crushy" mode for their "masterpon"
Wtf you mean Ariel, she's literally just a 16 year old bro 💀
My boy sam flynn aint "weird towards women"
Prince Eric isn’t like weird toward women though. Ariel is innocent and doesn’t understand human culture but the trope from OOP implies the man is taking advantage of the other character’s innocence in order to be shitty to her because no other woman would bother.
Isn't Ariel 16 though? I thought this trope was more for adult characters
Man i thought of plankton
Weird Science is another one.
TNG subverts it by partnering Geordi with a *male* sexy naive robot.
Chobits - Chi
the little mermaid is a robot? 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
Yea, i know fucking none of these very spesific sounding shows other then star trek which literally does the exact opposite with spock and human women…
Do you not know Little Mermaid
[удалено]
The debate about Kes rages in the Star Trek community to this day. We're pretty fucking degenerate but we feel like we have to draw the line somewhere.
would you consider poor things one of these?
Quorra is a terrible example of this trope. She is by and large self-sufficent, is not stupid nor lacks social abilities, and does not have a romantic relationship with the main character of Tron: Legacy. Seriously, Leeloo from the fifth element is basically the exact picture of this trope and a great example, and the difference between those two characters are night and day. Sorry, weird nerd rant, there was some youtube essay that put Tron Legacy in this box, and it always annoyed me.
"acting like this is some kind of widely known trope" I mean they literally explained it for the benefit of the people who don't know about it? Tweeters and Redditors are incapable of normal social interactions like "Interesting observation, can you provide examples?"
Not enough drama, I need to call ppl a PUSSY an absolute COWARD for not listing examples /s
I just don't feel alive anymore without hitting people with the: ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠏⠄⠄⠄⠄⠄⠄⠄⠄⠙⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠄⠄⢀⣀⣀⣀⡀⠄⢀⣠⡔⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣰⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⡆⢠⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡏⣻⣟⣿⣿⡿⣟⣛⣿⡃⢸⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣧⣿⣾⣿⣷⣿⣷⣿⣿⣿⣷⣽⣹⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡟⣟⣿⣿⠺⣟⣻⣿⣿⣿⡏⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢿⡝⠻⠵⠿⠿⢿⣿⣿⢳⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣯⣧⠈⣛⣛⣿⣿⡿⣡⣞⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡧⠄⠙⠛⠛⢁⣴⣿⣿⣷⣿⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠟⠉⠄⠄⢠⠄⣀⣠⣾⣿⣿⡿⠟⠁⠄⠈⠛⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⡟⠉⠄⠄⢀⠠⠐⠒⠐⠾⠿⢟⠋⠁⠄⢀⣀⠠⠐⠄⠂⠈⠻⢿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⠋⠁⠄⢀⡈⠄⠄⠄⠄⠄⠄⠄⠄⠁⠒⠉⠄⢠⣶⠄⠄⠄⠄⠄⠈⠫⢿ ⣿⣿⡟⠄⢔⠆⡀⠄⠈⢀⠄⠄⠄⠄⠄⠄⠄⢄⡀⠄⠈⡐⢠⠒⠄⠄⠄⠄⢀⣂ ⣿⣿⠁⡀⠄⠄⢇⠄⠄⢈⠆⠄⠄⢀⠔⠉⠁⠉⠉⠣⣖⠉⡂⡔⠂⠄⢀⠔⠁⠄ ⣿⡿⠄⠄⠄⠄⢰⠹⣗⣺⠤⠄⠰⡎⠄⠄⠄⠄⠄⠄⠘⢯⡶⢟⡠⠰⠄⠄⠄⠄
What is that? Robocop?
Yes. You should watch Robocop… NOW!
But like examples help illustrate the point though?
And asking "Can you provide examples, please?" like a normal person is difficult why?
Of course, but they could have just asked for examples instead of being a dick
Yeah I was about to comment saying I misinterpreted the comment. Ok yeah I get it now.
It's like that XKCD of average familiarity (https://xkcd.com/2501/). People who watch a lot of films and try to critique them (like myself, I just watched the pure kino experience that is Sonic the Hedgehog 2) are aware of examples of this trope or have seen the YouTube essay about it and assume that because it appears in big budget films that the average person has probably heard of it or seen examples themselves.
Everything has to have drama or an argument. Otherwise what else would you with your time? Do something productive? Impossible
I feel like this trope is pretty present in anime/manga. Like you’ve got a guy whose either a loser or just boring (sometimes both) who meets an angel/demon/monster girl who is completely infatuated with him for no reason, and is also very clueless and thus dependent on him for most things
Yeah. It comes from the same anxiety that causes some guys fetisise virginity. (If she dosent know about the society, sex or relationships enough to compare me to them it means that she dosent know how bad I'm at all of those things)
Which is a worse trope, that or an experienced, smart woman for some reason who knows all about society, sex, and relationships and still being in love with a guy who’s bad at those things for some reason?
I think the "some reason" would be love
So how do you get someone like that to fall in love with you if there’s a lot of things you’re not good at? I’ve never really been in a romantic relationship before, so it’s still hard to understand love as being that “irrational.”
Honestly if I like a guy's personality enough, as long as he makes an effort to improve yea I'd be with him
It’s not that irrational to fall for an adorkable guy who tries his best. Someone can be earnest, morally good, and absolutely hopeless at human interaction and life skills, and that can be adorable. Lots of people find golden retriever boyfriends cute, this is just that but scruffy mutt boyfriend instead.
Mangaka be like "but what if this [insert Isekai being] wanted to fuck my self insert"
For a wholesome version of this trope where the girl is not infantilized or immediately attracted to the guy, read [Kumika no Mikaku](https://mangadex.org/title/2a941f75-195b-48b7-ab89-6a3dccf6dac9/kumika-no-mikaku)
I was thinking this kinda sounds like shield hero. Especially the bird loli
> who meets an angel/demon/monster girl who is completely infatuated with him for no reason, and is also very clueless and thus dependent on him for most things However a lot of the time the girl in question could kill him if she wanted to. Like I legit believe a lot of anime romances are female-led relationships.
I don't exactly know why anime has so many of these tropes can someone educate me
There's a whole video essay on this by pop culture detective, who I think actually coined the phrase
A video that has 11 million views, btw. Not exactly niche
He did coin it
WHY DO MOTHERFUCKERS MENTION A COOL VIDEO AND THEY DONT EVEN TELL ME HOW TO FIND IT WHYYYY
"Born sexy yesterday" I think
They literally said the youtuber’s name
The Fifth Element is the most famous and literal example, but this is absolutely a common trope. Sexy adult-looking female doesn't know how the world works and relies on awkward man to function. Doesn't need to be literally born yesterday, could be from another planet or even another time. The important part is that the (usually) female character is dependent on the (usually) older male character. Oddly enough, at first, the guy is usually not romantically interested. The girl starts having feelings because he's literally the first person to help her. I guess it scratches the itch of having someone fully depend on you for some people.
I strongly believe that this trope stems from the desire to be validated without competition against others. Basically, the loyalty of your partner is guaranteed by external circumstances, and can't be threatened by your own shortcomings/the value of others. It's definitely a very unhealthy way of representing that idea, but I think it's a little bit sad that it stems from what's basically a feeling of vulnerability in the extremely competitive masculine world.
was Korben Dallas awkward and unlovable? The movie establishes him having an ex-wife so he must've been lovable at some point in his past
I wouldn't call him awkward and unlovable at all, I was more referring to Leeloo as the most recognizable trope. She looks weird, acts weird, she's an alien fish out of water and she's very sexualized.
I’m sure this is a trope but largely limited to Adam Sandler movies.
not at all, he just puts himself with hot women while he's not the most good looking guy
I mean he's not a troll either to be fair. Especially when he was younger and not as schlubby he was decent looking. I will defend Sandler's movies till the day I die though. They may have some dated humor but like all of them come down to "be a good guy, have growth as a person, appreciate your talents (like humor) and you'll find people to befriend and/or love". There's so much positivity in his movies beneath the goofy dumbness, and also Sandler himself seems like a solid dude. He makes sure all his friends have good paychecks and get to visit nice locations. Edit: Adam Sandler actually *did* voice a troll at some point I think though but I can't figure out what it was
yes some of his movies are funny i dont get the hate
I think a lot of the hate is just how saturated the 2000s were with Sandler movies. I tried googling how many movies he's made, and the official answer by Google was "At least 80". Wikipedia claims he made 69 feature films, 23 television series and 4 documentaries. I get it. If you aren't his target demographic it'd be pretty annoying, especially if friends/family enjoy watching them. My family loved picking random Sandler movies for movie night. It'd be like hating marvel in the 2010s lol.
Because he made tons of terrible movies with the dumbest possible humor lack jack and Jill and that’s my boy
I can only think of 50 First Dates but even then she was just an adult with intense memory issues. Are there examples of this in Sandler movies? I mean maybe the love interest in Waterboy now that I think about it, but he was also a downright moron in that movie so I don’t know if that counts either.
My pfp on discord is the same as yours on here and I saw it and got confused lol
born sexy yesterday is a massively common trope whats op on about.
poor things did this but deliberately critiqued the predatory men in her life, which i think was neat
Also helps that Poor Things establishes it’s fairy tale-esque tone that makes it clear you aren’t meant to be taking everything too literally/seriously.
I understood that the movie was critiquing the men, but I still couldn't shake how uncomfortable I was for the entire movie. I did not like the movie even though everyone else seems to love it
Same the entire movie felt incredibly uncomfortable to me, especially how the movie was portraying these man taking advantage of her as not a big deal, and how the extreme sexuality in the later part of the film was supposed to read as “empowering”??? Its a well documented thing that sexually abused children overcompensate with extreme sexual behaviors later in life and I hated how the movie was portraying that as positive somehow? The whole movie was massive ick for me
Ok I understand you didn't like the movie but pretty much all you said in here tells me you just didn't understand the film
#[VIDEO ESSAY ABT THIS TOPIC (ITS REALLY GOOD CHECK OUT THEIR OTHER SHIT TOO)](https://youtu.be/0thpEyEwi80?si=KKiEi7wOdX9n5Zy0)
video essays > sleep
A video essay that is shorter than 2 hours??? Blasphemy!
Was looking for this. If you didn't post it, I would have.
it literally is. it's called "born sexy yesterday."
That's what it says in the tweet
well, uh. i'm dyslexic so checkmate liberal
clylsexic
the person quote retweeting is actually stupid im sorry
Foo Fighters and Aigis my beloved
Toaster mentioned
i was thinking of the band for the longest time until i realized you probably mean FF from JJBA 😭
I don't watch jojo so I saw that and got scared because I like the band
why would you not think abt the band
This is a very common trope, no?
Your mom x me (I’m the female coded humanoid with autism)
I get that it can look predatory, but at the same time it feels a bit limiting to label this trope as only pedo bait. A lot of the aspects that make a female character "born yesterday" are just neurodivergent stuff. Not being able to read social clues ✅ exceptionally skilled at one thing but bad at normal tasks ✅ awkward in new situations and people ✅ "Banning" this trope (banning in quote because I understand this is twitter discourse which has literally 0 influence on people who touch grass) would mean that neurodivergent female characters would be banned from having relationships with neurotypical dudes. This feels a bit shitty imho. Male characters get to be really weird and awkward and still be attractive (which is good because weird guys are hot AF), it's unfair to label this trope as only predatory. I've seen the pop culture detective video on it, which has a ton of problems shared with a lot of his other videos, but in particular this one badly suffered his "I analyze media with the POV of a straight male and ONLY a straight male POV"
I think the problem usually comes more from how this trope is used to infantilize the girl and make her seem like a child, and to reinforce the power imbalance between her and the man where she's completely dependent on him and can't do much without him. I think you can still use those character traits for a romance, but you'd just have to make sure to not infantilize the girl and let her be an equal to the other person. I think so at least, I'm still looking at discussion Edit: the person who posted the tweet said they tried to rework the trope with their own autistic coded robot character, saying that they're given agency and treated with respect, even with their more "childish" traits, and are in a romantic/sexual relationship without their autistic traits being sexualized. So I do think the problem is more when the power imbalance is there and it's used to be all "look at this girl she's like a helpless child but also sexy", or to otherwise let the man be the "guiding figure" that teaches her stuff and knows better
Agreed. The people calling this trope disgusting make me so upset, the robot description is literally me (except I’m ftm and NOT sexy) and I already have the idea in my head that I’m too childish to be loved. I don’t need to hear that someone loving me is inherently gross or bad. The person responding to the tweet probably doesn’t think the trope exists because they may have only seen the trope as Autism + autism(or just a non-typical dude) relationship.
oooo that is an interesting perspective /gen I would be curious to hear the other problems his videos share
Well to be concise because else I would go on forever, he has the same "surface level analysis" problem Anita Sarkeesian had in her days (which is unsurprising considering they were dating). You know how terfs say that drags shows are mysoginistic because they equate being a woman with makeup? Stupid AF, I know, but it's easy to see why they would say that. It's a condition of having the bare minimum amount of social justice knowledge (aka "makeup = bad") but without any further analysis or reflection. It's the same mechanics that make some bigots say that BDSM is rapey because there's force and sex combined, without thinking that someone might be doing it for fun. As an example, he, I kid you not, made a video about videogames where he denigrated ALL of them for being violent fantasy. Apart from the ludicrous statement that every video game is about violence (night in the woods, a short hike, literally fucking peggle exist) his main reasoning was nothing more than "violence is bad". Again, yes I know violence is bad just as forcing women to put on makeup is, but the situation is way more nuanced than that. To give you a gut feeling about him. You know those conservatives comics that strawman progressive people as idiots who scream "mysoginy! Racism! Homophobia!" at completely unrelated shit to make them sound bad. Like that comic of the girl saying "ermh actually, planes are sexist because they keep air condition too cold for women!". The first you learn when you join leftism is that these people only exist in conservatives' mind, the second thing you learn is that they are real but are thankfully relegated on twitter. Pop Culture Detective is one of them.
The problem with the trope is how it *almost* always really lays into the power imbalance in the relationship. I have autism and feel pretty confident saying that people with autism are not completely incompetent outside of one specific area. There’s already enough media that shows us a savants in one area while being unable to function at all everywhere else.
Can we instead allow people to share criticisms they have of the media they like instead of telling everybody to distance themselves from everything they don't unconditionally love?
Just check out the trope they named, "Born Sexy Yesterday", on the TV tropes wiki, there'll be hundreds of examples
My first thought was ""Chobits", but I haven't actually seen it so maybe I shouldn't be so quick to judge. Maybe Shield Hero?
Nope I was looking for the chobits comment since nobody mentioned it, it’s literally this
Poppi α
And the localization team couldn't figure out how much neckbeard they wanted to localize and so that entire corner turned schizophrenic.
Some of y’all didn’t grow up reading tvtropes.com and it shows.
Born sexy yesterday is literally so common it has a name lmao
Chobits, Elfen Lied, several episodes of Code Geass, and -- look, pretty much anytime there's a less-than-human girl in an anime, it's this shit.
... lore olympus?
100% he is thousands of years old, she is 18 and he is shit at relationships and constantly pushes her boundaries, like when she was blackout drunk so he took her to his home, took a shower while thinking about how hot she is
Wait I know nothing about lore Olympus, how does him being shit make it a born sexy yesterday thing?
It's more like he gets to be mature and has a bunch of control over her while she is young and naive and has little agency in the story. Her lack of maturity and his control over her is fetishized. She enters the underworld with barely any knowledge about how things work, her uncle who runs the place becomes her boss and gives her special treatment which she doesn't realize. I haven't caught up with lore Olympus and I don't really feel the need to, so maybe the situation has changed, idk.
Okay so an autistic girl robot so me
So I definitely get how the trope is gross because it's fetishizing the power imbalance of a naive girl and a "smart" guy that can take advantage of her. My question is how to go about writing naive characters without it being gross like this. Like it it enough to just not put the character in that predatory relationship, or is the character type itself inherently an issue
I mean I don't think there is anything wrong with the character type, lots of stories rely on naive and uninformed main characters so we can learn and grow alongside them. But usually they're not just reliant on one person. A naive protagonist who meets lots of different people who they can learn from and rely on might be one of the most common tropes in storytelling. And just because a character is naive doesn't mean they don't have agency. In this trope all agency is taken away from them and they basically become children that have to be taken care of by this one guy they just met. I think as long as you don't infantilize them and treat them as their own person and not just a prop you should be good.
That definitely makes a lot of sense, and I even saw the OP of the tweet say they do a similar thing in giving their autistic coded character agency and respect to avoid this trope. Thanks for replying 👍
If it wan't the robot part I would say this is about Down to Earth
Hmmm. Mass Effect - Joker and EDI?
That's extremely common in anime tho
A lot of furry comics can be like this, tho with good intentions I imagine
This person just described heaven's lost property like... almost exactly.
This person is too scared to directly say they didn't like poor things
Does Joker/EDI count for this trope?
I think the trope is more about how one character is sheltered and doesn't know about the world so they are totally dependent on the other, which creates a weird power imbalance in the relationship dynamic. EDI is already a highly competent "adult" AI, she just gets a physical body later in her existence. Joker and EDI work together as equals to keep the Normandy safe.
elfen lied
It is a trope tho: https://youtu.be/0thpEyEwi80?si=4ySx52VtRbNg2dg2
wait is that aigis x makoto?
excuse e but as female codes robot this is relatable beep bloop
It is a real trope, and “born sexy yesterday” is the actual name of it. But I found out about it from a comic called “Born Sexy Tomorrow”
This is a very widely known trope tho
look chobits did this all day but that theme song has me in a chokehold
"I'm not aware of this thing so I'm gonna say it's not well known" Born sexy yesterday is quite common
This is an entire genre of anime, surprisingly the only people I know irl who enjoy it are all women Also that post was definitely about Chobits though
actually me and my gf lol
Looking at you Delia Ketchum x Mr. Mime 😤
Webtoon's two most popular romances are Lore Olympus, which is this plus lolita, and Down to Earth, which is also this.
The first I can think of that I am currently Playing is Persona 3 Reload. Though the degree of terribleness of the main character is mostly up to the player in regard to interactions
I fucking hate this trope in manga and anime. Anyone else notice in fantasy settings that the main character always buys a slave girl and then romances her or something like that, it fucking pisses me off
But it IS a trope! I've seen female characters in games get infantalized in future entries and oh God don't get me started on anime.
Down to earth webtoon
The funny thing about this tweet is that’s it’s complaining about something that already describes what the trope is: “born sexy yesterday”.