The polar opposite of the Casanova Wannabe and the Handsome Lech, this character has a long list of conquests and can bend any woman to his will — even though there's absolutely nothing attractive about him. In fact, he's a sleaze and/or looks like a baboon and/or treats women like garbage. Sensible, self-respecting women may scoff, but if so, he'll pull a clever come-on line on them or practice his patented stare on them and they'll be suckered in just enough to be proven wrong.
In some cases, the character is treated as a Sex God even by other characters. In other cases, the character isn't treated as particularly good at getting women — in fact, he might be an outright Casanova Wannabe — and yet, when you actually do the tallying, you realize he's managed to nail about a dozen people, and the entertainment industry being what it is, most of those people are going to be played by good-looking women who should by all means be out of his league. This is especially common in Long Runners, where by nature of the format, even ugly or unpleasant characters tend to accumulate a fair number of love interests, one-off or otherwise.
Possibly owing to Most Writers Are Male, Kavorka Women are less common. Men are societally judged to value a women's appearance more than women do men's, so the idea of a genuinely unattractive woman attracting handsome men is considered 'unrealistic'. The closest common example is a Big Beautiful Woman who often has numerous conventionally-attractive men vying for her attention (an archetype with historical precedent in Catherine the Great).
The line between Kavorka Man and The Casanova, usually wide, can sometimes be very fine. A Kavorka Man minus the conquests is a Casanova Wannabe. Compare Ugly Guy, Hot Wife. All Girls Want Bad Boys is when the ladies are attracted to a man with a seemingly repellent personality rather than repellent looks. Often arises due to power's allure or being surprisingly good in bed. Contrast The Schlub Pub Seduction Deduction, in which a beautiful woman will only approach an ugly man if she has ulterior motives. Also contrast Handsome Lech, which is basically an inversion of the Kavorka Man, a man that's unsuccessful with the ladies despite being attractive.
According to sex therapist Victoria Zdrok, there is Truth in Television to this, due to what she terms "equity theory": what Kavorka Man lacks in obvious attractors, he compensates for with less tangible qualities due to women being more cerebral than they're given credit for.
The term derives from the Seinfeld episode "The Conversion". Has nothing to do with Dr. Kevorkian, for which see I Cannot Self-Terminate. Or Madame Kovarian, the Big Bad of the sixth series of the Doctor Who revival show. Or the children's musician Raffi Cavoukian (yes, Raffi has a last name).
Examples:
Male examples
- The memetically-popular web ad claiming that "this ugly son of a bitch is fucking super hot chicks and basically, you are fucking stupid", relies on this trope, exhorting the audience to watch a free video to find out the Kavorka Man's secret.
- The Archangel Raphael from Angel Sanctuary. At least at first, before Sara helps him see his real personality. He doesn't look so bad, but boy is he a sleaze. His assistant is not at all surprised to find him with a girl, getting ready to have sex, before the Archangel Michael interrupts. Michael even asks Raphael if he expects him to remember the names of "all his broads".
- Dan from Bamboo Blade, despite being Gonk, has Miya-miya for a girlfriend. He also managed to get the American Carrie interested in him. His reason for wooing both of these girls? His resemblance to an armadillo/pangolin. The fact that he's ranked 3rd in his year in school (out of 390), is an excellent artist, is shaping up to be better at kendo than the guy with regular proportions, and is a devoted boyfriend sure helps.
- In Berserk the Count despite looking Humpty Dumpty if he was a Feudal Overlord had an extremely beautiful wife who bore his daughter. Then again said wife had pagan orgies while the Count was away at ironically hunting heathens, so she probably wasn’t all that happy in the marriage.
- Momonari Junta from DNA² is a short nerdish guy with ridiculous hair... And a time traveler revealed he's going to become the Mega Playboy, capable of seducing girls by existing at them, and that he'll proceed to have a hundred children from a hundred different women. Justified in that it's actually a psychic ability... That the time traveler accidentally activates early.
- Dragon Ball:
- Krillin is a short bald dude and one of the universe's greatest butt monkeys, but somehow he dated a knockout like Maron and married the badass and beautiful Android 18, to the surprise of the fans of the series.
- Mr Satan, (Hercule Satan in the dub) is generally portrayed with an entourage of beautiful women despite looking like a trailer park hick. Though he’s an extremely wealthy Fake Ultimate Hero with a manly mustache so that may explain it.
- Vegeta similar to the Wolverine example had one of the biggest babes in the series Bulma fall for him and bear his children despite being a particularly short and constantly scowling lug and later in Super Cat Girl Hop wants to scratch his “handsome face”. Granted Vegeta was subject to Progressively Prettier so him being a Chick Magnet is far less jarring than it is with Krillin or Hercule.
- The second episode of Kaiba gives us Butter.
- Roberto in Monster is kind of disgusting, and his... luck with women... is a deep well of squick and even Nightmare Fuel. OTOH, he is said to be, uhm, well-endowed and VERY good when using his... er, tool.
- Satou Kohta from My Balls, although it is unclear if this is natural, or because the Queen Of Terror is trapped in his balls.
- Lampshaded in The Mystery of Mamo. The titular antagonist questions Fujiko why she would pass up immortality on series protagonist Lupin III. She responds to him by saying that immortality is hardly worth it to see the man she loves turn old and grey while she remains eternally youthful.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion:
- Gendo Ikari is a dour, frowning, and cruel man on his best days. He managed to marry Yui in the past, and seduced both Naoko Akagi and her daughter Ritsuko.
- His son Shinji is an unassuming, emotionally vacant teenager who manages to attract attention from his copilots Asuka, Rei, and Kaworu. Even his guardian Misato makes an awkward pass at him, and Mari from the Rebuild of Evangelion timeline is all but stated to like him too.
- Masato from No Bra. Many readers think that there's no real reason for the girls (and guy) of the story to be attracted to him, beyond some cases of Mistaken Identity.
- Nobunaga-sensei no Osanazume's protagonist is as repulsive as it can be, and yet every girl adores him.
- One Piece:
- Señor Pink is a middle-aged unkempt fat man dressed like a baby (and has grown fatter with time). For some reason, he is surrounded by beautiful women who are constantly yearning to throw themselves at him, whom he feels ambivalent towards. Like everything else in One Piece, this has an explanation: The reason he rejects the women is that he still considers himself to be Happily Married to his wife who is in a vegetative state. Back when he was younger (and quite a handsome man too), they got married without her being aware he was a pirate, (he told her he was a banker) and after the death of their child and the accident that put her in said state, the only thing that got her to smile was when he dressed up in their dead son's baby clothes.
- Vinsmoke Judge unlike his four sons is not handsome at all. He’s brutish, big chinned and hulking and even the cover story that shows him during his youth reveals he wasn’t a Prince Charming being a sketchy looking creep (in anything he looks more like the imposter version of his son Sanji Drip from the Fake Strawhats) nonetheless he still married the extremely beautiful Sora who bore his five children.
- Both Kaido and Orochi have numerous very sexy female minions sucking up to them with the former also having the gorgeous Black Maria all over him while drinking despite Kaido looking like a roided out Genghis Khan crossed with a Oni while Orochi is straight up Gonk. Of course great power, influence and wealth are at play here.
- Moroboshi Ataru, the main protagonist of Urusei Yatsura, is a lecherous, obnoxious, selfish Jerkass (if one with a number of redeeming qualities)... And starts the series dating Shinobu, later revealed to be the third most beautiful girl in his school, quickly finds himself accidentally engaged to the gorgeous alien Lum, and has got the attention of the beautiful Oyuki and Mendo Ryoko (though the latter may have just trying to get entertained and annoy her brother). These are only the recurring ladies who for some reason have found him attractive.
- Takuma in Val × Love is a precociously large young man whose ugliness and size actively frightens people to the point where classmates are prone to accidentally falling through windows trying to get away from him; he has the In-Series Nickname "Akuma" ("Demon") as a result. He's actually a Gentle Giant with severe social anxiety whose capacity for bravery is quite a turn-on to his Battle Harem of valkyries.
- In Yakitate!! Japan, Yuuichi Kirisaki (Gendo Ikari's Captain Ersatz) — who's possibly Squickier than Gendo. Granted, Yukino is more evil than him. And the source of his evil? The Virus that was created by his BREAD!
- Archie. At one point Betty and Veronica realise that he's a stupid, boorish, selfish, average-looking jerk and they both decide they should break it off with him... and say "You first." They then wonder why they can't give him up. Archie shows up, they pounce, and he thinks to himself that his good looks, intelligence, and charm have done it again.
- Justified depending on the particular story. Some have it that he's particularly sweet, charming, or modest, especially compared to boys like Reggie.
- This was particularly prevalent for the first 50 or so years of the series' existence: Up to the early 1960s, Archie was decidedly goofy-looking, adopting a more average, yet still rather cartoonish appearance via Art Evolution (and some help from a changed wardrobe). Then, at one point during the 1990s, he began to be referred to as rather handsome (again helped by a change on his clothing).
- Batman: The Penguin has been known to date some supermodel-quality women, despite being short, fat, usually bald, and ugly; a lot of that has to do with him being rich and influential, however.
- Condorito is a rather ugly bird, yet he doesn't only have a beautiful girlfriend, but is often seen with other pretty women (all human). This also applies for his human friends, none of which are particularly good-looking.
- Darkseid, despite you know being a craggy alien god with stone-like skin has had two wives Suli and Tigra (both now dead) whom were extremely hot. While Darkseid’s immense power and magnetic lordship does explain this to a degree, the fact anyone would find him attractive or arousing is hard to shallow at face value. Wonder Woman in Justice League Infinity for instance is squick-ed out and baffled by the fact her Alternate Self had a passionate romance with Darkseid (albeit a more heroic incarnation of him).
- Elmer Fudd, of all people, in the one-shot Batman/Elmer Fudd #1, in which he has beautiful socialite Silver St. Cloud, Bruce Wayne's ex-girlfriend, fall head over heels for him.
- Deconstructed in the Franco-Belgian comic Dad, via the titular protagonist. Dad is portly and has greying hair, but has nonetheless managed to successfully woo ladies in the past. However, his love affairs never seem to end amicably, as each of his previous lovers leave him in the charge a daughter he sirednote , so he has to take side jobs to make ends meet.
- One time, Tony Stark attended a party with Dazzler as his date. Everybody is shocked, not only because they think Dazzler is way out of his league, but because Tony is disheveled, sleep-deprived, and has forgotten to take a shower — not exactly his usual dapper, charming self. Sebastian Shaw calls him a kavorka man, assuming that Dazzler was taken in by his wallet.
- Deadpool: Deadpool is gruesomely disfigured (which is why he rarely removes his mask), insane, and immature. Yet all of his love interests are extremely hot women.
- He claims to have been married at least ten times previously in Deadpool #27 The Wedding of Deadpool, although not all of these stories may be accurate since he is an Unreliable Narrator. The past wives listed include Ms. Marvel turned out she was being controlled by an alien at the time, a sock puppet of Copycat he hallucinated was really her after he thought she died destroyed, although the real Copycat was still alive, a stripper calling herself Genosha killed during the wedding as a consequence of Deadpool messing with continuity, a woman whose name he forgot that he assassinated by pretending to be her groom she actually hired him to make her suicide look like a murder, a woman named Penny she didn't exist, she was part of a trap set by a villain, a woman named Anna he had actually killed the real Anna and married Copycat pretending to be her and it turned out the people who married them were replaced with actors so it didn't count, a Dumb Blonde named Lurleen divorced when it turned out she was actually Mystique, Outlaw her super strength made sex extremely painful, so probably divorced, Domino only pretending to be a couple for a mission but Deadpool took it like it was real, and she "divorced" him by shooting through him to get the bad guy, AIM assassin Betty Swanson didn't count, she was unconscious and the guy doing the wedding was a savage land native shaman that he coerced, and a large alien woman named Orksa although it didn't show it in this comic, he later divorced her so she could be with somebody who loved her more than he did, and of course, the main story of the issue is him getting married to Shiklah the Succubus but they have since separated, with Shiklah marrying Dracula like originally intended after their marriage falls apart due to Wade's negligence. Deadpool mentions in issue 31 of volume 4, that he thinks they're still technically married, but isn't sure how it works with her being a Succubus There are also all the women he had sex with but didn't marry, one of whom had his daughter.
- However, may be deconstructed since Deadpool sometimes never seems to remove his mask when he with some of his ladies. When having sex with Carmelita, he keeps his suit on. He has to leave to fight, and Carmelita wishes him luck and kisses him in case something bad happens to her. She even goes to the fight scene, wondering if Deadpool is ok. However, she'd never seen his face, and when she does, she chokes back bile and runs away in disgust.
- Granted, his face is only a mess due to injuries. When he gets his face fixed, he is quite handsome looking.
- Herbie the Fat Fury is a short, ugly, potbellied teen with a really bad fashion sense and an unhealthy addiction to lollipops. Even so, all the ladies love him, though he is mostly unperturbed by their attentions.
- The Incredible Hulk despite being a green (and occasionally grey) behemoth in his Hulk form has gotten laid by super babes an astonishing amount of times such as Jarella, Red She-Hulk (his wife Betty), Marlo Chandler, Caiera and Umar Dormammu‘s sister. Not to mention other hotties and dark action girls such as Amander von Doom and Atalanta expressed attraction to him with former all too keen to go green. Granted Depending on the Artist Hulk can look fairly handsome and his Smart Hulk persona is notably more good looking, but most of the time he’s a straight up ogre-esque monster with a broad flat face making his highly accomplished sex life strange to say the least.
- Jonah Hex is disfigured and uncouth but has maintained relationships with some incredibly gorgeous women: White Fawn, Mei Ling, Stiletta, Gina Gold, Tall Bird, etc.
- The Joker even though he looks a Monster Clown meets Game Show Host with Thin Chin of Sin on his best days and has outright an Nightmare Face at other times, he’s still had the drop dead gorgeous Harley Quinn and Punchline be infatuated with him, this generally gets Hand Waved by his Manipulative Bastard charisma enthralling them but it still seems unbelievable he’d be able to turn women on. Batgirl, Catwoman, Vicky Vale in the 1989 movie and Silver Age women on the other hand more realistically give him “Not even if you were only clown on Earth” responses to his creepy flirting.
- Popeye: Popeye himself is hardly the looker. One eye permanently closed, a huge jaw, short in stature, and big bulbous forearms. And yet he somehow manages to have quite a few women love (or at least want) him.
- Spider-Man:
- Norman Osborn gets laid a lot more than you'd expect, considering he's in his forties with a 20-something son and weird hair. But he got down with such megababes as Gwen Stacy and Lily Hollister as well as had the gorgeous Lyra make out with him while overvaluating. The former two of whom were young enough to date his son * . Though Gwen sleeping with Norman got mercifully retconned in The Amazing Spider-Man (2018), to the point of it being lampshaded in-story that Gwen would have never in her right mind had sex with a craggily evil businessman like him.
- Mac Gargan as Venom in Dark Avengers manages to form a harem out of and sleep with the contestants of the Miss Big Apple Contest when pretending to be the judge and none of the women are put off by the fact he’s a evil inky black monster man with More Teeth than the Osmond Family. Granted he’s a Villain with Good Publicity at this point, but still there’s open mindedness and then there’s this.
- Teen Titans: Terry Long, the one-time spouse of Donna Troy, is a bit infamous for this. He's a hairy-chested guy with a fro and a beard who looks about twenty years older than her, with a tendency towards cheap suits and come-ons pulled from Saturday Night Live, but... well, he married Donna Troy, a superheroine who basically looks like, and sometimes is, a younger Wonder Woman — and her friends considered him to be quite a catch for her! The intended message was that he was such a charmer and she was a Nice Girl enough to notice him; more often, readers found him oddly slimy and noted his uncanny resemblance to his creator.
- Thanos despite being looking like a muscly Grimace and being a deformed by Titan standards has had a literally cosmic amount of sex with Thanos’s origin story revealing much like his brother Eros he’s shagged his way across the universe, bedding numerous multicoloured humanoid space babes resulting in loads of bastards (whom he later kills along with their mothers to appease Death). Even the Asgardian goddess Hela became infatuated with him and took it very badly when Thanos dumped her to be with the proper Death again, rather than just the goddess of Death. Ironically however when She-Hulk (a Sex God of Marvel) tackled Thanos once in a fight she was more appropriately repulsed by the experience.
- Ultimate X Men: Despite weighing close to a metric tonne, Fred Dukes/The Blob seems to have a way with women — he fathered Firestar/Liz Allen and Fred Dukes Jr./Blob II while he was in the circus and implied he had other groupies in other parts of the country as he traveled.
- Wildcat is old and scarred with a cauliflower ear from years of crime-fighting, but he's still managed to sleep with several beautiful women, including Wonder Woman's mother Queen Hippolyta.
- Wolverine: Wolverine has had a large number of highly attractive love interests (particularly if they're redheads or Japanese), in addition to having a fairly large female fanbase. This is even though he's a short, hairy lantern-jawed guy with weird hair and a perpetual scowl. Unfortunately, poor Wolvie can never settle down and snuggle because his enemies will harm and/or kill them—or he'll just outlive them due to his extreme Healing Factor causing him to age at a much, much slower rate than pretty much everyone else. Not only that, but Wolverine also has rather poor hygiene (it's mentioned that he rarely bathes or brushes his teeth). The live-action movies seem to write this out (can't pass up the chance to do a Hugh Jackman shower scene).
- It's also that Wolverine's gruff appearance and brute demeanor belie the fact that he's actually quite brilliant. He's fluent in eight languages and conversational in a dozen more. His world travels, military/espionage training, and great age have allowed him to acquire immense knowledge and skills as well. He doesn't need pheromones to attract women. He does it by being possibly the greatest example of a modern renaissance man. Most of the time, though, it's just his bad-boy persona that attracts people, especially given that he was introduced at a time when antiheroes were relatively rare in comics.
- Lampshaded in an issue of New Avengers. Echo accuses Logan of hitting on her, but he retorts by saying soon enough she'll be hitting on him, and that there's nothing either of them can do about it.
- The Batman fanfiction series Cat Tales has Selena and Barbara Gordon squee over meeting Woody Allen, in this universe an iconic filmmaker of Gotham City, since the DC Universe does not have a New York City. Bruce and Dick are hilariously confused over the nerdish creator's success with women.
- Exaggerated and played for laughs in the Death Note fanfic Everyone Wants L
, where L seems to get jumped by another character every few minutes, despite the narration consistently describing him in unflattering terms, such as comparing his Characterizing Sitting Pose to a frog's or talking about his pale, bony ass.
- This is allegedly the basis for the Fakemon Babos and Osoe in the romhack Pokémon Quartz, obese bears with body hair (in addition to their fur), bad attitudes, and body odor, that are inexplicably popular with girls and have a moveset full of charm-style attacks.
- In The Single Father
, a Harry Potter fanfic, Peter Pettigrew of all people becomes this, to his own astonishment. That's because women are very impressed with a man who lovingly (they think) takes care of a baby (they think). The baby in question is Lord Voldemort in disguise, until he really gets de-aged.
- Watch any Adam Sandler movie since the early '90s. Every single character manages to hook up with or already be married to the hottest chick in the film....and it's viewed as perfectly normal.
- Any Woody Allen film he stars in. But especially lampshaded in Zelig where Woody Allen plays a combination of Been There, Shaped History, Master of Disguise, and this trope.
Zelig: "I would like to apologize to everyone. I... I'm awfully sorry for, for marrying all those women. It just, I don't know, it just seemed like the thing to do."
- Cal from The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Lampshaded by himself:
Cal: Look at me. Really look at me. I am ugly as fuck by traditional standards, but, I get with women. Aren't you curious as to how that's possible?
- Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein has Costello playing Wilbur, his usual dim-witted sort. Chick (Abbott) can't fathom how he bagged Sandra and also managed to get a date with the beautiful undercover insurance agent Joan. It ends up being a subverted trope though, as Sandra literally only wants him for his brain to make the Monster even more simple-minded and obedient, and Joan is just using him to further her investigation.
- In American Graffiti the older, college student returning to his old high school that Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss) talks to at the high school dance is first seen surrounded by admiring girls even though he's not remotely handsome.
- Austin Powers from the Austin Powers movie trilogy is a physically unattractive man by modern standards but considered a sex symbol in his day due to his self-confidence, merry personality, and "mojo." Vanessa lampshades this in the first film and still falls in love with him. He bags a number of beautiful ladies throughout the series who treat him like a stud muffin.
- In The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Nicolas Cage plays Terrence McDonagh as a cross between Richard Nixon and Laurence Olivier's version of Richard III, but he still has Eva Mendes for a girlfriend and Fairuza Balk practically dragging him into bed.
- Really, most Nicolas Cage roles, particularly in recent years, count as this. Cage was never a conventionally attractive or charismatic man, yet no number of bad toupees have prevented his on-screen characters from having romantic liaisons with a range of Hollywood stunners, including Meg Ryan, Angelina Jolie, Penélope Cruz, Jessica Biel, and January Jones.
- Evan's roommate Thumper in The Butterfly Effect, who's seen making out with an array of hot girls despite being an obese guy in goth clothing.
Evan: I guess charisma and eyeliner go a long way.
- The characters played by Sid James in the Carry On films are usually pretty successful with much younger women, although James was middle-aged at the time and certainly no oil painting. Up to a point, it became a parody of his own life.
- Downplayed with Dante Hick from Clerks and Clerks II. While not portrayed as unattractive, he's still a spineless Manchild with commitment issues and a tendency to whine about everything, especially when he finds out that his girlfriend sucked 36 dicks before they got together. In spite of this, both films are plotted around him winding up in a love triangle with two women considerably out of his league. Lampshaded by Randal in the second film.
"How the fuck do you always have like two good-looking girls who want you? You're the most hideous fucking chud I've ever met, and you always have a pair of girls fighting over you."
- Swanson from Rick Alverson's cult film The Comedy is a hipster jerk with no filter and a large beer gut. He has trysts with three women throughout the film, wooing one of them by brushing his teeth in front of her at work in the most disgusting way possible, and another by delivering a nonsensical monologue about killing slaves and making furniture out of their skin (in a stereotypical plantation owner voice to boot).
- Trumpeter Joey "The Lips" Fagan from The Commitments. He's old enough to be everyone else's "da," and looks every bit like a guy nearing 50 with his weather-beaten face, but his soft-spoken charm wins over the band's three female singers — he's seen kissing one of them, has sex with another, and at least gets the last one, who's engaged to a rather boring man, flirtatious with him. As all three girls are still smitten with Joey toward the end of the film, this causes their already-tenuous friendship to completely implode, along with the rest of the band.
- Cyclone (1978): The fisherman nicknamed Cachalote (which is another name for sperm whale, meaning the nickname may be a reference to sexual prowess) is a squat, surly, balding man with missing teeth, but he has several children with both his wife and another woman he's been living with for some time, and the two women (who know about each other) still seem concerned about his safety while filing a missing persons report after the storm.
- Erich von Stroheim in many films such as Foolish Wives. He more than makes up for being short and plain (and often wicked) with his suavity and aristocratic manners.
- Ben from The Graduate. He's unemployed (having just graduated) and doesn't seem to have any prospects, and is never presented as particularly handsome. The script makes it pretty clear he was a virgin (he denies it, but not convincingly.) And yet Mrs. Robinson seduces him, and then later her daughter ditches her whole life, including the man she literally just married, to run off with him. Their actions don't have much to do with him: the mother is lonely and looking for some young meat, while the daughter is dissatisfied and looking to rebel, an act she clearly begins to regret in the closing shot.
- Groundhog Day: Phil Connors, played by Bill Murray, manages to bed a whole lot of women who have known him for only a day despite looking like, well, Bill Murray. Here, however, it's more plausible because he takes advantage of his "Groundhog Day" Loop to have infinite opportunities to find out what will please the woman he's currently targeting.
- Max Goldman (played by Walter Matthau) in the Grumpy Old Men films is a Grumpy slob and not very good looking, but he appears to have had a lot of luck with women in the past. He apparently had a relationship with John's ex-wife, May at some point before John married her. His widow, Amy is stated to be very beautiful, he briefly dates Ariel (aka. Ann-Margaret) before she ultimately ends up with John, and finally, he marries Maria (played by Sophia Loren) at the end of the sequel.
- Holy Smoke!: PJ is not particuarly good-looking. Even so, he has sex with two different beautiful (and much younger) women during the film, Ruth and Yvonne, while it's also revealed he's got a committed girlfriend too, Carol, who's also quite attractive. Both of them even come onto him and not the opposite.
- Joey Boca (Kevin Kline) in I Love You to Death starts the film with a (hilarious rambling) confession that he committed adultery "ten or twelve times, give or take a few" in the past two weeks.
- The opening to Idiocracy shows off Clevon, a Fat Idiot and serial philanderer with a pretty ugly appearance. Inside the brief opening chronicling thirty years, he has sex with at least five different women (one of whom was young enough to be his daughter), and sires over twenty children.
- James Bond in Roger Moore era (especially later on) is having far more success with numerous young women than any wrinkled late 50s man should be. Even Roger Moore himself was squicked out learning he was even older than the Bond Girl Stacey Sutton’s mother in A View to a Kill and helped contribute to him stepping down as 007.
- Laurel and Hardy: Usually Oliver (the obese one) has more success with the ladies than Stan in their films. Presumably because he is a bit smarter and more mature.
- Colin Frissell (Kris Marshall) in Love Actually becomes one when he travels from his native Britain to the United States. Lampshaded by way of his pre-travel hypothesis that American women can't resist a man with a British accent, even if he lacks good looks.
- In The Luzhin Defence, Sascha Luzhin (John Turturro) is ugly, socially inept, and depressive but attractive socialite Natalia Katkov (Emily Watson) falls for him and marries him despite the hostility of her parents to the match. OK, he is a world-class chess player, but she is not particularly interested in chess and urges him to give it up.
- It's outright invoked in Manhattan. Mary goes on about how much her former boyfriend was a stud in bed and irresistable, and Ike is astonished when said boyfriend is, well, Wallace Shawn.
Ike: You said you, you know, you had always led me to — you said that, that he was a great ladies' man.
Mary: Yeah.
Ike: And that he opened you up sexually...
Mary: So? So?
Ike: So I — you know, and then this little homunculus is here. - Played for Laughs in Machete by having women react to Danny Trejo like he's a handsome Chick Magnet, such is his irresistable manliness. By the end of the movie he's been involved with Michelle Rodriguez, Lindsay Lohan (and her mother), and Jessica Alba.
- Mad Love: PJ goes mad trying to cure Ruth and ends up falling for her despite her reluctance.
- Jock from Mortdecai, who is constantly having sex with women despite being a total lout.
- It’s very common trend in crapastic Neil Breen films for numerous attractive young women to want to sleep with him even though putting it politely as possible he’s not much of a looker.
- In Neruda, half of Chile is wildly in love with famous poet and statesman Pablo Neruda, despite the fact that Neruda is a not especially attractive, balding, fat man in his late forties with a bad combover. Nonetheless before being forced to go on the run by a power hungry president, Neruda and fellow bohemians threw lavish sex parties, exhausted, cynical workers swoon over him, both male and female prostitutes hang on his every word, and even his ex-wife, to whom he owes money, chooses to defy the government by refusing to denounce him. Some, when called upon to describe interactions with him after the fact, describe him as having acted much more considerately or tenderly than what was actually shown on screen. It's fairly clear that Neruda's poetry, particularly his romantic poetry, sweeps most people off their feet and shapes their perception of him and his actions, although Neruda does at least treat people with kindness and compassion on a number of occasions.
- Stan and Jack in the On the Buses movies. Both too old and ugly (especially Jack) but always have the hot birds fluttering after them.
- In the same era, comic lead Leslie Phillips was the go-to actor when casting an aging and somewhat oily Lothario in British movies. Phillips was the epitome of the smooth-talking upper-class English cad who never failed to get the girl. although he tended to end up regretting it.
- Det. Gamble from The Other Guys — to the frustration of his partner: both for the trope's own sake and the fact that Gamble doesn't even notice how hot the women in his life actually are (He thinks his wife, played by Eva Mendes, is "just okay.")
- The Pink Panther: With his average looks, staggering idiocy and borderline fatal clumsiness, one would be amazed that Clouseau can get one women to fall for him. Yet Clouseau has won the hearts of no less than three (Maria Gambrelli in A Shot in The Darknote , Olga Bariosova in The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Simone Legree in Revenge of the Pink Panther and Countess Chandra in Curse of The Pink Panther.
- Pavi Largo from Repo! The Genetic Opera is a sex-obsessed, hideously disfigured maniac whose bearing borders on Flamboyant Gay and who wears the faces of dead women stapled over his own scars, and yet in virtually every scene he's in, women are giggling, hanging on his arms and fondling him. The fandom seems to agree with them. In all fairness, he is played by Nivek Ogre, who fairly oozes charm, and his father signs their paychecks.
- The Italian film Seven Beauties, with Giancarlo Giannini as an overweight, selfish guy who is himself a bit mystified at how easily he can seduce women.
- Lance in Sex Drive subverts a fat nerd archetype as girls seemingly want to get with him at any given time.
- Mauricio in Shallow Hal is played by Jason Alexander yet still gets the attention of impossibly hot women... whom he shoots down for reasons like them having one longer than average toe.
- Sherrybaby, in which Danny Trejo gets with Maggie Gyllenhaal.
- In Some Guy Who Kills People, Mrs Prichard describes her late husband Marty—who was grossly overweight—as a ladies man who was frequently found in the company of loose women. Sheriff Fuller has a hard time believing this.
- The Tao Of Steve is about a dumpy loser who gets women by emulating Steve McQueen (actor).
- The Three Stooges (but especially Curly) were known for this, both on and off camera. Shemp Howard once agreed to go along with a publicity stunt naming him "The Ugliest Man in Hollywood". He later told the reporters "I'm hideous".
- In Twins (1988), Vincent is like this despite being, like most characters played by Danny DeVito, a sleazy jerk. But his first time was at twelve years old... when he seduced a nun. In one scene, a former lover tells Linda, "never sleep with this man, never lend him money, and never believe a word he says!" He cleans up his act by the end, however, ending up Happily Married to Linda.
- In Up the Chastity Belt, King Richard is drowning in attractive women despite being played by Frankie Howerd in a bad blond wig. Being king must count for a lot because his twin brother Lurkalot (Frankie Howerd without the wig) has much less luck with the ladies.
- In The Wedding Singer, Robbie is no great looker with a loser job and a Hair-Trigger Temper, but he manages to reel in one gorgeous woman after another.
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Roger Rabbit, an infantile, short, goofy (in both behavior and outward appearance), animated rabbit is married to a gorgeous, fully human, sex bomb, Jessica Rabbit. Justified: Considering that Toons have a significantly different thought process from non-toons, and that literally their entire culture (and very existence as cartoons, no less) revolves around humor, it really shouldn't come as any surprise at all when it's explicitly stated that it's Roger who's the catch and Jessica who's out of her league. (Probably doesn't hurt that he's a movie star either.)
Eddie Valiant: She's married to Roger Rabbit?!
Betty Boop: Yeah, what a lucky girl.- In the original novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, Roger and Jessica's marriage is portrayed in a very different light and one that wouldn't get past the radar. Roger is a Jerkass A-list film star with an ego and a temper to match. Jessica's entire showbiz career was appearing in "Tijuana Bibles" (cartoon porn) rather than her rather glamorous nightclub singer gig in the film. Their marriage, while not completely dysfunctional, was significantly rockier and more mercenary in nature than it is in the film.
- Darryl Van Horne from The Witches of Eastwick is described as;
Alexandra: I think — no, I am positive — that you are the most unattractive man I have ever met in my entire life. You know, in the short time we've been together, you have demonstrated every loathsome characteristic of the male personality and even discovered a few new ones. You are physically repulsive, intellectually retarded, you're morally reprehensible, vulgar, insensitive, selfish, stupid, you have no taste, a lousy sense of humor and you smell. You're not even interesting enough to make me sick.
- Said by a woman who ends up sleeping with him just minutes later.
- Spain used to love this trope. About every Spanish comedy or romantic comedy from the classic film era had this (almost never using it as the source of humor), frequently pairing the likes of Alfredo Landa
◊ and Conchita Velasco
◊. Made extreme during the "destape" ("uncovering") era between the mid-'70s and the early '80s, in which actors like the aforementioned Landa, José Luis López Vázquez
◊, Fernando Esteso
◊, and Andrés Pajares
were literally covered with sex goddesses all the time in dozens of sexploitation movies.
- Old Paley, in the Philip Jose Farmer story The Alley Man. Old Paley is the last full-blooded Neanderthal, a garbage scavenger (today we might think of him as a freegan), an alcoholic...and his pheromones make him irresistible to homo sapiens females.
- Mr Wednesday in American Gods. He does it by charm. Literally. "Charms can be learned."
- Tony in Armadillo Fists is fat and ugly. And dresses badly. Oh, and is a quadruple amputee. None of that stops him from being a big hit with the ladies.
- Ben and Me: In France, Ben Franklin is doted on by many of the French ladies of the court, despite being about 70 years old and obese. Truth in Television in this case, Ben Franklin was famous at the time for his popularity with French women.
- Severian, the Designated Hero of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, describes himself as physically ugly. He's also somewhat misogynistic, and after he's exiled from his position as an apprentice torturer, he takes a paid position as an executioner. The number of women who don't seem to mind is truly impressive. Then again, Severian is an Unreliable Narrator and at least one of his conquests is a possible rape.
- In the Cormoran Strike Novels, Strike is overweight, has a missing leg and has what he himself describes as "pube-hair." Yet he manages to regularly attract good-looking ladies. In Lethal White, his longtime-friend Eric Wardle finally wonders out loud, genuinely puzzled, how on Earth someone who looks like Strike keeps getting attractive women fighting over him.
Wardle: How d'you do it? Blimey, I'd like to know your—Strike: There's no secret. Some women just like fat one-legged pube-headed men with broken noses.Wardle: Well, it's a sad indictment of our mental health services that they're loose on the streets.
- Discworld: Despite looking like they got into a bad car accident at best and outright Frankensteinian at their worst, Igors are noted to be very popular with women. Them being good with their hands is the least perturbing reason that comes to mind as to why...
- Monk from the Doc Savage novels. He gets at least as many girls as the dapper and dashing Ham.
- Ignatius Prindable in Don't Call Me Ishmael! has No Social Skills and isn't attractive at all. He is very intelligent but can be obnoxious about it, yet he has no problem getting dates or girlfriends.
- Count Dracula in Dracula. His physical description shows him as being rather ugly, even after he grows younger, and he has hairy palms. However, he has three vampire wives and manages to put several women into his hypnotic spell. He's more of a Dirty Old Man/sexual predator than the more modern Vampires Are Sex Gods trope.
- The Dresden Files plays with this.
- Dresden himself is a borderline example. He is a Hardboiled Detective (or likes to act the part — he is a PI, but he's an absolute dork) and while he gets laid surprisingly rarely, he has any number of women attracted to him, many supernaturally beautiful. However, there's caveats.
- First, while he's not the most flattering describer of his own appearance, he's also intensely self-critical with hot and cold running self-esteem issues — other characters' narration indicates that he's actually at least okay looking, and probably better than average.
- Second, the supernaturally beautiful women are usually supernatural beings interested in him because power attracts and looking to get a handle on him — sex is an easy way to do that.
- Third, he doesn't actually get laid very often at all due to realistic complications — most people find him shabbily dressed, an intimidating figure, and off-putting/possibly autistic thanks to his refusal to meet anyone's gaze (in this case, because it risks a Soulgaze) and perpetual sarcasm. He's also quite shy and very leery of romance considering how it tends to go horribly wrong. Given that he and his First Love were technically foster-siblings manipulated into it by their Evil Mentor and foster-father, and he spent over a decade believing she'd willingly betrayed him, you can see why he's very shy in the first few books, until he gets closure with her.
- Fourth, on the mundane side, people think he's a conman or a hitter for the mob, while on the magical side, they think he's two steps away from becoming Darth Dresden.
- Binder's implied to be relatively successful with women, despite being a middle-aged looking uneducated and uncultured bloke with the demeanour of an ageing London Gangster. While he's got a certain cockney charm (he manages to crack up Charity Carpenter with one of his dirty jokes), it's implied that he mostly relies on the money he gets as a successful supernatural mercenary.
- More generally, in reference to Binder, Dresden explains to Hannah Ascher, Binder's very attractive female professional partner, that this happens a bit more often among human practitioners of magic because anyone who's on the upper end of hot could depressingly easily be a monster in disguise, getting you to drop your guard. There's consequently a high "twitch factor."
- Dresden himself is a borderline example. He is a Hardboiled Detective (or likes to act the part — he is a PI, but he's an absolute dork) and while he gets laid surprisingly rarely, he has any number of women attracted to him, many supernaturally beautiful. However, there's caveats.
- Girls Don't Hit: Joss' husband Colin is neither handsome nor charming, yet somehow he has a very beautiful younger mistress who's crazy about him and will even kill her to have him all for herself. She's not even his first mistress.
- In one of the Gotrek & Felix novels, the infamous duo comes across another Slayer who fits this trope to a T: short, ugly, and dirty, he manages to get it on with a remarkable amount of courtesans, to the point that Felix can't believe it.
- Nearly every male protagonist in any book by Tom Robbins, but most particularly Half Asleep in Frog Pyjamas.
- Embarrassingly common in Hardboiled Detective stories. The private eye may be a drunkard, a crackhead, and a self-pitying, self-absorbed fool, but the housewife next door, the beautiful reporter, the mysterious suspect ... in fact, every female character in the book under the age of sixty (or under the age of thirty-five, the sets are equivalent), seeks his tender ministrations.
- Viktor Krum from the Harry Potter series. He's rather ugly, and pretty awkward socially. However, he is a great Quidditch player, and thus has lots of fangirls due to this. He even manages to successfully ask out Hermione, who had said earlier in the book that he wasn't good looking — though in that case, it was because he was a genuinely nice person and quite shy, and the two remained friends.
- In Havemercy, we have the almost outright sociopathic Rook, who not only treats women with a brutal kind of scorn but comes very close to killing his new professor and long-lost brother Thom out of sheer rage; the ladies, including the Esar's niece, are not in the least bit bothered by this. Though admittedly, Rook is described as being almost painfully handsome and with that whole rugged airman thing going on...
- In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed President of the galaxy, is implied to be this. He has been described as the "best bang since the big one" by Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple breasted whore of Eroticon Six. He stole Trillian away from Arthur who was unsuccessfully trying to initiate a conversation with her during a party on Earth. Zaphod is not very bright, and was voted several times "The worst dressed sentient being in the known universe." And in adaptations, he's usually played by actors who while not exactly hideous are still not known for being conventional lookers. He may be President of the Galaxy, but he holds no real power whatsoever. His function is solely to direct attention away from those who hold actual power.
- The title character of Horatio Hornblower considers himself one. Though he attracts the affections of almost every woman who knows him for more than five minutes, when his first wife is pregnant for the first time he finds himself hoping the child doesn't have his looks, and in books set later in his life, he ruefully contemplates his thinning hair and unthinning figure. However, Hornblower is a thoroughly Unreliable Narrator when it comes to assessing himself (his other wish for the child is that they don't have his unhappy, self-critical temperament either) so it's debatable how much this trope really applies. The best assessment is probably the first book's neutral description of having a face neither handsome nor ugly. (For what it's worth, Hornblower's been played in film and tv by Gregory Peck and Ioan Gruffudd, so Unreliable Narrator really comes into play there.)
- Chief Ranger Dan O'Brian from the Kate Shugak novels is built like a fireplug with red hair and freckles, but he never lacks for female company. This is a constant source of puzzlement to Bobby Clark and many of the other male characters.
- Detective Terry Biggs of Lomax And Biggs is stated to look like a mule. He's been married four times, and they all fail (it's apparently the woman's fault, however). It's his voice and charm.
- In Mansfield Park, the Bertram sisters' first assessment of Henry Crawford is that he's short and plain, and the narrator notes he's not handsome. On their second meeting, he's still plain, but his teeth are good and his manners are so charming—and on the third they won't suffer him to be called plain by anybody. Henry makes full use of his charms of personality to be an Intentional Heartbreaker, flirting with both Bertram sisters at once and then turning his attention to Fanny when he realizes she doesn't like him at all.
- Eremis in Mordant's Need is described as being balding and not at all conventionally handsome, but he's got enough presence and charisma to make that irrelevant. He doesn't even seem to need a strong social position to make it work — even when he's imprisoned and disgraced, it's mentioned that there's no end to how many gorgeous women turn up to visit him in his cell.
- The Neapolitan Novels:
- Donato Sarratore is by no means a handsome man, but with his facade of a gallant and cultured gentleman, he manages to seduce many women.
- Lila's son Gennaro grows up to be an ugly, overweight, and unintelligent loser. Elena's two older daughters Dede and Elsa are madly in love with him as teenagers, despite being both much smarter than him. Neither Elena nor Lila can understand why.
- Sir Lancelot in The Once and Future King by T. H. White. He is known as le Chevalier Mal Fet, "the Ill-Made Knight", as he is short, bow-legged, and catastrophically ugly, to the point of almost being simian. Still, he gets it on with the beautiful Guinevere, just like the traditional myths. It’s a Justified Trope in his case, though, as he’s dedicated his life to being as much of an ideal knight as possible, making him attractive in non-physical ways that most Kavorka Men don’t manage to pull off, either.
- He also is pursued by Elaine (who was very beautiful when they first met), implicitly because she was smitten with him for saving her. This ends badly for him, as she tricks him into sleeping with her, triggering a huge Heroic BSoD. And she does it later, making him go flat-out mad.
- Arthur Hailey's Overload has Nim Goldman, who's on poor terms with his wife. He looks like a middle-aged Judd Hirsch, according to some covers, and has sex with an absurd number of women over the course of the book, including a quadriplegic who still has sensation. After she dies, he pours out his story about his affair with said woman to a female reporter. She suggests he go home. He says it's too far away. She suggests he come to her place, which is only five minutes away. He barely hesitates before accepting.
- Ainz Ooal Gown of Overlord (2012) is a skeleton with glowing red eyes, a Lack of Empathy for human life, and no genitalia whatsoever. Despite this, he's never lacking for suitors. That being said, most of the women swooning over him are the various monstrous inhabitants of the Great Tomb of Nazarick, who have different beauty standards from humanity and are fanatically devoted to him. Of his primary suitors, Albedo and Shalltear, the former is a succubus in love with him because he rewrote her backstory as a joke (literally minutes before she went from a game NPC to a real sentient being), the latter is a vampire who, being undead herself, has no qualms with his skeletal nature and is attracted to his immense power and authority as the ruler of Nazarick. Some of his "conquests" instead swoon over his disguised persona as the Black Knight Momon, who at the very least appears to be human, although under the helmet he's not particularly handsome either (it is strongly implied that the appearance of his Momon illusion is based on what he used to look like back when he was still a Japanese salaryman).
- Gabe Uglino in the first book of Percy Jackson and the Olympians he's ugly, drunk, can't hold a job, abuses Sally (it's implied he abused Percy too) yet he gets both Sally and Sugar (his grief counselor).
- Nicholas van Rijn from the Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic League. He's immensely fat, has a big nose, lives on strong cheese and beer, and takes snuff by the fistful. He's greedy, gluttonous, lecherous, and speaks his own brand of garbled Anglo-Dutch — yet he's constantly surrounded by lovely mistresses. His vast fortune has something to do with it, but he often seduces women by his sheer awesomeness too.
- A Song of Ice and Fire:
- Tyrion Lannister despite being a disfigured and Depraved Dwarf gets laid far more then you would expect though granted the beautiful woman he sleeps with the most, Shae, is a prostitute taken into his service and moment she gets a better opportunity she takes it and betrays Tyrion. In the show Tyrion is shown sleeping with far more women but here he’s played by the handsome Peter Dinklage so his success with babes is more believable, not to mention Shae being in genuine love with him in this version and betraying him out of jealousy of Sansa.
- Samwell Tarly despite being a overweight loser has the attractive wildling girl Gilly fall for him and become his lover, though of course Sam’s heroism and nice guy-ness compared the sheer abuse she’s suffered from other men in her life plays a large part in this.
- Aegon IV Targaryen despite being described as a king to be a hideous Fat Bastard had countless lovers. Though granted his most noteworthy romantic conquests, such as his super hot cousin Daena whom he freed from the Maidenvault, were when he was younger and just as much a Pretty Boy as most other Targaryen princes. It’s made clear later in life he’s just a Dirty Old Man who used his power to force numerous women whether they were married or not into sleeping with him. In fact by the time of his death Aegon IV was so obese and gross many wondered how his last mistress could even endure his embrace.
- King Shellar in Strange Kingdom Chronicles by Oksana Pankeeva. One of the first things we learn about him is that he is ugly. And until he learned to express some positive emotions, he looked outright frightening. Nevertheless, two women almost go into a fistfight at his bedroom door, Olga admitted that in different circumstances she would seriously consider marrying him, queen Dana actually agreed to marry him if he doesn't mind her being infertile (unfortunately, being a king, he has to) and, when he eventually marries, his wife is a gorgeous Statuesque Stunner, although with a scar from a battle. Neither of those women had any desire to become a queen (except for Dana who already was one).
- Olga could be considered a female example, but Word of God says she is, while not conventionally beautiful and also quite insecure, still quite attractive.
- Gary Karkofsky in The Supervillainy Saga is a somewhat dorky pseudo-intellectual who worked as a bank teller. He's also revealed to have been in relationships with three staggeringly beautiful superheroes and supervillains. It's Justified in text when he reveals his "secret." He treats his girlfriends with respect, works to make sure they have fun on their dates, and tries to make sex enjoyable for them.
- Vorkosigan Saga: Miles Vorkosigan was poisoned before birth, causing him to have abnormally small stature (self-described in the narration as "ahem-mumble-something under five foot"), a bent spine, one leg several inches longer than the other, a too-big head on a too-short neck, and a face prematurely lined with pain from more bone breaks than he can count. He still manages to sleep around with several gorgeous women throughout the course of the series. It's mostly that his sheer charisma and force of personality completely overwhelm his physical appearance once you actually get to know him.
- Berrynose of Warrior Cats. He has no tail, but he does have a huge ego. And she-cats love him.
- In Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher series Geralt as described as sinewy, haggard and possessing a creepy smile. None of this seems to be inhibit him bedding a conga line of beautiful usually magical hotties. It makes more sense in the video games and Netflix series where he’s unmistakably attractive.
- 30 Rock:
- Frank is overweight, sees women as mere objects, has terrible hair, and wears those weird hats. He also has "a lot of irons in the fire." It helps that his preferences run towards fat, past middle-aged women.
- Kenneth is odd-looking, acts weird, has no ambition in life besides working a menial entry-level job at NBC and is effectively asexual. However, when the TGS writer's room play "Sex, Marry, Kill", he's the one that Cerie chooses to sleep with (although the competition wasn't fierce). He's also shown to be irresistible to gay men, and Jenna occasionally shows attraction to him.
- The page image above is of café owner René Artois from 'Allo 'Allo!, who is a fat, middle-aged, balding, greedy, cowardly fool whose noblest aim throughout is to avoid being shot by any of the sides in the war who are using him for their own ends. His waitresses are constantly hanging off him and he has virtually every woman in the cast at some point — and even gets a few guys chasing him. The exception is Resistance leader Michelle, who makes it clear she doesn't know what everyone sees in him (though she pretends otherwise to manipulate him into doing what she wants).
- American Vandal: A Running Gag in the first season has the two main filmmakers keep uncovering the sexual conquests of a goofy-looking classmate and being thoroughly amazed.
- On Arrested Development, Tobias is arguably one, he doesn't go out seeking people, but a lot of people throughout the series just fall in love with him, e.g. Gob's wife, the marriage counselor that he sees with Lindsay, and a CIA agent.
- Franz Bieberkopf in Berlin Alexanderplatz had a string of beautiful women devoted to him despite being an overweight, unhandsome, unemployed ex-con.
- Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory is not exactly ugly but certainly isn’t handsome either, his appearance is often compared to a giant insect. Nevertheless multiple young and beautiful women are shown to be interested in him, which he barely notices most of the time. He doesn’t even have a nice personality; he’s weird, selfish, rude, arrogant, indifferent and antisocial. Most of the women who throw themselves at him appear to be attracted to his intelligence or find his strange quirks charming.
- Film actor Leslie Phillips (see Film above) was given a new lease of life in the 1970s as the star of his own TV sitcom, Casanova 1974, which followed the upper-class cad through a string of increasingly improbable affairs with women of half his apparent age. Phillips played Kavorka roles until well into his seventies.
- Nick Tortelli from Cheers is probably the ur-example — causes Diane to swoon just by standing near her when she doubts his abilities. His ex-wife Carla has a similar power over men in spite of her personality. Though the women Nick seduces are considerably more attractive than the men Carla seduces.
- Colin Fisher on Bones is a morbid, depressed beanpole who lives with his mother when he isn't institutionalized, and yet he manages to find casual sexual partners seemingly at every turn.
- Det. Nick Vera on Cold Case has a succession of women despite being fat, slovenly, and so very, very uncultured, save for that one time he took a co-worker to see Wicked. Hell, outside of his wife, his longest relationship was with Kima Greggs from The Wire!
- Pierce Hawthorne on Community is an elderly, bigoted manchild who can and will screw his friends over if it benefits him in some way. Despite this, he has been married seven times, and in the first season, he seduces the replacement Spanish teacher to convince her to let the Spanish 101 class pass after it turned out Chang had been faking his credentials.
- In the second season he ended up getting engaged to a much younger woman after only one date. Though she turned out to be an agent of corporation trying to pull off a hostile takeover of the company Pierce runs.
- Played for Laughs in Corner Gas, where everyone in Dog River thinks that Brent is the most good-looking man in town, to the point of Attractiveness Isolation as all the women think he is way out of their league. Lacey, being from Toronto, can't understand what the hell is so attractive about an overweight, balding gas station owner who eats his own weight in chili cheese dogs every day. She eventually comes to the conclusion that all of the other men in Dog River are so much more repulsive that Brent looks like the perfect man when compared to them. The other women pretend to agree with her, but as soon as she leaves they dismiss it as a load of crap. Sometime between the end of the series and the movie, Brent and Lacey end up dating anyway.
- French canadian soap opera Des Dames de Coeur featured the serial wife cheating character Jean-Paul Belleau. As a middle-aged man with large glasses and a bad haircut, the irresistible charm of the talented actor playing his role garnered him endless conquests of the many beautiful female characters as well as an enduring status as the show's most popular character.
- Flavor Flav of the hip-hop group Public Enemy, who starred in the VH1 reality show Flavor of Love, where each season, twenty skanks (most of whom are almost half his age) fought over the affections of what must be the most unattractive man on the planet.
- While it was a reality TV show, Flavor Flav is, by the accounts of his bandmates, a musical prodigy and actually a quite genial guy in real life, so he does have some appeal. The fact that he's a millionaire helps.
- Scorpius from Farscape. Creepy, amoral, looks like a corpse in a bondage suit
◊... and has had at least three lovers over the course of the show, and God knows how many more hiding away in his mysterious past. Two of them seemed to be in it for the kink factor.
- Father Ted:
- The Speed parody's villain Pat Mustard, who combines this with Cheating with the Milkman. He's revealed to be sleeping with a significant number of women on his job route, and since he's spending more time screwing instead of his job (plus Craggy Island's primary Catholic ties) this costs him his job when his bosses find out.
- To a less exaggerated extent, Bishop Len Brennan, an elderly, self-absorbed Jerkass who's broken his vows of celibacy with several much younger women.
- Frasier:
- Bulldog, who is short, bald, loud, sexist, racist, and highly obnoxious, yet still manages to score plenty. He seems to be unfazed by rejection, so it's possibly a numbers game for him. Roz has admitted to finding him attractive physically even though she's well aware of him being a pig, and has had several flings with him as a result.
- Despite being financially well off and a brilliant lawyer, Donnie is short, chubby, and not particularly attractive. During the course of the show, he dates Roz, nearly marries Daphne, and ends up with another very good-looking woman. It probably helps that he's ruthlessly good at his job and a genuine sweetheart to the women in his life (even his secretary).
- Daphne's brother Simon is rather homely in addition to being a sleazy, drunken layabout who doesn't know when he's not welcome. Yet he seems to be an expert with the ladies, even convincing Roz to give him a chance. Though this is due to him being a Consummate Liar, and the women he's with tend to quickly dump him once they find out what he's really like.
- A French Village: Raymond is not very handsome, nor particularly charming. Nonetheless, he has no trouble getting attractive women, from his wife to Marie and even his housekeeper, who practically throws herself at him when he's even less appealing (down with an injury from being shot). They marry after Raymond's wife divorces him.
- Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones could be considered this, being a dwarf — something even more discriminated against in Westeros than real life — however, this is offset by his wealth, family prestige, his wit and intellect, and the fact that it's implied nearly every woman he sleeps with is a prostitute. He's only been in a serious relationship with a woman twice in his life, and both times it ended horribly. It's indicated he has large genitals too.
- "Love Me Tender," an episode of The Golden Girls, features Dorothy dating Eddie, a short, bald, and totally bland man (played by John Fiedler, aka Piglet ... or, for those who remember the The Bob Newhart Show, Mr. Peterson) who not only has no personality but is still desperately pining over his ex-wife (on his and Dorothy's first date, he takes her to Roberta's—the restaurant said ex-wife, who is named Roberta, owns). Despite all of that, though, Eddie is a phenomenal lover, and his and Dorothy's relationship is purely physical. When the other girls try to help Dorothy break up with him, they too fall under his spell, and even Sophia leaps into his arms to give him a hickey. Surprisingly, in the end, the writers take the trope apart: Eddie explains that he absolutely hates the fact that he can irresistibly turn on women. He knows that they find him sexually appealing but otherwise a complete nobody, and any woman who's actually worth dating inevitably leaves him because they realize that sex alone isn't enough for a strong relationship.
- Dorothy's ex-husband Stan is not much for looks or charm, but never has a shortage of beautiful women ready to butter his buns. Being an Uncle Pennybags helps.
- Dan Stark from The Good Guys. He's been known to attract women without even intending to, much to the utter bafflement of Jack.
- Dr. Guy Secretan from Green Wing may be a wealthy anaesthetist — but he is also a womanizing jerk who could fairly be said to look like "Donkey" from Shrek. And he believes that women with small breasts aren't worth resuscitating.
- Many a joke on Guy Code is directed at panelist Jon Gabrus
◊ being married to a total hottie.
- Israeli series Ha Shoter Ha Tov (which received a Foreign Remake as The Good Cop) has protagonist Danny Confino. He's short and short-fused, a Cowboy Cop, macho, and average looking at best. However, he bangs an impressive list of women and has boatloads of UST with pretty co-worker Corinne.
- Hercules: The Legendary Journeys: In "Eye of the Beholder", the old and fat Salmoneus managed to score with the 50 Daughters of King Thespius. He had other love interests in other episodes.
- Bolander from Homicide: Life on the Street proves to be the biggest chick magnet out of the main cast in spite of being an overweight, elderly divorcee who's absolutely hopeless with women.
- Much like Wayne Knight's other character, Rick in Hot in Cleveland has had sexual encounters with Melanie, Joy, and Victoria, all of whom find him irresistible.
- In the How I Met Your Mother episode "The Naked Man," a guy named Mitch (who's broke, out of shape, balding, talks about nothing but fantasy football, and it's implied, doesn't have a very impressive male organ) still manages to hook up with Robin and, he tells us, a bevy of past dates by using the Naked Man technique.
- Step 1: Arrange a date with a woman.
- Step 2: Find an excuse to go up to the woman's apartment.
- Step 3: Wait until the woman leaves the room.
- Step 4: Strip completely naked.
- Step 5: When the woman returns, your sheer bravado (and a little bit of pity on her part) will get her to strip naked. And then it's on! (Two out of three times, anyway)
- He admits that he is one of these.
- Barney was originally envisioned as one, being described as John Belushi type, but Neil Patrick Harris got the part.
- Gibby from iCarly. Even though he is chubby, socially awkward, and takes his shirt off at inappropriate moments, Tasha, who is extremely beautiful, thinks he's hot stuff. Lampshaded when Sam wonders aloud, "What is wrong with that chick?", referring to Tasha.
- Frank Reynolds of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is a stubby fat balding man in his sixties who eats garbage, does drugs, treats those around him with callous disregard, and generally seems to be trying to break some kind of depravity record. He's also got a remarkable amount of romantic luck, including a tumultuous (but long) marriage and going steady with a woman young enough to be his daughter.
- Charlie Kelly is a cross between this and a Clueless Chick-Magnet. He has managed to attract tons of female attention, despite being an alcoholic Cloud Cuckoo Lander with horrible odor and sweating issues, among other things. He also usually disregards other women in favor of the Waitress. In Charlie and Dee Find Love, he even manages to win the interest of the incredibly beautiful and wealthy Ruby Taft, though he was only using her to make the Waitress jealous.
- Law & Order: SVU: Cal Cutler from the episode "Bedtime" is hardly an Adonis, yet had several beautiful women fighting over him, going so far as to attack and threaten his wife.
- Life on Mars (2006) and Ashes to Ashes (2008):
- DCI Gene Hunt is "an overweight, over-the-hill, nicotine-stained, borderline alcoholic homophobe with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding" who treats women "like beanbags". The number of times he has spoken to a woman without mentioning something rude can be counted on one hand, and even the people who genuinely like him find him brutish. Tales of his sexual prowess mostly come from himself, but the staggering number of female fans willing to give it up for the Gene Genie possibly makes him a semi-real-life example.
- Alex Drake, protagonist of Ashes to Ashes (2008), falls for him, and let's not forget the boatload of HoYay he has with LifeOnMars protagonist Sam Tyler.
- There was an inversion of this trope with chain-smoking, butch WPC Phyllis Dobbs. She nevertheless refers to herself as a "sex goddess" and has a healthy appetite for it, which even Gene acknowledges in his backhanded manner.
Gene: Does he let his guide dog watch?
Phyllis: His dog's giving your mam one. From behind.
Gene: (to no one in particular) Whatever happened to all the classy birds?
- The Looming Tower: John O'Neill is a middle-aged, pretty unattractive man. He has not just one but two girlfriends (they don't know about each other), both younger and attractive. O'Neill doesn't really even seem extremely charming, yet they both want a committed relationship with him. Judging by how they act, he seems to be quite good in bed though, which may be one reason for it.
- David Cross plays a few of these in Mr. Show (and might be one in real life) as Ronnie Dobbs, Derwin in the Lifeboat sketch and possibly Lee in "Our Secret Love." The former is a lazy, white-trash, boorish celebrity who had his first wife Tammy, also ended up with a second wife played by Jenny McCarthy (and in The Movie has a girlfriend played by Nikki Cox). Terry's inexplicable attraction to Ronnie as well might also be part of this trope. The second had been in a relationship with both a woman and her mother simultaneously, and the latter had an affair with an entire family.
- My Name Is Earl:
- Earl Hickey's got a receding hairline (with what hair he does have being very unkempt), a Porn Stache, and a very average build. He's lazy, uneducated, drinks like a fish, and (until a certain incident involving a winning lottery ticket and the front end of a Cadillac) a selfish, white trash criminal with no redeeming qualities. He is shown to have slept with many women over the course of the series. Ironically, Earl has very little luck with women after learning about karma and turning his life around, seeing it as his comeuppance for being so horrible to women in the past.
- Earl's Fat Idiot brother Randy. He's chubby, he has Perma-Stubble and Messy Hair, has a foul temper, and the IQ of a toaster. And he gets almost as much tail as Earl, even after Earl's Heel–Face Turn. His sweet personality no doubt helps and according to Catalina, he's very good in bed.
- The Nutt House: Dennis, the front desk clerk (played by Gregory Itzin), reels in women like nobody's business, for no readily apparent reason.
- The Office (UK): Chris Finch is an obnoxious, arrogant and sexist bully, and is not particularly attractive, yet he is seen to be reasonably successful with women.
- The Office (US): Dwight. He's weird-looking, creepy, borderline psychotic, but when he bothers to pursue a woman, he's often successful. To the point where he once had an entire WNBA team clamoring for his phone number. This seems to just be an aspect of his hypercompetence.
- That being said, on paper Dwight does have a lot of desirable characteristics, as the show's creators have pointed out. He's tall and strong; while his supposed martial arts prowess is questionable, he has proven to be kind of a badass when called upon; he owns his own land, a country B&B and a team of horses; and while he is weirdly intense, some women find that attractive.
- Stan and Jack in the On the Buses TV series. Both too old and ugly (especially Jack) but always have the hot birds fluttering after them.
- Rumpelstiltskin in Once Upon a Time. As the Dark One he's literally monstrous in appearance, and even in human form he's not particularly good looking, especially in comparison to the people around him. Yet he has had a string of romantic encounters with very attractive women, including as the Dark One, although in most cases those were Evil Sorceresses attracted to his power. Even his pre-Dark One wife Mila was very pretty.
- Parks and Recreation. Jerry is perceived by most of the cast as an ineffectual, bumbling, fat, sad loser. In truth, he has a ridiculously attractive wife, equally attractive children (Chris dates one for some time and feels he may not be attractive enough for her), and a beautiful house. He does claim however that he was a lot slimmer in his younger years (apparently resembling Chris).
- Pataclaun: Gonzalete in canon is stated to have a large nose and be overall kinda weird. That still doesn't stop him from banging many ladies (even beating the self-styled Casanova of the show, Tony).
- Peep Show
- Jeremy. Despite his receding hairline, gap teeth, and a clingy, obsessed personality, Jez is consistently involved with many attractive women.
- To a lesser extent, Mark fits the trope too. While he has encounters with fewer women, he has even less sex appeal than Jeremy.
- VH1's reality show The Pickup Artist was basically the idea of turning average guys with little to no game into Kavorka Men. note
- Spike Thomson from Press Gang, despite being short, not particularly attractive, and insisting on wearing leather jackets and sunglasses indoors, apparently has no trouble both attracting a string of conquests that he uses to annoy Lynda and continually stealing Colin's love interests.
- Jack Klugman as the title character in Quincy, M.E. who, despite being a coroner who lived on a boat and looking like Jack Klugman, managed to score a lot of women.
- This trope is deconstructed perfectly in this Saturday Night Live sketch
. The same man is featured with a new wife
played by Jennifer Lopez, and a new wrinkle is shown — they have an open relationship.
Becker: That's it! That's why you two are together — he lets you step out.
Jacqueline: Me? No, never. But he's got needs that I can't always meet, you know? You can't keep a stallion in the stable. - Seinfeld
- The trope namer is Kramer, where a Latvian Orthodox priest calls his power over women "kavorka" (meaning "the lure of the animal"). Over the course of the show, he's seduced Uma Thurman, a very devout nun, and a lesbian, offering no explanation other than, "I'm Kramer." This was actually Played for Drama on the episode that named it since he couldn't control the effect and almost destroyed the aforementioned nun's life against his own will, as she was willing to abandon the church just to sleep with him.
- George also qualifies; among others, he manages to have a date with Marisa Tomei herself at the height of her prestige/hotness.note This was also repeatedly lampshaded. When George can't have sex with his girlfriend, he gets smarter. Jerry theorizes that George has been devoting most of his brainpower to getting laid, and with that out of the way, he gains a new thirst for knowledge and starts studying textbooks constantly. Eventually, he is able to do things like show up the Yankees by using his knowledge of physics to effortlessly hit multiple consecutive home runs, solve a Rubik's Cube while watching Jeopardy! and getting all the answers correct, and become fluent in Portuguese accidentally just from hearing the cleaning woman at his job speak it. Which indicates that he normally puts a lot of effort towards getting laid. The episode shows that this is true for all men, not just George, but it's probably safe to say he needs to put in more effort than the average man. In one episode, a woman decides to cheat on her husband with him simply because he told her "God bless you" when she sneezed, which her husband never does. When Elaine tries to apply this to her own life however, it's revealed that the opposite is true for women as the chaste Elaine becomes gradually dumber by the hour until she finally gets laid and recovers her slipping intelligence.
- "The English Patient" does this with both George and a rival named Neal who is described as looking just like George but even shorter and stockier yet was dating a woman played by the beautiful Chelsea Noble Cameron who George is able to seduce away from him almost entirely by accident.
- Newman has also been out with some very attractive women. Jerry learns this the hard way when he realizes he is dating one of Newman's exes. Although as horrifying as that revelation was, it still wasn't nearly as bad as learning that he broke up with her for not being attractive enough. The idea that this woman — or any woman, for that matter — is somehow too ugly for who he considers being the most repulsive man on the face of the earth, is too much for Jerry to handle, and he can no longer bring himself to kiss her.
Jerry: All I could think of when I was looking at her face... was that Newman found this unacceptable!Elaine: Maybe there's more to Newman?Jerry: No. There's less.
- Despite being the Trope Namer Kramer actually has the fewest number of romantic pairings of the four main characters by a large margin. He has 27 partners over the course of the show, compared to Elaine's 50, George's 62 and Jerry's 73, although that could've been a question of focus (Kramer does his own thing a lot), and in any case—as noted—George counts as well. Still, for an unemployed "hipster doofus" with no filter on his thoughts and a clumsiness that borders on making him dangerous to be around, he does pretty well.
- Seven Days: Dr. Ballard falls somewhere between this trope and a Chick Magnet, being a nerdy balding guy in a wheelchair who is constantly being hit on by women. He's very smart and has a pleasant enough personality, which no doubt helps.
- Vic Mackey from The Shield: An amoral, malevolent ball of stocky menace, who nonetheless manages to score with a string of women. Taken to an extreme in Season 5 when he seduces the hot wife (played by Gina Torres) of Detective Kavanaugh played by Forrest Whitaker, implying him to also be a Kavorka Man. So essentially Vic Mackey out-Kavorkas another Kavorka man. Impressive.
- Silicon Valley:
- Erlich is a fat, arrogant slob, but he's pretty successful with the ladies.
- The awkward, average-looking Extreme Doormat Jared has no trouble attracting women and doesn't understand why anyone is surprised.
- Deconstructed by Dan Melcher. He's a fat, bespectacled nerd but has been married and/or engaged to three beautiful women. They all end up cheating on him. His second wife appears to have initially gotten together with him out of sympathy/pity after his first divorce; and his third fiance was apparently burned out after a series of relationships with handsome jerks and "settled" for an unthreatening Nice Guy like Dan.
- Cook from the second generation of Skins is forever getting laid.
- One of the central jokes of Son of the Beach is that everyone treats Notch Johnson like a sex god, when he's really a pale, bald, flabby middle-aged schlub.
- Bobby and Tig from Sons of Anarchy go through women despite Bobby being fat and middle-aged and Tig being both abusive and downright psychotic. Tig is good-looking for a man his age, though, and he has bad-boy appeal.
- The Sopranos:
- Tony Soprano is an overweight, chauvinistic, sociopathic criminal and yet sleeps with a variety of very good-looking women (not just strippers/prostitutes from the Bing) such as Irina (and her one-legged cousin), Gloria Trillo, Valentina La Paz, and Juliana Skiff (all of whom look like his mother — and one of whom even acts like his mother at times — adding to the All Psychology Is Freudian aspect of the show).
- Not just Tony; nearly all the mobsters in the show have beautiful wives and girlfriends, despite many of them being ugly, mean, or both. It's implied that the women they're with are attracted to the power they represent.
- Tony's sister Janice is a rare female example, as she gets a surprising number of guys chasing after her despite being a heavy-set woman with an overbearing personality.
- Star Trek:
- Quark in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a short, badly-dressed, sexist pig with humongous ears and scary-looking teeth, but he is usually seen with hot women over the course of the series. He's also an alien Ferengi, however, born into a culture where women are second-class citizens with no rights, so in that sense, he's not unusual. Working around humans and other alien races in which equality of the sexes is a given, however, does make him unusual. Most of the women he is seen with are attracted to his wealth and status (and/or are on his payroll), but a few are genuinely attracted to him. Probably his most impressive feat was landing a Klingon mistress, Grilka. In a society that lauds physical strength and detests the cowardly Ferengi on principle, this is totally unheard of (although what attracted her is his courage and straight-up audacity, which are values in both cultures).note
- There is also the Running Gag of the alien barfly, Morn, always being accompanied by a stunning woman. Supposedly he's a good conversationalist.
- Another joke is Jadzia Dax shooting down any and all advances from Dr. Bashir, only to go out on a date with Captain Boday. One of these men is a handsome doctor with a British accent and (we are led to understand) a long line of sexual conquests. The other has a see-through head. Being Really 700 Years Old, Dax has been around the block enough not to be bothered by Bizarre Alien Biology. She did not, however, ever hook up with Morn; she claims it's because she considered him out of her league.
- Quark's brother Rom is another example: worse dresser than his brother, even worse teethnote , and lacking the rudimentary smarts his brother has — though he does have a knack for fixing things. By the end of the series, he's married Leeta, one of Quark's Bajoran Dabo girls who are definitely hired for their looks. In this case, it actually was frequently commented on, and even Rom was bewildered by his good luck; at one point he had himself half convinced that Leeta just wanted his money, so he donated it all to charity just to make sure.
- Stargate Atlantis: The episode "Irresistible" features Richard Kind playing an obvious con man who has six wives and an entire town eating out of his hand. The main characters can't figure out why he has this effect on everyone and spend much of the episode wondering aloud at it. It turns out that he's been making an elixir from an alien herb that causes him to emit pheromones that no one can resist. Sheppard has a cold and is immune to the effect, which is the only thing that stops all of Atlantis from falling under his spell.
- Played for comedy in Stella, which has a Running Gag where the balding and bespectacled David Wain is irresistible to women.
- Woody Fink of The Suite Life on Deck is, quite surprisingly, no slouch with the ladies. What makes him this and not a Kidanova is his greasy, unkempt curly hair, obesity, flatulence, complete lack of personal hygiene, and extremely underdeveloped social skills.
- Suits: Louis Litt, a balding, slightly overweight man. Despite this, at least one attractive woman finds him irresistible. Like Dwight from the Office above, he's intense, smart, and highly capable. He's also a fairly well-off senior member of a top corporate law firm. The woman in question, Shiela Sazs, also dates another corporate lawyer, but a more conventionally attractive one.
- Olly Reeder from The Thick of It is a weaselly, pale, bespectacled prick who looks like an overgrown twelve-year-old...and over the course of the series beds Angela Heaney, Emma Messinger from the Opposition, and is also depicted as something of a womanizer. This is really very good going in a series that seldom bothers to look at anyone's private lives (because most of them don't have private lives). This does just apply to the character rather than Chris Addison, the actor who plays him; Chris Addison is quite handsome and something of a Bishounen, but underwent a bit of Beauty Inversion to properly play an awkward, constantly-stressed bureaucrat.
- Trotsky: Despite being pretty average looking and not very charming (he's charismatic, though not with them), Trotsky's gets with four different beautiful woman (while marrying two and having children by them) without visible effort of any kind.
- Two and a Half Men
- Alan manages to get together with many women such as Judith, Frankie, Brainless Beauty Kandi, Melissa, and Lyndsey. This is despite him being effeminate, spineless, a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, a Cosmic Plaything, broke, and not really all that attractive. Alan is arguably a deconstruction, since the women he attracts tend to not be very desirable (i.e. older women, women who are emotionally/psychologically damaged, or women who are just all around bitches). Lampshaded in one episode where he met an older woman on a dating site. Her words: "You're male, you're straight, and you've got a job."
- Jake becomes one in later seasons. He's unattractive, immature, obnoxious and dumb as a stone, but manages to hook up with an attractive neighbour, has a threeway with two cute girls while in high school (and at the age of 16, to be exact). He also had sex with a 24-year-old woman, after lying about his age. In season 10, he went out with a 36-year-old who had three kids, one of which was older than him. By that point, he was of age. Lampshaded:
Herb: Who's Celeste?Jake: My girlfriend. She lives next door.Herb: Is she pretty?Jake: She's gorgeous and smart and popular.Herb: No kidding?Charlie: We don't get it, either.Alan: Maybe she's punishing her father.Jake: Let's hope so. - The Wire: Bunk Moreland is fat, kind of lazy, smokes too many cigars, is probably an alcoholic, has one hell of a bad attitude (especially towards women), and rarely has a kind word for anyone. He also regularly cheats on his wife with a succession of beautiful women, who cannot seem to resist his attractions.
- "You'd Be Surprised" by Irving Berlin is about a shy, awkward man who is nothing special to look at or be around socially, but who nevertheless shows every gal in town a good time once one of them lets the cat out of the bag that he's an unexpected Sex God.
- Hilariously played with in the song by Adrián y los Dados Negros "¿Por qué me siguen las mujeres?!"
(translated as "Why do women chase after me?"), where a Kavorka Man is freaked out by all the girls following him and openly wonders what the HELL do they see in him.
- Played for bitter laughs in comedian Bill Hicks' song "Chicks Dig Jerks".
- Calypso singer Lord Melody had the gimmick of being popular with women but considered ugly. A lot of his songs have women thinking he was ugly and wanted him just for his money. He also had a number of fat women who slept with him just so he could buy food for them. It is hard to know how many of his song lyrics are true and how many are not, but he nevertheless had several children in real life.
- As Eddie Murphy stated in his stand-up act, "All you have to do is sing." His Ur-Example is Mick Jagger.
- Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out With Him" is about the narrator's distaste for one of these.
- Argentine party classic ¿Qué tendrá el petiso? ("What does the short guy have?") by Ricky Maravilla has the (supposedly handsome) singer wondering what's with the bald, toothless, ugly short guy that gets all women. It turns out, he has a lot of money.
- Insane Clown Posse has "Boing Boing", where Violent J and Shaggy themselves have no idea how the hell they're getting so many women, not that they're complaining.
- Gorillaz has Murdoc Niccals, the bassist and self-proclaimed leader of the virtual band. Despite being an extraordinarily unhygienic green-skinned Satanist, there's just something so sensual and charismatic about him that leads him to apparently rack up many sexual partners, not all of whom are women.
- Wimpy from Popeye is an overweight, squinty-eyed moocher, and yet can easily sweet talk any lady that he wishes.
- Scott Steiner. Steroided all to hell, loud, abrasive, obnoxious, can't go 5 seconds without insulting somebody, prone to random fits of violence... and he has "freaks" (his female fans) in every town just waiting for him to show up and show them a good time. And that's not even going into the various hot valets he had.
- Greg Excellent, from the US independent scene. A heavy hairy flabby man who is a proud slob. Yet women, even those filled with murderous intent for him, just can't help but lose themselves and kissing him. On the other hand, Excellent can't help it either, it just happens.
- Los Fabulosos. Silver King and El Dandy were both paunchy, not particularly good looking luchadors. Their manager was the absolutely smoking Stacy Keibler.
- Randy Savage (as a heel, since he was single for most of his time spent as a babyface) looked like a well-groomed caveman, wore outfits that looked ridiculous even in the world of pro wrestling, and was an insane, egomaniacal bully who mistreated women. Yet he won the affections of the lovely Miss Elizabeth, Sherri Martel (who, to be fair was a Fashion-Victim Villain and just as ugly personality-wise), Miss Madness, Madusa and Gorgeous George (no, not that one), the last of whom was a stunning blond who was half his age. His charisma helped out a lot.
- Kane is a seven-foot-tall, 300-pound, psychotic monster of a man who is not what most people would consider being good-looking — when not wearing a leather mask, that is. And he's been involved in storylines with quite the share of women in kayfabe such as Tori, Terri Runnels, Lita (although that one didn't exactly start out consensual), and A.J. Lee. And a certain Katie Vick that no one likes to talk about. As Kane himself once said to Terri: "Just because I have a burnt face note that doesn't mean that the rest of my parts aren't working just fine."
- Otis of Heavy Machinery and later Alpha Academy. While he isn't a conventionally attractive man, his kind and fun-loving personality gained him the attention of gorgeous Mandy Rose.
- One of LA Knight's nicknames is, "The Undeniable Kravorka"...despite Knight being a fairly good looking man who keeps himself in great shape.
- The Burkiss Way had the appalling Eric Pode Of Croydon. Despite his grimy malformed ugliness and a voice suggesting several contagious respiratory diseases had decided on a party in his lungs, he still got girlfriends. In one memorable episode, he even morphed into Lady Constance from ISIRTA (see below), indicating that the writers had recognised they were two halves of a split soul.
- In Lady in the Dark, Charley Johnson's female colleagues react with various degrees of offense to his habit of making drunken passes at them. However, he has little trouble getting pretty models to go out with him, even after pinching one on the behind.
- In Love Never Dies, the Phantom who is The Grotesque in the original book and musical not only has the beautiful Christine bare his child and choose him over Raoul here, but Meg is in love with him also and kills Christine so she can try and have him for herself. All of this flies in the face of the original novel, which painstakingly explained Christine is enraptured by the Phantom’s music rather than Erik himself, who she cannot helped but be repulsed by (despite genuinely pitying him) and at one point tries to kill herself when faced with the prospect of marrying Erik and Meg was no less terrified of him. Not helping matters is that the Phantom is a rich socialite here rather than a madman who lives under the Opera house like in Leroux’s original, making the fact he’s deformed in many ways pointless. Of course, Andrew Loyd Webber seeing the Phantom as his Author Avatar does explain this to some degree.
- Actually Older Than They Think as Love Never Dies is similar to Phantom by Susan Kay which features Christine having a night of passion with Erik that gets her pregnant and the fact he looks and smells like a walking corpse somehow not impacting Christine here as it most certainly did in the original novel.
- Pygmalion and its musical version My Fair Lady feature Alfred Doolittle, who's gone through girlfriend after girlfriend despite his grubby appearance, his low-status job collecting trash, and his hedonistic jerkassery.
- Shakespeare's Richard III is a hunchbacked, evil gnome of a man, and yet he woos the lady while simultaneously talking to the audience. Keep in mind that Richard's designs on the throne are in part motivated by his ugliness and poor record with women. ("If I cannot play the lover in these fair well-spoken days, I am determined the play the villain, and hate these well-spoken days.") Literally over her father-in-law's dead body — murdered by Richard's own hand, no less — which, for an extra romantic atmosphere, happens to be still oozing blood from its wounds. Apparently, Anne just can't resist a Magnificent Bastard. Some productions like to play with the idea that Anne herself is ruthless enough to accept Richard's hand just so that she can have a tiara again.
- In Asura's Wrath Deus despite being a wrinkly and pointy nosed looking deity compared to hunky Gods like Asura or Yasha, still inspires deep infatuation and worship from Olga the Aphrodite-esque Sex Goddess. Ironically it’s Deus who is unreceptive to her love, only seeing Olga as a loyal subordinate.
- This potentially applies to the Player Character of any game that has both Character Customization and Romance Sidequests, as you can make the ugliest Gonk possible who easily gets one or more attractive partners into bed over the course of the game. In Fallout 4 you can make the male Sole Survivor an obese freak with some spectacular Facial Horror and his wife a gorgeous babe.
- Jimmy Hopkins of Bully. Part of gaining control over each clique is wooing the top girl in it. He's nice, sure, but there's probably a reason for that. He barely has to do anything except offer a few compliments to get near any girl he wants to start making out with him in public.
- Crusader Kings can have generations of these. Your ruler can have traits that make them an ugly, hideously scarred and/or misshapen with a personality that would make Ivan the Terrible look like someone's favourite uncle, and they can still sire armies of children by multiple wives and lovers.
- Darkstalkers:
- Zabel Zarock (Lord Raptor) is Capcom's Kavorka Man. The Australian zombie lusts after fellow undead and Jiang Shi Hsien-Ko Lei Lei, much to her annoyance. This "relationship" is further explored in Namco × Capcom. Subverted if Zabel is still alive or is able to look like his human self, where he is a good-looking rock star.
- Demitri may be an even better example as the majority of art depicts him as either having the Face of a Thug or an outright Nightmare Face with Scary Teeth but he still has a massive Vampire's Harem and in later media such as the manga, OVA and Namco × Capcom even Morrigan the Sex God succubus wants to boink him as well. Granted some art in the game depicts him as more handsome when not in Game Face and Demitri does have an incredibly muscular physique so Vampires Are Sex Gods seems to be very much at play. In the Udon comics maidens even willingly let him drink their blood and turn them into vampires.
- Deadly Premonition has one in Sheriff George Woodman. He's not particularly attractive including a big scar on his cheek and several on his back, is not an adonis in terms of bodybuild, though he does work out, and is more stout and he's a pretty pompous, self-important man. Yet somehow he gained a lot of people for his cult and has several sexual relationships going on. Including two high school students, one of whom is dating the more attractive-looking Quinn. Though two of those relationships are because the people are deeply in love with him. Still leaves questions.
- Dragon Quest XI has Booga, a Fat Bastard demon who becomes an Abhorrent Admirer towards Action Girl Jade. According to dialogue and in-universe lore, however, he genuinely is considered a Casanova and extremely desirable among monsters, and the boss of Jade's side chapter is one of his jealous ex-lovers.
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, another aforementioned character customization/ romantic sidequests game. Despite the fact that the "romance" in this game has so little substance, intricacy, or overall game consequence that the comprehensive guide only gives the marriage section two or three pages, the company that developed the game is (in)famous for favoring smoothness and balance of mechanics over logic and realism so much that the end results tend to have outrageous and often comic implications (the previous game allowed anyone with an alchemy table to craft a magic potion of fire resistance from two ordinary hunks of cheese). First, none of the potential partners were designed with specifically romance in mind; they seem to have been selected at random across the board from the already-existing characters, from contract-giving guild leaders to minor characters otherwise barely above background-level. Some are old, some young. Their personalities vary wildly. All the races turn up on this list. The entire roster is always available to you, regardless of your character's age, sex, or even of which race you picked, two of which are anthropomorphic animals.
- In order to get the option to marry someone, you first need to do something that impresses them — whether this is fetching some firewood, killing ten bears, besting them at fisticuffs or murdering their ex-lover depends on the person. This, however, seems to be true of every fourth or so townsperson by default.
- Hancock of Fallout 4 is a Ghoul. Which gives him the appearance of a burn victim with no nose and solid black eyes. But travel to any settlement with him, and turns out his Ghoul state does nothing to deter people from wanting to jump his bones. Heck, even the Player Character can romance him.
- Caesar of Fate/Grand Order is so fat as to border on spherical (apparently as a result of a botched summon), but still keeps things up with his old bride Cleopatra, and can usually provoke a blush from most other female characters—keep in mind that pretty much every other character in the game is ridiculously attractive. This one is given some justification, as ever; while Caesar isn't much of a looker, his skillset is based on his status as a great orator and leader, and as such, he is The Social Expert to an almost supernatural degree.
- Mad Scientist Hojo in Final Fantasy VII. Despite being middle-aged and creepy, he is shown to be surrounded by adoring, bikini-clad young women when on his vacation. The backstory also reveals Lucrecia picked him over Vincent. The original game hints that he was a looker but in Dirge of Cerberus he still looked middle-aged and creepy even in his youth and didn't even attempt to hide his repulsive personality. Rebirth at least establishes that the women at Costa Del Sol were hired by the mayor to butter him up rather than having interest in him.
- Final Fantasy VII Remake has Don Corneo. He is an unattractive man, but somehow manages to net himself a new "bride" almost every evening. Once he's bored of them, however, he feeds them to his pet monster. Leslie's backstory and NPC dialogue indicates that many women who find their way into his bedchambers may actually just be down on their luck and tragically resort to becoming his brides in the hopes that a night with the Don will net them enough money to get them back on their feet again.
- Ebisumaru from Ganbare Goemon. This short, chubby, and effeminate guy is very popular with the ladies. The same goes for his Evil Twin.
- Larry Laffer from Leisure Suit Larry is allegedly a Casanova Wannabe, except...well, he's not a wannabe. He's a fortyish loser, he's sleazy and unattractive, and his fashion sense never made it out of the '70s. And yet he tends to score with at least a couple of very attractive women each game.
- In Lunar: Eternal Blue, all of the ladies in Larpa are crazy for Ronfar. While he's not hideous, he's sleazy and certainly below average in looks by Lunar standards.
- Mass Effect: an aforementioned character customization/romantic sidequests game, with the additional feature of humanoid aliens and blue-skinned space babes for partner options. note
- While Claude from Octopath Traveler II is fairly handsome, he's also a complete creep and massive Sadist. He also doesn't seem to do much to actually hide his sleazy nature, as Throné and Ori are both completely disgusted by him when they meet him. But somehow, he's managed to seduce and impregnate "countless" women (the player meets several of his children throughout the game, backing up this estimation), and even managed to get one to leave her current lover for him!
- Curtis, the protagonist of Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, has a girlfriend, another female coworker and a gay/bisexual male friend all attracted to him (and according to the actor who plays, even the Jerkass male coworker who keeps insulting and sabotaging his work does so to hide his attraction to Curtis), even though it's difficult to imagine anyone more generic in terms of looks and personality. It turns out that he's an Artificial Human built from Magitek by Starfish Aliens, so it might not be a natural effect.
- Planescape: Torment: Many female characters, including both female companions, find The Nameless One attractive for some reason. Despite looking like a scar-covered corpse. The game even lampshades this, saying on the back of the box that "despite your scarred visage, women swoon over your animal magnetism."
- Motorcyclist "Heartbreaker" Charles in Pokémon Black and White, an overweight, scruffy, middle-aged man who trained in obscure styles of Pokemon battling to impress girls, and offers to teach them to the player character.
- I'm a heartbreaker. My name... Charles.
- The main character in the Visual Novel Runaway City is blessed with incredible luck, resulting in being able to seduce every woman he meets. The game subverts the normal Unwanted Harem when the Genki Girl, Tsundere, and Bokukko all start to mutate into his favored type of girl just to please him. It becomes even worse when women he would never have a chance with spontaneously falling in love with him the second he expresses attraction to them. This results in him seeing his ability as Blessed with Suck; it makes every conquest he has akin to rape.
- Ernie Eaglebeak of The Spellcasting Series, a scrawny geek in Nerd Glasses that still manages to bed dozens of gorgeous women in his travels.
- Street Fighter:
- Among the World Warriors it appears to be a Running Gag that most of the Gonk or unconventionally cool fighters such as Dhalsim, Hakan and Rufus all
have stunningly
beautiful
wives or girlfriends.
- E.Honda lacks the good looks of fellow Japanese fighter Ryu being a hulking Sumo yet many beautiful women flock to his bathhouse and Ms. Fanservice Chun-Li herself asks him out in IV. Though in other games Chun-Li makes it more clear she’s just interested in making use of his spectacular bathhouse rather than actually dating Honda himself.
- F.A.N.G believe it or not is this, as the sexy A.K.I from SF6 is completely infatuated with him to the same dreamy-eyed extent that Sakura is with Ryu, despite F.A.N.G being a Fu Manchu looking creep.
- Among the World Warriors it appears to be a Running Gag that most of the Gonk or unconventionally cool fighters such as Dhalsim, Hakan and Rufus all
- Super Mario Bros.:
- Mario, a short, eccentric Italian plumber with a round big nose and high Mickey Mouse-like falsetto, nevertheless manages to be a Chick Magnet, especially in the Paper Mario games. Apparently, Pauline, Peach, and in one case, Daisy all dig the 'stache. And the nice guy-ness, too. (Some fans have unique interpretations
of this...)
- Wario, his rival and occasional nemesis, is out-of-shape, stubby little legs, has bags in his eyes, a pink garlic-shaped nose and a crooked mustache while being openly greedy. Yet he still manages to be an accidental Chick Magnet, as Mona, Princess Shokora and even his archenemy Captain Syrup all show differing levels of interest in him. Must be the muscles (and, in Mona's case, Wario's fashion sense).
- Super Mario RPG has Booster, an Expy of Wario's original characterization (a fat, ugly, messy bearded and cross-eyed Manchild who has no touch with reality) who starts the game by wanting to marry Princess Peach only to have a big party, and who leaves after he got the party he wanted. The end of the game reveals he seduced Valentina (a vain villainess with an Impossible Hourglass Figure who usurped the throne of a kingdom before meeting him) only by whispering something at her ear. Whatever it was, it shows that he has well-hidden qualities.
- Mario, a short, eccentric Italian plumber with a round big nose and high Mickey Mouse-like falsetto, nevertheless manages to be a Chick Magnet, especially in the Paper Mario games. Apparently, Pauline, Peach, and in one case, Daisy all dig the 'stache. And the nice guy-ness, too. (Some fans have unique interpretations
- Blitzo from Helluva Boss. In "Spring Break", his friends are shocked to hear he dated a pop star and ask things like "Is she brain damaged?" But he's also charmed a demon prince and any amount of random people at parties. While he could be impressive and count as accomplished if you only count the positive things, he tends to ruin it by acting like a hyperactive, rude (even by Hell standards) and insecure jerk all the time.
- The trope is discussed in Manly Guys Doing Manly Things between Marv, Kratos, the Commander, and Jonesy. Marv is convinced the trope is bullshit. Jonesy claims it isn't and Marv could be one if he wouldn't let his self-esteem get the better of him. The Commander's only response is "Kratos gets girls."
Kratos: Stop using me as an example.
Commander: Stop being an example. - Gary of Ménage à 3 manifested this trope after he started attracting female attention, being a plain-looking geek with a haircut that would fit in an Archie comic from the 70s, and no significant social skills, who nonetheless began to accumulate an accidental harem. However, Art Evolution made him look increasingly toned, in a cute sort of way, while he gained an in-comic reputation as an oral sex master, making his appeal less and less inexplicable as the story progressed.
- Mr. Boop: Despite Comic Alec being drawn extremely exaggeratedly, he has managed to marry Betty Boop, Madame Gina and Samus Aran. Lampshaded in Alec's coma dream when his housemates (Bugs Bunny and Peter Griffin) point out that a guy like him could never be married to Betty Boop.
- Joe in Punch an' Pie. He's a huge guy with an irritatingly uptight manner who nonetheless claims that few women can resist his "charms." The gigantic fistful of phone numbers he gathered in a few hours attests that he is telling the truth.
- Jason from Something*Positive is pretty similar. He has, as Aubrey explains, the right physique to play Santa Claus, and while he can be a really nice guy, he's also known to play horrible tricks on his friends and basically be an egotistical jerk. Still, he gets lots of girls until he gets married. He claims it's because he worked out a psychological formula which allows him to instantly plug into any woman's attraction, though we've never actually seen this process work onscreen. May have something to do with the fact that he has endowments that have been known to frighten webcam girls and offers his partners a contract promising a "minimum of two orgasms per encounter."
- The Walkyverse's Joe Rosenthal is a split between The Casanova and a Kavorka Man: he's got looks, brains, and superhuman strength, but he took an approach that was so direct that it should have earned him a lot of slaps in the face. It never did. This may actually be one of his superpowers, though.
- For some contrast, his Dumbing of Age incarnation has admitted at least some of his game was all talk, and he's made a lot of enemies after his sex list was hacked and leaked, but on the other hand he's canonically slept with Roz, Penny, and Malaya (the latter after the sex list was leaked too).
- Chad Vader. He's an awkward, deformed nerd who works as the day manager in a grocery store and can't survive without his suit, and yet the ladies seem to like him quite a bit.
- Dimension 20: Gilear from Fantasy High Figg’s non-biological dad is a balding, paunchy wood elf who’s usually got yogurt stains on his shirt and apparently a swollen foot. He’s by far the most pathetic Butt-Monkey loser in the world. Yet incredibly Gilear has had relationships with two of the hottest and most badass elven women in the series Sandra Lyn and Hallariel and even Riz’s Fair Cop goblin mom Sklonda became close to him. Although it’s revealed in a crucial moment in the second season that Gilear is in fact “Hung like a horse” (with the armour of Pride getting caught on his penis) which may go some length in explaining it.
- Pom Pom from Homestar Runner seems to be very popular with the ladies for a giant yellow ball with stubby arms...
- Goes both ways with Spoony's Spooning With Spoony. His persona is a smarmy, self-admitted rapist who makes videos about his sexual conquests and enjoys taunting them on how stupid they've been. Out of the six people he's spooned, That Chick With The Goggles, Benzaie and Bennett The Sage loved every second of it. On the other hand, The Nostalgia Critic got roofied and was so traumatized that he was mute for a while, The Nostalgia Chick ended up breaking down in tears and Angry Joe tried to kill him.
Never go drinking with the Spoony One!
- Big Fat Reverend Burn is a highly unattractive, morbidly obese and pizza-faced individual... who talks about his experiences with women almost as much as he jokes about his own weight.
Do you have any idea how awkward it is to make a sandwich while your penis is inside a woman?! No!
- The titular Italian Spiderman is an obese, perverted, misogynistic Jerkass superhero. Doesn't stop him from seducing women and having an entire harem living on his house.
- Josh Macedo, a former blogger from Tumblr, was this at the peak of his fame
, some people have observed that one possible reason for his popularity with women was his outward image of a die-hard male feminist ally. He managed to keep his fame and image until his scandal with underage fans
which completely destroyed his reputation.
- Corbin Scargill of Mix Beer With Liquor And You Will Get Sicker is described as being extremely short, greasy, unkempt, and having a hooked nose, but he doesn't seem to notice, or care, how he looks. His self-confidence rubs off on other people, and few seem to care after spending a little time with him. He has casually admitted that he has been around the block a few times, and his actions certainly attest to possessing a degree of experience there.
- This trope is the principle behind the "Tumblr Sexyman
", the slang for a character that was not designed to be physically attractive, but who still is a sex symbol on art websites because of his demeanor which makes him distinct from the rest of the cast. Examples include Wheatley from Portal 2 (a literal Idiot Ball dubbed by Stephen Merchant), Sans from Undertale (a small, big-boned and chill skeleton man), Spamton from Deltarune (an even smaller Perverse Puppet dressed as a 90s salesman with a glitchy speech pattern), and Jax from The Amazing Digital Circus (a Lean and Mean anthropomorphic rabbit doll who enjoys torturing his comrades in misfortune).
- Zero Punctuation has exploited the "nothing stopping you from making an ugly person in a game with romance elements" variant a few times, including making Shepard "an ugly motherfucker who looked like a cross between Pete Postlethwaite and Thom Yorke." He was also baffled when he added Senor Koquonfaes (a Mii who had abused the face editor to give him a cock instead of a face) to the roster of Tomodachi Life, only to discover him becoming the most popular Mii around and accumulating multiple romantic interests (finally ending up with X from Jam).
- Unlike Butt-head who essentially always fails at attracting women, Beavis from Beavis And Butthead displays an uncanny ability to be this in episodes such as "Vidiots" and "Holy Cornholio," though in both instances the duo's stupidity keep him from "scoring."
- Bojack Horseman is an overweight 50-something anthropomorphic horse who happens to be a washed-up sitcom actor and personality-wise is very cynical, irritable and unpleasant and yet one of the running gags of the show is that he has a very active sex life. It's also made crystal clear that most of his partners were just looking for some consequence-free sex with a convenient warm body that they never have to talk to again, which he is famous for in-universe.
- Granddad of The Boondocks manages to have several relationships with attractive women, most of who are half his age or less. Although as we've seen in flashbacks, he was quite a looker.
- The eponymous Dan of Dan Vs.. He's a short, unkempt, paranoid, violent, foul-mouthed malcontent who lives in filth, enjoys "wanton destruction," and is obsessed with taking revenge on any person, thing, or force of nature who he believes has wronged him, often not caring about anything or anyone besides himself (save for his cat Mr. Mumbles and his friends Chris and Elise, and even this can be spotty.) Despite all of this, some very attractive women take an interest in him. It never works out for one reason or another, but still.
Elise, after Hortense introduces herself as Dan's girlfriend: Wow, Dan, way to go!Dan: Why are you so surprised? The ladies love me.
- Family Guy:
- Brian Griffin has dated a fair number of human women considering he's a dog, both literally and figuratively.
- Chris is sometimes this. Many women (and two guys) have had some sort of attraction to him, despite being fat and looking very much like his father. However, he is still a virgin.
- Glenn Quagmire is an extreme example at times. Other times it's just that he drugs them.
- Bender from Futurama. He's a rude, amoral, alcoholic, kleptomaniac robot who's hooked up with countless fembots and even a few human women, though this may be chalked up to All Girls Want Bad Boys. It's also implied that he's considered extremely handsome by robot standards.
- They also lampshade Kissinger's success when Nixon is lauding his diplomatic skills.
Head of Nixon: Looking like that, he talked his way into Jill St. John's
bed. Enough said!
- Phillip J. Fry can be considered this as well. He's considered a dim-witted, ugly loser (and one episode suggests he has a small penis) but he still manages to get plenty of attractive women without much effort. His nice-guy personality no doubt plays a factor. Another episode implies he's apparently not that great in bed, either... by showing a large group of women (all of whom appeared in prior episodes) at his funeral going "ehhhhhhh...” though granted that was All a Dream by Leela no less.
- They also lampshade Kissinger's success when Nixon is lauding his diplomatic skills.
- With his awkward looks and doglike face, Goofy is not conventionally attractive. Yet the reason why, unlike Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, he has no official girlfriend is because he has had relationships with multiple women, most notably the mother of Max and Clarabelle Cow.
- Peter Potamus in Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law is literally a purple hippo, yet that doesn't stop him from often picking up human women.
- King of the Hill:
- Despite Cotton Hill's advanced age, looks, lack of shins, and extremely unpleasant personality, he still scores with various prostitutes and had at least three serious relationships. When Hank finds out he has a half-brother, he angrily asks how many women Cotton slept with, the answer Cotton gave him being 273. That number is doubtless a reckless exaggeration, but those three onscreen relationships speak for themselves.
- Bill Dauterive is homely, fat, bald, has poor hygiene, zero self-confidence, and a stalker-like crush on Peggy Hill. Yet nearly every episode centered around Bill involves him getting involved with a smart, attractive, successful, kind-hearted woman who genuinely likes him. He usually manages to mess it up by the end of the episode.
- Dale Gribble is skinny-fat, pasty, balding, a chain-smoking drunk and a barely-sane Conspiracy Theorist who betrays everyone constantly. Yet he somehow married the beautiful blonde Nancy (who, to be fair, has been cheating on him for years with the handsome John Redcorn, who is obviously the biological father of Joseph Gribble, though she eventually broke things off with Redcorn after a romantic dinner rekindled her feelings for Dale) and also managed to attract a beautiful female exterminator (voiced by Janeane Garofalo) and some groupies in the episode where he and Bill compete in hot dog-eating contests.
- Buck Strickland is old, fat, and balding, not to mention a corrupt Bad Boss and a general scumbag, yet he pulls in an astounding amount of tail. Even Hank thinks Buck has an irresistible way with women, enough to be impressed when Tammy refuses him.
- Bobby Hill is a kid version of this. He's short, chubby, effeminate, and incredibly immature for his age, yet he has little trouble with the ladies and dates a number of very attractive girls, including Connie, due to his charisma and sense of humor. This is a total contrast to Joseph, who is very handsome but is painfully awkward around women and everyone else to be honest.
- Boomhauer is a downplayed, yet deconstructed example. He is actually a fairly handsome if skinny-fat (like Dale) man (and one episode mentions that he's missing a toe), but he talks so fast that he's damn-near incomprehensible to anyone he isn't friends with, which makes his excellent skills with the ladies somewhat improbable. One episode reveals that his approach is to simply ask out every attractive woman he sees until one of them says yes, getting rejected 23 times in a row before one woman finally agrees to go out with him.
- Hank Hill himself could qualify as this. While not ugly, he's rather average-looking with a beer gut, has a foul temper, has difficulty showing emotion to anyone other than his dog or inanimate objects (such as his truck), is hopelessly devoted to his mundane job of selling propane and propane accessories and has some outdated views on life. Yet he's not only married to Peggy, but has had a number of other women express attraction to him, including Buck Strickland's wife "Miz Liz" and mistress Debbie, and a few minor female characters (one of them being a Fair Cop). Of course, being a Happily Married man, he does not reciprocate the affections of the other women.
- Principal Fakey on Moral Orel. He's not particularly attractive, tends to give horrible advice and make bad decisions, but marries an attractivenote woman (Millie Spraybooth-Fakey) and cheats on her with Nurse Bendy, who many other characters find attractive. The latter didn't seem to get anything out of her affair with him, which might be explained by this trope.
- Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero: Larry has caught the attention of two pretty girls.
- Madame President in "3 Big Problems".
- Lady Starblaster in the episode named after her.
- Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty is an elderly, nihilistic, amoral alcoholic Mad Scientist but has been seen to score with quite a few women (and men and a giraffe). He mentions how in an alternative dimension where they halted the aging process, lots of attractive women wanted to have sex with him because they were fascinated to finally meet an old person. He also had a past relationship with a hivemind called Unity. He was also once married to the mother of his daughter, though the marriage failed at least in some dimensions. For Rick C-137, the "protagonist" Rick the show primarily follows, his wife was killed by another Rick along with his adolescent daughter, preventing the birth of his grandchildren.
- Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. He has been paired with more women than anyone else in the Hanna-Barbera line, including: Daphne (in The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo), Googie and Sadie Mae in the Superstars 10 films, Mei Ling and a clerk girl in What's New, Crystal in Alien Invaders, Madelyn in Abracadabra-Doo, and later even attempted with Velma in the Mystery Inc. continuity.
- The Simpsons:
- Homer Simpson is stupid, obnoxious, lazy, doesn't know how to raise children, and endangered everybody's lives multiple times. Yet Marge still finds him attractive and other women apparently too. (Although, by his own admission, he was rejected by most women before he met Marge, so much that he tries to give Lisa advice on how to tell a boy you aren't interested.) Specifically, the women who have shown him interest were: Marge, a beautiful country singer whose career was kicked off by Homer, a nuclear plant employee who shared Homer's sedentary interests but still had a beautiful figure, Edna Krabappel, Lindsay Naegle and Cookie Kwan. When he was an opera singer, he gained tons of female fans, including one who became his manager just to stalk him. Homer has had tons of these throughout his adult life. That said, he has a very developed music ability, can be surprisingly clever when he bothers to turn on his brain and his loyalty to his family is unbreakable and unswerving, in spite of his innumerable acts of neglect and abuse.
Burns: You seem to have a way with women, a certain—how shall I put it—animal magnétisme.
- Downplayed with Moe Szyslak who isn't the handsomest of males in Springfield and has quite a number of abhorrent traits — on the rare occasions he does manage to get lucky with the ladies, those probably won't last too long. In "Dumbbell Indemnity", Moe falls for an attractive woman called Renee who returns his feelings, only for the latter to leave him after discovering his betrayal of Homer. In "Eeny Teeny Maya Moe", he meets the petite Maya, who is 3-feet tall: his insensitivity goes too far when he starts making jokes about her small size, and she leaves him. In "Pygmoelian", Moe gets plastic surgery and auditions for the "It Never Ends" soap opera as Dr. Tad Winslow, being surrounded by attractive women, only for his surgically handsome face to revert back to being as homely and gonky as before.
- Barney has quite a bit of success with women despite being a perpetually sloppy drunk alcoholic. Notably, in Borrowing the Beatles episode "Homer's Barbershop Quartet," he's the one who dates the band's Yoko Oh No. He also has a pretty flirtatious working relationship with Linda Ronstadt.
- Groundskeeper Willie once somehow managed to get a Swedish bikini model but was more dedicated to his job of raking leaves. Worth noting Willie is built like Charles Atlas underneath his overalls though.
- Homer Simpson is stupid, obnoxious, lazy, doesn't know how to raise children, and endangered everybody's lives multiple times. Yet Marge still finds him attractive and other women apparently too. (Although, by his own admission, he was rejected by most women before he met Marge, so much that he tries to give Lisa advice on how to tell a boy you aren't interested.) Specifically, the women who have shown him interest were: Marge, a beautiful country singer whose career was kicked off by Homer, a nuclear plant employee who shared Homer's sedentary interests but still had a beautiful figure, Edna Krabappel, Lindsay Naegle and Cookie Kwan. When he was an opera singer, he gained tons of female fans, including one who became his manager just to stalk him. Homer has had tons of these throughout his adult life. That said, he has a very developed music ability, can be surprisingly clever when he bothers to turn on his brain and his loyalty to his family is unbreakable and unswerving, in spite of his innumerable acts of neglect and abuse.
- Dizzy (counterpart of Taz, the Tasmanian Devil) in Tiny Toon Adventures. Popular with human teenage girls not because of his looks, but because the ladies always have a great, fun time when they're with him.
- Chode on Tripping the Rift sort of explains this trope by saying that only women's attractiveness is based on looks, and men's attractiveness is instead based on how much money they have. He explains this, of course, as he is happily counting a very large amount of money the crew had just received and adds "and right now I'm one attractive guy."
- Cal from the series Undergrads was made of this trope. Cal was able to effortlessly attract hordes of attractive college girls. Granted, Cal was somewhat handsome and good-natured — in sharp contrast to his rival Rocko, who couldn't get a date to save his life — but he frequently makes a slurping noise while talking or drools and often ends his sentences with the word "guy."
Among other bad habits.
- The Venture Bros.:
- Doctor Rusty Venture — a skinny, bald, hunched, pale Jerkass with enough neuroses to fill a few books — has managed to get a surprising amount of tail. Ironically, he has very little romantic luck when he's trying; whenever he decides to hold off on the terrible pickup lines and cheap suits and opens up a little about his problems, he can be quite the charmer. To wit, Doctor Quym, Sally Impossible, Myra, Nikki Fictel, and Doctor Mrs. The Monarch have all shown varying (and sometimes impressive) degrees of interest.
- The Alchemist is, by his own admission, paunchy middle-aged gay guy with a bald spot and a wrinkled face, and yet manages to catch the eye of the younger and hunkier Shore Leave.
- The former member of Wallace & Gromit is a bald paunchy middle-aged Bungling Inventor with a fairly childish (though friendly) personality and an abiding love of cheese. But of the four shorts and a film that make up the series canon, three of them involve him picking up a new love interest. Admittedly, all three women were relatively close in age to him and one of them was a Black Widow, but it's still a far more common plot for the series than anyone would expect from looking at him.
Female examples
- Maki from Airmaster is (especially in the manga) a large-nosed giantess with a pretty masculine and muscular build in stark contrast to other girls within her series and in other manga and anime. This does not prevent her from being the lustful obsession of multiple guys and Even the Girls Want Her. The anime version of Maki gets some Adaptational Attractiveness compared to the manga though.
- Tomiko from Hajime no Ippo is almost comically homely compared to every other woman in the series whom are all conventionally attractive and there’s plenty of cruel cracks at her lack of traditional beauty. Despite this however her hunky boxer boyfriend Aoki is deeply infatuated with her and they have quite a lot of sex. It probably helps that Tomiko has a very curvaceous body.
- Tomoko Kuroki, of No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, slowly develops into this over the course of the manga. She has No Social Skills to an extreme, is a huge perv and a bit of a maladjusted jerk, and is, at-best, average-looking, with a skinny and unathletic build and permanent Exhausted Eye Bags. And yet, over the course of the series, at least four major female characters, all of whom seem to be well out of Tomoko's league socially, have either definitely fallen for her or have done so in all but name. Tomoko is aware of absolutely none of this.
- One Piece:
- Big Mom is an obese, cruel, insane Gonk. Nevertheless, she has had dozens of lovers over the years (and eighty-five children to show for it). However, the author Oda later draws a sketch for the fans as well as in-story flashbacks that show that during her youth Big Mom was quite attractive. She just got uglier as she got older.
- Catarina Devon, one of the Blackbeard Pirates has a curvy body paired with a Butter Face. She's an extremely powerful individual in her own right, that Even the Girls Want Her.
- Popeye: Olive Oyl is a thin girl with no breasts, a whiny voice, and is a typical Damsel in Distress. Yet Popeye loves her and in the animated cartoons even has to fight off Bluto to protect her.
- Whitney Frost aka Madame Masque, recurring Iron Man villainess thanks to an accident has horrific Facial Horror that we only see glimpses of behind her signature gold mask but from what we see she clearly gives Freddy Kruger a run for his money, yet Tony was still willingly to shower her disfigured face with kisses and apparently sleep with her multiple times (she doesn’t take their breakup well) and Jasper Sitwell is also still attracted to her after she’s scarred. Worth noting that while her face got damaged Whitney still has a dynamite body to extent that Kate Bishop was forced to pad her bra when posing as her.
- Suske en Wiske: Tante Sidonia is a thin woman with large feet, a long nose, glasses, a hideous quiff, and virtually no breasts. Yet there have been men who were in love with her. Though her recurring suitor is the Jerkass Lambik.
- Amander Waller “The Wall” of Suicide Squad fame is a middle aged, overweight battle axe of a woman and yet she’s had surprisingly amount of romantic and sexual encounters with Lex Luthor (a man who’s dated many gorgeous women) unable to resist giving her a kiss when juiced up with a Kryptonite steroid in Superman/Batman and she later has a relationship with Daily Planet owner Perry White. Funnily enough when the New 52 made Waller a conventionally petite comic book hottie, there was an immense outrage from fans who much prefer her as a Brawn Hilda.
- Bianca Castafiore of The Adventures of Tintin. Despite neither being much of a looker nor very compelling company, she has quite a few male characters clearly enchanted, including Calculus and Colonel Sponsz. Granted, Calculus's reaction to General Alcazar's wife Peggy suggests he just may have a very unique taste in women.
- Marvel’s Death, the Love Interest of both Thanos and Deadpool unlike her beautiful Perky Goth DC counterpart is generally depicted as a creepy skeleton in a robe whose feminine attributes such as breasts only make her more disturbing. Yet both Thanos and Wade think she’s an utter knockout and go to immense lengths to woo and sleep with her numerous times. Averted at other times where she appears (aka certain artist depict her) as a dark haired gothic hottie though.
- The Fat Slags from Viz are a pair of overweight Big Eaters who nonetheless still manage to bed quite a few studs.
- Daria fanfic God Save the Esteem a series of unlikely events results in the chubby, bespectacled background character Cindy Brolsma becoming the most popular girl in school by default and being asked out by nearly every boy in school. Cindy is understandably confused but takes it in stride.
- The Warhammer 40,000 fan character Cuddles, of The Ragged Edges, who was created by
random rolls in Dark Heresy and ended up as a seven-foot-tall wire-thin albino mutant with Glowing Mechanical Eyes and More Teeth than the Osmond Family, who speaks like SHODAN and is part of a generally persecuted group. Attraction at that point would probably be verging on Admiring the Abomination, but she's noted in-universe and out for a fairly extensive collection of admirers, flings, and long-term boyfriends, who generally only part with her upon dying in battle (which happens surprisingly often).
- Shannon Mullins from The Heat.
- Winifred Sanderson in Hocus Pocus is subtly implied to be a rare straightforward female example — despite being a buck-toothed, browless, Uncanny Valley Makeup-sporting Wicked Witch (thanks to Bette Midler undergoing significant Beauty Inversion to play the role), with hair seemingly modeled on Elizabeth I’s wildest wigs, most of the adult men in the film treat her as though she’s just as attractive as her sisters Mary (a Big Beautiful Woman, albeit with a nervously contorted mouth most of the time) and Sarah (a Brainless Beauty Hot Witch). The only one who doesn’t is her ex, whom she murdered for cheating with Sarah. The teen boys of the movie, however, find her notably haggish and aren’t afraid to say so, with frequently dire results.
- Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson) from Pitch Perfect, though her success with men is somewhat lampshaded by her confident personality and zany sense of humor. It's also hinted that she's rich.
- Amy (Amy Schumer) from Trainwreck is an average-looking woman with an obnoxious personality who has her pick of the guys. Even gay men want her.
- Bridge of Birds: Lotus Cloud, the so-called "most expensive woman in China" looks like exactly what she started out in life as — a broad-footed, flat-faced peasant, so plain as to make a mud fence look attractive. The hero/narrator looks at her and finds himself wondering why anyone wastes any time on her When She Smiles directly at him — he immediately throws himself to his knees at her feet and wraps his arms around her thighs, declaring his unending love and devotion to her. She nicknames him Boopsie.
- Sugar in The Crimson Petal and the White is described as having "mannishly large" hands and feet, no curves, and a non-contagious yet incredibly obvious skin disease which causes her body to be permanently afflicted with angry red stripes. Yet she not only finds lucrative work as a prostitute but becomes incredibly popular with wealthy and intelligent clients since she's one of the few women who provide good companionship and can interact with them as an intellectual equal. In the TV adaptation, however, she's played by the very attractive Romola Garai.
- In The Flea Palace by Elif Shafak, Edith is not only this but also a Millionaire Playboy. She uses her wealth to welcome a crowd of men to her house (prefers intellectuals) and they're fascinated for no known reason and want to sleep with her although she's extraordinarily ugly.
- Myrtle Wilson of The Great Gatsby is described as being rather fat and not particularly attractive physically, but possessed of a burning vitality and gregarious personality that makes her a joy to be with.
- 30 Rock: It is once lampshaded that Liz Lemon is a female example of this trope. She is usually made out to be ugly and unattractive or having a poor personality, and yet she certainly has had a lot of conquests.
- Sadie from The Awkward Compilation is fat and also a huge bitch, but has no problem getting guys due to her family's wealth.
- Leslie Winkle from The Big Bang Theory as she is rather average looking with an unlikable attitude, and yet Leonard and Howard went out with her for a while and she boasts about having slept with different people in the majority of the time she appears. Leslie is somewhat plausible in that she's usually just after a one-night stand, is a woman who's willing to go to some effort to pick and seduce men who think they have no chance at sex period, can control her personality long enough to get sex, and that most of those men would find not just her intelligence but her sarcasm attractive as long as it was aimed at somebody else.
- Even pushing 60, Kathleen Turner is gorgeous. However, in Season Three of Californication, her performance as Sue Collini is deliberately off-putting, at times evoking Nick Tortelli in a skirt. This turns her extended cameo into a triumphantly flaming ball of distaff Kavorka.
- Carla Tortelli from Cheers is neither easy on the eyes nor a warm, friendly person, yet she has several children, some of which weren't by her ex-husband either.
- Mimi from The Drew Carey Show is obese and slathers on makeup with a trowel (not to mention being kind of a sadistic Jerkass), yet has a long list of sexual conquests, including no less than three famous rock musicians, one of whom she was married to for a couple weeks. This was lampshaded when a woman she briefly hired for a "Mini Mimi" joke showed up again in a later episode and revealed she had ended up maintaining the look when it inexplicably led to her getting more partners.
- Jennifer Putnam in the Franklin & Bash episode "Jennifer of Troy," a middle-of-the-road plain-Jane who turns heads through her confidence and charm. She sues a men's magazine for wrongful termination because she believes they were intimidated by her beauty.
- Frasier: Maris Crane, all the more impressive given she never appears in the flesh. She's a spoiled, selfish, demanding, quite possibly out-and-out mentally disturbed woman who many times is said to be not remotely conventionally attractive, being dangerously underweight and so thin and tiny she can hide behind breadsticks... and yet twice she has men inexplicably attracted to her regardless. The second time outright baffles Niles, because the man in this case gushing about Maris is her marriage counselor, and yet he's talking about how warm and caring Maris supposedly is (Niles wonders if there's just some mistaken identity going on. There isn't).
- My Mad Fat Diary: Rae herself, who despite being overweight and homely, is shown interest from Archie, Finn, and Mrs Dewhurst.
- My Name Is Earl: Patty The Daytime Hooker. She's a Hollywood Homely Streetwalker who is obviously in her 40's or 50's, and she's very open about being a prostitute. Yet she's slept with every straight and bisexual man in Camden...and all of them enjoyed it (even when she turned out not to be the comely young beauty in her newspaper ads).
- One episode of Nip/Tuck has an overweight nudist as an example of this trope. She seduces the notoriously shallow Christian Troy, giving him the best orgasm he's ever had (and he's had a LOT of orgasms, in-universe).
- The Office (US): Meredith, arguably the least attractive female Dunder Mifflin employee but really gets around.
- Orange Is the New Black: Big Boo, a self-professed diesel dyke, is neither beautiful nor a particularly endearing person, she still ties the other skirt chaser Nicky in a contest for most women screwed. note
- An episode of The Shield features an overweight, homely, trashy young woman who nevertheless has two men fighting over her. It's possible it was a Race Fetish thing, as she was white while they were black, and she would also financially support whichever one she was currently sleeping with. She enjoyed playing them off against each other and would alternate between them every couple of months, but the one she dumped would still desperately pursue her. This ends up backfiring on her, as she and one of the men are found murdered by the other man.
- Strangers with Candy: Despite being uglied-up and middle-aged, Jerri Blank manages to snag a number of teenage love interests at Flatpoint High.
- In Egyptian Mythology, the goddess Tawaret takes the form of a hippo with saggy breasts like those of an old woman. Yet she has multiple lovers (most notably Sobek), and she is always pregnant. So she must have been doing something right! note
- Recurring character Lady Constance deCoverlet in I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again. Described as utterly hideous and with a screeching voice partway between Lady Bracknell and a sexually compromised duck, she still manages to get her man, if only by sheer persistence. Voiced by Tim Brooke-Taylor, she was a firm audience favourite.
- As noted above, this potentially applies to the Player Character of any game that has both Character Customization and Romance Sidequests, as you can make the ugliest Gonk possible who easily gets one or more attractive partners into bed over the course of the game.
- One sidequest in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! is testing potential beaus for Nurse Nina, whose Animesque, Leia-resembling vending machine portrait turns out to be...somewhat misleading when you meet her in person. Despite this, three men seem interested, with two of them only breaking off their pursuit when they discover that the "testing" involves a Vault Hunter trying to kill them.
- Mass Effect: an aforementioned character customization/romantic sidequests game, with the additional feature of humanoid aliens and blue-skinned space babes for partner options note
- Medieval II: Total War: Princesses who have the "Flawed Features" or even "Hideous" traits can nevertheless have a high Charm score. That is, even though they're considered physically unattractive in-universe, they can still make up for it with other traits (such as intelligence, loyalty, diplomatic skill, charisma, courage, passion, warmth, humility, etc) and thus stand a good chance of finding a suitor.
- Mileena from Mortal Kombat is the Kavorka woman of franchise, as when it comes to her face she is famously quite hideous due to her mouth which depending on the game/timeline is either a little unpleasant
or absolutely nasty
and she gets frequent cruel remarks at her expense from other characters regarding her appearance. Despite this, Mileena has had more sex than everyone else in the franchise having boned Baraka, Tanya, Reiko and Goro and given birth to least one daughter in her MK11 ending. Of course, there’s no getting past the fact whatever her face may look like, Mileena is still built like a goddess from the neck down, so her conga line of partners isn’t so shocking.
- This is possible in Skyrim. While it's theoretically possible to make a fairly attractive PC of any race, most don't. This leads to the fair people of Skyrim all lusting after a grizzly, heavily scarred weirdo wearing dragon bones, which also allows for female examples. note
- In the Dragon Ball Z Abridged universe, Dodoria (who here is Gender Flipped), despite having a Gonk-like appearance compared to the other aliens, is regarded as the most beautiful and fertile woman on her planet (before Freeza blew it up). And for what it's worth, in HFIL she's implied to be sleeping with Raditz.
- 101 Dalmatians: The Series: Cruella is a female version in the finale. She's portrayed as not being traditionally attractive and with a horrid attitude. Men have usually been repulsed by her throughtout the series, but in the final episode, nearly every male character she's encountered as confessed their love to her and wish to be married.
- Detentionaire: Greta Von Hoffman is chubby, has a Big Ol' Unibrow, and is a member of one of the less popular cliques at school (the Mathletes). Despite this, she manages to be at the center of two different love triangles over the course of the show, with one of her admirers being a popular football player.
- Family Guy: Meg is sometimes a strange example. Although guys are normally disgusted by her, she sometimes gets dates like it's nothing.
- Hey Arnold!: Helga G. Pataki has had at least four boys fall for her over the course of the series (Brainy, Stinky, Arnold's creepy cousin Arnie, and eventually Arnold himself). This is despite the fact that she's scrawny, physically unattractive (Big Ol' Unibrow, potato nose, billy goat-like ears, large overbite, and questionable fashion choices) and a bully. While Helga does have a Hidden Heart of Gold, only Brainy knows this from the start and Stinky and Arnie never find this out. Arnold doesn't think much of Helga at first due to her always bullying him to cover up her massive crush on him, but over the course of the series, he gets to know the real Helga and by Hey Arnold! The Jungle Movie they officially get together.
- The Simpsons: Patty and Selma. Many Springfieldians consider them to be ugly and both have very unpleasant personalities, yet they have dated many people over the years, especially Selma, who's been married to many men.