Give Geeks a Chance

The geek shall inherit the Earth.

Betty: Are all nerds as good as you?
Lewis: Yes.
Betty: How come?
Lewis: ‘Cause all jocks think about is sports. All nerds think about is sex.

— Revenge of the Nerds

A trope common in Romantic Comedies and Teen Comedies, in which a dork, geek, or Stereotypical Nerd ends up with the totally hot babe. Generally, the geek begins the story as an outcast to whom the beautiful girl would never be attracted. He may be a band geek, a scientist with all the social graces of a tube worm, or a D&D player who still lives in his mom's basement. And through the course of the story, she begins to see through his socially awkward exterior to the decent, love-worthy man within.

Often, the guy will be smitten with the girl the first time he sees her. She, on the other hand, won't be attracted at first, and will often fight the attraction later on in the story. Eventually, despite whatever Three's Company-style misunderstanding crops up (and it will; you can count on it) she comes to realize that there is more to the geek than his pocket protector and love will bloom. It is never Love at First Sight for the babe, in any case.

Related to Ugly Guy, Hot Wife, and subject to the same Double Standard as traditionally for women in media, looks are the only thing that does and ''should'' matter. If a Hollywood Homely geek girl (or Hollywood Homely non-geek girl, for that matter) sets her sights on a hot guy, she might be able to win him over if she gets a makeover or takes off the nerdy glasses to reveal she was Beautiful All Along. But it's more likely she'll just be the Abhorrent Admirer who makes him run away in terror, hence why this trope is beginning to experience some backlash lately. That said, Single Girl Seeks Most Popular Guy stories do sometimes feature a nerdy girl pining for and eventually ending up with the hot Big Man on Campus, replete with scenes where the nerd girl marvels at how a guy like that would notice a girl like her.

Also extremely rare is the male geek that actually considers a similarly geeky girl, due to the latter's rarity in media in general, unless the geeky girl is a "nerdslut" who Really Gets Around with nerds in general, in which case she's at best a second choice in comparison to the hot babe. This holds even for works aimed at a female audience, and therefore any nerdy girl will eventually be revealed to be Beautiful All Along.

In general, this is slowly becoming obsolete as the terms "nerd" and "geek" become less pejorative, and "nerdy" interests in general are becoming increasingly more mainstream.

Compare Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl and Nerd Nanny. See Nerds Are Sexy, Endearingly Dorky, and Geeky Turn-On for when the attraction isn't despite nerdiness, but because of it. Contrasts with All Girls Want Bad Boys. Often overlaps with Just Friends.

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Example subpages

• Films — Live-Action
• Live-Action TV

Other examples

Advertising

• A Go Daddy Super Bowl ad once had a smoking hot model making out with a nerd (who turns out to also play one of the background geeks from The Big Bang Theory.) The reaction to it was pretty much universally negative, mainly because of the apparently intentionally disturbing close-ups and sound mixing.

Anime and Manga

• The ending of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt has "Geek Boy" Brief finally having sex with Panty. It helps that he turns out to be Beautiful All Along. However, after the final battle, their relationship seems to be the same (IE he's still the No-Respect Guy), though at least Panty starts using his name.
• In Bamboo Blade, the character Miyako Miyazaki dates and is very in love with Dan-kun. He has a head like an acorn, she sparkles.
• What the Wife did in Spotted Flower and likes to make the Husband remember that so he can be more confident in himself; despite being a hardcore otaku, he got a girlfriend, had sex with her, they married, and now she's expecting their child.

• Gender-Flipped in Vandread, where geeky mechanic Parfait is paired with Bishōnen doctor Duelo. The idea is that since both sexes are re-learning about each other, the normal social divide that would say he's out of her league doesn't exist.
• Variable Geo: We never see how it starts, but it's clear that Reimi Jahana is secretly involved with her personal assistant, geeky Washio. Such as when Chiho happens upon Reimi's private rooftop rose garden and finds them making out with each other.
• This is the basic premise of I Can't Understand What My Husband Is Saying, where an ordinary woman is Happily Married to a hardcore otaku (as happily married as you can be when, 9 times out of 10, she has no idea what he's talking about).
• The beginning of Tokyo Ghoul plays out like this, with nerdy and shy Ken Kaneki smitten with a beautiful and mysterious woman that frequents the same cafe. His best friend advises him to give up because she's completely out of his league and a bookstore date is a terrible idea. But Kaneki manages to work up the courage and scores a date with the beautiful Rize Kamishiro. The two have a fantastic time and he walks her home, before mustering the courage to ask her on a second date. Rize admits that she's interested in him as well ...as a meal, that is. Turns out, Rize is a ghoul and she likes to eat her dates.
• My Hero Academia features Girl Next Door Ochaco Uraraka crushing hard on nerdy and geeky Izuku Midoriya/Deku who mostly reciprocates the attraction, especially after she's revealed to have a particularly shapely hourglass figure when she wears her skintight costume. But given just how shy and awkward both are around each other, they remain Just Friends for now, even though it's quite clear from their interactions that both care deeply for each other in ways that are beyond platonic.

Comic Books

• Spider-Man
  • Peter Parker started out in his teenage years as an average-looking nebbish guy in glasses with an interest in science, burdened by poverty and taking care of his aunt. But he still managed to date three bombshells before marrying Mary Jane Watson, one of the most beautiful women in all of comics.
  • His cause is helped by the fact that after Steve Ditko left, his original plain and average features were altered by John Romita into a more handsome face and muscled body intended by Romita to suggest that College-Age Pete had grown up but on account of Romita's background in romance comics, ended up making Peter really really good-looking. In the movies, Andrew Garfield is closest to the handsome Peter while Tobey Maguire and Tom Holland are Ditko-Peter.
    And to his great surprise/It seems she prefers guys/Who can kiss upside-down in the rain.
  • This hasn't gone uncommented — Pete's friend Johnny Storm (otherwise known as The Human Torch) has pointed out the sheer number of gorgeous women that Spidey has dated, including Gwen Stacy, Mary Jane Watson, and the Black Cat (although Black Cat is more about Spidey than Peter).
  • This trope has become increasingly irrelevant as the decades have passed. Nowadays he's presented less as a geek and more like a smart but normal guy, so love interests like MJ don't seem so out of his league.
• Spider-Girl has a Gender Flip, though not with the main character—the real reason why Moose keeps clashing with the title character's nerdy friend Jimmy? He sees Jimmy as competition for their other nerdy friend, Courtney, whom he has a crush on. Played Straight when Jimmy hooks up with Heather, though.
• Amadeus Cho, the 7th smartest person on Earth (as verified by a soap company - oh, and Reed Richards). Managed to win the heart of a Perky Goth Amazon Gorgon girl. It must be noted that the looks are (kind of) inverted, as the aforementioned Amazon Gorgon got her looks from Medusa, while Cho is always drawn quite handsomely.
• Dr. Victor Fries was quite the shy, timid, and introverted scientist, but that didn't stop him from marrying the beautiful Nora. And they lived happily ever after.
• Runaways provides a rare Gender Flip: short, chubby, average-looking nerd Gert ends up with tall, blond athlete Chase.
• Elongated Man Ralph Dibny's marriage to Sue is depicted in this manner on occasion. Although The Flash was Central City's premier hero and got most of the town's adulation, when Sue met them both for the first time when Flash and Ralph both appeared together at a society function, she was clearly enamored of the more gangly Ralph.
  "He came by at the end to get me out of there. It was like trying to compete with Sinatra. But that's why ice cream stores don't just sell chocolate and vanilla. Every once in a while, someone walks in and orders butter pecan."

Fanfiction

• In What She Wants, a story in the Facing the Future Series, this trope is prominent when Sydney Poindexter hooks up with Desiree, the Wishing Ghost, with it lampshaded by Tucker.
• In the Discworld of A.A. Pessimal, canonical character Ponder Stibbons is pretty much the resident super nerd, a scholarly research wizard with an intellectual bent. Being forced out of the university to do hazardous and practical things in real life does not appeal to him very much but it is his fate that these excursions happen with depressing regularity. On one such mission he encounters Action Girl, Assassin Johanna Smith-Rhodes, who is seemingly his complete opposite and well out of his league. He discovers Johanna has her own deep-down inner geek. She appreciates his competence in a crisis. Romance happens. ^note Eventually - after a few years - it results in marriage and children. At the time of writing, their daughters are beginning to show their potential to move and shake things.
• Very common in Total Drama fanfiction, especially if it's about Cody.
  • Author Rufus T. Serenity is certainly a fan of this trope. Many of his Total Drama fanfics feature the geekier contestants (Cody, Harold, Cameron, etc) having girls considered far out of their league (Lindsay, Heather, Bridgette, etc) coming onto them.
    • Dreams Scented of Coconut and Apple: Lindsay moves to Cody's school and quickly becomes friends with him. When Tyler breaks up with her after forgetting his name one too many times, she starts trying to convince Cody to make a move on her.
    • Three Tests of Valor: Lindsay reveals to a shocked Harold that she is far more attracted to geeks and nerds like him than she is to the jocks that she is supposed to be into.
    • Second Chance at Love: After everybody else from the show hooks up, Lindsay and Leshawna realize they both have feelings for the last single guy left, Cody and both love him so much and are such good friends that they'd rather share him than leave one of them single.
    • A TDA Love Triangle with Betty, Cody, and Gwenny: Bridgette and Gwen both find themselves slowly developing feelings for Cody after their respective breakups with Geoff and Trent, creating a love triangle.
    • Lunch Date with a Goth, an Indie Chick, and a Wide-Eyed Bubble Boy: Gwen and Zoey playfully tease Cameron about this, about how he had been hinted as a possible couple for either Gwen herself or Courtney.
    • Unbreakable Red Silken Thread: Heather, the girl whose tag on Total Drama Island was 'The Queen Bee' decides to date Cody, the guy whose tag on the show was 'The Geek'.
    • In The Meek Shall Inherit The Babes is a fic all about the shows geeks hooking up with the shows babes.
  • The Kobold Necromancer also features this trope in his work, although not quite to the same extent. In particular, he LOVES shipping Harold with Bridgette; if the two aren't an actual couple (or in the process of becoming one) in one of his stories, then chances are they will be part of a major Odd Friendship with numerous Ship Tease moments between them.
  • Total Drama: Cody's Redemption has an older, miserable Cody being sent back in time into his younger self to before season one of the show started so he doesn't end up like he did. The changes he makes not only makes him a lot more friends but also gets him the romantic attention of Lindsay.....and Bridgette.....and possibly Courtney.
    • Gwen however averts this in the worst possible way. Despite Cody being nothing but nice to her ^note  He knows better from future/past experience that she will never be interested in him, so doesn't even try to pursue her romantically and even getting her and Trent together, she can't stand him on principal because he is a geek, and as far as she is concerned all geeks are creeps and perverts who only pretend to care about girls to get in their pants.
  • This is the entire point of A Codette World Tour - to develop a romance between the scrawny, tech-savvy Cody and the beautiful Granola Girl surfer Bridgette. However, getting to that point is easier said than done when Bridgette believes Alejandro to be the man of her dreams...
  • In Candy for Your Thoughts?, Cody develops a romance with the attractive, uptight, overachieving Go-Getter Girl Courtney due to the whole fiasco surrounding Duncan cheating on her with Gwen.
• Arrow: Rebirth: Sara Lance has slept with the likes of Oliver Queen, Dick Grayson, and Nyssa al Ghul. The guy she ends up falling for, though? Barry Allen.
• Doing It Right This Time: Mari Makinami has a Fun T-Shirt with this trope printed on it, which she wears when... not technically going on a date with Kensuke. The implications are not lost on him.
• Mortified:
  • Princess Dorathea and Sydney Poindexter have a strong friendship that later blossoms into a romance.
  • Star is revealed to have a crush on Mikey. They also develop a friendship, with a vague implication that they might be dating.

Film — Animated

• A Bug's Life: Flik is a bumbling inventor and Princess Atta is the Queen Ant's gorgeous but stressed-out daughter. While it's strongly implied that Flik has liked her all along, Atta's just annoyed and frustrated with him since his inventions often cause more problems for the colony and injury to herself. No surprise, she warms up to him over the movie.
• Milo and Kida from Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Milo fits perfectly the nerd description being lean, with glasses and a bookworm; Kida even lampshades it when they met:
  Kida: You are a scholar, are you not? Judging from your diminished physique and large forehead, you can be suited for nothing else!
  • Kida herself is a princess in a Stripperiffic outfit, (for the standards of the era) but she soon learns to appreciate Milo. She always had an interest in him though, because he can read her forgotten language.
• Played straight with Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon. He's smitten with Astrid first thing, but she is largely indifferent to him until she finds out his mind-blowingly cool secret and, more importantly, how brave and principled a warrior he actually is. Unlike most examples of this trope, however, Hiccup is far from bad looking.
• Averted and played straight in Megamind: Intrepid Reporter Roxanne Richie's camera guy Hal is introduced as a painfully awkward nerd who is completely in love with her, but she just sees him as a workmate. Later, after he gets superpowers and makes his move, he's revealed to be an Entitled to Have You Psychopathic Manchild who doesn't take rejection well. Just because he's a nerd and likes her doesn't automatically make him a good person or secretly the man of her dreams. However, Roxanne eventually falls for Megamind, who's quite the "dweebie intellectual" himself.
• Doctor Doppler and Captain Amelia in Treasure Planet. He's a bespectacled doctor in astronomy and not quite fitted for adventure. Thus he and the Captain develop a Belligerent Sexual Tension until they're kidnapped together and begin to warm up.
• The Ship Tease of Po and Tigress in Kung Fu Panda: the roly-poly overenthusiastic Ascended Fanboy and the Amazonian Beauty action Cat Girl. He may be geeky, but he proves in both films that he can succeed where she fails. In the first film, it's by being his own wacky, clumsy self. In the second, he masters a highly-advanced technique in a matter of days or weeks, a feat that took Master Shifu many years.

Literature

• All-American Girl (Meg Cabot): Downplayed at the end of the first book. Lucy, her fellow cheerleaders, and Kris all start dating smarter and geekier boys due to how Samantha dating the studious and artistic David has made it seem cooler. However, as Kris shows in the sequel, this doesn't automatically make all of the girls shed any previous bad attitudes. Lucy also breaks up with her now boyfriend pretty quickly, although she later goes on to date the equally studious Harold in the sequel (where the trope is actually inverted because she develops a crush on him first).
• Black Tide Rising: Billy, the protagonist of the short story Ham Sandwich, recalls how lucky he felt in high school that his pretty, popular girlfriend Cindy liked him, an overweight kid obsessed with electronics.
• The Hunt for Red October:
  • It is stated that Jones, the sonar technician of the USS Dallas, because of his nerdy looks and knowledge, gets enough action on the beach to "wear down a squad of marines".
  • Oliver Tyler, a former nuclear submarine officer (retired after losing most of his left leg) and computer nerd, though also a former American football player, has "five and two-thirds" children with his wife, "making up" for lost time while a submariner.
  • The latter bit about a male geek never pursuing a female geek is subverted in the later book, The Cardinal of the Kremlin. Major Gregory, a huge geek and the head of the book's US SDI program is in a relationship with another, female geek, who specializes in mirrors, which Major Gregory uses in his laser defense system. A match made in Heaven. If the universe, a certain jealous lesbian, and the Russians didn't conspire against them, that is. It all turns out fine in the end, though.

• Harry Potter being set in a British Boarding School generally doesn't quite have the same coding, and many students tend to be Academic Athlete in general:
  • Ron and Hermione reverse this. By Prince, Ron's technically a jock, and Hermione's still a geek. Not to mention Cormac, who is also a good-looking Quidditch player (though it's subverted in that Hermione thinks he's an idiot and only dates him once, to annoy Ron). Before that, there was also Goblet of Fire, when the popular and athletic Viktor Krum is smitten with Hermione, but Krum is also an Academic Athlete and a brilliant and talented wizard in his own right. Ron was also an Insecure Love Interest who felt overshadowed by Harry, even if Harry wasn't an especially brilliant student himself, and was likewise a sports player.
  • Harry felt this way in Goblet of Fire in the small Love Triangle between him, Cho, and Cedric. Cho and Cedric were both Academic Athlete, highly popular, and quite smart, while Harry was a younger famous celebrity with little experience in talking to girls (other than Hermione), and who was also resented by Hufflepuff House for overshadowing Cedric who got selected by the Goblet out of merit. Despite everything, he and Cedric actually become good friends.
  • Some of this dynamic is there in the Love Triangle of Snape, Lily, and James. All of them were brilliant students but Lily and James were popular and socially charismatic while Snape was asocial and unpopular. Nonetheless, Lily and Snape, owing to their childhood friendship, remain friends, and Rowling stated that if Snape had never gotten into the Dark Arts and the Death Eaters, a romantic relationship might have developed between him and Lily. She only dated and married James long after her friendship with Snape was over, thanks entirely to him.
• Percy Jackson and Annabeth Chase in Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Again, Percy is not so much a geek as he is the new guy. Once he gets used to being at Camp Half-Blood, they settle into a more Battle Couple style of coupledom. Arguably inverted, since Annabeth's much more of a geek with her architecture than Percy, who starts to develop into more of a jock with his swordsmanship.
• Another gender-inverted example is good-looking, popular athlete Calvin and bookish, frumpy Meg from Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quartet who eventually get married. (Although A Swiftly Tilting Planet implies that Meg, like her mother, grew up quite nicely from her 'awkward geek' teenage years.)
• In Rachel Flynn's Messing Around, Thadeus talks about how his similarly geeky father is writing a romance novel. From the brief excerpt we see of it, the novel invokes this- with no small amount of Wish-Fulfillment on the side. (In this case, it's the hot girl who notices the clumsy, bookish guy, not the other way around.)
• In Heart of Steel Alistair is a super-intelligent Cyborg Mad Scientist. Julia is less intelligent but smart in her own right, minus the madness. While he is instantly smitten with her, she spends more than half the novel getting to know the man under the metal before she ultimately warms up to him.
• In Skippy Dies, the decidedly geeky Skippy falls in love with Lori, a stunningly beautiful and popular girl. Despite being repeatedly told she's out of his league, they end up dating and Lori does actually love him back. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a Destructive Romance, as Skippy's competing with the deranged drug dealer Carl for her affection. Lori ends up cheating on Skippy, contributing to his suicide.
• Jumper stars Davy, who grew up with no money, dressed in second-hand clothes and brown-bagging bologna sandwiches, but spent every moment he could reading, even when it got him beaten by his abusive father. Davy courts and eventually hooks up with beautiful college student Millie, and when they finally sleep together, she questions whether it's really his first time, the implication being he did very well. Davy replies that he's very well-read.

Music

• The song "The Geek Gets The Girl" by American Hi-Fi is made of this trope.
• Played with in David Bowie's Short Film Jazzin' for Blue Jean. His dorky protagonist Vic tells his frosty dream girl a Celebrity Lie about knowing a handsome rock star (also Bowie), loses her to said star, whom she knew all along. At this, Bowie breaks character and objects to the "too obvious" unhappy ending.
• "Just because you're Nerdy and your friends are thirty, doesn't mean she won't swing your way."
• Nerd Like Me, a cheesy but catchy parody of Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me". Where the girl identifies and ends up with the nerd, despite initially liking the jock.

Video Games

• Life Is Strange: Can be invoked by the player, if they choose to have Max romance Warren who's established as an honors student at Blackwell Academy with a 4.0 GPA, which makes him its smartest student. He's also the school's resident sci-fi movie guru. In her journal, Max admits that she isn't sure whether she sees Warren as just a friend, a geeky kid brother, or something more. But she'll decide to give him a chance if you accept his movie invitation during episode 2 and follow up by writing on his dorm slate in episode 4.
  Max: (Thinking) I can have a little fun with Warren for a change. He's the one who wants to "Go Ape!" and sometimes... you have to take a chance and see what happens.
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots: Johnny Sasaki and Meryl got married in the end. Although this was a subversion, as Johnny revealed himself to be Beautiful All Along and his bouts of diarrhea immediately stopped. So most of his geeky qualities were dropped once Johnny unmasked. Otacon on the other hand averted this trope, due to the tradition that every girl he dated would eventually die once per episode. Alas, poor Otacon, he could never get a girl alive.
• Pokémon Diamond and Pearl has a tag-team battle with two NPCs: an Aroma Girl (a Yamato Nadeshiko-type girl) and a Collector, a nerd. The pre- and post-combat dialog indicates that they've just recently started a relationship.

Web Comics

• The trope is played with slightly cynically in later Ménage à 3 strips, as hopeless geek Gary is frequently pursued by various members of the comic's stunningly attractive female cast (plus at least one gay guy and including one transgender woman). However, not many of them like him for his geekiness; their reasons include his blushing, bumbling cuteness, his supposedly glamorous status as a (wannabe) artist, and his fabled skill at cunnilingus. Zii’s attraction to him fits the trope more closely, but she fights it furiously.
• In Pixie Trix Comix, pro wrestler Tess initially finds Aaron, who is written as the most irritating, socially inept sort of geek, as annoying as everyone else does, only associating with him because she’s desperate for advice on various topics. However, she comes to find him amusing, even likeable, and perhaps Endearingly Dorky, and ends up using him for a night of rampant sex, which actually goes very well. They have a weird sort of chemistry; it helps that she’s really not as cool as her image, while Aaron has been working out physically and very slowly improving his personality.
• Larisa from Sandra and Woo (who is openly stated to be the hottest girl in school) started going out with Landon after he helped her get a B- on a math quiz (more so that he was willing to help her than because she actually passed). Despite her self-admitted promiscuity, she has remained faithful to him the entire time they've been together (well over half a decade real-world time), and there's no sign that they're going to break up any time soon.
• In Disney High School, when Gaston decides to get a girlfriend, he initially asks out the most beautiful, popular, and wealthy girls in school but after all these girls immediately reject him because they know he's an egotistical Jerkass, he decides to follow Hans' advice of going after a "pretty little nerd" instead with the reasoning that an unpopular nerd would be grateful to get the attention of a guy like him. He chooses Belle as his "pretty little nerd"... who, contrary to his expectations, is just as repulsed by his advances as the more popular girls were.

Web Original

• This is something of a Pet-Peeve Trope for Harris O'Malley, also known as Doctor Nerdlove, because of its sexism, for giving geek guys unrealistic expectations for relationships, and for breeding a sense of entitlement. He's all for the geek getting the girl, but it doesn't happen without a lot of work.
• In Thalia's Musings, Hephaestus tries to invoke this in his marriage to Aphrodite. It doesn't work. After his divorce, he inverts the trope by falling for Aglaea, a science-obsessed demigoddess who's had a crush on him for a while.
• In the Whateley Universe story "The Big Idea", Reach is enamored with cute scientist Spark who is European and doesn't see him. (He has a bad Kentucky accent and wants to join the Intelligence Cadet Corps.) He eventually gets the girl, but by then they have both been transmogrified so they're both much better looking.
• Inverted in The Guild, where the geeky Codex tries to get with the attractive stuntman Wade. Of course, Codex is played by Felicia Day, so it's a clear case of Hollywood Homely. Played straight with Zaboo and Riley, although, technically, Riley is also a gamer (let's not get into an FPS vs. MMORPG discussion).

Western Animation

• Kim Possible and her geek-love Ron Stoppable. The trope is named for the quote in an interview by the creators of the show, when they were asked why they were pairing up Kim and Ron.
  • The show also gave us a rare gender-inverted variation in the season 3 episode Partners, where Ugly Cute Dr. Drakken ends up falling for the geeky DNAmy after she risks her life to save his. Amy however likes him only as a friend.
• Spider-Man: The Animated Series has another rare gender inverted version where Jerk Jock (with Hidden Depths) Flash Thompson falls in love with the geeky, bespectacled, studious Debra Whitman after he realises she has feelings for him. He initially flirts around with Felicia Hardy but once he realises Debra is interested in him, he quickly and genuinely reciprocates her feelings.
• Stacy in American Dragon: Jake Long has a thing for sweet, sensitive guys and ultimately ends up falling for the lead character's geeky friend, Arthur P. Spudinski (aka, "Spud"). However, after they get together, Stacy insists on keeping the relationship a secret (at least in the beginning) to uphold her reputation.

• Subverted in Daria. Quinn gets an older, brainy tutor named David, and begins to become smarter as they work together over the summer. She falls for him and asks him out, but he turns her down, noting that she lacks the "depth" he looks for in a girl. Quinn is heartbroken since David is pretty much the only guy to ever turn her down (or for that matter, the only one she ever seemed to like for more than just looks or popularity). Daria, feeling bad for her sister, helps her feel better by pointing out two key things:
  1. David's kind of a jerk for dismissing Quinn so coldly (not even giving her a chance).
  2. While David thinks otherwise, Quin clearly has some "depth" if she's willing to go for more in a guy than just looks, money, or social status.
• Doug: Athletic Patti and the clumsy, shy, dorky title character.
• Dr. Walter Hartford of Galaxy Rangers fits a lot of the usual definitions for a geek; highly educated, computer hacker, fast mouth, and fond of pop culture references. Princess Maya didn't think much of him at first and was more attracted to Gooseman. Then, Doc turned on the charm...made contact with an alien computer that was protecting the planet, and handed a Crown Empire spy his ass in a swordfight. Maya never mentioned Goose again!
• Gerald and Phoebe from Hey Arnold! is one of those rare moments that the girl is the "geek" in question here.
• Sheen and Libby in Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius. Sheen is the geek.
• The writers of the Rugrats All Grown Up! series tried to avoid flat-out confirming certain pairings (most likely trying to avert a Broken Base) but Ship Tease did happen nevertheless. One example of a pairing that got Ship Tease that fits with this trope is Chuckie and Angelica. (Which of course has received even more attention from fans in fan work.)
  • Among the parents Sickly Neurotic Geek Chas Finster, Chuckie's dad, has married twice, his first marriage ending in the death of his wife and his second marriage still going strong.

• Octus/Newton and Kimmy from Sym-Bionic Titan, where the redheaded cheerleader falls for the nerd who is actually a robot.
• Notably played with and then averted in W.I.T.C.H. between Irma and Martin. Early on it seems to be setting up to invoke this trope, as Martin is smitten and Irma rebukes him at every turn. She eventually (and reluctantly, as it was necessary for a distraction) goes on one date with him and is miserable the whole way through. Later though she is visibly jealous when he is interested in someone else. By the end of the series, she's the only main character not in a relationship, and she and Martin have settled into a mutual quasi-love/hate friendship. Irma took Martin on a Not a Date in the first season as a distraction and while it wasn't really fun for her, she still gave him a peck on the cheek at the end of it. In the comics where she actually gave him a Just Friends speech, Martin then had a cute French penpal that visited and seemed totally enamored of him with the feeling being apparently mutual; Irma quickly turned into a Clingy Jealous Girl while denying it to her amused friends. In one issue a possible (and likely) future version of Martin is All Grown Up with a significant amount of Ship Tease with future Irma. It's more like Irma doesn't want to give the geek a chance while giving him just enough to keep hoping.
  • Will herself could count as the "geek" with her relationship with Matt Olsen who's a budding rock star that is shown to be a Chick Magnet to the extent that Will... doesn't appreciate that aspect of him. Will is not a typical nerd as she's Book Dumb or at least hates math, though she does have an obsession with frogs going by her possessions and in one of the cartoon's openings she's implied to be a fan of The Muppets and Pokémon. And yet Matt has only ever shown interest in her, even with attractive girls making passes at him. Taranee and Hay Lin are geeky in their own way, being examples of Nerds Are Sexy and an Otaku Surrogate respectively, again have no trouble attracting boys. And it's not just a Guardian thing, either, as Will's own mother dates her history teacher who is a good-looking Nice Guy that is still a total history geek and a contrast to her much smoother ex-husband, though Will's father's failings may be the reason she's looking for someone different and more reliable.
• There are a few examples in Total Drama:
  • In Island, the gangly Harold develops an on-and-off relationship with the Sassy Black Big Beautiful Woman Leshawna after she discovers him to be her secret admirer.
  • In Action, the stout, homely, and socially awkward Beth repeatedly claims to have a hunky supermodel boyfriend named Brady, who turns out to be real in the finale.
  • In Revenge of the Island, chubby gamer geek Sam gets with Dakota, a rich, attractive, and spoiled Daddy's Girl and Paris Hilton expy. Even after the latter turns into a radioactive mutant.

Real Life

• Netscape founder Jim Clark is married to a supermodel.
• Filmmaker and self-professed comic book/sci-fi geek Kevin Smith and his wife Jennifer, who is absolutely gorgeous. In fact, Smith wrote in his book that he fervently hopes their daughter Harley grows to be as tall and shapely as her mother, thus sparing her from what he goes through with his weight. Smith also theorized that geeky and/or chubby men are better catches, as they're much more willing to go the extra mile for a woman.
  • Harley Quinn went through an "awkward" phase as a teen, but he needn't have worried◊.
• Batman: The Animated Series writer Paul Dini is married to a very lovely magician named Misty Lee whose resemblance to Zatanna is downright uncanny.
  • Interestingly, they met because of her resemblance. Paul Dini has always had an attraction to Zatanna, and a mutual friend convinced him to meet with her by showing him one of her publicity photos.
• There's the marriage between literary playwright Arthur Miller and Hollywood goddess Marilyn Monroe which actually was the major reference point for a lot of writers about this kind of pairing back in the day.
• US Democrat politician Dennis Kucinich and his wife Elizabeth are a prominent DC power couple
• Mistress Matisse's column in the Seattle Stranger mentions that geeks and nerds make up a frighteningly large percentage of the kink community, and advises those looking to mingle among them brush up on their Robert A. Heinlein and watch some of Joss Whedon's work.
• James Madison and Dolley Madison. She was 17 years younger than him.
• John Romero made Stevie "killcreek" Case his bitch.
• The beginning of an Overdosed Trope perhaps?

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