There are many ideals girls are used to represent in media, and none so prevalent as the idea of Love. The feeling of fighting for the sake of love; for an all-consuming lust for other people; for using love as a tool to get what one wants — all, at one point or another, have been associated with girls and the female form.
This universal association with women and love can be for many reasons. For one, many associate love with femininity because of a supposed "purity" — as women are characterized as nurturers and are seen as the emotional gender, it takes away from the "dirty" and physical biological urges of sex, which is commonly associated with men (and that dichotomy is a whole trope on its own). Feminine associations of Lust on the other hand are solely focused on the physical; whether it be tapping into the Male Gaze and showing women as an object of desire, examining the concept of female sexuality on both a macro and micro angle, or simply thinking feminine bodies are hot, Lust will always worm itself into the conversation. To add, girls are often considered the gender obsessed with love and romance, and will never miss a chance to talk about the love lives of themselves or others.
Thus enters this trope, which shows a girl (often the only girl if she's in a group) representing love in all of its forms. She may not always be the proprietor of love, but a major part of her arc could also be people hoisting her up as an object to be loved as well. Regardless of if she represents chaste or passionate aspects, she has a decent chance of being fused with the Ms. Fanservice trope.
One way to spot this type of girl is her being decked out in pink or red. Both colors are heavily associated with the concept of love and lust, with pink especially noted as both an erotic and feminine color and red being associated with vampish types, so expect her to wear a lot of either or both along with any heart accessories. Her ending up with a loving, affectionate personality is something to look out for. Expect her to have a "Love" or "Heart" based pun in her name.
If she has powers, Heart Beat-Down will likely be her magic of choice. A female Heart, who acts as the group's moral compass, is a strong candidate for representing this trope. Compare to Love Goddess, which has this trope applied to a female/feminine member of a cultural pantheon or mythology; as well as Succubi and Incubi, involving demons that operate on harvesting energy and offspring from their sexual (and sometimes romantic) relationships with humans.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Anpanman's only fellow female superhero, Melonpanna, has powers that don't actually hurt their opponents. Her Melo Melo Punch is used to overwhelm her opponents with feelings of love.
- Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: Mitsuri Konroji is the "Love Hashira", and employs her own special "Love Breathing" technique. She's an All-Loving Hero who is ironically Oblivious to Love herself but has immense Super-Strength that puts her right up at the top of the strength charts along with the other strongest Hashira.
- Digimon: Played with the Love-themed Chosen Children in the Adventure continuity. While both of them are female, they're also the most tomboyish of their group's girls at the time they received their crest:
- Digimon Adventure: Sora is the Tomboy of her group and wields the Crest of Love. One episode had Sora questioning if she was even capable of love because her crest had yet to glow like the others.
- Digimon Adventure 02: Yolei has the Digi-Egg of Love and is a tomboy just like Sora.
- The Homunculi from Fullmetal Alchemist are all men with the sole exception of the one representing Lust. She specializes in manipulating the affections of men to her advantage with her good looks. This is played with in the Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), where Sloth is also a woman, but she is still one of the most love-attuned Homunculi (but strictly in the motherly aspect).
- Jujutsu Kaisen introduces the Heian-era sorceress Yorozu in the Culling Games arc. She spent the last of her initial life obsessed with Ryoumen Sukuna, determined to be his romantic partner and show him how love can alleviate the loneliness of being strong. When she reappears in the modern day in the body of Megumi Fushiguro's sister, her sole fight is heavily themed around the love she thinks she can offer Sukuna, with her even giving him a parting weapon in the hopes that he'll finally learn what it means. This theme carries over into his later fights in the climax arc.
- Love Tyrant: Guri is a cupid who can form couples destined to marry by writing their names in her "Kiss Note". However, since she barely understands love herself, after she pairs our protagonist Seiji with a total Yandere, she adds her own name to the coupling in order to learn more about love.
- My Hero Academia:
- U.A. teacher Midnight is a BDSM-themed hero whose Quirk allows her to emit a gas that induces Forced Sleep from her body. She's an openly flirtatious woman whose sidekicks are a team of pretty boys and is turned on by open displays of passion. Although her sadistic side sometimes comes out as part of her hero persona, she's nevertheless a loving and passionate woman who cares deeply for her students and the people she's sworn to protect.
- La Brava is a villain associated with Gentle Criminal who has a quirk that is quite literally The Power of Love incarnate. She can use it to give a power boost to anyone she loves.
- Himiko Toga from the League of Villains uses a blood-based Quirk, but she explicitly ties it to her affection for her victims and the people she steals blood from. A major part of her arc is her desire to express her love for others by "becoming" them, which also includes the protagonist Izuku Midoriya, as well as her eventual rival Ochaco Uraraka.
- One Piece: Boa Hancock is the only woman among the Seven Warlords of the Sea. Her Devil Fruit ability allows her to shoot heart-shaped projectiles that turn anyone attracted to her to stone. As Hancock is considered the World's Most Beautiful Woman, this attack works on just about anyone except for Luffy who doesn't seem to be attracted to anybody.
- One-Punch Man: Do-S is a female monster whose appearance is that of a woman in a Dominatrix outfit and uses a whip which can mentally enslave people to her will. Those affected by this power gain heart-shaped pupils and she even refers to them as her "love slaves". She also has a heart symbol on her forehead.
- Pretty Cure: Many, many characters across the franchise have had their time in this trope, with many of the team leaders carrying around heart accessories and being compassionate girls who value friendship and love. However, the most blatant of them would be HappinessCharge Pretty Cure!'s Cure Lovely, who was already in a season that tried to explore the concept of love in many forms.
- Spirit Circle: Protagonist Fuuta Okeya's previous reincarnations each have a theme to their lives and recite it to them when they make their final goodbyes to him. His only female reincarnation, Fuuko, is meant to represent love, although in her own character arc, she only had an understated love triangle with her two male friends while all of his male reincarnations had love as an underlying theme.
- Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun features demons of all types of stripes, but the ones specifically dealing with love and seduction are women, and the seduction class at Babylls consists entirely of girls. Of the 13 Crowns, the highest authority of the demon world second only to the king, the aspect of lust is headed by a woman (Asmodeus Amuryllis).
Asian Animation
- In Planet of 7 Colors, the ruler of the blue kingdom is the only female leader of any of the Rainbow Planet's seven kingdoms, and as the representative of the deadly sin of lust, she has a romantic obsession with finding her true love.
Art
- One painting of Charity (Bouguereau) depicts the Embodiment of Love as a woman, and not only that, but shows her charity by doing that most feminine of tasks, feeding her hungry children and giving them a hug as they fall to sleep.
Comic Books
- Blackest Night: Wonder Woman is one of the only two deputized non-Lantern heroes who are female. She is granted a Star Sapphire ring because of her love for everyone on Earth.
- DC One Million: An offshoot Coluan sect focused their efforts on studying empathy and compassion rather than intelligence. Representing them in-story is Heartiac, a pink-skinned heroine adorned in a circlet made of hearts that defeats her enemies with kindness. While the Coluans in most continuities tend to be represented by masculine figures like the Brainiacs, Heartiac is the most prominent Coluan of this type.
- Green Lantern: The majority of the Star Sapphires (whose rings channel The Power of Love) are female. On the Lust side of things, they're one of the few groups of Lanterns with a very Stripperiffic outfit, and they are highly susceptible to lust-fuelled madness. Geoff Johns went on record as saying that there can be male Star Sapphires, but very few are judged to be worthy of wielding the violet light (with Kyle Rayner being one such male).
- In the Marvel Universe, Mistress Love is the Anthropomorphic Personification of love, opposite to her Spear Counterpart Sire Hate. While she can take on the form of any species or gender to better suit who she interacts with, most of her appearances had her in a feminine body.
- New Warriors: Pretty Persuasions is a member of the villain team Psionex and a former stripper. She can psionically stimulate the pleasure centers of people's brains, allowing her to psychically seduce and control them. She can also create weapons fueled by her won sexual urges. Her supervillain outfit is fittingly revealing and the weapons she creates tend to be bondage-themed such as whips and chains.
Film — Animated
- Animal Crackers (2017): The film's director explains in a behind-the-scenes video that Talia's head was subtly shaped like a Heart Symbol to symbolize her love for Bob, which was meant to be the most important aspect of her character. Bob loves her equally, but neither he nor anyone else at Bob's circus is associated with love as much as Talia is.
Film — Live-Action
- The Fifth Element: the titular Fifth Element is implied to be Love, and when it is synthesized with the use of biotechnology, it takes on the form of a beautiful woman called Leeloo.
Literature
- Beatrice is the only woman of the main characters from the The Divine Comedy and also the one who represents love. She served as the great love Dante had in life and in death, she serves as a sign of the graces of loving God and receiving the Divine Love in return.
- Charissa from The Faerie Queene is an Allegorical Character who represents the virtue of charity. She is a mother constantly feeding her many babies adorned with a golden crown to represent that love is the greatest of virtues.
- A Song of Ice and Fire: Lys is one of the Nine Free Cities famous for its brothels and pillow houses. Its citizens worship a love goddess, whose image is stamped on their coinage.
- In Warrior Cats, when a new leader gains their nine lives, each is given by a different cat, and each life comes with a gift. One gift that nearly all receive is love, and it invariably always comes from a she-cat. Interestingly, the love represented — one that mimics the intensity of a mother's protective nature — is painful when received, as opposed to the gentleness that usually characterizes motherly love.
Live-Action TV
- You (2018): Joe's Second Love, after he murders Beck, is literally called...Love. She's also a fast-moving girlfriend (and later wife) to Joe, a Living Emotional Crutch to her needy twin brother Forty, a very young widow who yearns to have kids, and soon becomes the mother of her and Joe's son Henry. It turns out she also exemplifies Mad Love when the series reveals that she killed her first husband James because he wanted a divorce, killed Forty's rapist Sophia for molesting him, and also killed Delilah and Candace when both of them risked Joe's safety.
Music
- The Beach Boys' 1977 album Love You features a song titled "Love is a Woman", which references the trope by name and why it's important to treat women gently as lovers.
Love is a woman
So treat her tenderly tonight
Love makes a woman
So give her all you love tonight
Folklore and Mythology
- Popular culture depictions of Seven Deadly Sins have a near-perfect chance of representing Lust as a beautiful woman, contrast to the varying depictions of the rest of the sins. As mentioned on its own trope page, Lust is usually drawn this way to invoke feelings of lust, while the other Sins just indulge in their own vices.
Video Games
- Heart Aino of Arcana Heart is a cheerful girl who fittingly serves as The Heart for her group. She's also a Pink Heroine, has a heart motif in her moves and Idiot Hair, and espouses love over fighting in her win quotes. Even her name means "Heart of love" in Japanese.
- Disgaea: Hour of Darkness: Flonne is a little angel girl who talks about love all the time and wishes for others to have some love in their hearts. She brings up love so much that she is often called a Love Freak.
- The Elder Scrolls: Two of the Aedric Divines Mara and Dibella cover the spheres of love between them. Mara covers familial and platonic love, while Dibella governs the more romantic and erotic parts of love.
- Final Fantasy XIV:
- The Valentines' Day event, Valentione's Day, is an annual festival to honor Countess Arabelle de Valentione, an Ishgardian noblewoman whose unparalleled courage in her pursuit of true love serves as an inspiration to longing and lovelorn souls across Eorzea. The festival itself is run by her descendant, Lisette de Valentione, who spends every year trying to spur on others to pursue love and happiness as her ancestor once did.
- According to Eorzean mythology, Menphina the Lover is the goddess of love and the divine lover of Oschon the Wanderer. Rather than solely representing carnal or romantic love, Menphina presides over love in all its forms. She's said to reward those who give as much love as they receive and her followers beseech her for solace, shelter, and hope. When she appears in the Euphyrosyne raid, she's overflowing with compassion for everyone, telling the heroes that the Twelve listen to each and every prayer even though they do not have the power to answer them all.
- In Fire Emblem Heroes, this is Caeda's motif, as demonstrated by her young version's unique skill 'Belief in Love' and her Harmonic conversation with Plumeria, in which her idealism is contrasted with Plumeria's Lust Fairy cynicism. Aside from her being the franchise's first official Love Interest, this theming may be in reference to an iconic recruitment conversation
from her original game in which she converts a soldier over to Marth's army by speaking gloriously to him about love. However, Heroes tends to depict her romanticism quite straightforwardly, while said original conversation comes across as far more feigned and manipulative.
Tell me: do you believe in love? - Elphelt Valentine from the Guilty Gear franchise is best described as love hungry. One of her main interests is talking about love; she's constantly on the hunt for a husband and tries to make one out of most of the male roster; and her default outfit in Xrd -SIGN- is a red-white pseudo wedding dress. Her Instant Kill finisher also makes whoever gets hit by her bullet fall madly in love. Tragically, she's so obsessed with love because it is the one emotion she cannot feel.
- Helltaker: Modeus, whose title is "The Lustful Demon", is obsessed with sex and pleasure and will try anything, no matter how depraved, to get it. She's also the demon who falls the hardest for the concept of human love, with her ending having her learn of it through romantic comedy novels and finding it incredibly kinky as a result. Appropriately, hearts appear all over her hair and in her eyes.
- The Love Shockers of Jet Set Radio take on a punkish flavor of this trope. They adorn themselves in hot pink and all of the logos they're associated with (as well as two of their three main graffiti tags) emphasize love and hearts. The Shockers, however, represent broken hearts, with their stated motive for acting out being vengeance on the people who broke theirs. The games never reveal their true targets.
- Pico: Nene, the only girl of the three main characters, is heavily associated with love and lust. Nene's Interactive Suicide introduced her as she got herpes from kissing a boy the previous night, fan flashes often portray her either as boy-crazy or a love interest to Pico, and she wears bright pink hearts on her clothes.
- Pokémon: Enamorus is a later addition to the Legendary Pokemon triad of the Forces of Nature and explicitly the only female of the bunch. As her name suggests, she's associated with the Power of Love and decked out in pink and heart symbols. Though she's a bit of a Gonky Femme as well.
- In Puyo Puyo, tomboyish Arle's girly girl rival Rulue has a romantic obsession with the Dark Prince, doing everything in her power to woo him. However, the Dark Prince is more interested in Arle herself, who barely has any romantic interest in any of the characters, let alone the Dark Prince.
- Sonic the Hedgehog:
- Amy Rose is a girly and very romantic Rose-Haired Sweetie who acts as a Stalker with a Crush towards the titular Sonic (much to his chagrin) and is strongly associated with heart imagery, with hearts trailing her trusty Hyperspace Mallet whenever she swings it around. Notably, she is the only character explicitly interested in romance in a series where No Hugging, No Kissing is played almost completely straight.
- Rouge the Bat is the franchise's prominent Ms. Fanservice. Naturally, she acts very flirty and seductive, especially towards Knuckles, and often wears outfits with heart imagery.
- Poison of Street Fighter and Final Fight fame has a dominatrix theme to her moveset. Multiple special attacks of hers reference love, such as Kissed by a Goddess, Love Me Tender, and Heart Raid.
- Super Mario Bros.:
- Princess Peach will often have a heart-filled aura surrounding her when using any of her unique powers. It was even implied in Mario Party 3 that her best quality is love. This is mainly on display throughout the RPG series, most notably in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door as she was shown to be quite knowledgeable on the subject.
- Super Paper Mario gives us Luvbi, a Nimbi who obsesses over love and being free of her controlling parents Grambi and Jaydes. In addition to her name, she even has heart-shaped wings! By the end of Chapter 7, she is revealed to be an Anthropomorphic Personification of the final Pure Heart, ancient items that exist as long as there is love in their world. Grambi and Jaydes intended to disguise it as a Nimbi so that none could come after the Pure Heart, but their growing paternal bond with her made them truly see her as a daughter and allowed her to have her own personality. It's that same love that has her sacrifice her corporeal form to allow the heroes to have all the tools they need to save the multiverse.
Webcomics
- Cucumber Quest: Princess Parfait is the compassionate, determined princess of the Donut Kingdom and the Lady to Sir Carrot's Knight. Her love for Carrot and empathy for the Nightmare Knight plays a major role in the story, and it is the overwhelming feelings of love from the Love Letter she wrote Carrot that ultimately gives him his Heroic Second Wind and Magic Knight abilities.
- Nepeta Leijon from Homestuck is a Sburb/Sgrub player that controls the aspect of Heart (a very emotion-based element), and is obsessed with shipping and romance in general. She's also one of the more girlish and feminine members of the Trolls. Her Beforus counterpart Meulin is an intentional exaggeration of Nepeta's romance-based traits. While the narrative shows that men can be designated the Heart aspect, such as the Alpha timeline's Dirk Strider, they aren't as heavily themed around romance.
- Sleepless Domain: Heartful Punch — civilian name Kokoro Aichi — is a Magical Girl themed, as her name would suggest, around hearts and love. Besides her name, bright pink hair and the many hearts adorning her outfit, she's an athletic Girly Bruiser whose punches are enhanced by pink heart-shaped energy blasts, and she also serves as main character Undine's love interest and later, her girlfriend.
Western Animation
- Chowder: Panini is a flirty young girl with a big heart on her dress, whose appearances often focus on being Chowder's Abhorrent Admirer.
- The Loud House: One of the sisters from the largely one-note rabbit versions of the Louds from Lincoln's Dream Sequence in "White Hare", Belinda, is obsessed with romance and a Shipper on Deck for Warren (Lincoln's equivalent in the dream) and the version of the new student Lincoln has a crush on in the episode. In terms of appearance, she wears a pink shirt with a red heart on it, has a red heart accessory with a yellow arrow, earrings shaped like smaller hearts, and is once seen carrying a bow like Cupid.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, or Princess Cadence as she prefers to be called, is the Alicorn of Love, and her role is to spread love throughout Equestria, though later she ends up becoming ruler of the Crystal Empire. Notably, Cadence is the only alicorn to be married, being the wife of Twilight Sparkle's brother Shining Armor.
- The Changelings are a race of Emotion Eaters that feed on feelings of love. Initially representing them was their Queen Chrysalis, whom represents a more negative take on love: namely, the lying, manipulation, and heinous acts she commits in order to hoard that love for herself.
