Basic Trope: One or more male characters are infatuated with a popular girl, possibly a cheerleader.
- Straight:
- The hero has a crush on a cheerleader.
- The entire male student body has a crush on one or more of the cheerleaders.
- Exaggerated: An ugly girl (think King Kong) is unpopular, until she joins the cheerleading squad; then, without changing anything about her appearance or even actually participating in the cheerleading squad, the entire male student body falls head over heels in love with her.
- Downplayed: Among the kinds of girls the hero likes, cheerleaders are one of the categories, but not necessarily the top category.
- Justified:
- The cheerleader's uniform is kind of skimpy, and thus catches the boys' attention better than regular clothes.
- Or it's such a small school that almost all of the girls are cheerleaders.
- Cheerleading is a very athletic activity, so it's only natural that the cheerleaders would tend to be quite fit and attractive.
- Inverted:
- None of the guys want cheerleaders.
- One of the reasons Jim Leon doesn't want to be with Carol is because she's a popular cheerleader.
- Cheerleaders want all the guys.
- Gender Inverted
- A guy joins the cheer squad, and the girls all fall for him.
- All the girls want the cheerleader.
- Subverted:
- Double Subverted: He starts going out with the cheerleader to throw his crush off, and ends up really liking the cheerleader and forgetting his previous crush.
- Parodied: A guy becomes a cheerleader, and suddenly starts causing Stupid Sexy Flanders for the other guys.
- Zig Zagged: The interest all the guys in the school have for a kind of girl randomly varies. In a specific week, cheerleaders are popular, but then next week, nerd girls become popular... until thursday when goth girls become the girl type of choice, then it's back to cheerleaders next week.
- Averted:
- The series does not take place at a school, or does not have any single men, or does not have any prominently featured cheerleaders.
- Cheerleaders are featured, but guys are not seen to be more attracted to them than to any other female character.
- Enforced: "We need our hero to have a foil for his main love interest. Let's introduce a cheerleader, because she will be believably sexy to distract him."
- Lampshaded: "Oh, God, she's wearing a cheerleader outfit. Nothing gets a guy more than a cheerleader outfit."
- Invoked: A girl becomes a cheerleader to get a boy to notice/like her.
- Exploited: Girls become cheerleaders in order to manipulate the boys to do their bidding.
- Defied:
- Alice quits the cheerleading squad because she's sick of boys only liking her because of it.
- "A cheerleader? No thanks, I don't like dating down."
- Discussed: "Dude, you have a crush on Alice? She's just normal!" "This isn't some high school drama. I'm allowed to be attracted to more than the cheerleaders."
- Conversed: "So they give us another romance subplot, and it's with the cheerleaders again? Poor Susan's never gotten a love interest, since she's not on the squad. What a shame; she's my favorite character, too."
- Deconstructed:
- The girls who are not cheerleaders are annoyed by the fact that the guys prefer the cheerleaders to them, and never get boyfriends, leaving everyone except the cheerleaders and the football players single.
- No one wants to join the cheerleading squad because they're always sexually objectified.
- Along with All Girls Want Bad Boys, if this continues, people will live in a world where you are judged for your physical appearance.
- Every boy in school decide to have a battle to the death to win over the popular girl. The end result is a pile of corpses and a school full of distraught girls.
- Reconstructed:
- Girls decide to at least give the guys a chance, and after a few dates, the guys start liking who they're dating more.
- The cheerleaders join a feminist group and ask the principal to make next year's uniforms more classy.
- The cheerleaders somehow stop that from happening.
Back to All Guys Want Cheerleaders
