Basic Trope: A work only includes characters of one gender.
- Straight: The cast of They Dance By Night consists of Aaron, Bob, Charles, Danny, and Elliott, while An Afternoon at the Dawn Cafe has Alice, Belinda, Claire, Diana, and Eve.
- Exaggerated:
- Even the extras in They Dance By Night are male.
- In a work in a language whose nouns are gendered, such as Spanish or French, even the nouns used fall in single gender!
- Even the animals featured in They Dance by Night are male.
- Everyone involved in the production of They Dance by Night (director, screenwriter, crew etc.) is male.
- Downplayed:
- The main casts are all of one gender, but the supporting cast is mixed.
- The only characters to appear onscreen are of one gender, but the work also features several unseen characters of the opposite gender, who play a significant role in the plot.
- Justified:
- They Dance By Night is a war movie about a unit far from home before women were allowed in combat, and An Afternoon at the Dawn Cafe is set at an all girls school.
- They Dance By Night is an After the End Zombie Apocalypse story, all women were dead due to chromosome mutation and there are only male survivors. An Afternoon at the Dawn Cafe is a spin-off story about the refugees who escaped the aforementioned apocalypse by traveling to the outer space, except there's no male crew in the space station.
- They Dance By Night is set in a men's prison, and An Afternoon at the Dawn Cafe in a women's prison.
- Inverted: Gender-Equal Ensemble - both genders are equally represented.
- Subverted: A male character goes to the Dawn Cafe in AA@tDC.
- Elliott is revealed to be the cross-dressing Ellen.
- Double Subverted:
- ...Turns to be a case of Samus Is a Girl.
- ...Turns out he's an Eldritch Abomination and he technically has No Biological Sex.
- Parodied: A man tries to walk onto the set of AA@tDC, but one of the female characters pushes him away before he can get any real screen time.
- Zig Zagged: Some episodes of the shows have mixed gendered casts, others just use the single-sexed main cast.
- Averted: There are women in TDbN and men in AA@tDC.
- Enforced:
- In TDbN, the producers decide not to fake Political Correctness in favor of realistic history.
- AA@tDC is performed by an all-female troupe and none of its members are willing to cross-cast.
- The author of They Dance By Night is not very good at writing convincing female characters, and would rather avoid including them than being called out for having extremely stereotypical, two-dimensional female characters in contrast to the rest of the cast. Vice versa with An Afternoon at the Dawn Cafe.
- Lampshaded:
- Claire: "Have you noticed that no men ever stop by the Dawn Cafe?"
- Elliott: "I hope on our break we can sneak into town to meet some girls. I haven't seen a girl in three months!"
- Invoked: Dawn Cafe doesn't serve men at all, not giving any men a chance to be on the show.
- Exploited: A character in They Dance by Night notices that all of the characters are male, and realizes they can use this to their advantage ("Let's lay a death trap for them that's activated by someone leaving the toilet seat up!")
- Defied: A woman sneaks into the main combat unit of TDbN.
- Discussed: "Hey, Danny! How come there are no girls around?" "I dunno, Elliot. I don't even remember the last time I saw my mother"
- Conversed: "This show is neat, but seems to go out of its way to avoid showing women, even in places you'd normally expect them."
- Deconstructed: The
Unfortunate Implications of women being entirely absent from a given setting are actively explored, such as how the fact that women are not expected to serve in the military implies both that they are damsels in distress and also that Men Are the Expendable Gender.
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