Basic Trope: Gorillas and other large apes are portrayed as gentle.
- Straight: Gary the Gorilla is a kind, friendly Gentle Giant.
- Exaggerated:
- Gary is an All-Loving Hero.
- Gorillas and other large apes are Always Lawful Good.
- Downplayed:
- Gary is a fairly nice individual, but can still be dangerous and powerful when he needs to be.
- Gary is a troubled Unscrupulous Hero who is a Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
- Justified: Truth in Television; unless provoked, gorillas and other apes (with the exception of Chimpanzees) are actually rather friendly creatures.
- Inverted: Killer Gorilla
- Subverted: Gary turns out to be Evil All Along.
- Double Subverted: Despite being evil, Gary still is Affably Evil and has plenty of lines he would never cross.
- Parodied: Gary is introduced in dark mood lighting and everyone shrieks in terror, only for it to cut to him petting a kitten.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Gary is introduced chomping off a person's head, but it's revealed that that person was actually a Complete Monster, and he saves the lives of the protagonists multiple times only for it to be revealed he was working for the villain the whole time, but then it turns out that he was actually being forced to and was trying to undermine the villains.
- Gary randomly alternates between extreme kindness and empathy and extreme cruelty and brutality in a fashion more similar to a Chimpanzee.
- There are some gorillas that are friendly and gentle, and some that aren't.
- Averted: There are no gorillas.
- Enforced:
- Many gorillas tend to be portrayed as dangerous or evil, so Gary was created as an antithesis to this stereotype.
- In a World of Funny Animals, there needed to be a character that was a Gentle Giant, and a gorilla was a possible choice.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "It's interesting that more gorillas are portrayed as nice creatures in fiction these days."
- Deconstructed: Gary's affable nature is mistaken as him being harmless, and when he gets excessively provoked he seriously injures a person. (In real life, Gorillas avoid conflict as a rule, but are very protective of themselves and their troupe and will often interpret innocuous things as threats.)
Back to Gentle Gorilla
