Basic Trope: A cast consisting almost entirely of female characters in a setting where it doesn't make sense.
- Straight: A class in a coeducative school consists of twenty-four girls and two boys.
- Exaggerated: Male characters are implied to exist, but they aren't seen anywhere. The main characters, supporting cast, extras and even every single person in the background "just happens" to be female. Even groups which are usually heavily male-dominated, like construction crews, military units or street gangs, consist entirely of women without any reasonable justification.
- Downplayed: The cast has plenty of men, its just that the core cast is almost entirely female.
- Justified:
- A plague or similar grand-scale disaster killed almost everyone except females under the age of 20, so the world is populated mostly by girls and young women.
- Or we are actually watching Human Aliens of a One-Gender Race.
- Or inverse Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism.
- A male gets kidnapped by a team consisting solely of females. Or applies to a room/course that consists mostly of females (because Real Men Wear Pink).
- The coeducative school was still an All Girl School last year, give it some time.
- A clique of girls all coordinated their schedule to make sure that the class wouldn't have too many boys in it.
- The teacher is a Straw Feminist who tried to keep boys out of her class.
- Inverted: A Cast Full of Pretty Boys in (stereo)typically feminine places (or in Played Straight's case, a class where it's 24 boys to 2 girls).
- Subverted:
- In the pilot of a show many female and just a few male characters are introduced, but the following episodes focus solely on the Character Development of the male characters while demoting the female characters to extras.
- The sheer amounts of female characters get picked off one by one until there are two left, and more male characters are being introduced.
- Double Subverted:
- The main plot of said shows turns out to revolve around the guys having contest who can get most of the girls to fall in love with them. First hilarities ensue but then the shallow love interests develop personalities and a serious Love Dodecahedron unfolds around the guys.
- Except there are even more female characters being introduced after the onslaughts.
- Parodied: All the characters are female. Even the ones who look masculine.
- Zig-Zagged: The main cast shifts between all-female and all-male at the end of every episode.
- Averted:
- The creators always seem to make sure to keep a 50:50 balance between number, depth and screen time of male and female characters.
- Fully male Chromosome Casting.
- Enforced:
- Market research found out that merchandising of female characters sells better and decided to remove or gender-flip some of the male characters from the adapted source material.
- Only female actors were available to the producers.
- Executive meddling decided to shoehorn a stronger feeling of feminism in the show.
- The author is simply better at coming up with female character designs than male ones, and decides to lean on it.
- Lampshaded: "Don't you find it one bit odd that the school administration put that many girls and just us two boys in a single class?"
- Invoked: A group consisting only of young women is isolated as part of a sociological experiment.
- Exploited:
- The One Guy realizes he has potential power over his female compatriots and thus tries one of three methods for getting them to fall head over heels for him:
- He becomes a paragon of compassion and understanding.
- He becomes a grouchy, Cadillac-speeding jerk.
- He becomes superficially knowledgeable about them and misleads them into thinking there's more to him than meets the eye.
- Defied: A mixed group is separated into subgroups by lot. One group happens to consist only of women. The person doing the lot decides to reshuffle the groups to avoid this.
- Discussed: "Jeez, are there any guys in here?!" "There's one over there!"
- Conversed: "So, is every adult male in this show a draft dodger, or...?" [Beat] "Yeah, the viewers just like their lesbians."
- Deconstructed: The women in said world realize that there are too few men around for all of them and start fighting bloody wars over them, not because they are afraid of not getting this man but because they have justified fears of not getting any man to father their children.
- Reconstructed:
- Grand-scale in-vitro fertilization solves the conflict, a feminist utopia is created and the show ends with An Aesop about how women can live without men if they need to.
- Alternatively, people start practicing Poly Amory.
- Alternatively, the characters find a way to regrow the male side of the population.
- Played For Laughs: The two boys have to deal with the hilarious awkwardness of constantly being the only guys.
Back to Improbably Female Cast.
