Basic Trope: The author or story treats death and harm toward a female character as worse than toward a male character. Therefore takes measures to avoid it, and it shows.
- Straight: Alice and Bob are ambushed by a serial killer who appears in front of Alice, makes a 180, and slices Bob's throat. He had no intention of "taking" Alice away, and went for him despite increasing his risk of getting caught by doing so.
- Exaggerated: A dozen men are laying on the ground sick and dying from a flesh-eating virus, while every doctor is in another room examining Alice's sprained ankle.
- Downplayed: Bob falls and loses his arm. He is treated with the appropriate concern but Alice receives the same when she sprains an ankle.
- Justified:
- The killer was friends with Alice but did not know Bob.
- Alice is the protagonist.
- The serial killer Wouldn't Hit a Girl.
- Inverted: A bear breaks into Alice and Bob's home, but the bear targets Alice despite her being armed with a chainsaw and being very slim, while Bob is a hulking 6'3 man who's currently asleep.
- Subverted: The killer, naturally, shoots both witnesses and then dumps their bodies in a lake, Alice having her skull shot open while Bob getting shot in the neck.
- Double Subverted: They're both discovered and Bob dies from his injuries, while Alice is somehow alive with a third of her brains blown out. This is never addressed.
- Parodied: "BREAKING NEWS! Boat sinks killing 463 passengers, including 5 women!"
- Zig-Zagged: ???
- Averted: The serial killer targets both witnesses because either of them can get him caught. If Bob dies, Alice's survival is perfectly reasonable and justified by the story and plot. If Alice dies, the trope is already averted.
- Enforced: Depiction of Violence Against Women 'laws' prevent Alice from being killed by anything other than either a painless unnamed disease or old age.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "It's not like I want to see a 17-year-old girl get gutted by serial-killer, but I don't understand why he'd go out of his way to target Bob unless the author just didn't want Alice to get hurt."
- Played for Drama: Charlotte begins to go insane because the deaths in her 3rd world village are going unnoticed by the larger population.
- Played for Horror: Evil, Inc. performs hellish genetic experiments on (lower-class) men because they believe they’ll have more time to get results before the FBI notices abductions targeting men.
As for the YKTTW, we must protect it at all costs, meanwhile for tropes like Men Are the Expendable Gender can be Red Linked for all we care about.
