Basic Trope: One of a fictional species' sexes (usually the female) coincidentally resembles attractive humans.
- Straight: Alice and Bob are two Troperians, a race of Fish People. Alice is a beautiful, voluptuous mermaid; Her husband, Bob is far larger, looks more hulking and scary, and has more aquatic traits: slimy green skin, sharp teeth, and visible gills, overall looking like an bloodthirsty alien shark.
- Exaggerated:
- Male Troperians resemble borderline Eldritch Abominations while Troperian women are virtually indistinguishable from human women.
- Every single race/species shown in the work shows this kind of dimorphism. All the females look like beautiful humanoid women with some odd coloration, while all the males almost indistinguishable from animals.
- Downplayed:
- The Troperian females also have the aforementioned aquatic traits, but have more human-like and curvier bodies.
- The Troperian males and females look relatively similar, looking humanoid, but the males are more beastly in the sexy sense while the females are more conventionally attractive.
- Justified:
- Troperian scientists naturally and artificially selected for women that look more humanoid for some reason.
- Male Troperians are specialized for fighting and defending harems as they have a highly spikey hard body, which while highly dangerous, would be downright lethal to their young, and are often seen fighting each other or hunting prey while they're seldom seen near baby Troperians. Female Troperian bodies are better capable of looking after young and have the manual dexterity to do things like remove parasites from males. Their retained monsterous features are mostly to prevent sex from leading to a grisly death.
- Inverted: Troperian male and females have less sexual dimorphism than would be realistic for most species.
- Gender Inverted: Alice looks like a monstrous predatory fish that could turn a shark into her meal. Meanwhile her mate, Bob, looks like a human Hunk and/or Pretty Boy with a fish tail and gills where his ears would be.
- Subverted:
- Troperian women just look like beautiful mermaids so they can lure sailors to their deaths. Once they're in Troperian territory, the illusion wears off and the women just as monstrous as the men...
- Troperian women actually look similar to the men, and Alice is regarded as hideous for her resemblance to humans...
- Double Subverted:
- ...Except the males actually look like hunky mermen.
- ...But then it is revealed Alice is part of a different subspecies of Troperian living separately from the ones we first meet. In this Troperian society, looking like fish monsters/mermaids is the norm.
- Parodied: Bob is just a fish, Alice looks like a human supermodel. They are the same species.
- Zig-Zagged: The show starts off with the basic trope- Troperian women are gorgeous supermodels who are just barely not human, and Troperian males are hideous animalistic troglodytes. Someone points out the implications of this to the creators, so they pull a retcon: Troperian males look just as attractive and human-like as the females, and the hideous examples from early on are dismissed as anomalies. Then later writers decide to gender invert the trope to make a point. Except by this point the fandom, which largely liked the original appearances, is tired of all the changes- so the reboot settles on a watered down version of the basic trope, with Troperian women being generally attractive (but still not quite human) and Troperian men looking a bit less appealing and more alien (but still humanoid).
- Averted: Male and female Troperians look the same.
- Enforced: Male and female Troperians were the same in early drafts, but the editors wanted a source of fanservice.
- Lampshaded: "How are Alice and Bob the same species when the women look so beautiful?"
- Invoked: Pulling from stories of other races that communicate with humans, Troperians genetically engineer their females to look more like attractive human women.
- Exploited: During an invasion of Earth, the Troperian females are sent in to seduce human men into obeying their army, after which the males conquer the planet.
- Defied: The Troperians consider it very important to maintain their visual distinctiveness, and engineer themselves specifically to appear less human.
- Discussed: "You mean Bob looks like human sushi and Alice looks like a total babe? This is like some male-oriented fantasy game!"
- Conversed: "Ever think about why males of a species always look beastly and females always look like babes?"
- Implied: We only meet Bob, but a blink-and-you'll-miss-it photograph on his desk shows his wife Alice, who looks like an attractive humanoid version of him.
- Deconstructed: The vast physical differences between Troperian males and females means that Troperian culture is extremely sexist. The males and females all have restrictive gender roles and it is assumed that males and females cannot understand each other.
- As a result, Troperians are firm believers of Men Are the Expendable Gender. Males are bred and indoctrinated at a very young age to be loyal hunters, soldiers, and guards of the colony, perfectly fine with defending it and their mates at all costs. Their mere existence is little more than drones and pets of the females, who are instead indoctrinated to being the colony's scientists, generals, and political leaders. Their main directive is to enforce the laws of the colony with their male pets and watch the fireworks that is enemy conflict.
- Because all the male Troperians are ugly monsters, the female Troperians view that as attractive, while thinking conventionally attractive men are ugly.
- Played for Laughs: Most human males are annoyed that male monsters find them sexually attractive while most female monsters aren't interested. Humans are also the 'elves' suffering from Elfeminate stereotypes.
Back to Sexy Dimorphism.
