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Gender Incompetence
- 138 statements
- 25 feature instances
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In fiction, there's a tendency of one gender to fail when the going gets tough even though there isn't much reason for it. It isn't that all the awesome superpowers belong to the gender that saved the day. Just, for some reason, one sex seems to come out on top all the time. This can take a few forms. Fortune Favors One Sex: In this instance, one gender loses all the time, just by really bad luck. Dumb Blonde Gender: Here, an entire gender is treated as being as dumb as a collection of granite chunks, causing them to screw up all the time through sheer lack of intelligence. Gender Baggage: This is for when all members of one gender are treated as being overly emotional, or conversely, emotionless, causing them to fail when greater strength/compassion is needed. Customary Incompetence: For instances where the failure of one gender is due to the way they're treated by members of the other gender. For instance, male characters encouraging equally-capable female ones to stand back and let them handle it. The women may go along with the plan because it's expected, reducing their effectiveness regardless of any spells/techniques/special training they may otherwise have. In all cases, one gender is made effectively useless throughout the course of the fiction, while the other is not. If one gender has all the superpowers, skills, weapons, and/or magic, and those powers cause them to succeed, this trope does not apply. This is only for instances where the reason behind the failure of one gender and the success of the other is due to something other than a physical, tactical disadvantage. Sister Trope of Competence Zone, which is when only people within a certain age group are competent, everyone else being The Ditz. Compare Gender-Restricted Ability, when certain items or techniques need the caster to belong to a specific gender. Compare and contrast Faux Action Girl, a female character who can't really kick your ass, but the show pretends she can; Bumbling Dad, when fathers are shown as moronic and incompetent at child-rearing; Hysterical Woman, when women are portrayed as too emotional to act rationally; Women Are Wiser; when women are depicted as more sensible and level-headed than men; and Men Are Better Than Women, when it's men the superior gender. |
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The Simpsons: The female members of the family are depicted as being far more competent than male ones. This goes to the point that the men are rendered as bungling idiots (Homer and sometimes Bart) while the women are rendered as innately clever, cunning, wise, or even good in a fight (Marge, Lisa, and Maggie). Lampshaded in one episode, where it's revealed that it's a genetic trait for Simpson men to end up as stupid losers. Simpson women, on the other hand, are invariably geniuses. Notably, the Simpson gene responsible for the male Simpson's stupidity is never mentioned again, and future episodes give other explanations for Homer and Bart's stupidity, like a crayon lodged in Homer's brain and (in Bart's case) a combination of ADHD, a pathological need for attention, and a generally bad experience during his first day at school; a woman heavily implied to be Homer's older half-sister was about Homer's intellect. Although Homer and Bart are usually shown as being less intelligent than Marge or Lisa, they're perhaps more likeable (at least until Homer's Jerkass tendencies went into orbit) and socially adept, balancing things out somewhat. |
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Mercy Hills Pack: Subverted. Most packs openly consider omegas (the submissive, child-bearing gender) profoundly incapable of much more than cooking and having babies. On the other hand, "an omega's labor is just... expected", and it isn't uncommon for an omega to be doing all the actual work of running a pack while an Alpha (the dominant, physically strong gender) gets all the credit for it. | |
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Street Fighter X Tekken: During a stage transition males and women receive different animations according to their gender. When a male loses his HP and the stage transition is happening, all of the girls could appear to be scolding their ally for losing while another male being anchor just looks like he wants to get revenge. | |
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Resident Evil 4: The game does this in its own subtle ways. Ashley, obviously due to not being trained in combat, moves slower and more feminine when it comes to climbing and parkour, and while Ada is generally on par with Leon while playable, there are some tasks neither Ashley nor Ada could do such as grab something that fell in dirty water while Leon would get it. | |
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American Dad!: Averted for the most part. Stan is actually a pretty intelligent and efficient operative in many aspects but is prone to making snap decisions and his judgment can often be clouded by his political views. Meanwhile, Francine is (usually) more rational and has noticeable hidden talents and intellect, but something of a Cloud Cuckoo Lander. Likewise, neither Hayley nor Steve seems especially more intelligent or competent than the other. | |
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Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-: Anime only, customary variety. Sakura never really manages to become an Action Girl, instead having the party do all the fighting while she is reserved for situations needing a MacGuffin solution. The other women in the anime are also basically told to Stay in the Kitchen. | |
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Birds of Prey (2020): Men here are either flat-out evil, sexist, or stupid and made into punching bags for the protagonists to wade through. | |
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Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts: Almost every male character (except teachers) is dumb or suffers from The Worf Effect. Some Take a Level in Badass to compensate, but even then they're still mostly Butt Monkeys. Women tend to be super-smart and have Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male at full strength. The only one without good scores has a good excuse (she spent most of her life in Germany and doesn't know kanji). | |
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The Legend of Zelda: It does this with the members of the Triforce. The bearer of wisdom is always female while the other two are male and while all three are portrayed as powerful in their own right the bearer of wisdom, no matter how strong and combat-ready she gets, will always be weak to sustained attack while the other two don't have the same weakness. | |
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Dune: It seems to be something of a theme to have an all-female society with strange and terrible powers suddenly have to deal with a man with those exact same powers, only several jillion times stronger. According to certain throwaway lines regarding Norma Cenva in God-Emperor of Dune, there have been gender-swapped variants of this in the past as well. It's stated that the limit of the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mothers was that their training to particularly feminine/maternal instincts meant that they couldn't access their male ancestry in their Other Memory. The Kwisatz Haderach was intended to overcome this weakness (as well as having other capabilities), which would require a male trained in Bene Gesserit ways. Note the fact that the Gesserit wanted to have a Kwisatz Haderach, but he ended up coming a generation too early for their plans. Then again, men didn't become Bene Gesserit because they kept failing the final test which killed them. Apparently, the depths of the male psyche are just that scary. |
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Invasion (2015): Pretty much all the women in the story are completely incompetent and useless and do nothing except whine and moan, getting themselves into trouble to be rescued by the more competent male hero. | |
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Super Robot Wars: Original Generation: The first season of the anime is quite unfair with its female characters, most of them barely getting to fight or only fighting once for a plot event, then not anymore. The most egregious example might be Kusuha, who only deploys for one fight so she can get captured. Thankfully, the second season averts this and makes both guys and girls awesome. | |
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Final Fantasy IV: Early on in the game, it features a battle to try to protect a castle that focuses on fighting hordes of bad guys, which wouldn't be so hard except that just before the battle, you're robbed of all your most powerful spellcasters, seemingly just because they're women. The rest of the game isn't bad at recovering from this, however. More likely, though, that they were just moving the party members who knew white magic to the back lines in order to treat the wounded. (The fact that the women are all spellcasters, of course, stumbles into another stereotype.) The end of the game averts this. Cecil tells the female party members to stay behind while the men go off to the final dungeon on the moon. Upon landing on the moon, they realize the ladies simply hid on the ship. Based on how hard the last dungeon is, Cecil should thank his lucky stars. The scene is semi-replayed during Yang's chapter in the sequel; it's just about the only point in the chapter (after she joins you) where Ursula isn't either fighting alongside her father or searching for him. |
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Kim Possible: Pretty much all male characters are either incredibly annoying, evil, useless in a fight, or some combination of the above. Slightly downplayed in that many of them do get at least a few instances where they get to shine, and many of them are Techno Wizards. | |
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The Wheel of Time: Men are widely regarded as weak, mainly because they can't really work together in channeling magic, and most of those that can channel get sealed up pretty quickly. On the other hand, most of the male characters are portrayed as fairly sensible, while the women are typically sniffing, arm-crossing Tsunderes who won't listen to reason. Men as a group become more and more powerful over the course of the series, while the women become less powerful (and often less competent), and even supposedly powerful and capable female characters end up in distress a lot. |
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Archie Comics: Seen a lot in the older issues. A storyline from the late 1960s or 1970s focuses on the cluelessness of women. Archie's mom goes into a frenzy trying to find her purse, which Mr. Andrews exasperatedly reveals has been in front of her all along; Archie learns from this situation and later willfully ignores Veronica while she desperately searches for her own purse, until it is, again, found to be right in front of her. Mr. Lodge then compliments him on his understanding of females. Another "classic" example of this ended up being reprinted in a more modern double digest. It demonstrated the ridiculousness of working professional women. The reader is invited to consider how silly it would be to have women in men's jobs, with funny vignettes portraying women failing in a number of professions including being a police officer and a doctor. |
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Futurama: Subverted. While at first, it seems that Women Are Wiser and can be trusted to do their jobs and the men are unreliable failures, things turn out to be more balanced as we get to know the cast better. Leela, for example, can generally be considered the most responsible and sensible of the crew. However, she can occasionally be as crazy and immature as everyone else. Fry, on his part, is functionally retardednote as a result of of lacking a Delta Brainwave, which is a straight inconvenience whenever the Brainspawn aren't a factor in whatever the current plot is. Hermes is genuinely competent, Bender is quite intelligent but totally amoral, the Professor has a brilliant mind, but one afflicted by senility and borderline insanity, Amy is a Genius Ditz, and even Zoidberg has his rare moments of insight despite being an utter loser. | |
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Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series: In"My Funny Skankentine", it's made very clear that Mai lost her duel with Joey because she's a woman. Well, that and the fact that 4Kids censored most of her cards. | |
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High Guardian Spice: While the female leads are shown to be not perfect, make mistakes, and struggle in their fights, the named male characters are pitiful. Excluding Snapdragon and the teachers, they are either evil, homophobic jerkasses, or stupid and generally not up to the intelligence of the main heroes. | |
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Siren: Compared to the men, the women have more limited climbing abilities, cannot use higher-skill weapons, and need males to help them get to certain areas when being escorted. These limitations also transfer to the ladies when the player is in control of them and can make a stage that was literally just played as a male much harder. Not even the evil female shibitos are spared from this as they share the same limitations as the human girls. | |
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Iron Jawed Angels: A major theme in the film is discussing and defying this trope. Specifically, in regard to the participation of women in America's political affairs. The suffragettes passionately argue that one's sex doesn't correlate with intelligence and common sense. The rest of society begs to differ. | |
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R.O.D the TV: The anime OVA is very good about balancing gender effectiveness. The TV series is another matter entirely. Even though the vast majority of the series' main characters are female, they seem to do a lot of losing, crying, and getting captured, despite the fact that they are physically capable of killing the bad guy at any time with their awesome superpowers. This is especially prominent in the final episodes. | |
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It seems to be something of a theme to have an all-female society with strange and terrible powers suddenly have to deal with a man with those exact same powers, only several jillion times stronger. According to certain throwaway lines regarding Norma Cenva in God-Emperor of Dune, there have been gender-swapped variants of this in the past as well. | |
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WWE Video Games: Possibly as a consequence of pushing the "Women's Revolution" in 2K20, Red is shown to be a wrestling prodigy while Tre is shown to be an incompetent doofus. A running gag in the game is that people mention how they always expected Red to do great things. Tre, "... not so much". | |
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Space 1889: Customary incompetence type was definitely present historically, but it is downplayed in the game. The game is set in the late 19th century, one of the historical epochs of the greatest cultural gender differences. Women are expected to be domestic, supportive, and sensitive; men are expected to be professionally competent, brave, and physically tough. People generally try to live up to what is expected of them and if you try to do otherwise you meet resistance and possibly downright hostility. One hindrance is that it will be hard for a man or woman to get training in and practice skills that are considered clearly outside their gender role. This is downplayed in the game and no rules prevent any gender from getting any skill once play has started. Nor are there any gender modifications to stats or so. | |
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