"And you know what else? You know what else, you're...you're...a girl dragon! Oh, sure, I mean, of COURSE you're a girl dragon!"
Ahh! A monster! A squicky mess of tentacles and seventeen eyes, a-and hideous teeth a-and his breath smells like sulfur and he opens his mouth! He's about to speak! He says: "I'm a she."
You see, in the mind of the audience (or at least in the mind of some characters) monsters are often initially assumed to be male. This trope covers situations when these characters are surprised to find out that the monster is, in fact, a female (especially if the female of the species is More Deadly Than the Male).
This takes the form of a monster in some way having her gender revealed, and someone acting surprised by this.
Contrast (or compare?) Viewer Gender Confusion, when it's the viewers who are surprised. See also Samus Is a Girl, Monster Is a Mommy, Juvenile All Along, and Your Tomcat Is Pregnant.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- A chapter of Naruto features a giant armadillo whose gender Naruto and Killer B argue about trying to discover, except that we ALL get a good look at its underside. TWICE.
- Combined with Samus Is a Girl in Negima! Magister Negi Magi: a Bounty Hunter with lecherous intent to several young girl turns out to herself be a Little Bit Beastly girl whose tentacles and stocky build come from a set of Powered Armor. She's still a huge pervert nonetheless.
- One-Punch Man: In the manga's Monster Association Arc, Saitama and Flashy Flash encounter a low-level Cephalothorax whom they force to guide them to the Monster King. They eventually get comfortable enough with each other to introduce themselves, and when Saitama remarks that "Manako" sounds like a girl's name, Manako clarifies that she is indeed female.
- In Pokémon the Series: Diamond and Pearl, Jessie manages to capture a Yanma, which then evolves into a Yanmega, a huge vicious-looking dragonfly with an extremely deep reverberating voice. During a later episode, a female Togepi uses the move Attract (which only works on targets that are the opposite gender of the user) to immobilize the main cast's Pokemon, including Pikachu, Piplup, Croagunk and Meowth (all four of whom are male). Jessie's Yanmega remains unaffected, and after putting two and two together, Jessie's shocked to find out that her giant bug Pokemon is, in fact, a female.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: The origin story of Blue-Eyes White Dragon reveals that in Ancient Egypt the White Dragon was not a Ka born from a person's heart like other Kas, but that it's actually a literal manifestation of Kisara's Ba. A Ka is powered by a person's Ba, which is their soul, their spirit energy. Since the White Dragon is simultaneously Kisara's Ka and Ba, it's literally her very soul in form of a dragon. This soul is carried over in its modern incarnation, Blue-Eyes.
- While it does not happen in Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, it happens in the OCG/TCG; White Wing Magician, the human version of one of the Four Heavenly Dragons, reveals that Clear Wing Synchro Dragon is actually female.
Comic Books
- Marvel Universe: Piranha (a normal piranha fish mutated by radiation into a semi-humanoid being) was always assumed to be male since the character's introduction in 1974. Even A.R.M.O.R.'s file on Piranha lists "male" under sex. In a 2009 comic, it's discovered that it's actually a female when the monster has incubated humans with its offspring.
- Plop!: In the first issue's story "Kongzilla", the titular monster is assumed to be a male and a woman named Selma Korn offers to make the sacrifice of becoming the gorilla-lizard beast's mate. Imagine her surprise when the creature instead kisses and makes off with her husband Irving.
Comic Strips
- In Popeye's "Plunder Island" Arc, Wimpy is at one point dragged off of Popeye's ship and onto the Sea Hag by the monstrous Goon. Soaked from being in the ocean, Wimpy decides to take off his clothes while being held captive with the Goon watching him. Just as he's about to strip naked, a voice comes through the door, saying, "Keep a close eye on him, Alice." Wimpy quickly realizes who 'Alice' is, and quickly re-clothes himself, saying, "I didn't know there was a female present."
Films — Animation
- In Shrek 1, Donkey is confronted by a dragon on a collapsing walkway and attempts to smooth-talk his way out, before realizing that the dragon is female, and she thinks that he's hitting on her. He goes with it.
- Strange Magic: Thang and the audience are both surprised to learn that his fellow goblin Stuff is female. She thought it was obvious.
- Everyone assumes that Kevin is a boy bird in Up. Not unjustifiably — with many bird species the colorfully-feathered one is the male. (Peacocks are the classic example.) Kevin's plumage is modeled on a male Himalayan monal
from the Sacramento Zoo. Kevin could still be male, even if he's raising babies, as there are several species of bird where the male does the childrearing.
Films — Live-Action
- In Dragonheart: Vengeance, Lukas is quite surprised to find out that Siveth, the Dragon he's been searching for, is female.
- In Godzilla (1998), Nick is shocked when a pregnancy test for humans reveals that the giant lizard destroying New York is pregnant. It's subverted in that everyone still refers to Zilla as a "he" due to it being capable of asexual reproduction.
Literature
- Animorphs: In The Change, Tobias and Rachel are surprised to hear one of the escaped Hork-Bajir (an alien race of 7-foot-tall, bipedal lizards covered in blades) call the other his wife.
- Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest: Hajime and his former classmates are surprised that the dragon he tried to kill via sodomy is very much a female.
- Discworld:
- In Guards! Guards!, the dragon tormenting the city is revealed at the last minute to be female, to the surprise of the city watch.
- "Chelonauts" in The Light Fantastic are trying to go over the edge to determine the sex of Great A'Tuin, the turtle the Discworld travels on. Their mission is largely unsuccessful, but at the end of the book, the strange lights wizards have been seeing in the sky turn out to be Great A'Tuin's eggs, and hatch.
- In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Norbert the Norwegian Ridgeback is revealed to be a Norberta, to Hagrid's bafflement. According to Charlie, the easiest way to tell this is that female dragons are even more vicious.
- Inheritance Cycle:
- In Eragon, Eragon comes with a long list of names to suggest for his newfound dragon to call her. He lists quite a few, before figuring out that the dragon is female, and he'd only suggested male names thus far.
- Another instance is seen in Brisingr with the Ra'zac. One is revealed to be female, while the gender of the other is left ambiguous.
- The title character in IT is protecting Its eggs, which will presumably hatch into Mind Screw monsters just like her.
- In I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level, after Azusa defeats the dragon Laika, she demands that Laika make up destroying her house (on accident) during the battle. The thoroughly cowed Laika asks to return home first to retrieve reparation money from their Dragon Hoard. The next day, Azusa is shocked when a cute girl in Elegant Gothic Lolita clothing introduces herself as Laika in a humanoid form. The anime adaptation supports the deception by applying a distortion to her voice which makes her sound male, which disappears after the reveal.
- Inverted in Jurassic Park (1990), in that all the dinosaurs in the park have been engineered to be female, to prevent uncontrolled breeding and overpopulation. The "surprise" comes when Dr. Grant finds a nest of eggs with baby dino prints leading away from it, meaning that some of the dinosaurs must be in fact male. Justified by the use of frog DNA, as some species of frogs can change sex in a single-sex environment. The trope proper is referenced earlier by the park's chief geneticist, Henry Wu, who says everyone always refers to the adult Tyrannosaurus rex as a "he" despite being aware that it is female, like all dinosaurs in the park are supposed to be.
- In The Serpents Secret, Kiran, Neel, and Kiran's parents are chased by a hungry newborn rakkhosh, who Neel's mother refers to as 'she,' much to Neel's surprise. She's also Neel's new half-sister because Neel's rakkhosh mother adopted her.
- Inverted in Slayers: a female-looking firebreather is revealed to be a "drag"-on despite Tertiary Sexual Characteristics when Gourry gets a good glimpse of the underside.
- In the Vorkosigan Saga short story "Labyrinth", Admiral Miles Naismith accepts the job of putting down a defector's Super-Soldier experiment, bungles the infiltration of his old lab badly enough for the guards to cast him into a basement to be devoured by said experiment, and... discovers a lonely teenaged girl.
- The Way of Kings (2010): Dalinar Kholin realizes about halfway though the book that the Parshendi send their "femalen" into battle alongside the males. Note that for Alethi like Dalinar, a woman fighting is about as scandalous as that same woman having sex in public. With someone she's not married to.
- In The Wingfeather Saga, the Grey Fang Nuzzard, a deteriorating, wolf-like humanoid captured by the Hollowsfolk, is referred to in primarily masculine or gender-neutral terms. When the Cloven and the Fangs are restored to humanity, she is revealed to be a preteen girl and is renamed Galya.
Live-Action TV
- Lorne's mother in Angel is played by an extremely muscular, bearded man. Angel is comically baffled when Lorne says, "Hi, Mom."
- The Mandalorian is nearly eaten by a blurg right after landing on Arvala-7. An Ugnaught moisture farmer stuns it for him, informing the Mandalorian that he'll need to learn to ride it if he wants to cross the desert. Needless to say the blurg has other ideas and keeps throwing Mando off its back.
Mando: Perhaps he remembers I tried to roast him.Kuiil: This is a female. The males are all eaten during mating season.
- Night Gallery: In "The Caterpillar", a man pays to have a romantic rival murdered by having a carnivorous earwig placed in the man's ear. The plan goes wrong, however, and the next morning he awakens to find that the earwig has been placed in his ear instead, and has crawled inside his head. He endures weeks of agony as the earwig eats its way through his brain, but he remarkably survives the ordeal. He is then told by a doctor that the earwig was female... and it laid eggs.
- In Reaper, Nina starts giving Ben some compliments that perturb him coming from her rather masculine seeming demonic form. They later start dating, though mostly in her human form.
- Star Trek: The Original Series: The Horta in "The Devil in the Dark" turns out to be female... and the "silicon nodules" that miners on its planet are destroying turn out to be her eggs.
- Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Ortegas is stranded on an alien planet in an Enemy Mine situation with a gorn. To her surprise, the gorn is a female who wishes to work with Ortegas and not kill and eat her.
- Supernatural:
- Gender-inverted, sort of, in "Something Wicked." The boys are hunting a Shtriga, a sort of witch that feeds on children and, according to the lore, is a Voluntary Shapeshifter which usually takes the form of a Witch Classic, so they initially suspect a creepy old woman at the local hospital who has an inverted cross hanging in her room. They're surprised when it turns out to actually be the male pediatrician overseeing the sick children.
- Gender-inverted again in "Sex and Violence" when the boys are hunting a Siren which usually takes the form of a beautiful woman. Dean is led to believe that it's hunting Sam by taking the form of the sexy coroner he'd been flirting with, but it actually took the form of the male FBI Agent Dean had been bonding with; the Siren points out that it technically takes the form of its victim's deepest desire, and since the episode occurs while Sam and Dean's relationship is on the rocks, Dean's deepest desire is for a brother he can relate to.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons: One 2E supplement about the Dragonlance setting has a section on minotaur society, complete with an in-character narrator who'd been captured by sea-going minotaurs. When this character asks the ship's captain about minotaur family life, the captain gruffly points out that the husky, wide-horned first mate who's been holding the narrator's hands behind his back throughout their conversation is, in fact, his wife. This was in sharp contrast to the few pieces of artwork depicting minotaur females, which tended to be unsubtle about things.
Theatre
- The gender of the giant featured in the second act of Into the Woods isn't specified until the characters actually see her, whereupon the Witch yells "THE GIANT'S A WOMAAAAN!"
Video Games
- You know the Level 300-ish dragon in Disgaea: Hour of Darkness that hangs around Laharl's throne room and helps save your ass once? She'll have you know that she's one of the more attractive of her lot. Dark Hero Days features a lesser surprise in the form of Actress, a female Entei. It would've been more surprising if not for the fact that you can hear her obviously female voice in the battle that occurs prior to someone bringing up her gender.
- Shale the golem from Dragon Age: Origins is revealed to have once been a female dwarf. Notably, even Shale is surprised by the revelation.
- In DuckTales: Remastered, the Yeti boss of the Himalayas is shown to be a female. It's a reference to an episode of the original TV show, "Lost Crown of Genghis Khan", which also features an abominable snow-woman.
- Infinity Wars: The "surprise" was enhanced due to it being a blatant Retcon (since she was originally referred to as "he" before the text on her card was changed later) but Shikana, Who Demands Tribute, is actually female. She looks like this.note
- The dragon Hooktail in the English GCN version of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.note Despite the character being the first major boss of the story, you don't learn this until the final chapter — where her older brother is the first of many bosses, and is predictably pissed off at you for what you did to his sister. Even the characters assume Hooktail to be male, and refer to her using male pronouns. This is averted in the Spanish localization, in which Hooktail is actually male. The English localization in the remake openly refers to her as female from the start rather than presenting it as a twist.
- Psychonauts: Raz discovers that the lungfish residing at the bottom of the lake is actually "Linda". With the deep, booming voice, the audience can be forgiven for its assumption.
Raz: What a magical lady.
Web Animation
- The Happy Tree Friends episode "Cubtron Z" introduces a Kaiju sea monster. You'd at first think the monster is a male, as it has a male voice, but at the end of the episode, the monster is revealed to act like a female, and is shown with eyelashes and an apron to fit.
Webcomics
- Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name has a vampire bat who Hanna wrongly assumes is male, and he seems to get more apologetic than she got offended when she corrects him. She has Tertiary Sexual Characteristics upon closer inspection.
- The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!: Upon encountering Nessie the Loch Ness Monster, Bob says he thinks she's a girl monster, because she has eyelashes. Molly, being a monster herself, confirms that only girl monsters have eyelashes.
- In Rhapsodies, Hilda and the rest of the Krampusi who show up in the Christmas episodes.
Websites
- Monster may be stretching the term slightly, but in SCP Foundation, there is Dr. Wondertainment.
Web Videos
- Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Dodoria is a male in the source material, but to Vegeta's shock and disgust, she's revealed to be a woman here, even regarding herself as the most beautiful (and fertile) on her home planet (until Frieza blew it up). Vegeta then proceeds to kill her (it doesn't help her attempt to talk him out of it is an offer to rule the universe "as husband and wife") and "repress the truth" of what he had just learned. This, in of itself, is a reference to the Hungarian Dub of Z, which made Dodoria a woman for some odd reason. Short and (far from) sweet summary from Kai Abridged, a compressed summary of a season of DBZ Abridged:
Vegeta: Any last words before I kill you?
Dodoria: I have a thick. Meaty. Vagina!
[Vegata blows Dodoria to shreds, then starts retching]
Western Animation
- Green Lantern: The Animated Series has the main characters defeating a giant monster in what seems to be a gladiator-style fight (their translators are offline). However, then the spectators rush out to tend to the beast, and we hear them speak legibly for the first time.
Alien: What have you done to Mother?
- The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: The show itself seems to have a hard time concluding whether Jeff is a male giant spider or a female giant spider, as he has been shown to lay thousands of eggs in two episodes but has a masculine voice and married the Spider Queen Velma Green. Lampshaded by Billy.
- The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack: The episode "Cammy Island" has the titular hideous ogre turning out to be a girl, who is implied to, at least mentally, not be that much older than Flapjack himself.
- Star Trek: Prodigy: The discovery of a universal translator in the pilot triggers the reveal that the massive, roaring rock monster Dal’s been wary of all episode is actually an eight-year-old girl. Her name’s Rok-Tahk, and she becomes The Baby of the Bunch once they have a crew to be the baby of.
- Subverted/inverted with Bigfoot in The Venture Bros., who Steve Summers is in love with. Summers never specifies Bigfoot's gender, but Brock assumed they were female. After shaving Bigfoot for the sake of a disguise, he reveals to the audience that he found out otherwise.
Steve: What are you, shy? Sasquatch doesn't have anything you haven't seen before.
Brock: Sasquatch is something I haven't seen before!