A Trope in The Lego Movie

Saw the Lego Movie. Was good, etc. There was a character set up between two of the main protags that I’ve been seeing elsewhere, though I didn’t seem to find it on the TV Tropes site. It’s similar to the Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy trope—or rather, it’s a very specific version of it in bildingsroman narratives.

The male protag in this trope is often a youngish goody two-shoes, hapless and inexperienced in life, who unknowingly possesses some latent powers that hold the key to defeating the main antag. The girl is a field agent of the resistance group and is his first contact with them. She is attractive and competent girl with moxie; the absolute double threat for any horny dork. He falls for her at some point but he’s too much of a bumbling beta male to be attractive to her, so she is a perpetual bitch to him while trying to be professional with the new recruit. Sometimes she will have a love interest within the resistance group with (surprise!) an overconfident jerk. Hapless beta male protag serves as a emotional tampon for her regrouping efforts, but then she goes back to overconfident jerk guy for a fling and the cycle continues. Sometimes betaboy gets the girl at or near the end when he proves he isn’t as much of a sissy, but not always.

I’ve seen this in plenty of anime series: RahXephon, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Eureka 7—those are ones that come to mind first but I’m sure there’s more. Usually those mecha-based series involve teen or pre-teen pilots, which lends the situation easily to this type of narrative. I’m not necessarily annoyed with it since the trope is not all that far from the reality of inter-relational sexual dynamics in our world, but it is an overused device.

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