Tropes/Archetypes

Common traits between characters that fandom finds attractive.

• 4th Wall Blurring: "Teasing" the 4th wall so to speak, sexymen who are implied to have some amount of insight into/control over the workings of their reality even if not full awareness of their own fictional nature. It is extremely rare for a sexyman to fully, directly, and intentionally with full awareness break the 4th wall outright, but it is very common for them to do things that blur the lines and make it unclear how connected the story world is with reality. This also applies to sexymen who blur the lines unintentionally due to something about their inherent nature or what they represent on a meta level, such as Gaster being a meta deconstruction of the concept of a dummied out beta character.
• Androgynous: Characters who are either genderless, or partly male and partly female in appearance.
• Animal Theming: A strong association or connection to an animal. Pops up in sexymen of all genders, but is more common in sexywomen.
  • Anthro: Literally just being an anthropomorphic animal.
• Angst: EXTREME amounts of sadness.
• Artsy: Sexymen who appeal to the theater kid in us: whether they paint, make music, or perform, they've got a flair for the arts for sure.
• Bait: Some sexymen emerge organically. Others are created by design. The creators of these characters are aware of this phenomenon, and deliberately design characters to be picked up by sexyman culture.
• Blank Slate: Sexymen who, in spite of their immense popularity, have little to no personality traits. This leads to fans expanding upon their characterization in fanfics.
• British: Characters that are British or are voiced with a British accent.
  • European: A sort of broader variation of the British trope, for Sexymen that are Russian, Italian, French, etc.
• Brick Shithouse: A subversion of the typical thin, pale twink sexyperson where the character itself is big as hell and is proud of it. They are often portrayed with large bodies that are either chubby, muscular, big-boned, or a mix of all of them, but it is not the butt of a joke. Instead, they know they are big, and take full advantage of it, which can make this trope overlap with Dominating a bit with how many characters under this assert their dominance with their size.
• Burton: Characters with that creepy Tim-Burton-esque style to them.
• Capitalist: Characters who are businessmen, CEOs, or have other ties to capitalism. Typically amoral and willing to disregard others for the sake of their own profit.
• Chaoslord: Characters who are strongly associated with themes of chaos, are nearly always trolls, and almost certainly rely heavily on random/quirky style humor (hey, nothing wrong with that!). Usually supernatural in nature. A very common trope to find in Dominating and Knifemurder characters. Prime example: Discord from MLP.
• Chronokinetic: Sexypeople who have association with time, usually having some form of control over it as well. Due to the latter point, this frequently overlaps with Power.
• Criminal: For when a character breaks the law in some way. Different from being just a villain.
  • Con Artist: For when your character's specific deal is scamming people out of their money or something else valuable.
• Cosmic: Characters whose visuals, powers, and/or background have a strong aesthetic connection to space, such as stars, meteors, nebulas, etc. Not to be confused with the Eldritch trope, but can often overlap.
• Clown: Characters that are clowns or have a clown aesthetic.
• Controversial: A character that is highly divisive among the fans for whatever reason, whether it be an action that the character did being highly judged, being unlikeable to a degree, or even for triggering subject matter.
• Dark Harvest: Characters from media intended for younger audience which became infamous for a certain or multiple scenes that caused them to give children long-lasting trauma. Extra points if the scene is not nearly as scary on rewatch as an adult. Perhaps this scene also was the catalyst for the character's eventual popularity, but not always the case.
• Deadpan Snarker: Sexymen that use a lot of deadpan humor, are snippy with others, or both.
• Dealmaker: Characters, usually supernatural in nature, who make deals or contracts with people for their own gain.
• Detective: What it says on the tin. Characters who solve mysteries, while sometimes being mysterious themselves.
• DILF/MILF: For when people outgrow the twinks and move on to older characters. Note: A character doesn't necessarily have to have children to fit into this trope, they just need to radiate DILF/MILF Energy™.
  • GILF: For when older men/women are old enough to be your grandparents.
• Dissonant: A trope in which something doesn't seem right with a sexyman on their source, due to their appearance, lore, motives, and other traits about them not fitting, whether it be slightly or obviously with those of other (mostly major) characters from their source. Sometimes, the sexyman might feel like they come from a different source than the one they have due to this. Tends to overlap with Nonstandard Character Design.
• Distinctive Voice: In many cases sexymen have extremely distinctive vocal performances that are virtually always considered by the fandom to be a major component of their sex appeal.
  • Distinctive Speech Patterns: Characters that speak in easily recognizable ways - using slang from certain decades, unusually posh wording, archaic or simple grammar, overusing abbreviations or barely using them... Especially common in media without voice acting, or depending on exaggeration.
  • Distinctive Laugh: Characters who have a tendency to laugh frequently and/or have a distinctive, iconic laugh.
  • Quotable Catchphrase(s): Many sexymen say something quotable that the fandom picks up on.
• Divorced: Characters who are canonically or headcannoned as being divorced, so all their fans have a chance of marrying them!
• Dominating: Characters who assert their power over others. Could be through manipulation, magic, smugness, or force of personality.
• Duality: Think Jekyll and Hyde. Sometimes the character has an existing evil side, sometimes the fans make it happen.
• Egotistical: Characters who think they are hot shit, basically. Expect them to brag about their accomplishments and act like they are the next coming. Might have a real "would date their clone" energy, which... might explain some things.
• Eldritch: Sexymen with strong eldritch elements to some facet of their character, whether it's a visible part of their physical bodies or just a general vibe their lore gives off. Since the typical sexyman is a tall mostly human looking pale twink, in a vast majority of the cases the eldritch is a heavy implication lying just under the surface given off by the way they're presented in-story rather than something immediately visible on the character themselves if you taken them out of the context of how they were presented in action. Pairing this in some way or another with Monster Features is so popular that it's practically a requirement.
  • Glitching: A distinct subset of eldritch where the character is associated specifically with corruption of digital media and electronic devices. glitchy screen aesthetics, pixelated flickering, corrupted audio files, games behaving in strange unprogrammed ways, frequent references to hacking and terms like "virtual reality" and "in the game" and "artificial intelligence", ect. originally common in bendrowned style creepypastas but slowly seeped out to become a widely used trope across all forms of fiction.
• Elsagate: A character who is notorious for often being stolen and used in predatory ""children's"" content to exploit the YouTube algorithm. Think like "BALDI AND FREDDY FAZBEAR KISS IN SQUID GAME!? HUGGY WUGGY RAINBOW FRIENDS ARE JEALOUS, SAD STORY BUT HAPPY ENDING!"
• Eye Imagery: Characters who are associated with/frequently portrayed with strange eyes, either in canon or fanon. Glowing eyes, more than two eyes, heterochromia, surrounded by eyes in fan art, etc. Can range anywhere from "this character's entire identity is pictures of eyes everywhere" to merely "a particularly piercing gaze or striking eye color", the only requirement is that it be something noticeable about them that they just wouldn't quite feel the same without.
  • Spectacles: Like Eye Imagery, this trope refers to characters who wear glasses or eye wear that are a prominent part of the character's recognizability. A good example would be the Invisible Man from Hotel Transylvania.
• Facial Hair: For Sexymen who have a distinctive type of facial hair, be it beard, a mustache, goatee or sideburns.
• Fanon Splintering: If you see fan content of a character interacting with alternate versions of the same character like they're each individuals… it's this. Specifically refers to treating different fanon/AU versions like they're individuals. If you're looking for alternate versions from the work itself, you're likely looking for Duality.
• Forest Dweller: Characters who are often seen in forests, or other nature-related environments. They tend to have an air of mystery to them, as well as wear long cloaks/hats. Tends to overlap with Mysterious, Long Coat/Cape/Robe/Etc., and Nonhuman.
• Gay: Characters who are canonically LGBTQ+.
  • Questionable LGBT Rep: A character that embodies a negative LGBTQ+ trope or stereotype such as predatory gay man/lesbian, gay-coded villain, etc.
  • LGBTQ+ Coded: Characters who are coded as being LGBTQ+.
• Girlboss: These are characters you love to see cause chaos, because while they may be evil, they're also very cool. If you can ask "did X utilize girl power effectively when they did this egregious war crime," and the overwhelming response is yes, you have a girlboss. If the response is more split, they're Controversial. This trope is gender-neutral, but appears more often in sexywomen/female characters.
• Glowing Neon: Glowing color elements in canon or popular fanon designs.
• Goo: For Sexymen who are partially or entirely made out of goo.
• Hot-headed: Characters who are aggressive and short tempered. Different from Knifemurder because they don't usually go for the kill.
• Himbo: Characters that are dumb, strong, and kind.
• Intelligence: A common trait of sexymen, whether canonically present or added/accentuated by the fandom, is marked intelligence, especially of the clever calculating manipulative chessmaster kind. especially common in chaoslords and anyone with "well-dressed class British tophat twink" vibes.
  • Smartdumb: Characters that are both intelligent and stupid at the same time, usually being "book smart yet street dumb" - for example, being an expert in their field, but lacking common sense or basic knowledge of the world they live in.
• Johnlocked: When two characters are shipped extensively by fans despite the pairing not necessarily being canon (or even present) in the original work.
• Knifemurder: Characters who like to kill people, usually by stabbing.
• Mad Scientist: Scientist characters that have no regard for morals or ethics in their scientific experiments. (ex. Victor Frankenstein)
• Magnificent Bastard: As per TV Tropes, a Magnificent Bastard is a "villain (or morally gray character at best) portrayed as confident, charming schemers who thinks on their feet, outsmarts their competitors with style and grace, and remains graceful even in the event of defeat".
• Marked Canon/Fanon Divergence: Sexymen with a large gap between how they are in the original work (Canon) and how they are commonly portrayed in fanworks (Fanon)
  • Flanderization: Borrowed from TvTropes, when the fandom takes a single trait in the source material and exaggerates it wildly, at least in certain fanworks (mostly memes, comedic works and such). For example in the source material the character may mention liking spicy things once, and fanon runs wild with that depicting them being obsessed with all things spicy to the point of literally thinking about nothing else and their whole character revolving exclusively around utter worship for spiciness with their only trait being trying to find spicy things to eat and talking about eating spicy things constantly while all of the fanart shows them in close proximity to at least one hot pepper. This can also result in the canon version of the character being flanderized in future material by the creators in response to the fan's flanderization.
• Monster Features: Sexymen who have monster features. Fangs, claws, and etc. Canon or fanon.
  • Claws: Characters who possess clawed hands, be it talons, pincers or sharp nails, and may also be depicted as having such in fanworks.
  • Fangs: For Sexymen with overly sharp teeth, whether they're sharklike in canon or more subtle but exaggerated in fanon.
  • Horns: Character that have horns. Commonly paired with Animal Features, Anthro, or Demonic.
  • Tongue Imagery: The character is often featured with a visibly prominent and usually slimy tongue, whether canon or added by the fans. Does it make absolutely no sense for them to have a tongue, much less one that long and weirdly seductively drawn? Then they'll have a glowing magical ectoplasm tongue.
• Mysterious: A strong sense of mystery surrounding a character is in many cases the main thing that catapulted them into popularity to begin with. This is more for the character themselves in-universe.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Borrowed from TvTropes, a subset of Mysterious in which the mystery around the character comes mainly from the fact that it's blatantly clear from the way the character is canonically presented that literally no one, not even the creators, expected this side character to get so popular. This version is more for mysteriousness on the meta-level due to it's nature as an unexpected cultural reaction to a minor entity.
• Neurodivergent: For characters that are canonically neurodivergent in some way, usually autistic/anxiety but it can be anything.
  • Neurodivergent Coded: For when a character has really strong HINTS at being neurodivergent, but nothing is ever confirmed in canon.
  • Questionable Neurodivergent Rep: Characters who fall under harmful stereotypes of neurodivergence. This accounts for all kinds of neurodiversity, but more often than not is specifically for stereotypes of autism, anxiety disorders, and/or OCD. Think of it like the cousin of Twisted Freaking Cycle Path.
• Nonhuman: Where Monster Features describes sexymen with some non-human features, this is primarily for sexymen who are not even humanoid. These sexymen are often humanized by fans, sometimes as a White Twink Humanization.
  • Skeleton: Being a literal skeleton. Often overlaps with Monster Features.
  • Undead: Ghosts, vampires, zombies, etc.
  • Vampire: Sexypeople who are vampires or a kind of creature that's meant to be vampire-adjacent.
• Nonspeaking: Characters who never or rarely speak, instead communicating in other ways, such as sign language, gestures, written language, or AAC.
• Nonstandard Character Design: This is terminology yoinked from TV Tropes, where a character has stylistic attributes that stand out significantly from most characters in the same work. Tends to overlap with Dissonant. Really hard to apply to works like ENA and The Amazing Digital Circus where EVERY character is radically different.
  • Stylistic Suck: Characters that are intentionally designed poorly and with minimal effort.
• Object Head: A character with a human body, but a nonhuman head (ex: King Dice from Cuphead, Doc Scratch from Homestuck).
• Obscured Face: Pretty self explanatory. Basically a character who wears a mask, helmet, etc. or canonically has never shown their face.
• Obsessive: Sexymen who obsess over another character or the viewer, usually in a romantic context. Often paired with Twisted Freaking Cycle Path and/or Questionable Neurodivergent Rep.
• Oncelerization: When a character begins to develop a large amount of alternate universe versions that each differ widely from the source material. A midpoint between Canon/Fanon Divergence and Fanon Splintering.
• Pale Twink: Skinny young pale dudes. Usually taller than average. Not much facial or body hair. Doesn't have to be white, just pale; this is an archetype of many Japanese anime characters.
• Parental Figure: Distinct from DILF/MILF as there is usually a dedicated anti-sexyman following that just wants the character to say "are ya winning son?"
• Parental Issues: Character who have serious conflict with their parents and/or were abused by them
• Pathetic: Sexymen that are considered sad, pitiful, and sopping wet. Those who like them tend to either want to fix them or make them worse characters.
• Perpetual Smiler: Characters who never stop smiling, be it because of their personality or the fact that their smile is a permanent part of their design.
  • Perpetual Frowner: The polar opposite to Perpetual Smiler; characters who never stop frowning be it because of their personality or the fact that their frown is a permanent part of their design.
• Power: Power is a sexyman trope that can come in many forms. In order to fit this trope, a character should have a distinctly higher level of power than other characters from their source material. Power, in this context, can be incredible supernatural or technical powers, having generous access to a very powerful weapon, or being very influential in their fictional world.
  • All-Powerful: Characters that are all-powerful such as gods or reality-warpers.
  • One-Winged Angel: When the sexyman canonically has an alternate "powered up" form they use at some point, usually during a boss fight. Does not strictly have to include a visible character design change, only be recognizable as some form of "powered up" or "going all out" state.
• Power of Love: The bad boy villain is redeemed through the power of love.
• Puppet Motif: Characters associated with puppet imagery. This comes in many forms: controlling characters having puppeteer themes (which overlaps with Dominating), characters who are pawns to others being metaphorical puppets or just straight up actually being a puppet.
• Religious Imagery: Said character is tied with religious themes, i.e. God or angels, a LOT, either in canon or fan-art. Usually means Christian imagery but can count if said character is tied to other religions/mythologies.
  • Demonic: Characters that are either demons or associated with occult/satanic imagery
• Retro: Sexymen that are heavily associated with "retro" things, such as old 1920s style cartoon animation, radios, and 8-bit arcade games.
• Rival: Characters who have an intense rivalry with someone else as one of their main defining traits. In terms of their fandom this often results in them being shipped with their arch-nemesis.
• Robot: For Sexypeople who are robots or AI.
• Royalty: For Sexypeople who are kings, queens, or anything in between.
• Scars: For Sexypeople that have some kind of identifiable scarring, usually around the face (though it doesn't have to be).
• Secret Agent: Characters that are spies, assassins or involved in any similar kind of work.
• Short: Not all sexymen are tall twinks. Some sexymen are little Scrimblo Bimblos too.
• Tall: Self explanatory. Characters that are really tall even abnormally so.
• Teacher Figure: Characters who serve as mentors, guides, masters or teachers to others.
• Theme Song: Characters that have a song created for them that is associated with them. (not sure how it relates to being sexified, but a lot of big boys like Sans and the Once-ler have this element.) Usually canon but could be popular fan songs.
• Thin: Characters who are fairly slim, but don't fit under "White Twink Humanization" or "Pale Twink".
• Traitor: Sexypeople, whom are usually Twist Villains as well, who betray someone who trusted them, either in their past or in the series's timeline. Usually tied to Angst and can lead into Power of Love.
• Twisted Freaking Cycle Path: Characters that are inaccurate stereotypes of mental illness, typically those that vilify mental illness. Often tied with Knifemurder.
• Unkempt: Characters with a more scruffy, messy look to them. Probably popular for making the character seem more relatable and vulnerable, even cuter and/or rugged on occasion.
  • Grime: Characters who occasionally end up very sweaty and crusty, but this isn't their default state. If they participate in Knifemurder they probably end up covered in blood a lot, too.
• Upper-Class: Sexypeople tend to be characters on the upper end of society or having similarly refined aesthetics.
• Urban Legend Aesthetic: Urban legends, creepypasta, cryptids, the aesthetic for people who got really into Lemon Demon. Fandom loves this stuff and it shows with the characters they drive to sexymanification.
• Villain: Characters who are the bad guys of their stories.
  • Complete Monster: For villains who are completely irredeemable and are extremely heinous.
  • Morally Grey: Characters who aren't necessarily evil, but aren't exactly good either.
  • Redeemed Villain: A villainous character who undergone a redemption arc and joined the side of good- potentially through Power of Love, potentially through other reasons.
  • Refined Villain: For that specific genre of evildoer that can't help but enjoy classical music or some perfectly aged port wine in their free time between slaughtering the innocent and causing chaos.
  • Technically Antagonist: Characters who aren't necessarily evil, or who are only the antagonist under specific conditions (think Sans in the no mercy run).
  • Twist Villain: Not initially presented as an antagonist, but revealed to be one.
  • Villain Protagonist: A villain who is the protagonist or main character. It's fairly self-explanatory.
• Well-Dressed: Sexypeople who wear overly intricate or fanciful outfits.
  • Alternative Fashion: Everything that falls into the "alternative" category: emo, gothic, punk, scene, etc.
  • Long Coat/Cape/Robe/Etc: Character's outfit is very long and hangs down around their legs, likely obscuring the silhouette of their body and causing a dramatic billowing powerful sort of presence and/or sense of mystery when they walk.
  • Suitguy: Characters who typically wear formalwear, specifically suits. Often includes waistcoats, top hats, bowties, and pinstripes. Other neckwear may also be worn.
    • Gloveguy: Characters that wear gloves.
    • Hatguy: Characters that wear fancy hats like top hats and fedoras as prominent part of their design
  • Uniform: Sub-archetype of suit/well-dressed- almost like a softer version of it. Lab coats, job-associated uniforms, business casual.
• White Twink Humanization: These characters are not skinny white men in their source material, but have been commonly portrayed as skinny white men in fandom. They are often Nonhuman, and are humanized by fans, but some are humans/humanoids from mediums without canonical character designs, such as podcasts.
• White Hair: Characters that have white or very light-colored hair.

Categories

It's highly encouraged you add these categories to characters they fit for organizational reasons.

• Sexyman: Characters who are men.
• Sexywoman: Characters who are women.
• Sexyperson: Characters who are nonbinary.
• Fine Wine: A character that was created before the onset of sexyman culture, but fits the bill nevertheless. Applies to characters made around the early 2000's at the latest.
• Officially Recognized: Sexypeople who were not created as bait, however their sexyperson status has been acknowledged and embraced by the/a creator of the work.