Improbably-Female Cast



"Yukinari: Man, and I thought there were too many girls here before..."

- Girls Bravo

An Improbably-Female Cast is when a work's cast is dominated by women in a situation where this is incredibly unlikely. This can range from males being present in the setting but not given screen time or importance to the story, to literally the majority of the people in the main setting are female. As a side effect, you can expect any male characters that do appear to gravitate to satellite status. Older women (where "older" can mean "over twenty-five") don't tend to fare much better.

There are two main reasons for a work choosing to have an Improbably Female Cast: they target a male demographic and the many women provide Fan Service and Les Yay, or they target a younger female demographic and are simply going with characters the intended audience will most likely empathize with. Confusion between these two motivations can easily result in a Periphery Demographic for both that can leave you asking "What Do You Mean It's Not for Little Girls?"

For another way that writers of Bishoujo Series get around needing all these female characters, see Otaku Surrogate. If there are a bunch of boys around, and it's due to Moe appeal rather than because the target audience might ignore girls, it may have a Cast Full of Pretty Boys.

Anime and Manga

 * Aside from the cute boy Twin Stars and a middle-aged commander, Galaxy Angel is noticeably devoid of men. This role is usually performed by Forte whenever a gag requires a "male" equivalent, something she eventually starts complaining about.
 * Broccoli (the production company) sometimes lampshades this in gags, notably the prince who kidnaps Milfeulle and a flashback to Usada's father, who are obviously women in really transparent disguises.
 * And the serious Dating Sim series puts the men in Mission Control, with an Unlucky Everydude, his Lancer and best friend, and various crew members that are either old Mentors or cute little boys.
 * Soukou no Strain did have male pilots, didn't they? There was Colin and Cedi, who were dead in the first episode. Carris? Dickon?  Ralph? Big Bad, Ax Crazy. Meanwhile the girls,, did mostly fine. All due an inversion of Women in Refrigerators. Well except for Ralph.
 * The male population of Lyrical Nanoha hasn't fared well after three seasons. Chrono got shipped off with (new character) Griffith to Mission Control, which, oddly enough, doesn't seem to affect their female co-worker Hayate's screen time in the least. There's a whole meme about Yuuno slowly losing his screentime once he stopped being a cute talking ferret, and new character Erio being prominently featured has a lot to do with being a non-threatening little kid that fan-favorite Fate likes to dote on. Zafira suffered an even worse fate, since he has apparently been trapped permanently, and inexplicably, in his animal form since the beginning of the third season. Even when severely injured and bedridden in the infirmary, he's still in wolf form.
 * Even the villains follow this trope. The Mad Scientist Scaglietti is male, but for some reason, except for Zest, all of his combat cyborgs and artificial mages are females. He does give a reason, albeit one with disturbing implications:.
 * ViVid takes this a step further, with every major character introduced being a girl. So far, Erio and Zafira (in a brief cameo) are the only named male characters to have made an appearance in the entire manga. At least Zafira get's to show up in his human form.
 * Force began to turn the amount of improbability back a bit by giving us a male protagonist in Touma and an antagonistic family with a male-female ratio of 3 to 4.
 * Tokyo Mew Mew isn't a bishoujo series, but Earth's chosen Magical Girls are all, well, girls, reporting to Bishonen.
 * While Keroro Gunsou isn't a bishoujo series, its creator is fond of the genre. To get around this, nearly all the male characters are funny aliens, while female characters are often prominently humanoid.
 * Lucky Star has a grand total of three recurring male roles (five, if you count Anizawa and his assistant.) The girls eventually Lampshade Hanging this by commenting on the lack of romance in their lives.
 * Parallel Trouble Adventure Dual enagaged in a bit of Lampshade Hanging with this trope, by claiming that only females were capable of piloting the series' Humongous Mecha. The lone male exception was a special case.
 * Mai-Otome. It's Justified Trope by the fact that the Applied Phlebotinum runs on Virgin Power.
 * Queens Blade, given the target audience and premise of the franchise, this is not surprising; still it's worth mentioning if one wants to take the story a bit seriously. There are only a few remotely significant male characters in the whole franchise, and even so they are basically token motivations (Owen and Count Vance) or enemies (Delmmore) for the female characters; basically if a man isn't a Satellite Character, he will definitely be a Cannon Fodder, a Mooks, a Posthumous Character, or any other defining role that minimises the screen time spent away from the girls.
 * Simoun. Another Justified Trope, due to the world they inhabit.
 * The iDOLM@STER Xenoglossia. Somewhat justified. The reason they use innocent girls as pilots is to avoid the appearance of the robots being weapons, since they're only used for asteroid defence.
 * Vandread, justified. The bulk of the cast are Space Pirates from an all-female planet. The few males are refugees/prisoners from the all-male planet. And the planets they visit are more normally gender-balanced.
 * In Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito, originally a Bishoujo Game, the role of the player is replaced by the side character Hazuki (a girl) who, in keeping with the theme, is the one with the crush on Hatsumi.
 * For some reason there are absolutely no male gondoliers in Aria, even though steering a gondola can be hard work requiring quite a bit of muscle power. The girls don't look especially strong, though. Explained in the manga: gondoliers not working in tourism do tend to be men, and the appeal of the female Undines has made them a tourist attraction in themselves. The sexism in the industry makes it so that any young woman looking to steer a gondola basically has to go into tourism.
 * Mai-HiME. There is an explanation given at the very end, and it isn't pretty.
 * For some reason all the mecha pilots in Sky Girls are cute young girls. There's a reason males of the right age aren't around, but you'd think they'd be able to find people out of their teens.
 * Battle Athletes Daiundokai is focused on a prestigious, interplanetary sport event which is for girls only. Male characters are rare, mostly passive and usually much older.
 * In Silent Möbius, the special agents battling the monsters/demons from another dimension are all women. At one point, their leader offers some sort of philosophical justification about women being able to bear children and thus being the key to the future. It doesn't really hold water, especially since one of the agent is a cyborg and most certainly unable to become pregnant.
 * Strawberry Panic is set at an all-girl school, and not one male character is ever shown. The only man who even comes up is Rokujou's arranged fiance, and all we see is his silhouette. Straight girls (if there are any) will have to settle for Amane.
 * The eponymous warriors from Claymore are all female. There's a plot reason why, and it ain't pretty (trust us).
 * In Strike Witches, which very much follows the mold of Sky Girls, only young, female mages can pilot the units that enable them to fly.
 * Koihime Musou uses Gender Flipped versions of the cast of Romance of the Three Kingdoms essentially making all the important characters female.
 * Pani Poni Dash!.
 * In Shikabane Hime, only girls of a certain age who die in specific circumstances can become Shikabane Hime. It is later justified, when it turns out the ritual to create them was originally developed by the founder of the Kougon Sect to resurrect his dead daughter.
 * Kurogane Pukapuka Tai manages to have only one recurring male character, the old, Zen Master-like Captain of the Unebi, who is monk-like in his asceticism and thus off limits for any erotic speculation. No explanation has been given except that the cruiser's intended crew were all taken ill with typhoid and a substitute crew had to be found; why these would be all women has not even had a Hand Waving justification, although a shortage of military-age men in 1943 might be one that comes up.
 * The only boys, aside from the adults which rarely appear, in the Higurashi no Naku Koro ni franchise are Keiichi and Satoshi.
 * Hayate X Blade uses the all girl school version. The only male character with any plot significance is the father of one of the characters. Even most of the parents who have shown up so far have been female.
 * The only male cast members in the buddy cop anime You're Under Arrest are Nakajima and Tokairin. Even then the latter is more of a guest member than anything. There technically is one more male member however he is referred to as female due to working as a woman and seems more like a Transsexual than a crossdresser.
 * Yamabuki High School in Hidamari Sketch is supposed to be coeducational, but males happened to only occupy a third of the student body. The only recurring male characters in the series is just the principal and an art teacher.
 * Miyuki-chan in Wonderland Not a male character in sight! (Kinda makes sense, though, as it's a lesbian parody of Alice in Wonderland -- among other things, in the manga.)
 * K-On! has exactly one eligible bachelor: Ritsu's little brother. Even when the band goes to a live show, most of the other bands are also all female.
 * Other than a magical pet, Puella Magi Madoka Magica has only three NAMED male characters - the title character's dad and little brother (who are practically nonexistent after the first episode), and another main character's love interest. Since it's a Magical Girl show, the five primary characters are all female; the aforementioned magical pet is technically male, but has a female voice actor and is closer to Ambiguous Gender than anything else.
 * Every major character in Infinite Stratos is female... well, except Ichika and his friend, who rarely appears. The school has no male staff, no prominent males appear to exist in the town the school is set in, and none of the girls appear to even understand what a 'male' is the way they fawn over Ichika.
 * Seitokai Yakuindomo's only important male character is Vice Presdient Tsuda.
 * Parodied in the Excel Saga episode "Increase Ratings Week", in which all the female characters are drawn in Moe style (as they go to a swimming pool, which just so happens to be populated by characters catering to nearly every fetish imaginable) and all the male characters are forced offscreen (much to their displeasure).
 * To Aru Kagaku no Railgun is arguably guilty of this seeing as almost every prominent character, including the main cast and both primary antagonists, is female. Male characters in the series barely rise beyond Mooks and few appear more than once or twice. Somewhat justified in that the titular character attends an all girls school but doesn't really account for the scarce male population elsewhere.
 * The World God Only Knows has a male protagonist, two very minor recurring male characters, and a helluva lot of girls. This makes sense, considering the show's premise.
 * Black Rock Shooter. While the manga and videogames have a decent number of males involved the original version had none whatsoever. The anime followed this by only having men be bit parts in the real world, and completely absent in the imaginary one.
 * Mato lampshades it in episode 4 of the OVA, noting that her Psychic Dreams for Everyone dreams of the Otherworld tend to be full of a lot of girls.
 * The 1121st Platoon in Sora no Woto consists entirely of young women, which is the main reason it's often called "Military K-On!"...at first. Other soldiers that show up later are mostly male, though; it's implied that individual platoons are intentionally single-gender.
 * Not only that; the 1121st Platoon is traditionally always composed of five females, as a callback to the mythical Flame Maidens who protected the city from a demon.
 * In any Media Factory light novel, Expect a female heavy cast.
 * Azumanga Daioh, despite being set at co-ed school, only 3 males are prominent and 2 of them are animals.
 * Trinity Seven has a magical school setting. It justifies the lack of male mages by stating that magic is based on emotions and since males are often more logic-based are much fewer in number.

Comic Books

 * Small Favors only shows young attractive females even during the crowd scenes of a supposedly normal city. No males are even mentioned in these comics.
 * "La Bionda"/"The Blonde" has an occasional male, and in one story a boy general (overshot with the youth serum)but is overwhelmingly populated by women. Not all of the normal proportions neither as Franco Saudelli likes BBW as well as the more standard superheroine proportions.

Films

 * Women make up an overwhelming number of the major characters in the Spanish film All About My Mother, although most of them are older than usual for the trope (and not all of them were born female.)
 * Volver doesn't take it as far as the above film, but it does have a large female majority in the cast.

Literature

 * In the Discworld book Monstrous Regiment, it's implied that a good majority of the Borogravian military consists of cross-dressing females who have fooled almost everyone, including each other. In fact, only three soldiers are confirmed male: Lieutenant Blouse, who tells the other regiment members that they could never pull off dressing as female; Paul, Polly's older brother; and the man who supposedly got Shufti pregnant (though she rejected him). Everyone (except Blouse) in the eponymous regiment is female. Hell, it's revealed at the end of the book that . At first, you're led to believe that it's really a Cast Full of Pretty Boys, but nope. This is possibly because the war (wars?) has been going on for so long that there aren't any men left.

Toys and Collectibles

 * The various Pinky:st figurines. Every last released figure has been female (with the exceptions being Akito/Agito Wanijima and Yuuichi Kannami).
 * Monster High consists mostly of the daughters of Universal Monsters, with four male characters (three if you count Jackson Jekyll and Holt Hyde as the same person) against eight females. The disparity comes in when you count how many times the female characters pop up in different lines compared to the males - Deuce is the only male so far (August '11) who has appeared in a second line after his introduction.
 * In Takara's CYGirls, only the two cyborgs were male.

Video Games

 * Arcana Heart is an all-girl Fighting Game.
 * Similarly, Variable Geo.
 * Skullgirls starts out as an example -- all eight of the initial characters, and at least two more that were announced prior to release, are female. The creators plan on introducing male characters, along with more females, as DLC.
 * Touhou contains about 130 characters, yet a mere three known males have ever appeared in any of the games or supplementary material, only one of which is even humanoid. Statements from ZUN however imply that this is less of a personal decision and more implicitly enforced, as Touhou has become so strongly linked with "cute girls beating the snot out of each other" that adding any males would wreak that dynamic. For example he mentioned that the Final Boss of Undefined Fantastic Object was originally going to be Byakuren's brother Myouren, but then decided the Final Boss of a Touhou game being an old man would be weird, and the Final Boss of Ten Desires is a Gender Flipped Prince Shotoku.
 * Rumble Roses. It's the only wrestling game that has an actual mudwrestling fight. Advertised right on the box, no less.
 * Your party in the story mode of the flash Turn-Based Strategy game Zening will most of the time have more women than men. At one point, a player will have six women and one man in the party. There are also times where the party is composed entirely of women.
 * The online game Blade Mistress is an aptly named version of this trope. Apparently it was done as a There Are No Girls on the Internet joke.
 * Seifuku Densetsu Pretty Fighter on the SNES
 * Eternal Fighter Zero is another all-girl doujin fighting game.
 * Hyperdimension Neptunia and it's sequel is an all-girl Eastern RPG game where Console Wars is literally the premise of the game. The sequel gave us three male characters who aren't even human.
 * Rosenkreuzstilette. A Mega Man-inspired Doujin game.

Web Comics

 * In the first chapter of Alpha Shade, set in a war, nearly all the important soldiers on both sides were attractive women, although crowd photos appeared to be mostly male.
 * Earthsong has 8 of the 9 protagonists as being female.
 * Angels 2200 is a space combat webcomic set in a future where a mysterious plague has killed all of the men. Needless to say it has a slightly high female-to-male ratio.
 * Collar 6 - To date there hasn't been a single named male character. A handful of male background characters have appeared, but so far only one of them has had any dialogue whatsoever.
 * The Dragon Doctors - Justified. The first case the Doctors solve in the series is a cursed valley with a statue in the center that caused all visitors and inhabitants to become permanently female. The doctors themselves were hit by this curse before they managed to destroy the statue, so most of them are stuck as women. Most of the comic takes place in Tinto, the town next-door to the valley, but it also has a large female population as a sociological side-effect of the curse; rescue workers, police officers, delivery workers and anyone else with a high-mobility job is female in case they need to pass through or near to the valley.
 * Electric Wonderland started out with three girls and one guy. Currently, the main roster consists of five girls and two guys, one of whom is Too Dumb to Live. The unequal skewing towards girls in the cast even got lampshaded once.
 * Amazoness has a cast full of Amazon lesbians who view men with disdain. When a captured slave turns out to be male (but very girly looking) the queen herself has to interfere to stop him being killed. Many of the Amazons view a male and female having a relationship as a perversion.

Western Animation

 * Out of over 60 recurring characters on My Little Pony, only three are male. And except for Spike, all of them were invented solely for the TV series; talk about girl toys. There are male ponies, but they only show up in one story; they've been on "a race around the world" the entire rest of the series -- According to one of the comics, the baby ponies come out of Majesty's magic mirror.
 * In the G4 incarnation, Friendship Is Magic, not only are nearly all characters female (the only recurring males are Spike and Big Macintosh), but background shots of Ponyville usually consist of no stallions whatsoever. Season 2 mostly addressed the background pony issue and added numerous male characters, including a major antagonist, but recurring males still peaks at two (Big Mac at least got more lines and a Lower Deck Episode, along with a "blind bag" toy).
 * The toy line has always been better with gender then the cartoon adaptations. Back in G1 there were some 20 or so male ponies, stallions and colts, and it was made explicit that ponies can breed normally (as seen by the "families"). My Little Pony Tales and the later G2 line had male ponies as much as female ponies but by G3 stallions were nonexistent.