Bimbos and Himbos

I was recently listening to a YouTube video that discussed how to give character tropes refreshing twists so that they don’t turn into tedious, done-to-death clichés. One strategy that was mentioned was the tired trope of the Bimbo - a woman who is extremely attractive but hopelessly stupid. It was funny once, but it's since been abused and overused and I believe one would be hard-pressed to find a story that incorporates the Bimbo trope without sliding into boring territory of cliché.

What was this video’s recommendation? Turn the Bimbo into a Himbo. Just make the attractive idiot a man instead of a woman. Problem solved!

Except it’s not. Yes, that’s different, but it’s not as simple as that. Himbos are not simply gender-swapped Bimbos. While both are rarely main characters, and even more rarely the hero or heroine, the Bimbo and the Himbo characters are fundamentally different in both the archetypes that they portray and the roles they play in a story.

A Bimbo is beautiful but dumb. She’s usually perfectly nice (since being secretly evil would require some level of intellect that she simply does not possess) and can be a good source of comedic relief as long as she’s used sparingly. Personally, I’m not a fan of the dumb character trope more generally because it’s very hard to write/act convincing stupidity . I see it done poorly more often than not. When the idiocy comes off as over-the-top, I begin to wonder how someone functions on a daily basis. (Yes, I have met people that stupid before, but a story has to suspend my disbelief in a way that reality does not.)

A male character put in the exact same role is only as refreshing as writing a male nurse into a hospital scene. The reader will say, “Oh. That’s different,” and then get bored in a few short minutes. Simply swapping the genders doesn’t avoid the cliché. The same rules apply – the character provides comedic relief but should be used sparingly and written convincingly. However a gender-swapped Bimbo is not a Himbo. Yes, a Himbo is a stupid but attractive man, but his role in the story is a very different. A true Himbo is analogous to Don Quixote. He doesn’t just sit on the sidelines and occasionally offer his ditzy one-liners. He’s more active, typically getting himself entangled in ill-informed misadventures by trying to save a female lead character. Little does the Himbo know that the heroine actually was never in danger, at least not as he understood it. I think the best use of the Himbo is when his misadventures actually end up saving the day at the end of the story, even though the Himbo thinks he’s helping the heroine by doing something else entirely. That sounds confusing so maybe an example will clear things up.

Imagine a story where a female lead (we’ll call her Jenny) has to hurry off to Vegas to stop her sister from getting married to some guy she just met. The Himbo (Ross) is the side character who has a crush on Jenny and pursues her, even though she’s not interested. Through some miscommunications and stupidity, Ross interprets Jenny’s sudden disappearance and flight to Vegas as running off for her own shotgun wedding. Well, Ross can’t let her make that giant mistake! He has to get to Vegas himself to stop her. But his car is out of gas because he forgot to fill it up. And when he calls an Uber to take him to the airport, he forgets that he has a pocketknife when he goes through security, so he gets interrogated by the TSA. When they decide that he’s just dumb and not a terrorist, they confiscate his knife, and let him through to the terminal. Then when he finally lands in Vegas, he gets kicked out of the casino that Jenny is staying at because they think he’s trying to cheat or something. Just when Jenny thinks she’s convinced her sister to call off the wedding, she wakes up the next morning only to find out that her sister is actually just moving the wedding to a different part of town so Jenny won’t get in the way. Worst of all, her sister stole Jenny’s car. Stuck at the hotel, panicking about how to get to the new church, and running out of time, that’s when Jenny runs into Ross who just so happens to have his own rental car that they can drive to the second church and stop the wedding.

There you go, the Himbo saves the day, just not in the way he thought he would.

The Bimbo trope doesn’t save the day. She’s typically used as pure comedic relief, maybe as a love interest, but the Bimbo is usually a rather inactive character. If you wanted to spice up the trope, that would be a good place to start - the Bimbo who decides she needs to save her man, who doesn’t actually need saving and isn’t actually her man yet. The Bimbo who decides she’s tired of sitting around and waiting for other people to do what she knows needs to be done, except she doesn’t really know how to do what needs to be done. That could be fun to watch. Of course, this begs the question is this character still a Bimbo? I would say no. I would call her a gender-swapped Himbo. This character would only be slightly more interesting than the standard Himbo because it is a woman instead of a man, but if the Himbo trope eventually grows into a cliché (as I’m sure it will someday) then this simple twist would not be enough to save a story from boring its audience.

I’ve been dancing around it until now, but the point is that there’s more to gender swapping than gender swapping. Simply taking a female trope and giving it to a male character (or vice versa) doesn’t create a new trope. In fact, it only barely avoids the cliché the write was hoping to subvert in the first place. This is because male and female characters play very different roles in stories. It’s present in the simplest form of storytelling - a brave knight goes on a journey to save the princess from the dragon. We have the white knight and the damsel in distress. Why is the knight a man? Because men are more aggressive, more risk-seeking, and men’s role in dating (pursuing selective women and proving themselves as worthy partners) is represented in the story of rescuing the beautiful princess from the beast.

Does this mean that action stories with female leads can’t happen? Of course they can. See Hunger Games. However flipping the genders on the archetypes comes off as bizarre - a young woman who goes out to save the prince from the dragon? Okay… why can’t the prince save himself? Why is a young lady doing the dirty work and not a bigger, stronger male knight? Certainly the woman doesn’t need to do this to prove herself a suitable partner for the prince because men are far less selective than women in dating. Can you come up with specific circumstances in a story that fix all of these problems? Yes, but the fact that you have to patch about ten different plot holes is exactly my point: the tropes in the original story are self-evident and require no explanation. That’s why they’re archetypes in the first place. We don’t need an explanation for why the young man wants to save the princess; we can deduce that for ourselves. We don’t need an explanation as to why the princess needs saving; we can deduce that for ourselves. The tropes are gender specific because they exist at their most fundamental levels as extensions of personality traits typical of men and women. Simply swapping the genders on a character who follows one of the archetypes requires so much explanation, duct taping, and plot hole patching that they eventually become different tropes themselves.

Because I mentioned it, what makes The Hunger Games different than the clunky, awkward, genderbending story I just mentioned? Katniss enters the Hunger Games not to rescue a captured young man and prove her worthiness as a bride, but to save her younger sister from certain death. What makes her the heroine is the extension of her motherly impulse to protect her younger sister (who Katniss treats more like a daughter than a sister) that leads Katniss to enter a fight to the death. It’s the later installments in the series that many readers and viewers thought fell flat because Katniss had to enter the games and lead a revolution to save Peeta, who had turned into gender-swapped damsel in distress. Katniss’ character morphed from protective mother to knight in shining armor in a way that felt unnatural and forced and audiences weren’t very happy about it.

So, can you gender swap a trope to avoid cliché? Yes… and no. Yes, you can do a simple gender swap and that might make the character a little more interesting. However, it’s more likely that in order to fully flesh out the character, you’ll have to make other changes to their personality and role in the story to such a degree that they end up conforming to a different archetype entirely. Bimbos and Himbos are not necessarily gender-specific characters, but they are gender-specific archetypes.