Bitch In Sheeps Clothing / Literature

Bitches in Sheep's Clothing in Literature.

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• Clive Barker's Abarat series contains a truly spectacular example, in the form of Princess Boa. The world she comes from (yes, more or less the entire world) remembers her as someone who was inhumanly kind, innocent, and noble. Absolute Midnight reveals that, boy howdy, she is none of these things.
• In Accomplishments of the Duke's Daughter, Yuri Neuer was the heroine of the otome game the protagonist Iris played in her past life. At first glance, she is a dumb but kind and well-meaning sweetie with the ability to charm the boys around her. She frequently encourages her fiance Prince Edward to wastefully spend by courting her and gives terrible political advice. And this is before it’s revealed that she’s a spy.
• In the Agent Pendergast novels we have Diogenes Pendergast. To one who doesn't know him (so pretty much anyone but his brother) he often initially pretends to be very sympathetic or one of the nicest guys on the planet... before leading his victims on to eventually brutally murder them or put them through severe mental damage. And that's not even considering all the times he pretends to be Reasonable Authority Figure in the museum Hugo Menzies...
  • There's also Captain Mason in The Wheel of Darkness: Second in command of the cruise ship the Britannia who always puts the well-being of its passengers first and foremost. You'd never think that she was a ruthless Serial Killer horrifically slaughtering those same passengers at first glance.
• Alpha and Omega: Ibrahim is initially presented as a Troubled Sympathetic Bigot who tries to achieve a peaceful compromise between the Muslims and Jews before his ties to various terrorist fashions (and willingness to use them to stop the temple's construction) become apparent.
• Jeremy Jason McCole in Animorphs. He seemed all nice and awesome on camera but was a total jerk off camera.
• Barna, the leader of the Barnavites in the final Annals of the Western Shore book. He appears to be a jovial, charitable man of vision in the "free city" he founded in the forest. But it doesn't take long to show that he has a Hair-Trigger Temper, will fly into a killing rage when his authority is challenged, or if he catches you looking at a woman he has claimed and treats women no better than livestock.
• Nancy from Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. She's nice enough to befriend Margaret—she's her first friend when they move in—but mean enough to start vicious rumors about Laura Danker just because she has big boobs. Also Philip Leroy, the most handsome boy in the class who all four of the girls crush on, but is a brat and a jerk as well as a Class Clown.
• In Ascendance of a Bookworm:
  • The commerce guild's guildmaster and his granddaughter Freida are quite friendly to Myne, but as Benno warns her they're also testing her out to see if they can exploit her. They eventually decide not to forcibly kidnap and adopt her to make use of her only because her health is so poor that it's not really worth the hassle. Subverted in that they honestly believed that taking Myne in was in her best interests, as they knew exactly what Myne's condition was (Freida has it too) and how unlikely she was to survive it without a contract with a noble. The profit Myne was capable of making for them was just the icing on the cake.
  • The High Priest's attendant Arno seems as courteous as any of the attendants, but an epilogue chapter from his point of view shows that he seethes with hatred for Myne's attendant Fran over events of their shared past: they both served a former director of the temple's orphanage, and Arno was jealous that she favored Fran over him.
• Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: Professor Playfair comes across as a fun, approachable, likeable instructor. Underneath, he's a callous man who values theatricality over people or morals, a side that first comes out when he stages a cruel, violent public expulsion of a student.
• Baccano!: Lebreau Fermet Viralsque. He appears to be a nice, calm, and loving figure. But his true nature is of a cruel sadist who tortured Czeslaw Meyer for a couple of centuries; he's the mastermind of the tragedies of the 1700 arc, killed Monica, Huey's wife, and is responsible for all the bad stuff that happened to the immortals.
• Bazil Broketail: Digal Turrent takes this attitude at times. He may be outwardly polite to his men, even greet them with a smile, but it's usually just an act — he will drop it the moment dragonboys do anything to displease him.
• Boy's Life:
  • Kindly Vet and church greeter Lezander operates on Cory's dog after it gets hurt and is the murderer from the opening chapter and a Nazi war criminal, along with his wife.]
  • Mr. Hargison, the mailman who saves Cory and his friends from bullies, is part of the small but increasingly dangerous local cell of The Klan.
• Keifer Porter from A Brother's Price. He is mentioned to have been very pretty, if stupid, and only over the course of several chapters, it is revealed that he was a villain, who was able to hide his monstrousness because his elder wives doted on him. At the start of the novel he is already dead, being Hoist by His Own Petard.
• The Butcher Boy: Francie accuses Mrs Nugent on being this.
  "I was thinking how right ma was. Mrs Nugent all smiles when she met us and how are you getting on Mrs and young Francis are you both well?...what she was really saying was: Ah hello Mrs Pig how are you and look Philip do you see what's coming now...The Pig Family!"
• Burgo Fitzgerald in Can You Forgive Her? (1864) by Anthony Trollope. Trollope included many others in his other novels.
• Carrie: Ms. Desjardin seems caring, but we learn early on that she secretly finds Carrie repulsive, and seems to enjoy having to slap her. During the Prom scene when Carrie gets covered in blood and people start laughing at her, Ms. Desjardin goes up to her and acts sympathetic. However, Carrie reads her mind and is horrified to see that Desjardin is secretly laughing at her as well.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa:
  • Wise Man Norix, who is Tasia's tutor and her father's chief advisor, initially seems at worst canterkerous. However, it turns out he was the mastermind behind the attempt on her life, and later her father's assassination. Tasia is framed for the latter.
  • Brother Rennus seems to be a benevolent, useful ally who willingly serves Empress Tasia. In book three it turns out that he's switched sides to the deathless king, her enemy, covertly helping with the mountain men's assault. He also tried to assassinate her multiple times. He recruited around half of the Brothers as well to his cause, with them attacking the Imperial soldiers in Pellon while Rennus then nearly kills Tasia as he mind controls one of her guards.
• Classroom of the Elite has Kikyo Kushida, who at first appears as a Nice Girl from the very beginning. However, it is revealed later on she's a resentful, selfish, and insane manipulative bitch whose friendly Genki Girl persona is only a facade. When Ayanokouji finds out, she threatens to pull a False Rape Accusation on him if he doesn't keep her true personality a secret. She's even worse in the original novel, where not only does she hate Ayanokouji from the start, but she tries everything in her power to get Suzune expelled for having some knowledge of her Mysterious Past, to the point where she even conspires with Ryuuen from Class C to achieve her goal, only to also tell him that she would get rid of him for seeing her dark side.
• Cobalt Blue: The first mention of the vice president says that he is asking people to pray for the heroes as they fight the Fury, but later scenes establish him as a narrow-minded Jerkass and The Quisling.
• In Companions of the Night, Ethan seems like a very nice guy when Kerry first meets him. It doesn’t last. As soon as she finds out that he truly is vampire, he drops the kindness act. By the end of the story, he does eventually become nicer to her though, and a tad more honest.
• The Corrupted Chronicles of Coco Claramisa: The title character ends up being one. Nobody knows of what she is actually like other than Fester and herself.
• Dark Shores:
  • Malahi who seems a nice, caring person but in reality manipulates everyone around to further her goals, and when her first plan fails, is ready to even send Lydia to kill her father. It's open to debate whether she really believes it's necessary for the higher good or just wants personal power.
  • Hacken Calorian. He does feed the starving civilians in Mudamora but he does it to further his political agenda, he can be very charming if he wants to, but anyone who comes in closer contact with him realizes he's a Jerkass.
• Robin Jarvis loves this trope. Two of these show up in his Deptford Histories books; Wendel Maculatum in The Oaken Throne and Dimlon a.k.a. Dahrem Ruhar in Thomas. Even more are to be found throughout his other works.
• Devils & Thieves has Darek, who spends the almost entire book acting like a genuine sweetheart to Jemmie, before being revealed as the villain who hurt her friends and manipulated her.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
  • On the surface, Greg seems nice to the people around him, but in reality, he is a massive jerk who looks down on everyone and he won't hesitate to manipulate and gaslight others to get what he wants.
  • Manny acts all nice and sweet around Susan and Frank, but in reality, he's a complete brat and the gloves will come off if he doesn't get what he wants.
• The Dinosaur Lords: Falk spins himself as a nice if somewhat misguided former rebel with a touching story of a Heel–Face Turn and zeal to prove himself before the Emperor, while in fact he's manipulating events to get the Emperor to do what he wishes, and fantasizes about forcing himself on Melodía when her almost-fiance is away.
• Dive (2003): Marina is the only one of the scientists who acts consistently welcoming and caring toward the divers, which sometimes causes them to forget that she's still manipulating them, dynamiting coral reefs, and trying to steal sunken treasure just like her partners. She is also willing to kill for the treasure, while her partners have a Heel–Face Turn rather than do the same.
• The Divine Comedy: While many of the damned in the 8th circle (fraud) are like this, the hypocrites are probably the best example (they pretended to be good people in life, while really being evil and self-serving) and receive an appropriately symbolic punishment: being forced to wear robes which look beautiful but are crushingly heavy and painful to wear.
• Izaya Orihara from Durarara!!. Nice friendly guy. Smiles a lot. Says he loves people. Cheerful attitude. Convinces people to kill themselves. One of the main reasons why Izaya hates Shizuo is because Shizuo was able to see right through him the very moment they first met, despite being Dumb Muscle. Hence, the Hate at First Sight meeting. That's why whenever weird stuff starts happening in Ikebukuro, Shizuo immediately blames Izaya, stating that when stuff like that happens, 99.9999% of the time, it's Izaya's fault. Disregarding the shoddy statistics, he's more or less right.
• Darth Zannah sort of qualifies. In Dynasty of Evil, she makes an act of being nice to people just to get favors, and she seduces a guy in Book 2, resulting in his death.
  • Given the Sith philosophy about self-realization, which means first fulfilling one's capacity to experience genuine affection, friendship, passion, and love (thus, directly rejecting the Jedi concept of detachment), and then attaining personal liberation and fulfilling one's capacity to experience pain and loss by betraying the objects of such affection in the deepest imaginable ways... really, not only does this come with the territory, this is probably the best outcome which can be hoped for.
• The Dragon Business: Sir Tremayne, who volunteers to slay dragons for free and inconveniences the Monster Protection Racket protagonists but initially seems like a Knight in Shining Armor who is far more honorable than they are. However, he has a misogynistic streak and also views some lives as more worth saving than others, trying to sacrifice Affonyl to a dragon to improve his own chances of catching it off guard.
• Dame Olga from Ella Enchanted. When we first meet her, she seems nice enough, at least compared to her daughters (especially Hattie). But once she marries Ella's father and discovers that he had no money, she quickly turns into the cruel, abusive, petty stepmother we know from the Cinderella tale, making Ella a slave in her own home and tormenting the girl after her father leaves for business.
• Mr. Elton from Emma. Initially he seems like a gentlemanly young man, if a bit empty-headed and too eager to please. After Emma rejects his proposal (and insults his pride by saying she thought he was in love with the moneyless and statusless Harriet), he shows his true colors as a social-climbing Gold Digger and he treats both of them in a callous, passive-aggressive manner. His new Rich Bitch wife doesn't help.
• The (impostor) Queen Vesper in Faeries of Dreamdark. And later, Dusk, an old friend of The Heroine's.
• Flawed: Logan acts super nice to Celestine while everyone else is alienating or bullying her. He turns out to be a huge asshole who goes so far as to strip her with his friends.
• Galaxy of Fear has Grimpen, exploiting I Just Want to Be Special.
• The Gatecrasher:
  • Emily was widely popular as a charming, kind society lady. Only her children, sister and son-in-law knew that she was cruel, manipulative and emotionally abusive, neglecting her son because she hated his birthmark and browbeating her daughter into marrying a man of Emily's choice.
  • Fleur herself is beautiful, charming and seemingly warm-hearted, but she's a ruthless serial Gold Digger who's swindled several wealthy men (many of whom were grieving widowers), and she generally neglects her daughter until she can use her as part of her schemes.
• Male example in The Graveyard Book. Mr. Frost is the nice bachelor who has recently moved in. He is friendly to both Scarlet and her mother. Turns out, he's also the same Jack who killed Bod's family all those years ago, and is still out to get him.
• Helen Vaughan in Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan appears to be a beautiful, charming woman. In reality, she's the Humanoid Abomination daughter of a dark nature god. She will seduce and lure you in, and drive you to madness and suicide.
• Harry Potter:
  • Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: Quirinus Quirrell appears to be a nice but nervous guy and is constantly bullied by Professor Snape. This is all but an act. He's been working with Voldemort the whole year. His nervousness is probably real.
  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: Gilderoy Lockhart is annoyingly boastful but is certainly affable and friendly with Harry. It turns out that he's a fraud and all his alleged accomplishments were stolen from other witches and wizards on whom he inflicted the Memory Charm.
  • Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Uber-feminine pink frills, kitten pictures, and passive-aggressive personal style go with an obsession with personal and governmental power. The bitchitude is meant to be transparent to the reader and sympathetic characters, but the intended hypocrisy is clear enough. Her inner bitch is meant to be out of the closet by the time she uses a magical instrument of torture on the hero.
  • During his school years, Tom Riddle. While Dumbledore can see through his facade, likely because he had seen Tom without it back at the orphanage, everyone else believes him to be an honorable, hardworking student, and a hero who caught the Heir of Slytherin.
• Haruhi Suzumiya:
  • Ryoko Asakura is the friendly, polite, attractive, class representative who always has a kind word and a smile... until she tries to stab Kyon because she's bored and she thinks killing him will get Haruhi to do something interesting.
  • Emiri Kimidori fits this as well, as she seems like a mild-mannered girl, but it's later revealed that not only is she a Humanoid Interface like Nagato and Asakura, she doesn't give a damn when Nagato is made ill by contact with the Heavenly Canopy Domain. This causes Kyon to call her a "monster" like Asakura. Basically all the Data Overmind interfaces except Nagato.
• The Hero Laughs While Walking the Path of Vengeance a Second Time: Princess Alesia is great at pretending to care about her subjects and her parents, and having a friendly face. In reality, she's an utter monster who promotes brutal slavery throughout the land and is racist towards anything that isn't a "pure-blooded" native human.
  • The entire revenge plot basically hinges on the fact that most characters in the series was this trope.
• Hollow Places features Monica, Jeffery's girlfriend. While she's polite and outwardly seems to care for Jeffery, she's materialistic and breaks up with her boyfriend of a decade the moment he loses his job.
• The Hunger Games: Johanna Mason's gambit in her original Games, but ultimately she turns out to be a Break the Haughty.
• Tommy Toledo in the short story "I'll Never Stop Loving You, Tommy Toledo" by Ellen Conford.
• The In Death series: A number of the murderers can qualify as this. A notable example would be Ava from Strangers in Death. Eve actually refers to the act Ava puts on as a suit, and Eve has to poke at it to eventually make Ava drop the act.
• Inkmistress: Ina starts out appearing to be a warm, loving girlfriend for Asra. It turns out she's a Gold Digger though who never loved her, becoming increasingly bloodthirsty and ruthless.
• In Insurgent, Evelyn comes off as the loving mother of Tobias who regrets leaving him as a child. But Tris has her suspicions of her, which are confirmed at the end when she betrays the Dauntless and chooses to establish an oppressive government of her own.
• Jaine Austen Mysteries: A number of the killers appear to be nice guys or girls at first, but are exposed as villains by the end. They include:
  • Cameron Bannick from This Pen for Hire.
  • Hank from Death by Pantyhose.
  • Emily Pritchard from Killer Cruise.
  • Peter Connor from Death of a Neighborhood Witch.
  • Daisy Kincaid, AKA, Emma Shimmel from Death of a Gigolo.
  • Justin from Murder Gets a Makeover.
• Blanche Ingram in Jane Eyre coos and fawns over Mr. Rochester to the point where it almost sickens the reader — though the company takes it as proof of her love — while giving Jane death glares and making cutting remarks that manage to sound innocuous while obliquely insulting Jane. Her love of Rochester, however, is put to a quick end when he tells her (lying) that his fortune is far smaller than she thought it to be.
• James Herbert:
  • Fluke: Elderly Miss Birdle alternates between kindness and vicious cruelty, towards both her cat and the titular stray dog.
  • The Dark: Parapsychologist Chris Bishop and wife Lynne, on five-year-old daughter Lucy's death, consulted a soft-voiced medium. On exposure by Bishop of his fakery, the medium flew into a rage. While his scepticism of discarnate spirits is soon refuted, Bishop maintains a strong dislike of fake mediumship.
  • The Magic Cottage: Mystical society the Synergists, while outwardly genial, are led by power-crazed fanatic Eldritch P. Mycroft.
  • Once: Unorthodox nurse Nell Quick, self-professed healer and practitioner of natural remedies, is a sinister occult practitioner.
• Grandmother in L. M. Montgomery's Jane of Lantern Hill. She's a sweet-looking little old lady, but sabotages her daughter's marriage, and can, and does, make anything sound like an insult.
• Tomomi in Ladies versus Butlers! definitely qualifies. While the end result is for the best, she usually grins in an evil way just to make her Unlucky Childhood Friend Akiharu and Unknown Rival Sernia squirm for her satisfaction.
• In Kämpfer, Kaede Sakura would qualify. Such a sweet girl, handing out stuffed animals to her closest friends and acquaintances. Through the early and mid portions of the story, she's seemingly oblivious to any and all of the strange occurrences happening around her. It's only later that her cold calculating side comes to the forefront.
• Mercedes Cook of the Kitty Norville series. When first introduced in Kitty and the Silver Bullet she appears to be a genuinely kind, funny, warm, and surprisingly human vampire who, once she's decided to "come out" to the public, has a candid and revealing interview on Kitty's show where she seems to be a kindred spirit, a great face for positive human-supernatural relations, and a possible ally. But after she invites Kitty over to her hotel room, only for it to turn out to be a set-up just to provoke a conflict between her and the antagonistic werewolves (her former alphas) who exiled her back in book one, she is revealed to be nothing like either her stage persona or how she appeared on the show — instead being a cold, manipulative, calculating creature whose motives are opaque and whose intentions are inscrutable. By the end of the book, she's unequivocally a villain and major threat to be dealt with (or as Kitty puts it later, a "double-crossing fink"); as of book ten, she's turned out to be a recruiting agent for and possibly The Dragon to the ultimate Big Bad of the setting, Dux Bellorum.
• The Locked Tomb:
  • Dulcinea, one of the nicer characters in Gideon the Ninth, is eventually revealed to be putting on a pose. Starting with that she's even Dulcinea; she's actually an impostor, and the real Dulcinea is dead.
  • The Emperor, John Gaius in Harrow the Ninth is generally a kind, supportive, fatherly figure who looks after his supporters and reluctantly does morally dubious things, until very late in the book. At which point it's revealed that he's a vicious, revenge-driven monster, who created a perfect process for harmlessly attaining incredible necromantic power...then forced people to undergo the flawed, unfinished process, which required using the souls of people they cared about as fuel for their abilities for centuries. Multiple times. His pose kind of unravels quickly after that.
• Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions! has Shinka Nibutani, who seems to be a sweet, friendly, responsible Yamato Nadeshiko class rep. She's actually a (semi-)reformed Chuunibyou with a violent, selfish temper who's trying desperately to be "normal".
• A Master of Djinn: Abigail, apparently nothing more than a harmless, shallow, none too bright aristocratic Englishwoman, is actually a cunning, ruthless murderer.
• Moribito II: Guardian of the Darkness: Despite acting nice towards his family, Yuguro betrayed one of his brothers for an offer of prestige by Rogsam, the same usurper who framed Jiguro for treason to feed his lust for power, despises one of his nephews for being like Jiguro in personality, attempts to kill another for getting in the way of his ambition for eternal prestige, and, in the climax of the novel, has the gall to blame Jiguro for turning him into an outcast by escaping with "someone else's daughter."
• The Naturals: Agent Locke is a well-regarded FBI Agent, funny and good with kids. Unfortunately, she turns out to be a murderer.
• Two prominent characters in Nightmare Alley very much fit the bill:
  • Stan as the "Reverend Carlisle" presents himself as an upstanding member of society and a well-respected spiritualist preacher while underneath he's a ruthless Con Man who cares about nothing but money and power.
  • Lilith similarly outwardly presents herself as a professional and well-respected psychologist with a wealthy clientele whilst underneath she's a scheming and cold-hearted sociopath who has no respect for her code of ethics and uses the secrets she's obtained through her trusted position to ruthlessly manipulate people. It's also heavily implied that Stan is not the only client of hers that she is sleeping with.
• The second Noob novel introduces Moulinof, the mentor of the Empire's pair of Insufferable Genius alchemists. He first gains the reader's sympathy by explaining that his former students once let him get captured by the Coalition so they could save themselves. However, after helping the main Player Party and others escape the prison in which they are held, he immediately requests an Escort Mission with the very same Entitled Bastard attitude as the one for which his former students are notorious.
• Of Fire and Stars: Lord Kriantz seems like a good and reasonable man at first. It turns out he's the first book's villain who was responsible for the plot and its results the entire time as well.
• Lady Lucy Fitzmartin in A Pearl for My Mistress. She is a dainty, sophisticated young lady, who is always Nice to the Waiter. She is also an ardent Blackshirt, dreaming of a fascist coup in Britain. She generally tries to avoid collateral damage, but her reasons for it are usually pragmatic.
• A major, Victorian mindset-fuelled plot point in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian keeps his social status because no one would believe any nasty rumours about such a handsome, charming man.
• Caroline Bingley in Pride and Prejudice is all friendliness to Jane... until she learns that her mother's family are in trade. Wickham is a male example: he seems like a wonderful, charming guy, but he's The Casanova and a con artist.
• The Princess Wei Yang: Zhang Le pretends to be kind and compassionate. She's actually cruel, ambitious, and plotting against her half-sister.
• The Reynard Cycle: Persephone's cousin, Celia Corvino. In public, she's gracious, thoughtful, and kind (and is considered a great beauty to boot.) Privately, she's been plotting her cousin's death since she hit puberty.
• The Rising of the Shield Hero:
  • Princess Malty Melromarc. Within a day, she accuses Naofumi of trying to rape her, constantly playing on her good looks and innocent facade to get what she wants, and always betraying her benefactors one after another, no exceptions. Of course, all of this comes to a point where she's screwed up so many people that nobody trusts her anymore and her mother punishes her by changing her name to Bitch to match her real nature.
  • Itsuki Kawakami, the Hero of the Bow, pretends to be a Humble Hero when he is really a narcissistic Smug Snake Attention Whore who is willing to endanger his own teammates by deliberately delaying attacking until they are in danger and then swoops in with a perfectly-timed save, invoking a Big Damn Heroes moment.
• Sense and Sensibility:
  • Lucy Steele might seem like a harmless ditz at first, but she turns out to be grasping and passive-aggressive; knowing that Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars are close, she makes a big point of talking about her engagement to him in front of Elinor. Elinor being the way she is, just sits back and takes Lucy's nastiness, but deep down she's hurting, and badly. Good thing Lucy ends up with Edward's brother instead...
  • Willoughby is perfectly charming on the surface but a complete bastard underneath, actually worse than Wickham by a large margin.
• Shatter the Sky: Piera, a noblewoman who Sev knew years before, acts like she's on his side and will help him against the emperor Rafael, her husband. It turns out she's loyal to Rafael and sets Sev up for him, exposing his plans.
• Sisterhood Series by Fern Michaels: Rosemary Hershey was supposedly this, but by the book Sweet Revenge, her little act has apparently worn thin. Little Fish, Stu Franklin, and Henry "Hank" Jellicoe are revealed to be this by the book Cross Roads. The book Deja Vu simply expands on the depth of Jellicoe's depravity.
• Several examples in A Song of Ice and Fire. Mostly because of the social belief that Beauty Equals Goodness.
  • Cersei Lannister was regarded as a dutiful and gracious leader before the rumours began flying about her Twincest with her brother, Jaime, and her eventual and obvious Sanity Slippage.
  • Joffrey as well until he became King. Sansa later notes how he can go from being charming and polite, or 'playing the gallant' as she calls it, to cruel and pissed off in an instant.
  • The resident Magnificent Bastard, Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish. On the outside: cheerful, Plucky Comic Relief who is totally harmless due to his lack of status and amiable nature. On the inside...a Chessmaster with severe Yandere-tendencies who is responsible for plunging an entire continent into a bloody civil war just to get back at the girl who rejected him. Yikes!
  • Renly Baratheon is a good-looking and charismatic man who wins enormous support when he declares himself King. However, he could be seen as a vain and treacherous character who plots to steal the throne from his nephew, and while negotiating with his older brother Stannis, he continually insults and mocks them with while flaunting his larger army and saying nobody wants Stannis as their King, turning down Stannis's offer to make him his heir and give him his old position on the council. This contrasts him with the uncharismatic but very dutiful Stannis, who claimed the throne because he knew King Robert's children were illegitimate, making him the rightful heir, while Renly was planning to seize power before hearing this, and, when he does hear, believes that Stannis is lying about it.
• Miryem's hometown in Spinning Silver. It's a typical rural medieval farming community — which is to say that while the townsfolk are friendly enough to their fellow Christians, they are horrible to the Jewish Mandelstams, to the point where they are happy to hold onto their borrowed money and watch the Mandelstams destroyed by the bitter winter until Miryem takes up collecting. Oleg in particular has a reputation for being kind-hearted, generous, and helpful, but he tries to murder Miryem out of antisemitic greed and it's hinted a few times that he was an abusive husband behind closed doors.
• Spock's World portrays T'Pring as this. Said arch-villain may have seemed semi-sympathetic when they first appeared. However, the book portrays them as more of a self-centered jerk. After the events of the kal-i-fee, they ignored their mate due to brooding over matters not having worked out exactly the way they wanted. Said mate thought they were in love with Spock or someone else and took a suicidal risk to make their bond "real". When their mate died, the arch-villain didn't even seem that upset about the loss itself, as opposed to not getting what they wanted again. They hate-mongered Vulcan towards secession specifically to hurt Spock, ignoring how many other thousands of people the movement would hurt.
• Sweet Valley High. A lot of the fans of this series see the supposed "good" twin Elizabeth as this. Unlike Jessica, who's often an outright bitch, Elizabeth was frequently just as snobby and stuck-up as she always accused Jessica of being, cheated on her boyfriends while criticizing Jessica for being promiscuous (making her a grade-A hypocrite as well), and was unbearably self-righteous and meddlesome.
• Sword Art Online:
  • Sugou Nobuyuki, the Arc Villain of the Fairy Dance arc; Asuna's father Shouzou viewed him as a friendly, bright prodigy, to the extent that he set up an Arranged Marriage between him and Asuna and intended for him to inherit his company, RECT Inc. In reality, Sugou is a Corrupt Corporate Executive and a Stalker with a Crush towards Asuna who not only trapped 300 SAO survivors, including Asuna herself, in ALO in order to conduct inhumane Mind Control experiments on them, but also planned to brainwash and rape Asuna and take control of the company. After Kirito defeats him, the sheep's clothing is flung off, and Sugou is arrested and incarcerated.
  • Kyouji Shinkawa seems quite friendly and supportive of Shino and attempts to be there for her while she's trying to get over her past. Then he reveals his motives to her, and attempts to rape her, along with trying to kill her almost entirely out of the blue after seeing how she seems to be more interested in Kirito than him. Not only that, but it turns out he was in on the Death Gun plot. This is potentially foreshadowed earlier in the arc. When Shino first starts to become more assertive in the real world thanks to Kirito's influence, he starts acting slightly creepy. Most people would be happy that their best friend is becoming more capable and seemingly better able to take care of themselves. Kyouji instead wraps her into a hug and begs her to stop being assertive and angry and go back to her normal calm self so that he can protect her.
• Tales From Alcatraz: In the second book, trustees Willy One-Arm and Buddy Boy act like reformed men who care about the kids, but they are plotting to escape and Buddy has no compunctions about killing a baby to silence his cries before their escape, and Willy only stops him because he's convinced doing so on Friday the 13th would be bad luck.
• Eliza Millward and Jane Wilson of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The former seems like a nice girl, and the latter is witty, alluring, and accomplished, but both turn out to be catty, spiteful bitches who enjoy Malicious Slander of their romantic rival Helen Graham, a rather shy and reclusive woman who has fled Domestic Abuse. The latter is also a social-climbing Gold Digger.
• Ami from Toradora!, although, with Character Development, she becomes more of a Jerk with a Heart of Gold in sheep's clothing, and eventually, just a Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
• A few in Tamora Pierce's Tortall Universe:
  • Princess Josiane in the Song of the Lioness quartet, after being turned down by Prince Jonathon, turns out to be quite literally Ax-Crazy. This happens a lot to Copper Islands rulers, due to excessive inbreeding; see below.
  • Bronau, the wayward prince in the Trickster's Duet, is a Balitang family friend who once courted Winnamine. He and Sarai are quite attracted to each other, but he's a gossip and makes racist remarks in his flirting when the Balitangs (who are not racist) are trying to get along with the locals. Then, he starts plotting against his brother and sister-in-law and tries to abduct the child king. When that fails, he attacks the Balitang estate and kills Mequen in an attempt to make Sarai marry him.
  • Imajane and Rubinyan put up a good front of being Reasonable Authority Figures when talking to the Balitangs in person. Piss them off — especially Imajane, who's the daughter of the previous insane king — and you'll be nailed to the docks with your kids thrown to the piranhas.
• Gordon in Twig. Well-liked, naturally charismatic, and often described as The Hero, Gordon is occasionally sly, undercutting, and even grimly sadistic in the name of doing his job. This probably comes as an out-of-the-blue surprise to most. He himself remarks on his completely undeserved reputation for honesty.
• Universal Monsters:
  • In book 1, Devin Chavarria's boss is Dr. Abel Dunn. She thinks he's her friend, but in actuality he's Dracula, escaped from his movie and out to turn her into one of his brides.
  • In book 4, Levi Tovar claims to be the son of Professor Angus Tovar, and a friend of the group. He turns out to be Imhotep.
• Vampire Academy:
  • Victor Dashkov acts as a surrogate family for Lissa and reportedly "had gone out of his way to help her after her parents died. He turns to be the Big Bad.
  • Natalie Dashkov acts like a cute and friendly dorky girl on the outside, which hides her true devious nature. She is not a true friend to Lissa, but an enemy, killing animals, which Lissa cares for, in an effort to manipulate her and leave mental scars.
• Several examples in Warrior Cats.
  • Sasha meets some cats on a farm Pine shows her. They pretend to be nice, but as soon as Pine leaves, they attack Sasha and her kits.
  • Hawkfrost acts kind and considerate, but really, he's a huge ass.
  • Ashfur is seemingly very nice, but he is consumed with hatred for Squirrelflight. To the point of trying to kill her.
  • Hollyleaf, after Long Shadows
  • Sol. Calm, kind, behind everything?
  • Willy and friends from Ravenpaw's Path.
  • Darktail, in both Hawkwing's Journey and the sixth arc. He acts friendly and innocent and gains the trust of SkyClan and later ShadowClan before attacking the former and taking over the latter.

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