They come in armies that lurk in the dark or ooze out of the walls of dank alleyways. Or they may stoop like hawks out of the sky to snatch unwary pedestrians off daylit streets. Or they may appear as bizarre day-glo female mannequins with a taste for human life energy. They're the many varieties of demons who inevitably want to invade our beautiful blue-green world and make it their own. Their victory, regardless of what they actually want, usually means
The End Of The World As We Know It.
A common and
conveniently slaughterable enemy that finds use in many settings and stories.
The
Hentai version usually comes equipped with
Naughty Tentacles.
Usually a part of
The Legions Of Hell and/or
The Heartless. See also
Alien Invasion
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- The Dark Kingdom from the first season of Sailor Moon.
- Most everything that isn't human in Legend Of The Overfiend and La Blue Girl.
- The Hollows in Bleach
- The demons from Berserk, which are very hard to kill.
- No two Orphans from Mai-HiME are alike, and their presence is made even more eerie once the characters (and the viewers) realize where (and who) they're coming from.
- The Hundred Demon Clan of Getter Robo G. Had one subordinate that looked like Hitler with demon horns.
- The Guze no Tomogarra (Denizens of the Crimson Realm in the dub) and their Rinne servants from Shakugan No Shana.
- Ronin Warriors had Talpa's Dynasty Soldiers, a seemingly endless supply of Faceless Goons.
- Pulled off in the 10th episode of Kanokon, when a hoard of them attack the school. When he reaches his Five-Tailed Form, Kouta lets loose an expanding energy wave that completely obliterates the hoard of baddies (save their leader, who flees).
- The Lucifer Hawke/Lucifer Folk from Silent Moebius.
- The enemy forces of the Demon Wars from Sakura Taisen.
- The Invaders from Gatekeepers and Gatekeepers 21.
- The Arigami from Blue Seed.
- Thoroughly subverted by Bakuen Campus Guardress.
- Even more thoroughly subverted by Hyper Police, in which the invasion is long over and the demons are a normal part of the landscape (to the point where humans are a rare and protected species).
Film
- The hawk-headed warriors from beyond the gate in A Night At The Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian fit this trope in part, although they were more "divine avengers of Ra" than demons.
Literature
- The "feeders" from Terry Brooks' The Knight of the Word novels almost fit the trope. Though they're dark and oozy and scary, they aren't very dangerous; they're more harbingers of evil than evil itself.
- Demons swarmed out of the Darkwood in Simon Green's Blue Moon Rising. In Beyond The Blue Moon, it turned out that the demons were really humans transformed into murderous monsters, subverting this trope.
Live Action TV
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, of course, has every kind of demon, monster, vampire, and other assorted baddies lurking in dark alleys, snatching innocent victims, and trying to destroy the world.
Video Games
