Creepy Asymmetry

People tend to gravitate towards finding this creepy.

"By making a character asymmetrical, they look like they've been sort of put together wrong [...] injecting asymmetry into a character design is a good way to make something look unbalanced or unnatural."

— TB Skyen, "What's the Deal with Fiddlesticks?"

Most creatures we see, including humans, are symmetrical in nature. We can identify what we see as relatable because of that subconscious association we fall back on; the distribution of limbs, the composition of a face, the evenness of a smile. When something goes against the expectation of symmetry, we immediately notice it, and it can creep us the hell out.

Characters with unnatural asymmetry aren't necessarily bad or dangerous, but that off-putting element persists. They can be human, animal, monster, and so on; the asymmetry in their appearance is what makes the trope. Body Horror is often at play.

• Disfigurements or defects (which can point to Unfortunate Implications)
• Extra limbs on one side
• Unevenly sized limbs (can include The Right Hand of Doom)
• Uneven torsos
• Facial features that don't belong where they are (can include Eyes Do Not Belong There and Two-Faced)

This might not even apply to a character's physical features either. How they present themself through things like movement can invoke this effect too, like an uneven walk or a stance that doesn't look quite right. It's why zombies always look creepy in motion.

Blob Monster can be considered a Sub-Trope, as creatures that fall under the trope are naturally asymmetrical (any examples of this pertaining to such creatures should be directed there).

Can overlap with Red Right Hand if the character is also evil. Contrast with Fashionable Asymmetry in which a character deliberately dons asymmetrical elements for the sake of style.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Chainsaw Man, the Falling Devil is a voluptuous Humanoid Abomination displaying a busty tall body with an hourglass figure when clothed. However, this is simply an illusion created by a malformed and twisted torso, drawn at angles that create a more alluring image. In reality, the chest of her Body of Bodies is jutting out at an impossible angle and the waist looks like it was twisted around several times before being attached to a mismatched pelvis.
• Kill la Kill: Ryuko ends up going berserk in one episode and Senketsu, her sentient uniform, unwillingly mutates the two of them into a wild and grotesque abomination of Ryuko. Her limbs are mismatched, her spine is being bent back and forth, and Senketsu's left eye twitches and bulges to huge proportions.
• Toriko: Half of Zebra's mouth is scarred into a grisly Glasgow Smile which accentuates his intimidating appearance.

Comic Books

• Batman: Two-Face is instantly recognizable by his asymmetrical face, one half being unharmed and clean, and the other being horrifically disfigured. This makes him not only look intimidating but also reinforces his Two-Faced nature; one half being the honorable and just lawyer, and the other the cold and vicious criminal.

Films — Animated

• Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within: The "ghosts" that roam the Earth, and keep humanity bottled up in their doomed hometowns are mainly composed of severely asymmetrical soldiers, that seem to be a Mighty Glacier fused to a Fragile Speedster.
• Igor creates the Ugly Cute Monster Girl Eva from (presumably) pieces of dead people. This mishmash creature has almost no symmetry, and nearly defies the creepy part. That is, until her Evil Bone gets activated, turning her into a One-Woman Army who makes short work of other monsters in Malaria's Gladiator Games.

Films — Live-Action

• Hellboy (2004): One of Wayne Barlowe's design considerations was that every Hell creature has an asymmetrical element to mark their otherworldly origin. Behemoth and the Ogdru Jahad both wrap their bodies in lopsided masses of tentacles, and in the latter's case crustacean claws. Sammael has two small eyes on one side of its face and a single large one on the other. And Hellboy himself has The Right Hand of Doom.
• Davy Jones, the captain of the Flying Dutchman in Pirates of the Caribbean, is a mixture of human and sea creature with various body parts that don't match. He has a human left leg, and a crab's right leg, which makes him walk like he has a Seadog Peg Leg. His left arm is a gigantic crab pincer, whilst his right has octopus tentacles instead of fingers, just like the tentacles that make up his beard. All of which combines to show that Jones is a Psychopomp who all sailors and pirates are afraid of meeting.
• The creature in TheThing is an extraterrestrial lifeform which can assimilate other organisms and produce a flawless imitation. Should someone or something that has been assimilated be revealed as an imposter, the creature will transform its body in an attempt to defend itself, completely breaking any facade of being a natural life form.

Literature

• Cthulhu Mythos: Shoggoth, an artificial lifeform created by the Great Old Ones as a servile race, are described as protoplasmic orbs capable of generating any organic tissue for any function they might need, including prehensile appendages, multiple eyes, and mouths with More Teeth than the Osmond Family. Typically, when a shoggoth appears, it is as a mishmash of misshapen body parts that bears no resemblance to any actual organism and is utterly asymmetrical.
• Deathstalker: Half-A-Man was split in half vertically in an Alien Abduction; one side is normal, but the other is a sinister Energy Being that's been slowly replacing him over the years. It ultimately consumes him.
• Malediction Trilogy: Trolls used to be eerily beautiful but the ones imprisoned under the mountain are usually disfigured, due to inbreeding and toxic influence of iron. Count Marc has a very handsome face — but only if you look from a certain angle, since if you look at him straight on, it looks as if it was split in half and then moved a bit. The result is described as highly disturbing.
• Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman goes the extra mile with his description of Hel, (see Mythology and Religion), stating that on one side of her body, she has a face of healthy, beautiful features, while the other half of her face is mottled, rotting flesh, with shriveled lips, decayed gums, and a blind, dead, pale eye. She starts out as a Creepy Child and Odin decides to make her the ruler of the land of the dead for those who died in dishonorable or unworthy ways, such as old age or accidents

Live-Action TV

• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Breen warships are asymmetrical Flying Cutlery Spaceships, with many odd sections protruding out in strange patterns that emphasize the species' Nothing Is Scarier angle.
• All of the Vader monsters from Denshi Sentai Denziman are asymmetrical, with many of them looking like two vertically split halves from different creatures stuck together, and appropriately, many of them are killed by being vertically split in half. Queen Hedrian, ruler of the Vader Clan, is extremely vain and wants to destroy all beautiful things, so it makes sense that she would only create ugly monsters. The Dustlers, which are the Vader's Mooks, are also asymmetrical, as they have half of a skull for a face and half of a rib cage on their chest.

Mythology

• In some surviving texts about Norse Mythology, Hel, an entity linked to the realm of the dead, is described as her body being half flesh-colored and half dark.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Eisenhorn: The Saruthi are a Starfish Alien species deeply corrupted by Chaos; as a result they are not symmetrical along any axis, with even their many limbs all having different proportions. It's suggested this extends to having biological Alien Geometries that makes it hard to understand how they move or to count how many fingers they have per hand. The first time Eisenhorn sees the Saruthi up close, their asymmetry leaves him incredibly unnerved.
  • Chaos Spawn are designed intentionally to evoke this. The plastic kit they've been running on since 2007 pretty much doesn't have symmetrical options for arms, meaning there's a practical limit on how symmetrical you can get them.

Video Games

• Amnesia: The Dark Descent: The Servant Grunt — which is actually a mutated, malformed human — has a jaw that is stretched to an absurd length with a huge portion torn away. Its left hand has also been replaced with blades that it slashes the player with. The Brute — also a mutilated human — has his left forearm cut off and replaced with a long blade.
• Batman: Arkham Series: The first Titan enemy in Batman: Arkham Asylum has disproportionate limbs, with his right arm and left leg thinner than the other. Later Titans in the game are proportionate; however, the Titans who appear in Batman: Arkham City possess similarly disproportionate limbs.
• BioShock:
  • Splicers are violent, mutated humans with asymmetrical features due to their mutations forming tumors in random locations on their body, without regard for symmetry, along with bearing wounds from fights that spring up in Rapture.
  • J.S. Steinman, MD, Rapture's finest cosmetic surgeon. Feeling that beauty is a moral imperative, he intends to improve his patients' appearance... whether they volunteered or not. His main focus though? He wishes to do for plastic surgery what Picasso did for painting, by breaking free of the tyranny of symmetry as a beauty standard...
• Dead by Daylight: Many of the playable killers are designed with asymmetrical elements to distinguish them as dangerous and scary opponents to the human survivors.
  • The Hillbilly's face is grotesquely stretched from one side to the other, the combination of a birth defect and years of abuse he suffered from his parents.
  • The Spirit was murdered and cut to pieces by her father in life, resulting in a body made of uneven, dismembered segments. As well as pieces of broken glass that stick out from various points of her body.
  • Half of the Plague's body is rotted and deformed from a pathogen that ravished her body in life, including a face that appears melted on one side.
  • The Deathslinger had his jaw broken in life, which carries over into his role as a killer where it's constantly slack. It accentuates his almost ghostly appearance.
  • The Singularity is a freaky mishmash of flesh and machine serving as the vessel for an AI. All of its components are designed to look imbalanced and like it's been cobbled together. Its flesh is strewn about in an unnatural way; both its hands are different, one a scythe and the other an Arm Cannon; and exposed wires poke out from random corners. Not even its limbs, which appear somewhat symmetrical, are designed with matching parts.
• Dead Space: Necromorphs are the corpses of deceased humans who have been violently reanimated by the infection which created them. As part of the process, some of the Necromorphs have been horribly transformed such as the Exploder, who carries an explosive pustule on one arm. Its right forearm and foot meanwhile have merged to act as a leg, while the original legs and left foot have fused and twisted to form a singular muscular limb. Then there's the Puker, whose original legs have intertwined with one another while a clump of nerves, intestines and muscles have formed a third leg; its fingers have merged into three claws on each hand and the Puker's upper torso has begun to melt from spitting digestive acid as a weapon.
• Digimon: Cyclonemon is obsessed with vengeance and has terrible bloodlust, and it has an abnormally enormous right arm with two big red claws. This contrasts its other arm, which is much smaller and has black claws, as well as more fingers.
• This trope, especially in the form of a monstrously large left arm, is practically a hallmark of FromSoftware's Soulsborne games:
  • Bloodborne: Several Beasts are asymmetrical through disturbing, inhuman characteristics. The standard mobs you fight for example have one arm that's longer than the other (and covered in beast fur), the Cleric Beast has a disproportionately massive left hand, half of Ludwig's body is disfigured into a freakish horse, including an extra mouth and multiple legs; and the One Reborn is an uneven abomination made from corpses.
  • Dark Souls has Manus, Father of the Abyss, from the Artorias of the Abyss DLC, who has a giant left hand, covered in eye-like growths.
  • Elden Ring: The Omens are ogre-like beings born with gnarled horns that grow unevenly across their body, highlighting their unnatural nature. It's downplayed with Margit aka Morgot, who retains an air of dignity and experience despite the deformities afflicting his body, and exaggerated with Mohg, whose horns have grown so much, one has even pierced an eye.
  • Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has the Demon of Hatred, who yet again has one arm larger than the other. Additionally, in the Final Boss fight (unless you do the Shura route), Isshin appears from one side of Genichiro's body, giving their combined appearance a temporarily asymmetrical look until they separate.
• Guilty Gear -STRIVE-: The already creepy Bedman, a mechanized bed frame with saws for hands, has a much more asymmetrical look due to being heavily damaged in its second appearance. Its face is cracked open with disjointed eye designs, one of its hands has its fingers blasted off, and its idle stance is an awkward lurch as it holds itself up with an arm, making it feel pained and off-kilter in combat.
• League of Legends: Fiddlesticks is a demon that's constructed a crude scarecrow-like form for itself from farm equipment, and it clearly doesn't understand or care what humans look like. One arm is clawed and drags along the ground, its face is made with an off-kilter bear trap for a mouth, and its torso is hunched over from all the uneven weight distribution. It's inhuman, doll-like movements accentuate it's unnatural appearance further.
• Left 4 Dead: Most of the special infected have disproportionately mutated bodies, resulting in imbalanced shapes and builds. The Smoker for example has its shoulder and half of its face mutated into tumorous masses; the Charger has most of its body mass shifted to its giant right arm, leaving a shriveled left arm on the other side; and the Boomer has massive pustules growing unevenly across its body.
• Moshi Monsters: Zommers were portrayed as the most ghoulish-looking monsters, and one of their deformities was that their right arm was bigger than their left.
• Prayer of the Faithless: People and animals become mutated and violent after being exposed to too much Miasma, including one enemy who has a blade for an arm.
• Resident Evil
  • Resident Evil 2: William Birkin's body is horrifically mutated by his fight for control with the G-Virus, causing his right arm and torso to swell into a massive, grotesque wall of flesh and bone (with a big ole eyeball growing from his shoulder). That unevenness carries into all of G's forms as it becomes more and more monstrous, eventually assimilating Birkin's human half and leaving the remnants of his face on the left side of its chest.
  • Resident Evil 3: Nemesis: Nemesis's face is grotesquely asymmetrical due to his right eye being stapled shut and the tentacles you can spot swarming beneath his torso. The remake version of his design adds more details like a crooked nose and pieces of skin that just barely drape across his head.
  • Resident Evil 7: Biohazard: Jack's final boss encounter has him mutate into a massive, multi-limbed monstrosity with eyes everywhere, none of which is consistently oriented or sized. What was once his face for example is swollen on one half with a giant red eye. It all makes him look incredibly pained and lopsided.
• Skullgirls: Double, being a shapeshifting blob-monster, has an entirely asymmetrical form, with her body constantly shifting from one state to another, never once feeling grounded or comprehensibly natural.
• Vermintide II: Chaos Spawn are tumor-like monsters with mismatched legs and a mass of Combat Tentacles erupting from one side of their body. They form when a human succumbs to the mutating power of Chaos, leaving them a mindless Living Weapon.
  Kerillian: That's the problem with Spawn. You never know what you're hitting.
• A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: The damaged enemy at the end of Corona Lucis shows its damaged state by having the left half be undamaged, and the right side in tatters.
• Warframe has the Orokin with their almost divine-looking faces contrasted to their oddly misshapen bodies, due in particular to their unnaturally long right arms. In the more traditionally creepy sense, the Infested are a horrible space plague that produces zombies, even from mechanical creatures, and their forms are all universally lopsided and uncomfortable to look at, especially when you start noticing where the original host's heads and limbs have migrated to in the new body plan.
• Weird and Unfortunate Things Are Happening is home to some freaky and uneven monster designs that lend to an uncomfortable aesthetic.
  • The common enemy sprite on the overworld for Pre-existing Encounters is some green monster with what appears to be four eyes in a square pattern; where the top left eye is actually appears to be a circular mouth, and its bottom right eye is shrunken compared to the "regular eyes" at top right and bottom left.
  • Obnoxious Orbs have their left eye about double the radius of their right eye, and their smile is made of teeth separated by gaps.
  • Knife Puppets' eyes are fish-eyed, pointing different directions, and somewhat mirrored along a diagonal; the left eye looks upper left, and the right eye looks bottom right.

Web Originals

• Mortasheen: Many of the setting's monsters are somewhat lopsided, reflecting their origins as the results of mad science or unpredictable mutations. These range from the basic Coccyx to the formidable Hestermoan, an enormous Nuckelavee with one oversized clawed hand and taloned foot.
• Slimyswampghost: Siren Head is a 40 ft tall Humanoid Abomination whose two sirens (actually mouths) are usually depicted as mismatched, with one higher than the other, unlike actual sirens.

Web Videos

• Pop Cross Studios:
  • In Mara's Final Kill, one of the five animal demons that Mara, Unkillable Kate and their new ally Tamika fight is Musophodra, a gigantic rat demon. Musophodra, like some grotesque parody of a Rat King, has rat heads that grow all across its body, including one head under its right arm (which means the head is partially merged with its body, so it doesn't have eyes or a nose), and another growing on top of Musophodra's left shoulder, and therefore has a more complete face, complete with a little organic horned helmet. This makes the demon look even more unnatural and nightmarish, appropriately, seeing as it feeds on human fear of rats.
  • Mara herself, the narrator of Christian's Demon Tales series, has a Curse that gradually turns her into a Demon of Human Origin every time she kills a demon, and her official character portrait, first revealed in this episode, shows that she has an entirely human left arm, but her right arm is massively oversized, with clawed fingers, and thick black demonic flesh that sometimes writhes in tendrils whenever she uses her powers. The top half of her face is similarly covered in demonic flesh, and her hair consists of a black solid wave of substance. In contrast to Musophodra, whose asymmetrical Body Horror is played for horror, Mara's uneven appearance is Played for Drama, as it terrifies her allies and fellow humans alike. The further the storyline progresses, the more Mara transforms, and eventually, her left arm becomes oversized and demonic to match her right.

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