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Stunted and twisted in body and spirit.
Dwarfs (not that kind, the real kind) in fiction are fairly uncommon. When they do show up, they tend to be either comic relief or playing a fantasy creature. But then, there's these guys.
The Depraved Dwarf is a pint-sized bucket of malice. He (and it's pretty much always a he) is either a sadistic psychopath, a twisted rapist, or at the very least a violent, cold-blooded criminal. Can go hand in hand with The Napoleon, if the Depraved Dwarf's misanthropy is implied to be a response - albeit blown out of proportion - to discrimination and abuse faced as a result of their short stature.
They tend to show up when the hero has been rendered helpless. Often, expect giggling.
If he's The Don or a similar leadership role, see Mister Big.
Contrast Little People Are Surreal.
For villains with other disabilities, see Evil Albino and Evil Cripple.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- In Berserk, Griffith spends a whole year in the tender care of one.
- "The Baby" from Monster, a neo-nazi and crime lord.
- Mukotsu from InuYasha is very small and toad-like compared to normal humans, and he's shown melting and suffocating people with his poisons. He also tries to do something nasty to a helpless Kagome, before being bifurcated by Sesshomaru.
- Fist of the North Star featured Habu, a Monkey Kung Fu master who served Amiba, and Komaku, a minion of Yuda who tried to poison the water supply and has a fighting style that gives him a great advantage in high, narrow places.
Comic Books
- Wonder Woman villain Dr. Psycho (pictured above). He can be best characterized as a "misogynistic, vindictive, spiteful, petty, sadistically cruel serial killer/rapist and cannibal with the ability to control people's minds".
- Some incarnations of the Mad Hatter. Which is to say, both his height and level of insanity vary wildly. Gail Simone writes an especially creepy one.
- For that matter, some versions of the Penguin.
- Gizmo of the Fearsome Five.
- The Dummy combines this with Creepy Doll by pretending to be a ventriloquist dummy.
- Fables revealed (or at least heavily implied) that the eponymous Seven Dwarfs did bad bad things to Snow White during their time together, which is why she murdered them all.
- Big Figure from Watchmen.
- Le Bossu from Batman RIP.
- Surprisingly averted in X-Men Noir, where Eugene Judd is one of the only good guys without any kind of pathology.
- Simon Culp of the Starman series. Besides starting out as a thieving, murderous hellspawn in the 1800s, he developed powers identical to fellow immortal The Shade, and eventually proceeded to turn their centuries long personal feud into an enormous Xanatos Gambit to consume and destroy Shade utterly; first his reputation, then his city, and then fight him into oblivion.
Fairy Tales
Films — Live-Action
- Mini-me from Austin Powers is a lighter example. He's not that depraved, but he does try to eat a live cat at one point.
- Considering the stock he is cut from, the dwarfism is probably not the main cause.
- Subverted in Foul Play; "The Dwarf" that Gloria is warned about isn't really a dwarf. This, of course, leads to confusion, and when she meets an actual dwarf, she goes nuts and throws him out of her apartment, seriously injuring him, only to find out he's really a bible salesman.
- The title antagonist from the Leprechaun series of movies.
- Death at a Funeral has the dwarf who blackmails the family with compromising pictures of him and the family patriach engaged in questionable acts.
- Olaf, the title character of the Danish Exploitation Film The Sinful Dwarf, lures young women into an attic and locks them up. They are later used for prostitution. Yes, the word "depraved" might be a little light in this case.
- Harry Earles plays what might be the Ur Example in The Unholy Three. He is easily the most vicious and evil of the titular trio, and pulls off the old 'midget in a baby carriage' trick.
- Downplayed with Nick Nack of The Man with the Golden Gun. He's Affably Evil at all times, but he does work for a renowned contract killer, and does not hesitate to try and kill others when he feels like it.
Literature
- Pär Lagerkvist's The Dwarf could be a trope codifier. The protagonist, the titular dwarf, is utterly, irredeemably evil.
- In the book Obsidian Butterfly, part of the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series, there is Nicky Bako, a pretty infamous necromancer who is the witch for the outlaw biker gang and werewolf pack in the area, Los Lobos.
- This is what everyone thinks Tyrion Lannister from A Song of Ice and Fire is, despite his being one of the only characters that's basically good. But he may have had a Start of Darkness because of his ill treatment.
- One gladiator in the second book of Detectives In Togas.
- The Colorman from Christopher Moore's Sacre Bleu. Contrasted with Toulouse Lautrec who has a more or less heroic role.
- In the Kindle short story ''Melon Heads''
 , there's a whole tribe of them living in the Ohio woods.
- The Old Curiosity Shop from Charles Dickens gives an early example, with the utterly depraved Daniel Quilp as the main villain of the story.
Live Action TV
- There's one in The Cape, although he's more a Jerkass than outright evil.
- Miguelito Loveless from The Wild Wild West is a cold-blooded criminal and Mad Scientist.
- Game Of Thrones. Tyrion Lannister is introduced to the audience in a brothel, where the whore Roz discusses his reputation as a "drunken little lecher". Subverted when we later discover Tryion is the most decent member of his Big Screwed-Up Family.
- Subverted in The X-Files episode "Humbug". While investigating a series of murders in a small town populated by various ex-circus sideshow performers, Mulder catches the manager of the trailer park (who happens to be a little person) crawling around beneath the trailer where Scully is staying. The manager indignantly corrects Mulder's implied assumption that he was peeping. He was just doing some necessary repair work on the trailer, with Scully's knowledge, in fact. He further claims that he has no need to spy on Scully because he gets more than his fair share of tail from "curious" women.
Music
- Frank Zappa's "The Torture Never Stops" mentions "a sinister midget".
Professional Wrestling
- Hornswaggle from the WWE universe.
Video Games
- When Rubi gets captured in Wet, she's subjected to the attentions of a dwarf Torture Technician.
- Salazar from Resident Evil 4.
- In Borderlands and its sequel, squeaky-voiced midgets are commonly-faced enemies in Pandora. One of the only named, voiced Midgets in either game is a boss called Sandman, a brutal, murderous pirate obsessed with finding a legendary treasure trove.
- God Hand has its share of midget enemies, the most notable being the Mad Midget Five and the Psychic Midget.
- The King Of Fighters series has Choi Bounge, a criminal who resembles a shrunken down Freddy Krueger.
Webcomics
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