Depraved Dwarf

Dr. Psycho: stunted and twisted in body and spirit.

Tyrion: Anyone named Desmond Crakehall must be a pervert.
Sansa: I hear that you're a pervert.
Tyrion: I am the Imp. I have certain standards to maintain.

— Game of Thrones

Dwarfs (not that kind, the real kind)^note Dwarves are fantasy creatures; dwarfs are short humans, and the polite term for the latter nowadays is "little people." This is, however, a relatively recent distinction that started with J. R. R. Tolkien. As in nearly everything else, most later fantasy authors have either followed his lead or not done so in a very pointed way to make a statement of some kind. in fiction are fairly uncommon. When they do show up, they tend to be either comic relief or playing the aforementioned fantasy creatures. 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 (presumably of the Mickey-slipping variety rather than the hold-them-down type), or at the very least a violent, cold-blooded criminal. They tend to show up when the hero has been rendered helpless. Often, expect giggling. Can go hand in hand with The Napoleon (although, that other trope may not always require morality for its own case, as opposed to this one), if the Depraved Dwarf's misanthropy is implied to be a response — albeit a misdirected one — to discrimination and abuse faced as a result of their short stature.

The polar opposite trope of Gentle Giant. Compare this trope to Evil Is Bigger, as well.

If he's The Don or a similar leadership role, see Mister Big. May or may not overlap with Little People Are Surreal. For villains with other disabilities, see Evil Cripple and Eunuchs Are Evil. May be part of a Subverted Suspicion Aesop if his being evil is treated as a plot twist. Contrast The Morlocks, who are the more depraved cousins of dwarves the fantasy race.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• In Berserk, Griffith spends a whole year in the tender care of one.
• 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. Of course, both of these two were no match for Kenshiro.
• 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.
• "The Baby" from Monster, a neo-Nazi and crime lord.
• "The Director" (no real name given) from Monster Musume is a slimy Con Man who harasses the girls under the pretense of filming a documentary about extraspecies people. He actually shows nothing but contempt for extraspecies and is only worried about how much money he'll make by selling their byproducts (discarded skin, scales, eggs, etc.) and his fetishising videos.
• Near the end of Promare, it turns out Vulcan is actually one of these controlling a beefy Mobile-Suit Human. Unlike most of the entries on this page, the suit allows him to be a very physical threat.
• Rave Master: Koala of the Six Guards is a short, child-like man who's often mistaken for a child despite not being one. He's also a psychopath who actively forces a man to brutally torture a girl with implements under the threat of death and later transforms said man into a cyborg under his control.

Asian Animation

• Downplayed with Logger Vick from Boonie Bears, who's more of an Anti-Villain than an actual human. With that said, he's still quite short for an adult human.

Comic Books

• Batman:
  • 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.
  • Le Bossu from Batman RIP. Near the end of the story, the Joker gives him a face to match his personality.
  • Gaggy Gagsworth, the Joker's first sidekick, is a dwarf.
• Big Man Plans by Eric Powell and Tim Wiesch is a deconstruction of this trope, showing how the titular character slowly grew embittered and mentally unstable after a lifetime of abuse and bullying, as well as being deployed in Vietnam as a special troop to flush out and butcher Viet Cong tunnels. By the time he returns to town after his childhood crush has been murdered, he's become his old enemies' worst nightmare.
• Marvel Universe stories containing the Darkhold occasional feature the Darkhold Dwarf, a mysterious entity that is possibly the anthropomorphic personification of the book itself.
• 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.
• Gen¹³: Mr. Luv's mother was infected with Gen-Factor chemicals while she was pregnant with him and he lost the ability to grow physically, but instead grew very intelligent. He runs the Luv Industries toy empire and has a tendency of dressing up like Max from Where the Wild Things Are. His encounter with the team was for the purpose of finding a mate so that he could create a new generation of Gen-Actives.
• Kondrati Topolov, a.k.a. the Gremlin, was a three-foot dwarf gifted with Super-Intelligence that he used to battle both The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man. He later built a copy of Boris Bullski's enormous Titanium Man armour so that he could better fight with Iron Man — a move that led to his death when the armour caught fire with him inside.
• Lucky Luke: A more family-friendly example than most is Joe Dalton who is moronic enough to qualify for Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain but at the same time is also rather bloodthirsty and sadistic (rejoicing in killing Luke and even other people and being ready to shoot at the slightest provocation) and can even become outright Ax-Crazy when he loses his shit.
• Preacher: Odin Quincannon, owner of a meat packing plant, is only four feet tall, but is a ruthless, amoral business owner guilty of numerous crimes and safety code violations. Then it's revealed that he makes love to a women statue sculpted from meat, to fully cement how psychotic he is.
• In one arc of The Punisher, a huge gang of people with dwarfism (led by the brother of a mob boss) starts taking out mobsters by kidnapping them and cutting off their legs below the knee. They actually thought that Wolverine and Frank would be on their side (Logan being The Napoleon but still taller than them, and Frank being known as a mobster killer).
• Rulah, Jungle Goddess: In "Condemned!" (Zoot Comics #14), Rulah battles Hagga the Dwarf who kidnaps and murders native maidens through a variety of creative tortures (including spreadeagling over a bamboo shoot that grows five inches a day so that the shoot breaks their spines and then impales them), seemingly for no reason other than pure sadism.
• Simon Culp from Starman (DC Comics). 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.
• Mister Mxyzptlk from Superman is sometimes portrayed as this. As a Humanoid Abomination from the fifth dimension, he's not so much depraved as he is Above Good and Evil, but he probably counts nonetheless. He's also similar to Rumpelstiltskin (one of the Ur Examples of this trope) in how he can be defeated, but the method is more complex: while the heroine of Rumpelstiltskin just had to tell Rumpelstiltskin his name, Superman has to trick Mister Mxyzptlk himself into saying his own name — backwards.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW): This version of Agent John Bishop was born with dwarfism. He was fed xenophobic rhetoric by his father, and who also commissioned a mech suit modeled after himself as he believed a man should look like his father. John is possibly the most sadistic character in the entire book, often taking pure delight in the torture, murder, and enslavement of non-humans.
• Teen Titans: Gizmo of the Fearsome Five is a Gadgeteer Genius dwarf capable of creating unbelievable weaponry by transforming one machine into another. In his tiny hands using state-of-the-art technology, something like an ordinary vacuum cleaner can easily be converted into a deadly, unstoppable tank.
• The Dummy, a for the Golden Age Vigilante, combines this with Creepy Doll by pretending to be a ventriloquist dummy.
• Watchmen has a minor character named "the Big Figure", who is naturally a dwarf and also a gangster until he was apprehended and sent to Sing Sing. He's introduced trying to get revenge on Rorschach for his part in arresting him, but Rorschach simply goads him into making mistakes that end with his two goons dead and Big Figure fleeing. Just before being broken out of prison by Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, Rorschach simply says that he needs the restroom — the same one that the Big Figure just fled into. A few noisy moments later, Rorschach comes out, and Big Figure does not.
• 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". Interestingly in his first appearance, Dr. Psycho was established as becoming evil because of relentless bullying over his height by other men, leading him to lash out against all of humanity.
• Surprisingly inverted in X-Men Noir, in which the dwarf Eugene Judd is one of the only good guys without any kind of pathology.

Fairy Tales

• Mysteries by Knut Hamsun has a character known only as "The Midget", a small hunchbacked man who serves as the depraved alter ego of the main character.
• Rumpelstiltskin seems friendly and helpful at first, but on his third visit, he demands the miller's daughter promise to give him her firstborn child. Willingly and knowingly making somebody enter a Leonine Contract with you is hardly the act of a kind benefactor, and some tellings even go so far as to imply he plans to eat the baby.
• "Snow-White and Rose-Red" has a dwarf who just seems rude and obnoxious at first, but he's later revealed to be outright evil when it's revealed that he stole a prince's treasure and later transformed the prince into a bear when he tried to get it back.
• The eponymous character in "The Yellow Dwarf", is an evil dwarf who interrupts a princess' wedding and kidnaps her because she had broken her promise to marry him (a promise made under duress, by the way). The princess' beloved king goes to save her, but then the dwarf finds the two, and kills the king, leading the princess to die of grief.

Films — Animated

• Mayor Susan Shelbourne from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, who is very power-hungry and corrupt, used to be shorter earlier in the movie up until the success of the FLDSMDFR^*Stands for "Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicatior.", a machine that converts water into food, where he's shown eating continuously, thus this trope has since been abolished when considering his later physical state.
• The 2012 adaptation of Dr. Seuss' The Lorax has Aloysius O'Hare, who is a very greedy businessman and mayor of Thneedville who tries to prevent any of the residents of that town to grow even a single plant because it would hinder his air business, where he even threatens the movie's protagonist Ted from doing so. This is in stark contrast to the titular character himself, who at least displays a significant level of humanity for others, including the Once-Ler.
• Morag, the caretaker of the Loch Loud Castle in Scotland and the Big Bad of The Loud House Movie.
• Head Chef Skinner from Ratatouille is the short, corrupt owner of Gusteau's restaurant following Gusteau's death who hates rats and is a bully to Gusteau's son Linguini.
• Shrek:
  • Lord Farquaad, the abnormally short Big Bad of DreamWorks' first Shrek movie, proves his evil cred by banishing all the fairy tale creatures from his kingdom^note except Mama Bear from Goldilocks, who got made into a rug, displaying a creepy interest in Princess Fiona, and (in his Establishing Character Moment) having his goons waterboard — er, milkboard — the Gingerbread Man so he can break off his legs. The musical even makes him a half-dwarf.
  • The Fairy Godmother, the Big Bad in Shrek 2, who is slightly taller than Farquaad but slightly shorter than Shrek. She displays a desire of taking over the kingdom of Far Far Away by coercing King Harold and Queen Lillian in marrying off their daughter Princess Fiona to her tall son Prince Charming, who becomes the Big Bad of Shrek the Third following the Fairy Godmother's death.
  • Shrek Forever After ups the ante with Rumpelstiltskin, who is even shorter and nastier than Farquaad, the Fairy Godmother and Prince Charming.
• Toy Story 2: Stinky Pete is a short prospector doll who secretly plots against Woody's wishes of returning back to the latter's original owner Andy once the entire Roundup Gang inside Al McWhiggin's apartment is complete, in favor of all of them being in display inside a toy museum in Japan, simply out of the former's greatly bitter reaction to not being bought and owned by any human while inside a dime store before.
• King Candy, the so-called ruler of the game Sugar Rush and the Big Bad of Disney's Wreck-It Ralph. He was also known as Turbo, an infamous video game character known for game-jumping. This is later subverted in the climax as King Candy gets transformed into a giant Cy-Bug after being swallowed by one, towering even Wreck-It-Ralph himself.

Films — Live-Action

• Sick-Head in 31 is a Nazi dwarf wielding two knives.
• Alien from L.A. features a mob boss named Mambino played by Deep Roy.
• 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.
• Ralphus, of the exploitation "classic" Bloodsucking Freaks, is the sadistic torturer Sardu's right-dismembered-hand man, and suffers from profound boundary issues with severed human heads. (On the bright side, he's a loyal employee with a strong work ethic.)
• In Circus of Fear, Mr. Big is a snoop, a blackmailer, and has sexual designs on Natasha: at one point considering blackmailing Gregor for access to Natasha instead of money.
• Death at a Funeral has the dwarf who blackmails the family with compromising pictures of him and the family patriarch engaged in questionable acts.
• Hercules, the demonic dwarf in The Devil Within Her who after being spurned by the protagonist for refusing his sexual advances places a curse on her child, which results in the newborn being supernaturally strong and murderous. The fact that he also works an act at a burlesque house doesn't help the stereotype either.
• Doubles as The Reveal in Don't Look Now. The mysterious small figure in a red raincoat repeatedly seen from the distance is not the protagonist's daughter. It is an adult female serial killer.
• Dracula vs. Frankenstein: Grazbo, the dwarf who operates the Creature Emporium for Dr. Durea, hates all normal-sized people and is working for Durea because he believes Durea's serum will cure his dwarfism. He enthusiastically cheers on Groton in the latter's attempts to kill Mike and Judith.
• 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.
• In Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks, Frankenstein's assistant Genz is a dwarf with a number of perversions: including voyeurism and necrophilia. During the Grave Robbing scene, he opens the corpse's dress and fondles her breasts. He later introduces Ook to the concept of rape.
• The clan of murderous inbred rednecks in Headless Horseman includes several dwarfs. One of them, known as 'the Rag Doll Man', makes rag dolls and then chops their heads off to represent the travellers who have lost their heads to the Horseman.
• Il nano erotico has a woman being hired to babysit a child that turns out to really be a sexually sadistic little person whose "mother" is actually his wife, a fellow psycho who watches (and gets off to) his antics through the cameras that they have hidden throughout their mansion.
• In Bruges downplays this with Jimmy, an actor in the Show Within a Show. Though not a villain, he is a vulgar, racist cokehead who solicits prostitutes.
• In the "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble" sketch of The Kentucky Fried Movie, one scene features a Depraved Dwarf in a clown suit preparing to whip a group of topless girls suspended from the ceiling.
• The criminal who calls himself "Chihuahua" in Land of the Dead has sold or taken away the main character's car and instead of setting things right, sends a man to kill him.
• The title antagonist from the Leprechaun series of movies.
• Lone Wolf McQuade: Falcon is a Depraved Dwarf and an Evil Cripple, as well as the head of an arms-smuggling operation and a rival to the main bad guy.
• 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 killing others when he feels like it.
• Mars Attacks!: The Martians. They are all very short. President Dale even calls them "little people". The only exception is the Martian Girl.
• In Orphan, the villain is an abnormally short woman who poses as a child.
• The Phantom of the Opera
  • In the 1962 version, the Phantom has a dwarfish hunchbacked assistant who is the one committing the murders in the film.
  • When a flashback in the 1989 version shows Erik making his Deal with the Devil, the Father of Lies is depicted as a little person.
• 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.
• The Spirit. Spirit shows a Cheek Copy of Sand Saref's "perfect ass" to every bellhop in town to find out which hotel she's staying at. The bellhop who recognizes it has dwarfism. Though that may just be because he was at exactly the right height to have a good view.
• Peter Dinklage plays the villain in Disney's 2007 Underdog movie.
• 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.
• Me, Myself & Irene has Chante, a chauffeur who's responsible for emasculating the protagonist Charlie and kicking off the mental traumas that would cause him to develop a Split Personality. Aside from physically assaulting Charlie with nunchucks after construing everything he says as racist/ableist while playing the victim card, he proceeds to have an affair with Charlie's wife that results in children that look nothing like Charlie, eventually running off with her and leaving Charlie with his kids.
• Patch Town: Kenny (played by comedian Kenneth "Ken" Hall) is a dwarf^note the actor is a little person, the character is a dwarf of the fantasy persuasion who enjoys "the perfect kidnapping gloves", frequenting a local brothel and attacking people. According to him, he has a standard: "I draw the line at eating kids". Trope is later averted when Kenny defects from Yuri and finds employment through a Toronto job agency, going on a date with a surly-looking employment counsellor not much taller than he is. Kenny is also implied to be bisexual, as he flirts with Yuri at least twice and also with one of Yuri's male goons-for-hire. Seems like Kenny wants to give up his evil ways in the end and just be your garden-variety Torontonian.
• Bolivar Trask is played by Peter Dinklage in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Despite the combination of villainy and dwarfism, his characterisation is that of a Well-Intentioned Extremist Mad Scientist, and though he has a distinct Lack of Empathy, there is none of the sexual predation or deliberate sadism that the trope usually entails. Very unusually for such a casting, his dwarfism has absolutely no discernible relevance to either the plot or his character, mainly because it was purely a case of Ability over Appearance after the script had been written, and any attempt to add things would have been deeply wrong. However, in the Rogue Cut, Trask insists that Mystique be handed over to him for research purposes; perhaps with this trope in mind, President Nixon responds, "I don't care who you screw, as long as it's not me."

Literature

• 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.
• In Clark Ashton Smith's (very) dark fantasy novelette The Colossus of Ylourgne, the sorcerer Nathaire is a deformed dwarf who is dying of the combined effects of his deformities and his dark magic, and seeks a way to both preserve his life and get revenge on the good people of Averoigne who have shunned him.
• The Tcho-Tcho of the Cthulhu Mythos are a pygmy Cannibal Tribe hailing from Southeast Asia.
• The Croning features a much darker take on Rumpelstiltskin. Here, Rumpelstiltskin is a Humanoid Abomination who happens to prefer to appear as a scary-looking, malformed little man when he walks amongst humans. Said guise is referred to by most who are unfortunate enough to cross his path as simply "the Dwarf". True to the fairy tale, the Dwarf's main activity is journeying around and offering people in need rather nefarious deals where he will grant them anything they wish for, even wishes thought impossible, in exchange for a Baby as Payment (except here, Rumpelstiltskin doesn't really try to make any secret of the fact that he intends to eat the baby in question). When the book's first temporary protagonist, the Spy first notices the Dwarf, he describes him as wearing the smile of "a butcher or coroner who enjoyed his job for all the wrong reasons." As The Spy follows the Dwarf's trail at his sister, the Queen's behest, he learns amongst other unpleasant things about his quarry that he likes to insert himself into any local festivals in the towns he happens to pass on his journeys, where he gets drunk and pervs on any young woman who aren't quick enough to steer clear of him, and likes to horrify children (and their mothers) with lurid tales involving monsters, fairies, and sexual deviancy.
• One gladiator in the second book of Detectives in Togas.
• Pär Lagerkvist's The Dwarf could be a trope codifier. The protagonist, the eponymous dwarf, is utterly, irredeemably evil.
• Farmer Bunce from Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of the three nasty farmers the titular Mr. Fox steals food and drink from. A foul-mouthed, foul-tempered dwarf of a man, Bunce helps his cohorts Boggis and Bean try to kill Mr. Fox, and resorts to methods as drastic as trying to dig him up with his tractor and getting entire teams of snipers to surround the hill he lives in.
• The Brobdingnagian Dwarf in Gulliver's Travels is more of an asshole than depraved as he's not keen on Gulliver taking the role of "court freak" on account of his even smaller size.
• Another downplayed example is the vengeful title character in "Hop-Frog" by Edgar Allan Poe. Hop-Frog, a jester with dwarfism and deformed legs (hence his nickname), is certainly cruel in his retribution, but the targets—a king and seven courtiers—deserved it for constantly mocking Hop-Frog and his fellow court dwarf Trippetta.
• The Midget, in the Illuminatus! trilogy, tends to take out his vengeance on the giant world in far less confrontational and more cerebral ways. But it's still terrible vengeance.
• Last Legionary: The One is a crippled dwarf, whose emaciated body consists of little more than a set of badly stunted tentacles that are too weak to do anything beyond crawl. He's also the leader of the Warlord's elite Deathwing squadron, responsible for the murder of entire worlds, and, when inside his huge golden exoskeleton, becomes a force to be reckoned with.
• Junji "Kappa" Kon in The Man with the Red Tattoo is a short assassin working for the Yakuza who finds killing fun, but turns out to be surprisingly honorable after being captured.
• 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.
• One of the creepy orderlies in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest had his growth stunted by the trauma of seeing his mother gang-raped. And yes, that's a thing; see the other wiki's page on psychosocial short stature.
• The Colorman from Christopher Moore's Sacré Bleu. Contrasted with Toulouse Lautrec who has a more or less heroic role.
• Subverted with Little Half from the final book in The Sea of Trolls series, who's a treacherous bastard but is just trying to protect his older brother.
• The Repulsive Ringmaster in Something Wicked This Way Comes employs a Dwarf and a Midget ^note Yes, there's a difference. In the past, "dwarf" signified disproportionate dwarfism (either the torso or the limbs are unusually short, but not both — more commonly the limbs) and "midget" signified proportionate dwarfism (in which the torso and the limbs are both unusually short). Nowadays, the word "midget" is considered highly rude, and "dwarf" is used for both types of dwarfism — though "little person" is preferable to either of those. as part of his sideshow of the damned.
• This is what everyone thinks Tyrion Lannister from A Song of Ice and Fire is, despite his being one of the more morally upstanding characters in the series not named Stark. But he may have had a Start of Darkness because of his ill treatment. He isn't helping his case by being a serial purveyor of prostitutes and a known drunkard. Also his treatment of his nephew Joffrey, while liked by the audience, makes him look worse when he is blamed for the murder.
• In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the latter character is an extremely short and ugly man with no redeeming qualities. This is, as the reader probably already knows, because he is the distillation of all the evil inside of Dr. Jekyll, therefore he is shorter than Jekyll. This is ignored in most adaptations, though, which typically lean on Evil Is Bigger.
• The Dwarf in Friedrich Dürrenmatt's crime novel Suspicion is a subversion. He is not quite 80 centimeters (31.5 inches) tall, seems to suffer from some sort of mental retardation, and is a strong and deadly assassin and henchman of Dr. Emmenberger. He is also a friend of Gulliver, who is a good guy. Gulliver also argues that The Dwarf is the only one who is innocent, comparing him to a trained animal. After being separated from Emmenberger, The Dwarf shows no murderous tendencies and behaves more like a toddler.
• Vorkosigan Saga: While Miles Vorkosigan himself is by no means depraved, this trope is so common In-Universe that it makes him a constant target of suspicion on his homeworld of Barrayar. In less parochial areas of the universe, he's fine.
• In The Witches, Roald Dahl describes the Grand High Witch as no taller than four and a half feet.

Live-Action TV

• Several show up in 1000 Ways to Die, although they tend to be more of the Jerkass variety than truly evil. And at least two of these die for being Too Dumb to Live.
• There's one in The Cape, although he's more a Jerkass than outright evil.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Tyrion Lannister is introduced to the audience in a brothel, where the whore Ros discusses his reputation as a "drunken little lecher". Subverted when we later discover Tyrion is the most decent member of his Big, Screwed-Up Family. Nevertheless, Black-and-Grey Morality means even he gets a few cold-blooded actions for which his dwarfism provides a Freudian Excuse.
  • Tyrion also invokes the trope in "The Lion and the Rose" when he jokingly cautions Joffrey to be careful around the dwarf jesters since they tend to get horny.
  • Later in the series, a rather crude fictional play depicting recent historical events portrays Tyrion as this, painting him as the Big Bad of the whole affair.
• The Toddler in Henry Danger is one of these. His whole schtick is that he's a dwarf who acts like a toddler.
• The New Avengers: In "Target!", the main villain of the episode Draker employs a midget assassin named Klokoe (played by Deep Roy) who takes an undeniable glee in killing: giving a sadistic grin when he stabs Steed with a syringe full of toxin while disguised as a child.
• Downplayed in The Wild Wild West. Miguelito Loveless is a Woobie/Well-Intentioned Anti-Villain.
• The X-Files: Subverted in the 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

• Dr Greenthumb by Cypress Hill has a dwarf hitting on the Night Nurse.
• Bushwick Bill of Geto Boys fame certainly liked to cultivate this persona. Be warned, 'cause "Size Ain't Shit." He did his share of horror-rapping on tracks like "Chuckie" and "Murder Avenue." In later years, though, he subverted this trope by venturing into gospel music.
• Alberich in Wagner's Das Rheingold goes from desperate and love-starved to a bundle of perverse rage, determined to force the world to renounce love and slave for him while he dallies with the pretty women. He even sires a son with Queen Grimhilde, Hagen after he buys her love with gold.
• Frank Zappa's "The Torture Never Stops" mentions "a sinister midget."
• The Midget Pirates of Willigoat from The Aquabats!' song "Captain Hampton and the Midget Pirates!"
  Although they were wee men, they had big swords and were known for gutting many and leaving few alive.

Mythology and Religion

• Many myths feature sinister Little People—for example, goblins in English folklore, kobolds in German folklore, Little People in Native American Mythology, and the Nibelungs in Nibelungenlied. Such critters tend to overlap with The Fair Folk.
  • Dwarfs in Norse Mythology are a rather interesting case. The concept of dwarfs may have evolved from dark elves; indeed, the Prose Edda equates dwarfs with dökkálfar and svartálfar (literally "dark elves" and "black elves" in Old Norse, respectively). As such, you'd expect these guys to be pretty nasty, and they often are in the myths. But as time went on, they became shorter and less malevolent until they were recognizable as the dwarves (spelled with a v, following J. R. R. Tolkien's example) that we know and love today.
  • The Ur-Example might be found in Classical Mythology, specifically in certain depictions of satyrs. These creatures were sometimes drawn with dwarfish proportions in ancient art, and were always depicted as debauched perverts (a trait that even shows up in Hercules's Disneyfied version of the myths), making this trope Older Than Feudalism. Like The Fair Folk, satyrs weren't strictly evil, but they were wild and uncouth, sometimes dangerously so.
• Detroit folklore gives us Nain Rouge, a violent, loutish dwarf whose appearances are said to be a sign of misfortune to come.
• In some Arthurian stories Morgan Le Fay has an evil dwarf as her assistant (who's usually unnamed, just referred to as "the dwarf"). Evil-doing dwarfs were fairly common in Medieval stories.

Professional Wrestling

• WWE's Hornswoggle provided two separate examples of this.
  • When he debuted as (Fit) Finlay's sidekick, he was known just as The Little Bastard. He spoke only in snarls and attacked Finlay's opponents as viciously as his small size would allow. After a while, he turned face, became able to speak, and ceased to be an example.
  • Although this never came to fruition, it was planned for Hornswoggle to become the new Raw GM, where he'd play a W C Fields type character, chomping on a cigar and contemptuously referring to the then-Divas as 'dames'. However, Swoggle couldn't pull the character off so it never made it to television.
• In the very early days of NWA-TNA, they had a small 'hardcore midgets' division, and the top heel of that division was Puppet the Psycho Dwarf. Puppet's gimmick was that he was a dwarf who resented midgets so much that he wanted to murder them. He literally cut a promo in the ring about wanting to murder midgets while waving a pistol in the air. Puppet was also caught masturbating while hiding in a trashcan by backstage interviewer Goldilocks.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer Fantasy: True of the Chaos Dwarves, who are essentially evil Mesopotamian-themed fire worshippers. They were regular dwarves once, but after a continental realignment trapped them underground for years, praying to the Ancestor Gods had no results and they were rescued by Hashut, a god of greed, tyranny, and fire in exchange for constant sacrifice of prisoners. Nowadays they specialize in binding daemons into weapons and forging Haunted Technology-like cannons. They're also responsible for the existence of Black Orcs: orcs bigger, stronger, tougher, and smarter than the average orc, and thus able to wreak destruction on a much bigger scale after breaking free from their dominion.

Theatre

• In Moonlight And Magnolias, director David Fleming is relieved to leave The Wizard of Oz for Gone with the Wind because it means he no longer has to deal with munchkins who spend their time getting drunk, fornicating in the urinals, or wrecking a shot by singing "Ding, dong, the bitch is dead."

Video Games

• In the Borderlands series, squeaky-voiced Midgets are commonly-faced enemies in Pandora, and are usually members of homicidal bandit gangs. One of the only named, voiced Midgets is a boss called Sandman; a brutal, murderous pirate obsessed with finding a legendary treasure trove. Ironically enough, the third game reveals that the first Vault Hunter himself was actually a Pandoran Midget.
• God Hand has its share of midget enemies, the most notable being the Mad Midget Five and the Psychic Midget.
• The King of Fighters has Choi Bounge, a criminal who resembles a shrunken-down Freddy Krueger. Mostly Played for Laughs, however.
• Ferra from Mortal Kombat X was originally thought to be a child, but is actually an example of this trope-a bloodthirsty one, to be precise. Subverted in that it's not permanent...
• The Imps from Plants vs. Zombies. Often seen riding a Gargantuar who throws them into your defenses, they're tiny, fast, and yet just durable as a normal zombie, and no less hungry for human brains.
• Resident Evil 4: One of the high-ranking members of Los Illuminados who Leon faces is Ramon Salazar, a Psychopathic Manchild with a stunted, child-like body.
• De Loco from Skies of Arcadia is an Insane Admiral and Mad Scientist who happens to be the shortest general of the Imperial Armada and the only major villain aside from the Final Boss who the heroes directly kill off.
• One of the playable characters in Thrill Kill is The Imp, a midget with a psychotic hatred of taller people who has a pair of stilts crudely grafted to his legs.
• When Rubi gets captured in WET, she's subjected to the attentions of a dwarf Torture Technician.
• J aka Joran from Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Out of all the Moebius, he’s easily the shortest of the bunch. He wasn’t always this way though. He was once a great friend of Noah, Eunie, and Lanz, but after he died, he realized just how useless he was in every battle he fought. This revelation turned him bitter, and he gained strength the only way he knew how: becoming Moebius.

Web Animation

• ATTACK on MIKA has Shimoda, a short teacher who looks after Iori and Akane's class. He harassed Iori who was taller than him. After she coldly rebuffed his advances he decides to accuse Akane of stealing the club money driving her to tears. Infuriated, Iori decides to pretend to get back with him while livestreaming the whole conversation to the whole class. He tells her to take off her shirt, but she reveals this and the principal fired him.

Webcomics

• Dr. Knickerbockers from The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, who was actually based on a recurring nightmare of one of the inkers.
• Inverted with Sarah in Ennui GO!, a Non-Ironic Clown by trade who is one of the nicest and most cheerful characters among the cast.
• Played With in Something*Positive—Pepito was originally the victim of depravity, being kept as Avegadro's Sex Slave for years. When he was eventually liberated, however, he kept up the same messed-up habits (peeing on people, etc.). When he eventually learned English he turned out to be something of a Jerkass, including to the people who (admittedly rather begrudgingly) helped save him in the first place. Then he was eaten alive by Cat Girls.

Western Animation

• One-shot Bugs Bunny villain Baby Face Finster is a criminal whose modus operandi is passing himself off as an infant. He fits neatly into a baby basket.
• Dexter from his eponymous show Dexter's Laboratory. He may be a child, but given his maniacal personality, supported with his scientific background, he can get pretty menacing in front of others, such as both his older sister Dee Dee and his personal rival Mandark.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy:
  • Eddy, The Leader of the Eds who is also the most inconsiderate member from them, primarily because of his ambitious goals of obtaining money and being more socially accepted than he already was with his best friends Ed and Edd.
  • Sarah, the Spoiled Brat younger sister of her very contradictory older brother Ed, who, in contrast, is a highly loyal Gentle Giant for her and his own friends Edd and Eddy.
• Family Guy:
  • Stewie himself is heavily capable of being this for someone who's still an infant.
  • In its episode "The Thin White Line", when Brian joins the Quahog police as a drug dog, one of their busts is a gang of dwarves running a drug ring under the masquerade of children at Sunday school.
• Gravity Falls:
  • Li'l Gideon Gleeful. Despite his surname, he's anything but cheerful by default, genuinely speaking, compared to his crush Mabel Pines. He's not the main antagonist for the show's 1st season for nothing.
  • Jeff the gnome, who was formerly the leader of a village full of gnomes like him. His madness is additionally motivated by his crush on Mabel, as well (similar to Gideon's case).
• Dr. Psycho is a main character in Harley Quinn (2019), and while he's far less degenerate than his comic counterpart, he still has some twisted moments such as having brainwashed Giganta into marrying him (which is Played for Laughs as she's no more bitter than the average ex-wife towards him), taking pleasure in watching people die in an amusement park as a child, and calling Wonder Woman a cunt (which gets him expelled from the Legion of Doom). However, the latter half of the second season has him Jumping Off the Slippery Slope and trying to Take Over the World for Darkseid, as he's "always had a hard-on for world domination".
• Heloise from Jimmy Two-Shoes. Even part of her own name sounds like the English word "hell", which fits her pretty devious personality.
• Plankton from SpongeBob SquarePants. When compared to the rest of the cast he is no larger than a bug. However, that doesn’t stop him from being the show’s main villain, and will do anything to get the Krabby Patty Secret Formula.
• While he is the same size as the eponymous hero, Simon Barsinister from Underdog is markedly shorter than any other adult human on the show. He is also easily the most evil of the Rogues Gallery.
• The Venture Bros.: The Murderous Moppets certainly qualify. They are a pair of Psycho Knife Nuts who seem to lack any empathy whatsoever, especially towards their victims. They only show respect to Dr. Mrs. The Monarch, who they lust over, and The Monarch himself, who is the only person (besides Brock Sampson, obviously) who seems to be capable of scaring even them.
  Tim-Tom: We could take out his tongue.
  Kevin: With a knife!
  Tim-Tom: Remove his heart.
  Kevin: Yeah, with a knife!
  Tim-Tom: A bigger knife!
  Kevin: Fucking knife!

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