Lê Chiến Kim/Dark Cupid: No love affair or friendship will escape my fury. No one will love again!
In the times of Ancient Rome, Cupid (and by extension, his Greek-counterpart Eros) was a god of love and an embodiment of sexual desire. He was armed with a bow gifted to him by his father Mars/Ares and a quiver of arrows; gold arrows that induced love, lead arrows that destroyed it. He was also a terrible shot, and would often be the blame for madness and chaos brought on by raw, uncontrollable desire among the mortals. With cultural osmosis, Cupid as an icon has endured the test of time in the form of an angel and flying baby that personifies love.
With every angel, there are its Evil Counterparts, with much more malevolent versions of the cupid portrayed as a Fallen Angels or even as all-out demons. Like their heavenly counterparts, Fallen Cupids have bows and arrows too, but they aren't nearly as wholesome. Instead of sacred couplings, perhaps they elicit more carnal desires like Succubi and Incubi, portraying them like the Greco-Roman Cupid of old in a more modern context. The love they inflict might be a form of Mad Love, and might even ensure that Love Hurts in the end just for the satisfaction of watching hearts break. They might manifest as a form of Jerkass Genie, granting a mortal's wish for love and have that love be an annoying, corrupting thing that brings out the worst in all parties. They could carry nothing but lead arrows and destroy love, or maybe they can pierce the heart of a person and they bleed to death.
Compare Bad Santa. Related to Love Makes You Crazy, Love Makes You Evil and Wicked Heart Symbol.
Examples:
- In My Balls, one of the demons sent to free Emmaniel from her imprisonment inside of Satou Kouta's right testicle (yes, really) is the Fallen Angel and former cupid Ariel who uses her black arrows to cause every woman he interacts with during the day to fall madly in-lust with him. Satou manages to defeat her by squirting lotion that he used as a distraction earlier into her eyes.
- Guri from Love Tyrant doesn't understand love despite being a cupid herself. When she has trouble expressing what she wants and Seiji says hurtful words to her, she turns into a demon with black wings and horns, and starts breaking people up or making them fight each other by stabbing them with a pitchfork and thus "getting red of their love." She returns to normal after a confrontation with Seiji and realizing that she just wanted to feel loved by him.
Guri: My apologies, but the Guri you knew no longer exists.
- DC Comics: Cupid is a recurring member of Green Arrow's Rogues Gallery. She was a special-ops soldier who volunteered for a super-soldier program that gave her a short-term memory and unbalanced emotional issues. She developed an imbalanced infatuation towards Green Arrow, convinced that they were meant to be together, becoming a bow-wielding Serial Killer vigilante to prove such to him.
- Two important characters from Lucifer evoke the visual image. Gaudium and Spera are a brother/sister team of demons that are fallen cherubs with a stunted, impish look. While neither are hugely focused on love during the story (more important things are going on) they both have a habit of becoming an Abhorrent Admirer to other characters.
- Fine Print:
- Succubi and Incubi are "cousins" to cupids who's job is to cultivate Lust in humans, using it to cultivate Eternal Ambrosia to prolong their immortality.
- If they so choose, cupids can swap their "divine essence" and become succubi/incubi.
- In Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas, the Big Bad Forte can create ghost scales in a Sickly Green Glow that can manifest as constructs. In his Villain Song, these would manifest as bow-wielding cherubs that torment the Beast, trying to make love seem like a mischievous, if not downright malicious thing that can't be trusted.
- Played for laughs in the second Franny K. Stein book Attack of the 50-Ft. Cupid, where Franny first hears about Valentine's Day and interprets Cupid as being a one-eyed demon who uses his arrows to skewer people. This trope is averted with the titular 50-Ft. Cupid, who fits the traditional depiction of a winged cherub and whose destructive actions are not intentional on his part.
- The evil enchanter from The Faerie Queene attempting to force a maiden to love him (of course) decorates his house with imagery of Cupid and his dominion over the gods.
- Carrie Cutter, a.k.a. Cupid in Arrow is portrayed much like her comic book counterpart, being an Abhorrent Admirer of the Green Arrow that becomes a bow-wielding serial killer to get his attention. Unlike in the comics however, she was not a spec-ops agent driven mad by an experiment. Instead, she was a police officer that possessed an attachment disorder; fixating on a single individual and projecting her own extreme emotions on to them to a murderous degree, becoming fixated on the Arrow after he saved her from a mugger.
- Cupids in Spyro the Dragon (1998) (and the remastered version on Spyro Reignited Trilogy) are a demonic cherub-like enemy in Dark Passage and Lofty Castle that shoot arrows at Spyro whenever he comes near them.
- Fate/Grand Order: Kama, the Love Goddess of Hindu Mythology, is portrayed as a "tired worker" who comes to hate her job.note She believes that Love Hurts and is a low-key sadist who enjoys seeing people fall into ruin because of love. And, due to them being counterparts of each other, she's also influenced by the demon Mara of Buddhist Mythology, the "demon of temptation" and "enemy of Buddhism". If Mara's influence dominates her, she becomes Beast III/L, one of the "evils of humanity" (specifically, "depravity") who wishes to shower humanity and the universe with her "love", corrupting them into depravity.
- Fortnite had a Cupid in the Love Ranger (A shirtless, stony grey, winged Jonesy reskin) and this trope in the Fallen Love Ranger, who is identical to the Love Ranger, minus the wings, plus some horns, and glowing cracks all over his (literally) chiselled body.
- In the Crypt TV short "Valentine's Die
", Cupid is portrayed as being a Creepy Cute homicidal maniac who seems hellbent on killing the main protagonists for cheating on each other.
- In the Miraculous Ladybug episode "Dark Cupid", Chloé Bourgeois makes Lê Chiến Kim a social media laughing stock out of his attempts at confessing his feelings for her, so Hawk Moth akumatizes him into Dark Cupid, a Cupid-esque supervillain armed with arrows that invert love — romantic or platonic — into hate. He reappears much later in the two-part Season Two finale where he is instrumental in keeping Scarlet Moth's akumatized army replenished by inflicting bad emotions on the heroes and anyone they de-akumatized.
- In the Hercules: The Animated Series episode "Hercules and the Comedy of Arrows", Icarus sneaks into Cupid's arrow factory in order to find a way to break up Cassandra and Melampus. He winds up creating loathe arrows — arrows that induce hate instead of love — that Pain and Panic steal, becoming Hades' own personal cherubs who sow hatred all across Greece.
- Anti-Cupid from The Fairly OddParents! is the Anti-Fairy counterpart of Cupid. While Cupid's job is to distribute love all across Earth, it can be presumed that Anti-Cupid does the opposite.
