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See, I told you I could do it!
"My aura has never been pinker!"
A good way of applying the humor of The Comically Serious to villains is by pairing them with the Perky Female Minion. This character is something like the Distaff Counterpart/ Foil to the Enigmatic Minion; they can range in psyche from Punch Clock Villain to fairly psychotic, but have an upbeat, Genki Girl personality in sharp contrast to the villain they serve who will be gloomy, Ax Crazy, etc. If the female minion has a crush on the other villain, it will generally be of the Mad Love variety, although this affection isn't a requirement, nor is its reciprocation.
However, despite her cheerfulness and energy, she is usually still good at what she does. When this is the case, her employer usually views her as a Bunny-Ears Lawyer.
Compare Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl for a similar dynamic.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Cyber Team In Akihabara has Blood Falcon, Death Crow, and Dark Pidgeon. All of them are in love with the gloomy villain, and all of them are extremely perky. They're also completely incompetent.
- Mon Colle Knights has Batch and Guuko. Guuko is the most perkiest of the two, if not the most dimwitted one.
- Berserk has Sonia, Griffith's New Band Of The Hawk's Mission Control who is also infatuated with her boss. Despite being always surrounded by horrible monsters - known as Apostles - she is always smiling and welcoming.
- Excel from Excel Saga toward Il Palazzo, although he is more of a jerk than Ax Crazy. Though he does have that disturbing habit of killing her for trivial reasons.
- Misa toward Light in Death Note, in which Light would kill her without a second thought were she not useful to him, and had her Mama Bear Shinigami (Rem) not threatened to kill him if he hurt her.
- Shader, the catgirl demon in Chrono Crusade.
- Bleach: Stark's fraccion, Lilinette Gingerback.
- Yuuri in Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch is the perky, suck-up Bratty Half-Pint in the first Quirky Miniboss Squad. She and all her teammates also fall under Mad Love (except Mimi and Sheshe, who are involved with each other) but only Yuuri fits the Perky Female Minion description. Alala from the second arc plays the role of Perky Female Minion as well, though she isn't nearly as attached to her respective Big Bad.
- Sein and Wendi of the Numbers Cyborgs in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. Their unprofessional personalities in a team created to be war machines is given many a Lampshade Hanging by the older cyborgs in the manga chapter that featured them.
- An exception to the Always Female rule in Hellsing's Warrant Officer Schrödinger. For good measure, he's also a catboy. This being Hellsing though, he does occasionally exhibit a Slasher Smile.
- Played straight on the other hand with Rip van Winkle, who is surprisingly airheaded and cheerful for a member of a nazi batallion, in direct contrast to Zorin, who is anything but this.
- In Pokémon Special, Commander Mars of Team Galacitc jumps up and down with joy and gets childishly excited at the thought of blowing up one of Sinnoh's lakes. In her first appearance, she also stops what she's doing to listen to one of Dia and Pearl's comedy routines.
Comics
- Harley Quinn was originally a psychiatrist to The Joker, but wound up falling in love with him and helping him in his crimes. She's an unrepentant murderer, but so cheerful and so absolutely devoted to "Mistah J" that one can't help but pity her when he slaps her around and/or threatens to kill her.
- Minordomo, assistant to Majordomo (who is Mojo's assistant himself) in X-Men. She's so genki she suffers repeated heart attacks getting worked up over imagined disasters. Since she is also a robot, this typically just requires someone to hit her reset button, rather than having any lasting effect.
- Mariah is the Colonel's perky assassin in Sin City that is both fashionable and a Deadpan Snarker.
Film
- Columbia in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. She's quite a bit like Harley Quinn.
- While Martin is an Anti-Hero rather than villain in Grosse Pointe Blank, Marcella, his Sassy Secretary fits this trope pretty well. Unsurprisingly, there isn't a romantic relationship between the two (they are played by siblings John and Joan Cusack), and in fact both don't really seem to like so much as respect each other.
- Miss Teschmacher in the Superman movies.
- Although in this case, they are both Ax Crazy, in the Harry Potter films, Bellatrix Lestrange comes across as one of these, as a contrast to Voldemort. While Voldemort is very cold and doesn't really emote normally, Bellatrix is gleefully psychopathic. Because of her crush on Voldemort, it seems like if this were a (very strange) romantic comedy, Bellatrix would be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
- Spann in ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2.
- Janice in Initiation Silent Night Deadly Night 4.
Literature
- Juliet Butler of Artemis Fowl, niece to Artemis's Battle Butler. She eventually decides that body-guarding isn't her thing and leaves to try out for a wrestling team.
Artemis: I can only hope that she fails the audition. Though I doubt it. She is a Butler, after all.
Live Action TV
Radio
- Paula with Professor Nebulous in Nebulous - although Nebulous isn't evil, he's a humourless jerk of a Mad Scientist with a God-complex who once blew up the Isle of Wight because he wanted to move it to the right a bit. Despite this, Paula has an incredibly poorly-disguised infatuation with Nebulous, to the point that at one point, when Nebulous breaks his arm, Paula tries to kiss it better, prompting Nebulous to reply "Paula... that's my midriff".
- This is lampshaded with her surname - Breeze.
Tabletop Games
Theater
Video Games
- Uzuki from The World Ends With You is a good example when paired with the composer, especially when she giggles.
- Lash in Advance Wars. She plays it to the hilt when paired with The Stoic Enigmatic Minion Hawke in Dual Strike.
- Grandia (1) has three of these; Nana, Saki, and Mio are ALL in love with the Colonel, and only fight with any effectiveness as a team. They are comically annoying even to their own side, but ultimately seem to be well-intentioned... Or at least intentioned alongside their boss. Who doesn't especially care for them.
- Project Justice has this in Momo, who serves Big Bad Kurow until he betrays her because of his failures. She's not all fun and rainbows, though, as she does show quite an evil streak.
- Tira from Soul Calibur is this to the grim and brutal Nightmare. Granted, she's pretty creepy and insane as well. Bonus points since he feeds her soul to Soul Edge in his story.
- An inversion (albeit almost certainly accidental) is Nastasia from Super Paper Mario. Her boss, Count Bleck, is cheerful in embracing his over-the-top villainy and magician-like looks and personality, while Nastasia, the minion, is gloomy, precise, and organizes most of the actual plans.
- Because of that she is more of the villainess version of a Girl Friday.
- Count Bleck has three other minions, one of them being Mimi, a perky female one to contrast the more enigmatic Dimentio. The third, a stereotypically Scottish big dumb guy called O'Chunks, is the comic relief of the trio.
- The first two games had Kammy Koopa, who is much, much older than most examples of this character type.
- Although most of the "leaders" in Touhou are fairly "perky" goofballs of Crazy Awesome calibur who have Battle Butler archers dedicated to cleaning up the messes they create, the more deadpan characters, like Satori, have Genki Girl "pets" or "minions" like Okuu and Orin.
- As of Mortal Kombat 9, Mileena counts. Her pre-match quote and some other lines display a childlike enthusiasm for violence, and she seems genuinely excited on fighting for her "father", the Obviously Evil Shao Kahn. One of the challenge tower missions involves her attempts to force Scorpion to accept a teddy bear that she made for him. She's still psychopathically Axe Crazy though.
- Both Venus and Lovrina from Pokemon Colosseum, but Lovrina slightly more so.
Webcomics
- Bangladesh Dupree from Girl Genius. Though in a bit of an inversion, she's the Ax Crazy one. Her boss is a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
- Violetta may qualify as well.
- Aimee to Lord Sykos in The Wotch, although really, they're both pretty perky.
- Mizuna of Adventurers! is the sister of one of the Action Girl protagonists and works for the Big Bad as her Evil Counterpart. She takes an upbeat, cheerful tone and seems excited at the opportunity to be a villain (she's been practicing! She kicked a kitten just a few days ago!), although even her boss thinks she's more misguided than evil — and this from a guy who's close to Harmless Villain territory on his own.
- Tsukiko from The Order of the Stick is the Perky Goth version of this. She hates living things and expects them to betray her at any opportunity, but she claims that The Undead are nice when you get to know them, and often acts like a Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher towards them (except for her boss, Xykon, who she's in love with despite all the evidence he cares nothing for her.)
- Mel Kelly of Narbonic is another perky minion who's more evil than the boss. Helen kills For Science!, and occasionally for Revenge, and in the main story it's really easy to talk her out of it. Mel kills because it's so much fun! It has also been shown that Mel is ready and willing to betray Helen and take power for herself if it'll allow her to kill more people. On the other hand, she does mellow out a bit in one possible future . . .
- Five Wave Fury from Keychain of Creation. She's so adorable you can almost forget that she's a shark-totem Full Moon Caste Lunar who's in love with an Abyssal working for the First and Forsaken Lion. And she has no problem with that.
- Greta Gravity from Spinnerette, assistant to the arch-villain Doctor Universe. Perky in more ways than one.
- In Sinfest, Satan brought in a new, green succubus when Fucshia left
 . Giving a nice contrast to Baby Blue's disgruntled manner.
Web Original
- Snarky, rude supervillainess Vamp, to her boss The Necromancer in the Whateley Universe. You know no one named The Necromancer is going to be a comedian.
- As an inversion, Beth Vandelinder of Survival of the Fittest was rather perky and upbeat...until She Bop (NSFW), where she became Melina Frost's minion.
- A more played straight example would be Lizzie Nolan of the Mini site spinoff Evolution, who does the announcements detailing the subjects' horrible deaths in a rather... energetic fashion.
Western Animation
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