Wily Walrus

See how they run like pigs from a gun.

"And to ensure complete dominance, the walrus needs a bigger mouth, so it can eat all our childrens. Because walrus don't have sympathy."

— Robbaz, Spore - Creature Stage - Walrus Overlord

Walruses are strange creatures, and ones that most people have little experience with. Perhaps this is the reason why they are less commonly featured in media compared to cats, foxes, reptiles, etc. Perhaps it is also the reason that their depiction in the media is so heavily influenced by their appearance. Real Life walruses are commonly seen as fat blobs who lie around on rocks, but many of their features translate readily into an anthropomorphized character with a distinctive personality.

Their wrinkly skin, bald heads, and bushy snouts resembling big mustaches give them the appearance of a Grumpy Old Man. As a result, female and/or young walruses in media are rare. They're also big and blubbery, leading to their portrayal as lazy, gluttonous, and slow-moving. Despite this perceived passivity, their massive tusks and sheer bulk make them appear powerful and potentially dangerous, so they’re also sometimes portrayed as being very physically strong, if a bit poorly motivated.

Villainous walruses are a popular version, combining Bald of Evil, Fangs Are Evil, Good Hair, Evil Hair, and Fat Bastard into one Obviously Evil package. This portrayal finds further fuel in the fact that they're predators who feast on all sorts of animals, from fish, to mollusks (such as clams and squid), to crustaceans (such as crabs), to occasionally other seals. They hunt in the murky depths of the ocean, in waters dark and cold. They also eat large amounts of food, making them seem like Villainous Gluttons. The Trope Codifier for the villainous variety is the poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" from Through the Looking Glass, featuring a sneaky, gluttonous walrus luring innocent oysters to their doom. He has been the inspiration for many a Wily Walrus. Because of this and their blubbery appearances, evil walruses are typically associated with Gluttony, Greed, and/or Sloth. And you don't want to make them angry, lest you invoke their Wrath.

Sometimes, fictional walruses are presented as even more predatory than they are in real life. They may eat animals like penguins, or even humans, even though real walruses do not eat any of these.

Wily Walruses can be presented in a variety of ways. Some creators find that the bushy, mustache-like snouts of real walruses make for a good Dastardly Whiplash. Other works portray them as brutal beasts, like a mammalian version of the typical Sea Monster.

Another factor that may have led to their villainous portrayals—especially the more brutish ones—is the remarkable sounds they make. Would you believe that walruses grunt and growl? In fact, walruses were even used for some of the dinosaur sounds in Jurassic Park!

In video games, walruses are commonly seen as enemies—or even bosses—in the Slippy-Slidey Ice World. While this is logical, as walruses are mainly found in the Northern seas, they are sometimes paired with animals such as penguins, which is not logical.

Good or neutral walruses still tend to feature at least one of the negative stereotypes associated with the animal's physical appearance, whether it be a grumpy and curmudgeonly personality, a tendency towards gluttony, or extreme laziness.

May or may not overlap with Sluggish Seal. Compare Monstrous Seal, who might be working for this guy, and Angry, Angry Hippos. Contrast Warm-Hearted Walrus. Unrelated to The Walrus Was Paul. Not to be confused with Wicked Weasel. Has nothing to do with a team-up between Doctors Wily and Eggman. (Although this has happened before.)

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Heroic example: Digimon Adventure, Digimon Adventure 02, and Digimon Adventure tri. have Ikkakumon, Zudomon, and Vikemon, the Champion, Ultimate, and Mega level forms of Joe's digipartner Gommamon. All three exhibit Gommamon's wit and cunning in battle, which gives them a Brains and Brawn advantage over most foes.
• Frost Walrus was already a bad dude in Mega Man X4, but he ramps his nastiness up to eleven in the manga adaptation, where he's a violent lunatic who releases Reploid prisoners that he massacres by hunting them for sport, and keeps the broken bodies of his victims as trophies of his conquests. He's hardly the only Repliforce member to be beaten over the head with the Adaptational Villainy stick, though.
• Subverted by Odd Taxi's protagonist Odokawa. He's cold, reserved and blunt, but he is a good person at his core. He's also not an actual walrus.

Comic Books

• Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars!: Subverted with Harman, a walrus who is part of the benevolent United Animal Security Council. While he is evil, being The Mole who was sent by the villains to infiltrate the Council, it is later revealed that he is not actually a walrus, but a newt piloting a robot walrus body.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
  • Boomer Walrus is the Mirror Universe Evil Twin of the friendly Rotor.
  • Tundra the Walrus is Rotor's father, who pulled a Face–Heel Turn and joined forces with the evil Dr. Eggman. To hammer in how bad he is, his tusks have been replaced with metal ones.
• Spider-Man: The Walrus is a Dumb Muscle supervillain who is mocked In-Universe not only for his general incompetence, but also for his rather bizarre choice of an animal theme. To be fair, he is at least somewhat intimidating, due to his sheer brute strength and his goals of causing random destruction For the Evulz.

Fan Works

• In this fanmade animatic for Voltaire's "The Beast of Pirate's Bay", Blackbeard, one of the "ne'er-do-wells" in Pirate's Bay, is depicted as an anthropomorphic walrus.
• The Big Bad of this Paper Mario game idea is Captain Coldfang, a sinister walrus pirate who kidnaps Princess Peach, and aims to cover the land in darkness for his own amusement. However, it's later revealed that Coldfang is truly a good man at heart, and he's merely being possessed by the game's true villain: Warlon, the Dark King.
• The thanoi hunters who chase Kay’la and Pyrestein down the Sharpeak Mountains in Vow of Nudity. Granted, Pyrestein had unwittingly led a crew of poachers right to their tribe, but Kay’la wasn’t even present for that and they still tried to kill her.
• Sognic: Mall-tiverse of Madness: Roter.exe, the Big Bad, is an Evil Counterpart to the friendly Roter Warlus [sic]. He "corrupts" various characters around the mall, turning them into his slaves, and he uses their bodies and powers to try and make them kill Sognic and friends.

Films — Animation

• Alice in Wonderland: The Walrus from the poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" was bad enough in the original novel (See the "Literature" folder below), but in this adaptation, he goes through quite a bit of Adaptational Villainy, and gains a Dastardly Whiplash-esque appearance to match. He takes all the oysters for himself instead of sharing with the Carpenter, like he did in the poem. Also, this movie portrays the oysters as youngsters, making the Walrus seem even more monstruous!
• In Arctic Dogs, the main villain is Otto von Walrus, a walrus (voiced by John Cleese) who walks around on robotic spider legs and plans to melt the Arctic so he can Take Over the World.
• In The Jungle Bunch: The Movie, walruses are the main villains, portrayed as a brutish tribe ransoming a peaceful penguin village for years until the protagonists manage to beat them.
• In one scene of The Simpsons Movie, Homer is seen playing an arcade game called Grand Theft Walrus, an obvious parody of Grand Theft Auto. In the game, an anthropomorphic walrus shoots a happy, dancing penguin to death.

Films — Live-Action

• Maguma, a Kaiju-sized walrus from the Toho film Gorath, who suddenly shows up to menace the humans when they're setting up a base in Antarctica to deal with the collision of the title asteroid. The scene was cut out of the American edit though.
• Bletch the Walrus from Meet the Feebles is a slippery drug dealer and an abusive boyfriend.
• In Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, Sinbad's crew is attacked by a gigantic walrus in the land of Hyperborea. The creature is animated by stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen.
• Invoked in Tusk (2014), where a madman is trying to create "the perfect human walrus" through a painful process that involves amputating his victim's legs and stitching their fingers together before stitching the body into a walrus suit made from human skin. Wallace, who ends up the victim of this horrible procedure, was a Jerkass before. After he ends up in the walrus suit, he manages to kill the madman by stabbing him with his tusks.

Literature

• Downplayed in the story "The White Seal" from The Jungle Book, which features an elderly, grumpy walrus called Sea Vitch who reluctantly gives some useful advice to the title protagonist.
• The Marvellous Land of Snergs: As making their way through an underground cavern, the protagonist trio happen upon a beast which is described as a bipedal, giant marsupial walrus. The critter is as gluttonous as cowardly, though, and it flees in fear when it spots the kids, even though they are half its size.
• Strangely handled in A Song of Ice and Fire. House Manderly has a resemblance to walruses as their motif, except it's not as spelled out as for some other houses. Their male house members tend to resemble walruses, the names they give their children tend to start with W, and the head of their house displays pretty much all the traits accounted for in the Trope description, except he takes a while to truly grow into / display his (oddly enough, heroic) Fat Bastard side. One gets the impression that the trope being full at work flies over the head of other characters in-universe, specifically because most people who interact with Manderley's don't seem to be familiar enough with walruses to be able to spell it out for themselves. This goes so far that their house sigil doesn't display a Walrus, as it most certainly would as they resemble them more than most other houses resemble their animal motif, but a "merman" instead - and pinnipeds (seals, walruses and such) were the real-life inspiration for tales of merfolk in the first place.
• Trope Codifier: The Walrus from Through the Looking Glass's poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" manipulates a group of oysters into following him so he can eat them. In Disney's adaptation, he's even worse.

Live-Action TV

• Subverted in Adventures in Wonderland, where walruses are apparently viewed as wicked, malicious creatures — most likely because of the walrus from "The Walrus and the Carpenter" — and thus everyone is appalled when Alice befriends a nice, polite walrus. Whether that walrus was an outlier in Wonderland is unrevealed.
• The Ultra Series - yes, they have walrus kaiju, too.
  • Ultra Q has it's most iconic monster being Peguila, a marine-based monster which is somewhere combined between a walrus and a bat. It has walrus fangs and bat-like wings, and is perfectly capable of flying from the Arctic to Tokyo.
  • The Ultraman Taro monster Depparas is a closer depiction of a walrus, but with the ability to regenerate it's body parts after being killed and to fire it's tusks like missiles.

Professional Wrestling

• While not technically an actual walrus, fans tend to nickname Paul Heyman as "the Walrus" due to his girth. In terms of being evil, the guy routinely manages heel wrestlers.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons: The thanoi, introduced in Dragonlance, are walrus-like Beast Men who exist as arctic Barbarian Tribes. Thanoi are known to be violently territorial, and their older lore paints them as enjoying the recreational killing of animals like seals, "the more helpless, the better." Unsurprisingly, they're assigned the Lawful Evil or Neutral Evil alignments.

Video Games

• The Walrus in Alice: Madness Returns is a wretched beast with an insatiable appetite which doesn't hesitate one bit to eat the oyster performers of his own theater show, the fish audience of said show and probably the rest of the Barrelbottom citizens. Seriously, gaze at the evidence of his past doings hidden beneath the Dreary Lane Theater. It could give you nightmares for weeks.
• Club Penguin: Tusk is a massive walrus with ice powers who created an army of snowmen to destroy Sensei and the other penguins. He used to be childhood friends with Sensei; but after being trapped within an avalanche as a result of him using most of his power during a sparring match, Tusk became the power-hungry pinniped he is today.
• Crash Twinsanity: One level has Crash running away from a hungry walrus cook.
• Disney's Magical Quest: In The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse, the boss of Snow Valley is an anthropomorphic, ice-skating walrus who tries to run over Mickey.
• Donkey Kong:
  • Downplayed in Diddy Kong Racing with Bluey the Walrus. Despite being one of the bosses that the heroes must race, and despite his Malevolent Mugshot appearing on his racetrack, he doesn't really do or say anything particularly villainous and comes across as quite Affably Evil.
  • Lord Frederik, the Big Bad from Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, is a walrus who leads an evil band of Vikings known as Snowmads, who take over Donkey Kong's island by freezing it. He is Obviously Evil from head to toe, thanks to features such as his incredibly deep grunts and roars, his fur cape, and his Glowing Eyes of Doom. He's also one of 3 bosses in the game to get a heavy metal boss theme. Some of his Mooks, the Waldoughs, are walruses too.
• Don't Starve has the father-son duo MacTusk and WeeTusk, who appear during winter time and will harass the player. They do drop some nice loot is you defeat them.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: one of the animals that can be encountered in the game are horkers, a fantasy equivalent to the walrus and other giant pinnipeds. They're peaceful enough unless you provoke them, but are considered quite dangerous in-universe, with a whole in-game book dedicated to it called Horker Attacks and contains advice for fighting them. In the DLC pack Dragonborn, a minor location on Solstheim is an island full of horkers with evidence all over the place that a group of bandits set up camp there not too long ago and they were all killed by the horkers, with a particularly large one being surrounded by piles of bones and having a bunch of human skulls in its inventory—in other words, it ate them.
• Bernardo, the Big Bad of High Seas Havoc is an evil pirate captain walrus who plans to steal the mysterious gemstone Emeralda and kidnaps the protagonist's girlfriend. He initially appears as the first boss and doesn't have much in the way of attacks, aside from swinging his cutlass. For most of the game after that, he lets his crew of Funny Animal pirates fight you instead. However, he reappears as the Final Boss, having Took a Level in Badass. He uses Emeralda to give him magical powers and puts up one hell of a fight. It's worth noting that he seems like Bowser, not only because he kidnapped the hero's girlfriend, but because he's big, colorful, and he's got some Big Ol' Eyebrows!
• In the Kirby series, one recurring miniboss is an anthropomorphic walrus named Mr. Frosty. He is An Ice Person who attacks Kirby with moves such as throwing ice blocks. In all of his battles, he is constantly jumping and dancing around to taunt Kirby.
• The second area boss in Lady Sia is a large walrus armed with snowball canons. Beating him does not involve defeating him, as what needs to be done is to push him back to the other side of the screen through Smashing Survival so Sia can get past.
• In The Little Mermaid, one of the bosses is a walrus. It sits atop an iceberg and drops objects into the water in an attempt to hit Ariel.
• One of the bosses of Mega Man X4 is Frost Walrus, a gigantic walrus with ice powers who looks down on the small and weak and acts like a roughneck.
• Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire has Walrein, the final evolution of Spheal. They aren't particularly mean or dangerous, but can put up a hell of a fight thanks to their impressive bulk and immense strength. A particularly tough Walrein is the ace Pokemon of Hoenn Elite Four member Glacia, and it can potentially One-Hit Kill your Pokemon with the incredibly dangerous Sheer Cold move.
• The fourth Skylanders game features the mechanic of trapping and then playing as villains, and two villains included in this are the two walruses Brawlrus and Brawl and Chain.
• Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus: Most of the Mooks of the first "world" are walruses. Why they're working for a frog and not for other mammals is anyone's guess.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: One of Dr. Eggman's original designs was a walrus.
• Spelling Jungle: Featured in the sequel Spelling Blizzard. Expys of the alligators of Spelling Jungle, the walruses swim up and down the river, hugging the wall and emerging from the water when Wali is close. Unlike the alligators, they can be bribed; unfortunately, this doesn't help if they've got Wali backed into a corner, because he can't push them even when they're frozen.

Web Comics

• In Ozy and Millie, the "ambassador" that Bush sent to Greater Llewellynland was a walrus who refused to believe in dragons (the "ruler's" species) and mostly just laid about eating all the food.

Web Original

• One of Bogleech's dreams featured in Nightmare Beings was about a malevolent humanoid walrus with painted on eyes that moved in a fast motion like sped-up video footage.
• Speaking of Bogleech, Mortasheen has the Gajoob, a vampiric walrus. Despite their appearance, these creatures are as deadly as any other vampire in the setting (if not moreso), endowed with cunning and cruelty belying their dopey appearance and wielding an array of Psychic Powers, including their signature cryokinesis.
• Trott from Hat Films has an anthropomorphic walrus as his Minecraft avatar, and he's generally the wiliest of the boys in their Let's Plays.
• LOLCats: Zig-zagged with Lolrus, simply because his personality and appearance vary Depending on the Writer. In the original picture, he was portrayed as a lovable elephant seal obsessed with his favorite bucket (or as he calls it, "bukkit"). Whether or not a Lolrus picture is of an actual walrus, the character is still usually portrayed as a benevolent creature looking for bukkits. Others play this trope straight by presenting Lolrus as violent and demanding.
• YouTuber Robbaz, who tends to play as a Heroic Comedic Sociopath, has a thing for walruses, modding The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim so he can adventure with a horker he calls Walrus, who eats "shildren."
• SCP Foundation: SCP-2424 is a missile-shooting walrus who is a boss from a video game transported into the real world.

Western Animation

• Animaniacs: In the episode "Bumbie's Mom", a walrus lady complains when Skippy starts crying in the theater, and she's very rude about it. However, Slappy quickly shuts her up.
• Walter from Cyberchase is a crafty prankster walrus who guards the Ice Palace. He stalls the marching penguins and refuses to let them enter unless they solve a problem.
• DuckTales (1987): In part 4 of "Treasure of the Golden Suns", Scrooge and co travel to Antarctica to find the missing half of their treasure map and befriend a penguin girl after saving her from a hungry walrus (despite walruses living in the Arctic), and later have to deal with a prehistoric woolly walrus that has been frozen in ice for millennia, after accidentally freeing it.
• Darkwing Duck: The walrus Tuskernini is a failed film director turned supervillain. He is also an Expy of the Batman villain The Penguin. He was meant to be portrayed as a glutton and the source of fat jokes, but evidently, this didn't work for the writers as only his debut episode portrays him like this. One comic based on the show introduced another villainous walrus named Paul Obtús, a chef.
• The Futurama episode "The Late Philip J. Fry" has Fry, Bender, and the Professor briefly end up in a future ice age via Time Travel, and they get menaced by hunters riding on walruses.
  • One episode portrayed an alternate version of the characters where Fry, Kif, and the others are elephant seals, (except Scruffy, who really is a walrus) but the idea is the same otherwise. Bender is given as The Rival of the other characters, is a great example of the negative walrus stereotypes (since the normal version of the character is a Jerkass in ways that translate well to the walrus stereotypes). This episode's use of the trope is unusually realistic in that it bases itself on the questionable sexual habits of Real Life walruses, with Bender controlling a harem and bullying all other males into staying away from the females and thus having no females of their own.
• Played with in Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts. Emilia's One-Winged Angel is technically a walrus, but so throughly mutated it barely resembles one (and its source is just a wild animal). Either way very fitting for her malevolence.
• Minnie the Moocher features a ghost walrus who isn't exactly evil, but very frightening due to being one of the many surreal, dark images in the cartoon. It doesn't help that the song he sings (which the cartoon shares its title with) is rather dark, being about a beggar woman who turned to drugs and was later found dead.
• Double subverted with Rhonda, the walrus from The Penguins of Madagascar. She initially appears to be a Fat Slob and the source of much Toilet Humor. Her roommate, Marlene, is disgusted by her behavior. However, because Rhonda seems oblivious to how crude she's acting, Marlene and the other animals don't tell her, not wanting to hurt her feelings. Then, at the end of the episode, it is revealed that she was Obfuscating Stupidity all along, and she's actually a competent spy for Dr. Blowhole.
• Pingu: A Nightmare Sequence has Pingu being hunted by a giant walrus/leopard seal/sea lion hybrid. Aside from his creepy appearance, said character first traps Pingu inside an igloo, and then it squashes and stretches the poor penguin like a doll. Finally, it takes the mattress of Pingu's animated bed and eats it as if it were a chocolate bar. This scene was considered so scary that the entire episode got banned from US television since its first airing.
  • It's even worse in the children's book adaptation. Not only is the walrus illustrated to actually look villainous, he outright states his intention to eat Pingu, right up to the classic "You'll never escape me!" line as Pingu runs away. The meant to be humorous stretching-Pingu-like-a-rubber-band sequence is adapted out, but whether or not that's for the better is anyone's interpretation.
• The Simpsons: In one Couch Gag, Marge, Lisa, Bart, and Maggie are penguins climbing onto an iceberg. Homer is a walrus who flops onto the iceberg, causing it to fling the penguins into his mouth.
  • In one of the "Treehouse of Horror" episodes, Dr. Hibbert owns an island where he turns people into animals. Homer is turned into a walrus.
  Homer: It's great! I haven't been this skinny since high school!
• Sonic Boom:
  • Willie the Walrus is a criminal who works for The Lightning Bolt Society.
  • Zig-zagged with Lady Walrus. While she is one of the innocent townspeople whom Team Sonic must save from Dr. Eggman, there are times when the townspeople turn against Team Sonic, and she is quick to join them. Her most villainous role is in "No Robots Allowed" when she is part of the snooty homeowner's association that tries to evict Eggman for owning robots.
• Wally Walrus is Woody Woodpecker's stuffy archnemesis who constantly tries to put an end to Woody's fun.
• Dr. Rusell the (very boring) science teacher in the short-lived Fox Kids show Zazoo U is walrus.

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