Psychopathic Manchild / Literature

Psychopathic Manchildren in literature.

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• The Queen of Hearts, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — though she presumably rules over Wonderland, she's essentially an overgrown spoiled brat who, upon being crossed or annoyed by someone, starts screaming her famous "Off with his/her/their head(s)!" The narrator points out that this is quite literally the Queen's only way of dealing with any problem, regardless of its size. Many adaptations of the book, including Disney's animated version, keep this characterization, making the Queen of Hearts into a temper-tantrum prone villain who switches from sweetness to screaming without any warning.
• American Psycho: A very subtle case, but Patrick Bateman's demeanor behind his Mask of Sanity is rife with this, with things like murdering people over having better stuff than he has and desperately trying to garner attention for himself make him come off as a petulant brat having frequent tantrums because no one's paying attention to him.
  • Some of his other behaviors often reflect this. The narration where he goes into obsessive detail about his designer clothes, expensive furniture, and top-of-the-line technology could be seen like a teenager bragging about all the cool stuff he has. In the book and film, he's seen drawing a picture of a dead woman with crayons.
• And Then There Were None: Anthony Marston ran over two children with his car and his only concern over the whole matter is that his license was suspended for six months. This is the reason why he's killed first, because U.N. Owen can't terrorize him or make him feel guilty for his crime.
• The Howlers, an ancient race of genocidal warriors in Animorphs. Jake was essentially expecting them to have the mind of a super-predator, but upon morphing into one, he discovers to his shock that they are actually possessed of a childlike simplicity and engage in genocide because they think that it's just a fun game and don't understand that they're hurting people. Eventually, the Animorphs were able to exploit this by revealing to the howlers that their victims are more than just mindless toys which exist for their amusement, thus "ruining" them.
• In A Brother's Price, Keifer Porter. Emotionally abused all his wives, cruelly tortured and raped one of the younger ones, and put on a Brainless Beauty act to avoid being punished for it by the elder sisters. Everyone agrees that he was simple-minded, and childish, though not without some cunning. Turns out there was someone more intelligent than him behind his poisoning, his father-in-law.
• A Certain Magical Index: Accelerator, the world's strongest esper, is initially introduced as a terrifying figure who tortures cloned soldiers to death in an attempt to increase his powers. It turns out that he's an emotionally stunted Tyke-Bomb who doesn't know how to resolve problems except through fear, and thinks that gaining absolute power will allow him to live a normal life because everyone will be too scared to manipulate him. The sadistic way he kills the clones is actually driven by guilt — he suspected that they were more human than the people running the experiment claimed, and wanted one of them to beg for mercy so that he could use that as an excuse to stop killing them. Accelerator later has a Freak Out when he learns that the designers of the programme actually intended him to get it shut down,^note The whole thing was actually a smokescreen for creating a powerful Hive Mind of cloned psychics and spreading them across the world but his weird logic resulted in it running much longer than intended.
• In Codex Alera, this seems to be the eventual demeanor of the Vord queen as she slowly becomes more and more human in her emotions.

• According to The Disaster Artist, Tommy Wiseau is this as he acts very childish throughout the book, even when he's trying to manipulate someone.
• Terry Pratchett's Discworld: Hogfather:
  • Mr. Teatime is one of the creepier examples. He gleefully claims to be in touch with his inner child, while Susan describes him as an adult version of the kid who doesn't know the difference between throwing a stone at a cat and setting it on fire.
  • From the other extreme of the spectrum, the same book features Banjo, an even more child-like thug, who is clearly mentally handicapped, and comes across as much more innocent. And he and Teatime are friends. Or at least, he does what Teatime tells him to while Teatime treats him with dismissive contempt.
    • It's implied that Teatime thinks this kind of devout servitude, in exchange for however long he decides to let you keep living, is what friendship is. It's kind of sad. So both Teatime and Banjo are Psychopathic Manchildren. It's just that Teatime is more Psychopath while Banjo is more Manchild.
• In Dracula, Mina Murray draws upon the new science of Criminology to profile Count Dracula and describes him of being of the "typical" criminal mind — childish, in thought and behaviour. Van Helsing explicitly refers to the Count having a “child-brain” when discussing what Dracula is likely to do next with the rest of the heroes.
• The Famous Five: Applies to several of the villains, especially when they have been outwitted by the children:
  • Mr Barling the smuggler in Five go to Smuggler's Top.
    Mr Barling: If the marshes go, my business will go too! My ships will no longer be able to creep in, bringing valuable cargoes! Not only will all my money go, but also the excitement, which is worth more to me than life itself!
  • Tiger Dan in Five go off in a Caravan.
  • Rooky in Five get into Trouble.
  • Maggie and Dirty Dick in Five on a Hike Together. When the children have found the loot before they do, they pursue the children furiously.
    Julian: Are they sorry we've gone, and want us back again?
• From Harry Potter: Dolores Umbridge shows varying shades of this in Order of the Phoenix. Bellatrix Lestrange and arguably Voldemort himself seem to have had some trouble growing up as well, given how much his worldview and his modus operandi has been formed by a need to invalidate his humble beginnings.
• Mason Verger in Hannibal is the spoiled son and heir to a billionaire meat packer who in his youth spent his wealth on playthings - torture devices, exotic pets, and people to victimize to fulfill his deviant sexual fantasies. Mason's father indulged and even encouraged Mason's worst sadistic and selfish traits, to the point where Mason thought he could get away with anything, including raping his younger sister and other children. Even after being left crippled and mutilated by Hannibal Lecter, he continues to enjoy tormenting people in petty ways, and the revenge he devises for Hannibal - being fed to wild pigs - is something that a cruel child would come up with.

• John Dies at the End has an interesting example in that the Psychopathic Manchild is Korrok, a gigantic amorphous Eldritch Abomination with the mental maturity of a 13-year-old who just discovered his first batch of cuss words. People under his control tend to do things like blurt out offensive comments and do strange and depraved acts like stripping naked in the middle of the street and packing snow onto their crotch or pissing on the hood of the protagonist's car, and his idea of tormenting the protagonist is to turn on his car radio and replace all the song lyrics with racist diatribes. When Dave and John finally meet him, Dave notices that his voice sounds like a toddler's.
• Stephen King:
  • It: Henry Bowers is this in spades, constantly fixating on how the Losers Club repeatedly humiliated him and beat him as teenagers when it was him who kept trying to hurt and torture them at every changce and even, with Pennywise's help, trying to murder them as adults. To be fair, Henry was never entirely stable to begin with, and by the time the adult portion of the novel begins, has been locked up in an insane asylum since he was 12.
  • King loves this trope. Quite a few of his villains tend toward this, from Annie Wilkes in Misery, to Harold Lauder in The Stand, to Ed Hamner in "I Know What You Need". (That's not even counting the ones who are actual children, literally or apparently.) In essays and his nonfiction work, King's even likened himself to one of these (not in real life, of course, but only when he's writing his fiction).
• While Harmony and Equity from The Last Adventure of Constance Verity were artificially matured to an adult age, they are only seven years old (the ideal time when the Caretaker spell activates) and they killed the scientists that created them because they "served their purpose" after making them, though limited TV time and broccoli were definitely factors in that decision.
• In The Magicians, the Beast AKA Martin Chatwin quickly reveals himself as one of these once his status as a Mood-Swinger comes into play: after breaking into Professor March's classroom and freezing everyone in place, he does little more than pare his nails, fart around with highly-advanced magic, casually devour one of the students alive, and then leave while singing a lullaby. His next appearance features him acting like an excitable little boy, exploding with foul-mouthed rage, and inflicting crippling wounds on the main characters. As it turns out, Martin ran away from home when he was thirteen to escape sexual abuse, and the Deal with the Devil that allowed him to stay in Fillory left him with a serious case of arrested development.
• On occasion Karsa Orlong comes across as a worryingly competent (and very big) child throwing a tantrum in the Malazan Book of the Fallen. However, being only around 70-years-old amongst the long-lived Teblor he's barely more than a teenager, justifying occasional childish behaviour somewhat. His size and strength do make this a big problem for many people who make him mad unknowingly.
• G. K. Chesterton's Manalive features Innocent Smith, an apparently mad Blithe Spirit who gleefully takes charge of a small community and changes everyone's lives for the better... before pointing a gun at someone and being arrested as a serial killer. It's gradually revealed that he has never, in fact, killed anyone.
• The Meq: The (presumed) Big Bad is the Fleur-Du-Mal, who, like the rest of the eponymous race of immortals, is Really 700 Years Old, but he's also a Psycho for Hire with a bone to pick with the rest of his race. He likes to cut throats, kidnap little girls and turn them into prostitutes, dabble in the occult, manipulate normal people, or Giza as they're called, with his appearance as a 12-year-old boy, and sadistically torment his own kind. Yeah, he's a Jerkass.

• Millennium Series: Ronald Niedermann. Freakishly strong, near-invincible due to congenital analgesia, and extremely intelligent, he is also irrationally devoted to his unloving father, has probably never physically achieved puberty, and is plagued by bizarre and terrifying hallucinations — knowledge of which (or not) can come in fairly handy.
• Mirror, Mirror (2003): The Borgia siblings are both C and E. Though they're less Axe-Crazy than unable to understand basic concepts like "breaking promises, ordering assassinations and sleeping with family are bad, bad things".
• Nation: First Mate Cox is at one point given a description suggesting this, when his gleeful expression at shooting down a parrot was compared to a little boy proud of wetting himself. On the other hand, at no other point is he shown as anything but fully, rationally aware of what he is.
  "First Mate Cox had a choice, every day, and had chosen to be First Mate Cox."
• Sidney Carroll's short story "None Before Me" features a fascinating, horrifying art connoisseur named Gresham who hoards the most priceless, exquisite works of art in the world, and toys with them like a child. He buys an enormous dollhouse described as "the best in the world" and places it in the center of his collection, obsessing over it every waking moment of the day. As the house absorbs his attention, he begins rearranging the furniture inside and talking to the dolls as if they are real people, and eventually he decides that he is the sole God over the people "living" inside the house. One day, he discovers a figurine of a religious idol inside the house; the "blasphemy" enrages him, and he smashes the priceless house with the back of his hand, destroying it — then promptly dies himself.
• October Daye: Blind Michael, the villain of the third book, is highly childish. When Toby's friends show up to rescue her, he throws a tantrum about how it "isn't fair" that he can't do whatever he wants unopposed (i.e. He wants to continue abducting children to warp their bodies and minds and force them into The Wild Hunt, as he's done for centuries. And he also wants to force Toby to become his bride).
• Lennie in Of Mice and Men could be considered this, aside from the fact that he is not psychopathic, but rather mentally challenged, and everything he does, from making a girl in Weed think he wanted to rape her, to killing Curley's wife, is the result of him not knowing any better or understanding his actions. It's worth noting, though, that Lennie literally has a child's morality, and his understanding of right and wrong is almost entirely based around what George will punish or reward him for. By the time he starts developing a conscience of his own, it's too late.
• The Origin of Laughing Jack: When Laughing Jack first witnesses Isaac's violence, he thinks of it as an entertaining game. He's very playful when he tortures Isaac to death, considering it alike to a show; he makes a balloon animal out of his intestine, he says "If you can’t say something nice, then don’t say anything at all!" before lobbing his tongue off, and he slices off Isaac's lips just to say that he "hasn't been flossing regularly". Justified since Jack is designed to be Isaac's playmate for life and adapts to Isaac's likes, so as Isaac gets more sadistic, so does Laughing Jack.
• In Otherland, the Other is the quasi-sentient operating system of the eponymous network. One of its many bizarre attributes is that despite being at least 20 years old, it seems to have the personality of an autistic child, and at several points in its "development", the Grail Brotherhood attempted to have it communicate with real children, in order to allow it to develop the capability to interact with people. The Driving Question of why an apparently home-grown AI behaves this way is only resolved when it's realized that the Other is not actually an AI; it's a real human child, stolen at birth and implanted as the "brain" of the network.
• The Phantom of the Opera: The Persian and Erik himself lampshade Erik's attitude as childish, and despite his multiple talents both murderous and musical, he is not interested in sex but to have a beautiful wife and a life like any other guy. It's only when he actually triumphs that he realizes how impractical those dreams are. Also, the Persian treats him as a spoiled child when he interrogates Erik about Raoul and Christine's destinies. Notably most adaptations (especially the musical) tend to downplay this childishness with the Phantom, purely for the sake of making him a more maturely mysterious and sensual antagonist.
  The Persian: He satisfied my curiosity, for Erik, who is a real monster I have seen him at work in Persia, alas is also, in certain respects, a regular child, vain and self-conceited, and there is nothing he loves so much, after astonishing people, as to prove all the really miraculous ingenuity of his mind.
• Doopy and Goshy the clown brothers in The Pilo Family Circus are insane like all the other members of the clown division, but manifest their particular lunacy in remarkably childlike ways which seem quite harmless at first: Doopy has the mental age of about 6-years-old and has a habit of whining like an impatient child, while Goshy communicates only in whistles and beeps and is in love with a potted plant. However, Goshy's apparent incompetence is offset by his appetite for wanton destruction and uncanny bursts of sadistic intelligence, and Doopy will fly into a homicidal rage if his brother is even mildly threatened.
  • JJ, the protagonist's vile alter-ego, will gleefully commit murder, vandalism, assault, and any number of crimes for his own childish amusement. However, if anyone responds violently or threateningly, he'll react by bursting into tears and running off.
• In the Redwall book Martin the Warrior, the heroes come across a tribe of Chaotic Neutral wild squirrels who live for pleasure and think it would be a really fun game to chase said heroes up a cliff and throw them off! They do end up working for the good guys later on, as they're convinced this would be an even better game.
  • Also, the horribly spoilt Prince Bladd from Triss (though his age is unclear, so he may in fact be fairly young). He likes playink mitt fire.
• The Colorman in Christopher Moore's Sacré Bleu who always shrugs off his murders with "Sorry. Accident. Couldn't be helped." and his molesting the female help with "Penis".
• In Seasonal Fears, Aven, a potential Summer monarch, is one of these. She may be physically and intellectually seventeen, but emotionally, she's a toddler who never got the talk about how it's not nice to hit people who won't share their toys with you. Except with Aven it's more a case of "vivisecting people who didn't do an impossible task they had no way of knowing you wanted them to do". Not that it's her fault, as she was raised in suspended animation, and alchemically educated in everything but how to interact with other people.
  Her father, right before she tortures him to death: What are you going to do with me?
  Aven: Nothing bad, Daddy.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, Daylen retains his incredible intelligence and strategic mind, but regressing to a childlike state of immaturity as a result of being The Caligula for so long before his Heel Realization. (Note that this is Daylen's own self-assessment.) As a result, he's prone to tantrums, hypocrisy, sulks, and tears, while also being a Berserker with a Hair-Trigger Temper.
• Reach, the King of the Cranes, from the Skyscraper Throne series is a particularly extreme example. On the surface a nigh-unkillable, several-hundred-year-old god, underneath he's a Fetus Terrible, struggling to be born.

• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Lysa Arryn throws tantrums like a spoiled child when things don't go her way and ignores her responsibilities as Lady of the Eyrie in hopes that they would go away. And when her new husband Littlefinger forcefully kisses her niece Sansa, she tried to murder the latter because she believed they tried to steal what belongs to her.
  • Cersei Lannister covers her inner woman-child with a huge layer of The Vamp (and all the Manipulative Bitchiness that requires), in addition with twisted aspects of Mama Bear in adulthood. But, her primary motivation for much of what she does is what it's been since she was very young... a humongous tantrum that she can't get the cool toys like the boys do (or, more specifically, like Jaime does). And, Daddy won't look at me like he does him! (So, I'll be better than Daddy!) It's not very pleasant when it combines with a streak vicious enough to advocate torture, murder and, occasionally, outright acting like her brother's (and cousin's) Lady Macbeth when she isn't being her children's My Beloved Smother, so any sympathy you might have for her points about the inherant unfairness in the Stay in the Kitchen attitude of most of Westeros gallops out the window thanks to her general toxicity. When she gets arrested by the Faith for her crimes she demonstrates how childish she really is when she responds by literally throwing a tantrum, screaming threats and abuse at her captors and resolving to "teach them what it means to put a lion in a cage" by tearing up the thin shift that was the only clothing they left for her after stripping her naked and smashing the ewer of water and the chamber pot in her cell- which means that when she's not immediately rescued by her escort and finds herself having to spend the night in the cell she's left naked, cold, thirsty and forced to relieve herself on the floor. Yeah, that really taught them, Cersei.
  • It's still up in the air about the inner workings of Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish. Whilst the execution of his plans are certainly mature, he is solely motivated by his childhood affection for Catelyn Stark. His plan so far can easily be viewed as a massive temper tantrum simply because he couldn't have her for himself, leaving almost the entirety of Westeros devastated by war and with winter just around the corner too...
  • Ramsay Bolton is still the little boy who pulls the wings off flies, roasts living grasshoppers, drowns kittens and beats nerds for lunch money whenever he feels like it inside. Just all grown up enough to add raping and flaying people to the list of things he enjoys doing.
  • Gregor Clegane is a downplayed one of these as he's not the giggling, vocalising kind and comes across as quite thick. However, he's not good at sharing his toys (he's killed most of his family and antagonised his brother into staying well away from home) and has an epic set of triggers you don't want to trip. He also likes to surround himself with similarly-minded, violently sadistic bullies.
• Sword Art Online
  • Akihiko Kayaba's ultimate goal is essentially to bring the world of his imagination to life and have it be as real as possible. He also possesses a certain sense of fair play. This is Lampshaded in the 4-koma, where the raid team accuses him of having 8th grader syndrome.
  • While Nobuyuki Sugou can put up a respectable front, Beneath the Mask Sugou is a physically weak, morally spineless coward who just wants to slobber all over Asuna, both in-game and over her comatose body in real-life, and throws temper tantrums when he doesn't get his way. Best shown when Kayaba's Virtual Ghost overrides his control of the game and gives Kirito admin privileges; Sugou whines and throws a temper tantrum, griping about how even in death, Kayaba's getting in his way and taking everything that Sugou considers rightfully his. Immediately afterwards, when Kirito gives him a small cut on the cheek with the Pain Absorber set to 0, Sugou has a minor Freak Out and whines over the pain like a child with a scraped knee. Made even more blatant in the original Japanese; Sugou uses the gentle-masculine "Boku" (normally used by little-boys) to refer to himself (instead of the coarse-masculine "Ore" or gender-neutral "watashi" expected of a grown-man), further accentuating that beneath his Mask of Sanity is a sinister Spoiled Brat.
  • While Vassago Casals/PoH can maintain his Mask of Sanity like Sugou, underneath it is little more than a vicious schoolyard bully, just flanderized into murderous sociopathy. His reaction when he logs into the Underworld is comparable to an overexcited kid on a sugar rush.
  • Chudelkin's clearly an adult, but acts extremely immature; he throwing tantrums over the most trivial of things, dresses like a clown, and he giggles at the silliest of stuff. His private quarters is brightly colored room full of children's toys, like a child's bedroom. "Fearless Resistance" even shows him angrily bouncing up and down in response to Quinella requesting a late-night meeting with Bercouli so he can give his mission reports. However he is also Ax-Crazy and enjoys torture or ordering the execution of others.
  • While Gabriel Miller never displays any behavior that would suggest this, the fact that his power to see souls and consume them in the Underworld stems from the delusional belief that he's actually capable of doing just that and that he's had this belief since childhood and has never grown out of it certainly implies that he is one.
• In one of the creepiest moments in the Agatha Christie canon, when the murderer in "Three Blind Mice" finally reveals themselves to their intended last victim, their voice suddenly devolves to that of a child.
  "I said that I'd kill you all when I grew up and I meant it! I've thought of it ever since! I'm grown up now; grownups can do what they like!"
• The Tome of Bill has two examples.
  • First is Jeff. He acts incredibly childish and has an exaggerated opinion of himself. He throws a fit whenever he doesn't get his way and is generally an all-around douchebag.
  • Second is Gansetseng. She's actually over 300-years-old, but she was turned when she was just twelve and hasn't physically aged since, and has barely aged emotionally thanks to her "father" (actually her some odd great-grandfather) treating her like a child for all her life.
• The Bane from The Underland Chronicles. Anyone who gives him food and tells him things he wants to hear is his "friend", he takes a childish delight in the idea of being king of all the rats, and he's still terrified of his father, even though he's long dead and probably wouldn't be much of a match for him now. It doesn't help that, towards the end, he's not ... all there anymore.
• Warbreaker
  • Nightblood is a lot like this, acting much like an optimistic child eager to please its owner — by killing things.
    Nightblood: I did very well today. I killed them all. Aren't you proud of me?
  • Tonk Fah from the same book. Unlike Nightblood, which is doing its best to destroy evil but is hampered by not actually knowing what evil is, Tonk Fah is a straight-up sociopath who takes delight in harming things, and Denth has to redirect those tendencies so they don't interfere with their plans.
• Wayside School: Dr. Jane Payne from Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger isn't only a Depraved Dentist who ends up being chased by her former teacher Mrs. Drazil over homework assignments she neglected to turn in years ago, but she also likes to tell the people she's pissed off to "rub a monkey's tummy with your head", an insult you'd most certainly never hear from a mature or professional person.
• Merricat in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, who introduces herself as 18 when the story starts, but her narration, dialogue and behavior make her come across as much younger. She hates washing herself, spends all her time in the woods practicing "magic rituals" like nailing books to trees in an attempt to keep her older sister Constance safe, and has a strong fixation on poisonous mushrooms. It's revealed at the end that she was the one responsible for poisoning her entire family aside from Constance, and her Blue-and-Orange Morality makes her genuinely believe she did the right thing.

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