Tropers / The Foxs Cloak

Welcome to the Blue Link Club! ~ Demon God Of Chaos 2

Common "Stock" Animal Stereotypes Used Can Include:

keeping these here, since I like them as a reference

• Ants: Hard-working to the point of losing all individuality. Ant society is usually portrayed as a harsh, conformist Police State or World of Silence based around a Hive Caste System; it may be rather militaristic, evoking army ants. They are matriarchal, but it's usually less emphasized than with bees, and as with bees, fictional works may or may not realize the workers are Always Female.
• Antelopes and Gazelles: Gentle, graceful, and very swift. Usually female. If male, very likely to be a Bishōnen.
• Archaeopteryx: The "first bird". Often acts very much like a modern bird, despite how primitive it's supposed to be.
• Baboons: Like other monkeys, but fiercer and more aggressive, even females. More likely to be portrayed as Maniac Monkeys.
• Badgers: Cranky, curmudgeony, down-to-Earth loners. "My home is my castle." In a pinch, they're stubborn and tough. Usually not evil, but sometimes their cynicism and irritability leads them to mistrust or look down on the hero. On the other hand, they may show up in the hero's True Companions as a Knight in Sour Armor.
• Barracudas and Pikes: Badass but cruel, ruthless and often evil. Voraciously hungry, expert killers.
• Bats: Nocturnal, often bloodthirsty and most likely evil. This while most bats don't suck blood, only a few species in Latin America and again they'll mostly go for animals that won't slap them of their bodies, like cattle. Another portrayal has them quirky, eccentric or downright insane, possibly due to their severe disorientation in daylight and/or habit of sleeping upside down. They might also be depicted having poor eyesight, which will cause them to fly in people's hair, against all of nature's logic (so expect them to wear glasses or at least contacts). They tend to have high-pitched voices, most likely a reference to some species' use of echolocation. Remarkably can be portrayed as either cute or sexy depending on the theme. Can qualify as Creepy Awesome Usually male.
• Bears: Intimidating and powerfully ferocious when provoked — females with cubs are especially vicious and short-tempered — sometimes portrayed as BoisterousBruisers. They may also be depicted as calm, wise and slow-moving when not angered. Sometimes lazy — don't bother them when they're hibernating. Young bears will be portrayed as cute, cuddly and brave.
• Beavers: Industrious, often with an air of a practical and unpretentious tradesman, but sometimes to Workaholic levels. Usually male. Like to chew through trees and build dams.
• Bees: Hard-working, dutiful and territorial. They live in a Matriarchy; queens are almost always a stern and serious version of The High Queen. Fictional works may or may not be aware that workers are Always Female.
• Birds of Prey: Fierce, dignified and serious, though they may kidnap young children, even though they wouldn't be able to lift them in real life.
• Boars: Extremely aggressive and irritable. Not predatory, but tough and quite dangerous if provoked. Almost Always Male; wild sows rarely exist in fiction, but when they do, they usually have several striped piglets following them. Often regarded by humans as Worthy Opponents.
• Bulls: Short-tempered, especially around anything red. Intimidating, tough and extremely strong, but somewhat stupid. May be portrayed as clumsy ("a bull in a china shop") or, more rarely, as Gentle Giants.
• Butterflies: Shy, meek and inoffensive as caterpillars, but bold and beautiful as adults - this contrast often symbolizes transformation. Usually female and fragile. More rarely, vain and superficial.
  • Moths: The Darker and Edgier version of butterflies, due to their association with the night. Harbingers of death and sorrow but also madness and suicide, being irresistibly drawn to light and fire. Think "like moths to a flame".
• Camels: Often portrayed as storing water in its hump in fiction even though in Real Life, that hump stores fat. Not very energetic, but slow and steady once they get going; they can endure any hardship. Cranky, stubborn and bad-tempered, but not actually aggressive. Likes to spit.
• Cats (domestic, that is): Clever, curious, sometimes playful, but often rather arrogant and vain, with a lazy and hedonistic streak. Aloof and independent, often something of a Tsundere toward potential friends and allies. Often vicious, manipulative and smug, but may be cute or heroic instead. Usually female; tomcats — especially strays — are sometimes portrayed as tough, streetwise, buffoonish, belligerent, and/or oversexed rather than elegant and dignified. Some breeds (especially the long-haired, white-furred, or slender, oriental types) can represent wealth, aristocracy and prestige. Has its own stereotype trope.
• Chameleon: Changeable and able to blend in with their surroundings, both literal and social. May be self-serving collaborators with no true values of their own. Often stealthy tricksters. Rather weird.
• Cheetahs: Known for their speed. Indeed they are the fastest land animal (though they get tired quicker than dogs). Mostly female.
• Chickens: Often cowardly and prone to self-destructive panic. See also more gender-specific stereotypes for both hens and roosters/cocks.
• Chimpanzees: Either portrayed the way monkeys are portrayed despite being apes or as erudite and snarky. Will be shown making grimaces that humans interpret as smiles.
• Cockroaches: At best: dirty, will live in any shithole they can find and crawl over everything in sight. At worst: will swarm en masse and devour everything in sight.
  • Mentions of cockroaches supposedly being able to survive nuclear warfare is common.
• Cows: Even-tempered, contented and docile, in stark contrast to bulls. Not especially bright. Often gossipy, something like less panicky hens. Sacred Cow in India. Often assumed to be so dumb that they are easily pushed over.
• Coyotes and Jackals: Cunning and tricky, although their antics can backfire and make them look like the foolish ones. Lacking in courage when it comes to direct confrontation; may be The Starscream. Jackals tend to have more of a cruel streak than coyotes, which are a little more likely to appear as heroic tricksters as long as Roadrunners don't get involved.
• Crabs and Lobsters: Crabby, unhelpful and easily angered. Often Ineffectual Loners. On the bright side, tough fighters and not afraid to engage much stronger foes.
• Cranes: Majesty, grace, and strength without aggression. Like many great migrating birds, a symbol of finding one's way. Also known for their spectacular mating dance.
• Crocodiles and Alligators: Lazy but strong. Usually vicious bullies or unknowable forces of nature. Often more savage than other animals, but are sometimes gentle giants (though this is usually an intentional subversion). Alligators are more likely to be portrayed in a positive light than crocodiles are.
• Crows and ravens:
  • Creepy Crows: Cunning and often ominous; an archetypal symbol of death. Slightly more often evil than good.
  • Heroic corvids will be clever and somewhat mischievous Guile Heroes, but they sometimes have a slightly morbid sense of humor.
  • Crows are occasionally portrayed as being African American. More often male.
  • Ravens can be among the creepy awesome as they are unnerving and dark in appearances. In Edgar Allen Poe's poem The Raven one coldly plays with the emotions of a mourning man taunting and aggravating him, while only replying "Nevermore" to spook the Gent.
• Cuckoos: A harbinger of spring. Also, a symbol for women who secretly make their husband raise another man's children (real cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds' nests). Insanity is another motif associated with cuckoos (see Cloudcuckoolander).
• Deer: Delicate and unperilous. Their grace hints at wary senses and swift flight, and so being hard to find. Stags, with their impressive antlers, symbolize nobility without being predatory, though their tendency to simply look majestic and fight over females means they may be depicted as vain braggarts.
• Dodos: Generally associated with stupidity and, unsurprisingly, death and extinction (e.g "gone the way of the dodo"). Sometimes, the stupidity and death go hand in hand. Could likely be given the Back from the Dead or They Killed Kenny Again treatment. More rarely, there end up being hints that they never went extinct at all.
• Dogs: Loyal and friendly, unless they are an Angry Guard Dog. Possibly not too bright but can smell things very well. May also be overly concerned with their "territory," and with burying (and then losing) bones. Certain breeds have their own characteristic stereotypes. More often male, except for showy breeds like poodles, which are almost Always Female. Also, easily distrac-SQUIRREL!
• Dolphins: Cheery, playful, clever, and extraordinarily graceful in the water, much like otters, despite the fact that real dolphins are almost universally sociopaths. Always friendly. See Heroic Dolphin, Friendly, Playful Dolphin, and Sapient Cetaceans.
• Donkeys and Mules: Humbler, more hardworking version of a horse. Proverbially stubborn, which may be portrayed as either a good thing (the donkey as Determinator, or the Only Sane Man willing to speak truth to power) or a bad thing (the donkey who doesn't Know When to Fold 'Em to the point of sheer stupidity). Often rather irritable. Usually male.
• Dromaeosaurids: Fast, intelligent and ferocious hunters. Usually associated with packs like wolves, even though this is controversial.
• Ducks: Clumsy and a little dim, but also possessing a strong will and perhaps a hidden grace. A little weird. Anthropomorphic cartoon ducks are traditionally highly temperamental and selfish, at best being attention whores and at worst outright sociopaths (though rarely as serious villains).
• Eagles: Noble, strong Giant Flyers who command impressive heights. Not above eating human flesh if they're starved for meat.
• Earthworms: Usually portrayed in a more positive light than other worms but just as unattractive.
• Elephants: Powerful, majestic and wise, with great memories. Usually Gentle Giants, but you don't want to insult their dignity or otherwise piss them off. Inexplicably afraid of mice. (This last point was tested on MythBusters and, contrary to everyone's expectations, actually got a reaction — Truth in Television?) African elephants are often female, Asian elephants are mostly male and always Indian (accent optional).
• Falcons: Swift and agile fliers but often cruel, vicious, and evil.
• Flamingos: Often bright, energetic creatures who love to party, almost always living in pretty blue lagoons (instead of the boiling, sulfurous crater lakes they inhabit in real life).
• Fleas: Often portrayed as likable, sympathetic hobos who associate with their hosts on a friendly basis. Also portrayed as associating only with dogs despite being external parasites to many species of mammal in Real Life.
• Ferrets: Clever and extremely playful, often hyperactive. Usually more like a land-based version of otters than like their weasel cousins, although evil, scheming, malevolent ferrets sometimes appear.
• Flies: Often considered of ill-omen, sometimes associated with the Devil, due to their habit of buzzing around people as well as feeding and breeding on rotten meat and feces. Often symbols of disorder, peskiness and insignificance.
• Foxes: Tricky, pragmatic and confident. Unlike their coyote and jackal cousins, which are otherwise portrayed similarly, foxes often have connotations of sexiness, although not all of them do.
  • Interestingly, these tropes transcend culture; both European and and East Asian mythology not only portrays the red fox as a trickster, but associates vixens with beautiful, seductive women.
• Frigatebirds and Skuas: Bigger, meaner and nastier versions of gulls, oftentimes with more pirate-like qualities, like thievery and brutality.
• Frilled Lizard: An anomalously cute and hyperactive little reptile.
• Frogs: Jolly musicians or luck-bringers, usually cheerful and friendly if kind of weird. Associated with rain and water in general. Usually male and always use their tongues to catch insects in the air. In school they will be subject of dissection, but luckily freed in the end.
• Geckos: Cute and likeable, but a little on the odd side. Always shown climbing walls and ceilings and licking their own eyelids, even if they happen to be Leopard Geckos or other Eublepharids, which have eyelids, unlike other geckos, and have claws on their toes, meaning they can't climb surfaces.
• Geese: Like ducks; more arrogant and irritable, but also more graceful in flight. Also can be portrayed as silly ditzes that are easily distracted. A symbol of good luck, abundance, endurance, and the ability to find one's way home.
• Goats: In older European works, goats symbolize paganism, evil, and lust. Today they're mostly just portrayed as surefooted, constantly hungry, and a bit weird, due to their habit of eating things like tin cans. They're also humble and quite stubborn, a little like donkeys, and can be surprisingly aggressive for smallish herbivores.
• Gorilla: Intelligent like Monkeys, but much calmer and more serious, and immensely strong. They are also seen as possessing a melancholy dignity, as if the authors assume they know their species is dying out. Alternately, monstrous savage creatures which respond to everything with violence, though, like King Kong, sometimes capable of reason and as much victim as villain. Always Male if only one gorilla appears in a work of fiction — females only show up if there's a whole troop.
• Guineafowl and Turkeys: Dignified but snobbish, unpleasant and uptight. Usually bigger and a bit tougher than chickens, although not as aggressive as roosters. Not very bright, but not as amazingly stupid as real-world domestic turkeys can be either. Usually male.
• Gulls: Greedy and undignified but also brave in defying adversity and a symbol of freedom and travel. Gregarious, almost always seen in groups.
• Hare: Somewhat comical but also admired for their fast and cunning flights. Independent and a little mysterious, even magical, particularly in older folklore. See also Hare Trickster.
• Hedgehogs: Fearful cowards or Crazy-Prepared survivalists. May symbolize a person who is "prickly" and difficult to get close to.
• Hens: Incurable gossips and not very bright, something like a more high-strung version of cows. Highly protective of their chicks but prone to self-destructive mass panic in a crisis. Unable to defend themselves unaided.
• Herons: Graceful and calm. Patient, with split second reflexes. Tends to be a loner. Sometimes associated with martial arts, much like the mantis, due to the reflexes.
• Hippos: Contented and gluttonous giants of the river. Obese, lazy, and often rather stupid. Rarely as incredibly aggressive and dangerous in fiction as they are in Real Life. Will be depicted as Always Female in comic strips and cartoons.
• Horse: Elegant, noble, passionate and spirited. Sometimes proud and vain. More often male in fiction; authors usually portray the stallion as not only dominating but leading the herd (rather than the boss mare, as in real life.)
  • Draught horses are always Gentle Giants slow in both movement and wit, sometimes depicted calm enough to sleep through an outright apocalypse. This is Truth in Television; draught horses are specifically bred for huge strength and calm temperament. Destriers used to be just as big but bred for battle, which made them so dangerous that they virtually disappeared as a breed as soon as they were not needed to carry an armored knight in combat.
• Humans: If they're counted as animals, you can expect a Lions and Tigers and Humans... Oh, My! setting. Humans fit into Black-and-White Morality, and either Humans Are the Real Monsters/Humans Are Cthulhu or Humans Are Special (but more so the former).
• Hyenas: Basically The Hyena. Either a harmless jokester or the animal version of a horrific Monster Clown. Laughs like a maniac for no reason. If the writer is aware that hyenas are one of nature's few thoroughly matriarchal species, females may be bigger and stronger and dominate males, but don't count on it.
• Kangaroos: Extroverted, good-natured characters, athletic yet laid-back. Usually female (although joeys are more likely to be male), they're devoted mothers. Sometimes, they're always shown with a pouch, no matter what.
• Koalas: Cute and friendly but rather lazy, or else irritable, gruff and not too bright (a little closer to the truth).
• Leeches: Like maggots and worms with the addition of bloodsucking, associated with putrid waters and the basest of natural instincts. In some cultures, associated with medicine as they can be used to suck off tainted blood.
• Lemmings: Like the sheep (below), but with a greater emphasis on following obviously self-destructive "popular" practices; i.e., to the classic question "if everyone were jumping off a bridge, would you?", a lemming will enthusiastically reply "yes!"
  • Note that real life lemmings committing suicide by jumping off cliffs is almost entirely an urban legend.
• Lions: Brave, proud, noble, majestic and powerful. Top of the food chain, "King of the Jungle". Can be lazy and vain; lionesses are a bit less likely to be portrayed this way, as most people are aware these days that it's the lionesses who do the hunting. Males appear more often in fiction, however.
• Llamas: Like camels, but weirder and a little more even-tempered, if equally prone to spitting.
• Maggots: Disgusting, filthy, repulsive, and mindless larvae of flies. Symbols of rot, decay and corruption.
• Magpies: Cunning thieves with a penchant for shiny objects. Sometimes gossipy chatterboxes. May be good or evil.
• Mantis: Bad Ass. Regardless of if they're good or evil, getting in close quarters with one is a major death wish. Interesting example since people tend to love them despite the fact we frequently use them as villains. Graceful killers in melee. Often associated with Martial Arts, thanks to the Chinese and Kung Fu Panda. When female, almost always a Femme Fatale.
• Mice: Cuter and far more sympathetic than rats. Mice are more likely to be prey, whereas rats are almost always tough survivors. Often meek, humble, gentle and inoffensive. They are sometimes portrayed as huge cowards with a tendency to jump at little things, but heroic and courageous mice are common as a subversion. Expect some puns to be made about a computer mouse.
• Moles: Bright, technically minded, and a bit nerdy, often with a special talent for digging or engineering in general. Usually short-sighted, though often in possession of Nerd Glasses that let them see after a fashion. What happened to the star nose? Sometimes they are in miner attire. Usually male.
• Mongoose: Vaguely resembles a weasel, but is a cute and fearlessly heroic defender of the innocent (Rikki-tikki-tavvi is probably the Trope Maker). Although they look harmless, they take on terrifying enemies and win through a combination of agility, wit and boldness; their fighting style resembles the swashbuckler rather than a burly brawler. If paired with a specific enemy, it will always be a snake, usually a cobra. Usually male.
• Monkeys: Hyperactive, mischievous, skilful and curious. They'll sometimes be referred to as closer to humanity (mostly in the worst ways) than the other animals. Known for throwing their own feces at people. Chimps are inevitably also thrown in the same group. Though they can also be dangerous Maniac Monkeys.
• Mosquitoes: Pesky, annoying, sometimes even dangerous bloodsucking flies. Often portrayed as bloodsucking even if they're male.
• Neanderthals: The archetypical Caveman. Often stupider, taller and stronger than modern humans; tough survivors in fur skins always holding spears; carnivorous. Cavewomen are usually depicted as mannish and intimidating but can be of any shade between the Nubile Savage and the Brawn Hilda.
• Octopi and Squids: Weird and otherworldly, probably the closest thing on Earth to alien life. May be either charmingly weird and likeable Cloudcuckoolanders or malevolent and terrifyingly alien, but octopi tend to lean toward the former more.
• Opossums: Often portrayed as "rednecks" or "hicks". Or just as having Southern accents. Or, alternately, as being somewhat raccoon-like in personality.
• Orangutans: The middle road between Gorillas and Monkeys: they possess the strength and determination of the first and the agility, goofiness and trickster nature of the second. More dangerous than they look.
• Orcas aka Killer Whales: Originally ravenous merciless mammalian predators, now like Wolves, respected master hunters of the sea whom even the great white sharks fear. Furthermore, they are friendly fellows like giant dolphins when well fed and in a good mood.
• Ostriches: Panicky and frightened and will always stick their heads in the sand, even though none of them do this in real life.
• Otter: Fun Personified. Joyous, playful, expert swimmers and acrobats, very similar to dolphins. Laid-back and optimistic, they "go with the flow" rather than worrying how things will work out. Think Surfer Dude, except that otters are usually portrayed as rather clever, rarely The Ditz. Almost always likeable and heroic, never as aggressive in fiction as real otters can be. Usually male.
• Owls: Wise and mysterious. Smaller species of owl may be portrayed as Absent Minded Professors or even Ditzy Geniuses, perhaps reflecting owls' disorientation in daylight. Alternatively, scary harbingers of doom.
  • Note that Real Life owls have terrible memories in relation to human training.
  • In Italian, "civetta" has the literal meaning "screech-owl" and the figurative meaning "coquette."
  • Can qualify as Creepy Awesome.
• Pandas: Gentle, peaceful and cuddly, usually a bit lazy and often fat. Usually male.
• Parrots: Will be portrayed as talkative to the point of being annoying. Can overhear important things and remember them to the disadvantage of those who want to keep it a secret. Will also be able to communicate in full sentences and fluent dialogues with humans, in sharp contrast with the low brain capacity and very monsyllabic nature of real parrots. Will be seen in Parrot Pet Position on somebody's shoulder, usually as Pirate Parrot.
• Peacocks: Vain, elegant, pompous. Often associated with nobility and if you have a couple of these wandering around your yard, chances are you have Impossibly Cool Wealth.
• Pelicans: Often portayed as a klutzy, comical, lovable goof. Usually male. Their throat pouches will be used as a Bag of Holding for about everything, even stuff that would definitely be unable to carry.
• Penguins: Inherently comical. Dignified, but clumsy except in the water. Rather cheery and optimistic, even in harsh climes. Usually male.
• Pigs: Greedy and slovenly in a comical way, but often intelligent and good-natured. More often male.
• Pigeons: They always fly in flocks, and are easily scared of anything, and are infamous for pooping alot. Will almost always live in urban areas even though most species (aside from the famous city pigeons) live in places like forests.
• Porcupines: Pragmatic and fearless, being well aware of how respected their defensive abilities are. May be either gentle and innocent, or prickly and irritable. Sometimes depicted as being able to actually shoot their quills, which they cannot do in Real Life.
• Pterosaurs: More commonly known by the colloquial name "Pterodactyl". Often depicted as large, dragonlike predators that swoop down and carry away animals and people to be eaten. Almost always depicted as resembling the famous Pteranodon.
• Rabbits: Sweet, innocent, and cuddly, but also trickster rabbits for the purposes of self-defense, like Bugs Bunny. Breed like crazy. Fast runners.
• Raccoons: Sneaky, clever, bold, and rather cute. Often thieves (due to their facial markings, which resemble a bandit's mask), but usually heroic or at least likeable ones. Usually male.
• Ram: Always ready for a fight. Tough, perhaps surprisingly so, but perhaps a bit dim. Something like a smaller version of the bull.
• Rats: Traditionally nasty, cowardly, indecent, aggressive, greedy, licentious and cunning. Often associated with filth and disease. Knows a lot about the criminal world, often a thief. Always a tough survivor type, whether good or evil, and virtually Always Male. Recently, more realistic representations have been presented in media, showing rats as being very clean (relative to their surroundings^note pet rats are much cleaner than sewer rats since they aren't living in a sewer, but both are significantly cleaner than there mouse counterparts), even tempered, and much friendlier than just about every other pet out there after dogs.
• Rhino: Powerful but somewhat dim. Incredibly dangerous when threatened, but prone to charging headlong without considering the consequences. Often have poor eyesight, which is Truth in Television. Somewhat similar to bulls, above.
• Roosters/Cocks: Proud and loud. Often singers, but not very good ones. Pompous and arrogant. Very prone to get in literal Cock Fights and highly possessive of the hens. Often the chief of the farm, or at least the barnyard fowl. Will often be shown crowing at dawn, even though roosters make noise all the time.
• Sauropods and Stegosaurs: Large and strong, yet slow and dim-witted. Gentle giants unless they are threatened.
• Scorpions: Vicious, venomous assassins who hide and stalk in darkness, and often sting for the sake of stinging. See The Farmer and the Viper (AKA Scorpion Dilemma). Sometimes portrayed as tanky, durable fighters due to their thick carapace. Can be either good or evil. When heroic, they tend to be Blood Knights or Proud Warrior Race Guys. Or both.
  • A realistic portrayal would show them to have glasses or contacts (as Scorpions have bad eyesight), and can be very sociable, calm and even docile (considering most Scorpions tend not to attack straight away).
  • Can qualify as Creepy Awesome.
• Seals and Sea Lions: Cute and playful. Adorably clumsy on the land, but breathtakingly graceful in the water. Associated with magic and the sea. Always hungry for fish.
• Sharks: Hunger and menace personified (except in the rare case of whale sharks, the most commonly used example of a shark that's no threat to humans). Cold and emotionless to the point of being sociopathic. Tend to go psycho once they get a whiff of blood. Will usually be portrayed as great white sharks, because other species are less impressive.
• Sheep: Passive and gentle, but rather dimwitted. Prone to suffering from "herd mentality" and blind, unquestioning obedience toward authority. Easily frightened and incapable of depending themselves, although rams may be more of a threat.
• Skunks: Gentle, innocent, and totally fearless, owing to their well-known natural defenses. Often depicted as producing a foul scent all the time, which they themselves are unaware of — or, somewhat more accurately, the stink may be portrayed as a form of Fartillery. May be somewhat crude and socially awkward, as the infamous stench associates them with the stereotype of the Gasshole.
• Sloths: Slow, sleepy and harmless. Tends to hang upside-down from tree branches. Not so much with prehistoric ground sloths.
• Snails and Slugs: Very slow and fearful but contented and usually good-nature. Slugs tend to be portrayed in a little less positive light than snails are.
• Snakes: Pure evil and talk with a lot of "S"-es. Almost always cunning, deceptive and manipulative. More often than not, snakes play the villainous role, and the odd protagonist snake is usually a Sociopathic Hero. More rarely, they are used to represent wisdom, rebirth, and/or immortality. Can also be charming, seductive and/or sexy.
  • Another portrayal is they are excellent dancers (considering how flexible snakes are), and in more positive light are loyal to those who are more respectful to them example: Nagini from Harry Potter, Viper from Kung Fu Panda, Kaa from the Jungle Book.
  • Can qualify as Creepy Awesome.
• Songbirds: A symbol of vitality, freedom and joy. Idioms such as "bird with broken wings" or "caged bird" are used to describe the figurative "death of the soul".
• Sparrows: Humble, cute and happy, agile and surprisingly brave.
• Spiders: Patient tricksters or venomous antagonists (similar to many other arachnids and insects). Just about Always Female. Often sexy and seductive in very dangerous ways, reflecting the fact that females of several species devour the males after mating. Some can be portrayed wearing glasses for a few species have worse eyesight than others.
  • Sometimes portrayed as eccentric artists, locked away in their own room/web creating things.
  • More positive portrayals can see them as, Amazing Stylists and Models, Accurate Weavers, and perhaps effective Doctors (like how most Spiders tend to eat their prey from the inside).
  • Can qualify as Creepy Awesome.
• Spinosaurus: Giant and powerful predators, even more so than Tyrannosaurus Rex. Basically a fin-backed land crocodile that walks on two legs. Rarely portrayed as a semi-aquatic piscivore/generalist hunter like it might have been in Real Life.
• Squirrel: Agile and graceful, but hyperactive and perhaps a bit crazy. Short attention span. Brave considering their size, and often somewhat hot-tempered, but more likely to retaliate with verbal scolding than a physical attack.
• Storks: Frequently cast as a Delivery Stork, specialized in bringing newborn babies to their parents.
• Swans: Beautiful, graceful, and pure. Also a symbol of love, as swans mate for life. Sometimes vain, but rarely as large and aggressive as real swans are.
  • Also known for having chicks that are not as pretty.
• Tanuki (or raccoon dogs): Sneaky, clever, bold, and rather cute. Often thieves (due to their facial markings, which resemble a bandit's mask), but usually heroic or at least likeable ones. Usually male. Also portrayed as highly sexual and having large testicles.
  • Note that although they look similar to raccoons, and tanuki in Japanese works are often turned into raccoons in Western adaptations, tanuki are not very closely related to racoons — they're actually in the dog family.
• Tigers, Panthers, Jaguars, and Leopards: Charismatic, exotic predators with an air of grace and power about their every move. Awe-inspiring even as they crush you. Black panthers in particular tend to emphasize the big cats' skill at stealth. Equally likely to be on the side of good or evil.
  • Their dignity and grace may be subverted by putting a big cat in a comic relief role.
• Toads: Ugly Cute and clumsy. Hidden beauty that reveals itself if you're being kind to it. Always Male.
• Turtles and tortoises: Slow but wise, except if they are snapping turtles, in which case they're bad-tempered. Often very long-lived. Also, shy and prone to hiding away in their shells whenever danger looms. Nerds of the animal kingdom.
• Triceratops: Basically a dinosaurian bull or rhinoceros, bad-tempered and prone to charging, but is often portrayed in a heroic role. Tyrannosaurus Rex's greatest rival or archenemy; the two would usually fight to the death whenever they meet.
• Tyrannosaurus Rex: Powerful, unstoppable, vicious hunters, like a land-based combination of shark and crocodile. Shown to be quite badass and top of the foodchain. See Stock Dinosaurs.
• Vultures: Birds of bad omen, especially the evil-looking turkey buzzard. Fond of Gallows Humor.
  • In a more humorous portrayal can see Vultures as Sport Commentators watching the players bruise and batter each other as they joke about the chaos.
  • Can qualify as Creepy Awesome.
• Walruses: Cute and contently fat, but comically dignified. Always Male, because of their Badass Moustache, usually benevolent. May or may not wear a monocle and/or top hat.
• Wasps and Yellowjackets: Aggressive, nervous, bitchy, and highly prone to mass fury. Often female. At constant war with bees.
• Weasels, Stoats, Martens and Polecats: Scheming, treacherous, cunning and malevolent villains, or else just plain out of their minds.
• Whales: Gentle, mysterious giants of the deep, slow-moving and very wise. In older works like Moby Dick, a furious force of nature able to destroy anything they choose, as powerful and inscrutable as the ocean itself. Today, in the post-whaling era, the latter role tends to be given to giant squid instead.
• Wolves: Evil, murderous and voraciously hungry or powerful, majestic and beautiful, depending on when and where the story was written. May be portrayed (especially in older works) as stoic, Bad Ass loners, or more realistically as being unshakably loyal to their pack. Sometimes harsh toward those they love, but god forbid any of them be threatened by an outside force or entity.
  • The "lone wolf" in media is too cool or too tough for help, a badass who won't take nothin' from nobody. In reality, wolves are highly social and have difficulty functioning without a pack. Individuals found alone are usually young adults looking for a mate to start a new pack, and won't last long if they don't find one.
  • In works where wolves are portrayed as social, the pack functions as a strict hierarchy, with an alpha male at the top and a bullied omega at the bottom; low-ranking wolves increase their status by defeating their superiors in one-on-one combat. Up until recently this was thought to be true of real wolves, but in fact it's not — it was based on studies of strange wolves thrown together in captivity, which tend to become neurotic and start acting out Prison Tropes. In the wild, a wolf pack is essentially a nuclear family; the alpha male and female are simply the parents of the lower-ranking wolves, who never rise up and challenge their parents for leadership — they just leave and start their own packs once they're a few years old.
• Wolverines: Territorial loners, utterly fearless even toward the largest and most intimidating foes, and able to back it up with sheer savage aggression.^note Real-life wolverines will attack grizzly bears — often successfully! Scary not because of their size or strength, but their utter ferocity. Almost Always Male.
• Worms: Disgusting, filthy, repulsive and mindless. Symbols of rot, decay and corruption.
• Zebras: When in presence of horses, they are often Soul Brothas or some kind of Black Best Friend. Otherwise, they are tougher versions of the antelopes, brave and fiercely independent, although not always very strong fighters. Almost Always Male. If there is more than one zebra you can expect You ALL Look Familiar and all the zebras will have similar personalities. And since they are preyed upon you can expect Designated Victim.
  • If sports are involved, they will always be seen as referees.

Also these:

Real Life — Australia

Yes, Australia has so much dangerous stuff we had to give it its own section. This quote is quite typical of most people's opinions on the place.

"Every creature [in Australia] is bigger and angrier than anywhere else in the world... spiders and snakes and the like normally hide under rocks. The Earth is one big rock, Australia is at the bottom of the big rock, and so they're trying to hide under it."

— Karl Pilkington - Happyslapped by a Jellyfish.

• Even the geological chemistry of Oz is trying to kill you. Proof. Midnight Oil sang about the workers who had to suffer for it.
• About the only things that aren't dangerous or poisonous are some of the sheep (which aren't native to Australia). And maybe wallabies. The following things will kill you: common spiders, the most common snakes, ticks, crocodiles, sharks, jellyfish, stonefish; we have a seashell that will go for you and deliver a very painful, fast death. Even (male) platypus are poisonous.
  • Platypodes aren't merely venomous, they have probably the most terrifying venom in nature. The other animals on this list will just kill you, the Platypus isn't that humane. Its venom attacks the victim's pain receptors, cranking them Up To Eleven and ripping off the knob. It causes pain so horrible that even the highest non-lethal dose of morphine isn't enough. To stop the pain, doctors actually have to physically sever the nerve from the affected area to the brain because that's the only thing powerful enough.
  • If a spider spins a web (as in a traditional, picturebook cobweb), it won't kill you normally, just make you wish it had.
  • A wallaby could still probably break a few of your ribs by kicking you, and that's pretty bad as broken ribs can lead to punctured lungs or a punctured heart.
• Then there's the most humiliating thing of all - mauled by Wombat. No joke.
  • Maybe Long Weekend was just Truth in Television.
  • It's not quite as silly as it sounds - wombats are regularly preyed upon by dingos, and escape by letting the dingos chase them to their burrows, waiting for the dingo to force its snout over the wombat's back, and then kicking upward with enough force to crack the dingo's skull. And, as burrowing animals, they have huge, sharp claws.
• We all know kangaroos hop around on their hind legs — well, those hind legs are strong enough to disembowel a person with a single kick. Breaking the old stereotype that island faunas are wimpy, kangaroos have proven themselves quite able to compete with other animals on the mainland. So don't diss the 'roo, mate!
• The Australian fierce snake (named for its home, the Fierce Desert, not for its temperament, which is actually non-aggressive) is considered the most poisonous snake in the world.
  • In fact, the top nine poisonous land snakes in the world are all from Australia. And almost all of the sea snakes, which are several times more venomous, are also from Australia, the sea snake capital of the world.
• According to the Made of Explodium page, eucalyptus trees have a rather amusing tendency to, well, explode, given the proper stressors. Truly a gamer's continent.
  • Eucalypts also produce dry, waxy leaves and loose bark that fuel the frequent and highly dangerous bushfires, and have a tendency to lose branches in high winds, or just after said fires. Add in the fact that eucalypt branches are often 1-2 metres in length, and all grow from the top foot or so of trunk, and you can see that even the trees are trying to kill you.
    • And why, pray tell, have they evolved this trait? Because the resulting fire regime burns out nearly any plant that even thinks about making a serious go at competing with the eucalypts for light, water, and soil nutrients. The trees aren't trying to kill you, particularly; they're trying to kill everything in the general vicinity that isn't them.
  • Also, falling gum tree limbs (known as widowmakers) have caused serious property damage and deaths. And they fall with no warning. Feel like taking a nap under a gum tree during a hot day? It might be the last thing you do...
    • The good news is that Drop Bears are just scare stories for the tourists. The bad news is that the trees the bears putatively live in do, in fact, drop lethal objects on you anyway. (The drop bear may have originated for this very reason; as a way to keep greenhorns and children from dawdling around under a tree, "deadly predator" is a lot more viscerally convincing than "shed limbs.")
    • It's worth noting that the oils in these branches is highly flammable and has fungicide properties, meaning that they break down very slowly and present a lingering fire hazard even after trying to crush you.
• And that's just the stuff on land, they also have - apart from the sharks and saltwater crocodiles - blue ringed octopus, box jellyfish, cone snails, stingrays, etc.
  • You know your country is scary when even the snails can kill. The aptly named Triton (not the car) is one of the few predators that will kill and eat "crown of thorns" starfish.
    • You know your country is scary when even the starfish have Names to Run Away from Really Fast.
• That is one of the reasons why Steve Irwin was considered one of the best Real Life badasses. "Now watch as I approach the kangaroo's babies, if I'm not careful the mama will rip off my arm and start beating me with it!!" Nothing he says is worth anything less then two exclamation points.
  • If Australia killed Steve Irwin, what chance do you have?
  • In other countries, Steve Irwin is remembered as a great man, one of the most out-spoken animal rights activists of all time. Australians on the other hand view him as a crazy person... since they actually understand how dangerous the things he did to educate the rest of the world were.
    • There's also the fact that in Australia everyone has an uncle who can do those things (although they almost invariably are smart enough to refrain from doing them). Steve Irwin happened to be able to build an international television career out of doing things that are, in any objective sense, completely idiotic.
  • The odd thing is, Steve Irwin was killed by an animal which is normally non-lethal: the stingray. The only reason he died was because he had the sheer misfortune to be stabbed directly in the heart.
• Emus are basically really big Velociraptor with a beak. Be glad that you do not meet their dietary needs. Cassowaries, too — which are like emus but actively aggressive towards humans. They were actually used as the models for the Velociraptor in Jurassic Park.
  • Adding to the horror - a cassowary is basically an emu with warpaint and an axe attached to its head.
    • This Cracked.com video sums it up pretty well.
• If you think that's bad, Australia was even more of a Death World back in the Pleistocene, when humans first arrived. Carnivorous buzz-saw toothed kangaroos? Check. Giant intelligent fast-running highly venomous monitor lizard the size of a one-ton truck? Check. Climbing, fast-running, warm-blooded saw-toothed, intelligent crocodiles? Check. Gigantic killer pseudo-python? Check. Marsupial lion with sickle thumbs and guillotines for teeth? Check. The Demon Duck of Doom! Oh yeah, it's there. Ninjemys, a gigantic horned turtle built like a panzer tank (and yes, the name means exactly what you think it means and it was named after that), check. Wombat the size of a rhinoceros with incisors built specifically for goring that can charge at 35 mile per hour? Check. Giant koala-ground sloth-tapir mixes the size of bison? Check. Everything that can kill you in Australia today (everything else on this page)? Check.
  • This also highlights the fact that, by a huge margin, the most lethal animal in Australia is... US. Humans wiped out all the above creatures with nothing more sophisticated than precisely shaped pieces of stone and wood, and fire. We first starved them to extinction by burning them out of house and home, at which point hunting could finish them off. We even changed the climate a bit, making it a bit harsher than it already was.
• This Cracked article feels appropriate. No, it isn't all in Australia, but half of it is.
  • Another Oz-related Cracked article.
  • Two thirds of the animals on this Cracked list of Killer Rabbits are found in Australia.
• Any child growing up in Australia learns (unless the parents are trying to kill the kid) a long list of things that can kill you, practically by heart. It's a long list, and just to make sure at least one state teaches it in primary schools.
• Koalas. If you try to hug a wild one, they will be happy to "hug" you back with razor sharp claws that are designed to be habitats for nasty shit, making them natural experts of biological warfare. Have you ever heard one growl at you? The cute little bears marsupials sound like giant ogres!
  • On top of that, most of them have chlamydia,^note And no, you don't have to root them to catch it from them. so, in a way, they kill your future children, too.
• Out of all these critters, the only ones that really cramp your style are the jellyfish. Sharks? Pfft, there's like three left. Spiders? Don't go picking up random bits of rusty iron. Snakes? Make a lot of noise whilst walking through undergrowth, wear tough shoes, etc. Stonefish/cone shells? Don't walk barefoot on reefs. Drop bears? Don't hang around underneath gum trees. But jellyfish? "Oh, I'm sorry if you wanted to go for a swim at that otherwise harmless sandy beach when it's 42 degrees. We'll just be floating around by our thousands, invisible and potentially fatal."
  • Not to mention the Irukandji. The worst of the box jellyfish (an infamous class of jellyfish), they will actively seek out prey rather than drift along in the current, are the size of a fingernail, are transparent, can swim through anti-jellyfish safety nets on beaches and pack a horrifically painful sting which has 'a sense of impending doom' listed as a symptom on That Other Wiki.
  • Sure the little guys are scary, but on the other side of the scale, Australia is also home to a southern-hemisphere relative of the Lion's Mane jellyfish◊. Yes, that is a jellyfish that can grow up to 120 feet long, 8 feet across, and whose stingers remain dangerous even after detached. While there hasn't really been a recorded case of a person being eaten by one of these, isn't it nice to know that there are species of jellyfish actually capable of devouring you whole? Oh yea, and sometimes they swarm. Sleep well!
  • Let's not also forget the Chironex Fleckeri, another specie of box jellyfish unique to Australia. Their venom is often said to be the most deadly in the world, and if The Other Wiki is to be believed, a single specimen holds enough of it to kill 60 adult humans.
• They may not be dangerous to humans, but the only known variety of sea squirt that snares prey like a Venus fly-trap rather than passively filtering water lives just off Australia.
  • Look at the rest of the list. Not dangerous to humans? Don't count on it.
• And because this list isn't long enough, the Blue-Ringed Octopus. The venom causes total paralysis of everything, including involuntary muscle movement - like say, breathing. Or your heart beating. And you're conscious every second of it - assuming you are going to live much longer, which is debatable because you're paralyzed, look dead and, well... just pray your buddy (you DO have one with you, right...?) can recognize the effects of blue ringed octopus venom, otherwise say hi to a very unpleasant death!
  • There is no antidote for the blue-ringed octopus's venom — in no small part because the horrifying concoction is hard to formulate an antivenom for, being a mix of several different horrifically lethal chemical substances, tetradotoxin in primis. The treatment is to start CPR immediately and keep going, no matter what, until medical help arrives; the victim is then placed on life support until their body can flush out the venom naturally.
  • And you know what the big Irony is? While it may or may not be the only venomous octopus species in the world, blue-rings are definitely the only ones that are lethal to humans. That's right folks, there is only one type of octopus that can kill you, and it lives in Australia.
  • And if the venom isn't scary enough, keep in mind that the blue-ringed octopus, like the rest of its order, is super intelligent; just imagine the cephalopod version of the Zodiac Killer armed with a powerful neurotoxin and a body of pure nerves and muscle that can fit through any crack or crevasse. Fortunately, once more like other octopuses, they're of the "will only attack when provoked" variety, but obviously it's still not something you want to mess with.
• And let's not forget the Great Australian Bight. For non-locals, that's a region of South Australia where the ground beneath your feet is brittle and conceals deep abysses leading to underground caverns filled with seawater, which will happily drown you if the fall doesn't splat you first. That's right: in Australia, even the ground wants to kill you.
• Slightly more north is the Nullarbor Plain. Imagine the biggest desert you can think of. Now imagine it bigger. Now imagine red. Now add the typical Australian NT climate heat of 48-50 degrees Celsius.^note 118-122 degrees Fahrenheit Now imagine having gone out there looking for gold which is relatively easy to find beneath the sand. Not only does the ground want to kill you, it tempts you into a trap to make it easier on itself.
• To elucidate a little further, it's not just NT ground that can kill you (although honestly, living in Alice Springs is almost a death wish, and you only live in Darwin if you have a love affair with bipolar weather and cyclones), but nearly all ground everywhere that can kill you. Apart from some of the most perilous mountain ranges anywhere (with sharp drops, deceptive rock formations, crumbling earth, nexus of underground caves which you won't find your way out of without a very experienced guide, and narrow winding paths that you only can travel with immense preparation (and these are mountain ranges with absolutely tiny mountains compared to the rest of the world, just look up the Flinder's Ranges)), you have wide vast expanses of ridiculously dry desert in Western Australia that you will die in if you don't have someone who knows how to find the water hidden deep beneath the ground, a coastline with so many abrupt cliffs that if you're not careful you can drive right off, and marsh land and estuaries in NSW and Queensland that will either suck you into their swampy extremes, or leave you wandering lost for days in sand dunes. Even the bushes will try to poison you and paralyse you! ... Oh god, why do I live here again?
• Continuing on from even the ground trying to kill you, everyone growing up in Darwin knows not to dig during the wet season with any cuts or injuries. The bacteria, Melioidosis, more commonly known as Nightcliff Gardener's Disease, lives deep in the soil, but comes to the surface when it rains. It has a nearly 90% mortality rate when untreated, and there's no known vaccine.
  • Here's a fun fact: remember that patient in season five of House who was willing to take hostages to get a diagnosis? This was the stuff that was killing him. Even on House, Melioidosis is extreme.
• Even the things that aren't native are happy to join the party. Just give them a little evolving time. This article, about felines that take Cats Are Mean Up To Eleven, takes place in, you guessed it, Brisbane.
  • Yes, even things only introduced to the Australian environment 100 years ago can now kick the ass of its counterparts in Europe and America. And they tend to be more sadistic too.
    • Especially the sports.
  • You also have to remember that pretty much any time Cracked mentions Australia, it must, and absolutely must, be restated that dingoes eat human babies.
• The plants can also kill you. The Stinging Tree is aptly named; all shrubs and trees of this genus have very fine hairs which will end up in your body if you walk too close (also, said hairs SHED, so too close is probably within a 5km radius). These stingers are poisonous, and they have been known to kill horses, dogs and, yes, people. With great efficiency. Even if it doesn't kill you, the hairs - and subsequently the pain, because it's the Stinging Tree for a reason - tend to last several years; the hairs are too fine to remove, and they don't break down in your body.
• If trees killing you weren't bad enough, the grass trying to kill you would be. Triodia (aka Spinifex) is a grass tipped with hard silicate arrowheads that break off in your skin.
• An equally unpleasant mention goes to the 'tiger pear' cactus, Opuntia aurantiaca, a South American species. They're invasive, fast-spreading, and have long, sharp spines that can punch straight through truck tires, shoe leather, and anything less tough than those. The pods are made to detach, so simply backing away from the plant after contact doesn't do anything to relieve the stab wound you just got; on the contrary, you're likely to tear out a chunk of skin trying to pull out an attached pod thanks to the spines being barbed on top of everything else. They're also surprisingly stealthy since they're not huge, cartoonish attention-getters like the stereotypical saguaro or beavertail cactus, so it's possible to brush against one by accident and pay dearly for your carelessness. Imagine falling into a bin full of rusty fishhooks and you have a rough idea of what stumbling into a tiger pear patch is like. Worst of all, they're absurdly difficult to kill. One or two isolated plants can be destroyed by burying it with dirt to smother it or judicious amounts of gasoline and a match, but when it's a whole field of them, well, good luck. Spraying becomes a precision and accuracy problem due to the need to kill the extremely tough root of the plant, fire is no longer as effective for the same reason, and while using insects for biological control can work, they tend to be alternately unreliable or slow. The only solution is to constantly plow over any area infested with tiger pears, since few plants are made to handle being constantly dug up and unable to reproduce.
• It is ironic when one considers that despite the high number of dangers Australia actually has a very low death rate from bites and stings, due to a combination of its people being well-educated about the dangers, advanced medical care being accessible to a majority of the population, and many of its potentially dangerous animals being unaggressive and/or restricted to remote areas where they rarely encounter people.
  • The stats speak for themselves. The take-home lesson - no worries.
• In the surrounding areas of the A.C.T (Australian Capital Territory), there is a road to a lovely beach town in NSW (Batemans Bay) called the Clyde. Along this road, there is a tourist attraction known as Pooh Bear's corner. Back in WWII, this fun little visiting spot (now filled with plush toys of its namesake) was filled with explosives. Back then, the Clyde was the only route in or out of Canberra and was meant to halt invading Japanese soldiers by either blowing them up or cutting off the road at an important point. So in Australia, even the most innocent of places could've killed you.
• Australia is not just an active killer, it's also passive-aggressive as all hell. There's been no crustal overturn in most of the continent since around the time of the first dinosaurs, so the soils tend overwhelmingly to be thin and nutrient-poor, and in many places — especially in the southwest — tens of millions of years of accumulated salt spray make the ground inhospitable to vegetation not evolved to cope with it. Europeans moved to this place and set about establishing European-style agriculture. Australia blinked and chuckled grimly at that, though it's true those rabbit things are annoying.
  • When Australia was discovered in 1622 by English sailors (about 20 years after the Dutch found it and left it well enough alone) they made the fatal mistake of believing Australia was more hospitable than it was- they landed in the middle of the wet season but because it was so hot, arid and barren they thought that it was the peak of the dry season and that the climate would become more bearable after a few months. After colonizing they found out that this wasn't the case.
    • Ah yes, and how did they find out? Well: The Europeans drove out the Aboriginal population, who actually did know how to live in Australia and whose firestick farming methods had kept the fuel regime nicely in check for thousands of years. After a year or two of that, one day practically the whole colonised area went up in flames in one fell swoop now known as Black Thursday. It's still believed to be the worst wildfire in recorded Australian history, and that is a phrase truly pregnant with meaning.
• Just to prove the government has a sense of humour - snakes are protected species in most areas, it's illegal to kill them. Snakes do not reciprocate this policy. Fortunately for gardeners, the natural enemy of the snake, the shovel, is often close by.
• But, there is one inversion. Most native Australian bees either have no stingers or stingers too small to penetrate human skin. Australia has a most ironic sense of humor.
• It gets even crazier in that all of this is pretty much scientifically JUSTIFIED. Because Australia is so isolated from other landmasses, all the organisms living here are basically in an extreme evolutionary lensman arms race to be more deadly and poisonous and venomous than their competitors. Particularly due to the aforementioned poor soil - not enough food growing, and no way to go elsewhere for more? KILL EVERYTHING THAT COMPETES.
  • Please note that this technically means that Australia is the only place in the world where the animals view humans as "competition" as opposed to "predators"
• Don't forget the most dangerous species in Australia; humans. Australia has one of the best armies on the planet. Yes, humans from Australia are trying to kill you. The ANZACs especially aren't to be mocked.
  • Check out Aussies With Artillery for more info about the Australian Army and what they did/could do. Fortunately, Australians have only ever gone to war for three reasons: 1. the British called them; 2. the Japanese landed a battalion a little too close to home (in Indonesia); or 3. The USA let them tag along. So don't do any of those and the Army won't do a thing. Most of the time they're running around dealing with disasters at home.
• Ok, Australia, now you're just showing off.
• Summed up nicely here.
• A bit of Fridge Horror for at least one invading species in Australia: The Cane Toad. These toads not only thrive in Australia, they're actively taking over due to the poison they secrete which can kill the native predators with ease. The horror comes in on how the Toad, if it can survive Australia's extremes... HASN'T taken over the rest of the world yet?!
  • The predators of the South American jungle had a tolerance for its poison and kept its numbers low. Australian farmers gave it a paradise where nothing would eat it, thinking it would protect crops; it did not. No one duplicated that mistake.
    • Let's also not forget that maybe because of the Cane Toad, Australia has one of the world's strictest Biosecurity rules anywhere. They take it very VERY seriously with items that could potentially HARM the native ecosystem that is trying to kill them in the first place.
• So basically.
• Oh, and Australia used to own half of New Guinea. 8,000-foot razorback mountains, lush malarial jungles and so many rivers and ravines that the smallest tribes are cut off from each other (half the languages spoken on the entire planet are in New Guinea) and often used to be cannibalistic to survive. The area is so trackless that some highland tribes weren't discovered until planes flew over them in the 1930s. Next to, maybe, Afghanistan, it is the worst place in the world to fight a war — and the Japanese, Australians and Americans spent three years trying. During the Kokoda campaign alone, the Japanese starved on their way over the Owen-Stanley mountains, the Americans who marched over Ghost Mountain cut out the seat of their pants because of the diarrhea, and the Australian 18th Brigade took 96% casualties, mostly from exhaustion and disease.
• And now, on top of everything else, Australia has become the home of the world's only species of crustacean that is poisonous.

Real Life — The Rest

• Let's be realistic here: this is basically the daily life of every animal in the wild. They'll be lucky if they die of old age. And even the largest carnivores aren't always safe: humans might try to kill them too.
• Africa. The largest collection of large predators on a single continent, poisonous snakes like the Black Mamba? Even prey animals like the Cape Buffalo will seek out and kill you. Rhinos are known for charging without provocation and despite being an herbivore the hippopotamus bites so many people into pieces the Egyptians associated them with the evil god Set. It has the only species of driver ant regularly known to eat human beings but going smaller, the continent is really known for its parasites and diseases, though some of them are close to being wiped out as people have been smartening up to them over the centuries.
  • That said, every continent had a lot of giant predators, before we killed all of them off. It was long ago and our species forgot about it, which is why this misconception of Africa being unusual pops up. Or, in other words, every continent was a death world until we wrecked them.
  • Ha. Ha. Ha. If the parasites and bacteria start dwindling, don't worry: the virus brigade will take up the slack. With more people putting pressure on the natural environment, Africa is one of the key places that enterprising viruses can learn to jump the species barrier as they get more chance to practice. Africa: only slightly less deadly than Australia. Because we grew up there and killed some of it earlier: what isn't already dead is just that bit cannier at dealing with us. And, considering we, in all our extinction-making splendour, came from there in the first place...
• Very relevant to this trope. But especially the Japanese giant hornets and Africanized bees.
• Everything Trying to Kill You is a way of life for any Explosive Breeder found in nature.
• A disturbingly wide range of the plant life on Earth will kill or maim you if you touch or attempt to eat it. We eat things like shallots, onions, and garlic, but most of their relatives are dangerously toxic even to us (and we've got tough livers from our nearly-completely herbivorous ancestors). Every part of the tomato and potato plants except the parts we eat are dangerously toxic. Many people enjoy the leaf stalks of the rhubarb plant, but the leaves themselves can be lethal, and they have relatives that are dangerous to even touch. An Asian relative of the wild carrot, giant hogweed, is spreading across North America, and it has sap that, if it touches your skin, makes sunlight cause second- and third-degree burns. Have fun mowing the lawn.
• Fuel-air bombs. When one goes off, it spreads a fine aerosol of fuel droplets into the air, this mixture then leaks into every crevice and confined space (incl bunkers, caves etc). Then it is ignited into a consuming, blazing inferno. Thus the air itself kills you (and when it fails to ignite, the fuel used can be so toxic that you die a horrible, slower death by chemical weapon instead)
  • If explosives are eligible for this trope, then land mines also qualify. Put a foot wrong, and the freakin' ground will kill you.
• Utah. Want some water from our largest lake? Yeah, it's four times saltier than the ocean. Located right next to a desert where the ground is made of salt. Have fun getting to California!
  • The Mormons didn't choose to settle there, either. They had been trying to get to California, but Utah has one more little surprise: The slope out of the valley the above lake is in turns out to be just slightly too steep for the wagons the Mormons had to be gotten back out of it.
• Arizona. At first glance, it doesn't look nearly as bad as Australia; its desert areas has an abundance of vegetation (as opposed to the stereotype of deserts being barren) while its forested areas look outright inviting. Not bad at all right? Wrong. Let's start with the desert. Okay, you can easily die of sunstroke or frostbite (you heard right), as the desert is either really hot or really cold depending on the season. However, that's just for starters. Beside the climate, the desert is home to an abundance of species that could keep with Australian types; the obvious ones are the rattlesnakes, coyotes (which can travel in packs of dozens by the way), cougars, jaguars (yes, really), and spiders (anything from tarantulas to black widows to brown recluses), but there's also the likes of the peccary (think the Sonoran's take on a wild boar), tarantula hawk (talk about Names to Run Away from Really Fast) and gila monster (one of two known venomous lizards, so named for their temperament) to name a few. Alongside, the combination of abundant vegetation and dry air can easily cause massive wild fires that are near impossible to put out (no thanks to the limited water supply); even a blown out match is enough to ignite one (which has happened more than once). And that's not discounting the vegetation itself; while the plants^note which range from the stereotypical cacti to prickly pears and other types with large abundances of thorns aren't venomous like in Australia, they're lethal in their own myriad of ways. First, they can easily catch hold of loose clothing and effectively trap anyone against them (which means if you don't have a knife or easy-to-rip-or-takeoff clothing, then you're stuck, period); even a slight brush can often lead to ensnarement. Alongside that, said plants may or may not be home to one of the local animals listed above, as snakes, spiders and insects like to use them for shelter.
  • Large patches of a devious little cactus called the teddy-bear cholla litter the Sonoran Desert. From a distance, they look as cute and fuzzy as the name implies, but get too near and you'll find that those fuzzy looking spines mean business. Entire segments of the plant will break away so it can cling to your leg like a gigantic cocklebur, making large areas completely impassable.
  • And then there's the forest areas in northern Arizona, which nearly takes the trope Up To Eleven. You read about the climate above, right? Well, it can be just as hot or cold in the north, and water is just as limited; unless you're near a (man-made) lake, death by dehydration is just as likely to occur as in the Sonoran. And just like the aforementioned, the air tends to be very dry, which can easily cause forest fires (from so much as an excessively hot day). And finally, there's always the local wildlife, which pretty much includes everything listed above, only now with addition of bears alongside additional types of wildcats and arthropods. In short, if you want to go on a nature hike, best pack heavy firepower (preferably something in the rifle range) and lots and lots and lots of water.
• South Florida. When your home is near by one of the biggest swamps/marshes in the world where many kinds of deadly reptiles live either naturally or not, you kind of have a problem. Also, we have our very own Venom One team.
  • Also, on occasion, the ground tries to eat you, with one particularly unlucky man having a sinkhole open up in his own bedroom while staying with his brother. There's a section referred to as "Sinkhole Alley" due to the prevalence of this event there. Only in Florida...
    • This problem is exacerbated by the fact that most of the Florida peninsula is composed of a large, deep bed of limestone which is riddled with water-filled caves, and the limestone and the caves extend well into the ocean. Tides mix fresh and saltwater in the caves, which tends to dissolve limestone into the consistency of soft cheese before washing it away entirely. This can quickly convert an apparently stable region into a maze of sinkholes of unpredictable size and depth. (Places where this occurred during the last ice age, when sea level was much lower, can be seen in otherwise shallow water as the famous Blue Holes.)
• The Rest of Florida. Besides the concerns mentioned above: Bears, Alligators, serious Feral Python problem resulting from the pet trade, Coyotes, Sharks, Rattlesnakes, Killer Bees, Brain Eating Amoebas, Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Forest Fires, Floods and occasionally deadly High temperatures make up some of the natural threats. And then there's the people....The Florida Zombies , Serial Killers, really it's no wonder half the entries on the Only in Florida page involved someone in mortal peril.
• Oceans. Especially the cool, clear, tropical oceans. Scientists have found that a horrendous 89% of all life on pristine coral reefs—in other words those safe from us—are apex predators, most of which are large sharks. The open ocean is probably even more dangerous, as the lack of food means everything is a top predator and constantly starving, and therefore willing to do anything to make a kill. Just look up bait balls on You Tube and you can see that this is a literal Death World.
• Francis E Dec, although not entirely fitting in this category, claimed that everything and everyone is trying to kill him on the orders of the Gangster Computer God.
  Deadly poison nerve gas smoke was sprayed at me from CIGARS, CIGARETTES and even from BALL-POINT PENS also from the WIG of a woman sitting next to me, even the Swiss cheese-type ice cubes were evaporating into poison nerve gas smoke in all of the "free" drinks!
• There's a certain object which can, if directly viewed, cause lasting or permanent eye damage; its very nature can cause dermatitis, skin rashes, burning, cancer, and hyperthermia; it has been known to utterly obliterate anything which comes within a certain proximity... and best of all, there's no easy way to kill or destroy it. Ladies and gentlemen: the Sun.

old Knife Nut Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Despite the fact that nearly everyone else uses machine guns and other firearms, Chane Laforet of Baccano uses small throwing knives as her weapon of choice. She's skilled enough to deflect bullets and throw them with pinpoint accuracy.
• Basilisk has Akeginu, Hotarubi (from the Iga) and Kagerou (from the Koga) using knives as their Weapons of Choice, in addition to their own powers.
• In Berserk Judeau's weapon of choice is throwing knives. They're later incorporated into Guts's arsenal following his death in the Eclipse.
• Shenhua of Black Lagoon is as good with knives as Revy is with guns.
• After being blackmailed and broken by her teacher, Chizuru Honda of Bokurano started to carry a knife with her at all times. She threatens Kako with it when he's about to rape her in her house, and in the manga, she stabs him in the neck and slits his jugular with it when he freaks out during his battle. And before dying, she passes it down to Kirie, who later uses it to injure Hatagai.
• Played for Laughs in Carnival Phantasm with Grail-kun, whose response to everything is to give people a kitchen knife and tell them to stab their problems.
• In Cells at Work!, this is the Weapon Of Choice for Neutrophils like U-1146. Each of them possesses both smaller knives to be thrown at enemies and six larger combat knives strapped to their legs and hips.
• City Hunter: Saeko may be a good shot with a gun, but it's with her scalpel-like knives that she's really dangerous.
• Code Geass:
  • Kallen has a knife disguised as a wallet that she ends up pulling on several of the main characters. The only reason it doesn't show up more is that she's also The Ace.
  • Rolo Lamperouge's weapon of choice tends to be a switchknife that he uses combined with his Geass.
• Count Cain: Godchild's Cassian is a fan of throwing knives. He's actually a rather calm person, though.
• Hei from Darker than Black mostly uses knives and a retractable steel wire (used sort of like a cross between a whip and a Grappling-Hook Pistol). The knives are usually attached to said wire so even if a thrown knife doesn't kill someone (which is usually the case), he can still use it to zap them.
• Durarara:
  • Izaya is quite fond of using a switchblade (hidden under his sleeve) as his main weapon of choice. He even uses it to shave a man half bald at one point!
  • Haruna Niekawa, while possessed by Saika, uses one to stab people with in order to spread Saika's "children" before she snaps out of it.
• Throwing knives are Ken's specialty in The Daughter of Twenty Faces. It's worth noting that he isn't very "nutty" about it, however, just very good with throwable sharp objects.
• In Endride, both Felix and Mischa are intense, dangerous people and quick with the knives, both magical and mundane.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Maes Hughes uses push knives, adding to his status as Ensemble Dark Horse. His skill makes him the fastest to kill a homunculus, and he even does it twice. Of course Death Is Cheap... for them at least. He can throw his knives, which are not in any way suited toward throwing, to impale skulls. They're called push knives for a reason.
  • Barry the Chopper likes to cut up helpless people for fun, so he carries a giant meat cleaver and a couple of carving knives to help with the process.
  • Lan Fan and Fu are both adept in their use of knives, particularly kunai.
  • Fully justified for Mei Chang, because kunai are necessary for alkahestry. She can throw them five at a time with enough precision to create remote transmutation circles.
• Full Metal Panic:
  • Xia Yu Lan likes machetes, at one stage battling Melissa Mao with one in each hand. Even though Mao was armed with a rifle she was lucky to escape with her life.
  • Yu Lan's skill can be traced back to its origins: Gauron. After all, he was the one that took her in and trained and raised her. It's revealed in the novels that Gauron's Weapon Of Choice and specialty is knives. Sousuke learned this the hard way during his first fight with him.
• Future Diary's Yuno Gasai is a knife nut, which makes sense, because she's nuts in general.
• The Garden Of Sinners: Ryougi Shiki, despite her main ability being with swords, favours knives for the convenience of being able to carry them around unnoticed in public. The sixth movie pokes fun at this trope when Shiki steals a school dining hall knife only to be discovered by Azaka, who immediately takes it away from her. Shiki looked pretty sullen after losing it. In the novel, she then subverts this by pulling out the other knife she stole, once Azaka locks up the first one in her cabinet. She then reveals that the real reason she was sullen was that she wanted one to use, and one for a souvenir... not that a mere lock would have kept her away from it if she really wanted it, but still.
• Kuro(u)do(u) Akabane (aka Dr. Jackal) from Get Backers pulls off Diagonal Cuts in rapid succession with his (wait for it) scalpels, when he's not throwing them en masse ("Deadly Rain!"). And you don't want to know where he stores them...
• The Nightmare Fetishist narrator in Goth becomes one of these over the course of the series. He gets his first set of knives from a collection left behind in a home that a Serial Killer had abandoned and quickly becomes proficient with them, his own homicidal urges being a strong source of motivation.
• Colice from Gun Blaze West has throwing knives as her weapon of choice.
• Gunslinger Girl's Pinocchio (particularly the manga version) cites knives to be his favorite weapon.
• Gunsmith Cats: Professional Killer Natasha Radinov uses a Spetznaz knife that shoots its spring-loaded blade.
• Lin Xianming of Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens prefers knives, and even uses a knife pistol at one point.
• Asakura Ryouko, the Girl with Psycho Weapon in Haruhi Suzumiya. Worse yet, it's a combat knife with nasty spikes on the backside. And Asakura can be scary. Very scary.
• Alexander Anderson from Hellsing could be considered a Knife Nut, if you just replace knife with holy socket bayonets. Much like Akabane, he can shoot countless amounts of these blades with deadly accuracy and slice entire subway cars in half with them easily. In one author's note section, Hirano goes so far as to say that the reason Anderson can produce so many out of Hammerspace is because he's actually fourth-dimensional.

• Bell of Is It Wrong To Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon uses daggers.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Dio Brando of Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Stardust Crusaders is famous for his use of throwing knives. He can also stop time to make sure that they hit their target. He actually only used the knives during one fight, after just sort of finding them lying around, but they eventually became a symbol of the character. This clip visually sums up this trope so well, particularly the "nut" part.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind gives us Narancia Ghirga, who - despite having a stand that is best suited for long-range combat - is rather fond of threatening people with his trusty switchblade, mainly because of his Hair-Trigger Temper.
• Valmet from Jormungand, while not gun shy in the slightest, seems to enjoy opportunities to do some knife work. In fact, her solution to taking out a bullet-proof van chasing her car in the first chapter is to draw her blade and tell her driver to get closer.
• Kino of Kinos Journey is in one episode ordered to disarm at gun-point, and proceeds to spend a considerable amount of time pulling knives out of her clothes- and this from a character who also carries two pistols at all times. Said knives include one with a blade surrounded by four .22 firing chambers (an actual design, though without the Laser Sight). In the novels, Kino is shown to buy knives from nearly every shop she visits, often just because they "look pretty."
• Lyrical Nanoha:
  • Cinque comes equipped with an Eyepatch of Power and a set of exploding throwing knives, and had killed an S-Rank mage on one of her earlier missions. Generally not someone you want to mess with.
  • Corona's Intelligent Device, Brunzel, takes the form of a knife, though she never actually uses it as a bladed weapon. Instead, it acts as a Magic Wand to help her summon her Improvised Golems, and she fights barehanded whenever she gets at close range.
• Rin from Mnemosyne is virtually a female version of Hughes, barring the fact that she's immortal. Stoic Spectacles? Check. Investigative line of work? Check. Obfuscating Stupidity? Check. And of course, push knives? Check.
• Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and the Cosmic Era works in general:
  • The Strike Gundams' and Impulse Gundam's standard armaments include a pair of anti-armor combat knives stored in the hip portions of their armor. A pair of rocket-propelled ballistic knives (the "Stiletto") can be found in the same place on the Earth Alliance's mass-produced Dagger-L's and Windams, and a trio of those can be found on the shoulders of the Blu Duel. As the Strike Gundam's pilot, Kira makes use of the knives numerous times, while Mu La Flaga, as the Brainwashed and Crazy Neo Roanoake, uses a Stiletto to destroy the shield of Kira's Freedom Gundam a few years later.
  • For a specific example we have Gai Murakumo, the badass mercenary from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Astray. One of the plot points of the SEED universe is that mecha run off of finite batteries (rather than fusion reactors as in most other Gundam works), so many pilots prefer to have a non-powered weapon to preserve energy. While Gadgeteer Genius Lowe Guele prefers his "Gerbera Straight" katana, Gai's mecha almost always wield combat knives. His Astray Blue Frame takes it even further with its upgrades, with Blue Frame Second L gaining blades in its feet and the most recent iteration, Blue Frame D, being literally covered with Attack Drone knives with varying functions.
• Louis James Moriarty of Moriarty the Patriot favors knives as his Weapon Of Choice and finds himself in more than one Knife Fight. He's scary with them, too.
• My Hero Academia has a few examples:
  • The villain Stain, known as the "Hero Killer", uses several different types of knives in addition to his katana. Justified in that he has to cut his opponents and taste their blood in order to use his Quirk against them.
  • The villain Himiko Toga mainly fights with a switchblade, and in her costume she has more knives. Again Justified, as she too needs to drink blood to use her Quirk.
  • Spinner initially has a sword made up of knives. No reason here beyond him likely thinking it was cool and being a Stain fanboy, and after this sword gets destroyed he switches to a normal sword.
• Naruto:
  • Throughout the series, mass-produced, disposable kunai are commonly used by ninja.
  • Ten Ten carries thousands of knives and knife variants in her scroll which she summons and throws at high speed from midair.
  • Suigetsu is an Ax-Crazy rogue ninja who sees it as his goal in life to collect all seven blades of the Seven Shinobi Swordsmen.
• Chloe and Lady Silvana in Noir and Nakhl in Madlax (almost) never use any weapons other than ritual daggers in combat and are nigh undefeatable with them.
• One Piece:
  • Dracule "Hawk Eye" Mihawk kicks Zoro and his three sword technique's butt with a 4-inch manicure knife.
  • Not half the badass Mihawk is, but we briefly meet a villain named "Big Knife" Sarquiss because... well, his knife is really big.
  • Buggy the Clown has also shown a tendency to use knives.
• Popee the Performer is shown in several episodes, such as "Knife Thrower", to have extreme accuracy with knives... and by accuracy, it means he always ends up killing whatever is on the receiving end of that knife, including himself. In the aforementioned "Knife Thrower", Popee can't hit the apple on Kedamono's head, but he always hits Kedamono, and when Popee gets tired, he misses Kedamono and the knife bounces right into his own body.
• Reborn! (2004): Belphegor. He's a knife-wielding psychopathic assassin in the Varia.
• Tomonori Komori from Shadow Star not only carries a knife of his own, but his shadow dragon, aptly named Push Dagger, is also shaped like a giant knife.
• Obi of Snow White with the Red Hair has a dagger Zen gave him hanging sheathed from his belt, along with as many hidden throwing kunai and other smaller knives as he can fit in his current outfit on him at all times. He even sleeps with his knives.
• In Sword Art Online, Sugou Nobuyuki fights Kirito in the real world outside the hospital where Asuna just woke up from using a combat knife, but is ultimately defeated and is arrested by the police.
• Tokyo Ghoul:
  • Juuzou Suzuya. As a child, he was trained to butcher people for the amusement of upper-class Ghouls, and he carried those knife-skills into his work as a Ghoul Investigator. His original Quinque is Scorpion 1/56, a mass-produced knife, and this leads to a scene where he flips open his jacket to reveal he's been collecting the whole set. He proceeds to make a Human Pincushion out of his opponent using all 56 knives. In the sequel, Tokyo Ghoul:re, his prosthetic leg includes a compartment for hiding these blades.
  • :re has Mutsuki, who was trained by the aforementioned Juuzou. Emphasize "nut". Especially in the second half of the manga.
• Toriko:
  • Lady Chiyo is known for her delicacy when wielding kitchen knives. In fact, she's so delicate she can cut an animal (or person) to pieces and they don't even notice.
  • Komatsu possesses a knife forged from the tooth of a Derous Dragon and sharpened with Melk Stardust, making it so sharp that it can cut through mountains.
• Tsukihime:
  • Shiki Tohno is the prime example. Early in the story, he uses a fruit knife to cut someone into 17 pieces over the course of... one second. This isn't even touching his main ability; he can see the "concept of death" on anything under Gaia. Cutting the lines causes irreversible (and often dismembering) damage; striking the very center of something's "meaning of existence" ends its lifespan, destroying it so completely only memory remains. He could actually cut the lines or points with anything from a pencil to a corkscrew, because it's just a matter of tracing lines with something sharp for him. But since Shiki prefers his knife over everything else, and because of certain sides of himself that he's not initially aware of, he's the ultimate example. Despite being a carefree, somewhat-irresponsible goof. Shiki even mentions that, for him, there can be no other weapon than the knife. Fortunately, the knife suits his fighting style very well and his ability to erase anything with a single precise stab.
  • When trapped in a dreamworld, Shiki's swisscheesed and patchwork memories, unique heritage, and personal fears of himself lead to the creation of an evil reflection of himself called "Nanaya", with whom he has some crazy knife-fights in Kagetsu Tohya. In Melty Blood, "Nanaya" later makes a reappearance, but in the real world, thanks to The Night of Wallachia's rumor-materializing power.
  • Roa also fights with a knife... mainly because his host wants to. Roa, having gone through reincarnation so many times, can actually see the "life" in living things, similar to how Shiki sees "the end" in anything.
• Vinland Saga: Daggers were Thorfinn's Weapon Of Choice for close combat pre time-skip, but he is good at throwing knives too.
• Violence Jack. Due to not remembering his name, he named himself after his signature jackknife. His real name is Akira Fudo.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: Yami Malik/Marik has a fondness for using the concealed dagger in the Millennium Rod.

• Humongous Mecha that rely largely on Humongous Combat Knives include Arm Slaves, EVA units (especially Asuka and Unit 02), Terminus-Class LFOs, and basic Aestivalis frames. Mecha with combat knives demonstrate all the fun melee tropes you see in Super Robot Sword Fights while being more "realistic". All of these examples also come with machine guns, however, the guns are mostly useless unless fighting mooks.

Comic Books

• In Asterix, Brutus is usually seen playing with a knife as foreshadowing to a certain event between him and Caesar. Caesar, at one point, tells him to put it away before he hurts himself.
• Batman:
  • Victor Zsasz. His signature weapon is a carving knife.
  • Dagger, a minor member of Batman's Rogues Gallery, who once disabled the Batmobile with a single well-aimed thrown knife.
  • In Batman R.I.P., the Joker makes frequent, borderline fetishistic use of twin switchblades to mutilate not just enemies and loose allies, but himself.
  • Knife, an assassin from Batwoman (Rebirth), uses throwing knives as her primary weapon (as if her name didn't give it away).
• Blade. Seriously, he's called that for a pretty good reason. He isn't crazy, but he's plenty scary and deadly accurate in throwing blades, not to speak of his swordsmanship.
• Mack "Clownface" Delgado in Body Bags doesn't need a gun, because he's "learned how to throw a knife at a velocity that makes its impact like a mortar round." In addition to that trick, he's been shown to perform a Diagonal Cut on two guys in one swipe and cut a gun in half.
• Corporal "Smiler" Dawson from Commando's "Convict Commandos" series. He has any number of knives up his sleeves which he can throw by means of spring-loaded feeders. He's an expert shot with his De Lisle carbine, too.
• Zolo of Copperhead has a large, curved knife he uses to menace captives that's clearly his signature weapon, if not the one he uses most commonly.

• Here's some obscure ones from DC Comics: The assassins Hellhound, Brutale, and Lady Vic all make use of a variety of knives, as does the serial killer Murmur. Wonder Woman occasionally ran into a mercenary who called herself Moot, who favored a stiletto she called "The Moot Point". On the heroes' side, Nightblade and Black Condor II are both noted as skilled knife throwers.
• Examples from Diabolik:
  • The namesake Villain Protagonist. Justified by his preference and need for stealth (why he Doesn't Like Guns) and being so good at throwing it he rarely miss and can brag that nobody will stand back up after being hit by his thrown knife (In fact, the one time someone survived without wearing armour was when he had to use a paper knife. It still brought down the victim, as it did reach the heart, the wound just wasn't deep enough to kill him on the spot until the victim's son arrived and pushed it down.). Also note that Diabolik carries custom knives that in-universe are extremely good as tools, melee weapons, and projectiles (even when shot by a crossbow). Sometimes the knives also contain a strange gadget, including one to shoot the blade (Justified again: He's been held at gunpoint by enemies and got away with this).
    
    Knives are so associated with Diabolik that the second reprint collection uses the thrown knives' "Swiisss" in the title, and part of the celebration for the first fifty years of publications was Italian knife-maker Maserin producing Diabolik's iconic knives (fans have verified they're really good for throwing).
  • Ronin, the world's greatest smuggler, was one. How good was he? He once hit a bullseye without aiming, and when the guys he was teaching how to throw knives expressed their admiration he simply asked them if they needed to take aim to pick up something with their hands. He was one of Diabolik's Evil Mentors, and under him the future King of Terror became as good as he is (He was already pretty good, just nowhere in the same league as Ronin. Now he's just as good if not better.), and copied the style of his knives.
• Many members of the G.I. Joe team (as well as Cobra) are skilled with knives, but Snake-Eyes has collections of them. His spike-knuckled trench knives get mentioned more than a few times during the Marvel Comics run alone, and his third costume (assembled from parts taken from his Cobra interrogators) has a pair of knives mounted right on his chest.
• Slice from the revival of Harlem Heroes favours knives and carries a ridiculous number of them around at any one time. When a rival gang holds the Heroes up and gets them to drop their weapons, Slice starts chucking dozens of knives out of his pockets.
  "He's heeled with more blades than a cutlery store!"
• Johnny C. from Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is this trope. The guy detests guns, and twin daggers are his trademark weapon of choice (though he does use a taser occasionally).
• Hit-Girl from Kick-Ass adores butterfly knives and swords, although she is a pretty good shot as well.
• Laal Khanjeer, a Pakistani Badass Normal superhero who makes occasional guest appearances in Ms. Marvel, has a hero name that actually translates as "Red Dagger". Although he's an expert knife thrower, he doesn't appear to be crazy or mean (actually, he's written as a Nice Guy), and he hasn't actually yet been shown to use his blades on a living target. His Improbable Aiming Skills do make for intimidating entrances and are effective on inanimate objects, though.
• The Corinthian, in his first appearance as a villain in The Sandman, seems very fond of knives. This is both for creepy purposes (menacing a victim with one in his hand, taking a felled mugger's switchblade and opening it in front of his face while commenting on how nice a knife it is...) and for much more practical ones.
• Hondo Karr of Star Wars: Legacy is a Stormtrooper that favors twin vibrodaggers.
• Superman:
  • In New Krypton, both General Zod and his equally insane wife, Ursa, carried knives with Green Kryptonite blades for use against their fellow Kryptonians.
  • In The Strange Revenge of Lena Luthor, Greg Gilbert is attacked by a mobster's enforcer who readily pulls a switchblade out as threatening him.
• Raphael of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles uses sais as his Weapon Of Choice. Well, he calls them sais, but real life sais aren't sharp.
• Van Grote, a Hessian Torture Technician from Tomahawk #112 who fancies himself the finest knife thrower in Europe.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Sensation Comics: Mimi Mendez's weapon of choice is a massive amount of throwing knives, which she enjoys tossing near her prisoners until she gets bored of them and lands one in their eye or heart.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): P'Q'Rort Antar Ftt B'Jan hides throwing knives up his sleeves that he's always eager to use in addition to the knife at his belt.
• X-Men:
  • Warpath dual-wields knives made of vibranium as his signature weapons in X-Force. Noteworthy in that he is not Ax-Crazy at all.
  • Short-time X-Man and heroic sociopath Marrow almost always uses bone knives which grow from her own body as weapons. She is drawn with them on nearly each cover she appears on.

Comic Strips

• Saxon Kenchu in Candorville collects knives, and at one point gives a speech about how they were the first weapons ever developed and they allowed humanity to triumph over a world full of hostile predators. He initially seems Ax-Crazy, but this is partially subverted—having to survive as a Dhampyr has left him Properly Paranoid and somewhat hardened, but he's a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire and is trying to keep the main character alive.
• Willie Garvin in Modesty Blaise, who is a horrible shot with a handgun but a dead aim with thrown knives.

Fan Works

• Judge Rawne in the Dredd fanfic Aegis. Teaches knife fighting at the Academy of Law, has a display of knives in his office, and is the best knife fighter in the city. Word of God is that he is named after the Major in Gaunt's Ghosts. Makes the mistake of bringing a knife to a fist fight.
• Jago from Ah! Archfall!. He generally has at least four on him (and he prefers his khukuri to his sword as a primary weapon).
• The Teacher Creature becomes this after being unmasked in Attack of the Teacher Creature.
• In the Italian remake of Battle Fantasia Project, Michiru Kaioh is noted in training to be extremely good with a knife, even if she never used it in combat (after all, it wouldn't have done much to what she usually fights). Nobody dares to ask her where she learned.
• In Between My Brother and Me: Mors Omnibus, Yvonne Maxa's Weapon Of Choice is a knife. She uses a variety of them, each of them depending on her attire: She uses two barbed daggers when dressed as Caiha, a stiletto as Jason the Toymaker, and her main knife is a switchblade that just so happens to be the one used by the mob boss that wanted to murder her.
• Peggy Carter, apparently, in Bucky Barnes Gets His Groove Back & Other International Incidents. The prequel short story reveals that she's into knifeplay, and she has a grand old time dragging the flat of her knife across Bucky's face and watching it turn him on.
• In Coveralls, Scully acts a lot more unhinged than normal and has a "knife office".
• In Fate/Parallel Fantasia, False Assassin's main weapon is a knife. It's not actually the weapon she's most skilled with, but rather the weapon which is most closely associated with her legend.
• Bucky Barnes in Infinite Coffee and Protection Detail loves knives. Their ease of concealment may have something to do with this, since he's trying to blend in with the civilian population but he isn't about to go unarmed.
• Kage: Jade has gained the ability to summon an apparently limitless number of kunai and shuriken from Hammerspace.
• Indigo Jack, one of the main protagonists of A More Flawed Gem, uses a simple butterfly knife in contrast with his classmates' more exotic weaponry.
• In Nightblade, Rythin chooses a dagger when he first logs in to Sword Art Online. It's only after he gets the titular Nightblade that he truly embraces this trope, however.
• In Old West, two of the antagonists, Ramirez Arvenga and Kepper, fight with knives. The former is fond of using his knife in collecting Creepy Souvenirs, while the latter is unhinged and carries with him every kind of knife imaginable. He's even known by the trope name.
• The Pieces Lie Where They Fell: Xvital the ahuizotl always carries a knife on her, which she wields with her tail hand.

• While not a psychotic example, Crow from The Sage's Disciple uses a married pair of magical knives as his main armament. Made from a stag's antlers and imbued with the concept of "purification", they work similarly to a low-powered combination of Black Keys and an Origin Bullet.
• In Storm on the Horizon, Max makes a knife into her Weapon Of Choice instead of a spear like Aloy's after she winds up in the future. Aloy is impressed after she manages to take down a Scrapper using only a knife and her time travel powers.
• Snow White in So Rot Vie Blut frequently toys with a knife and is into unsafe knifeplay during sex. Even from a young age she showed an interest in the weapon.
• In A Thing of Vikings, both Alvin and Heather are Knife Nuts, in contrast to their characterization from the TV series, but justified as Alvin is more of a credible threat, and he trained Heather. At one point, Alvin visits a former ally and notes that he has a dozen knives hidden around the room when he gets up to leave, and Heather performs an Extended Disarming as proof of her martial skills and for comedy, showing that she's carrying at least half a dozen knives on her person (excluding the last one, strapped someplace where only her lover usually sees it).
• Yognapped's Minecraftia is filled with swords carved from solid diamond, yet Sben still insists on using his personal dagger. Justified in that it's stated to be diamond-edged.

Films — Animation

• Blackburn the Professional Killer from Boogie is an expert wielding his twin curved knives, which he uses to massacre an entire hotel full of people. His flashback also shows him killing rival mobsters with this very weapon, including a few he halved from the waist.
• Lord Shen, the Big Bad of Kung Fu Panda 2, is dangerously skilled in the use of feather-shaped throwing knives that he conceals in his own feathers.
• A non-villainous example is Vitaly the tiger from Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted, who also uses throwing knives, although he is skilled with any sharp, pointy object. He uses them to threaten the main characters early in the movie and later throws them as stepping stones to help another circus animal escape Captain DuBois.
• Peter Pan consistently wields a dagger, and is able to match the rapier-wielding Hook in combat with it.
• Colette in Ratatouille, revealed when she "briefs" Linguini. She's never killed anyone (so far as we know), but is a bit disarmingly comfortable around knives. Well, she is a professional chef.
• Mother Gothel in Tangled is shown using knives to threaten people and actually uses it on Flynn.

Films — Live-Action

• Avatar: Colonel Quaritch doesn't go in for half-measures; he outfits his AMP Suit with a freakin' huge combat knife.
• Barbarella: The insane Black Queen of Sogo wields two double-bladed knives quite adeptly, and she drives them through Barbarella's attackers.
• Berkshire County: The intruders tend to use knives as their primary weapons.
• Beyond Sherwood Forest: Will Scarlet is a butcher by trade, and an expert with knives of all kinds.
• Cherry Falls: The killer has all sorts of knives, including ballistic knives where the blade can be fired out of the handle.
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Lucy Pevenise’s dagger (a gift from Father Christmas) is given much more prominence than its literary counterpart.
  • The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: At Aslan’s Camp she’s shown using the dagger as a throwing weapon, easily hitting the bullseye on a target.
  • Prince Caspian: Lucy carries the dagger with her throughout her adventure, wielding it against the rebellious dwarf Nikabrik and as a show of intimidation against the Telmarine army.
  • The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: The dagger is returned to Lucy when she arrives onboard the Dawn Treader. Pulled in defense against an invisible foe (later revealed to be dufflepuds) but is quickly disarmed.
• The Chronicles of Riddick: Kyra and Riddick use a lot of knives throughout the film. though they're not above using guns if necessary.
• Circus: Troy and Roscoe favour knives for threatening their victims. When threatening Leo, Roscoe opens his jacket to show the inside is lined with knives.
• Conan the Destroyer: Malak, Conan's thief sidekick and lancer is skilled with knives, able to both throw them accurately and cleanly slit a man's throat from behind.
• "Crocodile" Dundee: The eponymous character always carries a gigantic hunting knife around with him as a trademark. When a New York mugger tries to menace him with a switchblade, Dundee is famously unimpressed and presents his own, saying, "That's not a knife! That's a knife!" in his Broad Strine.
• The Crow: Tin-Tin, whose predilection for knives is so great that he's the only gangster in all of Detroit who doesn't carry a gun. In a bit of cruel irony, Eric uses these same knives to take Tin-Tin's life (and his jacket) after beating him in a fight.
• Cyborg (1989): Van Damme awesomely uses dozens of knives as he carves his way through gangs and bandits in an After the End setting.
• The Dark Knight: The Joker carries a number of knives on him. He states that they're his preferred weapon because he can savor his victims' subtle changes in expression as they die. He even carries a potato peeler.
• The Desolation of Smaug: When the Company is taken into custody by the Mirkwood elves and searched for weapons, Fili is shown to be carrying an improbable number of knives concealed on his person.
• Dick Tracy, Detective: Splitface hacks his victims to death with a surgeon's knife stolen from an undertaker.
• Dust Devil: It's the Dust Devil's weapon of choice when he cuts up his victims.
• El Dorado: Mississippi (James Caan) is brilliant with throwing knives (in his first scene he goes face to face with a gunman across a table and kills him before can bring his gun up).
• Elysium: Aside from being a fan of katanas, Kruger has a big combat knife strapped across his chest, plus explosive shurikens. He also uses a shard of broken glass to kill Delacourt.
• The Expendables:
  • Christmas, who gets into occasional discussions with Stallone's character over the age-old "guns vs. knives" debate.
  • Gunnar also uses a huge bowie knife, but it doesn't get much usage until the end.
• From Beyond the Grave: In "The Gatecrasher", the ghost that confronts Edward in his vision is carrying half a dozen knives in his belt, and uses one of them to stab Edward. Later, under his influence, Edward commits all his murders with a knife.
• Gamera vs. Guiron: A rather unusual example is Guiron. His own head is a giant knife which he uses to slice his enemies to pieces.
• Gang of Roses: Maria is inordinately fond of throwing knives and uses them instead of a handgun.
• Gangs of New York: Bill "The Butcher" Cutting, who is a gang leader and a professional butcher who practices knife-fighting on meat. The character was based on a real gang leader/butcher called Bill "The Butcher" Poole.
• Halloween: Perhaps the greatest example of a knife-wielding murderer in film history is Michael Myers. Sure, tons of movie murderers use knives, but none as iconic as Myers.
• The Hobbit: Throughout the film trilogy, Fili carries a ridiculous amount of blades and knives.
• Hooded Angels: Psycho Lesbian Ellie is obsessed with knives. She starts the massacre of the Posse by stabbing one of the deputies with a stiletto she keeps in her boot. Afterwards, she makes certain they are all dead by slitting their throats with a Bowie knife. She takes her time over the first one, obviously relishing it, until Hannah tells her quit wasting time and get on with it.
• Hostile: Juliette flags down a vehicle by blaring her van horn at it. When the guys in the van come for her, one of them comes at her with a knife.
• House of Flying Daggers: Throwing knives are the signature weapon of the eponymous underground rebel group, and feature in some very impressive camera shots.
• Hudson Hawk: Alfred the Battle Butler has spring-loaded knives hidden under his sleeves, which eventually lead to his death.
• The Hunger Games: Clove, the female tribute from District 2, is highly skilled with throwing knives and becomes one of Katniss Everdeen's fiercest opponents in the arena.
• The Hunted (2003): Could be more appropriately titled "Ode to Knife Nuts". For the final fight, the two fighters subconsciously agree to stop the chase just long enough to chip/sharpen their own. Then they rip each other to freaking shreds.
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Mutt and his switch-blade, which he can be seen playing around with in a couple scenes.
• Inglourious Basterds: Lt. Aldo Raine and Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz love their knives. Stiglitz's knife even has the phrase "My Honor is Loyalty" engraved on it, which is ironic since he is a German traitor who killed thirteen Nazi officers. Presumably it's an SS-issue dagger.
• Intruder: The killer is fond of using huge kitchen knives.
• Joshuu Sasori: Matsu favours a common kitchen knife generally, or on occasion a tanto or a scalpel.
• Kick-Ass: Has a scene where Mindy (aka Hit-Girl), when asked what she wants for her birthday, replies (after first worrying her father by pretending to want a puppy and a doll) that she'd love "a Benchmade Model-42 Butterfly Knife". On the day in question, she receives a matching set of them and is overjoyed. She even proceeds to demonstrate just how good she is with them in a display of twirling.
• Kill Bill: Vivica A. Fox's character "Copperhead" is apparently a knife nut. The Bride seems to know this about her and chooses to face her in a knife fight rather than bring along her Cool Sword. Once they reach an impasse, they make plans to square off in a second knife fight. Although Copperhead ultimately tries to shoot the Bride with a hidden gun, she's apparently a terrible shot and misses her at point blank range. Shoulda stuck with the knives.
• Knife for the Ladies: The Ripper's weapon of choice is a large hooked knife.
• Last Flight to Hell: Reb Brown's character is a heroic example, but about as sane as any Reb Brown character.
  Spoony: It's not quite as fun as watching Reb loudly massacre people with a heavy machine gun hefted under one arm, but you can't complain about Reb murdering people with knives.
• Life Gamble: Has two Anti-Hero protagonists whom are both knife nuts skilled in throwing knives, and the climax involves both of them in a throwing-knife duel.
• The Locals: homicidal farmer Bill favours the knife, and all of his kills are made with one.
• Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels: Soap reveals that he has a collection of large knives ("big fuck-off shiny ones"), and delivers a speech about how they're more practical than guns because they're quiet, concluding, "Guns for show, knives for a pro." The rest of the gang is creeped out. As the sole member of the group with an honest trade, this is both ironic and fitting. His job as a cook would presumably make him comfortable with knives and butchering.
• The Lord of the Rings: When his bow isn't practical (which, given his skill, isn't often), Legolas brings out a pair of fine elven knives.
• The Losers: Roque is the resident knife man, first confirmed when, while the others are betting their various souvenir weapons, he continues to bet bigger and bigger knives. It reaches a rather ridiculous zenith when they even task him with cutting loose tied up people he'd rather not merely because he's "the knife guy".
• Machete: Robert Rodriguez often casts Danny Trejo with these types of roles, most famously in this film.
• The Magnificent Seven (1960): Britt's (James Coburn) weapon of choice is a throwing knife. His introduction to the audience is him being forced into a face-off against a guy who fancies himself a gunslinger: his gun against Britt's throwing knife. Britt wins. This isn't to say that he's not also a very good marksman with a gun.
• The Magnificent Seven (2016): Billy Rocks has dozens of knives on him. He kills more people with them than he does with his guns. His attempt to instruct the townsfolk in the basic principles of knife-fighting does not go so well.
• The Matrix Reloaded: The Twins initially fight with straight razors.

• The Men Who Stare at Goats: Ben Echmeyer briefly demonstrates his "shock and awe" knife technique with two bayonets from his knife collection. Among other skills.
• Near Dark: Diamondback is a serious knife enthusiast and ace knife thrower. She's useful to her gang, as vampirism in this movie is hard, messy work.
• Nightbreed: The serial killer Dr. Decker prefers to use huge carving blades to kill his victims, often appearing with one in each hand. He's briefly seen in his apartment with an entire collection of knives and blades laid out in front of him on a conference-style table.
• Night School (1981): The killer's weapon of choice is a kukri.
• Pacific Rim: Hannibal Chau has his butterfly knife, which he's quite proud of and adept with.

• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time: Saso, though he doesn't limit himself solely to knives.
• The Professional: Leon explicitly postulates that the better you are, the closer you can get to your victim: sniper rifles are for beginners, and only a real pro uses a knife.
• Psycho: In the scary category, the shower scene of Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece involves a screaming woman, a big knife, and scary music.
• Pulp Fiction: Mia Wallace describes her character from Fox Force Five as the knife nut of the group.

• Rambo: Rambo just can't live without one. He actually makes a knife himself in the fourth film.
• Razors: The Return of Jack the Ripper: Jack the Ripper uses a box set of knives, each of which has a special meaning to him. The knives are so much a part of him that they constitute an Evil Weapon and allow his spirit to return to Earth.
• Repo! The Genetic Opera:
  • Luigi Largo. He's known to have sex with the stab wounds he's inflicted, among other delightful things.
  • The Repo Man himself, though his "companion" technically makes him a Scalpel Nut.
• Ripper: Letter from Hell: The killer's Weapon Of Choice is a large butcher's knife.
• Scream: Every killer that takes the mantle of Ghostface. Has almost always used a rather unique Buck 120 hunting knife, although how they appear usually changes quite a bit. An interesting fact about the Buck 120 is that it was seen on the film posters of Friday the 13th 4, 7 and 8. The knife's appearance on these iconic horror film posters may be why it was chosen as Ghostface's primary weapon.
• Se7en: Detective Somerset is a completely sane heroic example, always carrying a switch blade wherever he goes and practicing throwing it at night.
• The Sentimentalswordsman: Li the "Flying knife", who alway carry up to a dozen throwing knives which always find their mark, fitting his nickname.

• Sha Po Lang:
  • Jack, the psychotic Triad assassin played by Wu Jing, does most of his killings with his tanto knife.
  • Ah Zai, the evil browless assassin from the sequel, does knives as well. His weapons of choice are folding knives that he uses both for melee and for throwing. He ultimately faces down Chan Chi-Kit, who is played by Wu Jing, in a furious duel that is reminiscent of Jack's final battle with Ma Kwun from the first movie.
• Sherlock Holmes:
  • Holmes poses as one infiltrate Moriaty's gang in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace. When Charles pats him down, he pulls a large number of knives out of his pockets.
  • In The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Beppo is an expert with the switchblade he carries.
• Sockbaby: Though initially he might seem to be a wacky ninny, Davis The Grey is still deadly with a switchblade. He uses one to murder Burger in the car and steal Sock Baby while Ronny is distracted, and very nearly defeats Ronny with it.
• Special Female Force: The Dragon Lung is a deranged Sadist that favors using a wicked-looking serrated knife as his weapon. Right in his first scene in the Action Prologue, he's seen practicing his skills by scattering a box of cockroaches all over the road he's sitting on, and then using his knife to skewer roaches. Later his Hand Stomp method on the heroine who's Hanging by the Fingers is to gleefully drive his knife underneath her fingernails, slowly tormenting her until the pain gives away, causing her to fall to her death.
• Summer Camp Nightmare: Stanley Runk (a.k.a. Runk the Punk) is rarely seen without his hunting knife, which he uses throughout the movie, including when he accidentally murders the Camp North Pines director Mr. Warren with it.
• Suspect Zero: Serial Killer O'Ryan uses a long, curved dagger as his Weapon Of Choice, both for killing his victims and his signature of removing their eyelids.
• Swashbuckler: Cudjo, a knifethrowing rogue who helps the main character stage a revolution against the Big Bad Governor Durant.

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014): Shredder, as per usual. His Powered Armor has several retractable blades per arm, and he can even pull them out to make a double-edged blade. The suit can also fire the blades, and bring them back with magnets...
• Thor: Loki is able to throw small knives with unerring aim (also displayed in The Avengers).
  • In Thor: The Dark World, Thor: Ragnarok, and Avengers: Infinity War, he fights with longer daggers that he sometimes holds in Reverse Grip and/or Dual Wields.
• Versus: The Yakuza leader wields switchblades.
• V for Vendetta: V carries an arsenal of knives under his cloak.
• Visiting Hours: Colt Hawker prefers using his trusty switchblade to kill his female victims.
• Wanted: The Butcher is the knife instructor for the Fraternity, pointing out that knives don't jam or run out of ammo. His words are backed up beyond all expectation when he shows his ability to deflect bullets by slicing them in midair.

• X-Men Film Series:
  • Azazel from X-Men: First Class. Add the teleporting, and it's a deadly combination.
  • Warpath from X-Men: Days of Future Past wields two knives.
• Yamato Takeru: Oto Tachibana is heroic, but still maybe a bit too quick to throw a knife at someone if she thinks they deserve it. In addition, her main weapon (besides Playing with Fire) is a couple of longer knives that lock together to form a Battle Boomerang.
• You Might Be the Killer: The killer's weapon of choice is a jagged knife which appears to have been fashioned from a crocodile jaw.
• Zombie Strippers!: Rincon.
  Rincon: I like knives.

Gamebooks

• In Deathtrap Dungeon, one of the contestants is an Elf who wears a bandolier of daggers and those are her only weapons, which leads to her downfall.
  • Your character is a bit knifey. He's so enamored with a dagger of reddish metal and opal-studded hilt that he plunges his hand in a pit of large maggots to get it (it is a very pretty dagger). Also if he tries to save the dying Elf from getting crushed by a giant snake, he'll take one of her daggers as a Tragic Keepsake.
• In Wizards, Warriors and You, while the Warrior has the Sword of the Golden Lion as his main - he's also a master with a knife. One of his weapons is the Devil's Dagger which no one knows if it's magical or not because he's that skilled with it. Against a troll swordsmaster with an enchanted sword, the Warrior will die if he uses the Sword of the Golden Lion, but he'll win if he uses the Devil's Dagger. Later in the series the Warrior gets a dagger made from a dragon's tooth.
• In Spire Ablaze by Jeffrey Dean and Greek Winter Media, this print version of the video game book has your character able to use knives. The odd thing is that he only uses knives as throwing weapons, including a survival knife that he can requisition from the Technomancer Guild. Not once does he ever slash someone with his knives, it's all about tossing them and then pulling out a gun.

Literature

• All Tomorrow's Parties:
  • The Taoist assassin Konrad, who takes meticulous care of his tanto, practices an Argentine school of knife fighting considered mythical within the setting, and is ridiculously deadly with his blade.
  • While not knife nuts per se, Rydell and Chevette wind up carrying a ceramic switchblade and a knife with a pattern-welded blade made from the drive chain of a 1952 Vincent Black Lightning, respectively. Both are used at crucial points in the plot.
• Angels of Music: Rollo is the knife-thrower in Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in "Guignol" who is dismissed for collaborating a little too willingly with the horrors. He returns in "Deluge" equipped with dozens of blades and looking to extract vengeance on the Angels by skinning them.
• The Apprentice Rogue: Black Knights prefer short weapons like daggers and short swords to a BFS because it would conflict with their fighting style.
• In The Belgariad, Silk, Liselle, Sadi, Relg and Beldin all have a fondness for knives in combat. Silk usually carries at least three or four, Sadi poisons his, and Relg's has all sorts of sticky-out bits ^note That's a technical term. that do all kind of nasty things both on the way in and on the way out again. Beldin's have hooks. Liselle is straightforward and discreet about hers, at least compared to the others. She only carries a couple of small, simple daggers.
• Each member of the Black Dagger Brotherhood gets a custom-made, matched-to-the wielder set of black knives, perfect for stabbing the Lessening Society members back to the Omega. They are hand forged (literally) by Vishous.
• Isaac Asimov's "Breeds There a Man...?": Inspector Darrity always carries a switchblade. He uses it to clean underneath his fingernails and to have something to play with in his hands.
• In A Brother's Price, it's said of the Whistlers going to court that Summer carries one six-shooter and three knives, Corelle carries no knives but two six-shooters and a derringer, and Eldest matches Summer with knives, Corelle with guns, and also carries two pairs of brass knuckles and a wire garrote. Even Jerin has a knife.
• In Andrew Vachss's Burke books, Michelle is said to be very fast with a straight razor.
• The Camp Half-Blood Series:
  • Annabeth from Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Knives are used by clever fighters according to Luke, and since she is a child of Athena, she uses one as her weapon of choice.
  • Piper from The Heroes of Olympus takes Katoptris, the knife once owned by Helen of Troy, as her Weapon Of Choice. The knife has prophetic powers (it can predict future events when looked at) and is supposed to be used for scrying, but can be used as a weapon just as much.
• Circleverse: Former thief Briar Moss always has a few daggers on him. Seems to be Tamora Pierce's favorite weapon for commoners.
• Alex from A Clockwork Orange carries a straight razor, or as he terms it, his "fine starry horrorshow cut-throat britva".
• Osprey in Devil's Cape uses special knives strapped to her fists as her primary weapon.
• Terry Pratchett's Discworld series features a multitude:
  • Jonathan Teatime is a knife-wielding, psychopathic assassin in Hogfather.
  • Carcer Dun is a knife-wielding, psychopathic Serial Killer who always has an extra one.
  • Pteppic is a certified assassin and Pharaoh of Djelibebyi. When he finds out that his "companion" feels naked without her many bracelets, he has to admit that he feels naked without his knives.
  • Assassins in general are known to conceal so many knives on their person that they could qualify as a live-in kitchen.
  • In Jingo, Carrot runs across a knife nut boy. After a brief interview, Carrot discovers that the boy does not have enough gum to share with his playmates, but has more than enough knives for everyone.
  • Lord Vetinari keeps a drawer full of sharp, pointy greetings for rude callers.
  • In Carpe Jugulum, Shawn Ogg is in charge of development of the Lancrastian Army Knife. Mainly Played for Laughs here.
• Amy in Dorothy Must Die uses this as her Weapon Of Choice.
• In Dracula, Quincey Morris carries around a large bowie knife as part of his characterization as an American cowboy. Later he's upstaged by Arthur Holmwood, who busts out a kukri from his days in the military.
• In Dragaera, the knife is often the preferred weapon of Jhereg assassins, such as Vlad Taltos, who keeps a small arsenal of them hidden about his person. He uses quite a bit of throwing knives, but they're mostly useful as distractions: they hit hilt first, make the other guy flinch, or just make a minor wound. His wife Cawti is a fellow assassin who is known as "The Dagger of the Jhereg".
• The Dresden Files:
  • "Gentleman" John Marcone seems to materialize them from thin air and is very good with them.
  • Vittorio Malvora also uses them. Harry points out that when you've had centuries to practice and can launch them at a hundred miles per hour, you make up for the fact that thrown knives aren't particularly good weapons. Hell, even when one misses the hit from handle causes Harry's hand to go numb.
• The Fremen of Arrakis from the Dune series are a society of knife nuts. Every man, woman, and adolescent wields a curved crysknife made from the tooth of a 400 meter-long sandworm, and they train their lives to become impossibly deadly with it. They practically worship their knives. For instance, their knives are never allowed to leave the planet, anyone who owns one cannot leave the planet without their permission, and any outsider who sees the blade of a crysknife must either be cleansed or killed. Their obsession comes in surprisingly handy given that shields have made melee combat the standard for infantry soldiers.
• In The Edge, Declan is quick with his blades and has a canvas roll of knives he cleans regularly. The little boy Jack is awed by the display. Later Declan baits a trap for Jack with a particular knife he'd been eyeing, and then bribes him into cooperating with the knife.
• Blade from the Endworld series carries a pair of Bowie knives that he loves obsessively on his person at all times.
• In the Fingerprints series, one villain says the memorable lines, "I wonder how many cuts it will take you to die? I bet thousands and thousands..."
• A number of characters from Joe Abercrombie's The First Law series fall into this category, most notably Logen Ninefingers and, to a lesser degree (or, at least, to a less obsessive degree), Ferro Maljinn. One of Logen's many Catch Phrases is, "You can never have too many knives."
• The Ysabel Kid from J.T. Edson's Floating Outfit series is an expert with the Bowie knife.
• Almost everyone in the titular unit of the Gaunt's Ghosts books is able to use a knife well. In particular, Rawne's skill with them is demonstrated through the conspicuous aversion of There Will Be Toilet Paper when using his straight silver to shave in Ghostmaker.
• The original novel version of Goth has several of these.
  • The café owner uses a case of knives to carry out his murders. After deducing the café owner's identity, Itsuki takes the knives for himself. He later lends one knife to a little girl so that she can kill her abusive stepfather with it.
  • Mr. Shinohara uses a meat cleaver to cut off the hands of his victims.
• Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book plays this trope, ahem, to the hilt in its very first line, using it to draw the reader in and establish a frightening mood.
• Hannibal by Thomas Harris: Doctor Lecter knows his knives. He engages a knife-dealer at a fair, where they discuss blades before he settles for a serrated Spydecro, used for gutting a deer.
• During his adventures, Will Parry from His Dark Materials receives the subtle knife, a magic knife that can easily cut through any material. It can even cut windows into other worlds. After Will gets this weapon, he almost always fights with it.
• Sopy Kratides in The Hound of the D'Urbervilles, a Greek assassin who works for variously the Greek government, the Department of Supplies, and Moriarty's Firm. She mentions that she prefers knives because you get to look into the eyes of your victim as you kill them.
• Clove's preferred weapons in The Hunger Games are a jacket full of knives. And she never misses.
• I Become Shadow: Ren can fight with many weapons, but her favorite is daggers. She has a pair of trench knives that she's very fond of.
• Chisel of Illegal Aliens, who carries hundreds of them at any given point in time. He survives being stomped by a giant robot due to the sheer number of knives providing impromptu armor.
• In Insurgent, Tris can't bring herself to use a gun, but has no problems using a knife.
• Kings of the Wyld: Matrick uses two dangerous, named knives. At first he appears to subvert the stereotype, but it turns out that when he gets going, he's a wickedly cruel fighter who can give Ganelon a run for his money.
• Although Legolas in The Lord of the Rings prefers bow and arrows, he also has a long knife for when he runs out of arrows, such as at Amon Hen.
• In the Malazan Book of the Fallen, knives are the Weapon Of Choice of most assassins, and there's a bunch of them running around:
  • Long-knives are assassin Kalam Mekhar's favourite weapons. He usually has two on him and in House of Chains he acquires two Wickan-style long-knives, one of which is alloyed with Otataral.
  • Crokus Younghand, who later renames himself Cutter, starts out as a thief who is rather inefficient in combat, but learns the trade of an assassin from his Love Interest Apsalar and becomes scarily competent with knives. Competent enough that he catches Hitman with a Heart Rallick Nom by surprise.
  • Rallick Nom's beloved weapons of choice are two oversized, hooked knives which Cutter calls "pig-choppers" and which are instantly recognizable as his.
  • Knives are also Apsalar's favourite weapons. Quick Ben and Kalam recall an incident from when she was still named Sorry in which instead of killing a man, she basically mutilated him until even the seasoned killer Kalam could not watch any longer and had to step in and put the poor sod out of his misery. Apsalar retains her preference for knives even after her possession by the Patron God of Assassins ends.
  • Smiles is obsessed with her knives. Though she's a soldier and is supposed to use her shortsword in close combat, she prefers to fight with her knives and gets off on watching Koryk kill enemies. Her squad mates consider her an Axe-Crazy would-be assassin who cuts people out of boredom.
• Bèbelle from Malevil. A Creepy Crossdresser who pretends to be a woman to get close enough to cut throats.
• One minor villain from Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn not only always carries at least one knife, but seems intent on seizing every opportunity to tell people as much, to the point where he's earned the nickname "Avi Stetto" (which means "I have a knife" in the local Conlang). He's nowhere near as scary as he thinks he is, though, and he eventually makes the mistake of trying to take Duke Isgrimnur prisoner while warning him not to make any trouble because "I have a knife." Isgrimnur promptly demonstrates the superiority of Good Old Fisticuffs by laying the villain out with a single punch.
• Mistborn: The Original Trilogy: Both good and evil Mistborn use obsidian knives as their Weapon Of Choice, since metal ones are vulnerable to Allomancy.
• The Nightside books:
  • Razor Eddie, Punk God of the Straight Razor, who unsurprisingly wields an absurdly sharp straight razor. It's mystically bonded to his very being.
  • Bad Penny carries a brace of silver daggers, one blessed, the other cursed. When she uses both simultaneously, it's noted that some gods would die from such a blow.
• Vivian from Orbital Lily will attack large man-eating space-bugs with only her pocket-knife.
• In The Princess Series, Talia is skilled in hand to hand combat and can use many weapons well, but knives tend to be her primary weapon of choice.
• Cavanaugh in the novel The Protector gushes at length about the construction and abilities of the Emerson CQC-7 folding knife, at one point using it to tear through a car door. This is fitting, as the author, David Morrell, is most famous for creating another well-known knife nut.
• There's about one every other Redwall book.
  • Ferahgo in Salamandastron is notorious for his knife collection and skill with using them. He even has different knives assigned to different tasks, such as "the killer" and "the skinner". It varies in which order he uses them.

• Rasconza in Pearls of Lutra is never seen without at least ten knives on his person.

• In River of Teeth, Adelia spends most of the time she is with the gang with polishing and sharpening her knifes, of which she is extremely fond and which she uses exclusively when fighting, despite having access to guns. Justified, since she is a known contract killer, so nobody is particularly surprised.
• The Saint: Simon Templar prefers knives to guns; his ability with his favorite throwing dagger, "Anna", saves his and others' lives numerous times.
• Roderick Whittle, aka Jack the Ripper, from Richard Laymon's Savage.
• Multiple people in The Shadowhunter Chronicles:
  • Will Herondale and Jem Carstairs from The Infernal Devices prefer throwing knives in combat. But if necessary, they also fight with other weapons.
  • Isabelle Lightwood from The Mortal Instruments carries knives under her clothes everywhere so she won't be unarmed if she gets into a fight.
• Lots in Terry Brooks' Shannara series. Brooks seems to view the knife as a nice, lightweight weapon, and many characters, heroic and villainous, carry them in addition to (or in some cases in favour of) heavier blades. This leads to an awesome Knife Fight between one of the heroes and The Dragon in the climax of The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara.
• In Snow Crash, Raven, named by Hiro Protagonist as "the baddest motherfucker in the world", is an Aleut from a tribe that perfected the art of making glass knives with monomolecular edges that cut right through kevlar. Raven carries an arsenal of them, using them for throwing and fighting. Before the story begins, he steals a nuclear warhead from a submarine after slaughtering the entire crew with his knives. Uncle Enzo, the leader of the Mafia as well as an ex-commando, always carries a straight razor in his pocket. In the end, the two have themselves a knife fight. Enzo manages to shatter Raven's knives, but gets the worst of the exchange.
• Sergeant Zim in Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Not only does he train the boot-camp recruits in knife fighting and throwing, he likes to make and balance his own rather than use the perfectly good service-issue knives.
• Sonia Steiglitz, the beautiful and sadistic daughter of the ex-CIA chief/archaeologist villain of The Takers, a modern Two-Fisted Tales homage by Jerry Ahern. She uses guns when necessary, but prefers a knife.
• Tarzan is defined by his hunting knife, to the point that those who only know the character from adaptations can be forgiven for not knowing that he's also a gifted marksman.

• Tortall Universe: This seems to be a Cooper family specialty. First, George Cooper — the King of Thieves — uses knives as his Weapon Of Choice and has several on his person. His daughter Aly wears at least half a dozen hidden in her clothes at any given time. And their ancestor Beka Cooper did the same, being a cop who was often in dangerous places with other Knife Nuts.
• Treasure Island:
  • Israel Hands is a ruthless pirate, who, in an infamous scene, chases Jim Hawkins around the ship wielding a dagger.
  • Long John Silver, one of the most feared pirates in the book, slits an honest crewman's throat with a knife.
  • In one scene, pirate Billy Bones threatens Dr. Livesey with a knife and later uses it against Black Dog.
• Mary in Twig prefers throwing knives to guns, enjoys figuring out new ways of hiding them on her person (sometimes without sheathes, which seems to make her feel more secure), and delivers a Love Confession to a boy she likes while holding a knife to his throat.
• David Gemmell's Waylander is best known for his trademark two-shot crossbow, but carries a crapload of knives for use when he's fired both bolts. He's specifically described as a capable swordsman, but a brilliant knife-fighter.
• A large number of the characters in the Wheel of Time series seem to be knife nuts, as Mat, Thom, Min, Faile, and many Aiel, at the least, are all experts at wielding and throwing knives, usually pulled from all around their person with no explanation how so many weapons could fit on them.
• Much, in Will in Scarlet, is known for always carrying, and wielding, multiple knives. This is in part because, as the Sweet Polly Oliver of the Merry Men, she can't rely on strength of arm to defend herself.

• Worm:
  • Jack Slash — his power allows him to extend the cutting range of any bladed weapon apparantly indefinitely, hitting distant or even multiple targets with a knife. That he's more dangerous as a The Chessmaster and does almost no direct fighting in the series.
  • Contessa's Weapon Of Choice is a stiletto no longer than a finger, although she's got no prolbems with using other weapons when needed.

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • There's Faith and her large knife.
  • Willow attacks Glory with a bag of knives as part of a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • During a nightmare Faith has about bring hunted and killed, Buffy becomes this.
  • Not to mention class psycho/revived corpse Jack O'Toole.
    Xander: You gave your knife a girl's name. How very serial killer of you!
• Burn Notice: Larry prefers to use knives.
• Chuck:
  • Sarah Walker embodies this trope. In the pilot episode alone, she manages to take down three NSA agents in a crowded nightclub while dancing, and follows this up by stopping an NSA SUV by throwing a knife into a one-and-a-half-inch button from twenty feet away. A later episode reveals that this is a skill she already had before the CIA recruited her. In another episode, she hurls a knife through her beeping alarm clock instead of simply pressing the snooze button. So clearly she really likes knives.
  • The Greta played by Summer Glau has a tendency to get out her switchblade for everything.
• Deadliest Warrior:
  • Apache vs. Gladiator: Used to lethal effect at both medium and close range by the Apache.
  • Yakuza vs. Mafia: Yakuza break out the sai for both attack and defense.
  • Green Beret vs. Spetznaz: With a spring-loaded blade that can launch out of the hilt, the Spetznaz can stab at a distance.
  • Willam Wallace vs. Shaka Zulu: Wallace wields the quintessential Scottish dirk in combination with the targe spiked shield.
  • Jesse James vs. Al Capone: James wields a large Bowie-style knife that can be used for stabbing and throwing.
  • Aztec Jaguar vs. Zande Warrior: Both parties wield traditional blades as ceremonial execution tools.
  • Comanche vs. Mongol: The Comanche deploys a small, pocket-sized knife that can be used for multiple stabs in quick succession (as well as scalping).
  • Navy Seal vs. Israeli Commando: The NAVY Seal Rob Roy... goes a little crazy. Just a little.
• Deadwood: Al Swearengen is a skilled knife-fighter who cuts a number of throats through the series. He is a self-confessed terrible shot with a gun, and at one point curses himself for sticking with knives rather than learning to shoot properly.
• Defiance: Irisa is both shown and stated to have a fondness "for edged weapons".

• Firefly: Jayne Cobb has a number of large, heavy, nasty-looking hunting knives in addition to his collection of guns.
• Forged in Fire: Almost all the blades made for the first two rounds are knives, because they're simple to make and fit the weapon parameters set out for the round. Most of the bladesmiths also make knives in their day-to-day life.
• Game of Thrones:
  • When not using Needle - her signature sword - Arya Stark has used knives and daggers to kill enemies When facing down the White Walkers, she kills the Night King with a dagger of Valyrian steel- the same one used in an assassination attempt on her brother Bran in Series 1.
  • Through the generations, House Bolton has passed down not an ancestral sword, but an ultra-thin knife used in their traditional flaying practices. Their motto "Our Blades Are Sharp" applies to this and other knives as much as their swords. If you think Ramsay was sadistic with his mind-games, wait until he brings out the knives...
  • As a minor lord managing the court's books, Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish wears a dagger instead of a full-length sword.
  • Night's Watch deserter and cutthroat Karl Tanner learnt to fight in the slums of Flea Bottom. He uses two knives to devastating effect during his mutiny. Apparently, he always fights with knives rather than a sword.
  • Locke's main Weapon Of Choice before joining the Night's Watch was a rather huge knife (which he used to sever Jaime's hand).
• Harrow: In "Finis Vitae Sed Non Amoris" ("The End of Life, but not of Love"), a former soldier suffering from PTSD has a huge collection of knives, which makes him the primary suspect when a body is discovered in his backyard.
• Heroes: Season 4 character Edgar mainly uses knives with his Super-Speed combat skills.
• Kingdom Adventure: One character is actually named "Dagger", so it's not surprising he's eventually revealed to be this. Downplayed, though, as Dagger is a messenger, infiltrator, and spy, and doesn't often fight or kill, but he does pull a knife when he needs to.
• Legend of the Seeker: Kahlan Amnell uses two daggers in battle.
• Leverage: Eliot can edge up on this sometimes. Justified as he's also a chef when he's not killing people.
  Eliot: Hold a knife like this [holds a knife normally], cuts through an onion. Hold a knife like this [switches to a backhand grip], cuts through, like, eight yakuza in four seconds. Screams, blood, carnage. People are like knives. Everything's in context.
• Lost: Locke boarded the plane for a survivalist adventure in spite of his handicap and brought a bag filled to bursting with various knives. When Locke shows off his collection, the other survivors are creeped out, which goes along with the way the first few episodes tease Locke as some sort of psycho-killer. He later proves adept at hunting and butchering wild boar with only his knives.
• Lost in Oz: The Wicked Witch of the West is this, even wearing knives over her hands.
• Lucifer (2016): Mazikeen is a perfect example, often carrying her blades (and knowing how to use them).
• Merlin: Morgana carries a knife with her at all times in Series 4.
• NCIS: The team follows Gibbs' Rule No. 9: "Never go anywhere without a knife." Ziva David is especially enthusiastic, with an extensive collection. In one episode she holds a knife-throwing class for the team, naturally hitting the target over the heart in her demonstration. Tony hits the stomach, McGee doesn't even get the knife to the target, and Lee lets the knife slip out of her hand, almost hitting Gibbs in the face. Mostly averted in the end though, as they simply use their knives as tools.
• Power Rangers:
  • Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers:
    • Trini Kwan and her successor Aisha Campbell wield twin daggers known as the Power Daggers.
    • Tommy Oliver's Dragon Dagger, which is also a flute.
  • Power Rangers Wild Force: Jindrax wields an apparently endless supply of small, wavy throwing knives, which he can turn into longer swords at will. He also qualifies for the "nut" part early in the series before his voice actor is changed, and he goes from "what if The Joker were a Power Rangers character?" to, well, what you think he always sounded like if you haven't watched the series recently.
• Stargate Atlantis: Ronon has as many knives on him as you need concealed in various places, including in his hair. Sheppard jokes that he must have a hell of a time getting through airports.
• Star Trek:
  • Everyone in the Mirror Universe, although the women seem to be the only ones who actually use them.
  • Star Trek: Picard: In "Nepenthe", Narissa digs the tip of her large dagger into Hugh's neck, causing him to bleed. She carries at least two knives during her confrontation with Elnor, and she murders Hugh by throwing one into his neck. In "Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2", she grabs an intruder from behind and places her knife against the man's throat, although he turns out to be her brother.
• Supernatural: Joe Harvelle likes to play with a knife that used to be her father's.
• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Cameron, despite being an emotionless cyborg, seems to have a thing for large hunting knives. She also carries what looks like an Exacto knife on her for when she suddenly has the need for cutting things, as opposed to punching them through walls.
• Top Gear': In the Bolivia special in 2009, the normally even-tempered James May seems quite pleased to get his hands on a machete.
  James: I'll cut your ***ing head off; you will need to beep that, BBC 2.
• Yancy Derringer: Yancy's sidekick Pahoo carries a Sawed-Off Shotgun which he wields in emergencies, but most of the time he uses a throwing knife sheathed on his back.

Music

• Rob Cantor's "Shia LaBeouf" portrays Shia LaBeouf as a hermit murderer who goes after his victims with a knife and eats the bodies.
• Jim Croce:
  • Based on what Slim does to Big Jim in "You Don't Mess Around With Jim", he likely qualifies. To clarify, "And when the cuttin' was done the only part that wasn't bloody was the soles of the big man's feet. Yeah he was cut in about a hundred places..."
  • The guy "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" tangles with at the end:
    Well, the two men took to fighting
    And when they pulled them from the floor
    Leroy looked like a jigsaw puzzle
    With a couple of pieces gone

• While the Insane Clown Posse are more associated with hatchets, Violent J has a solo track on The Amazing Jeckel Brothers titled "I Stab People". He follows up with a song called "Still Stabbin'" on the later album Bizaar.
• "The Sentinel" by Judas Priest: Knife Nut + Cold Sniper.

• Tom Waits has an instrumental song called "Knife Chase" on his Blood Money album. It comes from the musical Woyzeck, where it's the backing music to... well, Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

Pinball

• Some of the animations in Stern Pinball's Batman shows the Joker flashing his knives.

Podcasts

• Fourvel from Comedy Bang! Bang! is an orphan who stabs people to death over perceived insults, and often carries an array of knives with him.
• Sid from Sequinox has a knife on her at all times, even when dreaming. Even when transformed. It's not her actual Magical Girl weapon. She even does her eyeliner with a knife! And her mom is the same way.

Professional Wrestling

• At a 2009 Apache Army show, Gosaku concealed a knife and used it to cut Mammoth Sasaki and Yoshihito Sasaki during a match.
• The Briscoe Brothers generally don't bring knives to the ring, but have been seen fighting with concealed knives off ring. Mark is more of a gun nut, but he's not afraid to "cut you deep."
• Subverted with Dementia D'Rose, who carries a shiny knife in her teeth because it looks pretty but doesn't want it to scare anyone. She is a wrestler, more than capable of making people bleed without a weapon.
• Ivelisse Vélez was left to fend for herself when Madison Eagles pulled out a fork at the start of their SHINE 22 match, but the referee finally decided to intervene when Eagles was disarmed by Velez, only to produce a knife in its place.

Radio

• Dead Ringers: Brian Perkins, gangland boss of BBC Radio 4, has a large knife he likes to use on those who incur his displeasure. He also occasionally uses it to help people in non-deadly ways, like opening lunchboxes. While calmly recounting his murder victims screaming like "stuck pigs".

Roleplay

• Darwin's Soldiers: Dr. Kerzach's Weapon Of Choice is his amorphous metal switchblade. He is quite proficient with its use as a weapon too.
• In The Gamer's Alliance, several assassins and thieves like using knives and daggers in their line of work. Sinlarine shamans have ceremonial daggers which are mostly for show but with which they can focus their innate powers to travel between the Void and the Land of the Living by shifting from one plane of reality to another.
• Rhianna von Adolph from Open Blue uses a diamond-coated combat knife, which she tends to playfully toss into the air and catch whenever she's talking to somebody. She can either chuck this at people with alarming accuracy, or cut them up seven times before they hit the ground.

Tabletop Games

• One possible Madness Talent from Don't Lose Your Mind grants you a knife that can kill anything; Automata, ghosts, immortals, up to and including ideas. Fall over the deep end with this power, and you turn into The Knifeman, a Nightmare whose goal is to create a beautiful world, by "cutting off all the flaws".
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Dungeons & Dragons 3.5:

• The Soul Knife is a Psionic Class. Their mind is a weapon, and that weapon is a knife.
• The prestige classes Daggerspell Mage and Daggerspell Shaper, arcane caster/rogue and druid/rogue hybrids, respectively, that gain special abilities when wielding daggers.
• The Whisperknife is a halfling-only prestige class that specializes in light thrown weapons, usually daggers.

• Many rogues in Fourth Edition use daggers as their Weapon Of Choice. One Paragon Path, Daggermaster, even allows the rogue to specialize in using them to deadly effect.

• Merisiel, the iconic Rogue from Pathfinder, carries double-digit numbers of throwing daggers on her person.
• Games Workshop games:
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Wickedly sharp and barbed knives are the most common close combat weapons used by the Dark Eldar with Lelith Hesperax, the leader of the Wych Cult of Strife, being the most proficient with a blade. Lelith takes great pride in her skill and is capable of killing any foe she faces with nothing but a pair of simple knives.
    • Catachan Jungle Fighters forge their own knives, which can reach up to twenty inches long for Catachan Fangs and four feet long for Devil's Claws. Even orks find them impressive, and their basic weapon is a five-foot-long axe/machete/backscratcher.
  • In Inquisitor, characters with the Blademaster talent, such as the twin Death Cult Assassins Severina and Sevora, are masters of knife fighting, able to cause more damage with a knife than other characters can cause with a sword.
  • Mordheim has the special mercenary character Johann the Knife, the most famous assassin in the Empire, whose skill with knives is legendary. In-game he counts his knives as swords when fighting in close combat and has a special rule called Knife Fighter Extraordinaire that allows him to bypass the usual limit of three knives thrown during his turn.
• Knives are part of standard Al Amarjan dress in Over the Edge. They're mostly used to open up chip packets and the like.
• Arimite Knife=Fighters in Talislanta are masters of the throwing knife.

Theatre

• Billy Bigelow in Carousel uses a knife in the robbery-gone-wrong that results in his suicide.
• After she is rescued from the Wolf, Little Red Riding Hood in Into the Woods is rarely if ever seen without her knife. It's implied that she becomes rather obsessed with hunting down wolves for her fur cloak, with which she replaces her red cloak (taken by the Baker).
• The Mrs. Hawking play series: Mrs. Hawking's preferred weapons are knives of all kinds, from a thin, sharp letter blade to throwing knives to a plain sturdy Bowie.
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Sweeney Todd's weapon of choice is the straight razor. Between him and Jack the Ripper, the razor soon developed a reputation as a murder weapon.

Theme Parks

• Universal's Halloween Horror Nights:
  • As you might expect from such a classic horror weapon, scareactors wielding these have shown up quite a bit over the years, including horror icons like Michael Myers and Norman Bates.
  • Chance is often seen with knives, be it throwing knives or her own personal switchblade.

Toys

• Dark Hunter Lariska in BIONICLE uses poison-tipped throwing knives.

Video Games

• Used for melee by the Cajun Cutthroat enemy and thrown by boss Lighting Rod in The Adventures of Bayou Billy.
• Alpha Protocol:
  • Konstantin Brayko is a both a nutter and a knife fanatic. A Knife Nutjob, if you will.
  • Michael uses a knife for stealth kills.
• In American McGee's Alice, a knife called the "Vorpal Blade" is Alice's primary weapon. It gets deadlier in Alice: Madness Returns.
• Stiletto Anyway in Anachronox uses plenty of throwing knives.
• One of the most fun parts of Assassin's Creed is to kill as many people as possible with your hidden blade. This is particularly fun with the beggars, who constantly harass you for coins, or the lepers, who are apparently well enough to push you two metres back whenever you get remotely near them.
  • Altair from Assassin's Creed carries a sword, a long knife for close combat, a whole bunch of throwing knives, and, of course, the traditional Hidden Blade. He is also the only assassin in the series to only use blades and no other long range weapons like a crossbow or a gun until he builds one a good seventy years later.
  • Ezio Auditore packs a couple of them in Assassin's Creed II, with extra features included. Along with a collection of knives (also swords and hammers) in his home, a couple of which border on BFS (BFK?) territory. The same assortment of knives are favored by NPC courteseans, friendly thieves, and Fragile Speedster enemies.
• Several mooks in Batman: Arkham Asylum and its sequel. Zsasz definitely counts in both games as well, being a Serial Killer who carries a knife whenever he shows up and uses it to cut a tally mark on his body for each of his victims.
• The Game Mod Batman Doom replaces Doom's Demons with "Strakes", muscled thugs armed with knives.
• Players are encouraged to use the knife in Battlefield 2142, as it is always a one-shot kill. Although lag will sometimes require you to make a second swipe, despite the "stab" noise.
• Peketo from The Black Heart. All his specials and some of his normal attacks involve the use of knives.
• Blame Him: The first enemy you encounter in the game will stab you to death with a knife if she catches you.
• Hazama in BlazBlue uses twin butterfly knives in combat, and has several more hidden within his pockets.
• In Bloody Wolf, you're forced to use your knife in several sections, which is typically justified in the limited narrative (the boss destroyed your gun, you're just trying to incapacitate a brainwashed friend, etc). But at one point, a boss named Knife Guy appears and you put aside your gun seemingly out of shared enthusiasm. When you re-encounter Knife Guy as a midboss in the final stage, your character hilariously shoots him in the face, killing him instantly.
• Commandos:
  • The Green Beret character is something of a Knife Nut, even quipping that they should help an isolated group of Allied soldiers by "offering a hand. Or a knife."
  • The Diver can throw knives from the second game on.
• Knife kills in Counter-Strike are a particularly badass Cherry Tapping. Not the case of a backstab, however, which is a one hit kill.
• Crush Crush: Ayano repeatedly tries to Murder the Hypotenuses with knives and cleavers, although she does use other methods like Tampering with Food and Drink.
  Ayano: [describing her new knife] Guaranteed not to slip, even when covered in... milk.

  Like with Pamu:

  Pamu: Wow! Some broad has been stalking me with a knife! She's so disturbed and adorable - I love her!
  Ayano: I think that Pamu might not be human... She laughs when she's stabbed... I hear.

  And Alpha:

  Alpha: My handlers told me that I received some poisoned chocolates.^note This could be a possible reference to the game Long Live the Queen I wonder if by accident?
  Alpha: I think someone tried to hack my servers today. And by "hack" I mean with a meat cleaver.

  And Quill:

  Quill: Are Cat-Catchers allowed to use steak knives for their jobs? Because the one that's chasing me sure is.

  And regarding Elle:

  Ayano: I heard people with narcolepsy sometimes slip and fall and stab themselves with knives 20 or 30 times. How awful!

• Crisis Beat has the Sharp-type mooks, enemies who attacks exclusively with knives, either by throwing or by stabbing. There's also the boss, Riot, who uses exclusively knives. These knives are collectable by the players, so the players can become this trope themselves.
• In Cultist Simulator, knives are a common symbol of Edge, the aspect of struggle and strife. Particularly the case for one Edge-aspect cultist, Elridge, "an elegant man of inelegant habits". He becomes better at hiding the tools of his hobbies and other telltale signs thereof as he progresses within the cult, but at first:
  He has almost learnt not to pick his teeth with his knife. He has not yet learnt to keep his knife in his boot.
• The Ancestor in Darkest Dungeon was good with a knife. Preternaturally good. Even before ever getting involved in Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, he managed to defeat an arch-vampire in combat — normally an impressive feat even for someone fully armed and armored — using only a mundane knife.
• Destiny:
  • The Hunter class is filled with Knife Nuts, especially the Blade Dancer subclass. However, only their Gunslinger subclass can throw knives.
  • Some Titan armors have knives strapped on them, but only for aesthetics, as their primary means of dealing melee damage comes from the lampshaded punching of their enemies with their Power Fist.
• Devil May Cry:
  • Lucia, the Deuteragonist of Devil May Cry 2, uses throwing knives as ranged weapons. However, she is a kind and soft-spoken person.
  • Devil May Cry 4 has Trish using a small, curved dagger in her "Gloria" disguise.
• In Divine Intervention, the little girl comes with a pair of knives and will stab you to death if she can.
• Riki the Stealth Assassin from Dota 2 uses a dagger for his weapon and prefers striking from the back for extra hurt. And he can easily do it by sneaking behind your back without being seen, or he jumps straight at your back.
• In the Double Dragon series, the knife is one of the most lethal weapons, and is most often wielded by Williams. In Double Dragon Neon, it can stab through multiple enemies at once.
• Dragon Age II has many characters who wield knives, but three named characters shine above the others.
  • The first is Hawke, who can be turned into one if played as a rogue and specced in Dual Wielding.
  • The second is Isabela, whose specialty is fighting battles of attrition against multiple enemies.
  • The most notable example of this trope in the game is DLC-only Tallis, who not only has two daggers that cannot be un-equipped for use in hand-to-hand combat, but also has a seemingly infinite supply of throwing knives, making her the only party member in the game who uses thrown weapons outside of cutscenes.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest II: The Princess of Moonbrooke can equip a Magic Dagger, although it is only her second weakest weapon.
  • Dragon Quest III: Wizards and Thieves can equip knives and daggers.
  • Dragon Quest IX: Morag, a demonic witch, wields one knife during her Boss Battle.
  • Dragon Quest XI: Knives are one of Erik's weapons of choice, which have low attack power but deal status-altering effects.
• The Elf of Dragon's Crown has this as a potential build, being able to equip a dagger at any time with the Holdout Dagger skill. While fighting with a dagger limits her range and attack options, she can deal a lot of damage with it using the Back Stab skill, and she can add poison and fire properties to her dagger with the Toxic Extract and Salamander Oil skills.
• Although Lucas Kane in Fahrenheit never uses a knife outside the opening sequence, he is depicted holding a bloody blade on every box art to underline the psychosis surrounding him throughout the game.
• Fallen London has Jack-of-Smiles, an Expy of Jack The Ripper. Actually, Jack-of-Smiles is his knives, which explains his plentiful bodies to use. The knives are alive, have a mind of their own, and will take over yours if you hold one for too long.
• Quite a number of characters in Far Cry 3 use knives as close combat weapons when they're not using guns.
  • The Rakyat have a legend about a warrior cutting off a giant's head with a knife to create their island.
  • Bambi "Buck" Hughes makes Jason Brody go on a Fetch Quest to obtain a rare Chinese knife for him — and he seems pretty interested in the history behind said knife as much as the weapon itself. And then Jason kills him with that same knife.
  • Hoyt Volker is pretty gifted at knife combat himself, as we see when he stabs Jason's friend Sam to death at a poker table, cuts off Jason's ring finger, and then gives Jason the hardest Knife Fight he's ever faced throughout the game.
• Ryuji Yamazaki from Fatal Fury and The King of Fighters always carries a knife around wherever he goes. Just try not to get too close to him.
• In Fighting Fantasy Legend by Nomad Games, your character can buy up to 2 throwing knives, one from the Port Blacksand market and the other from the Tall Man in the Black Tower. These knives are one use only, but they can be repurchased and used often. Both evil wizards, Balthus Dire and Zagor can get hit with a pair of knives. Meanwhile the abomination Zanbar Bone requires that the character use a Silver Throwing Knife on his heart before actually killing him. Your character can also gamble at a game called Pinfinger which involves a knife and your fingers...
• Final Fantasy:
  • Kiros in Final Fantasy VIII, double armed knives. His standing battle pose even makes him look like an Ax-Crazy assassin at the first grace.
  • Rem from the game Final Fantasy Type-0 dual wields daggers.
  • Tonberries, just Tonberries. These enemies always carry knives and can One-Hit Kill a character.
• Final Fight: Unlike the other two characters who would just throw a knife at enemies, as a skilled knife fighter, Cody can retain a knife and use it in place of his combo. Or he could just throw it.
  • Enemy boss, Rolento also likes to come at you with a knife.
• Fire Emblem: Thief/Assassin/Rogue characters. In the early games, these are just swords animated as knives (particularly cool for the assassins). In Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, knives became their own weapon type, which thieving characters use exclusively and Sages can also use (though they have to forgo staves to do so), although this latter feature is no longer in effect in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. Knives return in Fire Emblem Fates as the weapon of choice of Ninjas, their promotions (Master Ninja and Mechanist), Dread Fighters, and oddly enough, Maids and Butlers.
• Funtime with Buffy: If Buffy catches you, you're treated to a cutscene of him pulling out a knife and stabbing you.
• In the original Goldeneye 007 for the N64, one level opens up with James Bond in a jail cell within a Russian satellite facility. Naturally he has no guns, but he can use the electromagnet in his watch to get some throwing knives from a drain(?). Said knives can be used to great effect, and re-used if retrieved. There's also a "hunting knife" available as a melee weapon via a cheat code.
• The Guild Wars franchise:
  • The Assassin class from Guild Wars. Even though the dagger is the lowest-damage weapon in the game, Assassins use them to great effect, often drawing out huge amounts of bonus damage from their skills. They also have a few skills that allow them to throw knives for different effects.
  • Guild Wars 2 features two classes that can dual-wield knives: elementalists and thieves. However, only thieves make actual use of the knives themselves. Aside from a super-fast attack rate, Dagger Thieves can throw daggers to damage and cripple a target, leap at an enemy with a quick strike, stack copious amounts of bleeding on enemy groups, and even turn invisible — which sets up a devastating Backstab move for at least double damage. Heck, even their normal auto-attacks will poison enemies continuously. Thieves can also use daggers in their offhand with a sword, and can dual-wield a dagger/pistol combo in either hand for different results. A favorite trick among players is to use the pistol skill Black Powder Shot and leap through the cloud with the dagger skill Heartseeker. This renders the player instantly invisible and sets up a backstab. Suffice it to say, knives are at the heart of any good thief's offense.
• Halo:
  • Warrant Officer Emile-A239 from Halo: Reach is never seen without his signature kukri, and is introduced while sharpening it on his armour. He only uses it once.
  • The expanded universe establishes that Fred-104 is the best knife-user among the Spartan-IIs.
• In the card game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, the Rogue class from World of Warcraft is represented by Valeera Sanguinar, who dual wields fel-powered daggers and can infinitely summon them each turn (for 2 mana) for her heroic power. She can also equip various dagger-like weapons if they're in her deck and many of her spells are based on how one uses a knife, as many of them depict someone putting a knife in someone else (Eviscerate and Shiv are such examples). There's also Fan of Knives, where she throws a lot of knives at any enemy minion on the board. Valeera herself, while not appearing much in the main game, has always been fighting using knives during her comic debut.
• Hotline Miami:
  • Choosing Dennis the Wolf as your mask lets you start off with a knife.
  • The Biker's primary weapons are a butcher's cleaver and three throwing knives.
• Jagged Alliance 2:
  • You can make a custom Knife Nut character. Stealth and night ops specialties plus throwing knifes equals one-hit death for everyone on the opposing team.
  • One recruitable mercenary, Bill "Razor" Lamont, is crazy about knives, and talks about cutting throats or how knives "never run out of ammo" with disturbing regularity.
• Kevin Smith in Killer7 uses throwing knives as his primary weapon and a larger knife for close quarters combat.
• Killer Instinct has Maya, a monster hunter who fights with a pair of enchanted daggers known as "Temperance" and "Vengeance". They have given her a telepathic link to the sorcerer Kan-Ra, who once possessed them himself.
• Kindergarten:
  • Cindy is a kindergarten-aged Alpha Bitch who will stab the protagonist in the head with a knife if he makes her angry enough. For example by not playing house well enough.
  • Buggs carries a knife on his person due to paranoia of authority figures trying to kill him. Considering the principal's idea of expelling a child is shooting the offender in the head, his paranoia isn't misplaced. It gets confiscated in the sequel, and his mission revolves around getting it back.
• Larxene, the Psycho Electro Dark Action Girl of Kingdom Hearts. Though the way she holds them make the knives look like Wolverine Claws, reminiscent of Volgin.
• As of a class revamp in October 2013, Disco Bandits in Kingdom of Loathing have a number of skills involving stabbing their foes with knives, as artfully represented in the skill description of Disco Shank: "There are very few problems that cannot be solved with the judicious application of a very, very sharp knife."
• As with almost every weapon-to-personality trope,^note well, except for White Magician Girl Last Scenario completely averts this—the knife-using party member is the closest thing available to a Science Hero.
• Katarina from League of Legends is known for dual-wielding daggers that really hurt when thrown or slashed with. She's capable of wiping the whole enemy team with a few accurate dagger throws.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The weakest grade of enemy soldiers in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past carry knives.
  • Shad from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess carries a dagger in his book, although he's a noncombatant and leaves the fighting to his better-armed groupmates.
  • The Heavy of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Ghirahim, can magically summon and levitate daggers in conjunction with his saber.
• In the Marathon scenario Courier 11, the Hunting Knife replaces the bare knuckles as the player's melee weapon. One level has hostile BOB's with Deflector Shields who can only be killed with the knife.
• Mass Effect:
  • While Kai Leng appears in the games for the first time in Mass Effect 3 where he's gunning for Shepard, he first appeared in the book Mass Effect: Retribution, where he kills a krogan with a knife and later kills six turians by himself with just a knife. In Deception, he also kills the most powerful biotic in the galaxy (basically an individual with a bunch of very powerful psychokinetic powers, and the ability to summon miniature black holes and energy balls at will) with... a sharpened toothbrush.
  • In Mass Effect: Andromeda, we have the Firaan, a small dagger made by the Angara that has the highest attack speed of any melee weapon in the game. There's also an electrified version of the Firaan that has a chance to stun enemies.
• Metal Gear:
  • Vamp in Metal Gear Solid 2 has a signature knife and is obviously quite nuts. He apparently has kind of a knife fetish.
  • See also Naked Snake/Big Boss in games where he's the protagonist. Notably, he carries a special CQC knife that he holds along with his pistols at the same time, so he can switch from shooting to close-quarters combat in an instant. Sometimes he'll also have a separate survival knife.
  • Gene from Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops is pretty good with a knife.
• Daggers are the Weapon Of Choice of the Miis from the Thief class in Miitopia. Granted, they do not all look like daggers (there are some that are shaped like fishes or Moai statues), but the difference is purely aesthetical.
• Subverted and played straight with Mitadake High. The knife is the weakest weapon in the game except for the dead taser and the empty can of paint, but that doesn't stop people from enjoying them. This may have something to do with the fact that, besides the Hammer and the weaker Nanatsu Yoru, the Knife is one of the only weapons that can kill without draining all of your energy.
• Mitsumete Knight:
  • One of your eventual enemies, the Circus's Knife Thrower Pierrot, uses them in battle.
  • The Eight General, Corkilneipha the Swift Thunder, is another enemy Knife Nut, but of a different variety: rather than knives, he uses thunder-imbued needles.
• Modern Warfare 2:
  • A popular class combination in is an honourable mention. Using the "Tactical Knife" pistol attachment (holding a knife and a pistol out at the same time to strike faster), the "Marathon" perk (to sprint forever), the "Lightweight" perk (to move faster) and the "Commando" perk (to be able to strike with the knife from farther away), you get a class that even Penny Arcade notes its effectiveness.
  • In the single-player campaign, you fight the Big Bad with nothing but your knife, but you seem to drop it when he stabs you into the chest with his own. After passing out for a minute or two, you pull that very same knife out of your own chest and throw it through his eye.
• Mogeko Castle: Moge-ko is seen wielding a knife on several occasions, and doesn't use any other weapon. It's heavily implied that she uses them in torture sessions, and possibly during sex.
• From the Mortal Kombat series:
  • Kano and Frost both dual wield knives.
  • Mileena uses paired sais (which aren't actually sharp in real life).
• In Murder!, the murderer is given a knife, with the ability to both sprint and throw it at their opponents (as well as stab them with it).
• Mystery Case Files: Broken Hour introduces Meredith Huxley, a psychopathic woman who murders people with an ornate dagger.
• Persona:
  • Koromaru in Persona 3. He wields them in his mouth due to being a dog who lacks opposable thumbs.
  • Yōsuke Hanamura in Persona 4 uses knives in battle.
  • Contrasting his sword-wielding predecessors, Persona 5's "Joker" prefers knives, as befitting a Phantom Thief.
• The Twin Daggers weapon type in Phantasy Star Online and its successors averts the usual connotations surrounding daggers. They aren't any more "scary" than any of the other weapons. (It helps that they often look flashier than the usual knife; many look like wings.) You're more likely to find a badass Action Girl^note Or Vain Sorceress in PSO2's case using one than an Ax-Crazy character.
  • Phantasy Star Universe has an exception that, oddly enough, cannot be used by the players. Some criminals use more standard-looking photon knives to mug people.
• Psych 2021: The killer holds a knife in his left hand.
• Aht in Radiant Historia dual wields daggers as her weapon of choice. Most of her non-trap special abilities involve her throwing them, as well.
• Resident Evil has its fair share:
  • Resident Evil 4's Leon is a knife fighting expert who uses his knife for everything from breaking locks to taking down giant mutants, but his Ax-Crazy Worthy Opponent Krauser cements his status as the game's Knife Nut by having a design on it, and a little notch so he can twirl it. Leon then gets Krauser's knife when you beat him in the knife fight sequence. Ironically, Krauser's weakness in his boss battle is Leon's knife.
  • Resident Evil 5:
    • While calling her a nut would be an insult, Sheva stabs Wesker seventeen times with a knife.
    • Jill is portrayed as stabbing with her knife when other characters swipe.
  • Claire's opening video for Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles has her throwing a special forces knife into a zombie.
• In Rise of the Kasai, while Tati does have access to other weapons, including a huge axe, a deadly spear, and a supply of exploding toxic mushrooms, her favorite weapon is a pair of twin knifes that she especially uses to maul Kasai warriors.
• There's a reason Edge from Rival Schools chose his nickname. He loves to play with knives and uses them frequently in his arsenal of dirty tricks.

• The main character from Rush'n Attack squares off against an army of soldiers, all clearly holding rifles (although few of them actually use them), but other than the occasional bazooka, he fights solely with his knife. In the HD remake, most of the enemies also fight with knives or punch knives.

• Kyrie of Sands of Destruction uses knives for his basic attack. All his attack spells involve either knives or throwing several knives. His Limit Break can throw up to sixteen knives that, due to lazy programming, hit every enemy.
• The 1982 Synapse Software Berzerk-style computer game Shamus has the titular robot detective fight his enemies by throwing Ion SHIVS at them, rather than use a gun. These Laser Blade knives stand for Short High Intensity Vaporizer and they're effective against your enemies, who are all fellow robots.
• Shank uses two knives as his main melee weapons, if you couldn't tell by his name.
• Loki as portrayed in Smite comes with two daggers he hides on sight (they don't even appear in his hand if he's being idle), and he can go invisible, and sneak up to an unknowing enemy, and strike at their back for massive damage. Or just plain teleport behind them and strike.
• Danette of Soul Nomad & the World Eaters uses two of them.
• In Spire Ablaze by Jeffrey Dean and Greek Winter Media, this 2nd video gamebook of A Road Less Traveled series has your character able to use knives. The odd thing is that he only uses knives as throwing weapons, including a survival knife that he can requisition from the Technomancer Guild. Not once does he ever slash someone with his knives, it's all about tossing them and then pulling out a gun.
• StarCraft:
  • Sarah Kerrigan in StarCraft, before and after her transformation. Before her transformation she likes killing with knives (no in-game ability, but in the novel Liberty's Crusade she takes out a room of guards on Antiga Prime), and after her transformation, she not only has knives on the end of each fingertip, but has wing-like appendages growing out of her back which end in, you guessed it, more knives. It's no wonder she got the moniker of "Queen of Blades".
  • Starcraft II presents Gabriel Tosh, who flips around an oversized butterfly knife. And also uses it on Voodoo dolls.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: Imperial Operatives specialize in knife attacks, and all Imperial Agents get an equipment slot for them. They are always used more like daggers, though gigantic daggers.
• Dolph in Suikoden V could carve out your liver and hand it to you, despite having one of the goofiest fighting stances ever.
• The Tales Series has a few examples of characters using knives, but given the series' love of playing with tropes, it avoids most of the usual implications; It's most common for the knife-wielder to be the group's healer:
  • Tales of Symphonia has knives that can be used by Kratos or Zelos. They're treated as swords with a smaller hitbox.
  • Tales of the Abyss has Tear Grants. She uses throwing knives for her physical attacks and in cutscenes, although her equipped weapons are staves.
  • Ange Serena of Tales of Innocence. For a character whom most would dismiss as a White Magician Girl, she sure has some impressive melee combos with that knife of hers.
  • Tales of Graces has Cheria Barnes, party healer and Team Mom who fights with magic-infused throwing knives.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • The Spy wields a variety of butterfly knives that, in addition to any number of other abilities, can be used for a one-shot kill backstab.
  • The Sniper is an Awesome Aussie with an even bigger knife (though in-game it's usually used in extreme emergencies only).
• Ayame from the Tenchu series uses a pair of knives. Specifically, kodachi◊.
• Sherudo Garo, the Stage 2 boss and Big Bad of Time Crisis. Given how annoying knives are in the Time Crisis series, this also has the effect of making him into That One Boss.
• Sakuya Izayoi from the Touhou Project series fights by throwing a seemingly infinite number of knives that she actually recovers between volleys by stopping time. It's speculated that she can do more than just stop time, and that her many knives are actually the same knife. Of course, it is mentioned that she carries many knives as well. Best exemplified in her conversation with Alice in Perfect Cherry Blossom:
  Alice: So, far what reason do you worry? About yourself.
  Sakuya: Because I'm carrying only three changes of clothes. For myself.
  Alice: Ah, good reason.
  Sakuya: That, and a spare set of knives too.
  Alice: Ah, I- KNIVES?!
• Hawkeye of Trials of Mana demonstrates Dual Wielding with knives. One of his techs, the "Flying Swallow Toss", involves tossing a barrage of knives at every target on the screen. One wonders where he keeps them all...
• An option for traitors in Trouble in Terrorist Town is to buy a knife, which can cause a One-Hit Kill if used to stab an innocent or a detective in the back. To prevent it being too broken, the knife can only be used to kill one person.
• In Undertale:
  • In the encounter with the Mad Dummy, after you hit it with its "dummy bot" attacks a certain number of times, it fires them, angrily declares "I DON'T NEED FRIENDS!!! I'VE GOT KNIVES!!!", and pulls out a knife to throw at you. Too bad it only has one knife, which it wastes with its first attack.
  • Take the genocide path, and your character will start to show a fondness for knives. And the last weapon you get, instead of being a stick or ballet shoes, is the Real Knife. However, by the time you get it, the only enemy whom you can actually fight, Sans, is smart enough to just dodge your attacks, so it's really just for show.
    Here we are!
  • For a more benevolent example, you can also find a toy knife early in the game. Which belonged to the human who possessed the Light Blue heart. Appropriately they are represented by spinning knives during the Photoshop Flowey battle.
• Archduke Maximilian Von Reginrave, Big Bad of Valkyria Chronicles, has a collection of thousands of knives, and often carries several hidden on his person. He can use them very well. This is yet another manifestation of his raging paranoia, the result of him growing up as the hated bastard child of the Imperial royal family whose brothers constantly tried to get rid of.
• Seether from Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom uses a double-bladed knife, first threatening Blair with it, then slitting Captain Paulson's throat.
• The Rogue class in World of Warcraft is a good example of this trope. All three of its specializations have been able to make use of them at some point in the game's history:
  • The Assassination and Subtlety specializations require using daggers. Some of their strongest moves can only be used with daggers while others are adjusted when wielding a dagger to compensate for the weapon's low damage per hit. The dagger's fast speed also makes it good for triggering poisons and other effects.
  • Before Cataclysm, Combat rogues who take the Close Quarters Combat (dagger and fist weapon spec) talent get a bonus while using daggers and fist weapons that they won't if they use other weapon types.

• Becoming a Knife Nut is actually the Boring, but Practical choice for Yandere-chan in Yandere Simulator. Sure, it's not as cool as a katana, but Yandere-chan can easily hide it on her body (even, ahem, when she's nude) until an opportune moment to commit murder presents itself. Besides, there are just more knives to use than any other possible weapon — the kitchen knife in the Cooking Club (and if she joins the Cooking Club she gets the added bonus of not being seen as suspicious if she carries it openly), the ritual knife in the Occult Club (which can become a flaming knife), and the box cutter in the Art Club. It should be noted that update videos demonstrating game mechanics usually have her wielding a knife.
• Madotsuki from Yume Nikki is frequently depicted as one because of a widespread Player Tic which involves killing everyone, with the knife being the only weapon available.

Visual Novels

• Min from Butterfly Soup is a fan of butterfly knives. When she is asked to hand over the rest of her knives, she takes her jacket off and several knives fall to the floor.
• Doki Doki Literature Club!: Yuri is one. If you go down the Yuri route in Act 1, it's revealed that she has a large collection of knives at home, and the one she brings over to the MC's home is so sharp that gently touching its tip causes bleeding. Yuri even says it "cuts through skin like paper". Her Self-Harm tendencies are hinted at, as well, creating a real Uncanny Valley Girl feeling about her. This is brought to full light in Act 2, where Yuri basically goes full on Yandere, courtesy of Monika's Mind Rape combined with Hostile Show Takeover, which takes her obsessive traits and self-harm tendencies Up To Eleven. You end up with some indiscretion shots of Yuri cutting herself (both of which are hijacked by Monika; one is rewound and the other has her physically manifest over the entire GUI), as well as the climactic ending of Act 2, where Yuri stabs herself to death, either as a show of pure despair at the player refusing her confession, or a show of pure ecstasy at the player accepting it. Either way, she dies.
• The mysterious killer in the Yarudora game Double Cast primary uses a knife, giving much tension in the scenes where he assaults the protagonist and/or his friends.
• The Fruit of Grisaia: Yumiko always carries a box cutter with herself, usually only to scare off her classmates when they get on her nerves, but she actually tries to attack protagonist Yuuji with it after he makes a particularly bad first impression on her.
• Guilio The Knife/Knifer from Lucky Dog 1 is extremely skilled with a knife, citing that it's his favourite weapon - Ivan comments that he's practically useless without one. It becomes very useful when he needs to do knife tricks so the team can pretend to be performers after escaping prison.
• The [9]th Man of Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors threatens Clover with a knife at the start of the Game. Ace later takes a knife (either his or finds his own) and kills Clover in the "Safe" ending, and the rest of the cast in the "Knife" and "Submarine" endings.
• When sweet little Kotonoha Katsura from School Days snaps after all the Break the Cutie and her own emotional instability, she grabs a cleaver and shows how well she can use it. Seeing the kid slash Sekai's throat open with it in one of the bad endings is... horrifying. In The Anime of the Game, it's even worse. Sekai fatally snaps on Makoto via stabbing him repeatedly in the chest with a kitchen knife, and then Kotonoha stabs and cuts Sekai's stomach open afterwards with another huge knife... after revealing that she beheaded Makoto's corpse. And then she carries the head with her.
• Souji in Suika always carries a silver knife in his pocket, but isn't actually a murderer or anything. But he does consider using it at several points and appears to have a fairly violent side that he suppresses. It's finally justifiably used near the end, but he doesn't kill anyone.

Web Animation

• Colonel 100 from Battlefield Friends. So much that he doesn't use any other weapon, not counting the C4. In later episodes he attaches bipod to it. In even later episodes he unlocks a bipod for the bipod.
• Happy Tree Friends:
  • Flippy's murderous Split Personality Fliqpy can and will kill people with just about anything he can get his hands on, but he also has a bowie knife he uses when it suits him.
  • The far less bloodthirsty good Flippy also seems to be quite handy with knives, considering he briefly holds his evil side at knifepoint in "Autopsy-Turvy". He's skilled enough to perfectly sharpen a pencil with a machete in "Random Acts of Silence".
• Red Vs Blue:
  • Felix favors combat knives alongside his other weapons. He uses them up close and also throws them.
  • Washington proves himself quite handy with knives too, as seen in his fight with the Meta and with Felix.

• Mr. Stabby from Weebl & Bob. True to his name, he has a penchant for stabbing people (and drowning puppies). Oh, and his theme song has such a serene-sounding tune.

Webcomics

• Black Mage in 8-Bit Theater carries a dagger, which he most frequently employs against his nominal teammates, Fighter and Red Mage.

• In Basic Instructions, Scott friend Rick, which directly led to the inclusion of a superhero (of sorts..) named the Knifeketeer.

• In The Fancy Adventures of Jack Cannon, Jack's mother. Since she was also in charge of his Training from Hell, this means he is very good with knives as well. You should see his smile when someone throws him some.
• Girl Genius: DuPree is ecstatic about getting to kill and torture and her implements of choice for both are the many little knives she keeps on her person at all times.
• The Fox Sister: Yun Hee's weapons of choice are blades of various sizes. She is quite proficient with them.
• Chapter 29 of Furry Fight Chronicles has Kalita fight a knife wielding cat lady outside an alley. She still wins with a single punch.

• Vekken va Kapo from Ley Lines is definitely a knife nut. It's plain to see and confirmed by Wordof God. He carries at least four knives, hidden in his shirt.

• Quinsy Sharps in The Motley Two. He's literally described by the author as a "knife nut".
• Belkar "The Sexy Shoeless God of War" Bitterleaf in The Order of the Stick is Dual Wielding his knives.
• The hero has his trusty knives in Problem Sleuth.
  PS: Hate to cut and run...

• A battle of the badasses occurs in Rice Boy, when T-O-E and Angel Eye fight, both using knives.
• "Stabs" Doogan from Rusty and Co., notable for having more knives on her at any time than most monsters have Hit Points.
• Finland of Scandinavia and the World is always seen with a knife in his hand.
• Shadownova's Cameron Hunter. He's a Blood Knight and the Alt Text implies that he names them to boot.
• Sluggy Freelance:
  • Bun-bun's weapon of choice is usually the switchblade, with its signature ka-CLICK sound when he flips it open.
  • Oasis might use Improvised Weapons or laser cannons on occasion, but her favorite weapons are definitely knives. Whenever she comes Back from the Dead, she always seems to bring a few dozen knives along with her. That's all she needs to kill trained assassins, small armies, and chocolate ice cream.
• From String Theory (2009), we have Professor Phineas Armastus, the resident psychopathic murderer of Nevada State Penientiary, who can clear a room of guards armed with automatic rifles in a matter of seconds with nothing but a pair of prison shanks. And then take their gummy bears.
• Swageon and Glacigeon has Swageon, who uses knives to kill people. She's one of the main protagonists.
• The Jakeskin cultists in Templar Arizona are armed with giant razor sharp knives from an early age.
• Tower of God: Khun likes to use knives. How many knives? Many knives.
• Flush from Waterworks. Subverted in that, despite liking knives, he has no clue what to do with one in a fight. But things get dangerous once he uses his Spin Attack...
• Changhui from Weak Hero, especially notable when most other fights in the series are bare-knuckle. When a mook slashes at his cheek, leaving him with his distinctive scar, Changhui's only reaction is to smile, take the knife away, and reveal that he's also good with blades. In the present day he keeps a knife hidden on his body, and attacks Donald with it in an attempt to turn the tables.

Web Original

• In Ash & Cinders, Thavian has yet to be seen with any less than six knives looped through his belt. He's quite fond of using them for intimidation.
• Cutlerylover has a channel (as you can tell from the title) primarily focused on blades, knives in particular.
• Vadiir in Dark Dream Chronicle has racks of knives, including a kukri machete as his Weapon Of Choice.
• Kat and Mouse - Guns for Hire: Mouse is fond of all things sharp and stabby and carries an arsenal from throwing knives to her favorite wakizashis.
• Jeff The Killer is known to like his knives.
• Protectors of the Plot Continuum: Many agents use knives, or bladed weapons in general.
• Ato of The Questport Chronicles smuggles knives into the Questport Temple, where weapons of any kind are absolutely forbidden.

Web Videos

• Part of Ryan Haywood's Token Evil Teammate shtick in Achievement Hunter videos is that he loves knives and his first objective in games is to murder. He also keeps a cup filled with them at his desk.
  Ryan: Why do I need a cup full of 37 knives? I don't, but I like it!
• The Call of Warr has Prince. He's quick to pull out his knife at any moment, and is just as willing to kill anyone who even so much as startles him.
• Evan of Everyman HYBRID is an absolute fiend for knives, switchblades, cleavers, daggers, and knife gloves a la Freddy Krueger. He's rarely seen without some kind of cutlery in his hand, which is getting increasingly worrisome, as he seems to be on a greased slide to Ax Craziness. Oh, and he's occasionally possessed by a disembodied homicidal maniac.
  EMERGENCY. MACHETE.

• Played for Laughs in the Gus Johnson sketch "your friend who always has a knife". The friend doesn't use his knife as a weapon, but he seems convinced it's always the best answer. One of his friends gets sick of it, but tensions soon rise after that friend has to make a sandwich and realizes there are no knives in the drawer.
• Mortal Kombat: Legacy: Shirai Ryu commander Hanzo Hasashi's talents with the kunai were so well-known that they earned him his nickname (later, his codename): Scorpion.
• The Nostalgia Chick had some Licking the Blade action when she tried to stab Allison Pregler.
• Defied in the case of sword reviewer and HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) practitioner Skallagrim, who makes it clear that while he is enthusiastic about bladed weapons, he only advocates safe, responsible weapon collecting and handling.
• The nameless interviewee in the "Terrible Interviewees Montage" episode of Trope of the Week from Echo Chamber makes Tom rather uncomfortable with his knife play.
• Venturian Tale: Jimmy Casket really, really likes stabbing people.
• Yami Bakura from Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series is this even more than his canon self. "I like knives. They make me feel all tingly."

Western Animation

• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Mai uses throwing knives as her Weapon Of Choice.
• The Dragon Prince has Rayla. She has two large knives, which are loosely based on real butterfly knives, which she uses in almost every fight. With these knives, she can switch between the blade and the hook, thus adapting her combat tactics to it.
• Roberto, a mentally unstable robot from Futurama, has an obsession with stabbing things with his trusty "Stabbing Knife".
• An Anti-Hero example is Razer from Green Lantern: The Animated Series, who seems to keep an unsettlingly large number of knives on his person at all times. Considering he has a Red Lantern ring on his finger, one wonders why he does so.
• Kaeloo: Mr. Cat. While he sometimes uses more dangerous weapons like a bazooka or a chainsaw, he uses knives fairly often. Usually he just throws them at people.

• Early Cuyler from Squidbillies seems to have an infinite supply of identical buck knives along with his Sawed-Off Shotgun.
• Brock Sampson of The Venture Brothers carries a large knife instead of a gun. Tim-Tom and Kevin, the Murderous Moppets, also show a particular fondness for stabbing things with their switchblades.
  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!
• Frances from The Weekenders, judging by her catchphrase "I like pointy things!"

Real Life

• A Philippine Urban Legend warns that Batangueños (people of Batangas province in Southern Luzon) all carry a balisong and will use it to settle matters of honor. While the Filipino martial art of Eskrima is well-known for teaching its practitioners to Dual Wield a pair of rattan sticks, or to put Machete Mayhem into practice, it does have forms specifically for knives of any type, including the aforementioned balisong.
• Getting one's first puukko is a ritual of coming to an age in rural areas of Finland. For both boys and girls. The knife doubles as a handy tool, a dining utensil and a close combat weapon in the Finnish Army. A knife is actually the only civilian item (besides eyeglasses) the Finnish conscripts may carry while in uniform. Most Finnish conscripts bring their own knives with them from home when entering the service.
  
  The Finnish Army also produces ceremonial puukko, which are awarded in the same way other armies award ceremonial swords and daggers. Finnish soldiers had a history of not bothering to carry their issued bayonets, feeling their puukko is a better close-quarters weapon and more useful out of combat as well. After World War II, the Finnish Army clued in and started issuing a bayonet that basically is a puukko, even having a scabbard similar to the ones that are normally hand-made for puukkos. Basically, a fighting knife that just happens to also fit on the end of a rifle, whereas with most bayonets it's the other way around.
• Spanish people of Renaissance times developed straightforward — and often dirty — swordfighting techniques for street brawls, which developed into knifefighting techniques as the decades passed. This produced a strong knife culture throughout Spain, with the Andalusian navaja becoming ubiquitous. Latin American countries seem to have developed strong knife cultures in the past as well, likely from both Iberian and native influences; the gauchos of the South American grasslands are commonly identified as both good horsemen and deft hands with knives.
• Tony Atlas had this much to say when asked about why it took so long for Bruiser Brody to get medical treatment after he was stabbed by Invader #1.
  Tony: So I get Brody to the hospital and I told them that I got a friend that got a stabbing. Now one thing about Puerto Rico that a lot of people don't know, a stabbing in Puerto Rico is like a cold in America. They don't take it seriously because they get stabbed, it's a common thing there. You may be in San Juan, a nice area, but once you get out of San Juan, let me tell you, Puerto Ricans believe in stabbing people, maybe not in American but over there stabbing is very very common...
  
  ...so I told it was stabbing, he opened up the door, he showed me a bunch of people standing there with stab wounds, but not as severe as Brody's.
• Everyone in medieval Europe. Everyone. Daggers were ubiquitous across most European cultures throughout the early and late middle ages - how else were you going to cut your food and do a million other little tasks throughout the day? Everyone carried a knife almost everywhere. Medieval dining etiquette, according to some researchers, evolved partly because literally everyone at the table had to trust everyone else when all of them were armed. ^note Other factors included out-classing each other at court as central states grew in power over time and greater education as the middle ages progressed.
  
  Special mention goes to medieval Scandinavian and Finnish women, who regularly owned daggers as part of their clothes. One would suppose it figures. The symbols of the lady of the house were knife and keys on belt. As a matter of fact, the seax is a knife even Scandinavian children were given... mostly to use as a tool.
  
  Knives were so ubiquitous that Europeans horrified the Chinese. The Chinese considered having a knife at the table gauche; the cooks were expected to cut the meat up beforehand into tiny pieces so no knives would be needed at the table.
  When the Chinese first saw Europeans eating food with knives, they were aghast. "The Europeans are barbarians," they would say. "They eat with their swords."
• Jim Bowie is the namesake of a particular type of large hunting knife that he carried and used in several knife fights.
• A few notable designs were made around WWII:
  • The Nazi SA were famous for their use of knives in street conflicts during the Weimar Republic, as opposed to the Communists, who preferred beer bottles, bats and chair legs, and other clubs. It was said at the time said that if you went to the hospital you could tell who won the latest street brawl just by the type of injuries: crushed skulls and blunt-force trauma meant that it had been the Communists, while mostly stab wounds meant that it had been the Nazis. After the Nazis rose to power, the SA celebrated its knife-fighting roots with ceremonial daggers (copied from a Swiss design) with "Alles für Deutschland" ("All for Germany") inscribed on the blade. The Schutzstaffel (SS), which started out as a branch of the SA, used the same dagger except with the inscription "Meine Ehre Heisst Treue" ("My Honor is Loyalty").
  • During their time in the Shanghai Police, William E. Fairbairn and Eric A. Sykes would create a modern dagger that would be heavily associated with the S.A.S., and a fighting style to go with it: the Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife. Most people will remember it as the knife Bishop uses to play Five-Finger Fillet with Hudson in Aliens.
  • Because the USMC found that the Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife was too specialized as a weapon (its needle point profile was too fragile for anything else), they never adopted it for widespread use in WWII. What they got in 1942 was a knife that would be heavily associated with the USMC: the iconic KA-BAR knife, a design that was useful both as a weapon and a tool.
• The Sicarii. You don't get a name that means "dagger-men" without trying.
• Hong Kong Triad gangs most commonly wield knives and machetes due to the difficulty of obtaining firearms in the city.
• There are a fair number of self titled "Knife knuts" scattered around the internet on various forums and the like. In a distinct subversion of this trope, they tend to be well spoken, gentle, and good-humored individuals that just happen to collect knives and enjoy talking about them. They have their own magazines, conventions, and are generally a friendly sort like any other group of hobbyists.
• The story goes that John Henry "Doc" Holliday once literally brought a knife to a gunfight — and used it successfully. It wasn't the one he's most famous for participating in, of course, but he did make short work of an obnoxious and dishonest poker player who barely got his gun out of his holster before Holliday took up his blade and lay him out dead.
• Much like the middle ages, knives were ubiquitous in antiquity; they were just as useful then. Copper daggers predate Sparta's heyday by over two millennia. Speaking of which, prior to the Scandinavians, all Spartan women carried a small, easily accessible knife on their person, and were trained in its use. The primary purpose of this blade was cutting an abusive husband across the face. That way, the moment he stepped foot on the street, everyone would know exactly why she was divorcing him.
• Gabe Newell has a very large knife collection in his office. He has at least one knife for every month that Half-Life 3 hasn't come out.
• Medieval German laws prohibited serfs from carrying swords. Since swords were defined as having a double-edged blade and pommeled-handle, knife makers made meter-long, two-handed blades that were still legally knives by being single-edged and riveted-handle. To ensure that they were still not referred to as swords, they were known as the Kriegsmesser or the Großesmesser, effectively giving the German peasantry the European variant of katanas.
• During World War 1, the Italian Army created some of the world's first shock troops called the "Arditi" meaning "daring ones". Their main armament was their daggers, and their most valuable use in battle was to charge enemy lines during artillery bombardment, and leaping into trenches just as the shells let up. Most Arditi didn't even bother carrying carbines or pistols, their knives were all they needed to secure victory and hold it Untilt he main italian force arrived. The Arditi training regimen was so harsh that many recruits actually died just during basic.