Rat Men

aka: Rat Folk

"Kill-slay the man-things! Yes yes!"

Master Splinter: You do not have to fear me, my friend. Rest assured I do not bite.
Casey Jones: He's a giant t-t-talking rat?!

— Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, "The Good, the Bad and the Casey Jones"

Ratmen are the rat equivalent of Lizard Folk: an entire race of intelligent anthropomorphic rodents or a single specimen thereof.

As is often the case with Lizard Folk, these creatures are likely to be villainous. Living in filth and squalor, they reproduce at a dizzying rate and worship foul deities. Still, they can also be just another humanoid race with no particularly outstanding good or bad traits, or victims of a Forced Transformation. They may be (or descend from) rodents that developed humanoid features or humans that developed rodent features, whether through magic, science, radiation or natural selection.

Ratman supervillains often have either "rat" or "vermin" somewhere in their names. Ratman civilizations are sometimes given a quasi-Japanese flair or called "Nezumi," which is simply the Japanese word for mouse or rat; the proper Japanese translation for Ratmen would be "Nezumi-jin." If they have leadership instead of each rat fending for themselves, it's likely to be in a form of Rat King.

Sub-Trope of Beast Man. Contrast Rodents of Unusual Size (where the rodents are huge but not necessarily humanoid or intelligent).

Note when adding examples: do not confuse ratmen with wererats: the latter are humans who can assume the form of a rat (or a giant rat, a human-rat hybrid, etc). Normal-sized rodents with human mannerisms do not count unless they are explicitly called out as abnormal in the fiction they appear. Refer to Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism for guidance.^note Wrong examples would be Tom and Jerry, The Great Mouse Detective, An American Tail, Capitol Critters, Cinderella's mouse friends, all rats from Ratatouille, Rizzo the Rat from The Muppet Show, Mickey Mouse, the Jews in Maus, the Rat King from The Nutcracker.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Dragon Ball Z has Babidi and his late father Bibidi, as they both resemble naked mole-rats minus the overbite. Real-life mole-rats lack the long fleshy catfishesque whiskers that they both have (Bibidi's are significantly longer), but otherwise, they fit.
• Nezumi Otoko (Rat Man) from GeGeGe no Kitarō. They don't call him "Rat Man" for nothing.
• Nezu-kun in Nurse Hitomi's Monster Infirmary is a mouse boy.
• The Vision of Escaflowne: Dryden's unnamed aide is a (very jittery) mouse-man.
• Yakitori: Soldiers of Misfortune has a sympathetic version. Even though they're fighting the protagonists, it's to free their homeworld Barka from the Trade Federation (the protagonists are human mercenaries from a Vichy Earth). The opening scene of the anime has a Barkan contemplating a Fatal Family Hologram before going into battle.
• Episode 16 of the anime Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon shows a clan of demons who look like rats walking upright and are a little smaller than humans. They are known for being demonic blacksmiths and for making magical armor. They are cruelly murdered by Konton.

Comic Books

• Bone: The rat creatures, sometimes referred to as hairy men, are a race of large, vaguely rat-like beast people which live in the Valley. Their resemblance to rats is more informed than visual however, because they traditionally lop off their skinny tails and crop their rounded ears when they come of age, and have piranha-like jaws filled with huge, razor-sharp teeth, making them more resemble ape-bear monsters. Their chieftain, Kingdok, is even weirder looking, with proportions resembling a Tyrannosaurus rex.
• DC One Million: The 853rd-century incarnation of the Batman villain the Ratcatcher is Ambiguously Human with rat-like characteristics. His followers are giant humanoid rats.
• Ghost Rider: One of Ghost Rider's minor foes is the bipedal, flesh-eating rat creature Verminous Rex, the sole survivor of an entire race of such creatures Berev'Ha Dentii that lived in the spaces between dimensional walls. The Berev'Ha Dentii did have a moment of glory in the Danny Ketch era, when under Verminous Rex's command, they successfully kidnapped and killed a number of Ghost Riders so that Verminous get their power.
• Joe the Barbarian: The hero, a diabetic teenager trying to stave off death, hallucinates that his pet fancy rat is a noble Rat Man warrior who aids him on his Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane quest to defeat "Lord Death" and retrieve his insulin.
• Lori Lovecraft: In Lori Lovecraft: The Dark Lady, the true form of the demon who attempts to pull a Grand Theft Me on Lori is a giant humanoid rat.
• Mampato: The comic includes, among several other mutant species, a 40th century race of ratmen, who work as spies for villains.
• Okko: The second Cycle introduces the one-armed Samurai Setzuka and her nezumi companion, Nuuk, a bipedal, talking rat creature.
• Seven Soldiers of Victory: The Klarion and Manhattan Guardian miniseries briefly feature a race of sentient, bipedal rats who dwell beneath New York City's subways. Since they're still the size of ordinary rats, Klarion's cat Teekl rather casually devours their king off-panel.
• Shazam!: In one story, Captain Marvel has to deal with a far future where giant rats rule the world and catch humans in man-traps. Despite what you might think from the premise, the rats are the good guys in this — the humans in this messed-up future are those who were left behind after the rest of humanity left Earth for the stars, and have been trying to kill the rats so they can reclaim Earth, and are very much the real monsters in this.
• Spider-Man: Vermin is a human being mutated against his will by Baron Zemo into a cannibalistic, insane Rat Man.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Master Splinter. Depending on the continuity, he was either a normal rat or a human ninja (Hamato Yoshi) who was mutated into a ratman.
• Tomb Of Terror: The Rat Man from issue #5 is a man who was resurrected into a giant rat by a life-restoring fluid. He is intelligent and can talk and use things, but is also evil.

Comic Strips

• Dick Tracy: Itchy is portrayed in a manner that evokes this trope: small, pointed nose, slight overbite, and a nasal and occasionally squeaky voice.
• Snarfquest: One character is a human prince who was been transformed into a rat man by an evil wizard, and is seeking to be restored to normal.

Fan Works

• Rocketship Voyager has a non-malevolent version with Nee'Lix, who had to flee the forest moon of Rynax after it was destroyed by Hostile Terraforming. Along with others of his species he ekes out a living on the fringes of society, regarded as vermin by the authorities.

Films — Animation

• My Little Pony: The Movie: Among the various Beast Men inhabiting the Wretched Hive of Klugetown are a very large anthropomorphic rat with prominent buck teeth and a more mouse-like Klugetowner with very large ears.
• In Strawinsky and the Mysterious House, the Rat King outright refers to his people as "ratfolk". Besides himself, who is bipedal and wears a cloak, however, they aren't particularly anthropomorphic, and spend most of their time disguised as books.

Films — Live-Action

• In Peter Jackson's BrainDead (a.k.a. Dead Alive in the States) the zombie plague is carried by the "Sumatran Rat-Monkey." It has as much in common with ratmen as monkeys do with human beings.
• Harry Potter: Peter Pettigrew looks a lot like a rat even in his human form, which was probably an intentional choice from the filmmakers. Pettigrew, an animagus, spent years disguised as an actual rat.
• The Nutcracker in 3D features an entire anthropomorphic race of rats (all dressed in Nazi attire), ruled by a Rat King who has human features but is a rat and can shoot out his teeth at will. He has a Rat Queen mother who drinks "rat juice" (booze) and speaks with an Italian-American accent.
• Ratboy: The title character of is a mysterious hybrid of human and rat found in a dumpster by the female protagonist.
• In The Ratman, a scientist creates a murderous humanoid rat creature named Mousey ^note (played by Nelson de la Rosa, better known as the little assistant from The Island of Dr Moreau) in hopes of getting a Nobel Peace Price.
• In Rats: Night of Terror, the group of survivors gets decimated by common rats that seem to be driven from their underground habitat, making them extremely aggressive and dangerous. In the film's twist ending, it is revealed that intelligent mutant rat-humans are responsible.

Literature

• The Chronicles of Narnia have the Talking Mice. Like other talking animals, they're closer to human-sized than their non-sapient kin, and they're generally portrayed as sympathetic. The primary example would be the swashbuckling Reepicheep from Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
• From the New World: The bakenezumi ("queerats" or "monster rats" in translations) are bipedal rat people who live in warring colonies and serve only their respective queens, occasionally helping humanity out. However, there's a lot of Fantastic Racism going on, with the humans despising them and the bakenezumi eventually growing to resent the humans for lording their Psychic Powers over them. As it turns out, the bakenezumi were originally humans with no Psychic Powers, genetically engineered to mutate into rat-people in order to protect the psychics' oligarchy.
• In Robert Rankin's The Garden of Unearthly Delights, the town of Kakkarta is inhabited by a race of rat-like humanoids with a taste for human flesh. They're even referred to as Skaven.
• Garrett, P.I.: Ratmen (and a genius ratgirl) play a part in the series. It seems the wizards of a few generations back had quite a fad for the creation of new sentient lifeforms, and they shared real-world scientists' preference for using rats as research subjects.
• The Legatum series has murids, which are scruffy, humanoid rat creatures who can talk and wear clothing like humans do.
• Legends & Lattes and its prequel Bookshops & Bonedust each include one prominent character of the rattkin species, which in cover art are depicted as approximately hobbit-sized bipedal mice. Both are friendly, ordinary folk; Thimble in Legends & Lattes is a genius baker who works at the titular coffee shop, and is very shy and soft-spoken, while Fern in Bookshops & Bonedust is a much more outspoken (and foul-mouthed) bookseller. Their race doesn't come up much but helps to imply that each is a Non-Action Guy who can't be expected to participate in the "action & adventure" portions of the stories.
• The German booklet series Maddrax has creatures called taratzes. The plot takes place in a world devastated by a comet impact, which has mutated plants and animals into monstrous creatures. The taratzes are over two meters tall, can walk upright, and are almost as intelligent as humans. Taratzes are much stronger, faster and more resistant than humans, and in addition, they are also predators that sometimes hunt humans.
• A Practical Guide to Evil has the ratlings, a race of fast producing humanoids that are considered a menace for their unending hunger (which presumably also includes flesh) in the country of Procer. The young ratlings are rather small and barely sentinent, but if they manage to survive long enough they become "Horned Lords" — nearly the size of a house, horned, frightingly clever and so dangerous that a team of Named is required to put them down.
• The Rats in the Rats, Bats and Vats series by Dave Freer and Eric Flint are still rat-sized, but have human-like intelligence and use tools. Technically, they are not rats or even rodents, but genetically modified (including some rat gene-splicing) and cybernetically uplifted elephant shrews. Everyone (including themselves) call them rats, though.
• In Ratman's Notebooks, the unnamed Villain Protagonist dons a rat mask when he and his trained rodents go out robbing houses by night. Chance witnesses who catch a glimpse of him start rumors that an actual rat-headed mutant is on the loose.
• Ephaniah Grebe from Septimus Heap is the unfortunate victim of two rogue spells, one of which involved rats, hitting him at the same time. He spends most of his time in the Manuscriptorium's basement, hiding his rodent face from the outside world. His transformation also changed his vocal cords to make him unable to form human speech, so he communicates using notecards.^note He can communicate with normal rats, though, some of which can also speak human. He's not a bad person at all once you get over the initial shock at his appearance.
• The Craven (as they're named by humans; they just call themselves the 'People') in Achten Tan, volume one of Tales from the Year Between, are large, intelligent ratlike humanoids.
• Nom in Time Out of Time is very rat-like in appearance (in fact, he'd actually been transformed into a rat by Balor when Timothy freed him), and knows a lot about how rats think.
• In The Underland Chronicles there one of the many races of oversized animals are rats. These rats are primarily antagonists but there are several heroic members of the species.

Live-Action TV

• Grimm has Reinigen, a race of rat-like Wesen.
• In the Red Dwarf episode "Skipper", Rimmer jumps into a dimension where Lister got put into stasis for bringing a pet rat. As a result, the ship is infested with the humanoid descendants of that rat, one of which (the Rat) befriends that universe's Lister.

Music

• Super Ghostbusters has a Rat Man break into your house, sneak in the basement, and go up at night to eat your cheese. You call the cops when you find out, but the cops don't take it seriously, so you call the Ghostbusters instead. The Ghostbusters are ill-equipped, as they only have ghostbusting weapons, so the Rat Man murders them with his gun.

Myths & Religion

• Japanese folklore gives the tale of Raigo the Rat, based on a historical figure from the 11th century. The emperor broke a promise to him and he used black magic so that, when he dies, he will come back as a giant rat, with a rat army to eat valuable scrolls.
• There is an urban legend about a girl who threw the Koran at her mother and was turned into a rat girl by Allah. This is accompanied by a picture, meant to "prove" the story as real, of the creature the girl had become, which was in fact that of a human-rat hybrid sculpture, originally part of an art exhibit titled "Leather Landscape", by Patricia Piccinini.
• In the town of Southend-on-Sea, in England, there is a local legend about a ghostly Rat-Man living in a tunnel. The story goes that an old tramp lived there until a group of teenagers found him, beat him, and left him to die. His spirit now appears there, looking just like the rats who nibbled at his body.

Tabletop Games

• Apocalypse Prevention Inc: In the second edition, one of the new playable demon species is the Vermen, who subvert all the tropes associated with this kind of creature except for the Explosive Breeder part. Even if they are one of the nicest no-human species in the setting and their technological abilities are greatly apreciated, there is some Fantastic Racism against them due to their physical similarity to the servants of the Rat Queen, the ones responsible for the Black Plague, and because they still look like rats.
• Rat Men are recurring enemies in Crossed Swords, with two King Mook rodent-men serving as the first two bosses of the second game.
• Some third-party d20 supplements have included varieties of ratmen, such as Aradan (from AEG's Mercenaries), Cavian (from Races of NeoExodus) and Ikrikit (from Masterwork Monsters: Rats in the Walls)
• Dungeons & Dragons: Has an on-and-off relationship with the trope.
  • The recurring "Oriental" race of Hengeyokai, which are shapeshifting animals based on the "animals who can take human form" breeds of youkai, includes a Rat Hengeyokai subrace in every edition from 1st to 4th. Like all hengeyokai, rat hengeyokai can take on the form of an ordinary rat, a subtly rodent-featured human, or a full-fledged humanoid rat.
  • In 3rd edition, due to its base campaign for the "Oriental Adventures" sourcebook switching from 2nd edition's Kara-tur to a licensed adaptation of Rokugan, the Nezumi were introduced as a playable race. Despite this, the rat hengeyokai also appeared in the same sourcebook.
  • In Dark Sun, the Tari are amongst the multiple sapient humanoids who exist in the setting, but strangely were never made playable. They're a peaceful and inoffensive race of humanoid rats who largely inhabit underground ruins or warrens beneath the various city-states, scavenging from the surface. Humans regard them as just another kind of vermin, little more than a particularly cunning strain of giant rat, and place bounties on their heads.
  • In the third-party campaign setting Scarred Lands, the Slitherin (expies of the Skaven) are rats that became intelligent humanoids by consuming the flesh of the fallen Titans. Some of them have been further mutated, developing special powers related to the Titan they are descended from. In 5th edition, a portion of the Slitherin have rejected Titan-worship and are instead aligned with the godspawn races, such as humanity.
  • In the third-party campaign setting Ptolus, rat people are an antagonistic species divided by size into the halfling-sized ratlings, the human-sized ratlords, and the ogre-sized ratbrutes.
  • Third-party setting Midgard features highly civilized ratfolk as a player race, largely inspired by the ratfolk of Pathfinder.
  • Third-party setting The Chronicles of Aeres has the Rattevir, a race of humanoid rats and one of the "breakaways" from the collective Beast Man races. Like the Pathfinder or Midgard, they are a playable race and based on real-life observations of rats as a highly sociable, fastidious and empathic species. They even have their own sourcebook.
  • Third-party setting Dungeons Of Drakkenheim has the Ratlings, mutated from regular rats by Delerium. They're manic, hyperactive, rapid-breeding, and obsessed with the taste of human flesh — with infants considered a delicacy.
• Legend of the Five Rings also has a race of rat-men called the Nezumi in it. Alongside the naga, they're the only non-human race in the setting that isn't hostile towards humanity, although they do have a recurring problem with Cross Cultural Kerfuffles.
• Magic: The Gathering has the Nezumi Rat Men from the plane of Kamigawa, a race of Black mana-aligned rat man Ninjas. They usually live in swamps or on the outskirts of human cities, which they often raid, and some of their shamans can summon and control swarms of insects, tying into this trope's association with vermin. Notably, though the cards mostly depict them as thieves and mobsters, several characters are sympathetic in the novels and later stories, with the destruction of one of their villages by the planeswalker Tezzeret being treated as an atrocity.
• Pathfinder:
  • Ratfolk are halfling-sized, highly social, and good at tinkering. Many of them are Intrepid Merchants. For the most part, they are portrayed fairly sympathetically — most of them are neutral in alignment, and they can be player characters — but some of their racial options, like the Plague Bringer alchemist, have more of a Skaven feel.
  • The ratlings are a more sinister take — typically subterranean-dwelling, the size of regular rats (ratfolk, meanwhile, are around 3 feet tall), and both typically evil (their favorite food is children) and rather intelligent (all have spell-like abilities, and they're quite capable of becoming arcane casters). Beyond their size, they're easily distinguished from ratfolk in that their faces and hands, ironically, seem more human, whereas ratfolk are more rodentlike.
  • In Starfinder, the ratfolk, under the name ysoki^note originally the name for ratfolk on the planet Akiton, but as Akiton was home to the most vibrant, respected and populous ratfolk culture it spread to other worlds when interplanetary travel became more common, are one of the standard player races, known for their love of tinkering and their great adaptability.
• Anthropomorphic ("uplifted") rats (and mice) exist within the Realms of Pugmire, and are given the focus in the supplement Squeaks in the Deep. These rats subvert many negative stereotypes of rat characters, as although they lean towards cynicism and are seen as shifty criminals by other species, they're notably intelligent, protect their own from other species due to the discrimination they face, and are just as likely to be good or evil as any other species. Although rodents are the only uplifted species incapable of magic, they are also the only ones capable of using psionic powers, and they have a notable interest in Man's research and science (whether for good or, as the Cult of Labo Tor uses it, for ill).
• Red Dwarf: One of the potential races you can play as is a race of evolved rat people (or Rattus Sapiens), who resemble Little Bit Beastly versions of humans (having pointier ears and "Roman"-looking noses). It is also possible to play as evolved mice people (or Mus Sapiens), who look like short humans. Notably, the Rattus Sapiens eventually appeared in an episode of the series proper, although the one specimen shown looked a lot more rat-like.
• Small World has Rat Men as one of the races. Unlike the other races, they have no special abilities, as they have reserves.
• In Warhammer, the Skaven are a race of ratmen that live in squalor and may be something of a Trope Codifier, having inspired numerous imitators in tabletop gaming. They are the most numerous race in the setting and have advanced Magitek equipment (like ratling guns and doomwheels) and would have taken it over long ago if their entire culture wasn't based on Chronic Backstabbing Disorder. One of the best known traits of the Skaven is that they don't exist. Within the Empire their existence is officially denied, though whether or not anyone believes this varies between stories. The Skaven maintain the secret because although they massively outnumber humanity they are so paranoid and cowardly none want to risk it. The Empire keeps them a secret because the leadership fears that letting people know that a vast malevolent civilization lives under their feet would cause panic.
  
  The Skaven as a whole are essentially based on every single negative stereotype of rats in British culture, multiplied by their fascist instincts. They are ruled over by a quartet of "Great Clans" who bring in more nuanced rat stereotypes. Clans Skryre and Moulder are both based on the association of rats with scientific experiments; Skryre are Mad Scientists who produce the highly dangerous and unstable magitek that the Under-Empire runs on, whilst Moulder are Evilutionary Biologists who use surgery, selective breeding and mutagenic compounds to breed mutant Skaven and rat subspecies for use as beasts of war. Clan Pestilens^note a somewhat butchered spelling of "pestilence" doubles down on the association of rats with disease, being a plague-worshipping cult of diseased fanatics who hold hands in prayer so they can share their diseases with each other and then stab their way into infecting anything that isn't them. Finally, Clan Eshin tap into the association of ratfolk with Asian cultures (or at least homage Master Splinter of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) by being a clan of Skaven who migrated to Warhammer's version of China and Japan, learned martial arts, then came back as a clan of ninja-themed ratfolk mercenary-assassins. All of the above are ruled over by an angry, narcissistic, hungry minor chaos god called the Horned Rat^note no, really who subsists entirely on the fear of his believers and will gladly devour his most fervent worshipers the instant they have outlived their usefulness. His edicts, genetically instilled in every Skaven and enforced by fear of a slow and painful death, are to kill anything that is not an ally or a leader (especially if it is not a rat) and kill your allies and leaders once they're no longer useful.
• Wicked Fantasy has the Roddun, who appear as giant humanoid rats and have a culture reminiscent of a somewhat more noble version of The Mafia.
• World Tree (RPG): Scawn are a non-prime species resembling humanoid rats about four feet tall. Because each Scawn can alter its shape once or twice in its life, and these changes usually breed true, many tribes and bands sport various additions to the basic bodyplan — they may be rat people with stinger tails, or with wings, or with horns, or so forth. Insofar as other species are concerned, they're mostly minor annoyances, petty thieves and would-be brigands. They have a peculiar obsession with the feline Sleeth, believing that they will reincarnate as a Sleeth if they're killed by or if they themselves kill one. Both beliefs are false, and greatly irritate the Sleeth.

Video Games

• BioShock: In the very early development of the game, the role of the Harvesters were originally played by small rodent-men similar to chipmunks or ground squirrels who wore baggy rags and carried around backpacks of supplies to pump fluids from corpses. This idea is later revisited in There's Something in the Sea, where the story of Rapture is changed to a science fiction story.
• A variant in the PC Beat 'em Up, Chipmonk!, which is set in a medieval-era world populated by andromorphic rodents. Your player characters are a pair of chipmunk knights, and rat bandits are the most recurring enemy in the game.
• In Dwarf Fortress, there are actually two species of rat men:
  • Rodent men, described as having a rat-like appearance, are one of the primitive underground-dwelling Beast Man races, forming crude encampments and fighting with spears and blow-darts.
  • Rat men are one of the numerous above-ground humanoid beasts, and as such do not technically count as a full intelligent race in-game and for the most part behave like normal animals unless "adopted" by a preexisting culture.
• Eastern Exorcist has rodent demons — humanoid rats — as the lowest-ranked enemies, showing up en masse in both campaigns.
• In Enter the Gungeon, the Resourceful Rat is one of these. He's largely content with scavenging any guns, ammo, and items you leave behind, and leaving behind insulting notes when he does. You can also fight him as of the 'Advanced Gungeons and Draguns' update, where he'll pilot a giant bipedal mech against you, and then challenge you to a fist fight. If you defeat him, he'll tell you about his past as a stowaway on a trader's ship trying to feed his family (using the correct collective noun of a 'mischief').
• Exit Limbo: Opening is set in a world of andromorphic animals, with a village of rodent people as your ally. Curiously enough, your character is a rhino, yet the rat-people are roughly the same size as you.
• Fantasy General: Rat Men are a Light Infantry class unit for the Evil side, appearing as hooded, sword-wielding anthropomorphic rats. The Evil hero unit Grimal the Rat Lord belongs to the same race.
• Humanoid rats are counted among the races of Farnham Fables. The most notable ones are the Isia family. They are modeled after the Cleyran and Burmecian races of Final Fantasy IX (and Cally has a doll of Freya Crescent, making the resemblance more obvious).
• Final Fantasy IX: The Burmecian and Cleyran races, to which your dragoon Freya belongs, are anthropomorphic rats. They avoid the stereotypes normally associated with this trope, instead being portrayed as a peaceful and civilized race.
• Guild Wars 2: The Skritt are generally regarded as pests by the more advanced races of Tyria due to their attraction to anything shiny and tendency to run off with said shinies. Skritt are individually weak and not particularly bright, but they share a pseudo-hivemind of sorts thanks to their constant ultrasonic chittering which makes large groups of them capable of surprising feats of intellect (such as outsmarting the Asura, the resident Insufferable Genius race).
• Inherit the Earth: The Rat Tribe is the resident Proud Scholar Race of the setting. Their underground complex is part library and part monastery, all built into what looks like an old sewer system.
• Legend of Grimrock II has the Ratmen, both as a playable race and as NPC enemies (with a distinct piratical theme). They start out with fewer total stat points than other races, but they can gain random permanent stat bonuses from eating cheese and can take a trait that will grant them a random stat increase at each levelup.
• Majesty and other games set in Ardania (like Warlock: Master of the Arcane) has Ratmen living in the sewers under pretty much every settlement. Unlike the Skaven they resemble, they're almost always Played for Laughs. (Their main reason for raiding the surface is an obsession with cheese, for example...)
• Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom has the mousefolk, who have both mouselike and ratlike members. The game's initial villain, Mausinger, falls heavily on the ratlike scale, as he leads a coup that exiles the game's protagonist, child king Evan. However, it's suggested that the mousefolk themselves are largely ordinary people just trying to live their lives.
• Pink Panther: Hokus Pokus Pink: Pink Panther travels to Siberian and discovers a whole civilization of giant rat people (who are just giant rats). Pink has to give an aerobics tape to their king, who wants to keep his subjects in shape.
• In Piratez there are the Rat People, an in-universe urban legend. Not to be confused with Ratmen, who are just a short and mischievous — and very real — variation of humans.
• The main antagonist of RATUZ is Prisoner Three, who was injected with a serum that turned him into an extremely deadly and violent humanoid rat. He spends the game as an Invincible Boogeyman stalking the prison/human experimentation lab, killing everyone in his path. Later on, Prisoner Five also encounters mouse men in the sewers, who are much more benevolent than Three and even help Five and any surviving comrades he has escape the prison/lab island.
• Shining Force II: Slade the Thief is a human-sized anthropomorphic rat.
• Titan Quest: Ratmen are found in all the three first acts of the game. They favor poisonous attacks.
• In Warcraft, Kobolds are a race of ratmen miners that live in Kalimdor. They are low-level neutral monsters, though they can be annoying in large numbers.
• Warhammer The End Times Vermintide is Left 4 Dead: Ratmen Edition.

Web Original

• The Harmsters from Hamster's Paradise may count, though they resemble three-foot tall gerbils with a theropod-like gait. They do fill the image of Rat Men though as vicious, swarming hordes.

Websites

• The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids: In the story The End of the Homeworld, Famine, from the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, looks a bipedal, sapient, "hunched, mangy-looking gray rat".

Web Videos

• Rats SMP: The main POV characters are rats, and qualify for this trope by virtue of their humanoid Minecraft skins, though they are all still under a block tall. Fan depictions vary on a sliding scale between this and depicting them as actual rats.

Western Animation

• Batman Beyond: In one episode, the villain Shriek's lab assistant is apparently a teenaged Splicer who has given himself rat traits.
• The Captain Planet and the Planeteers villain Verminus Skumm is a particularly anthropomorphic variation on this, resembling a man with rat-like hands, feet, and a rat tail. Apparently, he was created to represent the effects of urbanization and pollution on biodiversity. A few episodes show Skumm with Rat Men Mooks, and one episode shows that he has a disease called "rat rot" which turns people into rat men. Unlike most of the show's villains, he seems more interested in destroying humanity than nature.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: The Recurring Character Charlie the Mouse is a humanoid, overweight rat-man (despite his name, he looks more like a rat than a mouse) with a bad attitude (and a Brooklyn accent, no less), and an anchor tattoo on his arm who likes to eat rancid cheese. He may look as scary as most other monsters on the show, but he's actually a rather charitable guy who has helped Courage more than once.
• Futurama: In "A Bicyclops Built for Two", Rat Man and his girlfriend are a slovenly, sleazy pair of rat people and apparently close associates of the equally sleazy Alcazar.
• Gary the Rat: The titular character was transformed into one of these as a result of a Karmic Transformation.
• Invader Zim:
  • In "Game Slave 2", Dib stumbles across a group of "horrible rat people" living in a parking garage. They were originally normal people who became permanently lost in the parking garage and now live by scavenging, and this somehow mutated them into rat people. They don't look very much like rats, and Dib is skeptical that they've turned into actual rat people.
  • Invader Zim also has the slaughtering rat people of planet Blorch, who resemble rats much more closely.
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: Amy and Brad are two Mute Rats who have opended up an amusement park (Ratland) and in general act human-like.
• My Little Pony 'n Friends: The villains Erebus and Zeb are served by a group of thuggish humanoid rats, nastier and meaner cousins to the anthropomorphic mice of Muensterville.
• Vermin from The Neverending Story: The Animated Adventures of Bastian Balthazar Bux looks like a humanoid rat with bat's wings that allow him to fly.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
  • Splinter is a pet rat who was mutated into a four foot rat-man, or a man who mutated into a rat-man, depending on the series.
  • Rat King is a recurring villain who controls the vermin of New York and lives in the sewers. He seems human in at least appearance, however. In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987), the Rat King was convinced he was a humanoid rat despite being an ordinary human.
• Both ThunderCats (1985) and Thunder Cats 2011 have Ratar-O, a leader among the Mutants. The 2011 version expands his role as a ruler of similar mouse and rat humanoids.
• Rattrap, of Transformers: Beast Wars and Beast Machines, transforms into a giant rat, a choice influenced by Transformation Conventions. While not the genuine article, his personality is such that he might as well be, and he certainly seems to think of himself as one.
  "Rat... robot. Rat... robot. I'm a robot and a rat! Yeah, I like it!"

---