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Reptiles Are Abhorrent
(aka: Toads Are Abhorrent)

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Reptiles Are Abhorrent (trope)
Just once, we'd like to see an evil terrorist organization with a fluffy hamster motif.
"Reptiles are abhorrent because of their cold body, pale color, cartilaginous skeleton, filthy skin, fierce aspect, calculating eye, offensive smell, harsh voice, squalid habitation, and terrible venom; wherefore their Creator has not exerted his powers to make many of them."
Carl von Linné, a.k.a. Carl Linnaeus, also the epigraph of Jurassic Park (1990)

Reptiles Are Abhorrent refers to the association between reptiles and villainy. This trope manifests itself in several basic ways. The simplest is to have reptiles that are consistently villainous. In animal stories, villains might be anthropomorphic versions of Real Life reptiles, while the heroes are cute mammals and birds.note  In Speculative Fiction, they might be fantastic beings such as Lizard Folk and Snake People.

Even when the bad guys are not actual reptiles, they may have some sort of reptilian theme. Perhaps they are an Animal-Themed Superbeing with reptile-related powers. The villain might have reptilian pets and/or exhibit a special empathy with reptiles. They may even be able to turn into giant snakes. Even if they have no special powers related to reptiles, they might use reptile related Animal Motifs and/or Theme Naming. The trope even turns up, if only by metaphor, in non-fiction; saying that someone is a "snake," "lizard," or "cold blooded" is enough to get across that you're dealing with a nasty character. And any character named "Snake", "Cobra", or "Viper" is generally a villain, a hardened criminal or at the very least a particularly cynical Anti-Hero.

This trope is not applied with equal frequency and intensity to all reptiles. Snakes (especially venomous ones) and crocodilians tend to be the reptiles most associated with villains. Meanwhile, turtles and certain small, cute lizards like geckos, chameleons, frilled lizards and the like are seen as cute and harmless, and are less likely to be considered evil, while large lizards like monitors and gila monsters are basically snakes with legs. Stereotypically reptilian features such as fangs, claws, tails, visible scales, and slit pupils may distinguish villainous reptiles from friendly ones, as does the use of venom. Also, while this trope primarily applies to real-life reptiles or characters based on them, it can also factor into how your dragons are different. Indeed, the grotesque, poisonous, fire-spewing, maiden-abducting beast of Medieval lore might well be the ultimate incarnation of this trope.

Despite the trope's name, it also applies to amphibians. Toads, in particular, have become heavily correlated with evil and unpleasantness due to their poisonous secretions (which is part of the origin of the word “toadstool”), association with witches, and the myth that touching one will give you warts. Salamanders are also often depicted negatively. However, there are many favorable depictions of frogs in fiction.

This is not a character trope. It is a pattern only visible when looking at an entire cast of characters. Merely having a few bad reptiles among a majority of good reptiles does not invoke this trope. When the only reptilian character in a work or the majority of the reptile-themed characters are bad guys, this trope is in play. This trope does not require that reptiles be Always Chaotic Evil — there may be a few token good reptilians within a race of mostly evil reptiles as an example of My Species Doth Protest Too Much.

Sometimes the trope is invoked in-universe. Characters may assume that reptiles are more likely to be evil, whether or not it's justified. In these cases you may have Reptiles Are Abhorrent crossed with Fantastic Racism (see Animal Stereotypes).

If the expectation of reptiles being evil is set up and then overturned by the majority of such characters, the trope is being subverted. See PlayingWith.Reptiles Are Abhorrent.

Reptiles Are Abhorrent is fairly common, but it's far from omnipresent, so do not list aversions. Also, remember that for it to be a subversion, the audience must be set up to expect it before it is shown not to be the case. There are enough non-abhorrent reptiles in fiction that it would be a waste of time and space to list them all. Also, this is a Super-Trope of Snakes Are Sinister, Never Smile at a Crocodile, and Malicious Monitor Lizard, so examples specific to snakes, crocodilians, or monitor lizards should go to their respective sub-trope and not here.

See also What Measure Is a Non-Cute?, Scaled Up, Emotionless Reptile, Fangs Are Evil, Primate Versus Reptile, and Dragons Are Demonic. In works set during the time of dinosaurs, this may go hand-in-hand with Meek Mesozoic Mammal. Compare Amphibian Assault, Bears Are Bad News, Cats Are Mean, Cruel Elephant, Feathered Fiend, Mister Muffykins, Savage Wolves, Threatening Shark and You Dirty Rat!. Contrast with Lovable Lizard and Delightful Dragon. This is also closely related to Good Animals, Evil Animals.

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Beast Saga is a prime example of this - based on a revival of the Battle Beasts toyline, almost all the villains are exclusively various reptiles, as well as fishes, save for one turncoat mammal, who is naturally, a wolf.
  • Bleach: As if Rukia hadn't made the connection several hundred chapters back, Ichimaru Gin himself gave this little monologue in Chapter 414.
  • Buso Renkin: Kawazui, a Surinam Toad homunculus, is the most villainous of the animal-type homunculi from the series' first arc. While most of the homunculi are either driven by their hunger or a deep dedication to their creator, Kawazui has a slimy, greedy and torturous personality, while his role as a spy gives a very stalkerish feel to his character.
  • Eyeshield 21 has the Zokugaku Chameleons, with their linebacker, Habishira, having long arms like a chameleon's tongue.
  • Getter Robo: The premier antagonist faction of the series is the Dinosaur Empire which is composed of dinosaurs who evolved to become intelligent humanoid-saurians but were forced to flee underground to escape from the cosmic radiation which would become known as the Getter Rays. The shame of having to live underground and forefiet the Earth's surface to a younger species of inferior primates has instilled a bitter feeling of resentment over the millenia, causing them to be motivated by a sense of racial superiority and a desire for righteous revenge against humanity and the Getter Rays.
  • It isn't quite clear how Hayate the Combat Butler feels about this trope. Machina's alternate form (seems to be) a giant snake, and his first acts include nearly killing the main character and acting like an all-around bad guy. But as of Ch. 255-ish, he starts being more than friendly with the heroes, even (jokingly?) asking Maria to marry him for her (and Sakuya's) hamburger-making skills.
  • Kagerou Project plays with this one, as Azami and her descendants - all gorgon women - are treated like monsters because of this trope (in fact, the only instances of any of them using their magic to harm was in self-defence against human instigators), but they are all very nice people. On the flip-side, the series' Big Bad plays it straight, as he is the single one of Azami's snakes with sentience, and has successfully killed off the whole cast multiple times.
  • No reptilian Brute in Killing Bites has ever been portrayed as having anything close to redeeming qualities. Cobra is a pervert whose only motivation is raping as many pretty girls as he can get his hands on. Gecko is a Sadist who enjoys watching others suffer before she kills them. The Horned Dragon sisters are Creepy Children who have no idea what morals are, and the Chameleons are Sumitomo's personal hit squad called in to do unsavory things on his behalf. It's apparently explained in that the therianthrope powers are essentially Personality Powers, and that said powers are modeled on their Animal Motif that reflects their personality.
  • The Liminal Zone 2: Downplayed in "The Shells of Manjunuma" by the creepy turtles that live in the titular swamp. When they're picked up, they make a disturbing noise that's said to sound like a human drowning and let out a lot of foul-smelling urine that's described as like the water a drowning victim would throw up. Along with this, their plastrons have vaguely face-like shapes in them, and if someone dies in the swamp, they'll eat the corpse just like pigs would. This ends up happening to Kunikazu, who chases the crows into the mountain by the swamp, but a freak landslide kills him and carries his body into the swamp, and dozens of turtles are seen feasting on his body in the last panel.
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha The MOVIE 2nd A's has Nachtwal, the improperly programmed defense system whose addition to the Book of Darkness is the reason why it became an Artifact of Doom and Death. Its base physical manifestation is an indestructible mass of writhing black snakes capable of ensnaring and impaling mages, including the Wolkenritter and Reinforce.
  • In Martian Successor Nadesico, the Earth government refers to its enemies in the war as "Jovian Lizards" because of this trope, even though they only send Mecha-Mooks into battle so most people don't actually know what they look like. In fact, they're actually humans.
  • One Piece has the animal-themed Seven Warlords of the Sea, which usually play as villains. You have Sir Crocodile, Gecko Moria, and Boa Hancock, who is a pretty horrible person but at least is very kind to the protagonist and Took a Level in Kindness.
  • Pokémon the Series:
    • The anime zigzags this trope. The most prominent is the Ekans (later Arbok) owned by Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain Jessie of Team Rocket. And later she comes into ownership of a Seviper, yet another snake Pokémon. Generally, all the fierce and threatening-looking reptile Pokémon take an antagonistic portrayal, whereas the cute ones tend to be on the good side, and if they have vicious-looking evolutions, they don't evolve. During the Unova arc,the main character had an adorable charming Snivy, but his rival has a mean-looking Serperior (its evolution). Also strangely averted at the same time as the anime establishes very early on that Ekans is actually a Affably Evil Punch-Clock Villain who is perfectly willing to be friendly, it's just his trainer that's a villain. Still counts since they're still technically villains but an interesting twist.
  • In Reborn! (2004) most of the Arcobaleno have cute mammals or birds as their pets. What do the greedy Viper and Mad Scientist Verde get? A frog which can turn into a lizard which can bit its tail Ouroboros-style and an alligator, respectively.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (1992) plays this trope almost as straight as that show. In a school of who knows how many students, all of the students are good, aside from the school bullies: Anton the Lizard and his cohort (Mad/Matt, his pet/brother, no-one's actually sure).
  • In the Transformers: ★Headmasters episode "Rebellion on Planet Beest" (sic), the reptiles, amphibians, and fish on a planet of Beast Men side with the Decepticons. It's up to the mammals and birds to form a rebellion.
  • In Ultimate Muscle there's Shockodile (Pumpinator's Grandfather).
  • The Yu-Gi-Oh! anime includes a set of Reptile monsters, but their only major appearance was in GX while being used by Professor Viper. Gansley, Corrupt Corporate Executive and Big Bad of The Big Five uses a Reptile deck that focuses on locking down his opponent's cards.

    Comic Books 
  • The DCU and DC Animated Universe:
    • Legion of Super-Heroes (1989): When the characters were rebooted in 1994, Princess Projectra was redesigned as a member from a race of sentient snakes, making her a rare heroic example in comics. She does state that she has run into prejudice before, and this is given as the reason she appears to strangers initially in a 'normal' appearance. (She was later mutated into a slightly more humanoid form and slipped into a mild Heroic BSoD due to horror at her appearance.)
    • Green Lantern: Isamot Kol the alien space cop lizard-man is a good guy, but Ophidian the Orange Entity, the living embodiment of temptation and selfishness, takes the form of a giant snake.
    • Kobra is a terrorist cult who uses a snake motif for their criminal activities. They later appeared as a cult in Batman Beyond. In their most notorious story, a few of them transformed themselves into snake people with the help of Splicer technology and... dinosaur DNA... And then they were going to throw a "Thermal Bomb" down a volcano (!?) to raise the temperature of the world (they are "cold blooded"), Kill All Humans, and take over the planet. Yeah.
    • In Hoppy the Marvel Bunny #11 "Magic Madcaps", Sorceror Snake is an evil reptilian warlock, who was kicked out of Funny Animalville for casting black magic spells on innocent people, so that he tries to destroy the town in revenge.
    • The Checkmate arc plays with this trope. After the Rooks take out a major Kobra base they find a large nest of baby snake people. The Rooks decide to raise them.
    • The Snake-people in the DC Animated Universe wanted to Kill All Humans.
    • There are yet more snake-men in the Justice League Unlimited] episode "Chaos at the Earth's Core". As with their fellow DCAU snakemen, they're involved with hilariously (depending on your point of view) inaccurate dinosaurs and wish to Kill All Humans...
    • Copperhead is another Batman villain who started out with a special suit that gave him snake-like flexibility and was later mutated into an actual snake-man. The snakeman version (with a silly snake-hat) appeared as a reoccurring enemy of the Justice League and a similar character was a one-off villain in Batman Beyond.
    • Turtle Man is a rare example of a mean turtle. He's "the Slowest Man Alive" and is a minor enemy of The Flash. He was originally a joke villain, but later became a credible threat when he gained the power to drain speed from other objects, including the Flash himself.
    • The Gordanians are a race of Lizard Folk slavers who terrorize the Vega System, home to Starfire and the Omega Men.
    • In The Multiversity, the evil Dr Sivana's Alliance of Alternates includes a cartoon snake, presumably the foe of Hoppy the Marvel Bunny.
    • The main villains of Sun Devils are the Sauroids, a race of humanoid lizard-men, and their leader, Karvus Khun.
    • Superman's enemies Lord Satanis and Syrene can summon animals, but in Two for the Death of One they only ever summon snakes. Satanis summoned a nest of vipers to kill some poor villagers who offended him, Syrene summoned giant -literally- infernal snakes, and she even transformed the ground under her husband into a humongous snake which swallowed him whole.
    • In Superman Family #174, an alien race of serpent men attempts to subjugate mankind by mind-controlling Supergirl into working for them.
    • In The Man Who Destroyed Krypton, villain Jax-Ur transforms into different kinds of reptilian or reptile-adjacent creatures after being hit with a Red Kryptonite bullet: a massive man-headed python, a giant rattlesnake, and a scaly, serpent-haired Medusa.
    • In Power Girl (1988), Kather, one of the servants of the Big Bad, is a horn-headed, green snake-man.
  • ElfQuest has Winnowill referred to as the 'Black Snake'. Rayek gets called this a few times as well.
  • Fun Home mentions how unsettling snakes are, and somewhat rhetorically suggests that this is because they are a strange mix of masculinity and femininity.
  • The Lizard League, Invincible's Alternate Company Equivalent to the Serpent Society.
  • Judge Dredd: Dredd regularly came to blows with the Kleggs, a race of alien Lizard Folk (with some crocodilian features, depending on the artist) who were among the most dangerous enemies of Mega-City One.
  • Les Légendaires has Raptor the Green Shadow, a lizard-man working for the Big Bad and with Starscream tendencies.
  • The Marvel Universe:
    • Spider-Man: Curt Connors' experiment to help people with missing limbs, like himself, caused him to transform into The Lizard, a monstrous reptile who detests all "warm-blooded" life (though it probably goes without saying that he doesn't like spiders either). In the well-loved '90s cartoon, he looked a great deal like a giant, very anthropomorphic Anole. The latest revamp of Connors gives him the ability to activate the "lizard brain" of humans, encouraging them to act like reptiles. Apparently, lizards are really sexually aggressive and mindlessly violent towards their own kind. Who knew? Komodo, who might count as a Distaff Counterpart of The Lizard, manages to be an exception. She was Connors' lab assistant and stole some of the formula that turned Connors into the Lizard, perfected it (for herself, anyway), and used it to grow new legs. Even though the use of said legs requires her to stay in her reptile form, she's still able to change back and forth (though being human means her legs go away), and in reptile form, she suffers no desire to Kill All Humans.
    • The Serpent Society is a whole brigade of snake-themed villains - some actually reptilian, others who just like the fashion statement - who are intertwined with the ancient evil artifact of eldritch reptile gods, the Serpent Crown.
    • The Skrulls are reptile-like aliens are can be even more so Depending on the Artist.
    • Viper is yet another snake-thematic villain.
    • The Serpent Squad are a team of snake-themed mercenaries who sometimes serve as antagonists of Captain America.
    • Guardians of the Galaxy: Played straight with the males of the Brotherhood of the Badoon. Somehow, though, the females of the race are neither reptilian nor evil.
    • The Sons of the Serpent are basically Marvel's version of the Ku Klux Klan.
    • Like the rest of the Conan the Barbarian mythos, the Serpent Men and their god Set are part of the Marvel Universe - or they were until the license ran out a few years ago.
  • Requiem Vampire Knight: The Dystopians are evil brits that performed evil deeds in name of colonialism and reincarnated as humanoid lizards in Hell. They are extremely greedy and cunning, and serve as rivals to the vampires' supremacy in the afterlife. Notably, despite being an evil race, they ironically have at least one heroic member, Sir Tolecnal (to get a clue who he used to be in life, read his name backwards) who serves as the closest thing as a Knight in Shining Armor, but this world being what it is, he is dumb as a sack of bricks.
  • Reyn has the Venn species, who all look like salamanders and just so happen to be responsible for enslaving and nearly driving humanity into extinction.
  • Usagi Yojimbo: Lord Hebi, a giant snake and the only non-mammal recurring character, is The Dragon of Lord Hikiji, who's stuck as The Faceless since the author regretted making him a human.

    Comic Strips 
  • FoxTrot: Quincy, Jason's pet lizard, is seen as one by Jason's sister Paige, as he is constantly having Quincy chew up her stuff and generally freak her out. He's actually pretty passive, though.

    Fairy Tales 
  • In "Diamonds and Toads" -Charles Perrault's version of "Mother Holle"- a fairy punishes the wicked daughter so that toads and snakes fall out of her mouth with every word she speaks.
  • "Follow Me, Jodel!": Subverted. Jodel feels nauseous when the toad comes near him, believing such a repulsive critter must want to do him harm. Even so, Jodel follows the toad's instructions, and he finds the ugly animal is both kind and helpful.
  • "Prince Lindworm": The titular prince is a hideous, violent snake-like dragon who swallows two princesses. One Indian version reverses this, though; the prince is cursed to become a monstrous fish and the girl is helped by talking snakes.
  • A toad in a well causes it to dry up in "Right Always Remains Right," "The Three Golden Hairs of Grandfather Allknow." and "The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs" (link).
  • In "Sleeping Beauty", the evil mother-in-law includes these in the pit to throw Sleeping Beauty and her children in.
    she commanded next morning, by break of day (with a most horrible voice, which made everybody tremble), that they should bring into the middle of the great court a large tub, which she caused to be filled with toads, vipers, snakes, and all sorts of serpents in order to have thrown into it the Queen and her children, the clerk of the kitchen, his wife and maid.
  • In "The Swan Maiden" variant "The Three Swans", the huntsman must endure the torture of three dragons for three days to remove his wife's. Every time they turn into large snakes or fire-breathing turtles.
  • In "The Three Little Men in the Wood", a girl is punished by having a toad hop from her mouth every times she speaks.
    And when she opened her mouth, and was about to tell her mother what had happened to her in the wood, with every word she said, a toad sprang out of her mouth, so that every one was seized with horror of her.
  • In "The Three Snake Leaves", a snake slithers into the vault where the main character has been buried alive with his deceased wife, and creeps towards the corpse. The prince swiftly cuts the snake into three pieces, but after a time another snake creeps into the crypt, and uses the titular leaves to restore and resurrect the dead reptile.
  • In "Thumbelina", Thumbelina is threatened by an Arranged Marriage to an old toad.
  • In The Brothers Grimm's "The Ungrateful Son," a man hides a roast chicken from his aged father, but when he takes it out again, it's become a toad which hops on his head, never comes off, and has to be fed every day or else it eats him.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animation 
  • The Emperor's New Groove: Main villain Yzma uses her fair share of decorative snake motifs. Also, one of her Mooks was transformed into a lizard. Averted with the alligator that clings onto Yzma and later Kuzco after they fall through the "wrong lever" trapdoor; it runs off scared with a gentle smack.
  • Flushed Away uses the "Amphibians Are Abhorrent" variant: the heroes are mammalian, human-like rats, while the Big Bad is a toad called "the Toad" who despises rats (albeit for a tragic reason) and wants to wipe out the rats in London's sewers so he can replace them with his tadpoles. If that's not enough, he also has a cousin called "Le Frog", who has other frogs as henchmen. There are no heroic amphibians in the movie, although there are villainous rats.
  • Heavy Metal 2000 features a race of violent Lizard Folk who have a taste for blood sports to the death and conquest.
  • Zig-Zagged with the How to Train Your Dragon franchise, where some dragons are villainous like the Red Death, Drago Bludvist's Bewilderbeast, and Grimmel's Deathgrippers, while certain other dragons are more benevolent, such as Toothless, Valka's Bewilderbeast, and the Light Fury.
  • Kaa in Disney's The Jungle Book is another funny villain. In the book, Kaa was one of the main mentors for Mowgli. In the Disney adaptation, he was transformed into a villain. note 
  • Kung Fu Panda 4 introduces the Chameleon, the ruthless ruler of Juniper City. Her enforcers are a bunch of komodo dragons themselves.
  • Although no reptiles appear in Penguins of Madagascar, the leopard seals are called "Nature's Snakes" by the penguins to show their fear.
  • In Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: The Tiger Prowess, Counselor the gecko is one of the villains of the film alongside Lord Japper the tiger and Leopold the leopard, and is the only reptile of the trio while the other two are cats. This goes even further when it's revealed near the end of the film that he's the one masterminding Lord Japper and his amusement park, on top of him convincing Lord Japper and Leopold that they're a tiger and a leopard respectively when they're actually a house cat and a hyena.
  • In The Princess and the Frog: Some of the "Friends From the Other Side" take on snake forms. It's to be expected when your villain is Jafar reincarnated as a 1920s voodoo doctor.
  • Zig-Zagged in Rango. While the heroes are lizards, Rattlesnake Jake is a vicious rattlesnake who inflicts dread on Dirt's people, though he does have a noble side to him. However, the same cannot be said for Mayor Tortoise John, who lacks any noble qualities and flips the idea of turtles and tortoises being heroic reptiles. Overall, reptiles are no more villainous than any other creature.
  • Robin Hood has the Punch-Clock Villain Sir Hiss. Oddly enough, he's a goofy Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain. Another villain is an axe wielding crocodile Elite Mook. The movie does feature a more sympathetic turtle: Toby, nerdy friend of Skippy Rabbit.
  • In the original Shrek film, Dragon starts off as this, having to face off against anyone who attempts to rescue Princess Fiona from a guarded castle.
  • Two of the animals Mad Madam Mim turns into during the Wizard Duel from The Sword in the Stone are a crocodile and a rattlesnake, respectively. And then, there's also the dragon...
  • Since his adventures take place in the jungle, Tarzan from the Disney movie gets into a lot of battles against crocodiles and snakes. In the spin-off cartoon, a huge snake named Hissa becomes the villain of one episode.
  • Trolls Band Together has the Superstar Duo Velvet and Veneer, who are capable of physically stretching and reflexing themselves, and are described by Floyd as "succubi" (even though they're demons and not reptiles) for extracting his natural talents. Even if never stated, all of these traits can be summarized as the duo themselves, more so Velvet, being snakes.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • A Cold War-era instructional film warned of the dangers of Hostile Intelligence Services (HISS), portrayed as an animated Smug Snake with a Lzherusskie accent.
  • The Amazing Spider-Man 1 has the Lizard as its main villain, who aims to mutate all of New York into reptiles.
  • In The Dark Crystal, the evil Skeksis look like lizards with some of the most repellent traits of vultures added for good measure. Their good-guy counterparts, the Mystics, have downplayed reptilian features and much more fur, giving them a softer and cuddlier appearance.
  • Dreamscape featured a little boy who suffered from nightmares about The Snake Man. The villain of the piece took on the hero by turning himself into The Snake Man.
  • Played on in Enemy Mine (1985), where humans are at war with a hated species of reptilian-like people called "Dracs."
  • In a "making of" documentary for The Film of the Book Eragon, one of the people in charge of designing Saphira said, "We decided first of all, to make Saphira the dragon more likable, so we made her look more like a lioness instead of a reptile."
  • Escape from New York and its sequel, Escape from L.A. both star Kurt Russell as a Sociopathic Hero named Snake Plissken.
  • They aren't reptiles, but while we're on the subject of horror movies that assume we think crawling, scaly, swamp-dwelling animals are inherently scary: Frogs. Yes, Frogs. (And the frogs in question aren't the poisonous or gigantic variety, either.) Funny thing is, the frogs themselves don't do anything. They just stand around being ominous. All of the mayhem and murder is done by alligators, moccasins, snapping turtles, and anoles (the last lock a guy in a greenhouse and cause a chemical reaction that asphyxiates the guy with vapors).
  • In his original appearance, Godzilla was portrayed as a walking nuclear explosion, destroying everything in his path. In subsequent movies, however, he was depicted in a grayer light, and became a hero at times.
  • Gremlins: The fluffy mammal-like Mogwai outside of Gizmo are already depicted as a malicious bunch, but they become an unstoppable horde who create havoc in the town and kill several people only after they're turned into fierce reptilian-esque Gremlins.
  • There's a subplot in Hard Ticket to Hawaii about a snake that is contaminated with toxins from cancer-infested rats. It kills two honeymooners after escaping its box, and later it finds its way to the home of one of the main characters and tries to attack her after it comes out of a toilet. It ends up killing one of the two main bad guys, and it is then shot point blank with a rocket launcher.
  • Harry Potter: Snakes are used to represent evil, the main examples being Voldemort, Nagini and Basilisk. Even Voldemort followers follow this snake-like trend e.g The Dark Mark tattoo on the Death Eaters is a snake coming out of skull, and Barty Crouch Jr. and his Maniac Tongue. Voldemort's appearance is also meant to be snake-like, with no hair, nostril slits instead of a nose, and a two-point tongue.
  • Zigzagged in the 2010 Bollywood film Hisss (also known as Nagin: The Snake Woman), which has a case of Black-and-Gray Morality going on. The titular Nagin, a female from a species of magical shapeshifting Snake People, engages in brutal murder of several men... but only due to being considerably provoked. She's on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge because a man dying of cancer kidnapped her husband in order to force her to come to him, so that he could torture them both into giving him their magical elixir so he can be cured, and even then, she only attacks people involved in her husband's abduction, men who abuse women, or men who are stupid enough to try and abuse her. Most infamously, her first kills of the movie, where she responds to two men luring her into their home to try and rape her by biting the first to death and then devouring the other.
  • Lampshaded in the film version of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man, where Rod Steiger's character crushes a garter snake with a rock and feeds it to his dog. When another character asks why he did it, noting that garter snakes are harmless and good to have around, he angrily responds, "It ain't no good to anyone, it's a damn snake!"
  • Indiana Jones when dumped into a snake-filled pit of doom in Raiders of the Lost Ark:
  • In Just One of the Guys, the character billed as "Reptile" is constantly showing off his collection of lizards and amphibians. They are not well-received.
  • Lincoln: Thaddeus Stevens rebukes his fellow Congressman George Pendleton with such an insult.
    Stevens: You are more reptile than man, George!
  • Live and Let Die: Mr. Big/Dr. Kananga uses snakes to kill adversaries, either releasing one into their hotel room, or using one in an elaborate voodoo ceremony (pulled from a coffin full of snakes). Then there's his crocodile farm/heroin processing center.
  • Played with in Noah. While it follows the biblical creation story including the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve, the film gives focus to a scene where hundreds of snakes enter the Ark, as they are also part of the Lord's creation and deserve to be rescued from the flood. Additionally, original good is represented by a relic owned by Noah's family line: a snakeskin belonging to the deceitful serpent. As the snake in a flashback is shown shedding its skin just before it goes to deceive humanity (and subsequently looks more fearsome), the snakeskin signifies the old creation that was once good, including the snake.
  • Q: The Winged Serpent was about an evil version of Quetzalcoatl, the ancient Aztec feathered snake god.
  • In Race with the Devil, the cultists hide a pair of live rattlesnakes inside the heroes' RV.
  • Rattlers. You never can have too much snake B movies. And the film poster on IMDB is, like, radically Freudian...
  • Reptilicus is a giant, man-eating lizard-dragon-thing.
  • The original Star Wars films have very few reptilian sentients. Most of them are in the Cantina on Mos Eisley. The only exception is Bossk, a rather vicious Trandoshan bounty hunter. General Grievous was a Kaleesh, a reptilian species that are at war with the Huk, a mantid-like species. The Huk were the Invaders, and Grievous was very noble back then. The prequels have some other reptilian species, but none in a prominent role. Amphibian-based species are more of an even split, with some being portrayed as good (the Gungans) and some evil (the Hutts). That said, we did get this article on the subject of Gungans:
    "I'm addressing, of course, the vicious, bigoted pattern of lizard-hate in the culture, and in the media.
    The Phantom Menace doesn't just contain one species-ist character, it slurs the entire reptilian phylum."
  • Although clearly scaleless and unrelated to any real-world organism, the monsters from the Tremors films and series (or just their tongues) are frequently described as resembling reptiles of one sort or another.
  • Viper, the reptilian-themed Baroness from The Wolverine.
  • Zathura (which is Jumanji IN SPACE!) gives us the villainous Zorgons, reptilian aliens who are attracted to heat sources.
  • In the 1962 William Castle fantasy film Zotz!, a mild-mannered professor of ancient languages receives a mysterious amulet in the mail from his niece's archaeologist boyfriend. He soon learns that while he has the amulet, pointing at something will cause it stabbing pains, and saying "Zotz!" will slow whatever he's looking at down, but pointing and saying "Zotz!" will kill his target outright. Naturally, when he goes outside he tries the stinger on a squirrel and the killer on a lizard (which bursts into flame).

    Literature 

By Author

  • Anytime a reptilian character shows up in one of Terry Brooks' books, you can expect raw evil (although Strabo of the Magic Kingdom of Landover is a noticeable exception). It's especially obvious with The Mwellrets, who are the only species in the Shannara universe that hasn't featured a heroic member. Indeed, one of them, Cree Bega, and his equally reptilian boss, The Morgawr, are the worst characters in series.
  • Robert E. Howard's stories of King Kull include the Serpent People, an ancient, pre-human species that survived the extinction of the dinosaurs. They were evil, dying out, yet determined to retake the world for their species. Among their magical talents was the ability to cast a glamour that made them seem human to observers. The illusion was so good in one story that Kull himself doubted (for all of a minute) his own existence. After which he killed the imposter. Death broke the spell, revealing the truth.
    • Howard would continue the tradition in his Conan the Barbarian stories, which had the evil cult of Set, the Old Serpent, as a primary adversary for the Cimmerian. In the novel The Hour of the Dragon, the priests of Set keep giant snakes.
      The Cimmerian recoiled, remembering tales he had heard — serpents were sacred to Set, god of Stygia, who men said was himself a serpent. Monsters such as this were kept in the temples of Set, and when they hungered, were allowed to crawl forth into the streets to take what prey they wished. Their ghastly feasts were considered a sacrifice to the scaly god.
  • Rudyard Kipling's stories invoke the trope only when applied to venomous snakes and crocodiles.
    • In "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi", which set the familiar Snake Versus Mongoose archetype which has a pet mongoose defending his guardians' home against the deadly snakes that are everywhere.
    • In "Kaa's Hunting", the "poison people" are self-absorbed. The mad cobra in "The King's Ankus" seems somewhat insane, claiming that a jewelled inanimate object is "death" (and it turns out he's also outlived his poison), but turns out to be right.
      • The villagers first introduced in Tiger-Tiger! keep a holy village cobra which is content with being fed and doesn't bother anyone.
    • Likewise, in "The Undertakers", the chief villain is a vain old crocodile called the Mugger,note  who boasts of having attacked human women and children (but is less than thrilled to be reminded that a woman once drove him away by shooting at him).
    • How animals are portrayed - "good", "evil", "brave", "cowardly" - does to a large extent depend on the individual story and who the animals interact with; thus "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" to a large extent reflects the irrepressible fear of snakes that Kipling describes as a typically "white" trait in a scene in Kim where the Kim and the lama come upon a venomous snake and the lama stops Kim from trying to kill it.
  • In H. P. Lovecraft's writing, reptiles are a frequent source of horror, most notably in The Nameless City.
  • Andre Norton:
    • Subverted in Operation Time Search, when a young man from 20th Century America is flung back in time to the war between Atlantis and Mu, and is surprised, though he doesn't say it aloud, to find that his Murian hosts revere snakes. A nine-headed serpent motif is often used in jewelry — and the Emperor's crown.
    • In Ordeal in Otherwhere, Charis finds a madwoman at the post where she is taken, who is obsessed with the horrible "snakes". She certainly was driven mad by contact with the reptilian Wyverns, but whether her horror caused or was caused by the contact is never even touched on.
  • Harry Turtledove's books have The Race, which initially seem to be this trope perfectly personified, along with many other tropes related to villainy, but later they're revealed as being simply arrogant but chivalric beings.

By Work

  • In Clive Barker's Abarat series, despite the archipelago of Abarat being home to a host of wildly different creatures, Finnegan Hob is out to kill all dragons, even young ones, because one of them killed his bride. All dragons appearing on-page are unsympathetic (and ugly), while Hob is depicted sympathetically, and none of the other characters have a problem with him wanting to commit genocide of a sentient species. This unnuanced portrayal of dragons is rare in modern fantasy.
  • In The Adventures of Caterpillar Jones, E. Phil Snake tries to eat C.J. and Cat, and is the only evil character in the book.
  • Debora Chester's Alien Chronicles series has the Viis, who resemble giant frilled lizards. They're a despotic race that has enslaved various mammalian races, with the only other reptilian species being their allies instead. When the mammalian races leave to find a utopia, not even their Viis underclass allies go with them, and what becomes of the turtle-people is never said. The web page for the series even invokes this trope.
  • In the first Animorphs book, Jake morphs a green anole lizard to spy on his assistant principal. He loses control of the morph and eats a spider, and the horror of the experience scares him off reptile morphs in general, as he only morphs two more reptiles throughout the next three years, both cases where he pretty much had no other choice. In general reptiles are not used as morphs by any of the team as frequently as mammals are. Reptile morphs are very rarely used, and even when they are, they're always snakes.
  • Goblins in Artemis Fowl are a reptilian species of fairy. They're presented as extremely stupid and almost universally prone to a criminal disposition. They are also the only fairy race with the ability to conjure fire.
  • In Astrosaurs series, all the characters are reptiles, however actually played straight (along with Predators Are Mean) as the heroes look more humanoid or mammal-like while the villains have much more pronounced reptilian traits.
  • Bazil Broketail:
    • Inverted, for the most part. Of all non-human races in the setting, dragons are actually the one which is the closest to humans, being integrated into their society, living and fighting by their side and even being the most friendly on personal levels.
    • This trope is occasionally played straight In-Universe, though, with certain characters who still hold a dislike towards dragons for various reasons, ranging from their monstrous appearance (which makes people outside Argonath consider them mindless animals), to the trouble and cost of their upkeep (which makes them very unpopular among some noblemen, particularly grain mandates who would rather sell their wares on the market rather than contribute to feeding the dragon corps) to downright petty ones like their ostensibly bad smell (according to Porteous Glaves, at least). Then again, since such opinions either stem from ignorance or are shared by characters who are either jerkasses or openly evil, there is no doubt how much value they actually hold.
    • One situation where this trope is played completely straight is the dragon freeze, a natural reaction of a typical human to seeing an adult dragon (and looking him in the eyes in particular). Most people are just immobilized with fear as a consequence. Only those who meet dragons on a daily basis (like dragonboys or other soldiers in the Argonathi legions) are unaffected, though there are also some humans who seem to have an innate immunity to the dragon freeze (like king Choulaput, who looked at Bazil — the first dragon he ever saw in his entire life — and remained calm).
  • Subverted by David Eddings' The Belgariad and Mallorean series. While the civilization most attuned to and appreciative of snakes, the Nyissans, are usually portrayed as a rather sinister, corrupt, and amoral people, eventually the chief eunuch Sadi becomes a rather amusing hero, and he brings his pet snake Zith, an intelligent, extremely lethal but extremely affectionate and endearing snake with almost cat-like habits. The only member of the party who doesn't take a shine to her is Silk, whose snake-phobia is more comical than rational. Zith's habit of curling up and sleeping in the bosom of Silk's love interest does not help this. Nor does how Silk finds out...
    • The leader of Nyissa getting turned into a giant snake actually improved her morality (from sinister and vamp-ish to amoral and dispassionate). The Snake-God Issa, meanwhile, is a decent enough fellow, though a bit forgetful and not very attentive.
  • Amoridere invokes this with Animal Motifs in her poem Bitten by the Snake, wherein the subject's ex-friend is compared to that of a snake, something predatory, and he's described to be unpleasant.
  • In The Book of Night with Moon by Diane Duane, it is revealed that humans' association of reptiles with evil (in the Book of Genesis and elsewhere) is due to the lizard people choosing to align with the power of evil. Also, both feline mythology and cetacean mythology has Satan taking the form of a giant snake. The city of the sentient lizard people is a horrific Crapsack World which runs on systematic oppression and cannibalism. However, the victory of the heroes give the lizard people a chance to choose a better path, and the lizard Ith becomes a sympathetic character. By the second book, the lizard people are as moral and agreeable as any other species.
  • The Builders only has three notable reptilian creatures: a salamander and snake who are both assassins with a high body count, and the Toad Lord, a corpulent toad who's responsible for the current state the country is in.
  • Inverted in Chess With A Dragon. Mammalian races are an extremely rare fluke in this novel, hence most civilized species insist that Mammals Are Abhorrent.
  • Played with in the novel Chester Cricket's Home, a sequel to The Cricket in Times Square. One of the residents of Chester's meadow, a water snake named Walter, realizes that many humans find him horrifying, a fact that he takes an inordinate amount of pride in. However, Walter is actually quite friendly and funny, if a bit of a wise guy at times.
  • Cradle Series:
    • One of the first antagonistic organizations that Lindon encounters are the Sandviper clan. They first attack him from surprise, with superior numbers, while he and Yerin are much weaker than them, and still use poison and every other dishonorable tactic they can think of. They don't get much better after that.
    • Similarly, the primary antagonistic faction for the middle third or so of the series is the Dragon Monarch Seshethkunaaz, an extreme Social Darwinist who considers it morally offensive that the strong should be punished for hurting or killing the weak. Unsurprisingly, most dragons have the same mindset, though there are exceptions.
  • Dark Heavens: "Some of my best friends are snakes."
  • The Death Gate Cycle: Invoked. The Serpents are fond of appearing as immense, monstrous snakes (hence the name) because they feed on negative emotions and have determined that this form evokes a great deal of fear, hatred and revulsion in most humanoids. That said, they have Voluntary Shapeshifting powers and can take any shape they want when they want to be more subtle — the giant snake-monsters are just a preference.
  • Destroyermen: A pair of WWII destroyers slip sideways into a timeline where dinosaurs were never wiped out and humans never evolved. Instead two other intelligent races did, one mammalian, one reptilian. Guess who the bad guys are? It should be noted, however, that the Grik (as they're called) are actually more bird-like than reptile-like, complete with feathers.
  • Dora Wilk Series: One of the primary villains is an Asper, a type of demon that can control snakes and other reptiles. He also has reptilian fangs with painful, snake-like poison which he doesn't shy away from using, not to mention that when he does Torture for Fun and Information, it doesn't have the "Information" part in it.
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Raoul Duke has hallucinations of man-eating Lizard Folk when he makes it to the hotel bar.
  • Fighting Fantasy has Serpent People and Lizard Men who are, of course, Always Chaotic Evil. The Demon Princes Ishtra, Myurr and Sith also favour reptillian forms. Downplayed with Suthis Cha and Vermistra, the gods of lizards and snakes, who are described in Titan: The Fighting Fantasy World as a rather selfish form of True Neutral, but not really more so than any other god of the Animal Court. (Suthis Cha created the Lizard Men, but they turned to evil when Myurr corrupted them in his absence. And Verminstra had nothing to do with the Serpent People, who were directly created by Sith.)
  • In his biography Fouché: Bildnis eines politischen Menschen (English title: "Joseph Fouché") Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig notes how much the coat Fouché got when he was made a count and later a duke by Napoleon — a snake wound around a golden column — was to this master of intrigue who also managed to amass a huge fortune.
  • Freckles: The Friend to All Living Things Freckles makes an exception for snakes. Killing one was an important part of Face Your Fears for him, and the summer where they retreat to the swamp is nasty.
  • Harry Potter:
    • A snake is the mascot of Slytherin House, which was never an "evil" house, but has a bad reputation due to the many Death Eaters who were sorted there in their school days. The snake is used as an evil motif by the Death Eaters. The ability to speak Parseltongue (snake language) is said to be associated with Dark magic, worsening the snake's reputation even further.
    • There was also the basilisk, a huge snake that Harry fights at the end of the second book. It was Slytherin's pet back in the day, and he kept it hidden in the chamber in hope that his heir would release it and use it to drive Muggle-born wizards out of the school.
    • Nagini is essentially Voldemort's Right Hand Snake and a partial Soul Jar.
    • However, the actual boa constrictor in the first book seems genuinely pleasant and just wants to go to Brazil, where his particular species comes from.
  • Hoka has two races of reptilian aliens that are presented as universally and unquestionably unpleasant.
  • Hurog: Subverted. There is a basilisk, and watching how it eats a man (thrown at it by the villain) is an abhorrent experience for the protagonist. However, later on, after the basilisk breaks free from the villain's enchantment, it is treated as just another dangerous animal, and a rare animal at that. The protagonists make an effort to get it to the equivalent of a zoo. (Where it will, presumably, be fed animals instead of sentient beings). It makes sense considering that the protagonist's title means "Guardian of Dragons" and basilisks are related to dragons, in about the way apes are related to humans; basilisks are not as intelligent as dragons.
  • Lizard Music: Discussed. The lizards on the island are completely mellow (thanks to television waves), but the narrator is wary of going to the island at first, because of this trope.
  • The Lost World (1995): Exploited by Biosyn. Dodgson remarks that while animal rights activists can easily drum up support for laboratory dogs who "lick your hand and break your heart," reptiles are less likely to garner such public sympathy. Hence, his expedition to Isla Sorna for potential experimental subjects.
  • Miles Taylor and the Golden Cape has the Unnd in the first book, "Attack Of The Alien Horde".
  • Pellucidar has two reptilian species: the Snake People Horibs who are villains right out of central casting, and the more nuanced Mahars who are telepathic, parthenogenic pterosaurs who start out ruling Pellucidar but are overthrown by the human hero. It later turns out that the Mahars — who are deaf and communicate entirely by telepathy — were unaware that humans are sapient.
  • Redwall: While the mammals are split between being good or evil, every single reptile and amphibian is a bad guy. In the first book, a snake is given a demon's name (which it likes to chant for some reason) and likened to a giant, intelligent, evil dragon/monster. In one of the later books, a desert-dwelling character keeps a pet sand lizard; "Get 'em when they're young and they're good likkle critters." This was lampshaded hilariously by Something Awful, though it was in response more to the mustelids all being evil.
  • The Riftwar Cycle:
    • Silverthorn introduces the Pantathians, a race of snake-men who worship their creator, the Valheru Alma-Lodaka, and seek to bring her back at any cost. Doesn't sound so bad until you find out that their creator belongs to a race of evil Precursors who will destroy the world if ever freed. They know this, and they don't care; they want their Mistress back, no matter the consequences. Notable for being literally Always Chaotic Evil: they were created by Alma-Lodaka specifically to serve her and are genetically incapable of anything else; even a brand-new hatchling has an inherent hatred for other life. By the end of the Serpentwar Saga the Pantathians are extinct, every last one of them, and it's presented as a good thing.
    • Averted in the Serpentwar Saga by the Saaur, a Proud Warrior Race whom the Pantathians trick into working for them. Physically the Saaur strongly resemble larger versions of the Pantathians, but mentally and morally they couldn't be more different. While you might not like having them for neighbors (they're highly skilled warriors and insatiable conquerors), the Saaur are honest and honorable warriors, who end their war on the Kingdom of the Isles instantly when they learn how they've been manipulated.
  • In The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, Quetzalcoatl is one of the more evil-aligned Elders (seriously, people need to stop making the nicest Aztec god evil just because he's the only one they've heard of) and a Komodo-dragon-like monster called a Nidhogg is summoned and nearly eats Scathach in the first book. Also, everyone's magical aura has a different smell, and one of the villains' auras smells like a snake.
  • Invoked in A Series of Unfortunate Events by the Baudelaire's second guardian Dr. Montgomery "Uncle Monty" Montgomery, a herptologist who, while he works with various kinds of snakes, overall describes them as misunderstood creatures. He discovers a new species which he names The Incredibly Deadly Viper but is actually nonvenomous and friendly, which he purposely named as a prank to his colleagues in the field.
  • Sherlock Holmes: Holmes can't stand snakes. The arch-villain Professor Moriarty and the 'worst man in London', blackmailer Charles Augustus Milverton, are both compared to reptiles: Moriarty in the way he moves his head, Milverton because he gives Holmes the creeps. The only actual reptile in the series is the Indian swamp adder, which kills people.
  • Spellsinger: This trope becomes Reptiles Are Stupid; reptiles are the only air-breathing vertebrates that aren't intelligent tool-users. Except for the turtles and dragons, which get an exemption on grounds of popular appeal. Lizards and snakes also grow large enough to be used for meat and pack animals, nicely averting Carnivore Confusion.
  • Spirit Animals features the Great Beasts, fifteen Physical Gods with tremendous power over various aspects of reality. The only reptile, Gerathon The Serpent, is one of the two Great Beasts to turn evil. Additionally, a saltwater crocodile is the symbolic animal of the main villain and his crown features a serpent biting its tail.
  • Star Trek: Typhon Pact: This trope is discussed at some length in Seize the Fire. The book also plays with it when the reptilian Gorn show similar revulsion to mammals.
    "Mammals. Why did it have to be mammals?"
  • Villain.net plays with this one: upon encountering Chameleon, apprentice supervillain Jake Hunter presumes the reptilian shapeshifter to be a fellow evil-doer. He is quickly disabused of that notion. However, over the course of the first book, Chameleon shows himself to have a nasty edge, being perfectly willing to kill, and seeking revenge rather than justice.
  • West of Eden: This is central to the conflict. Humans find reptiles disgusting and frightening, and the Yilanè (intelligent descendants of mosasaurs) have an equally low opinion of "ustuzou" (mammals). Each ends up seeing the other as vermin to be wiped out.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Animal Planet:
    • Blatantly invoked in Fatal Attractions (2010), during an episode about an animal hoarder who owned several Nile monitors and allowed them free reign of his apartment. The man died in his apartment and his body was discovered in a heavily decomposed state, with his pet lizards having fed upon the body. The show seemed to go out of its way to demonise the reptiles themselves (as well as the people who own them, painting them as egomaniacs who form no emotional bonds with their pets), with no shortage of re-enactments featuring close-up shots of plotting, shifty-eyed lizards filmed in a sinister monochrome. The show also hypothesised that the monitors deliberately envenomated their owner and waited around for him to die like Komodo Dragons, a hunting strategy which Komodo Dragons themselves are no longer believed to use, let alone Nile Monitors. It also perpetuated the myth that reptiles spread salmonella.note  The show also neglected to mention the far more likely possibility that the man simply died and was scavenged upon by his starving pets.
    • A season two episode about pet crocodiles seems to have a very black-and-white issue on the subject. Crocodiles are depicted as either mindless cold-blooded killers or as intelligent beloved pets. There is, sadly, no middle ground stating that crocodiles are intelligent predators that should NEVER be kept as pets because of how dangerous they are, but that we shouldn't go about mindlessly killing them just because they're predators.
    • Man-Eating Super Snake, a documentary that indulges in blatant fearmongering based on the possibility that the feral Burmese Pythons and African Rock Pythons in the Everglades will breed and produce hybrids with the size of the former and the purported aggression of the latter. Not only is this premise utterly sensationalistic and like something out of a Syfy original movie, but Burmese and Rock Pythons have already been hybridized in captivity; "Burmrocks", as they are known, are no larger or more aggressive than their Burmese or African parents. In fact, they're actually quite docile, a trait they inherit from their Burmese parents, exactly the opposite of Animal Planet's "Man-Eating Super Snake".
  • Billy the Exterminator: Billy's mother Donnie seems to be a firm believer in this trope; even a small, harmless snake causes her to throw a hysterical fit until the offending serpent is no longer present.
  • Doctor Who: The reptilian Ice Warriors were introduced as a villain race, although they eventually became a more sympathetic Proud Warrior Race.
  • Farscape:
  • Most reptilian Wesens in Grimm are mean — except for the nice Turtle Wesen, of course, who are peaceful, docile and at worst are too smart for their own good.
  • Kamen Rider has multiple antagonists based on reptiles, most of them Monsters of the Week. Some series also introduce reptile-based Kamen Riders, with the majority of them being outright evil. Examples below:
    • Kamen Rider Ryuki:
      • Kamen Rider Ohja, which means King of Snakes — a Meaningful Name, since his Rider form is based on a cobra. His human identity is Takeshi Asakura, a convicted but escaped murderer who has an unhealthy obsession with fighting. He is easily one of the evilest characters in the show.
      • One of the specials introduces Itsuro Takamizawa a.k.a. Kamen Rider Verde, whose Rider form is based on a chameleon. While he maintains the appearance of a successful businessman, he is no better than the aforementioned Kamen Rider Ohja, as he has no qualms about violently killing everyone standing in his way.
    • Subverted with Taiga Nobori a.k.a. Kamen Rider Saga in Kamen Rider Kiva. He does start out as an antagonist and his armor is based on a snake, but later becomes an ally to the hero.
    • Kamen Rider Build has Blood Stalk, a Kamen Rider-like villain based on a cobra. He has no qualms whatsoever in experimenting on innocent civilians, kill bystanders who stand in his way and even goes as far as to instigate a war between two nations, just to further his agenda.
  • The Sleestak are the worst sentient villains in Land of the Lost (1974).
  • Power Rangers:
  • Sesame Street intentionally avoids the trope, featuring friendly introductions to "scary" animals to assure the kids that they're not mean. There's a song about a friendly snake named Sammy. There is also one about an alligator king and his seven sons; both song and alligators are pleasant.
  • The main Big Bads of Space Cases are the Spung, an Always Chaotic Evil (except for Elmira) race of bipedal reptiles.
  • Stargate SG-1:
    • Subverted with the Unas. When first introduced, the lizard-like Unas are unquestionably evil. This is because the only ones encountered are possessed by the Always Chaotic Evil Goa'uld (who are referred to as "snakes" by several characters, though they're closer to eels). Later, the team finds un-possessed Unas, who are initially somewhat primitive and feral, but later show capacity for honor and other virtues.
    • However, there's also the first Big Bad, Apophis; his Jaffa wear snake-themed armour, and he himself wears golden snake armour. (Apophis was associated with snakes in Ancient Egypt, and the premise is that the Goa'uld had inspired human religions by pretending to be gods.)
  • Star Trek:
    • Star Trek: The Original Series has a surprising subversion with the Gorn from "Arena", who is forced to fight Kirk the same way Kirk is. What's more, the previous attack on the Federation outpost was a result of the Federation accidentally and unknowingly violating Gorn space. This misunderstanding, more than anything, was the cause of the fighting in the first place, and while Kirk admits that "Like most humans, I seem to have an instinctive revulsion to reptiles.", he eventually suggests that the Federation and the Gorn could negotiate a peaceful solution. According to the Expanded Universe, most of them are actually quite friendly, and over time the Gorn have become allies of The Federation. On the other hand, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds plays this trope horrifyingly straight by portraying the Gorn as Always Chaotic Evil; the three episodes thus far that have featured the Gorn are straight-up horror shows. Security Chief La'an Noonien Singh survived being held captive by the Gorn but watched her family and friends get slaughtered; the experience left her severely traumatized.
    • Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine have the Cardassians, a very unpleasant race with distinctly reptilian features. Apart from a bare handful of Cardassians who thought My Species Doth Protest Too Much, the only exceptions were some background characters in the movies, revealing that The Federation does have turtle-people and lizard-people amongst its citizens; they just don't do anything. Maybe they need more sunlight?
    • This trope is subtle but there in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Lonely Among Us". The Enterprise plays host to delegations from two sentient bipedal species: Antican and Selay. The two delegations are at each others' throats from the beginning, and at the end of the episode we learn the Antican delegation has killed a member of the Selayan delegation and wants the Enterprise's chef to help them prepare their victim for a meal. It's all okay, though, because the Anticans are a mammalian species with doglike heads and the Selay are a reptilian species with the heads of cobras. Thus, what might ordinarily strike the audience as a horrifying act of murder and cannibalism is almost played as an "Everybody Laughs" Ending.
    • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine introduced the Jem'hadar, a scaly race of drug-addicted, genetically engineered Super-Soldier fanatics who look like humanoid styracosaurs and worship a race of fascistic shapeshifter space amoebas. Despite this, they're the nicest out of all the races created by the Founders.
    • The Hirogens in Star Trek: Voyager are another very unpleasant race with distinctly reptilian features..
    • Star Trek: Enterprise introduces the Xindi, an association of species all hailing from the same planet, who the show insists are very closely related genetically, even though they vary wildly in morphology. There's the (dolphin-like) Aquatics, human-like Primates, human-like (if hairier) Arborials, ant-like and scary-looking Insectoids, lizard-like and also scary-looking Reptilians, and the extinct and presumably birdlike Avians. You win no prizes for guessing which two species remained villains. It’s the Reptilians and Insectoids, and then just the Reptilians when the Insectoids have second thoughts.
  • V (1983): The Sirians embody this trope, but more to the point, the show-makers rely on it working on the audience. When they first appear, they are disguised as humans, and the fact that they are actually reptiles hidden behind Latex Perfection is treated as a revelation just as horrifying as their attempt to enslave all of humanity.
  • The X-Files had several monsters with reptilian motifs.
    • In "Young at Heart", Doctor Ridley uses salamander cells to de-age Barnett, giving him a horrifying reptilian hand in the process.
    • "Die Hand Die Verletzt" makes a use of a school python as an Animal Assassin.
    • In "Signs and Wonders", both agents are on edge by an awful lot of snakes. Though it turns out the snake handlers are actually the good guys, more or less.
    • The monster in "Alone", originally thought to be some kind of reptile, is actually the cryptobiologist who seemed to be protecting the creature he created and who is able to transform himself at will.

    Music 
  • The Church: Starfish: "Reptile" makes use of explicit Biblical symbolism.
    And I should have believed Eve.
    She said we had to blow.
    She was the apple of my eye.
    It wasn't long ago.
  • Nile: The band gets a lot of mileage out of this one, from serpents to crocodiles to the Lovecraftian "prehuman serpent volk" to turning into a snake.
  • Nine Inch Nails: "The Downward Spiral": "Reptile":
    She splits herself wide open, to let the insects in
    She leaves a trail of honey, to show me where she's been
    She's got the blood of reptiles, just underneath her skin
    Seeds of a thousand others, drip down from within
  • The Soft Boys: Underwater Moonlight: "He's A Reptile": The lyrics utilize the metaphor to describe a smooth-talking, sharp-dressing, woman-stealing sleazeball.
  • Jim Stafford: "Swamp Witch": "Strange green reptiles" and large snakes inhabit the Black Bayou. They are among the owners of the "thousand eyes" that make people steer clear of the place.
  • Static-X's song "Reptile" portrays reptiles' physical attributes (venom, shedding skin, and venom) as gross and horrifying.
  • Frank Zappa: "Frogs with Dirty Little Lips": It's basically about everything that the singer hates about frogs.

    Myths & Religion 
  • The original The Farmer and the Viper, from Aesop's Fables runs on this concept. A woman or a farmer finds a venomous snake shivering outside in the snow. It begs her to let it in so it does not freeze to death. She refuses, on the grounds that the snake will bite her and she'll die. The snake continues to plead, assuring her he will do no such thing, asking how he could possibly hurt the one who saved his life. So the kindhearted woman brings the snake in, and cuddles it to her breast by the fire. When the snake thaws out, it bites her anyway. As she lies dying, she asks the snake why he broke his word. The snake replies that it's just his nature — "you knew I was a snake when you let me in!"
    • This story survives even into the Old American South, starring kind-hearted Br'er Possum in place of the woman and Br'er Snake as himself. "You knowed I was a snake when you put me in yer pocket..."
    • It was a popular song in 1968, sung by the great Al Wilson.
  • In Norse Mythology the mighty Midgard Serpent, Jormugandr, is the mortal enemy of Thor and a spawn of Loki. There's also Nidhoggr, the serpent who munches on Yggdrassil the World Tree's roots.
  • In Sumerian myth, the world is made from the body of the primordial dragon-goddess Tiamat after she is killed by her much more human-like divine children. Also, the Trickster God serpent steals the secret of eternal life from Gilgamesh.
  • Most mythology surrounding dragons in most Western and Middle-Eastern cultures portrays them as poison-spewing, slimy, fire-breathing, and/or virgin-munching abominations that spread death and destruction wherever they go and must be killed by a brave hero or outwitted by a clever, pure-hearted maiden. Though their depiction has evolved over time, most early Western and Middle-Eastern dragons are just giant snakes, with or without embellishments like wings and horns.
  • Islam: Islamic tradition has it that getting up to slay a snake is one of very few permissible reasons to interrupt one's prayers. It's even attributed heroic value; those who have slain snakes may earn entry into Paradise. The large number of venomous snakes in the Middle-East is an obvious source for the sentiment.
  • The Bible and Christianity:
    • A snake persuaded Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. For this offense, Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden, but the snake itself was cursed by God to "crawl on its belly, eating dust", and to forever be hated by mankind.
    • Satan is often called "old snake" or a "dragon", and is often conflated with the serpent in the Garden of Eden in modern interpretations. Christian art will always show the Archangel Michael, who cast Lucifer out of Heaven, as defeating the latter in the form of a dragon. Also, the dragon appearing in the Book of Revelation is usually interpreted as being him.
    • In the Apocrypha the fallen Archangel Ramiel (whose name in the Greek translations of the Apocrypha is referred to as Hades) is described as a snake and has a personality similar to the Leviathan of Job in that he rules over Pride (unlike the other snake Satan who rules over deceit).
  • In The Legend of the Gallant Jiraiya, Jiraiya has a student named Orochimaru who uses snake-magic. Orochimaru decides he wants more power, and heads on over to The Dark Side. Jiraiya and his wife Tsunade use their toad and snail-magic (respectively) to fight Orochimaru. He manages to subdue (although not completely overpower) their summoned creatures, until they are helped by another of Jiraiya's students. The actual outcome of the battle is undetermined, however.
  • Consumption of reptiles is prohibited under the rules of both kashruth and halal.
  • Chinese Mythology: One of the many monsters Yu the Great has to deal with to save China from its flood and other strife is Xiangliu, a multi-headed serpent.
  • In mythological studies, there is a trope called "Chaoskampf". It is always along the lines of "storm god fights huge serpent/dragon, representing order vs chaos". It appears in the form of Indra vs Vritra, Zeus vs Typhon and Thor vs Jormungandr. It's very common in Indo-European traditions, and the ancestral IE mythology is thus assumed to have had such a myth as well, but similar myths are present in unrelated traditions as Susano'o vs Orochi.
  • In Filipino beliefs, snakes in the home are seen as a bad omen, but small geckos (referred to as "butiki" in Tagalog) in the home are considered good luck. The latter might be because the geckos do a good job of keeping vermin out of the house — although they may also be themselves considered vermin.
  • Zigzagged with Egyptian Mythology, with reptiles as potentially both good and evil. Considering the environment the Ancient Egyptians lived in, perhaps this is to be expected.
    • One the one hand, you have gods such as Wadjet (the cobra goddess), who is the snake often depicted on the pharaoh's crown serving as a guardian, Renenutet (another cobra goddess), associated with fertility, and Sobek (the crocodile god), who is dangerous but venerable.
    • On the other hand, you have the giant Chaos water snake, Apep, who embodies everything the gods stand in opposition of and is an unambiguously evil, destructive entity. Turtles are also associated with Apep, to the point that eating turtle flesh was considered impure among the Egyptians.
    • The basic gist of it therefore seems to be "land reptile = good", "water reptile = bad". Sobek and similar crocodile gods were an exception, although even they were still a case of Good Is Not Nice.

    Print Media 
  • Ranger Rick, of all places, used this trope off and on:
    • Uncomfortably applied in one issue. There was a short story in which Rick and his gang help an Ocelot in the Everglades and are menaced by an alligator, who was explicitly described as a villain. This was jarring considering it was the only time an animal filled the antagonistic role; usually Humans Are Bastards (they staunchly used the Humans Are Misguided subtrope). Even worse? The very next issue Rick and co. head back to Florida to help... alligators.
    • Ranger Rick magazine also had a series of nonfiction books about animals and of those, one of the most beloved is The Unhuggables. It did all it could to discredit this trope (though it's telling that snakes get their own chapter to themselves) as well as Carnivores Are Mean and (as you could probably guess from the so-close-to-being-the-Trope Namer-title) What Measure Is a Non-Cute?.
  • An issue of New Scientist with a cover story about "Gaia's Evil Twin". The cover picture showed Gaia surrounded by "good nature"; green shoots, flowers, butterflies and doves, and Evil Gaia surrounded by "bad nature"; black roots, flies, carrion birds, and snakes. This did not reflect the actual story in any way (it was about the nature of mass extinctions).

    Professional Wrestling 
  • Jake "The Snake" Roberts, whether in the WWF, WCW, or anywhere else, was generally portrayed as just as sleazy, slimy, and duplicitous as the reptiles he handled. He also loved to use his snakes to intimidate and/or humiliate his foes, and cleared the ring in at least one battle royal by letting loose an 8-foot boa constrictor and watching everybody scramble over the top rope trying to get away from it. (We'd love to know what the snake was thinking.)
  • "Stone Cold" Steve Austin also went by "The Rattlesnake," although it was because of his violent and unpredictable nature rather than because he was truly evil.
  • Then there's the Viper himself, Randy Orton.
  • Discussed in IWA Deep South, where Chikara's Gecko Roman Wrestler Argus was suspected of being an Illuminati agent plotting to takeover the world.

    Puppet Shows 

    Radio 
  • Alien Worlds: "Night Riders of Kalimar": The villainous Night Riders of Kalimar are described as being reptilian.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Cartoon Action Hour: One of the fictional series, "Warriors of the Cosmos", has a evil snake-human in the form Serpentina, but that tabletop kisses the mouth of 1980s cartoons very hard.
  • Champions has the ubiquitous VIPER criminal organization as well as reptile-themed villains. One is King Cobra (formerly Dr. Timothy Blank), a Mad Scientist who discovered the Coil Gene, which mutates humans into super-powered reptilian creatures. He was his own first subject. His goal is to turn every human in the world into reptiles... loyal to him, naturally. He's been a master villain in Champions for at least the last three editions of the game, probably longer.
  • Crimestrikers: One of the villains is Dolores Dedmond, an anthropomorphic rattlesnake. She's an amoral Mad Scientist who creates horrific weapons as well as an arrogant Jerkass.
  • Dragon Dice: There exist the Swamp Stalkers, a race of war refugees and deserters who sought refuge in the setting's swamps and were there transformed by Death into a race of snake men with the power to mutate members of other species in order to increase their numbers.
  • Dungeons & Dragons features many, many cases over the editions. Just a few examples to start with:
    • The kobolds are small, cowardly, and malevolent lizard-people distantly related to dragons.
    • The troglodytes are Chaotic Evil lizard-like humanoids that live underground and raid human settlements to feed on the inhabitants.
    • The Lizard Folk play with this trope. They're often used as antagonists, but their default alignment is True Neutral and they really just want to be left alone.
    • The yuan-ti range from mostly-human people with a few snake features to mostly-snake people with a few human features, as well as several other heavily-mutated varieties. They're emotionless sociopaths to the last, seek to conquer and dominate all other species, and their patron deity is Merrshaulk, a Chaotic Evil giant snake-monster that spends most of its time slumbering in its realm in the Abyss.
    • The naga (giant snakes with humanlike heads) are an interesting case; on the one hand, there are several variants, spread all over the Character Alignment chart; on the other, evil variants are usually (depending on edition) more numerous than nonevil ones, and unlike most other human-headed, animal-bodied monsters, in 3e they have the "aberration" creature type, which is usually reserved for either really weird monsters or outright Eldritch Abominations.
    • The bullywug are a race of Chaotic Evil frog-like humanoids. They can be dealt with by tempting them with alcohol ,which they can't resist and so drink until knocked out by severe intoxication.
    • Many demons and devils have something of a reptilian appearance, the marilith being the most well known, appearing as a six-armed woman from the waist up and a huge snake from the waist down. On the flip side, lillends and couatls are heroic celestial beings: couatls being winged snakes with psychic powers while Lillends are beautiful winged women from the waist up and snakes with brilliant, iridescent scales from the waist down.
    • Forgotten Realms: The sarrukh feature a long history... of which a huge chunk boils down to explaining the general tendency towards this trope, as the sarrukh are both the originators of almost every non-draconic reptilian race and their history once their empires were reasonably established was one of moral degeneration and corruption, with good coming mostly as comparatively minor side-effects (such as the move from "honoured Sarrukh sacrifices" to "mass slave sacrifices" — it led to the creation of a good demigodess of purification, but also was a major factor into the corruption and splintering of the World Serpent deity into several mostly-evil gods, such as Merrshaulk).
  • Magic: The Gathering: Snakes were originally depicted as nasty creatures with cards like Serpent Warrior, but more recently the Orochi were powerful and noble Proud Warrior Race Guys, if a bit hostile. However, Orochi are surely the least snake-like "snake men" ever illustrated: they have hair, breasts, four arms, two legs, and no tails, and their faces are mostly humanoid. Dragons have been in every alignment (including a genius dragon mad wizard scientist), but skew towards evil or violently, destructively instinct-driven. Reptiles may be simply animals, but aside from some Orochi there aren't many heroic reptiles, nor are many in White, the most community-driven, justice-oriented, or stereotypically "heroic" color. There are, however, worlds that are home to notable exceptions:
    • On Amonkhet, while wild venomous snakes are still as dangerous as any other wild animal, snake symbolism on tends to have benevolent connotations. The cobra-headed god Rhonas taught lessons of resilience and self-sufficiency to the people of Naktamun (and is the first to recognize the God Pharaoh's betrayal), the naga of Amonkhet are perfectly content to live alongside and cooperate with the other peoples of the plane, and the snake-obsessed human vizier Hepatra is a Reasonable Authority Figure who played a key role in rescuing what remained of Naktamun's population in the wake of the Hour of Devastation.
    • On Bloomburrow, the lizardfolk are seen as kind of grumpy and unapproachable, but are are valued members of the various woodland communities of the plane nonetheless, and are also the Valley's most talented metalworkers.
  • Mutants & Masterminds: It's specifically stated that reptiles tend to be villains, with snakes as evil masterminds, lizards as mid-level bad guys and crocodilians as dumb mooks. Freedom City's Big Bad, Overshadow, becomes Cobrashadow.
  • Chronopia has the Stygians, who are a mix of dinosaur-like reptiles and Snake People. They are bloodthirsty desert raiders, and make constant human sacrifices to their Priestesses.
  • In Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game, Ss'lussthu-Kha is a member of an entire species of Snake People who used to rule the world, but have since been driven into hiding. She's part of a team called the Contendors, made up of Humanoid Abominations, and is using them as cover to scout the human world in hopes of finding a weakness her species can exploit to conquer and enslave or eradicate all of humanity.
    • Drakis, a stranded member of a species of aliens who look like humanoid dragons, is portrayed more sympathetically, being mostly interested in finding a way back to his homeworld and frustrated with how humans keep referring to him as some sort of monster.
  • Vampire: The Requiem: In the sourcebook Mythologies, one of the possibilities for the first vampire? The son (or daughter) of Eve, the First Woman... and The Serpent of Eden. The book includes several snake-based powers to apply to vampires to further imply that this might be true, including making snakes into default forms for the Protean discipline, it being easier to Ghoul snakes, and making vampires immune to snake venom (ordinarily, snake venoms — like most haemotoxins — work just fine on vampires).
  • Warhammer Fantasy subverts this: the Lizardmen are mysterious, quite defensive, and have very little empathy or mercy for other species, but are trying hard to protect the world from Chaos. On the other hand, they're the foremost enemies of Chaos, the targets of their genocides are Always Chaotic Evil creatures like the Skaven, they're sided with Order rather than Destruction, and most of their clashes with others are the result of Blue-and-Orange Morality rather than active malice.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! has several sets of Reptile-type monsters that either affirm or subvert this; the Venoms (evil corrupting snakes with Naga-like "gods"), Aliens (patterned off of the reptilian humanoid and Roswell Gray alien theories, but no official word on their allegiance), the Gagagigos (flip-flopped between evil and good, but now officially evil), and the Worms (Light-Attribute, but horrendously ugly, and the enemies of the Dark-Attribute Ally of Justice monsters. The Gagagigo cards are actually all the same character at different points in his life. He start as a good Ugly Cute lizard kid, who grew up to be an evil lizard man, but turned good after becoming friends with a hero. He turned bad again as a result of being turned into a cyborg. At his most evil, he actually appeared LESS reptilian and more like an Animalistic Abomination. In his most recent form, (he is back to good again thanks to his friendship with the aforementioned hero) he looks like an angelic cyborg lizard man. So this is a Zig-Zagging Trope for him.

    Toys 
  • BIONICLE: The Zyglak. There are also the Skakdi — a group of them (the Piraka) were collectively the Big Bad of the 2006 Story Arc, and one of their leaders (Nektann) briefly became The Dragon to overall series Big Bad Teridax during the 2010 arc. It is not uncommon for villains to get turned into snakes.
  • Beast Wars: Most reptiles and arthropods are villainous Predacons. However, fish, manta rays, sharks, and squid are usually Maximals.
  • Masters of the Universe has the Snake Men, led by King Hiss. They more or less serve as the main villains of the second season in the 2002 animated series, where there isn't a single member of their kind who isn't bloodthirsty and cruel. Skeletor's team also features one - Whiplash the Caligar - although he's an outlier, as his people are otherwise on good terms with the forces of Eternia (notably, the Snake Men also look down on them and don't mind using them as slave labor or food). The 80s toyline also gave He-Man a Lizard Folk ally.

    Visual Novel 

    Webcomics 
  • Terinu: The Galapados are gene-gineered reptile warriors designed to match humans for sheer aggression.
  • WTF Comics is based on EverQuest, so most of the reptilian Iksars are hostile. Straha Ironscale, one of the protagonists, is a rare exception.
  • In one arc of The Wotch, Anne and Robin turn into a snake and dragon respectively through changing the dimension they're in.
  • Eerie Cuties has twin lizard boy bullies. And a nice girl Brooke Lynn who as a Melusine is sometimes considered scary by other students. She uses this intentionally on said bullies, but is mostly shy about it.
  • Played straight in Goblins by Takn, a sadistic kobold.
  • Played with in Prophecy of the Circle: since the main story is told from the perspective of the (mammalian) tikedi race, their rival race of tekk is generally pictured as menacing, murderous beasts. But the tekk are as sapient as the tikedi, and the tikedi themselves are regularly organizing hunts for tekk. Furthermore, some of the chapters follow tekk characters showing them in a more sympathetic light.
  • The conclusion of this two-parter of Nobody Scores!.
  • Subverted in Legend of Legendary Mighty Knight. Chapter 5 opens with the newly-befriended dragon relaying to the others of how it was driven from its home by a cruel king who wanted its head. When the dragon gets to the part where it had to flee in terror, it breaks down into tears. The dragon didn't initially try to drive the knight and its companions away because it wanted to hurt them- it was just hurting and lonely itself.
  • Lancer: The Knights of Fenris, a Space Opera set in a World of Funny Animals, has the reptilian/dinosaur-ish Drogahri. The ones we've met are Always Chaotic Evil creatures dedicated to war and conquest, causing the mammalian species to join forces against them in self-defense. If any there are any good Drogahri, they haven't appeared yet.
  • Kevin & Kell: While for the most part this is averted (Dr. Caduceus is the town doctor and Greta is a loyal friend to Rudy's peer group), there are also some straight examples, such as the snake that invaded the Rabbit Council while Kevin was filibustering to leave the council, the snake that tried to eat Kevin and Fran when they were babies, and a Heel–Face Turn example in the snake that tried to kill Lindesfarne's goose neighbors, but when he failed and R.L. tried to eat him in retaliation, he went to the police with evidence of R.L. targeting people.

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 
  • The Amazing World of Gumball has the aptly-named evil turtle, a soft-shelled turtle who happens to be extremely aggressive. In "The Nest", she has offspring that prove extremely destructive; after the Wattersons release her into the wild, they reason that the turtle wasn't evil, she just wanted to be a good parent... until she and her babies take down a ship, and Anais reasons that it's probably both.
  • Avenger Penguins: Used and subverted with Harry Slime. He's mainly a creepy henchman, but not outright evil and has frequent attacks of wanting to be a good guy.
  • In Bilby, the eponymous bilby is introduced by running from a hungry monitor lizard, then on his journey to return an albatross chick to the sea, he encounters a snake, a frilled lizard and a bunch of crocodiles who all try to eat the chick.
  • Brandy & Mr. Whiskers inverts the normal rules for this trope, with a villainous gecko and a kind-hearted boa constrictor.
  • Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars! concerns an interplanetary war between the Toads and various mammal and bird species. In one episode, a guy named Al Negator (a crocodile-like creature called a "Sleazosaur") joins the crew of the Righteous Indignation. Gunner Deadeye Duck is the only one who distrusts him, although Bucky points out his hypocrisy for doing so given Deadeye's own criminal past. It looks like the episode is setting up Deadeye as the complainer, but Al betrays them and steals the ship.
  • Usually played straight in Class of the Titans, except for the God of Harmony, who is a giant pink snake.
  • Danger Mouse: Baron Silas Greenback is a greedy toad and the arch-enemy of Danger Mouse.
  • Family Guy: "Lois Comes Out of Her Shell": A seemingly nice, harmless turtle turns out to be murderous critter named Sheldon.
  • Final Space: "And Into the Fire": Bolo fights one of his evil brethren that are in service to Invictus, a Titan resembling a bipedal lizard.
  • Fish Hooks: The usual rules for this trope are inverted, with the geckos as antagonists and a friendly rattlesnake.
  • The Get Along Gang: Catchum Crocodile constantly bullies the gang with the support of his reluctant sidekick, Leland Lizard. Sometimes, the duo is joined by a turtle named Braker as an ancillary member of the Gang.
  • G.I. Joe's Big Bad enemy is a terrorist organization called Cobra.
  • Jackie Chan Adventures: Viper is a master thief. Though she sometimes works with Jackie and the crew, she is still a thief and still steals (and is occasionally given a What the Hell, Hero? by Jackie).
  • Justice League: "Eclipsed": The Flash attempts to stop the Heart of Darkness, a purple crystal that enclosed the vengeful spirits of an evil ancient race of snake people called the Ophidians who attempted to destroy humanity by possessing anyone who touched it. Also counts as Dark Is Evil as the Ophidians worshiped the moon and preferred the night over the light, which transfers over to the spirits' possession being broken through intense light and main attempt to destroy humanity by destroying the sun. Any herpetologist will tell you that since snakes are cold-blooded, they need warm environments to increase their metabolism as they can't regulate their own body heat. Cold environments like the sunless night would make them more sluggish.
  • King of the Hill: "SerPUNt": Done in-universe. Bobby gets a pet snake. This is treated by his family as if he's started practicing Satanism or witchcraft. The snake doesn't actually do anything wrong, but that doesn't stop Animal Control from brutally killing the snake when it escapes.
  • Discussed in one episode of Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness where one of the villains was a cobra named Fu-xi who was once a noble and brave warrior that defended others with his skills and fear-inducing venom. However, when he and his kind are persecuted by others out of fear and paranoia, he becomes hateful towards all "two-leggers" and tries to convince Viper (after saving her from some paranoid villagers who also attacked her for being a snake) to ally with him so they could take their revenge by infecting the valley with his enhanced venom and leave all non-snake kind in perpetual terror. Playing the Fake Defector, Viper leads Fu-xi along, pretending to be his apprentice until she is able to locate the venom and stop his plans from taking fruition. Afterwards, the once fearful village accepts her and treat her as a hero.
  • In The Lion Guard, you can expect which reptiles will be aligned with the Lion Guard depending on their stereotype. And thus reptilian villains have been crocodiles, cobras, skinks, and monitor lizards. When it comes to crocodiles, however, this trope is zig-zagged and even deconstructed. Ironically, pythons are the only large reptilian predators to avert this treatment completely. The show seems to make the effort to avoid this only on non-venomous reptiles.
  • Cecil Turtle in The Looney Tunes Show. While his original incarnation was a Karmic Trickster who only antagonized Bugs Bunny as a result of the latter instigating their conflicts, this version is an Adaptational Jerkass. His first appearance has him switching off Bugs' cable for his own amusement and dialogue indicates that Bugs is not the first person he has done this to. His second appearance reveals that he scams money out of people by making them think they ran him him over and cracked his shell. He even went as far as trying to kill Bugs and Porky to stop them revealing this information.
  • Subverted with the snake Natalie rescues from the animal testing lab in Mission Hill. It plays it up as a monster that wants to eat Baby Nameless, but it turns out he's really friendly and just wants to be loved.
  • Played with in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic with reptilian creatures, as it seems for every evil reptile such as Cipactli or the cockatrice, there's a good one like Steven Magnet or Spike. Dragons as a whole are for the most part neutral, save for a couple of truly malignant ones.
  • Over the Garden Wall: A small black turtle shows up all over the Unknown and good-aligned characters often harm it, hinting at the negative nature of that kind of fear.
    • In Chapter 1, a snarling dog-creature is revealed to return to the form of a normal pet dog, once it regurgitates a turtle.
    • In Chapter 2, pure young Gregory befriends a group of friendly Civilized Animal schoolchildren, one of whom picks up a turtle and throws it far away.
    • In Chapter 7, Auntie Whispers is seen picking a turtle out from a basket, and then eating it. This seems creepy and weird at first, but as it turns out it's a sign she's not as sinister as she seems.
    • In Chapter 8, it also shows up in Greg's Cloud City dream sequence, in rubberhose cartoon character form - right in front of an old man carrying a lantern, calling to mind the creepy woodsman associated with the show's Big Bad.
    • In Chapter 9, Wirt has a poster for a band called the Black Turtles in his room as he's battling his own fear and anxiety.
    • In Chapter 10, the Fish fisherman hooks up a turtle in the epilogue.
  • The Penguins of Madagascar features a snake named Savio as an antagonist. However, there's also a friendly alligator named Roger and some friendly chameleons.
  • Sam & Max subverts this, wherein the titular duo adopt a discarded baby alligator and nurture it to full size. Despite (or perhaps because of) the terror a giant alligator invokes in their hometown, they have no qualms with keeping it indefinitely, treating the car-sized monstrosity like a common house pet. The gator obliges.
  • Subverted in The Simpsons with Bart's one-off pet snake "Strangles". The instruction manual declares it's pointless to name them because "snakes have poor hearing and live only to strangle", but Strangles is actually friendly to and protective of Bart (the one time he strangles anyone is Homer... to defend Bart from being strangled). In the end Bart is forced to choose between Strangles and Santa's Little Helper, and when he picks the latter Strangles is heartbroken:
    Stranglesnote : If he breaks your heart again, don't bother calling me! ...Oh who am I kidding? I'll always be there for you.
  • If a Trandoshan (a race of Lizard Folk) appears at all in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, expect him or her to be a bounty hunter, mercenary, assassin, or a greedy loner looking to get rich. Or in Garnac's case, a sadist who kidnaps people and hunts them for sport.
  • On SWAT Kats, Dr. Viper is an Evilutionary Biologist villain and part snake. Everyone on that show is an anthropomorphic cat, and he's part plant too; he's then, what, a quarter-human, quarter-cat, quarter-snake, quarter-plant?
  • TaleSpin:
    • Played straight in the two-parter episode "For Whom the Bell Klangs": the reptile Klang is trying to find a legendary superweapon and Take Over the World. To make him even more abhorrent, he is revealed to be, not a lizard as he appears, but a giant snake. Shocking, considering that the rest of the population of the world are bipedal, anthropomorphic animals.
    • Another recurring villain in the series was a crocodile named Trader Moe, who clashed with Baloo and co. on more than one occasion.
    • There was also a one-shot villain named Dr. Axolotl. He was, as his name suggests, a salamander, and he created a Killer Robot to kidnap Shere Khan.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
    • The 2003 series has two fused villains use a time scepter to transport the turtles to separate time periods for revenge. Leonardo is dropped in Miyamoto Usagi's universe and is attacked by two animal riders because of this trope. Leonardo himself invokes this trope when battling the ruthless Daimyo, Lord Hebi, a giant snake: "It's guys like you that give us honorable reptiles a bad name!"
    • For its part, the 2012 series has an interesting case when Karai accidentally gets mutated into a snake creature. She initially has trouble keeping her sense of self and attacks anyone on sight until the Turtles reach out to her. Then Shredder has her brainwashed into servitude for a while by using mind worms. When that's undone, she finally becomes more of a reptilian antihero. Her entire situation is sympathetic, all in all.
  • The original ThunderCats played this trope straight; Reptilians are bad, period. The reboot shakes things up; the Lizards have some pretty darn good reasons for hating the Cats.
  • Top Wing does it pretty blatantly. There are four crocodile characters in the series, and all of them are evil. The only good reptile is...surprise, surprise...a turtle.
  • T.U.F.F. Puppy has Francisco the crocodile, a member of DOOM, and The Chameleon.
  • The Wild Thornberrys: Crocodilians and snakes are always a menace to Eliza even while she's speaking to them. Even dangerous mammal predators, such as big cats, wolves, and bears, are usually depicted as at least being able to be reasoned with, but reptile predators are invariably threatening.
  • The main characters in The Wuzzles were all obvious, easily identifiable Mix-and-Match Critters. Background characters were less-obvious mixes. But the thing is only the antagonists, Big Bad Croc (crocodile/dinosaur) and his sidekicks Frizard (frog/lizard) and Brat (dragon/boar) sported any recognizably reptilian features. And aside from that, your guess is as good as ours what they were meant to be hybrids of. (Many fansites hold that they are, respectively, "half-crocodile/frog/lizard, half-dragon". Strange, given that all other Wuzzles were combinations of real animals.)

 
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Alternative Title(s): Toads Are Abhorrent, Amphibians Are Abhorrent

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Birth of Wrath-Amon

In an attempt to gain a more competent minion, Ram-Amon transformed his pet Stygian Gila Monster into a powerful, evil, and intelligent anthropomorphic lizard. Unfortunately, his attempt worked too well as his new minion usurped him, becoming known as...Wrath-Amon.

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