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Uncanny Valley Girl

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I just, like, stabbed some loser to death.

She's cute. Beautiful, in fact. Friendly and popular. She's the head of the class in terms of looks, money and everything that counts for her approval rating, but she's not the Alpha Bitch, even if she has a Girl Posse or the entire grade on her side. One of Those Two Guys might have a crush on her, even though he never gets anywhere. She's the perfect girl...

...except there's something not quite human about her, and she's secretly out for your blood.

The Uncanny Valley Girl is smarter than she lets on, and puts on a very convincing persona that's made the class adore her. It's the high school girl version of Villain with Good Publicity, except the publicity is good enough that nobody, not even The Hero, knows she's the villain — or anything other than normal. Not until she comes at you with a sharp object, that is.

Sub-Trope of Nothing Nice About Sugar and Spice.

Compare Yandere, Cute and Psycho, Deceptively Human Robots, Stepford Smiler, Living with the Villain, Dark Magical Girl, Faux Affably Evil, Psychopathic Manchild and Bitch in Sheep's Clothing. Contrast Alpha Bitch, Fallen Princess, and Loners Are Freaks. In extreme cases, she may be a Humanoid Abomination. Note that the Uncanny Valley Girl doesn't have to be evil — she could also be very misunderstood or Creepy Good — but a lot of work will have to be done to reconcile the apparent contradiction for the story.

Note that the focus is on the words "Uncanny Valley". The "Valley Girl" part is only a pun...unless...


Examples

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    Anime and Manga 
  • Akudama Drive: Despite being an ordinary person, there is something off about Swindler. She felt perfectly okay chasing someone into a collapsing building just to give him back a 500 yen coin and she's taken the murderous personalities of Cutthroat, Brawler, and Doctor completely in stride.
  • Discussed in Attack on Titan. Eren Yeager accuses School Idol Krista Lenz of being one, stating he always found her false perfection incredibly creepy. While not quite a murderous psychopath, when she isn't pretending to be The Ingenue, she can be incredibly callous about the lives of her comrades and even admits she doesn't really understand the feelings of other people. She's getting better, though, and learning to be a real person.
  • Shiro from Deadman Wonderland. She's actually The Wretched Egg.
  • Mio Hio from D.N.Angel fits this to, like, a really creepy T! She's an American Expy, even has one of Those Two Guys when she's after the other to either kill him or bind his Superpowered Alter Ego Phantom Thief. Death Equals Redemption, which is, like, a drag.
  • Maria no Danzai: Maria's a beautiful, polite school nurse who is considered a guardian angel by everyone... and is also planning a cold-blooded revenge, all while hiding her severe emotional trauma following her son's death.
  • Ajimu Najimi of Medaka Box looks like a sweet angel and Too Good for This Sinful Earth, but it turns out she views people as indistinguishable from furniture and only seeks for a way to entertain herself.
  • Johan Liebert from Monster decides to pull a stint as an Uncanny Valley Boy in volumes 6 through 9, when he starts attending University of Munich as part of a plan to get at Hans Georg Schuwald and puts up a front of the most mind-bogglingly perfect human being in existence. When Schuwald is finally confronted with the possibility that his new student secretary is a psychopathic bastard who's probably planning to kill him, Schuwald isn't even the least bit surprised. Why? Because he was so damn perfect that he just had to be evil.
  • From My-HiME, there's Miyu Greer's adorable little charge/soulmate, Alyssa Searrs, the Golden Angel of the School Choir.
  • With her lack of affect and strange hair colour, Rei Ayanami is this trope in-universe in Neon Genesis Evangelion, which was apparently how the viewers were supposed to see her as well. They didn't.
  • In Psycho-Pass, Rikako Oryo is one of these: she's beautiful, intelligent, a talented painter, extremely popular with her peers, but one of her classmates notes that her eyes always seem so empty... Seeing as she's actually a Mad Artist Serial Killer with a Crime Coefficient of over 400, one of the highest seen in the series, they're right to be afraid of her.
  • The mysterious transfer student in Saitama Chainsaw Shoujo seems pretty unfazed when she encounters the blood-drenched, murderous protagonist... complete with giggling and smirking while throwing her "boyfriend" towards Fumio's chainsaw.
  • In Shin Mazinger Zero three beautiful, tall, ponytailed, blonde triplet girls called Gamia Q1, Q2 and Q3 transferred to Kouji's high school. Given that they were gorgeous and friendly, even if they behaved in a strange fashion and looked a tad weird, all boys in class started to quickly slobber at them. In reality they were three androids (appeared for first time in the Mazinger Z original manga and Mazinkaiser) sent to assassinate Kouji Kabuto. Seemingly Kouji bought their masquerade, but shortly after he suggested them dropping their act, and he revealed that he had suspected it all along.
  • Tokyo Ghoul
    • Shuu Tsukiyama turns out to have been one in the past. Attending a prestigious private Academy, he was the charming School Idol adored by almost everyone for his good looks, excellent grades, athletic talent, and extreme wealth. Of course, he was also beginning his career as the infamous "Gourmet", a ghoul known for his very particular tastes and tendency to maim his victims. Even among other ghouls, he was considered horrible for doing things like skinning people alive or tearing out their eyes.
    • Minami Uruka in the Prequel, Jack. A cute, popular student when they weren't terrorizing the 13th Ward and killing humans out of jealousy.
  • The Vampire Princess Miyu OAV:
    • The schoolgirl named Ranka is pale, beautiful, elegant, sweet tempered and ensnared the heart of the local Chick Magnet... she's also a Shinma that transforms people into dolls. Her guy knows it and loves her that way.
    • To a certain degree, Miyu herself counts when she poses as a schoolgirl to fit better in the human crowd.
  • Ryuuko Kounuma from Wolf Guy - Wolfen Crest. She seems nice enough, is rather charming and carefree... Except she is completely psychotic underneath. Having spent several years under the sexual abuse coming from her dad and her pimp, she deals with it by having sex with lots of men and ruin their lives ruined afterwards, to an insane extent. She doesn't fit the Emotionless description, though, as she's pretty much Ax-Crazy.

    Comic Books 
  • In X-Men, the seductive Foxx turns out to be the shapeshifter Mystique trying to seduce Gambit away from Rogue. A similar plot occurred in X-Men Evolution, when Rogue's friend Risty Wilde turns out to be Mystique spying on/stalking her adoptive daughter.

    Fan Works 
  • As per canon, Neon Genesis Evangelion fanfic often portrays Rei as this:
  • Izuku in The Undead Schoolgirl: Dead Pulse is noted by many to be very cute if slightly odd looking with her pale skin, blue lips, and bloodshot eyes. But she becomes extremely creepy after awakening her Quirk. According to Naomosa, she has a case of "Quirk Instability" where Izuku knows she's immortal and doesn't feel pain so she doesn't see the problem with dismembering herself and flinging the severed limb at something to draw it towards her when her Healing Factor kicks in. Even pro heroes tend to be at least slightly unnerved when she casually bites off a finger or uses a cleaver to cut off her hand.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • In Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone's character Catherine Tramell is this. She is a beautiful, wealthy, brilliant author but embodies this trope with her fondness for ice picks
  • Alice from Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen. She looks like a hot blonde who can't keep her hands off Sam, but she's actually a Decepticon who's after the Allspark info in Sam's brain.
  • Liz in The Hole deliberately keeps several people locked in a bunker for days because she's a Stalker with a Crush on one of them.
  • Marybeth from The Faculty, an alien invader pretending to be human.
  • The title character from Jennifer's Body. While she starts off as a normal Alpha Bitch, she becomes this after she gets possessed by a demon.
  • Asami in Audition seems like the girl of your dreams. However, when she asks you to love only her, she means it.
  • Ex Machina:
    • Ava, to a degree, considering she's clearly designed to resemble and act human, but very clearly isn't. When she puts on clothes and a wig, she could easily pass for a human if she had put on a scarf to cover up her metallic nape and the "skin" her clothes didn't cover (and also if she didn't make a buzzing noise when she moves).
    • Kyoko's lack of vocalization is also rather disconcerting. When she starts peeling the skin off of her face, it gets really disturbing.
    • Ava had several predecessors, all of whom were nude in their flashback footage. One had a time lapse of being built up from a pair of legs, section by section, then doing a Supermodel Strut, which dives right into Fan Disservice. Another, we see as a completely skinned woman minus the metal skull and neck vertebrae; Nathan dragging around her lifeless body like a corpse was...creepy. Another one, apparently "Jade", was being interviewed by Nathan and demanding to be let out in her concurrent interviews, until she was clearly desperate and panicked. Her footage ended on her having a Freak Out and battering at the door until her arms disintegrated, and eventually gave up, crying. Had she been human, her hands and forearms would have been worn down to the bone.
  • India from Stoker is beautiful, wealthy, polite, intelligent, and highly cultured. On paper, she sounds great, but there's just something... off about her. The fact that she rarely conveys emotion, combined with her eerie, ethereal appearance, gives the sense that something's not quite right. As the film goes on, it becomes more and more clear that that sense is entirely correct, especially as she comes under the influence of Charlie. As the title suggests, while there are no supernatural elements, the film was inspired by Bram Stoker's Dracula, and in many ways plays out like a vampire movie without the actual vampires.
  • Gwen Grayson in Sky High, who turns out to be the Secret Identity of the supervillain Royal Pain, plotting to take over the titular Superhero School and turn it into a School for Scheming.

    Literature 
  • Animorphs: Taylor is a very literal example, being a Californian Alpha Bitch whose external beauty is actually artificial, and whose Puppeteer Parasite is a sadistic Torture Technician. Tobias morphs into her once, showing off the body she would have had if she hadn't been caught in a house fire and rebuilt with plastic, and finds that he gets more male attention than the real deal— Taylor's plastic face and barely-restrained unhingedness are unsettling enough to cause boys to avoid her, even if they don't know why.
  • Haruna Niekawa from Durarara!!, though it's mainly due to her being possessed by a Yandere Evil Weapon.
  • Tammy manages to conceal the fact that she's the high priestess of a cult trying to bring about the end of the world, and the one responsible for the plague of zombies in Gil's All Fright Diner, despite that the townsfolk (as well as the drifter two main characters) are VERY experienced with the supernatural. This may be because she uses her great female beauty to distract and manipulate all males in the book. The fact that she only has one cultist to aid her (her would-be boyfriend) and is a teenager probably doesn't hurt, either.
  • Haruhi Suzumiya has several, and all of them are alien data interfaces:
    • Ryoko Asakura —the Uncanny Valley Girl. She keeps up her charming persona and amazing smile even while trying to gut Kyon.
      Asakura: You think it's a... joke? Huh. You don't wanna die? You don't want me to kill you?
    • In the tenth novel, Emiri Kimidori is revealed to be every bit as apathetic towards human suffering as Ryoko, just less proactive about it.
    • We eventually meet Kuyo Suo. She's an interface for the Heaven Canopy Domain, and is so completely inhuman that normal humans won't even acknowledge her presence. She speaks in stops and starts, inserting somewhat relevant phrases she clearly doesn't understand the meaning of here and there. She rarely moves, instead preferring to just appear places, and overall gives the impression of someone who simply has no idea how living things, let alone humans, act.
      Kyon: A cardboard cutout would have had more life than her.
    • Yuki Nagato is a subversion, as she is also an alien data interface like Asakura and Kimidori but despite being the least socially adept of those three (prefers solitary activities like reading and her words always being straightforward without much cadence) her interactions with the others in the SOS Brigade show her to be the most humanlike character under the surface. Kyon ends up trusting her the most out of the major cast.
  • Kyoko of Is This A Zombie?, an old friend of Orito, and the only survivor of an attack by the same serial killer who murdered the protaganist, Ayumu. She survived because she is the serial killer who murdered Ayumu, and she's murdering people so she can collect their souls to earn more than one life, effectively making her immortal. She's also actually a Magical Garment Girl, and was modifying Orito's memories to make him think they've been friends since childhood.
  • Lilith from The Mortal Instruments is described as beautiful, but unsettling.
  • In Percy Jackson and the Olympians book 4, Percy starts off the book by meeting Kelli and Tammi, two beautiful cheerleaders. They later turn out to be monsters concealed by the Mist, and they try to kill Percy. Oh, and they're also part of Kronos' army.
  • In the Uglies series, the "Specials" are essentially this: Tally describes them as being very beautiful, but a mean, threatening kind of pretty.
  • There's a Skulduggery Pleasant short story told from the perspective of the hitman Billy-Ray Sanguine as he stops at a gas station in the Texan desert. The locals are your stereotypical hillbilly types, and the visitors are a set of four Californian students on spring break. Sanguine eventually finds out that it's the kids who've been doing the torture-and-murder game, rather than the locals, who look creepy but are ultimately innocent.
  • In So I'm a Spider, So What? Wakaba Hiiro was the most beautiful girl in her class and very popular with the boys. Despite this she never actually interacted with anybody, never emoted, and was actually really creepy; the boys were simply ascribing personality traits they liked to her. The fact of the matter is that she was actually the goddess D, slumming it on Earth, and her treatment of the students' souls after they die shows more than a little pettiness and malice.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Subverted on Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide with May, June, and Julie, the "Stepford Schoolgirls". Moze becomes convinced that the three girls are robots, but they're not; there's a perfectly logical explanation for everything.
  • Kuroki Mio in Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon is an alien and an arc's Big Bad in disguise who is successful at blending in when she isn't carrying out her nefarious plans.
  • Claire Bennet from Heroes is a cheerleader who'd seem masochistic if she didn't heal quickly.
  • Debbie Berwick (self-described Cupcake Queen of the Universe) in Phil of the Future is an evil robot. But until the "Halloween" episode, only Pim seems to see it.
  • Ingrid from Young Dracula, though it takes a major Weirdness Censor on the part of everyone else not to notice.
  • Darla from Buffy makes her introduction as one of these in the first episode.
    • As does Anya later on.
  • In Pretty Little Liars Mona seems like a normal, if ditzy, popular girl at first glance. Throughout the first few seasons it's revealed that she's smarter than she appears. Then it's revealed that she's secretly a psychopathic genius. And A.

    Tabletop Games 

    Video Games 

    Visual Novels 

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 
  • Kakos Industries: Hailey Solomonari behaves like a ditzy, cutesy teenager who asks inane questions and says "like" like, a lot in her sentences. It's unclear what exactly she is, but when she's aroused, she secretes an enzyme that when touching her partner's body, feeds on their energy and has a disturbing amount of sway over how attractive they are to her. When she was sentenced to a bondage facility for discipline after having sex with her boss, she passes all 66 challenges that leave most mentally scarred or dead with ease, beats custom challenges that should've been even harder, and leaves the place with everyone else as her submissives. Then there's what happened at Melantha's tea party that leaves even Corin taken aback.

    Western Animation 
  • In the episode of W.I.T.C.H. "T is for Trauma", Big Bad Nerissa disguises herself as the beautiful Stacie, showing up at Sheffield Institute in order to lure the heroines' boyfriends away and to spy on them. In addition to being beautiful, she uses a spell to make every guy in school completely crazy for her (except Will's boyfriend Matt, who was immune because Nerissa had already messed with him).
  • Invader Zim could be seen as a subversion of that trope, except that he's not a girl. Tak (who is a girl) is a somewhat straighter example.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Cozy Glow is the sweetest girl in school, top of her class, always willing to lend a hoof. She's beloved by all, so much so that people gladly accepted her with open arms when she briefly took over as principal. She is, of course, one of the craftiest and most villain in the show's run who got the closest to winning out of anyone.
  • In The Oblongs, Milo gets a crush on an alien who infiltrates not only his school but also the Debbies' clique, despite her Paper-Thin Disguise.
  • In Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, Elena Validus seems like a normal scientist who is more than willing to help Ben and his team to stop the nanochip hive but she becomes obsessed with having Ben for herself and it's revealed that she's the nanochip queen.
  • South Park gives us Leslie Meyers who is seemingly a normal girl who's constantly called out by PC Principal. However, when we finally get to hear her talk out loud, she has a very odd and unnerving way of talking. Then it's soon revealed that she is a living advertisement as well as the Big Bad of season 19.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender: Joo Dee. In fact, she is a perfect example of this trope, as she's one of many "Joo Dees", AKA women who are indoctrinated into feeding propaganda to newcomers to Ba Sing Se.
  • Steven Universe: In-Universe, Pearls are a Servant Race made to their would-be owner's specifications, and their personalities will inevitably be formed due to their master's influence. Blue Diamond's Pearl is quiet and demure, and Yellow Diamond's Pearl shares her owner's snarkiness. They also share the same VA. Then White Pearl comes along. She has a massive scar where her left eye should be, limited facial and body movement, and is instead voiced by her master's VA. All of this gives her an appearance similar to a puppet or a broken porcelain doll, and is a good preview of her master's aura.

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