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Sandbox / A Mischief Of Mice Wick Check

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A Mischief of Mice:

The description, to being with, seems to try to contain several unrelated subjects. It starts by saying that "mice are more often than not portrayed as the good guys" and then, immediately after, that "mice are also likely to be portrayed in fiction as antagonists, or at least as very unwelcome pests". The first paragraph then mostly talks about ways in which mice are viewed as unwelcome, gross or frightening, and mentions the trope Eek, a Mouse!! and real-life mouse phobias as evidence of this.

The second paragraph describes mice as being characterized as "mischievous, scheming, and greedy", and how they often antagonize cats, whether they are provoked or not. It then says that this may involve Resourceful Rodent if the mice are clever and resourceful, but there isn't a obvious transition. It then switches back to talking about how mice like to scare people for laughs. The next section also mentions Elephants Are Scared of Mice.

The laconic is "Mice are troublemakers, pranksters, or generally annoying."

Given the description and laconic, the trope seems to have some difficulty deciding whether it's about mice being pranksters and tricksters, mice being evil, or mice being seen as gross.

The example check comes out thus:

    open/close all folders 

    Mice are serious villains or explicitly evil 
  • Manga.Beastars: A bunch of mice decide to join together to form one big super mouse and become a feared criminal. They were defeated by Yafya and are now some of his most trusted subordinates.
  • Anime.Gregory Horror Show: Gregory and his family are anthropomorphic mice, and most of them fit this trope to some degree.
    • Played for Horror with Gregory himself. He is the owner of a Hell Hotel, which is basically Purgatory, and he uses psychological manipulation, and his violent hotel guests, to keep anyone from leaving. He is also physically and verbally abusive to Neko Zombie, a cat who he keeps locked up in the hotel. Despite this, his attitude is usually very whimsical. He likes to speak in a very formal way, as if he was just a regular hotel owner. His dialogue is often cryptic as if he knows a lot more than he lets on. His Signature Laugh is high-pitched and sneaky as well.
    • Also Played for Horror with James, Gregory's Bratty Half-Pint grandson. He hates the Second Guest so much that he attempts deadly pranks on her, such as giving her a box containing Lost Doll. And he does it all with the attitude of an annoying, petulant child.
    • Averted with Gregory Mama, who is straight-up malevolent with few trickster qualities, if any. She's a Wicked Witch who collects people's souls. She claims that she does this to stay young-looking, although it's debatable how effective this is, as she still looks like a deranged old lady.
  • Animation.Pakdam Pakdai: Charly, Marly, and Larry are a trio of mice who, much like the titular cockroaches from WesternAnimation.Oggy And The Cockroaches, constantly make the life of Don the dog a living hell on a regular basis.
  • WesternAnimation.The Great Mouse Detective: Invoked; Ratigan loathes being called a rat and insists that he's just a "big mouse" (which he actually was in the original book). He really is a rat, though, and he's a sadist who's proud of the fact that he has drowned widows and orphans.
  • Music.The Aquabats: "Idiot Box!" from Return of the Aquabats! features an unflattering reference to Mickey Mouse.
    Children, I wanna warn ya
    'Cause I've been to California
    Where Mickey Mouse is a demon!
  • Theatre.The Nutcracker: The primary antagonist is the Mouse King. In some versions, he is changed to the Rat King, presumably to conform better to the audience's expectations.
  • VideoGame.Bonkers Seg: Mr. Big (from the TV series episode "Hamster Houseguest") is a mouse who is one of Toon Town's four most wanted criminals. He has set up a bomb set to explode in the warehouse, and since Fall-Apart Rabbit is trying to defuse the bomb, Mr. Big has hidden Fall-Apart's pieces in crates. He also has mouse henchmen who try to stop Bonkers from collecting Fall-Apart's pieces.
  • VideoGame.Sly Cooper Thieves In Time: Penelope, Penelope, 'Penelope'. Murder, greed, manipulation, warmongering, and, of course, treason, makes her one of the most odious enemies the Cooper Gang has faced.
[[folder:Western Animation]]

    Mice are jerks or otherwise personally unpleasant 

    Mice are thieves 
  • ComicBook.The Beano: The Nibblers are a group of anthropomorphous mice who like stealing food. Their home's owner Porky and his cat would try and fail to stop them every time.
  • ComicBook.The Dandy: Korky the Cat sometimes has to deal with mice who keep raiding his larder and stealing food.
  • WesternAnimation.Robin Robin has a slightly more benevolent example than most. Dad Mouse and his four mouse children often steal food from human homes. They're not greedy, they only take what they need to survive, but they do take pride in how good they are at sneaking around. They even sing a musical number about it called "The Sneak Song". The protagonist, Robin, is a robin adopted by the Mouse family. She is terrible at being stealthy, which makes her feel bad. She wishes she was more like the mice until she learns to be herself at the end.
  • The Squeaks from VideoGame.Kirby Squeak Squad are a group of thieving mice responsible for kicking off the plot by purloining Kirby's slice of strawberry shortcake. They do realize the error of their ways, though, and make amends with Kirby by giving him another slice at the end of the game and assisting him in VideoGame.Kirby Mass Attack.
  • Literature.Redwall: Gonff the self-titled Prince of Mousethieves, while not evil by any stretch of the imagination, is a Lovable Rogue who was first introduced in the book Mossflower stealing food from the antagonists, Just Like Robin Hood. In a later book, it is revealed that he has an entire tribe of descendants who are all also thieves.
  • Franchise.Super Mario Bros:
    • Little Mousers are a masked species of mice, with roles often involving some form of theft.
    • VideoGame.Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door: Ms. Mowz is a flirtatious and highly effective badge thief. In battle, one of her moves allows her to steal an enemy's items.
    • VideoGame.Mario Party 8: Mowz appears on King Boo's Haunted Hideaway, running a roulette-like game. If the player successfully pockets a ball in either the star, coin, or candy slot, Mowz will steal the corresponding asset from another player. He also appears on Shy Guy's Perplex Express as a suspect in stealing Holly Koopa's Candy, hiding in one of the three-to-five train cars.
  • The VideoGame.Rhythm Heaven game "Rat Race" features three mice who make their way across a large table in order to get at a giant piece of cheese seemingly left unguarded. They have to be careful not to let a very watchful black cat catch them.
  • VideoGame.Yoshis Island: Little Mousers are a masked species of mice. In most appearances, their role is to steal eggs (or balls of yarn) from the player character.
  • Felix the Cat: The episode, "The Mouse and Felix", features a mouse who ransacks Felix's house to steal his food and outsmarts him at every chance he gets. However, it's revealed that he's been taking Felix's food to care for his children, so Felix makes him feel welcome into his home.
  • WesternAnimation.Garfield And Friends: In "Trial and Error", two mice named Elmo and Ferd love to steal food. They nab Garfield's pie, which Odie gets blamed for.
[[folder:Western Animation]]
  • WesternAnimation.Looney Tunes:
    • "Stooge for a Mouse" has a mouse who tries to get some cheese from a nearby table. How? By sabotaging the friendship between Sylvester and a bulldog named Mike. Unlike the mouse in "Canned Feud", who got away scot-free with starving Sylvester to death, he gets his comeuppance in the end.
    • Creator.Tex Avery's early short Ain't We Got Fun revolves around mice who raid an old man's pantry and then frame it on his cat.
  • WesternAnimation.The Pink Panther: The cartoon "Pink-A-Boo" has a pesky mouse abscond some supplies from Pink's home, often right under his nose. Later, this mouse is joined by a platoon of guest mice, and they start a loud party in the Mouse Hole in the panther's living room.

    Mice are tricksters, pranksters or troublemakers 
  • Anime.Voltron: The Space Mice were a heroic version of this. They would very much play tricks on the space explorers, particularly liking to harass Pidge. This actually becomes a plot point at the start of the series when Pidge realizes the mice are able to move around the castle at will and most likely were the ones who pilfered the Black Lion's activation key. Once they return it, they become a lot more tame, but their mischievous natures do allow them to cause the occasional amount of trouble for Zarkon's forces when they manage to get into the Castle of Lions from time to time.
  • ComicStrip.Garfield: While Garfield is actually more into befriending mice rather than chasing and eating them, sometimes the mice will actually mess with him, such as giving him a makeover when he sticks his head in their mouse hole.
  • Literature.There Is No Epic Loot Here Only Puns: One of Delta's puzzles involves a mess-making mouse.
  • Film.Mouse Hunt: The titular rodent is the source of all of Lars and Ernie's problems and outsmarts them at every turn. He reforms at the end of the film when he gets a new job as a cheese tester in the brothers' new cheese factory.
  • Film.Stay Tuned zigzags the trope. At one point, Roy and Helen Knable, jumping around on Hellivision's channels, find themselves in an animated show as cartoon mice. At that point, Roy helps himself to a donut "the size of a Buick". Then they're pursued by a cartoon robot cat, and they spend their time dodging, evading, and using every cartoon trope in the books, from dropping a dryer in a bathtub with the robot feline to saying "Don't Try This At Home." Much of what they do, though, is drawn from their own knowledge of cartoon mice, so that it's not that they're being deliberately mischievous, but that they're just doing what they know. All of it was done by the great Creator.Chuck Jones.
  • Literature.Anatole: Anatole the mouse is most upset when he overhears a family talking about how terrible mice are for scrounging food, so he secretly sets himself up as taster at a cheese factory, leaving little signs on the different cheeses. With Anatole's cunning methods, business booms at the factory; but he keeps his identity as a mouse very secret.
  • A traditional Irish song, "The Mice Are At It Again", is about a guy who lives in a run-down rooming house, and is bedeviled by the resident mice. Not-entirely-accurate lyrics can be found at mudcat.org.
    "Well last week I earned some overtime and like a big fat-head
    I hung my trousers at the foot when I got into bed.
    The next morning when I awoke I found I had been dunned.
    I asked the Mrs. about it and she says "it's ten to one
    That the mice are at it again, oh, been up to their tricks."
    I said "they must have been hungry for to chaw up seven-and-six.
    For I knew I'd half a sovereign." "That's right," says Mary Jane,
    "And they chawed it down to half-a-crown, oh the mice are at it again."
  • VideoGame.Toonstruck: There is a pesky mouse running around and causing trouble in the tavern. It even nibbles on the Barman (who is an anthropomorphic hunk of cheese.) The Barman hates the idea of hurting the mouse, but he's still so fed up with it that he offers a reward to anyone who can get rid of it.
  • The WesternAnimation.Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers episode "Catteries Not Included" has Dale and Monty dare to visit Cat Alley to see if any cat knows the whereabouts of the missing kitten Spunky. To their great surprise, Dale and Monty find that Cat Alley is overrun by mice, who have turned it into a party-land playground. The most intel the two Rangers glean from these mice is that all the cats disappeared two nights ago, and have been unseen since.
  • WesternAnimation.Hey Duggee: True to their title, the Naughty Mice often purloin things and play practical jokes on others. They also dress and talk like stereotypical "bad boys".

    Mouse-based videogame enemies 
  • VideoGame.Cool Spot: In "Off the Wall" and "Back to the Wall", there are pajama-clad mouse enemies who attack Spot by tossing pieces of cheese at him.
  • The final biome in VideoGame.Hades features mice both big and small as enemies. The small mice attack as a swarm but take little damage to kill, making them a soft check on whether or not the player has a dash boon. The large mice have a fair amount of health, attack, and drop poison on the ground when they are attacked that does not damage to the player.
    • This section also has a mini-boss called "Tiny Vermin" that is as small as the normal mice but has a bite equivalent to the big mice. It also can summon big mice to fight against you. It is arguably the hardest mini-boss in the biome.
  • Several mouse-based Franchise.Pokemon tend to fit this bill according to their Pokedex entries. Rattata-line having rather annoying reputation, and Pikachu-line having tendencies to shock people literally are two of these.
  • The Franchise.Sonic The Hedgehog games have various robot mice enemies created by Dr. Eggman. Specifically:
  • Franchise.Super Mario Bros: One of the bosses from VideoGame.Super Mario Bros 2 is a mouse named Mouser who tosses bombs at the player. To defeat him, the player must catch the bombs and toss them right back at him thrice.
  • VideoGame.Wario Land 4: One of the bosses, Aerodent, is a mouse ghost that pilots a giant floating teddy bear. It drops pin enemies to attack Wario.
  • VideoGame.Yokai Watch: Phantasmurai (and its recolor Spooklunk) is a boss fight who attacks the player. Whenever it's weakened, it's revealed that it's actually being controlled by a mouse.

    Other mice in antagonistic roles 
  • WesternAnimation.Epic: After she shrinks to Leafman height, MJ discovers the dangers of the forest when she and Nod are both attacked by a deer mouse, which is giant from their perspective.
  • Literature.The Gruffalo: Invoked. In the first book, the mouse lies that he's The Dreaded so he can scare the Gruffalo off, and it works when he claims that he loves to eat Gruffalo crumble. By the second book, the Gruffalo has given him the moniker "the Big Bad Mouse". Subverted, however, as the mouse is actually harmless.
  • WesternAnimation.Goliath II: All elephants fear mice, which one particular mouse exploits for a cheap laugh because he thinks it's hilarious to scare people.
[[folder:Western Animation]]
  • WesternAnimation.Looney Tunes:
    • Hubie and Bertie, a duo of mice created by Creator.Chuck Jones, have psychologically manipulated Claude the Cat in two cartoons; "WesternAnimation.Mouse Wreckers" (playing pranks on him to drive him insane to the point of leaving) and "The Hypo-Chondri-Cat" (where they trick him into thinking that he has gotten sick).
    • "Snow Business" features a starving mouse who attempts to eat Sylvester in a reversal of the "cat trying to eat a mouse" cliché.
    • The Unexpected Pest has Sylvester catching the same mouse over and over again to prove that he's still of use to his owners. The mouse eventually catches on to the fact that Sylvester needs him to stay alive, and he starts intentionally endangering himself (hopping into Sylvester's mouth, jumping off of a shelf, etc.) and otherwise breaking things around the house just to sabotage Sylvester's efforts.
  • WesternAnimation.The Twisted Tales Of Felix The Cat: Skidoo the mouse is a real troublemaker. Depending on the episode, he can be a mischievous trickster or even an outright antagonist. For example, in "The Maltese Milkshake," when Felix says he has a dream sequence coming up, Skidoo is more than eager to knock him unconscious with a mallet.
  • WesternAnimation.Superfriends: The episode "Professor Goodfellow's G.E.E.C." has an inventor create a supercomputer that can automate any machine normally operated by humans. The Super Friends are skeptical at first, but the device demonstrates itself more than capable of any task. Things go wrong when a mouse gets into the circuitry, generating increasingly worrisome errors that cause automated machines to go haywire.
  • The titular Jerry from WesternAnimation.Tom And Jerry tends to flip flop between Nice Mice[[note]](dealing with Tom's bad behavior, helping out others, etc.)[[.note]] to this trope [[note]](harassing Tom and making him suffer just for his own sick kicks, which is more apparent in the infamous Creator.Gene Deitch cartoons)[[.note]] on a regular basis.

  • Mice as villains: 17/69 = 24.6%
  • Mice as jerks: 8/69 = 11.6%
  • Mice as thieves: 15/69 = 21.7%
  • Mice as pranksters: 10/69 = 14.5%
  • Mice as game enemies: 10/69 = 14.5%
  • Other mice: 9/69 = 13%

Only 21 crosswicks have been made, so I checked all except for the laconic and Image Source. They break down thusly:

    Thusly: 

Since there are only nineteen examples here and four lack any context to work with, there isn't really enough material to analyze beyond noting the same erratic spread of content ranging from "ledge-patrolling game enemies" to "food thieves" to "vicious, heartless murderers".

There are some obvious identity problems going on here. First off, the scope of this trope as-is is extremely varied, covering things like "mouse serving as a major antagonistic who is trying to take over the world/kill the heroes", "mouse who is abrasive and personally unpleasant", "mouse who is a mischievous prankster", "mouse who is a heroic thief", "wild mouse is dangerous to lilliputian people", and "mouse-based video game enemy who moves back and forth on a ledge". There really isn't any unifying thread here beyond "this mouse serves as some kind of opponent or obstacle for some entity in the story". Additionally, a number of examples, such as The Great Mouse Detective, The Secret of NIMH, Tom and Jerry: The Magic Ring and Mickey Mouse, are of works where all or most characters are mice or similar rodents, which makes them seem less like some form of deliberate animal-personality association and a more a coincidental case where a cast composed primarily of a given type of animals will end up having multiple personality types and characterizations among those animals. Is it really all that notable, for instance, that Ratigan is an evil mouse when every other character in the movie is also a mouse, including the explicitly non-evil ones? It just doesn't strike me as a valid example of a theoretical "mice are evil" trope than the presence of a human villain in all-human cast is a valid example of Humans Are Bastards.

My suggestion is to just ditch the moral aspect entirely. "This animal but evil and/or antagonistic and/or inconvenient" is not a trope, and this kind of wastebasket taxonomy has been a definite issue with animal tropes recently. The examples describing mice as food thieves or wily tricksters do seems to describe a valid trope, but we'd first need to decide how much it overlaps with Resourceful Rodent, and specifically whether or not it's worth keeping separate. If we decide that yes, the two things are worth keeping apart, then I'd say to cut out all of the examples from the "Mice as villains", "Mice as jerks", "Mice as game enemies" and "Mice as random opponents" sections and refocus this around the "Mice as thieves" and "Mice as pranksters" ones. If we decide that no, this should be folded under Resourceful Rodent, then we can just move the relevant examples there and redirect or disambig the page.

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