Tropedia

  • All unique and most-recently-edited pages, images and templates from Original Tropes and The True Tropes wikis have been copied to this wiki. The two source wikis have been redirected to this wiki. Please see the FAQ on the merge for more.

READ MORE

Tropedia
WikEd fancyquotesQuotesBug-silkHeadscratchersIcons-mini-icon extensionPlaying WithUseful NotesMagnifierAnalysisPhoto linkImage LinksHaiku-wide-iconHaikuLaconic
Literalbadbunny

A LITERAL bad bunny!

Cquote1
"That's no ordinary rabbit! That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on!"
Cquote2


It's small. It's fluffy. It's adorable. And if you get on its bad side, your death will be painful, but swift.

Related to but distinct from Fluffy the Terrible, as well as being sort of a subtrope to Our Monsters Are Weird, the Killer Rabbit is any monster that's far more dangerous than it looks. Maybe it's strong for its size, poisonous on a massive level, has flesh-rending pointy bits that aren't readily apparent, or can just turn into something far more dangerous. Either way, it can make a person wary of picking on small, defenseless animals, much like the Old Master can make a person more eager to respect their elders. In many cases, the creature isn't even all that harmful unless you actually mess with it, whether intentionally or not.

This trope takes its name from the "Dread Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog" in Monty Python and The Holy Grail, which seems to be a completely ordinary bunny rabbit, with the notably unusual ability to leap through the air at high speed and tear out people's throats.

This creature is also known as a "Vorpal Bunny", a name which comes from the monster of that name in the original Wizardry game from 1981, possibly inspired by the Monty Python movie and is named after "The Vorpal Blade", a fictional sword used to decapitate the title creature in the Lewis Carroll poem "Jabberwocky". The name also spread (via Dungeons and Dragons) to other games such as Quest for Glory and Ultima Online.

There's enough truth behind this that one of the first things many children are taught is "don't try to play with any animal until you know it's friendly." (Another lesson, learned later in life by many, sometimes too late, is: "Animals can become unfriendly pretty damn fast.")

Specific types of Killer Rabbits include Evil Girl Scouts and Ridiculously Cute Critters that are secretly evil. Civilizations that are more dangerous than they look are Superweapon Surprises. Killer Rabbits are the most notable subversion of What Measure Is a Non-Cute?, which is pervasive enough for everyone to assume that cute animals are friendly.

This trope is pervasive enough that if any of the Five Races in games seems to be cute and harmless, they would by definition have to be occasional Killer Rabbits to make them viable to play.

For cases where the Killer Rabbit is a literal rabbit, see Hair-Raising Hare.

If it has a scary name, but not a scary demeanor, it's Deathbringer the Adorable.

Compare: Happy Fun Ball; Beware the Nice Ones; The Catfish; Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass; Cute but Cacophonic; Badass Adorable; Super Fun Happy Thing of Doom; and The Not-So-Harmless Punishment. If the video game character becomes a Killer Rabbit only when you hamper him, then he's Savage Setpiece.

Contrast: Level Five Onix; Holy Hand Grenade (which is often the most effective way to deal with this).

Not to be confused with Kill da Wabbit.

Examples of Killer Rabbit include:

Subpages[]


Other Examples[]

Advertising[]

Card Games[]

  • Magic: The Gathering
    • The Unglued expansion set gave us the Infernal Spawn of Evil, a powerful beast from the darkest pits of hell. This is what it looks like. Not to be outdone, the Unhinged set introduced its even stronger child, the demon known only as the Infernal Spawn of Infernal Spawn of Evil.
    • Then there's that other Unhinged set card, When Fluffy Bunnies Attack.
    • The real "killer rabbit" of the Magic world is the squirrel'. Some squirrel-themed cards, such as "Deranged Hermit" and "Squirrel Nest" have seen extensive Tournament Play.
    • Hyalopterous Lemure. The artist didn't know what a "lemure" is (a ghost) so he drew a "lemur" instead (a fuzzy rodent).
    • Also, Jackalope Herd. A bunch of bunnies with antlers, amazing combat stats for their mana cost, and a drawback (returning to your hand when you play another spell) that can be turned into an advantage fairly easily.
  • Munchkin has a level 2 monster that's basically a rabbit with a switchblade, where the Bad Stuff is "you die" (yes, a literal Killer Rabbit; not surprising since he's actually Bun-bun, the Sluggy Freelance character mentioned below). One time in six, it turns into a level 15 monster, as "That One Rabbit from That One Movie", and it's too late to get help.
    • The Munchkin Bites! expansion has 17th-level monster The Evil, also from Sluggy Freelance. For those not versed in the webcomic, it's an adorable cute kitten. It steals a level from you just by meeting it.
  • Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! gives us Mokey Mokey. It looks cute and harmless, and it is, but with this card present on the field at the same time, you will not want it to get angry.
    • Then there's Blade Rabbit. It depicts a rabbit with actual daggers for teeth.

Live-Action TV[]

  • In one episode of Xena: Warrior Princess, sidekick Gabrielle must fend off a vicious attack by what is essentially the Rabbit of Caerbannog.
  • The original Basil Brush.
  • The Furbie-esque Nubbins in Sanctuary are a variant of this — they're only dangerous in large groups and when being directly attacked, but their extremely high reproductive rate and lack of predators outside their natural environment make them potentially highly destructive to the ecosystem. Unfortunately, they're a Hive Mind far brighter than they seem, and are more than willing to sacrifice individual lives to escape and spread.
  • In an episode of Honey I Shrunk the Kids called "Honey, the Bunny Bit It", Nick Szalinski revives the school mascot à la Frankenstein, and chaos ensues as it runs amok.
  • An America's Funniest Home Videos episode features a rabbit fighting a snake. The rabbit kicks the snake's proverbial ass, forcing the reptile to retreat up a low-hanging tree, despite the rabbit attempting to yank the snake down for more.
  • When Count Duckula asks a spaceman to take him to the most dangerous planet in the galaxy he gets to meet the Fluffy Bunnies of Planet Cute, who want everything to be sweet and pretty and cuddly, and get very mean when Duckula and co. persist in being grouchy and sour.

Puppet Shows[]

  • Fizgigg from The Dark Crystal. If a tribble and a bear trap had a baby....
  • "HI, I'M A BUNNY!" This is a subversion. You don't need to be a genius to realize how dangerous Carl is...especially if you fit in his mouth.

Music[]

Radio[]

  • In the the radio show Old Harrys Game, Satan finds the most evil being in the world is a Dolphin. Called Chuckles.
  • In one episode of A Prairie Home Companion, cowboys Dusty and Lefty come across "The Free-Range Chicken", which they then engage, and nearly lose to, in a gunfight.

Sports[]

  • The South Sydney Rabbitohs have won the more premierships than any other Rugby League team in Australia.
  • The Pittsburgh Penguins. Penguins are not exactly known for their toughness.

Tabletop Games[]

  • Dungeons and Dragons
    • The common housecat in 3.5 is a serious threat to all 1st level characters, even those with class levels. This is because all successful attacks deal at least one point of damage, and cats get up to three a round. A level-appropriate encounter of four stray cats can easily wipe out a 1st level party, especially if the cats use their racial stealth bonuses to launch a surprise attack. This is why 1st level Commoners don't walk down alleyways at night.
    • The original "Arduin Grimoire", a very early third-party supplement, included among its bestiary a creature called the "killkitten". Resembling normal kittens, these beasts were actually cunning pack predators whose hollow claws could inject a paralytic poison. Their normal procedure was to set one of their number as bait to attract a potential victim by acting like an injured kitten, while the remainder of the pack lurked, hidden, nearby. When the unsuspecting schmuck picked the "kitten" up, it would paralyze him with its venom, after which the rest of the pack would swarm and eat him.
    • The Tibbit, a player race introduced in Dragon Magazine, are perfectly normal humanoids that happen to be able to take on housecat form at will. One of the illustrations on their section in the Dragon Compendium is man lying facedown in a pool of blood, with a metric ton of cutlery jutting from his back and a glowering kitty crouched on top of him.
    • Kobolds, having low HP and a reputation for cowardice, are frequently slaughtered in the open by first-level parties. They're also known for their trap-designing prowess, meaning that a clever DM can make a trap-filled death maze that can frighten well-prepared parties. The most popular recount of this happening is "Tucker's Kobolds", named after a particularly nefarious DM.
    • The 3.5E Monster Manual IV introduced the Skiurid, an evil squirrel from the Plane of Shadow, and generally regarded as one of the worst monsters D&D ever introduced. Then an infamous column on the Wizards of the Coast D&D section came along, specifically looking for ways to make Skiurids lethal. The squirrels are quite capable of bringing even a mid-level party of well-equipped adventurers to their knees.
    • The giant shrew, a critter from Basic D&D, looked like a normal-sized grayish rat, yet could do a pretty good Vorpal Bunny impression on low-level adventurers.
    • Quite a few fey arguably qualify — the well-known nymph, for example, has one ability you don't hear about too often: if you happen to catch a sight of the nymph naked, she can force you to make a fortitude save or die on the spot. Other kinds of fey are more "harmlessly cute" than the nymph, but tend to have a wide range of powerful magical abilities. Very few fey are harmless. In fact plenty of them will do horrible things to you given the chance.
    • Then there's the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing, a rival with the skiurid for one of D&D's worst monsters. It's not the bunny you need to beware, so much as the stump it's sitting on...
    • "Blink bunny", called Al-mi'raj ("experiment 72") by the gnomes of Krynn. It's just a stupid bunny, but it can teleport around, is nearly fearless and have an unicorn-like horn which it doesn't hesitate to use if threatened. Oh, and it's a herd animal. Now the bad news: one of ten adults have Psychic Powers with ridiculously large power pool. The dreaded rust monster may decay one's sword or armor if manages to hit it with antennae, but a psionic blink bunny can blast it into cloud of shrapnel just by looking at it. It also can set stuff afire and control flames so that it or its nest isn't hurt. While flying around. It first appeared in 1st/2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons in the original Fiend Folio, and is based on the Miraj (see Literature). The very first version of the Al-mi'raj was just an ordinary, very fast, dimwitted, unpredictable rabbit that appeared in packs of 2-20 and which could deal damage as per a dagger by stabbing someone with their horn.
    • Brain moles, which absorb energy from psions to turn them into life, and which spread a psionic disease. They're not hugely lethal, but their challenge rating is still about on par with that of a level one warrior.
  • Deadlands: The Weird West features jackalopes, which are evil and carnivorous versions of the infamous "rabbits with antlers" from Wild West folklore. They kill their prey by cursing them with bad luck, then stalking them until they suffer a fatal accident.
  • GURPS IOU includes lethal versions of rats and squirrels.
  • Gamma World has a hilariously literal version with the Hoops, a race of bunnymen who "want to be the master race" and who can turn metal into rubber by touching it.
  • Warhammer 40000
    • The setting, known for a habit of Everything Trying to Kill You cropping up everywhere, brings us the Catachan Barking Toad: a large, sad-looking amphibian sometimes dubbed the "Ronery Toad". If attacked, hurt or even surprised, it explodes into a cloud of obscenely virulent toxins, killing absolutely everything for miles around and poisoning the earth so that nothing will ever grow there again.
    • The original "Rogue Trader" book for Warhammer 40K also featured the "Catachan Face Eater" a carnivorous creature that looked quite a bit like an ordinary wash cloth.
  • Plenty of the weapons in the (coincidentally-named) Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot game fall under this. Included:
    • Quite Irascible Diffractable Cheese Balls.
    • (Bitter-Sweet) Chocolate Covered Anti-Matter Raisins.
    • Europan Robotic Titanium Termites.
  • Wastits in Human Occupied Landfill a.k.a. HoL — small, cute waddling soft creatures resembling animated teddy bears that will suddenly "explode into a maw of teeth the diameter of a whale's privates". For added fun, until they attack they're almost indistinguishable from wastems, completely harmless creatures that are the primary food source of HoL's inhabitants.
  • Most of the creatures that Shadowrun's shapeshifters start out as are pretty dangerous on their own (lions, bears, eagles, etc.), but a fox magician character can lead to a cute little ten-pound fox hurling fireballs.

Toys[]

  • The Werebears toys were seemingly adorable teddy bears with reversible heads and paws that would reveal their "nasty" face when turned inside out.

Video Games[]

  • Shin Megami Tensei V: This trope is subverted with the cutesy demon Amanozako. Aogami believes that she’s a demon that feigns kindness to prey on humans. But it turns out this isn’t the case.

Web Animation[]

  • The Bunnykill web animation series. A liberal exercise in the trope of Killer Rabbitry (and Katanas Are Just Better).
  • The Metal Gear Solid short "Crab Battle!", where Naked Snake gets his ass handed to him by a Kenyan Mangrove Crab.
  • Happy Tree Friends has several small animals that are for some reason vicious. Whistle, the man-eating puppy, a man-eating baby turtle, and a flock of man-eating ducks have all appeared. Plus, well, most of the cast.
  • This short animated film Red where Little Red Riding Hood refuses the advances of the wolf (who looks like a slightly feral child wearing a wolf costume) after spilling the cakes she was going to bring to her grandmother. After leaving brokenhearted, Red encounters a unicorn-horned rabbit, which she hugs (not noticing the evil toothed grin it makes before mutating into a bear-sized horned monster that was ready to devour Red before the wolf comes back in time to save the day.

Notes[]