Enfant Terrible / Anime & Manga

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• Attack on Titan:
  • Averted with Eren, whose actions were truly brave. At the tender age of nine, he tracked down a gang of murderers that had kidnapped a girl (Mikasa) and proceeded to lure them in with fake tears. When the first man got down to comfort him, he stabbed the man in the throat with a knife. The second fared much worse, getting stabbed with an improvised spear, knocked to the ground, and stabbed over and over again while Eren screamed at him. When questioned about his actions, he calmly stated the criminals were simply animals that happened to look like people. His actions were ruled justified, but the officers investigating were visibly frightened by what a 9-year-old boy had done. It's when he grows up that he goes completely insane with despair.
  • A Justified case exists with the Colossal Titan. An 11-year-old was responsible for all that death and suffering, though years later they express remorse for their actions, with it implied they didn't fully understand their actions at the time.
• Baccano! (see trope quote 2) has someone who (probably due to horrible torment and constant fear) turned into one. Though it might be just an overcautious kind of self-preservation.
• Berserk:
  • Rosine is a more sympathetic example, prior to becoming an Apostle she was a sweet if ecentrically weird girl but the violent abuse from her father who believed (possibly correctly) that she was Child by Rape eventually led her to snap and uses the Behelit and make a deal with the God Hand, sacrifcing her parents in the process. As an Apostle she's a demonic Enfant Terrible, although given her age and past it's implied she simply can't comperhend the evil she's doing.
  • Farnese was this as a girl along with being a Pyromaniac, she would even whip and bite her servant (and unkown half-brother) Serpico to horror and disgust of the household staff. She is still somewhat sympathetic though being a Lonely Rich Kid with a domieering father, it takes a lot for Farnese shift from a callous character to the gentle hearted woman we see later in the manga.
• Black Butler:
  • Cute little Ciel, only 12, has made a contract with a devil to slay his enemies. He even shot a pedophile in the face with his own gun and then had his butler kill everyone in the mansion, even though he was ordered to rescue them.
  • Even worse than Ciel is anime-only character Alois Trancy, who seems around the same age as Ciel and acts doubly as bloodthirsty; his introductory episode has him gouging out the eye of a maid, with his fingers, in a sudden bout of fury that she looked at him, for one thing...
• Hansel and Gretel of Black Lagoon play this archetype well past the hilt with their childish fits of pique-turned-bloodbaths, shared multiple personalities, laundry list of psychosexual disorders, and cutely-adorned heavy machinegun. They aren't supernatural, their immunity to recoil forces aside, but they are very, very messed-up. Justified, due to their traumatizing freudian excuses of a past.
• Bleach: In her early appearances, the anime-exclusive character Ririn used the trope for her facade. During one of the fights, despite everything she had brought down on them, both Ichigo and Renji make note of how hard it is to fight brats and instead opt to attack her two minions.
• Cells at Work: Bacteria!: Salmonella is portrayed as a very powerful and cruel little boy, that tries to take over the host body.
• Code Geass:
  • Subverted with V.V.: even though he looks like a little kid, he is really in his late 50s to early 60s and has a code for immortality.
  • Played straight with Rolo. The kid is an assassin, who's been killing people since he was a small child. Nobody would suspect a six-year-old to shoot someone, but it helps that he can stop people's perception of time.
• Wen from the Cowboy Bebop episode "Sympathy for the Devil" is a killer who stopped aging in his childhood after exposure to Green Rocks.
• Daily Lives of High School Boys: Habara was such an inhumanly powerful bully in her elementary school years that she was nicknamed "the Archdemon" by her peers, being feared even by high schoolers. After a particularly nasty incident that left a visible scar in Karasawa's forehead, the ten strongest children of the neighborhood banded together to take her down. Though she was defeated, most of her opponents couldn't stand on their feet by the end of the fight. She's mellowed out in the intervening years, but many who knew about her bullying days fear the day that the Archdemon reawakens.
• In Danjon No Maou Wa Saijaku, The Protagonist is one, albeit usually a kind and gentle soul if he doesn't have reason to believe he's being threatened. Though he is technically "0-years-old", he was "born" with the body and mindset of a preteen. This does nothing to stop him from coming up with truly brutal and sadistic dungeon designs, or even being in any way squeamish about walking up to the body of someone his top aid has bashed to death right in front of him, hacking the guy's head off with a shotel, and then presenting said head to the visiting dignitary of yet another nation that is trying to enter into a peaceful relationship with him, or at least not provoke him, and does it all with a genuine smile.
• The Digimon Emperor alias Ken Ichijouji from Digimon Adventure 02 has elements of this, but a lot of that is because he simply doesn't realize that the Digital World is Not a Game until he is defeated and then his Digimon partner dies. Just watch his childlike glee when he creates the Dark Spiral and Chimeramon.
• Dragon Ball:
  • As flashbacks and the Bardock movie special show, Vegeta was a murderous and callous little tyke from the beginning. Although as the series shows, the destruction of his race did genuinely effect him and he eventually gets better later as an adult.
  • In Dragon Ball Z The purest form of Majin Buu was Kid Buu, a child-like form of Buu completely lacking any sense of morality or moderation. Essentially, his first act on being cleansed of those features absorbed from past victims was to blow up Earth while still on it, reform himself, and start blowing up other planets while trying to find Goku and Vegeta.
  • Kurzia, Frieza's young son who appears in Neko Majin Z and Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 2 is as malcious as the rest of his family, although not quite as evil as his father, uncle or grandfather.
  • Broly as a kid as seen in Dragon Ball Z: Broly – The Legendary Super Saiyan gained his Ax-Crazy behavoir ever since he was stabbed as an infant. Another flashback to when he was a kid shows him gleefully blowing up planets to the horror of his father Paragus, who was forced to put a Mind-Control Device on him. Averted in his canonisation as Broly was a sweet and gentle child like Goku, although he still gets the innocent beaten out of him by Paragus (who's much worse in this version).
  • As some flashbacks show, Goku as a baby was ill tempered and violent, staying true to his Saiyan heritage, until a cranial injury caused him to lose his memory and become more benevolent and kind.
• Elfen Lied
  • The series is about a race of superpowered psychotic little mutant girls called the Diclonius. The greatest danger comes from them developing tremendous telekinetic powers at an age when they don't yet fully comprehend hurting other people and accidentally kill their families, but most that could be captured alive become highly aggressive and violent in response to the treatment they get from the people experimenting on them. And then there's Mariko, a five-year-old girl who is so powerful that she grew up inside a sealed vault and fed by tubes her whole life and unsurprisingly became completely insane. The only thing that can keep her in line are explosive implants all over her body that can be triggered remotely at any time and also require a remote confirmation code every 30 minutes or explode automatically.
  • Tomoo could also easily qualify. He attacked Kaede without any mercy. And then there is that scene where Tomoo killed Kaede's dog for his own amusement.
• Isaac, the prepubescent mass-murderer from Eternal Sabbath. In his defense, however, he has a Freudian Excuse: He is a clone, created for the specific purpose of having a spare to dissect as soon as he reached maturity. He was raised in a vat to keep him from developing consciousness, but being telepathic, he has known of his intended purpose since infancy and has consequently developed a rather poor opinion of human morality.
• Excel♡Saga has an example of this: Cosette◊ from the episode "Increase Ratings Week" is an eight-year-old assassin.
• Jellal from Fairy Tail. While he's an adult at the start of the story, he convinced everyone to be his slaves as a child because they thought he was a sweet, morally righteous kid. Justified because no one knew that Jellal himself was possessed.
• Fate/Prototype has Manaka Sajyou, an adorable-looking 13-year-old Child Prodigy who's also an Omnicidal Maniac who, having been connected to The Root since birth, has a total lack of empathy and a terrifying quantity of power. Manaka was so innocently evil that she sacrificed her father and many local girls to the Holy Grail, dancing and sincerely thinking that it was what she had to do to raise the Beast and only being stabbed to death by her own Servant when she attacked her little sister Ayaka while telling her "I love you" managed to stop her...until she was revived several years later.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • In the manga, Pride, although he looks like a sweet little boy, is actually a 300-year-old homunculus. Not many kids out there can fill a dark room with working mouths and eyes.
  • In the 2003 anime version, there was Wrath after being corrupted by Envy and remembering his past, but after a while his mother Izumi made him a better person..
• The Fifth diary holder, Reisuke Houjou in Future Diary, is one of these, being an adorable four-year-old who uses his magic picture diary to adorably kill people (i.e., asks a girl to take a bath with him, and then tries to electrocute her). He has a Freudian Excuse that his parents didn't love him enough (they never "slept like a river", next to each other with him in between) due to the influence of the Omekata cult. Well, that and God is telling him to kill people. No, not as in he's Hearing Voices that he attributes to God, but as in God exists, and he's telling a four-year-old to kill people. And he tells that to other people, too. Because he's THAT much of a prick.
• Although he may be a bit too old to count 16-year-old Hajime Muroto from Gantz certainly displays the traits; he plays it out like he's a very innocent and sensitive boy, but as it turns out he's a dangerous psychopathic serial killer and rapist.
• Despite not having a humanoid form, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex's Tachikomas evoke this at times, speaking with cute, childlike voices and behaving in cute, childlike ways just before cheerfully shredding a whole platoon of infantry with a Gatling gun.
• Ralph from Glass Fleet may be adorable and loving most of the time, but he won't hesitate to attack and try to kill you if you get on his bad side
• The little girl assassins in Gunslinger Girl may also be viewed as Enfants Terribles, although they have been specifically brainwashed and manipulated into being that way.
• Every kid in Hunter × Hunter who isn't Gon. The Zoldyck family is made up mostly of child assassins.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Phantom Blood: Dio Brando, as a child, killed his father (who was abusive, but still), got adopted into the Joestar family, made Jonathan look like a bitch for all of his early childhood years, forcibly made Erina, the girl that Jonathan loved, kiss him, burned Jonathan's dog alive in a furnace, and beat Jonathan up in a boxing match. And this is all before he becomes a vampire and plots to Take Over the World. His primary motivation for the vampirism? Jonathan beat him for having kissed Erina, so he decided to get back at him in the worst way possible. When Dio tries to use his abusive father as an excuse for his behaviour, Speedwagon shoots it down and states outright that no matter what he says to justify his actions, it changes nothing; he's evil and has been since the day he was born.
  • Stardust Crusaders: The user of the Stand Death Thirteen is a remarkably intelligent and sadistic baby named Mannish Boy. Whenever his victims fall asleep, Death Thirteen pulls them into a dream of an amusement park and killing them there kills them in their sleep. Should they escape, they have no memories of the dream. Kakyoin manages to cut a warning into his arm, but is unable to convince the others. Fortunately, he figures out how to bring his own Stand into the dream.
  • Stone Ocean: The Green Baby is a mysterious baby-like creature that shrinks down anyone who approaches it into nothing. It's later revealed that its actually a homunculus of DIO created to fulfill Pucci's plan of obtaining Made In Heaven.
  • JoJolion: Poor Tom has the looks of a young baby, even though he's actually a very old guy who's also a member of the Rock Humans, especially enjoys using his appearance to peep up through dresses.
• Kouganei Hana from Karakuridouji Ultimo. A cute little tyke, when she isn't smiling like a lunatic and ordering her giant killer robot to murder everything in sight.
• Kaitei Kubilah from Legend of Heavenly Sphere Shurato. He's the youngest follower of Queen Shiva, and a really fucking creepy teenage boy with pyrokinetic powers.
• Loveless has Natsuo and Youji Sagan, child soldiers genetically engineered not to feel pain. Their first appearance has them killing two people and a dog, and nailing Soubi's hand to the ground just to see how he reacts. They do get better, though.
• Stella Irvine in Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force. Sure, she is a Cute Mute, but after she merges with Esquad Huckebein...
• Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro: After he was born, Sicks' father handed him a razor to gauge his potential. Sicks used it to slash the throats of all the babies in the Maternity Ward. He killed his mother when he was 2-years-old and his father when 4-years-old. By the time of the series takes place, Sicks is the CEO of an international arms manufacturer... And 'Absolute Evil' as far as the entire cast is concerned.
• Medabots has the Ankle Biters, whose Medabot, Churlybear, is a deceptively powerful Gravity Master. Though they don't exactly kill anybody, they are nasty pieces of work, though granted, Spyke kinda had it coming.
• Medaka Box has Unzen Myorii, the first Big Bad after the Genre Shift. He's a 10-year-old cute little boy who's Establishing Character Moment is him breaking the Orchestra Club leader's arm, and then massacring the entire club for being too loud.
• Masato from Mermaid Saga who is an adorable little child who happens to be an 800-year-old sociopath known for poisoning women with mermaid's flesh in hopes for the Million to One Chance (an actual one, not the type that occurs nine times out of ten) that it might make her immortal instead. The "lucky" one who doesn't die an agonizing death doesn't have it much better either, as he tends to punish them by repeatedly killing them.
• Desil Galette from Mobile Suit Gundam AGE. While he's only seven-years-old, he's done more than his fair share of heinous acts.
• The titular Monster, Johan Liebert, murdered many people as a child, including several sets of adoptive parents.
• Michio Yuki of MW converts from a sweet, adorable kid to this. It happens to him because of being exposed to the titular Psycho Serum.
• My Hero Academia: All For One's origin story reveals that he was evil since making his way out of his mother's womb. The first thing he did was steal her Quirk, which he then used to hold on to her corpse as he tried to drain what nutrients her body had left. Growing up in a time where Quirks were met with suspicion and bigotry by the rest of humanity, All For One regularly stole Quirks from people and killed muggles to pass the time. When his younger twin brother Yoichi (whom he saw as more of a possession than a sentient person) tried to stop him, All For One kicked him in the face to shut him up. After reading a bunch of comic books Yoichi found, All For One developed his fascination with the idea of becoming a Demon Lord who reigned the world through fear, explicitly voicing his dream of creating a world that existed solely for his sake. When word reached him that the glowing baby had gathered 10 million followers in their pursuit of peace, All For One took offense at the fact that they were famous for simply being the first known Quirk user when he knew there had been at least a few dozen more before them, and declared that they had no right to mobilize so many people with "undeserved fame", so he killed them and stole their Quirk. And all of this happened while he was still in his early teens.
• Alyssa Searrs from My-HiME. Sure, she's huggably cute, but you'll soon forget about all that when you realize that she can call an army of tanks to your doorstep...and she's not afraid to order to shoot to kill. Just don't look up at that metallic thing floating high above the ground.
• Naruto:
  • As a small and relatively cute child, Gaara reacted to another child's rejection by trying to kill her. Hard to blame him, though, after all the Mind Screw-ings his family gave him.
  • Zabuza while a young child, and without any shinobi training, killed a hundred ninja students on his own. The village made him a ninja and promptly changed the rules to prevent something like that happening again.
• Noir is a case where the Enfant Terrible gets a bit better, more or less.
• One Piece:
  • Donquixote Doflamingo was a massive Creepy Child in his Dark and Troubled Past, graduating into this when he kills his father at age 10 as "punishment" for ruining the Donquixote family's lives.
  • Doflamingo's henchman Sugar is physically and emotionally a child, having stopped aging at age ten due to her Devil Fruit, but she's as cruel and sadistic as her boss is.
  • Sugar's colleague Dellinger was one of these too. He is a human-fishman hybrid, and the fish part is derived from the fighting fish. This gives Dellinger incredibly nasty violent streaks, such that he was considered an equal to his crewmates at the age of 2. By the present, he is 16-years-old and is mowing down expert fighters decades older than he is largely to humiliate them.
  • Charlotte Pudding did not start as such, but when she snapped after having been harshly abused, she became this with gusto.
  • Her mother, Charlotte Linlin, better known as Big Mom, had already some creepy tendencies when she was five-years-old, trying to "correct" the bodies of people of different races because they looked funny and she didn't know any better, but she didn't have bad intention to do so. However, once the Giants start to fast for 12 days, Linlin couldn't bear it, and the delicious Semla she ate prior to the fasting made her addicted to it, which causes her to go on a rampage at the seventh day and she destroyed her village. This was probably the starting point with her extreme obsession for sweets.
  • Sanji's brothers, Ichiji, Niji, and Yonji, were genetically engineered to be sociopathic Super Soldiers, so this is kind of a given. Sanji himself only escaped this via his mother's Heroic Sacrifice.
• Cynthia from Overman King Gainer is a perfect example of this. She's an elite soldier working for her foster father, who enjoys killing and likens it to a game — except she knows she's actually committing horrible crimes. However, her father legitimately loves her and is proud of her for her deeds, so she might just be the perfect soldier.
• Patlabor: While thankfully not as sanguinary as other examples in this list, Bado is 12 years old and the pilot of the Griffon, the most destructive Labor that has appeared in the series, and undyingly loyal in all the wrong ways to Richard Hong, a Corrupt Corporate Executive who wishes to extort the Griffon's superiority as a weapon of war even if that takes terrorizing Japan and nearly killing the Tokyo PD's Special Vehicles Division.
• Saffron, Ranma's final foe in Ranma ½, first appears as a very nasty child with a chip on his shoulder and a kingdom of powerful, flying soldiers at his beck and call. He later acquires his true, mature form and proceeds to devastate half the countryside.
• Ginger Bread of Reborn! (2004). Except that he's actually a doll, that's being controlled. Lambo, or the Arcobaleno babies would fit better, even though they were adults transformed into babies.
• Rurouni Kenshin has Soujiro and young!Enishi. The former's a Stepford Smiler serving a Social Darwinist, the latter is a Yandere who severely lacks empathy, and both can cut people down into hamburger.
• The Saga of Tanya the Evil has the titular character and Child Soldier herself, who at around the age ten-years-old, has already established herself as a disturbingly brilliant, manipulative, and ruthless leader, who has earned the fear and respect of her mostly full grown male battalion, (It probably also helps, that she is a naturally gifted mage.), and is also completely morally bankrupt to the point of bordering on The Sociopath. Justified in this case, as she was originally a grown and very cynical man, who was reincarnated as a little girl for talking back to a god and essentially has the brain of a full grown adult.
• Wadatsumi in Saint Seiya: Episode.G Assassin, is as rude and violent as she is cute.
• Narrowly averted with Tokito of Samurai Deeper Kyo, who is referred to as sadistic by one of the characters (who isn't a very nice guy himself, when it comes down to it) and has a lot of onscreen fun torturing people, both psychologically and physically. Eventually, though, she is redeemed.
• Himeko from Shinigami Trilogy is Mandy with the ability to be deceptively adorable. In fact, she looks suspiciously like a certain DeviantArtist's version of Mandy, and combined with her grim reaper suitor they look like Mandy's children Mini-Mandy and Grimm Jr.
• In Tamagotchi, Spacytchi and his brothers Akaspetchi and Pipospetchi are all young Tamagotchis who attend school. They're a Terrible Trio who do whatever they can to eventually take over Tamagotchi Planet.
• Tokyo Ghoul plays with this in multiple directions.
  • Ghoul children are rumored to be like this, as a way for the CCG to justify killing them. But the majority completely invert this, being normal children until life forces them to become violent to survive.
  • The Oggai, a 100-strong force of Child Soldiers. Their youth and angelic faces contrast heavily with their capacity for extreme violence and brutal efficiency in wiping out anything in their path. They are introduced performing a public execution and like to show off the heads of their victims when given the chance.
• Young Knives in the Trigun anime. Having been abused by Steve a human simultaneously murders and breaks up the crew of the ship who adopted him and Vash, and in the end, he leaves everyone including Vash's beloved mother figure Rem to die on the ship after he causes it to blow up. It is fair to note in the manga Knives was a bit more sympatheitc, being a geuinely sweet child who only snapped and became a Enfant Terrible after seeing what the humans had done to Tesla another Plant like him.
• The Vision of Escaflowne has Dilandau: a psychotic, murderous Spoiled Brat who at the "tender" age of 14/15, revels in killing and blowing up things. Then it's revealed that he's Allen's younger sister Selena, who was kidnapped as a little girl and then experimented on horribly and ended up Brainwashed and Crazy by The Empire..
• Mokuba Kaiba comes disturbingly close to this at the beginning of the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga (when he's still trying to kill Yugi), but he gets better afterwards. Seto Kaiba around the same age (flashbacks) might have been even more dangerous. He still is.
  • In the parody Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, Rebecca Hawkins's teddy bear.
  • Noah Kaiba from the Virtual Nightmare Filler Arc is Seto and Mokuba's adoptive brother. Seriously injured just prior to their adoption, Noah's mind was placed in a virtual environment that preserved his consciousness but at the cost of permanently stunting his emotional growth. Despite being in his late teens or early twenties, he still appears as a child within the virtual world and acts like one as well.
• Vino from Zatch Bell! is an INFANT whose demon partner is more or less Hitler mixed with Satan. And he enjoys watching him destroy the world. After his demon partner is killed one of the main characters adopts him because he's still just a baby.

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