Deceptively Cute Critter

Aww, look at the little guy! Isn't that just a sweetest little puppy/rabbit/kitty/sheep/mouse/bird/dolphin you've ever seen?

That's exactly what they want you to think. A Deliberately Cute Critter knows that human beings find animals adorable, and opts to use this to their advantage. They want humans to fawn all over them as part of some grander scheme. Maybe they're from another planet. Or top-secret agents. Or hungry. Or just looking to get something for themselves. Either way, they know breaking out the Puppy-Dog Eyes will turn the tides in their favor.

Many times, the Deceptively Cute Critter is the enemy or foil to a large, intimidating animal (or simply a normal animal) who doesn't look as cute. The cute animal will gleefully cause trouble for the other animal, who will get fed up and retaliate. Then the cute animal will pull a Wounded Gazelle Gambit to get other humans and/or animals to come its aid, getting the other animal in trouble and making it look like a big bully.

Sub-Trope of:

• Ridiculously Cute Critter: An extremely cute animal.

Related tropes:

• Cute Is Evil: Cute-looking villains.
• Deliberately Cute Child: A child exploits their cuteness for ulterior motives.
• Disney Creatures of the Farce: A scene spoofing how Disney princesses always seem to attract and be friendly with woodland creatures.
• Luring in Prey: A cute animal might pretend to be cute and harmless in order to lure in unsuspecting prey and devour them.
• Killer Rabbit: A small but deadly creature that looks cute and harmless.
• A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Somebody hides their true self by pretending to be nicer or more harmless than they truly are.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Pretending to be a victim to manipulate others.

Compare:

• Femme Fatale: A sultry, highly attractive, but rather dangerous woman.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Beautiful!: Using your good looks to get away with stuff.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Pokémon: The Series:
  • In "UnBEARable'', a wild Teddiursa does this to manipulate Ash and co., taking advantage of its inherent cuteness and seeming harmlessness to get close to them and steal their food, and then make it look like the other Pokémon in the group were responsible. Fortunately, the local Nurse Joy has long since caught on to its tricks and alerts them to the truth. Teddiursa subsequently loses the ability to do so after it suddenly evolves into the far larger and more dangerous-looking Ursaring.
  • "Where No Togepi Has Gone Before!" stars an evil, manipulative Togepi that uses its cute appearance to play tricks on both Ash's friends and Team Rocket.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Incubators take the form of ridiculously adorable weasel/cat/fox-things, the better to appeal to the girls that they target with their contracts to become Magical Girls. Their agenda for the girls, unfortunately, is anything but benign: every magical girl they create is doomed to become a witch, and to be killed by other magical girls who are in turn doomed to become witches, all to try to prevent the heat death of the universe.

Comic Strips

• Doctor Who Magazine: The comic strip continuity has recurring comedy villain Beep the Meep, an adorable big-eyed ball of fluff who just happens to be a homicidally insane intergalactic war criminal. In his first appearance, he actively pretended to be a harmless Alien Among Us, and he regularly uses his Puppy-Dog Eyes on people who don't know him.

Films — Animation

• Bolt: Downplayed example; Mittens teaches Bolt how to beg for food, using his cuteness to his advantage.
• Lady and the Tramp: Aunt Sarah's cats pretend that Lady scratched them to manipulate their owner and frame Lady for all the mess in the house.
• Lilo & Stitch: Stitch sucks in his retractable limbs and poses as a puppy to be adopted by the Pelekai sisters since he knows the Space Police hunting him won't hurt a native Earth creature.

Films — Live-Action

• Captain Marvel (2019): Goose looks and acts like an adorable cat, so much so that Nick Fury is reduced to baby talk around her. Talos the Skrull, however, knows better, calling her a "flerken". Flashback shows that Goose used to accompany Carol's old mentor, Wendy Lawson a.k.a Mar-Vell, and after her death, remained hanging around in the facility her owner used to work in, with no one the wiser, since Goose looks exactly like an ordinary Earth cat. Her true nature is shown later when she can swallow the Tesseract with no problems, and she can also sprout tentacles out of her mouth and swallow multiple people/things at once into her Black-Hole Belly. The Kree soldiers classified her as being a high threat.
• Cats & Dogs: Both types of pets are far more intelligent than they let on and have their own secret society with elaborate spy organizations. However, they still consider humans the ultimate authority over the earth and are mostly looking to one-up each other. The plot centers around a cat terrorist by the name of Mr. Tinkles who wants to make it impossible for any human to keep a dog as a pet again.

Literature

• Alice, Girl from the Future: In the novella The Golden Bear Cub, there is the eponymous bear cub. It is so adorable that nobody even bothers to remember it was found on a planet where no other animals lived. It turns out to be a banished tyrant with brainwashing abilities.
• The Dresden Files: Dresden's dog Mouse (a scion of a Foo dog, with human-level intelligence and supernaturally-empowered strength) frequently employs the Big Friendly Dog trope to make strangers more comfortable around him or to trick enemies who aren't aware of what he is into underestimating him.
• KonoSuba: Tranquility Girls are a type of plant monster that takes the form of a helpless and/or injured little girl that employs a Wounded Gazelle Gambit to guilt-trip adventurers that pass by into protecting it forever. If they try to leave, the Tranquility Girl will employ the use of addictive fruits that have no nutritional value, resulting in their prey dying from malnutrition. Once dead, the Tranquility Girl can use the corpse as fertilizer. They're considered so dangerous that other adventurers would put up warnings telling anyone who encounters one to kill it on sight.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: In "The Star Beast", Rose finds a small, furry, cute-looking alien named Meep and takes it in. It acts like a cute animal for a while, playing with her stuffed toys and asking for help against the monsters coming to hunt it. It's actually the evil one, eventually breaking the facade after tricking people into fighting for it and then luring the Doctor, along with Donna and her family, into a trap. It digs the knife in by taunting all of them and nearly killing the Doctor and Donna.
• The Haunted Hathaways: In the episode "Haunted Telescope", Louie volunteers to take care of the class ferret. However, things quickly go awry when the ferret tricks him using its cuteness and then possesses him.
• Odd Squad: Centigurps are cute fuzzy spherical creatures that lure curious agents into freeing them from their confinements and allowing them to multiply rapidly by exposing them to light. From there, they gravitate to objects in the shape of spheres. About the only thing that makes them not so cute are their disturbingly human-like eyes, which are hidden under their fur.
• Red Dwarf: "Can of Worms" reveals that baby Polymorphs are capable of turning into adorable animals as a defense mechanism, preventing people who would normally throw them out into Deep Space due to their nature of being an Emotion Eater to take pause.

Video Games

• Lobotomy Corporation: Ppodae is an adorable puppy that uses its cuteness to lure in people and devour them.
• Pokémon:
  • Purrloin is a cat-like Pokémon that enjoys stealing for fun. It's so cute, however, that its victims can't help but forgive it.
  • Litwick is a cute little candle Pokémon that appears to lost travelers in the darkness and pretends to guide their way with the flame on its head. It is actually absorbing their life energy.
• Xenoblade Chronicles:
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Acknowledged in-universe — the Nopon know they are cute, and characters find it hard to hate even villainous Nopons. This is exploited: Onequest reveals that an ancient Nopon discovered that by changing the Nopon language into the cute way they now talk, other races would better perceive their cuteness, which would make it easier to exploit them for money. They used to talk just the same as everyone else with proper grammar and syntax.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles X: The Nopon are a Proud Merchant Race to whom doing or giving something for free is unthinkable, even in situations where both parties would benefit from the greater good. When someone helps them without compensation, they refer to this as "Freeworking" and treat it as if labor is on sale. After they make First Contact with humans, a lot of Nopon notice that humans are more likely to "freework", or settle for vastly unfair deals, if the Nopon exploits their cuteness or vulnerability. However, there are limits to this, and most of the more ethical Nopon will swiftly put a stop to it if this tactic gets too abusive.

Websites

• Neopets: Zigzagged for the Meepits. A Running Gag is that they might be secretly evil and just using their cute appearance (they look like technicolour hamsters) and cute "meep" sounds to feign innocence, but it's left ambiguous. Regardless, they are far from harmless; one of the strongest Battledome abilities (only obtainable at Level 500) involves summoning a stampede of Meepits to pummel your opponent.
• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-247, A Harmless Kitten, appears to observers as a tiny orange-and-black kitten. However, it is actually an adult Bengal tiger projecting a harmless appearance so it can lure in humans and eat them. People in its presence are affected by a psychic effect that overwhelms them with SCP-247’s cuteness and makes them unwilling to harm it, even as it is literally eating them.
  • SCP-1048, Builder Bear, is a stuffed animal rather than a real one, but the principle is the same. It is a living teddy bear that acts cute and endearing, gaining the trust of Foundation scientists and other personnel before revealing its true nature — its power is to make copies of itself from material such as human ears, aborted fetuses, and rusted metal scraps that are deadly to humans.

Western Animation

• Played with regarding Uni, the Team Pet unicorn from Dungeons & Dragons (1983). While she isn't intentionally manipulative, her tendency to attract trouble and her role as The Load have caused plenty of headaches for the sextet, especially regarding their mission to head home.
• The Fairly OddParents!: A few episodes have the characters contend with the Gigglepies, rabbit-like aliens who plot to Take Over the World.
• Futurama: The cats from "That Darn Katz!" pretend to be adorable house pets, but in reality are scheming to manipulate humans into building a device that will transfer Earth's rotational energy to their home planet.
• Looney Tunes:
  • This is entirely Tweety's shtick. His act is that of an innocent, sheltered bird who can be easily taken advantage of by cats and who then proceeds to arrange their downfall from as high as possible. This is especially noticeable in the Bob Clampett era, where he’s more aggressive than later in the Freleng era.
  • This is a Bob Clampett schtick in itself: the title character of "Porky's Naughty Nephew", for example, is a vicious little git who does things like smack Porky on the head with a shovel for fun.
• Martha Speaks: In "Martha Takes the Cake", when Nelson (the Boxwoods' mean cat) is trying to pretend he couldn't have been the one who ate part of Alice's birthday cake (and two of the candles), he does Puppy-Dog Eyes.
• Men in Black: The Series: One episode sees Jay and Kay trying to protect a small teddy bear-like alien from a vicious bounty hunter. Said bounty hunter turns out to have a perfectly good reason for hunting the critter, as it turns into a larger carnivorous beast.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • In "No More Bunny Business", Dennis the Rabbit poses as a desirable pet for Candace so he can gain access to her house and hack into the O.W.C.A. mainframe.
  • In "Meapless in Seattle", Mitch's Evil Plan is to become the most adorable being in the universe, hypnotizing anyone who looks at him with his Cuteness Proximity, thus making sure no one can ever deny him what he wants or even think about anything but him. It works, and he manages to take out Planet Meap's entire army plus Phineas.
    Phineas: Aww, look at the little guy! What's the fastest way I can transfer all my assets into his name?
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
  • In "Cat Man Do", the Professor adopts a Persian cat who turns out to be a diabolical criminal mastermind who hypnotizes the Professor into doing his bidding.
  • "Sweet n' Sour" features a trio of cute criminal animals (a puppy, kitten, and rabbit) who take advantage of their cuteness to get away with whatever they want. The Puffs eventually turn the tables on them by luring them into a room of children eager to cuddle them.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: The Moopsy from "I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee" is an adorable alien creature that resembles a quadruped land-based axolotl that invokes Pokémon Speak, only saying its name. It's also a vicious bone-sucking (literally) predator. When it gets out of its cage, Mariner dismisses it as harmless until she and everyone there watches it do its work, at which point they all run for the hills.
• Tom and Jerry: In "Triplet Trouble", Mammy Two-Shoes adopts three cute little kittens and makes Tom babysit them. They start playing violent pranks on both Tom and Jerry, leading the cat and mouse to form an Enemy Mine and teach the bratty kittens a lesson.
• Wander over Yonder: Li'l Bit is a cute little kitten with an evil agenda: deliver Wander to Lord Hater. Wander is too smitten with Li'l Bit to realize this is what's happening, and Sylvia is unable to convince him. Thankfully, Sylvia is immune to Li'l Bit's charms and pulls an I Surrender, Suckers to save Wander and deliver Li'l Bit to Lord Hater's tractor beam. The end credits show that Li'l Bit escapes You Have Failed Me by employing her cuteness against Lord Hater as well.

Real Life

• Cats have evolved so that their meow sounds like a human infant, the better to trigger our cuddly and protective instincts. Adult cats generally don't meow at each other, either — only at humans, when they use their feline wiles to acquire food and attention. They've got us trained.

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