Dragon Lady

We're pretty much screwed now. And not in a good way. ^note You mean the "Blind Idiot" Translation?

The Baroness meets Yellow Peril. The Dragon Lady is characterized by her overt sexual and physical aggression, untrustworthiness, and mysteriousness. Probably wears a qipao, kimono, or other traditional Asian finery (regardless of her actual ethnicity), often with a dragon on it, and knows martial arts. If she carries a weapon, it's usually a concealed stabbing or slashing weapon; combat hand fans are a perennial favorite. She is contractually obligated to have legs that would make Tina Turner jealous, to better pull off the dress.

To maintain an aura of mystery around herself and keep her (usually male) interlocutors guessing, she would often speak cryptically, using flowery metaphors reminiscent of koans. There's also a solid chance that by the time you figure out what she meant, you would already be dead or unconscious.

The Dragon Lady overlaps heavily with The Vamp, the Femme Fatale, and The Baroness, but is set apart by her level of stereotypical Asianness. However, please note that just because a villainess is Asian (especially in non-Asian works) doesn't mean she's automatically a Dragon Lady. Nor is it the same thing for a woman of any background to simply be called "Dragon Lady" just because she's overbearing. This trope has a very specific look and feel.

If a Chinese person is calling you this, it's a compliment. Dragons are revered as fierce, powerful, wise and sensible beings devoted to caring for those under their charge. And they were the personal symbols of the Emperors, after all.

Also sometimes overlaps with Daddy's Little Villain, especially if the Dragon Lady turns out to be the daughter of a Chinese opium king or corrupt leader.

Contrast Anime Chinese Girl, Asian Airhead. Not to be confused with an anthropomorphic female dragon, or a "Dragon" who is a woman.

noreallife

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Shenhua in Black Lagoon. A Taiwanese assassin who wears qipao and talks in pidgin English (or Japanese depending.) Don't underestimate her because of that if you value your life.
• A far more Ax-Crazy version is Liang Qi from Canaan.
• Quanxi of Chainsaw Man is the most sexual of the assassins hired to go after Denji. Unlike many examples, however, she doesn't use her feminine wiles to get at her target, preferring to work with her all-female Battle Harem.
• One of these shows up in Darker than Black's interquel OVA, with the added bonus of being a Gravity Master who takes down the seriously badass hero without breaking a sweat.
• Lanhua in Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch, an odd example from an Asian work; she's Chinese and part of a Quirky Miniboss Squad (along with a crossdressing vampire, a youthful Idol Singer, and a Fashionably Evil lesbian couple).
• Wang Liu Mei, the Anime Chinese Girl from Mobile Suit Gundam 00 has what it takes to become one of these in the second season, since in the first one she's shown as an agent of Celestial Being who's more for direct action than others in the group. And then, it becomes more apparent when she picked up the Yandere Nena Trinity, then at least was able to keep her on the leash, then it starts getting more radical that she sided with Ribbons and the Innovators, and later on with Ribbons' seemingly rogue Innovator, Regene Regetta. However, she ends up ultimately being a Smug Snake when Nena eventually betrays and kills her.
• Subverted in Mobile Suit Gundam Wing with Chang Wufei's late wife Meiran. She aspired to be powerful and respected, both in terms of her fighting ability and her intellect (often getting into heated debates with her husband). She kicked ass, in order to protect her home. She wasn't particularly The Vamp, or a villainess, though. Wufei admired her strength, albeit somewhat grudgingly.
• The Mystical Laws features Leika Chan, who is Tathagata Killer's mysterious right-hand woman. She provides the Godom Empire with advanced weaponry and is almost always shown wearing red qipao dresses in the scenes featuring her. However, this is subverted by the reveal that she's actually not Chinese nor from planet Earth, but an alien princess named Theta, who hails from the dying planet Vega; she only aided the Godom Empire in order to find a new home for her people.
• Poison knife-wielding Qinglin Cui from Night Raid 1931 is one that runs an illegal prostitution ring by kidnapping aspiring actresses.
• Boa Hancock, Pirate Empress of One Piece shares many traits with archetype, though she's somewhat of a newcomer when it comes to being a vamp.
• Saiyuki's Gyokumen Koushu is a fair example of this type of villain. Always wears elegant Japanese silk kimonos and traditional headdress. Overly sexual, she is mistress to the Ox King Gyumaoh as well as occasionally sleeps around with the head scientist Nii Jenyii. She has little compassion for anyone but the Ox King and is often seen ordering her minions to kill off those who are even the tiniest of nuisances.
• Shinzen of Speed Grapher has this kind of vibe, with her domineering attitude and taste for revealing kimono in a modern setting.
• Jun Tao from Shaman King started off as one of these, but Character Development quickly brought her out of it and into a more typical Anime Chinese Girl with a Dragon Lady's taste in fashion.
• Subverted by Yuuko in ×××HOLiC. She's pretty sexual, dark, mysterious, wears fabulous Asian outfits, is all about hitsuzen, and styles her home as a Chinese opium parlor...but is a good guy.

Board Games

• Miss Scarlet in the US version of Clue was portrayed as Asian on the cards between 1972 and 1996. While the "characters" don't have personalities as such, this is almost certainly the trope they were going for, just as the Caucasian version is clearly intended to be a Femme Fatale.

Card Games

• Munchkin-Fu, the martial arts movie spinoff of the Munchkin card game series, actually has a card called "The Dragon Lady." She is level 20, the most powerful enemy in the game, criminal mastermind behind all the other monsters and thugs, and any male who fights her and loses takes a -5 fear-induced penalty if she happens to appear in any later battles.

Comic Books

• Lu Sin from AC Comics. Fitting, as she's an Expy of Fah Lo Suee.
• Lady Serpent, foe of the Golden Age hero the Black Terror. She possessed hypnotic powers, owned several large and deadly snakes. Her weakness was her love of gems which she loved to steal.
• Miss Ylang-Ylang from Bob Morane. Asian, seductive, and the leader of her own criminal organization. Her alias is Hispanized Tagalog/Filipino for a type of aromatic tree and its flowers (ilang-ilang), yet she's French-Vietnamese. But this was done consciously in-universe, and the title of one of the original novels is The Perfume of Miss Ylang-Ylang, alluding to such use of the plant.
• Danger Girl: The Chase has Anastasia Kilbourne, a master of edged weaponry who Sonya describes as "a tattooed ninja assassin". She even has a tattoo of an oriental dragon running all the way up the right side of her body.
• The DCU:
  • Lady Shiva, a morally-ambiguous martial artist whose life mostly revolves around being the best-unarmed combatant in the world.
  • Cassandra Cain, Lady Shiva's daughter and the third Batgirl, temporarily became a Dragon Lady as pretending to be a villain.
  • Talia al Ghul's design and role in Batman (Grant Morrison) was fashioned after one, with her Asian physical features being more prominent than ever, her tendency to wear red Qipaos, Took a Level in Jerkass and becoming far more ruthless and her role as The Leader of a terrorist organization of her own. In Son of the Demon, Ra's al Ghul says her mother was half-Arab and half-Asian, although it is not clear if this is still canon.
  • Cheshire is a Vietnamese Professional Killer who's sexually aggressive, exotic, mysterious and has quite a family history.
  • Shado, a character best known for raping Green Arrow.
  • Lillian Worth, also known as Sweet-Lili, is a former princess of Cambodia, ex-lover of Slade Wilson and mother of Rose (Ravager) Wilson. She worked as the headmistress of a Bordello in the Siem Pang Wat in Cambodia during the time of the Khmer Rouge.
  • Shiv, the teenage granddaughter of a Japanese Golden Age supervillain. Her Asian heritage isn't particularly pronounced though, and some artists don't seem to realize she's Asian at all. Textual evidence indicates she is half-Japanese and half-Desi.
  • The JSA villainess Roulette isn't Asian, but is the sort of person who wishes she were. She does wear a qipao, has Chinese tattoos (including one of a dragon), wears chopsticks in her hair etc. When it came time for her to appear in an episode of Smallville, she was indeed played by Steph Song, an actress of Asian heritage. Lois even refers to her as a dragon lady! Referring to her outfit as a 'bigger Red Scare than Cold War Russia.'
  • Sometimes Blackhawk foe Miss Fear (who also appeared in the Guns Of The Dragon mini-series) fits this trope.
  • Superboy faced an opponent called—wait for it—Lady Dragon, the leader of the Silicon Dragons, who seems to fit in this trope. Like Roulette, the untrustworthiness is somewhat reduced by her obsession with fair play, or as Lady Dragon calls it, "equal measure."
  • Robin foe Lynx, who for bonus points runs a gang called the Ghost Dragons. Her successor in Red Robin also pretends to be an over-the-top Dragon Lady villainess, but claims to be in actuality an undercover cop from Hong Kong.
  • The mysterious, vain Tao Jones of super-villain team Helix, frequent foes of Infinity, Inc., fits this trope somewhat. She wears a jade green slit gown with a dragon on it, and even sports a yin-yang choker.
• Chinatsu from Drain is a heroic version. Albeit she's a Japanese vampire ninja whose seeks revenge against her family's murderer while killing bad guys along the way. Play straight with the white Freya, Chinatsu former lover, who even dresses in a qipao.
• The title character of Executive Assistant Iris.
• The title character of Chaos! Comics' Jade is this.
• In the Marvel Universe:
  • Sasha Hammer, daughter of The Mandarin. She seduces Iron Man and has sex with him while he's driving a fast car. Then she tries to kill him. Hammer is notable in that she is the daughter of a white woman and a half-Asian man so she is only one quarter Asian.
  • Ms. Locke, sidekick to the X-Men supervillain Arcade. She is pretty much called one to her face at one point, and takes it as a compliment.
  • Wolverine archenemy Lady Deathstrike plays this so painfully straight it hurts.
  • Orson Randall faces off against dozens of them in Immortal Iron Fist Annual #1.
  • Tyger Tiger from the Wolverine comics.
  • Jade Claw from Agents of Atlas.
  • Lady Lotus from The Invaders and The Marvels.
  • Spider-Ham, Marvel's Funny Animal Superhero, once faced a canine Dragon Lady. She was, of course, called "The Dragon Lassie".
  • Yi Yang, an immortal Chinese drug lord from the Black Widow and Nick Fury story Death Duty. Her arch enemy Night Raven even refers to her as a "the Dragon Lady" at one point.
  • Lotus Newmark from Wonder Man, later retconned to be the same character as Lady Lotus.
• A People's History of the American Empire has a real life example with Vietnamese First Lady Madame Nhu.
• Anna Sui Hark, from Warren Ellis's Planetary, is a rare good version. Like the classic Dragon Lady, she comes off for a long time as morally ambiguous - but is ultimately revealed to be aiding the bad guys solely out of fear of losing everything her father had worked to accomplish.
• Parodied with the "Dragging Lady" from an obscure Popeye comic about his origin, who subverts the Ms. Fanservice aspect by being huge.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) have the Iron Queen, though current writer Ian Flynn made her a Technomage and less a traditional spellcaster.
• Shamelessly parodied as the "Lizard Lady" in The Trouble With Girls.

Fanfic

• One Piece: Parallel Works has the up-and-coming Warlord of the Sea Shenhua Jiang. Not only does she run a brothel, she almost forces Daisuke into prostitution, murdered Enlai's father and kidnapped his sick little sister, and she is implied to be allied with The Triads and the Tongs. To add to that, her Wanted poster nickname is "Dragon Lady".
• When Total Drama's Heather appears in a fanfic by Gideoncrawle, this trope is certain to be invoked. Heather will be described as a "dragon lady" or some variant thereof in reference to both the ethnicity and personality of her canon counterpart.

Film — Animated

• In Batman: Soul of the Dragon, Shiva has the exotic Asian appearance, the fighting prowess and is even mentioned to be the head of organized crime in Gotham's Chinatown.
• The Siamese cats in Disney's Lady and the Tramp exhibit most of these stereotypes during their Villain Song and following Wounded Gazelle Gambit.
• In Turning Red, Grandma Wu's introduction makes her appear to be one of these with her intimidating scar, mention of bringing reinforcements and effect on the normally unflappable Ming.

Film — Live-Action

• Alec to the Rescue cast... Nicaraguan Barbara Carrera (best known from Never Say Never Again) in such a role.
• General Fang, from the Jackie Chan version of Around the World in 80 Days.
• In the Trish Stratus action movie Bounty Hunters the villains' team has an Asian female. She's suitably deadly and vampy, naturally getting a Designated Girl Fight with Trish's character Jules.
• At the end of the movie Bowfinger, Bobby Bowfinger (Steve Martin) and Jiff Ramsey (Eddie Murphy) star in a kung fu movie called "Fake Purse Ninjas" where Christine Baranski plays a Dragon Lady type ordering a horde of ninjas to attack them.
• Joan Chen was typecast as the Dragon Lady in several 1980s-1990s films, prompting her to return home to China for a few years and try her hand at directing instead.
• Myca in The Crow (1994) played by Bai Ling. The boss villain's Asian half-sister, tattooed, sexually depraved, and has a thing about young girls' eyes.
• Madame Lee in Death Machines is a combination of this trope and The Queenpin, a ruthless Asian female crime boss who hires the titular trio of assassins to kill her competitors in crime.
• In Death Ring, Danton Vach's extremely competent second-in-command is Ms. Ling: a half-Vietnamese assassin who killed 17 Americans during the Vietnam War, starting when she was 14.
• Majorly defied in The Expendables 2 with Maggie Chan, with only one subversion. She's Oriental, but she's wholly good, capable of kicking and shooting bad guys' asses to kingdom come instead of being a Damsel in Distress, witty, not cynical at all... and has no problem using either Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique or Cold-Blooded Torture to extort informations... out of thugs and bad guys (It's off screen, no worries).
• Referenced in Gran Torino, where Clint Eastwood's racist war veteran demands that "dragon lady" (a neighbouring Hmong teenager who has befriended him) get him a beer.
• Lucy Liu frequently plays aggressive and domineering characters, but O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill is the only one that features her running around in a kimono while wielding a katana (thus fulfilling the overt Asianness of this trope).
  • In a recent interview Lucy Liu denied that her O-Ren Ishii character is an example of this.
• Madame Piranha AKA Madame X from King Kong Escapes qualifies, even if we're never told what Asian country it is she is a representative of.
• The Hong Kong action picture Legendary Assassin casts a Japanese woman in this role, and to better play up her ethnicity, gives her a katana as a weapon. Her ability to lead and kick ass is largely informed, however, as she spends most of the movie taunting the hero over the phone, threatens his captive Love Interest for two minutes at the end of the movie, then gets beaten in one hit by said love interest once the girl is set free.
• Mai, The Dragon of Live Free or Die Hard.
• The 2005 comedy film Monarch Of The Moon plays this character to the hilt in the form of Dragonfly. She's an assassin, she speaks in stereotypical engrish, wears a skintight robe, utilizes bulletproof fans, and even has the word Dragon in her name. And like many dragon ladies of the time period said film is meant to invoke, she's played a white actress (Kimberly Page).
• The pirate lord Mistress Ching, based on the real-life pirate Ching Shih, in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.
• Madame Rose, the villainess/villain of the Thai film Tom Yum Goong, retitled The Protector in the US.
• Royal Kill - an independent action film from 2009 - has an Asian assassin being sent to murder a long lost princess raised as an ordinary suburban girl. Gail Kim, mentioned below, plays her. Of course since most of the cast is Asian, including the 'princess', it's a little less offensive.
• Hu Li, a Triad assassin and enforcer from Rush Hour 2.
• The qipao-clan main villainess from Shanghai Grand, who spends much of the film's first half antagonizing the good guys. Her Establishing Character Moment involve her killing a man by chewing his throat out and later on she personally machine-guns a cage filled with 20 helpless prisoners. Her final moment involves her trying to feed the film's lancer to her pet boa constrictor while she gleefully watches.
• Depressingly subverted in Skyfall with Sévérine, the lover of the Big Bad who looks like an Asian version of The Baroness (to the point where her actress drew inspiration from Xenia Onatopp), but is actually a terrified non-combatant former Sex Slave who tries to Heel–Face Turn to get away from Silva and ends up with a bullet hole in the face for her trouble.
• Miss Yang, who hires and later betrays Terry Tsurugi in The Street Fighter.
• Cantana in Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.
• In Thirteen Women, the Big Bad Ursula is a sinister Eurasian beauty (played by Myrna Loy in Yellowface) who dresses in slinky gowns and has Hypnotic Eyes who embarks on a campaign to destroy the 13 Caucasian women she blames for ruining her life a decade earlier.
• Where East Is East: Madame de Sylva is a perfect example: sexy, mysterious, dresses in a Qipao, Really Gets Around. Her servant knows what's going to happen when Madame sets out to seduce the innocent American, Bobby: "White boy like sheep with tiger!"
• Miss East in the Wild Wild West film, also played by Bai Ling. The villain Loveless does have an entire Amazon Brigade, but Miss East is the only one who tries to seduce one of the heroes as part of a ploy to kill him.
• Many of the characters played by Anna May Wong - starting with The Thief of Bagdad (1924) until Daughter of the Dragon. This was a source of considerable annoyance to her, especially since she was lucky to even get those roles, because most went to white actresses in yellowface makeup. After Daughter of the Dragon, she took her career to Europe to play more varied roles.
  "Why is it that the screen Chinese is always the villain? And so horrible a villain - mean, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that!"

Literature

• In Deep Six (1984), Min Koryo is implied to have been this in her youth.
• Ancient Mai, one of the heads of the White Council from The Dresden Files, sometimes comes across this way (albeit without the overt sexuality - as her name might suggest, she's too old). In the TV series she's younger and hotter, but Harry suggests she could be an honest-to-God dragon in human guise.
• Fah Lo Suee, the daughter of Fu Manchu. Possibly the Trope Maker.
• Madame Butterfly from The Girl from the Miracles District is a rather stereotypical Chinese immortal running the District's Asian-themed brothel. She's dangerous enough that contract killer Nikita agrees to go to the local Mordor for her without getting paid for it.
• I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President: Tatiana, someone who even the titular evil overlord-type considers cruel, invokes this trope with a kimono embroidered with pink dragons.
• In Christopher Moore's book Lamb: The Gospel According To Jesus' Childhood Friend Biff, a character named Joy (short for Tiny Feet of the Divine Dance of Joyous Orgasm) fits this trope. She's actually a prostitute who just happens to be a total badass at the same time.
• In Stephen King's 1983 novel Misery the villainess Annie Wilkes is titled "Dragon Lady" by the Colorado press after she is arrested and charged for Would Hurt a Child-level crimes. This is strictly a namedropping of the trope, however, as Wilkes is a large and decidedly unattractive Caucasian woman.
• Northwest Front features the Filipina RaBang Miller, a former prostitute that became a FBI Agent by sleeping with other agents and conspires against the protagonists. However, Unfortunate Implications are averted - because the work is unashamedly white supremacist, so there's nothing to imply.
• One of the main characters in The Periodic Table of Science Fiction is known as 'The Dragon Lady'.
  • Miss Adrienne Wong-Heppworth, found in the chapter "Lutetium".
• Missee Lee, in the Swallows and Amazons sequel of the same name, is a subversion; she's a Cambridge academic who doesn't actually like being a pirate, and teaches the kids Latin when they're captured.
• Temeraire: Lung Tien Lien has the personality down pat. She also happens to be a literal dragon.

Live-Action TV

• Ally McBeal: Ling Woo was created to embody the stereotype of exotic Asian women being sensual yet vicious and domineering, and is appropriately a Sex Goddess and an Iron Lady who doesn't take shit from anyone, and soon becomes the Token Evil Teammate of the law firm. Some of Ally's Imagine Spots even show Ling breathing fire like a literal manifestation of a dragon lady.
• Code Name: Diamond Head: Tsao Tsing owns a boat called Dragon Lady, but she's actually the Chinese positive archetype of "dragon lady": warm, loving, intelligent and protective.
• The bizarre Saturday morning chimpanzee-acted parody of spy parody Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, featured the "Dragon Woman," a female Oriental spy (voiced by Joan Gerber), who was (as the Theme Song assured us) "lovely, but she's wicked all the same."
• This trope is arguably developed and perhaps averted in Lost. Sun, a Korean female, was initially portrayed as an innocent victim of her culture's patriarchy, despite (or because of) their wealth. Over time, it was revealed that she knew all about her father's criminal industrial complex, and eventually came to take it over. On the other hand, Sun does not fit the "dark outfit" stereotype, for the most part. In the end, she used her father's resources and contacts to get in touch with Charles Widmore to find a way back to the Island.
• Princess Koji, villainess of the short-lived Tales of the Gold Monkey, who varied from wanting to kill Jake Cutter and wanting to bed him. She's played by a white actress with the Hand Wave that she's half-Irish.

Music

• The Blue Öyster Cult did a song about this trope.
• Progressive Metal band Crimson Glory also has a song of the same title, complete with a nice Evil Laugh at the beginning.
• Han-Mi in Miss Helen's Weird West Cabaret plays this role in the titular Show Within a Show, much to her annoyance. She rather likes playing the villain, but is fed-up with the outdated, racist cliches that keep getting written for her.

Newspaper Comics

• The Trope Namer is the original Dragon Lady, also known as Madam Deal, introduced in 1934 in Milton Caniff's comic strip Terry and the Pirates. According to Trina Robbin's "Tender Mercies: Women Who Kill", the character was based on the real-life Lai Choi San, who was a rather successful pirate active in the China seas in the 1920s and 1930s.

Professional Wrestling

• Although WWE initially did not play up Gail Kim's Asian heritage, she was promoted as a very dangerous and mysterious competitor. She also debuted during the peak of The Matrix's fame, so this all combined into what might be called a cyberpunk Dragon Lady. When she was forced to become Molly Holly's lackey they started billing her as "A Native Of Korea"(she's ethnically Korean but a native of Canada) and had her seduce Eric Bischoff to get what Holly wanted out of him.
• Mia Yim played such a character on a few Wrestlicious live events - an Asian spy named Kim Thiu Sun.
• While Shotzi Blackheart prefers to call herself "The Ballsy Badass", she's more commonly referred to as "Dragon Lady" or "Samurai Pizza Cat", and seems to have no problem with it.

Radio

• A Played for Laughs version appears in The Navy Lark with the recurring villain by the name of "the Mistress".
• Sumuru, created by Sax Rohmer as a Distaff Counterpart for Fu Manchu.

Theatre

• Linda Lo of Flower Drum Song is a more benign example. She merges this with Genius Ditz, but she's a manipulative seductress who tries to secure her own comfort - and is contrasted with the Yamato Nadeshiko Mei Li. Ironically enough Linda is an Asian-American - whereas Mei Li is a Chinese immigrant.
• In the stage play of Get Smart the Wong Sisters. A dumb blonde character goes so far to say "What happened to the three dragon ladies?"

Video Games

• Ace Attorney:
  • While she's not as combative as other examples, Morgan Fey carries several traits, including a subtle iron fist on her daughter and a quite disturbing Death Glare. It's doesn't stay "subtle" for long though, since she's one of the two culprits of the case where you first meet her, and her daughter is pretty central to her motivation for committing the crime.
  • Morgan's niece Mia occasionally seems like a benevolent version of this trope: She's frighteningly competent for someone who's dead, is a harsh if encouraging mistress to her old pupil Phoenix, and is quite attractive.
  • Played very straight in Spirit of Justice with Ga'ran Sigatar Khura'in, the Queen of Khura'in, especially once she gets serious. Her Evil Costume Switch in very reminiscent of this trope, and she's considered downright terrifying by everyone. Even before she became a dictator, she was a prosecutor known for being especially ruthless. Once she took the throne, she went to every length to ensure she stays in power, even making defending a criminal in court a capital crime.
• MayDay from Aquanox 2 is playing the trope as straight as possible.
• Litchi Faye-Ling of BlazBlue plays around this trope. Although heavily Chinese-oriented and occasionally aggressive when drunk, she is overall a good, modest, kindhearted lady. Then in the end Continuum Shift, it would seem that she ends up joining NOL, making her look like the trope, double subverting the trope. However, it turns out that she is in fact Forced into Evil, didn't act like a typical vamp or seductress, her kind heart didn't get replaced by aggressiveness on obsession and it is shown clearly that she regrets what she had to do, but has no other choice, thereby triple-subverting the trope.
  • On the other hand, the novel character Mei-Fang Lapislazuli is a straighter version: A sadistic Combat Sadomasochist who has the power to Feel No Pain, which annoys her because she likes pain on herself, and leader of the Zero Squadron of NOL and overall just very unstable. She has played the Big Bad role in Variable Heart and has a dark involvement in the Ikaruga Civil War, as detailed in Spiral Shift novels. Which includes a beheaded ally courtesy of herself.
• Maiko in Cyberpunk 2077 is almost a deconstruction of this as she is a beautiful Japanese prostitute/gangster with an utterly ruthless vindictive streak. However, she's (mostly) on your side and all of her nasty elements come from having to survive in an environment that does not treat women very well as well as doesn't hesitate to use violence. As she says, you have to be utterly ruthless and utterly polite at the level of gangster that her bosses operate.
• In the original Dead to Rights, Slate has to fight an entire massage parlor of dragon ladies.
• Deus Ex has Maggie Chow, a Femme Fatale Chinese actress with a Qipao and a sword. Seeing as she's an actress, she might be embodying the trope on purpose.
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution has Zhao Yun Ru the ruthless, demanding CEO of the Tai Yong Medical biotech corporation. She's even informally known as "the Dragon Queen" in Hengsha. She's also in deep with the Illuminati and is directly behind the assault on the manufacturing plant at the beginning of the game.
• Yuma Lau of Far Cry 4 is the adopted sister of Pagan Min, murderous dictator of Kyrat. Like her brother, she's ethnically East Asian, and she plans on betraying and overthrowing her brother because she believes that Pagan's love for Ajay's mother Ishwari was softening his tyranny. Apart from that, she's also the governor of Pagan's Royal Guard and the chief warden of Durgesh Prison. Oh, and she tries to rape and kill Ajay because he's a living reminder of the woman who served as a Morality Chain to Pagan. Needless to say, in contrast to the rest of the villains, she's a Complete Monster.
• A Hat in Time has The Empress, a mysterious and ruthless crime boss in charge of the Nyakuza.
• Ai Ling, a minor character in the early stages of Jade Empire, and the much more significant Silk Fox both could count.
• Kung Fu Chivalry for Macintosh computers has a muscular qipao-wearing femme fatale as its fourth(and only female) boss.
• Rinrin, the boss of Asian Town in MadWorld. Considering the entire game is a satirical play on sex, violence and crude humor in video games, it comes off as less offensive and more humorous.
  • In the pseudo-sequel Anarchy Reigns, Rin Rin returns, this time with her sisters Ai Rin and Fei Rin along for the ride.
• Li Mei from Mortal Kombat has elements of this.
  • Interestingly, in her Deception ending, she marries the Big Bad, Onaga, and becomes The Dragon.
    • Although subverted, because Li Mei is a good person and her ending isn't canon. And in Mortal Kombat X, she's showing none of the villainous parts even if she's just an NPC.
• Mai Hem from Perfect Dark Zero.
• In Compile-era Puyo Puyo games when she is a villain, Draco Centauros gives off this vibe, wearing the qipao and being quite physically aggressive, seemingly knowing martial arts. In the Sega era this is averted as she's far too ditzy to qualify.
• Seemingly played straight and actually averted with the "second" Ada Wong in Resident Evil 6. True, she dresses in a sexy dress, is cruel and kills in sadistic manners without mercy, and appears to be a Dragon to the Big Bad, but she's really a vengeful Caucasian woman who was manipulated and transformed against her will into a physical copy of the real Ada, who is an Anti-Hero.
• While there are many Chinese deities in Smite, the Nine-Tailed Fox Da Ji is the first to adhere to this trope, looking very sexy and playing the Lady Macbeth to Emperor Zhou of Shang, and above all else, bonafide evil Card-Carrying Villain with a lust for torture, which is integrated to her skills.
• Chun-Li from Street Fighter II is an exceptionally rare good version, combined with heroic Action Girl — competitive, sexy, a bit aggressive, and certainly Asiatic. She also dons a qipao.
• Tekken:
  • Anna Williams is a rare example of a white woman portrayed as this trope. She may be Irish, but she has the dress, the legs, the vampiness, and the killer instinct native to the trope, and as of Tekken 6, she's the G-Corporation Kazuya's right-hand woman.
  • Lana Lei from Death by Degrees is a straighter example, being an aggressive and untrustworthy Asian woman. Unlike most examples of this trope, however, she has one man in her life whom she truly loves.
• Ming Xiao, leader of the Asian vampires in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.
• World of Warcraft's Mists of Pandaria expansion introduced plenty of opportunity for Dragon Ladies, the most prominent example being Madame Gao, who runs the Black Market.

Webcomics

• Wanda from Erfworld; she's a mysterious, sexually-aggressive, ambitious woman from a long-lost Asian-looking tribe.
• The Handmaid from Homestuck, who has a distinct Asian theme (despite being an alien from another universe) and is also the unwilling servant of an Eldritch Abomination whose purpose is to end universes.
  • Her past self Damara Megido is a over-exaggeration of this trope, speaking in Japanese in an otherwise English-language comic, making lewd sexual advances, and described as excessively violent.
• Mavra Chan (marginally) qualifies in Terinu. Though she tends to wear stompy boots and an armoured corset rather than a kimono, she's certainly mysterious, sadistic, evil and perfectly willing to sell out the human race to make a fast buck. Unfortunately she's also the only human character in the main cast to show any ethnicity at all (the rest are white Australians).
• Yu Hansung from Tower of God appears to be this and is quite the scheming Chessmaster. She is heavily Korean-themed, however she is not presented as sexy, because Tower Of God just isn't that type of manhwa. And fifty chapters in you discover that she... is a he.

Web Original

• The Inspector Rather series - a series of spoof blog posts featuring Dan Rather as an incompetent detective and the various personalities in the right-wing blogosphere as a Rogues Gallery of stereotypical detective story villains - portrays Michelle Malkin as one of these. She even calls herself The Dragon Lady.
• Silver Serpent, of the Whateley Universe, whose father Iron Dragon sent her to Whateley Academy to... find out stuff we haven't discovered yet. Except we know she's supposed to track down the Handmaid of the Tao, who's one of the protagonists.

Western Animation

• Princess Azula of Avatar: The Last Airbender is a less ethnically offensive version of this trope. She has a lot in common with traditional Dragon Ladies, being a cruel, aggressive, manipulative daughter of the Fire Lord. But pretty much everyone in the series is a fantasy Asian or Inuit, so the stereotype is balanced by plenty of counter-examples. She's not so much a Dragon Lady as just a villainess in a world where practically everyone happens to be Asian.
• A dragon lady lures Paul to her ghost ship in The Beatles episode "Anna."
• Lady Fang from the Centurions episode "Firecracker", who engages in War for Fun and Profit.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: One of the dog's most formidable enemies was a Chinese Empress who embodied this tropes to a supernatural extent.
• Jonny Quest. "Jezebel" Jade is an exceptionally rare Good variant, combined with mild Action Girl — mysterious, sexy, aggressive, untrustworthy and vaguely Asiatic. She appears in "Double Danger" and wears a qipao in "Terror Island."
• Parodied in a Looney Tunes short China Jones featuring Daffy Duck as a detective who is interrogating an Asian woman known as "The Dragon Lady." When the terminally genre-blind Daffy asks her why she is called that, she breathes fire on him. ("Is answer question?")
• Max Steel has a female villain called Dragonelle.
• The eponymous gangster in the Spiral Zone episode "Lair of the Jade Scorpion".

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