"Ye cannot goad one of the serpent folk into hatred or fear, or evoke in it love or friendship. They make fake such things to cozen ye, but within they are always cold, calmly calculating."
— Elminster on the Yuan-ti, Volo's Guide to Monsters, Dungeons & Dragons
In fiction, reptiles are often portrayed as stoic and unemotional. This can range from their simply being portrayed as calm and unruffled to being utterly lacking in emotion or empathy. In neutral or sympathetic examples, the creatures in question can be portrayed as thoughtful, contemplative, and not prone to rushed or biased thought. In more negative ones, their emotionlessness will come across as inhuman, robotic, cold, or outright sociopathic. In large part, this is derived from the slow and deliberate movements of most reptiles, alongside their tendency to remain still for long periods of time to conserve energy, which makes them come across as stoic and calm in demeanor. This is also the source of the use of "cold-blooded" to figuratively refer to someone being calm, stoic, or unemotional.
In fiction, this is often applied to both reptilian Funny and Talking Animals and to Beast Men such as Lizard Folk and Snake People. This trope is often invoked alongside theories of a Reptilian Conspiracy, as believers always portray the reptilian overlords as extremely cold and calculating geniuses who have absolute control over every event that occurs within the world.
Compare and contrast Reptiles Are Abhorrent, with which this can overlap when the reptiles are depicted as cold, heartless, or unfeeling.
A Sub-Trope of Animal Stereotypes and The Stoic. See also Sturdy and Steady Turtles, which are often depicted as calm, patient and contemplative.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Beast Complex: In one chapter a snake protrudes his penises in front of somebody he barely knows in order to prove that snakes don't feel shame. Also somewhat subverted, since the chapter is about said snake developing a very sweet friendship.
Comic Books
- Blacksad: The villain of the first story cites this as the source of his power, claiming that Blacksad is leashed by his conscience and unable to strike back at him. Unfortunately for him, Blacksad isn't afraid to get his hands dirty.
Comic Strips
- The Far Side: Parodied. A crocodile on the stand in court, to the lawyer cross-examining him: "Well, of course I did it in cold blood, you idiot!... I'm a reptile."
Literature
- The Belgariad: Queen Salmissra's Forced Transformation into a snake leaves her coldly dispassionate, and she says outright that "I no longer have desires." This actually makes her a much more reliable ruler, aside from occasionally killing underlings; most people, herself included, consider it an improvement.
- Chrysalis (RinoZ): Rassan'tep is able to keep several junior ka'armodo in line just by hinting that their preferred course of action (pressing the assault on Anthony) might be "hot-blooded" — practically a curse word among their people. One of those juniors was so close to losing her cool that she nearly scratched an itch, which would have been a severe social faux pas.
- Shadows of the Empire: Prince Xizor believes that his reptilian ancestry gives him superior emotional control that sets him above the warm-blooded species. Though he is The Chessmaster, his emotions rule him more than he admits; his desire to seduce Leia and his rage at being thwarted lead directly to his death.
Live-Action TV
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has a tragic example with the Jem'Hadar. They're genetically engineered by The Founders to fight and die on the behalf of The Dominion, with an unnerving blend of discipline and brutality. Even the Klingon Martok finds them creepy after being a prisoner of war in a Dominion internment camp. They naturally find the Klingons worthy foes and relish the opportunity to do battle with them, which might be considered one of the few notable emotions they possess (if any).
Tabletop Games
- Bulldogs!: Saldralla (a race of Snake People) are notoriously ruthless, pragmatic, and morally flexible, ignoring emotional appeals in favor of doing whatever is the most expedient and beneficial.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Lizardfolk are often portrayed as very unsentimental and pragmatic in outlook. They simply don't form emotional attachments, and only view the world in terms of short- and long-term survival. For example, they just don't get things like mourning the dead or treating them in a special way; that corpse isn't going to do anything for you, so just loot it, eat the meat, and use the bones for crafts. A lizardfolk who travels extensively with warmbloods will eventually pick up habits like politeness or respect for the dead, but only because they eventually realize that not humoring the warm-bloods' bizarre ideas harms group cohesion and is more trouble than it's worth. They protect their allies and fight their enemies, but only because they know that allies can help them survive and that enemies will kill them if they don't fight. The bright side is that they won't harass other races without serious provocation; raids risk the lives of their warriors and invite retribution, and they have no interest in revenge or desire for power for its own sake.
- Yuan-ti, a kind of Snake People, are by nature completely devoid of emotion, operating only on cold logic and self-interest. When they display any kind of emotional reaction, it's always faked as part of a calculated ruse.
- Genius: The Transgression: The Third Race, snake-people who ruled the original Lemurian conspiracy, are described as having been cold, passionless, calculating and cruel. When they shed their physical bodies to become beings of pure information, they lost what little emotion and compassion they had had to begin with.
- Pathfinder: The lizardfolk are known for their extremely stoic personalities. They tend to take a very passive, objective, and long-term view to life and problems, preferring to calmly wait and watch before reaching decisions.
- Red Dwarf: Iguana Sapiens (a playable race of Lizard Folk who evolved from the iguana) are a very laid-back race who never give any indication of their feelings and who are usually tight-lipped and private unless the situation calls for it. They also never become embarrassed and don't care what other people think of them.
- Warhammer:
- Only War: The Sslyth, snakelike alien mercenaries who serve the Dark Eldar, are described as existing in a sort of profound emotional lethargy, serving their masters more out of habit than for any particular loyalty or passion, and fighting with blank, hollow-eyed expressions that do not seem to acknowledge any life, including their own.
- Warhammer Fantasy: The Lizardmen are extremely clinical and mentally rigid beings, with little ability and less interest in moving outside of the often very specific instinct and programming that was given to them by the Old Ones who created them; the only thing they care about is fulfilling their very specific personal roles in the Great Plan. On the one hand, this means that they don't hold grudges, don't seek power for its own sake, and fight with little hatred or malice; if something doesn't objectively advance the Great Plan, they don't care about it. On the other hand, they're almost impossible to reason with, because only very specific logical arguments will sway them from a set course — they have no more empathy than cruelty, and emotional pleas or ethical considerations don't register for them. In-game, this is represented through their Cold-Blooded rule, which gives all Lizardman units the ability to roll an extra dice when taking morale tests and choosing the most favorable results.
Video Games
- The Elder Scrolls: A common stereotype of the Argonians, but an entirely false one. They experience emotion just the same as the races of men and mer (and Khajit, for that matter), it's just that since they're reptilian, their faces physically cannot make the expressions that other races associate with emotion, which has led to the misconception that they don't have feelings, though paying attention to their voices would make it abundantly clear that they do.
- Memoirs of Magic: Typhon, an anthropomorphic snake gorgon dragon, is a stoic, emotionless god who is shown to be rather disinterested and disconnected from the genocide he previously committed by trying to turn the world to marble. If you free him, he's only concerned with helping you just long enough to get back on his feet and try ending the world all over again.
- Pokémon:
- Snivy is a cool-headed snake with a calm demeanor and a high intellect. It becomes more haughty as it evolves, with its final evolution, Serperior, having a cold demeanor and a facial expression that says "I don't care about your problems".
- Inteleon is a chameleon combined with a Tuxedo and Martini secret agent, who shoots gunshots from its fingers. Personality-wise, Inteleon is cold, calculated, and aloof, with a knack for strategy and analysis.
- Sonic the Hedgehog: Espio the Chameleon is, as his name states, a chameleon. He's also a stoic ninja, though as a member of the Chaotix Detective Agency, this mostly amounts to playing The Comically Serious foil to the other two.
- Star Fox: Leon Powalski, an anthropomorphic chameleon and member of Star Wolf, is a sadistic killer, to the point where the Star Fox: Assault manual describes him as being "a cold-blooded assassin" who "has no morals or conscience and will perform any job with machinelike disinterest".
Webcomics
- MoringMark: This comic
focused on Star vs. the Forces of Evil invokes this trope when Toffee comments that he and Star are not so different, because they both ended up destroying magic. Star openly refutes this, stating that she destroyed magic to save her friends, whereas he did it to avenge his defeat at the hands of a literal baby, and then goes on to list all the things they don't have in common, before concluding "Not to mention that I have a boyfriend, and you... I don't even know if you have emotions!" However, judging by Toffee's saddened expression when he hears this, it appears that this trope doesn't apply to him after all.
Western Animation
- Ben 10: Xylene, Max Tennyson's former lover and original holder of the Omnitrix before she was forced to send it to Earth after being attacked by Vilgax, is a reptilian alien known as an Uxorite who, while not absolutely emotionless, is very blunt and stoic in demeanor. She also mentions that Uxorites don't have much in the way of parental instincts, as newborns are left to fend for themselves after hatching, so she has problems understanding Max's continued attachment to his grandchildren Ben and Gwen.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Pinkie Pie's pet baby alligator, Gummy, hardly ever shows any real emotion, and often just stares out into space, barely reacting to anything going on around him.
- Rick and Morty: Crocubot is an alien who is half cold, unfeeling reptile and half cold, unfeeling machine. Rick points out that his existence is a living redundancy as crocodiles and robots are already cold and unfeeling independently.
- The Spectacular Spiderman: Discussed and partially defied. Dr. Curt Connors used the serum to try to bring back his lost arm, but the transformation starts to set in, his son Billy is worried that his father will become a monster and stop caring about him. Peter tells Billy that his father will always love him, no matter what. When the transformation kicks in, Billy manages to reach Curt for a second, it's not much but it shows that Curt still does love his son.
- Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Toffee of Septarsis, Ludo's enigmatic Dragon with an Agenda, projects a very calm, almost monotonous tone of voice, even while on the field. He sometimes shows a bit more emotion, especially later on, but for the most part retains his cool and collected demeanor for most of his appearances. This makes the few times he does show any emotion all the more chilling.
