Grotesque Cute

Awwwww yeeeeaaaah.

"...and he kept stabbing them, again and again... He's a halfling, he's supposed to be jolly... Why isn't he jolly? WHY ISN'T HE JOLLY???"

— Belkar's Conscience, The Order of the Stick

Generic Cuteness is taken for granted. You have all manner of strange things depicted as cute. But way past the vampire girl, you have the deliberately over-the-top depictions, where Sickeningly Sweet saccharine cuteness is depicted with wild, graphic violence.

For obvious reasons, these situations are more common in shows dabbling in satire.

See also: Cute and Psycho, Enfant Terrible, Killer Rabbit, Girl with Psycho Weapon, Cute Monster Girl, Ultra Super Death Gorefest Chainsawer 3000, Art-Style Dissonance. Can be a pretty deep well of Nightmare Fuel. Based on the same principle as Fan Disservice and Mood Dissonance.

Compare with Kawaisa.

Not to be confused with Ugly Cute or finding Joseph Merrick intensely lovable (see What Measure Is a Non-Cute?).

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Examples:

Advertising

• The PSA Dumb Ways to Die consists of friendly-looking little blob things with smiley faces meeting their ends in graphic ways due to their own idiotic decisions. In each chorus, all the characters killed so far sing and dance — while still covered in blisters, on fire, headless, etc. And those who still have faces are still smiling.

Anime & Manga

• Carnival Phantasm: Grail-kun is an adorable Super-Deformed representation of Angra Mainyu as All the World's Evil, the corrupted Greater Grail. It appears in a series of running gags where various characters ask it for advice and it offers the same solution to their problems: a kitchen knife.
• Elfen Lied. The Diclonii are, to a one, completely adorable girls with a pair of small horns on their head that make them look something like catgirls. Unfortunately, they are, with only a single exception, also heartless, murderous, superpowered psychopaths who can (and frequently do) forcibly and violently separate anyone nearby from their limbs and/or head with their telekinetic vectors.
• From Fullmetal Alchemist, Pride. Aww, look at the cute little boy. Say, why are the shadows moving towards me and why do they have eyes and sharp teeth? Wait... ARGH!
• Road Kamelot in D.Gray-Man certainly qualifies. She looks no more than 12 — yet in one of her first appearances she stabs the main character's eye with a candle, then licks the blood off afterwards.
• Doubt prominently features rabbit masks, which have cartoonish proportions but also blood-red eyes and stitches.
• The main School Days series was already infamous for its bloody finale... And then comes the Magical Heart Kokoro-chan OVA, with the eponymous young lady helping pilot a giant Hello Kitty, chainsaw-wielding Combining Mecha, ripping apart the enemy and drowning the city in a sea of blood. Yeah...
• The giant milk-bleeding stuffed animals in AKIRA.
• Many of the creations by Henmaru Machino, where Hentai and extreme sexual pathology meets Kawaii.
• The theme park from the Mad Pierrot episode of Cowboy Bebop uses this a lot. Some scenes of the destruction of cutesy park mascots, and their use as weapons, are terrifying.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica. At first the show lets you believe that it's a typical Magical Girl Warrior show with a Puni Plush design. Then episode three hits, where Cool Big Sis Mami gets her head chomped off by a candy-themed monster inside its Level Ate lair. The same scene in the manga version is even worse.
• Shizuku from Hunter × Hunter embodies this trope, being essentially a childish collection of moe tropes who happens to be a member of the most bloodthirsty group of criminals on the plannet.
  • Her first appearance has her acting completely moe and scatterbrained, losing a round of arm wrestling to Gon because she forgot that she's left handed. Her second appearance has her smashing two named characters' heads into paste with a completely stoic expression.
• PandoraHearts. EVERYONE works with this trope, but the ultimate would have to be Lily. She's an adorable little girl....who has a demonic dog who can and will rip your throat out. And that's ignoring the fact that she made THIS FACE.
• Happy Sugar Life. Girl meets girl. Girl falls in love with girl. Girl is a grade schooler that the MC (who is a high-schooler) has kidnapped. And that's just before the murders begin...

Comic Books

• Roman Dirge's comic book Lenore the Cute Little Dead Girl is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Max in Sam & Max: Freelance Police — threatening cruel and unusual punishments while extolling his own "marketability".
• Marvel Zombies Returns #1 has Zombie Spidey in a world that is like a late '60s-early '70s Spider Man comic. Everything's so happy UNTIL SPIDEY RIPS OUT KRAVEN'S THOAT WITH HIS TEETH!!
  • Everyone (except Zombie Spidey and Sandman) ends up infected and killed or just eaten alive.
• I Hate Fairyland is a series in which an Ax-Crazy woman trapped in the body of a child in a Sugar Bowl world brutally destroys everything in her path in her quest to find the key that will get her back home. The protagonist herself counts in a way, as she looks like a little girl, but has a maniacal and ragged air to her.
• New 52 Harley Quinn on several occasions, especially in the covers of issues #2 and #3.

Fan Works

• Mentioned by name in the Left 4 Dead chapter of Puella Magi Madoka Magica in regarding Charlotte, the Witch that Mami more or less adopts.
  The Littlest Cancer Patient with mutated hands and teeth fit for tearing through raw meat was making low, growly sounds. She was also poking at her dairy products in dainty, neat motions. It was kind of adorable... in a freakish, disgusting way. Was there a word for that? Grotesque cute? Ugdorable?
• When Diamond comes around... Either hide, run, or be very prepared to hear an adorable girl/young woman babble on happily about how best to kill a man if you want the most artistic blood splatters. Also be prepared to see her stab her own hand through her upper arm to make blood whips, explode, giggle as she shoves her hand through a man's chest, and a myriad of other things. If you still haven't run away, she'll treat you to seeing her with horns, a tail, bat wings, and maybe a little illusion of a nice little battle among Eldritch Abominations that she recently participated in.
• Quite a few My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanworks are this, ranging from humorously gory to genuinely disturbing. The fact that many of the fandom's popular works are Dark Fic certainly helps this.
  • Fluffy Ponies are this concept incarnate. One rarely has to look any further than the front page of the fandom's biggest site to find something grotesque happening to a cute fluffy.
  • Ask Pinkamina Diane Pie. Take the idea of a serial killer Pinkie Pie and roll with it.

Films — Animation

• From A Bug's Life, we have the baby birds that eat Hopper alive.

Films — Live-Action

• Batman Returns. Psycho clowns, rocket-mounted penguins, PVC bodysuits covered in weird stitches, Danny Devito's makeup, and... Christopher Walken.
• Cool World: Nails, Toons when they're not acting Ax-Crazy, most anyway.
• There's a certain element of this to V in V for Vendetta. Round, pink cheeks; Eyes Always Shut; huge smile; little upturned nose (at least in the comics); silky, shoulder-length hair... and he kills people with his bare hands!
• The weasels of the Quirky Miniboss Squad in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, especially the appropriately-named Psycho. Despite his disturbing mannerisms and glee in killing ("Time to kill the raaa-biit ... heehee!"), a surprising number of the fans think he's adorable.

Literature

• Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan is illustrated in a cute art style in the original light novels as well as the anime and manga adaptations, but it thrives on Black Comedy and has a Running Gag of an adorable angel brutally murdering a boy with a club, then resurrecting him to do it all over again.
• In Dean Koontz's book, Brother Odd, the title character encounters a manufactured animal who is the epitome of mindless cuteness. Mindless, in that it has no mind or soul and is therefore profoundly disturbing rather than cute.

Live-Action TV

• The suicidally depressed giant teddy bear in the Supernatural episode "Wishful Thinking".
• The Criminal Minds episode "Uncanny Valley" was aiming for this as a general feel. It was an episode where the Unsub, who had her dolls taken away from her by her father kidnapped humans to serve as her dolls. It came complete with very kid-friendly music throughout.

Music

• Invoked in the music video for "Bloodline" by Slayer, where a kitten can briefly be seen lapping up a pool of blood.
• Vocaloid: Too many Rin and/or Len songs to count. A few examples? Any Evillous video where they play an incarnation of Hansel or Gretel, Trick and Treat, Karakuri Burst....et cetera.

Tabletop Games

• The titular Mons in Pokéthulhu are cute. Eldritch Abominations, granted, but cute Eldritch Abominations. They'll also attack you and try to devour your soul if you're not careful.
• Vampire: The Masquerade's vampires keep the looks (and age) they had at a moment of their death and vampiric transformation. So, it's possible to meet (or play as) a hundreds of years old undead monster, who looks like an angel-faced 10 years old.
  • In the old (and VERY disturbing) Montreal sourcebook (made by White Wolf's "Black Dog" imprint, which in itself should be considered a warning), not only is there an angel-faced 10-year-old vampire — who's her pack's warrior — but the local vamps' unofficial mascot is a limbless dwarf Samedi (vampires who look like rotting corpses) who they use in a variety of gory "games", like "bob the apple" but with humans stuck up to their necks in a flour silo. No points for guessing the place is a Sabbat stronghold.
• Pathfinder goblins can fall into this, when their funny little songs and childish antics crash hard against their general violence and destructiveness.

Toys

• Some of the Plushie Dreadfuls look pretty monstrous, but they're still very huggable.

Video Games

• Gears of War (a game widely known for its Gorn) has the Big Heads mutator, which gives everyone a near-Super-Deformed appearance plus a higher pitched voice.
• Peggle Extreme, a demo of the Pop Cap game included with The Orange Box, features Peggle's lovable unicorn mascot Bjorn being eaten by a headcrab.
• SD Snatcher, despite the Super-Deformed characters, is just as gory as the original Snatcher. There's something strangely beautiful about seeing an adorable chibi with his head grotesquely twisted off◊.
• The player characters in the Playstation Network game Fat Princess are adorable chibi fighters, wizards, and such... who bleed copiously when injured or killed.
• Cannon Fodder is a(n in)famous example—it's the trope namer for War Has Never Been So Much Fun, but it also attempts to avert Do Not Do This Cool Thing, with bloody results.
• Robbie the Rabbit, the mascot of the Silent Hill Amusement Park is a pink bunny wearing a blue overall whose most prominent feature is the blood-stained mess on his mouth and clothes. Heather from the third game says that "it is more creepy than it is cute". Coming from a girl who has deadpan snarked her way through the eponymous town, without batting an eye to the overall gory insanity around her, this says a lot.
• Ms. Fortune in Skullgirls is a cute Cat Girl, in more ways than one. Then she attacks with High Pressure Bloody Murder and Detachment Combat.
• Dahlia Hawthorne in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations is extremely cute and beautiful, even with pure white butterflies flitting about her. However, at the end of the first trial, after she's been proven guilty of murder, she actually incinerates her butterflies with pure rage.
• PETA's Cooking Mama ripoff Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals. The cute jingly music doesn't make it any less hilariously Narmful.
  • Same goes for their Super Mario Bros. Kentucky Fried Cruelty game. For that matter, probably anything they market to children.
  • And now PETA is three-for-three with Pokémon Black and Blue. And then Nintendo told them to cut that shit out.
• Eversion: An adorable little orange flower travels through increasingly warped and unsettling dimensions, to the point where he starts brutally splattering his enemies when he jumps on them.
• Many of The Behemoth's games, such as Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers, and BattleBlock Theater, combine a cutesy art style with comically over-the-top blood and violence.
  • Dan Paladin's artstyle in general. See Dad 'n Me.
• The Creeper from Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. Flowers are pretty. Which makes a bio-weapon that makes flowers sprout from underneath and fatally turn you into a floral display in a most painful manner all the more disturbing.
• Kingdom of Loathing's Iiti Kitty, a mummified Hello Kitty.
  She wrenches open the lid of a nearby sarcophagus, and countless articles of stationery, toiletries, and household goods with her face on them pour out. My god, she's everywhere! Aargh!
  • In the Kingdom of Loathing universe, seals aren't adorable fuzzy flopping creatures as in real life; they're hideous, shambling, bloodsucking monstrosities that happen to look like adorable fuzzy flopping creatures, one of which looks more like a mutated leech than any land mammal. That said, one familiar you can acquire as a Seal Clubber is an Adorable Seal Larva, which intersperses descriptions of it sucking the blood from your opponent and bursting into an enemy's corpse so it can regurgitate a healing fluid into your body with gushing about how adorable the thing is.
• Considering how cartoony the characters in the Metal Slug series are, some of them die in fairly bloody ways.
• Messiah has the contrast between Bob, a sweet, chubby cherub who looks like a winged baby in a diaper, and the violence and brutality throughout the game (a lot of it inflicted by Bob himself.)
• The Nephilim in El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron are surprisingly adorable. Then they start swallowing each other whole, becoming insane gigantic fiery beasts.
• Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion uses this as a large part of its premise. At first the game seems cute, until you encounter the legitimately creepy monsters. Even the cute cardboard cutouts can get pretty terrifying. Spooky herself provides a lot of this. The mini games all star her, and also feature bloody murder. It's revealed that the entire reason for her gathering a house full of monsters is so she can raise an army of ghosts from the people who died in it. Why? Because she hates it when people call her cute, of course.
• The Elder Scrolls has Namira, the Daedric Prince of the Ancient Darkness, associated with all things revolting, decay, disfiguring diseases, and cannibalism. She usually associated with things most would consider disgusting or repulsive, such as slugs, insects, or disfiguring diseases. In fact she only allows those considered ugly to summon her, and she hates attractive people.
• Doki Doki Literature Club! keeps its Animesque Moe aesthetic even as the Disguised Horror Story hits. It makes bits like Sayori's suicide by hanging, the obvious glitching, Yuri's Sanity Slippage, the player being forced to watch Yuri's body decay after she commits suicide by stabbing, and Monika's Yandere obsession with the player all the more disturbing.
• Many of Edmund McMillen's games are this, most famously Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac. Basically, games with cute, simple characters full of Gorn, Body Horror, grossout, and Black Comedy.
• Lobotomy Corporation is another excellent example. The cutesy Animesque art-style doesn't stop truly horrible deaths or abnormalities being depicted. It's In-Universe too — in an attempt to protect the manager's sanity from the full consequence of their actions.
• Gori: Cuddly Carnage revolves entirely around this, with the protagonist being an artificial cat using a neon hoverboard to disembowel mutant zombie Unicorns in a toy-dominated, rainbow-colored, post-apocalyptic Cyberpunk world.

Web Animation

• The Sock Series artstyle is quite at odds with the apocalyptic scenario and carnage, which is to be expected when the main antagonist is a satanic hamster.

Webcomics

• Everything is Fine's story revolves around a bunch of characters with cute big cat-heads living in a pastel-colored suburbia. But every now and again, the comic shifts to show the reader intensely creepy moments, like the cut to Winston's dead, rotting corpse in episode 1.
• Nana's Everyday Life, has the art style of a manga for little children; plays the mental, emotional, physical and sexual abuse of an underaged girl for laughs. Very dark laughs. Until it stops being funny.
• Something*Positive:
  • The Little Blue Thing, aka Fluffmodeus. He's like an '80s cartoon character who Care-Bear-Stared a little too long into the abyss...
    "It only takes seven pounds of pressure to break a human skull... FROM THE INSIDE. Kisses now!"
• Kiki playing with No Content from Sluggy Freelance: it gets bloody quick.
• Charby the Vampirate is described as an ultra-violent Saturday morning cartoon, with adorable characters who will occasionally eviscerate or suffocate their many victims, brutally, with no Gory Discretion Shot. The combo is especially obvious with Mye, the zombie girl who smells sweet despite 315 years of decay, plus the unhealed slit in her chest where she got a sweet heart transplant. Her Evil Eyes are bubblegum pink.
  • Mye isn't decaying, (she is a traditional zombie, not a Hollywood/Romero zombie) the sweet smell is candle wax and gummy bears, two things she spends a lot of time with. And her brother's eyes are pink, too!
• Erf World, with the incredibly cute and adorable-looking, child-like midgets engaged in brutal, unending wars for no real, discernible reason.
• Arcturus Winrock from Suicide for Hire is downright ADORABLE with those big Puppy-Dog Eyes of his but he DOES have a dark side to him.....
• Drowtales presents the amaceing Mili'ani!
• The Unspeakable Vault (of Doom) is a Lighter and Softer look at the Cthulhu Mythos—for instance, its cartoonishly-drawn "Cthulhoo" says "yum yum" every time he eats an unfortunate cultist. But it's still the Cthulhu Mythos, and the gore factor actually goes up compared to Lovecraft's work. It'd be Mood Whiplash if the death and dismemberment weren't so heavily integrated into the comic alongside the silliness.
• Ghost Eyes has rather simple and cute character designs and the horror storyline goes side by side with a very Slice of Life -esque story of gay teenager boys developing crushes on one another much to their dismay. Hilarity Ensues. It would be a cutesy Coming-Out Story if said boys weren't all mentally disturbed in one way or another and if one of them in particular wasn't being followed around by a sadistic being who calls himself a "Grey Man".
• Homestuck starts off simply being about a kid who is celebrating his thirteenth birthday by playing a new game. Then the game turns out to cause The End of the World as We Know It and summon monsters wearing jester hats to torment the protagonist, and it only gets worse from there on out.
  • It becomes more clear later on, with an army of anthropomorphic chess pieces being slaughtered by Jack Noir, a children's show's characters turning out to be representations of "Horrorterrors" and comic relief character Gamzee going Ax-Crazy and deciding he needs to kill all his friends.
  • The various trolls all tend to qualify as this. Mindfang's diaries suggest that it is not only normal, but expected and encouraged of trolls of Gamzee's rank; in troll society, such traits are considered the mark of strong leadership skills. It's so prevalent that the main 12 trolls outright decide to call themselves "Team Adorabloodthirsty". The most spectacular example among them is Nepeta Leijon, who is a Moe Cat Girl with a fondness for shipping and cutesy roleplaying... and who kills wild animals for food with her Wolverine Claws.
  • Caliborn. One of the first things we see him do after his proper reveal is gnaw off his own leg, leaving him spattered with his own blood. As for personality, he's a sociopathic Jerkass who seems to find the sight of his sister's friends dying/being knocked out hilarious. And he likes firing rounds into people until they look like a bloody mess. All that being said and done, he still has large, rather adorable eyes with doll-like eyelashes, and as a cherub, he's the pinnacle of Ugly Cute.
• In an attempt to tone down the violence and make the strip more viewer friendly (or so we are told), Kagerou brings us "cute chibi blood".
• The Order of the Stick: The stick figure art makes everything look much cuter than it would in a more realistic style. And yet you still get characters like Xykon and Belkar and quite a bit of violence. In particular, Tsukiko sleeps with an adorable Xykon plushie, and Belkar is a fuzzy-footed halfling of chibi proportions who gleefully stabs everyone who crosses him or has something he wants. Then you get the Implosion spell shown in its full gory glory. Or Familicide: just... everything about it as the implications just snowball.
• Ruby Quest is more or less about taking some cute animal people and then breaking them physically and mentally in horrible, horrible ways.
• Sonichu unintentionally falls into this. It looks a lot like something your seven year old child would draw, with characters that are a combination of ones from Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokémon, an Author Avatar that is the mayor of the town, and cartoony villains. However, it features graphic sex scenes and true to this trope, scenes where a bunch of Internet trolls are tortured to death, including one getting drilled in the groin by a little girl.
• Considering how cute most of the doctors at Sparklecare are, it's easy to forget that almost all of them are Mad Doctors who torment or kill their patients with no remorse.

Web Original

• Moe Cthulhu Mythos creatures.
• The video for of Montreal's Wraith Pinned to the Mist (and other games). Good God. (And yes, this is the song that inspired their Outback Steakhouse jingle.)
• This is the design philosophy for all the monsters in Mortasheen, and the author's list of favorite monsters shows a definite personal preference for that style.
• The same artist's literal Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book, which has a calvacde of horrifying things, all drawn in a cutesy, cartoonish style. Some samples for you.
• Childrin R Skary Adorable children? Check. Copious amounts of blood and gore? Oh, you better believe it!
• A contest once resulted in Manowar's "Hand of Doom" being given a music video featuring mass-murdering Muppets.
• Don't Hug Me I'm Scared. The characters are Ugly Cute puppets and the videos appear to be quite innocent and childish at first.
• The Furry Fandom has a subcategory of art known as "candy gore", in which brightly colored furry characters are mutilated in some way but bleeding a bright, candy-like substance in place of blood or organs.
• Hamster's Paradise: The first sapient species to evolve on the planet are the harmsters, they are small in size and have round chubby faces but are also naturally sadistic sociopaths that maul their own disobedient young and rule their societies through fear.

Western Animation

• The Chubbchubbs seem to be an alien combination of cute fuzzy hamsters and chickens, with soft fur and big blue eyes. Until they bare their mouth full razor teeth and eat everything in their path, anyway.
• South Park gets a lot of mileage out of clashing the cutesy, colorful, and simplistic animation that looks like it's for and by pre-schoolers with the extreme violence, vulgar dialogue, and generally disgusting things that actually happen. In this instance, the art style helps the show get away with a lot more than if it was more realistic looking.
  • The Woodland Critters are seemingly adorable and friendly, but are really insane, violent satanists who have blood orgies and want to bring about the Antichrist.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy once had an episode entitled "Wishbones" in which a skull granted people's wishes, with results of varying degrees of misfortune. Pud'n's wish was that he had a little talking bunny that always loved him. Although the bunny wasn't THAT cute, it proceeded to chase Pud'n around, beating him and trying to murder him multiple times, ending with HALF OF HIS FACE BLOWN OFF OF HIS HEAD IN DETAIL WITH THE WORDS "Sometimes love hurts, Pud'n, and I love you....to deeeaaaattthhh...." as he hopped towards Pud'n slowly. Kids are sure to enjoy it!

  "Pud'n, have you ever heard of ''tough'' love?"

• Invader Zim. It has quirky humor, a more-or-less chibi art style (albeit an oddly angular one), and a wacky robot sidekick who frequently wears an adorable dog costume... and it's still one of the darkest shows to grace Nickelodeon, featuring Black Comedy, people turning inside out, and an entire episode about Organ Theft. There's even an episode where Zim tries to exploit this by turning a hamster into a giant monster, the idea being that the hamster Kaiju would be too cute for anyone to bring themself to stop it.
• The Itchy and Scratchy Show in The Simpsons. A relatively cute cat-and-mouse cartoon akin to those made during The Golden Age of Animation, but with over-the-top gore instead of bloodless slapstick.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has dabbled in this on rare occasion. Particularly the death scene of the clones from The Mean Six, which was so graphic it had to be toned down.
• The Powerpuff Girls: They're a trio of perfectly-adorable little girls — with over-sized eyes, no noses, and limbs that end in rounded stumps. They're also about as violent as they can possibly be.
• Robot Chicken loves this, frequently taking cutesy kid's shows or products and corrupting them, like the Four My Little Ponies of the Apocalypse, or the Care Bears committing genocide on the Care Bear Cousins.

Real Life

• Japanese fashion Gurokawa. Literally. It is short for "grotesquely cute''. They are moe products with blood splatter everywhere◊, or with bones and entrails visible, or products◊ based◊ off◊ body parts◊ itself◊.
  • When Gurokawa meets Elegant Gothic Lolita it's called GuroLoli.
• Frequently happens in nature. Ridiculously Cute Critters can kill or eat each other just like any other animals.

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