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Tang Shen's once beautiful long black hair had been replaced with a writhing nest of dark indigo snakes. Her face retained a semblance of her original self, only now it was pale white, smooth, and covered in scales. From her partially opened mouth, he could see a forked tongue and long fangs. Where her nose had been was a pair of small slits, and the minimal makeup she'd been wearing had seemed to have seeped into her scales for the only color on her pale white face.
The rest of her was just as unnerving. The dark blue gi she had been wearing was in tatters over her body, creating a stark contrast to the milky white scales that covered her. Where her legs used to be was a long serpent-like tail with a sharp arrow-like tip at the end. Her hands were still human-shaped, but now sported long knife-like fingernails that were curled in the shape of fangs.

Snake People, Nagas, Lamias, Valusians, or Sneople (singular Snerson) are a type of liminal being usually depicted with a human head, arms and torso with the added twist of a snake's tail as a lower body, similar in many respects to a mermaid, centaur, and some genies. Beings like this can also involve more exotic bodily configurations such as wings or changing the ratio of snake to human. Sometimes they can have legs but will usually be far more reptilian in appearance. Also, for some reason, most examples are female.note 

Most of the time such Snake People are depicted as slithering upright like a cobra about to strike, instead of slithering face-down with their whole body. Female Snake People are almost always depicted with Non-Mammal Mammaries and often with Non-Mammalian Hair; they're almost always bewitchingly beautiful.

Snake People may have some proficiency for aquatic movement as well, either being superior swimmers than other species or actually being able to breathe underwater, in which case they would be a subtrope of Unscaled Merfolk, with the best of both worlds. They may or may not talk in Sssssnake Talk. Similarly, they are often evil because Snakes Are Sinister, but like many other Cute Monster Girls, Dark Is Not Evil may come into play. Or they were already villains who just turned into snakes. Wise Serpents are just as likely — associating them with wisdom, cunning, and knowledge because of the way they hunt.

Traditionally, Lamia was a Libyan queen who ate children, but John Keats might have turned her into a snake woman even though she wasn't originally, possibly combining her with Lilith, who was associated with the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

In Hinduism and Hindu Mythology, Nagas (more properly nagin or nagini if a female) are a very diverse group of snake-related entities, ranging from nature spirits to gods. Perhaps influencing the number of Snake People who are Multi-Armed and Dangerous. Though the Naga of Hindu myth themselves usually only have two arms or none; the prevalence of four-armed (or more) Naga is a result of conflating them with the major Hindu gods who usually have extra arms. Sometimes they have multiple heads.

Compare with Lizard Folk (another species likely to be behind a Reptilian Conspiracy), and with Gorgeous Gorgon when the Snake Person is hot. Because Snakes Are Sexy, this happens quite often even though snake people are, like mermaids, frequently subject to the Mermaid Problem.

Medusa is occasionally depicted this way.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • 3×3 Eyes: Hua She is a benevolent example, turning into a snake-woman with fins and Creepily Long Arms with Femme Fatalons when needed. She also has a more sinister and demonic form when she's Brainwashed and Crazy, including one where she turns gigantic and resembles a Hydra Person. One of the minor demons serving Shiva after his release from the Sacred Demon Stone is She Gui (Snake Demon), a demonic-looking human-headed snake.
  • In Amatsuki the demon Byakuroku usually appears as half beautiful man and half white snake.
  • In Bleach, when Cyan Sung-Sun activates her Resurrección, her lower body becomes that of a snake's, making her look like a lamia. She can also conjure up snakes to attack with.
  • A Centaur's Life: The Antarcticans are called "Serpentines" because of their snake-like appearances, but they are not reptiles. Biologically they're related more to birds than snakes. While all shown characters are females produced by the queen, unlike most examples they are essentially huge big-headed snakes with humanoid limbs and no trace whatsoever of human faces or breasts. Some have both arms and legs, some are huge with four arms and slither around. Antarcticans are up to all kinds of things behind the scenes, but the member of the main cast, Sasasul, is a very nice and timid girl.
  • In Claymore, Ophelia's Awakened form looks like one of these, only she has what are like gigantic blades coming out of her human-looking back.
  • Dropkick on My Devil: Jashin-chan is a serpent devil with half-snake body who is summoned from Hell by the witch Yurine Hanazono.
  • Fairy Tail:
    • Kinana is a girl who was unwillingly turned into a giant snake and given the name Cubellios. She's eventually turned back into a normal human, although she later starts learning transformation magic.
    • The guild Lamia Scale has, as the name implies, this creature as their mascot, though their members are humans and not Lamias.
    • In the sequel series, after being defeated and captured by the servant of the Moon Dragon, Selene, Lucy is transformed into a Youkai called a nure-onna, which gives her snake-eyes, and a snake body from the waist down.
  • Gundam:
  • Inuyasha:
    • The twins Kinka and Ginka, who have human-looking torsos and very long snake tails which end up encircling each other. They are from a species of Youkai always hatching with two heads, but usually with the stronger one devouring the other head early on.
    • The early villainess Mistress Centipede was a centipede variation.
  • In Killing Bites, Den Onuma is a cobra hybrid with a sadistic personality who prefers to sexually abuse his opponents rather than actually fight. In his hybrid form, his lower half is replaced with a cobra's tail.
  • Monster Musume is an Ecchi/Harem manga in which the main character has to be a host towards a female Lamia who constantly makes advances on him. Early on, it hits him that she's pretty much half-human, half-anaconda; if she ever completely lost control of herself, she could easily crush him in her coils like an empty soda can.
  • My Hero Academia: Habuko Mongoose, Tsuyu's first friend, is a snake-headed girl with the ability to briefly paralyze people with her gaze.
  • In Naruto, Orochimaru, and later Kabuto as well. They both started out as normal humans but gave themselves snake traits via genetic alteration.
  • In One Piece, the Gorgon Sisters are actually human; however, Marigold and Sandersonia can transform themselves into snake-like humanoids, having been force fed the King Cobra and Anaconda Zoan-class Hebi Hebi no Mi Devil Fruits as children.
  • In One-Punch Man, Eyesight is one of the monsters that attack Y-City during the Monster Raid Arc. She has the appearance of a beautiful Medusa-like monster, being half-snake and half-woman.
  • In the Out Comes the Devil, Out Comes the Snake manga, the protagonist Yuu Matsubara moves to her mother's old home and meets Suzu, a beautiful girl who falls in love with him at once. Suzu is revealed to be a snake youkai which Yuu had contact during his childhood. Other than her human form, Suzu can assume a half-snake form or even transform into a giant snake as well.
  • Panzer World Galient: In the third OVA shows up Jashin-Hei, an Humongous Mecha with half-snake part.
  • In Pet Shop of Horrors, one of the very first "pets" was a basilisk that looked like a beautiful snake woman. This particular variety was albino — but looking into her eyes meant instant death.
  • In Rage of Bahamut: Virgin Soul, during episode 18, the main group encounters a friendly lamia.
  • In Rosario + Vampire, Lamias are youkais known from Greek legends, their upper body is human while her lower body is that of a snake. They posses the power to control people's minds and is a feared monster who lures children in and kills them. The teacher Ririko Kagome is revealed to be a lamia.
  • Ushio and Tora has two rather unusual examples in Hitotsuki, the eastern "jashin" (serpent god) and his western counterpart: technically, they are snake demons, but the former usually looks like a gigantic, purple Oni with a round, smooth faced, one horn and monk-like robes and staff, but his massive body is actually composed of intervined, coiled snakes he can manipulate and his base form is a humanoid-headed serpent with a big horn. His western counterpart Shibumori is even weirder, looking like an odd-eyed old monk with a giant winged snake wrapped around his abdomen and the serpent head is split in four, acting like four separate heads.
  • Vampire Princess Miyu: The titular protagonist fights against a terrifying snake woman in one of the episodes of the TV series.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!: In the Battle City arc, Rashid used the "Trap Monster" Embodiment of Apophis. (A Trap Monster, as the name suggests, is a Trap Card that functions like a monster once activated. Ironically, this one is the weakest, having no other effects, but it gained notoriety for being the first.)
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, Misty Tredwell uses a Reptilianne deck which focused on the card Reptilianne Gorgon.

    Arts 
  • Sistine Chapel: The Serpent from Genesis is visualized as a beautiful woman with a scaled, green tail where her legs should be. This helps to show the temptation she offers Adam and Eve without any verbal explanation.

    Card Games 
  • Magic: The Gathering features a variety of snake-people, often featured as snakes with arms, though their appearances across the multiverse differ depending on the plane and it's real-world inspiration.
    • The original Kamigawa block featured the Orochi, snake people with two sets of arms and no tails and the stewards of Jukai forest. In Neon Dynasty, set centuries later, they found themselves cut off from their source of magic when the rest of the plane constructed the high-tech city of Towashi. The kami of the forest made them a deal: they could regain their powers by sacrificing their legs and a pair of arms; to their surprise, all the Orochi accepted. In return they became powerful nature shamans, and many of them retained their extra arms after all.
    • Nagas are giant serpents with the arms, heads and torsos of reptilian humanoids. They are found on the planes of Tarkir — where they are the rulers of the Sultai Brood, a clan of necromancers, sorcerers and assassins who inhabit the plane's swamps and jungles — and Amonkhet — where they are visually based on cobras, although some have elements of other snakes such as sidewinders. Previoulsy a dedicated in-game creature type, in 2023 they were mechanically retconned into being snakes (matching species like Leonin and Aven, who are mechanically cats and birds respectively but their own species in-lore).
    • Gravebreaker Lamia from the Greek-inspired Theros resembles a cobra with humanoid arms.
    • While gorgons are normally humanoids with reptilian skin and writhing serpent tails instead of hair, the gorgons of Theros have the lower bodies of enormous snakes where other gorgons would have humanoid legs. Pharika, the goddess of poisons and medicine and the progenitor and chief deity of the gorgons, herself takes the form of an enormous snake person. One card, Evolutionary Leap, shows a giant python shedding its skin to become a snake-bodied gorgon.
    • An odd example of this trope are the coiling oracles of Ravnica, which are explicitly Mix-and-Match Critters created by the Mad Scientists of the Simic Combine by splicing together elf and snake. They do not have the naga creature type, although it is worth noting that they predate said type's introduction by some years.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!:

    Comic Books 
  • Athena Voltaire: In Athena Voltaire and the Brotherhood of Shambalha, the way to Arharta is guarded by a statue of a four-armed, sword-wielding naga, and opening the way brings that statue to life. Ethan Storm believes that his ritual will control her; either he's wrong or he's treacherous, because she promptly kills his allies.
  • Black Moon Chronicles:
    • Methraton's servant Serpent is a half-snake warrior usually seen guarding his master's temple in the clouds. He also makes noticeable use of Sssnake Talk.
    • Some of the original inhabitants of Terra Secunda are the Ophidians, a race of snake people who don't take too kindly to the new invaders. They have humanoid torsos and arms, but with snake-like heads and long serpentine tails in place of legs.
  • DC Comics:
    • Batman: Detective Comics #514-517 features a villain named Lady Viper who is a naga. In issue #516 she bites Batgirl, who later has a nightmare in which she has grown her own serpent tail replacing her legs. She awakens later relieved it was a dream only to discover to her horror that she has become half snake in reality as well. In issue #517 Batgirl in her naga form manages to defeat Lady Viper and finds a way to become human again.
    • The Robin (1993) villain Tapeworm is structured like a snake person but with a long tail of detachable regenerating flat segments rather than a scaled tail.
    • Wonder Woman (1987):
      • Echidna is built with a humanoid torso atop a giant snake, with a venomous snake head at the other end of her body.
      • During "The Witch and the Warrior" Circe transforms Batman into a giant snake with a human torso and head.
    • Controversially, the post-Zero Hour version of the previously totally human-looking Princess Projectra from Legion of Super-Heroes was turned into an alien resembling a giant snake, who wore a robotic harness with little arms. She was named Sensor. Despite her appearance, she was friendly and sweet. She was later mutated into a half-humanoid Snake Person, which upset her very much.
  • Hellboy's Hecate turns into one.
  • Marvel Comics:
    • There's an obscure villain called Slither who is, as you might guess, a snake-man. He was usually associated with a fairly obscure team called Mutant Force, which originated as a short-lived iteration of the Brotherhood of Mutants.
    • The Viper (Madame Hydra), a regular foe of Captain America, launched a hostile takeover of the Serpent Society so she could use them to carry out a plot against Washington, D.C.: to poison the population and turn them all into Snake People. Slither was her right-hand man for the operation.
    • In the Conan the Barbarian stories, Serpentmen appear across various storylines. The Conan Saga issue #56 also includes an unusual cross between this trope and Medusa in one of its final artpieces, which depicts Conan triumphantly holding the severed head of a gorgon over her kneeling body. The gorgon is depicted as a (rather beautiful) human woman with tentacles/snake tails for fingers and toes and a body covered in scales, complete with an exotic "diamond" pattern. And then you get to her severed head, which is that of a giant viper with a writhing mane of smaller serpents for hair.
  • Snake Woman by Virgin Comics involves Jessica Peterson, who transforms into one whenever she is put under considerable stress. She's described as something "not quite snake and not quite human."
  • Vampirella: Mamba is a giant green-skinned snake goddess with a human upper body.

    Fan Works 

    Film — Animation 
  • G.I. Joe: The Movie: Cobra Commander is revealed to have been a humanoid with some snake-like traits, but is punished by his superiors by being turned into a barely-sapient snake with only a few humanoid traits (small arms and a more human-shaped face with Extra Eyes).
    WAS ONCCCCCCCCEEEEEE A MAN!
  • The Nightmare Before Christmas has the Creature Under the Stairs. In addition to his snake fingers, his head and neck look rather snakelike as well. His head and neck resemble the giant snake that is delivered as a present later in the movie.
  • White Snake (2019): The Snake Clan is a group of snake demons that are all over the Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism. The least powerful snakes look exactly like snakes, with more powerful ones having arms, a defined torso, and a snake tail. Only the most powerful snakes, such as The Master, Blanca, and Verda, can take fully human forms and get Scaled Up at will.
  • Wonder Woman (2009) has some wyvern/dragon things with a serpents tail as background combatants. They were intelligent enough to do so without riders, unlike the pegasi.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • In The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, an evil magician temporarily combines a woman and a snake to create a four-armed woman with a snake's tail as part of a magic show for the sultan's entertainment. Initially, she seems quite happy with the transformation, putting on an elaborate dance for the sultan, but suddenly her tail wraps itself around her neck and starts choking her, forcing the magician to undo the spell to save face.
  • The short film Ahas ("Snake"), part of the Filipino horror anthology film Shake Rattle Roll XV, features a murderous man-eating mutant snake-woman as the antagonist. Sarah, as she is called, was conceived when her father dosed his wife with a dodgy fertility drug cum "good luck potion" he had received from a local witch doctor, causing his wife to birth twin daughters; Sarah and the apparently human Sandra. Sarah normally looks like a beautiful human woman from the waist up and a giant snake from the waist down, but has a Game Face where scales cover her humanoid body parts and her head becomes more serpent-featured. Her mother wanted Sandra killed for her deformities, but her father believed she was spirit-touched and a living good-luck symbol, so he instead sealed her up in the basement of the mall they owned. Initially, she was content to feed on live animals they threw into the basement, leading to a surprisingly comical scene where she is shown slurping up a cow's tail like a noodle, but when a construction worker accidentally fell into her chamber and injured himself, she ate him and developed a taste for human flesh, taking to preying on random shoppers when she was hungry. Things finally reach their breaking point when she both falls in love with a man who is attracted to her human sister and grows tired of being kept in the basement. She ultimately dies when she swallows the hero whole after he rejects her love, and he cuts her open with a concealed knife.
  • Beetlejuice has a memorable scene where Beetlejuice uses his Voluntary Shapeshifting powers to assume the form of a giant snake with his own head, albeit with a slightly more reptilian cast to his features.
  • Clash of the Titans (1981) is the definitive basis for Medusa being depicted this way, featuring a stop-motion animated Medusa with the upper torso of a human woman with snakes for hair and a giant serpent's tail replacing her lower torso. The the 2010 remake keeps the basic outline, but swaps stop-motion for CGI.
  • Dreamscape features no less than three Snake-Men. Alex meets the first one in Buddy's terrifying nightmare. Later, Tommy Ray transforms into one to terrorize Alex when they both enter the President's dream. Finally, Alex himself transforms into one when he dispatches Bob Blair.
  • The Evil Dead (1981) originally was going to have Linda's possessed form as this, before the make-up artist decided on a Creepy Doll look instead. Remnants of the snake make-up can be seen when Ash is dragging her out of the house.
  • The Golden Child: The woman who gives information from behind a screen turns out to have a lower body consisting of several long tails. You see, one of her ancestors was raped by a dragon...
  • Hisss: The Protagonist is a shapeshifting cobra who is able to take the form of giant cobra, human, or something in between.
  • The Lair of the White Worm: The vampires hover between this and Lizard Folk, being bipedal and mostly humanoid, but with scaly skin, distended jaws and oversized curving fangs clearly meant to evoke snake fangs.
  • Star Wars has Thisspiasians, aliens with the lower torsos of snakes and faces almost completely obscured by facial hair. The most notable example is Oppo Rancisis, often seen in the background of the Jedi Council scenes in the first two prequels.
  • The Snake Prince: The prince and his subjects are snakes who can shapeshift into human forms, although upon being exposed to sulphur smoke, they begin shedding and reveal scales on their exposed skin. Too much sulphur and the prince will transform into his One-Winged Angel form, a massive snake monster.
  • The Sorcerer and the White Snake, an adaptation of Legend of the White Snake, introduces the snake-woman heroine Bai Susu and her protégé, Qing the green snake, as half-human, half-serpent monsters, their lower bodies being snake tails that stretches for miles.
  • White Mamba from Space Jam: A New Legacy is a humanoid snake, based on her nickname the "White Mamba".
  • The Witches from the 2020 film of the same name have serpentine features such as enlarged mouths and forked tongues.

    Literature 
  • All Tomorrows has two versions of this:
    • The Snake People are descendants of humans who were first turned into a non-sapient burrowing Worms before eventually evolving into a sapient form millions of years later. These Snake People are almost completely serpentine in shape, except for the hands on the end of their tails derived from their ancestors' feet, and are noted to have spiral-shaped brains.
    • The Amphicephali are an unrelated race of aliens from another galaxy encountered millions of years later, and are essentially giant sapient snakes with a secondary, internal reptilian body that can emerge from their mouths.
  • The Belgariad: The Nyissa, especially the queen.
  • Book of Imaginary Beings has lamias, who are women from the waist up and snakes from the waist down.
  • A Chorus of Dragons: The Thriss are a race of scaled humanoids with cobra heads who hail from the jungles of Zherias and its surrounding islands. They were created by the god-king Ynis, who greatly liked snakes and modified his subjects to more closely resemble them. They survived his death during Emperor Simillion's purge of the god-kings, and still inhabit Zherias' jungles.
  • Conan the Barbarian: A naga-like "Man-Serpent", with a human head with snakes for hair on a purely serpent body (to differentiate its kind from "Serpent-Men", who have scaly human bodies with the heads of snakes), appears in "The God in the Bowl", sent in a large jar to a man who dabbled with secrets he shouldn't have touched.
  • In The Echorium Sequence, one of the four races of "half-creature" are naga: half human, half water snake, and obsessed with shiny objects.
  • The first monster Saint George faces in The Faerie Queene is a hideous woman who is half serpent. She has the ability to projectile vomit of bile and poison, where her brood of vipers rests until called upon to assay her enemies.
  • Fighting Fantasy:
    • One of the many oddities/dangers of Port Blacksand is the so-called Serpent Queen from City of Thieves (1983), a woman whose head and neck have been replaced with those of a giant snake.
    • The supplement Out of the Pit describes the Caarth (and their elite warriors, the Serpent Guards, showing up in the Lost City of Vatos in Temple of Terror), a whole civilization of Snake People living in the endless desert wastes of the world of Titan. They're rumored to be responsible of the curse laid on the Serpent Queen.
    • The first member of the Cadre Infernal the players can encounter in Howl of the Werewolf is Serpensa the Serpent Woman, formerly a Vain Sorceress who's cursed into becoming a half-serpent, half woman hybrid.
  • Harry Potter: There are no nagas in the series. However, the legend may be known — Voldemort's snake familiar is called Nagini, which is either a reference to the naga or to Kipling. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald reveals that Nagini Was Once a Man — a witch cursed to transform into a snake.
  • In the Horus Heresy novel Fulgrim, the Emperor's Children Space Marine legion exterminated the Slaanesh-worshipping Laer, a four-armed snake-like alien race. The Laer practiced extensive bioengineering so that every member of their race was perfectly adapted to their role in society, leading to a number of different types of snake people including winged and aquatic versions.
  • InCryptid:
  • Kull features the Serpent Men in the story The Shadow Kingdom, a group of cultist snakemen who operate in secret among humanity, live by a Religion of Evil, and plan to resurrect their long-gone society by pulling a Kill and Replace on various people. Unlike most future examples, they're humanoid, with their serpentine aspects consisting of scaly skin and ophidian heads. The Serpent Men are pretty influential on the trope in fantasy, having appeared in various Cthulhu Mythos stories and been a major inspiration for the Snake Men of He Man and especially the yuan-ti of Dungeons & Dragons.
  • Lamia involves the god Hermes helping restore the titular character to her human form, in exchange for help in finding his love interest (a nymph). At the end of the poem, however, the sage Apollonius reveals to Lamia's lover Lycius that she's still a serpent — she suddenly vanishes, and Lycius dies instantly.
  • One minor character in Leia, Princess of Alderaan is the Fillithar Sssamm Ashsssen, who's in Leia's Pathfinding class and a fellow apprentice legislator. In the book he seems to be pretty much just a giant snake with a prehensile tail and no hands, though his body secretes a substance that lets him easily climb a sheer cliff face and he slithers comfortably through snow so his biology is probably not that close to Earth snakes. In the manga he has short, webbed flipper-like appendages for arms, which he flaps when excited, but he still slithers close to the ground in a serpentlike way rather than having his upper body raised. He's a friendly and enthusiastic fellow.
  • In the Lone Wolf series, Darklord Taktaal is described as having the body of a snake, covered by disease-ridden hair. He also has clawed hands and a smooth, ice-white head with a muzzle filled with rows of razor-sharp fangs.
  • Lords of War features the haas suul, warm-blooded snakes with arms and a crest of feathers, which were humanity's first contact since the wider galaxy had forbidden approaching either species. Unlike most examples of this trope, haas suul and humans are super besties, sharing a unified government known as the United Empire of Earth and Halshaa. It's rare to see a group of Lords of War that doesn't include both species.
  • Myth Adventures: Sibone, a Caffeind and old girlfriend of Aahz from the later novels, has this sort of anatomy. Being a green-scaled Pervect himself, Aahz isn't put off in the least by her serpentine lower body.
  • Rainbow On The Ground: The Shas-saaree. Also called "snake-people" or "serpentar" by other races, the shas-saaree (or "shask" for short) are mostly serpentine in appearance, but have some characteristics found neither on humans nor on regular snakes. While their bodies are covered by scales, the shasks have crests along their spines and unfolding crest-like membranous sensors in place of mammalian ears. Unlike any reptile, shasks have hair, are fully warm-blooded and give birth to live offspring after a mammalian-like pregnancy. Their most distinctive characteristic is the division of their society into clans by main scale colour, with every clan having their designated colour and purpose in the community. The events start with the protagonist being turned into a shas-saaree after being bitten by a rare magical snake and unknowingly imbibing a poison which was supposed to kill him painlessly before the snake's venom did.
  • In the Star Trek Novel 'Verse, there's a race known as Resaurians, who are essentially snakes with upper grasping limbs. They're usually quite friendly.
  • The Star Wars Expanded Universe, chiefly in the Star Wars Legends continuity, has other lesser known snake-like races:
    • The Ipharian-Da'Lor, who have a similar body structure to the Thisspiasians minus the excess facial hair. They also have prehensile tails tipped with retractable spikes.
    • The Sluissi have the trunks of snakes and the upper bodies of reptilian humanoids, with fins on their forearms, flat faces and hoodlike folds of skin on the backs of their heads. Like true snakes, they possess forked tongues that can detect heat.
    • The Ssither resemble giant, upright cobras with arms extending from just below their hoods, and are naturally telepathic. They led nomadic lives in the cavern systems of their homeworld until their sun went nova, something they barely survived thanks to a group of rebels evacuating a number of them on a stolen Imperial ship to an uninhabited world.
  • Wind and Sparks: Shay-za'ns or "Burnt Souls". Upper torso of a human without ears and nose, short snake tail below. The front cover illustration from Chasers of the Wind is accurate enough. They don't crawl, they fly with magic, albeit no higher than 2-3 yards above ground. Desert dwellers, unsurpassed archers (of the Cold Sniper variety), who like to eat sentient creatures, especially Je'arre (winged people). According to legends they used to be Je'arre too, but revolted against their god, and he took away their wings and souls; they die the final death and don't go to the Blessed Gardens or Abyss. Considering that god's general disposition, one has to wonder what the Abyss they did to make him act. Or maybe that wasn't him at all.
  • Xanth, Fantasy Kitchen Sink that it is, is home to a race of Nagas, the princess of which ends up as a Love Interest to one of the characters.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • Machida, the snake-thing from "Reptile Boy", has a humanoid head and arms while the rest is all snake.
    • Aluwyn from Season 8 has the torso of a green-skinned woman mounted on a long serpent body tipped with a rattlesnake's tail.
  • Doctor Who: In "The Magician's Apprentice"/"The Witch's Familiar", Colony Sarff combines this with The Worm That Walks — they appear to be a "normal" snake person in a long black robe, but they're actually a conglomeration of hundreds of snakes who are able to take on a single face and voice through means unknown.
  • From Dusk Till Dawn: Vampires are generally referred to as culebras (snakes) and have reptilian traits like serpent-like fangs, eyes and scales.
  • Hercules: The Legendary Journeys:
    • In "The Wrong Path", Hercules fights the She-Demon, which has the upper half of a woman and the lower half of a snake.
    • Echidna, the Mother of All Monsters (and specifically of the She-Demon) also appears half woman/half snake. Sort of, but it's a bit of a stretch. She had serpent tails/tentacles for her arms and legs, but she did have two of them coming out of her hips.
  • Sanctuary: One of these appeared briefly as a cunning predator that had been accidentally released in the Sanctuary.

    Music 

    Myths & Religion 
  • Greek Mythology:
    • Echidna, the mother of all monsters, is something of this. She's depicted as having anywhere from one to two snake tails. She is technically called a dragon-lady or drakaina, but she comes close to being this.
    • The story of Lamia, Queen of Libya, a woman driven to eat her children, sometimes depicts the title character as half snake.
    • Also Kekrops, an early king of Athens who was depicted as being Closer to Earth by having the lower body of a snake.
    • There was also a tribe called the Skiritai who were snake men with slit nostrils (bringing to mind pit vipers and the like) and a pair of bow legged reptilian legs. may also count as Lizard Folk.
    • Medusa and some gorgons are depicted as being half-snake in addition to having snake-hair in some art, though it's much more common in modern works.
    • Ophiogenees tribe were a race born from when a drakon mated with a human woman that had wandered into the grove it guarded. While never physically described, the fact that Greek mythological hybrids typically share the physical features of both parents, it's safe to assume they had the look of snake men. What is fully confirmed however is the fact that males of the tribe are able to cure people of venomous and poisoned wounds by touching the affected area and absorbing the toxin into themselves (of which the ophiogenees are immune).
  • The siblings Cobra-Norato/Honorato and Maria Caninana from Brazilian Folklore were the children of magic river snake Boiúna and a human, and thus could have the shape of giant snakes, at day, and of humans at night.
  • Nagas are a wide-ranging use of this trope. They originate in India with Hinduism, which, along with Buddhism, spread legends of them throughout Asia, with a lot of local variantions naturally springing up. In many cases, they seem to displace/incorporate whatever snake/dragon creatures the local population already had.
    • The "classical" Naga can shift from a (often multi-hooded) snake to human form, or something in between, and almost all are capable of magic. The first written source for them seems to be Mahabharata. The text proclaims them to be the "persecutors of all creatures" and emphasizes their dangerous powers, but the naga we see in the story vary between good and evil.
    • One of the most powerful is the thousand-headed Naga named Ananta Shesha (roughly "That Which Remains Endlessly"), a servant of Vishnu, who reincarnated as his master's brother in some incarnations (notably, as Rama's brother Lakshmana and Krishna's brother Balarama). He is said to have lived before the universe was created and will continue to exist even after said universe is destroyed, hence his name.
    • Often a Nagaraja ("king naga") is named, though it's rare to see the same one in multiple stories. One is Vasuki, who lives in the netherworld. The Nagas living in the human world are nature spirits associated with water — rainfall, lakes, rivers, wells, seas and springs — and will bring droughts and floods if provoked.
    • The Buddhist naga is usually depicted as a cobra, sometimes with several heads, or as a human with a snake behind its head, indicating that it shapeshifted into a human form. The most famous naga in Buddhism is Mucalinda, the naga that protected the Buddha. When you see the Buddha meditating under the hood of a coiled cobra, that is Mucalinda.
    • In Thailand, the Naga is an underworld deity associated with wealth, sort of like Pluto in Classical Mythology. Another related being is a dragon that lives in the Mekong River, where the Naga Fireball phenomenon occurs.
    • The Malay believe nagas are multiple-headed dragons.
    • Laosians view the naga as sea serpents with beaks.
    • Cambodians believe they are descended from the daughter of the King of the Nagas, a race of snake creatures with a vast empire under the Pacific Ocean. Seven-headed Nagas decorate Angkor Wat, hinting at this union.
  • In Chinese Mythology the primordial goddess Nuwa, who created humans, is often depicted with the body of a serpent and the head of a woman.
  • The snake-headed Roman deity Glycon, worshiped by Alan Moore, is closer to the trope, as are certain depictions of the serpent in the garden of Eden, sometimes shown with a woman's head.
  • Nure-onna are Youkai in Japanese folklore that have a woman's face and a serpent's body.
  • Melusine was supposed to have been like this, though she is sometimes depicted with two tails instead of one, or even as a non-human dragon.
  • A number of adaptions of the Legend of the White Snake have the eponymous snake demon appear half-human, sometimes accompanied (depending on the adaptation) by a foil/rival/sister known as green snake.
  • Although a far cry from the archetypal medusa model, Native American mythologies have their own equivalent in the snake-skirted women (who... wear skirts made of living rattlesnakes). Probably the most (in)famous example are the Tzitzimime (or "star demons") of Aztec Mythology, skeletal women associated with birth, death, fertility, the stars, and eating the sun and the rest of the world if they weren't held back by constant sacrifice, although related creatures can be found throughout the South West at least.
  • Oddly enough, there are two (mostly) unrelated mythological creatures also known as lamia:
    • The lamiaPlural from Basque mythology, which were beautiful river spirits who would provide help with farm work in exchange for presents, and built bridges at nightnote . However, they were portrayed as human women with duck feet, with the exception being the itsaslamiak, lamiak's who lived in the sea, who had fish tails like mermaids.
    • The type of Bulgarian dragon known as a lamia. It is believed that its name does come from the Greek Lamia, but other than both being partially reptilian, they are extremely different creaturesnote 

    Pinball 
  • In Asteroid Annie and the Aliens, a yellow serpent alien with spindly arms and a bald humanoid head watches a saucer on the right side of the playfield.
  • Big Bang Bar: One of the aliens is a giant serpent with a cartoonish humanoid head.
  • Fathom: The mermaids have long prehensile tails that evoke this trope.
  • Viper features a Robot Girl amid a group of robotic snakes—the gynoid appears to have snake-like features herself.

    Radio 

    Roleplay 
  • Darwin's Soldiers: Snakes usually take this form. They have no hair, no breasts and only two arms.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Bulldogs! features the naga-like Saldrallans, who are not only one of the core player races, but make up one of the setting's two rival empires.
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • Pictured are the yuan-ti, the descendants of humans who underwent profane rituals involving cannibalism to take on serpentine traits in emulation of their dark gods. They tend to dwell in Mayincatec ruins in the jungle, and come in a variety of subtypes based on how snake-like they are, which determines their ranking in the yuan-ti hierarchy. Yuan-ti "purebloods" look mostly human save for tells such as slitted pupils, a forked tongue, or patches of scales on their bodies, and they commonly infiltrate neighboring human civilizations. "Malisons" or half-bloods are the middle class of yuan-ti society, and vary greatly in appearance: some look human save for their snake heads, others have serpentine tails or lower bodies, while others might have tangles of serpents hanging from their shoulders instead of arms. "Abominations" look like oversized serpents with a pair of humanoid arms, and are the ruling class of yuan-ti temple-cities. Finally, yuan-ti "anathemas" are essentially huge abominations with multiple serpent heads, and are revered as demigods by their kin. Common to all yuan-ti are Psychic Powers, an affinity for poison, and a cold-bloodedly logical outlook that views all other creatures as either threats to be avoided or meat to be exploited.
    • The jarkung in Dragon magazine #14 and #37 have a snake-like body, two arms and long tail with a knob on the end.
    • Although common lamia are described as tauric hybrids of woman and beast, with the artwork traditionally depicting them as a lioness, there is also a noble lamia (originating in the 1st Edition Fiend Folio), a hybrid of man or woman and snake.
    • Lillendi, debuting in Planescape, are a Chaotic Good example, celestials that appear as humanoids with both colorful feathered wings and serpentine lower bodies. They're patrons of artists and militant protectors of the unspoiled wilderness, who possess the Magic Music abilities of bards. According to their original lore, all lilendi are biologically female and reproduce via parthenogenesis, but some are born with male-looking torsos and take on masculine dress and customs.
    • Mariliths are a type of demon that resembles a six-armed female humanoid with a snake tail for a lower body. They're among the most dangerous of tanar'ri, due to their military genius and martial skill, and are natural generals for the demonic hordes.
    • Medusae have varied in this; in 2e, they were just human women with snakes for hair, but also had a 10% female only minority who were of the "Lamia style"; snake-haired human woman from the waist up, giant snake from the waist down. In 3e and 4e, though, they are fully humanoid Snake People, having no tails, but definitely reptilian features, scaly skin and, of course, snakes for hair. In 5e, they've returned to the "human with snakes for hair" appearance.
    • Nagas are essentially oversized snakes with humanoid heads. They come in a variety of subtypes that vary in power and alignment, but all nagas tend to be wise but arrogant, possess magical powers, and try to set themselves up as the unquestioned rulers of their territory. They tend to clash with the aforementioned yuan-ti, as both they and nagas consider themselves the epitome of snakedom.
    • Ophidians are former humanoids who fell victim to a serpentine curse that transformed them into snake-like creatures with stunted arms and legs, a curse they can pass on via their bites. They're a natural Servant Race who instinctively serve other serpentine creatures such as yuan-ti, nagas, dragons, or even giant snakes.
    • Salamanders are a fiery version of this trope, with reptilian humanoid arms and torsos on snake bodies, all Wreathed in Flames.
    • In the Forgotten Realms setting, the sarrukh are one of the ancient creator races, responsible for all the "scalykind" creatures, from dinosaurs to nagas and yuan-ti. They look something like serpentine Lizard Folk, with snake heads and very fine scales covering their bodies.
  • Exalted:
    • Snakemen are the most common type of beastman in the Southern deserts, and are also widespread in the jungles of the Southeast and one of the most likely types of beastman to adapt to urban life. They generally resemble humans with snake scales, heads, and tails; some possess snake trunks instead of legs, and some tribes have venomous bites. A region in the south of An-Teng, the Domain of the Serpents Who Walk Like Men, is ruled by snakemen who have become more human than snake over the ages and now chiefly resemble tall humans with slit pupils, claws and scales along their cheeks and arms.
    • The mutants who live in the ruined city of Liriel-Anneth have the scaled hides and the eyes of the golden serpents with whom they share their home.
  • Fabula Ultima: Echidnas are a powerful type of demon resembling an elegant woman with green skin, a forked tongue, and a mass of live snakes in place of legs. They possess a Deadly Gaze and can fry people's brains with magic.
  • Feng Shui has the Snake Men, just one of the many demons the Lotus like to summon, which are not to be confused with Ascended-style transformed snakes, which are descended from snakes which transformed themselves into humans.
  • Games Workshop games:
    • Blood Bowl: Boa Kon'ssstriktr is an Amazon star player resembling a huge humanoid boa wearing Mesoamerican armor. He can use his prehensile tail to tangle and trip opponents, while his Look Into My Eyes rule lets him mesmerize an opponent once per game to make them simply hand him the ball.
    • Warhammer:
      • Dechala the Denied One, mistress of the Tormenters Chaos Warband, is a Slaanesh-worshipping High Elf who has been gifted with a snake-like form for her devotion. Dechala's disturbingly beautiful body is that of a six-armed elf from the waist up, while her lower body takes the form of a daemonic snake with a stinger that drips paralyzing venom.
      • Bloodwrack Medusae, Dark Elf sorceresses cursed into monstrous forms by the jealous goddess Atharti, possess the upper bodies of elven with hair made out of writhing snakes and the lower bodies of serpents, with secondary snake bodies branching off from them.
    • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Many of the Daughters of Khaine are serpentine. The Melusai are a cross between an elf and a snake, the Bloodwrack Medusae also have snakes for hair and Morathi has all that and wings.
  • GURPS has details for a range of snake people in various setting books and other supplements. Notably, The Madness Dossier includes the baÅ¡mu, a Mesopotamian Monstrosity with the body of a snake and a humanoid torso, which serves the terrible Red Kings as a guardian of important sites.
  • Hc Svnt Dracones: Snake Vectors are playable, although they can only take the Lateral or "taur" Morphisms. In the latter case their two extra limbs are arms, and they are colloquially known as "nagas".
  • Legend of the Five Rings: One of the races and a former playable faction, the Naga are an ancient race of snake-folk. Despite their alien nature (and the assumption of many characters early on that they were demons) the Naga were dedicated to the destruction of The Foul (their race's term for creatures of the Shadowlands and Lying Darkness).
  • The Lexicon (Atlas of the Lost World of Atlantis): The tropical jungle of Yallock had the Nagaraja, who are half human and half serpent.
  • Mutants & Masterminds: The Lemurians in the Freedom City setting are evil snake-men who worship an Eldritch Abomination.
  • Pathfinder:
    • The lillend, marilith, naga and noble lamia — here renamed the lamia mariarch — all appear from their parent game. A fan article from Kobold Quarterly #23 adds a weaker version of the lamia matriarch, known as the lamia commoner, as a playable race.
    • The serpentfolk are a Shout-Out to the humanoid snakes of Conan the Barbarian and Kull, being fully reptilian humanoids with arms, legs and snakes' heads and tails. There are also syrictas, creatures created when serpentfolk fuse a malformed egg with a clutch of normal snakes, creating a humanoid with a writhing mass of snake tails instead of legs, another, muscular snake tail instead of a right arm, a left arm forking into two venomous snakes, and a cobra head.
    • A playable race, the vishkanya, are Snake People who essentially resemble humans with scaled skin and snake eyes, as well as poisonous blood and saliva. They come from Vudra, Pathfinder's as-yet mysterious India stand-in, like the vanara monkey-folk, and were based off of mythological female assassins from India.
    • The nagaji, meanwhile, are far more dramatic hybrids of human and snake, though still bipedal and tail-free; they come from the Dragon Empires, where they were created by the nagas as a servitor race.
    • Most medusas are physically like humans in everything except their snake hair, but two variants — the euryale, an incredibly powerful medusa variant introduced in 1st edition Bestiary 6, and the brazen medusa, the result of another medusa reproducing with a particularly powerful humanoid — have the bodies of snakes from the waist down.
    • There are also the sthenos, who came into being when a euryale named Stheno turned against the goddess Lamashtu in favor of her foe and some-time Villainous Crush subject Shelyn at the cost of her own life, and was rewarded in death by the latter reviving her hair-snakes as independent humanoids.
    • Starfinder has the ramiyels, an all-female species resembling the aforementioned lamia commoner.
  • Rifts: The Cernun are a limbed variant resembling the ram-horned serpents prevalent in Celtic art.
  • Spears of the Dawn: The Umthali snakemen are the descendants of people who worshipped the Gods Below and were transformed by them. They range from the most pure-blooded, who just look like giant snakes, to the most diluted, who look like regular humans with maybe just some slight serpent-like trait such as slitted eyes and who might even live their whole lives unaware of their ancestry... unless of course the unnatural hungers of their blood should happen to awaken.
  • The World of Darkness:
    • Changeling: The Dreaming:
      • Merfolk from House Melusine have the lower halves of air-breathing sea creatures, which can include snakes.
      • The fu hsi hsien are serpent shapeshifters with three forms: their human form, their snake form, and their supernatural form, which is half-human, half-snake.
      • The South American sachamama can fuse their legs together into a long serpentine tail, and can transform into a snake as long as they're in contact with their shed skin.
    • Vampire: The Masquerade: The Followers of Set acquire the power to become this at advanced levels.
    • Werewolf: The Apocalypse: The Nagah weresnakes turn into this in their warforms. As with other werecreatures, their heads are fully snakelike; their humanoid torsos are also fully covered in scales. Notably, snakes are the only kind of reptiles to have their own specific Changing Breed — all others, including lizards, crocodiles, turtles and non-avian dinosaurs, are part of the Mokole's purview.

    Theatre 
  • Zarkana features a number of "Mutant Ladies" who try to seduce the titular Zark. Among them is Kundalini, a snake woman.

    Toys 
  • BIONICLE: Metus is turned into one (well, more like his head attached to a snake body) by Mata Nui using the Mask of Life, as punishment for betraying his folk. He gets turned back into his original form some time later as a result of Mata Nui using his powers to restore the planet Spherus Magna into its original state and undo all mutations that befell the characters.

    Video Games 
  • Age of Mythology goes for the snake-bodied interpretation of Medusas, and gives them a bow as well. That sounds familiar...
  • The 1993 Alien vs. Predator SNES game made for the arcade has the half-serpent Xenomorph as the level's fifth boss. Unlike other Xenos, this one have an excessively thick tail and no legs, and moves around by slithering.
  • Arabian Fight have a snake woman serving as one of two bosses of the desert stage.
  • Arx Fatalis features a friendly race of snake-women who served as librarians and advisers to the king. They were not all good though: the human princess was demanded to join them without giving her (or her father, the king) much say in the matter.
  • Battleborn: Pendles is an anthropomorphic snake alien called a Roa. His species spend a part of their lives as bipedal creatures before eventually shedding their limbs and return to living beneath the waves. Having too much fun murdering people, he put a stop to his natural molting process via hormone therapy after his right snake tail-like tentacle fell off. He then replaced said tentacle with a nifty prosthetic arm.
  • BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm: In the virtual world, users from Instagram resemble lamias.
  • Boxxytress: Serpent men are one of the primitive subterranean animal races, taking the shape of large snakes with humanoid arms and torsos. They are distinguished from the other animal races by their venomous bites and Sssnake Talk. Further, among the various aboveground humanoid animals, there are adder men, anaconda men, black mamba men, bushmaster men, copperhead snake men, king cobra men, kingsnake men, python men and rattlesnake men, all in the shape of large serpents with with the torso and arms of a man.
  • Chrono Trigger has the Naga-ette. You can find an item called "Naga-ette Bromide", which is in fact an erotic photo of said creature.
  • City of Heroes:
    • City of Villains has a whole enemy group called the Snakes, which were giant snakes with arms. They were the children of Stheno, a woman who became a serpentine Incarnate by drinking from the Well of Furies.
    • Speaking of Furies, the all-female Talons of Vengeance is host to a number of snake people as well—women who succumbed to the Hate Plague spread by the Talons, joined their ranks, and morphed into a half-human, half-snake hybrid.
  • Dark Souls:
    • The first game has the Man-Serpents of Sen's Fortress. Unlike most other examples listed here, though, they have humanoid bodies but with a snake head atop a long neck, with the females also having cobra hoods and four arms. It's not clear where they came from, but since a few of them also show up in the Duke's Archives, they're popularly believed to be a result of Seath's insane experiments.
    • Dark Souls II has the boss Mytha, the Baneful Queen, who had an unrequited love for the Old Iron King and tried to become more beautiful by poisoning herself. This ended up having the opposite effect and turned her into a naga. A headless naga who carries her own severed head around by the hair and uses it as both a sorcery catalyst and a sorcery grenade. She is also healed by poison, and her entire boss room is covered in poison sludge unless you figure out the Guide Dang It! solution to draining it.
    • Dark Souls III has Man-Serpents similar to but not quite the same as the ones in the first game. They have a more hunched posture, are capable of stretching their snake-necks long distances, and the females, if there are any, are indistinguishable from the males. Since they are only found in Archdragon Peak, and Dark Souls mythology indicates that serpents are "incomplete" dragons, it's believed they may be dragon-worshipping humans who tried to turn themselves into dragons and failed. Supporting this is the fact that they are capable of breathing fire.
  • Deltarune has the Rudinns and Diamond King, which have serpentine bodies with arms and diamond-shaped heads.
  • Devil's Crush, a PC Engine/Turbografix pinball game, has a shadowy face in the middle of the pinball board that, when struck, reveals itself to be a woman. Hit it a few more time and she slowly morphs into a half-snake hybrid, then a full-on snake.
  • Diablo III: The Deceivers have humanoid bodies with hooded faces on serpents' trunks, and can take the appearance of a human for a while.
  • Dungeon Crawl has Nagas as one of the many playable species. They are semi-humanoid with a snake tail instead of legs, are stealthy, can spit and resist poison and are good at poison magic. Their poison resistance is very useful, but nagas are the slowest race in the game. And Dungeon Crawl is a game where running away is a vital survival skill. However, there is a deity who can turn slowness into substantial stat bonuses, and one of his worship powers deals a massive amount of damage to anything faster than the invoker.
  • Dusty Revenge has the boss of the mines stage, Aliciaconda the Snake Lady, of the humanoid-with-serpentine-scales variety. Her design's loosely based off a cobra, including a headgear resembling a cobra's hood, and she even pilots a gigantic snake robot during the first phase of a battle (by controlling it via flute, Snake Charmer-style).
  • Eastern Exorcist has the first boss of Xiahou-xue's campaign, the Snake Yaksha, depicted as a massive serpent-man with a snake's tail as his lower body. There's also the Yaksha's boss, the mighty Python King who looks more like a serpent (albeit one in Imperial Chinese robes).
  • Elden Ring, like its predecessor series, has Man-Serpents, though this time they are much more serpent than man, essentially just being man-sized snakes with arms and legs. Found exclusively in the seedy underbelly of Volcano Manor, they are one of Lord Rykard's blasphemous creations, and are created exactly how you think they are. They wield magma-infused curved swords and whips, can comically stretch their entire bodies like an accordion, and there is exactly one who is a sorcerer and wears a giant egg on his head for some reason (which actually functions surprisingly well to block your attacks). The Manor's scout, Rya, is actually a Woman-Serpent named Zorayas in a human disguise, who despite being affiliated with an assassin's guild that aims to destroy the gods themselves, manages to be one of the sweetest and most innocent characters in the entire game.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • The series has the Tsaesci, supposedly a race of "Snake Vampires" complete with serpentine lower bodies, native to Akavir, a continent far to the east of Tamriel. However, other sources indicate that they are are a race of Men little different than those in Tamriel. We likely won't know for sure until they make an appearance in-game (and possibly not even then, as some sources leave open the possibility that there are both men and serpent people called Tsaesci).
    • Seen in-game are the Medusa (in Arena) and the Lamia (in Daggerfall and The Elder Scrolls Online).
  • EverQuest 2: The Nizari. There's also the Onaya and Ca'Na as aquatic variations.
  • Final Fantasy occasionally includes Lamia as an enemy type.
    • The upgraded version are often called Liliths.
    • Final Fantasy has the Fiend of Fire, Kary/Marilith as a powerful, multi-limbed snake person. It's the game's second Wake-Up Call Boss (the first being Astos).
    • Lamia and Lamia Queen first appeared in Final Fantasy II and their appearance differs depending on the version. In the original version of the game, they looked like human women with spotted snake bodies in place of legs. In the Game Boy Advence and Playstation versions, their bodies are entirely covered in scales. In the PSP release, they have a scaly snake half and an elven-looking humanoid half. All variants across all versions wield knives and have a propensity to cast Charm on the party.
    • Final Fantasy Tactics Advance: Lamias are red-scaled snake-women with a mix of human and cobra-like features that sings to lure prey. They know the Blue Magic spell Night. A stronger blue variant called the Lilith also exists and knows Twister, which can also be learned by Blue Mages. This game's incarnation of the Magus Sisters are all Liliths. Both variants like dishing out all kinds of nasty status effects.
    • Final Fantasy Tactics A2: The Lamia and Lilith return, though the latter has a much more vibrant color scheme this time. An even stronger purple variant called the Lamashtu is also introduced.
  • Freedom Planet: General Serpentine is a snake with arms who is Brevon's right hand man. Subverted by the fact that his arms are actually mechanical enhancements, and without them he's simply a sapient, but otherwise regular snake.
  • Guild Wars has different breeds of Naga, some looking like straight up giant snakes with arms, others with cobra hoods.
  • Hero of Sparta has Gorgon enemies of both genders, depicted as scaly humanoids with huge, serpentine bodies for their lower halves. Despite being a really common mook in the original, they're absent in the sequel.
  • Hydra Slayer has snake-bodied Echidnas as a playable race. More fragile than a human character in a game where being able to kill a level-appropriate monster quickly — or at all — is never certain and the only source of healing is killing, too slow on their lower body to run without being brutalized every "step" of the way, and they start (like humans) only able to carry two weapons. But where any trained human is ambidextrous, an echidna is (as the page image would imply) multidextrous; their "basic attack against one target" can be executed with any subset of held weapons. With enough arms and a versatile set of weapons, this race can master the quick kill or stun.
  • Viper, a boss from Jitsu Squad, is a snake-woman whose lower body is a giant snake tail, though she can alternate into a far more humanoid form. Oddly enough, despite her name, Viper looks more like a cobra.
  • La-Mulana has Tiamat, one of the eight Guardians of the ruins. She's a powerful Reality Warper and has eleven monstrous children, who act as minibosses in the area she resides in.
    • The remake reveals that the First Children were snake people, and retcons the Mother into having a more serpentine form. The sequel reveals that bipedalism was actually a trait introduced by alien interlopers.
  • Last Armageddon: One of the 12 monsters races is a race of snake people, looking like man-sized snakes with human arms and torsos. One of them is a party member under the name Giant Snake.
  • League of Legends: Cassopeia became a snake from the waist down after she triggered a tomb-guarding curse. She likes her new form. In-game, she is the one character who cannot buy Boots (items that increase the movement speed stat) — her passive, "Serpentine Grace," gives her increasing movement speed to make up for it.
  • In Leifeng Pagoda the titular pagoda's higher floors contains serpent-demons, albino snake-people whose heads and lower bodies are serpentine, but with a human torso. They slither all over the place while tring to rough you up with their daggers.
  • Lucifer Ring has the Echidna, a green-skinned snake-woman with massive talons, serving as a boss at the mausoleum's entrance.
  • Miitopia: The Medusa enemy is half-woman, half-snake. Its hair is 100% snakes, too.
  • Monster Girl Quest is loaded with lamias of different varieties, most notably Alice, the lead female character and current Monster Lord who is distinguished by her purple skin.
  • Monster Rancher: The appropriately-named Naga species of monsters. Being that they are directly influenced by Hindu lore above, the species looks masculine as opposed to the usual feminine, and are completely animalistic, with scales and fangs and even claws on their hands.
  • Raging Blades have the Cobra Assassin, a dangerous boss halfway into the game which resembles a humanoid cobra. He does have arms (with Wolverine Claws attached) and legs, however, alongside his massive tail which he'll occasionally use to Tail Slap you.
  • Puzzle & Dragons has two Snake People in the "Healer Girl" series. There's Naga -> Echidna. Then there's Succubus -> Lilith. In the case of Lilith, she has a snake permanently attached to her, as traditionally depicted. Then there's an upcoming REM monster Typhon, a very muscular Snake Person with two snakes as his tails. As a nod to mythology, he's wielding the same swords as "Crimson Lotus Mistress, Echidna". note 
  • Shantae: Nagas show up a bunch in the series. They're common overworld mooks, and quite durable and painful. The fourth game in the series, Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, introduces Tuki, a friendly naga NPC who will sell rare dance moves. Shantae and the Seven Sirens has their Monster Card give Reduced Mana Cost for Fireballs.
  • Shin Megami Tensei: A great deal of these exist — naga (usually portrayed as male), lamia, gorgons... Shin Megami Tensei II even had Betelguise in snake-person form as a boss.
  • Sinjid: In Shadow of the Warrior, Mountain Nagas are humanoid serpents that serve as mid-level enemies in the Monster Portal. They're notable for releasing fountains of blood when killed, which contrasts with all the other on-screen deaths that occur in the game.
  • Skylanders has a few playable snake men, being Rattle Shake, Cobra Cadabra and Pit Boss. All three have snake-related abilities: Rattle Shake is able to coil his snake tail to bounce around like a spring, Cobra Cadabra can summon smaller snakes inside baskets, and Pit Boss is able to transform into a giant non-anthropomorphic serpent.
  • Tecmo Knight ends the second stage with a Dual Boss against two humongous snake-women, who slithers all around the arena while laying bouncing eggs that explodes on you.
  • Total War: Warhammer: Bloodwrack Medusae are fairly typical snake-bodied fantasy gorgons, with the distinction that they have several snake necks branching off from their serpentine tails.
  • Toukiden has two examples, one added in Updated Re-release Toukiden Kiwami:
    • The Nightblade is a huge four-armed snake person with a rather masculine, reptilian face and attacks with a combination of giant weapons and magic. There is also a stronger version called the Sableblade.
    • The Glaciabella (and Palette Swap Mortabella) introduced in Kiwami has a woman's torso, an inhumanly beautiful face, and soft "wings" growing out of its back. Its real head, revealed when it goes berserk, is snakelike with a woman's face growing under the jaw.
  • Warcraft:
    • Warcraft 3's naga are former night elves who were transformed by magic and the influence of the Old God N'zoth and lived underwater for millennia, becoming reptilian beings with serpentine lower bodies. The males are more monstrous, the females more human-like with four arms. They show up again in most beachside zones of World of Warcraft, and the Battle for Azeroth allows the players to fight them in their homeland of Nazjatar. High-ranking naga, such as Queen Azshara and her handmaidens, do not hew to this trope to any real degree however, generally resembling octopus-based Fish People or crustacean centaurs instead.
    • There are also venomlords, trolls who have overdosed on the mojo of their native snake Loa (animal spirit) and turn into a more realistic looking snake naga than the actual nagas (who look more dragon-like than snake-like).
    • Battle for Azeroth also introduces the Sethrak; cobra-like people with legs and arms.
  • X-COM
  • Wind Child Black gives us Echiradne "Ecchi" Abraxurxes, a long-lived sorceress who has slept for the last 10,000 years. Despite other characters calling her a "lamia", including herself, her people are actually a race called the Urush, an isolated and patriarchal society living in large underground cities in the desert.

    Web Animation 
  • The Last Lamia has the titular lamias, half-women, half snake creatures that have existed since ancient times and with the power to control minds. However, after a genocide, there is only one remaining: the titular Lani.

    Webcomics 
  • Addictive Science: Geenie, the snake genie with a crush on Lukas.
  • At Arm's Length: Charlotte is a four-armed naga who owns an auction house and provides information on exotic artifacts.
  • Crossworlds: Nagas (both armed and armless) are just one of the local species of Beast Man. Apparently both male and females have Non-Mammal Mammaries. All There in the Manual, or at least in the background information on the site: the naga have a caste system, and a naga's status is based on the number of arms, with the eight-armed being the leaders down to the two-armed being the peasants, and armless being an "untouchable" caste. Armless Naga gain telekinesis to allow them to manipulate objects and are commonly gifted with sorcery.
  • Several Dungeons & Dragons-inspired webcomics features the races of Snake People mentioned above.
    • In Drowtales, nagas have the upper bodies of elf-like humanoids and the lower bodies of snakes. True nagas are a naturally occurring species that just happens to look that way, while the naga created by the Vel'Vloz'ress are the result of prisoners having their lower bodies engulfed by giant, snakelike biogolems that thereafter bond inseparably with their bodies, creating mindless and easily controlled minions. True naga aren't fans of this practice.
    • In Goblins, Kin the yuan-ti is a Cute Monster Girl and a rare case of snake person as a main character.
    • Krakow: Kia's sister Guinness in the original run is based on the D&D marilith.
    • In The Order of the Stick, Malack identifies himself as Lizard Folk, but seems to lack hind legs (it's not quite clear at first due to his long cloak). He's also a vampire.
    • A red-headed yuan-ti with a Texan accent appears in Rusty and Co.. She's been retconned into a lamia after legal squabbles with Wizards of the Coast.
  • Eerie Cuties: Brooke is a 14-year-old Melusine (now 15, as of the timeskip) with the ability to voluntarily shift into snake form. Though she's ashamed of it and would rather her friends not know about it, which is why she prefers to remain in human form — unless provoked.
  • El Goonish Shive: During the Pokémon parody storyline "Grace-A-Monsters!", one of the Grace-A-Monsters is based on Arbok but with a humanoid upper body.
  • Karin-dou 4koma has Sara, a white snake youkai. She has the lower body of a snake and on one occasion gets slit pupils and a snake tongue while angry. Ironically, her boyfriend is a toad youkai, who's a little unsettled by Sara's regular, loving remarks about him looking delicious and wanting to eat him up...
  • Kill Six Billion Demons: In Round 2 of the Ring of Power, Allison fights a four-armed serpent woman that tries to crush her in her coils.
  • Kubera: The whole Ananta sura clan is this... and manages to cover the whole spectrum of snakey-reptileness and peopleness, sometimes in one individual, depending on the age and type of sura in question. The younger and lesser sura are mode-locked in the snakiest forms, though.
  • MeatShield: The inhabitants of Vedris, the City of Serpents, turned themselves into serpent people out of devotion to their god.
    The Church of Vasra, God of Serpents and Secrets, is headquartered here. Long ago, a fundamentalist movement in Vedris prompted the faithful to undergo magical transformations into snake-human hybrids to prove their devotion. This magical alteration has bred true and now nearly 50% of the population are snake people.
    — Extract from the Encyclopedia Ardrisia
  • Modest Medusa: The titular Modest is a baby hydra, which resembles a typical gorgon with the lower half being the body of a snake.
  • Skin Deep: Lamias and nagas both exist, and are rather distinct creatures:
    • Lamias are Always Female, hail from Greece and have little innate magic of their own. They resemble human women with snake bodies from the waist down.
    • Nagas come from India, come in the full sexual spectrum and are both highly magical and innate shapeshifters. They can alternate between being fully human, many-headed snakes or lamia-like creatures with additional snake heads sprouting from their shoulders.
  • Unsounded: Efhebys like Ruck have a humaoid torso, long snake tail in place of legs, tentacles in place of hair and venom that allows them to melt and consume memories.
  • The Wotch: Both the title character and the writer Anne Onymous have been portrayed as shapechanged into the form of a naga.

    Web Original 
  • Codex Inversus: Nagas, humanoid serpents, are among the inhabitants of the Beasts' Nations. They are known to be excellent cooks, thanks to their keen sense of smell and ability to sense heat, but their lack of chewing teeth means that Naga cousine is perforce heavy on soups, eggs, and food chopped into small pieces.
  • Nagas appear in Felarya, often scaled up to Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever proportions.
  • Japanese artist Ogitsune (a.k.a. Anakakecya-han), known for his Moe Personifications of warships and military vehicles, personified the American P-39 Airacobra sporting a snake's tail, Cute Little Fangs, and mechanical wings.
  • In the Alternate History fiction Magic, Metahumans, Martians and Mushroom Clouds: An Alternate Cold War, the Khmer Isarrak eventually get the idea to turn themselves into mythological Naga in order to get an edge over the French. After they win the war, they proceed to force the entire (surviving) population of Cambodia to transform themselves in much the same way. According to Word of God, 2/3 of Cambodians are Naga by the time Saloth Sar'snote  regime is destroyed, thus permanently scarring the country as the world's first and only majority non-human nation.
  • Whateley Universe: Diamondback, one of the mutant students (and secondary viewpoint characters) at Whateley Academy.
  • Mahu: In "Second Chance" the troops of prince Arius find what at first appears to be a large, abandoned palace in the middle of nowhere, only to find out it is the home of a group of nagas. They are so dangerous the prince decides to call off the attack. For now.
  • Gorgons are portrayed as more snake-like than humanlike in Looming Gaia. They have snake tails instead of legs, scaled hairless skin, forked tongues, slit pupils, and fangs.

    Western Animation 
  • Aladdin: The Series: Jasmine begins turning into a venomous naga in one episode, and Aladdin has to go on a quest to find the cure. When it seems there's no longer a cure, Aladdin turns himself into a naga as well to be with Jasmine. They both return to normal though.
  • Aqua Teen Hunger Force: In an early episode, Carl picks a mummy's headdress out of the garbage and shows it off to the other characters, completely unaware to the fact his legs have turned into a snake's tail.
  • Batman Beyond: The villain of "Splicers" becomes some kind of naga with stuff added before going Clipped-Wing Angel.
  • Ben 10: Alien Force and Ben 10: Ultimate Alien A villain called Ssserpent, He is an anthropomorphic snake alien.
  • Conan the Adventurer had a naga that was less a human with the lower half of a snake, more like a large snake with small arms and a humanoid face. The Serpent-Men are examples of the rare "fully humanoid" version, having snake-like facial features (including fangs, tongue and breathing tube), scaly skin and legs, without any hint of a tail.
  • One of the Rulon subraces on Dino-Riders was a race of snake humanoids.
  • Gargoyles: A gargoyle with this body type is part of the Guatemalan clan; according to Greg Weisman, this is the standard form in Guatemala.
  • Hazbin Hotel: Sir Pentious is a snake-like demon, with fangs, a sinuous lower body studded in glaring red eyes, and a retractable cobra-like hood with more of the aforementioned eyes..
  • Legend Quest: Adult Quetzalcoatl is portrayed as one of these with a serpentine lower body and the upper body of a scaled human with fangs and a forked tongue that wears ceremonial Aztec clothing.
  • Masters of the Universe: The original runs of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and She-Ra: Princess of Power feature the Snake Men as recurring enemies. They ruled a powerful empire in the past, before being thrown into Limbo by the Elders when they tried to conquer Eternia. The few that were left free desperately want to free their fellows and rebuild their old empire, and often work alongside other villains to achieve this. They mostly look like humanoid snakes with arms and legs, but a few have more peculiar appearances — their ruler, King Hiss, looks like a fairly normal human but can shed his torso's skin to reveal a writhing mass of snakes, for instance, while Rattlor has a rattlesnake tail and Tung Lashor an abnormally long tongue.
  • Ninjago has had a surprising number over the years.
    • The skeleton mooks working for the Big Bad were phased out in favor of the Serpentine in the first season, whose name tells you everything you need to know. There are five tribes, each with a unique power: the Hypnobrai can hypnotise others, the Constrictai can strangle their foes, the Venomari can spit hallucination-inducing venom, the Fangpyre can turn people and vehicles into snakes, and the Anacondrai are the most powerful and dangerous out of all of them.
    • The afore-mentioned Anacondrai were worshipped by a cult that wanted to become them during the Tournament of Elements arc, and who eventually partially succeeded.
    • In The Hands of Time, the Mooks are the Vermillion, a hive mind of snakes that can work together to operate human-sized armor and larger mechs.
    • Later the only known Serpentine capable of wielding Spinjitzu, Aspheera, was revived, who led an extinct tribe of Serpentine called the Pyro Vipers, who all proceeded to harness Kai's elemental fire powers.
    • Subverted with the Maaray Guards from Season 15 Seabound, who are based on eels, but closely resemble the Pyro Vipers in their molds.
  • Rick and Morty features an alternate universe where snakes evolved to be the dominant species, not humans but history is loosely the same, including Snake Abraham Lincoln and Snake Hitler.
  • The Secret Saturdays: A whole cryptid race of Naga shows up, though the one the audience gets to know about is Rani'Nagi. They're primarily serpentine in appearance with long snake tail for legs, a narrow humanoid torso, long skinny arms and fingers terminating in claws, and an oversized head with elongated skulls and prominent fangs on their faces. While mainly antagonistic due to their worship of Kur and hope that he'll wipe out humanity for them, they're quite capable of teaming with the heroes when in their best interests, such as rescuing Zak from a Well-Intentioned Extremist who planned to kill him in order to stop Kur's resurrection.
  • Steven Universe references snake people by name in "Keep Beach City Weird", with Ronaldo even once providing the page quote; however, Ronaldo's "sneople" theory is closer to the concept of reptilians than this trope, as he believes they're shapeshifters that usually look like humans.
  • Summer Memories: One major recurring character in the show is Snake, a red businessman with the lower body of a snake who bears a strong resemblance to Tim. He sometimes comes to Tim to try to coerce him into being a villain, eventually taking over as the Big Bad for a story arc.
  • There is an episode of TaleSpin where the villain is a cobra fellow. He appears to be anthropomorphized like the rest of the cast, but when he loses all his clothes at the end of the episode, he's just a big snake.
  • W.I.T.C.H.: Cedric, The Dragon from the first season, is one of these in his true form, though he spends a lot of his time shapeshifted as a human. Interestingly, his race all seem to be shapechangers, but aren't all Snake People- the only other one shown, Miranda, changes into an anthropomorphic spider.

Alternative Title(s): Snake Or Naga Or Lamia Oh My, Naga, Lamia, Snake Person

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The Snake Clan

The snake clan is made up of anthropomorphic snake people.

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