Snake Versus Mongoose: The snake is usually portrayed as the villain in this match-up.
Snakes Are Sexy: Dovetails quite well with this trope and Evil Is Sexy.Scaled Up: Villains who turn into snakes.The Great Serpent: Gigantic snakes are frequently made to be hostile.Fangs Are Evil: Venomous snakes possess fangs.Evil Slinks: Snakes and snake-like creatures often slink about.Basilisk and Cockatrice: These snake-bird hybrids are often quite monstrous.Smug Snake characters can play with this, even if they aren't literal snakes. Thus, many of the examples below aren't really snakes but humans or other creatures that use snake symbolism as an evil motif. Many mythologies also tend to associate snakes with water and darkness (not inaccurately due to many species being aquatic), so they are easy to symbolically digest as a "degenerate" form of life opposite to humanity.īecause of their primeval scariness, it does not take much imagination to portray these animals as monsters or harbingers of death in fiction.Īside from literal serpents, this also works metaphorically. Do note that studies on monkeys show this phobia to be something of a learned behaviour. Snakes in general also embody qualities that most social primates dislike, like unblinking eyes and "unnatural" legless movements. Several hypotheses have been put forth, with the most popular thus far being as a defense strategy against venomous snakes: animals that are hard to spot and whose warnings can easily be missed. This is not an ordinary phobia, but an instinctive Primal Fear. People tend to fear snakes more than other crawling creatures.
In the case of constrictors that lack venoms, they tend to be huge and have another nasty method to kill you: squeezing you to a slow, painful death before swallowing you whole. So why do snakes in particular get such a bad rep? Well, out of all the different groups of reptiles, their lack of limbs makes them the least anthropomorphic and thus harder to sympathize with, and a lot of them have venom, one of the nastiest methods to get yourself killed. Aversions of this trope are rarer than aversions of Reptiles Are Abhorrent in general-heroic turtles and lizards are fairly common and good crocodilians, while rare, are not unheard of, but heroic snakes much less so. Now how many times have you seen a good snake in fiction? None? Very few? That's because of this trope. It's even worse when you're a snake's natural prey.
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