Who needs arms (or eyes) when you have teeth like that?
A creature with two legs but no arms (and sometimes wings). This design may be used to make a creature look more alien, or to make something appear harmless until it's too late. Armless bipeds can also be used to stylistic effect for cartoons with less realistic character designs.
Note that it's armless, not harmless — they may still have a dangerous bite, kick or tail-whip/sting, or may have psychic or magical abilities.
Note that examples only count as this for species that naturally lack arms. That is, humans and other races that normally have them don't count just because of injury or a birth defect that caused them to be born without them.
Waddling Head is this minus a torso. May result in Invisible Anatomy.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Digimon Adventure: Digitamamon is an egg with legs.
Film — Animation
- Monsters, Inc.: The original designs for Mike Wazowski aren't too different from his final Cephalothorax design, except that he doesn't have arms, just legs.
Film — Live-Action
- Godzilla: King Ghidorah has two wings and two legs, but no arms. Averted by his incarnation in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), where his wings have proper arm joints and he walks quadrupedally on his wings like bats and pterosaurs do — his other incarnations are always bipeds.
- Kong: Skull Island has Skullcrawlers, giant lizard-monsters with two legs and a long, prehensile tail.
- Star Wars: The Kaadus resemble duck-billed dinosaurs with ostrich-like builds and no forelimbs.
- Tremors: The Shriekers, the second life cycle of the Graboids, are small bipedal hunters with a huge jaw resembling those of the giant worms they spawned from as their only weapon. However, Shriekers that live long enough eventually metamorphize into Ass-Blasters, which possess wings.
Literature
- After Man: A Zoology of the Future:
- The wakka have evolved from South American field rodents into long-legged and very fast runners that resemble mammalian ostriches, only without the vestigial wings.
- The fin lizard is a bipedal lizard found in deserts, having likewise adapted to a lifestyle of fast running and having lost its arms in the process.
- Arcia Chronicles: The Carrion, an Eldritch Abomination summoned by the Gods of Light to devour the bodies of the slain Old Gods, consists primarily of a mouth and two legs.
- The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution: The descendants of tyrannosaurs eventually lost their forelimbs, which atrophied until they vanished entirely.
- Noddy's Toyland Adventures: Inverted by Mr. Wobblyman, who has no legs and a rounded bottom.
- Halo: Hunters in the Dark: The morolaath, aka "blind wolves", that live on the Ark resemble two-legged lizards with no eyes. They were actually going to be in the first Halo game but had to be cut out before release.
- Orson Scott Card's Empire: The mecha are pretty primitive, forcing them to use a simple spherical cockpit and dangerously unstable legs. Empire was based on it and there was cross-pollination during development, Shadow Complex also features these same mechas.
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: The Hammerheads are armless, and attack by extending their necks like a jack-in-the-box.
- Xanadu (Storyverse): Rampede, a type of Gamimon, resembles a bighorn sheep without forelimbs and with a long tail to balance its anterior body.
Live-Action TV
- Extraterrestrial (2005): Gulpogs are terror bird-like animals without forelimbs, possessing only a pair of long, powerful legs.
Mythology
- Egyptian Mythology: Medjed the Smiter resembles a Bedsheet Ghost with only feet for limbs.
Tabletop Games
- The Awful Green Things From Outer Space: The eponymous things are two-legged globs with single eyes. Despite the lack of a mouth, they exist only to devour the crew of the spaceship they have infested.
- BattleTech: While most Battlemechs have arms to some degree, some have arms that consist of nothing but a tiny missile pod, such as the Catapult and Stalker. And even more extreme, there are even a handful of mechs with no arms whatsoever, such as the Blitzkrieg.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Lindworms are born to chromatic dragons, but some rare birth defect leads them to hatch without forelegs or wings, and leaves them with stunted magical power and weakened breath weapons. Their parents drive them from their nests soon after they hatch, and other dragons will kill lindworms out of course and leave the body to rot, so lindworms who survive infancy tend to grow into bitter, hateful creatures.
- Digesters are portrayed a vaguely birdlike/reptillian bipeds with no arms. They run around spitting acid on things, and then slurp up the dissolved remains.
- Prior to 3rd Edition, giant striders were depicted without forelimbs.
- Games Workshop games:
- In early editions of the Epic scale version of Warhammer 40,000, the Hell-Scourge and Hell-Knight Daemon Knights of Slaanesh differ from most other classes of Knight as they lack any arms, mounting their primary weapon systems on top of their hull instead.
- The Tau's Stormsurge
lacks arms or arm-cannons like all their other battlesuits, instead it has two humongous rocket pods and a stupidly huge shoulder-mounted Plasma Cannon.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! has multiple monsters that are armless and biped, both natural, like Blue-Eyes Shining Dragon, and artificial, like Booster Dragon and Dual Assembwurm.
Toys
- Furby looks like a fuzzy penguin with bat ears and no flippers.
Video Games
- Anarchy Online has Leets, little adorable rodents that lack a set of forelegs. An idle animation, in which they groom themselves with one of their feet, lampshades it. There are also Onagis/Pendpods, which resemble giant terrestrial seahorses with a pair of legs.
- Dungeon Keeper: Inverted by bile demons, who are so fat that their legs have atrophied and they scoot forward on their hands and bottom.
- The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has Alit and Kagouti, native species of predatory reptilians roughly the size of a cow with massive heads on stubby, armless, two-legged bodies. Alit are more crocodilian in their heads while Kagouti have dinosaurid frills and tusks.
- Golden Sun: Djinn don't need arms, since they can blast you with Psynergy or augment your powers.
- Journey (2012): The player figure has no arms which was meant by the developers so people wouldn't wonder why they can't climb or pick things up.
- Ogmo from the Jumper series is a lab creature consisting entirely of a rectangular head on two tiny legs.
- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword:
- The giant monster, the Imprisoned, is a mouth with legs. No eyes. No nose. And covered in black scales and feathers that wave like fire on its back. It laters gains arms, a tail, and a halo that allows it to fly. And that isn't even its final form...
- Fi also has no arms to speak of, just a body, head and legs. This is best exemplified in Hyrule Warriors, where she moves by gliding around like an ice dancer and attacks by mostly kicking. Concept art, though, did indicate that Fi does technically have arms, she just kept them hidden under her cape at all times.
- Oddworld:
- The Glukkons are suit-wearing executives that walk on their hands, their legs having shriveled in disuse.
- Metroid:
- Metroid: Dessgeegas, Novas/Sovas and Sidehoppers lack front limbs. With the exception of the Novas, they all have the ability to walk on the ceiling, jump toward the floor and "fall" upwards.
- Metroid II: Return of Samus: Hornoads, skreeks and motos look like armless amphibians, birds and horned lizards, respectively.
- Metroid Prime Trilogy:
- Metroid Prime: The Sheegoths are dangerous ice-breathing predators who only have weakspots on their backs, and no arms. Then you realise that they are the babies when you scan them — an adult one appears later, who is much bigger and meaner, and then becomes a Degraded Boss.
- Metroid Prime 2: Echoes: Grenchlers are armless creatures that look quite similar to the Sheegoths from the first game, except they're more amphibian in appearance and are much more aggressive and more dangerous, with abilities Sheegoths don't have, like firing electricity at long range and leaping across entire rooms. And then there's the one room in Dark Torvus with the Dark possessed Grenchlers, and the Grapple Guardian, which is a King Mook.
- Metroid Prime 3: Corruption has the Defense Drone, a boss fought in Elysia. It is a large mechanoid that relies on high jumps instead of walking, shooting powerful missiles, unleashing balls of plasma, and performing electrified Shockwave Stomps. Its weak point is the core behind its face, but to unveil it Samus has to hit the three antennae at its top and then use the Grapple Lasso to open up the core's carapace.
- Minecraft: Creepers technically have four legs, but their vertical bodies make them resemble armless bipeds more than the other quadrupeds in the game.
- In No Man's Sky, critters possessing two legs and no forelimbs are a common sight on many planets in the game's vast procedurally generated universe.
- Pikmin:
- The Bulborbs are stout creatures that waddle around on a pair of short legs, and use their giant mouths as their only weapons.
- Hey! Pikmin: The Mockiwis are wingless birds.
- Pokémon: A few Pokémon have this body type, such as Oddish, Poliwag, and Wooper. While most gain arms when they evolve, some fully evolved Pokémon also fit, such as Dodrio (an ostrich-like bird minus the vestigial wings) and Exeggutor (a palm tree with a pair of trunk-like legs). Geodude inverts the trope, as it has arms but no legs.
- Psychonauts: The Knife Thrower enemies. How do they throw their knives if they don't have arms? With their feet.
- In Purple, several enemies are waddling heads with no limbs besides two legs. However, the similarly designed player character has arms that vanish when not using weapons, so it's possibly the case for those enemies as well.
- Shin Megami Tensei
- Take-Minakata a recurring demon, has no arms. In mythology, his arms were cut off in a duel.
- In the spinoff series Digital Devil Saga, Gale's demon form, Vayu, is an armless green creature which attacks by kicking with the bony blade on one of its feet. As does Harley's Hayagriva form.
- Subverted with Vayu. His arms are hidden by his wings (you can see them when he guards, uses an item or does his victory pose), and Hayagriva has T. rex-esque arms hidden by little shell-thingies on his arms (observe when he uses Fire Storm or how he stands when he has Void Ice up). Dyaus would be a straigher example, because he has wings with tiny hands on the end of them.
- Take-Minakata
- Stardew Valley: A non-hostile Shadow Person named Krobus runs a Secret Shop in the sewers. Unlike the rest of his species, he appears to have no arms. It's unknown if this is a birth defect, or if it's just normal for members of his species to sometimes be born without arms.
- Super Mario Bros.:
- The Goombas — and by extension the Galoombas, Goombrats and all other related subspecies — resemble mushrooms that walk on two stubby legs but lack arms.
- Bob-ombs are living Cartoon Bombs who waddle around on a short pair of legs, which are their only limbs. In their first appearance in Super Mario Bros. 2, Bob-ombs do have arms, but lose them by Super Mario Bros. 3 (with rare exceptions, such as in the credits of Paper Mario).
- Super Mario Sunshine: The Cataquacks are large duck-like creatures with no arms or wings, but make up for it with their large bills that they use to fling Mario into the air.
- Super Mario Odyssey has Robobrood, a boss example. Because of how tall it is, Mario has to weaken at least one of the legs so he can reach the weak points, all located in the main body. As it has no arms, it shoots its projectiles (bombs, enemies and energy discs) from its mouth-like cannon; its only other attack is running towards Mario to hurt him.
- Tattletail is a parody of Furby with a cat-like face instead of a beak and feet like a hominid instead of a bird.
- Undertale: The Monster Kid resembles a bipedal lizard with no arms, and wears a sweater that's essentially just a tube of fabric. They tend to trip a lot as a result.
- In Unreal, Na Pali's fauna includes a few two-limbed critters, including a rabbit-like species, tiny raptor-like creatures (appearing in Expansion Pack Return to Na Pali) and lumbering creatures that are used by (four-armed) Nali people as livestock.
- Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: The first Tzimisce creations that the player comes across are heads with arms coming out of where the ears should be.
- In Warframe, the Lumbering Fragments are hostile creatures consisting entirely of a pair of legs. They can combine with other Murmur fragments to form a large, many-armed entity known as the Fragmented.
Web Animation
- Homestar Runner: The title character, along with Marzipan, the King of Town, Homsar and a gaggle of minor characters all have legs but no arms. This doesn't stop any of them from holding things or typing on keyboards; whether they appear to have invisible arms or telekinesis varies. Marzipan and the King of Town don't even have visible legs; it's unclear whether their legs are hidden by their clothes, or if they outright lack them.
- Kiwi!: The eponymous kiwi wants to fly, but doesn't have functional wings; its "wings" are tiny barely-visible nubs. As such, the kiwi tries to simulate flight instead.
- The Land of Boggs: About half the characters have two legs and no arms, while the other half have two arms and no legs. The armless characters usually use their legs for anything that requires hands.
- RWBY: Creeps look like they run on two massive legs, upon which they run quite fast. They have a tail and appear to have no arms or wings. However, the 'legs' are actually their arms; it's therefore legs that they lack.
- First popularized by BFDI, many Object Shows, such as Brawl of the Objects, Inanimate Insanity, and Object Overload to name a few, will feature characters with no arms. Over time, variants emerged like inversions, where one has arms but no legs, and those who have no limbs at all. As such, these objects use their feet as hands but are still hindered by their condition (Except for the ones exhibiting telekinesis depending on the show). There used to be a stereotype associated with armless objects being useless (From other objects' perspective) and lacking in brains.
Webcomics
- Gunnerkrigg Court: Doctor Disaster's simulation features the Enigmarons who somehow made a death ray and tied people up without any arms.
- Kid Radd: In an homage/parody of the Goomba, Bogeys are limbless.
- The Mansion of E: Gobules are armless balls with legs.
- Schlock Mercenary: "Legs" has a pair of long legs ending in large feet and a tiny set of vestigial wings for upper limbs. She gets by using a combination of her feet, long prehensile tongue, and Shoulder Cannons.
- Wonderlab: The Road Home would resemble a normal girl, if not for its lack of arms.
Web Original
- Brackenwood: Prowlies have only one set of limbs, which serve as both their arms and legs; they also use their prehensile tails when climbing.
- Petscop: The Guardian, Marvin, and Tiara are all armless. They even share the same armless torso sprite. At one point it's mentioned that the Guardian doesn't know how to open doors, possibly due to this.
- raocow uses as his avatar Demo, who is a blue-haired armless alien demon cyclops lady. Demo is also the protagonist in A Super Mario Thing.
- Sagan 4: Several examples.
- Alpha timeline:
- Capis lost their hind legs sometime during their evolution and walk on their forelegs.
- Saucebacks never had arms in the first place.
- Tasertongues and their closest relatives are bipedal and lack arms, instead manipulating objects with their long prehensile tongues.
- In the beta timeline, the "neosaucebacks", similar to the alpha timeline species they were named after, are also armless bipeds which never had arms in the first place.
- Alpha timeline:
- Serina: The water snuffle is an aquatic platypus-like descendant of the canary that entirely lost its wings to become a more streamlined swimmer. Its descendants, the softbill birds, never redevelop forelimbs but later evolve prehensile facial tentacles from their soft fleshy snouts, giving rise to the club-wielding bludgebird, the squid-headed squork, and the predatory grapplers, as well as boras and terries, groups of tentacle-faced flightless birds that are arboreal and terrestrial, respectively.
- Snaiad has the Titaniformes and the Monoanticheirans, two clades of Snaiadi vertebrate-analogues that lost their forelimbs entirely. Subverted with the Tromobrachids, who initially appear to be this trope, but their "jaws" actually are their arms, playing a role in chewing food and funnelling it into their chest-located oral cavity.
Western Animation
- The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin: Tweeg's Evil Minions are the red, armless, bipedal Bounders.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: The birdlike creature seen among the show's nonspecific background monsters doesn't possess front limbs, instead only having a pair of long legs.
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In "A Sunny Day in the Void", Gascon and Whack encounter a flock of slender, ostrich-like alien birds that only possess a single pair of long running legs.
- Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea: Inverted by the Arkadians, who have no legs and a rounded bottom.
- Steven Universe: The "Dirty Tongue Flapper" is a globular creature with a pair of taloned legs and no other limbs.
- Weebles: Inverted by the inhabitants of Weebleville, who have no legs and a rounded bottom.
Other
- Fuzzy only has feet. Acro conversely only has hands.
- Some types of dragons are represented as having just two legs. Although wyverns are more typically armless bipeds with wings.
- The 2007 meme "Retarded Running Horse", featuring a photoshopped two-legged horse running to the gibberish lyrics of El Chombo's "Chaccaron Maccaron". Naturally, this spawned numerous copycats with other animals, including a two-legged elephant (that runs with its trunk, no less), a two-legged giraffe, a two-legged sheep, a two-legged polar bear and even a "Retarded Running Ostrich", which is supposed to have only two legs anyway, of course.
Real Life
- The moas are large, extinct ostrich-like birds from New Zealand that completely lacked wings. Other flightless birds had their wings reduced to a few bones, but moas lost even the joints to which the wings were attached.
- The modern-day kiwi has two very short stubs located where its wings once were, and are covered up by its thick, feathered body. Interestingly, kiwis also have a tiny hooked claw at the end of each wing.
- Snakes probably lost their front limbs before their hindlimbs- even today, you'll still find boas with vestigial pelvic girdles and clawed 'spurs' where their hind limbs used to be. Although they never stood upright, so that probably doesn't count.
- There are a couple of lizard species that have lost one pair of limbs, although it's the front pair they retain and use for burrowing rather than to walk.
- Abelisaurs such as Carnotaurus were on the process of becoming this: their arms retained a single spike-like claw, with the remaining 3 fingers being mere stumps, and their forearms had shrunk in length to the point of outright becoming part of their wrist, reducing their arms to backwards-bending stumps that were functionally useless and were getting smaller over time. Tyrannosaurs, however, were NOT going that route: The arms were reduced and had one finger fewer than those of other advanced predatory dinosaurs, but they were also ridiculously strong for arms of that size. Likewise, the feathered alvarezsaurs have very reduced arms with only one finger, but they were actually quite robust.
- Inverted with frogs: when metamorphosing from tadpoles, their legs are the first things they gain upon reaching adulthood. They instead lose their tails.
- Motor proteins, which transport materials along the microtubules inside cells, have a pair of "legs" that they use to grip and "walk" along the tubules' surfaces.
