"Oh my god, what is that? It's like a fox, but kinda looks like a girl."
— Phoenix SC analyzing a user-created Minecraft recipe, "Dumb Minecraft Crafting Recipes"
A subtrope of Beast Man, a Fox Man is a character with foxlike traits. Typical features are pointy ears, nose, fur, and the all-important bushy tail. Most vulpinoid characters tend to be based off of red foxes — other species tend to be rarer, but the Fennec fox, with its large ears, is probably second.
Their personality tends to be sly, intelligent and cunning, sometimes even foul, and if you encounter one you can bet that they are some sort of trickster or Con Artist. They are depicted in both positive and negative lights, ranging from heroic if tricksy people, to annoying but ultimately harmless, to morally grey characters with Hidden Depths, to simply being villains.
Characters of this variety fall on the Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism as Little Bit Beastly to Beast Man. For varieties that are actual foxes — ranging on the scale from Funny Animal to Nearly Normal Animal — see Fantastic Foxes.
See also Asian Fox Spirit, a page on foxes in East Asian folklore and mythology. A supertrope to Foxy Vixen. For their wolf cousins, see Wolf Man. Foxes are also the most popular fursona type in Furry Fandom.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Digimon:
- In Digimon Tamers, Renamon is a bipedal fox with yellow fur and piercing blue eyes. Her Ultimate/Perfect-level form Taomon has more or less the same design, but is dressed in priestly garb.
- Doumon is a blue Palette Swap of Taomon that appears in Digimon Fusion as a minor illusionist villain. Another one appears in Digimon Ghost Game, having come to the human world to study onmyodo but getting possessed along the way.
- Tamamo-chan’s a Fox!: Tamamo and her sisters are divine fox spirits who assume a glamor that makes them look human so they can live in the human world. Those who can see past the glamor, such as 99.9% of the student body of Tamamo's school and one Sensei-chan, see the sisters as bipedal, humanoid foxes with white fur.
Comic Books
- Alopex from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW) was once a normal arctic fox before she was caught by the Foot Clan and mutated into their first mutant kunoichi. While her Super-Speed made her a deadly foe to the turtles, she eventually defects when she finds out that the Foot Clan killed her family and burned down the forest she once lived in in order to secure her loyalty.
Fan Works
- Teana's Travels: Aspatrians are a race of vulpine sapients, who were under the control of a vicious dictatorship who violently oppressed and objectified women and children (to the point where they literally weren't considered people). The League caught wind of this thanks to an escaped slave, and promptly leapt in and deposed the dictator and his armies. The Aspatrians, now much happier and more stable, were made a "protectorate" of the Tripartate.
- Zero Context: Taking Out the Trash: Aldonza Karate is a Kittenoan, an alien race of anthropomorphic cats and dogs that draw inspiration from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, and is described as a mixed-breed fox caninoid. Word of God clarifies this to mean that she has both red fox and bat-eared fox heritage, giving her the coloration of the former and the ears and teeth of the latter.
Literature
- The Adventures of Fox Tayle: The titular Fox is an Artificial Animal People example, uplifted from a wild fox to become a soldier.
- Amaranthine Saga: Amaranthines are shapeshifters who can change between a "speaking form", which is humanoid with some inhuman and animalistic traits, and a "truest form", which is an unusually large form of whatever animal their clan is aligned with. Fox-clan Amaranthines are thus a subtle version of this in speaking form, appearing as humans with vulpine ears, tails or eyes. Unusually, however, most of the foxes focused on in the series are silver foxes, not the typical reds (although Lady Nona and her sister are red foxes).
- The Book Of Deacon, by Joseph Lallo, has malthropesnote who look like fox-people and are hunted down as vermin by the humanoid races. Practically to extinction on the continent where most of the stories take place.
- The Dark Profit Saga: Most breeds of Gnoll look like canine halflingsnote ; Fennekin are a Demi-gnoll breed with more fox-like features and large ears.
- Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? has the Renards, a rare race from the Far East who are known for having fox-like ears and a tail. They're unique among the races as they're integral to the creation of a Killing Stone, which rips a renard's soul out of their body to allow the holder to use whatever magic that renard could. Ishtar wanted to force Haruhime to create a Killing Stone for her so she could use her magic to overrun the Freya Familia.
- Log Horizon:
- Fox Tails are one of the three Beast Folk races in the MMORPG Elder Tale, resembling humans with fox ears and one or more tails (which they can hide with magic). While they have high magical stats, they're unpopular with players due to a bizarre mechanic which replaces one of their skills with a random one every few levels (with results that can vary from Joke Character to Game-Breaker).
- When Elder Tale somehow fuses with a real fantasy world, the trapped players find that the mix of real and videogame physics allows them to use their characters' abilities in previously impossible ways, nicknamed "Overskills". One Fox Tail player, Nureha, invents an Overskill which takes the race's Kitsune themes up a notch — combining the racial "hide your ears" illusion with the persuasion abilities of her Courtesan subclass in order to create a Glamour effect that can disguise her as other people.
- Medea: The alien Fuxes start life as foxlike, 6 legged, female centaurs that lose a pair of hind limbs each time they reproduce. When the final pair drop off, they are left as bipedal and male.
- In The Quetzal Paradox, dwarves are described as having colorful fur, narrow snouts, pointy ears, and vulpine faces.
- The Red Vixen Adventures: The Foxen are aliens who happen to look like anthropomorphic foxes and have a culture strongly resembling Edwardian England.
- Tour of the Merrimack: In the final book, a planet with is discovered whose primary sapient inhabitants are bipedal, foxlike marsupials at an approximately stone-age level of development.
Live-Action TV
- Grimm:
- Fuchsbau are wesen based on foxes. In accordance with animal stereotypes, they're generally considered to be less than trustworthy, being cunning, mischievous and sly. Rosalee Calvert is part of the main cast, making the Fuchsbau the second most prominent Wesen to appear.
- Vulpesmyrca are bigger black fox wesen, with less human shaped heads, larger fox like ears and much more pronounced fangs. They also possess enhance physical strength and speed, and who commonly work as mercenaries and prey upon Willaharas (rabbit wesen) for their feet.
Tabletop Games
- Chaotic: Kinnianne and her father, Hune Canin, are fox-like Overworlders. While Hune appears to be based on a red fox, Kinnianne appears to be based on a fennec, based on the color of her fur, size of her ears, and the fact she lives in the desert as ambassador to the desert-dwelling Mipedians.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- The sourcebook Oriental Adventures for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition, which later spun off into the Kara-Tur setting, introduces the hengeyokai race; being a composite of the various shapeshifting animals of Japanese mythology, the kitsune-inspired fox hengeyokai is one of the only hengeyokai subraces to appear in all four editions. They lack any unique lore, instead being characterized the same as all other hengeyokai; magical animals that unlock the ability to assume human and half-human half-beast forms after reaching their first century. In their 1st edition appearance, they were restricted to Evil character alignments, but they lost this trait in 3rd edition.
- In 4th edition Raavastas were conniving demons that looked like fox-headed humanoids in their base form, replacing the jackal-like Arcanaloths of previous editions. Arcanaloths returned in 5th edition, some of them still resembling foxes, including Shemeshka the Marauder.
- Fading Suns has Vulpanthropes, a species created as shock troops by a noble with Mad Scientist leanings from human and fox DNA. They proved more prolific than expected and have come to plague isolated human settlements on many planets.
- Pathfinder has a race called kitsune, although despite the name they're only nominally related to traditional kitsune in Japanese mythology. Pathfinder kitsune are based on the 3.5 fox hengeyokai, but Nerfed by removing the animal form (which instead becomes a "disguise" that higher-level kitsune can learn by spending a feat) and making the hybrid form their true form. They also have a reputation as tricksters who use their guile and charms to get what they want, and have a racial rogue archetype based on fitting this stereotype.
Video Games
- Against the Storm: The fifth species unlocked, Foxes specialize in Scouting to complete Glade Events more quickly, and enjoy working in buildings with blightrot cysts. They have the lowest base Resolve of any species, and are the hardest to please, as their preferences generally require more infrastructure that you just might not havenote . They also are massively susceptible to hunger, taking more Resolve penalties from it than any other species, but unlike the others won't suffer from global Hostility resolve penalties.
- Army of Tentacles: Thatcher is a friendly, if shy, student with fox ears and tail.
- Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter: Hortensia has fox ears. Concept art shows she was going to have a tail too, like Lin, but her final design doesn't have one.
- Dragon Quest: The Fencing Fox, Night Fox, and Volpone monsters are agile aristocrats who wield rapiers and are capable of doing magical dances to befuddle opponents, reduce tension, or heal.
- The Raposa from Drawn to Life. Their species name is the Portuguese word for "fox," and they sport big ears, mostly reddish-orange or grey fur, and short, fluffy tails.
- Dungeon Fighter Online: Hunter Von, a Pandemonium resident who is part of the Adventurer's Guild. He resembles a fennec.
- The Elder Scrolls: The Lilmothiit were a vulpine beast race who once inhabited Black Marsh. They were said by some to be related to the feline Khajiit of Elsweyr. The Lilmothiit were a nomadic tribal group, but became extinct long before the games began.
- The vupfox in Exodus Borealis look like anthropomorphic foxes in colonial-era clothes. The art◊ on the developer's website shows them with tails, but the in-game assets originally lacked them.
- EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce: Fei's youkai companion Ri=Ko, a sarcastic and cheeky fox girl with obligatory ears and tail. Fei's rival, Ran Ran, also has a youkai companion En with similar features.
- Fate/EXTRA: Tamamo-no-Mae, who is actually a facet of the sun goddess Amaterasu. She's commonly mistaken for a fox, and while she doesn't mind she points out that foxes did not exist in Japan during that era, and that the animal in her legend was more likely a wild jackal that got confused with the fleeing woman.
- Fire Emblem Fates has Kitsune as a Character Class. They're depicted as Little Bit Beastly characters, with fox ears and a tail, and the ability to turn into an actual fox for their attacks. Their chief, Kaden, is very friendly, and puts a lot of value into repaying kindness, but can become very dangerous when someone is after the fur of himself, or his daughter, Selkie. Kaden even straight up lures Corrin into a trap in Conquest, and he and the generic Kitsune enemies in that chapter can use illusions to avoid combat temporarily.
- Furwind: The Player Character is an anthropomorphic fox who's been tasked with defeating Darhun before he can spread his darkness across the land.
- Genshin Impact: Tighnari is a Forest Ranger descended from the foxlike Valuka Shuna race, with his design based on the fennec fox. His constellation is named Vulpes Zerda, the Fennec Fox and he's renowned for his botanical expertise and low tolerance for foolishness in the forests he patrols.
- Honkai: Star Rail: The Foxians are a race associated with the Xianzhou Alliance and have lifespans ranging from 250-450 years. They're known for their distinctive fox ears and tails, although some foxians are known to have been born without a tail. The race are also known for keen instincts, eloquence, and dexterity, making them suited for piloting starskiffs or managing the Xianzhou Alliance's trade networks. Among the notable Foxians include Tingyun/Fugue, Yukong, Huohuo, Jiaoqiu and Feixiao.
- Jade Empire: The Forest Shadow and her fox-spirit servants look like six-foot-tall anthropomorphic fox women with two tails. They're said to take human form to test humans with tricks.
- Paladins: The Vulpin are humanoid fennec foxes, and smaller than humans. Their hat is medicinal alchemy, although Pip, the playable representative of the species, prefers using potions as weapons.
- Pokémon: Zoroark, Braixen, and Delphox are bipedal Pokémon based on foxes, initially evolving from quadrupedal foxes (Zorua for Zoroark, Fennikin to Braixen then Delphox).
- Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?: Cardomon is one, although she's pretending to be a Cat Girl because her master, Sir Sweet, hates foxes. She appears as a boss in the Demon Sea Aria. She tends to be extremely flirty but will attack at a moment's notice.
- Stellaris: You can bump into randomly-generated fox people, in both regular and mushroom-infested varieties. Their homeworld may or may not be Lylat, depending on rolls.
- The Tenth Line: Rik is a kobold, a humanoid fox whose fur is sought after by hunters.
- Tunic puts players into the metaphorical boots of the Ruin Seeker, an adorable little bipedal fox roaming the mysterious world with a sword and shield in hand. And you might not be the only one, either.
- Vambrace: Cold Soul: Foxiers are a race of fox-eared people who excel at archery. They also have Korean-styled names, as opposed to the more Western-styled names of basically everyone else.
- World of Warcraft: The Battle for Azeroth expansion introduced the vulpera, a group of Gnome-sized Fennec people native to Zandalar. A number of them have also formed a pirate crew known as the Bilge Rats.
Web Animation
- hololive: Fubuki Shirakami is a fox-girl, but unfortunately still has to deal with "cat-girl" commenters due to a very catchy song that claims she's a cat and not a fox.
Webcomics
- Crimson Flag: Reyn, the primary sapient species of the setting, are based on different species of fox. Reds, Grays, Snow, and Fens have been seen. It eventually turned out they are foxes that were uplifted by the "goddess" worshiped by the Reds as a Servant Race.
- Dela the Hooda: "Hood" are a vulpine species from the Science Fantasy dimension of Mhâr where they exist alongside more "traditional" fantasy races like goblins, elves, dwarves, and humans. Dela found herself in Canada after an accident with her halfling boss's experimental jump drive.
- Keychain of Creation: Marena is a Lunar Exalted with the fox totem, and as such her Shapeshifter Default Form has fox ears and tail and her warform is a giant anthropomorphic fox.
- My Impossible Soulmate has Kitsune, a type of demi-human with fox-like ears and a tail. Among the students in Room P-1 is Keegan, a Little Bit Beastly fox boy with a very expressive tail and equally expressive ears.
- Nixvir: Lord Nix is one example of this, being a god with the head and tail of an arctic fox, both physical traits he shares with his sister Lady Aqua.
- Terinu: Vulpines, a fox-like alien species formerly enslaved by the Varn but who allied with humanity to overthrow their galactic domination.
- Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic: Pookas are shapeshifters who can look like what they please. T'Chall seems to prefer looking like a humanoid fox.
Websites
- SCP Foundation: SCP-953 is not a kitsune, but an evil being from Korea called a kumiho. This is compared in-universe to "the difference between a Cherokee Indian and a New Delhi Indian". She takes advantage of the confusion when it suits her.
Web Videos
- Dice, Camera, Action!: Shemeshka the Marauder is an Arcanaloth that appears as a fox-like woman in elaborate evening gowns and spectacles.note
- Empires SMP: Lizzie's Season 2 kingdom of Animalia counts bipedal foxesnote among its citizens. One of them was sent through the Rift, and was turned into a regular Minecraft fox on the Hermitcraft side.
Western Animation
- Alopex from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) was once a normal Chinese girl before she and her brother wandered into a Kraang portal and mutated into a fox and tiger respectively. When they escape, they join a circus before they involve themselves in the Triad. While her brother would go onto become the Foot Clan hitman Tigerclaw, she would blame her brother for their life's downward spiral and seek vengeance on him.
