An Evil Cripple is a villain or generally morally perturbed character who also suffers a debilitating physical condition, often taking the form of paralysis requiring the use of a wheelchair. The Evil Cripple doubles as the Genius Cripple a lot, providing an intellectual threat to compensate for their physical frailty. Alternatively, the Evil Cripple can become a physical threat if they use futuristic enhancements to overcome their disability, such as replacing missing or defective limbs with super-strong Powered Armor or cybernetic parts.

There are a variety of reasons this trope exists.

The first is rooted in eugenics-based ideas linking disability or other physical deformities with a "natural" predisposition towards madness, criminality, vice, etc. The Rule of Symbolism is often at work here, since a "crippled" body can be used to represent a "crippled" soul — and indeed, a disabled villain is usually put in contrast to a morally upright and physically "perfect" hero. Whether consciously on the part of the writer or not, this can reinforce cultural ideas of disability making a person inherently inferior or negative, much in the same way the Sissy Villain or Depraved Homosexual associate sexual and gender nonconformity with evil, and is on its way to being a Discredited Trope.

In some stories, especially those featuring superheroes, the contrast between a hero with super strength and a villain who is physically handicapped and instead relies on his brainpower plays on the archetype of brain vs. brawn. It also provides a buffer against the standard "solution" of punching the bad guy out since the hero would look pretty low hitting a cripple compared to an able-bodied villain. These stories also tend to feature a Freudian Excuse in the villain's background—either trauma from an accident, or, if they were born disabled, envy of the able-bodied, that is the cause of their hatred for the world.

Many villainous pirates have Hook Hands, Seadog Peg Legs, and Eyepatches of Power, though this may simply be to reinforce their badassery, a case of Handicapped Badass rather than Evil Cripple as these things are rarely shown to handicap them much. These attributes seem to be cases of Follow the Leader; the Seadog Peg Leg originated with Long John Silver of Treasure Island and the Hook Hand with Captain Hook of Peter Pan, and later writers just based their pirates on these guys.

A common subversion of this trope is when the character is revealed to not actually be crippled, leading to a Throwing Off the Disability scene, but was exploiting that image to maintain a cover or give the illusion of helplessness. Given that, some of these examples contain spoilers.

This trope may overlap with Handicapped Badass in the case of particularly powerful crippled baddies, and with Dark Lord on Life Support in particularly extreme examples. See Mental Handicap, Moral Deficiency, Insane Equals Violent, and Ax-Crazy for villains with mental, as opposed to physical, impairments. See also Cybernetics Eat Your Soul; Depraved Dwarf; Eunuchs Are Evil; Hook Hand; Red Right Hand; Good Prosthetic, Evil Prosthetic; Good Scars, Evil Scars; Disability as an Excuse for Jerkassery; Four Eyes, Zero Soul; Ailment-Induced Cruelty. Compare Karmic Disability, in which someone is disabled, usually physically, as punishment for evil.

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