Prickly Porcupine

Porcupines show up in nearly every form of media. It seems that porcupines tend to fall under two distinct personality types: They're either A) the Grumpy Bear or The Eeyore, pessimistic and anti-social, or B) The Woobie, shy and lonely because no one wants to go near them.

Many works of media (particularly in Video Games) portray porcupines as being able to shoot their quills as projectiles, even though this isn't true in Real Life (North American porcupines swing their tails at predators to dislodge the quills in their faces, while Old World porcupines tend to charge backwards at their enemies instead).

Compare: Literal Ass-Kicking, Rump Roast

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Examples of Prickly Porcupine include:

Comic Books

• In The Amazing Transformations of Jimmy Olsen, Jimmy Olsen finds himself as the "Human Porcupine" after a mischievous yet angry Miss. Gzptlsnz cast a spell on him for dumping her marriage proposal. The reporter can even shoot his quills.

Film

• In Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie, the van in which Bob the Tomato and others were riding gets its tires punctured by the quills shot at them by an angry mother porcupine that was crossing the road with her babies.
• Over the Hedge featured Lou and Penny, a porcupine couple with three children named Bucky, Quillo and Spike.
• Chance gets nailed in the face by a porcupine in Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey when he attempted to befriend it (as well as mistaking it for a squirrel with a bad hair day).
• A porcupine named Buddy shows up in Open Season.
• Morcupine Porcupine on Chicken Little. Yo.
• The porcupine from The Fox and the Hound (film).
• Mr. Pricklepants from |Toy Story 3, who is a stiff-lipped stuffed hedgehog toy who constantly quotes Shakespeare.

Newspaper Comics

• Porky Pine from Pogo is the grumpy variety.

Literature

• One Darwin Awards urban legend mentions a man admitted to the hospital with a bunch of porcupine quills stuck in his crotch...
• In The Second Jungle Book, Ikki the porcupine has a brief cameo where he's a Deadpan Snarker - i.e., prickly. Pamela Jekel takes this a bit farther in her posthumous sequel The Third Jungle Book, where there's a story about Mowgli and Ikki playing pranks on each other, until Mowgli gets into real trouble and Ikki is the only one who can fetch help.
• A Porcupine Named Fluffy It's about a porcupine named Fluffy who befriends a rhinoceros named Hippo.

Live-Action TV

• From The Electric Company, Tom Lehrer's song "L-Y":

As you walk along the street
A porcupine you meet
How do you shake his hand when he says hi?
Carefully ... carefully .... careful ... L-Y

Music

• The Hedgehog Song.

Video Games

• Not a porcupine per se, but Sonic the Hedgehog would possibly qualify.
• In Urban Rivals, one of the factions is made of zoo animals turned antropomorphic by a freak accident. One of them is a porcupine who uses his quills as blowgun darts and picks himself bald over the course of levelling up.
• The Corehogs in The World Ends With You.
• Land forme Shaymin from Pokémon. Cyndaquil also has some hedgehog/echidna traits.

Web Comics

• Zelda in Nip and Tuck, who finds it highly inconvenient.

Western Animation

• The aptly named Porcupine from My Friends Tigger and Pooh.
• Ben 10 Alien Force has two examples in the form of Kevin's backstabbing little friend Argit, and one of the plumber boys, Manny and Helen's brother.
• Flaky in Happy Tree Friends is very shy.
• One of the animals Gus the raincloud made in Partly Cloudy is a porcupine.