He's such a windbag.
Due to how devastating and terrifying tornadoes and other wind-based natural disasters can be in real life, it can be easy to anthropomorphize them, imparting malicious intent to them. Some works of fiction do just that and have whirlwinds that are conscious and capable of directing their own movement.
Unlike real tornadoes, these characters will tend to only suck up or blow away things they directly touch. If they show up as an enemy in a video game, they're likely to use wind-based attacks. Some of these characters may have a body or body parts blowing around inside the whirlwind, but they can still count as long as the whirlwind is a primary part of their body. When humanoid, they tend to have Fog Feet.
Due to the aforementioned associations of whirlwinds with destruction, living tornadoes in fiction are likely to be antagonistic and chaotic. Some may even be portrayed as unstoppable if they're large enough.
Sub-Trope of Elemental Embodiment. Compare Cumulonemesis, Winds Are Ghosts, Hostile Weather, The Stormbringer, and The Old North Wind. Not to be confused with Tornado Move; that trope describes characters who merely temporarily create a tornado for an attack, instead of being a living tornado themselves. Can overlap with Elemental Giant if the whirlwind is of sufficient enough size.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- One Doraemon chapter has Nobita create a small living whirlwind with one of Doraemon's gadgets. Said whirlwind basically becomes his pet for the day, doing things like playing fetch or driving away the local bullies from him. At the end, though, when the news of an incoming storm appears on TV, said whirlwind flies away to clash with it... at the cost of its life.
- In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: JoJolion, Dainenjiyama's Stand, Doobie Wah, takes the form of a miniature reactive twister that's able to track down his target and tears them apart. Once it has been set on a target, its form grows by using the breathing of the ones it's currently attacking.
Comic Books
- The DCU:
- Ulthoon is a sentient wind elemental that would briefly tussle with Adam Strange and the Justice League of America before it separated itself into two halves. One of those halves, Tornado Champion, would merge with one of villain T.O. Morrow's machines, becoming the second heroic Red Tornado.
- As part of the Entity's plan in Brightest Day, it revives Hawkwoman and Hawkman, then kills them again in order to turn them into Wind/Air elementals for the last part of its plan. In issues #23-24, the couple reappear as living whirlwinds
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Film — Animated
- Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation: Early into the film, Dark Heart transforms into a tornado in an attempt to sink the ship carrying the then infant Care Bears and Cousins.
- Frozen II: Gale the air spirit is represented as a benign (but sentient) wind. When agitated, however, she can transform into a powerful tornado.
- Hercules: Stratos, one of the Titans, is a giant black tornado with two smaller tornadoes for arms, and glowing red eyes and mouth. Hercules uses him to suck up the other Titans and throw them all into outer space.
Literature
- In the Beka Cooper series, "dust spinners" are air spirits that resemble small whirlwinds and typically form on street corners. They collect sounds from the winds and Beka has the unique power of being able to communicate with them and hear fragments of the conversations they capture. The spinners are enormously grateful for her, as they exist in a grim medieval world where they regularly overhear murder and torture, and Beka can remove these emotionally disturbing sounds from them. Spinners grow stronger, larger, and more intelligent with age, with the oldest spinner Beka encounters even being capable of speech.
- In The Citadel of Chaos, one of the first encounters you can come across in the Black Citadel's courtyard is a human-sized sentient whirlwind with a woman's face who tries following you around when she sees you. She's invincible if you try attacking her and you will take some damage in the process, but you can also get rid of her with a spell (best option? Use Creature Copy to summon another whirlwind woman, let them bump each other for a while as you make a run for it.)
- In Robert A. Heinlein's 1949 short story "Our Fair City", a newspaper reporter is introduced to a living, intelligent, and playful whirlwind named Kitten. The reporter decides to have Kitten run for mayor of the city to challenge the current corrupt regime. After various shenanigans by the regime (including false arrest and kidnapping), Kitten, the FBI and the power of the press remove the corrupt mayor from office.
- The Seventh Tower: Implied regarding the Old Khamsoul, a Time Abyss oracle in the Spirit World. Its voice can only be heard from a pillar within a vast, unending tornado, and Tal wonders whether it is the tornado.
- Spellsinger: One of the Wacky Wayside Tribes that the protagonists encounter in Son of Spellsinger is a group of sentient whirlwinds that like collecting living things and subsequently try to collect the protagonists. The protagonists respond by summoning a sentient tornado that attacks the whirlwinds... and then turns on the heroes once the whirlwinds are gone.
Live-Action TV
- Charmed (1998): The demon Shax has the ability to transform himself into a small tornado.
- Elmo's World: In the episode about Weather, Elmo meets a sentient tornado, who tells him that it's too dangerous to play outside when he's around, but there are ways he can play in safer kinds of weather.
- Square One TV: The Mathman segments use a sapient tornado called Mr. Glitch as the antagonist, whose role is to destroy the protagonist with Collision Damage whenever he answers the fictional game's math questions incorrectly. And sometimes not even waiting for that.
- The Weather: In "Tornado", there's a recurring sketch about a living tornado, named Tornado, adopted by human parents. Black Comedy hijinks ensue as he trashes his room and gets into trouble at school (during which he tosses his principal from a window and sends him into a coma). In the end, he's released into the wild, with the goal of becoming the biggest, most destructive tornado ever.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons: Air elementals are invariably depicted as vaguely humanoid whirlwinds or tornadoes across all editions. They can also become small funnel clouds that can suck creatures in and fling them away.
- GURPS: Sand Wraiths, described in the Space Bestiary, resemble miniature sandstorms. Their main attack is to blow sand around to skeletonise enemies.
- Magic: The Gathering: Most air elementals tend more toward Cumulonemesis than this, but a few like Tornado Elemental, Cyclone Sire, and Thousand Winds take the form of living cyclones.
- Smash Up: The "Tornados" Faction is made up of malevolent tornadoes, which are capable of teaming up with the other factions.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!:
- "Tornado Dragon" is, despite the name, a WIND-attribute Wyrm, and its card picture shows its body made of literal tornadoes.
- "Destruction Cyclone" is a cyclone shaped like a frilled lizard.
- "Tornado Dragon
Theatre
- EPIC: The Musical: Aeolus the wind god is implied to take the form of a whirlwind. Due to the musical being audio-only, however, it's unclear how literally the description is meant to be interpreted.
Aeolus: Ha ha ha. I am the wind, twisting and turning. I give the fire the fuel to keep burning.
Video Games
- The Battle Cats: The Cyclones, a group of Optional Bosses, are living tornadoes with a single eye. Some of them are composed of more esoteric things than just wind, with Cosmic Cyclone being a nebula storm born from a black hole, and Zyclone being composed of the swirling souls of those defeated by the Battle Cats.
- Battle for Wesnoth: In "Across the Harsh Sands", the second mission of the Under the Burning Suns campaign, if you kill all the Ogres you encounter before the second oasis you get a Dust Devil as a reward — basically, an animated sand twister that uses its own body to attack.
- Crystal Warriors: Cyklo, one of the Monster Allies your army can tame, is a living tornado with eyes and a mouth.
- Donkey Kong Land: Swirlwinds are tornado enemies. They inflict Collision Damage when touched from the side, but jumping on them springs Donkey Kong or Diddy Kong into the air.
- Final Fantasy I: Air Elementals are depicted as living whirlwinds and the GBA/PSP versions even go as far as to color them green. Water Elementals, on the other hand, are a Palette Swap that depict them as waterspouts. The Dawn of Souls release also adds a third variant in the Death Elemental for the Bonus Dungeons.
- Golden Sun (2001): After the Mt. Aleph eruption, the Suhalla Desert became plagued with sand tornadoes that will carry anyone caught in them back to the town of Suhalla or, in the case of the big red one, an uncharted island. Some NPCs suspect that these sandstorms are alive, and these suspicions are correct; disturbing them with water will make them stop spinning and reveal their true form of a giant frilled Tornado Lizard. A much larger sandstorm that pursues Isaac and company contains a bigger Storm Lizard which serves as the dungeon boss, and an even larger, redder sandstorm that you have to go out of your way to reach contains the massive Tempest Lizard Optional Boss.
- Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft: Skarr the Catastrophe is a giant air elemental that takes the form of a living dust tornado. Like the other elementals in the region, he's angered at the Bloodrock Mining Co.'s destructive mining habits ruining the Badlands, and is lashing out at the inhabitants.
- Kid Chameleon has tornadoes with heads as enemies.
- Kingdom Hearts III: Adapting the film Hercules, the Tornado Titan Stratos appears as a major antagonist of the Olympus Coliseum.
- Kirby Air Ride: Caller is an enemy composed of multiple swirling segments within a tornado. As you'd expect, it gives the Tornado ability.
- Magical Starsign: Swurly is a living tornado monster with a ball-shaped central core. It's described in the bestiary as having a chaotic temperament, blowing up at the smallest things — literally. A later Palette Swap of it, the Short-Fuser, is a subverted example; it looks identical, but it merely rides a tornado instead of actually being one.
- Miitopia has living tornadoes in its bizarre bestiary, and like all other enemies of the game, they have stolen Mii facial features on them. There are three variants of them: the Spring Breeze has a Mii nose and can heal the enemies, the "Traveler" Wind which can temporarily blow Miis away from the fight, and the Fire Wind is a fire tornado with Mii eyes which can burn the Miis.
- Minecraft: The Breeze is a monster that looks like a small tornado with a head. It attacks by shooting Wind Charges, which launch the player into the air and trigger nearby traps. The swirling wind around its body also allows it to deflect most incoming projectiles.
- Pajama Sam 2: Thunder and Lightning Aren't so Frightening: As part of the theme of the game, the "Show Within a Show" Pajama Man TV show that Sam is watching at the start features a humanoid-like "Dust Devil" character, of the "Foul Weathermen" villains. Averted with a cartoonish dust devil in one path of the game, with no real consciousness to speak of, yet somehow keeps the Snowflake Inspector hostage on the roof of WorldWide Weather.
- The PC game Richard Scarry's Busytown has an activity called "The Wind" where you play as a tornado.
- Ruphand: An Apothecary's Adventure: The Air and Storm Elementals use different colors of the Wind Spawn art that looks like a brightly-colored tilted tornado.
- Scribblenauts: Elementals are depicted as small, sentient whirlwinds. It's also possible to make any whirlwind living with adjectives.
- Skylanders:
- The final upgrade on Warnado's "Wind Master" path turns his tornadoes into autonomous Wind Elementals that attack enemies on their own.
- Windbag Djinnis are enemies that appear in Stormy Stronghold that take the form of tornadoes and are capable of firing lightning bolts.
- Tornado enemies show up infrequently in the Super Mario Bros. franchise, usually showing up in desert levels and being impossible to defeat.
- Paper Mario 64: Tweesters, whirlwinds with glaring eyes, appear in Dry Dry Desert. When touched, they blow Mario to a new area of the desert.
- Super Mario Galaxy: Bone Twisters, found in the Dusty Dune Galaxy, are tornadoes with googly eyes. When touched, they suck up Mario and send him spinning into the air.
- Tornado Outbreak: Zephyr, the main protagonist of the game takes on the form of a tornado as he wreaks havoc across various environments. A blue, swirling tornado covers the lower half of his body in his humanoid form.
Webcomics
- In Grrl Power, part of the team, while on a visit in Africa, end up dealing with a Super that can turn himself into a tornado made of sand. Eventually Sydney stops him by turning the desert underneath him into glass. And while they don't know his name, a suggested alias is "Darude", presumably because of his song "Sandstorm".
- Unsounded: Typhoon whales are eternal living hurricanes that roam the oceans — and in fact filled the oceans at the end of The Time of Myths. Of all the creatures that the Gods directly created in that era, they're by far the most awesome and inscrutable, and are sometimes worshiped from a safe distance.
Web Originals
- The Archdruid Report: In the post "The Monkeywrench Wars", John Michael Greer posits a thought experiment where a tropical storm starts seeking out patches of warm water to fuel its winds and staying away from wind shear, and how this would make it much more challenging to respond to than a nonconscious storm in the real world. The point of the thought experiment is to demonstrate the differences between responding to systems with different levels of consciousness and agency.
Imagine, though, a tropical storm that started seeking out patches of warm water and moving away from wind shear, so it could prolong its own existence and increase in strength. That's what all living things do, from bacteria to readers of The Archdruid Report. Tropical storms don't, which is a good thing; there would be a lot more cataclysmic hurricanes if they did.
- Dimension 20: In Fantasy High, before he retired from piracy, Bill Seacaster welcomed a tornado into his crewnote . He even paid it a fair wage in gold, which it sucked up as debris to become even more deadly. It still stops by now and then for a social call.
- This Drawception game features an anthropomorphic tornado using a public bathroom.
Western Animation
- Beetlejuice (1989): In one episode, Beetlejuice has to face the Dust Demon that lives under his sofa, which takes the form of one of these.
- Care Bears (1980s): The Nelvana run's Big Bad, No Heart, is a Voluntary Shapeshifter, and in a few episodes, he does assume the form of a tornado, either for fast movement or to try and blow the Care Bears away.
- Centaurworld: Taurnados are tornados given sentient form in Centaurworld by the thousands of souls they contain. The one the main characters meet in "Fragile Things" looks like a black horse made of wind, with a tornado funnel for a head and a Voice of the Legion. When a living creature gets sucked in by a taurnado, its mind and voice will start to merge with it, as Glendale nearly does.
- Classic Disney Shorts: In "The Little Whirlwind", a mischievous little tornado interferes with Mickey's yard work. When he chases it away with a rake, it calls Mama Whirlwind, who proceeds to go on a rampage and destroy Minnie's yard in retaliation.
- Fantaghirò (1999): Darken summons a giant tornado monster called The Black Cloud, which proceeds to devastate the countryside of Dana and Tuan until Fantaghirò figures out how to put a stop to it.
- Perfect Hair Forever: Terry is a living tornado who has an alternate Jerkass personality called Twisty.
- Samurai Jack: One episode features a female wind elemental alongside a fire and earth elemental.
- Tiny Toon Adventures: In "Whirlwind Romance" (part of "What Makes Toons Tick"), Dizzy Devil falls in love with a sentient tornado, having mistaken it for a female Tasmanian devil, since it managed to pull some clothes off a clothesline, making it look like it's wearing a hairbow and skirt.
- Xavier: Renegade Angel: In one episode, Xavier helps one man bring hurricanes to life. Later, the man uses them as his slaves.