Rodents in fiction tend to have specialized and clichéd roles. The mouse steals food (especially cheese) while avoiding cats and other predators, the rat is like a food-stealing mouse that also spreads disease and is much more unpleasant, the beaver busily builds dams, the squirrel acts nutty (pun not intended), and the hamster and guinea pig act as adorable house pets. One rodent, the lemming, has a special role: killing themselves.
Fictional lemmings tend to be based almost exclusively around urban legends according to which food shortages lead the rodents to engage in millions-strong mass migrations, where the masses of rodents wander purposefully but aimlessly and inevitably perish when they run headlong into great danger — including, most iconically, seaside cliffs. Some works omit the reasons behind the migration entirely, depicting lemmings as simply possessing innate urges to throw themselves off high places. These depictions often also incorporate An Aesop about herd mentality, the idea being that the lemmings mindlessly do what the rest of the swarm is doing, even when this will lead them to throw themselves to their deaths.
A good deal of Artistic License – Biology is at play here: while it is true that real life lemmings jump off some cliffs, it's done for the purpose of migration. It is not the mass suicide that the media claims it to be; the Square-Cube Law is on their side so terminal velocity usually won't harm them. Falls also happen by accident when a thick crowd runs alongside a cliff. Also, lemmings are actually quite good swimmers and thus fearlessly enter large bodies of water, even the sea, in search of new territory, with only the occasional unlucky lemming actually drowning if they get caught in a strong current or rough water. That doesn't stop writers from milking the legend for all it's worth, if for no other reason than that it's amusing. This originally entered the pop-culture consciousness due to the 1958 Disney documentary White Wilderness, during the filming of which filmmakers purposely drove lemmings off cliffs to record footage of their demise, though records of the belief that they commit mass suicide date back to at least the 19th Century.
Subtrope to Somewhere, a Mammalogist Is Crying. Will double as Suicide as Comedy if the trope is played for dark laughs. Not to be confused with Gullible Lemmings — an entirely different trope about naivety — though it is the Trope Namer for it. And for another trope about an animal that mindlessly follows the herd, see Mindless Sheep.
Examples:
- The follow-up ad to Apple’s “1984” ad portrayed people as lemmings waddling off a cliff unless they looked into the new Macintosh Office.
- Cadbury's Caramel Bunny: One advertisement featured a lemming that was rather enthusiastically about to run off a cliff... until the bunny gets his attention.
- Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In Carl Barks' "The Lemming With the Locket" (which was adapted in the DuckTales (1987) episode "Scrooge's Pet"), the boys get Uncle Scrooge a pet lemming, who runs off to Norway to migrate, carrying Scrooge's locket (which has the new combination to the money bin) with him.
- National Lampoon produced a stage show, Lemmings, which combined this trope with a spoof of the Woodstock Festival. Instead of gathering for "Peace, Love, and Music", in Lemmings, they gathered to "off themselves". Performers included John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Christopher Guest, Dan Aykroyd, and Gilda Radner. They parodied the Woodstock stage announcements. The songs parodied bands and singers such as Joe Cocker, Bob Dylan, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. They also released a soundtrack album.
- The Beano: Calamity James' pet lemming, Alexander Lemming, likes to find high surfaces to plummet from.
- The Far Side:
- Parodied in one strip featuring one lemming among a horde running into the sea wearing a life preserver.
- In another strip, one lemming shouts "Cannonball!" as he jumps off the cliff.
- In yet another strip, a lemming family is on a road trip. The father threatens to drive over the nearest cliff if the kids do not behave themselves.
- Garfield: In a September 1983 series of strips, Garfield meets a mouse with a lemming mother. He describes lemmings as "gerbils with suicidal tendencies", and inherited traits such as compulsively jumping off high places and trying to drown himself.
- Pearls Before Swine will sometimes have a joke about a group of lemmings about to throw themselves off a cliff. Lampshaded in one strip where one of the lemmings finds out this trope is actually a myth.
- Joscha Sauer (Nicht Lustig) just loves this trope. A selection:
- enviroment-concious lemmings sit on a compost pile and wait to decompose
- a lemming hitchhiker holds a sign “Over Me”
- two lemming duelists keep insisting that the other shoot first
- lemmings in banana costumes enter a monkey cage
- ghost lemmings walk over a cliff and keep walking through the air
- a lemming walks away from the cliff arguing that he’s already dead inside
- Chicken Little (2005): Parodied; there is a news report on the panic caused by the title character focusing on a group of lemmings who, unable to find a cliff, start jumping off park benches.
- The Little Polar Bear: Downplayed. A group of four lemming characters are very depressed and prone to leaping off ledges, but being a kids' movie, their impacts are always cushioned, and rather than actively trying to kill themselves, they mainly aim to bury their heads in the snow so they don't have to interact with or look at the world.
- The Disney documentary White Wilderness is notorious for codifying this trope. The documentary contains a scene that supposedly depicts a mass lemming migration that ends with the lemmings jumping to their deaths into the Arctic Ocean. Though the film flatly says that the cliff-jumping is probably less suicide and more migration, it is notorious nowadays for the fact that lemmings were pushed off the cliffs for the sake of showing them being killed on-camera during its production, and for importing a truck-load of lemmings that weren't native to the filming location for the purpose of killing them.
- The Book of Bunny Suicides: One strip has a bunny riding with a group of lemmings on a skateboard as they jump off a cliff.
- Deathstalker: Mentioned and Played for Laughs in one of the books, in which Oz (Owen's quirky AI sidekick) notes that "I've known depressed lemmings on window ledges with better survival instincts than you."
- Discworld: The Discworld has a relative of the lemming called the vermine. Due to being descended from those rodents who were a bit more careful about leaping off cliffs than their cousins, they now only leap from very small pebbles, abseil down cliffs, and build small rafts to cross rivers. When they do reach the seaside, they just kind of sit around awkwardly taking in the view before going home early to beat the traffic.
- Trollogy: Parodied. A lemming feels duty-bound to commit suicide but keeps getting saved from his various attempts by the main character.
- The Most Extreme: In the "Animal Myths" episode, the lemmings are the number 1 myth and the episode explains what the people behind White Wilderness (though the episode does not say it by name) did to the lemmings. They filmed the migration sequence by placing lemmings on a snow-covered turntable. Then to add a little drama, they went outside and herded the lemmings towards a cliff by a river.
- Red Dwarf:
- In "Stasis Leak", Rimmer, wallowing in misery at how everyone and everything always goes wrong for him in the end, recalls having a pet lemming as a boy. He states that he built the lemming a little wall for him to hurl himself off. Eventually the Lemming bit Rimmer on the finger and wouldn't let go, causing him to have to smash its brain out against his bedroom wall, thus completely ruining his helicopter wallpaper. The little git!
- The idea is used metaphorically in "The Last Day", when the Epic Fail of Rimmer's day working for the Samaritans made the papers as "Lemming Sunday" as five people he had spoken to over the phone decided to jump off buildings. One of them was a wrong number; he only wanted the Cricket scores.
- Deadly Rooms of Death: The Second Sky features Lemmings as enemies in the level Lemming Beach, some of which have teeth as sharp as Beethro's sword. While they will stop if they reach the boundaries of a pit or some water, should those Lemmings go towards a bomb or powder keg, the results are generally not in their favor.
- Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist: Freddy saves the town from a horde of stampeding snails by diverting them into a chasm. The narration notes that they "look just like little lemmings, marching over that cliff" and the cutscene of snails falling to their doom is a pretty obvious Shout-Out to Lemmings.
- The Jackbox Party Pack: In Quiplash 2, one of the possible comics for a Comic-Lash round involves a group of lemmings parading off a cliff.
- Lemmings involves guiding a group of lemmings, here depicted as vaguely-anthropomorphic, green-haired, blue-robed humanoids who are not so much suicidal as they are incredibly careless. Unless you instruct them otherwise, the lemmings will blindly march forward, turning around if they bump into a wall or a Blocker lemming, and keep going until they reach the exit for the stage, fall off a too-tall cliff, drown in water, or blunder into a booby trap.
- Viva Piñata: While regular Lemmonings show no suicidal tendencies in the game like they do in the cartoon, Sour Lemmonings will self-destruct when angered, leaving behind sour candy and weed seeds (doubling as a reference to the urban myth about lemmings spontaneously exploding).
- The Order of the Stick: One of the voting incentive comics
shows a "Dire Lemming", which instead of attacking Roy runs past him and off a cliff.
- One of the Fakemon introduced in The Kaskade Region series is Folleming, an Electric/Psychic type rodent that travels in groups, led by a "guru" Folleming (which possesses a long cult-leader-esque beard) that mind-controls lesser Folleming to become its followers.
- The Ace Ventura: Pet Detective Animated Adaptation: One episode involved an attempt to murder someone by poisoning them with lemming hormones, so they would throw themselves off a seaside cliff.
- BoJack Horseman: In "BoJack the Feminist", Princess Carolyn remarks to Vance Waggoner that producers blindly follow each other like lemmings. A nearby lemming family gets offended, and remarks that they're going to go find the nearest cliff.
- George of the Jungle (2007): In one episode, George saves a group of lemmings jumping off a cliff. He is bored with it because they keep doing it every year.
- The Bakshi Mighty Mouse episode "Still Oily After All These Years" features an Amish farmer asking Mighty Mouse's help in corralling his flock of runaway lemmings. The farmer is working against nature, says Mighty Mouse, and the farmer concedes.
- The Molly of Denali episode "Bye Bye Birdie" plays with this trope. The episode has puffins jumping off a cliff much like lemmings would. Molly and Trini are worried about them, and though it's never said outright, it's clear that they think the puffins are killing themselves (or at least severely injuring themselves). Turns out the puffins are simply using the cliff to launch themselves for their first flight.
- Robot Chicken: Parodied in a sketch that spoofs nature documentaries, where lemmings gain the title of "Nature's Retards" for not only the typical behavior, but also running right into the path of moving cars, jumping into a blender, and not using condoms.
- The Story of Santa Claus has the two elf characters trying to decide what should pull the sleigh. Aurora can't remember the problem with lemmings until they start moving, where they promptly hurtle themselves over the cliff.
Aurora: I think I remember the bad thing about lemmingssssss... *the sleigh goes over a cliff* They like to run off cliffs.
- Viva Piñata: Lemmonings get a thrill over running off cliffs as shown in one episode of the cartoon, though they don't really know why. They don't seem to show this trait in the game- because instead, the Sour Lemmoning explodes itself!
