Always Chaotic Evil / Literature

Always Chaotic Evil in Literature.

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• All The Skills - A Deckbuilding LitRPG: The scourge will attack all life, without exception. They're mostly mindless, but Arthur encounters a mindsinger that ate a Rare mind card, and is both intelligent and malevolent.
• Vampires in Almost Night all delight in causing pain and death. They are capable of playing along with society's rules and refrain from murdering people, but they still unleash their sadistic fury on animals behind closed doors. Possibly also the Eldritch Abomination races seen briefly.
• Subverted and/or deconstructed repeatedly in Animorphs:
  • The Yeerks are built up as a monolithically evil species who enslave other races because they're dicks. However, we later learn that Yeerks without hosts are almost blind and deaf, and can only swim about feebly in small pools; thus, the fact that they possess other species is understandable, if not commendable. Later still, we encounter Yeerks who do not agree with enslaving other species and either enter a voluntary commensal relationship, or live out their lives in Yeerk Pools. Even later, we find out that the Iskoort, which consist of the 'isk' and the 'yoort' (the later of which is basically a yeerk) generate artificial "isk" bodies to live in which have no minds of their own... and have genetically altered the yoorts to only be able to live inside an isk as a nod to playing nice with other sentient species.
  • Taxxons are vicious, cannibalistic monsters who are constantly in the grip of an absolutely irresistible hunger, and who apparently voluntarily submitted themselves to Yeerk domination. However, they are also intelligent, and there is a group of rebels on their home world fighting against the Yeerks. Their vicious nature is a result of evolving on one of the harshest planets in the galaxy. In the end, they all morph into pythons and live out their lives as animals to escape the constant hunger. The reason they volunteered themselves for controllership was also an attempt to free themselves of the hunger. This didn't work.
  • The Howlers were a fascinating subversion. They were created by the God of Evil / Eldritch Abomination Crayak, and had spent at least thousands of years wiping out countless species across the galaxy for no apparent reason. Cassie, however, refused to believe they were Always Chaotic Evil if they were truly sentient. When Jake eventually morphs one and gets to experience its natural instincts, he finds out that their minds are closest to dolphins.^note This book was written before we gained a better understanding of what dolphins are really like. They're childlike and playful, and honestly don't know that other species have sentience until the Animorphs infect their Hive Mind with their own memories. They have no concept of death or suffering, since any Howler who experiences pain or injury is destroyed before its personal memories can enter the Hive Mind. They basically think they're living in a giant game.
  • The Hork-Bajir seem evil (they look like dinosaurs with knives growing all over them), but once we meet free Hork-Bajir, they turn out to be peaceful and good-natured. They didn't even have a concept of war before the Yeerks invaded their planet; when Dak Hamee first gets attacked by a Hork-Bajir-Controller, he cannot understand what's happening, since the thought of another Hork-Bajir purposefully hurting him had never occurred to him before. The blades growing from their bodies are for climbing and harvesting tree bark, their main food source. They were, in fact, genetically engineered by the natives of their homeworld to keep the world's decidedly fragile ecosystem stable by acting as a species of arboretum-keepers.
  • Surprisingly played straight with the Helmacrons, an entire race of Napoleons who run on Insane Troll Logic.
• The "Trolls" in The Apocalypse Troll by David Weber. Though only one is technically featured, the rest are described as just as psychopathic, manipulative, and omnicidal. They're like robots, but with the apparent ability to choose not to kill everything in their path — they just choose to do so, most of the time. Unfortunately, they're not actual robots. They're human brains, often cloned when "fresh" ones are unavailable (and guess how they get the fresh ones) which are then tortured horribly to the point where all they want to do is kill everything in revenge for being made into what they now are. Given the choice, which they do not have, they'd turn on their masters in a heartbeat. Then go back to killing humans because it's "fun". Their creators, nicknamed the Kangas (and guess what they look like), are psychopathically xenophobic because of their religion that states that anything appearing as a non-Kanga is the Devil in another disguise.
• The Arts of Dark and Light plays this completely straight with its orcs, who are essentially a race of sociopaths by human standards. The stereotype is subverted with the goblins, however: while the humans generally consider them, too, to be this, the POV chapters/stories from their side show that they are quite humanlike psychologically, and some are actually even morally upright people.
• Balancing My Support Magic and Summoning Magic in a Different World has the monsters of the new world. Regardless of race, they kill, rape, and destroy, for seemingly no reason, whatsoever, even their own underlings. It is presumed they are artificial constructs because when they die, they disappear in a puff of smoke, leaving loot behind.
• Banished from the Hero's Party: Subverted or zigzagged with demons, since although they still act demonic, they are revealed to actually worship the same god as humans, and thus consider the Demon Lord a heretic for going against them. Indeed it's stated that their war against humans is the demons acting in accordance with the roles given to them by Divine Blessing, exactly the same as humans in the setting do.
• Bazil Broketail: The monsters created by the Masters of Padmasa (imps and trolls being the most common) invariably are completely malicious, with no redeeming features (nor even much personality). It was by design, given their only purpose is to kill and repress the enemies of the Masters.
• The Belgariad:
  • The countries and, thus, races are dramatically stereotyped: the Drasnians are sneaky, while the Arends are all brash to the point of stupidity and definitely belong somewhere in a pseudo-medieval hierarchy. The bad guys are split into a number of groups, but can all be described simply as "bad guys". There are degrees of nuance hinted at in the first series, but this isn't really expanded upon until the sequel.
    • The author handwaves this by having the "races" be the product of selection by the gods and the corresponding influence the god in question had on them - where Aldur's original disciples all ended up looking somewhat like him over the centuries, the same seems to have happened on a societal level with the rest. Chaldan, god of the Arends, values honour and courage over brains (or, at least, common sense). So when he got to select his chosen people, he picked accordingly, their traits were driven into overdrive, and things got predictably out of hand from there. Belar's a brash, irreverent young god with a fondness for the ladies and drinking, so the same happens with the Alorns. Likewise, the Angaraks were bad guys in large part because they were driven to it by a bad god who wasn't pushing them in the sequel, being dead.
    • The author justifies this in the Belgariad by stating that the three "bad guy" countries are controlled by a rigid and invasive religious hierarchy of the cruel god. This means that, for the Belgariad, all the antagonists are products of a chaotic evil society. The most "liberal" of the three is still populated by people who fear the priest caste. The fourth "bad guy" country is governed by a more cosmopolitan and urbane group, and, thus, is less chaotic.
  • In the sequel series, the Malloreon, however, the author takes great pains to humanize at least some of the bad guys, usually by adding them to the protagonist's adventuring party. At that point, the Angarak nations get more distinguished by their individual hats than the fact that they're evil, with the general impression being that they're all human, for better or worse.
  • The Nadraks and Thulls are never really presented as evil. The Nadraks tend to be more closely aligned with the Drasnians than their fellow Angaraks, and the Thulls are straight up victims of Angarak society and will quite happily surrender to any western force that happens by just to get away from the Grolims.
  • Likewise, nuances hinted at in the first series are expanded upon:
    • The Arendish hat of pride and courage leads to endless, needless conflict over arcane concepts of revenge and they never bother to talk to each other, and their society is built on the misery of serfdom, which is barely a step up from slavery - oh, and one of the Duchies wiped out the third, Wacune, entirely.
    • The Tolnedrans are ruthlessly mercenary, having explicitly committed a total and brutal genocide of the Marags for the sake of the rich gold reserves in the country and sold the survivors into slavery to the Murgos, the most 'evil' of the bad guy nations (and that because for the five centuries before the main series it was ruled by a dynasty with hereditary madness, and really ruled from behind the scenes by Ctuchik). Their capital is repeatedly referred to as the most corrupt city in the world, and their politics are noted to be barely any less vicious than the Angarak civil war in the second series.
    • The Nyissans are perpetually drugged and are perpetual opportunists. However, as Sadi, the main Nyissan viewpoint character points out, drugs aren't that different from the Alorn habit of binge-drinking (and it's eventually chalked up to cultural differences), and Nyissa is a tiny, swampy kingdom that's caught between the resident superpowers of the Alorns and the Angaraks, so they have to play both sides against the middle just to survive - and to avoid antagonising the other, again, to survive, because the last time they really enraged the Alorns, the Alorns nearly wiped them out.
    • The negative side of the Alorns is shown in greater detail: the arch-conservatism and sexism that's present even in sympathetic characters is dialled up several notches into xenophobic misogyny (they despise Ce'Nedra simply for being Tolnedran) and a desire to conquer all the other Western Kingdoms, Rape, Pillage, and Burn style, by the Bear-Cult, who are the single most fanatical and violent religious group outside of the Grolims - and they repeatedly try to seize power in the Alorn Kingdoms throughout both series, something that's revealed to have been going on for thousands of years. Similarly, there's a general streak of savagery in the Alorn nature, with witch-burnings being far from unknown, and Arendish style feuds aren't unknown - clan wars are mentioned, and Brand explicitly says that Alorns are almost as impulsively emotional as Arends. Which, like Arends, leaves them vulnerable to being manipulated.
• In The Berenstain Bears cartoon and spin-off Bear Scouts series, the weasels, led by Weasel McGreed are depicted this way, in a contrast to the bears' more nuanced, flawed-but-well-meaning society. Every weasel character encountered by the protagonists is evil, with no exceptions.
• Books of the Raksura: Subverted with the Fell. They're introduced as a Horde of Alien Locusts whose hive rulers are rapacious sociopaths with mind-control powers. However, the third book adds two heroic half-Fell who were raised by Raksura. The fourth then introduces a rogue Fell hive whose ruler learned basic morality from a Raksura Breeding Slave and now leads by consensus rather than mind control. Given free will, even the Mooks turn out to have goals and desires very similar to the Raksura, dreaming of founding a safe, stable colony.
• The Weavers from The Braided Path. This is a group who, after Weaving, lose themselves to a post-Weaving mania that can be satisfied in a variety of ways including painting or singing, but more often than not takes the form of rape, necrophilia, coprophagy, torture, cannibalism and any number of other depravities that they no longer have the conscience to inhibit. This is in addition to their overall goal of transforming the world into a barren, volcanic, mortal aspect of a god of destruction who wants to kill all the other gods and conquer existence.
• Subverted in most of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Several races in his science fiction novels appear to be evil, but on closer inspection, it is usually revealed that they are evil because of some aspect of their culture rather than anything inherent.
  • The vicious nomadic Green Men in his John Carter of Mars series turn out to be violent and sadistic with Lack of Empathy because their culture disdains affection and families and actively punishes parents who try to treat their children lovingly or even find out who their children are (they lay eggs and randomly shuffle them before they hatch). It does make them fit the trope as a result; the unusual part is that they're, nevertheless, not simply antagonistic all the time. The Thark nation often helps the good guys after it comes to be led by an individual who actually knows some personal affection, and because the other Tharks aren't too picky about their causes if it involves fighting under someone badass enough.
  • The cannibal men of U-Gor in the seventh Martian novel turned to cannibalism out of desperation because their President Evil enforced policies that led to starvation.
  • The hideous Coripies from the Pellucidar novels are antisocial and violent because they kill women who have a lot of children to control their population, making women hate their children, and men avoid sexual relations with any woman they like.
  • The Mahar of Pellucidar seem to be evil at first, but turn out to have a sense of justice and honor. Also, the Mahar don't know humans are anything other than animals, since they are deaf and communicate through telepathy, and thus can't hear human speech. (Admittedly, missing human tool-using and technology, even of a Paleolithic culture like most of Pellucidar, seems pretty Too Dumb to Live for a species which is supposed to be at least as smart as humans, probably smarter...)
  • The Wieroo in the Caspak trilogy come a little closer, in that we're never explicitly told why they developed their sadistic religion. But when you discover that your entire race is doomed because you can't produce fertile women... except that you can reproduce with normal humans... who unfortunately consider you hideous monsters, and thus will never willingly sleep with you... well, it's still awful, but unsurprising that something had to give.
• The kif from the Chanur Novels have nothing resembling a conscience or sense of morality. Their entire society operates off of I Fight for the Strongest Side!, and a résumé from a kif would be a rap sheet in any other civilization.
• In The Chronicles of Narnia, certain races, such as Ogres, Hags, and Minotaurs, are always evil. In Prince Caspian, Caspian and his followers immediately reject the idea of recruiting the few surviving Werewolves and Hags for their army, even though they have a common enemy. Some animals are also portrayed as evil, wolves seemingly one of them, until it's mentioned that some are in Aslan's army. Partially averted in the second and third films, in which the Minotaurs have undergone a hoof-face turn.
• Chronicles of the Emerged World: Played with with the Fammin. They were created by the resident Big Bad Aster as his faithful and ruthless soldiers, and are at first presented as a typical evil-by-default, barbaric and sadistic species of orc stand-ins with no culture or interests beyond warring and killing people and who can be massacred with no moral compunctions, but there are some members called the "Wrong Ones" who have feelings and free will, but are forced to obey orders as their names are magical spells. When Nihal realizes this, and that the hordes of fammin she gleefully cut down over the course of the war were most likely innocent beings with no control over their actions... she doesn't take it well. After Aster's death, the Fammin were so used to living under the Tyrant's constant control that they lose all drive to do... anything at first, and so the free people decide to let them live in peace.
• Played straight in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant with the Cavewights (though it is established that they weren't always evil), and subverted with the ur-viles. Despite their name, the latter are less evil than they are alien and inscrutable, and are allied with the Big Bad only to advance their own ends. In the second and third series, they apparently decide that helping the heroes advances their ends better. Unfortunately, as they either can't or won't speak English, we're not entirely sure what those ends are...
• In Codex Alera, this is played straight at first and averted later. The Canim and Icemen are considered mindless killing machine races by the Alerans, and their Relationship with the Marat is only slightly better. Until, of course, they get to know them and begin to understand the differences between their cultures that have led to conflict int he past. The Vord play this straight, being essentially a Horde of Alien Locusts. The Queens are the only actually sapient members of the species, controlling the other members in the process of destroying all other life.
• Justified in Council Wars. The Changed who make up the majority of New Destiny's military forces may be innocent victims, but thanks to the engineering of Mad Scientist Celine Reinshafen, they're evil, raping, pillaging, killing machines to the core. When they aren't just Dumb Muscle, who are also evil.
• Cradle Series:
  • Subverted with the Dreadgod cults. While they are each serving a different God of Evil and are afflicted with a Horror Hunger that drives them to consume everything they can, there are a number of non-evil members among them. Advancing the sacred arts the normal way costs an absurd amount of money (requiring the backing of someone powerful), but taking in the power of a Dreadgod grants a Cannibalism Superpower. Of course, most people who take in such power are immediately driven insane and end up doing nothing but providing food to the Dreadgod, and even those who retain some semblance of sanity tend to consider devouring a village a fine way to pass the time, but it is possible to retain your sanity and morality. You just have to accept the fact that your god is evil, all your leaders are evil and insane, and most right-thinking people will attack you on sight.
  • Northstrider, Akura Fury, and the Beast King are listed as great enemies of dragonkind. They insist that dragons spend half of their time destroying everything they can and the other half toying with humans in lethal games just because they can. Evidence demonstrates that dragons aren't that much worse than anyone else, but considering that the default state on the world is Asskicking Leads to Leadership and Moral Myopia, "slightly worse than average" comes off as pretty bad. The fact that the Dragon King is an avowed anarchist and Social Darwinist who thinks civilization is the root of all ills probably doesn't help.
    Northstrider: Dragons are beings of destruction. They would rather see a field reduced to ash than see someone else have a bite to eat.
• The Crimson Shadow: The entire cyclopian people. We see don't see a single one that's anything but a bloodthirsty brute, though one solitary officer is a bit more refined in his tastes.
• Cthulhu Mythos:
  • "The Shadow Over Innsmouth": Have you ever seen a Deep One that wasn't evil or Cthulhu-allied, even in Mythos works not written by H. P. Lovecraft? (OK, there was one in The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross and another in The Trail of Cthulhu by August Derleth.)
  • Neil Gaiman played with this in his short story A Study in Emerald. However, it does acknowledge the evil-alignment at the end, when it is implied that the detective-hero is not actually Sherlock Holmes, but his antagonist, who is working against the evil he perceives in the Great Old Ones, is. Considering that it's blatantly stated that the Old Ones eat people, and that the peace they brought to the Earth is one of terror and subjugation, it's safe to say he's not playing with it that much.
  • It doesn't help that Lovecraft treats actual human "races" in a very similar manner (read the descriptions of the cultists in "The Call of Cthulhu" for a fine example), besides creating several inbred communities in rural America and the infamous fishmen of Innsmouth, who stand out as an ugly, racist metaphor concerning immigrants. Lovecraft himself was rather open about his xenophobia, even going so far as to tell his Jewish wife that he thought mixed marriages were a bad idea. To be fair, Lovecraft also had no trouble in writing about degenerate, barbaric white people, and did it with far greater frequency than writing against black people. As might be obvious from the above mention, Lovecraft also wasn't antisemitic, which was more than could be said for many racists in his time.
  • His racism aside, the Always Chaotic Evil nature of the beings in the Lovecraft mythos was because their psychology and morality were normal to them, but completely alien to humans.
  • Averted in the case of the Elder Things in At the Mountains of Madness. The narrator even praises their determination:
  "poor Lake, poor Gedney... and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last — what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn — whatever they had been, they were men!"
  • Also averted for the Great Race of the Yith in "The Shadow Out of Time". What at first seems a rather straightforwardly, almost supernaturally evil plan, stealing the bodies of mankind as hosts for a race of time-traveling aliens, actually becomes rather sympathetic over the course of the story. The Yith aren't really aggressive so much as they're desperate to preserve the galactic heritage of accumulated knowledge that they tend, and are using body-switching as a last resort to escape from actual mindlessly evil beings they're losing a war against. They give their inadvertent captive freedom to move around and are even nice enough to explain things to him so that he doesn't freak out... essentially because they're being nice, as if they'd left him an incoherent broken-down wreck it would have concealed their activities completely. They're still planning to displace humanity, they just have a very reasonable attitude and aren't actively malicious about it, and kinda feel for us.
• Roald Dahl did it twice: once with the giants in The BFG (except the titular Big Friendly Giant), and again with the witches in The Witches.
• The Grik in Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen series, although "Always Lawful Evil" would be more accurate, and in the third book, the Alliance meets a member of a different but related species that's not evil. Further, in the fourth book, the Alliance finds some Grik who, possibly as a result of being cut off from their army for several months, are willing to surrender and give peace a chance. Grik are berserkers, more or less; they don't surrender. But these do.
• Discworld has the Elves/Fairies, most of which are Always Chaotic Evil, although Nac Mac Feegle are more Always Chaotic Neutral. And the Auditors, who are Always Lawful Evil (from humanity's point of view) except, eventually, for Myria LeJean. And the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions, which are beyond human morality, and often too stupid to understand it. And Demons, who are evil. Every other race, however, subverts this by being stereotyped as vicious monsters by humans but actually being mostly quite nice.
  • Played with in Unseen Academicals. Mr. Nutt learns that he is not a goblin as he has always believed; he is an orc, a race seen as this trope. He expects everyone to hate him, but the people of Ankh-Morpork are rather blase about it at this point, having dealt with and accepted (to varying degrees) trolls, vampires, zombies, and golems. "Mild interest" is the worst reaction he gets. In fact, it's the authorities (read Vetinari, Margolotta, Ridcully) that think once the truth gets out, both Nutt and the public will go insane from the knowledge, resulting in much violence from both sides. They end up really underestimating just how much weirdness the Ankh-Morpork public is used to (with most of the weirdness originating from the authorities themselves). The most interest Nutt gets is a fashion magazine article (everyone else is far more interested in the newest supermodel to hit town).It also plays with Tolkien's idea that orcs are grotesquely tortured and mutated elves; in this case, yes, except replace "elves" with humans, because nasty as elves are, there's no one for inventive cruelty quite like a human.
  • Overall, Pratchett likes playing with this trope.
    • Elves are ACE because of the parasitic nature of their home universe: and even then, the King of the Elves is Affably Evil at worst and his faction are entirely willing to wait out little things like civilisation, and the Queen of the Elves, Nightshade, actually develops a conscience when exiled to the Disc by her personal Starscream and forced to rely on the mercy of Tiffany Aching - meaning that Lack of Empathy is standard for Elves, but they are capable of it. Likewise, half-elves exist and are morally no different from humans, being prone to sunburn with slightly pointy ears and a tendency to giggle.
    • Orcs were bred to be ACE but have ceased to be so now that the power that created them no longer exists.
    • Demons are evil because it's their job; not all of them seem to enjoy it, or to be evil when they don't have to be.
    • Vampires have a predatory culture and a major corruption-of-power issue, but are still perfectly capable of rubbing along with other species.
    • Noble dragons are brutal and merciless because that's how people imagine they are, but one is still horrified to learn that humans can be that way and claim it's good.
  • In the rare case when a genuinely evil villain appears in Discworld, it's usually either a human psychopath (Teatime, Carcer, Duchess Felmet) who plainly enjoys being one, or a product of human cruelty (Spider the Rat King).
  • The moul in Pratchett's The Carpet People are this but it was his first novel, written and published when he was seventeen who in the Author's Note at the beginning of the rewritten and reissued edition is stated as having very different ideas about what fantasy was all about than he does now. Even so they are the way they are because they've mistaken a natural (sort of; it's implied that The Fray is just a human vacuuming) phenomenon for a God of Destruction and think they're just obeying Its will.
• Demons are presented this way in The Divine Dungeon. Artorian explains at one point that the Abyss, the realm they're native to, is a place completely alien in nature, where what we think of as misery, grief, and pain is considered the baseline normal, and that any being spawned from that insane environment is simply not biologically capable of what humans consider "being good."
  • Played with in a later book, when a high-ranking demon defects to join the good guys after seeing Artorian single-handedly wipe out all his forces. He shows no signs of actually being good, he's simply driven by self-interest and not wanting to be on the losing side of the conflict. Later, as Artorian eventually begins to treat him well for his help, the demon starts to feel good about it, which leaves him nauseated.
• In Doctor Sleep, ghosts are always evil because the people who choose to cling to the mortal world after death are the ones who know that a nasty afterlife awaits them as punishment for their crimes.
• Defied in DragonFire; one of Leetu Bends' contacts is a bisonbeck mole, who has done a Heel–Face Turn.
• The Dresden Files:
  • All three kinds of vampires are regarded as this by the White Council, and the fact that they naturally prey on humans means it's largely accurate. Black Court vampires are straight-up killing machines, Red Court are vicious predators who can at least put on a veneer of humanity to manipulate their victims, but are ultimately dominated by blood-lust. White Court are minor deconstruction — they are essentially composed of a human and demon in symbiosis, and while the demon is an Always Chaotic Evil predator, the human is more or less just a person. Of course, the demon still does have to be fed (although it can be and often is done non-lethally), so White Court vampires who try to resist it are few and far between.
  • Ghouls are vicious, predatory creatures who tend to be the supernatural community's go-to Psycho for Hire. However, on at least one occasion, Harry expresses pity for the way in which they're enslaved by their Horror Hunger.
  • Winter Court Fae aren't necessarily evil (Blue-and-Orange Morality is in full swing with all of The Fair Folk) but they're uniformly harsh, unforgiving, and dangerous, even when they're legitimately trying to be helpful. Of course they're actually the good guys in the grand scheme of things, responsible for defending all existence from the Outsiders. Their harsh nature is explained as a necessity to survive their ongoing war.
  • Fallen Angels are a fairly straight example, though in this case, they Fell because they're evil, not the other way around. And even then, Lash is evidence that their Shadow, a perfect copy of one of the Fallen, can choose to be better. While Harry theorises that this is because she was imprinted/created on his psyche, meaning that she's as malleable as he is, it leaves the question open.
  • The nagloshii are another straight example; they know at all times how best to hurt you, and they do not practice restraint in their use of that knowledge. The only known exception is Half-Human Hybrid Goodman Grey, and even he is an Unscrupulous Hero at best.
  • There are two things known for certain about the Outsiders. One, they all work together for their common goal. And two, that goal is (or at least involves) the destruction of reality itself.
• Averted in The Edge Chronicles, where even the more aggressive and violent races like shrykes and flat-headed goblins have individual members who are shown to be good people or neutral civilians. The goblins in particular later in the series are shown to be largely miserable conscripts suffering under warmongering clan chiefs and the Proud Warrior Race Guys who enforce their rule. The conflict between the Free Glades and the Goblin Nations is ultimately resolved when the remaining goblin Mooks Heel–Face Turn en masse, choosing to turn against the clan chiefs and surrendering. The only sapient species that seems to be inherently evil is the gloamglozer, who is both an Eldritch Abomination and a Single Specimen Species.
• The Elric Saga:
  • Although they don't go 'round cackling about it (much), the Melnibonean culture in Michael Moorcock's Elric series is evil by definition. Torture, slavery, betrayal, cruelty, sadism, and ruthlessness are prized traits in their "civilization." Essentially, the decaying race of Melnibone is a decadent form of evil elves. Elric is by far the best of them, and he is a Grade-A Anti-Hero who betrays his kingdom because even he feels that Melnibone as a whole just needs killin'.
  • One story set before Elric turned on his people does show a couple of Melniboneans who weren't dyed-in-the-wool monsters, but even so weren't what we would call "good" either. Essentially, Melniboneans were a race of sociopaths, all literally born without a conscience. The "nice" ones weren't particularly moral, they just weren't interested in sadism and brutality, in much the same way that a human might be disinterested in sports. Elric himself had a vague understanding of good and evil, but only on an intellectual level after years of study.
• Empire of the Vampire: Vampires within the setting all gradually become soulless, hollow and utterly inhuman husks of their former selves, obsessed with nothing but their own survival and satiating their endless hunger. Invariably, by the time they've existed for a few decades, they become so utterly removed from the human experience they are left dangerously ambivalent at best and actively malevolent at worst.
• Ender's Game: Subverted — the buggers are presented as this until the end of the book.
• Exordia by Seth Dickinson contains a deconstruction. The titular Exordia is a tyrannical, genocidal intergalactic empire ruled by a race of snake aliens called khai who not only are all ontologically evil on such a level that other species immediately know they're evil simply by looking at them, due to a special psychic effect called the cultratic brand, but provably all go to hell when they die. (Their scientists checked.) It has absolutely nothing to do with their choices; the species was marked long before they formed the Exordia, and no amount of goodness removes the brand or the damnation. Ssrin, a khai who has given up everything and repeatedly risked her life to free the galaxy from the Exordia, horrifies humans by her mere presence even when she's actively in the middle of rescuing them and will go to hell right along with her gleefully genocidal kin. Knowing this has utterly warped Exordian culture—while Ssrin is far from the only rebel khai, and there are plenty of non-rebels who nevertheless oppose the empire's worst excesses, the species as a whole has essentially flung up their hands and decided Then Let Me Be Evil. At the end of the book, it's revealed the cultratic brand is actually a signature—somebody did this to them, and the cosmic weapon awakened by the protagonists intends to find out just who.
• Goblins in Goblin Slayer. Make no mistake, the goblins here are possibly the most absolutely vile and depraved depiction of the standard fantasy goblin in modern fiction. Every goblin is without exception a self-obsessed and pitiless savage who would watch every other living thing on the planet die with a smile, including a fellow goblin. Adventurers captured by goblins can expect to be tortured, Eaten Alive and, in the case of female adventurers, raped. There is a conversation brought up from time to time about whether benevolent goblins exist or not, and interestingly enough, the eponymous Goblin Slayer himself — who's a shameless full-blown Sociopathic Hero when it comes to killing goblins — does actually believe that there might be goblins who aren't evil. But the way he sees it, if they do exist, they're more likely to keep to themselves rather than seek out any sort of interaction with humans in the first place, and his viewpoint is only reinforced by the sheer evilness of virtually every goblin the cast ever comes in contact with.
• The Mijaki in Karen Miller's Godspeaker Trilogy that had to be contained with their own land so they wouldn't overrun the world, which they do.
• The original Goldfinger novel is rather infamous for its portrayal of Koreans as this. The Big Bad exclusively employs Korean henchmen, who are thuggish brutes to the man. It's stated that all Koreans enjoy raping white women. The main Korean character, Oddjob, is frequently compared to an ape and can't speak, further dehumanizing him. Interestingly, in the movie, only Goldfinger is racist against Koreans (and even then, it's mostly about how they know nothing about golf). In the book, Bond and the narrator join in, clearly implying the reader should, as well.
• Goosebumps HorrorLand: The HorrorLand monsters, who run a deadly amusement park to kill families for fun. They may act welcoming and friendly at times, but don't let this fool you — it's an act. They'd serve you up for lunch as soon as amuse you. And their idea of "amusing people" is to scare them to death or put them in lethal traps.
• In the fairy tale Gorgo the Ogre, all Black Ogres are evil, twisted and malevolent, with their king being this up to eleven, so much that his own subjects are afraid of him.
• In The Guardians (Meljean Brook), both the nosferatu and the demons are Always Chaotic Evil. Justified in that the demons are Fallen Angels who followed Lucifer in his rebellion against God, and the nosferatu are the angels who did not choose a side and were cast down to Earth.
• Dementors from Harry Potter. This is a race that cares for nothing except sucking up human happiness. The only way to get them on your side is to give them a bunch of human souls to suck on. Even if you can do that, they'll turn on you the second someone else shows up with a better deal. To make it even scarier, they're apparently capable of breeding and immortal. This is an unusually justified example because they are supernatural forms of negative emotions given sapience more or less. This is averted, however, with some races which are normally given this treatment. For example, goblins are Loan Sharks, but they're not considered inherently evil.
• The Alesians of A Harvest of War are humans but they still seem to embrace this trope, being clearly the most vicious Thyll Mooks. They are infamous for their banditry and even some of their allies are disgusted by them.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy:
  • The callous and bureaucratic Vogons are this by way of being Always Lawful Stupid. Douglas Adams came up with a justification for this which was put into the movie; the Vogon homeworld is covered in paddles that fly up and whack you in the face whenever you have an idea.
  • Now, the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax — they were about as evil as one could get in Hitchhiker.
    ... That was just the name of their race. The name of their army was something quite horrific.
• In the InCryptid universe, the telepathic predators known as "cuckoos", aka the Johrlac; the Price family, whose entire deal is peaceful cohabitation with nonhumans, has a shoot-on-sight order for them. Every cuckoo is by human standards an insane sociopath, literally from birth; pregnant cuckoos spend nine months telepathically immersing the fetus in their worldview, and by the time the kid is born, the conditioning is in deep. On top of that, the method of the conditioning's activation both traumatizes and isolates cuckoo children; it lies dormant until they reach puberty, then overwhelms them with cuckoo knowledge and forces them to kill their adoptive families, destroying any shred of positive connection they might've felt and leaving them with only their mind-control powers to rely on. The only known exceptions are a cuckoo with no receptive telepathy and the adoptive daughter she spent a great deal of time deprogramming. Additionally, there's one cuckoo who managed to not kill his sister when his memories awoke, and who's a lot more morally balanced out of his love for her. He may be selfish and ruthless sometimes, but he's not a gleeful sadist and he ends up genuinely heroic. As all cuckoos on Earth are descended from violent criminals who had to be exiled from their original home dimension of Johrlar, and who then broke into Earth from the exile dimension, this is understandable—imagine constructing a human population solely from Jeffrey Dahmers. (And, since Johrlar felt these guys were so repulsive they had to be kicked out of an entire universe, it can be inferred that most cuckoos aren't evil, or at least not this evil.)
• Inheritance Cycle:
  • The Urgals play with the trope. Early on they are treated this way, as apparently they've hated humanity from the get-go (and vice-versa). The Urgals are presented as primitive, monstrous creatures that have no issues with killing and will do anything to get what they want, which seems to be death to all the other races. Later on we find out that one of the key sources of conflict is that they physical strength and combat victories basically determine their entire cultural hierarchy, and their coming of age ritual is to send the young Urgal off into the woods to kill literally anything. However later in the series we learn that Urgals do have an organized society and care for one another in a manner to dissimilar from humans. They were misled by Galbatorix into working for him (he plans to exterminate them eventually) and start helping the Varden after they realize what a screwup the whole arrangement was. After the war with Galbatorix ends, Eragon attempts to help bring peace by setting up an Olympics style tournament to replace the previous system of combat victories dictating prestige. Their leaders have doubts about how well it'll work until Eragon reveals he also plans to modify the spell to allow Urgals (as well as Dwarves) become Dragon Riders.
  • The Ra'zac are this trope played straight. They are predators who primary prey on humans for a large part of their life-cycle, putting the two species automatically at odds. They even have the ability to paralyze humans (an ability which doesn't work on Dwarves or Elves), and all the members species we see are straight-up evil. Of course that's only about four total, as Humans previously launched a highly successful and more or less Guilt-Free Extermination War with the help of the Dragon Riders.
• The Prodryans of Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse attack other species' colonies constantly. An attempt at diplomacy had one of their representatives responding to the question, "There's plenty of space in the galaxy, why do you attack us?" with "Because we are assholes." Prodryans see any non-Prodryans as food or threats and are convinced of their own cultural superiority, being proudly xenophobic. However, they are, also, individuals and people and their own sense of self-preservation is strong. Strong enough to lead to peace in the end, though if it will last is an open question.
• The monsters in the dungeon in Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? seem to qualify for it. They always have red eyes and attack every adventurer they see with full aggressiveness. But they also have in common that they only have the intelligence of animals. The manga later also shows monsters with human intelligence and human shape, and they can obviously also choose the good side.
• Kull: The Serpent People are completely malevolent, with no goal beyond ruling humans.
• Lampshaded in Kyo Kara Maoh!. After it is revealed to the main character that he is really a demon lord and must seek out his ultimate weapon:
  Yuri: ... a holy sword that you need to defeat the last boss.
  Wolfram: A holy sword?
  Yuri: It's not?
  ...
  Gwendal: Of course it's a demon sword!
• Zotl in A.A. Attanasio's The Last Legends of Earth are never shown with particularly noble or redeeming features — although to be fair, when your species literally feeds on the pain of other species, the ability to genuinely empathise with them would be something of a drawback.
• Land of Oz:
  • The good witches were a subversion of witches as Always Chaotic Evil.
  • In The Film of the Book The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch's guards are expected to be the mook version of this trope, but once Dorothy defeats the Witch, the guards thank her and praise her. This doesn't happen in the book, as it was explicitly stated that the Wicked Witch had enslaved the Winkies (the people of Western Oz).
  • The Mangaboos play this straight, as they are violently xenophobic towards anyone who enters their territory, and have no problems with blaming and ordering the executions of children for natural disasters. It is implied that Princess Ozma had them all exterminated afterwards for their cruelty towards Dorothy.
• The Posleen from Legacy of the Aldenata at first seem to be this — they are a voracious Horde of Alien Locusts that loot worlds and eat the inhabitants. However, it is later revealed that they are genetically engineered Super Soldiers created by a long-gone alien race, and are merely following their programming. Individual Posleen even show some level of nobility when they are viewpoint characters. Michael O'Neal, Jr even comments that he does not hate the Posleen, but if he ever runs into their creators, he'll really hate them.
• The Legend of Drizzt plays with this trope. Denizens of the Abyssal planes fit the trope; drow mostly stay true, with one very notable exception (and a small group of Chaotic Good drow that end up dead); orcs are monolithically portrayed as such until Obould shows up and starts civilizin' the lot.
• Trolls in Liavek are said to be this. It's hard to be sure, since only one troll is shown. He fits, but since we never see another one...
• Light and Dark: The Awakening of the Mage Knight: The shadows attack humans and cause destruction without reason or provocation. The ending, though, implies that some are sentient and may have some sort of Evil Plan beyond mindless killing.
• The German SF series Maddrax has the taratzes, who are initially presented in this way, but good taratzes have been seen again and again. With them, it is more like a case of Mostly Chaotic Evil. Hydrites are another interesting case. They are actually a peaceful and benign species, morally much more developed than humans, but when they eat meat, they immediately become vicious and aggressive.
• The Koloss in Mistborn: The Original Trilogy, explained in the third book by appropriately horrific sorts of mutation and mind control. Played with in the form of Kelsier, the Legendary Hero Whose Name The Masses Whisper In The Iron Grip Of The Evil Emperor, who thinks of everyone on the opposing side as Agents Of The Darkest Evil Who Must Be Purged. Most of his crew, while on board with the whole rebellion thing, are deeply unnerved.
• The trope plays straight with the demons in The Mortal Instruments. Most of them do not seem to be very intelligent, and they have nothing else in mind than humans to attack and eat. But some of them also have a human-like intelligence. But these are actually worse because they rape humans to witness warlocks. Clary once said that the demons can only destroy, and descend only about why humans because warlocks are the only thing they can create. However, the warlocks invert this trope. They are just as moral as humans.
• Almost all vampires in Necroscope. The vampires there arise because an alien parasite attacks and converts human bodies. And this parasite causes its host to get evil over time, even if particularly strong-willed people can resist it for a while, but not permanently.
• Subverted and discussed in Nevermoor. Most characters think Wundersmiths are this, but Jupiter points out that there are good and bad people in every group, and the idea of an entire class of hundreds of people all being irredeemably evil is complete nonsense. As proof, our heroine Morrigan is herself a Wundersmith, and despite the prejudice she faces, she's a kind, clever, sensitive young girl. Ezra Squall, the one known as The Wundersmith, really is as bad as people say, though, meaning it's mostly a case of one Chaotic Evil guy making a bad name for everybody.
• With the exception of the protagonist Yuki in Now I'm a Demon Lord! Happily Ever After with Monster Girls in My Dungeon, the general consensus among everyone, including other Demon Lords, is that Demon Lords are haughty, vicious, and vile beings who all commit atrocity purely for their own amusement. Yuki is the very, very rare exception because he's a reincarnated Earth human, and prefers to live quietly, at peace.
• Old Kingdom: The Dead were originally humans, but have been reanimated. They'll suck the Life out of anything even if they aren't allied under a necromancer. Being an animated, twisted sin against the cosmic order will do that to ya. Specifically, the Dead NEED to kill living beings in order to remain active. This is well known among citizens of the Old Kingdom, so anyone who isn't evil chooses to walk past the Ninth Gate.
• The Infected and The Blight in An Outcast in Another World are clear examples. They post a contrast to the much more gray conflicts in the rest of Elatra's history.
• Pact: Demons are beings of destruction, disorder, and entropy, which exist purely to unravel the world around them by their very nature. It is pointed out that while many Others (such as goblins, bogeymen, or even an Incarnation of War) are dangerous, a sufficiently clever Practitioner might be able to call upon them for benevolent reasons and turn their powers toward good or Right. Calling upon a demon at all is considered Wrong, because the very act of doing so destabilizes reality just a little, and many believe there is no possible circumstance in which using a demon's power, however "safely" one does it, that ends up in a net positive for the universe.
• There are probably more examples in Perry Rhodan than anyone would care to mention here, but just in the newest arc (which started only a few weeks ago) there is a race of Big Bads (who can't really die) who have genetically grown really bad mooks at their disposal, in almost unlimited quantities.
• The Epics in The Reckoners Trilogy are regular people who have been gifted with superpowers. A side effect of using those powers is to drive the user paranoid and violent, causing every single one to subjugate and oppress normal people when not fighting each other for dominance.
• In the Redwall series, the species of a character alone will (almost) always tell you if they're good (mice, moles, shrews) or evil (rats, ferrets, stoats). Even one of the evil species who was raised in Redwall turns out bad, because it's apparently Villainous Lineage. Cats seem to be the only species to avoid this, as there are examples of good and evil cats in the series.
  • It does avert the normal Planet of Hats behavior - it’s clear that most vermin live in small groups, and when someone manages to strong-arm enough of them to create an actual warband the end result is usually too beset by dysfunction and infighting to do anything more than run over isolated villages. It’s very rare for a villain to not just raise an army but actually get them all on the same page.
  • Veil in The Outcast of Redwall turns good at the end of the book. However, he dies from it. Bryony's theory is that he turned bad precisely because it was expected of him; he was always accused of theft when something went missing and generally treated like a bomb about to go off by the rest of the Abbey dwellers, so he started living up to their expectations out of spite. Oddly, at the end she decides he was evil all along, even after he'd saved her life.
  • Then there's Blaggut from The Bellmaker, the only vermin who isn't evil from the moment of his entrance. He's a decent guy who gets manipulated by his traditionally-evil captain. Eventually, he strangles the captain to death for having murdered the abbey's Badger Mother, and then leaves Redwall out of guilt. It's established that he pays it regular visits afterward, and the Dibbuns are very fond of him.
  • And Romsca, though she doesn't last very long either.
  • The biggest exception to this rule is at the end of Marlfox, when almost all of the rats under the Marlfoxes' control do a Heel–Face Turn and become peaceful.
  • Brian Jacques, the author of the series, has explained on his website that most of his animal creations are based on the mythological interpretations of the animals — wolves and foxes are sly and clever creatures, badgers are noble and proud, and birds such as sparrows are based on the author's personal observations of sparrows in his back yard (note that the sparrows aren't truly evil-only one of their kings). He also stated a dislike of moral ambiguity in his work: "Goodies are good, and baddies are bad" as he put it.
  • Parodied by Something Awful.^note Note that in the second book, Mossflower, genocide was explicitly rejected by the characters as a valid way to deal with their enemies.
  • On the other side, there were only a few evil examples from the good species — a couple voles, and one shrew.
• Reincarnated as a Sword has not only monsters, which are mindless beasts, at best, unless summoned by a mage and made into familiars, but the entire race, known as the blue-catkin tribe are so odious, it takes over 200 chapters before even one of them is shown to be anything but a Smug Snake Card-Carrying Villain, and then because he was specifically raised opposite to his people's philosophy by a slaver caravan which wanted to present a "good face" to the general public.
• The Riftwar Cycle:
  • The dark elves (a.k.a. moredhel, a.k.a. Brotherhood of the Dark Path) are presented as ruthless, murderous, and unscrupulous. In an interesting twist, they are of the same blood as the eledhel, the High Elves of the series. It's explained that their differences are solely cultural, and that their cruel tendencies are mostly due to the lingering influence of their former dragon rider masters, the destructive Valheru. They're shown to have grey areas, and have Proud Warrior Race Guy and Noble Demon tendencies. Occasionally, a moredhel will leave his or her people and join the eledhel, after which, he or she is considered an eledhel.
  • The Pantathians are snake-people who are described and shown to be alien and destructive in their very natures, with no chance of redemption (even a Pantathian that's hatched from its egg minutes earlier will attack any non-Pantathian on sight). But they're justified by having been created by an evil mistress as minions.
  • The various extradimensional creatures, such as the demons and the Dread, neither of which have ever been shown doing anything besides trying to destroy the world and devour all life. They're too alien to life on our plane to coexist peacefully with it.
  • The Dasati in the Darkwar subseries are introduced as Always Chaotic Evil, to the point that their society hunts down and kills their own pregnant women and children to ensure that only the strongest will survive their attacks, and there are no doctors or healers. However, we quickly learn that there is a secret society known as the White that is working to reform their culture, and they are not irredeemably evil.
  • The one race in the Riftwar-verse that is utterly and irredeemably evil is the Valheru, a.k.a. The Dragon Lords. Beings of nigh-godlike power, who ride dragons throughout the multiverse, looting whatever worlds capture their fancy, and killing and eating all manner of other creatures, including each other. While not sadistic, the Valheru are power-hungry, completely immoral, and so powerful that they cannot be allowed to be free... well, anywhere. However, the novels themselves point out that the Valheru aren't so much evil as they are other — they come from a time when good and evil were meaningless concepts, unlike the modern world after new gods arose, and as such, can't really be allowed free reign anywhere in it because they upset the balance of the universe just by doing what Valheru do (which is to say, whatever they please).
  • This is actually discussed in a scene depicting a meeting between the king and his council of advisors in Rise of a Merchant Prince about the Pantathian threat. Calis, one of hid advisors bluntly points out how how different they are from the other opponents the kingdom has faced after the king objects to the idea of slaughtering their eggs and young:
    "You may somehow think that these creatures are born innocent. That is not the case. Everything we know about them says they are born hating from the moment they hatch from their eggs. They are created to be the way they are. If we killed every adult and child, and took the eggs, and hatched them in this palace, raising those who were born here, they would come to consciousness hating us and seeking to reclaim this 'lost goddess' they so mistakenly believe in. It is their nature to be this way, as it is the nature of a viper to bite and poison. They cannot help it any more than can the viper. You may someday forge a treaty with the Brotherhood of the Dark Path, as you call the moredhel. You may see goblins obeying Kingdom law and visiting our town markets in some dimly imagined future. You may see open borders with Great Kesh and free travel between the two nations. But you will never know a moment's peace in this world so long as a Pantathian draws breath. Because it is in his nature to scheme, kill, and do whatever needs to be done to seize the Lifestone in Sethanon and reclaim the 'lost goddess' Alma Lodaka, the Dragon Lord who created him."
• In Poul Anderson's Sargasso of Lost Starships, the aliens. Driven mad by the long dying of their world — they are vicious and sadistic — fortunately they also rely heavily on their psychic powers and do not, therefore, use tactics.
• Subverted in The Scar. The Grindylows are set up like this, but it is revealed that they are merely zealous defenders of hearth and home. A throwaway line in the next novel, Iron Council, reveals that they have become allies of New Crobuzon against Tesh.
• Second Apocalypse has the "weapon races," which were created by the Consult using Organic Technology and magic to exterminate humans and the Nonmen. All of them have a sexual lust for violence. The scranc are a hardy breed of dog-sized creatures who breed explosively and Zerg Rush relentlessly. Bashrags are three humanoid bodies twisted into a hideous ogre-creature. Skin-spies can imitate and impersonate people to act as spies and assassins. Wracu are essentially dragons.
• In Lila Bowen's The Shadow series, vampires don't change in personality and don't need much blood to quench their thirst — so unless they're already evil, chances are a vampire is mostly harmless. Loups are extremely feral and while they often than not end up bad because of this innate savagery, a Loup can still be a good person if a bit unhinged. But no matter how good you were before, if you are turned into a chubacapra you'll become a sadistically evil goatsucker.
• Trolls and Goblins in Shadow Keep. Averted by the Lawful Neutral Zhiss'ta.
• The title race in The Shadowspawn, except for Adrian, the Defector from Decadence, although since Adrian is that way from having been kidnapped and raised by a human, it's implied there might be hope for others, which is why he kidnaps his children in the second book from his sister, their mother.
• Already a Subverted Trope in the eleventh century epic The Shahnameh, written by Persian poet Ferdowsi and drawing from much older myths. Zal, the son of the Shah's Pehliva (king's champion) goes to Kabul, and is well-received by the royal family, despite the fact that they descend from an evil three-headed dragon who ate brains, learnt magic from the Ahriman, the Zoroastrian devil equivalent and tried to Take Over the World. Zal was warned not to sleep in their home or eat their food, and complies, candidly saying why (he was raised by a bird and has No Social Skills). Deeply humiliated, king Mehrab... does nothing, and keeps treating him well, even innocently recounting the whole thing and praising him to his daughter Rudabeh behind closed doors. The proud Rudabeh starts acting like The Vamp, seduces Zal, and they proclaim their desire to marry against the Shah and his father's advice... and nothing bad happens until the shah and Zal's father march against Mehrab's kingdom. Then, Mehrab finally has enough... and asks his daughter if she would agree to be executed by the Shah, to save their people. At this point, Zal goes to his father and performs a guilt slinging over his abandonment of him as a child, and the girl's mother goes the Shah, convinces him to take a good look at her daughter, and proves him that she isn't a man-eating serpent. Everything ends well.
• Discussed in Shaman Blues with particular sub-type of spirits — apparently vultures have terrible reputation as being unreliable and downright harmful to people they're supposed to protect.
• In the Rigante novels, the Vars mostly come off as murderous assholes bent on conquest with precious little depth to them.
• The Silerian Trilogy: It's believed that people such as Mirabar, with red hair and/or golden eyes, are demons. However this turns out to be a lie spread by the water lords-it's actually a sign they're especially blessed by their goddess.
• The Kibmadine from The Silkie by A.E. van Vogt. Telepathic, shapeshifting literal sexual predators whose chief delight is changing the victims' terror into a longing to be eaten alive.
• Slayers:
  • The Mazoku. Given that they feed on negative emotions, they have a lot more reason to be this way. Also, they are demons, whose stated goal is to end existence. It's just how they were created. Oddly enough, the Dragons, servants of the gods, are oftentimes morally ambiguous. Throw in that Xellos, a Mazoku, can sometimes be friendly and helpful when not actively trying to end existence, and you get a fair amount of moral ambiguity. At one point, Xellos helps save the world because he and the Mazoku want to end it themselves.
  • Played utterly straight with trolls and other monsters (it is based on D&D, after all).
• The Others from A Song of Ice and Fire, from what little we've seen of them, appear to be about nothing more or less than the extermination of all living things. Word of God has hinted that their motivations, when revealed, will be at least somewhat more nuanced than simple For the Evulz.
• In The Spirit Thief, demons and, by extension, demonseeds, are all more than happy to be destructive would-be devourers of the world, with the exception of Nico (who has Josef as her Morality Chain) and Nibel (who's too hard-headed).
• Star Wars:
  • It's perhaps inevitable that the Star Wars Legends and Star Wars Expanded Universe continuities would be chockfull of alien species whose cultures cling closely to the stereotype of Planet of Hats, especially when they play minor or relatively minor roles — and all too often, the particular stereotype is that they're all criminals, barbarians, or savage warriors. The writers do try to justify this by often giving the species a plausible Freudian Excuse: they're ignorant (such as the Noghri, who serve the Empire because they're superstitious primitives and don't know any better), it's part of their culture (the Rodians had to become ruthless bounty hunters to survive the predators on their homeworld), or they're just horribly misguided (the Trandoshans, whose goddess they worship promises to reward them in the afterlife for committing murders and certain other atrocities). A particularly tragic case were the ancient Sith, who suffered from a genetic mutation that predisposed them toward the Dark Side of the Force. But there's no justification for the vile Hutts: while their extreme arrogance can be chalked up to their mythical beliefs (according to their mythology, they are literally gods), nothing could ever excuse their incredible sexual perversity and cruelty, even to the point that the suffering of other creatures is their primary form of entertainment. Not all Hutts are sadistic, and a few are willing to stay out of the Hutt crime syndicates (though mostly out of pragmatism or apathy), but trusting a Hutt is still only something you should ever do if you have some kind of power over them.
  • The Yuuzhan Vong from New Jedi Order are initially introduced as being pure evil down to the last warrior, but it turns out that their being Scary Dogmatic Aliens is a cultural thing due to living under the stranglehold of a Religion of Evil manipulated by their insane leadership for millennia, plus mass Sense Loss Sadness from losing their connection to the Force. There's nothing in the Yuuzhan Vong's genetic makeup that causes them to be evil, Jacen explicitly says they're no better or worse than humans would be under the same situation. Over the course of the later books, several of them are given sympathetic POVs (Nen Yim, Harrar, Vua Rapuung — even Nom Anor to an extent), and in the end, a lot of them wind up doing a Heel–Face Turn or committing suicide when they find out that the gods they were fighting for were either horribly misinterpreted or (in one case) didn't exist at all.
• The Stormlight Archive:
  • The Voidspren are literally made out of hatred, and are apparently fragments of Odium, a former human (albeit an evil one), who is described as "God's divine hatred separated from the virtues that gave it context." Many people insist that Odium has no choice but to be evil; Hoid insists that he was an asshole before he purposefully picked up the Shard of Hatred, so he shouldn't get any sympathy for getting exactly what he wanted.
  • The Voidbringers themselves, on the other hand, are a subversion. The parsh are a species who chose to side with Odium thousands of years ago because the humans (who the parsh had allowed to live on their planet as refugees after the humans destroyed their own world) were attacking the parsh. The modern Voidbringers are split between the normal parsh (referred to as singers), the Regals who are empowered by nonsentient voidspren, and the Fused, who are the souls of the original parsh who were betrayed by humanity, and now possess the bodies of contemporary parsh (killing the host in the process). The Fused have varying levels of sanity, but have a pretty understandable reason for hating humanity. The Regals have their negative emotions boosted by their voidspren, twisting their minds into a state that Odium finds more useful, but the singers are just scared peasants who are remarkably similar to humans. It's made clear that many of the singers don't actually have any desire to fight despite their centuries of slavery (in fact, the Azish singers were successfully suing the government for back pay and damages, and the government was negotiating with them to make it happen), but the Fused and Odium aren't giving them much of a choice but to fight.
  • It's specifically noted that rule under the Fused and the singers isn't much worse than what the humans were already doing to each other — in fact, in several key ways it's better. Sure the Fused have all humans as second-class citizens, but they are equal under the singers, and given authority and rewards based purely on merit. Several people admit that they might be willing to allow the Fused to rule if that's what it takes to get peace... but Odium doesn't want peace. His plan is to use the humans of Roshar as a slave army against the entire rest of the Cosmere, with the parsh being only slightly higher in his hierarchy.
• Symphony of Ages: The F'dor are elemental spirits of fire who seek to consume the entire world in flame. The first generation of F'dor, faced with the choice between becoming pure elemental spirits or embracing dark flames of hatred, chose the darkness; the second generation was born already bound to the black fire. Their ultimate goal is to awaken the Sleeping Child, a wyrm they modified long ago to become the Beast of the Apocalypse.
• In Wen Spencer's Tinker series, the oni. Their chief characteristic is a total Lack of Empathy. They do not exterminate other races, though — they use them for breeding stock.
• Tolkien's Legendarium has evil creatures mutated from natural ones by Dark Lord Morgoth: Orcs, Trolls, Dragons, Werewolves, Wargs, etc. However, as a devout Catholic who believed in spiritual salvation, the idea of a race of inherently or irredeemably evil creatures was one of Tolkien's major sticking points with his own work. He spent much of the latter part of his life as a writer trying to justify it. He never did come up with an explanation that satisfied him.
  • Orcs: In The Silmarillion, the Elves theorize that Orcs were Elves tortured and corrupted by Morgoth (This is addressed in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, where Galadriel discovers that Adar is a corrupted Elf from Beleriand, and that the Orcs that follow him are the first Elves that were enslaved and twisted by Morgoth, being called "Moriondor") and in The Lord of the Rings Treebeard voices a similar theory about Trolls being bred as a mockery of Ents. Both of these are beliefs of characters, which are never directly confirmed by the author. Another idea was that Orcs are generally just Human tribes and are "evil" precisely because of Sauron and Morgoth's magic. After the One Ring is destroyed, they become feral and scatter in all directions.
    
    These later explanations of Orcs can be seen as an exploration of institutionalized abuse and slavery. While they may be a "species" genetically distinct from their Elf and/or Human ancestors, their evil cultures resulted from millennia of slavery, Religion of Evil, and deliberate corruption. They are less inherently evil than a race that's been warped by external forces into cannon fodder. Tolkien even wrote "deep in their dark hearts the Orcs loathed the Master (Morgoth) whom they served in fear, the maker only of their misery."
    
    Perhaps the most tragic and frightening thing about Orcs and Trolls is that we can never know what they would be like if Morgoth and Sauron hadn't ruined them, or if any of them were able to grow up in a less cruel culture. They're never given the opportunity to be anything but evil. They're raised in cultures that encourage hoarding and greed and hatred, and the differences between them incite the violent tendencies bred into them by the Dark Lords. In an Orc society, cooperation would reduce your own chance of survival in a dangerous situation (i.e. leave your partner to the wolves and escape on your own). Sauron's propaganda also convinced them that their enemies, particularly Elves, were even crueler than Orcs, to discourage them from ever surrendering in battle. It's worth noting that the Forces of Light are essentially waging an extermination war against the Orcs and likely wouldn't know what to do with any that actually surrendered peacefully.
    
    In one letter, Tolkien points out that some Orcs display courage and tribal loyalty if nothing else, and that they wouldn't have been able to function as well if they were completely evil. And he was generally quite good at giving individual Orcs distinct personalities. (This is touched on in the animated version of The Return of the King, where some orcs sing that they don't want to go to war but their officers and Sauron tell them to.) In other letters, Tolkien treats "orcishness" not as a set of physical characterstics but rather a state of mind.
  • Trolls: Aside from Treebeard's theory above, Tolkien suggested that Trolls were artificially created from stones. Yet in The Hobbit, William the Troll has mercy on Bilbo and asks that the other Trolls let him go. William "had already had as much supper as he could hold; also he had had lots of beer." The other Trolls also seem somewhat reasonable (although they also want to eat Bilbo on sight), but are concerned that there may be other 'burrahobbits' in the woods and don't want to be attacked in their sleep.
  • Wolves: Taking his cue from mythologies in which wolves are always evil, the Wargs are giant intelligent wolves with the malevolence to match. The only mention of normal, non-evil wolves is in The Fellowship of the Ring when Gandalf mentions that natural wolves would only attack people out of hunger.
  • In the case of Dragons and Werewolves, both were specifically created to be evil by Morgoth himself, and it's stated that the latter were inhabited by the spirits of dreadful beings (ranging from fallen Maiar to Orcs).
  • For their part, the Giant Spiders are the descendants of the evil spider demon Ungoliant (who's either a fallen Maia or some other form of Eldritch Abomination) and have all inherited their progenitor's vileness.
  • Humans: The Easterlings, Haradrim, and other so-called "evil Men" are not treated as inherently evil. In fact, it is implied that they only serve Morgoth and Sauron because of lies and promises made to them (and never kept), or just their fear of the Dark Lords. For example, in The Two Towers, the Dunlendings are amazed when, after being captured by the Men of Rohan, they are freed by their captors, having been told the Rohirrim burned prisoners alive. In the First Age, the biblical Original Sin took the form of the first Humans worshipping Morgoth out of ignorance when he went into the East. The evil Men come from cultures which never rebelled against Morgoth, whereas the good Men (including some Easterlings in The Silmarillion) rebelled and fled to the western end of Middle-earth. Later writings from Tolkien also mention that the last two Wizards successfully jump-started rebellions against Sauron in the homelands of the Haradrim and Easterlings, which explains what the good-aligned ones were doing during the events of The Lord of the Rings.
    
    In addition, many of the "evil" Humans of Middle-earth had legitimately suffered abuse by the Númenóreans in the late Second Age, who ruled over them as tyrants, taxed them heavily, often enslaved them and destroyed their livelihoods (e.g., by clear-cutting their forest homes), and abducted them for Human Sacrifice. Between that and Sauron's various propaganda and lies, the Easterlings and Haradrim continue to believe that the Númenóreans' Gondorian descendants and their allies are evil and cruel. In truth, the Men of Gondor are actually the descendants of the Númenóreans who opposed all of this.
  • Originally, Tolkien intended the Dwarves as this, but while writing The Hobbit decided to make the Dwarves one of the "good" races.
  • Interestingly, The Silmarillion notes that during the Siege of Barad-dûr, "All living things were divided in that day, and some of every kind, even of beasts and birds, were found in either host, save the Elves only. They alone were undivided and followed Gil-Galad. Of the Dwarves few fought upon either side; but the kindred of Durin of Moria fought against Sauron". This implies that at least a few Orcs, Trolls, etc. fought for the good guys, or at least against Sauron. That said, the passage would also imply that at least a few Eagles and Ents fought for Sauron, which seems rather unlikely considering that those races have an absolute hatred of the forces of darkness, and some readers consider it to be a case of Unreliable Narrator as The Silmarillion was supposedly written by the Elves. Which could mean that even the Eldar were divided in those days.
  • For their part, the makers of the The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy were concerned that the idea of a race being evil by definition seemed racist, claiming that in Tolkien's time, people didn't mind such stuff. Hence, the added scene where Uruk-Hai are created from the earth in Saruman's dungeons. This is not mentioned in the original books, but was one of the author's earliest ideas for their origins, as an attempt at the "artificial origin" justification. Tolkien later believed that evil cannot create new life, so the Orcs and other monsters must be bred and corrupted from natural people and animals. The Orcs of Mordor, Moria and beyond are implied to be breeding the old fashioned way, leaving Uruks as the only artificially created race in the setting.
• All vehicles become this in Stephen King's short story Trucks adapted later into the Maximum Overdrive movie.
• In The Underland Chronicles, most Underland rats and humans believe this about each other. Neither species is actually this, they've just been at war for so long that prejudice has generally overwhelmed good sense. Played straight by the ants, however, who hate all creatures that aren't them and would like to wipe them out.
• The Strigoi from Vampire Academy. They lose all sense of morality when awakened into their new existence. They are all indiscriminate killers, have no loyalty to fellow Strigoi even when allied, and have no appreciation for beauty.
• In Villains by Necessity Valerie's underground-dwelling race of dark elves were regarded as this. As the plot of the book involves the forces of darkness being wiped out and heroic armies and warriors reigning supreme, their entire people wind up on the receiving end of genocide.
• In the Warrior Cats series, ShadowClan is always branded as this by everyone (particularly ThunderClan). Despite the fact that the only ShadowClan cats who were ever truly evil were Brokenstar and Clawface.
  • The more recent books have subverted this with ShadowClan being nothing more than a rival Clan, and most opposition come from WindClan instead.
  • Also subverted with Bluestar's Prophecy, where ThunderClan faces the most opposition from RiverClan, and never had to deal with ShadowClan. It seems that different Clans end up being seen as "evil" depending on the political atmosphere (ThunderClan was actually branded as evil for a while early in Bluestar's Prophecy after their unprovoked raid on WindClan camp).
  • The cats tend to see humans (or twolegs, in the language of the clans) like this. After all, some people bulldozed the entire forest the cats lived in, forcing the cats to find a new home. Some humans run over the cats with their cars (or monsters) and injure the cats badly or even kill them!
• The various Shadowspawn from The Wheel of Time are a case of the "artificially created to be evil" variety, being genetically engineered to be the Dark One's slaves. With different kinds of Shadowspawn, we see different variations on this trope.
  • Trollocs and Draghkar are exceptionally violent, bloodthirsty animals who are too stupid to know what they're doing is wrong.
  • The gholam has human intelligence but is a straightforward living weapon and quite proud of that fact. However, he takes a dispassionate view of his purpose, and is not usually malicious, being more like a Punch-Clock Villain: he was created to be an assassin, so he assassinates. Also, he needs to drink fresh human blood to survive. As he puts it, "Fish must swim, birds must fly, I must kill."
  • The Myrddraal, though, are definitely the creepiest — the commanders of the Shadowspawn, they are absolutely emotionless and driven to conquer the world for the Dark One. They derive no pleasure from anything except inflicting pain (and they don't show it — the fact that they go out of their way to do it in the first place is the only indicator that they like it) and have a heavily implied fetish for raping human women, which almost always drives the victim insane (why they do that is probably best left unknown). It's very telling that the Dark One himself uses a modified Myrddraal, Shaidar Haran, as his mouthpiece.
• Ewu are treated this way in Who Fears Death, because they are the product of violence, they are expected to become violent in their future.
• Subverted with the Dark Court of The Fair Folk in Wicked Lovely. They often seem to be Always Chaotic Evil, but as we learn more about them, it is increasingly revealed that this is not the case. They aren't evil, just cruel. They have to be, since they feed off the darker emotions (rage, lust, fear, pain, etc).

  "We are what we are, Niall. Neither as good nor as evil as others paint us." ~ Irial.

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