Create Your Own Villain / Literature

Times where the hero creates their own villain in Literature.

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• Animorphs:
  • David, the Sixth Ranger turned Sixth Ranger Traitor. Though introduced from the start as a kid with a bit of an attitude, he at first tries fitting into the team and making the best of things. It's not until he's given the cold shoulder by everyone, forced to sleep in a cold barn and threatened with death by Jake that he decides to betray the team. At that point it's hard to blame him.
  • Even worse was Visser Three — he wouldn't have been able to take an Andalite host and become the Abomination without Elfangor's unintentional aid.
  • We eventually learn that this trope applies to the entire series regarding the Yeerks and Andalites. Specifically, a kindly, compassionate Andalite named Seerow discovered the Yeerk homeworld and their inherently pathetic state: small, helpless, blind slugs that can only communicate telepathically. Seerow took pity on the Yeerks and gave them the technology required for interstellar travel...and the slugs immediately set out to assimilate all existing life in the universe, and, just for kicks, destroy anything they can't infest on the planets they invade to make more breeding grounds for their kind. Needless to say, the Andalites are deeply ashamed of what has come to be called "Seerow's Folly," which explains their personal vendetta against the Yeerks.
• The Black Arrow: When Sir Daniel pleads with Lord Earl Risingham to not believe an outlaw like Richard Shelton, Richard's lover Joanna steps up and states Dick became a brigand because of Sir Daniel's own actions. When Dick fled for his life from Sir Daniel, the Black Arrow -whom he previously fought- found him and took care of him. So what did they expect him to do? Siding with the "mentor" who betrayed him or the bandits who saved him?
  Joanna Sedley: "My Lord of Risingham, hear me, in justice. I am here in this man's custody by mere force, reft from mine own people. Since that day I had never pity, countenance, nor comfort from the face of man—but from him only—Richard Shelton—whom they now accuse and labour to undo. My lord, if he was yesternight in Sir Daniel's mansion, it was I that brought him there; he came but at my prayer, and thought to do no hurt. While yet Sir Daniel was a good lord to him, he fought with them of the Black Arrow loyally; but when his foul guardian sought his life by practices, and he fled by night, for his soul's sake, out of that bloody house, whither was he to turn—he, helpless and penniless? Or if he be fallen among ill company, whom should ye blame—the lad that was unjustly handled, or the guardian that did abuse his trust?"
• In Blott on the Landscape, had Lady Maud's night-time meeting with Dundridge at Handyman Hall been strictly business, they probably could have resolved the whole motorway nonsense together in a swift, just and painless way. Instead, she overestimates his feelings towards her and makes a pass at him that sends him fleeing in horror. To make matters worse a jealous Blott slashes Dundridges's car tyres and, when Maud spurns his white-knighting, fires a shotgun into the air in rage while Dundridge is still on Maud's property. Thereafter Dundridge's Face–Heel Turn is sealed; he decides It's Personal and resolves to ram the motorway through Cleene Gorge come what may.
• In The Daevabad Trilogy, Ghassan and his father's treatment of Manizheh brought this about. They kept her as a virtual prisoner in the infirmary and punished her brother if she stepped out of line. Her brother ended up broken by the abuse, but she became filled with hatred and a bone-deep determination to avenge her family, which is why she chose such brutal methods to deal with the Qahtani dynasty.
• In The Descendants, the titular heroes inadvertently did this (at least in the eyes of Gundown and Slicer) when a random drug dealer they caught made bail and carjacked Slicer, dragging her behind the car he stole for three blocks. She (and her brother) felt it was their fault for not just killing the dealer.
  • More recently, the Joykiller has decided that his goal is to kill Hope because he feels she does too much good with her healing. Ironically, she feels the exact opposite.
• Harry Potter:
  • Dumbledore in the backstory, enabled Grindelwald in his exile from Durmstrang, both of them drawing up several plans and ideas to Take Over the World including Grindelwald's Badass Creed, "For the Greater Good" which Dumbledore came up with. This bites him hard and he later tackles Grindelwald on his own.
  • Sirius Black in the 5th Book is under virtual house arrest in his family home which he hates and is run by a nasty, bitter house elf who parrots the racist ideas of the family that Sirius wanted to run away from in the first place. Despite knowing that house elves have Blue-and-Orange Morality and have to obey their masters, Sirius is indifferent to his plight. This makes Kreacher pass along crucial information to Voldemort (only possible because Sirius carelessly gave an order that allowed Kreacher to leave the house), an action which led to Sirius' eventual Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal induced death.
  • Likewise, Barty Crouch Sr., a Knight Templar wizard who allowed wizards to use extreme methods to combat Voldemort, was so driven and career focused that he neglected his son, who became a Death Eater and later committed Patricide.
  • In the extended backstory and comments by Word of God, its suggested that James Potter's bullying of Severus Snape only intensified his interest in Dark Arts as an outlet to gain revenge. His arrogance and Underestimating Badassery of Peter Pettigrew also played a part in the latter's betrayal and his eventual death.
• Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta: Jewish Villain Protagonist Barabbas makes it clear that his actions are inspired by racism and oppression at the hands of Christians and Muslims.
  Barabbas: Why, I esteem the injury far less,
  To take the lives of miserable men
  Than be the causers of their misery.
  You have my wealth, the labour of my life,
  The comfort of mine age, my children's hope;
  And therefore ne'er distinguish of the wrong.
• Monster Hunter International: Monster Hunter Alpha has this in the third book. Earl bit one of his teammates by mistake while she was pregnant. The resulting child was not only quarter-siren but a werewolf as well, and had a lifelong hatred of the one who forced it upon him.
• In The Night's Blade, there is Kelstra — or, as she was once known, Kestrel Safane. The Assembly's contempt for her difficulty controlling her powers, their fear of those powers, and lack of regard for her emotional difficulties meant that it did not take much to push her over the edge, and she quickly went From Nobody to Nightmare.
• In Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain, the teenage sidekick Miss A uses her connections to get alien technology to rig a science fair, all to create bait for any supervillain's children who might be going to her school. This results in Ray trying to trash the science fair in revenge. When Penny and Claire go to stop him, Miss A attacks Ray and the aftermath of the ensuing fight causes Penny, Ray, and Claire to become supervillains in a team called The Inscrutable Machine instead of the heroes Penny and Claire set out to be. Though their general villainy is much lower than most other supervillains.
• In Seven Sorcerers by Caro King, the titular sorcerers are responsible for transforming Arafin Struud from an ordinary human into the Big Bad that he is by first letting him drink a potion that makes him fully immortal, and then torturing and mutilating him horribly to see just how well the potion works. And then trying to make amends with a simple "Sorry".
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Cersei Lannister is just so paranoid about imaginary plots to get her that the people she's offended start plotting against her for real. Her incest with Jaime (which was most likely a form of narcissism on her part) and terrible parenting of their son Joffrey (she didn't trust anyone who wasn't a Yes-Man, including Maesters, for example) kick off the War of the Five Kings, and she eventually reinstated the Faith Militant for yet another paranoid, petty scheme, an absolutely boneheaded move which backfired on her spectacularly when they turn on her for the aforementioned incest and have her publicly humiliated.
    • "The Mad King" Aerys II was even worse than Cersei in this regard. His extreme paranoia and abuse of his supporters meant that most of them turned their coats almost immediately when Robert Baratheon began his rebellion.
  • Lady Barbrey Dustin has held a long grudge against House Stark because her love Brandon (House Stark's heir) was betrothed to someone else and her husband Willam's bones were left in Dorne with a half-assed explanation by Brandon's brother Eddard. Because of this, she is House Bolton's strongest supporter as they seek to gain supremacy in the North after the Starks have been ousted.
  • Robert Baratheon sends an assassin to kill Daenerys Targaryen and her unborn baby, justifying it as a way to prevent a potential invasion of Westeros by a Dothraki army (though everyone isn't fooled by the fact that he does this mostly out of spite to Rhaegar Targaryen). Instead, it angers Daenerys' husband, Drogo, who had no interest to help her before but now willingly leads the invading army, further motivates Daenerys to retake the Iron Throne, and eventually leads to her acquiring three dragons. The irony is that had Robert left Daenerys alone, she would have probably stayed with the Dothraki the rest of her life, her dream of going to Westeros slowly fading away and therefore thwarting any attempt to restore her family back to the throne.
  • Roose Bolton hanged a miller and raped his widow for the grievous "crime" of getting married without his permission. Said widow got pregnant, and the child, one Ramsay Snow (Later Ramsay Bolton) would grow up to be a dimwitted, Ax-Crazy sociopath who killed Roose's trueborn heir and son, and is constantly screwing up Roose's carefully laid plans by being a brutish, dull-witted thug.
  • A backstory example from Fire & Blood; during the Civil War known as the Dance of Dragons between two rival factions within House Targaryen, one side convinced Lord Dalton Greyjoy to attack their enemies in return for being allowed to plunder to his heart's content. After the civil war ended and the new king's regents ordered Dalton to stop, he ignored their demands and carried on raiding the coastline indiscriminately.
• In Sonic the Hedgehog in the Fourth Dimension, Dr. Robotnik succeeds in taking over Mobius, but Sonic uses Time Travel to stop him ever being transformed from Dr Kintobor, but then a different set of villains steal the Chaos Emeralds in an attempt to infect the Big Bang and therefore the entire universe with Chaos, so Sonic has to stop his earlier self from stopping Robotnik's transformation, as the transformation safely flung the Chaos Emeralds across Mobius out of their reach. In the process, he ends up creating a chaos-infected version of himself called Cinos.
• In Stay Sonic, Sonic distracted the kindly Dr Kintobor, causing the accident that turned him into the evil Dr Robotnik.
• In Star Wars Legends, the Jedi Order inevitably ends up creating the Sith Order. Each time the Sith are wiped out, some Dark Jedi, recently separated from the Order, finds Holocrons left by a previous Sith Lord and the Order is born anew. The worst part is that this cycle has occurred over half a dozen times.
  • Ajunta Pall creates what is presumably the original Sith order after being kicked out of the Jedi Order.
  • Freedon Nadd, having left the Jedi order due to massive ego and rampant paranoia, finds the holocron of one of the old Sith Lords, and resurrects the order.
  • Ditto for Exar Kun, who finds other Sith Holocrons and resurrects the Sith order.
  • Revan breaks off from the Jedi to form a new Sith Order — in order to fight the remains of what he calls "the true Sith".
  • Revan's former Jedi Master, Kreia, leaves the Jedi to find out why her apprentice turned. She makes her own mini Sith order. Ironically, her goal was to destroy the Force itself, as she saw that as long as the Jedi existed, there would be a Sith order, and that their conflicts would inevitably doom the galaxy. So she sought to eliminate both.
  • Darth Desolous ditches the Jedi because he thinks the Sith are cooler. Cue mini Sith order on his homeworld.
  • Darth Ruin leaves the Jedi, starting the order again and begins the New Sith Wars.
  • At the battle of Ruusan, the Jedi were shoving lightsabers into the hands of small children and sending them to slaughter. They also deemed the native "Bouncers" as too dangerous to keep alive because of the thought bomb. Well, one of those Force Sensitive kids sees her Bouncer friend killed by Jedi right before her horrified eyes. Congratulations! They just created Darth Zannah! Thus, the sole survivor of the Sith Order has the apprentice he needs to rebuild from scratch.
  • And then, with Luke Skywalker having destroyed both master and apprentice of the Sith, you'd think it's over, right? No. There's a Jedi Purge survivor that starts a Sith order that would rise to power 100 years later. And Jedi from Skywalker's new Jedi Order jumping ship (one in particular who is even related to him!). Luke has angst about this trope, wondering if he's not training Jedi the right way, but he does try hard; most villains he trained went bad entirely on their own, after they left him. However, there was Brakiss, who was an Imperial spy who was Becoming the Mask and really starting to trust Luke. Luke trusted him too and thought he'd completely make a Face–Heel Turn, and put him through a test of his spirit just like he'd do to any of his other students... and it was too much for Brakiss to take.
  • And then there's this little stroke of brilliance from Jedi Apprentice, Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon's backstory series. So, the Jedi council has this problem kid, Xanatos. Too much anger and whatnot. His Master believes in him, but the Council doesn't. And they decide that hey, they're not sure they can trust him, they need to put him to the test. So they send him and his Master to intervene in a conflict where his dad is The Man Behind the Man, and everyone knows it, in the hopes that he'll screw up and they can boot him out. Well as it turns out, the plan works a little too well. Xanatos Face Heel Turns, his Master is forced to kill his father, and he swears bloody revenge on the Temple, going on to become a Corrupt Corporate Executive and Manipulative Bastard out for Jedi blood, who spreads slavery and death wherever he goes, and targets Qui-Gon (his ex-master) and Obi-Wan at every turn. Nice Job Breaking It Heroes.
  • If there's any conciliation to the Jedi's ability to create their own worst enemies, it's that the Sith are just as good at it. The person most likely to kill a Sith isn't a Jedi — it's their own apprentice. Just around the movie timeline, Darth Tenebrous killed his own master, and was in turn killed by his apprentice Darth Plagueis. Plagueis was eventually murdered in his sleep by his apprentice, Darth Sidious/Emperor Palpatine, who was tossed down a bottomless pit a few decades later by his apprentice, Darth Vader.
  • Nor is Sith tendency to create their own nemeses confined to villains. Darth Vader's own son blows up the Death Star and eventually defeats his father, and his daughter plays a massive role in the Rebellion. Darth Vader's apprentice, Starkiller, is responsible for founding the Rebel Alliance. Anakin Skywalker's apprentice, Ahsoka Tano, becomes "Fulcrum", a major organizer in the Rebel Alliance. Even the droid Vader built as a child, C-3PO, would become one of the heroes opposing him.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Silmarillion: Fëanor decides that the Valar were plotting against the Noldor elves (and himself in particular) and that his half-brothers Fingolfin and Finarfin wanted to take his place in their father's esteem and the leadership of he Noldor. He becomes secretive and paranoid, publicly draws steel on one brother, and antagonizes them in various ways until the Valar and his brothers actually turn against him. Then he believed that the other elven peoples wanted to hinder his quest to regain the Silmaril jewels, so he started murdering them at the first hint of opposition, he and his sons swore an oath to kill anyone who tried to withold the Silmarils, whether Morgoth or their own kin, and they carry it through many times. As a result, the House of Fëanor goes from a great house to a bunch of pariahs and the Noldor as a whole are shunned and mistrusted by every other elven group, and banned from Valinor by the Valar.
  • The Silmarillion and The Fall of Númenor tell us exactly why the peoples of the South and East of Middle-Earth sided with Sauron during The Lord of the Rings. Númenor (Gondor's predecessor state), originally a country of peaceful and wise folks, devolved and became corrupted into an oppressive, world-spanning, land-plundering, slave-trading, human-sacrificing empire. Even though Gondor was founded by Númenoreans who refused to engage in their countrymen's barbarism, and current Gondorians don't like to remember the ugliest bits of their civilization's history, Sauron has made sure that the Southrons and Easterlings have not forgotten them (of course, Sauron also somehow neglected to mention his part in Númenor's corruption).
• Six of Crows: Kaz's backstory is a case of a bad guy creating a worse guy. Turns out that Kaz was just an innocent kid before Pekka Rollins swindled his older brother out of all of their money, leading to Jordie's death and Kaz's Start of Darkness. Pekka lives to regret it.
• In Worm, the "hero" Sophia Hess/Shadow Stalker was not only one of the many whose treatment of Taylor/Skitter drove her to villainy, but was directly responsible for causing said villain's Traumatic Superpower Awakening in the first place. In a more direct example, Armsmaster's poor handling of Taylor's offer to be an undercover hero in one of the city's supervillain gangs also played a major factor in deciding to be a supervillain.
• Rob Roy: Robert Campbell was an honest cattle-raiser until he got into debt, and his creditors and neighbors stole his property and land and abused his wife. Then Rob and his clan sought shelter in the ancestral McGregor lands and become outlaws, and as Nicol Jarvie puts it, the same people who ousted him and his clan would prefer to see him shepherding fifty cows again rather than fifty brigands.
• Liam in The Fey and the Fallen is an Irish Catholic during The Troubles, but was fairly apolitical. Then he's wrongfully arrested as a rioter by British security and imprisoned, abused in prison by an English warden, released and wrongfully arrested again for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. By the end of his second prison stint, he has become completely radicalized and joins the IRA.
• Villains by Necessity: Or Create Your Own Hero, for a given value of Hero, or Villain. Mizzamir and his allies are responsible for Sam and company going out on their quest to save the world from the forces of Good.
  • Arcie, the head of the thieves' guild, was captured by the local guards and sentenced to be whitewashed, until he "hired" Sam to kill the wizard, and the pair escape during the confusion.
  • Valeriana, a dark sorceress, saw her family, including children, be murdered by Fenwick.
  • Kaylana, a druid, is the last survivor of her kind due to the Heroes killing the others during the War.
  • Blackmail/ Sir Pryse a Dark Knight, a former Hero who changed sides after his brother, who turned to the dark side, was changed into a horse by Mizzamir.
  • Robin, a centaur minstrel, ironically enough, was chosen by Fenwick and Mizzamir to spy upon the villains, even reporting their movements, until they save his life, and caused a change of heart in him.
  • Sam, an assassin, is the result of his mother being raped by Mizzamir, which, in a sense, set everything in motion to Mizzamir's eventual death by Sam's own hands as his childhood trauma set him on the path to his profession, later caused him to cross paths with Mizzamir and sent him on a quest to save the world. He succeeds in this and kills Mizzamir.

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