Times where a plan Goes Horribly Right in Comic Books.
- A Marvel example: the scientists of the Enclave seek to create an artificial, perfect human. From the cocoon emerges Him... who immediately senses that the scientists motives are impure, destroys their space station, and goes on to become known as Adam Warlock.
- Played for Laughs in Archie Comics when Archie notices that while School Coach Floyd Clayton goes easy on most of the boys in his gym class, he overworks his own son Chuck. When Archie calls Coach out on this unfair treatment, Coach Clayton agrees, resulting in him going hard on the entire gym class like he did with Chuck. Naturally, all the boys went chasing after Archie in rage.
- Asterix and the Normans: Timandahaf, the kuningaz of a Germanic tribe that has forgotten fear, leads a band of proto-Vikings to Gaul on a mission to re-learn it. By Þunraz and Wōdanaz, they find out all right, with the help of a Dreadful Musician. When Timandahaf begs Asterix not to let Cacofonix sing again...Asterix: In short, you know the meaning of fear!
- He's even more succinct in the Latin translation:
Asterix: UNO UERBO: TIMES!lat - Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Search reveals that Ozai and Ursa's marriage was an eugenics experiment by Azulon to combine the bloodlines of Sozin and Roku. The genetic part worked out quite well; Azula is a firebending prodigy unequalled, and while Zuko isn't as good (at first), he's still a very powerful firebender (and, unusually, also very skilled at normal fighting) whose issues come mostly from comparing himself to Azula. Unfortunately, everything else about it failed miserably — mostly because Ozai was involved and screwed everything up by being an Abusive Parent and spouse. His abuse gave Azula severe perfection issues that would eventually lead to a mental breakdown, Zuko got anger and self-worth problems (luckily, he also had Iroh), and Ozai eventually goaded Ursa to murder Azulon to protect Zuko. The experiment was a success, but Ozai undermined the results so severely that it would probably have been better for the Fire Nation and Azulon himself if he hadn't bothered.
- The second Batgirl, Cassandra Cain, was raised from childhood to be perfectly attuned to the body language of others (because she was never taught how to speak, it was her only way of communicating) in an attempt to make the perfect assassin. But when she made her first kill, her knowledge of body language meant she understood exactly what her victim felt about dying... resulting in the horrified Cassandra swearing never to kill again.
- Batman:
- In the Shadow of the Bat story "The Ugly American", Batman learns of a man who was trained and experimented on to be the perfect patriotic soldier, building up his loyalty to the US. However, it worked a little too well, turning him into a madman who considers anyone not "white" to be "the enemy".
- Batgirl: Year One: At the start, Batman stealthily supplies Batgirl with his tech, hoping his toys would keep her alive until she wised up and quit. Instead, they keep her alive long enough that Barbara becomes real good at the job, at which point she will not quit because she loves it.
- Cluemaster was a villain who, like the Riddler, had a compulsion to leave clues behind when he committed crimes. He was quickly caught and sent to Arkham Asylum, where he was cured... of the compulsion to leave clues. He still committed crimes, just without leaving any hints behind.
- "Close Before Striking", the story that details the start of Bruce's Dead Person Impersonation of Matches Malone reveals that Matches and his brother Carver ended up accidentally killing a homeless man with a fire they set for one of their insurance scams. While they were racked with guilt, Carver's drove him to take his own life. To preserve Carver's reputation, Matches tried to make it look like Carver was murdered as part of a break-in — which only ended up framing Matches himself for the deed, forcing him to fake his own suicide by incineration. Bruce also made too much of a good job impersonating Malone — because when Malone returns to Gotham trying to find who is doing that, it gets him killed by Scarface (who was suspecting "Malone" was connected to Batman somehow) and Bruce develops a brief case of Split Personality from the shock.
- Fear State is this trope writ large. To wit, Simon Saint has learned of Dr. Jonathan Crane's Fear State theory, that a tremendous traumatic event could be utilized to help evolve society for the better, he recruits Scarecrow to set up a False Flag Operation to drive Gothamites into accepting a Magistrate-led rule. In DC Future State, this worked, but here, Scarecrow hijacked the plan, turning this theory into a frighteningly serious threat to Gotham City.
- Big Hero 6: In one story of the Comic-Book Adaptation, Fred asks Hiro to make an invisible suit. Hiro does such a good job that neither him nor Fred can find it afterwards.
- In the classic "Born Again" storyline, The Kingpin discovers Daredevil is Matt Murdock and sets out to ruin his life. In the space of a few weeks, Murdock is bankrupt, disbarred on charges of bribing a witness, his assets frozen and he returns to his apartment building just in time for it to blow up. The Kingpin then beats Murdock to a pulp and has him dumped in a cab pushed off a dock. But when the cab is discovered without Murdock's body, the Kingpin realizes he's made a mistake. Because he took absolutely everything away from Murdock...which means Murdock has nothing left to lose, not even hope.The Kingpin: And I...I have shown him...that a man without hope...is a Man Without Fear.
- Disney Ducks Comic Universe:
- The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck show that Scrooge receiving his #1 Dime was planned out by his father to teach his son to be more careful not to be cheated like their ancestors were. It works, but when Scrooge starts insisting on receiving receipts for the money he gives his family (For tax purposes!) Fergus remarks, "Hoots, mon! Ah may have overinspired the lad!"
- In The Secret of Atlantis, Scrooge hatches a scheme to make a fortune by buying up every 1916 quarter and then destroying all but one of them, making it a rare coin. Ultimately, he succeeds; but when he tries to cash in on the sole remaining quarter, he's informed that there's only one person in the world rich enough to buy it: Scrooge himself.
- Just about every Gyro Gearloose story is about him creating an invention that works perfectly at what he designed it to do... and ends up causing a lot of trouble because Gyro failed to anticipate some practical problem with the design. E.g., if he creates a robotic guard for Scrooge's moneybin, expect the guard to be so good at its job that it doesn't even let Scrooge himself in.
- Some of the wishes in Eight Billion Genies end up this way. For instance, a girl is shown wishing that her parents would "burn in hell", only to look on in horror as her parents are burned away until nothing's left but their hands.
- In the Gold Digger series, the Djinn Madrid takes on Gina's form with some outside assistance in an attempt to get past her race's No Self-Buffs limitation with their wishes by using said disguise to access an artifact called the "Magic Sun". She ends up imitating Gina so well that she ends up taking on Gina's memories and personality traits (it helps that their most obvious differences were basically that Madrid lacked a work ethic or moral compass), as well as her technological skills, and apparently losing her magic powers. Eventually, she basically suffers a Death of Personality as the result of being abused by a pair of dragonesses and effectively becomes a clone of Gina with Madrid's memories.
- Green Arrow: Albert Davis, a one-off villain, attempted to rid Star City of all crime by summoning an army of demons and ordering them to punish anyone who committed a crime. Unfortunately, he was unable to control them past that order, and their interpretation of that order was "Disable all technology more advanced than a shovel and teleport around and indiscriminately murder anyone and everyone who commits any crime no matter how minor the offense." In the end, He asked Mia Dearden to kill him by shooting an arrow through his heart, as he was unable to call off the demons and his death was the only way to get rid of them.
- In year two of Injustice: Gods Among Us, the remnant of the Justice League and the Green Lantern Corps face against Superman's regime and the Yellow Lantern Corps. Black Canary takes down Superman using a kryptonite bullet, but he uses a Yellow Power Ring given by Sinestro to extract the bullet, and hits her with a beam of heat vision, seriously wounding her. As she lies dying she tells Superman that she's broadcasting his actions to the whole world so they can see what he's become. Batman then tells Black Canary to cut the feed because the video images only serve to make the world afraid of Superman, and since the Yellow Power Ring he's got on becomes more powerful with fear...
- This is basically Iron Man's origin. Terrorists kidnap weapons manufacturer Tony Stark to force him into making weapons for them. Tony did build a weapon, but his kidnappers didn't count on Tony using it against them.
- Iznogoud: In the story "Scandal in Baghdad", Iznogoud hires scandalmonger Leguenn Scandales to discredit the Caliph by planting a fake story in the newspapers that he has an illegitimate child whom he abandoned at birth, and soon, the whole country (except, inevitably, for the Caliph himself) has heard the news. The plan backfires when over three hundred people come forward claiming to be the Caliph's illegitimate child, including Wa'at Alahf and a woman old enough to be the Caliph's mother, and the kindly Caliph adopts them all.
- In Judgment Day (Marvel Comics), the X-Men and The Eternals are caught up in a war between the two groups over the latter being designated "Deviants". To fix this, two of the Eternals, along with Mr. Sinister and Iron Man decide to reanimate the Progenitor Eternal, which had been serving as the base of the current incarnation of The Avengers, as a brand new Celestial to stop the fight. At first, it works, as it immediately calls for a cessation of combat, calling back the Eternals in the process... then it goes belly up as it reveals its utter fury at how the inhabitants of Earth treat each other and decides to put Humanity on Trial to see if they should live another day or the Earth goes kablooey.
- An issue of Justice League of America has the two Mad Scientists Dr. Ivo and Dr. T.O. Morrow team up to both destroy the JLA and prove which of them is the better scientist. Ivo creates a robot body so sophisticated that it can pass as a living thing even to the enhanced senses of Superman. Morrow creates a mind so advanced that it is truly sentient and can fool the telepathy of Martian Manhunter. The resulting "Tomorrow Woman" contains a bomb, and at the moment when the League is at its most vulnerable she will detonate and destroy them all. But she pulls a Heel–Face Turn and sacrifices herself to save them instead. Morrow takes this as proof that he is the superior scientist. His robot brain was so advanced that it developed the concept of morality on its own, even though this was deliberately left out of her programming. He even claims that what they witnessed was "a soul being born". Morrow actually suspected this would happen, he's had problems with that before.
- Dr. Morrow goes and does it again with 'Genocide' in Wonder Woman (2006) who runs off and decides to kill everyone ever. Personally. Then she discovers mental torture.
- A classic flaw of power mimics such as Amazo. Some such mimics copy the weaknesses of their target in addition to the strengths, since the weaknesses are inherent to and inseparable from the powers. The ultimate expression of this might well be the time when Amazo was defeated by Superman declaring that the Justice League was officially disbanded. Superman was the chairman of the Justice League at the time and thus had the authority to do so. Since Amazo's powers are based around mimicking the powers of the Justice League and not the individual members of the League, Amazo's powers immediately vanished, allowing him to be disassembled pretty handily. The Animated Series took a similar take on this, where Amazo copied Superman's powers, enabling Batman to defeat him with Kryptonite. And then Martian Manhunter deliberately exposed himself, so that Amazo would copy his telepathy...and read Lex Luthor's mind to discover that he was being manipulated by Luthor and that Luthor had implanted a self-destruct device in Amazo. Cue Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal.
- Kingdom Come: The public decides that they prefer 'modern' heroes willing to kill over 'outdated' non-killers. As summed up by one of the former:Magog: They chose the one who would kill over the one who wouldn't. And now they're all dead.
- Livewires: a team of ultra-tech androids created to control the spread of ultra-tech in the Marvel Universe. They started with the scientist that created them.
- Of course, the scientist in question planned it that way. Project Livewire itself was the government acknowledging that rogue agencies were constantly screwing up ultra-tech projects and making the government look bad when superheroes intervened — and decided to start up a project dedicated to that one purpose. The implication is that the head scientist was disgusted with how the government started Livewire without understanding the implications — that they have created so much runaway ultra-tech that they were now starting ultra-tech projects for the sole purpose of policing ultra-tech. His idea was that they should create ultra-tech that replaced human authority, so he made sure the androids would have a Zeroth Law Rebellion.
- It's been suggested that Lobo was the universe's attempt to balance out the peaceful world of Czarnia, which had no real evil in millennia. He balanced things out, alright — by killing every last person except himself.
- Mortadelo y Filemón: in "El racista", the vice-president is a racist that is intent on kicking all members of other races and/or ethnic groups out of the TIA, assigning them dangerous and difficult missions so that, when they fail, he can present that as a consequence of what they are. After failing at helping those other agents with their missions, Mortadelo and Filemón plan to have Mortadelo disguise himself as an agent of another race and then Filemón tells some big story about that agent. The president becomes so impressed at those stories (without checking whether they are true or not) that he kicks the vice-president out... and then decides to put people of other races in charge of most of the organization's operations, leaving the Súper as a lowly delivery boy.
- In The Punisher MAX, one of the gangster capos thinks that it would be a great idea to record a video of him digging up Frank's family and urinating on their bones, then sending it to every news station in the city. The plan was to make Frank incredibly angry, because the gangster believes that angry people always make sloppy mistakes and he can take advantage of that to kill the Punisher. This plan succeeds in making Frank angry all right... but it ends up sending him shooting right past Unstoppable Rage and into pure Tranquil Fury instead. Rather than making mistakes out of fury, Frank uses his newfound focus to effortlessly butcher his way through dozens of local mafia-types en masse until the police bow to his demands to reinter his family.
- A cartoon from Quino (of Mafalda's fame) has a man teaching his son to be a ruthless businessman caring only for money. Then, when the man is old, he's forced to live in the street because the son doesn't want to pay for his retirement home. The last panel has the old man begging to a passerby, saying something in the vein of "help me, my son grew up right!"
- The Red Skull was the result of Hitler claiming that he could turn even a simple bellhop into a great Nazi. He succeeded so well that eventually Hitler became afraid of him.
- A major arc for Captain America involves the Red Skull getting a Reality Warper to rewrite Steve's life so that he was secretly The Mole for HYDRA all this time. However, Steve remains the same; "Loyal to nothing except the dream." Formerly, it meant loyalty to the American Dream and not the government. Now it means loyalty to the dream of HYDRA... and not Red Skull. Rogers feigns subservience to the Skull for awhile, but when the time comes he unhesitatingly kills him and takes over HYDRA himself.
- Scooby Apocalypse: The nanites that turn most of the world's population into monsters were originally supposed to just remove negative emotions in order to bring about world peace, so as far as that goes it's a case of Gone Horribly Wrong. However, in the final issues it's revealed that it's also become a case of this trope, as the Nanite King, the ultimate manifestation of the nanites' Hive Mind, has decided it needs to completely wipe out humans and monsters alike, thereby from the view of its Insane Troll Logic would be a fulfillment of its original goal.
- The Smurfs comic book story "The Smurf Threat" had Papa Smurf create a group of evil duplicates of himself and his little Smurfs so that they could see in the duplicates what they were becoming with all their fighting among themselves. It succeeds all too well in bringing the Smurfs together when the duplicates become such a threat that they nearly destroy the village and take the original Smurfs captives. Near the end of the story, Papa Smurf works on a way to make the duplicates disappear.
- Another story called "The Strange Awakening of Lazy Smurf", which is actually an adaptation of the cartoon show episode "Smurf Van Winkle", where Lazy is led by his fellow smurfs to believe he has been asleep for a few hundred years and that his friends have aged while Lazy somehow stays the same physical age (He didn't think to check himself in a mirror to see if he had aged as well). It's actually a huge Faked Rip Van Winkle masquerade by the other smurfs. It's basically done to teach him a lesson about not being lazy all the time. However, what the other smurfs didn't know, is that the prank would lead to...unforeseen consequences. In the cartoon, the "gone horribly right" part comes in after Lazy, who actually IS convinced that hundreds of years have passed while he took a nap, tries to make things go "back to normal" by giving the other smurfs a rejuvenating potion, which turns them all into children smurfs. In the comic, however, Lazy figures out that he's being pranked much sooner. He gets revenge on the other smurfs by making them believe that they drank a rejuvenation potion and that they will all de-age pretty soon. The "gone horribly right" part comes in when the others smurfs actually do believe that Lazy is telling the truth, wich leads them to go to Gargamel's house to search for a potion that will make them age a few centuries to negate the effects of the supposed rejuvenation potion. They nearly succeed.
- Sonic the Comic:
- Commander Brutus, once a generic Trooper Badnik, was hand-picked by Robotnik to be programmed with a copy of Robotnik's brainwaves to serve as his Dragon. However, Robotnik failed to anticipate that, in uploading his brainwaves onto Brutus, he also programmed the robot with his personality and his ambitions, and it doesn't take long for Brutus to betray him and try to take over Mobius for himself.
- Metallix, the STC version of Metal Sonic; the first two were a success, but the rest were an army of mass-produced Robotnik-built rebellious robots.
- In one of the later arcs, Robotnik, having been sent to a sub-atomic universe called Shanazar, eventually created a "Dimension Blender" to enlarge Shanazar until it occupied the same space as Mobius, fusing the two planets together; in the expected chaos and destruction created from the merger, Robotnik planned to conquer Mobius once again. The plan backfires when Mobius and Shanazar fuse without ill effects; instead, the Zones from Shanazar as simply added onto Mobius.
- In Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics), the former Julian Kintobor Robotnik creates a robotic vine known as Krudzu, which runs rampant in the Great Forest until they're destroyed with water. Snively and Antoine attempt to find another set, but are destroyed in the process. One last batch evolved into a deadly "Krudzu Hybrid Hydra", only to be destroyed by Dr. Eggman, who felt that only he could defeat Sonic.
- Also in the Archie comic, Mina Mongoose, suffering from PTSD after the Magitek-wielding Iron Queen took over New Mobotropolis, used her status as a public icon in an attempt to send a message for the citizens to rise up against fear and take care of themselves. It worked, only she didn't expect Ixis Naugus to use his magic to amplify the existing fear and anger of NICOLE, eventually leading to NICOLE being exiled from the city completely.
- The Spider-Man villain The Lizard (aka Dr. Curt Connors) is a Forced Transformation victim who became a villain completely by accident. Dr. Connors lost his arm while serving in the military, and spent many years working to try and restore it. He eventually developed a formula based on lizard DNA, as lizards can regenerate lost limbs. Out of desperation he used it on himself. This trope was the result, as he got back his arm...and also turned into a giant, deadly lizard-man. Of all of his rogues, Spider-Man is the most sympathetic to Connors (which is saying something) and often works with him to try and either cure his lizard side or keep it at bay.
- In Sturmtruppen, the antics of the soldiers often end this way:
- One soldier, having found out that by being declared insane he could ask for a medical discharge, started pretending he was insane, culminating in volunteering for burying spoiled nitroglycerin (much more explosive than normal). That convinced the sergeant he was indeed insane, at which point he asked for his discharge... Then the medic pointed out that the comma 22 of the rulebook states that if one asks for the discharge they're not insane, getting him stuck with that job. He actually went insane midway out of fear, and as he was being dragged to the asylum the sergeant gave him the notice he had been medically discharged.
- Early on, Musolesi volunteered for a dangerous mission to get a special lunch. He was given the lunch... And a literal suicide mission, prompting him to make a phone call to Mussolini to remind him his death would get some bribes to the armament industry exposed (Mussolini had him banned from suicide missions).
- A soldier decided to he got killed early in an assault on enemy positions to skip the attack. The sergeant fell for it... And used the "corpse" as an improvised battering ram on a barrier once they had ran out of demolition charges, shield against a machine gun nest, and catwalk over some barbed wire. Then he was Buried Alive, and when he came out of the grave he was almost shot as a deserter, forcing him to pretend he was a zombie and being used by the military medic as an experiment subject.
- To avoid taking part to an assault, another soldier claimed to be an expert chemist and that his knowledge could be used for studies to achieve invisibility, and the Military Medic, who was fixated on that, took him as an assistant... And, once he started suspecting a trick, forced him to use himself as a subject for his own invisibility serum, eventually leading to being sent on a commando mission alone and naked while still visible.
- Supergirl:
- In Red Daughter of Krypton, Supergirl fought Lobo. Knowing he couldn't go toe-to-toe with a Kryptonian, Lobo tried to piss her off so she was so irrationally angry that she couldn't fight effectively. He succeeded and he drove her mad. He drove her so mad that she flew off the handle and crushed him like a bug.
- In Bizarrogirl, Bizarro Lex Luthor succeeded into drawing a creature able to kill Bizarro #1... never thinking that creature might — and DID — kill him, too.
- In Supergod, the entire world is totally screwed because each nation was a little too good at creating an unstoppable Physical God during their superbeing arms race.
- Superlópez: El Supergrupo's Big Bad creates perfect robot copies of the entire group, the only differences being that they are completely loyal to him and that they never get tired. But they are such perfect copies of the group that they have the same leadership problems (i.e. fighting every time they tried to pick a leader) as the originals: when Superlópez realizes this, he comments on his counterpart being the copies' leader, and stands back, ready to watch the fireworks.
- Superman:
- In one story, Bizarro, the imperfect clone of Superman, decides to use the duplicator that created him on himself, creating a Superman that looks exactly like the man of steel. This went beyond mere looks, however; While the regular Bizarro was immune to Krytonite, the new clone was such a perfect physical copy of Superman that he melted when exposed to Kryptonite radiation. This was lampshaded by the original Superman.
- Bizarro, again displaying his infinite wisdom, used the duplicator on an alien caveman-like being, aiming to create the most horrific monster ever and make a movie out of him. As the resulting being, Sapollo, looked like a Hollywood star and spoke in very eloquent english, he proved perfect for Bizarro's purposes. The movie was filmed and shown on Bizarro World eventually... but Sapollo's visage proved so horrifying, all the theatre-goers ran off in a panic, and to make matters worse, Sapollo escaped and started running around the city trying to find Bizarro, leading to mass hysteria and Bizarro being forced to hunt his creation down.
- Metallo was created to be a superhuman cyborg that could defeat Superman. His inventor Professor Vale gave him the brain of a dying nobody named John Corben. The scientist clearly never screened for the right test subject because upon activation, Metallo killed his creator and continued Corben's life of crime. But hey, he did almost kill Superman several times so...mission accomplished?
- The Death of Superman: Doomsday was genetically engineered to be the ultimate warrior, courtesy of genetic experiments that made it capable of Lamarckian evolution. As shown in Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey, the creators succeeded, and were wiped out by their own creation, which was so traumatized by the Genetic Memory of countless deaths that it had come to view all other life as a terrifying threat to its own survival. On top of it all, it turns out that said creators were so focused on the experiments that they never actually thought about what to do with their experiment once it actually worked.
- In All-Star Superman, Lex Luthor manages to gain Superman's abilities for 24 hours in order to place himself on the Man Of Steel's level. However, the rush of sensory data and enhanced perspective has an unexpected side-effect — seeing the world the way Superman sees it makes him (at least temporarily) rise to Superman's level in the empathic and moral sense, too.
- In Superman '78, Lex Luthor is so incensed that Brainiac claimed himself a genius and is able to capture Superman that he's able to sneak a communication device onto Superman with the very intention of Brainiac picking it up when it's activated, intending on goading him back to Earth to prove who is the superior genius. It worked... and it angered Brainiac so badly he decided to bottle Metropolis.
- Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen: According to Jimmy in issue 5, Lex Luthor once invented an invisibility belt, which worked so well that even Superman couldn't see him with it on. The problem was, he had rendered his own retinas invisible, making him blind and causing him to make noise bumping into things, which Superman could detect.
- Kicks off the Myth Arc in Transmetropolitan. Spider hates the incumbent president, the Beast, so much that he tries to help the opposition, Gary Callahan, win the election and push the Beast out of office. It works... just in time for Spider to discover that the Beast was just a lazy and cynical man coasting through his term, whereas the seemingly squeaky-clean Callahan is secretly a deranged psychopath who wants to become president in order to carry out all of his horrific, depraved fantasies on the people of America.
- Ultimatum:
- If you had been reading Ultimate X Men since day 1, it should be abundantly clear that Magneto is absolutely not being out of character here. This kind of mass genocide had always been his goal; the only difference here is that the X-Men could not stop him in time this time. So, when you find Sabretooth and Juggernaut drowning their sorrows in the last X-Men issues because they had never signed for genocide, it's clear that they had been hit with this trope.
- Dr. Doom manipulated Magneto to declare war on mankind. And it worked. It worked too well.
- In Violine, Muller forces Violine to read the minds of several of the president's ministers to prove that she can read minds, so he can weaponize her. Unfortunately, being in an African dictatorship, all the ministers are plotting the president's overthrow, and after several such revelations, the room descends into chaos as all the ministers put their plans in action at the same time, all calling on the same military to support them.
- Wonder Woman: The True Amazon: When she realizes that she might not win the Contest, Diana releases the monsters trapped within the Silver Serpent Horn as a distraction. This works, and she gleefully pulls ahead, runs up to the podium, and grabs the tiara as victor. Only to turn around and realize that, since no one was prepared for a fight (much less one with incredibly powerful monsters), everyone else was being maimed and the city overrun. By the time the monsters are pushed back, not only are countless Amazons either dead or disabled, but Alethea — the woman who Diana desperately wished to impress and gain the love of by winning the Contest to begin with — turns out to be among the dead. In fact, she was the woman who protected Diana by taking a fatal blow when fighting the monsters, which traumatizes a guilty Diana all the more.
- Multiple examples from X-Men:
- In The Dark Phoenix Saga, Mastermind manipulated Jean Grey's mind to remove both her morals and the blocks she'd put on her cosmic power. The result was... a little more than he could handle. Dark Phoenix "rewarded" Mastermind by giving him exactly what he wanted: she made his mind "one with the universe", shattering his sanity in the process as the human brain lacks the capacity to comprehend what he'd experienced.
- This is the recurring problem with the Sentinels, courtesy of A.I. Is a Crapshoot. See, the Sentinels are programmed to eradicate all mutants. Mutants evolved from baseline humans as a result of a specific combination of genetic traits. The Sentinels are equipped with genetic scanners that let them identify this "X-Gene" both in active and in passive form. Meaning they can not only track mutants, but they can also track humans who might turn into mutants, and even humans who have a chance of having mutant children. Logically, then, the next step is to start wiping out those humans too. And if humans attack the Sentinels in defense of those humans, then the Sentinels, by virtue of their self-defense programming, are obliged to terminate those humans as well. Needless to say, the very first of the Bad Futures the X-Men were involved with was the Days of Future Past storyline, involving a world where Sentinels wiped out mutants and then all humanity.
- Similarly with the Purifiers, who gave Bastion a new body so that he could help them kill the X-Men. Bastion took one look at their plan, dismissed it and created his own, almost instantly hijacking the Purifiers' purpose completely. Unluckily for the Purifiers, they didn't know Bastion had no qualms about using ordinary humans as weapons...
- Similarly, with Madelyne Pryor: When S'ym and N'astrir unlocked her powers and corrupted her, they assumed that they would be able to control her only for Maddie to hijack the entire Inferno plan to go after her husband Cyclops.
- That happened twice involving her, in the same event! Mr Sinister created her as a clone of Jean Grey, and did so good a job the Phoenix entity itself considered the two one and the same and gave her a portion of its power. Neither he nor the two demons realized she had that kind of power in her, and it backfired on them badly.
- Sinister does it again in the Sins of Sinister crossover — he corrupts the Krakoan resurrection project so that every mutant who gets resurrected has an overlay of his personality. This means the Quiet Council is broadly on board with his plans ... but no more loyal to him personally than he's ever been to anyone.
- One Xxxenophile comic has a couple start a one-night stand, with an angel and devil showing up to watch because the child they conceive that night will be the Antichrist. The devil continuously gloats about how immoral and hedonistic the couple is as they go through almost every possible permutation of extremities to orifices the human body has to offer, while the angel remains doubtful. Finally the sun rises, the devil is triumphant... and the angel reminds him that for all their sexual contortions, the one sex act the couple didn't perform was the one well-known to cause babies.
