Ignored Epiphany in Comic Books.
- The same willpower that allowed Doctor Doom to resist the Red Skull's Hate Wave in AXIS also meant he was able to deny the revelations about himself the Truth Wave that was unleashed to counter the Hate Wave forced upon him (in the Axis tie-in issues of Loki: Agent of Asgard). The literal bonafide Truth smacked Doom in the face...and he refused to accept it. That's either impressive or sad. Maybe both.
- Black Science: This is pretty much Grant and Sara’s Fatal Flaw, in a Deconstruction of the Determinator trope. No matter how often they’re told and shown that their obsessions with the pillars and protecting their children are just causing chaos and destruction, they keep going and ignore any objections. Their alternate selves are just as bad; one Ward explicitly complains that, throughout the whole multiverse, Grant and Sara seemingly never learn their lesson and just keep ruining lives with the pillars. There’s a reason for this; the Prime universe Grant has implanted a subliminal imperative to build and use pillars in all his alternates because he’s an Omnicidal Maniac who wants to start a chain reaction that will destroy the multiverse. They keep using the pillars because they have an instinctual drive to use them.
- Hughie from The Boys has a moment of this when Butcher manipulates him into walking out on Starlight. She desperately begs him not to leave and calls out to him in tears, but Hughie is so angry, confused, and ashamed that he leaves her without looking back. As the narration from that scene puts it:The strange thing was, he knew she was right. Without being sure exactly why, he knew he was making the wrong choice. But he dredged up what he needed to keep going. To put one leaden foot in front of the other.
- A Death in the Family: When the Joker starts beating Jason with a crowbar, Sheila seems horrified and remorseful at first. But a moment later, she just walks away and helps herself to a cigarette, with a stern look on her face.
- The Golden Age: Johnny Thunder has a My God, What Have I Done? moment after his refusal to accept the truth about Thompson drives away his genie companion (who Johnny tries to order to kill Hourman). However, in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, after Johnny Quick notes that Atom "learned something from his mistake", the scene cuts to Johnny behaving obnoxiously at a Christmas party, having apparently not learned the same lessons Atom did.
- Injustice: Year Zero: Poison Ivy tells Harley Quinn she has a history of realizing the Joker's an abusive monster and leaving him before snapping back and going right back to her "puddin'", who uses and abuses her all over again, and she knows Harley will just keep doing it. She also makes clear she won't try and stop her, just be there when it inevitably happens, with the warning that one day the Joker will go too far. Sure enough, at the end of the series, Harley reverts again. Unfortunately for them and everyone, the next time is that time.
- Disney Ducks Comic Universe:
- At the end of Only a Poor Old Man, Donald Duck tells Scrooge McDuck that for all the trouble required to protect his three cubic acres of cash, Scrooge is only a poor old man. There's a beat as Scrooge seems to consider Donald's words, before the old miser thinks, "Bah! Kid talk! No man is poor who can do what he likes to do once in a while! And I like to dive around in my money like porpoise!"
- The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck:
- After his greatest failure, Scrooge spends decades wandering the planet, building his fortune. When he finally comes home, his sisters (who abandoned him afterwards) have gathered his family to greet him... but he storms past them, demanding they arrange for the people seeking donations to get away. Hortense, furious at the change in her brother, tells him he can either stop them from leaving or never see them again, at which point all and sundry walk out (a young Donald Duck giving Scrooge a kick in the ass for good measure). Scrooge, realizing how badly he's screwed up, is about to run after them... when he sees his Roster of the Rich and realizes he's the richest man in the world. The last panel shows him laughing in celebration... as his family walks away, leaving him Lonely at the Top.
- Earlier, while he's looking for gold in the Yukon, he spends some time sitting on a mountaintop, enraptured by the scenery, and wondering if he should just give up his money-grubbing ways and live off the land... then he says to heck with that, and announces that he'd put an oil pipeline through it if it would make him rich.
- In "Cry Duck!"
, Scrooge staged "tests" to see how his employees (among them Donald Duck) reacted. Hilarity Ensued when a real thug attacked him and Donald dismissed his plight as another test, but Scrooge failed to learn anything, refused to admit he was ever at fault, and ends up chasing Donald out of town trying to clobber him.
- Mr Gone from The Maxx knows every little psychological detail of why he does what he does. He even feels bad about it. That doesn't stop him.
- Mega Man (Archie Comics): After Xander rants about how robots will destroy humanity, Dr. Light points out the reality of the situation. It's the Spears who are threatening people, and the robots saving human lives. Xander takes a moment to contemplate this, only to detonate explosives shortly afterwards.
- Cassidy's pattern of abusing women, then feeling remorse in Preacher.Cassidy: Yeh do it an' yeh're one of the monsters...But yeh know what? Yeh wake up the next mornin' an' yer still alive...Yeh sort yerself out a bit... An' a wee tiny part've yeh starts to believe in a second chance.
Jesse: An' then you do it again. - Velma handwaves this in a Gold Key Scooby-Doo story (issue 23's "Tribute in Flames") where a monster from a volcano terrorizes a town. Shaggy thinks the monster is a scientist the gang met earlier, so he and Scooby run to confront him:Fred: (as he, Velma and Daphne run after Shaggy and Scooby) We've got to stop him before he does something stupid.
Velma: (dryly) Why tamper with nature? - Secret Wars (2015)'s Giant Size Little Marvel: a vs. x, the twins finally have enough of the in-fighting between the heroes and chew out Cyclops, Iron Man, Captain America and Medusa. The kids are remorseful over it, but when the twins ask if they would stop fighting for now on, all four declare "NAH!" and we're greeted with a two-page spread of an all-out war between heroes and the twins end up joining the bad guys.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
- In issue 59, Sonic and Tails get trapped in a pocket dimension with Horizont-Al and Verti-Cal, who are now locked in eternal combat thanks to the events of issue 50. At the end, after Sonic and Tails win with The Power of Friendship, they give Al and Cal a speech about how they should go back to being friends. They briefly ponder this... then decide "Naaaaaaah!" and return to killing each other.
- After Sonic's return from space, Fiona Fox admits to him that his Heroic Sacrifice against the Xorda is what finally convinced her that he truly was a valiant hero, having convinced herself otherwise after he unintentionally left her behind in Robotnik's lab. Upon her defection to Scourge in issue 172, Fiona has disregarded this and throws his failure to save her in his face, telling Tails that he can't count on or trust anyone and using Sonic as her "prime example".
- Star Wars: Invasion: In Issue 3, during the battle for Rychel, Finn spares the life of the Vong warrior Tsalok when he has him at his mercy and tells him to "learn". Tsalok is left very confused by this, since he cannot understand why anybody would show mercy to a defeated foe, and the text builds this up to make it seem like he is about to reach some internal revelation... but he promptly goes back to slaughtering helpless captives soon afterwards.Tsalok has never heard of mercy, let alone employed it — he is not about to start now.
- Superman:
- "Luthor Unleashed": After another humiliating and painful (in both senses of the word) defeat, Lex Luthor realizes he cannot go on like this: his war against Superman is pointless and will only get him killed him. Lex decides to admit defeat and exile himself into planet Lexor, where his family lives and he is beloved by everybody. Nonetheless, he cannot let his hatred go, and ends up resuming his war against Superman once again.
- Superman: Red Son: Pyotr at one point laments his own evil deeds, most notably having killed that universe's versions of Thomas and Martha Wayne. He even attempts to commit suicide while Drowning His Sorrows, but is saved by Superman. At one point Pyotr says something along the lines of how Superman makes him want to be a better person than he is. But once Stalin dies and Supes becomes head of the Soviet Union, Pyotr promptly goes right back to being a ruthless, scheming bastard who actively attempts to depose Superman.
- Superior Spider Man:
- One issue of Team Up had SpOck's "Superior Six" plan utterly backfire on him with him realizing what he had done was horrible and that he's planning on quit being Spider-Man and turn himself in to The Avengers. However, when he encounters Namor and the former ruler talks to him about his problems... he knocks Namor on his ass, tells him to get out of his city and promptly swings away, proclaiming that he will still be the Superior Spider-Man.
- This basically applies to the digital recreation of Octavius that emerged during the events of Dead No More: The Clone Conspiracy; learning about the circumstances of the original Octavius's death (he willingly deleted himself from Peter's mind because he recognised that Peter was the true 'Superior Spider-Man'), the 'new' Octavius instead convinces himself that his other self had some sort of mental breakdown because Peter's brain couldn't cope with his own superior intellect.
- Transformers:
- The Transformers Megaseries: After murdering Leadfoot in cold blood, Galvatron suddenly pauses and, for the briefest of moments, seems to realize how pointless and his obsession with power and violence really is; it hasn’t made him happy and has cost him everything he truly cared about. Then the rest of Leadfoot’s squad attacks to avenge his death, and Galvatron immediately pushes the thought out of his head to focus on fighting.
- In The Transformers: Robots in Disguise, Prowl falls under Decepticon mind control. This causes a chain of events that culminate in riots, and death and critical injuries within the main cast. Afterwards, the character realises that the reason nobody except Arcee noticed what was wrong was because he already had a reputation for being an insufferable jerk even before he was mind controlled. He then promptly goes back to his usual jerkass shenanigans, including provoking Chromedome about his dead husband, spying on Optimus, pointing a gun at Jazz's head for a completely illogical reason, revealing himself and putting humans in danger just to chase one down for a simple talk, and generally doing things behind the Autobots' backs. Go figure.
- Sins of the Wreckers lampshades this, with Prowl's old partner Tarantulas noting that Prowl often goes through "cyclical phases" of regretting his actions and wanting to change, only to go right back to being the same morally compromised jerk he always was.
- Wonder Woman:
- Wonder Woman (1942): In Judgment In Infinity after putting mankind to a test, the Adjudicator briefly wonders whether he should spare Earth in order to study humans further. One second later, he decides he is not interested in researching worlds but in "judging" them (that is to say, destroying them).
- Wonder Woman (1987): When Circe regains herself after her Memory Gambit as Donna Milton she is quite conflicted about her newly learned sense of morality, and even tries to help rescue Artemis. The next time she's seen she's still struggling with it, before deciding that she's furious she even has such thoughts and goes to help another villain kidnap, torture and mind rape a teen into attacking and murdering other teens before going on a murder spree of her own in New York.
- Uncanny X-Force has Wolverine's tendency towards this examined:
- Fantomex kills a kid version of Apocalypse, even after the rest of the team agreed it was unjustifiable? A clear sign that X-Force is going too far, right? No, according to Wolverine it was totally justified in hindsight and X-Force is still a perfectly good idea. Deadpool and Psylocke immediately call him out on the fact that he's not just lying to himself, but also blatantly contradicting his previous opinions. And keep in mind that the only reason Fantomex didn't agree with them was because he used the World to revive Kid Apocalypse and undo his indoctrination; in other words, instead of denying his sins like Logan, he actually made an effort to undo or atone for them.
- Its eventually revealed that the team's ruthless "no matter the cost" attitude will bring about a Bad Future where crime is prevented by brutally executing anybody who even thinks about doing something bad. Despite being given firsthand evidence that he's becoming just as bad as the villains and the rest of the team being justifiably unnerved, Wolverine still refuses to believe that he's done anything morally wrong and even tries to justify the horrific world his future self has helped create. It takes Psylocke attempting suicide and being forced to kill his own son for Wolverine to finally realize and accept the mistakes he's made.
