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alt title(s): Axe Crazy 
Lizzie Borden took an ax
and gave her mother forty whacks
When she saw what she had done
she gave her father forty-one
An "ax crazy" character is someone who is psychologically unstable and presents a clear danger to others. Ax crazies are capable of extreme violence, whether carried out with a Slasher Smile, a Creepy Monotone, or out and out murderous rage, and they're not too picky about their victims, which makes them extremely frightening to deal with. This mainly differentiates them from other eccentric characters who may themselves be obsessive, weird or seemingly crazy, but use this condition hand in hand with doing good, or at least not being in the way. However, some formerly established heroes can go through an episode of ax-craziness and still retain their heroic mantle.
Despite the title, many ax crazies don't limit themselves to axes — most of them favor big knives, straight razors, or other nasty implements of gory death, with the truly crazy among them favoring the chainsaw, and the best of them, chainsaw axes. A good number of other ax crazies are also Trigger Happy, preferring either Really Big Guns that blow really big holes in people, or weapons that allow them to kill lots of people with reckless abandon, such as any automatic weapon. The truly crazy among these people prefer a heaping helping of high explosives or a good-sized flamethrower.
It is rare for a truly Ax Crazy character to be a protagonist. Common as the antagonists in Super Hero and Crime And Punishment shows, often serving as a Psycho For Hire.
Sadly, this is also an example of Truth In Television, as Real Life ax crazies have been responsible for many horrible tragedies.
See also: Automatically Violent, Mad Bomber and Blood Knight. Many of the worst examples of The Pesci are Ax Crazy, as well as just about any Yandere when she goes off the deep end. The all but canonical Character Alignment for an Ax Crazy character is Chaotic Evil (a few more benevolent ones, such as many Ophelias, may manage to be Chaotic Neutral or Chaotic Good). Sometimes The Unfettered.
Note that the "Ax" is metaphorical. For people who wield an actual axe, see An Axe To Grind.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
Newspaper Comics
- In one story arc in Bloom County, Steve Dallas, in a bid to not die in six months, tries to quit smoking. As Michael Binkley puts it, "He's a psycho even with Nicotine in his veins!" Opus ties him to a chair, but this doesn't help, as later Steve is seen hopping after Opus, still tied to said chair, holding an axe in his mouth. Later on, Milo Bloom is looking through the boarding house windows with binoculars, and sees Steve holding Opus by the throat, screaming something along the lines of "A pack of Marlboros or I'm having penguin pate for dinner!" Fortunately, Steve's withdrawal-induced insanity is alleviated when he finds a huge stash of Hostess Ding Dongs, and gorges himself into a sugar-coma.
Comic Books
Film
- What? Doesn't replacing your right hand with a FUCKING CHAINSAW and using the other hand to use a Sawed-Off Shotgun count? Wait, it does? Groovy.
- Captain Nero from Star Trek. Quite literally, he wakes up in the morning looking for new shit to blow up. And with advanced tech from the future, he can actually accomplish this.
- Trigger Happy Lola from The Transporter 2
- "Actually, my problem's not medical. It's psychological. (shoots the nurse)
- And a few moments later: "What seems to be the problem?" "Me." (yet another burst of gunfire)
- Geaer Grimsrud from Fargo. In fact, in one scene he actually uses an ax.
- John Ryder in The Hitcher is one of the most chilling and disturbing examples.
- Mark Collins in Twisted.
- J.D. from Heathers.
- David Allen Griffin in The Watcher.
- Arthur Burns from the film The Proposition is a well read and very deep Warrior Poet...who just happens to have a penchant for gang-rape and mass murder.
- Max Cady (especially De Niro's version) from both versions of the film Cape Fear.
- Detective Norman Stansfield from Leon has the habit of murdering entire families while humming Beethoven, in fits of drug-induced lunacy (though it doesn't help that he is also a death obsessed psychopath).
- Mr. Blonde/Vic Vega from Reservoir Dogs while certainly being the embodiment of cool, is a sadistic monster who nonchalantly murders and tortures innocent people for the hell of it while dancing to catchy tunes on the radio. Let's just say, the scene he is most famous for is a classic case of crossing the Moral Event Horizon.
- Elle Driver and Gogo Yubari (as well as basically the entire main cast) of Kill Bill Vol. 1/2 are excellent examples. Elle is a venomous, hateful, Rival Turned Evil who distinguishes herself from the other ruthless killers of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad by being the only member who is genuinely evil and malicious, while Gogo is simply a violent, sadistic sociopath who, quoting The Bride, "Makes up for her young age with madness."
- Harry Powell from The Night Of The Hunter.
- The Joker.
- Norman Bates in Psycho brutally kills Marion in the shower while dressed as his mother. If that's not ax crazy, I don't know what is.
- That's multiple personality disorder, that is. "Norman" is pretty much harmless (although he did poison his mother and her love and embalm her corpse), it's "Mother" you have to beware of...
- Sarah turns into this over the course of The Descent. Differs from many examples in that it wasn't a random attack so much as the Ax Crazy making her act on her motivations. Alternately, the movie purposely left open the possibility that she had imagined the creatures and it was really just her slaughtering all her friends. Which would make her much more Ax Crazy, and throughout the whole movie.
- Only in the Revised Ending. In the original ending, there's an additional scene which shows her about to be killed by the very-much-not-imaginary creatures while hallucinating that she's back with her dead daughter.
- Frank Booth from Blue Velvet. One of the most memorably profane and sadistic psychopaths ever put to film.
- Jonathan Brewster in the play and movie Arsenic And Old Lace. He's murdered as many people as his two aunts combined, but did it far less calmly. He wants to kill again just so he can be ahead in the count.
- Arguably the old ladies are even worse, having killed 11 old men, and making it to the end of the story still convinced that what they've done is a form of charity.
- Repo! The Genetic Opera has Luigi Largo. He's been described as walking around with a flask and a knife, drinking and stabbing anything that gets in his way, including his own employees. He's also tried to strangle his brother in 'Mark It Up'.
I'm the smartest and the toughest!
I will find a hole and f*** it!
If there ain't one, I will make one!
Luigi don't take sh** from no one!
- Heddy from Single White Female. From the number of people she kills and impersonates she certainly seems to fall under the Axe Crazy heading.
- Why is Kazuo Kiriyama from Battle Royale not here? He shoots down several unarmed girls, grabs their microphone thing and puts it to one girl's mouth SO EVERYONE WITHIN HEARING DISTANCE CAN HEAR HER GROANS OF DEATH AS SHE DIES. Did I fail to mention he makes a pretty threatening figure with FIRE SURROUNDING HIM as he's dying. And that a certain blonde from a certain band in Japan was considered for Kazuo's role?
- Wooley from Dawn of the Dead. The guy just runs around the apartment building in the beginning of the movie shooting everybody in sight, whether they were zombified or not. The movie implies that he could've been racist to minorities. He was so out of control, the SWAT had no choice but to kill him.
- Implied? He cleary uses racist terms toward the mostly minority residents of the apartment. The fact that he's killing everyone in sight doesn't help at all.
- Never steal Dr. Frank N Furter's spotlight while he's holding a pick axe. It may be the last thing you do. Meat loaf, anyone?
- He can also be pretty intimidating with an electric carving knife.
- Morrell in A Room For Romeo Brass appears to be just a lonely eccentric, but he soon reveals his true colours when he threatens a disabled boy with a knife for a harmless practical joke that made him appear foolish in front of the woman he is obsessively fixated upon, threatens to kill the boy's family, and then threatens to kill the boy's best friend (and brother of the object of his lust) when the woman rejects him. However, compared to several of the others on this list he's an unusually laughable and ultimately rather pathetic example; his attempt to make good on his threats is put in its place when the best friend's estranged father — who hasn't taken any of Morrell's shit throughout the entire movie — charges in, gives Morrell a damn good kicking and sends him skulking away with his tail between his legs and the promise that, if the boy's father ever sets eyes on him again, he'll be the one who ends up dead.
- The almost perputually chipper and cheerful Angela Baker in the Sleepaway Camp movies. Originally a kind of puritanical killer she just degerated into killing for the sake of killing after a while.
Angela Baker: "I've never chopped wood before, but I've chopped other things!"
- The titular killer from The Stepfather films whose sanity is shaky at the best of times, going from perfect All-American dad to a ranting psychotic who beats people to death with a wooden board or stabs them in them in the face with a rake at the drop of a hat.
- Bonecrusher hates axes. They're nice for hurting things he hates more, though.
- A fairly generic ax-murderer is one of the antagonists in Last Action Hero. The fact that he's a hulking, semicoherent clone of every other Ax Crazy slasher on film is surely deliberate, as he's a fictional character from a rather trite series of lowbrow action flicks.
- The Movie of Matilda adds a good dose of Ax Crazy to The Trunchbull in addition to her cruel treatment of her students. The first thing she does when she suspects intruders in her house? She bull-charges from room to room, leaps down from the second floor, bringing down her chandelier in the process, and eventually starts swinging an Olympic hammer around and randomly smashing it into her possessions.
- Cemetery Man. When the Grim Reaper tells you to kill people, you kill people.
Literature
- Patrick Bateman, title character of American Psycho.
- And Rachel Newman, of the female-centric sequel to the Film Of The Book, which seemingly missed out on the fact most of the killings were in his head, though a few were debatable. She actually IS superior to Bateman in every way, and the fact she's doing this all in Quantico might just make her a JerkassStu as well as Ax Crazy. It's debatable how much of AP 2: All American Girl is satire poking fun at misconceptions about the first and how much is Gonterman-level 'writing ability.'
- The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett often has these as villains. Instances: Jonathan Teatime the assassin in Hogfather, Carcer, a sadistic sociopath in Night Watch, Mr. Tulip and Mr. Pin, aka The New Firm, in The Truth, Wolfgang from The Fifth Elephant is the prototype for the later character of Carcer. Thief of Time has multiple ax-crazy moments, such as Jeremy Clockson's behavior when he hasn't had his medicine, and Mr. White's mental breakdown while holding an actual ax.
- If Edward Hyde isn't Axe Crazy I don't know who is. He does pretty horrible things along the book, but the most gruesome of his deeds is the murder of one of leaders of parliament. He has completely no reason for it, no provoke, and bashing in the face of old gentleman isn't really anything that sane man would do. As desribed in the book:
The spirits of Hell woke up in me to their full rage. I hit the defenceless body within intoxicating ecstasy and I enjoyed every single hit * Then I ran along the lit street still full of this amphibious euphoria, gloating about my crime and at the same time planning ligheadedly new ones, altought listening carefully in case for the steps of chasing avenger. With a song on his lips Hyde mixed the potion, and upon drinking it he drank the toast of dead man.
- Jack Torrance from Stephen King's The Shining, especially the Jack Nicholson version, who uses an actual ax instead of a croquet mallet when he finally goes over the edge. "Heeeeeere's Johnny!"
- No female fits this description better than Annie Wilkes of the Stephen King novel Misery. She has a habit of amputating a person's foot and cauterizing the wound with a blowtorch when she doesn't get her way.
- Dwayne Hoover in Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions winds up going on an insane rampage, which the author/narrator attributes to the influence of "bad chemicals."
- Francis Begbie from the book (and The Film Of The Book) Trainspotting, despite being one of the few members of his group to not use drugs, is the token berserker psychopath of the story, once casually injuring a random woman by throwing his beer mug off of a balcony and hitting her in the head, just so he could start a massive Bar Brawl.
- Anton Chigurh from the novel No Country For Old Men is Ax Crazy personified. He has almost no personality other than pure murderous evil, which is made abundantly clear throughout the book.
- Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar, in the novel (and BBC miniseries) Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.
- Holloway Roberts becomes Ax Crazy in House Of Leaves as a result of ever more dire circumstances while trying to explore the house's labyrinthine halls.
- Rodya Raskolnikov from Crime And Punishment, like Annie Wilkes, is literally ax crazy at least once. Although that was because he flipped out in the middle of a murder he'd already premeditated.
- Lijah Cuu from the Warhammer 40000: Gaunt's Ghosts series.
A casebook sociopath, if ever he'd seen one.
People called Larkin mad, but he wasn't mad like Cuu. Cuu was a cold killer. A psycho.
- Bellatrix Lestrange from Harry Potter. In fact, there are numerous occasions where Voldemort decides he has to stop Bellatrix from killing anyone (admittedly because killing them would ruin some plan of his, rather than out of any actual mercy, but even so...)
- Oh, sure. 'Cause only Voldie can hold her back, right?
- William Hamleigh from The Pillars Of The Earth has elements of this.
- Gregor Clegane. You know you're insane when even The Hound is scared of you.
- Interestingly enough, Arya Stark (a survivor of one of Gregor's murderous rampages through south-central Westeros) seems headed in this direction. She's one of the good guys, though. It's a real pity that she never got the chance to give Gregor a taste of valar morghulis ( High Valyrian for "Everyone Dies") before his death.
- She may still get the opportunity to, seeing as it hasn't been confirmed that Gregor is dead, and that Maester Qyburn appropriated his body to use in his experiments to create a "great champion" for her.
- In Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, the murderer is obviously Ax Crazy material as they are more than willing to kill nine people for the sake of making sure they don't escape justice considering they killed people and all. Interestingly enough, one other character qualifies who is not the murderer: Vera Claythorne, after being forced to endure four straight days of pure psychological torture including looking back on her murder of a little boy so her lover could inherit his estate, completely snaps and kills Philip Lombard minutes before committing suicide.
- Malus Darkblade from the 'Warhammer: Deamons Curse''series is a shining example of Ax Crazy. He eats the heart of a previous captor, makes his oldest brothers face into a mask, and murders his father for a knife. And that's before the deamon stole his soul.
- Note that this is not in any way unusual in Druchii culture, for example, that father of his torured him for about a week for some reason I dont remember. (he probably doesn't either.)
- Iida Sadamu from Tales Of The Otori:
When those bright eyes met mine, I at once knew to things about him: first, that he was afraid of nothing in heaven or on earth; second, that he loved to kill merely for the sake of killing.
- Sallie Declan, the Villain Protagonist of A. N. Wilson's A Jealous Ghost, has longstanding...issues. While babysitting a six-year-old boy, she loses her temper and hits him on the side of the head, hard, sending him smashing into a faucet. Later on, in college, she loses her temper again and nails a fellow student with an iron. And, making the third time the charm, when Sallie is dismissed from her job as a nanny, she murders a young girl by smashing her skull in and slashing her face to bits.
- Zane of Mistborn is a self-admitted lunatic who hears a voice in his head every time he sees someone except for the heroine telling him to kill them. Normally he does his best to ignore it, but every so often he will kill or maim someone (or just cut himself) to keep the voice under control. He's also psychotic in other, more subtle ways and in fact his violent insanity was what allowed the voice, actually that of the literal god of destruction to speak to him in the first place. The Inquisitors from the same series are also decidedly unstable, because they draw their power from the same god.
Live Action TV
- There have been many episodes of Law and Order dealing with ax crazies.
- Drusilla in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel.
- A significant number of vampire in "Buffy" could fall under this trope. After all, 'souless killers' is part of the definition for vampire in this series. And Drusilla's craziness is a result of the mental trauma she experienced as Angelus tortured her and made her watch while he tortured and killed her family.
- Angelus himself, who liked to recreate the slaughter of his own family whenever he got bored, may be a better example of this trope. And let's not forget Darla, who seems to have wreaked some very bloody havoc of her own.
- Faith in the third season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. She later does a Heel Face Turn, and both reforms and becomes more stable.
- Warren Mears
- River Tam from Firefly is an example of someone who has gone through Ax Crazy moments while still retaining her protagonist (and woobie) status. Her main violence has been against bad guys, but she's attacked fellow crewmates in the past, but has not done so with enough force to kill. Still, it's enough to freak out more than a few people who are not familiar with her history and motivations for violence.
- Particularly memorable is the scene in "Ariel" where she slashes Jayne's chest with a butcher knife because he was wearing a Blue Sun T-shirt, and because he would later try to turn her and her brother Simon in to the Alliance for the reward money. With her psychic abilities, she most likely sensed something stabworthy about him.
- Sensing something stabworthy about him does not require psychic abilities.
- She singlehandedly slaughtered an entire army of Reavers in a Crowning Moment Of Awesome.
- Ax Craziness is the hat of the Reavers. As Zoe puts it in the pilot episode, these cannibalistic once-human horrors will "rape you to death, eat your flesh, and sew your skin to their clothing - and if you're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order."
- The titular character of Dexter is an Ax Crazy, if a likable and methodical one.
- Lila from Season 2. Sure, Dexter's a serial killer with deep psychoses, but he's methodical and reasonable about who he kills. Lila, on the other hand, is completely batshit.
- Not really in either case. Dexter is extremely discriminate about who he kills (murderers). Before the series Lila has only killed one person, and it may have been an accident. Now the Ice Truck Killer on the other hand ... he was Ax Crazy. Seems like the Big Bad of Season 4 is as well.
- In the last season of Red Dwarf there's an inmate named KillCrazy. Ironically, at the first chance to actually kill something, he runs headlong into a doorframe and knocks himself out cold.
- Of course, the Dwarfers used to occasionally run into simulants, Ax Crazy robots who were bred for a war that never happen, and bend on destroying all life. Plus the one time they were send a replacement for Kryten, Hudzen, it turned out to be Ax Crazy as well!
- From Scrubs:
"Heh, Hooch is crazy."
"Who the HELL... put bouillon cubes in the shower head!?! Huh? Hm, did you do it? Hm? Did you? If it happens again... I will wait in my SUV, blast me some speed metal — five point one surround sound, heavy on the bass — and someone... will be getting... mowed... down."
"... Hooch is crazy!"
- From Doctor Who, THE DALEKS DEMAND TO KNOW WHY THEY ARE NOT HERE ALREADY!
- The Master also qualifies, since he seems to kill whether it helps his plans or not.
- The Daleks don't really qualify for this trope, as they are all genetically bred genocide stormtroopers. If it's in your genes to be a genocidal stormtrooper, there's not really much you can do about it. Their creator, on the other hand, is definitely Ax Crazy with a vengeance.
- Unless it's the Special Weapons Dalek. Basically, a Dalek with a BFG strapped to the front. The only problem is that the radiation drives the Dalek insane, and as liable to destroy its own Dalek comrades as the enemy.
- Xena Warrior Princess has Callisto. Freudian Excuse notwithstanding, she is one of the most disturbing TV villainesses this troper has ever seen.
- 01 Boxer in Charlie Jade
- Only in the Betaverse, and arguably the Alphaverse. He seems to manifest a different personality in each world; in the Gammaverse he's a loving husband who is horrified at what he becomes in the other two universes.
- Wiseguy. Vinnie Terranova stumbles across a corrupt toxic waste-disposal company, whose boss ends up beating a woman to death with a golf club. He later turns out to be suffering from mercury poisoning - he was literally "as mad as a hatter".
- Lost: Keamy is already not a nice guy, but like several people on the freighter it appears that the Island has made him unstable. Extremely unstable. To the point where he casually kills the captain of the ship just to prove a point and intentionally puts the entire crew (well, the ones he hasn't killed yet) at risk...just so he can complete his mission of getting Ben. He also saves his life by kicking a grenade at his second-in-command when it lands at his feet.
Music
Tabletop Games
- The Wayward creed in Hunter: the Reckoning are all Ax Crazy. Every Hunter is imbued by the Powers That Be, but most are left to their own devices afterward. The Waywards, however, get to experience the Powers up close and personal all the time; this being the (old) World of Darkness, that's not a good thing. Furthermore, other Hunters show a preference to protect humanity from unruly supernatural forces; Waywards, on the other hand, are more likely to blow up any supernatural creature they encounter (no matter how harmless), and shrug their shoulders if any humans die as a result of "collateral damage." The biggest Ax Crazy is Joshua, AKA "God45," who is implied to have stolen a nuclear weapon during the Time of Judgement. He becomes a player character in the video game Hunter: the Reckoning: Wayward, where Fanatic656 displays the traditional Wayward traits.
- Hunter: the Vigil, Reckoning's new World of Darkness counterpart, features slashers as antagonists, humans who are driven to kill. Some become mortal serial killers; others, however, begin to manifest supernatural powers to 'help' in their pursuit...
- The World Eaters legion from Warhammer 40000 are Ax Crazy with a side order of fries (And that's not ketchup). Extra points because they actually use axes. Well, chain-axes.
- The most famous member of the World Eaters, Khârn the Betrayer, is noted for being the Ax Craziest of all the Ax Crazies in 40k. He has a special rule that causes him to attack other members of whatever squad he's attached to. In the background, he reportedly became so enraged that his fellow World Eaters were taking shelter from an intense blizzard powerful enough to kill even Chaos Space Marines instead of fighting their rivals that he took a flamethrower and burned down all their shelters, before running about and beheading troops on both sides. Khârn racked up such an insane kill tally in this one battle that he shattered the World Eaters' capacity to be a coherent fighting force.
- He's still a pretty fun guy to be around during a bloodletting campaign, though.
- Chaos Dreadnoughts are also prone to this kind of thing, with one dice result on an Insanity check causing them to frag the closest unit with all weapons on full auto.
- Orks are also Ax Crazy, arguably, though that's pretty much normal for the species as a whole.
- Arguably?! Needs more Choppa.
- The Iron Kingdoms: Kommander Orsus Zoktavir, The Butcher of Khardov, is a very literal case of ax crazy. Its name is Lola.
- Cyborgs who get too many implants, in settings where Cybernetics Eat Your Soul. They're known as "cyberpsychos" in Cyberpunk 2020 and C-SWAT's special Psycho Squad gets called in when one goes on the loose.
- Pretty much anything Always Chaotic Evil in Dungeons And Dragons. Especially the Demons. <shudder>
- Surprisingly rare among darklords of Ravenloft, as most aren't truly insane, hence are wholly responsible for their own evil actions. The Hive Queen, Tristessa, Malken, and Duke Gundar have all shown strong Ax Crazy tendencies, however, as do quite a few non-darklord villains like the Midnight Slasher.
- "Madman" actually had its own entry in the 2nd Edition Ravenloft Monster Compendium,
Video Games
- "I am Truth, Voice of the Covenant!" Halo's own ax crazy madman. He finally gets to almost use his weapons (7 rings that will make all life in the Milky Way extinct) in Halo 3. The Arbiter in Halo Wars is a clear example.
- Sapphire of Disgaea 3 qualifies. Not as psychotic as some here, but still quite violent.
- Fritz from Brain Dead 13, whose deranged methods of killing involve egg beaters, harpoons, and even a blender. Combine that with him being a Determinator, and, well... you're screwed.
- Arioch from Drakengard is an Ax Crazy Action Girl. Due to the loss of her children (presumably right in front of her eyes and in some gruesome way), she's now a cannibal, and has a preference for small children.
- In Dwarf Fortress, every now and then one of your dwarfs may snap and start killing anything and everything in sight. The usual cause for this is their happiness falling too low, although there are others.
- Often from having seen/being attacked by another dwarf that had this happen to them.
- Memorably, in the Something Awful Let's Play fortress of Boatmurdered, the fortress deteriorated to a level where it was in a constant state of anarchy, with dwarfs becoming so annoyed by the smoke and miasma that they snapped and went on a rampage, invariably killing a dwarf that was the relative of another dwarf, driving that dwarf into a homicidal rage, and so on. Probably the best individual moment of this was when one of the former governors of the fortress, who was possessing of insane strength, managed to beat several other dwarfs to death incredibly messily. While on fire.
- Sheogorath, the Daedric Lord of Madness in The Elder Scrolls series (appearing in the flesh in the expansion pack of Oblivion) is an Anthropomorphic Personification of this trope.
- For someone who ends all his conversations with "Visit again or I'll pluck out your eyes!", he is surprisingly nonviolent. Even if you attack him, he doesn't attack back directly, just scolds you and teleports you into the sky, causing you to fall to your death.
- Just don't make him too happy or talk to him while he's contemplating on having Brain Pie for lunch.
- Kefka from Final Fantasy VI. This is a man who reduced the planet to a burned-out shell because he could, and then randomly took out the remaining pockets of civilization with a Wave Motion Gun whenever he got bored.
- Somewhat subverted in Jade Empire; the Black Whirlwind is a hot-headed hulking brute who carries twin axes, has murdered innocent noblewomen, burned down temples, and more, most if not all while drunk, but he's on your side.
- Ignus, a fire mage, from Planescape: Torment, who nearly burned down the entire city of Sigil before being stopped, can join your party. Ravel Puzzlewell, who almost destroyed the city of Sigil before the Lady intervened, is connected with your character. The Xaosects/Chaosmen, represented mainly by the insane Starved Dogs Barking thugs, prowl The Hive (though you can speak to one, Barking-Wilder, and turn him briefly sane). Acaste, the Ghoul Queen, hungers for flesh, though that's pretty standard procedure for a ghoul. One of your own past incarnations was quite ax crazy and damn near impossible to kill, to boot. You can use a fossilized arm of his as a weapon.
- The crown king of all Ax Crazy RPG villains is Luca Blight from Suikoden II, hands down. Nothing is safe from his wrath...not even small children. In fact, Luca rewrites the book on Bad Ass, as it eventually takes as many as eighteen of your party members, several volleys of arrows (each one shown capable of immediately killing one of his soldiers), and after all this, a duel to the death with the main character to bring him down in a suitably epic Climax Boss battle.
- Albedo from the Xenosaga series. The particularly disturbing "Ma-Peche" scene gives testament to this, especially when he tears his own head off to prove a point about how he can not die.
- In the Japanese version, he cuts it off, but the edited scene in the english release actually manages to be more disturbing than the original.
- Omega from the Mega Man Zero series is a mechanical embodiment of this trope. His sole purpose is simply to kill. His bloodthirsty nature rivals even a Khorne Berserker.
- Who may actually be Zero's Superpowered Evil Side and/or Evil Counterpart inhabiting a separate body.
- Omega's own creator, Dr. Weil, also qualifies. Destroying a whole neighborhood just to capture the Dark Elf? Check. Making humans' lives completely miserable, with the choice of either dying or living under his rule? Check. Setting a Kill Sat to destroy a human encampment? Check. Plus, going completely nuts after the Kill Sat is set and fired against himself, initiating a Colony Drop with him inside the satellite, believing himself to survive the crash...
- And even before all that, the fact that Weil's schemes in the Elf Wars caused the End Of The World As We Know It and claimed the lives of 60% of all humans, and 90% of all Reploids. Sheesh...
- He's such an incredibly dangerous person to have around that even after his bodily death, his sheer loathing and insanity leached into the surrounding wreckage, giving inanimate material the ability to feel hatred and desire complete obliteration of all sentient life on the planet. Even so killed and diffused, he's still so thoroughly evil that mere proximity to fragments of this wreckage can drive a person to insanity, which eventually becomes a major plot point in the sequel series Mega Man ZX.
- Super Paper Mario has Dimentio. It's not obvious at first, but about three-quarters of the way through the game he starts killing characters left and right, all the while cracking jokes and delivering lines like "It won't be so bad, I promise", in addition to being The Starscream. He's also referred to as being psychotic at least once in the game.
- The Beauty and the Beast Unit from Metal Gear Solid 4 is an entire Amazon Brigade full of Ax Crazy women driven insane by horrific war-time atrocities. They also have Powered Armor, so that's cool too.
- Touhou has a number of characters who might be considered borderline Ax Crazy, but the two poster girls for the trope are Yuka and Flandre.
- Except Yuka isn't canonically insane: there's just one particular doujin comic that makes her so.
- Yuka may not be quite as insane as Flandre, but she still qualifies as Ax Crazy due to her dialogue in Mystic Square. For example: "Genocide is just another game, whether it's Humans or Makaijin." Even if the doujin took it to the extreme, the basis is firmly grounded in canon.
- Daniella the maid in Haunting Ground. She is a "construct" built to be the "perfect woman" by her master. However, she cannot feel pain or pleasure, which drives her to scream at her reflection in mirrors because she feels she is not "complete". She gets even crazier and hateful towards Fiona, who can feel what Daniella cannot. Daniella comes to a logical conclusion—she headbutts a window until it breaks, takes a big shard of glass from it, and well, she's gonna hack Fiona into itty-bitty pieces.
- In the first Mechwarrior game, you can get pilots to help you in your group, each comes with a picture and a quote along with their stats, before you hire them. One of them is Killer, wearing a ski mask, with the quote "I want to burn villages and eat dead!"
- Roughly 3/4ths of the cast of No More Heroes, give or take.
- From The Mark of Kri we have Tati. This deserves special mention because her older brother Rau is the one with the ax, but he's remarkably calm and level headed. And he never speaks in anything except battle cries. Unless Tati turns to The Dark Side, in which he will utter her name once before Tati and the forces of darkness slaughter him. Tati, on the other hand, is very vocal and has moments of exceeding maliciousness. The way she slaughters single enemies with her knives looks more painful than anything Rao does with his ax, and considering the bodycount Rao racks up with it, that's saying something.
- Barbatos Goetia of Tales Of Destiny 2 is also an example of Ax Crazy trying to prove that he's the strongest out there, which caused him to be written out of history in the first place. It's not just his personality that is insane, his power is also insane that he can even be invulnerable against magic whenever someone tries to cast one. He also wields an ax. If you want more of his Ax Crazy stuffs, just listen him pull an Evil Laugh or his Kiai.
- The main reason Jade Curtiss from Tales Of The Abyss banned relicating living creatures was that when he attempted to revive his Dead Little Sister through it, the resulting clone was an ultra-powerful Bonus Boss with a sociopathic personality. No wonder he was a bit apprehensive about using it again.
- Zagi from Tales Of Vesperia, who, at about 3/4 through the game seems to have no reason for wanting to kill Yuri other than that he wants to kill Yuri. His Ax Crazy status is lampshaded by his one eye that's smaller than the other possibly because he's so insane that he can't be bothered to hold them both open. in one of the boss battle against him he also casts poison on HIMSELF Most battles consist of him spouting random crap about wanting to kill Yuri. Also kind of a stalker with a crush possibly.
- Several of the playable characters from Team Fortress 2, particularly Scout, Soldier, Heavy and possibly Pyro. Surprisingly, not Sniper.
- Sweet Tooth in the Twisted Metal series, especially his Twisted Metal Black incarnation. That guy is the single handed reason I'm afraid of clowns and ice cream trucks.
- Hell, the cast of Twisted Metal Black is made up of delusional priests, hillbilly psychos and doll faced murderers. The sanest character in the whole thing is CALYPSO. How disturbing is that?
- Not quite. Both Agent Stone and John Doe are genuinely good and sane people, who are in it for totally just reasons, making you wonder why they were both institutionalized in the first place.
- Severe PTSD and amnesia-related conditions, respectively.
- Aran Ryan from the Wii version of PunchOut!! Most of the other characters emit grunts of pain or anger when you've landed a massive combo on them. Him? Deranged laughter.
- In between rounds, he shouts to Mac, "Keep hitting me! I love it!!" Then, when he gets back in the ring, he punches himself several times, then makes an insane smile at the camera. Not to mention his fighting style, which involves him running around the ring and attacking from the side, as well as jumping off the wires and trying to punch. Keep in mind this guy was perfectly normal in his first appearance.
- HK-47 from Knights of the Old Republic is an insane killing machine who who enjoys nothing more than the slaughter of anything and everything around him.
- Meria from Knights In The Nightmare is a lovable example.
- Batman: Arkham Asylum given Quincy Sharp, who is by all appearances normal when you speak to him, but in the Spirit of Arkham, it can be seen that he is an absolutely batshit Knight Templar.
- Let's not forget the main villains on the plot, some of the absolute craziest of Batman's rogues gallery. Zsasz, Joker, Killer Croc...
- Catalina of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. Cesar, her cousin, describes her as "really intense, holmes." As C.J. soon finds out, "intense" doesn't even begin to describe her.
 In addition to being a hair-trigger violent adrenaline junkie, she's also quite the Yandere to boot.
- Her Grand Theft Auto III incarnation is just as crazy and Yandere, but has traded in the adrenaline junkie streak for a treacherous streak a mile wide.
- The Burning Blade clan in Warcraft II and World Of Warcraft deserves a mention, as an entire clan of Ax Crazies which were held in check by a large group of ogre enforcers. The Horde "was not willing to employ them except in the most extreme cases, for fear that they might turn on other clans or even each other".
- Zombies Ate My Neighbors has both Chainsaw Maniacs and traditional ax-wielding Evil Dolls. The sounds of a chainsaw revving offscreen coupled with insane children's laughter serve as perfect High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
- "God Of War" has Kratos. I mean, there are some others, but seriously. Kratos is what happens when someone decides that the Spartan culture is too nice.
Webcomics
- Black Mage of 8-bit Theater. He's kinda the anti-Staff Chick.
- Belkar Bitterleaf of The Order Of The Stick, described as "a Chaotic Evil halfling who is constantly trying to murder anyone who gets in his way! Or looks like they may possibly be thinking about getting anywhere sort of near his way at some unspecified future point, just to be sure."
- "I AM A SEXY SHOELESS GOD OF WAR!!!"
- The Infernomancer (TIM for short) from Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire.
- Red of No Rest For The Wicked, even if she is one of the protagonists.
- Bangladesh Dupree from Girl Genius, although Baron Wulfenbach and his son Gilgamesh have some control over her.
- Kamekaze Kate is a car racing Ax Crazy in Misfile.
- At first at least after she was freed from her sister's influence she got a lot better. And her race with Ash ended in a traditional Defeat Means Friendship moment, that is Ash's defeat by Kate
- Richard from Looking For Group sums himself up in song: [1].
- Electric Retard[2] is full of them. One even happens to be a naked guy with an axe.
- Axel of the Ansem Retort seems to go out of his way to inflict grievous bodily harm on his "friends", and generally murders anyone who happens to exist anywhere within a hundred mile radius of himself.
- Larxene is, arguably, even crazier having destroyed Disney Land and everyone/thing inside it just because she wanted funnel cake.
- Cousin Dougal from Platinum Grit, a psychotic immortal Scotsman who lives to stab.
- Oasis moves in and out of this in Sluggy Freelance. Her mental state is in tatters, and each apparent resurrection shifts it. Even in her more lucid moments, though, she realizes how close she is to violent mayhem. And heaven help anyone nearby if she activates Override B-1.
- David Willis, author of Its Walky, ventures into this from time to time.
- Il'haress Kharla'ggen Vloz'rezz from the DrowTales webcomic is the personification off Ax Crazy.
- Butch from Chopping Block[3].
- Lothar Hex from Exterminatus Now is psychotic enough that he regularly attemps to cause harm to next door's dog for no reason, but in order to REALLY get him riled up, all you have to do is ruin his hat. At which point, don't expect too many of your limbs to still be attached.[4].
Web Original
- Terrence in KateModern, after Villainous Breakdown sets in. He goes around beating up random families he meets in the park and clubbing people with golf clubs just for the hell of it.
- Several characters from Survival Of The Fittest definitely fall into this trope. Eminent examples are Cillian Crowe of V1, Mariavel Varella of V2, and Melina Frost of V3, all of which have cheerfully massacred fellow students in undoubtedly horrific and messy ways. In some instances, characters also fall under Trigger Happy too, although given the prevalence of firearms in each game, this is only to be expected.
- Protectors Of The Plot Continuum Agents have to be a little... strange... in order to function. However, some snap completely; this is called going flamethrower-crazy, as the most dramatic example involved a mad Agent tearing down the corridors with a flamethrower, looking to kill Mister Rogers, and anyone who got in his [the mad Agent's] way.
- Tactical Noobs gives us the Crazy Burger King Guy, a Burger Fool who kills people for doing things like ordering food he cannot give them and voting for a different presidential canidate than him.
Western Animation
Real Life
- Socrates argued that not all good-faith promises should be kept. His example is a scenario where an ax is borrowed from a man who then goes crazy. It would be immoral, Socrates notes, to return the ax. This may be the origin of the ax as the weapon of choice for a fictional homicidal maniac, and qualifies this trope as Older Than Feudalism.
- The real-life incident involving a Japanese high school girl, that led to the cancellation/preemption of select episodes of Higurashi Kai and School Days, i.e. the infamous "Nice Boat" incident.
- The page quote poem refers to an incident in Massachusetts in 1892, where Lizzie Borden's father and stepmother died mysteriously with over a dozen hatchet wounds each.
- The guy on the bus who stabbed and beheaded a fellow passenger sleeping beside him. Then ate some.
- What's scarier than Axe Crazy? Axe Crazy in charge of a country. How about a list of some deranged dictators?
- Joshua "General Butt Naked" Blahyi of Liberia, infamous for entering combat totally in the nude.
- Nah, he was just fighting in the spirit of Terry Goodkind. He had the right Moral Fiber to run around naked in battle!
- Foday Sankoh who fought in the civil war in Sierra Leone. His best-known military campaign bore the charming title: Operation Kill Every Living Thing.
I get it now! It's a play on the phrase "acts crazy"!
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