Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
alt title(s): Motiveless Malignity 
"Some men aren't looking for anything logical like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn." — Alfred, The Dark Knight
Most villains have some kind of logical motive. Maybe it's money, maybe it's to improve the world, or maybe they're just the Anthropomorphic Personification of evil. Whatever it is, it makes sense that this villain is doing what he does, so you can talk the villain down sometimes.
But then there's the kind of villain that doesn't have that kind of motive. They can't be reasoned with because they're in it 'cause it's fun. Their motive for doing evil things is "because I can". A subset of Card Carrying Villain. Some Psychos For Hire follow this trope. If your motive is this, you might be a Complete Monster, but it's just as likely that you're Evilly Affable. If you do this while ignoring common sense and basic self-preservation, you're probably Stupid Evil.
Such a villain is usually really, really cool, Evilly Affable, completely horrific, or absurdly stupid. Or, (s)he may just be the victim of rampant Motive Decay. This depends on the way it's written and the context of the story.
Video Game Cruelty Potential is the Virtual version of this.
Compare If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten, and Trolls.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Comics
- In one Calvin and Hobbes strip, Calvin asks Moe why he bullies him all the time. Moe's answer is "Because it's fun." Calvin, lying in the dirt, remarks, "Oh, he's a sportsman."
- Nearly all depictions of Batman's arch-nemesis, the Joker.
- Victor Zsasz. There is a storyline where an archvillain tells him he's got potential for greater evil than random murder as a part of his criminal empire and asks what he'd like to do. Zsasz's reply is simple: "I like to hurt people."
- A Star Wars Boba Fett comic featured a Mengele-analogue who has given up any pretense of being scientific. He openly admits that he's butchering entire alien races because it's fun.
- Blackblood from The ABC Warriors ran a weapon shop where you didn't pay with money or goods, but with videotapes of the weapons being used on orphanages and such.
- Carnage, of Spider-Man. Blood. Just 'cause he can.
- A few of the Joker's lines in The Dark Knight are taken directly from Cletus in Maximum Carnage.
- Daredevil's Bullseye.
- This was the only visible motivation of Antonio Prohías' Sinister Man and Sinister Woman.
- In the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics, this trope was explicitly stated to be the motivation behind Baxter Stockman's plan to blackmail the city with his mousers.
- Doctor Destiny's Diner of Death. When he briefly freed his victims from his control, one of them demanded to know why he was tormenting them this way. His answer? "Because I can."
- Supreme Power villain Redstone's reasons for killing: "Because I can, because I'm good at it, and because I like it."
- Willy Pete. What else is there to say about a cannibal who doesn't even need to eat at all, but just happens to like the taste? (Plenty, actually, but I'll spare you the squick.)
Film
- The Dark Knight: The Joker, as the above quote indicates.
- The Scorpio Killer from Dirty Harry, who was based on the Real Life Zodiac Killer:
Harry Callahan: You know, you're crazy if you think you've heard the last of this guy. He's gonna kill again.
District Attorney Rothko: How do you know?
Harry Callahan: 'Cause he likes it.
- That said, while the movie makes it clear that he gets a thrill out of killing for its own sake, he also has a more overt motive in demanding exorbitant sums of money.
- If you're good at something, never do it for free.
- The main character's former partner in End of Days suggests they cast their lot with Satan under the reasoning that their long careers as mercenaries meant they had no chance of "going upstairs" anyway, so they might as well have fun while alive.
- Castor Troy from Face/Off ought to qualify.
Troy: You're not having any fun, are you, Sean? Why don't you come with us? Try terrorism for hire, we'll blow some shit up. It's more fun!
- The sociopathic Door Gunner from Full Metal Jacket. While machine-gunning Vietnamese peasants from his helicopter:
Sgt Joker: How can you kill innocent women and children?
Door Gunner: Easy! You just don't lead them as much! (cackles) Ain't war hell?!
- The two killers in Funny Games. They give several conflicting stories for their backgrounds and motives.
- The Creepy Child Enfante Terrible titular character of The Good Son.
- Kurgan from Highlander. Okay, so there's a prize in it for him, but none of the other immortals are so delightedly, delightfully, savage in their efforts to collect it. The man leers at nuns! What could be more evil than that?
- John Ryder from The Hitcher.
- All the Mad Scientists in Igor are of the traditional sort, loving evil for its own sake. But the prize goes to the king, who created a weather-controlling device that cast the entire country under permanent stormclouds, destroying the citizens' livelihood, and then suggested they all turn to mad science to make the country successful again. Okay, and... why did he do this, again?
- Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men. He wants the money, but literally anyone he meets is a potential victim. Another character mentions that this is because of some kind of indecipherable code of honor.
- Reservoir Dogs: "Was that as good for you as it was for me?"
- Hannibal Lecter, the quintessential psychopathic Serial Killer, at least in Silence of the Lambs, Manhunter, and Red Dragon. Any work in which he is the title character fills him with Badass Decay and basically turns him into Edward from Twilight.
- The three killers from The Strangers.
Why did you do this?
Because you were home.
- Lola from The Transporter 2 is outright Ax Crazy. When the hero asks her why she slaughters people nearly at will she says "because it's fun".
- The Warriors.
Swan: Why'd you do it? Why'd you waste Cyrus?
Luther: No reason. I just like doing things like that.
- Major Vic "Deak" Deakins (John Travolta) in Broken Arrow (1996, directed by John Woo). "Deak" crashes a stealth bomber to steal two nuclear weapons, detonates one just to get rid of his copilot and show the U.S. government he's "serious" in ransoming the other, kills his contact with his backers, and finally tries to nuke a city with himself "riding shotgun" on the nuke, resulting in this exchange with his (former) copilot;
Hale: You're out of your mind.
Deakins: Yeah, ain't it cool?
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: The Wicked Witch of the West, opening the door to severe Leather Petticoating.
- Hey, bitch stole her shoes - that shit don't fly in the merry old land of Oz.
- Michael Myers from the Halloween films is never given a motivation (except in Halloween 5, which many fans don't like to talk about), and Dr. Loomis, his psychiatrist, is convinced that Myers is pure evil, plain and simple. Moreover, he isn't even shown to enjoy his actions. Apparently, he murders people for literally no reason, which makes him all the more frightening.
- Despite the picture above, Agent Smith is an aversion. He may do a huge amount of evil things, but he does them for a simple reason:
Agent Smith: More.
- Daisy Pringle, a Creepy Child from The Wicker Man.
Daisy: The little old beetle goes 'round and 'round. Always the same way, y'see, until it ends up right up tight to the nail. Poor old thing!
Sgt. Howie: 'Poor old thing'? Then why in God's name do you do it, girl?
- The truck-driver in Duel.
- Troll2.
What did Peter do... to the goblins?
That's the point. Goblins don't need to justify their cruel acts. They're evil creatures.
- Played straight rather well with Gabriel in The Prophecy.
Gabriel: I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why.
- Chad in In the Company of Men. When asked why manipulated a deaf woman into a love triangle, he says "Because I could."
- I believe Alex and his droogs would like a word with those who failed to mention their movie adaptations.
Literature
- Carcer from the Discworld novel Night Watch. "The sort that joins up for the looting, and that you end up hanging as an example to the men". Possessed of a pair of shoulder demons, in competition with each other.
- While Nyarlathotep from HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos often works to fulfill the wishes of the Outer Gods or release the Great Old Ones, a lot of the times he seems to be messing with mankind for no other reason than his own amusement. Including the time (not written by Lovecraft, please note, but more sort of published fanfic) he possessed a man, turned him into a nuclear physicist and helped to develop the A-Bomb, just so we would eventually start a nuclear holocaust and end the world. In the rare Lovecraft stories where Nyarlathotep actually appears, he (it?) is portrayed as a destroyer of the earth (in "Nyarlathotep"), an alien deity or leader (in The Whisperer in Darkness) or as a sort of divine custodian (in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath).
- And in The Dreams in the Witch-House he appears as a guardian demanding blood-sacrifice and absolute devotion from anyone who wishes to surpass certain limits in their understanding of the space-time continuum. Here he is closest to being the Satan Expy he's often presented as in the works of later authors, but even here the implications are that this is just a small portion of his duty.
- Fantomas: the valuables he steals is just an added bonus, what he really enjoys is to spread fear.
- Pretty much the guiding philosophy of Acheron Hades, and probably the rest of his family as well. He even says as much in one of the quotes at the beginning of a chapter.
- Inverted in The Acts of Caine. The bad guys always act out of self-interest, ideology, or pure hedonistic lust. The protagonist is the one who, for shits and giggles, escalates conflicts almost compulsively. So far this includes "escalating" a verbal argument into a lethal fight, a skirmish with an ogrillo tribe into ethnic cleansing, and a minor political conflict into a civil war. (And the bad guys are still worse.)
- In the Young Wizards series the Lone Power's primary motivation seems to be that It enjoys suffering.
- Edgler Vess from Dean Koontz' Intensity is a self-proclaimed homicidal adventurer, who loves to kill just for the sheer intensity of it.
- Vassago from another Dean Koontz novel Hideaway kills people so he could be reincarnated as one of the demon princes in Hell.
- In CS Lewis' Perelandra, Satan himself is this. While he has real (and deeply malicious) ambitions, when he can't move directly toward them he's just as happy torturing small animals or tearing up the turf, so long as he can hurt something.
- In James Beauseignuer's "Christ Clone Trilogy" when Decker, the viewpoint character, asks The Anti Christ Christopher Goodman why he does what he does when he knows he's going to lose the reply is "Because it feels so good to twist the nose of God!"
- In Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four, O'Brien admits that the Party isn't looking forward to improving the world, only seeking power for the sake of power, oppression for the sake of oppression. Ironically, this is the same reason why the nameless prole woman sings: just for the sake of singing.
- Jack Mort, a minor villain from Stephen King's Dark Tower series likes to hurt people and has ruined the lives of two major characters just for his own sadistic joy.
- A Song of Ice and Fire — The series has some minor villains, who seem to be along just for their own sick pleasures. The worst ones would be the huge rapist knight Ser Gregor Clegane (among countless other atrocities sickening in nature), the inhumanly cruel outcasts in the Brave Companions, aka the Bloody Mummers, sadistic Ramsey Snow and the heartless boy-king Joffrey Baratheon, who practically revels in his power and prefers to make people fear him (not to forget what he did to Ned Stark).
- Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange. This guy likes to kill, beat up and rape people for his own enjoyment and one could say he certainly deserves the treatment he gets after being brainwashed...
- Organizations with essentially the same motives as 1984's The Party are a recurring element in the satirical horror novels of Bentley Little. e.g. The Store is about a Walmart-esque retail chain that goes far out of its way to be as oppressive and cause as much unnecessary suffering as it can; The Association is about a homeowner's association that does the same; The Policy is about an insurance company that does the same.
- Warrior Cats: Okay, so we know that Sol wants to use the Three's powers to gain control over all cats living around the lake and eliminate belief in StarClan, but his manipulation of the Twoleg place cats doesn't have anything to with his plans, and was seemingly done for the hell of it. Plus, he doesn't seem that committed to his goal, doesn't approach it with much urgency, and seems to get way too much enjoyment from messing with the main characters' minds.
- Dr. Mabuse, who was inspired by Fantomas (see above). In addition to spreading fear, however, Mabuse wants to destroy the world... and laugh maniacally over the rubble.
- Bellatrix Lestrange from the Harry Potter series always seems to have way too much fun killing people and breaking their stuff.
Live Action TV
- Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation'', half the time. The other half he's playing a mentor...
- In Doctor Who, we have this dialogue between Martha and a Toclafane:
Martha: But why? Why come all this way just to cause all this death and destruction?
Toclafane: Because it's FUN.
- From the same series, the Master fit this trope after he lost anything resembling a motive, or, as one of the producers said while trying to describe his actions in "Last of the Time Lords": "He is a twelve year old and the world is his bed room."
- Also, his last appearance in the last serial of the Classic Series. He has just escaped the doomed planet that the Doctor is still trapped on. Does he then go and steal the Doctor's TARDIS and call it a day? No, he instead goes over to a youth-club to mind-rape the kids and sic them on the Doctor when he shows up again. Why? Because the Master is a enormous dick, that's why.
- Played For Drama and deconstructed in the Big Finish audio Master. All his evil plans were never expected to work, they were only designed to cause as much misery and destruction as possible. Why? Because as one of the Doctor's titles is Time's Champion, the Master is Death's Champion.
- Similarly, a villain in the Torchwood episode "Countrycide", when asked the reason for his actions, simply responds "Because it made me happy."
- And there's this quote from a charming recurring villain in "Exit Wounds", the second season finale:
Captain John Hart: Do I mean fun or carnage? I always get those two mixed up.
- Dr. Mikoto Nakadai in Bakuryu Sentai Abaranger is an Evil Genius who is utterly bored with life... until he discovers that tormenting the heroes and plotting widespread death and destruction is just the kick he's been missing.
- Similarly, in the Supernatural episode "The Benders", Sam gets captured by a family of cannibal hillbillies, and Dean allies himself with a female county cop (whose brother was captured by the same hillbillies) to get him back. At the end, the female cop asks the hillbilly patriarch why they killed her brother, and he answers, "Because it was FUN." She shoots him off-screen.
- Subtly subverted in the Millennium episode "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me". Four demons cause death and destruction behind the scenes apparently just because it's fun for them. Except at the end, it's revealed (by Frank Black himself) that the demons are very lonely, simply doing evil not because they like it, but because it's what they've been doing forever and they don't know what else to do.
- About the only reason why Arthur Petrelli of Heroes does anything. Mr. Linderman of Season One wanted to blow up NYC to heal the world and Adam Monroe of Season Two wanted to release a deadly virus to give his people a second chance, but Arthur didn't even bother with idealistic pretense. He just spouted the usual villainous cliches, and even then in a half-hearted fashion, as if he could barely be bothered to even offer a modicum of justification for his douchery.
- Angelus during season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who nearly destroyed the world just for the giggles. Somebody earlier mentioned what could be more evil than leering at nuns? How about killing an entire convent just to drive one girl insane? Yeah, he did that because he could. And then he made her a vampire.
- Most demons and vampires are like this, by their very nature. Two villains, however, get special mention: Spike and Ethan Rayne. Spike at least has an excuse, he's a vampire, and therefore is Always Chaotic Evil. Ethan doesn't even have this excuse; he's just an ordinary human who worships pain and chaos.
- Spike could also be considered a subversion. While he enjoys killing humans as individuals, he actually likes human society in general and doesn't want to see it destroyed.
Spike: "The thing is, I like this world. You've got Manchester United, dogracing, and people''. Millions of people, all walking around, like Happy Meals on legs."
- Jonathan Creek, given that it focuses on Locked Room Mysteries and other planned murders, usually has very rational and logical villains with complex motives. Thus this trope came as something of a surprise when it was played in season four - after the media suggests that a series of murders are inspired by the fact that all the women killed were named after flowers (as an attempt to "deflower women") and the real killer is caught, Jonathan notes that no-one had considered the idea that a young woman would kill other young women "simply because she likes to". The floral connection of the names was just a coincidence.
- Criminal Minds: A trio of killers graduate from vandalism to murder, and one of them is caught editing footage from their latest killing (to The Dead Weather of all things). When asked why they did it especially in light of the fact that unlike the profile they had steady jobs in a bad economy, the lone survivor can only say "Because it's fun."
- Also the (unrelated) rioters in the same episode.
- The earlier episode "3rd Life" had a guy manipulate two high schoolers into helping him abduct a pair of teenage girls, who he tortured for kicks.
- Rico in Hannah Montana explains the fact that he is always trying to make people (his so called friends no less) miserable as "I'm rich and bored, it's what I do."
- On an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a serial rapist and murderer who is also a Phony Psychic keeps butting into a case in which he is actually the killer. After he's captured, a detective asks him why he did it, since he'd probably have gotten away with it if he hadn't. His response? "I just had to see what I had set in motion. The expressions on your faces were priceless. This place was like a big beehive that I poked with a stick."
- CSI episode "Fannysmackin'".
Manga & Anime
Tabletop Games
- In Exalted, the Ebon Dragon is the incarnation of this trope. Seriously, when the world was being created from formless chaos, he invented the entire concept of betrayal. He also argued for the invention of a being of virtue and light to defend the world solely because its formation would empower him as something to oppose. His power suite is built entirely around dicking people over. And just to cap it off, while he's trapped in the prison-body of his king like the rest of his kin, he would gladly make his escape back into the world and slam the door shut behind him in the face of the Yozis, and possibly seal them away for all eternity just to laugh in their faces. This guy just doesn't do it For The Evulz, he wrote the book on it as a checklist for personal life goals.
- Quite a few Dark Eldar and followers of Chaos in Warhammer 40000 have lost whatever reasons they once might have had for their journey to what lies beyond the Moral Event Horizon and are now in it for the giggles.
- The Dark Eldar are a particularly stellar example as the reason for their current predicament (hiding in the Webway and constantly hunted by the god of perversion) is that their entire civilization imploded in an orgy of hedonism and depravity, and they have no intention of stopping.
- The Orks, meanwhile, are an entire species who embark upon interstellar campaigns of genocide for entertainment purposes. "Orkz wuz made fo' fightin' an' winnin'!"
- Most who serve Chaos do so for the promise of power and advancement from them, or are even just clinging to it for the hopes their god(s) may help them (they generally won't, and even if they do, you still probably won't find it pleasant.)... but it's not common for many of their servants to simply become addicted to the horror they inflict in the names of Chaos. With Khrone's followers, it's generally hard to tell due to their sheer Ax Crazy.
- Remiare, the assassin, in Mechanicum, who casually burned out a man's memory centres simply because she enjoys making living beings suffer.
- The old fantasy Warhammer has the Skaven... Frankly, most of their clans neither want nor need a motive for what they do.
- Though they are pretty goal-oriented whenever they are put up against someone of equal or superior skill (and considering the strength of the average skaven, that isn't too hard).
- Tends to happen rather spectacularly every time PCs are permitted to be actually evil rather than just designated. The Full Frontal Nerdity take on this gave us the cleverly innocent name of Dark Lord Evisceratrix O'Kittensquisher. This is not much of an exaggeration.
- Depending on what Haunt you trigger in Betrayal At House On The Hill, the Traitor's motivation can range from Tragic Monster to More Than Mind Control to this. The poor preacher might randomly turn into a werewolf, or the geeky Tagalong Kid may just decide the Giant Spiders are just too cool to fight.
Theatre
- Shakespeare is known for doing this:
- Iago's motives from Othello were noticeably thin and contradictory, which leads many scholars to surmise that he doesn't have motives at all, only excuses. This trope was almost named "The Iago" because of this. The alternative title Motiveless Malignity is a term Shakespearean scholars often use to describe his actions.
- The "Villains by Necessity" speech in King Lear Edmund gives, in which he mocks people blaming their faults on the stars, as they did him, for being an illegitimate son of the Duke of Gloucester conceived under "bad stars." Edmund sums up with "S'foot (bullshit): I should have been what I am had the maidenliest star twinkled on my bastardizing." It's also possible that he went bad because people thought he would, in something like a Self Fulfilling Prophecy. Of course, to Edmund it doesn't matter anymore...
- Don John from Much Ado About Nothing, actually mentions early in the play that since people have pegged him as a bastard already, he might as well get into it and enjoy himself.
- Richard III: He tells us in the very first speech of the play that he's going to be a villain because he has nothing else with which to occupy himself.
- Aaron of Titus Andronicus does everything he does over the course of the play because he simply likes being evil. There's a lot of Values Dissonance going on there: his evil is explicitly linked to the fact that he's a black guy.
Ah, why should wrath be mute and fury dumb?
I am no baby, I, that with base prayers
I should repent the evils I have done;
Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did
Would I perform, if I might have my will.
If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul.
- Ursula in the stage version of The Little Mermaid, from her Villain Song entitled "I Want the Good Times Back".
Video Games
- Kefka from Final Fantasy VI might not be a pure example, but it's clear he's having a lot more fun then he should be. "Nothing beats the sweet music of hundreds of voices screaming in unison!"
- Kefka appears to be the result of crossing this trope with Nietzsche Wannabe. His whole motivation just comes down to "Hey, there's no point to anything in this world, so why not have some fun watching everyone else squirm under your ultimate power?"
- Saleh, one of the Quirky Miniboss Squad in Tales of Rebirth is an extreme case that he is very much repulsed with anything good and strives to do evil and it just delights him to see people suffer.
- Kirei Kotomine, the Big Bad of the Fate route in Fate Stay Night, was going to empty the contents of the Holy Grail, an Artifact Of Doom containing a tangible form of all of man's evil upon the world, causing untold amounts of death and destruction. When The Hero asks him why he's doing it, he replies with a speech that can be summed up as: "Just as some people find music or art entertaining, I can only find amusement in watching other people suffer".
- The Heaven's Feel scenario turns this into a Deconstructed Trope by giving us Kotomine's backstory and showing just what sort of twisted and tormented person he is: Kotomine is perfectly capable of understanding the nuances of right and wrong and has, in fact, in several occasions tried to live a good life — by for instance becoming a priest specializing in healing and trying to have a family — while at the same time being utterly unable to get any pleasure from life unless he's causing someone pain and suffering. He is fully aware of just how deviant this makes him and he considers his birth to be a 'mistake'.
- Yuber and Luca Blight from the Suikoden series.
- Both Archibald Grims and Lubikka Hakinnen from Super Robot Wars. Archibald forced Elzam to make the Sadistic Choice between killing his wife or gassing a whole colony, as well as bombing an excavation site all for the lulz. His predecessor Lubikka is also said to have done a lot of atrocities for the lulz, and takes extra lulz if he is torturing Tytti mentally.
- Majora's Mask from the Legend of Zelda game of the same name. This is emphasized by the fact that the person it chooses to possess is a (skull) kid, and during one of its three boss fights, it dances around giggling like a child. It doesn't seem to have a clear reason for all of the horrible things it does, part of what makes it scary as fuck.
- Doubly so in the questionably canon manga adaptation, where the Mask is revealed to have hexed Kafei into a child for the hell of it when he refused to play with the possessed Skull Kid, and once discarding the Skull Kid, comments that Link "looks like a fun fellow" and tosses off a few inexplicably creepy lines about how he wants to play with Link now, eventually settling on "tag". Majora further has a Villainous Breakdown as he and Oni Link fight, calling Oni Link a "meanie" when he hits him the first time and giggling madly before repeating his actions from the video game of running around tittering with excitement. In the final form, he bawls out Link for ruining his "game", screaming that humans had always "played" willingly with him before. We're given a pretty good view that Majora threw the entire world into chaos and tried to destroy it purely because it was fun.
- However, there is a theory that Majora's Mask did all of those things to absorb power from all the suffering and death of crashing the moon onto Termina and become no less than a god itself. Also pretty creepy, if you think about it...
- Doctor Neo Cortex in Crash Bandicoot.
Coco Bandicoot: Cortex, why do you keep doing stuff like this?
Doctor Neo Cortex: Well, actually it's pretty fun. You should try it. Y'know, riding around in huge, rumbling machines and whatnot? Very stimulating.
- Admit it - you've done this yourself...
- This is a recurring trope in multiplayer games dating back to the dawn of MUDs. One player by the name of Redstripe took pride in a vast career of pointless bloodshed on other players on many different MUDs, bragging, "I've killed more players than you've eaten rations." Possibly the most heinous was a Doctor Rainbow from Sociolotron, who forceably aborted the fetuses of pregnant women at random, abducted, raped and assassinated so many of the ruling class that Judges and Prime Ministers feared to be seen in public, and finally was banished to Hell where she gathered even more power and supporting cultists as a demoness.
- In Persona 4, Adachi, like the protagonist, was given the power to enter the Midnight Channel by Izanami. As it turns out, his bumbling personality was just a mask, he rants and rages how he hates being stuck in the "boonies" that is Inaba, and has a low opinion on women who reject him in general. When asked on why he committed the murders and secretly convincing Namatame to toss people into the TV world, he simply says "because it's fun". He would vastly prefer Inaba and the TV world to merge, as he was carrying out Izanami's plan to cause total assimilation, if humans desired it enough.
- Rugal Bernstein from King of Fighters. Some of his plans have a reasonable motivation, but he usually just does evil because he's amused at how low he can sink. Why do you think he killed all those people he then made into decorative bronze statues? Because he could.
- The Evil Matriarch Hilda from Fire Emblem 4. Most of her acts seems to derive from her lust of power. But torturing her sister in law Tiltyu to death and then her daughter too? That's simply done For The Evulz. Also, when her husband was very much disdainful towards child hunting so they can be sacrificed to an evil God, she goes ahead and supports it wholeheartedly. For what? For The Evulz.
- Carnage and mass destruction are integral parts of fun for Gig from Soul Nomad and the World Eaters. He is very open about this, by the way.
- Likewise, Thuris seems to cook up virulent, nigh-incurable plagues mainly for shits and giggles. The protagonist of the Demon Path trumps them both by a long shot. His/her final words after destroying reality itself in a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum? "It doesn't matter. It was fun."
- This is what Ji Adel Bernal's motivation boils down to essentially in Super Robot Wars Z.
- Meria, of Knights in the Nightmare, loves to run around blowing shit up. She will actually take it all the way to Asgard if you let her.
- Pokey/Porky Minch from the Earthbound series seems to fit this trope perfectly in Mother 2 and Mother 3. He pretty much states that being the hero doesn't sound like fun to him. In Mother 2 he seemed more like a harmless example who usually appeared to taunt or hinder Ness. Mother 3 however... his actions shifted more towards Complete Monster territory, transforming a peaceful island's plants and animals into violent chimeras, then gathered all the inhabitants on the island to his flying "utopia" so they could all watch as he awakened a dragon to destroy all of existence. All this because he was bored and needed a quick laugh.
- Rosso from Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus. Her motivation boils down to "why not?". The rest of the Tsviets say similar things, to the tune of "We were made as killing machines, so why not do what we do best?"
- Pretty much the main motivation for every time Marisa in Touhou seems to go out youkai hunting is just because she likes blasting the bajeezus out of cute monster girls. (If not just to annoy Reimu, or to steal from her "villainous" victims.) It also perfectly describes the motivations of the "villains" in both of the fighting games - they just wanted to cause some chaos, and the other cast members are only too happy to start beating their friends senseless.
- To clarify: Of the Windows Touhou games (excepting Shoot the Bullet), Byakuren and Shikieiki are the only final bosses not to instigate their game's story/incident. Remilia did the Red Mist, Yuyuko stole spring, Suika made the endless feasts, Eirin and Kaguya made the false moon, Kanako and co. tried to steal faith (Suwako just went along for the ride), Tenshi caused the natural disasters, Okuu went mad with power, and if it wasn't for Nue pranking Gensokyo, nothing would've really happened.
- More than half of the Acts of Infamy in Evil Genius are done solely to make sure you're the most evil genius trying to Take Over The World.
- Malefor is a complete monster no matter what fans try to portray him as. We're talking about a Complete Monster who kidnaps a baby dragon only too have some company after exposing her to darkness, then he launches an army of crazed apes to kill anybody who tries to stop him so that he can destroy the entire world with a deadly blast. What would that accomplish?
- And if you you're really looking for nasty evil leadership, seems like the whole place of Sim Nation is an ultimate Crap Sack World that corrupt mayors can run cities in. Crime can be rampant on the streets, or a mayor can summon a tornado to hit that peaceful neighborhood, or he can even drive around and spill toxic waste in shopping districts.
- Word Of God states that this is Wario's reason why he's working with the Subspace Army in Super Smash Bros Brawl. [1]
- Wario does have motivation in greed, but the efforts he goes through to get it, right down to literally shaking money out of enemies way too gleefully just proves he enjoys the methods as much as the gains.
- RICHARD Hawk, who laughs constantly while testing out a superweapon on New York City and filling Chicago with poison gas.
- Most villainous contacts in City of Villains use you as a tool as part of a Xanatos Gambit, for some petty thefts or revenge plots, or trying to further their own (and, in some cases, your) agendas. Westin Phipps, on the other hand, poses as a charity worker and sends you to do things like kidnap an inspirational schoolteacher, destroy textbooks, and poison food supplies. Why? For no reason other than to crush the hopes of the downtrodden poor. People are split over whether or not he's evil enough to make even villains uncomfortable.
- Murry, the Demonic Talking Skull from the Monkey Island series fits this trope quite nicely.
"What! Murry, I did you a favor!"
"Yes, thus making my betrayal all the more evil! Muhahaha!"
- The first mission of Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception has Enemy Chatter showing that some Leasath chair forcers are raining bombs on a defenceless city just because they can spare the ordnance.
- Mass Effect: The reapers plan to purge the galaxy of all intelligent life, including mankind, because... that's simply what they've been doing for ages.
"Your extinction is inevitable. We are the end of everything. ... The patten has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Organic civilisations rise, evolve, advance and at the apex of their glory, they are extinguished."
- It should be noted that this is game one of a planned trilogy, their motives right now may appear to be "for the evulz" but by the end of the third game it's likely that there will be an actual reason given.
- Emperor Murod, Prince Sornehan, and Queen Galliene purposely cultivate Zero Percent Approval Ratings upon taking power… Because they're part of a demonic cult whose acolytes literally fuel their magical power with evil and suffering.
- Nene in Blue Dragon has an actual ultimate plan: he tricks your party into powering up their magic so he can steal it and save himself from a wasting disease, but in order to pull this off, he simply cackles and invokes this Trope at every one of their meetings. At a certain point, it starts to seem like he just sits around brainstorming new ways to make the heroes mad.
- In Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion there is the Dark Brotherhood which the player can join. While some of the victims are slain for revenge or to send a powerful message to the Brotherhood's enemies, there are a few instances where there is no hint in that direction. On your second mission you are sent to stage a lethal accident on a harmless old man, who doesn't seem to have done ANYTHING to deserve his fate. Later you are sent to a fancy manor to where five guests have been lured by a false promise of hidden gold. No matter how much you socialize with the guests and how much information you get them to tell you about themselves(and each other), at no point do you get any slightest clue about why the Dark Brotherhood would want them dead. Quite frightening, if you think about it.
- The Dark Brotherhood are assassins. They kill people for payment.
- Actually, the first time you meet Lucien Lachance and ask him about the Dark Brotherhood, he remarks:
Lucien Lachance: '''We kill for profit, for enjoyment and for glory of our Dread Father Sithis."
- Also the player himself can do this. This troper has started to suspect he's a sociopath for loving to slaughter random strangers on a whim, just because he likes the challenge of being the wanted criminal and finds amusing, when NP Cs scream things like: Heeeelp! Mmmuuuuuuurrdeeeer! or My god, there's a psychopath on the loose!
- Fawful in the third Mario and Luigi game at first seems like he's pretty much just out to make everyone in the Mushroom Kingdom have a really bad day and nothing more, but then it is revealed he actually DOES have an evil plan. However, absolutely nothing he does to Mario, Luigi, Peach, Bowser and the citizens of the Mushroom Kingdom in any way contributes to his evil plan, making this more of a subversion than an inversion.
- By the time Travis Touchdown reaches her, Bad Girl in No More Heroes is so utterly burned out by her career as an assassin that she slaughters countless gimp clones just for the fun of it. She openly admits that she has no reason to kill anyone, she does it to keep herself entertained. Travis, who is only slightly less of a Villain Protagonist than Kratos, finds himself disgusted.
Webcomics
Web Original
Western Animation
Real Life
- Serial killers in general, especially the subset known as "thrill killers." A thrill killer is literally into murder it for the hell of it. There are other subsets, with more Freudian motivations, but thrill killers are possibly the most terrifying kind - at least you can kind of relate to a former abuse victim. More examples follow below.
- The infamous Zodiac killer in the '70s.
- Though one of the messages he left suggested he thought killing people would somehow make them his slaves when he dies and is reborn in "paradice".
- Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, seems to have had similar beliefs.
- Most investigators have discounted the Zodiac messages due to inconsistencies. The prevailing opinion has been that they were created by the Zodiac killer to be intentionally misleading, that he was far more intelligent and educated than the letters made him appear, and that he was killing simply because he believed he could do so and get away with it.
- Likewise, Mr Starkweather.
- They declared me unfit to live said into that great void my soul'd be hurled/ They wanted to know why I did what I did/ Well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world.
— Bruce Springsteen, "Nebraska"
- John Allen Muhammad is on record saying that he did his crimes "for the sheer terror of it."
- Though some have theorized that his motives might have been a completely insane Xanatos Gambit to murder his ex-wife and get custody of their children (assumedly to kill her as one of the 'random' victims of the Beltway Sniper, one could assume) that spun out of control for one reason or another.
- More people know that Brenda Ann Spencer had no more reason for her crimes than "I don't like Mondays" than know who she is or what she did, thanks to The Boomtown Rats. She later professed to actual motives in the Freudian Excuse category, but all indications are that she's just making this up to try to excuse herself from her actions, and she was just a good-old-fashioned sociopath. She also claimed to have been on PCP at the time. For context, she used a rifle to shoot a bunch of elementary school students and other random people from her bedroom window, killing two men and injuring eight children.
- Anonymous, a faceless army of Internet trolls with minimal hacking expertise out to cause grief "for the lulz". The bulk of their antics are meanspirited but ultimately-harmless pranks (Your Mileage May Vary depending on how seriously you take the Internet), but at one point they put flashing strobe-type graphics on an epilepsy website.
- A certain Los Angeles FOX station famously blew the threat of Anonymous way out of proportion, calling them "hackers on steroids" (real hackers — you know, ones who actually know how to make real viruses and the like — are far more dangerous) and "domestic terrorists". Also there was stock footage of an exploding van that had nothing to do with anything.
- It is worth noting that just like any large other group of people, characterizing Anonymous as a whole this way is tricky business. For example, they have also helped track down and stop child molesters and protested Scientology, while the event involving the strobe graphics on an epilepsy website was controversial even within the group — not that that lets the actual perpetrators off the hook.
- Cheyenne Cherry the 17 year old girl who threw a kitten into an oven because she doesn't like them, and she thought it would be funny. What The Hell???
- Far as I know, most of /b/ was angry at this as well.
- In a similar vein, the two guys who posted a video of themselves lighting a cat on fire on the internet, eventually leading to the YTMND fad "NEDM", "Not Even Doom Music" can make setting a cat on fire cool.
- I remember collecting those cats. And most of you know how I feel about cat abusers.
- The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs, also known as The Ukrainian Thrill Killers, are a group of three young Ukrainian men who killed 21 people at random, filming and/or photographing most of their crimes. They claimed to have an interest in making snuff films, and even a prospective buyer for their films, but there's a strong possibility that's just an excuse, and not a very good one at that.
- Serial killer Edmund Kemper claimed that he killed his grandparents "just to see what it felt like".
- This is referenced in the The Silence of the Lambs, when Jame Gumb did much the same thing.
- Ted Bundy said the same thing when asked why he chose to take a bite out of one of his many female victims.
- I knew a guy in Tasmania, Aaron Joseph Streets, who believed he was going to prison, so he figured he may as well go down for something significant and bashed and murdered a defenseless old man. When caught by police he said about the high he got from the murder, better than any drug to take someone's life away.
|
|
