Forced to Feel Empathy

Professor: I'm installing an empathy chip.
Fry: And that'll allow Bender to feel other people's emotions?
Professor: Yes, if by "allow" you mean "force".

— Futurama, "I Second That Emotion"

How to deal with The Sociopath? You can talk down the monster, or you can use magic, psychic powers, or technology to give them the feelings that they lack. This will lead to the sociopath in question beginning to feel horror and shame for all of their sins, leading to a Villainous Breakdown, especially if they didn't want emotions. If the sociopath wanted emotions to begin with and it proves to be too much for them, this can lead to a case of Be Careful What You Wish For. In dramatic works, the whole episode usually results in a victory for the heroes (as the sociopath no longer wishes to commit villainy), but when Played for Laughs, most of the time the change is inevitably reversed (with the sociopath reverting to their original self) after a case of We Want Our Jerk Back!.

Results in a First Time Feeling for the villain given empathy, and may also result in What Is This Feeling? Wielders of The Power of Love may cause this trope.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• All-Star Superman: In the final issue, Lex Luthor, under the influence of a serum that gives him Superman's powers for 24 hours, has a gravity gun that accelerates that time. Seeing how all of reality and life is connected leaves him overwhelmed by genuine care for everyone.
• The Authority: The end of the Earth Inferno arc (written by Mark Millar and ghostwritten by Grant Morrison) after a previous Doctor goes rogue and starts destroying the Earth, he's finally brought down by forcing him to feel empathy for all his victims. He appears to undergo a genuine My God, What Have I Done? moment... which the team takes advantage of to incinerate him.
• Doctor Strange (2023): The first major Arc Villain of the run, General Stephen Strange, is too powerful for even Stephen and Clea to defeat. Stephen instead subdues his foe by having the Freaky Doctor Zee bombard General Strange with psychedelics, creating an opening for Stephen to perform Psychic Surgery and transplant a portion of his conscience into his opponent. Now forced to feel guilt and empathy for the first time in thousands of years, General Strange, a Shell-Shocked Veteran waging a Forever War, collapses from the sheer weight of his actions.
• The Flash: Demon lord Neron has taken the love Wally and Linda West have for each other in exchange for releasing the souls of The Rouges from demons that were attacking the city. Because he is a Jerkass Genie, releasing the souls still means the demons are wrecking the city. But Linda and Wally's love is so great, Neron feels empathy and compassion and can't function as a demon lord, so he begs the couple to take their love back. They only agree to do so if he saves the city and now having compassion, Neron agrees.
• Ghost Rider: Ghost Rider's penance stare forces its targets to feel all the pain that they've inflicted to the innocent.
• Green Lantern: This is the principle behind the Indigo Tribe, a Lantern corps who are powered by compassion. Unlike most of the other Lantern Corps who recruit individuals who embody their respective emotion, the Indigo Tribe recruits individuals who lacked compassion. All of their members are sociopaths who committed heinous crimes and were granted the ability to feel guilt by their power rings. Abin Sur secretly founded the Indigo Tribe because he predicted that the Guardians of the Universe giving up the ability to feel emotions would eventually cause them to turn evil and planned to have the Indigo Tribe force the Guardians to wear Indigo Rings and regain their compassion. The Guardians ended up having their emotions restored by an entirely different method before they were killed off.
• The Immortal Thor: Thor grants Toranos the power of Thor by tricking Toranos into grabbing Mjölnir. Because Thor decides who was worthy, and whoever is worthy of holding the hammer gains the power of Thor, Toranos becomes a version of Thor, complete with all the mercy and restraint that entails. Toranos throws away the Hammer but is still overwhelmed by guilt and runs away.
• JLA: Rock of Ages: Martian Manhunter temporarily restores the Joker's sanity, causing the clown prince of crime to be horrified by his own actions.
• Maximum Carnage: After noticing that Dagger's powers to project positive emotions seem to weaken Carnage and Shriek, Deathlok teams up with her to build a massive gun that channels and amplifies her powers. The weapon incapacitates Shriek, but feelings of love and empathy are so alien to Carnage that they actually cause him physical harm and he narrowly escapes by faking his own death.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers (Boom! Studios) puts a darker spin on its campy source material, explaining that the "moon dumpster" that contained Rita Repulsa for 10,000 years forced her to experience the pain of every single person she hurt in her intergalactic warmongering by making her live their entire lives until their deaths by her hands or her forces. In fact, she was sentenced to be in there longer but was freed by accident.
• Our Worlds at War ends with a shred of Wonder Woman's kindness remaining in Darkseid, of all people. The Lord of Apokolips considers this as horrible — if not more so — a price as the thousands of Amazon lives lost in the War.
• X-Men: Red: Cassandra Nova is defeated in when Jean Grey psychically implants her with empathy for mutantkind.

Fan Works

• All's Fair in Love and War (And Turnabout's Fair Play): Disgruntled by Lila Rossi's demand to akumatize her so she get revenge on Adrien for exposing her true manipulative nature to their classmates, Hawkmoth akumatizes her into Empath to feel the emotions of people around her. Besides her inability to manipulate people since they know she's a Consummate Liar, she's unable to process the alien emotions (such as genuine concern) and gets overwhelmed if they are a large group of people around her.
• Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past: Harry's final duel with Voldemort ended when Harry used their mental connection to dump all his feelings into Voldemort's head. Since most of those emotions revolved around his anger and grief at losing everyone who ever mattered to him, over the course of a 13-year constant war, the result was a form of torture that immediately reduced Voldemort to screaming, making him an easy target. Unfortunately, since everyone who ever mattered to Harry was dead at that point, it was a rather hollow victory — kickstarting the plot, as Harry sets out to try again.
• The Infinite Loops: During a conversation with Weiss, Tak mentions how, in a previous loop, the Irken Empire end up in conflict with Sailor Moon, who gave them a chance to back down. When they didn't take it, Sailor Moon forced the entire race to feel compassion for those suffering under them. The Tallest ultimately ended up begging for her to get rid of it and Tak admits that she wishes Sailor Moon just killed her.
• The Unlikely Ally: A bizarre accidental example. The Incubator Drone that would become Key decides to purify a Magical Girl's Soul Gem just as she is transforming into a Witch in order to convince her friends to make a contract with him, reasoning that making an exception wouldn't hurt. Draining the despair from the girl's Soul Gem causes the Incubator to be stormed with emotions, both negative and positive, which also includes remorse for manipulating the girl who treated with kindness and as he decides to save her from turning into a Witch. Accepting the emotions causes the drone to lose his connection to Kyubey's Hive Mind and also granting him facial features that allow him to express emotions. Unlike most examples, Key actually embraces his new ability to feel empathy.

Film — Animation

• Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion: It is implied that this is what Homura does to Kyubey at the end by having him take on all the Curses that Magical Girls would have dealt with.

Film — Live-Action

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005): The Point of View Gun was designed by the supercomputer Deep Thought and causes the target to see things from the shooter's point of view.
  • Humma Kavula wants to use it to convert more people to his religion, and blackmails Zaphod into retrieving it for him.
  • Trillian uses it on Zaphod when she's angry at him — which works too well, causing him to not only sympathize with her but also understand some things about her that she wasn't admitting to herself.
  • Marvin saves the day at the end when he cripples an army of Vogons by afflicting them with his overwhelming depression.
• The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter: Bastian defeats the Evil Overlord Xayide by wishing that she has a heart. She then sheds a single tear of remorse, which magically undoes all the damage she caused to Fantasia. And then she explodes due to the contradiction of being an embodiment of emptiness with a heart.

Literature

• Animorphs: The Howlers are Crayak's elite shock troops, aliens with all kinds of augmentations and abilities that make them better killers including a species-wide shared memory. When Jake morphs into one, he expects its mind to be a Blood Knight, but instead finds it's basically a child that considers war as a game with other children. The Howlers are neutralized as a whole when Jake manages to insert the memory of his and Cassie's Big Damn Kiss in their shared memory, resulting in the Howlers trying kissing during their next genocide.
• Inheritance Cycle: In Inheritance, Eragon ultimately defeats Galbatorix by casting a spell that forces him to feel the pain of all the lives he’s ruined. Galbatorix is so overwhelmed by the emotions that, after begging Eragon to make it stop to no avail, he magically detonates himself in a powerful explosion.
• Quantum Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner: When Sera was a child, being an Emissary from the Divine, she was only able to communicate with the Eldritch Abomination god who created her, and was completely incapable of even perceiving the existence of most humans. Since emotions are purely a human-exclusive trait that her creator lacks, she was also incapable of perceiving the existence of emotions as well. This, coupled with her Physical God powers, resulted in many, many deaths, up until a psychic doctor went through a Freak Out and decided to Mind Rape her by linking her mind with that of the thousands of people dying as a result of her powers. This killed the doctor, but Sera definitely started understanding human emotion after that one. She also got Trauma-Induced Amnesia and lost most of her own abilities and the ability to communicate with her creator god, so by the time the Embryon meets her she seems like a kind-hearted girl absolutely obsessed with helping everyone.
• The Sellswords: Jarlaxle gives Artemis Entreri a ring that allows him to feel the emotions of others (Promise of the Witch-King). This starts him off on his Heel–Face Turn toward becoming a true hero.
• Ward: Cradle, a sociopathic supervillain, is given feelings of empathy and guilt by fellow cluster member Rain, causing him to feel regret for his past actions. However, this only convinces him that he needs to drain Rain's shard more quickly before those feelings cause him to give up on his plans altogether, because he's gone too far to stop now.
• Wyrd Sisters: At the climax, Granny Weatherwax manages to incapacitate the Duchess by making her experience all the suffering she has made others feel. Subverted because this works... for all of 30 seconds, at which point, the Duchess rises up laughing, saying she'd do it all again, only longer and hotter. Nanny Ogg then has to knock her out with a cauldron.

Live-Action TV

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: In the final season, the Chronicoms invade Earth, forcing the team to go on a trip through time to stop them. In the series finale, Daisy's half-sister Kora (who died in the main timeline) is revealed to be the key to reprogramming the Chronicoms to feel empathy so they choose to live on Earth alongside humans peacefully.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: We learn of the Ritual of Restoration, a curse that restores a vampire's soul.
  • The curse was placed on Angel, forcing him to repent for all of the death and devastation he wrought as Angelus. After he becomes Angelus again, Willow is forced to cast the curse in hopes of saving the world.
  • Spike seeks out his soul willingly, but then spends the next several episodes slowly losing his mind because of the intense shame and guilt over things he's done as a vampire. When Buffy finds him, he's babbling incoherently and there are scratch marks on his chest from where he tried to claw his soul out to mitigate the self-loathing. The scene ends with Spike imploring her "can we rest now?" before draping himself over a cross, unconcerned about the smoke rising from his charred flesh while Buffy looks on in horror.
    Spike: They put the spark in me and now all it does is burn.
• The Librarians (2014): In one episode, a fairy is rampaging across a town that she'd been forced to keep safe for the last thirty years, under the auspices of a wish she'd granted a young boy. Another boy freed her from the snow globe she was bound to, and Cassandra points out that the fairy owes him a wish, now. He wishes for the fairy to know what it was like to be afraid, after having heard it didn't know or understand fear. Overwhelmed by the emotion, the fairy declares that if knowing the feeling of fear was what it meant to be human, it was punishment enough, and she is allowed to depart, having decided to spare the town.
• Once Upon a Time: Cora used magic to rip out her own heart as a young woman after being told that love was weakness, stopping her from feeling guilt for her power-hungry actions or from truly empathizing with anyone, including her daughter Regina. Years later, Regina forced Cora's heart back into her, hoping her mother would actually love her back when she did. Indeed, Cora finally realizes, upon getting her heart back, that she didn't need power — her daughter's love would have been enough. Unfortunately, Mary Margaret had already cast a dark enchantment on the heart to trade Cora's life for Mr. Gold's, so getting her heart back causes Cora to collapse in Regina's arms and die.
• The Sandman (2022): In the Season 1 finale, Dream of the Endless "ends the dreams" of an entire convention's worth of Serial Killers, causing them all to gain a conscience for the very first time. As they shuffle outside wearing Thousand Yard Stares, one is seen calling the police to turn herself in, and another commits suicide.
• Saturday Night Live: Played for Laughs in the 2020 Parody Commercial "5 Hour Empathy", where a straight white man expresses a desire to understand the racial unrest going on in the country. The voiceover (done by the black Kenan Thompson) offers him 5-Hour Empathy, an energy-drink-like substance that would give him empathy for other demographics. "Cool," he says, except he's completely reluctant to try it and defensively claims that he's not a racist when pressed by the voiceover. The man then elects to jump out the window rather than empathize. Meanwhile, his white wife claims that she doesn't need it because she's a woman, to the voiceover's offense.
• Star Trek: Voyager: When the crew of the U.S.S. Voyager rescue the crew and compliment of a damaged vessel in "Repentance", one of them is badly wounded, and the Doctor uses Seven of Nine's Borg nanomachines to help save his life. It turns out that he's a convicted criminal who was being transported to have his death penalty carried out. However, it turns out that he suddenly feels the unfamiliar sensation of guilt. His criminal behavior was facilitated by a type of brain damage that kept him from empathizing with others. Seven's nanomachines recognized the damage and repaired it, causing him to experience empathy and remorse for his past life. Unfortunately, the families of his victims do not accept that he has become a better person, and his death sentence must still be carried out — and due to the Prime Directive, Janeway has no choice but to turn him over to the authorities of his home world.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): Gunther Lutze from "Deaths-Head Revisited" is a Nazi and former concentration camp commander who is confronted by the spirits of his victims (led by his favorite target Alfred Becker), who put him on trial for his numerous horrific crimes. After Lütze consistently denies any remorse or even that he was culpable, the sentence they decide on is for him to feel all the pain he caused throughout his life. Lutze goes insane from the sheer agony in under a minute.

Music

• Antonín Dvořák's symphonic poem The Wild Dove is based on a poem of the same name from Kytice, a collection of ballads by Karel Jaromír Erben. It tells the story of a woman who poisoned her first husband to death and then remarried. One day, a dove appears by her husband's grave and makes the same sad cooing sounds every day. She is eventually so overwhelmed by her guilt that she ends up drowning herself.

Tabletop Games

• Pathfinder: Arueshalae from the Wrath of the Righteous Adventure Path is a succubus who once seduced and then devoured a priest of Desna, goddess of freedom. The ever-unpredictable Desna reached through her priest to forcibly give Arueshalae a conscience, causing her to become horrified at what she'd done and repent; she's now trying to become an Ascended Demon.

Video Games

• End Roll: The protagonist and player character, Russell Seager, is a serial killer despite only being 14 at the time of his arrest. He's unable to feel empathy or guilt due to his abusive upbringing, so he's forced into a trial experiment of a drug called "Happy Dream" designed to cure sociopathy. In the True Ending, this works a little too well. Russell, now able to feel true human emotion for the first time in his life, breaks the syringe from his last dose and repeatedly stabs himself with the broken glass until he bleeds out and dies before the medical staff can stop him or save his life.
• Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous: Arueshalae is a succubus who once seduced and then devoured a priest of Desna, goddess of freedom. The ever-unpredictable Desna reached through her priest to forcibly give Arueshalae a conscience, causing her to become horrified at what she'd done and repent; she's now trying to become an Ascended Demon.
• Persona 5: Making their targets feel empathy towards their victims is one of the effects of Phantom Thieves stealing their metaphorical hearts (another is reconnecting them with their conscience). The Phantom Thieves typically target only the most unrepentant psychopaths and narcissists who walk over other's heads and, often, corpses, but after they are done with them, the targets usually break down crying, overwhelmed by the suffering they themselves have inflicted upon their victims.
• Sunset Overdrive: A sidequest has the Player activates Fizzie's empathy chip, forcing the obnoxious AI and corporate mascot to have a Freak Out over all the damage he and the Overcharge have caused. When he's calmed down and allowed to think clearly again, he literally begs Player to just finish him off.

Webcomics

• Housepets!: After being captured by Negabreel, the Enemy Without embodiment of Breel's sins, Keene finds out he intends to absorb the other Breel's virtues and become a complete soul, but not before killing Keene for fun. Grilling him on this, Keene asks what he intends to do once he gains Breel's empathy and realizes he's killed someone, which Negabreel cannot comprehend. To prove he wouldn't regret such a thing, Negabreel harmlessly absorbs a small fraction of Breel's capacity for guilt and is immediately overloaded with the guilt of everything he's done and intends to do.
  Negabreel: You tricked me! Goodness isn't supposed to feel painful!
• The Order of the Stick: This is how Durkon manages to defeat the monster that has taken over his body. Seeing a memory of a completely selfless action acts like a Logic Bomb because they don't have the experience to process the emotions it forces them to feel or understand why somebody would do something so selfless, so they try to absorb all of Durkon's memories at once to gain the experience needed, which backfires on them.

Websites

• Orion's Arm: Psychoempaths are a horrifying subversion. They can feel other people's feelings and physical sensations as if it were happening to them, but are also extreme sadomasochists who enjoy the feeling of torturing other people to death.

Web Videos

• Critical Role: Attempted in campaign 2: After the Nein defeat Trent Ikithon, Caduceus repeatedly casts Command on him, ordering him to "empathize" with the suffering he has caused. It's ultimately subverted as Matt eventually states that, although Command can force an attempt at an action, the individual also has to be capable of the action in the first place, and Trent's Lack of Empathy is too strong for the command to have any effect on him.

Western Animation

• Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot: In "Moon Madness", Rusty is able to save himself by tricking Edie the soulless AI into thinking the backup copy of his human emotion grid is the chip she needs to rule the world. It ends with her realizing the error of her ways and playing video games with Rusty.
• Futurama: In "I Second That Emotion", Bender flushes Nibbler down the toilet. Leela is heartbroken, and Bender's indifference leads the Professor to install an empathy chip so Bender can feel the pain he caused. This leads to Bender flushing himself down the toilet to retrieve Nibbler. For further laughs, at the climax Bender is unable to save Nibbler because the chip overwhelms him with Leela's concern for her pet's safety, which leads to Leela having to learn how to feel Lack of Empathy. The episode ends with the two of them, equally Jerkasses, going off to annoy the world.
• Jade Armor: In the finale, Jade purifies the Shards inside the body of the Crimson Lord, purifying him in the process as well. This causes the Crimson Lord to have a Heel Realization.
• Steven Universe: Blue Diamond is revealed to have this as her main power. She can force other Gems to feel the overwhelming sorrow and pain she's experienced since the death of her sister Pink Diamond. Blue's baseline mood simply makes the Gems around her cry, but when she weaponizes her emotions, she can utterly immobilize the toughest warriors and even affect humans. The only Gems ever shown to be able to resist Blue's grief bomb are Garnet — and even then, it took every ounce of Heroic Willpower she had to stand up — and Lapis Lazuli, whose millennia-long history of abuse has rendered her Too Broken to Break ("I've felt worse"). After Blue Diamond's Heel–Face Turn, she instead makes other Gems feel relaxed and happy, as she's finally processed her sadness.
  Blue Diamond: You cannot fathom how much I've MOURNED — what thousands of years of GRIEF has DONE TO ME!

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