The writers have a villain, and they want to give that character some depth. The obvious solution is to Pet the Dog. Unfortunately, that tends to make the character less scary, causing Badass Decay and Villain Decay.
Instead, writers may keep the villain just as vile as before, but reveal that they have an excuse for being that way. The most popular one is the Freudian Excuse: the villain had a crapsack childhood, making them insane and warping their perception on the universe, and that's why they go around as uncaring sociopaths insulting everyone or blowing buildings up. (Or, if in School, they had a crappy home and school life, for example being frequently bullied). Sometimes, this is done for deliberate Badass Decay, but usually it isn't. The villain is as horrible as ever, only now the audience can look at them in a new way. If the villain's excuse is especially tied to his objective and causes the audience to pity him, it's a Monster Sob Story.
Unfortunately, just like a Pet the Dog moment, the Freudian Excuse sometimes fails to give a villain any depth at all. If the villain is particularly evil, it can come across as illogical and lame: "his father beat him, and that's why he's a mass murderer." Even if the villain's crimes are proportionate, the writers have to strike a hard balance. Too much emphasis on the excuse, and it looks like they're attorneys justifying the villain. Too little, and it looks like a ridiculously gratuitous scene of Wangst: "Okay, we know his father beat him, now let's get back to beating the crap out of him. But we'll feel his pain. But only because this ability says so."
Most importantly, the Freudian Excuse does not involve the character growing or changing; it explains why they haven't changed, and in fact, often serves as a signal that they could not and never will. Bad writers often think that the excuse can substitute for Character Development, but it does the exact opposite. Good writers know the excuse has limits, and watch them. If done shrewdly enough, it may lead the audience to Cry For The Devil. A Freudian Excuse is often invoked to explain how someone who Used to Be a Sweet Kid became such a monster instead - again, much writerly skill is generally needed to pull this off and make it poignant rather than pathetic.
The excuse however is often subverted. One way is to use it to show how pathetic a villain is — after the villain gives a Hannibal Lecture, a hero's classic rebuttal is "says the guy who became a hit man to work out his daddy issues." The second is for the villain to sneer at the hero's pity for them, even exploiting it in a fight. (In a Double Subversion, the villain is protesting far too much.) A third subversion is to simply present it as an explanation rather than a full excuse. Sometimes the author simply shows what warped the character into what they became without expecting the audience to feel any more sympathetic toward the character- a sort of psychological How We Got Here. And a fourth subversion is to use the Freudian Excuse as a justification for a Heel Face Turn; if the villain gets treatment he no longer has any reason to be evil and may pay the heroes back out of gratitude.
One thing that is almost never done is to explain how far back the abuse goes. For example, if the villain was beaten by his father, was the father beaten by his father? Most shows don't care.
Many Crime and Punishment Series (and Darker and Edgiersuperhero comics) are notorious for Writer On Board stories deconstructing the Freudian Excuse. At least once per storyline, there will be a slimy psychiatrist or defense attorney who declares that the Neck-Chopping Killer is merely a victim of circumstances, and it's the hero who should be locked away. These stories tend to end with said psychiatrist or defense attorney getting murdered by the killer, which is depicted as poetic Irony.
Fandoms often have an annoying tendency to create these out of whole cloth for a Draco in Leather Pants.
Often Truth in Television, justifiable whether it's any model of psychology, Freudian, Psychodynamic, Cognitive or Behaviouristic: children who have been conditioned in violence, pain and misunderstanding often tend to perceive a world of violence, pain and misunderstanding and inflict it upon others. Sometimes, in more neurologically based cases, the "Freudian Excuse" can be caused by mere brain damage or halted neuron development which was the result of said abuse.
Takes the "It's Nurture" position of the "Nature vs. Nurture" argument. For the Nature position, see In the Blood.
Mommy Issues is a subtrope. See also Start of Darkness, Abusive Parents, Parental Abandonment, "Well Done, Son" Guy, Single Issue Psychology, Being Tortured Makes You Evil and Who's Laughing Now?. In cases of Complete Monsters, the Freudian Excuse fails to justify anything. Not to be confused with Freud Was Right or All Psychology Is Freudian.
Examples
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The Angry Whopper from Burger King is extra spicy. Why? Because the onions were grown by an abusive farmer.
Anime/Manga
Fist of the North Star has loads of these, Souther probably being the most accurate, based on his childhood-crappitude-to-adult-bastardry ratio.
Sadly enough, this excuse gets completely omitted in the movies, in which he turns into a one-dimensional villain solely in it For the Evulz, without any justifications at all as to why he is on Complete Monster levels of villainy.
Neon Genesis Evangelion: Shinji, Asuka, Rei, Misato, and Ritsuko are all marked by horrible childhoods, and although they're not quite the "villains", it still helps lead to The End of the World as We Know It. Going further, some of the Applied Phlebotinum in the series depends on its users having had crappy childhoods to function. To top it off, the show is stuffed with Freudian imagery. Just to include the most obvious things, the dream sequences, the Elaborate Underground Base, the giant robots, the invading aliens, and the alien-induced hallucinations are all quite Freudian.
Topping it all off, Asuka's mother is played in the Japanese Version by the actress who played a character rather like Asuka in Gunbuster, named Jung Freud.
"Let me get this right, my father wants me to pilot my mother?"
Ranma ½ has many messed-up teenagers (Ranma, the Tendos, the Kunos, Shampoo...), with implications that it's because of their obnoxious parents (or great-great-grandparent in Shampoo's case). This is played for laughs, but Fanfic sometimes makes it explicit, comparing them to abuse victims.
Fushigi Yuugi tosses this in at the moment the villain is defeated, and the heroes suddenly pity the man who's been tormenting and manipulating them for 52 episodes. The villain himself chastens the hero for being so rude as to lay bare his psyche just as he was about to die a mystery.
Seto Kaiba's issues with his adopted father on Yu-Gi-Oh! and Manjyome's issues with his older brothers in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX . The GXprotagonist, Judai, is revealed to have grown up with workaholic parents who didn't have enough time for him, prompting his obsession with the game of Duel Monsters.
Marik is suggested to have turned evil because he was forced to live in a tomb and guard the Millennium Items against all invaders, and because he was forced to undergo a painful tombkeeper initiation ritual. Granted, Dark Marik was something of an alternate persona, but he was one created from the normal Marik's resentment, and normal Marik still wants revenge against Yugi.
Yami Marik is the embodiment of Marik's anger and rage. Keeping it suppressed for years, along with the crap treatment he got from his father, caused him to snap and essentially manifest a split personality. Of course, this being Yu-Gi-Oh, the second personality is rather real...
Yami Bakura/Thief King Bakura takes the prize among Yu-Gi-Oh! characters, though. He wants revenge for the pharaoh (Not Yami Yugi, his dad) having his whole village slaughtered in order to make the millennium items. He even watched them, while they were still (mostly) alive, be dropped into a pot of boiling gold. Gold boils at a temperature of 2807.0°C ( 5084.6 F), so no wonder they only showed silhouettes. There is a chance too, that he would have had more difficulties due to his purple eyes and white hair. Pale hair, skin and/or eyes in Egypt were often thought to be signs of demons, which is why Kisara is treated the way she is.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Father began his existence trapped inside a flask and used as a resource of alchemic knowledge. His desire to be free and to never again be bound by anyone or anything is what drove him to create the philosopher's stone and try to obtain the power of God and create the homunculi, becoming emotionless in the process just because he wished to have a family.
In the anime, Envy claims one of these due to having been abandoned by his father Hohenheim. The excuse is really not intended as a redeeming factor but more of a retrospective explanation for why he's so obsessed with Hohenheim and the Elrics, and its revelation is immediately followed by Envy stabbing and killing Ed.
In Nobuta Wo Produce, the much-vilified bully Bando is revealed to have an abusive boyfriend. Luckily, this is quickly followed by some actual, brilliant character development for her.
This is quite a popular backstory for Naruto villains, anti-heroes, and general douchebags. Neji was bitter and full of rage because he and his father were kept as a servant class within their clan, and his father was eventually killed so his body could be substituted for the head of the clan's.
Kimimaro spent most of his childhood locked in a cage except when he was brought out to fight (only in the anime).
Sasuke takes a turn down a dark path of vengeance because his older brother killed the rest of their family and Mind Raped him, twice.
And Gaara... oh, Gaara. It's hard to tell which was the worst part of his childhood: being hated by everybody in his village, being constantly targeted by his father for assassination, not being able to sleep for years on end, being betrayed by the one person he thought cared about him, who reveals he actually always hated Gaara right after trying to kill him, or being infused with a demon spirit while still in the womb. Not so surprising he ends up being a serial killer.
What's even more surprising is that, once he gets over it, he's actually a pretty nice guy.
And Naruto himself has an excuse- he grew up alone and friendless, shunned by everyone in the village for (to him) no apparent reason- he just doesn't use it. Except for the occasional Bart Simpsonesque minor act of vandalism very early on, that is.
Spoofed in Naruto The Abridged Series, when Sakura tells Sasuke she's not interested in Naruto because he's got such a downer background, yet isn't using it as an excuse to be emo.
And Itachi Uchiha, the Well-Intentioned Extremist. His childhood was during the great ninja war and he was traumatized by it (Quote Madara: "For a child, war is hell."), so he grew up to be a man who values peace above anything else. Above anything else. And then, you know the story. Then again, unlike some of the other Freudian Excuse-inspired villains, he was forced into the situation, albeit because Danzo knew about that part of his personality, and did not turn evil because of it.
Danzo's excuse was revealed to be not being picked as the Third Hokage when he was a rival with Sarutobi in their youth. The exact situation is that the Second Hokage named Sarutobi when the latter volunteered to be a decoy for 20 enemy ninja when a mission went bad. Danzo volunteered so as not to seem weak, stating his grandfather and father died in battle (saying that it's the way of shinobi life), but the Second recognized that Sarutobi was the best pick for successor and left them to be the decoy.
Orochimaru has an indirect excuse. His parents died when he was young and over the years his desire to see them again led him to study forbidden jutsus, whether to directly revive them or gain immortality to wait until they were reincarnated. Sasuke mocks him for having forgotten the very purpose for all of his crimes.
There's also the former Dragon Pain real name Nagato. He wants to make the ultimate weapon of mass destruction and bring suffering to the entire world because he saw his parents killed by enemy ninja and grew up orphaned in a country constantly embroiled in both civil wars and war with other countries. When he, Konan, and Yahiko lead a peaceful organization, they're attacked by Hanzo, backed by Danzo, both of which have brought a small army with them thinking the group are revolutionaries. When Nagato is left with the choice of killing Yahiko, the leader, or watching Konan be killed, Yahiko grabs Nagato's knife and kills himself with it.
Interestingly enough, unlike many other Freudian Excuse villains his most despicable acts in the eyes of the fanbase (killing Jiraiya, destroying Konoha and almost killing Hinata) occurred after his Freudian Excuse was revealed, almost as though to counteract any sympathy we might feel for him. As some fans believe, while Pain has a tragic backstory, it isn't enough to justify the extent of his plans and actions.
Let's not forget Kakuzu, started out life as Shinobi loyal enough to his village that he willingly let them experiment on him, then when chastised for failing to assassinate the First Hokage (perhaps the most powerful ninja to date), he turns on his superiors choose to only put faith in money.
Sasori everyone! He grew up without parents; grandmother Chiyo never broke it to him that they were really dead, instead claiming they were away on mission after mission after mission. So he fills the gap by creating two puppets to replace them, but quickly realizes that wooden dolls can't take the place of real parental love. His emotional growth is stunted to that of a young teenager, which makes sense because he preserved his body to look that of his 15-year-old-self. And so begins the journey of a cold, heartless, stoic Puppetmaster who cares little of kidnapping ninjas and turning their bodies into his personal puppets and weapons. There seems to be a trend of broken children in the Sand Village...
In Gundam 00, it's probably easier to point out which characters do NOT embody this trope rather than the ones who do.
Arlong first appeared as a racist who terrorized innocent people for money. But as it turns out, him and fishmen in general have a pretty good reason for hating humans for what they did to them (which includes a long history of slavery, oppression and discrimination).
It's not just Arlong being a fishman, it also turns out he was raised in the Fishman District, which was an orphanage meant to house the enormous amount of children orphaned by the slave trade and the chaos caused by the Great Pirate Age on Fishman Island. Said Fishman District quickly deteriorated into a lawless ghetto, not the best place to grow up in. On top of that, the only person Arlong ever looked up to - Fisher Tiger, was a former slave who was killed by the marines for the crime of freeing slaves and who was betrayed by the humans he helped. He also spent some time in Impel Down, which "cruel and unusual punishment" doesn't begin to describe. It kind of messes with the viewer; Arlong is one of the few villains in One Piece that successfully and directly kills a character onscreen, yet he also is the only villain that is actually shown crying of sadness. To top it off, he's crying over the death of a mentor, something usually reserved for the Straw Hats themselves. Adding more fuel to this trope, Arlong Park was modeled after Sabaody Park - a place fishmen and merfolk were unable to attend because of the high risk of being kidnapped - and that Arlong, Hachi, Kuroobi and Chew longed to go to as children. Hachi even says that what they truly wanted was to be part of the human world, even if they took it too far.
Moria was once like Luffy, idealistic and adventurous, but his entire crew was wiped out by Kaido, leaving him as the sole survivor.
Crocodile has this heavily implied when concerning his desire to kill Whitebeard, likely because he may have wiped out his crew, and caused him to become cruel and sadistic.
In Black Lagoon, the Creepy Twins/Psychos For Hire Hansel and Gretel have a definite Freudian excuse for being so deeply, deeply broken, creepy, disturbing, sociopathic and just plain wrong in the head. Born in Romania and abandoned by parents too poor to raise them, they were raised in an orphanage no better than those of 19th century London (a sadly common story during Nicolae Ceausescu's rule). Then they were sold to a producer of kiddy snuff porn, where rape, torture and murder were part of their daily routine - to the point where they can no longer grasp the concept of surviving without killing. Unlike many cases of the Freudian excuse, this one actually works, making the twins both the most evil characters in the show, and the most tragic.
Aion from Chrono Crusade starts his plan to overthrow the demon's government and destroy the world when he discovers that Pandaemonium used to be a human woman and she was pregnant with twins when she was transformed—twins that just happened to be him and his brother, Chrono. That's just in the manga, however—in the anime, he's just evil for the sake of being evil.
In Princess Tutu's second season, it's revealed that Rue's reason for becoming Princess Kraehe is that she believes she's the daughter of the Raven and he's told her that only the Prince from the story could ever love her.
Actually, to be more precise she was kidnapped as a child, brainwashed and raised as Princess Kraehe and became Rue to forget and be happy for a while..
Blood+ does this masterfully with its antagonist Diva. Her 'childhood' was so full of torment, neglect and abuse that you "almost" want to give her hugs and love and tell her it'll all be alright - almost. Then she does something completely Ax Crazy and unforgivable like raping and murdering the protagonist's 12-year-old little brother and is just as terrifying and squicky as before, only now it... kind of makes a little sense.
Don't forget, she also steals his face.
It's stated in Hana Yori Dango that the reason Domyoji Tsukasa is prone to semi-sociopathic fits of violence (including beating the crap out of and having the rest of his high school torture a student who accidentally squirted lemon juice in his eye, and beating another student to the point that his organs ruptured) is that his parents ignored and neglected him in order to focus on running their vast corporate empire (ironically, the reason he was able to get away with his gratuitous exploits). He's not all bad, however...
Rolo Lamperouge from Code Geass... whoo boy, where to begin? He starts off as a Tykebomb sent to spy on and eventually kill Lelouch, until Lulu uses the feelings of brotherly love Rolo's built up over the past year to manipulate him with the full intent of killing him once his usefulness runs out. This proves to be effective because Rolo, as a raised-from-birth assassin, has never known any form of real kindness. Unfortunately, this backfires on Lelouch when Rolo becomes so obsessive and fixated on being the only person his "brother" cares about that he murders Shirley, one of the few people Lelouch was genuinely close to, and plans on killing Nunnally, who's basically Lelouch's whole reason for living. Amazingly, Rolo managed to be Rescued from the Scrappy Heap by saving Lelouch from the Black Knights' mutiny at the cost of his own life, declaring that though he knows Lelouch has been manipulating him the whole time, his own feelings of love were genuine, and for the first time in his life he's doing something he wants to do instead of something he's been ordered to do. Cue Tear Jerker music and Alas, Poor Scrappy effects.
He's not the only one, either. The absolutely vile Psycho for Hire Luciano Bradley, according to the light novels, was abused by his evil father and neglected by his alcoholic mother, and killed his father (who said out loud he didn't care for his child's life) at age seven. Also, Emperor Charles and his brother V.V were witnesses of all the backstabbing, hatred and death surrounding the Britannian Imperial Family ever since they were young children, which culminated when they saw their mother get a carriage dropped on her.
Lelouch's mother is mysteriously killed and his sister Nunally is crippled, and he and Nunally become political hostages in Japan. They are assumed dead once Britannia invades anyway. Which instills in him a hatred against Britannia and a murderous intent against his own half-siblings and father.
More of a subversion, considering Lelouch has sound political reasons for wanting to overthrow the empire, even if his desire to do so STARTED from his mother's assassination.
It's also worth noting however that a lot of his motivation comes from the opposite of what his father does - his father thinks that those who are weak are useless, and thus Lelouch (likely due to disgust with his father) pretty much incorporates the antithesis of his father's views into the Black Knights' slogan.
Suzaku has one, too, though not quite as bad. As a child, his father, Genbu, would have let the war go on until Japan was destroyed, so Suzaku killed him, resulting in almost immediate peace. His guilt over the incident and complete lack of punishment for it is why he argues that anyone who uses the wrong means to achieve freedom (in short, anyone who doesn't bow down to their conquerors and earn it through their system) is wrong. It gets a little hypocritical when he starts doing the things he speaks out against, while still calling others out for the same. Midway through the first season though, it is revealed that this is more of an excuse for him to put himself at risk in his pursuit of a so-called honorable death on the battlefield, in order to absolve himself of his guilt over going unpunished for killing his father.
Mao in Code Geass. The guy was a six-year-old orphan when C.C. gave him his Geass, which ruined any chance of a remotely normal life. And then she deserted him when she was the only person he loved. * sniffsniff* BOOHOOHOOHOO!!!
Most bad Code Geass characters have Freudian Excuses of some sort. The attention they're given in the actual show largely depends on their relevance to the characters' situations.
Many GOOD Code Geass characters seem to possess this trope at first as well, but escape it by either having massive amounts of character development, which contradicts the trope, or actually exploring the depth and legitimacy of the excuse.
In the manga version of Rosario + Vampire, Hokuto has one of these. My father beats me and monsters at school beat me as well, so I must destroy the world and recreate it in my image!
Subverted in Yu Yu Hakusho. Sakyo says that his childhood was exactly like that of his four brothers, who went on to become civil servants, but he became twisted for an inexplicable reason and sought out brutal pleasures until he eventually joined the Black Book Club; as he says, "The depravity up here began through no one's fault but my own". Mukuro, however, plays it straight in that she was adopted and sexually abused by her stepfather, and sought to take out her anger on the world by killing people, which is what led her to become one of the three strongest figures in the Demon World. However, in the manga, Hiei notes that she had a hypnosis-instilled manufactured memory of her adoptive father showing her kindness, which was made to come to her mind every time she wanted to kill him, and she has "grown strong because [she's] confused, not because [she] suffered". Keiko once wonders if Yusuke turned out the way he did because of how irresponsible Atsuko is.
Younger Toguro's students were murdered by a powerful demon Kairen and he was badly beaten; in order to kill this demon he willingly gives up his humanity to become a power hungry mass murdering demon.
Czeslaw Meyer from Baccano!, whose reason for wanting to kill all the passengers in the dining car of a train in order to root out any other immortals who might be a threat to him stems from being tortured for two hundred years by his guardian, who he had trusted.
He struck back a lot sooner than that, but it was still a long period of the kind of torture where they do things no one could survive, Healing Factor activate, repeat.
The Funimation dub of Dragon Ball Z did this with Vegeta during his death scene on Namek, having him justify being evil by blaming Freeza for taking him as a child, saying, "He made me what I am." As well as revealing that a good portion of this involved forced servitude (In other words, Frieza forced Vegeta into serving him because he threatened his father, and even when he did everything for Frieza just to keep his dad alive, Frieza killed him anyways.)
Broly technically has one as well, as apparently one of the reasons why he went Ax Crazy was because of traumatic events relating to his birth: Mostly Goku crying, although there was also the attempt on his life by King Vegeta (having one of his guards execute Broly by stabbing him in the stomach just because he feared his power level), and then nearly being threatened with death by Frieza when he destroyed Planet Vegeta, and it is later implied in his first movie that he also destroyed several planets due to Paragus' influence (not to say he didn't destroy any planets before getting that control ring on him, but he certainly started destroying more planets than before as a result completely against his will.).
Vision of Escaflowne's Dilandau Albatou is crazy due to horrific government experiments being performed on him, changing him from a sweet little girl to a psychotic pyro killer. The ruining of his face and destruction of his Dragon Slayer force by Van only exacerbate his issues.
Luxus, one of the biggest Jerkasses in Fairy Tail prior to his defeat and Heel Face Turn anyway used to be a cheerful kid who loved his grandpa Markarov. That changed when Markarov kicked Luxus's father Ivan out of Fairy Tail for endangering his comrades. After that Luxus resented both his grandfather for valuing his True Companions more than his family and the concept of friendship that close and strong in general. Since, as mentioned earlier, he's one of the biggest assholes in the series, who even went so far as to threaten to destroy the guild's hometown if Makarov didn't hand it over to him because he wanted to make Fairy Tail stronger, it's not a very good excuse.
Hiro Mashima came up with a much better excuse for his villains in Rave Master. The more notable ones are King causing all that mayhem to draw Gale Glory out of hiding so he could make him suffer for causing the death of his wife and kid, and Lucia, King's not actually dead kid, who forces him to witness his mother's death, attempts to cause his, and robs him of his childhood by locking him in the basement of a maximum security desert prison
From Death Note, we have Misa Amane, a Serial Killer who generally shows no signs of sympathy for her victims, nor hesitation to kill them. These people can be just about anyone who gets in her way. Her excuse is that her parents were murdered before her eyes in a robbery. This makes her support the original Kira, Light Yagami, who punished her parents' killer after he escaped conventional justice. As such, her behaviour is more explainable, though not entirely excusable.
We've also got Teru Mikami, an even crazier prosecutor turned serial killer whose victims include even the unemployed, eventually. However, as a child his mother died, and he endured horrific and near-constant bullying at school, simply for defending his classmates' honor.
To elaborate, he was beaten up and disillusioned about justice in middle school. Then, four bullies ran over his slightly unsupportive mother and all five died, prompting him to believe that justice was real. He wasn't sad that so many died, just relieved, and he decided that when he was older, he would work to extend the arm of justice to protect people everywhere. Somehow, that led to him becoming a prosecuting attorney, and then a vigilante. Pretty screwed up, huh?
He also believed he had psychic powers to wish the unworthy dead (he thought so similarly to Light, that the people Light killed often ended up being people Mikami thought should die), even before he got a Death Note and actually had them.
Also in the second film, Light dies in Soichiro's (who, by the way, does not die here) arms, begging him to believe he acted as Kira to put justice, which the latter had told him about since childhood, into effect.
In Glass Fleet, Vetti's horrific actions (including raping the main character, Michel) are all forgiven in the end and he gets a pass. The reason? He was sexually and emotionally abused as a child.
Each volume of Saki begins and ends with a page from an omake story about Yuki, who travels to the Land of Tacos to find that some unnamed king from a neighboring territory has... um... harnessed the power of corn to wage war—leaving behind none to make new tacos with—because his parents divorced when he was young over how bad tacos tasted.
Mahou Sensei Negima! toys with the whole idea in regards to Evangeline. Evangeline was turned into a vampire at age ten, inadvertently killed her parents during the transformation, and was essentially considered an undead abomination for the next 600 years or so, causing hundreds of people to try to hunt her down and kill her. Despite this, she claims that she's totally and utterly evil, refusing to acknowledge the fact that her (very long) Dark and Troubled Past may have influenced her actions a little. Asuna points this out, noting that Eva isn't really as evil as she thinks she is, and that she's just acting that way in response to all the crap she's been through.
Scarlett from Steam Boy is an utterly spoiled snotty brat, treating Ray with haughty disdain and punching her little dog in the head when it tried to run away from her. Then later on she tells Ray that she has five 'mothers' - one that cooks her food, another that takes her shopping, another that helps her get dressed, another that reads her stories at night and another that teaches her, and angrily tells him that she doesn't run off to them if she's in trouble (unlike Ray, who was worried about his). It's obvious at this point that Scarlett is so bratty because she's never had anything close to a parent, just servants who did everything they were told. She does get better by the end of the movie, though.
Wiseman from Sailor Moon uses Chibi Usa's feelings of inadequacy and abandonment to turn her evil.
He also twists Demand to his purposes by preying on the prince's feelings of rejection and bitterness at the moon kingdom.
Really, Wiseman is the king of using people's traumatic backgrounds to turn them ax-crazy.
Medaka, who only thinks the best of everyone (up to a point), believes this must be the reasoning with all the delinquents in her school. For instance, she thinks the thugs using the kendo hall must be a heavily disillusioned team when in fact they really are just thugs who happened to find a large empty building. Nonetheless, her sheer force of will combined with the thrashing she and her partner give them causes them to become a real kendo team.
In Romeo X Juliet Lord Montague gets one of these dumped on him in Episode 17. "The What Do You Mean, He's Not Likable?" kind....
Why is Tetsuo from AKIRA not on the list yet?! After enduring years of kids bullying him and trying to make him cry, and being the youngest member of a biker gang who is looked down on by everyone, including his best friend... he discovers he has power greater than all of them. And... cue his Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
All of the members of the Team Rocket trio have Freudian Excuses. Jessie was raised poor and her mother was killed in an avalanche, accounting for her Tsundere personality. James was raised by neglectful parents who wanted him to marry a Yandere named Jessiebelle, accounting for his timid and repressive demeanor. Meowth never had any family and learned to talk just to impress a female Meowth who still rejected him, accounting for his conniving features.
Pokémon Special. Lance's excuse for wanting to Kill All Humans? As a little boy, he sees a Dratini dying in a pool of industrial sludge. As he hugs it to his body, he can feel its pain, see its thoughts. He sees through the its eye that Humans Are Bastards, and that must've been pretty damn traumatic for him as well as the Dratini.
Doesn't his Blackthorn heritage come into it somewhere, too? Clair's just as off-the-handle as Lance, just less...ambitious.
During Bleach's Soul Society arc, most of the Soul Reapers who defended Rukia's attempted execution that weren't part of Aizen's plot had one of these. Soifon was hellbent on ensuring the laws were upheld due to her pain of being left behind by Yoruichi, Yamamoto was firmly dedicated to enforcing the laws of Soul Society despite his personal feelings, Komamura felt he had a life debt to Yamamoto and followed him, and Byakuya had sworn an oath on his parents' grave never to break a law of Soul Society. Byakuya is an interesting case, as he had also sworn to his dying wife, Rukia's sister, that he would always protect Rukia. This made Byakuya, who seemed to be the coldest of the antagonist Captains, to actually be the most conflicted.
Rurouni Kenshin IS this trope. Essentially every character with a combat role has some sort of melodramatic horrific past. To name a few:
Kenshin was orphaned, briefly enslaved, raised by a violent (if brilliant and essentially decent) jerk, made into a murderer by a government he later came to resent, and wound up accidentally killing his own wife. Though that last is more his excuse for being angsty and standoffish, since it's ultimately the reason he got through the war sane and swore the no-kill vow.
So(u)jiro(u) was an illegitimate son who suffered constant abuse, killed his entire stepfamily in self-defense around eight or so, and under the wing of a megalomaniac grew into a prodigy assassin with no feeling other than 'contentment.' He gets better.
Yukishiro Enishi, the brother of the wife Kenshin accidentally killed, was so traumatized by witnessing the event that his hair and eyes turned white and turquoise respectively. And, since he'd already hated Kenshin, consequently spends the next ten years plotting revenge, becoming a blackmarket weapons kingpin, and nursing his sister complex.
Friendly young monk Anji turned into revolutionary death monk after the local head man had his temple burned down with all his orphans inside, to curry favor with the young Meiji government and their imperial Shinto project. (This was a real thing. Orphans optional.)
Aoshi's original one was he didn't get any chance to fight and win honor in the war, and now the government doesn't want to hire ninja, and while his second one "I got my men who loved me killed by my jerk employer for no good reason".
Kamatari wants Shishio to love him, but he's not as womanly (or awesome) as Yumi and doesn't have the combat skill to earn his respect, so he just does what he's told. Why he's a scythe-wielding crossdresser who thinks a taken, hideously scarred maniac like Shishio makes a good One True Love is never touched on.
Sano actually started the trend, with Kenshin outright asking him what had messed him up so bad when he was obviously a decent sort. Comes out that as a kid he became the only survivor of the Sekiho Army, a company of irregulars betrayed by the revolutionary government, and is really mad and disillusioned about it. Defeat Means Friendship for Kenshin, though, and Sano becomes his new best friend.
Saito is gloriously unexcused, though, as is Shishio and Jin-e.
Chou too, actually, who appears to be just a cheerful Kansai psycho who really likes swords.
Surprisingly the Gag Dub of Shin Chan gives one for Penny's and her mother's violent behavior by saying that her father abuses them. In the original no explanation was ever given for there violent outburst.
Not a villain, just a Jerk Ass, but Kanda Yu of D.Gray-Man turns out to have a very good reason for being so aloof and cynical. Namely, this, over and over again for months. Additionally, he was created artificially and knows it, grew up with very little human affection, and was eventually forced to fight the closest thing to a friend he had to the death. However, other characters with incredibly traumatic backstories normally turn into The Pollyanna instead.
It gets worse. The Second Exorcist project, which Kanda is a product of, involved implanting the brains of dead Exorcists into new bodies, and he eventually started regaining memories of his own death. Kanda's life sucks so much that using an Exposition Beam to show someone his memories qualifies as Mind Rape.
In Elfen Lied we have LucyKaede and Mariko. Kaede is harassed by her peers at what appears to be an orphanage because of her horns. They even killher dog. Mariko, on the other hand, is nearly killed by her father at birth. His wife convinces him not to before she dies. Even then, Mariko is forced to live in a solitary confinement chamber where she can't even move. And she ends up killing the one person that ever talked to her.
All human villains in Rave Master get one of these. King wants revenge on Haru's dad for getting his wife and son killed. Lucia, King's actually not dead son, wants revenge on the world for killing his mom and for being locked a prison from the age of 6 to 16. Doryu wants revenge on 'the light' for being condemned to darkness by the humans of a town he tried to create to dissolve racism (he failed). Reina wanted revenge for her father's unjust torture and death. Jegan lost it just a little when the woman of his dreams chose someone else. Shuda and Julius didn't have to good of reasons, but Shuda was more of a good guy on the wrong side anyway, and Juliua was... special.
Subverted in Durarara!!, where Shizuo is more than a little distraught that his angerissuesaren't the result of abuse or childhood trauma.
Shizuo: Why did I turn out like this? It wasn't my family. There was no childhood trauma I can think of. I never watched any violent anime or read violent manga. Didn't watch movies either. So that leaves only myself, doesn't it? It's gotta be me, right?
Ginias Sahalin from The 08th MS Team apparently went nuts and was driven to create super-advanced weapon systems because his mother left him at an early age. His sister even compares the prototype mobile armor he obsesses over to a womb.
Referred to in Soul Eater, when Stein tells Medusa of the doctors who wanted to know what trauma in his childhood could have caused his desire to experiment/cut people up. He claims there wasn't one. Medusa herself has so far not given any excuse for her terrible actions, other than the fact she feels like it, and a world under the authority of Lord Death just isn't appealing to her. On this much, she and Stein appeared to be in agreement to some extent.
Crona is given one. After all, his/her mother isMedusa. Who wouldn't be messed up after being raised by somebody who experiments on you with the black blood, forces you to kill cute little bunnies, gives you an illustrated book on various methods of killing, and locks you in a closet without food for several days if you don't do what she says?
Ax Crazy Alois Trancy in the second season of Black Butler. His foster family died in front of him, from unknown supernatural means, Including his adoptive brother and only friend and he was also possibly raped and beaten.
Ax Crazy genocidal maniac Gennai Doma from Black Lion swore to wipe out all ninjas off the face of the earth because a group killed his wife and nearly killed him.
Oskar von Reuentahl from Legend Of Galactic Heroes is not a villain but one of the "good guys" (although he does a sort of Face Heel Turn eventually, but even then he remains unfailingly loyal to Reinhard whom he admires and respects). However, behind his calm and composed facade he's a bitter misogynist, an increasingly broken and self-destructive man. He was born with heterochromia, and his mother took his brown eye as an omen about her illicit relationship with her brown-eyed lover so she tried to gouge it out when he was still a baby. After this she went insane and eventually committed suicide. This drove Reuentahl's father to alcoholism and emotional abuse, often telling his son that it would have been better if he had never been born.
Odin of Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple has a pretty stupid one (but that's the point): He fought Kenichi for a yin-yang pin when they were kids, and lost, but Kenichi felt sorry for him and tried to give it to him anyway. At first it looked like it was the influence of the Great Sage Fist that made him crazy, but we see in a flashback that, if anything, the Fist stabilized him for a time.
In Jackals, minor antagonist Daryl the Mincer is afforded one of these; the local crime syndicate's information broker attributes Daryl's homicidal tendencies to being sexually abused by his stepfather as a boy.
Just about all of the Diclonii in Elfen Lied hate humans and turn psychopathic, but they arguably have a good reason for this. They're almost invariably hated by their peers for their horns, if they're even allowed to live outside at all. Most of them are, from birth, used as experiment subjects. However, it's also noteworthy that many of them have a very strong instinct to kill humans. Nonetheless, Nana proves that not all of them are as Always Chaotic Evil as people make them out to be.
Madoka Magica: Kyouko acts like a self-centered Jerk Ass because she wished for people to listen to her preacher father. Then he found out and freaked the hell out, killing himself and the rest of the family. So now she avoids helping others so avoid hurting them or getting hurt.
Claymore: Opheliais the wayshe is because she saw her older brother get devoured by an Awakened Being and was driven to insanity in order to avenge him. The Awakened Being turned out to be none other than Priscilla who in turn has her own Freudian excuse for her behavior because she saw her family get eaten by a yoma who - just to add to the trauma - had killed her father and had taken possession of his body.
In Fruits Basket, pretty much every character that's constantly in the strip has a Freudian Excuse. Tohru, the main character, had her mother killed in a traffic accident and her father when she was only three, which caused her mother to ignore her completely for a period of time.Kyo, her boyfriend and later husband, had his mother commit suicide, and his father hated him as a result. He believed that it was his fault for most of his life.Yuki has a rather extreme version: Akito, who probably has the greatest Freudian Excuse of all of the characters, locked him up in a room for most of his life, and beat him. He's shown with a whip in the anime. It goes on and on, even extending to minor characters like Kakeru and Machi (who becomes not so minor when she and Yuki start dating). Subverted by Kimi, who had been bullied by some girls when she was younger. They told her that she should just use her looks to get boys to do what she wants. She follows their advice.
In Revolutionary Girl Utena, even Akio has one. Back when he was still Dios, he worked himself almost to death while trying to save people, so his sister hid him inside their house. When people came looking for him, she tried to stop them, and she was stabbed many times, turning her into the Rose Bride. It is implied that this event also led to Akio and Dios becoming separate people.
In LifeKatsumi is a manipulative Jerk AssBitch in Sheep's Clothing who Crosses the Line Twice.. But he has abusive parents who forced him to date a girl due to her father being a CEO. Manami was bullied when she was younger, so now she bullies anyone she feel deserves to be bullied.
Comic Books
Subverted in the Brian Bendis run on the comic book Daredevil. Daredevil has spent his life tormented by the monstrous Bullseye. When Daredevil discovers Bullseye had a horrible childhood, the hero feels no sympathy, and says he will never fear Bullseye again. A mass murderer is scary; a mass murderer who kills because he had a crappy childhood is merely pathetic.
Possibly because of Daredevil's ownBack Story. Maybe not everyone can spin "Blinded by toxic spill at age twelve and single father was coerced into not suing due to carelessly negligent waste handler's mob ties" into "hot-shot lawyer AND superhero", but still...
Of course, Bullseye has a Multiple Choice Past, so it's possible "The Crappy childhood" is a lie. In some versions of his origin, he was bad even as a kid.
Many of the Batman villains: Anyone born looking like Waylon "Killer Croc" Jones would have trouble leading a normal life; Bane was forced to live out his escaped father's life sentence, and so on. Some are a bit suspect — Scarecrow was bullied as a child, yes, but so were a lot of us, and we didn't turn evil.
Inverted by Batman himself, who, after seeing his parents murdered by a criminal, devotes his life to fighting crime and improving the quality of life in Gotham.
Lampshaded in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, wherein Terry gets the better of the titular villain by, among other things, mercilessly mocking his past, although in this version it's just the chemical bath.
The Joker himself likes to make fun of this trope, by making up horrible child abuse stories in order to mess with people's minds. He did this most notably in Mad Love.
Oh, and Killer Croc once teamed up with fellow biological misfit Baby Doll, and they were quite successful—but apparently being a Jerk Ass at heart, he decided to ditch her, at which point she snapped on him.
One of the few "abusive father" backstories that really works: Harvey Dent/Two-Face's violent, sadistic alternate persona, called "Big Bad Harv" in the cartoon, emerged as Harvey's way of coping with a drunken, abusive father. In the comic in which this element of the character was introduced, it's revealed that his father would take Harvey and "play a game" with him, flipping a silver dollar and beating the child if it came up heads. The coin had two heads.
The nature of Two-Face's father's abuse varies slightly depending on the story. One story suggested that his dad had a split personality himself, and would violently beat Harvey when he was angry with him before realizing in horror what he was doing.
The Riddler is another of the "abusive father" strain. In particular, his father would savagely beat him every time he lied, so the Riddler feels the compulsion to always tell the truth... albeit in convoluted riddles.
Scarecrow gets an abusive grandmother and maternal abandonment, as well as vicious school bullying. In fangirl circles, this is taken as an actual excuse. If you can find a Youtube Scarecrow video posted by a female user who doesn't portray him as The Woobie or, after Cillian Murphy played him in the movie, a Draco in Leather Pants, I will give you five bucks.
This even extends to non-villain characters. Much of Jason Todd's problems lie from his childhood (mother died when he was young, father was a Two-Face mook who was eventually killed). When he is adopted by Batman, Jason lives for the "Well Done, Son" Guy, and his desire to see his real mother (who he has never even met) led to his death at the hands of the Joker. Since he was revived, he's been unable to fully understand why Batman got a new Robin, but still lives for his old mentor's approval. This reached a head in "Battle for the Cowl" where his inability to accept Batman's death resulted in Jason snapping completely, trying to take his Batman's place (as a murderous Batman), and even nearly killing Tim Drake.
A perfect example of the slimy psychiatrist appears in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, in the form of Dr. Volper, who attempts to present the Joker as being a mere victim of Batman's psychosis. In thanks, the Joker snaps his neck on live television (while gassing the studio) - although it's suggested that the psychiatrist, irritating, blinkered and naive jerk though he may be, might have a point, as the Joker had spent the period that Batman had been absent from Gotham City in a catatonic state that he only emerged from when Batman returned.
Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, during which the Joker has his Freudian Excuse explained as an extended flashback. Joker explains that the story might be entirely false due to his own unreliable psyche, but DC seems to be treating it as canon, given a later story arc where Riddler says he witnessed the murder of "Jack's" wife and offers to tell Joker who did it in return for protection.
Of course, the whole point of The Killing Joke is Joker trying to prove that all it takes is "one bad day" for even the sanest person to go off the deep end. He tries to drive Commissioner Gordon insane by shooting and brutalizing his daughter Barbara, then forcing Gordon to look at photographs of her naked, broken body. However, Gordon doesn't break and, when Batman rescues him, he tells Bats to bring Joker in by the book, to prove "our way works".
This is turned on its head in Batman Begins, in which the corrupt psychiatrist, when his "clients" cease to be useful to him, uses a neurotoxin to render them legitimately insane.
The Batman The Animated Series episode "Trial" has the villains putting Batman on trial for ruining their lives. Of course, even they end up admitting that they had problems, some self-inflicted, before Batman became involved. Being villains, they attempt to follow up the verdict of innocence with an execution, regardless.
Roman Sionis a.k.a. Black Mask also had an abusive childhood. Whenever he suffered an accident that should have him taken to some hospital, his parents were more concerned with their image and covered the incidents. Despite hating the Waynes and not hiding it from Roman, his parents forced him to befriend Bruce for the sake of being connected to one of Gotham's elite families. When Roman started dating a secretary from his father's company, they opposed it. That was the last drop for Roman, who burned down the family home with his parents inside it. Not being as good as a businessman as his father was, he drove the company bankrupt. His girlfriend left him, the irony being that his parents were right about opposing the relationship. Using a defective product from his company (the very same one that drove him into bankruptcy), he exacted his revenge on her. Feeling humiliated that Bruce Wayne took over the company, Sionis (now Black Mask) started kidnapping executives of Wayne Enterprises.
Has been used at times to explain the motives of Spider-Man villains, and to possibly contrast them with Spidey himself, who did not exactly have the best childhood. The worst example was when Venom was given a cliched tragic backstory as part of a bad idea to turn the character into a hero.
This was actually addressed in Ultimate Spider-Man, where Nick Fury reveals that the reason he had given Spidey such a hard time was because he has assumed, due to the tragedy in his life, Peter was almost certain to become a villain.
In Ultimate Fantastic Four #7, it is explained that on Victor Van Damme's tenth birthday he was presented with his family history dating back to Vlad Tepes Dracula and basically the blueprint for his entire villainous mindset, and from that day on at dinner he was required to recite said family history from memory, receiving beatings when he got it wrong and being forced to start over until he got it right. Not much of a Freudian Excuse, but... the last page of the flashback shows ten-year-old Victor sitting in the chair where he received the original lecture and instruction in five panels depicting it slowly getting darker. In the last one, he says "It's my birthday." If you don't feel sorry for him (at least the child version, not necessarily the one who proceeds to recite the names of his ancestors and ask if his father can hear him now while attacking the FF with a rocket launcher) after that, then you have a heart of stone.
Magneto of X-Men: his parents and family were okay people, but they were Jews in Nazi Germany. He was the only one who lived; some issues say that he was forced to clean their ashes out of the incinerators. Magneto is constantly going through the Heel Face Revolving Door, always working to make theoppressed mutants safer, often going too far. By some accounts, he can't make himself believe that peaceful coexistence is possible.
And then, once he and his soon-to-be wife Magda settled in Ukraine, a mob burnt down the inn where they were staying, and he was unable to do anything while his daughter burned to death. And then, when he lost control of the powers he didn't know he had and killed the mob, Magda ran from him, calling him a monster. Later, when he was hunting Nazis for a living, the people he worked for (heavily implied to be the CIA) killed a female friend of his because he went after the "wrong" Nazis. Oh, and his powers make him bipolar. The man has so many issues it's a wonder he's still able to function.
Let's not forget that on the two occasions when Magneto decided to try the more ethical path of establishing a separate nation as a sanctuary for mutants and otherwise leaving flatscans entirely alone, both times his attempted 'Mutant Israel' was almost immediately nuked off the map. With literal nukes. Magneto's subsequent urges to burn the world are most definitely understandable.
A Child Services worker in Transmetropolitan has a rather poetic rant on this:
"Everyone's looking for someone to blame. Society. Culture. Hollywood. Predators. Looking everywhere but the right place. Children are very simple, Mr. Jerusalem. Very easy devices to break, or assemble wrong. You want to know who did this to these kids? Only their parents. That's the thing no one wants to hear. Every time you stop thinking about how you're treating your kid, you make one of these. It really is as simple as that. It's got nothing to do with the failure of the society or any of that. It's got everything to do with the responsibility of making a human."
Junior from Secret Six has this turned all the way up to eleven. Her father was the original Golden Age Ragdoll, a psychopathic mass murderer and cult leader in the Charles Manson style. He beat his son because he wasn't triple jointed like he was and when it came to Junior (Real name Alex) he would repeatedly rape her, from a very young age. It doesn't excuse the horrific crimes she later commits (Junior is a sadist, rapist, mass murderer, and torturer who's crimes are so horrifying there are people in Arkham who are scared of her) but when you look at what her father was like it explains so much.
Sistah Spooky's rather pathological hatred of blondes (like her teammate Empowered) was summed up thusly to said teammate by an ex-lover:
"It's a messy High School (Über-Aryan Mean Girls) trauma, to oversimplify things considerably."
The Terror Titans miniseries by DC is based around this trope. Every issue features one member's backstory, usually involving a terrible childhood.
Arguably every member of the Umbrella Academy, and definitely Vanya. Hargreeves is a total dick and terrible parent, for instance his habit of sorting his children by their apparent worth.
Backblast from G.I. Joe. He grew up next to one of the busiest airports in the world, and whenever a plane landed or took off his whole house shook with the force of an earthquake. When he signed up for the military, the first thing he asked was "Where can I go to shoot airplanes out of the sky?"
Similarly, Charbroil used to have to heat the water pipes in his family's basement as a kid with a blowtorch to keep them from freezing in the winter, and as a teenager worked at a mill, feeding coal into blast furnaces. When asked by the recruiting sergeant what kind of job he was interested in, he replied, "What have you got with open flames?"
Subverted in the MAD parody of Touched by an Angel. The somewhat jerky boss objects to a flashback of him being abused by his father that is used to explain his behavior, saying that it isn't real, but the angel showing it tells him that they need it for Tear Jerker material.
Superman: Birthright gave Lex Luthor a small excuse. His father was emotionally distant and he felt alienated from everyone because of his money and intellect. However, he was also a raging sociopath with a superiority complex that dwarfed the heavens and many people point out that Luthor made his own choices.
While not a villain ('just' a Heroic Sociopath), Rorschach from Watchmen was raised by a prostitute who never cared for him. The Comedian is implied to have had a rough childhood as well.
Rorshach states his reason for becoming a crime-fighter in a deconstruction of the superhero origin story. The therapist he speaks with see's it as nothing more than a shallow excuse for his violent life.
Ozymandias had an (unspoken) excuse of his own in the movie, or at least from the POV of the actor who played him. Matthew Goode decided to portray Veidt as being shamed by being the son of a Nazi, and that his Well-Intentioned Extremist views arose out of a desire to shed his family guilt and save the world.
Defied in the first strip of The Grievous Journey of Ichabod Azrael (and the Dead Left in His Wake): the narrator says he'd like to say Ichabod became a killer because his father beat him,but in reality, his childhood wasn't any harsher than any other kid at the time. Some people are just born mean.
Barracuda from The Punisher MAX series. Though an Affably Evil character to the point of almost being likable, he's a Complete Monster. He turns on allies in an instant, given sufficient reason to do so, and tries to get revenge on Castle by kidnapping his infant illegitimate daughter and planning to torture her to death in front of him. However, during a scene in which the tortured Barracuda snaps completely and utterly, a dialogue in his head reveals that his father had been abusive to the point of torturing his young son. When he goes off the deep end, Barracuda screams "I never did find you, Dad! I had to take this shit out on the goddamn world, instead!"
Let's not forget Nicky Cavella, who was manipulated and sexually abused by his aunt. She also made him kill his parents, although the Slasher Smile on his face heavily implies that he wasn't quite normal to begin with. When he's grown up and finally suffocated his aunt with a pillow, he gleefully pisses on the remains of Frank Castle's family and murders the youngest son of one of his opponents before cooking and serving him to said opponent. Do I need to mention he's a Complete Monster?
Even Jake Gallows, the Punisher in 2099, runs afoul of guys with backgrounds like this. Kron Stone claims his family never loved him, leaving a robot to care for him but never bothering to program it, causing it to default to veterinarian mode. "Do you know what it's like to be fitted with a collar, live in a kennel, and be fed on dog meat?!" "No, but I know what it's like to have your family butchered by a crazy with a sob story."
Alex Hutton, alias Hazard, has a lot of open hostility for the police. His cop father was killed by a car bomb right in front of his eyes and he was raised by his government-hating survivalist grandpa.
Defied in X-Men Noir; Jean Grey's Motive Rant includes lamenting that Professor Xavier never truly accepted that she was always extremely immoral and manipulative. "Nobody touched me, nobody corrupted me. This is me."
Parodied in a Fun With Milk & Cheese story called "Society is to Blame!", where the titular dairy-products-gone-bad commit their usual horrific fit of violence, but this time decide to do so all the while spouting cliched freudian excuses as to why they're doing it.
An early Silver AgeCaptain America story had Cap the prisoner of the Red Skull where he told of his tough early life as a homeless child, exploited by street criminals and who could only find work in menial labor until he met Adolf Hitler. However, Cap tells him to Quit Your Whining, noting that he himself struggled with poverty in his youth (although he had a loving mother) and is in no mood for sob stories.
Which would make this one rare example of Cap being a hypocritical douche, since he himself did well enough to study art at college before he joined up. Of course, the Skull is his Arch-Enemy and a thoroughly unpleasant individual besides, so he might probably be forgiven for this lapse.
In the IDW Transformers continuity, Megatron forms the Decepticons because he is [[oppressed by the corrupt Autobot Government, with his band originally formed as freedom fighters. In a sense, most of the Decepticons fall under this trope. Well, most of them.
Drift definitely falls into this category, though his excuse is a pretty limp manner to justify his faction switch.
In Star WarsKnights Of The Old Republic, both of the big bads (Chantique and Haazen) have the excuses; Haazens is that he failed to make the grade as a jedi, and was treated indifferently by a well meaning but somewhat classist employer, while Chantique was sold into slavery by her own father, sold when she failed to be ruthless enough to survive, and was raped by her owners. In Haazen's case it's subverted, since a large part of it was his failure to grow and learn from experience. Chantique's excuse is why she has a Villainous Breakdown when Zayne returns to save Jarael.
I'm surprised it's not already here, but I would think Marvel's Loki would count. First, there is the fact that he is a midget giant who was abused by his real father for being a weak, midget giant. After he helps kill said father, he is adopted by Odin, who does so only because he is convinced that it is the only way to appease the spirit of his own dead father. After he is adopted, it is implied that Odin neglected him wholly in favor of his real son, Thor. Thor, in return, is implied to be one of maybe a hand full of people who like Loki, as well as maybe being the only person who probably actually loves him. For Loki, this boils down to a seething self-hatred, which he in turns projects onto Thor, which he only does because he knows that his brother will never completely turn him away.
Averted in Johnny the Homicidal Maniac as little/nothing is mentioned of Nny's backstory. Jhonen himself even mentioned that the reason he avoided going into Nny's backstory was to avoid this trope. He then proceeds to parody it in a hypothetical scenario... "YAAAARGH!! I have been pantsed!! I kill like the damned now!!!"
The Flash has a pile of unhappy backstories subverted (and not) to varying degrees, including —
Captain Cold and Golden Glider's father was an abusive alcoholic.
The second Mirror Master was left at an orphanage as a baby. One of the other boys there tried to rape him; he fought back and ended up drowning his attacker.
Cobalt Blue was Barry Allen's twin brother, but at birth he was given to the abusive Thawnes and used as a living prop in their scams because the doctor who was overseeing both deliveries accidentally killed the Thawnes' baby and figured the Allens had one more kid than they needed.
The first Trickster came from a family of aerialists and his father mocked him for his fear of heights—never mind that this fear came about partly because Dad was constantly Distracted by the Sexy and often came close to dropping his son from a height during their trapeze routines.
Fan Fic
DEATHmatch, by Shadow Crystal Mage, attempts to justify Nekron's attempt to wipe out all life in Blackest Night by saying the paperwork had been getting him down
Played straight in the 2010 version of The Killer Inside Me. The camera pans over the main character's bookshelf, lingering prominently on a volume of Freud. He immediately takes a bible off the same shelf, opens it, and finds forgotten photographs of his mother's sadomasochistic sex life.
Inverted in a scene on the couch in Funny Games in which the two villains "Peter and Paul" come up with various reasons why they're doing what they are to the family. Of course seeing as how you should never trust a villain, they were all lies.
Anakin Skywalker was raised as a slave on a hellish backwater planet, as Yoda pointed out in the very beginning. Then his mother gets killed by Tusken Raiders.
Oddly, he seems to have been a fairly happy child. Probably would have cut his master's throat in the night if he'd made it to adolescence on Tatooine, though.
Psycho even gives us a psychiatrist at the end of the film to give us an explanation of how the Freudian Excuse applies in this specific case.
8mm has a character who goes out of his way to subvert the trope, blatantly declaring, "Mommy didn't beat me. Daddy didn't rape me. I'm this way because I am." The idea that some people are just twisted is a core idea of the film.
This is subverted in the made for TV film Intensity, where the sadistic, sociopathic spree killer Edgler Vess, after being accused of abuse causing his current state of mind, proudly proclaims that his parents were extremely loving and that he was truly a sadistic person from the start (in fact he murdered his loving parents).
The new remake of Halloween attempts this with Michael Myers.
The original Halloween, while appearing to be a shallow motiveless-serial-killer movie at first, it is notable for how it stresses just how strange Myers' behavior actually is. Behind the scenes, Nick Castle (the man behind the mask) reportedly tried to figure out just what would drive a serial killer like Myers and act accordingly, but Carpenter specifically insisted on the "soulless killing machine" approach. One of the main characters, Dr. Loomis, is an experienced psychiatrist who is both baffled and terrified at the seemingly causeless evil lurking behind Myers' eyes. The overall idea is that, by any realistic standard, there should be a reason for someone to be anywhere near as warped as he is.
The Ring: Sadako Yamamura and her American counterpart, Samara Morgan.
In the David Cronenberg movie Spider, with Ralph Fiennes, a variety of flashbacks start to illustrate just what has turned Fiennes into a demonic version of Mr. Bean. It turns out that he imagined the whole thing, and just happens to be insane. It is tp be noted his character suffered from schizophrenia, serious brain disease which you cannot control more than epileptic can control his convulsions. So he really could not help it.
Turned on its head in the Korean film The Host. The hero gets a Freudian Excuse for his lethargy and occasionally carrying the Idiot Ball . He didn't get proper nutrition as a kid. A brain tissue biopsy later fixes all this. Apparently they removed his Awesome Inhibitor or something.
Subverted in the 2008 Batman movie The Dark Knight. The Joker explains what seems to be the source of his insanity when he reveals the origin of his smile-scars, involving an abusive alcoholic father who wanted to know why he was "so serious"—after killing his mother right in front of him. But later in the movie, he eagerly reveals the origins of his scars again, totally changing his story to one involving a wife who wanted him to smile more, who was disfigured to pay for her gambling debts, and taking to self-mutilation to make her feel better. Chances of both stories being outright lies (or at best delusions) suddenly look pretty good.
Subverted in Simon Birch, where despite extreme neglect by his parents, Simon appears to be the nicest person living in a town full of assholes.
In Gladiator, Commodus explains, prior to killing his dad, that all he wanted was a little love and a warm hug...and what he would have done to get it.
In Ip Man, Rival Turned Evil Jin defends his actions, which include beating on all of Foshan's kung fu masters and robbing the factory of Ip Man's friend, by saying that he experienced poverty at a child and never wanted to starve again.
In the Tim Burton remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka's dentist father forbade him from eating sweets, and his obsession with candy was borne of rebellion.
In the backstory of Audition, Asami was physically and sexually abused as a child. Then she learns about piano wire...
In 9, the robot that kills all living things on the planet was made by a scientist for peace, but as the military of the country were he was made (is not clear in what country the story of the movie happen) tear him away from his master, he seems to reach out as a child being torn from his mother. He then goes mad and tries to kill his oppressors. After being forced to make machines of mass destruction, he is sickened by humanity and orders the robots to slay everything that lives.
In the 1995 version of A Little Princess, Sara realizes that Miss Minchin's father didn't tell her that "all girls are princesses," which we are led to believe is the reason for Miss Minchin's loveless, horrible personality.
This is actually subverted a little when you remember Minchin and Amelia are sisters. Whatever daddy issues she had, Amelia's kind personality (even after being put down so often by her sister) suggests that that alone couldn't have been the cause for the way Miss Minchin turned out.
Regina of Mean Girls: slightly different in that rather than a bully, her mother is a mindless drunk who is so desperate to be seen as young, hip, and her teenage daughter's best friend that she has become a willing slave that Regina treats with total contempt - the suggestion being that her total ineffectiveness and lack of parenting is what created her daughter.
Subverted in Phone Booth when the villain, while on the phone with Stu, starts sobbing and tells him that he had an unhappy childhood... then when Stu starts to believe him, he laughs and tells Stu that he actually had a very happy childhood.
Everybody in The Breakfast Club, villain or not... Bender's parents despise him (and they burnt his arm with a cigar for spilling paint in the garage), Claire's parents pamper her to get back at each other, Allison's parents ignore her, Andrew's dad is a Stage Mom who is obsessed with his winning, and Brian's parents are obsessed with him getting good marks to the point that he considers committing suicide because he got an F.
Subverted and parodied hilariously in Monsters vs. Aliens, in which the Big Bad claims he is about to tell the heroine his life story... but he's strapped to a machine that stamps him into the ground every few seconds, so you never hear exactly what he's trying to say; only fragments that skip most of the crucial information!
On the sled symbolism in Citizen Kane, Orson Welles remarked: "It's a gimmick, really, and rather dollar-book Freud."
Star Wars has quite a few examples, the most notable being, of course, Darth Vader. As the prequels illustrated, he left his mother, was trained as a monk-type for ten years, watched his mother die in his arms, had his hand cut off, was subjected to all sorts of pain, then was manipulated into killing children and, in a way, his wife Padme.
Also averted with Emperor Palpatine—through all the Expanded Universe, he's pretty much implied to have been an evil dick all along.
Boba Fett as well, having witnessed his father beheaded and been hunted for the next few years as a result.
This is at the heart of one of the better parts of Star Trek: Nemesis. Shinzon, a clone of Captain Picard, insists that he is what Picard would have grown up to be if he had lived his life. Picard tries to turn his "mirror" metaphor around on him, which Shinzon brushes off, but later admits that the idea has gotten under his skin. Data disagrees and (drawing a comparison to the "B-4" prototype he has been dealing with) sees a major difference: That in spite of their wildly different lives and experiences, he, like Picard, aspires to be better than he is, something Shinzon and B-4 seem to lack.
In American History X this comes off as heartfelt rather than trite. Derek is transformed into the uber white supremacist after his father is shot by a black drug dealer, but flashbacks reveal that his father had laid the groundwork for this transformation by his rants against Affirmative Action. Derek had resisted buying into his father's racial stereotyping, instead looking to his high-school English teacher (a black man) as his mentor. It was only after his father was killed that Derek started to think: "Gee, maybe Dad was right all along."
Dr. Lecter: Look for severe childhood disturbances associated with violence. Our Billy wasn't born a criminal, Clarice. He was made one through years of systematic abuse. Billy hates his own identity, you see, and he thinks that makes him a transsexual. But his pathology is a thousand times more savage and more terrifying.
In Iron Man 2, we learn that not only is Ivan Vanko driven to "avenge" his father, Anton, but that Anton spent the last 20 years of his life in Siberia in a "Vodka-fueled rage". In Nick Fury's words, not a good setting to raise a child - except Fury's tone definitely says "yeah, that sucks, but there's nothing we can do about it and you've still got to stop him."
In the same movie, Tony describes his father as emotionally distant, "calculating", and not given over to displays of affection or love. This might help explain some of his present-day problems.
It's suggested in The Public Enemy that Tom Powers (James Cagney) grew up to be such a violent Jerkass because he got spanked a lot when he was a kid.
In Despicable Me, there are flash backs where it suggests Gru got an inferiority complex issue from his mother's lack of enthusiasm for his achievements, including building a fully functional rocket at a young age. Although he otherwise had a healthy relationship with his mother.
In Silent Hill, Sharon/Alessa Gillespie is revealed to have had a very troubled past, involving her being ostracized by her classmates, sexually assaulted by a janitor, and eventually burned alive.
In the 2010 Centurion film, the Pict scout, Etain was raped and had her tongue cut out and had to watch her parents being murdered by Romans.
In Addams Family Values, psychotic Debbie explains it was her parents getting her the wrong Barbie that caused her psychotic break. In the form of a slide show.
Debbie: My parents, Sharon and Dave. Generous, doting, or were they? All I ever wanted was a Ballerina Barbie. In her pretty pink tutu. (slide change) My Birthday. I was 10, and do you know what they got me? MAL-I-BU Barbie.
Morticia: Malibu Barbie.
Gomez: The nightmare.
Morticia: The nerve.
Debbie: That's not what I wanted! That's not who I was. I was a Ballerina, graceful, delicate! They had to go.
(Next slide shows their house on fire.)
In Red White & Blue, Erica, when confronted about her cavalier attitude about having unprotected sex with practically every guy she meets and not bothering to tell any of them that she's HIV positive, reveals that she lost her virginity at age 4 to her mother's boyfriend.
Erica: You get fucked two days after your fourth birthday, you tend to not care about anything much.
Half Past Dead centered around a group of mercenaries or whatever trying to get a location on stolen gold from a death row inmate by taking a group of hostages. One woman asks the leader what his motivation was, to which he insinuated he was beaten by his father and raped by his mother. Though he never actually admitted this to be true, he subverted the trope by claiming it had nothing to do with his actions as he's simply a sociopath motivated by greed. Earlier it was revealed that he suffers from Gulf War Syndrome and may suffer from Post Traumatic Stress as well, which may actually play the trope straight.
Played for laughs in Formula 51 with the drug dealer Iky.
Iky: Ya'see, you're like me, Mr. Mc Elroy. You're a sky-high-etrist, I'm a sky-high-etrist. See, I always knew I'd be a drug dealer, even when I was a kid. I saw me dad hit me mother, me mother hit me brother, me brother hit me sister, and me sister fuck me father. So I suppose it's inevitable, really. I mean, you'd have to be on drugs just to live in that madhouse, wouldn't you?
Lampshaded in Grosse Pointe Blank. The main character, hitman Martin Blank, comments that it is very likely being raised by an alcoholic father and insane mother influenced his career choices. Blank doesn't treat his childhood traumas as an excuse, merely an explanation, and takes full responsibility for his own actions.
Literature
Wang Sau-leyan in Chung Kuo, ugly, fat and clumsy, was treated as a poor sequel to his brothers while he grew up. This is not presented as an excuse for his behavior, but it helps explain it.
Marco from Animorphs is a snarky survivalist early on. While Tobias exalts about how with great power Comes Great Responsibility, Marco snaps back that Tobias can't even go a day without getting his head flushed down a toilet. Once Tobias is stuck as a hawk, Marco's barbs begin to verge on actual cruelty. Later, we find out that Marco's mother supposedly drowned, and his father suffered a nervous breakdown; Marco is terrified of dying because he's afraid of what will happen to his father if he does. He fully admits to being a Sad Clown and that he makes fun of Tobias because what happened to Tobias scares him.
Isaac Asimov: The Mule is driven to conquer the galaxy because of a childhood of ostracism and abuse due to his physically deformed stature; he claims in his internal monologue that it is now "his turn." Appropriately, he is stopped by a master psychologist administering instant therapy with a bit of mind control thrown in for good measure. He spends the rest of his life happy — and out of the way.
Subverted in Children of the Mind: In a backwards attempt to explain why she is so contrary, Quara reveals to Wang-mu that she was sexually abused at a young age by Quim, her soon-to-be sainted brother. When Wang-mu immediately believes her, she reveals it wasn't true, but points out the hypocrisy of people who would more easily believe the worst in a saint of a man like her brother than believe that some people are inherently, for no real reason, jerks.
Though this is somewhat justified in that all of the good and bad personality quirks of the Ribeira children are due to the abusive nature of their father, who wasn't really their father.
Her argument is flawed anyway. Who's to say jerks can't become saints?
Subverted in one of the Dancing Gods books, wherein a) the character discussing his tragic early life is on the side of good, and b) it transpires that this tale of a sad past is complete and utter nonsense designed to throw the villain off his game. It works.
Still later we have Coydt Van Haaz, the Big Bad of Empires of Flux and Anchor, who wants to turn a Lady Land into a No Woman's Land to get back at the priestesses who castrated him for a relatively minor offense.
Averted in Dostoevsky's novel Notes from Underground to the point of being An Aesop. Dostoevsky was concerned with the far-reaching consequences of certain ideas being batted around in his day - essentially, that despite humankind appearing to be fundamentally irrational and uncontrollable, using psychology and whatnot they'd one day be able to figure out exactly what makes people act the way they do, and could correct anti-social behavior easy as solving a math problem. (And then they could fix all their woes and achieve a socialist utopia, hooray). So he wrote a book featuring a maladjusted hero who's a miserable prick for no reason and will no doubt continue to be a miserable prick no matter what happens to him. Needless to say, it was not popular with Soviet critics.
In the Sherlock Holmes series, there is some evidence that Professor James Moriarty suffers from an inferiority complex because he has several other brothers, all of whom are named James, thus stifling his sense of individuality.
Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion: El Patron's ruthlessness arises mainly from the fact that he lived a dirt poor childhood, and was the only surviving child of a large family. The man was forced to live by his wits.
In Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm, having seen "something nastyin the woodshed" isn't just Aunt Ada's excuse for being a domestic tyrant who never leaves her room, it's also how she does the tyrannizing: anytime anyone tries to leave, or do anything else she disapproves of, it "brings on her trouble". Flora finds this suspiciously convenient.
Hannibal Lecter lost much of his mystique when explanations for his actions were presented in Hannibal and Hannibal Rising during his jarring Badass Decay into a misunderstood Anti-Hero.
In the context of the scene, why would Hannibal even bother to tell Clarice when at that point in time he had nothing but contempt for her? On a related note, Hannibal still had a warped sense of nobility in Silence as well.
The author was all but forced to writeHannibal Rising, having been told that if he didn't provide a backstory for Dr. Lecter, some other writer would.
Jame Gumb and Francis Dolarhyde are given very detailed backstories in the novels, which works well to humanize them. Gumb was born to an alcoholic prostitute and lived in foster homes until moving in with his abusive Grandparents at the age of 10. Dolarhyde was born with a severe disfigurement to his face and was abused by his Grandmother, after being ditched by his stepfather's family which had the same structure as the families he killed. There is only one reference to Gumb's Freudian Excuse is given in the movie, however, which is "Billy was not born a criminal, but made one by years of systematic abuse." It works rather effectively.
Between the level of detail that goes into the other serial killers' backstories, the recurring emphasis on psychology (as unreliable as it can be), and Lecter being, well... Lecter, it's likely that Lecter's seemingly inherent evil was meant as the exception, not the rule.
Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera gives an excuse for Erik's cold bloodedness: humanity hates him because of his deformity, so he hates humanity. The Phantom adaptation gives more of a backstory to this: in addition to the deformity, his mother shows him no love and keeps him shut inside where he can't fully use his genius. Still a creepy guy for a protagonist.
There's a similar version in the 1990 TV miniseries. While the Phantom's murderous behavior is not condoned or excused, when we get his backstory, his mother is depicted as loving and adoring him despite his deformity, and it is appears that his passion for Christine is based on the resemblance between the two. Which is a whole other Freudian Excuse.
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
And then played straight, as you realise that Caulfield's deceased younger brother is a large part of the reason he's so unhinged.
Deconstructed in Lolita- Humbert's reason for being a pedophile is literally very Freudian (at age sixteen he was interrupted having sex with his childhood sweetheart who died shortly afterward) and he thinks about it in these terms. However, the author's point was that this is a poor excuse for his terrible actions.
The mostly sane (he hears voices in his head, but that's alright, one of them is his psychiatrist!) protagonist of Eric Nylund's A Game of Universe has a more subtle Freudian Excuse for his background. His childhood (born on a hellhole of a planet, dad killed his mom when he was born, dad whored out his brother to miners (a fate he only avoided by being too young at the time), then accidentally killed his brother while his brother was trying to rape him) doesn't mess him up that badly, it's only when this background leads him to panic over a misunderstanding and murder his mentor does he really start to lose it. (He spends the next few months hiding in a sewer, and then the next few years in a school based on Klingon Promotions.)
A kind of subversion, based on going into more details. In Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony we are introduced to Billy Kong (previously called Jonah Lee), and told that his teenage brother was killed when he was quite young. Later, we learn that when Jonah was young, his brother claimed that he was part of a secret group that fought child-eating demons, in an attempt to keep Jonah off the Miami streets while their mother was working, due to trouble his brother had been having with a gang at the time. When his brother was murdered, Jonah was convinced that demons did it, and he and his mother moved to Taiwan (where she was from) shortly after. Jonah is said to have later decided his brother had deceived him, causing him to become inherently distrustful and making it easier to hurt people, which combined with the environment he grew up in, turned him into a violent criminal. Shortly before the book begins, he is hired to help capture a fairy demon, causing Kong to start wondering if his brother had been honest after all. When Holly is captured while trying to save the captive demon and is being interrogated, she uses her knowledge of Kong's past to try and psych him out, and unknowingly feeds into his delusions by "confirming" the abilities that Billy's brother said demons had. This leads to Kong having a rather tragic nervous breakdown, and starts an obsession with destroying all demons, and killing anyone who gets in his way.
Inverted with James T. Kirk, whose tendency to Take a Third Option is explained in various Star Trek novels as being a result of surviving the mass executions on Tarsus IV (from the TOS episode "The Conscience of the King") as a boy. It also probably explains why he doesn't believe in the The Kobayashi Maru and the No-Win Scenario.
Pretty much every single villain from Warrior Cats.
Tigerstar: His father abandoned him at a young age to be come a kittypet, causing his irrational hatred towards kittypets, and he was mentored by an incredibly aggressive warrior whose personality traits seemed to rub off on him. Apparently, father issues, an aggressive personality, racism, and ambition combine to create the feline version of Hitler.
Scourge: He was constantly teased and excluded by his brother and sister until he eventually ran away from home, where he was attacked and almost killed by Tigerstar. He spent the rest of his life trying to prove that he was strong, and to get revenge on Tigerstar, which eventually lead him to being a mass-murdering psychopathic dictator.
Hawkfrost: Not mentioned often, but Hawkfrost was essentially an orphan and had to grow up living in his father's shadow until he eventually decided to follow in his footsteps. Also, his brother died, that might have something to do some of it... kinda...
Brokenstar: He had a horrible foster mother in his kithood, who hated him and always tried to exclude him, making him the Un Favorite. Due to this, he saw aggressiveness as the only way to prove himself, and eventually killed Raggedstar, his real father, to show that he could become a leader, and prove his greatness. This lead him to commit all sorts of atrocities, so that he could make ShadowClan the strongest Clan of them all.
Ashfur: Started out as an adorable, boisterous young apprentice, until his mom was killed indiscriminately by Tigerstar. Fell in love with Squirrelflight, only for her to pass him over in favor of Brambleclaw. Then he was forced to mentor their "son", whose very presence was a constant reminder of the mate that he lost. He eventually went insane and went on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, attempting to kill Squirrelflight's "kits" to make her feel the same emotional pain that he felt when she rejected him.
And don't forget Mapleshade: Fell in love with a RiverClan warrior, but when she tried to bring her kits across the river into RiverClan territory (since her own Clan had driven her out), the kits drowned. Eventually, the tom she was in love with found another mate and had kits with her. She hated Crookedstar because he was her former mate's great-grandson.
And Sol has been given a backstory as well: His mother, Cinders, didn't really care for her kits - she hadn't even bothered to name them - and complained all the time. His father was never around. The only good part in his life was that she told them stories of "sky warriors". She eventually abandoned them at different Twoleg nests. Sol felt that if he could have been a "sky warrior", she might have been proud of him and stayed around. Then he discovered SkyClan, but after trying to train with them, they felt he didn't respect the warrior code, so they wouldn't make him a warrior. This resulted in his trying to get revenge on all the Clans, not just SkyClan.
Snape from Harry Potter was revealed to have had an abusive father and poor home life in Order of the Phoenix. In addition he was bullied by James Potter, thus explaining why Snape bullies James' son.
Voldemort also grew up an average orphanage but he already seemed to have chosen a life of evil. At ageEleven he had already killed other kids pets, taken up stealing the possessions of other kids, and horribly mentally scarred two fellow orphans.
In the short story collection The Further Adventures of the Joker, the eponymous Joker gets a story devoted to a snapshot of his childhood with an abusive father (SMILE, I SAID!) as the centerpiece. That, and killing small animals and collecting the bones to make grotesque sculptures. Perhaps most notably, we get some insight into how his father got to where he is. Big surprise — it involves his father.
Jane Austen's Mansfield Park contains a Take That at this trope: Edmund excuses every red flag in Mary Crawford's behavior as the result of faulty upbringing or the influence of bad friends. He finally has to admit he's been Loving A Shadow and the perfect woman he thought was spoiled by a crappy childhood in her uncle's house is a Rich Bitch who was hoping his ill older brother would die so Edmund would become the heir of the family and be rich enough for her to consider marrying... which makes him smarter than many readers.
The title character of the Wally McDoogle series writes a new superhero story in every book in between the action. Every one introduces the Villain of the Week with speculation as to what might have caused him to turn evil.
Herod Sayle of Stormbreaker (renamed Darrius Sayle in The Film of the Book) came from a poor Lebanese background and was sent to a British boarding school after saving a wealthy English tourist couple (in the film, he was an American who lived in a trailer until his mother won the lottery), where he was bullied due to his background by several other children, many of whom became influential figures in British government (including the Prime Minister). His reaction to this is to invest in a multi-million dollar advanced computer system which he would donate to the British scool system, which secretly contains biological weapons which, when simultaneously activated, will kill millions of children, and probably thousands of other innocent people. Lampshaded in the movie.
Alex Rider: Alright so you were bullied; lots of kids are bullied! It doesn't turn them into mass-murdering psychopaths!
Same with Desmond McCain, who was bullied for being black and criticized in the newspapers. Still doesn't justify his evil charity and his love of killing.
General Alexei Sarov, from the third book. His son was killed at war, and then he lost the country that he lived for. That still doesn't come close to excusing him for his plan to cause a massive nuclear explosion.
In Scorpia Rising we have Julius Grief. He is a fifteen year old who gets pleasure from other people's pain, seems quite fond of murdering people, and is consumed by his hatred of Alex. However, considering he was created and raised so he would be evil, with no purpose other than helping Doctor Grief take over the world, and it is stated that he and the other clones got the cane if they shot a gun the wrong way, resulting in him being completely insane, it's hard not to feel a little sorry for him.
Not really. He never experienced any sort of emotional pain or trauma in his childhood, and never spoke badly of his father. In fact, the fact that his own psychologist instinctively dislikes him seems to be a subtle hint that readers should not pity him.
Dr. No, in the novel of the same name, got where he is in large part due to his father's rejection of him. His beginnings in the crime world — violence, destruction, and a general lack of empathy — were largely a reaction to his father's treatment of him and a manifestation of his rejection of authority in general. Curiously, by the events of the story, he is plainly aware of this fact and doesn't hesitate to put it in those very words.
In Watership Down, General Woundwort's violent and un-rabbitlike behavior stem from his traumatic kittenhood, in which his father was shot, his siblings scattered, and his wounded mother killed and eaten by a weasel right in front of him. Adopted and nurtured by a kindly human, who'd nevertheless failed to keep his cat from menacing the young rabbit, Woundwort never learned to interact civilly with other rabbits, and his lapine psyche became warped, his natural flight-instincts supplanted by aggression.
Truth in Television, as captive-reared wild animals tend to develop behavioral problems and socialize poorly with their own species.
In The Silmarillion's, some of Fëanor's rash actions can probably be attributed to the fact that, in what was virtually paradise, his mother was the first person ever to die, that his father (however loving) remarried (which was completely unheard of and never happened again), had other children, and then was the first person to be killed in Valinor. Now, in the published Silmarillion, this is not belatedly revealed to excuse Fëanor's actions; in fact, it's not explicitly held up as an excuse at all. However, it is a relatively late addition to the Quenta Silmarillion: in earlier versions, Fëanor's just someone who obsesses over his jewels and hates his brother because of Morgoth's lies; later, he's also to be pitied, a bit.
In Violet Eyes, the reason for Dr. Frankenstein's cruelty is that during his childhood, he was jealous of his brother, who was more talented than he was.
This one depends upon your point of view. In "The Icemark Chronicles" Medea had a bad childhood because her parents didn't give her the attention that her sibling had. However there is a debate among fans as to whether this was her parents fault or her own.
Crenshinibon from the Forgotten Realms was originally an extremely powerful and dangerous but nonsentient artifact. At one point it fell into the hands of a sultan who overestimated its power and relied entirely on the crystal towers it generated to protect his land from invasion. He realized too late that the more towers that are created they weaker they are, and his lands were overrun. At the moment of his death, his tormented spirit merged with the Crystal Shard, and at last Crenshinibon was complete. The insatiable desire for power and control that Crenshinibon forces upon its wielders is the twisted reflection of a sad man's regrets of failing to protect his people.
The mystery villain of Janet Evanovich's Smokin' Seventeen engages in his killing spree because [[spoiler: Stephanie's it's-complicated Joe stole his girlfriend back when they were all in high school together, so now he intends to steal Joe's girlfriend. With murder. Somehow.
In The Pale King, The unnamed narrator of Chapter 23 has issues with regards to his self-worth. He remembers a presentation he did on The Iliad in the eleventh grade, and he freely associates it with his family. He likens his family to Achilles, in that his seemingly perfect brother is Achilles's shield, while he is the heel. He even develops a fixation on people's feet.
In Death: Played straight and averted across the series. Some of the murderers have this, and some of them were always Complete Monsters. Either way, Eve and Roarke do not consider the Freudian Excuse acceptable, considering the Abusive Parents they had.
Max Barry's Machine Man has the excellent example of Lola, whose father deliberately self-maimed himself in a series of industrial accidents to collect insurance and pay for Lola's Heart Trauma replacement. As a result, Lola as an adult finds men who've lost body parts irresistible, and works in prosthetics.
Sisterhood series by Fern Michaels: Averted for the most part across the series. Practically none of the bad guys have a single excuse for their behaviour. With that said, Senator Webster from the book Payback and John Chai from Vendetta may be exceptions. The Senator had good parents, but he distanced himself from them and basically disowned them because he was ashamed of them and the fact that they were so low-class! John Chai is the son of a diplomat and an ambassador, and he may have gotten feelings of entitlement and being untouchable from being born in all that power, wealth and position.
The narrator/protagonist of Letters Back To Ancient China (a time travelling mandarin from medieval China) compliments a western woman on her breasts. She rationalized his odd behavior by concluding that he wasn't breastfed enough.
Many Inheritance Cycle villains have these. Sloan is such a jerk because his wife died, and, of course, Galbatorix was partially motivated by the death of his dragon.
In Septimus Heap, Merrin Meredith's nastiness is explained by Word Of God as coming from his bad life with DomDaniel, and it's mentioned In-Universe as well.
Live Action TV
In Merlin, Uther is given one of these for all the atrocities he's committed in trying to wipe out magic. His excuse: He hates and fears magic because Nimueh cast a spell, at Uther's request, to give him a child. He asked her to do this even though he knew that in order to give life by magic, a life must be taken. Uther's wife died and Arthur was born.
Alan A'Dale gives one of these to BBC's Robin Hood when Robin finds out about Alan being The Mole.
Alan: That's easy for you to say though, isn't it? Yeah? You get the glory, you get the girl, everyone loves you. Then when the King comes back, you'll have lands, property, a wife - everything. What will I have? You're always in the sun, Robin and I'm always in the shade.
Robin: Is that meant to be an excuse?
Dexter: Dexter himself as well as several supporting characters.
Then again, it is pretty traumatic that it may cause insanity. His mother was dismembered with a chainsaw in front of his eyes and then he and his older brother (Who went just as insane) were left to soak in their mother's blood (which filled the entire floor of the container and went up an inch) for days in a hot shipping container.
In the books, Cody and Astor Bennett, Dexter's step-children, were horrifically abused by their father early in their lives. They're growing into a serial killer tag-team, and Dexter has taken it upon himself to teach them the Harry Code in order to channel their murderous impulses into "something productive", just like Dexter's adoptive father did for him.
It actually seemed that she was making an effort to change for the better, then So The Drama came along, and she never recovered.
For the male version, this was done to Flash Thompson in Spider-Man, when it was revealed (many years after his introduction) that he bullied Peter Parker because of abuse by his father. In this case, Peter helps Flash eventually redeem or heal himself; in the end, Flash demonstrates genuine regret for his past mistreatment of Peter.
There are exceptions. Madison Sinclair from Veronica Mars had great parents, and was still a horrible person.
Not just an exception, an outright inversion, being a (double) example of In the Blood. Avoiding spoiler tags, Madison is exactly who her parents raised her to be... for the correct values of those nouns and pronouns.
In NCIS, Ari Haswari tells Gibbs his reason for being a Complete Monster is that his father impregnated his mother, raised him badly, and killed his mother just so he could have a mole in Hamas. He gets shot straight after, by his own sister, in what ends up being her Freudian Excuse for having severe trust issues - which really isn't so much an excuse as a valid reason.
iCarly: Sam Puckett, despite not being the Alpha Bitch (she's more like The Dragon for Carly, who could with some Alternate Character Interpretation be seen as the Alpha Bitch at her school), has several of these: Her mother is horribly ignorant and a terrible parent who pays little attention to her. Her father ran away and never came back. Her family as a whole are hardened criminals.
In Girl Talk, the only sympathetic character in Stacey The Great's clique was shown to be The Unfavorite of her mother, who doted on the girl's other sister to the point of forgetting the very important ice skating even despite being reminded about it six times.
In the Disney Channel movie Camp Rock, Tess' almost-instantaneous Heel Face Turn comes as a result of her mother taking a cell phone call during her performance at Final Jam. To Tess' credit, she owns up to being a bitch despite the fact that the girls she's bullied don't actually show her any sympathy or even bring this up, making the application of this surprisingly somewhat less of a Broken Aesop than the previous examples.
Lost: The extent of the pain Ben's father heaped on him isn't quite clear yet, but we do know that he was horrifically verbally abusive. To whit (this is on tenth or so birthday):
Sawyer is a perhaps more artful execution of Freudian Excuse. That his father killed his mother, then himself, in front of young James stirs our sympathy. However, it was used more to explain his self-loathing after becoming a con man like the one who destroyed his family.
Lost is full of characters with Freudian Excuse backstories...who, amazingly, become if anything more badass afterwards.
As of Recon, even the damned SMOKE MONSTER is claiming a Freudian Excuse. And in "Across the Sea", it's pretty well confirmed.
Logan isn't exactly a villain, but he does have a home life worthy of one: his famous father sleeps around and is physically abusive, his mother commits suicide, and his sister is an emotionally void, aspiring (and failing) actress whose primary motivation in life is to improve her career without working at all.
For that matter, Logan's father—a murderer himself—claims that it was his father's abuse which made him who he is.
Even more blatantly, Cassidy Casablancas is a psychotic mass-murdering teenager due largely to the physical and emotional abuse of his father and older brother.
I thought it was because he was raped by his Little League coach.
More along the lines of he was scared about what Big Dick and Little Dick would do to him if they found out. Or found out he liked it. In this case, it's arguable he killed a bunch of people to stop his Freudian Excuse from getting worse.
The show also has a Lampshade Hanging. In the first-season episode "Drinking the Kool-Aid," a boy joins a cult, and his rich parents ask Mr. Mars why he'd go when he was provided for. Mr. Mars says that it's often rich kids who leave, and the boy's father sighs (paraphrasing): "Yes, I know what you're thinking. Spoiled rich kid, no material need denied, no spiritual need fulfilled. That's not us."
Subverted by Meg, whose parents are crazy fundies, but is still a very nice person.
In the same episodes where we find out about Meg's parents, Sheriff Lamb also indicates his dad abused him, and combines it with a Pet the Dog moment.
Kathleen becomes a bigger Jerkass every episode. Eventually we see that she has an alcoholic mother and chronically absent father. She remains a Jerkass for the rest of the show, although she does change in the sequel series Degrassi High.
Stephanie (Alpha Bitch) has an overprotective, very conservative mother, which makes Stephanie want to be the glamorous, all-powerful vixen at school.
Liz, a Snark Knight who is eternally negative and repeatedly harassed (but indirectly, via vandalism) a girl who had an abortion, was almost aborted at the insistence of her father against her mother's will. We later learn she was sexually abused for approximately 4 or 5 years before she came to the series by her mother's then-boyfriend.
There are decent parents on the show, but they are all subject to strict Parent Ex Machina. (This was a conscious decision by the show's creators, who wanted parents to appear as little as possible.)
Liberty, the resident Control Freak, has pushy parents who had impossibly high expectations for her, and no expectations at all for her pesky little brother.
Alex started as an utterly evil gang member, until she was revealed to have no father and a drunken mother who was beaten by her revolving door of boyfriends. Alex eventually went through Badass Decay, but unusually, that wasn't until many episodes later. In the episode where we learn about her parents, it's just an excuse she uses to beat Rick up.
Serial Killer: Please... with you people, it's always the mother.
... ...
Detective Tutuola: I don't want to hear how you didn't do it, it wasn't you, you were abused as a child.
... ...
Female Serial Killer: I was raped, more times than I can remember...
Detective Benson: Right, and your mother died, and your dad beat ya.
Naturally this shows up in Law & Order: Criminal Intent, most famously with Goren's ex-FBI profiler mentor 's daughter who, having washed out of the FBI several times decided the next best thing was to become one of his subjects. The constant "shop talk" at home and using dad's torture tapes to test potential boyfriends right before making out also had something to do with it... Another example is Stephen Colbert's master forger who was doing his best to discredit a soon-to-be canonized priest because his mom used the guy's charity to literally steal his childhood.
The Slitheen from Doctor Who, in particular Margaret Blaine. Also, the Master, as "The Sound of Drums" has revealed that at the age of eight, as part of a Time Lord initiation ceremony, he looked into the Time Vortex, which drove him insane. Of course, that episode also revealed that every other Time Lord saw the same vortex, and he was still the only one we know who went supervillainy as a result. "The End of Time" reveals that the root of his villainy is more complicated than just the Time Vortex.
The Doctor Who Expanded Universe audio drama Master, which predated the new series, gives another origin for the Master's evils that may or may not have affected his Vortex Madness*
which would make a great trope name
: In his youth, the Doctor was visited by Death, who wanted to make him her disciple. The Doctor avoided her by directing her to the Master, turning him into Death's Champion. He regretted this decision since.
Subverted by Arnold Rimmer in Red Dwarf; he has numerous elements in his back-story that could be used to excuse his actions as an adult - his mother and father despised him, his brothers and schoolmates relentlessly bullied him to the point of homicidal sadism, no one liked and encouraged him and he eventually died a horrible death as a useless, unfulfilled failure - but whilst these elements are sometimes used to promote sympathy for him, they are never used to justify his snide, cowardly and hypocritical actions or utter stupidity and incompetence, much as he would like them to. Despite his constant whining about the subject, no one excuses him because of it, and in fact it's clear to everyone around him that he himself merely uses his past as an excuse not to deal with his failings, even those that can't be brushed away so easily.
Further subverted in Back To Earth: when confronted with The Creator, his reaction is not to blame him for his own character flaws, but to be pissed at the crappy childhood and life he's had.
Not to mention his alternate-universe double, Ace Rimmer (what a guy!), a brave hero that causes women (and a good few men) to crush on him simply by being himself, had an equally poor childhood and is only different in that he was held back a year, letting him realise that life wasn't fair and he had to work with what he had.
Losing his Freudian Excuse actually appears to be one of Rimmer's greatest fears, as demonstrated in Back to Reality, in which he believes his lack of success can be blamed on his negligent parents, only to discover that Lister (believed to be his half-brother at this point) shared his upbringing — implied to be much better here — and became a rich, successful and famous member of the government. The realization that, in this reality, he no longer had this crutch to fall back upon was enough to drive him to attempted suicide. Which is strange because his brothers already also shared his horrible upbringing and they went on to be successful (at least until a deleted scene in season 6 implied they all had mental breakdowns in the middle of missions resulting in large body counts).
Rimmer's brothers shared his parents, yes, but Rimmer's brothers are also consistently shown to be among his most abusive tormentors in the rest of the series, doing things like burying him alive in their sandpit with only his face showing and smearing his face with jam for the ants, and tying him upside down from a tree and abandoning him. Because he doesn't have any memory of Lister having engaged in similar cruelty in that reality, it's possible that that was a contributing factor, along with the realization that in that reality, he was even more of a failure than he was in the game, and he'd also missed several opportunities to be awesomely badass in the game. He doesn't remember who he is, he shares an upbringing he doesn't remember with a man who's greater and more successful than him, and he's wasted four years of his life playing a video game in which he was playing the wrong version of Rimmer the entire time. Being told that not only is everything you thought you were a lie, but a lie many times over is quite a good reason for suicide. It is also worth noting that his reason for suicide was the most complex of the four, as befits his status as easily the most complex character on the show — Cat was no longer cool, Kryten took a single human life, and Lister believed himself to be a fundamentally evil man responsible for genocide, but Rimmer has a multilayered reason for suicide.
In the episode "Inquisitor", Rimmer successfully uses this Freudian Excuseto justify his pathetic and worthless life and avoid being completely erased from history. "Yes, I admit I'm nothing. But from what I started with, nothing is up."
The pilot of Medium does go unusually far back in the cycle of abuse, thanks to Allison's ability to talk to ghosts. When questioning an imprisoned pedophile, she's accompanied by the spirit of the man who molested him as a child, and the spirit of the man who molested him as a child, and the spirit of the man who in turn molested him as a child, and so on.
In Smallville Lionel Luthor's refusal to show his son any affection, or leave his sense of self-worth intact is a major part of Lex's slide into villainy. However, as the show frequently points out, people are defined, not by what happened to them, but by the choices they make. Emotional abuse left Lex damaged, but he still could have pulled back. Lionel is himself the product of abuse, having received severe physical abuse as the hands of his own father, Lachlan. Both cases end with the son ultimately murdering the father.
Father Issues were also a reason some of the Freaks of the Week turned bad when most other teenagers just would've been like "Wicked cool, I got super powers!" In particular, the kid from "Leech."
A Villain of the Week devoted his life into killing meteor freaks because one of them killed his father.
Of course, it's been implied (if not outright stated) since then that the Kryptonite may actually be conducive to violent behavior.
Parodied and subverted in an episode of Scrubs where Jordan declared several times that "My parents were mean to me" when she was bugged for the hateful things she did, and eventually admitted that they were actually very nice and supportive.
But played straighter with Dr. Cox's family, as his father was a violent, abusive alcoholic while he mother just didn't do anything to stop his father.
Later subverted again with the manipulative intern (can't remember her name) who justifies her actions to Carla with "My dad died when I was a baby, and my mother was a heavy drinker. I've had to do everything myself my entire life." Carla's response? "Awww...HEARD IT! Me? Dead mom. JD? Dead dad. Elliot? Emotionally abusive parents. Dr Cox? Emotionally and physically abusive dead parents who he may have killed. No ones really sure."
Lindsey Weir on Freaks and Geeks can't stand obnoxious Kim Kelly, until she is invited over to her house for dinner and sees how awful Kim's family life is.
Supernatural's Bela was sexually abused by her father and this gave her the motivation to make her deal with the devil. But as she tried to make the boys' life a misery instead of going to them for help like she should have done (which she realises now), she gets torn apart by the hellhounds instead of being redeemed. Which has the oddly powerful effect of making viewers who hated her before feel sorry for her instead.
Subverted in that when Dean finds out about the deal and calls her on it, she just smirks and says that her parents were nice, loving people, and she killed them anyway. Evidently, Bela wasn't one for sympathy.
This made for a particularly intense piece of characterization in an episode of Criminal Minds. The profilers bust the murderer of the week through their understanding of his crappy childhood, and Agent Hotchner, while interviewing him, says that with an intensely violent, abusive childhood like that, it's not surprising that some people grow up to be killers. As they're dragging him away, the murderer asks what Hotch, meant, that some people grow up to be killers. In his crazy-intense voice, (CSI's Horatio Caine without the sunglasses) Hotchner replies that some people grow up to catch them.
A slightly humourous example comes from an episode where Hotch and Reid go to interview a serial killer, Chester, on death row. After a series of events that leave them locked in the room with the killer, Reid saves them both by profiling the shit out of him for thirteen straight minutes, linking all of his violence back to his childhood and saying that Chester "never really had a chance" to be anything but. Cue chuckles when Chester asks if it's true that he never had a chance to escape his sociopathic tendencies, and Reid replies with an offhand, "I dunno, maybe," as he flees the room. It kind of speaks to his genius, that he's able to cook up an elaborate Freudian Excuse in seconds, spiel it for thirteen minutes, and then carelessly discard it.
A massive number of killers in the show have terrible childhoods. Often, it's used to explain not just why they kill but why they kill in that particular fashion. One of the major themes of the show is the question of how evil arises, so it's only natural that this trope would come into play a lot. Some of the most extreme:
Tobias Hankel was raised by an abusive religious fanatic who went as far as to burn a cross into his forehead with a red-hot poker.
Samantha Malcolm was sexually abused by her father, who then gave her repeated electric shocks to shut her up about it.
Darrin Call was raised by his abusive father, who was a serial killer himself and who would make him help bury the bodies of his victims.
Sticking with the serial killers and criminal profilers - it's regularly used and (occasionally) subverted in Cracker (and I guess probably its US remake as Fitz - I gather 'cracker' has another meaning on that side of the Atlantic...). It's a show about what makes people do terrible things, so it regularly delved into Freudian Excuse territory.
Parodied in Blackadder, in which Blackadder discovers and exploits a super-villain's Freudian excuse with deadly accuracy:
Blackadder:Just one thing, Ludwig - were you bullied at school?
Ludwig: [Tense] What do you mean?
Blackadder: Well, all this ranting and raving about power. There must be some reason for it.
Ludwig: Nonsense, no - at my school, having dirty hair and spots was a sign of maturity.
Blackadder: I thought so. And I bet your mother made you wear shorts right up till your final year.
Ludwig: [Losing it] Shut up! Shut up! When I am King of England, no one will ever call me 'shorty greasy spot-spot' again! [Storms out]
Spoofed in the episode of Frasier, "Fool Me Once, Shame on You, Fool Me Twice...":
Frasier: Let me guess. Daddy didn't love me, Mommy didn't pay attention to me, the bully next door took my toys. Nathan Lane: No, no, you got it all backwards. Dad loved me. Mom spoiled me. I was the bully next door.
Discussed in Everybody Loves Raymond where we learn that Deadpan Snarker Frank was indeed beaten by his father. What's interesting however is that they actually do go into depth about how his father being beaten as a child too, and i believe even his father as well... Ray and Robert both were surprised by this fact; because although Frank isn't exactly an 'ideal' father himself, he never actually hit them.
Stephen Colbert's Freudian Excuses are frequently hinted at, and were made explicit during the "Superegomaniac" segment celebrating Freud's 150th birthday.
Stephen: Yeah, maybe a library shelf fell on me when I was three, but that's not why I hate books.
His book, I Am America and So Can You, is pretty explicit about most of his Freudian excuses.
Although they're not villains, it's clear that at least three of Murphy Brown's characters' traits come as a direct result of lousy parental relationships:
Murphy's competitive nature stems from her relationship with her father. In a flashback, we see him tell her point-blank that her B+ paper "should've been an A". On top of that, he worked constantly, and as such it was often very difficult for her to get his full attention. On top of THAT, Murphy reveals in one episode that her father wanted a boy. And as if all of that wasn't enough, her parents had a messy divorce plagued by frequent verbal battles which still continued whenever they encountered each other in the present.
Frank's constant need to validate himself stems from his parents, who never really hear the words that come out of his mouth. He's also one of seven children, so he constantly felt lost in the shuffle when he was young.
Jim's stuffy exterior can be attributed to his father, who told him that real men don't show their emotions. He was 10 years old at the time.
Scorpius of Farscape was revealed to have been engineered and brutally raised by the Scarrans, spawning an intense hatred of that species for his treatment as well as for the rape and death of his Sebacean mother. For this reason, he's prepared to do just about anything he can to take revenge - including the acts committed against John Crichton. However when Scorpius actually brings up these details close to the end of the third season, he does so not to make Crichton pity him, but to try and convince him that the Scarrans must be stopped before any more innocent people suffer - and given their actions in the fourth season, he's not exactly incorrect.
Parodied in 3rd Rock from the Sun — when Sally decides to have a childhood and takes up a child's ballet class, Dick doesn't come to her performance. Harry and Tommy congratulate her on experiencing the neglect and rejection of a normal childhood, and Harry informs her that "if you ever flip out and kill a guy, you can blame it on Dick".
This was lampshaded in Buffy the Vampire Slayer when a psychotic vampire captured and tortured Buffy's mother and complained to her about his mother "stealing his self respect", before adding "I have mother issues. I'm aware of that."
Angel's father wasn't a bad man, not abusive, just stern. The two had a difficult relationship, and he was the last of the family that Angelus killed on being turned. Darla told Angelus that now he'd never be able to beat his father.
Wesley also has a difficult relationship with his father. He just can't seem to live up to the man's expectations.
In the first season, the team deals with a telekinetic girl who was molested by her father. Neither crazy nor evil, she does have issues.
Lindsey, one of the lawyer's from Wolfram & Hart starts a Hannibal Lecture about how he grew up poor, but in interrupted by Angel.
Subverted by House. While House's Daddy Issues make up a large part who he is, only one person knows about the real abuse (the ice baths and being made to sleep outside) and even that had to be dragged out of him.
This was one of his Pet the Dog moments too. He was trying to offer comfort to a rape victim. He was the first to figure out she'd been raped, and maybe this was because he'd been abused (Though not sexually as far as we know) in the past.
He also called that the teenage supermodel in "Skin Deep" had been raped by her father.
Is it really being raped if she gets him drunk first and is all part of her plan to get him to let her do whatever she wants?
Yes.
Certainly, if we're talking about law...
Lampshaded by Amber in a Season 4 episode. "Why are you afraid to lose?" "Mommy didn't love me! Daddy expected too much of me! ...Something! What is it you want me to say?"
Ironically, Hugh Laurie actually does have parent issues because he felt they disliked him and expected too much from him; his father Ran in particular was a distinguished medical doctor (how's that for irony) and an Olympic rower who won gold in the 1948 Coxless Pairs. They also apparently disapproved of his wife. Read and see enough interviews with him and his low self-esteem issues become fairly obvious. This has not, on the other hand, stopped Laurie from being described as a "panda" by everyone who knows him.
Sylar from Heroes. His father's even played by John Glover, who played Lionel Luthor in Smallville.
While it isn't depicted in the show itself, Malcolm McDowell has speculated that his character, Mr. Linderman, must have had "quite an unhappy childhood" to take his plans so far.
This is confirmed in Volume 4, where flashbacks show that he was placed in an internment camp simply because he has powers, and given his deduction on what the camp actually was, its likely that he may have spent time in the German Concentration Camps when he was younger.
Monk's mother was very uptight and neurotic, which is probably part of why he is. To overcome OCD, it's necessary to resist the compulsions, so Monk being raised by the kind of person who encourages excessive order may have allowed the condition to develop a stranglehold on him in a way it otherwise wouldn't.
The fact that his wife was killed in a Car Bomb also made his OCD condition grow even worse, suffering a total relapse that caused him to resign from the Police Force, and apparently nearly drown himself.
Law & Order: Mike Logan's temper is attributed to the beatings he received as a kid from his alcoholic mother. Lennie Briscoe's meth-addicted daughter blames all her problems on her former alcoholic dad's absence during her childhood.
On MASH, it's made pretty clear that a big part of the reason why Frank Burns is such a Jerk Ass is that his entire childhood was miserable, complete with heaping helpings of ParentalAbuse (both physically and mentally).
Inverted completely in Superhjaltejul; no villain were traumatized in their childhood by jerks, they were traumatized by jerky children in adulthood.
In Beverly Hills 90210, Valerie is given a succession of increasingly horrifying Freudian Excuses. First, her father committed suicide. Then, it is revealed that she was the one who found him in a pool of blood. Later, we learn that her father had been raping her since she was 11 years old. And for the grand finale, she was the one who murdered him.
The spin-off, 90210, has Liam starting off as bad... so bad he's almost 'evil'. Then it's explained he had a jackass step-father. Dylan from the original series (mum's a hippie, dad's in jail) also works, and for some extent most flaws on most characters (Kelly's mum's a drunk, Steve's adopted, Gina grew up poor, David's the son of a serial cheater and a schizo...).
In Battlestar Galactica the constant physical abuse Kara suffered at the hands of her mother, coupled with her father's abandonment of her, goes a long way towards explaining why she's so dysfunctional as an adult.
More noteworthy is Cavil. The entire genocide of the colonies was brought about because he thought his parents loved humans more than him.
Wings: Joe blames his mother abandoning him as a child for him growing up to be a tightass. In another episode Brian discovers the letters he wrote to Captain Kangaroo that he wrote when they were kids and that Joe was supposed to send and then expounds an elaborate theory about how believing he had been ignored by his hero eventually led to all his failures in life as an adult. Joe is skeptical.
Played with in Star Trek: The Next Generation, in an episode where it's invoked, dismissed, and averted all in the span of a moment when Data is held captive by a collector.
Data: You are a fine debator sir. It is a pity you have used your verbal skills for mere hucksterism and the advancement of your own greed.
Fajo:(sullen) Perhaps... Perhaps you would not judge me so harshly if you knew of my desperate youth. Wasted, wasted, on the streets of Zimbala.
Data: Your past does not excuse unethical or immoral behavior, sir.
Fajo:(suddenly chipper) Eh, doesn't matter, isn't true anyway. My father was quite wealthy, actually. He was a thief.
Averted in The X-Files episode, "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose". The FBI is tracking a serial killer with a penchant for purported psychics. It turns out the killer was actually trying to discover the Freudian Excuse behind his violent tendencies and killed the psychics when they failed to divine a satisfactory answer. Ultimately, he crosses paths with the titular Mr. Bruckman who is genuinely clairvoyant and we get the following exchange:
Killer: So there's something I've been wanting to ask you for some time now. You've seen the things I do in the past as well as in the future.
Clyde Bruckman: They're terrible things.
Killer: I know they are. So, tell me, please, why have I done them?
Clyde Bruckman: Don't you understand yet, son? Don't you get it?
(The killer shakes his head and shrugs.)
Clyde Bruckman:: You do the things you do because you're a homicidal maniac.
(The killer thinks about it for a moment and smiles.)
Killer: That... that does explain a lot, doesn't it? It's all starting to make sense now.
It's suggested T-Bag is only a pedophile because he had been sexually abused by his father.
Lampshaded in The Electric CompanySpider-Man clips segments, where the villain always has some pathetic excuse, like the little rich girl who didn't get a pony for her birthday...
Played for Laughs on Get Smart. After Max captures Sigfried, he asks him why he chose to be evil. Sigfried says it's because his mother never got him a sled for Christmas.
Sigfried: Do you think it was because we lived in Florida.
Max gives an Eye Take as the episode fades to the credits.
In Terra NovaLucas Taylor is working with a group of Corrupt Corporate Executives to make the portal go both ways so that they can destroy Terra Nova and rape the alternate past earth where the colony is located. Why? Because he wants to get back at his father for failing to save his mother in Somalia when he was a kid.
Music
In West Side Story The Jets playfully make a song, "Gee, Officer Krupke" out of this.
My daddy beats my mommy My mommy clobbers me My grandpa is a commie My grandma pushes tea My sister wears a moustache My brother wears a dress Goodness gracious, that's why I'm a mess!
Or, in the alternate lyric from the stage play:
My father is a bastard My ma's an SOB My grandpa's always plastered My grandma pushes tea My sister wears a moustache My brother wears a dress Goodness gracious, that's why I'm a mess!
As quoted above, John Flansburgh (of They Might Be Giants fame) has recorded a song called "It Never Fails", about cops manipulating the psychological problems of criminals in order to keep their arrest quotas up.
Anna Russell's song "Jolly Old Sigmund Freud."
At three I had a feeling of ambivalence towards my brothers, And so it follows naturally I've poisoned all my lovers, But I am happy now I've learned the lesson this has taught, That everything I do that's wrong is someone else's fault!
A particularly Anvilicious case is Harry Chapin's "Sniper," about a boy whose mother never makes time for him, so he grows up to be a deranged mass murderer who explicitly voices his hatred for her at the climax. Can be considered a darker version of Chapin's "Cats in the Cradle."
The person the singer is singing to in "Numb" by Linkin Park has one, apparently ("but I know you were just like me with someone disappointed in you").
The Sara Bareilles song "Machine Gun," about the jerk whose sole purpose in life is to aggravate those around him:
Maybe nobody loved you when you were young Maybe boy when you cried nobody'd ever come Will you try it once? Give up the machine gun...
The Wound that Never Heals by Jim White, is about a Black Widow. It has this to say about her backstory:
She runs from devils, she runs from angels
She runs from the ghost of her father and five different uncles.
Blinded by their memory, seared by their pain
She'd like to kill 'em all, yeah, kill 'em all again
She don't think much about what she's done, or the funny way she feels (No she don't)
To her it's just a condition she picked up as a child
A little thing she calls "The Wound that Never Heals".
I think someone was mean to you, when you were little
That's what I think
I think someone was mean to you
Had Enough by Breaking Benjamin may be an example of this trope, as it could be about an Omnicidal Maniac who is motivated by hatred for someone, possibly his father.
You should have learned by now, I'll burn this whole world down
I need some peace of mind, no fear of what's behind
You think you've won this fight, you've only lost your mind
You had to have it all, well have you had enough?
You greedy little bastard, you will get what you deserve
When all is said and done, I will be the one
To leave you in your misery and hate what you've become
Radio
Lampshaded in an otherwise weak episode of Adventures in Odyssey, which takes an oddlyindecisive stance on the subject. When pressed, chronic troublemaker Rodney Rathbone ad-libs a story about being locked in the basement by his parents, then promptly admits that no, it was just something he heard on TV. That said, outright abuse aside, a lot of his behavior can undoubtedly be attributed to his upbringing.
In another episode, presumably by another writer, a one-episode bully named Brock is revealed to have a bad home life dominated by a drunken father. While it is stressed that this doesn't make him unaccountable for his actions, a little sympathy (properly executed) can go a long way.
Parodied in the penultimate episode of Bleak Expectations season 3, "An Evil Life Sort Of Explained". Card-Carrying Villain Mr Gently Benevolent turns out to have been raised by an evil mother, who married (and then murdered) a succession of evil stepfathers in order to ensure her son was properly evil (and in addition it's alsoIn the Blood, the Benevolents are evil because they're descended from Judas's accountant). However he came very close to rising above this, and then his childhood sweetheart married someone else before he could escape from the Boarding School of Horrors.
Throughout the second season of Community it is revealed that Pierce turn outs to have this. Pierce's inappropriateness, overzealous creativity, and pathological need to be accepted at all cost are all likely due to frustrations getting attention from his father.
Table Top RPG
It's a long story, but the story behind the githzerai and githyanki in Dungeons And Dragons is effectively thus: the Gith were slaves. They rebelled. One faction wanted to conquer the universe so they would never be enslaved again. The other wanted to train all their race to overcome both literal and metaphorical enslavement. On that day they split; one to found monasteries of order in a plane of chaos, and the other to maraud the planes. This example both uses and subverts the trope.
When it gets down to the basics, the entire galaxy-shattering civil war that brought the Imperium of Man down into the nightmare that it is today is the result of one very long, very brutal series of Freudian Excuses.
Recent stuff reveals it was actually a Xanatos Gambit by Lorgar the first heretic who was a little off his rocker from the start that created the current situation.
In Forgotten Realms, Cyric's mother was a failed street performer and prostitute who was murdered by his most likely father after she tried to get him to acknowledge his child. His father then sold baby Cyric to a childless couple looking to adopt for financial reasons. He was ostracized for his background, escalating until his adoptive parents openly rejected him on this basis (and then he killed them). At first, a human and less blatantly evil Cyric tells this to (future) Mystra to explain why he thinks love is nonsense. Hints of its continued effects on him can be seen after he hits godhood, when he exalts his mother in the Cyrinishad as a "beautiful bard with a mind as quick as Oghma's."
Theatre
Described in "Officer Krupke" in West Side Story, where the Jets sing a mocking song to a (not present) police officer describing various excuses for their misbehavior.
Joseph Pitt from Angels In America had a rough relationship with his now-gone father. During a phone conversation with his mother, he asks if his father ever loved him. She dodges the question. When he tells her that he's gay, she snaps that he knows damn well his father never loved him, and that's no excuse for him to be acting up like this.
Later on, discussing her son's homosexuality with his wife, she says "...they think it's mothers who are close to their sons that cause this. Well, guess we disproved that theory, he and I."
Pity the child who has ambition Knows what he wants to do Knows that he'll never fit the system Others expect him to Pity the child who knew his parents Saw their faults, saw their love die before his eyes Pity a child that wise
The actor playing Cox in the stage version of Nation decided to give his character one of these (dead wife and son), as his diary exercise for the character reveals (on page 22).
In All Shook Up Matilda has one for the way she acts as mayor.
In Chicago, Roxie Hart sings a line in the song Roxie that goes "And the audience loves me. And I love them. And they love me for loving them, And I love them for loving me. And we love each other. That's because none of us got enough love in our childhoods."
Video Games
Downplayed with Kefka, who's insane because the process that made him a Magitek Knight shattered his sanity. It's minor because it doesn't detract from his Complete Monster status.
Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII was raised by his father the evil mad scientist Hojo who regarded him as little more than a human lab rat, and was trying to turn him in to the perfect super soldier. Obviously, Hojo mostly succeeded. Being told his mother died giving birth to him and then finding out that his "mother" is a Cosmic Horror couldn't have helped, either.
Just about everything regarding Squall's screwed-up mental state in Final Fantasy VIII can be traced back to separation issues at a very young age when Ellone was taken away from him at the orphanage. Compounded by an apparent complete lack of emotional support following their separation, and by the fact that junctioning Guardian Forces during his training caused him to forget his childhood, making it impossible for him to re-evaluate his childhood trauma from a more mature perspective.
Not to mention Ultimecia, whose whole motivation behind her evil is being feared and hated for something she hasn't even done and doesn't know she's going to do yet.
The Nintendo DS remake of Final Fantasy IV gives this to Golbez. His father was killed by the town for teaching magic, his mother died giving birth to his younger brother, Cecil. The hate he generated was enough for Zemus to manipulate him into stealing the crystals.
According to Takashi Tokita, this was originally written down in the script, but three-fourths of the script were removed in the Super Famicom version, and it wasn't until they made the DS remake that they could implement it in. In other words, the DS remake was actually more of a directors cut.
Shadow The Hedgehog has one as the main purpose for his motivation in Sonic Adventure 2, due to the death (metaphorically) of Maria Robotnik, he vowed vengeance against all of humanity He remembers later that Maria does not want that, and wanted him to forgive humanity for there are some good people in the world.
And in his spinoff game, we have the GUN Commander's motivation for his seemingly blind vendetta against Shadow. It turns out that he was one of the (very few) survivors of the Ark Disaster, and, like Shadow, was a close friend of Maria. The Commander's hatred for Shadow was because he blamed him for Maria's death, believing that if Shadow had never been "born", Ark wouldn't have been wiped out and Maria wouldn't have died. He realizes the folly of this reasoning in the True Ending, however.
A great majority of villains in Sly Cooper have one of these. Let's see...
Muggshot was picked on as a child, so he wanted to be a gangster.
Mz. Ruby had no friends as a child, so she learned to summon the dead in order to have some.
Panda King spent a decade mastering fireworks, but the rich noble men turned him down because of his poor background.
Dimitri had been rejected from the art community (of course, it wasn't that good to begin with).
Rajan was born into poverty on the streets of India.
Arpeggio never grew from his minute size so he couldn't keep up physically with his peers and couldn't fly.
Octavio chances at opera were ruined when Italy began to favor Rock n Roll.
Dr. M leads us to believe he was mistreated by Sly's father when they were working together.
One was given to the recurring villain of Final Fantasy X, Maester Seymour Guado. In a nutshell, Non-human Dad marries Human Mom, but his species' xenophobic civilization doesn't like that their leader married a human, so she and Seymour are exiled to a long-abandoned temple. Mom decides that Seymour will need to be powerful to be accepted, so she undergoes a procedure that will allow him to call her as a powerful summon beast but will also turn her into a statue while young Seymour is crying for her not to, effectively meaning he's been abandoned by both parents. Not to mention that Summon Beast Mommy looks like this◊.Whiny protagonist Tidus also has significant father issues.
For all the evil that he did afterwards, Ganondorf from The Legend of Zelda series had a fairly understandable reason for his desire to conquer Hyrule and claim the Triforce: His people were trapped in a lifeless desert, forced to steal from others just to eke out a life. Seeing his people in such despair, and then seeing a land in spitting distance that was rich, prosperous, and inhabited by people who didn't even realize their good fortune, made Ganondorf understandably VERY angry. Supplemental material like the official Nintendo Comics, and brief mentions in Ocarina of Time, hint that Ganondorf actually tried to invade Hyrule the old-fashioned way. When that fails and he is forced to swear fealty to the Hyrulian king, he turns to searching for the Triforce as a second option.
It gets even worse in Skyward Sword, where it heavily implies that the reason behind Ganondorf's evil is because he's the reincarnation of Demise's hate, meaning he's been screwed up since before he was born to do evil.
Zephiel was a kind and loving boy in Fire Emblem 7, but his father Desmond hated him. This hatred, ultimately resulting in Desmond attempting to kill Zephiel, was the only reason why Zephiel turned out to be a misanthropic tyrant in Fire Emblem 6.
First Encounter Assault Recon's entire storyline is one giant Freudian Excuse in which the main villain, Paxton Fettel, sets out to free his mother, Alma, who was a powerful psychic who was used as a living incubator for psychic supersoldiers since she was eight years old, and had her children stolen from her in front of her eyes. Incidentally, the project lead who was behind this whole round of depravity turns out to be Alma's own father, Harlan Wade.
Prince Luca Blight from Suikoden II is one of the nastiest, evilest, and most badass villains ever conceived. He makes some pretty good attempts at subverting Infant Immortality, even. He also kills an entire unit of his own country's soldiers (The 'Youth Brigade', even - kinda' like heavily armed boyscouts), kills his father, usurps the throne, starts a war, and unleashes some Sealed Evil in a Can to depopulate a large city completely. However... When he was 6, he watched his mother being raped by soldiers from the country he's invading in the present, while his father ran to hide in the capital. The kidnap-rape wasn't just a random act of malice by enemy soldiers, it was ordered done by the then mayor of Muse. Even though the Highlands and Jowston were indeed at war, they weren't invading anything, they were non-combatants. Luca's mother died nine months later, which was when his little sister was born. The little sister, who grew up to strongly resemble her mother and thus serve as a living reminder of the horror that he'd witnessed all those years ago. He was basically seeking revenge on both his father, and the country he blames for the events.
Suikoden IV has Graham Cray, who masterminds a war and creates a Weapon Of Mass Destruction... motivated by his Start of Darkness: the True Rune of Punishment, which was sealed away on Obel Island, once chose him at its host. To avoid being consumed by the rune, he chopped his own hand off... at which point it jumped to his son. Though he begged his son not to use its powers, the boy naturally ended up disobeying him... using its power to destroy the soldiers raiding their village. Oh, and the soldiers were part of a False Flag Operation being pulled by the Scarlet Moon Empire, Cray's superiors. Naturally, they blamed him for the incident, sending him off in shame to start plotting revenge. So the whole thing's just so he can try and reclaim the rune, reuniting him with some small piece of his son.
In Suikoden V, Gizel Godwin and Euram Barows share a Freudian Excuse, in a way: both of them had loved ones killed by Nether Gate, the Queendom's cabal of assassins, during the bloody Succession War. For Gizel, it was his mother; for Euram, his elder brother, who was supposed to be his father's heir, thrusting him into a role he hadn't expected. They cope with this trauma in different ways, neither of them really all that good.
In Star Control II, the Ur-Quan reveal that their entire race has a Freudian Excuse: They were psychically enslaved until they discovered that their masters could not command beings that were in excruciating pain. After earning their freedom they vowed to protect themselves from ever suffering such a fate again. This in combination that the fact that the green Ur-Quan, who enslave other races, are relatively benevolent when their orders are obeyed, makes them more of an Anti-Villain. The Big Bad black Ur-Quan, on the other hand, just want to kill everyone.
Word Of God has it that the Ur-Quan were in fact based upon real-life acquaintances of the creators who were abused as children and the effects it had on them.
Sam: Why do you persecute harmless bigfoots? Conroy: Harmless? Harmless? I'll have you know my parents were killed by a rabid bigfoot! Sam: Really? Conroy: Well... no. Actually, I'm just a warped evil person who gets his jollies torturing innocent woodland creatures. Sam: Well, that's a valid motivation too.
Basically the entire point of Psychonauts is Raz going into various people's minds and fighting their Freudian Excuses. In addition, you can break open vaults and see film-strips that detail important parts of that character's childhood, often revealing their Freudian Excuse.
On the other hand, some of them are handled well enough that they actually make sense-Sasha's obsession with keeping one's mind under control stems from the incident that prompted him to leave home-an amateurish psychic foray into his father's mind to learn more about his dead mother ended up dredging up some contexts he wasn't quite ready to see his mother in. Like the context that culminated in Sasha. And Milla is haunted by the deaths of the children she used to be a nanny to, but she doesn't let it get in the way of things. And then there's Ed Teglee's, which even he admits is a little pathetic, once he gets over it.
Further subverted in that Raz's actual father helps him fight the nightmare. Turns out Raz just needed to communicate with his father more; it was really all one big misunderstanding.
It's a fairly common theme in the Metal Gear series, but especially in MGS4's "Beauty and the Beast Corps." Their crippling post-traumatic stress disorder is apparently the key ingredient to being cybernetically enhanced elite troopers.
A nice example is from the non-canon Ghost Babel, wherein serial-killer-turned-special-agent Marionette Owl reveals the beginning of his gruesome murder spree stemmed from finding the love of his life disemboweled and dismembered, and realizing the beauty of death.
Kojima seemed to be so set on giving Psycho Mantis one of these in MGS1 that he ended up giving him two. In codec discussions early in the game, Mantis is said to have worked for the FBI is a psychic profiler until he dove too deep into the mind of a mass-murderer and took on his personality. When he's defeated in battle, Mantis says his murderous ways are caused by accidentally having killed his father as a child and being forced to witness that all human beings only exist to procreate, with no mention of the FBI.
Solidus Snake's reason for the stuff he did and wanting to go to extremes to eliminate the Patriots was because he wanted to be remembered by people, as he cannot leave behind any descendants (because he was created without any means of procreating), and he can't even hope to just leave behind records of his existence because the Patriots wish to delete any evidence of his existence anyways, as they intend to do with anyone else, so he decided to free America from the Patriots similar to how George Washington helped free America from British rule. He also explains to Raiden that the reason why he killed his parents was because he wanted to know if he truly was of someone else's creation, indicating that even back then, he did not feel good about feeling as though he was good only as a manmade tool for the Patriots.
Big Boss himself had to endure several of his allies being exploited by the government, sometimes just being sold out to their enemy to cover up their secrets, and he had been used to kill his mentor just because they didn't want to abort a mission to steal the legacy from the enemy and yet avoid nuclear war (and that's just going by the abridged version of the true reason for his being recruited to kill The Boss, In the unabridged version, it was deliberately set up that way specifically because they feared her charisma and planned her death from the beginning, and even manipulating a sadistic GRU colonel into firing on his own countrymen and create an international controversy just to have the excuse to have her killed.), and even his own friends use him for things, even taking his DNA and cloning him without his consent. It's no wonder why he would end up founding Outer Heaven and Zanzibar Land.
Xenogears; Fei/Id/Grahf and maybe even Ramsus and Krelian.
Bulleta/B.B. Hood in Darkstalkers... maybe. It's implied that she really is Little Red Riding Hood, with all that entails, but this has never actually been outright confirmed or disproven.
Also in Silent Hill 2, Eddie used his humiliating childhood traumas to excuse his violent methods of coping with the way people look at him. And by "violent", I mean murder.
Then in Silent Hill 3, Vincent blames Claudia's religious zeal on her father beating her. This apparently deeply affected Vincent as well, which raises a host of questions about just how early in life he was involved with the Order. Unlike the example from Silent Hill 4 above, however, the player is less likely to be sympathetic towards Claudia, considering what she did to kick the plot off, and then there's the possibility of how she treated the children in the "care" of the Order... even though by the end of the game, she apologetically admits to failing in her mission to turn the world into "Paradise", too. It's not enough by then.
Depending on your interpretation (and which games you consider to be cannon), one possible explanation for LeChuck's evil aggression is his unrequited love for Elaine. However, later games indicate he was evil before meeting Elaine (he IS a pirate, after all). Most recently, the manipulative nature of the Voodoo Lady seems to be a possible source of his evil.
Valkyria Chronicles has Maximilian, who tries to conquer the world because his mom was unpopular amongst the nobility, and then was killed.
The GBA game Nightmare Before Christmas: The Pumpkin King explains that Oogie used to be the leader of the Holiday called Bug Day. However, it was forgotten and the entire town was destroyed leaving Oogie as the sole survivor. The reason he wants to take over Halloween Town is to re-make it into a new Bug Day. This also explains his dislike of Jack in the movie.
Most of the major villains in Dark Cloud 2 (Dark Chronicle) have one of these; notably Dr. Jaming, Gaspard, and Emperor Griffin himself. The only exceptions are Flotsam and Dark Element.
The good-aligned path in Baldur's Gate: Throne of Bhaal is to accept that Sarevok, Big Bad of the first game and the protagonist's half-brother, could just as easily have turned out like the protagonist and vice versa had their childhoods been swapped.
This was also a plot point in the first Baldur's Gate, in which his lover asks you to subdue him, rather than kill him (she'll help you only if you agree) for that exact reason. Later, when she tries to fight you in order to protect him, you can decide not to fight her (in what would lead to her slaughter, she knows this). This shakes her out of her delusion and helps her realize that while you are both tied to the same destructive heritage, he has chosen his path, and has no real excuse. She then steps out of the way.
In Dragon Quest VIII, Marcello, manipulative Jerk Ass extraordinaire, is revealed to be the child of an affair between a sleazeball noble and his maid. When the noble's wife gives birth to a son, who happens to be Angelo, the noble ousts both the maid and the young Marcello without a penny to their name, just to cover his tracks. Marcello's mother soon afterward died of sheer despair, leaving Marcello alone to struggle to survive in the world, eventually joining the clergy. However, throughout his time in the clergy, most of the higher ups constantly looked down upon and outright insulted him just because he was of common blood, despite the fact that he quickly became a prominent figure in the church's Templar branch. All of this resulted in what Marcello is in the game proper: A bitter, condescending, overly ambitious prick who blames Angelo for everything he went through, and while this is technically true, he takes his bitterness over it way too far.
In Pokemon Black And White, N is perceived as a well-intentioned extremist since he wants to separate humans and Pokémon because he thinks that humans treat the latter like tools. The reason for this is because his father, Ghetsis, deliberately neglected him so that he would become what he is now. N was raised with abused Pokémon for a good portion of his life and believed that humans were evil, setting Ghetsis' plan into motion so that he could make Pokémon illegal for everyone but himself so he could rule Unova. And Ghetsis even tells N that he's 'a monster incapableof understanding humans.'
Cyrus is said to have been under intense pressure as a child to live up to the demands his parents put on him. Despite being so intelligent and such a good student that people in his hometown still talk about him as such when he's in his late 20s, he could never live up to his parents' standards. His plans involve him becoming a god—a perfect being, ruling a perfect world, with perfect people.
Silver from Gold/Silver/Crystal and their remakes fits this trope. He pushes the player character around, mistreats his Pokemon and most all, detests Team Rocket; however, the Celebi event in Heart Gold and Soul Silver reveals that his father is Giovanni, the leader of Team Rocket, who abandoned him after the events of the Green/Blue/Red/remakes.
Count Bleck, the Big Bad of Super Paper Mario, had a pretty understandable and sympathetic reason for causing the events of the game: He was originally a man named Lord Blumiere, and he fell in love with a woman named Lady Timpiani. However, his dad didn't agree to the relationship, and thus exiled her to several dimensions, causing him to kill his dad in grief and summon the void in an attempt to commit suicide. In other words, love made him evil, and it also acted as the very thing that turned him back to good and undo the Void once he found out that Timpiani, AKA Tippy was alive.
Dr. Koppelthorne in Metal Gear Ac!d 2 primarily did the stuff he did because he wanted to revive his wife who was killed.
Napoleon LeRoach, the Big Bad of the second Spy Fox game, was made fun of for being too short for a certain ride at the World's Fair. This led him to come up with the Giant Evil Robot Dog plot, where the giant robot is not only taller than everyone else, but also a ride that activates as soon one million people go through the Fair entrance.
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion has Bellamont, an assassin who turns on the Dark Brotherhood and tricks you into murdering most of their leaders. According to his diary, he was driven insane after watching Lucien Lachance murder his mother and joined the Brotherhood so he could murder them one by one in revenge. He still keeps his mother's head and apparently has delusions of it speaking to him.
The Shouty Guy from Mondo Medicals apparently (as far as his insane Engrish ramblings can be believed) witnessed his father dying from cancer and this shock was at least partially responsible for his decision to begin curing cancers via killing the patients, including killing the player character under pretense of curing cancer.
In one instance of Fallout New Vegas, the player can take advantage of this with a high enough Medicine (and thus sufficient knowledge in psychology), telling an angry Ted BaxterSupreme Chef that his tendency of yelling at people is him projecting his hatred of his father. He will then run off to go have himself a breakdown.
This is the ENTIRE POINT of what The Origami Killer is trying to do inHeavy Rain.
In Dragon Age II Meredith's Freudian Excuse for being an extreme Knight Templar is revealed if you are supportive of the Templars throughout the game. Her younger sister was a mage, but Meredith's family hid her so that she wouldn't have to go to the Circle. Her sister lacked the strength and training to resist the demons of the Fade, and she became an abomination that killed the rest of Meredith's family before she was put down by the Templars. As far as Meredith is concerned, any leniency towards Mages could lead to similar tragedies.
Many people online should at least have some awareness of the Allegedly Free GameAdventure Quest, and its prequel Dragon Fable. Both games are full of puns (we aren't kidding, even the designers and game characters lampshade this) and are generally very comedic in nature, but the way they create their villains are a lot more mature than they let on.
Drakkonan: Used to be a friendly blacksmith apprentice. His entire hometown was burned to the ground by a massive fire dragon, and the main hero of the story (that's you) fails to save his family, which causes him to befriend a less than stable fire mage named Xan. Xan teaches him how to cast fire, and Drakkon becomes one of the most legendary villains in the game's history.
Sepulchure used to be a legendary hero in the Dragon Fable timeline, but then he lost a "loved one" and apparently began to fall, and fall, and fall...until he goes from being a Fallen Hero to a class-A Big Bad.
Ironically, Sepulchure actually treats his daughter with lots of love as a baby in Dragon Fable ... speed up to the MMO Adventure Quest Worlds where Gravelyn is not only an adult, but is also evil. She has no Excuse.
Spoofed in the Team Fortress 2 comic "Meet the Director." The Director attempts to pin some of these on the Heavy and the Sniper. They are bemused and unamused, and the Heavy insists on talking about his minigun instead.
The Director: If you could pick one word to describe yourself, Mr. Mundy, what would it be?
The Sniper: Er. Well...
The Director: I'm going to answer that for you. Victim. Of the educational system. Of the role society has shackled you with as an Australian, of course. And let's not forget the current administration, which...
The Sniper: Wait, back up. What'd these folks do to me again?
The Director: Forced you to be a killer.
The Sniper: For the last time, mate, I'm a professional.
The Director: Exactly. A victimized professional killer.
In The 1st Degree has artist James Tobin charged with first-degree murder and grand theft. The interrogation tape of Yvonne Barnes suggests that Tobin ended up doing these things because his wife Helen divorced him. However, she did that because she apparently got fed up with his ways. This would indicate that Tobin may or may not have much of an excuse for what he did.
Shar-Teel, a character who can join your party in Baldur's Gate, is classified as Lawful Evil and she Does Not Like Men. Her biography says that she also hates Flaming Fist mercenaries and that "...likely her childhood was not of storybook quality." This all makes a bit more sense when you meet her father; he's one of the villains in the game, and he's also a corrupt member of the Flaming Fist.
River City Ransom has this for the Big Bad, Slick. Slick was actually Simon, a friend to Alex. He grew jealous that Alex was always better than him in everything and got all the attention, so Simon started the events of the game just to get revenge on Alex.
Just about everyone in Gospel of Megaman Battle Network 2, gradually getting more and more sympathetic.
Speedy Dave who was trying to protect the natural world. It's more left to the viewer's imagination; but it's probably easy to assume the rapid modernization of the world caused him to lose his home or a childhood site he loved to visit.
Princess Pride of Creamland. Creamland was one of the first nations to go online, but was soon ignored by other bigger nations that went online later.
Gauss Magnus was born to a poor family. His brother was adopted by a rich family, but not him. Then his parents became ill and died, leaving Gauss with nobody. So he worked hard to get rich and break the society from within.
The leader, Sean, was orphaned in a plane crash. Despite inheriting a fortune from them, he was forced to live with cruel relatives and was ostracized by society. He also mentions that he was being picked on, too. The internet was the only way he was able to make friends, so he played at being an adult and made net-friends in everyone else, who came together to form Gospel.
Just about the only members who don't have a Freudian Excuse of some kind are Arashi and Dark Miyabi. considering that Dark Miyabi was a Punch Clock Villain and Arashi wasn't...that says a lot.
All the stuffed animals in Die Anstalt are crazy, and part of the puzzle in the game is figuring out why:
Lilo the hippo is withdrawn to the point of autism because he blames himself for one of his former owners getting caught cheating on a math test.
Kroko the crocodile is paranoid and afraid of water because he was abandoned in a public restroom, and used as a mop-head by the cleaning lady, who callously discarded his beloved hot-water bottle.
Dolly the sheep seems to have a canine Split Personality because she's a reversible plush (sheep on the outside, wolf on the inside) who repressed her "other self" after being used as a chew toy by a dog.
Sly the snake is prone to hallucinations because he was used to hide his owner's drug stash, and was abandoned on a highway so they wouldn't get caught; after getting his tail run over by a passing car, his body absorbed some of the hallucinogenic drugs which were stored inside him.
Dub the turtle is obsessed with exercise because he was lost at an airport, and was unable to catch up to his owner because of a moving sidewalk.
Dr. Wood is a psychologist with a few issues of his own that culminate in him succumbing to narcissistic personality disorder and starting a cult. This is because he spent years in a display case in a pediatrician's office, watching children who wanted to play with him but couldn't.
Visual Novels
Played with in Fate Stay Night Heaven's Feel. When Sakura tells Rin how she was raped by the males of the Matou household, as well as other crap she had to go through, Rin agrees that it's perfectly understandable that she would become a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, but shows her absolutely no sympathy whatsoever. Unfortunately, that is NOT what Sakura needs to hear from her older sister and (assuming the player chooses NOT to kill Dark Saber), her response is essentially "You don't care how I suffered, eh? Well, why don't you experience it through my eyes, see how you like it!" and when you get the bad end, you can hear Rin apologizing over and over. Of course, Rin, being a Tsundere, has already resolved to kill Sakura. However, if Shirou did kill Dark Saber (and thus, keep her from showing up to grab Rin), Rin will realize at the last second that she can't bring herself to kill her younger sister.
Rokushiki and Shinji get one in Kara No Shoujo. The former lost his lover to a prolonged illness and then had to perform an abortion on a prostitute, which pushed him over the edge. Before that he was a really nice guy and you can still see traces of that persona. The latter was beaten by his mother until she ended up mutilating her face, after which she raped him. The terrified Shinji pushed her off of him and she died via impalement. Then his father went crazy, cut up his lover and used use her as a model for his masterpiece, Kara no Shoujo. He might still have been okay if the first guy didn't push him over the edge.
Franziska von Karma of Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney, to some extent. Her drive to defeat Phoenix Wright stems from a desire to outperform her adopted brother Edgeworth, who (at least in her view) her father devoted more time to. She seems to conveniently ignore the fact that her father focused on him because he was trying to mold Edgeworth into a ruthless, coldhearted prosecutor as a convoluted revenge against Edgeworth's father. She does cool down slightly by the end of Justice For All, but the arrogant streak is there to stay.
In Animamundi Dark Alchemist, Mephistopheles asked Dr. Glening why he was so insistent on wanting a a deal with him (note that this is the kind of guy that even the fucking devil didn't want to put up with). The man went on to explain he was seeking revenge when his magic-based homeland was invaded, and he was forced to eat his own parents corpses in order to survive. The devil just remarked that his persistence is remarkable, but he's still pathetic. The Player still wouldn't feel sympathetic Dr. Glening, considering he's a Complete Monster.
In El Goonish Shive, Lord Tedd may or may not have one. Consider the facts that he is the most powerful known being in the comic and that the creator admitted that people wouldn't like his backstory because it is just that sad.
In Fans!, Alisin Oberf, during her dark days when she was dying of a rare disease, was, beneath her Perky Gothexterior, a self-loathing mess, who took pleasure in heavy bondage and sadism. Years later, after she was cured of the disease, but not her negative self-image, one of her "partners", Keith Feddyg, emerged as Alisin's greatest nemesis, using her own self-loathing to force her to become his sex slave and blaming her for his having become a psycho. Subsequent evidence indicates that he was alreadythere before Aly ever showed up.
Also, Alisin killed Robert's goldfish, which may or may not have something to do with the latter's eventual world dominating ambitions.
Joel from Concession has about three Freudian Excuses: his father left their company to his older brother, his sister was killed by his brother when they were young, and their parents blamed Joel for the murder and put him in an asylum where he was sexually abused by a doctor. There have also been a couple of throwaway gags which, if taken too seriously, could imply that his mother resents him for not being a girl. If there was a trope for Freudian Sue, Joel would probably be the posterboy.
Parodied and invoked In The Order of the Stick: Belkar at one point claims that his sociopathic demeanor comes from being mocked in his village, and that he became an adventurer to become strong enough to kill them all — however he only says this to get free experience points for proper role-playing.
Also played straight with Redcloak, who lost his village to the crusading of the Sapphire Guard as a child. Subverted with extreme prejudice by Xykon, a Complete Monster who has reveled in his wickedness practically from the cradle and eats villains that need a Freudian Excuse for their villainy for breakfast.
Kria imagines this occurring as a result of her poor parenting in one DMFA strip. Being a demon, she seems more worried about her daughter hating her then the whole "razing dozens of cities and posing on a mountain of skulls" bit.
Pops up twice in Kevin and Kell: Ralph constantly tried to hunt and eat his brother-in-law Kevin because he didn't want his sister to go through the same heartbreak he did when his herbivore lover died in childbirth. More recently, Desdemona Fuscus tried to push Lindesfarne and Fenton to marry earlier and earlier. This was because she was secretly a vampire bat, and didn't want Lindesfarne to find out and call off the wedding.
Basically Flik's whole motivation. Since we see the problem before we see its results, it's rather differently played than normal.
Yuki in Ménage à 3Does Not Like Men because of her exposure as a little kid to her father's work, who was a famous hentai artist (dubbed "The Tentacle King," no less). This causes her to, as Zii puts it, "see things".
Gary's virginity and sexual dysfunction are a result of his severely repressive ultra-religious parents and cockteasing girls. (Resulting in him living with a professional cock tease, a very talented amateur cock tease, and lusting after a girl with penis-phobia. Um...)
In Yuki's case, she's not even aware of it. When Gary covered up a naked man's crotch with his hands to stop Yuki from Groin Attacking him, she snaps out of "TENTACLLLLES!" mode and promptly asks "Hey, how come you've got your hands over that guy's junk?" In a later strip she's absolutely dumbfounded to hear that she destroyed an entire store's worth of pornography, one thumb-through-a-TENTACLLLLE at a time.
Off-White: She's not a villain, but the tragic death of most of her litter is at least partly to blame for Jera's attitude.
Vriska from Homestuck is arguably only a HUGE BITCH BLUH BLUH because her guardian was a giant spider who she had to regularly feed other young trolls or be eaten herself.
Mariavel Varella, the primary villain of Survival of the Fittest v2, has something of a Freudian Excuse to justify her actions. She was raped by her father as a child (although this may have since been the subject of a Retcon). However, what does remain Canon is the other abuse she suffered at the hands of her father - as well as him killing her brother.
Steff in Tales of MU: "Don't you think I've earned a chance to be the one at the top of the shitheap for a while? Three more years and then nobody's going to fuck with me, ever again."
In Yu Gi Oh The Abridged Series, Tristan asks Bakura why he is so evil, to which Bakura replies "Well, I guess my mummy didn't love me enough. Did you know she wanted to name me Florence? Who names a boy Florence?!"
Stray discusses this - it's set in the Metal Gear universe, land of villains with unhappy childhoods, and at least two characters (including one of the protagonists) are former Tykebombs. However, Adamska (one of the tykebombs in question) eventually rejects the idea that a person's essential nature can be changed by the actions of other people.
Gaia Online's current Big Badwas neglected by his "father", Johnny K. Gambino, in favor of his natural son Gino. This led him to found his own Mad Scientist corporation, NeXus, to study the Animated and eventually use them to try and take over the world.
Lord Doom, an Evil OverlordWell-Intentioned Extremist supervillain from the Global Guardians PBEM Universe was nine years old when he became the only member of his family to survive internment in a Nazi concentration camp (his father was executed right in front of the boy by a camp guard who was "merely testing his newly-issued pistol"). He didn't even have the consolation of a community of Holocaust survivors to relate to as his family wasn't Jewish, or Gypsy, or Slavs... there were merely politically inconvenient. His campaign to take over the world is founded on his very real, very sincere, and very, very obsessive wish that no more children suffer the loss of their Mommy and Daddy and little sisters like he did.
Parodied in the Christmas Special of Dragonball Z Abridged: Turles hates Christmas because Santa never visited Planet Vegeta, and so their only holiday was Freeza's Day. Also his henchmen all did horrible things, including dropping a whole truck of coal on a naughty child's house and raping Rudolph.
Unsurprisingly, this is implied to be the reason Red Letter Media'sMr Plinkett is a mentally unstable kidnapper and murderer. He mentions attacking a doctor who asked about his "dear old mother", then we are shown a brief flashback of his mother telling him to "bury the bodies under the floorboards".
Echo Chamber's Tom and Zack have Freudian excuses.
Tom tries to be better than his younger brother, who was superior to him in every way since they were kids. As you might expect, this doesn't justify why he picks on Zack.
Zack's father dictates his life, so he's never had to make a decision before. That's why, when he begins working with Dana and Tom, he acts like a Man Child.
The Nostalgia Critic mentions that part of the reason he has such a Bias Steamroller over Doug is that when he was younger (When the show was popular) a lot of people would tease him about it and constantly bring it up, saying "If you were named 'Doug', you were ALWAYS associated with this show."
Western Animation
Avatar The Last Airbender shows that the villainous Prince Zuko was raised in a nightmarish, back-stabbing court where his sister was always more successful and favored, his once-renowned war hero uncle breaks down after losing his son in battle only to later lose his place on the throne, his motherkilled his grandfather the night she disappeared in order to keep her husband from killing Zuko, and his father not only publicly ridiculed him when giving him his trademark scar and banishment from home, but is voiced by Mark Hamill. Let the Star Wars parallels begin! (Even his voice actor couldn't deny it.)
And the key motivation of the outburst that got him burned and banished was caring about the common soldiers of his father's army and being morally offended by a general calling new recruits fresh meat. Show traits that could lead you to be a caring leader someday, experience agonizing pain and lose everything you have. Is there such a thing as a Skinnerian Excuse?
Azula: "My own mother... thought I was a monster." [perks up] "She was right, of course, but it still hurt!"
Ty Lee is an incredible flirt because she had six other identical sisters and got no attention. Mai grew up a rich only child who had to stay quiet so as to not screw up her father's political career.
One episode shows that Ozai's father was also terrible, but since Ozai treats his kids even worse and is an all around Complete Monster, it doesn't really garner much sympathy.
Totally Spies! has a rather big list of villains who do bad things for something that happened in the past. There was one episode where a lady decided to mind-control all the guys through cologne so that they worshipped her because she was not chosen the prom queen at her high school. Seriously?
Clay of Moral Orel had a very complex abusive relationship with his father after he accidentally killed his mother, and he's only an alcoholic in a failing marriage because Bloberta convinced the once-sober Clay to get drunk and tricked him into marriage. After watching these events unfold, it's actually quite difficult to blame Clay for much of his behavior.
In Quest for a Heart, when Millie remarks on Footman's disagreeable personality, the other Rollis tell her that he had a hard childhood. She asks for more details, and they say he had to grow up in a Rolli village in the midst of Rollis.
Parodied in a Buttons & Mindy short on Animaniacs. Mindy, a curious little toddler, accidentally walks in on a bank robbery...
Mindy: (to one of the robbers) Whatcha doing, Mr. Man?
Robber: What's it look like? We're robbin' the bank!
Mindy: Why?
Robber: 'Cause we're bank robbers!
Mindy: Why?
Robber: 'Cause that's what bad guys do!
Mindy: Why?
Robber: 'Cause maybe our mothers didn't hug us when we was kids!
Subverted in Ruby-Spears' Mega Man, in the first episode: Wily mentions having a less than perfect childhood—then goes right on to working on Protoman, expounding on a different subject. The show never brings it up again, implying that Wily's bid to take over the world is simply due to his villainous nature, not this trope.
Dr. Doofenshmirtz from Phineas And Ferb sometimes has these, played for laughs — as part of his speech, he'll refer to some unpleasant past event that motivated his current act of villainy. Possibly the most outlandish was his deciding to steal all the lawn gnomes in the Tri-State Area because as a child, he had been forced to take the place of his family's lawn gnome after it was repossessed.
During his school's Science Fairs his machines always lost to a baking soda volcano. So what does he do several decades down the line? He infiltrates an elementary school Science Fair and sets up "The World's Largest Baking Soda Volcano!"
He hates swimming pools because his mother didn't let him swim. Humourously accompanied by a very short clip of Doofenshmirtz's mother simply saying to him, 'No.' Doofenshmirtz argues not every backstory has to be dramatic.
Other components to his backstory: he had to wear hand-me-up girls' clothing, his mother loved his brother more than him, his father replaced him with a dog named "Only Son", his only friend (a painted balloon) flew away, his artistic masterpiece was destroyed, his girlfriend left him for a whale, and he was raised by ocelots. Yes, all of that.
In Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension, Doof-2's only reason he's evil(er) is because he lost a toy train once. Doof-1 obviously deconstructs this because of how much more miserable his life was, yet he is less successful. Once Doof-1 gives him the train at the end, he decides to stop being evil.
In Danny Phantom, pretty much all of Vlad's evil tendencies were blamed on the pivotal portal experiment in college.
But in spite of disfiguring his face and losing the woman he loved, the positives started to pile up after a while. Vlad's insanely rich, and has super powers. What more could you want?
Dark Danny could possibly qualify for this to. I mean having everyone you care about die all at once and its your fault, having to go live with your arch enemy for lack of no where else to go, having your humanity ripped out then killing it and then finally destroying the world. Despite the fact that Danny didn't have emotions while he was doing this I think the fandom could still feel a certain level of sympathy for him, if not more. He was messed up pretty bad.
Also Freakshow uses this troop to give an excuse to all the bad things he does. Everyone in his life, including himself, likes ghosts more than him. Being upstaged by ghosts his whole life messed him up but then again he might very well just be insane. I personally think it's a bit of both.
The eponymous Dr. Thaddeus S. 'Rusty' Venture of The Venture Brothers has his horrific upbringing by his father to blame for his Jerkass tendencies, something that the 3rd season goes out of its way several times to point out. Several times, it's hinted that Rusty was forced to murder several people in his childhood by his father. That would screw up anyone.
"That's nothing. My father made me kill a man with a house key once. I was ten!"
Every single horrifying thing Dr. Rusty Venture has ever done can be traced back to his just as horrifying childhood; more specifically, his complicated relationship with his father, which has left him with some very odd (not to mention neglectful and abusive) notions about how to play father to his own teenage sons. This trope was played with in "The Doctor is Sin," in which Rusty is forced to relive "the moment that his father went from protector to tormentor/rival," and drawn upon even more heavily in "Assisted Suicide," with Dr. Orpheus entering and traversing Rusty's subconscious mind.
Drawn Together lampshades this in the song "Who's Afraid of a Bully" from the episode "Requiem for a Reality Show".
In Transformers Animated, why Bumblebee would rather work on his own than to learn the value of teamwork could be attributed to what happened in "Autoboot Camp." His first team was consisted of jerks who went as far as unscrewing his legs then locking him inside a locker. It didn't help that his Drill Sergeant was Sentinel Prime, who took every opportunity to humiliate him. The only ones who didn't treat him like crap were Bulkhead (who he had written off as a hic from the energon farms) and Longarm. Bumblebee eventually warms up to Bulkhead, and even takes the heat for him - which boots him out of Sentinel's good graces and gets him demoted to Space Bridge Repair duty (resulting in his Stingers being downgraded to be useless in combat).
In an original story board of Disney's Aladdin they wanted to have Jafar, the villain, have a Freudian Excuse themed song explaining why he was angry and evil. It was later dropped and was replaced with a reprise of Prince Ali to satisfy the staff's wishes to have the voice actor sing, to the delight of most of the audience. Of course, when you think about it, why would Jafar need a Freudian excuse? We already know he's unhappy in his current position (which is sometimes all you need), thinks the sultan is an idiot, is greedy, and has a case of megalomania (thus the last genie wish).
The rationale was probably to add depth to Jafar's character and provide an explanation (necessary or not) as to how he became so evil and twisted. As it turned out: No, not necessary, but all the more intriguing by its absence.
Incidentally, Jafar's excuse mainly focused on being mocked and unpopular when he was young, and having to live and work underneath the bumbling Sultan in adulthood. The latter of these was clearly shown in the actual film. If you're curious, the song and storyboards for it can be seen here.
Played with by Demona, one of the two main villains on Gargoyles. She has certainly endured more than her fair share of misery over the centuries, and a lot of it seems to be the fault of the humans (thereby setting up her motivation nicely. Closer inspection, though, reveals that Demona herself directly or indirectly caused all of her own suffering, with the humans sometimes large players, but sometimes just scapegoats. It's implied that Demona is aware of this (and of her own evil) on some level... pity she's the queen of the Ignored Epiphany. This trope is outright averted with the other main villain, Xanatos, who by all accounts had an idyllic childhood but wound up a wealthy Diabolical Mastermind anyway. He's still not entirely unsympathetic.
Most, if not all, of Batman's rogues gallery, as well as Terry's. The only two of Terry's that spring to mind is the "skeleton Joker Gang" guy who attacked Max because she scored higher then him on an SAT, making his ice-queen mom very disappointed in him. There's also the geeky technopath student whose Jerk Jock dad didn't care either way about him, even after he stole his construction equipment and later buffed up in prison, although his particular hang-up was over a girl who naturally didn't care about him either.
Hilariously inadequate to the point that it was most certainly intentional, the villain of Meet the Robinsons became villainous and lost his mind due to a minor mishap as a child in which he lost his baseball team the game because he fell asleep partway through. It fits in with the moral of the story of moving on, because while his team was upset for a while, they got over it and forgave him, but he focused only on that minor mistake and it ruined his entire life.
Murdoc Niccals, resident Jerkass of the animated band Gorillaz, suffered a thoroughly unpleasant childhood at the hands of his father, his brother, various school bullies, and (if you believe him) the dinner lady who took his virginity when he was nine.
"I'm often asked why my behaviour is so crooked now, but it's a lot clearer when you see what manky loins I sprang from. 'Man hands on misery to man', y'know."
In Toy Story 3, Lotso became evil after his first owner lost and replaced him.
In the second movie, Stinky Pete is evil because he was an unpopular toy and no child ever played with him.
In Ed, Edd n' Eddy, Eddy's characterization can be summed up as Jerkass. That was because he was trying to emulate and impress his Domestic Abuser older brother. His breakdown and admission to this led to the others accepting him.
Virtually every Kim Possible villain there is. Seriously, it would be easier just to list the ones who didn't complain about everyone laughing at them.
The underlying reason behind Tai Lung's fury in the original Kung Fu Panda. However, after he is told that he had no reason to feel this way, it doesn't matter to him and the years of feeling slighted by Shifu have turned him completely cold.
By contrast in Kung Fu Panda 2, Lord Shen's feeling of being rejected by his parents in his youth is completely blown out of proportion in his mind considering they did that only after being horrified at him committing genocide against the Giant Pandas.
In previous Scooby-Doo incarnations, the villains in the monster costumes had viable reasons for donning their disguises. However, in Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated, the excuses are lame and pitiful, which actually makes them more villainous, especially since they are more dangerous.
Professor Monkey-For-A-Head : (Sees a fruit cart) Fruit carts?! I hate fruit carts!!! (The monkey fused to his head mumbles something to him) Why?! I'll tell you why! It's because a fruit cart, a STINKING FRUIT CART, killed my pa!!!
Regular Showfinally explains why Benson has one of the worst Hair-Trigger Tempers in the history of Western Animation: one night at the dinner table when he was a boy, his father encouraged him to yell "Pass the salt!".
Real Life
The Freudian Excuse has been used by defendants in real-life court cases, although nowhere near as often (or as successfully) as fiction and TV make it out to be.
It's not really a legal defense, except as a set-up for some form of insanity plea. No matter how much you explain your actions ("I'm only a murderer because daddy beat me" as analogue to "I'm only a thief because I have no money"), explanations don't form a legal excuse.
Psychologist Philip Zimbardo spends most of his book, The Lucifer Effect, talking about what causes good people to turn evil, but punctuates it with reminders that understanding the evil doesn't make the people any less responsible.
Joseph Fritzl. Turns out he hid his daughter and three of her children in his basement in Austria for twenty-four years because his mother abused him.
In The Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams recounts the horrific tale of how he had to wear shorts for the first four weeks of sixth form (having been forced by school regulations to wear them all through prep school, despite having already grown taller than most of the teachers). He says that if he ever "[came] across as a maladjusted, socially isolated, sad, hunched emotional cripple...then it's those four weeks that are to blame".
"It is my personal opinion that lyrics cannot harm anyone. There is no sound you can make with your mouth or word that will come out of your mouth that is so powerful that it will make you go to hell. It's also not going to turn anyone into a 'social liability.' 'Disturbed' people can be set on a 'disturbed' course of action by any kind of stimulus. If they are prone to being antisocial or schizophrenic or whatever, they can be set off by anything, including my tie or your hair or that chair over there." — Frank Zappa
Unfortunately in real life, while it is not always true, people are actually more likely to do bad things if their parents did them. For example, if someone was abused by their parents, they will be more likely to abuse their own children.
While it's certainly no excuse for his actions, Adolf Hitler had an abusive father *
Whom he believed had Jewish heritage, although it's ambiguous whether he actually did.
Some also suspect Hitler was a scat fan. To elaborate, his mother was very strict when it came to toilet training, which some believe caused him fetishize poo as something "dirty" and "forbidden", which these believers point towards his later atrocities, as they feel this fetish caused him to think of certain groups of people as "unclean". While it doesn't even remotely begin to excuse him, it is at least slightly better than "HE'S COMPLETELY INSANE".
Not really, since its just an extreme example of Single Issue Psychology if true. Which it probably isn't, the "fetishing poo" part anyway.
Sexual abuse is one of the factors that can lead to men and women becoming pedophiles, though current evidence suggests that this is a very, very small minority.
A recent book studying relationship abusers yielded interesting results (will add name of book when I can find it in this office). When asked why they abuse, they said it was because their mother/father/etc. abused them. When the interviewer called BS, telling them they would remember the abuse and not want to inflict it on others, nearly 60% of the abusers fessed up and said that wasn't why they abused.
One theory of Anti-Social Personality Disorder is that usually those who have it did not merely have Abusive Parents; rather, they had Abusive Parents who periodically would make some half-assed and short-lived attempt at discipline or generosity, or pretend that everything was "normal", for example to fool outsiders. Its the chaotic and random hypocrisy of the situation that really set them off, teaching them that punishment is arbitrary, kindness is a mask, and other such Family Unfriendly Aesops that they end up internalising, along with a shortage or total lack of more positive role models.
Subverted with Serial Killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who went on record to say that he took full responsibility for his actions, and that when he heard people trying to explain his crimes by blaming his parents it actually made him angry because they had nothing to do with it, and were as in the dark as anyone.
A lot of horrors, rushes to judgement, and misunderstandings come from people's inability and/or unwillingness to understand backgrounds and why people do what they do. Yes, people are responsible for their actions, yes Freudian excuses can be abused and even falsified, but we can't just blindly say "Oh, he/she should know better!" Yes, they ideally SHOULD know better, but a lot of people out there don't. If you are raised from day one with shitty value systems, role models, and/or environments to be aggressive, unsympathetic to others, and all those other bad things, there is an excellent chance you WILL end up that way. I'm completely serious; there are a SHITLOAD of people out there with that criteria. I don't condone ANY bad behavior, but I say without apology that we are fucked if we don't deal with how and why people became the way they were.
