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He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
"Enemies, as well as lovers, come to resemble each other over a period of time."
—- Sydney J. Harris
Not exactly a villain, but they act antagonistic enough that they might as well be. Something has happened to our Fallen Hero; his village is destroyed, his friends killed, his puppy roasted on an open spit, whatever. All that matters is that Its Personal, and he feels the law just isn't suitable enough (or has become too corrupt) to be of any use to him in settling the matter. Oh, sure, he'll justify his actions by claiming it's justice he's after, not vengeance, but anyone with half a brain can easily see that he's out for revenge...unfortunately, they also see that the more he hunts the cause of his woes, the more he takes on the villain's personality and mannerisms — something that our "hero" is too blinded by his single-minded goal to realize.
He may have good intentions — the fiend may well be too dangerous to be kept alive — but ultimately, his obsession with meting out due punishment twists him into a monster just as bad as or worse than the one he's hunting. And even before he gets to that point, it's nigh-impossible to turn him away; The Power Of Friendship and The Power Of Love were lost to him the moment the atrocity that sent him on his wild goose chase happened, and he feels Team Spirit is just a hindrance. Don't expect him to make a Heroic Sacrifice or Heel Face Turn anytime soon; if he dies in the process of bringing his nemesis down, it's usually with him crossing into Villainstown in his moment of glory. If he doesn't die...
See also Cycle Of Revenge and Knight Templar. Not to be confused with " eh kills aleins and doesn't afraid of anything" (sic) or Those Who Hunt Elves. Compare And Then John Was A Zombie, where the character becomes a literal monster. Obviously a perpetrator of Van Helsing Hate Crimes. If You Kill Him You Will Be Just Like Him is pretty much a sped-up version of this.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Negi Springfield, kind hearted and unselfish title hero of Mahou Sensei Negima has just taken the first irreversible step to becoming a monster like his teacher Evangeline (or so she says) by learning evil Black Magic in a rash decision to catch up with his father sooner. When sufficiently provoked by Kurt Godel, he started turning into a demon and almost killed him!
- The Black Magic isn't explicitly evil, it just runs off of and exacerbates negative emotions (hate, fear, desire for revenge, etc.) that Negi already has. The real danger is that he can lose control of it, and his negative emotions take over, turning him into a demon.
- Haruna also identifies Kurt Godel himself as being this type of person
 . He was an undeniable good guy as a kid, only to grow up into one of these.
- Ken, the pilot of Blade Gainer in Godannar is one of these. His obsession with killing the Mimetic Beast that killed his wife causes him to mercilessly hunt every Mimetic Beast down, without regard to how much property damage or civilian casualties he causes.
- However, he somewhat subverts this with his Loli companion Lou, who also shares his obsession on killing the Mimetic Beasts. His last words before his death to her is for her to not become someone like him. Lou continues to fight off every single Mimetic Beasts alone, but Ken's words prevent her to go down his brutal way.
- Scar of Fullmetal Alchemist; mainly in the anime (the manga version is decisively more antagonistic). Especially ironic since he uses a form of alchemy to destroy his targets: state alchemists.
- Hellsing treats the trope in a very interesting way.
- Alucard who is fighting monsters (mostly vampires) and self-admitted worst of them all is very clear on the point only a human could ever destroy evil which does not keep him for slaughtering them.
- At the same time he does his best to screw with Integra's mind e.g. when she has to order him to kill a squad of human police men. Whether or not this is because you need to be a monster to hunt monsters!' might be up to discussion.
- Nothing is left to interpretation when Alucard shows clear dissappointment and even grief over Father Anderson's decision to turn himself into a literal monster in order to remove Alucard's threat from the world. He fails but only closely.
- The Major is a very complicated thng. Yeas, he did not turn into a literal monster but stayed human (okay, an immortal human mind in a cyborg body) but his actions are clearly these of a monster. Also, not only is he not the one to defeat Alucard because without his monsters he would have been utterly useless he does not even achieve a total victory. Also, he did not even intend to 'fight monsters' to begin with but merely wage war out of fun.
- In the Meakashi chapter of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni, Shion becomes convinced that her family kidnapped and/or murdered her Love Interest Satoshi, and starts on a chain of murders of her own to avenge him. This leads up to the point where she murders Satoshi's younger sister after torturing her gruesomely, realizes she's become this, and then, just to underscore how much, decides, "What the hell" and continues on her murder spree with the intention of getting away with it all by switching places (again) with her twin sister (who Shion locked up and pretended to be since her spree began). And she would've gotten away with everything, if she hadn't snagged her shirt on a nail while climbing on a building, and then fall to her death. Top this off with the irony that her family had nothing to do with Satoshi's disappearance to begin with, and ladies and gentlemen, I give you Meakashi!
- The monster hunters of Claymore use demonic power to increase their fighting strength. If they use too much, they transform and become living examples of this trope.
- Code Geass's Lelouch, and Suzaku as well. The Emperor and Marianne were either a case of this or just big-time hypocrisy. Or maybe both, who knows..
- Naruto is centered a lot around revenge, mainly on Sasuke's side. He wants to fight his supposed evil brother and therefore joins the evil side.
- Later, he even goes so far as to want to destroy Konoha in order to avenge his brother's death..
- It gets worse. Just so he can kill Danzou, he leaves behind on the battlefield two members of Taka (his team), and a few chapters later, doesn't hesitate to kill The Chick of his own team to reach said Danzou.
- In Yu Yu Hakusho, Toguro's disciples are killed by a demon named Kairen, who challenges him to fight in the Dark Tournament. Toguro fights and kills Kairen, and wishes to become a demon himself (his appearance when using his demonic powers is somewhat similar to Kairen). However, this is partly due to his guilt over his failure to protect his disciples, and he wishes for an opponent strong enough to defeat him.
- In Last Exile, Alex Rowe skates dangerous close to this. Although he never makes the jump into full-out villain territory, his need for revenge again Maestro Delphine and the Guild is all-consuming, and at one point he orders his ship to open fire on Delphine's at the coronation ceremony of the new Empress, even though if they had shot her down the wreckage would have fallen and killed the new Empress (who is also the closest thing to a friend he has), and the combined leadership of both Anatoray and Disith, shattering the tenuous peace that had just now been established between them. Fortunately, his helmsman, Campbell, countermands his orders, advising the gunnery crews that 'the Captain's not himself'.
- In Berserk, Guts is every bit as cruel and sadistic as the Apostles he hunts at the beginning of the series. He deliberately tortures the Baron and Count in the beginning chapters, and after fighting with Rosine doesn't even stop trying to kill her even after an innocent girl who was tagging along threw herself in front of him. Currently, the only thing preventing him from completely going off the deep end is his need to protect Casca from the monsters he fights, and occasionally, from himself.
- And the worst part of this all? If he wasn't willing to sink to that level of depravity, he would have gotten killed a dozen times over. As bad as he is, everything else is worse.
- As if that weren't enough. Due to his unstable personality, which developed in the face of unreasonable adversity coupled with the effects of this trope, Guts now struggles with a rather powerful inner demon.
- Lord Genome of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann was a Warrior of Spiral/Rasen no Senshi who along with many like him from various Spiral Worlds failed in a battle against the Anti-Spiral/Han-Rasen at least one thousand years before the series' story took place. His failure led him to believe the one way to save humankind, as a Spiral life form, from complete annihilation by the Anti-Spiral was to subdue it through fear and drive it to an impoverished underground lifestyle so that human population would not exceed the critical limit of one million which would trigger the Spiral Extermination System. His daughter, Nia, completely unbeknownst to herself, points out the similarity of his ways to those of the Anti-Spiral, who demand "absolute despair," during the Battle of Tepperin. He responds by declaring that he is the one who "saves this world" and the "guardian of humankind." Eventually, he is redeemed in a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
- Ray Lundgren from Gun X Sword. At least the protagonist Van, while skirting this line, still made standards here and there about not ruining properties, taking innocents' lives, etc. Ray, on the other hand, will gladly kill any innocent things if it stands between his way and The Claw. Even he also claims that just as long as he can kill The Claw, he doesn't mind becoming a sadistic murderer himself.
- Howl, from Howl's Moving Castle (the movie, not the book) may qualify. He's literally becoming a monster, in his efforts to combat both sides of the war. It's outright stated that only Sophie breaking his contract with Calcifer will prevent this. Considering her methods, Suliman might qualify, too.
- Used in One Piece where one of the Big Bads, Arlong and his crew of fishmen, oppress humans with the Darwinist explanation that since they are physically more powerful than humans, they deserve to rule over them. Flip ahead several hundred chapters and it's revealed that they behave this way because they were once horrendously oppressed and enslaved themselves by humans that considered them subhuman and treated them accordingly.
- This trope is given a bit of a workout in Monster: Johan's antagonizing of Tenma and Nina is in many ways because he wants them to chase him and make this trope come into effect. In some ways he actually succeeded with Nina, who shot him during the events of the first episode; however, he utterly fails to break Tenma.
- In Shakugan No Shana all flame Hazes aside from the title charater have some elements of this and it is stated that most of them became flame because they have a personal hatred of the Crimson Denizens.
- It's clearest with Margery Daw when she is first introduced trying to kill a Denizen that she knows not is not only restricts his harvesting so to protect the balance and humans Friendly Neighborhood Vampire but is also under Shana's protection thus resulting in fighting someone who should be her ally.
- Char Aznable of Mobile Suit Gundam fits this nicely, up until he acknowledges to his sister that revenge wasn't the best idea later on in the series.
- Really? Nobody's mentioned Death Note? Light attempts to rid the world of evil by committing mass murder.
- This could actually be seen as sort of a subversion or a playful instance of the trope at first, as Light almost immediately begins killing to protect his identity. However, afterwards it's being played straighter and straighter as his killings quickly increase in frequency and cruelty. One could say that his lack of empathy gradually reinforced his belief that everybody's expendable in the face of his grandiose ambition, and ultimately leads up to him seriously considering killing his father and sister to further his ends.
Comics
- Batman's greatest fear is that he will become a character like this, if he hasn't already. In fact, this is the way many other heroes see him, and they are not entirely wrong (depending on who's writing him).
- The Punisher of Marvel Comics is often presented this way whenever he makes a guest appearance in more idealistic books like Spider-Man or Daredevil. However, in his own book it's a very rare problem that isn't best solved by shooting it in the face.
- Even in his own books he's portrayed as a profoundly messed up individual, more tortured machine than man.
- The Vigilante, Adrian Chase, slew himself for this very reason.
- The Lone Wolf, in Mike Barry's novels, ending up going so out of control that his own sidekick took him out. Mike Barry, actually Barry Malzberg, felt pleased to bring the series to this conclusion.
- And yet, he still worries. After 'The Slaver' storyline, he is troubled by the graphic extremes he went to rescue innocents and dispose of the bad guys. Of course, he just finished shooting some people in the forehead...
- In X-Men comics and especially the movie trilogy, Magneto - a survivor of the Holocaust - is so determined to ensure that what happened to him never happens to his fellow mutants that he himself becomes increasingly xenophobic and genocidal towards unpowered humans, quite happy to wipe them out in order to ensure mutantkind's supremacy and ultimately winding up little better than those who prompted him to begin his fight.
- A fact that former Nazi Red Skull pointed out.
- Rorschach from Watchmen describes this in great detail, recounting how he became a dark and gritty Anti Hero first (though he had a violent childhood) by brutally taking out his anger and disgust on a kidnapper who had butchered and fed a little girl to his dogs by setting him on fire. It even affects Rorschach's psychologist, who quotes the line from Nietzsche above. In fact, the chapter we learn this from is called "The Abyss Gazes Also".
- Indeed, this trope also figures in the Tales of the Black Freighter sub-comic: a lone, marooned sailor, convinced the titular ship will raze his village in his absence, returns to defend his loved ones on a raft of his mates' bloated corpses. He begins his bloody crusade against the raiders — except the raiders hadn't arrived yet. He ends up attacking his wife and, horrified at what he's done, throws himself into the ocean, where the freighter collects his condemned soul.
- General "Thunderbolt" Ross from The Incredible Hulk. This is made especially clear in Hulk: Gray, where many parallels between Ross and the Hulk are drawn and Ross grows more and more fanatical in his pursuit of the Hulk as time goes on.
- Spider-Man villain Supercharger was the son of a scientist who was obsessed with mapping the biology of superheroes and was given electric powers in the very accident that killed his father. So, the guy was embittered against superheroes and felt that they were ultimately more trouble than they were worth. Somewhat understandable. So he demonstrates that people with superpowers are dangerous by going completely crazy with his powers so people will see how dangerous he is.
- The Jedi Covenant from the Knights Of The Old Republic comics become so determined to stop the Sith from re-emerging that they're willing to kill their own apprentices to keep that from happening. Ironically, the Covenant turns out to be puppeted by a Sith Acolyte who makes up for his lack of power by being a borderline- Magnificent Bastard. When the leader of the Covenant finds out about this, he does a Villainous Breakdown, Villainous BSOD, and Heel Face Turn, in that order.
- Elf Quest has the Go-Backs as an example of a whole culture falling prey to this. All they wanted was to follow the call of the souls of their ancestors to the Palace of the High Ones, but the Frozen Mountain Trolls fought a war to keep them away from it. The Go-Backs didn't only only grow into ruthless warriors, but also took up a habit of their enemies that disgusted even other trolls: Eating the bodies of enemies they killed in battle.
- The Red Lanterns are an entire Corp of these.
Fan Fiction
- In Aeon Natum Engel, a Nazzadi (artificially created human-like race created for sole purpose of annihilating the humanity, but rebelled) is supervising a project of Replica soldiers (artificially created soldiers for sole purpose of annihilating the enemies of humanity, including the Nazzadi's creators the Migou, and they no concept of rebellion).
- The infamous Doom Repercussionsof Evil features the main character, 'John' who recklessly offing cyberdemons. A voice on his radio informs him that: "No, John. You are the Demons.". The story's twist ending confirms this in a terrifying way...
- One criticism of The Open Door is that while the Necrons are Omnicidal Maniacs, the nominal Type V Anti Heroes/Villain Protagonists are themselves highly culturally and militarily aggressive, The Culture On Dark Grey. Their aspiration to and failure to achieve The Unfettered status only serves to blacken their image further in the eyes of some.
Film
Literature
- As mentioned in film above, Willie Stark from All The Kings Men becomes the kind of politician he once meant to oppose.
- Bartemius Crouch, Sr. from Harry Potter, the head Auror (dark wizard fighter) during the first Wizard War, was later depicted as "having become almost as bad as those he was fighting", authorizing torture and use of lethal force.
- Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, making this Older Than Radio.
- Subverted in A Series Of Unfortunate Events, in which the quotation of the above aphorism is enough to convince the heroes not to drop a villain into a literal abyss.
- Robert Neville, protagonist of Richard Matheson's famous vampire novel I Am Legend, is seen this way for killing both the feral vampires and those who have enough sanity to attempt a rebuilding of society. In his defence, he didn't have a way or an incentive to tell the difference.
- The original ending of The Movie has him discover that they are all somewhat intelligent and realizes what a monster he's been. He is then able to reconcile with the vampires peacefully and leave. While in the theatrical ending he doesn't and dies killing them, which in light of the original ending fits this trope without actually showing it.
- The novel had it end with him being captured by the 'sane' monsters and realizes they exist before they execute him. The title of the novel is based on his realization, that he is a Legend...a legendary monster to them.
- The Eisenhorn novels set in the Warhammer 40000 universe chronicle in first person the struggle of Inquisitor Eisenhorn against the vile forces of Chaos while attempting to avoid being corrupted by them himself. As the series progresses, he shows himself more and more willing to use the devices of Chaos against itself, applying a sort of "ends justifying the means" logic to his actions.
- The danger of this happening is given as one of the reasons that the Imperium's Inquisition is so prone to slaughter everyone associated with an outbreak of Chaos, sometimes including the soldiers who helped them fight against it, since association with most enemies of the Imperium, but particularly Chaos, damns one in the eyes of the authorities. The Gaunt's Ghosts novels also deal heavily with this trope, particularly in Traitor General and later novels.
- This trope is in fact held to be inevitable by either Eisenhorn or his protege, Ravenor. One of them (I forget which) explicitly stated that the Jump Off The Slippery Slope is inevitable when you spend so long fighting monsters - what matters is how much good you do beforehand.
- In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the book that inspired the film Blade Runner, Decker meets a fellow bounty hunter, Phil Resch, who hates Replicants a good deal more than he does. He's got a good reason for that, and, considering what the other guys who went through the experience were like, he got lucky.
- This trope is a central theme of the book. Deckard often doubts that he is any more human than the replicants he is hunting.
- The philosophy teaching love interest in Jeffery Deaver's Garden of Beasts mused on the eponymous Nietzsche quotation with reference to the hitman main character.
- Subverted in Terry Pratchett's non-Discworld novel Nation. The heroine has been warning the hero about the Big Bad, who as typical in Pratchett is far more of a monster than any creature with a face full of tentacles. In the middle of fighting said Big Bad, this goes through the hero's head:
It was a strange, chilling thought, dancing across his head like a white thread against the - terrible red background. It went on: He can think like you. You must think like him.
But if I think like him, he wins, he thought back.
And his new thought replied: Why? To think like him is not to be him! The hunter learns the ways of the hog, but he is not bacon. He learns the way of the weather, but he is not a cloud. And when the venomous beast charges at him, he remembers who is the hunter, and who is the hunted!
- Madame Atomos, the most famous creation of writer André Caroff, is a Yellow Peril villain whose goal is to take revenge on America for the many lives lost during the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This includes Atomos's husband and children.
- Missionaries (by Lyubov and Yevgeny Lukin). Nerdy guys found a portal into past (as they thought) and tried to stop an European colonization via giving locals-to-be-colonized some more advanced weaponry. They succeed... but local development was a bit faster than they imagined and European exploration a bit slower. So it ended up much the same way, only roles changed, "ethanol-powered turbine polymaran rocket plane carriers vs. caravels" being obvious Curbstomp Battle.
How it came to this? How we who hated missionaries became missionaries ourselves before we knew! Missionaries of rocket launchers...
- In the Codex Alera by Jim Butcher, it turns out that Attis Aquitane, one of the villains trying to overthrow Gaius Sextus the First Lord, came to be where is because he was one of the best friends of Septimus, the assassinated Princeps. He was so disgusted with the corrupt politics of the nobility and Sextus' refusal to do away with it that when Septimus was killed, he decided the best way to end it was by using that same corruption to take over as First Lord himself.
- Mordeth from the Wheel Of Time series.
- In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Jacen Solo eventually comes to the conclusion that the only way to save the galaxy from an evil dictator is to attempt to become one himself. This is one of the leading reasons for his fall to the dark side and conversion to a Sith.
- This is fairly common throughout the Star Wars EU, namely, characters concluding that the power of the dark side is the answer in order to defeat a greater evil. See Luke Skywalker (several times, always ending with a Heel Face Turn), Yuthura Ban, Quinlan Vos, Darth Revan (possibly), Depa Billaba...
- At the end of the Warhammer 40000 Grey Knights novel Hammer of Daemons, Alaric expresses concern that the plan he concocted out to bring down Drakaasi's Chaos lords and escape makes him less of a Grey Knight. He even outright compares himself to a rebellion-fomenting cultist.
- Fëanor from The Silmarillion.
- The Kingpriest from Dragonlance started out as The Messiah, but as he became increasignly confronted with corruption in the world, his quest to purify it became more and more unhinged. In the end, he was hardly better than the people he was fighting and completely insane to boot. The scary thing was, up to the very end he was still charismatic enough to convince people he was still the same kind and pious man who took the throne decades ago.
Live Action TV
- One episode of The X Files featured an FBI agent who became so obsessed with "getting into the head" of a serial killer that he was chasing that he soon turned evil and began murdering people in a manner similar to that used by the serial killer.
- Dark Willow from Buffy The Vampire Slayer started out wanting revenge against Warren and his friends for what they did to her girlfriend Tara, but her rampage soon escalated into Card Carrying Villain territory, until she eventually tried to destroy the world. But unlike most villains who take this road, Willow was brought back from the abyss by Xander.
- Holtz from Angel. He is so obsessed with obtaining "justice" against Angelus that he follows him into the future, disregards all the myriad evidence of Angel's reformation, and does all he can to make Angel suffer psychologically, to the point of kidnapping his son Connor and raising him to hate Angel. Although at the end he seems to make a comeback when he mentions that love has overcome hate, this turns out to be a ruse; he even uses his own death as further fuel to get Connor to take his revenge for him.
- Holtz doesn't DISREGARD evidence of Angel's reformation, he openly acknoledges that Angel has changed, but Holtz doesn't care about Justice, it won't bring back his family. All he wants is Revenge. And Angel's soul and loved ones make him far more vulnerable to this than his old foe Angelis ever could be.
- Angel himself goes pretty far into this territory in season 2, and he seems to do it deliberately, re-shaping himself into someone willing to use evil methods to wipe out evil.
- The New Adventures Doctor Who Expanded Universe novels, which featured a Doctor whom, in the name of defending the universe from evil, would not only Shoot The Dog but subvert history over a hundred years to make sure the dog and the gun were in the right place and then blow up the planet to be on the safe side, often had him contemplating the Nietzsche quote.
- Let's not forget how very many Cybermen and Daleks the Technical Pacifist Doctor has killed. He has annihilated entire fleets of enemy spacecraft, and presumably, his own people. Don't leave out the various monsters of the week. The Doctor seems to swing back and forth on the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism quite frequently. In one case, the Doctor was attacked by creatures who wanted to steal his immortality. They got their immortality all right. Getting the Doctor personally angry is, in his own words, "not a good place to stand."
- As Donna says in The Runaway Bride, "I think sometimes you need somebody to stop you." - since he became the Last Of His Kind, the influence of a companion idealy should serve to keep him from becomming too monsterous.
- In his latest TV appearance, The End of Time, they go into detail about what was going on at the end of the time war. After both sides had done too much messing around with space wedgies and paradoxes, the fabric of time was irreperably damaged (though in a localized area). Countless Daleks and Time Lords alike were being slaughtered over and over again in endless time loops and Gallifrey itself had basically turned into hell. The Doctor didn't end the war through genocide, he ended it by cutting them off from reality and locking them all into their own separate bubble of time where the hellish war continues endlessly. If The Doctor hadn't ended it the way he did, The Time Lord leadership had decided to destroy all of reality though they (and they alone) would have been able to survive outside of time as beings of pure energy and information.
- Gordon Walker in Supernatural.
- All the Winchesters have been like this (mixed in with that good old Death Seeker attitude) at some point. John was this when his wife died, Dean was this after John died and he had that big-secret-that-totally-wasn't weighting on his shoulders and Sam was this after Dean died in Mystery Spot.
- Eric van Helsing from Young Dracula is a comedic version of this.
- Dexter's eponymous Villain Protagonist inverts this as his fight makes him less of a monster than he would be otherwise. He's more a combination of Evil Versus Evil and Even Evil Has Standards.
- HRG in Heroes. While much of what he does is for Claire, working to capture the monsters in Level 5 shaped him into the unscrupulous operative he is today
- Peter is also headed down this path in Season 3 of Heroes, when taking Sylar's power in order to save the world has caused him to also gain Sylar's hunger
- One season 9 episode of Law And Order Special Victims Unit had a serial killer found dead in the same manner as his victims. Turned out it was the lead investigator, who killed him because her mentor committed suicide from the stress of trying to catch him. However, it meant she inadvertently killed his last victim, who had been abducted but not killed yet. When Olivia takes her back to her apartment to get the gun, she tearfully quotes the page title word for word before blowing her brains out.
- This was the origin of the title character in Xena Warrior Princess. Xena first raised an army to protect her village from a warlord, but her brother was killed in the process. She proceded to actively seek out possible enemies of Amphipolis and destroy them, it was not until her first encounter with Caesar that she abandoned this as a excuse.
- CSI New York had a soldier-wannabe who went off his meds and became paranoid that America "wasn't ready" for a terrorist attack. So what does he do? He plants bombs and blows people up, while playing Criminal Mind Games with Mac and the cops.
- A certain character from 24 in season 7 displays this trope.
- The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica saw the Resistance on New Caprica using suicide bombers against the Cylon occupation force. Colonel Tigh gives us this quote.
"Which side are we on? We're on the side of the demons, Chief. We're evil men in the gardens of paradise, sent by the forces of death to spread devastation and destruction wherever we go. I'm surprised you didn't know that."
- A patient, Curtis Ames, from ER was a good man who crumbled under the loss of his right arm, the divorce of his wife, his children calling another man "dad" and losing his job. He sought to get even with Kovac, who had treated him.
Tabletop Games
- In Warhammer 40000 The Nighthaunter's backstory is made of this trope. Of course, since he's the grimdark version of Batman, what can you expect?
- Also: Radical Inquisitors, Commander Farsight some of the time...40K is the only game where even the monsters can succumb to this trope.
- The literal version is suspected with Comissar Yarrick, arch-enemy of the Orks- he's fought them for so long, he's started acting a bit like one, and official models always have him painted with a tinge of green...
- The Orks do think that he's Orkier than they are, and with their latent psyker abilities, maybe they're projecting Orkiness onto him.
- Forgotten Realms has entire elven god, Shevarash, dedicated to nothing more but hatred and vengeance to Lolth and drow (though he readily beats anything Always Chaotic Evil in absence of drow targets). Aside of other traits "endearing" to Seldarine and other "good guys", he's little too close to the main local dark deity who make Lolth look rather nice by contrast. Elves who aren't immediately endangered and not desire some vengeance aren't too enthusiastic about his followers either. "The holy symbol of the faith is a broken arrowshaft that has been dipped in drow blood and blessed by a priest of Shevarash." (Demihuman Deities)
- Hunter The Vigil has this as an explicit risk of taking up the Vigil. Too many hunters have broken in the face of the world's supernatural threats and gone insane, becoming either maniacal killers or, worse, Slashers.
- In Legend of the Five Rings the Kuni Witch Hunters are the people who hunt down people who have become tainted by oni/the Shadowlands. In search of these people and in search of how to destroy the Shadowlands, they frequently become tainted and summon Oni.
- In the prologue of the Dungeons And Dragons book Fiendish Codex II, this is how Asmodeus transformed from a powerful angel to the ruler of all the devils. He started by fighting off the demon hoards, and began to willingly take on the traits of the demons to better fight them. Although, it could be argued that he was always evil from the start and the changes may have been solely physical in nature.
Video Games
Web Comics
- Dominic Deegan has a literal version of this with Karnak.
- Professor Broadshoulders, from the webcomic Zebra Girl, is obsessed with destroying demons and people tainted by demons, to the point where he sacrifices his very soul, giving into his own demonic curse and physically transforming into a demon, to destroy Sandra, the titular zebra girl, despite the fact that Sandra was still a good person despite being transformed into a demon herself. Appropriately it was Broadshoulders' attempts at destroying Sandra that finally pushed her over the edge, turning her away from wanting to cure her condition to indulge her demonic hunger for pain and torment.
- Vaarsuvius from OotS has recently become a very literal example of this trope.
- However, unlike many, s/he has since "recovered" and regrets hir actions.
- And Redcloak, depending on your interpretation. Although in his case it's less a matter of fighting with (against) his enemies and more fighting with (alongside) Xykon.
- This is invoked in GastroPhobia: when Bambikles seeks to avenge his mother by killing the monster who took her life, he's told that "To kill a monster, you must become a monster." So he does.
- Arguably, Baron Klaus Wulfenbach from Girl Genius, if not personifying this trope, certainly straddles the line. He is referenced on many occasions as being capable of acting very ruthlessly and, if need be, wiping out whole cities, but does it because the previous anarchy of the Long War between the Sparks of Europa was arguably worse.
- As is usual, Penny Arcade gives us quite the atypical example.
- the Vatican and Aesir churches of Cry Havoc level cities to destroy a handful of deamons. Although seeing as the last time their foes congregated, a decade long war that killed half of the worlds population occurred, they may be more justified than most.
Web Original
Western Animation
- Depth Charge in Transformers: Beast Wars snubbed most of the Maximal cast to continue his hunt for Rampage, who had murdered the colony he was supposed to protect beforehand. The one time he decided not to put his vendetta before an important mission, he was ambushed by his prey, and chose to finish him off in a suicide attack rather than return to his duty.
- Being frequently AWOL allowed him to pull off several Big Damn Heroes moments, but that doesn't excuse his not being there fighting in the first place. He also utters the trope's Stock Phrase word-for-word: "It's not revenge I'm looking for, it's justice."
- In his second appearance he was busy fighting with Rampage while the Maximals carried out a very important mission regarding the retrieval of the security system from their old base. After his fight with Rampage he decided to check up on the Maximals and see if he could help, but ending up causing a blunder (thanks to lack of communication) that lost the system to the Predacons.
- Depth Charge even went head-to-head with Optimus over it, when he showed no remorse at Cheetor's death and didn't care about what really happened to him. Optimus-fucking-Primal had to threaten him with a lobotomy to get an answer and some respect. Of course, one Depth Charge opened up a bit he revealed a fondness for Cheetor.
- General Wade Eiling in Justice League Unlimited became so obsessed with taking down the show's titular League (and metahumans in general), that he injected himself with a Nazi-created Super Soldier serum so he could more readily combat them. His only claim to fame after this? Beating up on seven non-powered second-stringers and causing the same superhuman fear-mongering from the citizens he swears he's protecting from the League.
- Hama of Avatar The Last Airbender.
- Ditto Jet for that matter, although he calmed down a little eventually. And by "eventually," we mean "too late."
- Also that random Earth Kingdom general who was obsessed with forcing Aang into the Avatar State.
- On ReBoot, little Enzo Matrix never took the presence of Lawful Evil Megabyte too seriously, until Megabyte finally took over Mainframe, exiled The Hero Bob into the WWW and pushed Enzo into despair until he was trapped in games. When Enzo came back much older and much more serious, killing Megabyte was all he could think of. There was even an episode where in a simulation of Mainframe, he was in Megabyte's body and easily acted the part unconsciously. All this anger towards a virus that once gave Enzo a guitar for his birthday .
- However, giving Enzo a guitar was more a 'Rule Of Funny' moment as well as pressure to keep it 'kid friendly' from the meddling executives. Once free from said executives, they were free to make a much darker and less kid friendly story where Megabyte showed his true colors.
- Agent Kent Mansley from The Iron Giant, whose fanatical anti-communist efforts make him unable to accept the titular robot's overtures of peace, even when the general he was advising was willing to stand his soldiers down.
Truth In Television
- Truth In Television, as Winston Churchill said "The future fascists will call themselves anti-fascists" This is often the case where a dictator is overthrown by revolutionaries (especially Communists). The leader of the rebellion becomes the head of state, and a few years later, everything's back to the way it was before. This isn't a recent development, either; see France under Robespierre.
- As illustrated in Animal Farm.
- And specifically stated in 1984.
- For that matter, a few establishments dealing with rebellion, civilised or not, have turned to Knight Templar methods little better than those they oppose.
- Malcolm X. To the point where he said things like "The white man is by nature a devil and must be destroyed." He got better. Magneto is based on the idea of a Malcolm X that didn't get better.
- Specifically it was his pilgrimage to Mecca where he saw Muslims of all colors worshiping together.
- The human immune system, in the process of destroying intrusive micro-organisms ("fighting monsters"), can get over-sensitive and start reacting to harmless things like dust, causing rashes and eczema, amongst other allergic reactions of varying severity, that have very real effects on lifestyles. In fact, the human immune system is pretty bad on this account; if the accounts are to be believed, cytokine storms were responsible for quite a lot of deaths of influenza victims, instead of the virus itself.
- In Japanese mythology, a person who kills many Yokai (1000 yokai is the variant this troper is most familiar with) will themselves be transformed into a Yokai. This occasionally gets played around with in games, manga and anime from the country — for example, in La Pucelle, this is the basis for a Non Standard Game Over, one that gets taken more or less as canon in the Disgaea series. And in Inu Yasha, the murderous Bankotsu of the Band of Seven manages to transform his weapon into a demonic blade by using it to kill 1000 yokai and 1000 human warlords.
- While Stop Having Fun Guys are insufferable pricks, unexposed casual players must be careful not to let them get to them. Overwhelming hatred for SHFGs can turn one into a Scrub.
- Political figures of the nation of Israel have occasionally suggested they'd rather re-enact the Holocaust on the rest of the world than risk it happening to them again- and have closer than you'd think to following up on that. When Israel developed nuclear weapons, they reportedly printed "never again" on the first few bombs. So Yeah.
- Some gangs and citizen militia started out trying to protect their people from the predations of criminals in the face of at best hands-tied and at worst outright brutal and corrupt cops. However, it didn't take too long for them to get into terrorising people, running extortionist protection rackets and generally being little different from the criminals they were meant to fight.
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