Heinousness Retcon

A hallmark of nearly any long enough-running series (and several shorter ones) is that some antagonists will make a return, maybe just once or maybe their role will be significantly increased, often to the delight of the fans. But wait, did they just say the guy who only murdered his wife is one of the world's most prolific Serial Killers? Why is everyone acting like the environmentalist who attacked oil pipelines was always a psycho who wanted to blow up the city? And isn't that the same arsonist who was introduced laughing while watching people burn to death now insisting they've only ever lit empty buildings and would never hurt anyone? Why is no one acknowledging these drastic changes?

Simply put, you've encountered the Heinousness Retcon, a particular type of Retcon that focuses on taking an existing antagonistic figure and altering (potentially quite drastically) the heinousness of their crimes and/or their character.

Unlike Took a Level in Jerkass, Took a Level in Kindness, Villain Decay, or Motive Decay where their turn for the better/worse is (usually) presented as a development and acknowledged in-verse, in this case their past will be erased and everyone will act like they were always like this regardless of how much it contradicts their previous presentation.

Can be linked to or an extreme example of Flanderization, though it doesn't need to be (and unlike it there is no gradual process of change).

Occasionally, there may be a handwave about how key information simply wasn't known during the original encounter, although don't expect much explanation of when it was discovered or why it never came up before (cases where the information couldn't possibly be known beforehand only count if they directly contradict something which has been previously established, e.g. a guy who is shown panicking at the prospect of killing suddenly having multiple bodies buried under their house).

What matters is now they're either much worse or much better than they were beforehand.

There are a variety of reasons why writers might decide on this retcon. It might be the previous characterisation or intended role simply wasn't a good fit for the actor or setting, or the consequence of a character being more popular than expected and their role being expanded, or maybe it's simply the stakes have changed so much since their last appearance that the need is to be better/worse to continue fitting in/standing out. Another common reason is if the work wishes to explore a particular Aesop and needs someone to fulfill a specific role for it to work.

Compare Depending on the Writer where a character's heinousness is overall somewhat inconsistent rather than flat-out retconned, and Early-Installment Weirdness and Characterisation Marches On when character details are inconsistent due to them not being fully established yet. Draco in Leather Pants and Ron the Death Eater when it occurs in fan works rather than the actual work. Contrast Adaptational Villainy, Adaptational Nice Guy, Adaptational Heroism, and Adaptational Sympathy when a new version of the character is presented as morally different compared to the original. Adaptational Consent and Adaptational Self-Defense, where adaptations change a crime into either something less heinous or more heinous. See also Backported Development and Same Character, But Different.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Ludwig Revolution: Early in the series, jealous of Lisette's (Red Riding Hood) closeness to Wilhelm, Prince Ludwig tricks her into killing her parents by making her believe they sold her and her grandmother as sacrifices to the Wolf, in exchange for a bag of gold. Realising this made the character come across as irredeemable, later works retconned her parents into being horrifically abusive towards her, even forcing Lisette into prostitution from a young age.

Comic Books

DC Comics

• Batman:
  • The Killing Joke: In a possible backstory before becoming the Joker, he was shown to be a loving and caring husband and one of the key things that caused him to snap was the loss of his wife and unborn son, and Alan Moore's notes state he didn't think of the man Pre-Joker as abusive. Batman: Three Jokers presents this backstory as true for the "Comedian" Joker —and that he was indeed abusive to his wife, resulting in her faking her death, so she could leave him and raise their son without him.
  • The 1987 graphic novel Son Of The Demon had Bruce and Talia conceive a child. When Bruce nearly dies protecting her and the baby, Talia lies that she suffered a miscarriage and puts the baby up for adoption. When Grant Morrison integrated the events of this story into main continuity, they retconned Talia into drugging and raping Bruce to conceive Damian whom she raised with the intent of him taking over the League of Assassins.
• Eclipso: After spending the first three decades as a C-list villain and the dark half of Dr. Bruce Gordon, in the 1990's he was retconned as actually being the immensely powerful Spirit of God's Wrath (making him the Evil Counterpart to The Spectre, the Spirit of God's Vengeance). Initially, it was claimed he was only pretending to be a minor threat to throw the heroes off guard, though in later appearances this was forgotten and he was treated as always being a serious deal.
• Justice League of America: Whilst Dr. Light was always a supervillain (including being a literal case of Light Is Not Good, given not just his power, but the fact he's a scientist named "Arthur Light"), in an attempt to explain him going from a dangerous criminal to an idiotic fool Identity Crisis (2004) retconned him to have originally been a monstrous Serial Rapist and that his Villain Decay was the result In-Universe of a group of Leaguers' effectively lobotomising him in response to him raping Sue Dibny.
• Teen Titans: Geoff Johns' run revealed that not only was Deathstroke behind Cassandra Cain's Face–Heel Turn by brainwashing her with a special drug but he had also done this to Tara Markov in order to use her against the Titans. Keep in mind that in the original story, Slade was in a sexual relationship with the teenage Tara yet the story treated him as the more sympathetic of the two.

Marvel Comics

• Spider-Man:
  • Norman Osborn killing Gwen Stacy just to hurt Spider-Man was bad enough but Sins Past retcons the reason behind this action to being even more heinous. It is revealed that Norman had an affair with Gwen Stacy while both were in emotional turmoil — Gwen due to her father's death and Norman because of Harry nearly dying from a drug overdose. This affair resulted in Gwen giving birth to twins which aged faster than normal due to a mutation in the DNA they'd inherited from Norman. After killing Gwen, Norman found the twins, raised them as assassins, and poisoned their minds against Spider-Man making them believe he'd killed their mother. Sinister War would undo this with its own retcon that Harry was The Man Behind the Man (more or less), having arranged Mysterio to hypnotize Fake Memories of the affair into Norman and Mary Jane, when the children were actually clones created from Norman and Gwen's DNA.
  • Doctor Octopus's first love was a woman named Mary Alice who later died of HIV. In Superior Spider-Man Team-Up Issue #11-12, it is revealed that Norman Osborn was the one who infected her with HIV because he saw her as a distraction to Otto.

Other

• The Transformers (IDW) features a rare conversation between an Optimus Prime and a imprisoned Megatron. One in which Megatron claims he'd kill every last Autobot until the war was won, not merely because he would have to, but because he'd enjoy it, eventually breaking out and unleashing another series of attempts to wrest control of Cybertron from the nascent peace that had begun. Later, in the sequel series Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, said lines were recontextualized to be Megatron's Heel Realization, which sets up his long redemption arc throughout the final years of the storyline.

Fan Works

• Infinity Train: Voyage of Wisteria: Throughout Blossoming Trail, The Apex were presented as The Dreaded, widely feared and despised for their tendency to murder Denizens for their own sick amusement. Come the sequel, however, Charlie and Vaggie investigate and discover that most of these claims were Malicious Slander... and many of the actual instances of them killing Denizens were done in self-defense.
• The Recursive Fanfic Karmic Backlash retcons several events from The Karma of Lies in order to paint Marinette and her allies as total jerkasses:
  • In Karma of Lies, while Chat Noir's final confrontation with Mayura is Caught on Tape, nobody is close enough to realize that he didn't hand the Ring over willingly. Backlash retcons things so that Juleka and Rose witnessed what happened; however, they refused to set the record straight, allowing him to be Convicted by Public Opinion.
  • During the denouncement of the original story, Marinette tells Luka that she simply doesn't have any evidence of Lila's crimes. Backlash holds that she should have used the Miraculouses to gather proof through magical means, and that her refusal to bend time and space to her will in order to ensure Lila was properly punished for her crimes was far worse than Adrien's own Betrayal by Inaction.

Films — Live-Action

• Saw: Zig-zagged with John Kramer. In the first three films up to his death, he was consistently depicted as a fearsome yet professional mastermind who abducted people who had done something "wrong" but relatively light in their life, taunted or showed notable sadism about their struggles and (almost always) incoming fates, and wasn't above putting victims' relatives and children in harm's way. What was described of his backstory did little to garner him sympathy. Starting with the flashbacks he appears in from Saw IV onwards, while his previous acts and events are still acknowledged from time to time, he's portrayed in a more sympathetic light, with extensions to his backstory that retcon supplementary details from the Saw: Rebirth comic, and him appearing to have more genuinely good intentions as he's said or shown to be more restricted to outright criminals for the most part. That said, the present plots clarify (likely unintentionally on the producers' part) that he's noticeably gotten even worse, having pettier targets and more Kick the Dog acts in his posthumous schemes.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek (2009): Nero is a Romulan miner driven mad by Romulus's destruction from a supernova, who tries to kill Spock Prime, whom he blames, along with the Federation, for leaving his people to die, in a fit of rage and despair over the destruction of his homeworld, only to be dragged through a singularity over a hundred years into the past. Instead of realizing that he has a chance to save Romulus, he instead comes out of the rift swinging, destroying the Kelvin before retreating to search for Spock Prime, stewing in his hatred for twenty-five years so he can inflict the same pain on him, culminating with destroying the planet Vulcan. Later, Star Trek: Picard revealed that the Federation really did leave the Romulans to die, a decision that disgusted now-Admiral Picard so much that he resigned from Starfleet. Meaning Nero's hatred, though seriously misplaced, isn't unjustified.
  • Star Trek Into Darkness: Khan Noonien Singh is accused by Spock of having intended eugenics-motivated genocide on all those he considered inferior during his reign. This contradicts his presentation as a Benevolent Dictator in his introduction in "Space Seed", with it being stated that under his rule there were no mass killings and no wars that weren't started by other parties, his status even being a plot point as it causes the crew of the Enterprise to underestimate how ruthless and power-hungry Khan really is. That the events take place in an Alternate Timeline should have no effect on this as Khan's time was centuries before the departure point.
• Star Wars: The Sequel Trilogy does this with Ben Solo, aka Kylo Ren. The Force Awakens states that Ben's fall to the Dark Side involved him attacking his teacher Luke Skywalker, and leading the Knights of Ren in slaughtering all of Luke's other students. Then The Last Jedi reveals his attack on Luke wasn't unprovoked. Luke had sensed the Dark Side within Ben and considered killing him just long enough to ignite his lightsaber, before thinking better and lowering his weapon—but that was still enough to make Ben think he was being attacked and lash out. (The movie mocks the idea that this sympathetic backstory absolves Ben of his later crimes. Upon learning about Ben's past, Rey becomes convinced she can redeem him, and this fails spectacularly.) Then the tie-in comics leading up to the release of The Rise of Skywalker further absolved Ben Solo by revealing he didn't actually kill Luke's other students. The Knights of Ren did that without Ben's input, aided by a sudden thunderstorm (implied to be caused by Supreme Leader Snoke). Presumably, this was done to make Ben's actual for-real redemption at the film's end more palatable to audiences.
• Thor: In the first Thor film Loki appears to have been a decent kid and maintained a close relationship with his brother, only growing treacherous in adulthood due to a combination of envy, a misguided attempt to restrain his brother, and to appease his father. Both Thor and the Warriors Three express disbelief in the first film at the possibility that Loki could be a traitor. Come Thor: Ragnarok it's claimed that Loki has always had a treacherous side since childhood, with Thor relating an incident when they were 8 and Loki stabbed him as a "prank".

Literature

• Alice, Girl from the Future: The recurring Space Pirates duo Rat and Jolly U are a lot crueler in the first three books that feature them. They use blackmail and torture, occupy peaceful planets, and even try wiping out entire planets' populations. Further on into the franchise, they suddenly become much nicer without anyone In-Universe acknowledging it. In the later books, for example, Alice muses that Rat and Jolly U would never imprison anyone for the sake of obtaining secrets of new technology (never mind that it's exactly what happens in The Voyage of Alice), and Rat is furious at planetary tyrants who spent their lives conquering and oppressing others (having apparently forgotten he did the same some books earlier).
• The Belgariad: A frequent criticism of the books was that the series treats Zedar, one of Big Bad Torak's Disciples as unredeemable, even though it seemed apparent that he was under Torak's control and even though the series takes place in a universe where You Can't Fight Fate, and therefore his worst actions had to happen in order for the good guys to triumph in the end. David and Leigh Eddings thus felt compelled to address this in the prequel, Belgarath the Sorceror, which reveals that Zedar was always arrogant and obsessed with power, even back when he was a Disciple of Aldur, and then he was the one responsible for driving Belmakor, a briefly mentioned Disciple of Aldur, to suicide.
• Brig Scarlet Flamingo: In the earlier version, the crew of the eponymous ship, whilst always charming Corsairs, suddenly becomes a lot more moral at the end of the first part. In particular: in the first chapters, their captain has to stand guard over the female passengers of plundered ships, but starting from around chapter fourteen, the whole crew suddenly completely agrees that Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil. Especially noticeable is the case of Joseph: in chapter eight, he laments that he couldn't get his hands on a pretty girl like Yvonne, and in a prequel, written later but taking place weeks earlier, he admires her friendly, gentle personality as much as her looks and ceases all thoughts of even flirting with her when he finds out she is happily engaged. Word of God admits their plans for the story were altered mid-writing and they opted to write new chapters rather than revise the existing ones.
• Land of Oz: In the second book, it's revealed the Wizard overthrew King Pastoria in order to rule Oz and gave away the infant Princess Ozma to an old sorceress. When he reappears in the fourth book, it was retconned such that it was the Wicked Witches who did the evil deeds and all the Wizard did was rule Oz in the royal family's absence. This inconsistency was a long-standing mystery in the Oz Books; Hugh Pendexter III, in his short story, "Oz and the Three Witches" (published in Oz-Story 6, by Hungry Tiger Press, in 2000) manages to come up with a reasonable explanation.
• In Kate Daniels, Hugh D'Ambray starts off as The Dragon to Kate's evil estranged wizard-king dad Roland, who is, while honorable in some ways, a brutal and ruthless killer who will not stop at torture to get what he wants. When Hugh becomes a more sympathetic character, new details are added that soften the worst of his actions (ie, he wasn't actually torturing a teenager, he just told Kate he was in the hopes she would reveal herself by coming to stop him), and play up the extent to which Roland mind-controlled him.
• Warrior Cats: In Thistleclaw's first appearances, he's simply a bit of a War Hawk who, despite his aggressive nature, truly loved his mate and son and was loyal to his Clan in his own way. Fans were surprised when he ended up in the Dark Forest, so the authors made a point of explaining why he'd be there: in later books taking place in the same time period, he was depicted training in the Dark Forest while alive and using the illegal moves he learned there, encouraging his apprentice to blind his own son, calling his mate weak and not long after her death trying to persuade a she-cat younger than his son to be his new mate.

Live-Action TV

• Battlestar Galactica: Cavil is introduced at the end of season two as an Affably Evil Cylon who whilst still a murderous Knight Templar (like all Cylons), still comes across as friendly and even helps Tyrol come to terms with his psychological issues whilst undercover as a human. Come season three, he's now a vile, sociopathic piece of work who is suddenly torturing people and ordering mass executions at the drop of a hat, which gets to the point that other Cylons call him out, with no one remarking on this drastic change. Season four takes it even further by introducing major retcons that make him the true mastermind behind the Cylons' genocidal attack on humans and he generally Kicks The Dog as much as possible, doing utterly horrific things like gouging out his father's eye and then raping his mother out of spite.
• Blindspot: In his first appearance, whilst still goofy and fun-loving, Rich Dotcom is presented as a falsely charming, somewhat creepy criminal mastermind who casually executes one of his own loyal henchmen on the spot for an apparent failure, and is even described by Patterson as one of the most dangerous men alive. Come all subsequent appearances (before his Heel–Face Turn) and he's presented as a genuinely friendly wise-cracking hedonist whose crimes are centered in cerebral trickery and avoids violence at all costs, with no one ever remarking on this change. No doubt his unexpected popularity (leading to his drastically increased role) led to this softer characterization.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Warren Mears. When he was introduced in season 5, he was an awkward nerd who made a robot girlfriend to cope with his loneliness, then ditched her upon finding a real girl. He was, at worst, obnoxious, cowardly, and a bit misogynistic. In season 6, however, he reappears and takes a deep dive into evil, being the worst member of the Trio and a self-proclaimed Supervillain who becomes an attempted rapist, nearly kills Buffy and actually kills Tara. No one ever remarks on his change, with Buffy treating him suddenly trying to kill her as not surprising in the slightest. Originally the writers had intended for him to be a lackey to Tucker Wells, who unlike him (and Jonathan) had been truly malevolent in his introductory episode, but Tucker's actor was unable to reprise his role leading to Warren being drastically rewritten as the leader and Tucker's previously unseen brother Andrew becoming the third member of the group.
  • Amy Madison goes through this in the comic continuation. Although she Took a Level in Jerkass in the last two seasons of the show, her worst actions were trying to ruin Willow's attempts to quit using magic and casting a spell on her that turned her into Warren Mears, which were petty attempts at revenge on Willow for taking so long to undo the spell that turned Amy into a rat, being more powerful than Amy, and being forgiven by everyone for going dark side and trying to destroy the world, but didn't really do any lasting damage. In Season 8, she's retconned as having resurrected Warren and been dating him and acting on his orders during Season 7 and joins the Twilight Group, attempting to kill the Scoobies and the rest of the Slayers, with nobody acknowledging that this is in any way a step up from her previous villainous acts.
• Criminal Minds: Season 1's "The Fox" saw the team facing Karl Arnold, a family annihilator who took families he considered dysfunctional hostage, forced them to treat him as the head of the household for three days before killing them. He's presented as living out a fantasy (his own family leaving him due to his obsessive-compulsive behavior) and killing them in the end due to subconsciously understanding it can't last. Come his return in season 5's "Outfoxed" Arnold is now also a pedophile who sexually abused the children he took prisoner and it's stated his crimes were purely sexually motivated.
• Desperate Housewives: While he was alive, Rex cheated on Bree, didn't appreciate all the work she did as a homemaker, and was a little too quick to believe she tried to kill him. However, he was still sympathetic because he was proven right that Bree would judge him for his interest in BDSM, her obsessiveness made her housework feel like a burden on her family, and the evidence implicating Bree was compelling. After he died, it was revealed that he used to avoid his mother and make her think Bree was the one cutting her out of his life, flashbacks showed that Rex belittled Bree when she thought she could write a cookbook, and then it was revealed that he had a secret son.
• Doctor Who: This trope hit Sabalom Glitz badly in his third appearance. In his first two appearances, both during the The Trial of a Time Lord arc, he was a Loveable Rogue and Dirty Coward who was there mostly for comic relief. However, in Dragonfire he still has the same characterization but is stated to have sold his crew into slavery and in supplemental materials to have potentially committed statutory rape upon Ace, the Doctor's new companion. Although the Doctor's departing companion Mel goes off with Gltiz at the end of the story despite this. The role was originally written for a completely new more ruthless character (a Space Pirate Razorback) but John Nathan-Turner opted to bring him back as Glitz was popular, leading to the jarring inconsistencies.
• General Hospital: Soap operas are infamous for their never-ending character retcons, but Franco on General Hospital is a particularly egregious example. Originally created as a means for James Franco (the actor) to have some fun with daytime TV, Franco (the character) was introduced as a sadistic serial killer gleefully messing with peoples' heads when he wasn't messing with their lives and bodies. After the character supposedly died and Franco (the actor) had had his fun, the writers decided to revive Franco (the character) as a series regular worthy of some audience sympathy. To that end, a lot of his supposed crimes were revealed to have either been acts of defense or simply not happened. The rest were explained away by a brain tumor, showing Franco really wasn't so evil and sadistic after all!
• Jonathan Creek: Patrick Tyree the antagonist of "The House of Monkeys" is a cerebral extreme animal rights activist who murders Doctor Eliot Strange by sending him a self-titled letter laced with a powerful hallucinogenic that would infect him when he licked the seal. Come his return thirteen years later in "Daemons' Roost" he's now a huge, thuggish psycho whose plan for revenge against Jonathan is no more complicated than stalking and attempting to gut him and his wife with a knife. Likewise, Jonathan and Polly's reactions to simply hearing his name suggest he had always been like this.
• Lost: Early into the series Sawyer is presented as bigoted. In the second episode, his attack on the Iraqi Sayid is clearly racially motivated, with Sawyer believing he's a terrorist that must have brought the plane down solely due to him being Middle Eastern even though everyone saw the plane shake and break apart due to turbulence. While his Jerkass personality remains and he often feuds with other survivors, the racism aspect is instantly dropped after this confrontation, and no one, including Sayid, ever calls him out on it.
• New Tricks: Whilst Ricky Hanson's vicious personality and criminal nature are consistent throughout all his appearances, in Season 4's "Casualty" when breaking into a hospital to kill Jack Halford whilst he's recovering from his injuries, to get to him whilst he's sleeping Hanson attacks the nurse on duty, with there being a clear shot of her lying facedown unconscious or dead before he attempts to suffocate Jack. Yet when Hanson goes to trial for the events in season 5's "Spare Parts" the entire affair with the nurse is completely forgotten about with not even the heroes bringing it up, enabling Hanson to lie about his intentions and get off due to lack of impartial witnesses.
• Oz: Downplayed. Scott Ross is a total Jerkass and a Neo-Nazi who's a lecherous pervert to boot, but after he died it retroactively became a character trait that he was a compulsive liar prone to outrageous boasts, something he never demonstrated prior.
• Silent Witness: Nikki Alexander's father Victor was a minor recurring character between season 11 and season 15 where he's presented as a deadbeat schemer, cheater, and gambler, who is responsible for costing their family everything forcing them to leave South Africa and abandoning them when Nikki was a child. In the present, he is a remorseful man who wants to reconnect with his daughter but can't overcome his old bad habits right up until his death. Come season 23's "Seven Times" he's suddenly a vicious brute who regularly beat Nikki's mother whilst they were together, despite nothing like this even being hinted before especially in the many times Nikki called him out. Handwaved as Nikki being too young at the time to recognize the signs and only realizing it now due to similarities to the case. Although for several fans this was still hard to swallow, especially considering the number of other cases she'd handled that involved domestic abuse before this one (and the number of explicit flashbacks the episode showed).
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Ferengi go through several versions of their villainy potential getting continually downgraded during the show's run, mostly due to initial plans for them to be the main antagonists of ST:TNG falling through.
    • In "Encounter At Farpoint" it's heavily implied they're notorious for eating other sapient species, something which is never mentioned again throughout the entire franchise (save one novel that reconnected it as part of a propaganda campaign to make them look fearsome in preparation for meeting what they believed was a truly insane faction).
    • In their first appearance "The Last Outpost" the Ferengi are effectively caricatures of the worst parts of humanity (to contrast with how advanced and enlightened the crew of the Enterprise is) and presented as manic, vicious, greedy warriors, who are openly hostile and hell-bent on attacking the crew then looting the corpses. Following it being realised they were nowhere near intimidating enough to work in this role, later episodes switched to presenting them as, whilst still potentially dangerous and obsessed with greed, an overall cowardly race who only attacked when they clearly had the upper hand, and whose tactics leaned towards deception, subterfuge, and illegal activities.
    • Come Star Trek: Deep Space Nine the Ferengi were completely reimagined as a Proud Merchant Race whose only focuses are on economic pursuit and profit (albeit with not many moral scruples), with Quark outright boasting that the Ferengi had never engaged in active warfare during their entire existence, instead using their economic skills to force any opponents into making a quick (and often highly profitable) deals. Neither Chief O'Brien nor Worf, both of whom were aboard the Enterprise and involved in several Ferengi attacks, ever called him out on the discrepancy.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • Joran, the secret former host of the Dax symbiont, whilst always a murderer and presented as psychologically unstable, in his origin "Equilibrium" was a regular killer with only one victim, someone he had a motive to kill. In all his later appearances he has more victims and is full-blown deranged, with even Quark somehow knowing it, to the point that Ezri summons him to help her get an insight into the mind of a psycho when there is a Serial Killer loose on the station.
    • During season 4, the Klingon chancellor Gowron starts a war with Cardassia, convinced that they've undergone a Dominion-engineered coup, and then starts a simultaneous war with the Federation when they refuse to support him. In the season 4 finale, "Broken Link", Odo joins the Great Link and learns that Gowron has been replaced by a Changeling impostor. So, season 5's premiere episode, "Apocalypse Rising" has Sisko and several officers, including Odo, infiltrating a Klingon space station to expose Gowron as an impostor. But Odo discovers that Gowron's military advisor, General Martok, is, in fact, the true changeling impostor, and the Martok changeling gets killed, realizing the Dominion wanted to turn the Klingons and Federation against one another so that they'd both be too weak to defeat them. Later that season, Worf and Garak discover that the true Martok is alive in a Dominion prison camp, who's rescued and eventually becomes Worf's blood brother and chancellor after Worf defeats Gowron in combat.
  • Across the entire franchise, Khan Noonien Singh gets this. In his first introduction in TOS' Space Seed, he's presented as one of several 20th century despots. Albeit the most successful one of his time period. There's implication he's even a bit of a Benevolent Dictator, with Scotty and Kirk both expressing admiration for the man. Bones goes out of his way to mention that "There were no massacre under his rule". He's also small fries enough that figuring out his identity takes the bulk of the episode (And Khan's not putting a lot of effort in hiding who he is, basically just refusing to give his last name), and the crew has to hold a presentation to fill in everyone on just who the guy is. Basically, he's an historical footnote. One of many dictators during a troubled period of history. This continues into Wrath of Khan where anyone not familiar with the events of Space Seed don't know who he is - like Chekov's new captain. Later series paint him as Trek's version of Hitler. His name and deeds are now infamous among the Federation - particularly humanity. They basically are a byword for evil. He's so horrible that centuries after his time, Starfleet still has laws on the books against Genetic engineering just because they don't want another Khan to occur. In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Una recounts how the prejudice against genetically modified people is so strong she and her family endured enough persecution to meet Starfleet's criteria to count as a refugees. La'an, Khan's descendant, mentions how her family name got her bullied in school, and she has a lot of baggage about augments due to said bullying. Federation Admirals admit that the Federation's laws against Genetic modification are discriminatory, but humanity is still too traumatized by Khan's actions (which, again, took place centuries ago) that removing them is just not feasible. A Time travel episode features an alternate timeline where the divergence point is that Khan was killed as a child, and the absence of his reign apparently changed history so much that the Federation never formed, and Earth is a wasteland due to wars between humans.
• Supernatural:
  • "The Kids Are Alright": Upon being prompted to investigate them by Ruby, Sam discovers that Azazel had his mother's family, the Campbells, massacred to the point where he can't find any members who are still alive. Come season 6 and suddenly there are quite a lot of living Campbells, with them being able to pull together at least a dozen or so members, and at least two being specially stated to be the brothers' third cousins. At no point does either brother ask how they survived or even bring up the massacre.
  • "Are You There God? It's Me, Dean Winchester": The Vengeful Ghost of Victor Henriksen claims that Lilith slowly tortured him and all the other innocent officers to death after Sam and Dean left them in the police station, especially mentioning one poor woman she brutally flayed before his eyes. However, whilst very much in character for Lilith, when we saw the event play out in the previous seasons "Jus In Bello", she simply blew up the building they were in, killing everyone instantly.
• Timeless: Flynn, the main antagonist of Season 1, is presented as an international terrorist who attempts to undo several major historical events and casually murders several innocent people, sometimes for no reason. Come Season 2, the protagonists learn that Flynn did all that he did in an effort to defeat the true villain of the show, the Rittenhouse organization. Flynn and the protagonists then join forces, and all of Flynn's past crimes are mostly swept under the rug. From that point on, Flynn is much less bloodthirsty, and some of the other characters even develop a close friendship with him.
• Veronica Mars: In season 1, Veronica investigates the circumstances around the night she was raped and confronts Cassidy Casablancas, one of her initial main suspects. He admits that his Big Brother Bully tried to pressure him to do it, but he couldn't go through with it. This is accepted, with him just being a secondary character who is quickly dismissed from the investigation and has no further role in the plot. Come season 2, and Cassidy is revised to now be the calculating Big Bad of the season who is the mastermind behind several murders. With Veronica randomly realizing that he was lying to her before and really did rape her, all delivered in a single line.
• Young Sheldon: In The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon reveals that he always knocks three times because he accidentally walked in on his father, George, having sex with another woman, suggesting that he was a cheater. In the final season of Young Sheldon, we find out that the other woman was his mother, Mary, who was wearing German clothing and a wig and was roleplaying, so Sheldon assumed she was another woman since it was in the dark and he couldn't see.

Theatre

• Simon Boccanegra: Paolo Albiani is introduced as a cunning politician, morally grey but ultimately good enough for Doge Simon Boccanegra to make him his trusted advisor. A Time Skip of twenty-five years later, he is suddenly so evil that he kidnaps Amelia Grimaldi when the latter refuses to marry him and then poisons Simon after the latter condemns the kidnapping. And on top of that? Apparently, his villainy is so obvious that when Amelia first meets Simon and tells him Paolo is a wicked Gold Digger (and at that point, she has seen Paolo in person for several seconds), Simon immediately believes her, even though before the Time Skip, he treats Paolo as firmly an ally.

Video Games

• Fire Emblem:
  • The remake of Fire Emblem Gaiden, Echoes, establishes that the gods Mila and Duma were succumbing to madness by the time of the story and no one noticed, making Rudolf's actions look much more Necessarily Evil than they did in the original.
  • Zigzagged with Ashnard. Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance implies that he instigated the Serenes Massacre as part of his plan to get Lehran's Medallion and a Heron who could release the goddess within. The sequel, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn reveals that it was actually the Begnion Senate who orchestrated the massacre (which is more understandable, given their already established Fantastic Racism and Heron slave trade). However, Radiant Dawn also establishes that the "plague" Ashnard engineered to get rid of everyone else in line for the throne was via Blood Pact, meaning a lot of innocents must have died in the process, far more than previously implied. It also establishes he was an Abusive Parent who married a Dragon Laguz in hopes their child would be powerful, and when the child seemed normal he abandoned them both. So while his heinousness was downplayed for one event, it was ramped up in other ways.
• Metroid: Ridley started as one of the many Space Pirates bosses of the original games, and this remained unchanged for a time. There wasn't any connection between him and Samus. However, due partially to his popularity as his role expanded two adaptations rewrote him to give him a much more personal connection:
  • Metroid Fusion: The Japanese exclusive child mode was the first to show Ridley leading the Space Pirate raid that destroyed Samus' home planet and left her an orphan.
  • Metroid (Manga): Building upon the first example, it specifically has Ridley murdering Samus's mother, and being the cause of her father's sacrifice. Not only that, many years later Ridley kills Gray Voice, Samus's adoptive parent. The manga is stated as canon, thus later installations such as Metroid: Other M and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate would openly acknowledge Ridley as responsible for leaving Samus an orphan and killing her parents, giving them a deep connection for their enmity.
    Pit: So what's the story behind him and Samus?
    Palutena: Ridley killed Samus's parents when she was young.
    Pit: That's messed up!
• Puyo Puyo: Lemres goes through this during the installments despite not appearing until the sixth installment. In the fifth installment, Ocean Prince's transformation from a prince to a fish is first explained as the result of a curse against his will. However, when Lemres is introduced in the sequel as the wizard who did it, the prince says he asked to be transformed so he can escape his princely duties, lessening Lemres's responsibility (though he's aware that turning someone into a fish is not something that is praised). In the later series, his backstory is expanded to reveal that he never liked being a dark mage, and seeing the prince happy with his transformation made him realize that he wants to bring happiness to others with his magic.
• RuneScape: The main three Gods of the setting, Saradomin, Guthix, and Zamorak, were the Gods of Order, Balance, and Chaos, and were generally treated as good, neutral, and evil for most of the game's early history. Around the release of RuneScape 3 in 2013, aspects of siding with factions and making different moral choices in quests were made more central to the game's story. In order to make multiple factions look supportable, Saradomin's "Order" was re-interpreted as showing signs of tyranny, and Zamorak's "Chaos" was re-interpreted less as pure evil and more as subversiveness and creativity, and Guthix was Killed Off for Real. The alternate light on Zamorak and his follower's nature doesn't mesh well with some older quests and lore (some of which were outright replaced, like the Black Knight's Fortress quest with The Death of Chivalry), particularly in the case of the Kinshra which Jagex have tried in several cases to re-interpret as misunderstood and noble.
• In Shadow Hearts, Cardinal Albert Simon, who went by the name of his mentor Roger Bacon, successfully summoned a biomechanical fortress known as the Neameto Float to call forth the God from beyond the stars to cleanse the world as he believed that mankind was beyond salvation. In Shadow Hearts: Covenant this was retconned to be a misguided attempt to stop a former ally of his, Rasputin the Mad Monk, a actual warlock with dark powers in this continuity, from enacting his own evil plot that involved summoning another biomechanical fortress from which he planned to vent the flames of the ongoing World War I and watch the ensuing carnage for his own amusement.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: In his introduction in Sonic Adventure 2, it's implied Professor Gerald Robotnik built the Eclipse Cannon as a Weapon of Mass Destruction either due to the loss of his granddaughter Maria driving him to insanity (or else he was mad even before her death); with the twist being he planned to destroy the planet via crashing his space colony into it. Come Shadow the Hedgehog it's revealed the Cannon was in fact created for a good reason: to destroy the Black Comet — as Black Doom offered his blood for the creation of Shadow the hedgehog, in exchange for the Chaos Emeralds to conquer the planet. Of course, then Maria gets killed by GUN and Gerald in his grief and madness decides to repurpose both the Eclipse Cannon and the ARK...
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: The main story implies Mobius N destroyed the first City, killing all its inhabitants, on Z's orders in exchange for resurrecting M. This is treated as something of a Moral Event Horizon for N in-universe. Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed reveals that the first City's destruction was an accidental side-effect of stopping Alpha's evacuation of its people, which would've killed everyone else in Aionios if it'd succeeded. By extension, Z's ordering of this becomes a case of Evil Vs Oblivion rather than pure sadism.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney implies Miles Edgeworth frequently used forged evidence in his days as an "undefeated" prosecutor. The bonus case, "Rise from the Ashes", which was added to re-releases made after Edgeworth's Heel–Face Turn in later games, has Edgeworth state he never knowingly forged evidence, it was all just rumors. Emphasis on knowingly, however.
  • Downplayed with Manfred von Karma in Gyakuten Kenji 2. A flashback to the case that led to the DL-6 Incident reveals that the forged evidence von Karma used in the trial was prepared by someone else and he wasn't aware of the forgery. At the same time, he's still very much the same Amoral Attorney he is in the present, and it's still implied he forged evidence in past cases, and the flashback case also reveals he had the defendant interrogated non-stop to the point where his hair turned white, which is what he actually received his one penalty for. It's also implied that, through the events of this game, Franziska finally comes to terms with how horrible her father was.
• Danganronpa:
  • In Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, Junko announces that Izuru massacred the entire student council at Hope's Peak, leaving Hajime stunned. In Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School, it's shown instead that Junko herself set up a killing game resulting in the student council murdering each other in a matter of hours, and proceeded to frame Izuru.
  • In the first and second games, the "Ultimate Despair" group is portrayed as a Cult of Personality who were seduced by Junko's philosophy and sought to indulge and spread it by their own decision. However, Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School instead specifies that Junko created new members of Ultimate Despair by using an Ultimate-level Brainwashing technique (a video filled with subliminal messages that near-instantly brainwashed someone against their will), most notably absolving (almost) the entire cast of Danganronpa 2.
  • A significant plot point in Danganronpa Zero is that Junko isn't able to enjoy the Despair caused by the deaths of the student council because she doesn't really know any of the students involved and isn't personally attached enough to despair over their deaths. Danganronpa 3 completely ignores this, reintroducing her by randomly murdering a taxi driver just because she can.

Web Animation

• Spooky Month: When introduced in the first episode, the then-unnamed Bob Velseb was little more than a gag, holding Lila at knifepoint but happily letting go once Skid reminds them both that it's "Spooky Month" and Lila offers him some candy. In his second appearance in the fifth episode, "Tender Treats", Bob is revealed to be a serial killer with a high body count and taste for human flesh, and a flashback to the first episode shows that Lila called the cops on him moments after Skid left the house.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Choices", Nicole's parents appear to be straight up Abusive Parents with no redeeming qualities. Mary, in particular, seems to relish her daughter's success for selfish reasons. It's also implied they disown Nicole for getting together with Richard and refuse to attend their wedding. However, in "The Parents", they come off more as Parents as People, as it's shown that they pushed Nicole because they wanted the best for her. It's also revealed that they did try to go to Nicole's wedding, but they got the directions wrong. They also actually tried to contact their daughter, to no avail. The episode ultimately ends with them reconciling.
• Castlevania: When she's first depicted in the show's third season, Lenore, while initially seeming to be A Lighter Shade of Black proceeds to gaslight, dehumanize and abuse her prisoner Hector, even having dubiously consensual sex with him and enslaving him via magic during the act before going on to declare that she will make him her full-time Sex Slave. The fourth season, however, has Lenore and Hector on friendly terms, with Lenore being a Sympathetic Slaveowner and the two of them seem to get along just fine. The Sex Slave bit is of particular note, as Hector seems not to have been abused and is in fact happy to make innuendos toward Lenore, implying that Lenore was bluffing. The fourth season ultimately defangs Lenore's previously vile nature so much that Hector saves her life from Isaac's invasion and she ends up killing herself in an Alas, Poor Villain moment.
• Futurama During the Fox seasons, Fry's parents were depicted as quite cold and emotionally abusive, with his father berating him and his mother ignoring him in favor of sports. When Fry initially learns he'll never see his family again in the pilot, he cheers. Even when Fry's mom says she misses him in a flashback, she also remarks that all his "crap" is still in the house. The first movie and episodes in the later Comedy Central seasons depict Fry's experiences with his family as much happier. "Cold Warriors" still depicts Fry's dad as harsh but gives him the excuse of trying to toughen Fry up through tough love. "Game of Tones" is much more sentimental, as Fry gets to relive the last time he saw his family and has such a lovely time that he doesn't want to leave them, especially his mother. In the end, Fry ends up in his mother's dream, and it's made more obvious that she still loves him.
• The Simpsons: Kamp Krusty as a whole undergoes this in "Kamp Krustier". In the original "Kamp Krusty", the campers were treated genuinely cruelly, being forced to eat gruel, sleep in freezing barren shacks and manufacture wallets in what Lisa described as "a Dickensian sweatshop", with Mr. Black, the camp's owner, being a Card-Carrying Villain who revels in his awful treatment of the kids. In "Kamp Krustier", despite the premise being them being traumatised by the experience, the camp's actual cruelty and slave labour are forgotten about and the kids' bad memories of it are reduced to Faux Horrific Poke the Poodle offences like having to watch a bad production of The Parent Trap with the one seemingly genuine trauma a kid drowning trying to escape, turning out to be a mistake, while Mr. Black is nowhere to be seen and never mentioned. Also, Jimbo, Dolph, and Kearney are depicted as having taken part in the rebellion against the camp when in the original episode, they were the counsellors that the other kids were rebelling against following suffering their vicious abuse.
• Star Wars Rebels: In the season one episode "Droids in Distress", Agent Kallus gloats to Zeb about how he took a bo-rifle (a weapon only wielded by the honor guard of Zeb's species, the Lasat) from a Lasat he killed, and that he was the one who gave the order for the Imperial forces to use the T-7 ion disruptors (weapons meant to take down starships) to decimate the population of Lasan. However, during an Enemy Mine situation in the season two episode "The Honorable Ones", Kallus admits that he was given the bo-rifle after defeating its owner in combat (as per Lasat tradition). It is also revealed that Kallus wasn't the one who gave the order to use the disruptors, and had only claimed credit to make Zeb angry.
• Voltron: Legendary Defender: From the third to fourth seasons, Prince Lotor is depicted as a Noble Demon who, while cold and often ruthless, prefers to take planets with minimal bloodshed, and whose evil paled in comparison to his father Zarkon. The fifth season has Lotor perform a Heel–Face Turn. The show's sixth season then reveals that Lotor was performing horrific experiments on the surviving Alteans, all the while making their home a tribute to him due to extreme narcissism with his Quintessence-gathering being part of a plan to rewrite reality itself and wipe out the Galra Empire entirely. Thanks to these events, those who loved Lotor or at least respected him are horrified and feel betrayed, and Shiro even mentions that Quintessence, previously framed as a corruptive source of power, only brings out What You Are in the Dark to drive the point home that Lotor is viler than anyone could have predicted. The show then proceeds to re-retcon this in later seasons; while Lotor is dead, characters frequently express sympathy for him, and his Well-Intentioned Extremist and Tragic Villain traits are considerably emphasized.

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