Jumping Off The Slippery Slope - Television Tropes & Idioms

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

— Old proverb

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

See madness, as you know, is... like gravity. All it takes is a little push!

— The Joker, The Dark Knight

The heroes encounter someone who engages in behavior that is an uncomfortable shade of gray. Someone who is just killing off enemies/criminals, or fighting an ally-of-convenience of the good guys.

There is an implication that what that "someone" is willing to do makes the good guys look negligent and a little under-committed to the cause of good.

Thankfully, before the heroes have to question their own morality too much, said gray suddenly turns black. The "gray" start engaging in obvious "too far" behavior, usually with a touch of fanaticism, becoming Well Intentioned Extremists. The good guys no longer have to ponder the ramifications of the original behavior. Status quo is restored.

The Aesop here is supposed to be the Slippery Slope Argument

, but it is fast-forwarded due to time constraints.

This is the opposite of a series recognizing that some people have to Shoot The Dog, a lucky character may realize they've Kicked The Wrong Dog.

Compare with Contrived Coincidence, Moral Event Horizon, and Motive Decay.

Sometimes this happens with the protagonist, leading to Moral Dissonance or What The Hell, Hero?

Examples:

Anime

Death Note: Yagami Light begins using the supernatural notebook to rid society of criminals, but soon his black list expands to include anyone who stands in his way for any reason, starting with the FBI. Along the way, he coolly manipulates the feelings of both people and shinigami. Repeatedly stating that he plans to become the god of the new world he is trying to create doesn't help matters, either.
- To be fair though considering what he wants to achieve having a line to cross would be "stupid."
- For that matter, Mikami Teru uses the notebook to eliminate minor and reformed criminals.
- Declaring that he will eventually execute people for being lazy implies that Light has done away with the slippery slope completely and simply jumped off the metaphorical deep end.
Recently Double Subverted in Naruto Sasuke went from betraying his village to kill Itachi for killing his clan to wanting to destroy the entire village because some (but not all) of the higher ups of it convince him to do it (even though his clan was planning to start a civil war). However, he then told his teammates that he was only really gunning for the top brass and only siding with Konoha's enemies for now. But then, he tells Madara that he wants to destroy it and every man, women, and child in it. Of course, all of this just throws his goals even further into the air.
In Code Geass, Lelouch Lamperouge wanted to destroy the Empire of Britannia (despite being an ex-Imperial Prince) and started to organize La Resistance. However, as time passes, he becomes more hardened and crazy, going as far as massacring children and unnarmed people for possessing Geass powers and being a part of a Britannian-sponsored cult... which trained or brainwashed the children in it to use theirGeass to make a guy murder his own allies. Let us not forget Rolo, THE Tyke Bomb of the series, was raised there too.
- To be fair to Lelouch, it is hard to see a way to justify letting those kids live. With those sorts of gifts and lack of human contact, they'd be destined to become more Maos and Rolos, that is, not actually dangerous to the world as a whole like Lelouch or The Emperor, but plenty dangerous to society at large. Could a whole generation of Geass-using sociopaths prowling the streets possibly be a good thing?
  - However, beyond just the children brainwashed and given Geasses, there were also scientists present at the laboratory, who were also killed. Also, it should not be forgotten that Lelouch originally intended to control the Geass Cult to become more powerful than The Emperor.
- Then there's Suzaku who finally decide to have end justify means and drug Kallen to get a confession out of her. Unlike Lelouch, he doesn't go through it.
- And of course, we have The Emperor and V.V, who after suffering all his pain in the childhood, do the exact same thing fifty years later, even though they said they will eliminate lies. Not to mention V.V. is to blame for ordering the brainwashing and training of Rolo and the kids....
- In general, everyone in Geass flew off slippery slopes.
  - Except, ironically, Euphemia, who actually goes on a rampage, killing Japanese people... but only because she was under the power of Geass and was unable to stop herself.
In Mobile Suit Gundam 00, the Trinity group shows up and starts actually destroying military bases and arms manufacturers. Most of the battles up until this point had hundreds of civilian casualties, with one battle threatening to basically screw the entire world with nuclear radiation. Through destroying military installations instead of waiting for war to start, Trinity is preventing these needless deaths. However, the "it's not right to attack before you're attacked" excuse is played, Trinity is painted as villainous when it's actually clearly good... and it suddenly starts blowing up random buildings for no reason. Let's also point out that the villains out to cause perpetual war for personal profit are never portrayed in nearly such a negative light.

Comic Books

The majority of heroes who meet The Punisher in the Marvel Universe are usually Technical Pacifists, so most of them think that this Anti Hero has jumped off and is now gaily frolicking at the bottom. In fact, any Anti Hero who lives in a verse that's on the idealistic side of the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism could be said to have jumped, at least from an in-universe perspective.
- Averted sometimes in the Marvel Universe when he doesn't kill (for various reasons, mainly when having to team with the majority of the protagonists), and averted in his MAX series where to date things have been almost entirely on the cynical side and... Then again, arguably he's not treated that nicely there either, it's just that his targets are apparently much, much worse, and the reason that he keeps a select few alive? Well...
  - Garth Ennis admitted that his sheer anger regarding human trafficking and sex slavery led to the infamous arc "The Slavers," which has Frank Castle graphically disembowel a slaver, throw his sister face first into a window repeatedly until the shatterproof window breaks off from the frame, and then set their father on fire... even after Frank admits that this won't make a big difference and that he's just going after their group, and at the end his inability to really help the victims.
Iron Man started the Marvel Comics Civil War Crisis Crossover with a perfectly valid idea: that superheroes should be held legally accountable for their actions, and should all register their identities with the government to help enforce that. Then they started conscripting registered heroes, arresting everyone with powers who didn't register (whether they intended to use them or not), restraining former friends in secret prisons, turning loose mass-murdering supervillains so they can work as government-sanctioned enforcement agents, cloning a god, etc. etc., turning supporters of registration into strawman politicals. (Tony's fans complain that he didn't jump, he was pushed by the writers.)
- The Clusterfutz is made only more mindbending when Mark Millar, the man who wrote most of the mainline story, is basically on the record that, at least in the main book, the people we were supposed to agree with were the Pro-registration people. Even after countless upon countless What The Hell Hero moments. And Sally Floyd....Oh, Sally Floyd...
Often happens in X-Men comics, with debates about the rights and wrongs of mutant cures being short-circuited by revealing the cure is poisonous, or was created by illegal experiments on mutants, or something similar.
- Went back-and-forth in Whedon's Astonishing run. The cure is a threat to mutants - but so many mutants want it - but it was developed in a horrific way - but it was all done because an alien was trying to save his civilisation - but that civilisation was horrible - but what about the children?

Film

Anakin in Star Wars. Specifically, note how quickly he goes from agonizing over his role in Mace Winu's death to killing children being raised by the Jedi without a problem.
- Also, in the EU, Jacen Solo's means to an end actually make sense, even after he becomes a Sith. However, you realize a few books before the finale that he's completely lost touch with his original philosophy and is just retroactively trying to justify his insane actions.
The character of Amanda in the Saw movie series makes Jigsaw look downright merciful by the third movie.
Magnum Force has Dirty Harry dealing with cops who have been executing guilty criminals who escaped justice due to technicalities. When he refuses an offer to join them, they try to murder Harry, thus proving they didn't have a complex or unorthodox sense of justice after all, they just like killing. Just once this troper would like to see this theme revisited in a film or TV show where the criminal-executing folks actually just end up facing the music for their actions, because it turns out they really are idealistic and refuse to murder innocents or people who get in their way.
- Dexter comes close. But this troper finds Yagami Light a lot more realistic.
Crimson Tide is often noted as quite admirably morally complex for a Jerry Bruckheimer film, with Gene Hackman's character given quite a bit of sympathy in wanting to launch the missiles. At least until the ending, when he makes a thinly veiled racist comment to Denzel Washington, which Washington promptly reverses on him.
- There's also the fact that Gene Hackman's character gets increasingly loud as the movie continues, yelling and screaming at people, while Denzel remains calm and logical, which serves to show you just who's right.
The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent wasn't so much "jumping off" as much as the Joker kicked him off it.
The Brave One showcases a woman's gradual escalation from being a rape victim to buying a gun to feel safe, to inserting herself into dangerous situations so she can shoot predators in self-defence to killing a crimelord in the heat of the moment after being shoved to outright premeditated revenge killing of her rapists.
- Which is actually less of a jump and more of the slippery slope slide into violence.
Sweeney Todd goes from wanting to just get revenge on two specific people to randomly murdering people off the streets who won't be missed and having them baked into pies about halfway through the movie. (Same thing goes for the stage version as well.)

Literature

This trope is Older Than They Think. It appears in the classic adventure book, Around The World In Eighty Days, where the heroes, a British officer and a native guide secretly observe a procession to suttee, the ritual self-immolation of a widow in the funeral pyre of her husband. Phileas Fogg is outraged at this, but persuaded not to interfere in part because he has no right to dictate his values to a woman in another culture doing this by her own choice. However, the native guide realizes that the woman is drugged and thus obviously not doing this voluntarily. Thus the suttee to be performed is revealed to actually an act of mere murder and thus the heroes are now free to intervene.
- Possible example of Truth In Television; some Hindu widows were indeed compelled to commit sati, either by social pressure or by physical force.
  - Some? How do you take social pressure out of the equation, in the days when it was legal, traditions permeated everything, and the alternative to to the pyre was.... what?
  - If the widow did not throw herself on the pyre, tradition states that she will become a part of the "unclean" caste, and be doomed to a life of poverty, etc. See Deepa Mehta's film Water, which is about the life of widows in early twentieth century India - one of them a child of eight, who was married at five, and expected to live the rest of her life in an ashram away from her parents after her husband died.
  - Another alternative was to marry her husband's brother (or other male relative).
In Damon Knight's short story "The Analogues", a scientist invents a procedure to create a "better conscience" in the form of hallucinations that prevent you from committing crimes. This raises a lot of questions about the morality of removing free choice, but then it turns out the scientist plans to use it to take over the world, and has already used it on the protagonist to prevent him from stopping the plot.
Eragon went from wanting revenge to strangling unarmed guards and killing left and right.
King Erius in Lynn Flewelling's Tamir trilogy starts by taking the throne from his insane mother, who was executing people left and right, in defiance of the divine edict that for no apparent reason essentially promises Bad Things if a man ever rules the country. Bad Things happen. He then proceeds to institute sexist practices and start killing off his female relatives...

Live Action TV

Star Trek had numerous cases of this. For example, in Star Trek Voyager a race of holograms rebel against a race that had been hunting them, and start freeing all other holograms in the area. Even Voyager's holographic doctor joins them. But then they start killing off anyone who might enslave an intelligent hologram.
- Then they move onto anyone who uses humanoid holograms at all, regardless as to whether those holograms are intelligent. Then again, their leader is a religious fanatic.
- In the original series episode "The Ultimate Computer", Starfleet toyed with replacing Kirk with a computer, raising questions about the nature of progress. Naturally, the whole moral issue became moot when the computer turned evil.
Xena Warrior Princess had Najara, a character who either converted or killed criminals. Rather quickly, Najara is revealed to be insane, and can't tell the difference between obvious criminals and lesser offenders.
Supernatural had an episode where the Winchester brothers met a rogue vampire hunter. Despite seeming like a decent enough chap and a worthy ally, the more experienced hunters tell the boys the guy is bad news. The new character makes a swandive off the slope when the local vampires turn out to actually be peaceful and swear not to kill humans, yet he still attempts to slaughter them - then goes out of his way to attack the protagonists for no adequately explained reason.
- No adequately explained reason? They were protecting the vampires.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Soon after Faith's arrival, the enjoyment she gets from slaying begins to make Buffy question the job. But just as Buffy is coming round to Faith's way of thinking, she does something that cements her position at the bottom of the slope, and Buffy's dilemma is over... although she still agonizes about it, until Faith makes a point of attacking Buffy's circle of friends directly.
- Another example occurs in the season 2 episode "Phases". A werewolf hunter shows up and at first there appears to be a moral dilemma over whether it is morally acceptable to kill werewolves (who kill people, but aren't in control of their actions). Fortunately, the hunter quickly reveals himself to be evil, and so an exploration of whether it is moral to shoot the dog is avoided.
Battlestar Galactica: The "Pegasus" arc has been accused of this by some critics, with Admiral Cain taking about twenty minutes to go from merely being a hardassed martinet, to mass-murdering civilians, ordering the rape of a pregnant woman as a Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique, and sentencing the crewmen who interfered to summary execution. In fact, the episode "Pegasus" had had to be radically trimmed to fit network time constraints; some of the footage that was lost (and reinstated on the DVD) implied the passing of more time than seems to go by in the episode as aired. The Razor movie, which came later, gave Cain a Psycho Lesbian backstory to explain her excesses.
- There's also the episode where the woman put in charge of a tribunal takes about 24 hours to go completely nuts with power, and attempt to accuse the commanding officer who appointed her of the crime she's investigating.
- Similarly, in the 'Black Market' episode, the leader of the organisation running it does a pretty good job of defending the need for a Black Market in the fleet. Then he talks about having child prostitutes, so Lee can shoot him without feeling guilty
  - Lee did acknowledge the argument about the need for a black market, though, given that he allows it to stay in business afterwards. He just wanted them to clearly understand where the limits were.
Seems to happen about once a season in Doctor Who. A few notable examples;
- "The Mind of Evil"; a scientist invents a machine that removes criminal impulses from the human mind, and offers it to the government as a means of dealing with dangerous criminals without resorting to the death penalty. Turns out its inventor is actually the Master and the device brainwashes people to serve him.
- "Genesis of the Daleks"; Davros invents the Dalek (or "Mark III Travel Machine, as he initially calls it) ostensibly for the purpose of making life easier for mutated Kaleds. When his superiors start getting cold feet about the research, he has the entire Kaled race wiped out.
- "Rise of the Cybermen"; When the British government refuses to fund John Lumic's Cyberman research, he kills the leadership and begins forcibly cyber-converting the British population.
Holly in Slings And Arrows wants to streamline the Festival's business end and replace most of its Shakespeare with musicals. This is only marks her as a villain in the context of a show where Shakespeare is Serious Business, until she starts abusing her boyfriend and deliberately aggravating the heart problem of a board member who disagrees with her.
Gerak in season 9 of Stargate SG 1. At least he got a redemptive death, though.
Similar to the Magnum Force example, season two of Murder One featured a storyline about Clifford Banks, a serial killer who tracked down and executed criminals who escaped justice, or had an unsuitably short prison sentence. He started out on this path through the murder of his retarded brother, he never kills innocent people, and throughout the arc a few people comment that "sometimes the streets need sweeping." Any moral ambiguity is then done away with by the lawyers finding out that Clifford actually killed his brother himself over his frustration about giving up his whole life to care for him, causing a mental breakdown that directed his guilt outwards onto other criminals.
In the pilot episode of The Shield, Vic Mackey partakes in numerous criminal acts including the use of excessive force during arrests, working with a drug dealer and beating a suspect with a phone book in order to make him talk. Then, at the end of the episode, he shoots another police officer in the face to prevent him from gathering evidence against Vic's team.

Tabletop RPG

Vampire The Masquerade has an actual mechanic for this: acting like an inhuman, unprincipled bastard will make you more of an inhuman, unprincipled bastard.
- This applies to all World of Darkness games and is a large part of the new system.
Chaos in Warhammer 40000 is grease on the Slippery Slope. As Chaos is a sentient form of The Dark Side by way of The Corruption, this trope becomes rather understandable.

Video Games

In Bioshock, harvesting more than two of the Little Sisters gives you the bad ending; it is simply implied that you jumped off the slope and became ADAM and power-hungry the moment you first harvested.
- This is actually Justified—killing the Little Sisters gives you more ADAM, and why should you be immune to the Psycho Serum that's turned the rest of the city into twisted freaks?
Subverted in Rondo of Swords. After a very harsh Friend Or Idol Decision that ends up on the favor of the Idol, Serdic experiences an immediate Karmic backlash, complete with title change, power swap, and costume switch to reflect his dog shooting. While his Nakama repeatedly accuse or suspect him of jumping off the slope, Serdic experiences no lapse in emotional or moral health. The epilogue also reveals that he was a just and well-loved ruler with a happy marriage.
Nanomachines in Metal Gear Solid and its sequel were used to monitor soldiers excessively and, as shown in Metal Gear Solid 2, do disturbing things to the mind when used unscrupulously, but they also provided accelerated healing, concentration and a variety of political benefits (such as DNA-tagged weapons for reducing war crimes), and Snake was a shameless user of them. By Metal Gear Solid 4 they were shameless Body Horror devices which had to be inserted in a Squicky way (using an electric needle straight into the neck, rather than in a simple, relatively painless injection into the forearm with a standard syringe like in the original Metal Gear Solid), produced spontaneous explosive PTSD when broken or blocked, and were used for direct mind control.
99% of evil plotlines, should they be offered, are this.

Webcomics

In The Order Of The Stick paladin Miko Miyazaki starts out as a narrow-minded, Holier Than Thou Knight Templar who the titular Order despise and even her own comrades tend to look for excuses to send her off on missions to distant lands that keep her out of town for long periods. Then she overhears Lord Shojo talking to Roy and Belkar about their plans to do the dirty work behind the paladins' backs, ignores his perfectly good arguments about why he had to do it, declares him guilty of treason and executes him on the spot. She's IMMEDIATELY stripped of her powers by the gods for murdering an unarmed octogenarian and goes into a psychotic breakdown when she refuses to accept that she could have been wrong.
- Vaarsuvius just took a jump, too. See comic #639.

Western Animation

The Batman The Animated Series episode "Lock-Up" introduced Lyle Bolton, ruthless head of security at Arkham Asylum, who eventually goes crazy and becomes the supervillain Lock-Up. He starts off making some good points about his regime bringing Arkham's role as a Cardboard Prison to a halt. Fortunately - so to speak - he also turns out to be a sadistic monster who steps way past his boundaries and abuses his inmates, allowing Batman to take him down without any worries.
- When new-vigilante-in-town The Judge shows up later on, attacking the villains and not caring whether or not he kills them, this is never even brought up; it is taken for granted that his actions are wrong. (The big jump probably comes moments before Batman intervenes, when he is about to kill a small-time corrupt politician, but still.)
Also, in Justice League, Cadmus. Their stated goals: Provide America (and her allies, probably) a defense against the super powered types, especially the Justice League. What with Superman nearly taking over the world when being brainwashed by Darkseid, the Justice Lords in a parallel universe taking everything over, and the Justice League having a freaking Orbital Superweapon pointing down, this seems entirely okay. Up until the cloning, torture, firing nuclear weapons, being allied with Luthor, creating Doomsday...
- And the Justice Lords from a parallel Earth. Superman abandoning Thou Shalt Not Kill to stop Luthor from starting a nuclear war: justifiable. The entire team doing away with the concept of Joker Immunity altogether and resorting to killing and lobotomy on a semi-frequent basis: arguable. Setting up a totalitarian state in which elections do not happen until the Justice Lords say they do and people can be arrested for complaining too loudly: seems unnecessary.
Avatar The Last Airbender gives us Jet, whose goal it is to protect children like himself orphaned by the war mongering Fire Nation and to fight back. However, its made pretty clear that Jet has jumped off this slope when he attempts to drown an entire town uninvolved with the war effort, murder innocent elderly people, and put his own life at risk for the purpose of revenge. He notably later attempts to jump back on the slope, but it doesn't turn out too well.