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" Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable."
— James Baldwin
Sometimes, the Forces of Light and Goodness get too hardcore. In a deadly combination of The Fundamentalist and Well-Intentioned Extremist, they get blinded by themselves and their ideals, and this extreme becomes tyranny. It's not the Forces of Darkness' fault, but they are laughing their asses off. It doesn't mean that they won't still fight to the death, but they take great satisfaction in the fact that they were right.
Usually, the Knight Templar's primary step (or objective) to his perceived "utopia" is to get rid of that pesky "free will" thing that is the cause of crime and evil. Many Knight Templar types are utterly merciless in dealing with those whom they consider evil, and are prone to consider all crimes to be equal. The lightest offenses are met with Draconian punishments such as full imprisonment, death, brainwashing, or eternal torture. Note that the canonical "minor offense with staggeringly out-of-proportion punishment" is jaywalking. If you're in a story like this, don't jaywalk.
It's important to note that despite being Lawful Evil, Knights Templar believe fully that they are on the side of righteousness and draw strength from that, and that their opponents are not. Invoking actual goodness and decency will have no effect, save for making Knights Templar demonize your cause as the work of the Devil. After all, they are certain that their cause is just and noble, and anyone who stands in the way is a deluded fool at best and another guilty soul to be "cleansed" or evildoer to be killed at worst, and doing so is not even Dirty Business (except, sometimes, for how much it makes them suffer, having to hand out all this justice). Trying to reason with one isn't much good either, because many Knight Templar types believe that if you're not with them, you're against them. Indeed, it may take them a while to realize that a person with sense and good will really oppose them; the righteousness of their cause — and their own selves — is self-evident to them.
Many Knights Templar can be found in the ranks of the Corrupt Church, Church Militant, or Path of Inspiration: expect them to be screaming " Burn The Heretic!" at the top of their lungs. A Knight Templar in a fantasy setting is usually a Principles Zealot, religious or otherwise. In a modern or Sci-Fi setting, the Knight Templar is just as likely to be a Totalitarian Utilitarian instead. In either case, she's likely to be a bigot who hardly qualifies as noble, but might be troubled by her own Black and White Insanity. Sometimes, the Knight Templar is an artificially intelligent computer that took its instructions to "protect humanity" just a bit too far.
The Knight Templar is the ultimate incarnation of Light Is Not Good, and in series where Dark is Not Evil, you can count on this guy being the villain who believes that the "dark" characters are evil and must be destroyed.
If a Knight Templar is not the antagonist of the story, expect to see What the Hell, Hero? and/or Not so Different come into play at least once.
Very prone to It's All About Me, thus, expect their pride on being the only righteous ones to bring them down. Because Knights Templar usually have high-minded goals, many are resistant to the Complete Monster treatment, though they're not immune, especially if the acts they commit in pursuit of those goals are truly heinous and horrific.
Contrast with Card-Carrying Villain - a villain who completely believes that he is bad. A Knight Templar can become this if he has a Heel Realization and decides to keep being a villain anyway. Alternatively, he might turn Necessarily Evil. Compare and contrast with the Knight in Sour Armor, who is what happens when a Lawful Good character chooses to err on the side of Good instead of erring towards Law.
A mild, comedic version is the Lord Error Prone. See also Knight Templar Parent, Knight Templar Big Brother, and Lawful Evil. Sometimes, they start out Fighting Monsters, and jumped off The Slippery Slope or crossed the Despair Event Horizon. Those who will really do anything for their beliefs count among The Unfettered.
Blind devotion to All Crimes Are Equal without the religious zealotry falls under Lawful Stupid.
Compare/contrast Knight Errant. Contrast Good Is Not Nice for when a character is genuinely on the side of good but may rub other characters or the audience the wrong way. In case you were looking for historical Templars, see The Knights Templar. Not related to Blood Knight.
Examples:
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Anime
Comic Books
- The Authority is an entire group of Knight Templar superheroes.
- This is a common Alternate Universe for Super Heroes.
- The Elseworld story Superman: Red Son features a Kal-El who lands in Soviet Russia, is brought up as the son of Stalin, and encompasses the world in a prosperous but tightly controlled dictatorship, which deals with dissidents using robotic mind-control on the basis that, hey, it's better than killing them! In the end, Lex Luthor defeats him by writing him a letter: "I'm distilling everything Superman hates and fears about himself into a single sentence." The contents of the letter: "Why don't you just put the whole WORLD in a BOTTLE, Superman?" Unusual for most Knight Templar characters, this works, and Superman breaks down and cries, realizing that he's no different from Brainiac, who shrunk down cities and put them in bottles — the only thing Superman wasn't able to undo.
- Before he becomes a Complete Monster who vaporizes pregnant women, Superboy-Prime gradually turns into a Knight Templar throughout Infinite Crisis, as Earth 1 and its heroes were too amoral for him.
- During the Knightfall story arc, Batman's fill-in, Azrael, aka Jean-Paul Valley, was a member of the Order of St. Dumas, a Templar-esque organization of assassins.
- The second part of Knightfall, Knightquest, tells the story of how Jean-Paul turned from Batman's Legacy Character into a Knight Templar.
- Ra's Al Ghul was also this, along with his whole League Of Assassins. He truly believes that he is purging evil from Gotham, and he's steadily going crazier due to the Lazuras Pit. That's a bad combination!
- Another Knight Templar, and a Canon Immigrant, was Lyle Bolton, a.k.a. Lock-Up, who, in the animated series, was once the new Head of Security at Arkham Asylum, but whose methods were so harsh and extreme that everyone at the asylum was afraid of him, particularly Scarecrow. After being relieved of his post, he would go on to "arrest" those who he deemed to be at the root of Gotham's problems, including the mayor, Commissioner Gordon, reporter Summer Gleeson, and the chief doctor of Arkham before being stopped by Batman and Robin.
- Rorschach, from Watchmen. His moral absolutism leads him to continue fighting crime even after superheroics have been outlawed, because evil must be punished.
- Judge Dredd is one of the best examples of this in the world of comics. In any given strip, there's a chance that Dredd may sentence witnesses or even the victim of a crime after they reported it to him. Notably, in the more emotional story "America", Bennett Beeny gives Dredd a witness statement after he was shot through the throat by democratic terrorists, and immediately after their conversation, the Judges are contemplating whether or not they should arrest Benny for a separate offense. In that one particular instance, Dredd decides to let Beeny off the hook.
- Starr from Preacher, a fusion of Templar attitude and Templar position and mission.
- Iron Man became one of these during and after Civil War. This need not have happened; both sides were intended to have valid points, but the Editors failed to realise that almost none of the fans (or the writers) agreed with the Registration side, so they just kept penning atrocity after atrocity.
- The main book—the book being written by Mark Millar, who was responsible for the whole plot—had him (illegally) clone a god and set him on his former friends, resulting in the death of one. Moreover, the atrocities that didn't involve Iron Man, such as arresting Captain America for refusing to enforce something that isn't a law under the orders of someone who has no authority over him, also took place in the main book. It was a Knight Templar orgy from the beginning.
- In the lore of the Green Lantern mythos, the Lanterns were preceded by a robot force known as the Manhunters. A perfect example of the trope, they are the "logical guardian machines removing free will".
- Sinestro got kicked out of the Green Lantern Corps for doing this. He had the most peaceful and orderly planet in the universe—because he was ruling it with an iron fist.
- And now the Green Lantern Corps has created a sort of internal security force called the Alpha Lanterns—using Manhunter technology. This ends up biting them in the ass, eventually.
- The X-Men have faced the Purifiers; a sect of Christian fundamentalists led by Reverend William Stryker. The Purifiers believed that mutants were the children of Satan, and they were fighting a holy war against them.
- At one point, the Autobots in the Transformers Generation 1 comic became like this when Grimlock became leader after one of Optimus Prime's numerous Heroic Sacrifices.
- The Autobots also did this during the Nova Prime administration in the latest series of comics.
- In the Ultimate Marvel reboot of the Fantastic Four, the Ultimate version of the Psycho Man mind controls an entire world to feel happy and contented, while the Ultimate Silver Surfer argues that they are merely happy slaves. Also, let's not forget that Dr. Doom is always working on creating his "utopia", even if it means destroying the world as we know it. Hey, it's for a good cause.
- In the indie graphic novel Artesia, there are the Templars of Agall. These guys worship a patriarchal New God, calling those still dedicated to the matriarchal Old Goddesses heretics. It's their Islik-given duty to protect His church and slay those that oppose them. They have no respect for powerful women like the main character, and any woman who even seems to be dabbling in magic or herbalism deserves to be burned as a witch. Not very nice guys. And they happen to be pretty Badass.
- Baron Zemo became one after his so-called reform in Thunderbolts. Zemo crafts elaborate plans to take over the world, but every one is a dressed-up Evil Plan that involves removing free choice from humanity. Furthermore, most of these plans involve Zemo giving himself godlike powers, and he expects everybody to trust him with such power despite his past attempts to take over the world.
- Shadow in the Sonic the Hedgehog comic becomes one in the "X Years Later" storylines. First, once Sonic leaves the timeline, he conquers Mobius and implements a totalitarian regime. He's eventually overthrown and put in stasis by Sonic, but It Got Worse: five years after being put in stasis, Shadow is freed by his loyalists. Understandably pissed at what happened, he proceeds to release Tikhaos in order to destroy Mobius, so that he can rebuild society afterwards. When Lien-Da protests, he simply kills her, sics Tikhaos on the planet, and teleports away.
- Deadlock and the order of the Knights Martial in the ABC Warriors comics are specifically stated to be inspired by the tradition of the Knights Templar.
- Kingdom Come. The premise being "what if the DCU experienced a metahuman population explosion, and they became Knight Templars Nineties Anti Heroes with no regard for collateral damage or civilian casualties, thus forcing the Golden Age and Silver Age heroes out of retirement to set them straight?" Most notable of them is Magog. He ends up repenting though.
- The titular Wanderer from Just A Pilgrim. If you're a raider and you meet up with him, you'd be better off just shooting yourself - there's less talking involved.
- Jei-San's goal is to eliminate the evil in the world, but there's just so darn much of it...Fortunately he doesn't seem to have a hair-trigger and can walk through town uneventfully, but when it's pressed...There's also the fact that he/it was born from "evil gods" which makes his definition of "evil" highly suspect.
- Foolkiller from Steve Gerber's Man-Thing believes that he's on Earth to punish fools for being insufficiently godly.
- The Spectre sometimes goes this route, especially when he's portrayed as a completely inhuman creature that happens to use a human body as its host. He once considered annihilating New York to avenge the death of a single innocent man.
- Captain Rochnan, the commander of the Vatican's Warrior Monks, in Le Scorpion.
- The Punisher, Frank Castle, is one of the deadliest Vigilante Men in the entire Marvel Universe, with a body count that rivals most of Marvel's villains. His watchword is Pay Evil unto Evil, and when he's on one of his many vengeance sprees, the question is not "how far will he go?", but "how fast will he get there?"
Fan Fic
- The Circles from the Deva Series. They firmly believe that artificial magery will lead to The End of the World as We Know It and seek to kill Hayate and friends for using Devices. Admittedly, there is a smidge of truth in their beliefs, but the extents to which they go, combined with their insistence on refusing Hayate's offers of We Could Have Avoided All This, do not help their case.
- Subverted in the Sonic the Hedgehog and Sailor Moon crossover Chaos Infinity
 . Chessmaster/Mad Scientist Dr. Eggman manipulates the Sailor Scouts into thinking that Sonic and his friends are the ones responsible for the crisis in Tokyo and pushes them to fight each other, think that the Scouts are too much for his archenemies to handle. His plan fails when Sonic gathers enough Heroic Resolve to pull out his own Chaos Blast to overpower their rivals and calls out BOTH the Sailor Scouts and the people of Tokyo for their mistreatment. And then Eggman nearly kills Sailor Moon when using her and the Master Emerald as batteries for another one of his war machines to take out Sonic for good and everyone knew from then on who was really friend and foe. Again, it backfires. After stopping his final weapon, the Sailor Scouts and the Freedom Fighters become friends.
- In the Pony POV Series, one of the Alternate Universes that Applejack sees at one point is a world were the Mane Cast have become a group of dictators who brainwash and otherwise brutally supress anything "disharmonic". They are actually based off of the Justice Lords from the Justice League series.
Film
- In the 1983 Italian schlock Post-Apocalyptic film Warriors of the Wastelands, the main villains call themselves Templars, and are dead set on destroying all literature (since they feel that books led to World War III) and anyone who isn't them.
- In Frailty, Matthew McConaughey's family is commanded by God to destroy demons. One of the kids sees "destroy demons" to mean "kill people". The dramatic irony is that all the people killed are murderers or worse.
- Robocop, in the second film, has been reprogrammed with an All Crimes Are Equal package as a means of making him ineffective. He comes across somehow as both Lawful Stupid (shooting at a man for smoking in a no-smoking zone) and Stupid Good (by refusing to fire at someone shooting at him and trying to talk things out). He realizes that this isn't right, goes to an electrical station, and self-electrocutes to remove the programming, something that said programming didn't expect.
- The Operative in Serenity is another example - he truly believes in the ultimate rightness of his actions, even as he acknowledges that they are horrible and he is a horrible person for doing them, and as such, he will have no place in the perfect world that he is trying to create.
- In a way, some of the Alliance can be seen as Knights Templar, considering that they killed thirty million people on Miranda while testing a peace-enducing chemical inhalant and the entire justification for them cutting River's brain up was to "make a better world".
- The Jigsaw serial killer in Saw does not consider himself a killer. Oh, sure, he acknowledges that his actions frequently lead to horrible death, but he never pulls the trigger. And he firmly believes that the people who survive his themed deathtraps will overcome their sins and become better (though this never actually works).
- He kills his apprentice because she doesn't allow for her victims to actually have a chance of escaping their traps.
- The government of Libria in Equilibrium suppressed human emotion, as it was believed responsible for causing the human tendency for violence that brought about the war that practically destroyed the world, which meant destroying art, movies, and other things inductive of emotion (including cute little dogs) and terminating "sense offenders" who go without the government mandated drug called Prozium.
- Jonathan Doe from Se7en believes that he is punishing the wicked by killing people that go against his belief system. It could be argued, however, that he is simply a sadistic psychopath.
- The Paladins in the film version of Jumper, led by Samuel L. Jackson. They believe that they are doing God's will by murdering all of the jumpers, as "only God should have that power".
- Subverted in The Wicker Man, where Sgt. Howie is introduced as a religiously intolerant, uptight Jerk Ass. However, his faith and sense of duty are presented in a more and more admirable light as the film progresses, and he's far less infuriatingly fanatical than the townsfolk.
- An inversion, maybe, but in a Tyler sorta way, he is one. I mean, he talks about the greater good and the removal of free will (at least to get people out of their consumerist lifestyle). It's just chaotic instead of orderly.
- Literary, not film, but still Chuck Palahniuk: similarly, Brandy Alexander in Invisible Monsters claims that all of our desires have been conditioned by external forces, so we can't trust the things that we want. Hence, his decision to become a woman.
- The League of Shadows in Batman Begins have devoted their lives to defeating crime and evil by any means necessary. They eventually decide to kill every single person in Gotham City and force the societal structure of the city to collapse because they feel that the entire city is beyond redemption. Judging from what we've seen of the place, they may have a point there. Fortunately, they didn't contemplate the philosophical ramifications of their earlier attempt to destroy Gotham in terms of their absolutist theories.
- The Teutonic Knights in Alexander Nevsky are portrayed as even worse than any Templar, and the real Knights were thought to be quite ruthless as well.
- Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski. NOW MARK IT ZERO!
- Hayley Stark in Hard Candy. This chick would give Chris Hansen nightmares.
- Bartleby in Dogma, once he snaps. Loki seems like this at first, but really, he's just doing it cause it's fun.
- The Christians in Agora. Special mention must go to Ammonius, who is this Up to Eleven and to the point of Stupid Evil. The pagans aren't much better, though, doing a Too Dumb to Live move, attempting to avenge "an insult to the gods".
- The villains of 16 Blocks are cops who got sick of red tape and decided to put criminals behind bars even if it meant breaking the law themselves. By the time the film begins, they've lost sight of their goal of safeguarding innocents and are willing to kill someone just for witnessing their misdeeds.
- The anonymous sniper from Phone Booth is another. Similar to Light Yagami, his targets are usually unrepentant criminals like murderers, child molesters, and, at one point, a businessman who made off with a collapsed company's profits, leaving his employees and investors to rot. His target in the film, however, isn't a Complete Monster, or any type of criminal for that matter, but simply Jerk Ass Stu Shepard, who is having an affair and pretending to be a big shot; not exactly what you would call pure evil. Also, the sniper's methods to get criminals, real or imaginary, to confess, including targeting their loved ones, are quite questionable, to say the least. In the end, Stu confesses to his deeds, and the sniper decides to spare his life and those of his loved ones...though it's hinted that the sniper is going to check up on Stu once in a while to make sure that Stu keeps his promise of not being a douche.
- Henry J. Waternoose, CEO of Monsters, Inc., remarks at one point in the movie that he would be willing to do anything to keep his company afloat. He wasn't kidding.
- In the Cold War political thriller Seven Days in May, General James Mattoon Scott is secretly staging a coup against the President of the United States because he disagrees with the President's efforts to set up a disarmament treaty with the Soviets. Several chilling Hannibal Lectures, followed by some equally impressive Shut Ups, follow toward the end.
General Scott: James Mattoon Scott, as you put it, hasn't the slightest interest in his own glorification. But he does have an abiding interest in the survival of this country.
President Lyman: Then, by God, run for office. You have such a fervent, passionate, evangelical faith in this country - why in the name of God don't you have any faith in the system of government you're so hell-bent to protect?
- Judge Claude Frollo is hell-bent on destroying the entire race of gypsies for "inflaming the people's lowest instincts". His fanaticism is bad enough at first when he kills a gypsy woman for hiding "stolen goods" *
which turn out not to be stolen goods at all, but instead, her deformed baby , but add some Perverse Sexual Lust for another gypsy woman and things reeeeeally go downhill. If anything, Frollo is a Deconstruction of a Knight Templar. As a Knight Templar, Frollo believes that All Crimes Are Equal, and that the punishment for every single one is death. While the gypsies have committed crimes, they have not done anything to bring this kind of punishment down on them. Frollo even has a family's house set on fire with them in it, even though they do not even know about the gypsies. This causes Phoebus to turn against him, and Frollo to try to kill him in return. He considers the gypsies to be vermin and advocates genocide against them. Frollo demonstrates why a Knight Templar, logically and realistically, would be a horrible person.
- Clu, in his pursuit for the perfect system, eradicates every single thing he believes to be an imperfection...including the IS Os, which his user believes to be a miracle, and could have very well changed the system and the real world for the better had it not been for Clu's fanaticism.
- Similar to the Jumper example above, the Royal Spanish Navy in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is on a mission to destroy the Fountain of Youth for the same reasons, and shoot one of the English soldiers to begin with.
- Transformers: Dark Of The Moon: Sentinel Prime, former commander of the Autobots, is revealed to be this. Originally Optimus's mentor and father-figure, Sentinel had been corrupted by eons of war. Convinced that Cybertron's survival was more important than loyalty to his men, Sentinel struck a deal with Megatron to find another world whose resources could be used to replenish Cybertron. Finding himself on Earth in present day, Sentinel turns on his former allies and joins Megatron to begin making plans to use Earth's resources (in particular, the six billion or so fleshlings they can turn into a Slave Race). Sentinel's Knight Templar status is also revealed to be influenced by his god complex; remembering how the Cybertronians, particularly the Primes, once lived like gods, he is immediately disgusted by how Earth's leaders treat the Autobots as simple machines.
Literature
- Sun Wukong from the novel Journey to the West, when it comes to dealing with demons and bandits, who he sees as evil monsters who prey on the weak (especially those who want to eat Xuanzang). This is most notably seen during the White Bone Demon and the Doppelgänger chapters. In some adaptions, Xuanzong kicks Wukong out not because what he did (like killing innocent humans who were all actually demons in disguise or groups of bandits), but because of his Knight Templarish attitude.
- Jorge of Burgos from Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is the epitome of this trope. He's already a crazed extremist at the beginning of the book, and then he kills - or has killed - seven people. All to prevent somebody from reading a book that Jorge considers heretical: Aristotle's lost chapter of the Poetics discussing comedy. His Karmic Death comes as a huge relief, even to his allies.
- The Anathemata Curialis from the Felix Castor series will do literally anything to fight back the suddenly rising wave of undead and demons, including, yes, recruiting them. You'd just better hope that you don't get possessed by anything, or otherwise get in their way.
- In Harry Potter, Dumbledore and Grindelwald once wanted to take over the world, so wizards could stop hiding: "Muggles forced into subservience. We wizards triumphant. [Us], the glorious young leaders of the revolution." On the other hand, Dumbledore manipulates many people, even planning Harry's Heroic Sacrifice, to defeat Voldemort.
- Voldemort himself (among others) believes, not that he is a "good guy", because for him "there is no good or evil", but that wizardkind must be purged of what "infects" it - namely, everyone who's not a pureblood or half-blood wizard. He's not a perfect example though: he's got daddy issues at the heart of his motivations.
- His ancestor, Slytherin, seems to have based his prejudice towards muggles and muggleborns on a belief that they are inherently untrustworthy, and some of the secondary villains (namely, Bellatrix and Umbridge) do have a moral belief that all non-purebloods are dangerous subhumans.
- Another Knight Templar is Barty Crouch Senior, who authorized the Aurors to use unforgivable curses and sent people to Azkaban without trial, and when he did give trials, they were often for show in a Kangaroo Court.
- On the other hand, the Aurors, who hunt down Dark Wizards for the Ministry, can sometimes be this, particularly Alistair "Mad Eye" Moody, who's heavily scarred and has lost several limbs while single-mindedly doing his job. He doesn't even trust his allies.
- The Whitecloaks in The Wheel of Time series. They think that all Aes Sedai are servants of the Dark Lord and get neighbors to accuse each other of being "darkfriends". Only three of them are presented as honorable men.
- The Questioners, a branch that specializes in tortured confessions, are so nuts that not even the Whitecloaks can stand them.
- Also from Wheel, the Red Ajah, that faction of the Aes Sedai dedicated to finding and depowering men who can channel. A large portion of them began to despise all men (they don't even have Warders), and eventually, they began to break Tower Law by gentling men outside the tower. As punishment, the three sitters were all exiled to farms.
- In Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files novels and, to some degree, the TV series based on them, the White Council and their enforcers, the Wardens, frequently come across as Knights Templar, primarily with their draconian enforcement of the Seven Laws of Magic (usually entailing instant beheading). Morgan, one of the leaders of the Wardens, is the first and best example of this. However, this ends up somewhat subverted later in the novels when Harry, who had been viewed as a troublemaker at best and Lawbreaker at worst, and had once been under a one-strike-you're-dead parole, is recruited into the Wardens after many of them are slaughtered during the war with the vampire Red Court. Even Morgan changes his position: while he still believes that Harry is dangerous, he no longer thinks that he's evil - just arrogant, undisciplined, and stupid. This is a major change from a character previously thought to be unchanging. Even more of a subversion, as Morgan's changed opinion is mostly right.
- The Wardens do end up seeming less like Knight Templars later into the series, once Dresden becomes a Warden and has to face a lot of the same situations. Breaking the Laws of Magic warps and corrupts people's souls, and bringing someone back from the edge of corruption is a long and risky process. Harry's ex-warlock apprentice, Molly, only broke the Laws of Magic twice, and backslides repeatedly despite Harry's constant supervision. Once Harry can't supervise her any more, she starts building up a body count.
- Another major subversion is Michael Carpenter. He is literally a Knight Templar (Knight of the Cross), and is probably one of the best examples of Lawful Good done right: compassionate, kind, and all that other good-aligned stuff while still being a total Badass.
- Lilith de Tempscire in the Discworld novel Witches Abroad, whose warped narrative awareness leads her to believe that anything she does as a fairy godmother is justified by the Theory of Narrative Causality, and means that everyone will live Happily Ever After. She's absolutely shocked when Granny Weatherwax tells her that she's not "the good one".
- In the Revelation Space universe, there is an entire species which plans to prevent any technological civilization from arising for 6 billion years to make sure that life can flourish after the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies collide. They are perfectly willing to kill trillions of sapient beings and wipe out whole species in order to achieve this goal.
- A similar feature is in Anvil of Stars and its prequel, where the good guys' mission is to defeat a group of planet destroyers who eliminated Earth. This involves eradicating nine different intelligent species who have the misfortune to be in the way. Apparently, those races were deliberately created as (non)human shields.
- In certain time periods of Larry Niven's Known Space universe, minor crimes such as "repeated traffic violations" are punished by execution. However, this is primarily because the organs of all executed criminals are harvested for the "organ banks" for use in transplants.
- While Lord Asriel's grand plan in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials novels is certainly noble in theory, the fact remains that he first kills a child in order to open the first portal to the parallel worlds, and then pulls a Lucifer and makes war on Heaven, all in a plot to kill God. We're not too sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing that he succeeds. Asriel is still pretty awesome.
- This trope also appears in The Amber Spyglass, in which the Magisterium dispatches a young priest named Father Gomez to kill Lyra. Gomez fairly blazes with righteous piety and the belief that he is on a holy mission. The sin of murder is explained away by the church as having already been "paid for", since Gomez has been doing pre-emptive penance for most of his life. It would be You Fail Religious Studies Forever if the story wasn't set in a parallel universe (Dante has a very special place in his Inferno for people who apply this sort of logic). Pre-emptive penance requires a logical impossibility; you can't repent of a sin in advance (and no penance is effective without repentance) because true repentance means wanting to have never done the sin. Truly repenting in advance would mean that you'd never do the sin.
- In the Dragonlance series of books, the Kingpriest is a Knight Templar. His insistence on destroying all evil leads to him attacking neutral people and gods (because if you aren't with us, you are against us) as well as evil. His upsetting the balance, as well as demanding from the gods the power to destroy all evil, brings about the destruction of a large part of the planet, as all the gods decide that humans have gone too far and get pissed.
- Forgotten Realms is ripe with these. Khelben "Blackstaff" Arunsun is a great self-sacrificing hero when there's a real threat. When there isn't, however, he may easily find something or someone to absurdly overreact to. Eventually, he got kicked out from Harpers for carrying "dealing with evil forces against other evil forces" idea too far for their taste (and they aren't quite paladins themselves). That's the mild case.
- Renwick Caradoon, co-founder of The Knights of Samular, used his niece as a bait for a Deal with the Devil — or rather, an incubus — whom he planned to betray. When this backfired, he locked the fiend up...along with about 200 relatively innocent souls. When his sanctimonious indiscretions and half truths sent Khelben into seething rage, he ensured that the power acquired from the deal stays with him — through blackmail and hiding behind the paladins' With Us or Against Us mentality — and ontinued in the spirit of such deeds.
- Spin-a-yarn tale Only a Woman Can Take This Sort of Abuse presents Dzeldazzar, an intelligent sword that took over a paladin of Tyr.
"Evil!" the sword hissed, jerking Sir Thongolor's arms this way and that. "Any who would resist or prevent me or the holy warrior who bears me must be evil — and must be destroyed!"
- Inspector Javert from Les Misérables. To him, law is everything, and when he realizes that to act lawfully is to act unethically, he snaps and commits suicide. Doubles as a Inspector Javert.
Javert's ideal, was not to be human, to be grand, to be sublime; it was to be irreproachable.
- Villains By Necessity by Eve Forward portrays a whole world dominated by Knight Templars, in quite serious inversion of many classical tropes.
- The Humanoids, a model of robot from Jack Williamson's 1947 novella "With Folded Hands" (and the follow-up novels The Humanoids and The Humanoid Touch) are classic examples of this trope combined with the Literal Genie trope. The Humanoids are programmed to "Serve, Obey, and Guard Men from Harm". Since nearly every human activity has some risk of harm associated with it, the Humanoids, in practice, never let anyone do anything (although, occasionally, if they really need a single human's help to "protect" a great many humans, they will bribe them with limited autonomy). When people begin to complain that these restrictions are psychologically harmful, the Humanoids drug or lobotomize them. In the end, the Humanoids invent a machine that gives them Psychic Powers and use it to institute an Assimilation Plot).
- In the Ciaphas Cain novel Duty Calls, an Inquisitor is willing to stage a massacre, abandon innocents (including children) to an alien attack, and actively cause an alien attack and massacre (not to mention trying to assassinate Cain three times) on the grounds that what he is protecting is too valuable for the information to get out. He even thinks that Cain will agree with these actions because of the importance of the artifact.
- In the same book, Battle Sisters refuse to retreat to the line of their defenses because they must serve the Emperor; Cain finally points out that if the Tyranids outflank them, they will be responsible for the massacre of the civilians in the Emperor's Temple. This not only persuades them to retreat, it causes one of them to thank him later, for reminding them of their duty, and admit that their zeal had lead them astray.
Later, this takes on a grimmer note. The Sisters realize that they have sheltered a renegade inquisitor. Even his deception does not ease their guilt; their zeal had blinded them to the facts. In atonement, they sacrifice their lives to ensure the escape of the Inquisitor who told them the truth and her party.
- In Xenos, Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn explains some of the mindset behind such people. He finds himself in a position where he can either mercy-kill an innocent and allow a heretic and traitor to escape, or follow the heretic and allow the innocent to die horribly. He talks to the reader for a moment, saying that, if you would kill the victim, that is good, you are human. On the other hand, you are not an inquisitor; he must place the millions of lives that the heretic threatens over the life of one. If one man must die, that millions might live, that is how it must be.
- Many people in a position of authority in the Imperium are Knights Templar — the difference is that they have no real choice. Warhammer 40,000 is set in an incomprehensibly horrible dystopia. The Imperium can't afford to err on the side of mercy — Chaos is just too dangerous, and spreads too fast. Killing a thousand people just to nail one heretic or rogue psyker may be extreme, but it has been long-established that the whole galaxy would be overrun by Chaos if they did anything else. Of course, Chaos runs on fear, suffering, and insanity, so by their actions the leaders of the Imperium are ensuring that they can never truly defeat it. They may even be feeding it and making it stronger.
- In the Sword of Truth series, Sister Nicci fits the trope better than anyone else. Even after her Heel Face Turn, she keeps some definite traits of this.
- Robert E. Howard's Puritan avenger, Solomon Kane.
- Lucas de Beaumanoir in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, who actually is a Knight Templar — indeed, the Grand Master of the Order. Although most of the Templars in the novel are corrupt and immoral, Beaumanoir "is of a different stamp — hating sensuality, despising treasure, and pressing forward to that which they call the crown of martyrdom..." He comes to the preceptory of Templestowe to root out vice and, in the process, puts the noble Jewess Rebecca on trial for sorcery.
- Maxim, an uninitiated Light One in Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch, is this. He has been enchanted so that he can sense the evil of the Dark Ones but not the good of the Light Ones, causing him to consider himself a lonely crusader in a world choked with evil (as opposed to a world in an eternal stalemate between evil and good), leading him to kill low-powered and not particularly evil Dark Ones. Actually, given the Night Watch's philosophy of good as working for the greater good, the entire side of light can occasionally become Knights Templar, and we are explicitly told that both Soviet Communism and Nazism started out as plots by the Light to win against the Darkness.
- Terry Pratchett's Discworld Auditors are very much this. They just want a universe of perfect order. Is it their fault that life, especially intelligent life, keeps getting in the way of this?
- In Outbound Flight, Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth is renowned for cutting past the bantha poodoo and solving whatever he's been assigned to solve very quickly. He also believes that, as a Jedi connected to The Force that binds all things, he's under the best leader imaginable. Non-Jedi, if they don't have Force Sensitivity, are to submit - well, everyone is to submit, but his Padawan watches him striding through a crowd which makes way "like a swirl of dried leaves" and realizes that she's starting to think of them the way he does. In command of Outbound Flight, he's terribly authoritarian and controlling; slowly, every decision becomes his decision, and his decisions are always right. C'baoth is largely responsible for Outbound Flight's destruction. The other Jedi on board questioned what he was doing, but...he was C'baoth. Surely, it couldn't be as bad as it looked.
- Jorus C'baoth had a clone, Joruus C'baoth, in The Thrawn Trilogy. The clone had each of those traits, Only More So and with a dash of crazy. Joruus went so far as to use the Force to control the people he led and guided.
- In The Lord of the Rings, it seems that Gandalf would have become some sort of Knight Templar had he taken the Ring.
"Gandalf as Ring-Lord would have been far worse than Sauron. He would have remained 'righteous', but self-righteous. He would have continued to rule and order things for 'good', and the benfit of his subjects according to his wisdom (which was and would have remained great)." (Letter 246)
- And Gandalf recognizes this, as he explains to Frodo after he tries to give the Ring to the wizard. "Understand. I would use this ring out of a desire to do good. But through me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine!" This is a temptation for Galadriel as well - both Sam and Frodo encourage her to take the Ring, insisting that she'd help people and do good with it. She responds sadly that that is only how it would begin...
- Stannis Baratheon from A Song of Ice and Fire is a good example of why a truly just man is terrifying. He gets engaged in the Succession Crisis not only because he actually wants to be king, but because he feels that since he is the nearest successor, he has to. When dealing with a smuggler who brought him supplies during a siege, he knights him for his valor and chops off the fingertips of his left hand for his lifetime of smuggling. By the time of the story, he has actually become less of a Knight Templar and is willing to compromise his justice for the sake of his ambition — most notably, murdering his own brother and letting others take the fall, trying to bribe the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch and have him forsake his oath, and not punishing those who sided with his younger brother, Renly, when he has a better claim to the throne. The smuggler in question — Davos — longs for the days when Stannis was a proper Knight Templar, because he no longer recognises this man who has betrayed so many of his own principles, and is willing to commit horribe crimes in the name of his ambition.
- Keira in Sandy Mitchell's Dark Heresy novels Scourge the Heretic and Innocence Proves Nothing - fanatic, dedicated to eradicating evil, convinced of the heinousness of the most minor of faults, and finding Dirty Business whenever she has to pass some trivial evil by. And people who have known her in the past think that she's mellowed out like this. Convinced that Sex Is Evil, she's first oblivious to and then deeply disturbed by the notion that she is attracted to a man, even though they are both free to marry. To be just, confronted with a prostitute trying to escape that life, she is awed by the effort the woman put into her escape.
- The Silence in Laura Anne Gilman's Retriever series began as an organization dedicated to protecting Nulls from supernatural dangers. Motive Decay led to them deciding that the best way to do this is to destroy all supernatural beings, including sentient non-humans and even magic wielding humans.
- Simon R. Green gets a big kick out of this trope, by setting up Knights Templar as the opposition and then pulling their self-righteousness out from under them. Sometimes (e.g. the Removal Man from Unnatural Inquirer), it's by revealing to the Templar that he's unwittingly been serving the forces of evil, other times, by simply proving to them (the Walking Man from Just Another Judgement Day; the terrorists from Shadows Fall) that they're unquestionably in the wrong.
- On one hand, the Knights of Khryl in Caine Black Knife count as Knights In Shining Armor, almost to a man. Almost. They also oppress nonhuman species, are completely inflexible, and are led by a woman who believes herself to be, in her own words, "incapable of sin". Since Khryl is a hardass, they do have some supernatural justification.
- In the Dale Brown novel Edge of Battle, the US finds itself on the slippery slope to this as US-Mexico tensions grow due to the villain's plot, but ultimately avoids dropping off the slope.
- In John C. Wright's Titans of Chaos, Hermes justifies being an Omnicidal Maniac with the fact that he will put the universe back together again, right.
- Lucian Gregory in G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday
"First of all, what is it really all about? What is it you object to? You want to abolish Government?"
"To abolish God!" said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. "We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves.
- Moses (yes, that Moses) is portrayed as this in The Pilgrim's Progress.
- The scriptures of the Church of God Awakening in the Safehold novels explicitly state that "Extremism in the pursuit of godliness can never be a sin". The Inquisition considers this a license to commit any atrocities necessary to secure their power base...in the name of God, of course.
- In Death: Donald Dukes from Purity In Death is very much this. He actually believes that he is so right that he has to murder every person who does not fit in his warped vision of the world.
Live-Action TV
- Uther Pendragon in the 2008 tv show Merlin. He hunts down and kills anyone related to magic in any way, even healers and children, but is not above using magic for his own ends.
- Gordon Walker of Supernatural is a hunter and tries to kill Sam Winchester because he firmly believes that he's the Anti-Christ. And now also Castiel, well, until he became much worse...
- Lucifer himself viewed humans as murderous apes who ruined planet Earth, which he referred to as God's last perfect masterpiece. His Humans Are Bastards belief as well as his self-centered, self-righteous personality caused him to rebel against God.
- Adam Monroe of Heroes is immortal and has lived for 400 years. This has led him to see the World as a never-ending nightmare, filled with war, famine, and global epidemics. Thus, he plans to create a perfect world by unleashing a virus that will destroy 94% of the planet, and giving those who survive a second chance. He also believes himself to be a God, and compares it to when God flooded the Earth and had Noah build an ark to start over.
- Nathan Petrelli becomes one in the third season of Heroes. He starts off as one in Volume 4 too, but his Dragon, Danko, quickly usurps the position from under him. Nathan's plans involved simply rounding up all people with abilities and detaining them to protect national security, whereas Danko seems more interested in just eliminating them outright. They don't call him "The Hunter" for nothing.
- The main Knight Templar from Volume 3 was Angela Petrelli.
- The Knights of Byzantium in season five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
- Before the whole thing was derailed into the widely-despised and nonsensical magic-as-drug-addiction storyline, Willow was very realistically developing into one of these with the season 6 premiere "Bargaining", where her absolute devotion to Buffy takes quite a dark and scary turn, as she proves willing to cross any line and break any rule to bring Buffy back from the dead and considers details such as the difference between good and evil to be trivial compared to the life of her best friend.
- Jasmine in season four of Angel. Holtz is also an example of this.
- To an extent, the Syndicate of The X-Files qualifies for this, as, over the series, it was revealed that they were collaborating with the alien Colonists in order to stall for time to prevent the coming invasion, and to work on a vaccine for the alien plague.
- The Vorlons in Babylon 5 are clear examples of this trope - they seek to maintain peace and order through the manipulation of the "lesser races", often using very morally questionable methods. By this standard, the Shadows also qualify, as they truly believe that their Social Darwinist agenda of deception, violence, genocide, and Mind Rape is for the Greater Good.
- 'Infection', from the first season of Babylon 5, finds the station under attack by a cyborg Templar. An ancient artifact infects a man, transforming him into a walking weapon designed to eradicate anyone not of 'pure Ikarran' stock. Unfortunately, for the civilisation in question, the definition of 'pure Ikarran' was unsurprisingly set by a bunch of fanatical racial purists, rather than scientists, and, as a result, not a single member of the Ikarran species actually measured up to the programmed standards. Whoops. On a side note, Straczynski has apologized for the Anvilicious nature of this.
- The recurring antagonist Alfred Bester is a bit of a Knight Templar for the Psi Corps. The best example of this is the fifth-season episode The Corps Is Mother, The Corps Is Father, where we see how he appears to the other members of his organization.
- Iris Crowe on Carnivŕle believes that her brother Justin has a destiny. And she'll do anything to help him achieve it. Unfortunately, he's the Antichrist - and "anything", in this case, involves arson, multiple homicide, self-mutilation, and incest. The actual Knights Templar on the show are actually just MacGuffins to distract us from the fact that Ben's a fairly crappy savior. But Iris is just a chip off the old block compared to her father, Lucius Belyakov, aka Management, who's willing to orchestrate murder after murder so that Ben can realize his destiny. Ironically, this makes him the polar opposite of a Knight Templar Parent, since Ben's destiny is to kill Justin. That's good parenting.
- Lord Dread of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future wanted to create a better world by fusing man with machine, removing the "weakness" of emotions and allowing humanity to be ruled solely by logic. Hence the "Metal Wars" and the subsequent "Project New Order", where the planet is ravaged and most of humanity annihilated, with the few that remain either loyal to Dread, in hiding, or in an organized resistance movement opposing Dread's empire.
- While Lord Dread is plagued by the remnants of his humanity, and occasionally doubts the worthiness of the cause, the supercomputer Overmind is unflinching and resolute, and it can be argued that it doesn't share the same concern for humanity's ascension to perfection, being more focused on absolute domination by the machines.
- Near omnipresent in Alias, to the point where multiple terrorist cells successfully pose as CIA Knights Templar to recruit unsuspecting agents, and the core group of one of those cells goes on to become actual CIA Knights Templar.
- Charmed was notorious for relying on this one. A few examples: Paige Matthews' initiation as a witch was almost spoiled when the Big Bad of the time attempted to make her use her powers to tear out someone's heart. Incidentally, Paige's powers were staggeringly powerful in their possible implications - imagine calling nuclear weapons or lightning. When the evil and good worlds started becoming TOO evil and good, respectively, the good world was marked by extremely pleasant punishments for the slightest transgressions. And an Elder, a being of great rationality and goodness, spends a good portion of his time trying to murder an innocent baby out of fear that the baby is a Dark Messiah, of course, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Lampshaded at one point by one of his friends in on the plan. Of course, he didn't last long afterwards.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Section 31, a secret rogue Federation agency who assassinate foreign dignitaries, kidnap disloyal officers, and even attempt to commit genocide against the Founders in the name of protecting the Federation.
- Admiral Leyton, Sisko's old CO, attempted to overthrow the Federation President and establish a military dictatorship in order to protect the Federation from Dominion attack.
- DCI Frank Morgan in Life on Mars is eventually revealed to be one of these. He began as a subversion of A Tyrant Takes The Helm, being a more competent, enlightened, and thoughtful administrator than Gene Hunt, who he replaces. It's then revealed that he deliberately allowed a sting operation that Hunt has set up to be badly botched in order to reveal Gene Hunt's incompetence, thus allowing Morgan to take over and reform Hunt's department. That this will result in the death of everyone on Hunt's team is a sacrifice Morgan can live with.
- Eliot Stabler from Law & Order: SVU has been known to act like this, especially in the early seasons. After he does things like waterboarding a perp, mercilessly locking up a survivor of the Serbian genocide, and arresting a porn director for "promoting pedophilia", even though said director's models were of age, and even though said pedophile was messed up even before he saw the porn, you have to wonder why you're supposed to sympathize with the guy. Not to mention that he's implied to be prejudiced against transgenders.
- Bounty Hunter Keisuke Nago in Kamen Rider Kiva plays this trope so damn straight that, at times, he borders on self-parody. For example, as a young adult, he led his father to commit suicide when he reported a simple accounting error to the police as evidence of corruption, and when lambasted by an understandably furious Papa, he replied, "Sin is sin". He's also a member of a Fangire-hunting organization and believes that all Fangire are monsters to be slain - including those who are happy to co-exist peacefully with humans. He does get better, though. Bonus points for his rider form, IXA, sporting a heavy Paladin/Holy Knight motif.
- The Knights Templar in a few episodes of Andromeda are fanatically devoted to destroying the humanity-offshoot known as the "Nietzscheans". Their leader has dark-sided in her/his attempt to stay alive "for the cause".
- While a Complete Monster in the Sword of Truth series, in Legend of the Seeker Darken Rahl is more this trope.
- In Battlestar Galactica, the Cylons have a paradigm shift brought on by Boomer and Caprica Six. They realize that they no longer want to destroy humanity, but rather help humanity. So, they take over New Caprica in order to rule humans and "make them better".
- Laura Roslin edges towards this periodically throughout the course of the series, but is usually pulled back from the slippery slope by one of the Adamas.
- The Outer Limits revival episode "A Stitch In Time" was a meditation on how Knights Templar come to be created and the price a person pays for being one. It's generally regarded as one of the best episodes of the series.
- A few unsubs in Criminal Minds see themselves as heroic people ridding the world of evil by killing off acquitted criminals ("A Real Rain"), vagrants ("Legacy"), or just general sinners ("The Big Game"/"Revelations").
- In the 1998 Merlin series, Queen Mab, the ruler of the Old Ways, is this. According to the novelization, King Constant was like this before Vortigern overthrew him.
- The Magister from True Blood definitely qualifies for this trope, because of his Draconian belief system and almost fanatical dedication to the Vampire Council.
- Agent Van Alden in Boardwalk Empire is the head of the local prohibition agents, and is completely insane. He is so commited to bringing down Nucky and the bootleggers that nothing else matters in his mind, and the ends justify the means. These means include torturing a mortally wounded man to death and drowning a fellow agent that he suspects of being The Mole. That he is right about that last point doesn't stop that act from serving as his crossing the Moral Event Horizon. That is, if he didn't cross it much earlier by reaching into a dying witness's gaping abdominal wound to extract a statement...
- Detective Vic Mackey of The Shield would like to think of himself as one. He constantly commits acts of brutality, harassment, and even murders a fellow cop in order to continue his work of taking down gangs. He is often able to continue this through intimidation and the fact that many of his victims include rapists, cop killers, and child molesters, people who appear worse than him at first appearance. However, Mackey's self idealization completely falls apart upon further examination, as the last season shows him for what he truly is: a violent, sociopathic bully only concerned with his own safety and greed.
- President Bartlet from The West Wing has shades of this trope, though he's usually self-aware enough to catch himself before he goes too far, and when he's not, he's calmed down by Leo. Made particularly explicit in "A Proportional Response", where Leo chews out Bartlet for the latter's rants about how he wishes there was an American form of "Civis Romanus" (referring to when Rome's reputation for Disproportionate Retribution was so feared that no one in the world would dare harm a Roman citizen). Leo remarks that if Bartlet tried to take steps towards such a goal, he'd have to kill Leo first, promptly making Bartlet realize just what he had been wishing for.
- The Commander Dopant, the Big Bad of the Kamen Rider Double special W Returns: Accel, kills any criminal, no matter what the crime. His first true appearence has him vaporize someone for pickpocketing, and he's seen having other pickpockets electrocuted.
- Superintendent Fuller from Wild Boys is this. Determined to stamp out the bushrangers, he has no trouble in riding roughshod over the law he is supposed to uphold in order to do it. In the first episode, he stages an escape attempt to allow him to gun down three prisoners, including one that he had framed.
Tabletop Games
- Considered an ideal in Warhammer where rigid thought control is the only known way to keep the villains' More than Mind Control from spreading.
- The followers of Solkan, one the gods of law, are this to the point that even other extremists fear them.
- And presented again in Warhammer 40,000 by the Inquisition of the Imperium of Man, who eradicate entire worlds to stop heresy from spreading. Justified, considering that heresy is inevitably followed by the horrors of the Warp (and, by extension, Chaos Gods). Or is it?
- Some chapters of the Imperial Space Marines themselves fall into this. There's even a chapter called the Black Templars who are notorious for their intolerance of aliens, mutants, and heretics — going as far as to "purge" entire planetary colonies because somebody there has bought equipment from alien traders. (The standard Imperial response would be to make the buyer/s pay a fine, unless the stuff came from a Rogue Trader — in which case it's all good — or starts showing signs of Chaos taint.) Their colours and insignia are derived from The Knights Hospitallers, though.
- This applies to the Tau, too, to a lesser extent.
- If we ignore the extreme speciesism common to all factions in the universe, the Eldar would come across as almost heroic. As it is, the whole "We would rather ten thousand humans die than one of our own" mindset dooms them to this territory.
- Virtually all the factions in Warhammer40000 whose main goals are not exactly self-serving are this, perfectly representing its Black and Gray Morality. Or, to put it another way, all the factions are either Knight Templars or Complete Monsters. That, or they are the Orks or the Tyranids.
- In the RPG Deadlands: Hell on Earth, there is a group of people - including some player characters - that call themselves Templars. In a post-apocalyptic setting named, well, Hell on Earth, you can imagine what they're like: unflinchingly hard-nosed and often turning away those in need simply because they don't live up to some subjective moral standard. Even worse, sometimes they force others, who are less "worthy", to do unseemly tasks with their awesome supernatural powers. And they're the good guys. Their more messianic counterparts have been corrupted: while they start out trying to save everyone, they inevitably become pawns of evil.
Jo, Templar Grand-Master: Here's the way we see it. The old world was full of greedy, violent people. It was also full of lazy bags of crap who knew the world was going to Hell and didn't do a damn thing about it. The small minority who stood up against evil, who sacrificed everything to help fight oppression, didn't usually get much help. Templars have vowed not to let that happen again.
- Dungeons & Dragons has several examples from several settings.
- At least 10% of anyone involved in anything in Eberron are Knights Templar. Literally, in the case of the Church of the Silver Flame, whose hardliners a) want to forcibly convert everyone and b) consider fire a divinely sanctioned weapon, even against civilians. This is from a Lawful Good religion, with help from Eberron removing the rule about cleric alignments. And one of the basic premises of the Silver Flame is that swordpoint conversions are utterly meaningless. Shifters are also rarely members of the Church, mainly because of their recent crusade against lycanthropes: many shifters were similar enough to the lycanthropes to be targeted as well. They're still not pleased on that score.
- Forgotten Realms 3.5 ed. sourcebook City Of Splendors - Waterdeep introduced a special feat, "Veil of Cyric". It makes evil characters (but not following an evil deity) undetectable (only) as evil, as they rationalize any acts they "have to" do as just and pure. Cyric is here probaby because the Prince of Lies used to see the people who indulged in such self-deception as his personal jesters.
- Moving to Planescape, roughly half of the Mercykillers faction can fall into this category; they were originally two separate factions, the Sons of Mercy (Lawful Good) and the Sodkillers (Lawful Evil), but when the Lady of Pain declared that only ten factions could exist, they joined forces; after the Faction War, when the Lady banished all the factions, the Mercykillers split apart again.
- It's also an inherent risk of certain paladin-based prestige classes, such as the Grey Guard (who get cheap atonement when they do something less-than-angelic in the service of good, like beating someone to death to get information out of them) and the Shadowbane Inquisitor (who, despite having levels of rogue, are considered unsually hardassed even by other paladins).
- The Monster Manual 3 from the 3.5 version introduces the Lumi, a race of extraplanar light-empowered beings who believe lying to be the ultimate sin. To be clear, if the choice was between telling a lie and letting thousands of people die, a Lumi would have no doubt: all those thousands of innocents would have to die. It seems that these guys are planning a mass invasion of the Material Plane to destroy any and all deceivers...and even those who have so much as told a white lie.
- In Ravenloft, there's a Darklord who's one of these, a Paladin named Elena Faith who became so extreme (as in, not even her god would support her pogroms against the "unworthy") that the Dark Powers took notice of her and stuffed her into Ravenloft. Every night, she is taken on a ride across her domain to see the spirits of all she has tortured to death, and when she gets back up, she is filled with a desire to make her domain a better place. Unfortunately, this usually means more torture and pogroms. Plus, her "detect evil" actually detects strong passions, so people who like her register the same as people who loathe her, and both usually end up on the chopping block.
- The Ravenloft setting is also home to Diamabel, who closely fit this trope, as well as some more sympathetic examples, such as the well-meaning but ignorant Tepestani Inquisition, and monster-hunters or Darkonian Ezrans who've gone overboard in their crusades against supernatural evils.
- One of the game's most famous figures tops all these as the game's ur-example and an inversion. According to 3.5 mythos, Asmodeus starts out as an immensely powerful angel tasked with fighting demons and keeping them from wrecking the gods' shiny new Creation. Over time, he proves to be the very best at this task, and he and those like him take on demonic aspects to better fight and kill demons. When mortal species begin sinning and tearing down the orderly lawful framework made to keep the demons out, Asmodeus creates the concept of punishment. The gods love this new idea, and give Asmodeus and his angels the task of tormenting sinners after death, so that living mortals will understand that their actions have consequences and stop misbehaving. Asmodeus and the angels following him take to their new task of torturing the souls of sinners with relish, literally making the heavens run red with blood and echo with screams. Eventually, horrified by this, the gods sign a contract with Asmodeus to get him and his followers to agree to leave the celestial planes, so they can do their demon-fighting and sinner-torturing elsewhere. They do so, but only to create Hell and begin tempting mortal souls into evil to make themselves more powerful. When the gods see this and charge into Hell to stop it, Asmodeus reveals just how much he's completed his inversion of the trope, pointing out that the contract gives the devils permission to do all of this. Or at least, that's his version of what happened.
Asmodeus - "You have granted us the power to harvest souls. To build our Hell and gird our might for the task set before us, we naturally had to find ways to improve our yield."
Hieroneous - "It is your job to punish transgressions, not encourage them!"
Asmodeus smiled, and a venomous moth flew out from between his sharpened teeth
Asmodeus - "Read the fine print."
- Magic: The Gathering frequently uses this trope with White. In fact, most angels are portrayed as fanatical warmongers. Particular examples include the archangel Radiant (turns a paradise into a police state in the name of her goddess), Akroma, Angel of Wrath (leads a genocidal war to wipe out an evil organization), and Reya Dawnbringer (raises her followers from death, denying them repose).
- Akroma's flavor quote fits nicely here. "No rest. No mercy. No matter what."
- The Boros Legion from Ravnica. They just want to stop Ravnica's eternal guild warfare. The fact that their method for achieving this is to break huge numbers of heads, blow up a few things, and generally demonstrate the reason guild warfare is bad...is neither here nor there.
- Yawgmoth is a Black-mana version: for him, the perfection of Phyrexia justifies any means.
- New Phyrexia brought us two different examples: Elesh Norn, the White mana Principles Zealot, and Jin-Gitaxias, the Blue mana Totalitarian Utilitarian. Strangely enough, the two of them get along well with each other: Jin-Gitaxias even uses Elesh Norn's sacred book, the Argent Etchings, as part of the basis for his Great Synthesis.
- The Knights of the Harrowing from Infernum might fit into this trope, or another trope entirely. They are an order of Christian Crusaders (their old name was the Knights of the Sepulchre) who deliberately decided to transport their fortress into Hell in order to exterminate every last demon, who, by the way, number in the billions...and have a reproductive system where any individual can be sacrificed to produce up to eighteen new demons (which will go from "birth" to "fully grown and ready to kill" in about six months)...and have technology roughly equivalent to the 19th century, backed by Black Magic and demonic innovation (including, but not limited to, machine guns that shoot acid, biomechanical Golems, and rudimentary guided missiles). Also a case of Honor Before Reason verging on Too Dumb to Live.
- Peleps Deled from Exalted. Our first introduction has him sparring with a fellow monk over a minor theological point, only to brutally crush her windpipe when he trips her. The question: "Is Terrestrial Exaltation of the Dragons, or from them?" And just to further clarify, this is a man whose actual job is supposed to be hunting the Anathema, and he murders his own colleagues over prepositions (a large portion of his appeal to players and Storytellers is that while most Dragon-Bloods in the Realm can be treated as "good guys" in the right circumstances, Peleps is universally Thunderclap Rush Attack fodder).
- Ubiquitous in The World Of Darkness. Hunters, Vampires, Werewolves, Mages...all of them have the threat of becoming this hanging over them. (Hunters are 'extreme risk', since they're able to modify their code to facilitate hunting...and this tends to send them over the deep end, especially since the average 'veteran' hunter, i.e. one who hasn't been dismembered yet, hasn't had a good night's sleep in five years.)
- Some Mutants And Masterminds Freedom City villains have these traits. The costumed villain Warden has a particularly extreme case: he worked on making prisons as non-cardboardy as possible, and got a bit fed up with people making that task harder by telling him that the prisoners have rights; didn't they forfeit those when they ended up in prison? His current goal is to overthrow "soft and corrupt" law and replace it with something altogether more draconian.
Video Games
Webcomics
Western Animation
- Megatron from Beast Machines willed the establishment of total order by eradicating free will. After conquering Cybertron by disabling the Transformer population, he extracted every single one of their sparks and stored them away. He intended to absorb every spark into his consciousness to create a perfect, technologically precise entity.
- This seems unusually unpleasant even for Megatron, yeees.
- Two examples from The Real Ghostbusters:
- In "Mr. Sandman, Dream Me a Dream", the titular creature seeks to end war - by making the entire human race sleep for 500 years.
- In "Ragnarok and Roll", a depressed young man with a broken heart decides to end human suffering - by using a magic flute to play a "song of destruction" that will end the world.
- Most of the Superman: The Animated Series episode "Brave New Metropolis" takes place in a Mirror Universe where Lois Lane's death has turned Superman into a tyrant who cooperates with Lex Luthor.
- The two-part Justice League adventure "A Better World" featured a vaguely similar plot. It featured the League's Mirror Universe equivalents, the Well Intentioned Extremists called the Justice Lords, who decided to end crime by ruling their world as fascist dictators. Interestingly, in this version, the straw that broke the camel's back was Superman killing Luthor, in response to his murder of the Flash. The aftermath of this encounter was seen in the first two seasons of Justice League Unlimited.
- The animated movie Superman: Doomsday had Superman's clone turn into this. He's obsessed with protecting Metropolis but decides that he should have the final word on how it's protected, leading him to brutally slaughter Toyman for the murder of a 4-year-old girl.
- The Darkwing Duck episode "Time and Punishment" introduced a futuristic version of the character, Darkwarrior Duck, who not only ran every bad guy out of St. Canard, but was now enforcing his iron will on its citizens for such "crimes" as staying out too late and eating too much junk food.
- Nerissa, the villain of season two of WITCH, seeks to rule the universe in order to stop all conflict and war. She eventually gets this wish, if only as an illusionary world that she's unwittingly trapped in for all eternity.
- Alvin from Sabrina: The Animated Series. He starts off as a Ridiculously Cute Critter Morality Pet for Sabrina, but guess what happens when she neglects him and leaves the spooky jar out.
- Demona from Gargoyles thinks that she's on a just crusade to destroy the human race because it is Always Chaotic Evil and dangerous. Nearly everyone else, though, can see that Demona's an incredibly damaged individual lashing out at anyone who gets close enough to her.
- Goliath in Gargoyles, when he used the Eye of Odin to protect Elisa and Angela. When they complained that the eye was making him crazy, he got pissed.
- The Hunters and the Quarrymen may have started out as He Who Fights Monsters, but they turned into genocidal villains. It's understandable if they want to kill Demona, who's trying to wipe out humanity, but they want to kill all the innocent gargoyles, too. To give you an idea of just how bad this is, in the episode that introduced the Hunters, one of them, presumably a rookie, questioned the Hunters' desire to kill all Gargoyles, stating that Demona was their group's original target. One of the other Hunters grabs him by the throat and threatens to kill him for even suggesting that any Gargoyle deserves to live.
- Those two hunters? They're brothers.
- Ultra Magnus in Transformers Animated, who is perfectly willing to suppress the truth in order to maintain order. He also urges his subordinates to do the same.
- General Crozier from Metalocalypse, at least until Mr. Salacia took over his mind in the Season Two finale.
- South Park has thrown this label around on a number of occasions, sometime becoming rather insufferable with it.
- Cartman especially exhibited this in the Coon and Friends episode, destroying all that annoyed him with Cthulhu.
- The Knights of Standards and Practises in "It Hits The Fan". Granted, they were somewhat justified due to the fact that cursewords literally were curse words and "shit" was causing an epidemic, but they seemed fine with killing people who were not the masterminds behind this incident.
- In The Movie, Kyle's mom is this, although it doesn't prevent her from being a Complete Monster, seeing as she starts a war, a genocide against Canadians, and nearly causes Armageddon all in the name of cleaning up the entertainment industry.
- Jet from Avatar: The Last Airbender in his first appearance, as he was willing to wipe out an entire village just to get back at the Fire Nation. He got better.
- Wan Shi Tong, the Spirit of the Library, only allows Team Avatar into his library if they swear that they are only seeking knowledge for knowledge's sake, not for military purposes. High Octane Nightmare Fuel ensues when he attempts to trap them in his library eternally after discovering that they've broken their word.
- Von Goosewing on Count Duckula can't get it into his head that Duckula's an exception to the bloodthirsty vampire norm. Nor does he want to.
- Mr Krabs of SpongeBob SquarePants is determined to punish his rival Plankton for his unscrupulous deeds, even when he is using perfectly legitimate methods. Taken to extremes in "Plankton's Regular", where Plankton finally gains one regular customer and offers to call a truce with Krabs in return for keeping him. Krabs immediately becomes obsessed with taking away said customer.
- In Futurama, a robotic Santa Claus has been programmed to determine who is naughty and who is nice. Unfortunately, his standards for nice are set too high - everyone except Dr. Zoidberg is considered naughty, and to make matters worse, he ain't limited to putting coal in your stocking. He's more likely to turn you to charcoal instead.
- The Forever Knights in the Ben10 franchise. Their founder Old George fought an evil alien "dragon" from another dimension back in the Middle Ages. The Knights assume that all aliens are just as bad as the one George fought ages ago and act accordingly.
Web Animation
- The main villains of Broken Saints, Lear and Gabriel, fall pretty firmly into this territory.
Web Original
- The Mujahedin, from the Global Guardians PBEM Universe, are Islamic superheroes who use Shariah law as a guideline to how much force to use against the criminals they face...which means that they kill a lot of criminals. They're also fairly harsh against non-Muslims, liberal Muslims, and anyone who thinks the Mujahedin crossed the Moral Event Horizon a time or two. They also fall squarely into the realm of Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters when it comes to their views on Israel.
- Most worshippers of Khersis in Tales of MU come off this way towards the main character as a result of Fantastic Racism, owing to the fact that she's a half-demon and their god's portfolio includes protecting humanity from demons.
- The incipient paladin Gloria from her mixed melee class comes off as this, as well. Her characterization starts off painting her as just another run-of-the-mill fundamentalist, but when she starts to engage in activites that might seriously harm Mack, like sanctifying herself before battle and uttering prayers as Mack goes to meditate, which may indicate a slippage towards Black and White Insanity, she becomes this.
- The emancipated golem Two also comes off as this in a much less malicious way. She has a pathological desire to do as she is told, and so she takes rules very seriously, sometimes to such a degree that she causes problems for herself and her friends.
Other
- Most of the world's great religious teachers have identified "righteousness gone postal" as a major source of suffering and often the prophesied end of the religion and/or world, though few followers talk about it (after all, sermons are delivered by the
self-righteous). One example, from Matthew: 12:43 When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. :44 Then it says, 'I will return to the house I left.' When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. :45 Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.
- The Order of Mata Nui from BIONICLE is a secret organization, and as such, they do not need to show morals (as nobody would judge their actions) and have no problems doing unethical things, like imprisoning many without giving them a chance at parole and experimenting on and modifying an entire species to use as soldiers against the Brotherhood of Makuta (although the race as a whole doesn't have a problem with the changes and continues to aid their mysterious benefactors).
Real Life
- The namesake of this trope comes from the members of a western Christian military order known as The Knights Templar. The Templars were skilled, pious, and occasionally highly educated elite fighters, cavalry, and bankers who fought primarily to open the pilgrimage routes during The Crusades. The Templar Knights were all in all a fairly normal (if vastly successful until its demise) depiction of the religious warrior class born from the upper crust of medieval society. However, its engagements in religiously and complexly motivated military operations — plus the shady circumstances in which they were destroyed — have inevitably tarred them in the eyes of the Western media, which frequently portrays them as major players of some Ancient Conspiracy. It doesn't help that they pretty much invented modern banking as we know it. Ironically enough, they averted this trope, at least to the point of being tolerant enough to work with Arab architects (which influenced the Gothic architecture seen everywhere in Europe), merchants, and even theologians, and not slaughtering enemies if they agreed to surrender, all of which were used against them during the trials against them staged by Philip IV of France. The truth is that, to modern eyes, a lot of people, Christian or not, who fought in religious wars were zealous fanatics (and that was actually seen as a virtue back then), but the notoriety of the Templars have pretty much singled them out thanks to well-played, centuries-old propaganda.
- The Spanish Inquisition and especially Tomás de Torquemada have this reputation. The reality was more complex; it originated with mob violence against Jews and Conversos, which was brought more or less to heel by the Spanish state (which was paranoid about possible subversion by them, but was not fond of lynching). When the dust cleared, the Spanish Inquisition had jurisdiction over all Christians and no one else; they burned Protestants at the stake but let Jews go about their business (until the expulsion of all Jews and Muslims from Spain). The legally-structured Spanish Inquisition executed about 4000 people for religious reasons in its roughly 300 years of existence.
- It wasn't just for religious reasons, to be fair. There were a lot of executions of people who were involved in other crimes not tied to religion, such as murder and treason.
- Arnaud Amalric, whose approach to making sure that every last heretic dies can be summed up in his famous quote: "Kill them all. For the Lord knows them that are His." It's disputed whether he said this or not (sources only say that he was reported to have said it), but if he said that, he was this.
- Many leaders of the Reformation were not at all opposed to capital punishment or torture for heretics and Jews; and while they all hated the Pope, they often hated each other more. The contemporary diagnosis was rabies theologicum.
- Historical portayals of Maximilien Robespierre are sharply divided between messianic (helped turn France into a republic, kept Austria and all the monarchies of Europe at bay post-Revolution, weeded out traitors in the republic, was nicknamed "The Incorruptible") and demonic (killed about 30,000 people who he thought might be foes of the Revolution or otherwise hindering it, usually makes "Top 10 Most Evil Men in History" lists), because he was very much this trope. He went to the guillotine after being overthrown, wholly believing that
God the Supreme Being and the people of France were on his side and that everything he'd done had been in accordance with the will of the greater good. The portrayals of Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (who gained the nickname of "Archangel of Terror") are even more divided between Well-Intentioned Extremist and Knight Templar. Interestingly, Robespierre was extremely reluctant about taking so much power and fulfilling this trope, but you know what they say about those who fight monsters...
- In a sense, the Shinsengumi were very much like the Knights Templar, but they were a smaller group and had only about five years of activity...but what a turbulent five years to exist in! They had uniforms that look visually arresting even today, an unbelievably strict code of conduct, and what even The Other Wiki has to get rid of any sugar-coating for and describe as "an unflinching readiness to kill." They supported the Tokugawa regime in its final years, opposing the imperial loyalists. Despite their job technically being to keep the peace, they had a tendency to deserve being viewed as a threat, of course. And despite only ever numbering about three hundred at the very most, they are often credited with singlehandedly delaying the Meiji side's eventual victory.
- The Unabomber tried to get across his anti-technology message by sending bombs, carefully crafted with homemade parts, through the mail to universities, ad agencies, and major companies.
- During the spread of Islam in the 7th century, Amr ibn al-'Aas, an Islamic general, allegedly burned down the Library of Alexandria, at the time one of the greatest repositories of written knowledge in the western world (especially as Europe languished in the dark ages). When asked why he would destroy the priceless books and manuscripts in the library, the general replied: "If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them."*
There are about four theories that attempt to explain how the library was destroyed, one of which is that Julius Caesar accidently burned it down. Few scholars currently agree that Amr ibn al 'Aas was the one to do it, since most of the sources that support that idea were written 500 years after the theorized burning and we only have Arabic sources for it.
- Vlad III Ţepeș, aka "The Impaler", prince of Wallachia between 1456-1462 and 1476. He killed one tenth of his population, but he made life safe for honest, law-abiding citizens. In all fairness, all the horror stories about him and how he loved a particularly squicky form of execution that gave him his nickname (spoilered for massive Squick: the victim would have a giant stake inserted into their anus and be left suspended on it until it came out of their mouth) were spread during the time he was held captive by the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus, and likely exaggerated. Must've been embarassing for Matthias when he had to release Vlad because his warnings about the Ottoman Empire came true.
- The word "Zealot" comes from one of the major rebel groups that fought against the Roman occupation of Judea. Their resistance was so bad that the Roman Emperor Vespasian sent his own son, Titus, and the 10th Legion to deal with them.
- During the first Jewish-Roman war, one of the more fanatical Zealot groups were the Sicarii, whose name approximately translates to knife nuts. They spent their days killing Romans, other heathens, and Jews they considered infidels, which meant about everyone they met. When the war was lost, they captured the fortress of Masada, killed all its occupants, and resisted a siege by the aforementioned 10th Legion for three years. When the Romans were about to breach the walls, they all commited suicide to avoid capture and torture.
- Some think that Judas was one of these before joining Jesus, or that he never really left ("Iscariot" could mean either 'the Sicarius' or 'from Kerioth', a town in the Holy Land). Advocates of this theory suggest that Judas' betrayal was motivated by anger that Jesus did not support the Sicarii's extremism or hope that Jesus' arrest would force his followers to turn to violence.
- Mark David Chapman, a murderer currently serving his sentence of 20 years to life, murdered John Lennon, motivated by his anger that "Lennon preached for love and peace and still can make big money" and his disbelief in God. By committing such a murder, Chapman thought he would become a Catcher In The Rye, a "quasi-savior" or "guardian angel" like Holden Caulfield, protecting children from the "phoniness" of modern society.
- Joseph McCarthy counted as this, wanting to get rid of Communists in America but willing to go way too far to do so. He exploited the fear of Communism that was prevalent in America during the 50s with his accusations that the government was failing to deal with the Communists that he said were in their ranks. Though McCarthy was not a part of the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee that was responsible for subpoenaing, blacklisting, and generally ruining the lives of a lot of people from those days, his general demagoguery was definitely a contributing factor to the atmosphere of fear and suspicion that persisted up until his downfall.
- The Cossacks tended to fill this role in Tsarist Russia and, to a certain extent, even the modern Russian republic.
- Some generals on both sides in the American Civil War — most notably, Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan, and William Tecumseh Sherman, the ravager of Georgia. There were probably more such generals on the Confederate side, devoted to honor, slavery, and/or My Country, Right Or Wrong; most of the Union generals were far too timid and/or inept for Knight Templar status. (Lincoln once asked McClellan whether he could borrow the Army of the Potomac, since McClellan obviously wasn't using it.)
- Sombra Negra (Black Shadow) in El Salvador is an ex-military vigilante group dedicated to ridding their country of drug dealers, especially the MS13 gang, which controls entire towns and is responsible for over eight thousand murders. They have executed at least seventeen dealers, possibly many more. They have also been known to desecrate bodies and even eat the brains of dead dealers. They're a mix of Knight Templar, Well-Intentioned Extremist, and He Who Fights Monsters.
- Ali Sina of Faith Freedom International both inverts this and plays it straight. While he wants to make the world a better place, his perception of the root causes as well as his solutions are woefully inaccurate.
- The Shining Path of Peru (Sendero Luminoso), a Maoist guerilla organization convinced that the only way to achieve a revolution is through violence, making no distinction between civilian or military targets and actually seeking to "induce genocide". Unlike other guerilla groups such as the FMLN or FSLN, who eventually became political parties in their respective countries, the Shining Path is classified by Peru and the U.S. as a terrorist organization.
- Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, compared himself to Jesus Christ before taking 32 lives.
- Anders Breivik, the domestic terrorist in Norway. The article describes him explicitly as such and he himself claims— possibly believes— that he's just one of a reborn Order of Knights Templar.
- Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar caused the deaths of thousands of people in order to rid her island nation of things introduced by the Europeans, especially Christianity, once she established her regime. Ironically, the arrival of Christianity to Madagascar had opressed the native religious beliefs, so it was essencially a Knight Templar destroying other Knights Templar.
- Osama bin Laden and the rest of the senior members of Al-Qaeda qualify as this. They desire to "purify" the world and get rid of the monarchies and dictatorships in the middle east and the rest of the Muslim world. However, to do this, they kill innocent people and commit terrorist acts. Moreover, Al-Qaeda's ideal government is a strict theocracy.
- That said, in 2002 a psychology professor called Dr Aubrey Immelman diagnosed bin Laden as an Unprincipled Narcissist, meaning he was a self-serving Manipulative Bastard who, in this case, got off on getting people to commit acts of terrorism. With CIA profiler Dr Jerrod Post he also diagnosed Malignant Narcissism, meaning he was driven to pulling off ever more daring and audacious acts- for him, acts of terrorism- to feed his own ego. Your Mileage May Vary on whether you agree with this or not, though if its true then he was only posing as a Knight Templar and was secretly just The Sociopath.
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