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alt title(s): Rape The Dog "Widely recognized as a tyrannical megalomaniac who prided himself on cruelty and ruled through fear, Caligula was nearly undone by an underground smear campaign to depict him as a 'pretty nice guy.' Other sculptures and frescoes of the time libelously show him flying a kite and helping an old lady cross the Appian Way. An incensed Caligula immediately went into 'damage control' by publicly sodomizing a puppy."
The Moral Event Horizon is the point of no return. Once a character crosses it of their own free will, they cease to be cool or admirable. It is a single act which, while not necessarily objectively worse than anything else the villain has previously committed, affects the audience and the story on a far deeper level. Whether the person has truly become irredeemable may be a question that can never be answered (or only by that person, the one they've wronged, or a higher power), but the viewers no longer wish for such a redemption.
A Million Is A Statistic often comes into play because psychologically, it is impossible to feel as deeply about reported villainy as about visual injury to characters we care about.
A Noble Demon who crosses the horizon ceases to be noble. Draco will lose his leather pants for most ( but never all) of the fandom. If a Knight Templar, Well Intentioned Extremist, or any other type of antivillain crosses it, they stop being sympathetic and become someone the audience wants to see dead and in Hell by the end of the story. If a hero crosses it, they immediately become an evil villain; when this happens, the hero will typically have been on the slippery slope to the Villain Corner for some time. Keep in mind that crossing the Moral Event Horizon is more than a mere Face Heel Turn; the former hero has to do something not merely evil but truly unforgivable.
A character can cross the horizon in a number of ways. Where the horizon lies on the spectrum of acts depends on the nature and style of the story, and where it overall lies on the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism. Maybe a Saturday Morning Cartoon villain committed a murder. Maybe someone got drunk on power and organized the gang-rape of a 12-year-old girl for the lulz. Or maybe they blew up an inhabited planet. Whatever happens, such an act signals a permanent shift of the character and often the work as a whole into Darker And Edgier territory.
The key point here is that once a character crosses the horizon, they cannot be made admirable or sympathetic without again altering the moral tone of the story. A good litmus test is that if you still think a villain is cool or potentially redeemable, they have not yet crossed the horizon. Similarly, if you feel a character being redeemed would make them a Karma Houdini, then odds are they have crossed it (unless they were that depraved at the start of the story).
If a character has a Split Personality, it is possible for one personality to cross the horizon while still feeling sympathy for the other — for example, we can still admire the Jekyll regardless of what the Hyde might get up to. Similarly, if a character is Not Himself or under the influence of mind control, the person can't really be considered to have crossed the horizon because they weren't doing it of their own free will. The Moral Event Horizon may be instead applied to the one responsible for the brainwashing, depending on the severity of the evil act in question and the degree of the brainwasher's control over the subject.
For some particularily villainous characters it is almost impossible to cross the horizon. These evil characters exercise a certain twisted charm, and no matter what they do, they are already so far across the horizon so nothing will make them 'uncool' in the eyes of the audience. The sort of behavior that would put another character across the line is simply expected of these villains. Heath Ledger's Joker and Hannibal Lecter fall into this category - so don't list any of their misdeeds here.
When this is a form of Character Derailment, it is apt to be more hated than other forms of Character Derailment. Authors Saving Throw is, obviously, limited to either claiming that the event did not happen, or that someone else did the deed and was the actual one to fall over the Moral Event Horizon. (Possession is a favorite form of this.)
Not to be confused with Morale Event Horizon, although the character who experiences Start Of Darkness and Face Heel Turn because of Morale Event Horizon may end up crossing the Moral Event Horizon, and a character's crossing of the Moral Event Horizon may be accomplished through pushing another character through the Morale Event Horizon.
Naturally, spoilers abound in these examples.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Evil Matriarch Precia Testarossa of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha is established early on as excessively cruel when she takes the whip form of her Intelligent Device to her poor daughter Fate for not collecting enough Jewel Seeds to please her, marking her as the true Big Bad of the first season. But her true crossing of the Moral Event Horizon was when she gave Fate a speech essentially saying:
You're not a real person, you're just a thing and I hate you. In fact, I've always hated you, so if you could just go ahead and die now so that I wouldn't have to see you ever again, that would be peachy. Also, did I mention that I've always hated you? Because I do.
- While other moments may be too subjective to judge, after Vol.2/Ep.7 most people hated Shou Tucker from Fullmetal Alchemist for combining his dog and daughter, into a monstrous chimera that is Mercy Killed by Scar. That wasn't the first time he did something horrible either.
- Also from Fullmetal Alchemist (anime only),Pride/Fuhrer Bradley does a good job of seeming nice and reasonable even after his true identity is revealed (too bad they had to give him the title Fuhrer, making the audience suspect him anyway). He seems to genuinely care about his family, until the series finale, when his son accidentally puts him at a disadvantage in his battle with Mustang. He then proceeds to attempt to strangle his son, revealing that any pretense of being nice or reasonable was just an act.
- He may have crossed the line much earlier... when he stabbed the sympathetic chimera girl to death while she's inside Al. Al just kind of collapses, as blood pours out of all the chinks in his armor. The entire time, the culprit has a calm smile on his face. Even while his sword is down Al's neck.
- Heartily agreed, and considering he's a very good liar and manipulator in general, he didn't really need to do it. It was more than likely prejudice as most in the military viewed the chimeras as less than human in some way or another due to their half-animal lineage. Add in that he's a homonculus and there's a touch of irony as well, since he'd be branded the same way if it came out.
- Speaking of Shou and Barry, the State Military's crossing of the Moral Event Horizon for many viewers came when they were shown to be using them. Of course, the flashback to the Ishvalan massacre in the manga shows you how awful the Amestrian Goverment really is. The Generals care more about getting all the credit than about ending the war, and the events are so horrifying that Gentle Giant Alex Louis Armstrong has a mental breakdown right on the field. The worst part is that its made clear that the soldiers (except for Kimblee) hate this and just want to get out of there.
- As a dark fantasy series, Berserk has many villains that perform really sickening acts. Most of them are Complete Monsters in general, but in terms of crossing the Horizon, several characters stand out:
- After Griffith crosses the Morale Event Horizon near the end of the Golden Age arc (which is about the point where the anime ends as well) and activates his Crimson Behelit, he, Guts and everyone in the Hawks gets transported to hell. Griffith, distraught over the destruction of his dream and wanting more than anything to have a second chance, does a truly malignant Face Heel Turn, accepting the Deal With The Devil offered by the Godhand and having every one of the Hawks being marked with the Brand of Sacrifice, and in a scene that defines Nightmare Fuel Unleaded, the demons come out of the woodwork to eat everyone alive until only Guts and Casca are left. And then Griffith, in his new form of Femto, the fifth member of the Godhand, takes Casca, Guts's primary love interest, and proceeds to brutally rape her right in front of him. After this, Griffith acting like a hero when he is reincarnated on Earth tends to be just a little bit ironic.
- Gambino, Guts's gruff mentor/father figure, loses all our sympathy after he sells Guts, who was just eight years old at the time, to a paedophile soldier named Donovan for three silver coins.
- The King of Midland, who after ordering Griffith thrown in the dungeons and put to the torture for having sex with his daughter Charlotte, tries to force himself on her out of madness. Charlotte just barely manages to fight him off, and the experience alienates her from her father, to the point where she won't even acknowledge him on his deathbed.
- Inquisitor "Bloody Scripture" Mozgus is just as horrible as you'd expect a fanatical religious nutjob with too much power and not a shred of objectivity can get. While it's pretty obvious from the start that he's Bad News, his vilest act we see makes him a Complete Monster of the first order: when a band of starving refugees attempts to steal some of the ample foodstuffs sent to Mozgus and his retinue, he spots among them a woman with a starving infant. When she begs him to feed her child, he gently takes her along to his residence, lauding her courage and dedication. He sends away the child to be fed and cared for, then escorts her to a room while extolling the fact that while her intentions were good, she still has to expiate her sins... Then he opens the door, where we see the other refugees being horribly tortured, and the poor woman is dragged, stripped, and tied to another torture device over her increasingly frantic pleas... Then the door closes. It's as nightmarish as it sounds, if not more so.
- When the cruel kids from Lucy's backstory in Elfen Lied forced her to watch as they beat the dog that she had started caring for to death, just to get any kind of reaction from her at all, they crossed the Moral Event Horizon to the point that for a good number of fans, Lucy snapping and murdering them all by making their heads a splode in a Beware The Nice Ones moment was too good for them.
- Lucy herself multiple times. Gouging a defeated opponent's eyes, killing a secretary, and ripping off Nana's limbs all stand out. Not to mention when she cuts the protagonist's little sister in half right before his eyes.
- But she also killed the girl who was her only friend and who loved the dog like she did, making her cross the horizon in the very same scene herself. Alternatively, she crossed the line when she killed all the bystanders at the fair, or killed Kouta's family in the train later that evening.
- The girl in question was forced to reveal the location of Lucy's dog to the cruel kids, and to be frank, that first lash-out with Lucy's diclonius powers was very much an indiscriminate one. She was past the point of caring about any innocents caught in the crossfire, as the incident was the final straw that clinched the idea in Lucy's mind that humans were bastards.
- What do you mean "forced"? It seems pretty thoroughly implied that she willingly sold Lucy out.
- The line was crossed in the first ten MINUTES of the first episode. Especially with the nice secretary's body *Shudder*
- In the Meakashi arc of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni, Shion has about three different scenes where she might be perceived to have crossed over, although the most commonly cited one is when she does her own perverted crucifixion of Satoko (the series' designated woobie). No matter how long people wait to say she's hopeless, though, just about everyone says it before the end of the arc.
- What Shion's family did to her earlier in the same arc - most notably and finally making her tear out three of her fingernails as a "distinction" and for the forgiveness of three - is pretty cruel as well, and certainly contributes to her madness. It still doesn't excuse her brutally murdering her lost love's little sister, though.
- In Bokurano, Mr Hatagai is the first love of Chizuru "Chizu" Honda as well as her teacher. Although he seems like a nice guy at first glance, he takes advantage of Chizu's feelings for him in a ghastly manner in the manga. He lures the unsuspecting middleschooler on a date, then locks her in a hotel room with several of his friends, who proceed to gang rape her. Furthermore, she's blackmailed with sex videos featuring her, meaning that if she dares say anything about what happened, those videos will be distributed with all her details attached. And just to drive home the point that Hatagai is a nasty, loathsome piece of work, when Chizu later discovers she's pregnant with his baby and tells him about it, he says it's great news because he can get a childbirth video out of it, and that he knows a doctor who can claim the baby was dead at delivery... very much implying that he'd kill it. No wonder poor Chizu completely snapped. (In the anime, Hatagai's actions are toned down considerably, but he's still quite a dick.)
- Name a One Piece villain. Any One Piece villain. Especially if they are Big Bads or are associated with the World Government.
- Aside from Crocodile and Arlong though, most non-World Government villains do eventually find redemption.
- Even Arlong has a bit of leeway now, given what we've learned about how fishmen are generally treated, particularly on Shabondy Island. Most fans, however, aren't buying it.
- And they shouldn't. He let Nami grow up gathering the money he promised that she could buy her town's freedom for, and then, on the day she would have finished, he sent a corrupt squad of marines to beat her up and steal all of the money before she would pay him off. That's not revenge; that's evil, pure and simple.
- The Diva, the Evil Twin of Saya in Blood+, crossed the line in a big way when she raped and murdered Saya's eleven year old adopted brother Riku, which among other things killed off the vampire Twincest fandom that had sprung up before this.
- Only to spawn a new one... Particularly hilarious though was the denial during the episode's play in the US. This troper's favorite was one hardcore fanboy who was always defending Diva as a broken cutie(well, she did start out that way, but never came back.) When this scene happened, he responded with increasingly delusional denials in AdultSwim.com, culminating in "Maybe she was just stealing some sweet candy and accidentally bled on him." while rubbing her belly. Delishus delusion, mmmhmm!
- This troper remembers Riku being 14.
- While he was introduced to Gundam 00 as a Lovable Rogue of sorts with impressive piloting skills, Ali Al-Saachez's Complete Monster status just built up over the first season. The first indicator was when it was revealed he made Child Soldiers that he recruited kill their parents to prove their faith in God and the cause — a cause he didn't even believe in himself. But he crossed the line for sure when he killed Saji Crossroad's Intrepid Reporter sister, Kinue, for no particular reason, after revealing his nature as a Blood Knight to her just for kicks, while explaining to her what a bad, bad man he is. Despite all this, his fanbase either doesn't care or just loves him all the more.
- Played straight with Nena Trinity, who attacked a wedding and crippled Louise Halevy because she was bored. Notable in that this is the worst she's done yet fans regard her with all the hate one would expect to be directed at Ali, showing Double Standard at play.
- Could also be a result of the attack happening during a socially indoctrinated special time.
- Reccoa Londe from Zeta Gundam completes her somewhat bizarre Face Heel Turn when she conducts a nerve gas attack on a space colony, massacring all 8 million inhabitants. Laying the blame on the AEUG for the tragedy by failing to stop her, and giving half-assed excuses for her actions didn't help her case much, either.
- In the final season of the anime of Sailor Moon, Galaxia is presented as the boss of minions who go off searching for Star Seeds hidden in living beings. Apparently, she has to find Star Seeds with eternal shines, so she can take over the planet. But after killing off her minions and descending to Earth once the Princess of a planet she destroyed showed herself, Galaxia took that Princess' Star Seed and apparently had nearly enough power to accomplish her goal. She then spent the next four episodes killing almost everyone on Earth by taking their Star Seeds, showing that the efforts of her minions were little more than pointless busywork. Sailor Moon redeems her though, because that's who she is.
- In Part 5 of Jojos Bizarre Adventure, the mysterious capo of Passione tasks Bucciarati's group with recovering his daughter from a renegade group of assassins who are trying to get his identity out of her (they want revenge for what he did to two of their superiors). With the task complete (and all the assassins but one dead), Bucciarati has no qualms about reuniting them. Until, that is, he finds out that what the boss REALLY wanted was to kill his own daughter just to make it forever impossible for anyone to learn his identity.
- Dio Brando gets one of these in his introduction in Part 1. Jonathan's dog Danny runs up to Dio, just to be friendly... and Dio kicks him as hard as he can! Dio then explains that he hates dogs because "they're stupid animals who don't know their place". That isn't even the worst thing Dio does in the entire series - in fact, that's not even the worst thing he does to Danny - but it certainly shows what kind of person he is.
- Lord Darcia of Wolfs Rain goes from being woobiliciously wicked to unforgivable in an instant when he kills off Toboe and Quent. It only worsens after his wolfish transformation, which makes him unattractive as well as evil, and kills off all the other characters.
- Kind of weird that said transformation would be self-inflicted, but he did go crazy, after all.
- Can't blame him too much as he wasn't really all there. If he had done it earlier it would have had a much bigger impact. The insane unrequited love of Jagara that caused her to begin much of the events in the series is probably more worthy.
- One Bleach character's Face Heel Turn crossed the moral event horizon so far you can't even see the act from the line. Stabbing their loyal second-in-command through the stomach? Definitely evil, but Bleach villains have done worse. Using the excuse of comforting Hinamori through the shock of seeing them Back From The Dead to get said second within reach? Vile, and somehow more disgusting than Mayuri's experiments on the Quincys and constant abuse of Nemu (we should remind the reader that Mayuri's already pretty far over the Moral Event Horizon himself).
- Nagi's moment comes close to the end of Mai-Otome when he shoots Sergey in the head for trying to subvert his plan behind his back, and then hooking him up to the Harmonium Organ in such a way that he can only continue living if Nina uses it. She does.
- Tomoe is considered having crossed the line at one of two points: when she "greets" Shizuru immediately after switching sides, or later when she confronts Arika and gloats about being responsible for crippling her and her friends throughout the series (while also saying something to the effect of "they were all useless, anyway" with a big smile on her face).
- The Organization from Claymore starts out a band of dog-kicking knight templars at best between their transformation of orphaned girls into demi-human monster hunters and the fact that they charge towns a lot for the removal of the 'Yoma' (far more than upkeep of the hunters and overhead would require). The subtle attempts to eliminate those "claymores" that may be succumbing to their Superpowered Evil Side or seem otherwise troublesome would also disturb observers (especially the mass suicide mission in vol. 10), but it can be excused as a useful force losing sight of its true goals. Then we find out that the Organization is creating the Yoma and is apparently using the whole continent as a Super Soldier testing ground...
- Alucard from Hellsing seems just to be a badass vampire hunter at the start of the manga, but as the series progresses, the reader finds he is quite close to being amoral. Case in point: his brutal battle against Rip van Winkle, where he crashes directly into the hijacked ship she occupied, taunts her by letting her tear him apart with her magic bullets (and promptly regenerating afterwards), then, in a scene of symbolic rape, impales her on her own musket and devours her. All this, whilst Rip cries hysterically for basically the entire scene.
- Pain from Naruto recently crossed the Moral Event Horizon, when he singlehandedly blew up Konoha with gravity because he has realized that Naruto, the very reason why he didn't completely obliterate the village in the first place, isn't there. This troper, who believed him to be reasonably cool prior to this event, now thinks that he seriously needs to die.
- To make it even worse, it looked like he was going to just leave. However, when he tries to lecture Tsunade about how the main villages constantly wage war (which his goal is to stop) without any concern for the people that suffer for it, she responds by saying that even the greater villages have suffered from it. He then decides to destroy their village and kill most of them (which will even drain several years of HIS life) simply to teach them a lesson about "true pain".
- Is it just me or does Pain remind anyone else of Ninja Jigsaw as far as motivations go?
- Also from Naruto, the Village elder Danzo, who prevented Naruto from coming to Konoha to prevent the aforementioned scene by killing a frog messenger sent to fetch him, expressing a desire to see Konoha destroyed so that he can succeed Tsunade as Hokage.
Comic Books
- The title character of the Lucifer comics punted dogs as a hobby (naturally), establishing him quite firmly as an epic Deadpan Snarker and Heroic Sociopath that was as amusing and Badass as those tropes suggest. This continued all the way until the Basanos arc, where in a rather impressive twist the Basanos actually mortally injured him... only for Lucifer to reveal that he had manipulated Token Loli Elaine from the start and trick her into dying in his place. He... might have redeemed himself later on (bringing Elaine Back From The Dead helped) but this Troper never again found Lucifer very funny, or hoped that he would find himself a happy ending.
- The writer mentioned that he considered Lucifer's destruction of The Mansions of The Silence Lucifer's point of no return, destroying billions of souls because he was impatient.
- His field team called him for help. Of course, he could have helped in a less intrusive manner, but he just doesn't care.
- While the man who would eventually become the Saint of Killers from Preacher had already a staggering kill record to his name (among other heinous actions), he was nonetheless a decent human being (at least compared to most of his murderous peers), and for a time lived a life devoid of killing people. However, he finally crossed over when, in the course of brutally avenging the peaceful life that he lost, he cold bloodedly killed an innocent for the first time in his life, damning himself to Hell in the process. What came afterwards (including the Ratwater genocide) was merely a formality, as it's arguable that was too far gone by then.
- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen's Griffen was implausibly popular with fans in the first volume, never mind he was introduced raping teenage girls and shown casually murdering an innocent policeman. To make sure we realise he's a very bad man in Vol 2, he sells Earth to the Martians in Vol 2 — and assaults Mina. It's the latter rather than anything else that results in his Karmic Death — by which point a reader can't feel any sympathy for him at all.
- Likely because this is a common sexual fantasy, of a pedestal-residing woman being available to someone who sees their social standing as lower than dirt. Some scenes in Hollow Man also play off of this, though they end in killing instead as the serum has driven to recipients batshit crazy by then. Essentially the male equivalent of a bodice-ripper, as far as the reasonings behind this go. (for execution purposes, see guys who got off to the movie Disclosure)
- A Star Wars Expanded Universe example. Dezono Qua from Dark Times would buy a child slave every ten days from offworld. Why? To eat them.
- No wonder Bomo Greenbark doesn't take it well when Dass Jennir beat him to the kill, even though Bomo killing Dezono Qua wouldn't bring back Bomo's daughter.
- In Infinite Crisis, Superboy-Prime was presented as a confused teenager with powers he couldn't control lashing out at people who didn't understand him... until he lost it and killed some C List Fodder, whereupon he turned into a near-demonic Card Carrying Villain.
- For this troper it wasn't so much his killing the C List Fodder as the fact that all along he kept whining that it was their fault. Please, at least accept some responsibility.
- Everyone's favorite Magnificent Bastard, Dr. Doom, also gets to cross the Horizon in the prologue to the "Unthinkable" story arc in Fantastic Four. He approaches his Unlucky Childhood Friend, Valeria, and promises to abandon Mad Science and be with her forever if she'll love him. Eventually, she accepts — and Doom immediately casts a spell that skins her alive and makes the skin into a new suit of leather armor. This was all a Xanatos Gambit by Doom, who made a Deal With The Devil for unstoppable magical power in exchange for abandoning science — and winning the love of a pure soul and damning said soul to Hell. Please note: Doom didn't even have to break his code of honor by lying; everything he told Valeria was technically true. Writer Mark Waid stated that the purpose of the story and the rest of the arc was to deconstruct Dr. Doom's "nobility". This arc became Dis Continuity very quickly in the eyes of many fans. Even Marvel Comics doesn't mention it any more.
- Later in the same arc, Doom possessed Reed and Sue Richards' daughter Valerie and kidnapped their son Franklin, imprisoning him in a Hell dimension. Again, in a deconstruction of Doom's supposed 'nobility' and 'honour', Doom, holding Val and showing Franklin in Hell, promised to 'set your child free' if the Four surrendered to him. They did so - and Doom put down Val, leaving Franklin in Hell.
Film
- One of the most famous crossings of the Horizon: the destruction of Alderaan in Star Wars: A New Hope. Palpatine and Vader are still considered darkly awesome, very few feel that way about Grand Moff Tarkin, who is almost despicably efficient and dispassionate when it happens. Leia's reaction, as well as Luke and Ben's, lets you know there were people on that planet.
- Another crossing is in the third prequel, when Anakin / Darth Vader proceeds to kill the Jedi children. Who actually trusted him to help them. Darth Vader embarks on a winding path toward redemption, requiring his life as payment.
- Mirrored in KoTOR. You might start off the game thinking "Malak is a Sith and thus evil. Yeah, sure, whatever." But when he orders the destruction of all Taris by orbital bombardment, all to kill one single woman, you know he's not screwing around.
- It's obvious from his first appearance that Captain Vidal of Pans Labyrinth is a very unpleasant man. At first, it almost seems a little too obvious. But there might have been a softer side lurking there somewhere. But after he crushed the skull of an innocent boy with a bottle and shot his father with a mixture of boredom and vague pleasure, it was made clear how evil he was. Note, this is just when he crossed the horizon. He kept right on going. He's a moral Magellan, really.
- Zero Wolf from Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. The leader of the war band is shown to be a brutal but efficient leader, a proud father and basically a honorable man. However, he crosses the horizon when he decides to 'play a game' with the remaining captives. They are set free, two at a time, and made to run across a field while Zero Wolf's warriors try to hit them with arrows and javelins. The protagonist Jaguar Paw is the only one who survives this.
- He's nothing compared to Middle Eye.
- Alex Forrest of Fatal Attraction loses all of our sympathy when she takes Dan's daughter's pet rabbit and boils it alive in the family's pressure cooker in a scene of pure Nightmare Fuel that coined the term "bunny boiler" for Yandere types in the west.
- And has since become a staple usage of bunnies in horror lit, for example, R.L. Stine's books.
- Warden Norton in The Shawshank Redemption starts off as stern, but ultimately reasonable and fair. He even becomes somewhat chummy with hero Andy Dufresne after he begins doing financial work for the prison. But when he orders the death of Tommy to ensure that Andy will never have his name cleared, he crosses the point of no return. Then, just to be extra nasty, he throws Andy in the solitary confinement cell for nearly a month just to break his spirit, which just makes it supremely awesome when Andy proves that his spirit is unbreakable.
- He gives Andy a month in the hole, comes to tell him Tommy is dead, and gives him another month to think about it.
- The scene in There Will Be Blood where Daniel puts his son on a train in the most Parental Abandonment-tacular way possible. We later learn that H.W. was sent to a school for the deaf, which is fine, but did Daniel really need to be so heartless about it?
- Nicely subverted in M, where the protagonist is a childkiller, and yet, he retains our sympathy. Peter Lorre was a really good actor.
- In The Proposition, it's bad enough that Arthur murdered the Hopkins family (although deleted scenes show that Patrick survived), but when we learn that he raped a pregnant woman to death, we accept that yes, he's got to die, Affably Evil or not:
Cpt. Morris Stanley: "Arthur Burns is a monster. An abomination. You were right to break company with him; what happened at the Hopkins' place was unforgivable. Did you know that that poor woman had a child in her belly?"
- Similarly, Complete Monster Eden Fletcher decides to flog young Mikey to death. For the record, Mikey is a retarded 14-year old who is barely aware of his crime.
- "Where's the money hid?"
- This trope caused a scene to be removed from Back to the Future Part III. Originally, the movie was to have contained a scene where Buford Tannen, ancestor of Biff, shoots and kills Marshall Strickland in front of the lawman's son. According to screenwriter Bob Gale, the scene was removed because it was felt that after Buford is seen committing such a deed, it doesn't seem right that he not die (and of course, he can't die, seeing as he will need to live long enough to extend the family line).
- Frank in the extremely dark Western Once Upon a Time in the West shows he's beyond this horizon twice. His very first act onscreen is the cold-blooded murder of an entire family, which culminates in the slow and methodical shooting of the family's youngest son. A later flashback, which plays during the final showdown, reveals he did something even worse to Harmonica and his brother, which fueled most of the plot.
- Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd were always Villain Protagonists at best, but when Toby, who in the movie is only a little boy, discovers the Awful Truth about Sweeney's murderous tendencies, Mrs. Lovett locks him in the evil basement and plans to have Sweeney murder him, even though Toby has just told her (via the song "Not While I'm Around") that he loves her and won't let anything bad happen to her. After that, Mrs. Lovett is no longer a sympathetic character, even before the reveal that she knew that Lucy Barker, Sweeney's thought-to-be-dead wife, was still alive.
- Not to mention the way she chooses to try and excuse herself to Sweeney, the words she chose show just how lacking in empathy she is, the song pretty much amounts to "Why did you need her anyway? You got me now, just throw out that trash! Here, let me sing to you how much better a catch I am!" Sweeney comes back from the horizon twice by disagreeing with her, then subsequently letting Toby kill him with his own blade in a move of poetic justice. In this troper's opinion, Mrs Lovett is the true monster of the musical, Turpin finishing a very close second, having embarked on this spree with Sweeney just for kicks and to bag a man, with saving her cruddy pie business as a tertiary cover reason. Since she's so camp most seem to overlook this however, and take her at face value.
- Judge Turpin, who is established as a dog-kicking machine after he has Benjamin Barker, who would become Sweeney Todd, sent away to Australia on a false charge so that he could have Lucy for himself, crosses the Moral Event Horizon himself during the "Poor Thing" sequence where he has the Beadle take Lucy to the Judge's place, where he has a masked ball in progress, and then proceeds to rape her once she's cornered and at his mercy. Then, as if that wasn't enough to make us hate him, we get a scene later on in the movie that has Turpin sentencing a little boy to death — which was actually a stand-in for a much squickier scene that involves him...ahem...expressing (via the song "Johanna (Mea Culpa)") his rather creepy lust for his ward Johanna, who he raised as his daughter.
- Johnny Wong of Hard Boiled tops John Woo's other villains in terms of sheer nastiness with his conduct in the hospital sequence in the second half of the movie, with his willingness to gun down innocent patients that try to escape the hospital. His most despicable act was the massacre of a group of patients standing between him and Alan, which is only stopped when Mad Dog, his Dragon, blasts the Mini-Uzi right out of his hands and calls him on this psychotic move, which ultimately gets Mad Dog killed.
- Burke in Aliens, when he tries to impregnate Ripley and Newt with alien embryos, so he can smuggle them through quarantine, and ultimately use them for bioweapons research. Even before that, he did the same thing with the colonists themselves.
- When being interviewed on The Tonight Show, Paul Reiser (who played Burke) revealed that he took his parents to see the film - and when the scene came where his character was killed... his parents simply nodded their silent approval. Damn - if your parents want you dead, you haven't just passed the Moral Event Horizon, you've ensured that the character you play Crosses The Line Twice.
- In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Judge Doom drops an innocent, adorable cartoon shoe into The Dip to demonstrate its effects, which turns out to be melting it alive.
- Made even worse by the fact that the poor thing was trying to show affection towards him. Considering how cold Doom was, it's easy to understand why no one would even bother to try, but the little shoe apparently felt that even cold, imposing figures should be loved.
- In Godzilla VS Destoroyah, Destoroyah gets one of these when he brutally murders Godzilla Junior which, naturally, pushes Godzilla into a grief-stricken fury.
- As outmatched as he was though, Junior put up a decent fight against an immensely superior opponent. Everyone should try Godzilla: Save the Earth just to see, in the hands of an experienced fighter and not some mindless beast, how overpowered his abilities really were. Unfortunately, one move is missing from his repertoire, dragging the opponent around the field using only his tail. He has more than enough to make up for it. The odd thing is he's a normal playable character despite being on an SNKBoss level of pain. Orga would be mid-tier were it not for a couple nasty throws. Space Godzilla comes close, but due to the strange nature of his strongest attacks doesn't quite measure up to Destroyah.
- In Serenity, the crew of the title ship manage to successfully evade the Operative, so rather than track them down he destroys all of their possible hiding places and kills anyone they'd ever had significant dealings with, including the people of Haven as well as Shepherd Book, who sacrificed himself in an attempt to stop him.
Operative: I'm sorry. If your quarry goes to ground, leave no ground to go to. You should have taken my offer. Or did you think none of this was your fault?
Mal: I don't murder children.
Operative: I do. If I have to.
- Mal's later gambit of leading the Reavers towards the Alliance is seen by some to be a case of a hero crossing the moral event horizon. Others don't, as the Alliance fleet was probably the only group with enough firepower to put the Reavers out of commission for good, not to mention being responsible for their existence in the first place.
- The Patriot's Colonel Tavington isn't exactly a nice guy to start with—the first time he shows up, he takes the protagonist's son prisoner, threatens to shoot the rest of the protagonist's family, shoots one of the kids anyway, burns their house down, and then orders the wounded to be shot, all within the span of about ten minutes. Still, he's not that much better than Mel Gibson's character until he locks a while town's population in their church and torches it. All without losing his Draco In Leather Pants status, too.
- Well, he is Draco's father after all.
- In The Professional, villain Stansfield kills a whole family, save the second protagonist Mathilda, with a shotgun, including her mother, who was just taking a bath, and then her little brother who was hiding under the bed in hopes that he wouldn't be seen and shot. What makes him the irredeemable bastard he is, is the fact that he takes drugs beforehand to make the killing more fun. Interestingly, it's her little brother who Mathilda is really mad at Stansfield about, since her parents were shown to be abusive Jerkasses in an earlier scene.
- If the knowledge that Mr. Blonde randomly massacred the hostages of the failed jewel heist (though it occured offscreen) because one of them set off the alarm didn't push him over the Moral Event Horizon, seeing him torture, mutilate and threaten to burn alive a young police officer while contemptuously ignoring his pleas for his life (including his statement that he has a young child) certainly did.
- Light Yagami from the Live Action Adaptation of Death Note is already closer to being a Card Carrying Villain even when compared to his Knight Templar anime/manga counterpart, but he finally crossed over when not only does he kill Misora Naomi in an even more twisted fashion than in the original version, but also his own girlfriend (and even doubting that he ever cared about her) just to garner access into the Anti-Kira task force. Such is his monstrosity than even Ryuk could only refer to him as "a demon than is more shinigami than shinigami themselves".
- In Enemy at the Gates, the German sniper played by Ed Harris is more an antagonist than a villain; throughout most of the movie he is portrayed as cold, but vaguely sympathetic - until he crosses the Moral Event Horizon and he pointlessly murders a child. Obviously the scriptwriters wanted to make sure that the viewers would not be rooting for him during the climactic fight.
- Despicable yes, pointless no. For starters the child had spied against him, and then the murder was almost certain to draw out the girl, whose planned murder would have then drawn out the main protagonist, making the whole plan much easier. Didn't exactly work out though...
- Besides, it turns out that kid in question was a real person, really did spy on the Germans for the Soviets, and was actually convicted by a German tribunal for espionage. Guess what the standard punishment for espionage during wartime is, folks?
- Much of the movie is based on a historical-fiction novel with real people and real events, with the blanks filled in with prose, even the romance was real! This is sometimes missed because the book carries a different name, War of the Rats. Considering the standard punishment, as well, the German sniper (who by the way is under debate as to he really was, since there isn't any record of a Kõnig) let the kid off light, as execution by firing squad frequently results in needing a coup de grace. When pressed for time and presented with a large load of prisoners, executioners simply let them bleed to death, shoving them out of the way for the next group.
- Frequently used in politically minded historical dramas to make sure you know who the bad guys are.
- Irish War of Independance/Civil War: a fully justified trope because the films usually have to convince you to root for the IRA.
- Michael Collins: loads of it. At one point the Brits find a traitor and hang him on site, without the slightest hesitation, while he's thrashing for his life. At another point the Black-and-Tans drive an armoured car into an in-use football field. After the few seconds of shocked silence one of the players takes the opportunity to score a goal, causing the crowd to cheer. The Tans then shoot him dead, and open fire on the crowd.
- The Wind That Shales The Barely: The English raid a house of IRA supporters, they hold down one of the residents then violently, bloodily cut her hair off, then set fire to the house.
- In Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (film version), after "abusing the help" and "breaking every rule Vegas lives by", Dr. Gonzo is portrayed as having finally crossed the "Moral Event Horizon" when he assaults a waitress with a knife. Although Dr. Gonzo is depicted as more of a force of nature than anything else, his monstrous nature was previously played for laughs until this scene.
- In the film Blue Velvet, if Frank Booth didn't establish himself as a Complete Monster of the highest degree in his Nightmare Fuelerrific introductory scene where he brutalizing and sado-masochistically rapes nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens, he certainly does when it turns out that he had systematically destroyed her life when he murdered her husband and is currently holding her small child hostage, threatening to murder the boy if she doesn't become his sex slave. He even goes so far as to cut her husband's ear off and show it to her just to torment her. And that's just the start...
Literature
Live Action TV
- In the NUMB3RS episode "Waste Not", after a sinkhole on a playground swallows up half a dozen kids and their teacher, it is revealed that the company Desert Shale has paved dozens of playgrounds with what is essentially reprocessed toxic waste. When this is brought to the attention of the CEO, he agrees to repave every site with asphalt. A rare case of a fictitious corporation taking responsibility for their actions, right? Of course not! Their real motivation is to cover up the fact that they buried barrels of acidic sludge underneath the playgrounds, which caused the sinkhole in the first place.
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer has Angel's dark side, Angelus, in Season 2. At first, he just seems like a Jerkass of epic proportions, but after the murder of Jenny Calendar and then an attempt to unleash a demon that will suck all life on Earth into a hell-dimension, something even the show's second-most-magnificent bastard won't do, Angelus (not Angel) lost anything resembling 'cool' for this troper.
- It wasn't just Jenny Calendar's murder that did it, but also the extreme lengths that Angelus went towards setting up Giles' discovery of her corpse.
- Buffy, to me, was merely annoying. But when she humiliated and tortured that geeky kid Andrew, she crossed the line into cold-hearted bitch.
- This troper found Miss Calendar's murder and the unbelievable cruelty of her discovery to be one of the most compelling moments in the series and in actuality had him like Angelus even more then he already had.
- What about Buffy beating Spike up in Dead Things? This troper found herself unable to look at Buffy the same way again... even to the point of reevaluating previous actions in light of it.
- On the other hand -"Seeing Red." This troper has lost any possibly of ever having sympathy for Spike afterward.
- Heroes: Sylar has far too much Draco In Leather Pants appeal and has yet to cross a Moral Event Horizon strong enough to make fans turn against him. Which, considering that he's killed some of the most sympathetic characters around - painfully, without a chance of fighting back thanks to being telekinetically restrained - says a lot. Ma Petrelli, on the other hand, spent much of the latter half of the first season and the entire second season flirting dangerously close to it, manipulating everyone to meet her own ends and even considering killing her own sons. In the third season, she seems to have finally crossed it by "feeding" one of her loyal and innocent agents to Sylar with absolutely no remorse. This is not a woman to be liked.
- That said, Heroes tends to gleefully dance directly down the middle of the Event Horizon with most of its major characters. In that sense, it can be taken as a deconstruction of the superhero genre in the same vein as Watchmen.
- Interestingly, Angela Petrelli seems to have finally backed away from the line, showing that much of her cynicism is because of protecting her sons after their father turned out to be a freaking psycho willing to kill them, and in general she has spent much of the show trying to rectify the mistakes she made up to (and in) Season 1.
- Sylar seems dangerously close to finally crossing it, as, after spending an entire season on a redemption ark for him as he learned to control the hunger and try to be a hero, he decided to kill the woman he was falling for, and has now seemingly become a Card Carrying Villain, no longer making claims about it being natural selection or whatever. Rather than coldly dispatching his victims, he's now killing them almost gleefully, making snarky jokes as he cuts their heads open. Only time will tell how the fans ultimately take it.
- Power Rangers has a lot of nasty villains, though most are understandably rather cartoonish. If you want utterly depraved, however, look no further than Lightspeed Rescue's Queen Bansheera. When her own son, Olympius screws up once too often and ends up trapped in the local equivalent of Hell, she opts to leave him there, and makes this decision while laughing. Later, to complete her One Winged Angel transformation, she casu
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