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"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die."
A nihilist who rants about how the Universe is cold and meaningless, we're just a bunch of filthy apes crawling around on an equally insignificant ball of mud, there is no Heaven and we're all going to be eaten by worms, so we might as well just start killing each other right now. May claim to be Above Good And Evil.
Almost every Ontological Mystery has a Nietzsche Wannabe, because their rants are perfect tools for playing mind games with the audience. Sometimes they serve as Mr Exposition, while other times, everything they say is a Red Herring, or they're a mix of both. They may be part of the secret, or just ordinary people who found out the truth and went mad. Oddly, nobody ever bothers to try and prove them wrong and claim the world is a fine place to be — there's few examples where the Aesop that "the Universe is a good place" defeats them. Usually people just shoot them and be done with the whole deal.
In more straightforward Science Fiction, they're always plotting destruction, and can get really corny (or other food product-y) if the writer isn't careful.
So called because a lot of their dialog sounds like somebody doing a bad job of ripping off the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. To be fair, Nietzsche may have been a pessimist, but he was never a nihilist himself; that honor might belong to his inspiration, Arthur Schopenhauer. In fact, Nietzsche criticized the notion that life was 'pointless', and found Nihilism to be naive and unproductive.
Compare Darwinist and The Fatalist. The Nietzsche Wannabe can make a nice "Last Man" for the Ubermensch. May be a target of Death By Pragmatism. Frequently tells more optimistic souls that they are behind the times. May be a Hollywood Atheist.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
Comics
- The Batman graphic novel The Killing Joke turned the Joker into a Nietzsche Wannabe who will do anything to prove to Batman that life is one big joke.
- And in The Dark Knight he's taken this Up To Eleven with a distinctly anarchist take.
- Harvey Dent (Two-Face) becomes one of these during the course of the movie, believing that Chance is the only truly fair law.
- In the Marvel Universe, The "Mad Titan" Thanos usually pulls this archetype off with a spectacular amount of wit and style.
- Carnage from Spider-Man is an anarchist, who doesn't believe in order and morality, and kills people for fun.
- In a strip of Calvin And Hobbes, Calvin says, "The problem with people is that they don't look at the big picture. Eventually, we're each going to die, our species will go extinct, the Sun will explode, and the Universe will collapse. Existence isn't only temporary, it's pointless! We're all doomed, and worse, nothing matters!" Of course, he's using this as an excuse to not do his homework.
- Watchmen Chapter VI: The Abyss Gazes Also, skirts around this trope. The chapter title is lifted from a Nietzsche quote (quoted in full at chapter’s end) and Rorschach includes a nihilist diatribe in his Hannibal Lecture.
"Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague, metaphysical forces. It is not God that murders children. Not fate that butchers them and feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us."
- Although primarily, Rorschach is an extremist Objectivist (according to Alan Moore) who selectively believes in some parts of Good and Evil while denying anything spiritual. And let's not forget the Comedian's reasons for his name and actions. Whereas the Ubermensch acknowledges the moral decay of the world around him and addresses it by becoming an exemplar of a superior code, the Comedian does the opposite; he becomes an exemplar of the logical extreme of mass society's vices. The "one big joke" attitude is, therefore, a mockery of what he sees around him and not a personal moral philosophy.
- Subverted in the DCU where nihilist Kid Amazo (whose intro features him talking to a Nietzsche Bust that talks back to him, just to give you an idea that this is a guy with the combined powers of the Justice League and is completely off his rocker) is preparing to fight the League after a Face Heel Turn and begins a Nietzsche Wannabe speech to the Bust. The Bust points out that Kid Amazo is doing things that go against what Nietzsche believed. It was promptly smashed.
- Tao
 of the Wildstorm Universe. As mentioned in Ed Brubaker's Sleeper: "The Tactical Augmented Organism (Tao) looked at life and saw Chaos and Order. Humanity's denial of Chaos appalled him.So he would tear it all down and fill the world with chaos,if only to watch mankind cling to their illusions as they burned around them."
- Batman villain Mr. Zsasz became a serial killer after having an epiphany that all life is meaningless; that people are nothing more than purposeless "zombies", and killing them is the only way to liberate them from their emptiness.
- This may be a reference to Serial Killer Carl Panzram, who described himself as "the man who goes around doing good." In the sense that he thought he was doing people a favour by killing them.
Film
Literature
- Hamlet, despite predating Nietzsche, preaches nihilism with the best of them.
- Dora from The Moth Diaries is not just a Nietzsche Wannabe, she's writing a book about a dialogue between the man himself and Brahms. She gets into a few arguments over the former's teachings with Ernessa. As to whether the book is completed before her death or not, we never find out. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this detail.
- MacBeth doesn't start off this way, but by the end? The titular character's soliloquy following Lady Macbeth's death ("Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow") is one of the more eloquent statements of the idea. His motives in the last act are his giving into this trope, made all the more terrifying because the amoral universe was of his own creation.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky loves this type of character:
- Ivan Karamazov and Smerdyakov both fit the trope in The Brothers Karamazov. One could make the case that Fyodor Karamazov is also a Nietzsche Wannabe, but he's more of a libertine than a nihilist.
- The famous novella Notes from the Underground features a protagonist who rants against the Nihilists, the Nietzsche Wannabes of the time, yet fits the trope pretty well himself.
- And of course, Rodya Raskolnikov from Crime And Punishment.
- HP Lovecraft wrote somewhere that "all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large", which fits the trope very well. (Source.)
- In Lovecraft's short story "The Silver Key", his Author Avatar Randolph Carter ponders about the matter, and concludes that aesthetics are the only value worth sustaining in a universe without direction or meaning. In a way he fits the Ubermensch category better than this one, since he creates his own values after realizing the insignificance of the current ones. Of course he had his best experiences in dreams, and in the end flees the material world completely, making him also a rather extreme lotus eater.
- Cronal, Big Bad of the Star Wars Expanded Universe novel Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor. He was raised by a cult of darksiders called the Sorcerers of Rhand, who believe that the will of the universe is that entropy and destruction are the only constants, and work to bring this about. At one point Cronal disparages Palpatine for attempting to create when he should have destroyed. All of which means that yes, there are people out there in the galaxy who are nastier than the Sith.
- In the Discworld book Night Watch, the bad guy Carcer is said not to be insane but rather too sane, in that he can do whatever the hell he wants because he knows that laws and things are just arbitrary lines the normal folk draw in the sand to pretend they're safe. Needless to say, Vimes does not take this well.
Live Action TV
- In a rare Detective Drama version, look for the Silent Witness episode "The Meaning of Death."
- Tony, the vaguely sociopathic lead in British drama Skins is a rare comedy example. He is seen on multiple occasions to be reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra one of Nietzsche's seminal works. This is reflected in how he manipulates his friends in increasingly cruel ways for his own personal amusement. He's stated in his tie-in blog and videos that the only purpose of anyone is to entertain him.
- Arthur Petrelli believes himself to be a Ubermensch better than normal people and free from moral constraints. Just to hammer this point home in Heroes series three he is seen reading Nietzsche shortly before telling his son Peter that he is "Better". Ironically subtler villains Linderman and Adam Monroe did a better job of representing this trope than Arthur ever did.
- Adam in particular. He believes he is better, that humankind is worthless and life is pointless. However he also adds a dash of Dark Messiah as he seeks to change the pointlessness of life but forcing mankind to experience a terrible cataclysm and taking the survivors as his followers to build a better world. So he's a fusion of this trope and Knight Templar/Well Intentioned Extremist
- Dr. Gregory House of House acts this way, and it is implied that the only reason he saves lives is because he likes solving mysteries, not because he cares if the patient lives or dies. He suspects everybody of hiding something or lying to him.
- What makes him a "wannabe" is that we're never truly sure what his motivations are. Usually he is in it for the challenge, but we're sometimes led to believe that he cares. House tries to subvert this by revealing how selfish he is, but it's pretty ambiguous.
- Connor from Angel reached his peak of Nietzsche Wannabe-ness in the Season 4 finale, and gave a rant that still sends chills down this editor's spine.
"There's only one thing that ever changes anything. And that's death. Everything else is just a lie. You can't be saved by a lie... you can't be saved at all."
- The sci-fi series Andromeda has an entire race of folks called Nietzscheans. They were originally humans who decided to live by Nietzsche's writings. They left Human territory to found their own colonies, genetically enhanced themselves, separated in to clans (called "Prides"), and generally don't like anybody but themselves.
- The famous-within-the-fandom 'Death And Dust' speech from Stephen Colbert. Even better because the character is (usually) a diehard Catholic. Shortly after the 2000 Florida recount, having decided that all the debate and argument is irrelevant and who's President doesn't even matter:
Stephen: You see, nothing means anything. Mankind is just a random collection of self-replicating protoplasm, floating in a godless universe where the stars blindly run and however frantically we may try to deny it, all our efforts amount to nothing more than death... and dust.
[long pause]
Stephen: [cheerful] Oh, and I'm having a Christmas cocktail party...
- Oz. Lemuel Idzik, the mentally-ill murderer of Kareem Said, who he'd met years before in Istanbul. Said gave a passionate speech about how life was meaningless because the universe would one day end. Lemuel took the lesson to heart and tries to commit suicide by killing two people in Oz — to his dismay he doesn't get the death penalty by reason of his insanity.
- Alpha is this on Dollhouse, even referring to himself and Echo after he forces her to undergo a composite event as Ubermensch.
- Subverted in Red Dwarf: the Inquisitor is a Simulant, a race of psychotic, violence-crazed humanoid robots created to fight wars for humanity, which humanity then attempted to shut down after they proved too sadistic. Equipped with a unique self-repair system of incomparable capability, the Simulant who became the Inquisitor survived until the end of time, and then beyond. Drifting in nothingness, he came to the conclusion that that is no such thing as God, no such thing as an afterlife, and that the purpose for existence is to live a worthwhile existence. Constructing a time machine, the Inquisitor now roams existence, meeting and judging each individual person who has ever and will ever live. If they fail to justify the life they have lived, he erases them and replaces them with a parallel version — a sperm that didn't make it, an egg that wasn't fertilized. Of course, if, in due "time", they too prove themselves unworthy of the gift of life, then they are erased and another parallel version is given existence in their place. The Inquisitor's end-goal is to ensure that the universe is populated only by the worthy, those who truly have made the best of having been born.
Musical
- Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd gives a rousing number, "Epiphany," devoted to the worthlessness of the human race and how we all deserve to die. From which point on he cuts a bloody swath in accordance with those precepts. Accompanied by dramatic chorus about moralizers and hypocrites.
- The operatic version of Shakespeare's Othello turned Iago, a villain who normally did it For The Evulz, into one of these with his Villain Song "Credo in un Dio crudel."
Tabletop Games
- Shar, the goddess of bitterness and oblivion in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting of Dungeons And Dragons, is the very manifestation of this trope.
- Tharizdun, the God of Omnicidal Maniacs, has many of these traits; it's just that instead of sitting around preaching about it, he's chained in the Far Realm driving people mad and plotting to destroy everything, everywhere.
- Archaon, Chosen of Chaos from Warhammer fits the actual Nietzsche mold fairly closely, believing that human society is irredeemably corrupt, and that a new form of society most be built. Of course, he thinks this should be done by killing everyone and turning the world over to Cosmic Horrors. He also held to the unrelenting pessimism, calling all human gods lies/liars, and believing this to such an extent that he was horrified to discover a Physical God had reincarnated to stop him — despite the fact that he had just won the fight.
- The Bleak Cabal from the Planescape campaign setting of Dn D is a subversion, as they are generally nice fellows despite their belief that the universe makes absolutely no sense.
- Furthermore, there's the Doomguard faction, whose members know that the entropy of everything is inevitable — in fact, the core of Doomguard philosophy is that trying to hinder entropy is inherently futile and some of its more extreme members even try to hasten along the process.
Video Games
Web Comics
- In Kid Radd, GI Guy, rather accurately observing that video game sprites like himself are created for the purpose of killing each other, tries to destroy the entire sprite world, and humanity with it.
- Dominic Deegan: Oracle For Hire has Celesto Morgan, who is determined to "cleanse the world" by killing a lot of people he thinks deserve to die, as exemplified in these strips. Dominic hinges on being one for a while in the same story arc, until he is shown a group of people who willingly sacrificed themselves to protect their friends; this shakes him out of the "The world is horrific" viewpoint he was holding.
- It is worth noting that he isn't evil — in more recent strips he negotiates with Deegan and tries to make a peace offering. He still tries to kill people. The fact that one is a psychopath and the other is a crime lord about to get away with it are points in his favor though... more of a Knight Templar now.
- Jack from Antihero For Hire, as shown here.
- In 8-Bit Theater, Lich von Vampire believes that all life exists to die. The cultists and Black Mage also seem to have a nihilistic philosophy.
- Though in Black Mage's case it's not because he believes the universe is meaningless; he just wants to destroy it because he knows its meaning is to hurt him.
Web Original
- Daphne Rudko from Survival Of The Fittest has a viewpoint that can best be described as this, viewing humanity as nothing but parasites that must be destroyed and life as bleak and torturous, causing her to play not as much out of wanting to live (though that was a big part of it) as wanting everyone else to die. Then again, she's probably one of the few justified Nietzsche Wannabes out there.
Western Animation
- Miss Bitters from Invader Zim is a Double Subversion. She's played totally for laughs — but given what happens in a typical episode of the show, she looks like an optimist.
- The 'Satan' sequence in The Adventures Of Mark Twain (adapted from Twain's novella The Mysterious Stranger) is one of the most frightening and disturbing examples. What's worse is that this was put in a family film.
- Arguably Professor Screweyes from Were Back A Dinosaurs Story. In a deleted scene (which really shouldn't had been censored), he claims that he believes that the world is senseless and cruel because, when he was a kid, a crow pecked his eye out, and as such he dedicated his life to scare other people. This is why his death in the end isn't senseless as many claim; its just that the creators of the movie were too stupid
Real Life
- Clarence Darrow's successful effort to save Leopold and Loeb from execution was essentially based on the premise that Nietzsche was evil and the casual murder they committed was due to following his philosophy.
- Also, while this idea is now discredited, it used to be widely stated that Adolf Hitler was heavily inspired by Nietzsche. Despite the inaccuracy of this, many Nazi characters will tend to have something like this going on.
- The perp in a recent school shooting in Finland quoted Nietzsche as an influence, and was apparently "cleansing the lesser humans".
- Including himself, apparently.
- Assuming murderers automatically make themselves Acceptable Targets, BUUUUUUUURN!
- If there are no "lesser humans", then who are the Übermensch going to be Über?
- The Columbine gunmen are also widely believed to have been like this.
- The members of the message board Commercials I Hate. That is all.
- As the description noted, not Nietzsche himself. Because you can't be a wannabe if you are the actual thing.
- On a more literal note, That Other Wiki claims that Nietzsche influenced philosophers such as Theodor Adorno, Jean Baudrillard, Martin Buber, Judith Butler, Albert Camus, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Ayn Rand, George Santayana, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Leo Strauss. Curiously, several of these philosophers brought about a wave of post-modern deconstructionism (not the same as that trope) and moral/cognitive/cultural relativism, which has been seen by some as the decay of morality. Your Mileage May Vary, of course.
- Of course, they're pretty much exactly the people Nietzsche was warning us about.
- Oh, the irony! It burns!
- Not uncommon upon this very wiki, if the unbearably whiny, smug and self praising Troper Tales page is anything to go by.
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