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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.
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 Mac Beth'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 unredeemably 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
- Albedo from the Xenosaga series is a particularly horrifying and sadistic Nietzsche Wannabe, gleefully traumatizing MOMO for no apparent reason and strewing his throne room with the corpses of other little girls.
- Kefka from Final Fantasy VI evolved from a Monster Clown with nihilistic tendencies into a fully fledged Nietzsche Wannabe upon essentially becoming God halfway through the game.
Why do people rebuild things they know are going to be destroyed? Why do people cling to life when they know they can't live forever? Think how meaningless each of your lives is!
- Seymour from Final Fantasy X, unloved and alone since his mother's death, wants to harness Sin and annihilate all life on Spira to put an end to pointless suffering. Two years later Shuyin from Final Fantasy X-2, eternally enraged and bitter at the world that let his one true love die, wants to harness Vegnagun and annihilate all life on Spira to end the existence of a world that he now sees as a pointless mockery. Clearly a lot of baddies on Spira didn't get enough hugs.
- Although in the world of Spira, the difference between the living & the dead isn't readily apparent (more than one character in the games is actually an Unsent...), & the dead hold onto their memories & ability to interact with the world. So killing everyone to end all suffering makes a certain amount of sense, in that context, as it would be far from oblivion (at least until being dead make you crazy & you turn into a Fiend).
- The backstory of Dark Matter, a (thankfully defeatable) Cosmic Horror that serves as the perennial antagonist of the Kirby games, makes it clear that its actions are meant to turn the universe into a place where no one can be happy, so that everyone can share in its sorrow and loneliness. Guess it's kind of hard to make friends when you're a sentient force of pure Black Magic.
- Ironically, Kirby's best friend technically is one as well.
- Adam, leader of the Delphi cult in Trauma Center, who spread the GUILT plague to give humans the "blessing" of death they "deserve". He may or may not have included himself.
- Darth Nihilus, an aptly named Sith Lord from Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic II, pursues the destruction of all life because "all life exists to feed his hunger". At least this is how Visas describes him.
- By contrast, Kreia follows Nietzsche's philosophy much more closely; her meditations on pity and suffering are practically a Cliff's Notes version of Daybreak.
- Kreia also gets thrown in this category for her master plan to destroy the Force itself using Exile (and Revan) to attack it
- Luca Blight from Suikoden II. Being the genocidal psychopath that he is, he could very well carry out his plan to eradicate humanity by himself.
- Sephiran, from the Fire Emblem games Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, manipulated events in both games in order to prove to his patron goddess that the two races of Tellius were unable to live in peace, and thus should be destroyed. Sephiran had attempted to bring the two races to live in harmony for over several centuries, since a previous war between the two was the reason the goddess nearly destroyed the world in a flood. But a nearly genocidal massacre of the Heron branch of the Laguz race and the resulting reprisals decades previous to the game's start convinced him that the situation was unsalvagable, and that he should wake up his goddess so she could pass judgment.
- Sephiran may be a partial subversion, as battle conversations with him imply that he regrets his actions somewhat, and that he wants to die (at the time, he's guarding the entrance to Ashera). If you satisfy certain conditions after beating the game once, Sephiran will actually renounce his old views and join your party for the final battle.
- From the 6th game, there's the Big Bad Zephiel, who started out as a Well Done Son Guy, trying to appease his father and is generally a nice boy. But his father is such a Jerkass that attempted his life so many times, Zephiel finally snapped, killed his father, starts to conclude that humans are evil, since they also bring out the emotions that made his father jealous to him. Thus, he began a campaign of conquering Elibe, and when he does, he planned to surrender the land and the human race to the Dragon race. Of course he failed in the end.
- All of the human villains of Persona 3 fit into this trope. One -does- admit to being in it for the power he'll supposedly be given over the world if he brings about the Fall, but ultimately, because the Fall is the Fall...
- In Persona 4, we have Shadow Teddie, who, being a manifestation of repressed nihilistic feelings and hidden existential dread, fits quite well. His most powerful (well, it would be if it wasn't telegraphed) attack is called Nihil Hand.
- Gig from Soul Nomad And The World Eaters has this attitude towards humans. And with him being a Grim Reaper, it goes without saying that the world he was responsible for was not having a good time until he got retired.
- Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid might count as one. He joined Liquid's revolution not because he believed in their goal, but because he hates humanity and wanted to kill as many as he could before dying himself.
- Don't forget Fortune. After losing her parents, husband, and her unborn child of three months, she joins the military, only to find that bullets and bombs can't hurt her. Fortune then goes on with the mission of using Arsenal Gear to use its hydrogen bomb just to kill as many people as possible since no one can kill her.
- Sargeras the dark Titan, creator of the Burning Legion in Warcraft universe, was driven insane by the depthless evil of the demons he fought, and because of this he began to believe that the Titans mission of creating new worlds was utterly pointless. Naturally he decided to raise an army of demons to set flame to all creation.
- In Tales Of The Abyss there's Sync. He's a failed Clone of a Creepy Child (according to the manga: Sync's original likes keeping people as pets) that was thrown alive into a volcano. He Lived. His response? Essentially, he wants to die, and take the whole, meaningless world with him.
- Kerghan from Arcanum Of Steamworks And Magick Obscura: his motive rant says it all.
- Actually, this is a subversion, because he isn't being nihilistic, he's being compassionate in a very warped way. He's proposing a constructive solution to the pain of all living beings. (Yes, "kill the world" is constructive in this sense. It solves the problem he's trying to solve, it's just not a solution that anyone else likes.)
- Ramirez from Skies Of Arcadia holds to the view that all of humanity is either corrupt (stating that they are driven by greed, hatred and bigotry) or weak (showing contempt for those who are incapable of defending themselves from him, or of using what power they possess to forcibly change the world), and uses these beliefs to justify attempted (and not-so-attempted) genocide. Curiously, he also holds to a somewhat more accurate Nietzschean philosophy, given that he believes his master, Lord Galcian, to essentially be an Ubermensch, stating that Galcian is driven only by the will to power and the desire to use it to change the world, and that only such a man can unlock the world's true potential. He goes fully Nietzsche Wannabe (not to mention Omnicidal Maniac) when Galcian is killed, stating that the heroes have condemned the world by killing the only person who was capable of saving it.
- Cyrus from Pokémon claims that life is meaningless, so it's perfectly acceptable for him to destroy the entire universe and create a new one in which he is a god and little things like emotions and the human soul do not exist: "The incomplete and ugly world we have now can disappear. I am resetting everything to zero. Nothing can remain. It is all for making the ultimate world. A world of complete perfection. Nothing so vague and incomplete as spirit can remain."
- Haer'Dalis from the Baldur's Gate series, as a member of the Doomguard, is a Nietzsche Wannabe, albeit a rather chipper one. At one point he states that he finds all the destruction wrought by the Bhaalspawn to be marvelous.
- The Reason of Shijima in Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne is the ultimate representation of this trope. Sponsored by the Assembly of Nihilo, with the Ubermensch Hikawa as its leader, it seeks to destroy and reconstruct the world as a place of utter, absolute stillness. It is a reality where mankind is subsumed into infinite peace and unity, with no passion, no conflict, and the total eradication of human consciousness and individuality. Should the Demifiend (the player) choose to support this Reason, the game ends with Hikawa congratulating him on an infinite, barren plain of complete silence and the bluest sky you have ever seen.
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.
- Far as I know, this was a (wisely) omitted sequence. It still unnerves this troper more than any other animated sequence, however. Okay, it freaks me the fuck out.
- 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 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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