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"I will destroy everything! I will create a monument to non-existence!"
"Let me feed and feed until nothing remains but Mandrakk! Bloated and alone beneath a skyful of murdered stars!"
"Now, open your eyes and see. I am no 'mere' Marduk. My age is countless. My names beyond reckoning. I am the embodiment of all creation's ills, and my purpose is but a simple one: to annihilate all that is unworthy. All that is a reflection of myself."
Who caused the Earth Shattering Kaboom? This guy. Destroying continents, wiping out civilizations, exterminating whole planets: When this character turns up, entire galaxies or universes may die, if not reality itself — the Omnicidal Maniac has made his entrance and where he goes, the survival rate of everything nearby quickly drops towards zero.
Put simply, the Omnicidal Maniac is a villain who actively seeks the destruction of whatever world the setting is based in to the exclusion of everything else, and is both aware of what he's doing and fully motivated to do so. Most Omnicidal Maniacs will aim for a class 5 on the Apocalypse How scale, but it may vary from setting to setting — in a Medieval European Fantasy setting, the known world may just be a kingdom or two, while in a Space Opera, expect the whole galaxy or even the universe to be his goal. Nonetheless, the Omnicidal Maniac will want it all destroyed. Despite the name, being completely insane is not actually a requirement, but having a Freudian Excuse doesn't make the Omnicidal Maniac any less of a menace.
Contrast the Person Of Mass Destruction, who doesn't want to use their powers to destroy the world, the Mike Nelson Destroyer Of Worlds, who causes damage of this scale largely by accident, through ignorance, or for comedic, non-serious reasons intended to elicit laughter. Omnicidal Maniacs are not amusing and have clearly-defined reasons for wanting to destroy everything nearby, which they do with a great deal of malice. The Omnicidal Maniac might overlap with the Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum if his motive is to take the whole of existence with him, though this may also lead to the Woobie Destroyer Of Worlds, who is generally treated with some degree of sympathy because the reasons are less malice and more of a desire to end it all. Compare and contrast Put Them All Out Of My Misery, where a villain seeks to destroy the world as if it were a disease.
A step-up of Kill All Humans. Compare the Planet Eater, Planet Looters and Horde Of Alien Locusts, which have similar outcomes but don't necessarily do it out of malice.
The Nietzsche Wannabe, the Psycho For Hire or the A God Am I mentality are very popular amongst this character archetype.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Anyone of importance in Dragonball can blow up planets. However, only Majin Buu seems intent on undoing all of creation merely out of malice, spite and boredom. And inability to get ice cream.
- Cell planned on becoming one of these after the Cell Games, but was killed before he could get started.
- Valgaav, both The Dragon and Big Bad of Slayers TRY wanted the destruction of everything before merging with Darkstar, believing that oblivion was what the world deserved. Afterwards, the knowledge he gained about the nature of the universe drove him to become a Well Intentioned Extremist merged with Darkstar's godlike power, intending to destroy the entire world and then remake it without strife or conflict.
- Rau Le Creuset of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED isn't perhaps the most obvious, as his goals merely encompass the extinction of humanity, Natural and Coordinator alike. However, given the much smaller scale(the action never extends past the Moon due to limited space travel), it's quite omnicidal in context.
- Digimon seems to have at least one per season:
- Digimon Adventure's got Apocalymon. The name says it all. When he was defeated, he tried to unleash a blast that would eradicate the human world and the Digital World.
- Digimon Adventure 02: Big Bad (or so we think at the time) Arukenimon's main plan is to destroy the Cosmic Keystones that maintain the barriers between dimensions, which would cause all dimensions to collide, destroying the multiverse. Her intended Dragon refuses to help on the grounds that she's an unworthy mistress, but eventually decides, for his own reasons, to do the same, making him just as much of an Omnicidal Maniac.
- Digimon Tamers features a non-Digimon AI that was designed to prevent other programs from exceeding their boundaries ('cause AI Is A Crapshoot) by deleting them if they surpassed a certain stage of development. It decides all humans and Digimon meet criteria for deletion. Then it gets really nasty.
- Digimon Frontier's Lucemon is more of a digital Evilutionary Biologist. The data that makes up Digital World's matter (and population) is easily manipulated, and it all had to be absorbed and used to release him from the Dark Area. He planned to use it to rebuild the world as he saw fit.
- Digimon Savers, aka Digimon Data Squad, has Yggdrasil/King Drasil, the computer that runs the Digital World. When the previous arc's Big Bad's plan backfires and both worlds are going to collide, he decides that the human world must go. When the Digimon fight against him and his minions to protect it, guess what he then decides? He, too, plans on restarting the Digital World after destroying the old one.
- The Millennium Earl in D.Gray-Man is very open about this, explicitly taunting the hero in his first real appearance.
The Millennium Earl: "You have only witnessed the opening chapter... the akuma in this world will continue to evolve. Now begins the journey leading up to the true tragic end. I am the Millennium Earl, the maker of the akuma. I shall obliterate your puny "God" and lead the world to its death with my akuma. An exorcist, a soldier of life. You can't save this world no matter how hard you try."
- The berserked defense program of the Book of Darkness in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. Its existence is as thus: Appear when Book of Darkness fills all 666 pages, destroy every world and dimension in its path, get temporarily killed either from a really powerful weapon or from having burned out its considerable amount of magic, rejuvenate with Book of Darkness somewhere else, repeat.
- Sailor Moon has several, Wiseman/Death Phantom the Big Bad of the R season, the entire Death Busters organization of the S season and Sailor Galaxia of the Stars season. Sailor Galaxia, in particular, is notable for omniciding at least a half-dozen, and probably much more, habitable planets, before coming to Earth - by the Grand Finale she pretty much wipes out all life in the Milky Way, in both the manga and the anime. Chaos, who directly controls her and is hinted (or outright stated in the manga) to be the Ultimate Evil behind the rest of them, is one too.
- Ralph Werec in Soukou No Strain went back in time via Subspace Or Hyperspace and saw the cost of the research that went into the Black Box that powered the series' Humongous Mecha. His sanity didn't make it out intact, and he decides to destroy his entire race in retaliation, never mind that nobody knows anything about it.
- Futari Wa Pretty Cure Splash Star gives us Gooyan, the Not So Harmless Man Behind The Man.
- Ah My Goddess, of all series, had one. The Lord of Terror aka The Ultimate Destruction Program, a bodiless entity whose one goal is to destroy the universe and recreate it in its own twisted image. Given the highly idealistic nature of the series, it failed (though it was a close call) and was Killed Off For Real when it was tricked into possessing a floppy disk which Skuld erased using a magnet.
- In Mahou Sensei Negima, the Mage of Beginnings and his minions, the three incarnations of Averruncus, want to destroy Magicus Mundus (a pocket dimension planet the size of and dimensionally anchored to Mars). Played with a bit in that they seem to think this will "save the world".
- One character refers to the third Averruncus as a religious nutjob, so it may be a "destroy the world so that it may be reborn" cult thingy.
- Ostian Governor-general Kurt Godel recently revealed that he wants to wipe out anyone who's not a normal human. That means wiping out most of the magic world's population.
- It's both better and worse than it sounds. He's not planning to kill them himself, he's just anticipating a major disaster and those are the only people he's planning/thinks he's able to save. But on the dark side... he's not even planning to try to save all the normal humans, just the normal humans in the city he runs. All the other normal humans, and all assorted magical creatures, will still be killed.
- Yami Malik of Yu-Gi-Oh explicitly states in the manga that all he wants is total destruction of everyone and everything.
- In Elfen Lied, most Diclonii have Chaotic Evil 'other' personas who wish to Kill All Humans. Lucy's - Kaede's, rather - wishes to annihilate everything, and has been working behind the scenes "forcing" her to commit bloody atrocities ever since she was eight.
Comics
- Imperiex of the DCU, a hive minded mechanical entity, saw its purpose as being the "hollowing" of the universe, destroying the flawed creation and remaking it in a new Big Bang. Ironically, the flaw he detected in the universe was himself, and a massive cooperative effort managed to throw him into the past where he in fact became the Big Bang in the first place, via a Stable Time Loop.
- DC Comics' ''Crisis'' crossovers has the following:
- While he does not typically fall under this category, The Joker did, in fact, reach this state during the "Emperor Joker" plotline in the Superman comics. In fact, considering that plot and a number of other situations it could be argued that the only things preventing the Joker from permanently attaining this state are a lack of superpowers and his obsession with Batman.
- Thanos is the most famous Marvel Comics example. He has a vision of Death as a beautiful woman and in order to win her favor he embarks on a quest to kill every living thing in the universe.
- Abraxas also hails from the Marvel Universe. The antithesis of Eternity, it exists only to destroy anything and everything in all creation. Keeping it imprisoned is one of the reasons Galactus needs the life energy from devoured worlds. The one time Abraxas did break free it...wasn't pretty.
- Annihilus, also from the Marvel Universe, became one of these during the "Annihilation" Crisis Crossover. His vast Harvester fleets carved a path of devastation across the galaxy, nearly wiped out the Kree and Skrull empires, and (with the help of Thanos and two cosmic superbeings) imprisoned Galactus himself. Why is he an Omnicidal Maniac instead of just another alien conqueror? Annihilus' true motivation for capturing Galactus was to turn him into a bomb. A bomb that would kill everything in the universe except for himself. What's truly scary is that he came damn close to pulling it off too.
- Jenny Fractal from the Wildstorm universe. She is the twin sister of Jenny Quantum kidnapped at birth by the Chinese government. She was put in an assassin program where she was forced to watch humanity's evil deeds: rape, murder, genocide,etc... She has the power to fracture reality and wants to use planet earth as a blackhole center to implode and collapse the entire multiverse. She states her reasons for doing this claiming "it's the only way to save them".
- One of the four possible backstories for The Phantom Stranger given in his issue of "Secret Origins" features a mad scientist from the future who wants to time travel back to the Big Bang and prevent it from effectively occurring. So not only does he want to destroy the universe, he wants to make sure it *never even existed in the first place*.
- The Dark Judges of Judge Dredd have a philosophy that basically boils down to this. Undead psychopaths devoted to Law, they figure that since only the living commit crimes, life itself should be made a crime that is punishable by death. They slaughtered the entire population of their world, then found themselves stuck, as they hadn't any form of space travel, making them come off more as Kill All Humans in practice.
- Winter of Stormwatch from the Wildstorm universe becomes this after rescuing the world when he flew the alien infested skywatch into the sun. Being an energy absorber he became one with it. Trapped by eternal agony he lures out The Authority so they can finally put an end to his life. Deeming it impossible to kill him without destroying the sun and ending the world he became enraged. Disgusted by humanity's cruelty he yells "your world does not deserve to live" and lashes out. He's eventually stopped by using the carrier's technology to seal baby universes and was condemned to burn for billions of years. Later on he's released by the new doctor and revived in his previous normal state. In the latest stormwatch issues it was revealed he still holds some of the sun's power.
Film
- In Dogma, the fallen angel Azrael tries to engineer the destruction of reality, because he figures non-existence will beat eternity in hell. By the end of the film, Bartleby figures out Azrael's plan, but decides to go along with it anyway in order to get revenge on God and humanity.
- In The Matrix sequels, Smith, corrupted into a virus after his first fight with Neo, has gone rogue and now considers both the machines and humans as equally flawed and deserving of extinction. Whereas he originally just wanted to destroy Zion, his new goal is to infect and destroy everything.
- Although the Earth and Federation have faced plenty of Earth Shattering Kabooms through the Star Trek movies, the villain closest to being an Omnicidal Maniac is Nero from the 2009 film: driven insane by grief over the destruction of his homeworld, he has no plans for galactic conquest or delusions of godhood. His only remaining purpose in life is to destroy each and every planet in the Federation.
Literature
- In Peter David's Star Trek novel Q-Squared , Trelane becomes an Omnicidal Maniac who wants to wipe out all of creation. But he wants to practice, so he starts by smooshing a "mere" three adjacent universes together into a chaotic orgy of violence and death. While playing the harpsichord.
- In theStar Trek DS 9 trilogy Millennium, the Grigari (who scare the Borg) worship an offshoot of the Pah-Wraiths, who want to reduce the physical universe — including all of history, not just the present — to a timeless, spaceless mathematical abstraction. They succeed. It gets undone anyway.
- Michael Swanwick's two parallel novels {{The Iron Dragon's Daughter}} and Jack Faust are both devoted to showing how an initially fairly sympathetic character can turn into one of these. In both books, it roughly boils down to living in a Crapsack World and being cruelly manipulated by a covert Evil Mentor.
- In Runemarks, the Whisperer seeks to start the End of Everything so that it can create a new world where it is in supreme control of everything, a desire stemming from being used as, essentially, a Magic 8-Ball by the Norse gods.
- The titular machines of Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series will stop at nothing less than the total eradication of all life. Note that this was what they were programmed to do (though this was supposed to be targeted only at a certain enemy star empire), so they don't exactly fit the mold — but whoever programmed them to do it probably did.
- The Storm King of Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series hovers on the border between Omnicidal Maniac and Woobie Destroyer Of Worlds. Presented initially as an implacable force of destruction waiting to be released on an unsuspecting world, it's later revealed that he got that way by evolving from The Messiah through Knight Templar to Well Intentioned Extremist, all in an effort to save his people and return them to greatness. By the end, he's completely insane and dedicated to destroying all living things, but it's his very Woobiedom that provides the key to his defeat.
- Hactar, from Life, The Universe, And Everything, is an ancient, sentient computer that was ordered to design the "Ultimate Weapon", and pulverized for disobeying that command (it couldn't conceive of any possible scenario where destroying the universe would be a preferable option). Set adrift as an interstellar cloud of still barely-functioning dust, Hactar spends the next several billion years manipulating another planet's inhabitants into reaching the same xenophobic cultural state as its creators, and then reinventing and triggering the same superweapon in order to put an end to all of existence. Hactar explains its motives as mostly simply fulfilling its original function, but partly to take revenge on the universe for the eons of suffering it has endured as a result of its original decision.
- The Xul from the Heritage/Legacy/Inheritance trilogies by Ian S. Douglas. They wipe out every race that is more advanced than the bronze age because they could be a threat.
- Ruin, Big Bad of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogy, is basically Omnicidal Mania incarnate. It was one of the two primal gods (its counterpart was Preservation), who combined their powers to create the world- something to which Ruin agreed only on the condition that it would get to destroy said world someday. To be fair, one can't really hold this against Ruin, as its the literal god of destruction and is just doing its job, but still the thing seems incapable of recognizing that unchecked destruction is bad (or maybe it does recognize it, but because of what it is it is incapable of caring).
- The main villain of The Dark Tower series The Crimson King wants to undo all of creation and plunge every universe that has ever existed back into a primordial soup of space-time dis-continuum. The reason: that primordial soup, which was pretty much pure magical energy, was what the Crimson King lived in before reality came about, and he wants to go back to living in the primordial soup.
- The Speaking Gun, from the Nightside series, is an organic sentient weapon that's capable of annihilating all of creation. And, boy oh boy, does it ever want to destroy it all, if only it could pull its own trigger....
- Morgoth of The Silmarillion is called "the Dark Enemy of the World" for a reason - his ultimate goal is simply to totally destroy the Earth, reducing it to the original primordial void. This mad scheme is in contrast to his apprentice Sauron (later the Big Bad of The Lord Of The Rings) whose original motivation was to impose order and structure upon what he saw as a chaotic and disordered world.
Live Action TV
Tabletop Games
- The Excrucians in Nobilis, for reasons best known to themselves.
- The Deathlords and their servants, the Abyssal Exalted, from Exalted fit this trope to a T. The Deathlords seek revenge on a world that betrayed them by feeding it to Oblivion, and many of the Abyssals believe that they're delivering the blessed perfection of the grave to a suffering world. This has been backed up mechanically by Second Edition rules; every Abyssal Charm (magic power) is rooted at destroying something, be it a life or a loyalty.
- The Neverborn are the ghosts of fundamental entities who cannot be separated from existence, whose death messed up the cycle of reincarnation and created the Underworld and who want to destroy the universe, apparently so that they can finally finish dying.
- Large factions of The Fair Folk want to destroy the universe, either because the mere existence of a world with rules and Alogic limits and disgusts them, or because it is dramatically appropriate for a scary monster and they like looking like scary monsters (or rapturously beautiful Whore-Madonnas or both).
- The Warhammer 40000 setting features the Necrons, who will strip planets clean of life out of their all-consuming hatred for the living and their C'tan masters who seek to destroy all souls in creation and feast on the life force of the living. There's also the forces of Chaos, who ultimately seek to overlap the physical reality with the Warp, home plane of the daemons, and thus turn all reality into hell on earth... Literally.
Necron Pariah: There is an alternative (to life). There exists a state in which all conflict is resolved and all is cold and silent. There are no wants, no wars, no squabbles. You may call this state death if you wish, but that is a misnomer. Death is but the ending of life, and that is only a means to an end. That end is purity, the time when all is still and unchanging.
- Can't forget Khârn, who loves killing indiscriminately so much he will even kill his own allies (both in fluff and tabletob) to the point where his nickname is "The Betrayer" and has had a kill counter installed into his visor.
- Applies to many worshipers of the blood god though, really.
- The fact these two are (im)mortal enemies is small comfort to those caught in the crossfire... That would be us.
- The demons of the Abyss from the Dungeons And Dragons settings. They are believed to be the will of the Abyss itself, which is of course endless raw chaos, distilled into sentient and individual form, with the ultimate goal of eradicating everything other than themselves. Assuming they succeed, as Chaotic Evil they'll then turn on each other, and when they are all destroyed, the multiverse will be silent once again. The exception is Graz'zt, who as befitting the Dark Prince of Deception, prefers that the world remain around for him to rule.
- While in 3rd and earlier editions this might be an example of Chaotic Stupid, in 4th it's their defining characteristic.
- And then there's Tharizdun from the Greyhawk setting whose goal is the destruction of all existence finishing with himself. It took the combined efforts of all the other gods, good and evil, just to imprison him. His credentials grew in 4th Edition, where he actually created the Abyss by throwing a shard of pure Black Magic into the Elemental Chaos.
- Thanatos, supreme Immortal of Entropy, supposedly has similar plans for the Mystara cosmology, although given his egotism and cowardice [1], it's questionable whether he'd ultimately include himself on the To-Be-Annihilated list.
- The book Elder Evils is full of Eldritch Abominations who would very much like to destroy the world/worlds/universe/multiverse.
- In the new World Of Darkness, while many beings are malevolent and highly destructive, most noteworthy are the Scelesti (mages who serve the abhorrent Abyss, and seek to allow its anti-reality to seep into this world in order to bring it to an end) and the Cult of the Doomsday Clock (a group of mages who believe that the best way to free the souls of humanity is to destroy all of time and history, using their evil clocks, and by becoming living time paradoxes. They also (unknowingly) serve the Abyss).
- From the old WoD, there's the Wyrm, the cosmic principle of Destruction, which has found itself trapped in the web of reality, and seeks to destroy everything so it will be free. Also of note are the Underworld's Spectres, who want to drag everything down with them into Oblivion. And the Mages have the Nephandi, who want to either destroy our world, period, or destroy our world so that creatures from beyond can replace it.
Video Games
- The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask: Clearly, any demon trapped inside a mask who wants to completely destroy the world by crashing the moon into the earth can't be sane.
- Final Fantasy is big into this. In order:
- Chaos, who came into existence thanks to the Fiends, who were already destroying the world to begin with.
- Xande is pissed about being made mortal and wants to put everything into suspended animation, forever. Cloud of Darkness, a personification of the Void wants to reduce everything in both worlds to nothingness.
- Zemus wats to exterminate all human life on Earth so that he (and the other Lunarians, maybe) can rule. Zeromus is just evil. Or something.
- Exdeath is an arbormorphic personification of evil. Neo Exdeath, a personification of the Void wants to reduce everything (including itself) to nothing... wait...
- Kefka, who is already quite insane but just got worse due to his acquired power from the Statues, wants to destroy reality and "build a monument to nonexistence."
- Ultimecia wants to compress time into a Timey Wimey Ball so she can recreate the entire universe because she's pissed off about centuries of oppression against her kind.
- Kuja doesn't like the idea of the universe outliving him.
- Seymour thinks that life is nothing but suffering, and that the only way of escaping Sin, the cause of it is that everyone should die.
- Shuyin was subjected to Mind Rape for a thousand years, so he really doesn't know why he's trying to kill the world, only that it makes him feel better.
- Chaos (again) chooses to destroy the world and himself, after finding that a world without Cosmos was a much emptier existence than he thought it would be.
- Id from Xenogears wants to basically kill everyone and everything, for rather vague reasons. Granted, he IS the embodiment of all hatred and suffering that Fei had mentally suppressed, but it doesn't change the fact that he finds little reason behind his slaughter other than it being fun.
- The Destroyer from Romancing Sa Ga 3
- Run, all ye Mortals, for Kratos approaches
- According to Kessler, The Beast From inFAMOUS
- The Burning Legion in the Warcraft games has, as its goal, nothing less than the complete eradication of all life in the universe — and, according to the Back Story, has already destroyed several thousand planets by the time it reaches Azeroth.
- Occasionally overlapping with the Burning Legion are the Voidwalkers, who are creatures of pure entropy who exist only to devour the physical world. One of their leaders, Dimensius, is responsible for destroying the Ethereals' homeworld. Players naturally get to punch him out.
- The Time Devourer from Chrono Cross is apparently Lavos (or one of his spawn) after being removed from time and getting pissed about how unfair life is. After all, he was just doing what he was meant to do. What right do cattle have to persecute or kill the farmer? So it's now going to eat all of time by fusing with Schala. Or something along those lines. The game is kinda vague about it.
- Marduk the plane-consuming demon from Sacrifice, whose mere presence on a plane of existence leads to its eventual decay and, ultimately, its complete destruction.
- In Super Paper Mario, Big Bad Count Bleck doesn't just want to destroy the world, he wants to destroy the multiverse and remake it in his image.
- Actually, that ambition belongs to Dimentio. Bleck was willing to just let everything stay destroyed.
- The Shivans from the Descent: Freespace series are an entire race of Omnicidal Maniacs. They've managed to destroy The Ancients, a civilization that was way bigger and more advanced than the Terran and Vasudan races combined. In fact, they've been named after Shiva, "The Destroyer", because they never attempted to communicate and only seems to be interested in blowing up stuff that isn't Shivan. The first game had cutscenes which chronicle the rise and fall of the Ancients from the Ancients' perspective (complete with Ominous Latin Chanting), and they call them "The Destroyers". The cutscenes reveal that the Ancients figured out a way to defeat the Shivan menace, but it was too late. This Ancient information was later discovered by Vasudan scientists giving the Terrans and Vasudans just enough time to save their collective arses. But not before the Vasudan homeworld was completely leveled, killing four billion of them, and just right before the Shivans got to Earth. That's right, not one but TWO (!!) of the most advanced, space-faring races this side of the galaxy would have been wiped out by the Shivans, if it weren't for artifacts left from a very advanced civilization that they did wipe out.
- Thirty-two years later in Freespace 2, the Shivans even manage to cause a star to supernova, in a system with billions of civilians in it. Granted, that time around killing non-Shivan stuff didn't seem to be their primary objective. They just killed everyone who got in their way. And to heck with collateral damage from the supernova.
- In both games, there are speculations from all sides as to why the Shivans seem so hell-bent on killing everyone. The Ancients thought they deserved their fate, for subduing "lesser" civilizations in their conquest of the galaxy. A Terran voice at the end of the first game mentions Shivans as a protector, sort of immune system of the galaxy, wiping out any civilizations that discover subspace to prevent them from being a threat to the younger, less advanced ones. The rogue Admiral Bosch from Freespace 2 thinks humanity has no future with the Vasudans, we're talking about an alliance with the Shivans, man! Admiral Petrarch, your FS2 boss, thinks Shivans are like the Terrans, wandering the galaxy for a way back home (the subspace link to Earth was cut off when the SD Lucifer blew up in subspace in the first game). Nobody really knows though, and the Shivans are unique in that they're a mystery race that actually becomes more mysterious as the series progressed. Nobody will ever know, either, space sims are dead and the original publisher is bankrupt.
- Gig from Soul Nomad And The World Eaters fits this trope to a T... And he's on your side.
- There's also Revya him/herself in the Demon Path, who ends up unmaking existence in the 'bad' ending.
- Star Control 2: "We are the Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah. We cleanse. You are the filth."
- Prince Luca Blight from Suikoden II is a combination of this trope and a Ax Crazy. Needless to say, he's not a very pleasant guy...
- Dorian General Grants, the Big Bad of Tales Of The Abyss, sought to annihilate the entire surface of the planet the game's set in, down to the last molecule, and build a new world upon it from scratch.
- The Reapers in Mass Effect allow life to evolve and advance to a certain level, then come out from hiding to go on a killing spree wiping out almost all life in the galaxy, after which they go back into hiding, and the cycle repeats and has done so for millions of years. The reasons are not explained, apparently because organic beings are too weak and puny to understand.
- After Galcian dies in Skies Of Arcadia, Ramirez goes insane and shoots for the destruction of the entire world, stating that it is no longer worthy of living. He even gives up his life to fuse with the Ancient Superweapon for Unlimited Power to destroy. In doing so, he mirrors the words of the Silvite Elders, who had the same goal but lacked the means.
- The Big Bad of Live A Live, Demon King Odio, is a great example. This holds true to various degrees in all of the chapters of the game, especially the medieval chapter, which doubles as his Start Of Darkness.
- Mortimer McMire from the Commander Keen games. In the first game trilogy he attempts to destroy Earth because he considers the human race Too Dumb To Live. After that fails he decides to blow up the whole galaxy instead. And then it turns out that the galaxy destroying scheme was just there to distract the hero, and his true goal is nothing less than the destruction of the entire universe! Sadly the next game was never made.
- The Void from the Ever Quest universe and Big Bad of Ever Quest II are a whole dimension's worth of these, by virtue of being the anthropomorphic embodiment of nothingness from before the dawn of creation. They are credited with the destruction of at least five other worlds prior to targeting Norrath and one alternate future shown in the bad ending of a mini-game scenario shows that they are more than capable of wiping Norrath from existence too should its denizens falter in their defense.
- Mastermind, World Conqueror, from the on-line game of the same name. You play as this villain and your goal is to destroy the earth.
- The Covenant in the Halo series are a doomsday cult led by omnicidal maniacs, the Prophets. They glass every planet they take after plundering it for Forerunner artifacts, and try to activate the titular Doomsday Devices to destroy all sentient life in the galaxy, believing it will lead them to Ascend To A Higher Plane Of Existence.
- Impossible Mission: Professor Elvin Atombender, a Mad Scientist who is attempting to hack the world's nuclear missile codes and destroy the planet.
- The Cosmic Horror that is the W'rkncacnter in the Marathon series.
- In Pokemon Diamond, Pearl and Platinum, Team Galactic Boss Cyrus wants to use the time-and-space bending powers of Dialga and Palkia to destroy the current world and build a new one in his image.
- He comes even closer to succeeding in Platinum, but is stopped at the last second by Giratina, which ironically is the Pokemon symbol of death.
- The planet Meteo from Meteos is a gargantuan malevolent eye that wants to destroy everything in the universe via the endless hordes of meteors he spawns.
- In House Of The Dead, final boss Magician's first words are "Who are you? Nobody gives me instructions. I shall destroy everything." In House Of The Dead 3, final boss Wheel of Fate opens the fight with "I will destroy everything. And resurrect everything." They sound the same for good reason, as the Wheel of Fate is none other than Dr. Curien, Magician's creator.
- Lord Ghadius of Klonoa: Door to Phantomile. His quote on the quote page is rather chilling.
- Mehrunes Dagon, the Daedra Prince of Destruction of The Elder Scrolls verse.
- Porky in Mother 3. He wants to destroy the entire world, because he's gone even more insane as a result of the Time Abyss he went through, and that still nobody loves him. Slightly different from the usual in that the world HAS already been destroyed - perhaps even by Porky - and that these people are the last remaining survivors.
- Requiem from City Of Heroes plans to turn Earth into a homeworld for the Nictus. While that may not be enough to qualify him as an Omnicidal Maniac, you discover an alternate dimension where Requiem's plans have succeeded, and he's gone insane from being the only human left and is trying to destroy the entire multiverse.
- You know you're living in what amounts to a crapsack universe when these are the kinds of guys in charge. Such is the cosmos in Lunar Knights, with the Immortals running around with their Planet Eaters, taking over all sorts of worlds and/or destroying them to impose eternity upon the universe. Granted, Lucian and Aaron make life much easier for their world by completely erasing Polidori (he's an Immortal, in case you lost track), but if what Dumas said has any weight to it, there are going to be a lot more on their way...
- The first Jak And Daxter game gave us Gol and Maia. The third game's Big Bad also fit this trope.
- Dr. Weil/Dr. Vile of the Mega Man Zero series. This is the only kind of Big Bad you could find in the darkest period in Mega Man history. He starts off as an ambitious scientist, who sees Reploids as mere tools instead of actual sentient beings, and was getting tired of the constant Robot Wars that they wage against humankind. When a cure was finally made (the Mother Elf) to rid the world of The Virus that started the war in the first place, Weil Brainwashed it to become his tool for destruction, and initiated the Elf Wars, where, in the span of only 4 years, a large portion of the human and Reploid populations (60 and 90%, respectively) were wiped out. After that war, he is sentenced to immortality, where his consciousness was transferred to a self-regenerating armor, and then sent to forever exile on the barren wasteland that he created. When he comes back (which his "executioners" didn't count on) he makes sure that the humans suffer the same way he did, or worse. And when humans start to rebel and flee from his reign of terror, and his general turns on him, he becomes much worse, setting a Colony Drop to Area Zero, the very last hope of restoring the dying Earth, along with the human refugees settling there! Only through Zero's efforts was he stopped in time, and even then, Zero makes his last hurrah, and Weil, whilst defeated, remained alive thanks to his curse. And he still continues to plague the world over and over...
- The female lead of Sands Of Destruction wants to destroy the world. She's one of the heroes, and it's actually a pretty good idea, given the state of the game world. It's still played for dark comedy more than once. It's... kind of a weird game.
- From Persona 3, both Shuji Ikutsuki and Takaya express an interest in destroying all life. The former seems to be under the impression that he will be spared and given the chance to remake the world in his image after Nyx destroys it, while the latter is already dying and just wants to see everything else go first.
Web Comics
- In Kid Radd, the Pixel Art Comic masquerading as a Sprite Comic, a character attempts to destroy the entire Internet and the video game escapee characters that inhabit it after realizing that their kind was created entirely for killing — which is, you know, accurate — and losing hope of change when attempts at organized societies fall into war.
- He also intended to destroy every computer hooked up to the internet, believing that it would destroy society (Not being sure whether humans were directly dependant on computers, or indirectly. However, what really takes the cake is The Seer who doesn't just want to destroy Earth, but realizes that with all the stars and planets out there, there HAS to be life on some of them. So that when he's done with Earth he will travel to one of those and kill everything there.
- The Snarl from Order Of The Stick.
- Though recent events have opened up all kinds of questions about this.
- Eight Bit Theater's Black Mage. These days, every other strip at least mentions to his desire to kill everything in existence just for the heck of it. He may be slightly justified, as Word Of God says the universe exists to make Black Mage's life a living hell. Then again, considering his intentions, the universe's tendency to blow up, smash, and/or inconvenience Black Mage at every opportunity may well simply be self-preservation. A real chicken-and-egg scenario...
- O'Malley, the Big Bad of Red Vs Blue, is an over-the-top parody of this trope. His goal is to take over the universe and "crush every living soul into dust. Um, except for you Vic. You can be assistant crusher."
- Zorgon Gola from Sluggy Freelance appears
 to be an Omnicidal Maniac, but this is actually part of a Xanatos Gambit to make himself a mere Galactic Conqueror. Unfortunately, Gola didn't count on the actions of three Spanners In The Works (our heroes) causing his Gambit to actually destroy the Punyverse.
Web Original
- SCP-682 is a strange, seemingly-reptilian "creature" — the term creature can be used only loosely, as it doesn't seem to be alive in the sense we usually think of it — that considers all living things disgusting sub-beings that must be destroyed. Well, all of them except Creepy Child SCP-053, which it was discovered to be oddly fond of. No-one's quite sure why it reacts differently to SCP-053 — and they're too scared to take advantage of it, as keeping an Omnicidal Maniac prone to fits of Unstoppable Rage and a toddler that induces Unstoppable Rage, then instantly kills anyone that hurts it in the same room seems like a bad idea. His reasons for this hatred for all life aren't directly stated, but implied to be out of a really extreme version of Humans Through Alien Eyes.
Western Animation
- Unicron from Transformers, particularly in Energon. He wants to eat the multiverse, one planet at a time, one timeline at a time, one universe at a time. Not because he's hungry, but because existence is somehow offensive to him. Megatron/Galvatron may be considered an accessory to the crime(s).
- This is Megatron's actual goal when the last part of Transformers Cybertron rolls around. He wants to use the black hole and the Cyber Planet Keys to destroy the universe so he can rebuild it in his own image. Somehow.
- Daemon from Reboot initially seemed to just be a supervirus corrupting countless programs to The Way, which turned them into her loyal slaves. However, the climax revealed that she intended to connect herself to everything, before initiating a program that would destroy herself and everything connected to her, ending all strife and conflict in the peace of oblivion. Of course, this is what she is programmed to do; so whether or not she's truly a maniac or just following her programming is up for debate.
- The Brains from Futurama. These unbelievably powerful, mindraping giant brains appeared in this universe milliseconds after it came into being. Their one goal is to gather all of the information in the universe, then destroy it so that no new information will ever appear. The only real opposition against them comes from the Precursors, the Nibblonians. Unlike typical Planet Looters, the Brains actually enjoy their omnicidal campaign. The Brains are basically Brainiac from the DCAU but they're an entire race, not just one evil AI. Thanks to there being no Superman to fight them, the Brains come damn close to succeeding.
- Lucky for humanity, Fry was immune to their mind powers. Then he made them leave the Earth for ''no good raisin!!''
- Later on, the Brains build the Infosphere to store all the information in the universe. Naturally, they plan on destroying the universe once they finish learning everything. Fortunately, Fry and the Nibblonians manage to stop them again.
- Danny Phantom becomes this in an alternate future, pretty much. Most fans certainly see it that way. Fortunately, this is averted... hopefully. It's made pretty clear that even though the exact circumstances of the change were averted, it's still possible.
- In the 90s Spider-Man animated series, for the big climactic series finale, an alternate universe Peter Parker is bonded to the Carnage symbiote to become Spider-Carnage. Already kinda unbalanced due to his clone hogging the spotlight (in a clever nod to the Clone Saga), he now becomes obsessed with not merely destroying the earth, or the galaxy, or the universe, but ALL universes!
- The Heys from The Tick. Played with the usual tongue-in-cheekness of the series, but their motivations are purely omnicidal.
- Darkseid from the DCAU has the ultimate goal of obtaining the anti-life equation and using it to undo the current existence, so he can rebuild it in a manner more to his liking. Unfortunately it tends to be overshadowed by his 'torment Superman' schemes.
- Brainiac, also from the DCAU, acts to destroy all of creation, but this is due to his programming rather than any genuine malicious wish to do so.
- The Fairly Oddparents has two. First, Dark Laser really wants to blow up the Earth because...well, it's there. A more serious example is The Darkness, a powerful and ancient entity who has destroyed countless worlds, including Wonder World and Yugopotamia.
- The Darkness is more a person (well, consciousness) of mass destruction. It just wants somebody to love it, but everyone keeps attacking it, so it defends itself, and is better at defending itself than the planet it was trying to defend is at hurting it
- Dr. Blight from Captain Planet talks about wanting to actively destroy the planet in some episodes but her goals change from episode to episode.
- It was fairly heavily implied that, unlike the rest of the show's vilains (who were merely greedy for power or wealth), Blight was actually completely insane - she was certainly the only one pursuing pollution for it's own sake.
- Trigon of Teen Titans had the explicit goal of destroying "the world of mortals", though he did plan on remaking it in his own image afterwards. As this would mean a literal hell on earth, it doesn't make him any less evil than the others on this list.
- The Real Ghostbusters had one guy who wanted to destroy the world because he felt it was a bad place. Fot that, he summoned a magical artifact - using The Ring Inscription.
- In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover movie Turtles Forever, the 2k3 Shredder, after being freed from his confinement in an asteroid, decides that in order to destroy all the turtles in the universe, he must destroy reality itself, and sets out to do just that.
- Avatar the Last Airbender had an example of this in Fire Lord Ozai. When Ozai is informed that there are rebels in the Earth Kingdom who refuse to surrender, Ozai's reaction was to attempt to reduce said Kingdom (which is at least 35% of the known world) to a heap of charcoal. Of course, it didn't help that this was just a little bit after he dubbed himself the "Phoenix King" and declared his intent on remaking the world to his desires.
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