Soul Saving Crusader - Television Tropes & Idioms

"And in the end the lesson was learned,

The Emperor knew you must suffer to be saved,

And he set out to save the world."

— Fireaxe, Food for the Gods, "The Lesson Learned"

This character righteously murders and tortures people for their own good. No, not self-righteously. Righteously. After all, no horrors in life could possible compare to eternal damnation in Hell. Yes, he is really willing to go the extra mile to save their souls. Unless they are Always Chaotic Evil, of course: In that case he simply do whatever is in his power to exterminate them, up to and including finding a Final Solution.

If he showed up in Real Life, any reasonable person would consider him a Windmill Crusader or worse. But this is not real life. An in-story audience may or may not know it, but all his actions are completely justified. Word Of God says he is not deluded, the threats he is facing are not windmills, and given the circumstances... he is actually doing the right thing.

Mostly an Undead Horse Trope.

Compare Heaven Seeker and The Soulsaver, who do not use so harsh methods, and thus can be good regardless of if the beliefs are justified or not. Also compare Psychopomp. Contrast Windmill Crusader, who might incorrectly believe himself to save souls, and Knight Templar, who may or may not actually save souls but either way isn't justified in his over-zealousness. Compare and contrast Heteronormative Crusader, who depending on the setting might be either a Windmill Crusader or a Soulsaving Crusader.

Please note that this trope depend on the audience being able to see the setting/universe from the outside, and that it thus cannot have any Real Life examples — subverted or otherwise.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

An interpretation of Puella Magi Madoka Magica is that the title character becomes this, effectively killing people before they literally become monsters.

Comic Books

Lucifer contains various subversions of this trope, including the angel Remiel from Sandman.
ZigZagged in Preacher: It turns out that the protagonist's horrible family WAS in fact doing the good Lords work when they tortured him and murdered his father and all the other horrors they committed in order to force him to become a priest. And their actions would indeed have kept him safe from eternal damnation, if he hadn't rebelled later. However, it also turns out that God Is Evil — and thus, saving souls for him actually isn't a moral thing to do.
Jack Chick gets really overboard with this trope in the tract called Uninvited: The tract features a nurse who harasses dying AIDS-patients for their "crime" of being gay. Of course, her actions are fully justified within the verse of the tract, since this is an anviliciously bigoted Author Tract. The real kick? It turns out that all the homosexuals became homosexuals because they were sexually molested as children. More to the point, when a child is sexually molested, she automatically becomes unclean, possessed by a demon of defilement. The trope Defiled Forever is played straight for everyone who isn't both The Fundamentalist and a christian. Averted for all characters who are (or become) Holier Than Thou.

Film

In the film The God Who Wasn't There, the Spanish Inquisition is briefly cast in this role. If they really kept all those souls out of hell, then it would be petty to whine about their systematic torture and murder of the people they in fact spared from a much worse fate.

Literature

The Grail Quest trilogy by Bernard Cornwell has several of these, one of whom is a primary antagonist in the second book.

Live-Action TV

The Cybermen from Doctor Who fall into this, both classic and new series flavors. They are a particularly grim example, who save humans from disease and prejudice and mental weakness at the cost of robbing them of all emotion.

Music

Seen several times in Fireaxe's Food for the Gods, hence the page quote.

Tabletop Games

Done in Games Workshop's Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 (Recycled In Space), where the humanity must be protected through Inquisition.
- But then again, in that universe, Chaos Gods were created by passion, and, well, zealotry is a passion...
  - Perhaps the Imperium is going to be destroyed by the birth of the Chaos God of zealotry, and then the Tau will take over...
  - The Tau are Scary Dogmatic Aliens who are made physically ill by the thought of not doing the right thing.
  - What they think is the right thing.
In Target Games' Mutant Chronicles, the Inquisition and its methods are a necessary evil to defend humanity from the forces of Darkness.
The player can potentially become one of these in KULT — it's possible to enlighten people in a positive manner, but it's often easier to drive them over the Despair Event Horizon.

Video Games

Basium in Fall From Heaven is essentially a Deconstruction. He wants bad people and demons purged from the world and locked back into Hell. He also wants to see good people killed, so they can go to Heaven as quickly as possible. In short, he wants everyone dead as quickly as possible, because it's the right thing to do.
This is essentially the motivation for the Omnicidal Maniac Big Bad of Arcanum, as there genuinely is an afterlife that is better than this world in that universe that everyone goes to upon death. Thus, he is portrayed rather sympathetically.