Start Of Darkness - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Descent Into Madness

Nobody is born evil (well, except maybe the Enfant Terrible). Something usually happened to push a villain down the path to villainy. And hey, mightn't that make an interesting story?

Thus, we have the Start Of Darkness, a Prequel where we find out how the main antagonist from the original story got to that point.

This, naturally, is especially common with Fallen Heroes, who usually get a Downer Ending where they lose faith in themselves and/or humanity. This will be especially poignant if they Used To Be A Sweet Kid.

Christopher Booker lists this plot (not as a prequel, but as the main story) in his The Seven Basic Plots, and calls it "Tragedy." He goes into great depth on the symbolism, but basically, it's the story from the point of view of the villain who is eventually defeated by the hero. It's also one step shy of his "Rebirth" plot, which allows a woman or child to reach the villain's heart, get him to turn from his evil ways, and be redeemed. According to Booker, if the villain repents but dies, it's still Tragedy, not Rebirth.

Keep in mind that the reasons aren't always good ones, if there is such a thing as a good reason for turning evil.

Badly executed, this can be a part of a Badass Decay. It can also be a Freudian Excuse. Much of the plot is often a Foregone Conclusion, often ending in The Bad Guy Wins; many characters are Doomed By Canon, which may require a full Kill Em All to explain why they don't show up in the original work.

This is for prequels and flashbacks that show a major villain's reason for turning evil, not just any villain with a backstory. A possible contribution to Motive Decay. See also Freak Out.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

The Rozen Maiden Ouvertüre OVA explores the start of Suigintou's fierce rivalry with Shinku and the source of her massive inferiority complex that motivated her to become the first season's Big Bad.
The 8th and final Parallel Works video for Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is one of these for Lordgenome.
According to the director, Ga-Rei -Zero- is about Isayama Yomi's Start Of Darkness. Or So I Heard.
- It is.
Spread out over a couple of episodes, Space Pirate Mito reveals that Ranban, the corrupt leader of the Galactic Patrol, was actually driven insane while in prison for not being a specific gender, since he was in line for the throne and only determined genders can reign (although the series doesn't make it clear whether he was imprisoned simply for that, or for lying about it for ten thousand years). He took revenge by blowing up the royal family's home planet and taking control of the galaxy by force.
About one-third of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni Kai is spent giving Nurse Takano one of these.
- Shion gets one in the first season's Meakashi arc. All the crap she's been subjected through her entire life (losing her status as rightful heir - as well as her birth name - due to a childhood mix-up, being treated as a second-class, being sent away to some random boarding school (she broke out), having three of her nails ripped out, and to top it all off losing the boy she loves) can't help but draw sympathy. In the Watanagashi/Meakashi timeline, all this built-up torment (and a Hate Plague) finally causes her to go off the deep end in spectacular fashion, and start a bloody killing spree that the other arcs' pale in comparison to.
Pain/Nagato's start of darkness in Naruto was because his parents were killed in self defense and his dog got blown up. After Nagato and co. grew up, they became the heads of some sort of revolution/army/thing, and they were ambushed by Hanzo, who feared they were a threat to his power. He kidnapped Konan and threatened to kill her if Nagato didn't kill Yahiko, at which point his best friend and leader Yahiko impaled himself on Nagato's kunai to save Konan, dying in Nagato's arms.
"Little Soldier Girls", the 21st episode of Black Lagoon contains a number of flashbacks to Balalaika's past detailing her childhood, service in Afghanistan, disillusionment with society and raise to power in Hotel Moscow.
One could view Mirai Nikki as Yukiteru's Start Of Darkness. He starts out a morally upstanding somewhat asocial nerd. Then he is recruited by God to take part in a battle royale, and partners out of neccesity with a girl who has both a crush on him and issues. His sanity slowly creeps away with each death, and he goes from trying to minimize fatalities and escape the game in the beginning, to most recently massacring orphans in the name of becoming God.
"Hey, Lithuania, we don't want children that can't play nice,right?"
- Well if history is considered canonical, then he probably started way before that like his first winter maybe, or the mongols.
  - Russia mentions all he's endured over the centuries. This could be taken as his Despair Event Horizon, when he simply couldn't take more.
Almost every Rave Master villain gets at least a chapter for this. Some are a little sad, some will leave you temporarily cheering for the villain (until you remember that every single one aims to wipe out all life as we know it).

Comic Books

The Batman Graphic Novel The Killing Joke is a Start Of Darkness story for the Joker. Just one of several, in fact.
Pretty much a large portion of Gold Digger's 75th issue was dedicated to Gina and company discovering the origins of both Alfred Peachbody (who was less noble in his beginnings) and Dreadwing, who fits this trope to an absolute T.
- Though Dreadwing's origins are detailed as mentioned above, it's further fleshed out in the Dreadwing's Myomior special, which is essentially Dreadwing's past narrated by himself. Arguably effective despite the repetition, as the unbiased depictions of events from earlier serve to highlight the twisted perspective Dreadwing views his past through. It manages to make him sympathetic and tragic, while simultaneously keeping him a Magnificent Bastard in the present.
Preacher had the Saint of Killers miniseries, which explained how the titular killer became the Implacable Man he is in the series proper. When he first appears, we know he was already a killer in the Civil War, but not how he got that way. Part of the miniseries shows his softening and becoming a family man. However, after a delay due to ruffians led to his family dying of fever, he returned to his killing.
- Herr Starr, the Big Bad, has his own issue of this, as well, showing how he rose to the position that readers see him in. He gets a Pet The Dog moment and a legitimate claim to having been a good guy at one point - and quickly shows the predilections that make him such an outstanding villain for the rest of the series.
Fantastic Four, Annual #2, showed the Start of Darkness for Doctor Doom. Reprised in a mini in recent years called "Books of Doom", with added hardcore edge.
While the Knights Of The Old Republic comic series is mostly Zayne Carrick's story, in its background it deals with the Jedi duo of "the Revanchist" and Alek, showing their gradual transformation into the Revan and Malak we see in the game. In fact, this trope is so pervasive that Zayne himself and his Master Lucien were speculated to be a past version of just about every Sith Lord from the two games at some point.
The Judge Dredd supervillain Judge Death has his origin given in 'Young Death - Boyhood of a Superfiend'. This shows (with some incredibly black humour) how a nasty and psycopathic child develops into a monster that wipes out his whole world. (Although, to be fair, the reoffending rate is to all intents and purposes negligible.) Darkness hardly begins to describe it...
In IDW's Transformers material, Megatron Origin details the origins of... guess who.
- Continuum erroneously claims that he was a slave^*
  ^{(seems that he had a major case of Happiness In Slavery going on)}
  . (If the guy behind Continuum had paid attention, he'd have noticed that Megatron was actually a miner who got laid off and didn't take it lying down.)
- Apparently "slave" was supposed to be easier for the younger target audience to understand than "laid-off blue-collar worker". Those being so rare in real life, and all.

Film

The trilogy of Star Wars prequels, showing how the Empire was formed and how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader.
The Scorpion King, a prequel to The Mummy Returns.
- Though we are never given a reason for why he became an evil warlord after being a hero.
  - Actually, we do in the second prequel: he is possessed/influenced by an evil being who may either be Hades (the Greco-Roman Lord of Hell), Ra (the Egyptian ~~Lord of Hell~~ sun god), or more likely, the Judeo-Christian Satan.
  - Like the Mummy series EVER makes sense?
Some think Hellseeker is this for Kristy Cotton..

Literature

Hannibal Rising is a poorly executed SOD for Hannibal Lecter, giving him a Freudian Excuse for many of the things he's famous for, even though he explicitly stated in the first movie that there wasn't any past trauma behind his deviant behavior.
A variation in the musical (and book as well?) Wicked, as well as in I Claudius, is showing the early life of a character thought of as villainous, but ultimately revealing them as well-intentioned and victimized by others.
- A similar situation occurs in the Jane Eyre prequel, The Wide Sargasso Sea.
Turnatt of Swordbird was never very nice, but he was a fairly normal red-tailed hawk, until getting his talons on "The Book of Heresy", (AKA Becoming an Evil Warlord for Dummies.)
The Warcraft novel Rise of the Horde, which details the fall from grace of the eredar, along with the beginnings of the evil Horde in the first two games, as you might've guessed by the title.
- Not to mention the aptly-named Arthas: Rise of the Lich King.
Some Star Trek novels are a Start Of Darkness for the Borg, but since none of them are canon there's never been a actual origin for them.
The Star Wars Expanded Universe has several examples:
- Outbound Flight serves as a Start Of Darkness of sorts for Grand Admiral Thrawn. Although he isn't exactly evil, it does explain why he took Palpatine's side. Eventually. Well, it introduces him to Darth Sidious and shows how perilously close he is to being exiled for his tactics. We know from the short story "Mist Encounter" that after he was exiled some Imperials found him and brought him back.
- The main point of the Darth Bane novels. Book one is Bane's SOD. Book two is Zannah's.
- The novel Dark Rendezvous has several flashback scenes that explore Count Dooku's past and gives him a very convincing SOD backstory.
Warriors: The Rise of Scourge. It turns out that Scourge was just a cat whose ego was inflated too much (though, to his credit, he did kill later on.)
The Warhammer 40000 Blood Angels short story Blood Debt serves as one for Ramius Stele.
- Thousand Sons serves as one (a REALLY tragic one) for the Thousand Sons, especially for Maginus the Red. Also confirms that the Blood Ravens are indeed descended from the Thousand Sons.
Ebenezer Scrooge, "who was a very nice little guy until something happened with Mr. Fezziwig that I can't remember." (The something was that his fiancee left him because he kept postponing their marriage until he felt he had enough money. Mr. Fezziwig was his employer and represents the man he could have become if he had chosen love and happiness instead of material wealth. There are also various Freudian Excuses having to do with a generally sucky early home life.)
Subverted by CS Lewis in The Magician's Nephew. It's a prequel to the rest of the series, serving to (among other things) provide a backstory for the White Witch- but she's already beyond the Moral Event Horizon when the reader first meets her, and just gets worse as the story progresses.
Babylon Five has "Deadly Relations - Bester Ascendant".

Live Action TV

Barney in the first season episode "Game Night" of How I Met Your Mother. We learn how he evolved from a long-haired whiney guy into the Barnacle.
- Plus, he had a one night stand with his ex-girlfriend years later (the one who's breakup with caused his Startof Darkness) - and recorded it on his cell-phone.
  - Legen - and I really mean that serious, because this was just awesome - dary!
Arguably, Smallville does this for Lex Luthor. It certainly intended to when the series began, although fans since then have been known to speculate that one day someone somewhere flipped a lightswitch.
The Big Finish audio drama series, I, Davros shows the early life of everyone's favourite Dalek creating Mad Scientist. Interesting in that he isn't given any Freudian Excuse, and you don't gain any sympathy for him, just understanding.
In Heroes, the episode Six Months Ago shows how Sylar first killed a man and stole his power. Two seasons later, another flashback from the same moment in Villains expands the story and shows Elle and Noah Bennet are at least partially responsible for him becoming a serial killer.
- The Volume 2 story arcs in feudal Japan show the Start Of Darkness for Adam Monroe, and some arcs in the axillary graphic novels show the background of characters like Thompson and Linderman.
- In Volume 4, we also get the background for Angela Petrelli as well as the beginnings of The Company.

Video Games

Metal Gear Solid 3 featured Naked Snake, who would later become Big Boss from the very first Metal Gear, in his US military operative days. Instead of being the traditional Bond Villain archetype he'd been in the previous game - or even the wise but guilty character his son was - he was a highly energetic, loveable dork who spent a great deal of the mission flirting unsuccessfully with his medic and debating eating wild animals for no real reason. And geeking out over guns. And finding interesting ways to mess with his tech's head by removing his own clothes and making disturbing innuendos about cardboard boxes. And being forced to kill his mentor by an Ancient Conspiracy so they could get the funds needed to extend their control over the whole world. Wait...
- Portable Ops takes this further, showing him continue to be disillusioned, and marking his transition from a lone soldier to a competent and respected leader.
- And it's not a Start Of Darkness only for him...
Donovan's storyarc in the Darkstalkers/Vampire Hunter games follow this path.
Subverted in the PS2 game Valkyrie Profile 2 which starts as a prequel to the first game. Who dies, who is imprisoned, and who turns to The Dark Side gets completely changed when the heroine and villain from the first game show up via Time Travel, and change this timeline into an Alternate Universe.
Super Robot Wars Original Generation Gaiden somewhat features the Start Of Darkness of one of MX's Big Bad Albero Esto. It was only mentioned several times in MX, but in OG Gaiden, it's... rather full blown and detailed.
- In Alpha Gaiden, Char's Face Heel Turn (since Chars Counterattack is part of Alpha 2) makes even more sense then it's UC Gundam verse reasons. Basically, during the course of the plot, he watches humanity keeping picking the Too Dumb To Live options and the horrrifying results, and this disillusions and pisses him off enough to decide a Colony Drop is actually a good idea.
Sengoku Basara 2 Heroes features a Gaiden story for Maeda Keiji, which in fact was a Start Of Darkness for a villain in the actual game, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi starts out as a normal man, joining Keiji in pranks here and there, until he encounters Matsunaga Hisahide, who proceeds to humiliate the hell outta him, and this causes him to become drunk with power, leaving Keiji and doing a lot of atrocities later on.
The Mass Effect novel Revelation serves as a Start Of Darkness for Saren, showing how he came to be the villain in the videogame....though in the novel itself, he's already an extreme Knight Templar.
A one third of Crisis Core is spent on telling us how did Sephiroth became the Magnificent Bastard and One Winged Angel he is in Final Fantasy VII. Sure, most of the scenes are actually remakes from the original flashbacks explaining his origins from Final Fantasy VII; but then again, both cases could be considered as a Start Of Darkness moment.
- To this Troper, it proved that he didn't suffer a sudden snap as the original game would lead one to believe, but rather more of a long line of betrayals that started as early as Gast's death and ended with the very facts of his own existence, which overall is both more believable and more tragic.
The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the Start Of Darkness for Ganondorf, explaining how he became the King of Evil Ganon.
- Not really, Ganondorf was evil right from the start. OoT only really explains how he got his hands on the Triforce of Power and became the series' immortal Big Bad.
  - No, the character dialogue in the game explains Ganondorfs back-story: Ganondorf was born as the once in 100 years Gerudo Male who becomes King, his people lived in a desert where life was obviously difficult, he became jealous of the relatively bountiful nearby land of Hyrule and sought to improve his people's lot by claiming it for himself. He needed power to defeat them, the ultimate power ideally... So Yeah...
- Likewise, The Minish Cap is the Start Of Darkness for Vaati, and explains his origins as a Minish sorcerer's apprentice.
Kagetsu Tohya fleshes out SHIKI and Roa's start of darkness with the Crimsoon Moon and Drinking, Dreaming Moon scenarios. The former was basically screwed from the start. Roa just wanted to research immortality and didn't really care if he himself had it, as he did not care about his own ego. Falling in love with Arcueid got in the way of his research and he went insane or something.

Web Comics

The Trope Namer - admittedly more recent than most of the other examples here, but it's still a pretty cool title — is Start of Darkness, an Order of the Stick graphic novel detailing Evil Overlord Xykon and his Dragon Redcloak's past. Of course Xykon, unlike most, is astonishingly evil from the get-go. We get to see him become more ~~evil~~ competent. Redcloak is a whole other story.
- The comic's author and illustrator, Rich Burlew, said in the Introduction that the greatest challenge of Start of Darkness was to tell Xykon's backstory without making him even slightly sympathetic. He solves this problem by making Xykon's every appearance push him farther beyond the Moral Event Horizon.
  "He's completely and wholly unapologetically evil, but more to the point, he's kind of a dick."
- The very first page of the comic might have been teasing at it: Xykon is shown as someone who might come off as sympathetic for the first three or so panels, but revealed to be already evil before the page is over - at the age of four.

Web Original

The Spoony Experiment spoofs this in its April Fools Day review of the original Final Fantasy. The Spoony One was driven insane trying to comprehend the game's time travel plot and became determined to invent his own method of time travel to stop the series from being made, ultimately causing his own time paradox by his future self appearing and presenting him with the technology fully formed. Along with a rather neat bit of acting, with Noah making a seamless transition from Spoony to Insano before our eyes.
The version two finale of Mega64 reveals how Dr. Poque became the Mad Scientist he is today.
Dr Horribles Sing Along Blog is this for a story that has not yet been written.
- Actually, there was a Dr. Horrible comic about...well...his origins.

Western Animation

Occurs in Meet The Robinsons with Goob becoming increasingly bitter from the lost baseball game and his future self's advice. The frustration keeps him from adoption and leads to him living alone in the Orphanage for almost 30 years until he eventually decides to take it out on Lewis, as his inventing kept him from the sleep he needed before the fateful baseball game, and becomes an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain.
Before being introduced on Danny Phantom, Vlad is shown while in college as a regular guy (if a science geek) and as Jack Fenton's best friend who "...shared everything." Then fate almost literally put it's fingers into Vlad's eyes when he's blasted in the face by a malfunctioning gizmo that disfigures him horribly. He got better (...and the disfigurement was somewhat temporary) but he was never again that regular guy.
- Danny's start of darkness occurs as early as the fifth episode and builds up gradually in time, concluding during The Movie, "The Ultimate Enemy". The whole episode is largely depressing, especially since it's hinted strongly that even if the circumstances are changed, it may still be Danny's future.
  - This tends to ignore the fact that in order for a time paradox to exist, a timeline have to diverge into parallel universes. Many Dark Danny fans tend to think that Dark Danny's continued existence means that that future remains Danny's future, rather than a now-alternate future that probably has been avoided. In order for Danny to stop the Nasty Burger's explosion, he would have to know of Dark Danny's existence, and if the Nasty Burger exploded, how could Dark Danny exist, and then how could Danny know of the Nasty Burger explosion etc. This is why most time travel fiction relies on divergent timelines to resolve time paradoxes.
  - And to a lesser extent, Tucker, who's easily corrupted by his vice. This troper says "lesser" because the series never emphasized it. Unfortunately.
The Venture Brothers offers a Start Of Darkness for Phantom Limb in "The Invisible Hand of Fate." At one time he was a Mad Scientist in the dotty/well meaning sense, and chivalrous enough to turn down future-Mrs-the-Monarch's sex-for-grades proposition. Long story short, both he and Billy Quizboy were victims in a Thirty Xanatos Pileup.
Powerpuff Girls: Mojo Jojo's origin was intinally revealed in the episode "Mr. Mojo's Rising". Mojo's telling of the origin paints him as someone who might come off as sympathetic — he was but a mere, innocent lab monkey named Jojo when Professor Utonium created the Powerpuff Girls. Their creation affected Jojo, giving him green skin and a large brain. He was neglected by Utonium in favor of the girls, so he left to start his villainous career as Mojo Jojo. Utonium, having a very faint recollection of Jojo, agrees to copy the girls' powers onto him. However, once he gains their powers, Mojo subverts his apparent Heel Face Turn and defeats the girls. He then declares his plots and machinery useless in his typical fashion, and proceeds to destroy them all. Mojo's destruction sparks Utonium's memories of Jojo, causing Utonium himself to reveal that Mojo was just as unsympathetic when he was Jojo, eventually leading Utonium to throw Jojo out when the girls were created. Infact, Jojo actually made Utonium accidentally add Chemical X to the mixture that created the Powerpuff Girls. Thus with this revelation, Mojo Jojo becomes too busy with his Villainous BSOD to notice or care that the Professor has removed his newly gained powers from him. The Movie expands on Mojo's origin, having him trick the girls into constructing his volcano observatory for him.
The main purpose of the four-part Gargoyles episode "City of Stone" is to provide a framing story for one of these for Demona and Macbeth.
The Batman's episode Riddler's Revenge, depicting Edward Nygma's gradual transformation from geeky, unappreciated kid to murderous costumed criminal.
In Darkwing Duck, an episode was dedicated to the origin story of Reginald Bushroot, and how he became a villain. He was a dedicated botanist attempting to find a way for people to photosynthesize, in order to cure world hunger and the carbon dioxide buildup simultanneously. His co-workers continuously pranked him, called him by a nickname he hated, made fun of him, and bullied him mercilessly, but he was too passive to stand up for himself. Then his funding was cut, when he was maybe three steps away from completeing his life's work. In a desperate moment, he tried one last experiment... on himself. He ended up a plant-duck hybrid monster, but the experiment was technically a success. Hoping that he might be able to get his funding back, he goes back to his lab, where his coworkers tease him about his new appearance. He snaps, and murders them by burying them in vines so thoroughly that it crushes and suffocates them. Then the one person who was ever nice to him (the lady he was head-over-heels for), panics when she sees what he's done. As he's still in Mad Scientist mode, (remember, Love Makes You Crazy, and With Great Power Comes Great Insanity) he attempts to repeat the experiment on her so she can join him. She doesn't respond well. After that, It Gets Worse.
In The Fairly Oddparents episode "The Secret Orgin of Denzel Crocker", it is explained how Crocker became obsessed with fairies and why he's so bitter toward his students and life.