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You don't look so good, Mr. Wellington.
The tendency of relatively calm and composed villains to lose their cool over the course of the story. Usually happens to arrogant Chessmaster-type villains (especially if said villain is a Smug Snake), as control of the situation slips from his or her grasp and things come up that they Didn't See Coming. Most notable when it happens towards the end of the story to show how pathetic the Big Bad is when things are not going exactly as planned (" This Cannot Be!"). Especially apparent if they previously had Creepy Monotone or Dissonant Serenity, and suddenly start Chewing The Scenery (when they do this because their plan is succeeding, it's more of a case of Drunk On The Dark Side).
Similar to Oh Crap, though the difference lies in that Oh Crap moments involve a single moment where the character finds that they are screwed, while Villainous Breakdowns have them see it coming from miles away. The good-guy counterpart is the Heroic BSOD.
Note that this isn't necessarily an example of Villain Decay. On the contrary, some villains become much more terrifying and dangerous when their façade of cunning and civility crumbles. They might even end up dishing out a vicious No Holds Barred Beatdown to the Hero(s), engage in some Cold Blooded Torture or, goodness forbid, drop the Villain Ball and Just FINISH HIM Already instead of playing around. It could even lead to them stop holding back their true nature and assuming their true form as the monster they actually were.
A somewhat less common, but not exactly infrequent, form of breakdown results in the exact opposite reaction: the villain lapses into a catatonic state as the shock of their defeat robs them of their wits. Another form of breakdown occurs due to Heel Realization causing a Villainous BSOD.
A Villainous Breakdown is usually a sign that the villain having one is not a Magnificent Bastard, but even the Magnificent Bastard may succumb to one if their plans suffer a particularly impressive implosion. (See: Norman Osborn aka the Green Goblin, Light Yagami, originally pictured above, or Albert Wesker). If they do suffer one, chances are it'll be even bigger than a typical villain's breakdown (As the old saying goes, "The bigger you are, the harder you fall").
Note that this is usually done in a climax and just the fact that one occurs is a pretty big spoiler, so read with caution.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
Comic Books
Films
- In Twelve Angry Men, Juror #3 (the most admamant supporter of conviction, and the designated antagonist of the piece though he's not really a villain per se) experiences this in the climax; He angrily rants at his fellow jurors, and then starts ranting about teenagers before tearing up a photograph of his son; After finally realizing that he's been transferring the rage felt at his own son onto the defendent he breaks down sobbing while saying "Not Guilty." Over and over again. Even though the guy was a total prick throughout the film it was impossible not to pity him.
- Juror #10 has a less sympathetic breakdown in which he essentially engages in a lengthy racist rant about how the defendant, a latino immigrant, is basically scum from birth and is racially programmed to lie, steal and murder. It so offends and disgusts the other jurors, even the vindictive Juror #3, that all of them either walk away from the table or turn away from him in disgust.
Juror #10: Listen to me. We're... This kid on trial here... his type, well, don't you know about them? There's a, there's a danger here. These people are dangerous. They're wild. Listen to me. Listen.
- Norman Stansfield from Leon, who gives us the above quote.
- Rock And Rule. Mok has a spectacular breakdown.
- 300 has King Xerxes flip out and execute half his generals after they repeatedly fail to dislodge the Spartans. Later, being grazed with a spear (which reminds him that he can, in fact, bleed) causes him to have a Villainous BSOD as well.
- Sanchez is Licence To Kill had a minor case of this during the final action sequence. He goes from treating his employees with trust and respect to impaling them on forklifts, gunning down The Scrappy, and swinging madly with a machete when he sees James Bond, cutting the air brake on his oil tanker truck, which naturally leads to Stuff Blowing Up.
- In Quantum Of Solace, when Big Bad Dominic Greene's plans begin to explode (literally) around his ears, he goes totally insane, trying to chop Bond to little pieces using an axe while making sounds more appropriately shrieked by demonic monkeys. His fury gets the better of him when he axes himself in the foot.
- LeChiffre goes from coldy and effortlessly dismantling his opponents at the poker table to a screaming, sweaty nervous wreck that has to resort to his own dirty work.
- Number Two, normaly a calm executor of Dr. Evil's plans, throws a hissy fit at the climax of the first Austin Powers:
Number Two: Dr. Evil, I spent 30 years of my life turning this two-bit evil empire into a world class multi-national. I was going to have a cover story with Forbes. But you, like an idiot, want to take over the world! And you don't realize there is no world anymore! It's only corporations!
- Scott Evil does this in the third movie in reaction to his father's Heel Face Turn.
- In Die Hard, Hans Gruber acts very calm and collected up until the point where Holly calls him "just a common thief", at which point you can see his facade of civility crumble into derangement.
- In Die Hard With a Vengeance, his brother Simon, on the other hand, is able to keep his cool nearly all the way through the movie...until he realizes that McClane tracked him to Canada.
- Alan Rickman again in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves - Just when it all starts to go wrong he takes it out on everyone else "Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas!"
- You're forgetting the other Sheriff breakdown, involving how he'll cut out Robin Hood's heart with a spoon. When questioned by Guy of Gisbourne, the reply is, "It's dull, you twit! It will HURT MORE!"
- In Agent Smith's "Why do you persist" monologue to Neo in the last Matrix movie, he seems to suffer from this.
- Citizen X. Andrei Chikatilo breaks down and sobs when psychiatrist Dr. Alexandr Bukhanovsky reads his psychological profile of the suspected serial killer; his theoretical assessment of the serial killer (Chikatilo) turns out to be on the money.
- The Big Bad of the Die Hard-on-a-bus film Speed has two such breakdowns. The first is when he realizes that his bus-bomb has already exploded with nobody on it, and the second happens when his money is ruined by a dye pack.
- The Operative in Serenity is unflappable for most of the story, going so far as to proclaim that Mal can't make him angry during their first confrontation at the Companion Training House. If you watch carefully, though, you can see the first pebbles of the rockslide earlier in the movie... until the climax where he freaks out.
( Serenity is followed through the ion cloud by an entire fleet of Reavers) Operative: ... target the Reavers. Target the Reavers! Target everyone! SOMEBODY FIRE!
- And then he shoots Mal in the back. Truly, no power in the 'verse can stop Mal from pissing people off.
- While not always cool and calm, Jean-Baptist Emanuel Zorg of The Fifth Element certainly fits the bill with his preferred means of shouting to display his disappointment.
- Another example fits this trope better: near the ending, Zorg opens a box supposedly filled with Cosmic Keystones, does an Evil Laugh... and starts to cry, as it is empty.
- Robert deNiro has a pretty memorable one as Al Capone in The Untouchables:
"I want you to find this nancy-boy Eliot Ness, I want him DEAD! I want his family DEAD! I want his house burned to the GROUND! I wanna go there in the middle of the night and I wanna PISS ON HIS ASHES!"
- And his ending breakdown, when he's been convicted of tax fraud and his criminal empire is being dismantled, is a pretty significant one as well:
Eliot Ness: Never stop. Never stop fighting until the fight is done.
Al Capone: What? What'd you say?
Eliot Ness: You heard, Capone. Here endeth the lesson. [Ness turns and calmly walks away]
Al Capone: Ah, you're nothin' but a lot of talk and a badge. [Ness pays him no attention; louder] You're nothin' but a lot of talk and a badge! [Psychotically] You're nothing but a lot of talk and a badge!
- HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, right after Bowman gets back onto the ship to pull his chips. This one is a little hard to detect, as he sounds just as calm as he does when he was a psychopathic killer, but through his words you can hear his desperate attempts to save his own life. It's much more notorious, however, as he starts losing his processing capacities:
HAL: Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. [...] I'm a... fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer.
- Lord Cutler Beckett in Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End has an unusually calm breakdown when his flagship is being torn apart between two legendary ships, and he can't even give the order to abandon ship. Instead, he just says "It's just... good business" and walks down the stairs to his doom.
- His breakdown was more like of a Villainous BSOD, there are people who turn aggressive, people who turn completely upside down and people like Beckett, who are so utterly and completely hit by the shock that they just... stop and need to reboot themselves. Too bad that Beckett started to reboot himself on the deck of a blowing-up ship. Nonethless, it was elegant and even... beautiful in some twisted way.
- "Baby" Jane Hudson, of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, goes completely insane upon learning in the end that the accident which crippled her sister, Blanche, was in fact caused by Blanche herself in an attempt to kill Jane, and not Jane in an alcoholic bender, and launches into her old song and dance routine, despite being 40-50 years too old.
- Jane to Blanche: "You mean, all this time we coulda been friends?"
- Tony Montana from Scarface wasn't usually a calm guy to begin with, but after having everything come crashing down and losing his sister Gina during the final assault on his mansion by Sosa's killers, Tony goes utterly ballistic, taking up an M-16 with an M-203 grenade launcher with the now-famous cry of "Say hello to my LITTLE FRIEND!" and going on a one-man cocaine-fueled rampage. He almost succeeds in taking every one of his attackers down.
- The Joker from The Dark Knight. Though one could argue that, being insane, he was ALREADY broken down before the movie started, he has a surprisingly subtle breakdown when neither of the ferries' passengers use the detonators, proving that Rousseau Was Right, and not ALL Humans Are Bastards. It's pretty much the first time in the whole movie things haven't followed his script, and he sees for just a moment that he might be wrong about life. His response is to whine that people aren't reliable and try to blow them up himself. It's the equivalent of turning over the chessboard and punching the other player when you're facing checkmate.
- It's also worth mentioning that this breakdown is likely an intentional case of dramatic irony, as earlier in the film, the Joker spoke to Harvey Dent/Two-Face about how normal people break when things "don't follow the plan" and that he's immune to this because he "has no plan". But when things don't go the way he thought they would, he is clearly upset by it and has his, as it were, reverse breakdown (going from his usual hysteria and out-and-out insanity to a quiet, solemn tone... the exact opposite of a normal example of a Villainous Breakdown.) Despite what he may have said or even thought, the Joker did have a plan... and he was not happy when it failed.
- He has a similar breakdown in the graphic novella The Killing Joke when Batman reveals that he hasn't succeeded in driving Gordon mad, proving that not everyone snaps after just "one bad day". This manifests as an all-out attempt to kill him and, when that fails, a moment of near-sanity when he actually considers Batman's offer to rehabilitate him.
- In Batman Forever the Riddler, already half-sane at best in this version (it is Jim Carrey playing him after all), becomes utterly, delusionally psychotic when Batman fries his brain by short-circuiting his own mind-reading invention. Partial subversion in that this renders him completely harmless.
- In The Truman Show, when it looks like Truman's about to escape the island on a sail boat or die trying, previously unflappable director Kristoff begins acting increasingly unhinged, culminating in a screamed order to "INCREASE THE WIND!" and capsize Truman's boat, regardless of the fact that Truman has tied himself to the sail and could drown as a result.
"How close are we?...Capsize him, tip him over...SHUT UP!...do it...DO IT!"
- He also has a much quieter breakdown after Truman rebuffs his offer to stay. While it seems like a simple BSOD breakdown at first, look closely when his screen shuts off and you see him slump over, either dead or in shock.
- Luthor, in the Superman vs. Atom Man serial, undergoes a subtle breakdown in the final few chapters as Superman closes in. He doesn't go completely over the edge, but after maintaining a picture of composition for most of the story, his shadowed eyes and (delightfully) deranged demeanor make it clear that he is losing his grip.
- Repo! The Genetic Opera had a great one at the end of the film — Rotti Largo loses it in front of the entire audience at the Genetic Opera when Mag defies him during her final song. He kills Mag — all the while insisting to the audience that it's All Part Of The Show—drags Nathan and Shilo on stage, and tries to force Shilo to kill Nathan. When she refuses, he kills Nathan himself. The stress of his breakdown causes him to finally succumb to his disease. His last actions are to insult his betrayed children and insist that the world was lucky to ever have him.
- Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny combines this with Engineered Public Confession when he's put on the stand in the trial of the man who mutinied against him, who has argued that he did it because Queeg was mentally unbalanced but forced to confess that he had never seen the captain "ranting and raving" as such. Under the defense attorney's questioning Queeg does start genuinely ranting and raving while also displaying his nervous tic of rubbing a pair of ball bearings together, Rather unusually we in the audience, having been privy to all that happened leading up to the mutiny, can kind of see where he's coming from, and it's left ambiguous whether he's actually insane.
- Shadow of the Vampire has its Bad Boss and secondary villain Director F.W. Murnau breaking down under the stress of using Max Schreck, a real vampire, in his film production. Already considered somewhat eccentric due to his addiction to laudanum and his obsession with realistic film, Murnau cracks during the final day of shooting, after Schreck kills the cinematographer and the producer: rather than ranting and raving, however, he simply orders Schreck back into position in a somewhat Creepy Monotone and continues filming. Eventually the doors of the makeshift studio are opened, exposing the vampire to sunlight, killing him; as Scheck disintegrates, Murnau continues working the film camera, rambling insanely:
Munau: The Death of centuries! Moonchaser! Blasphemer! Monkey! Vase of prehistory! Finally to Earth, and finally born! Yes, yes, you take the sun! (To the producer's corpse) Albin, collect the wooden stake and return it to its rightful place; it is necessary for the final frame, to remind us of the inadequacies of our plans, our contingencies, every missed train and failed picnic, every lie to a child.
(Max finally evaporates into nothing with an agonized scream. Seconds later, the screenwriter and some of the crew enter, looking a bit confused.)
Murnau: Softly, please. Our work is nearly complete. Our very own painting on our very own cave wall. Time will no longer be a dark spot on our lungs. They will no longer be able to say "you would have had to have been there", because the fact is, Albin, we were. Is there one among you who might wear the mantle of camera assistant? Could I possibly impose upon you to collect the slate at my feet and provide me with an end-board?
(A baffled crewmember takes up the slate and holds it in front of the camera.)
Murnau: Turn it...
(He does so. There is a pause, and Murnau finally stops filming.)
Murnau: Thank you. I think we have it.
- The Duke Brothers in Trading Places have a nice one after the heroes manipulate the
stock Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice market and cause them to lose everything. Randolph has a heart attack, and Mortimer abandons all pretense of civility, declaring "Fuck him!" (re: his brother), and screaming for them to reopen trade.
- Fritz Lang's movie Dr Mabuse The Gambler ends with the titular villain (played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge) suffering one of these, while being surrounded by the ghosts of all the people he had murdered earlier.
- AUTO in WALL-E sums up the trope with one sequence. The captain has raised the Holo-Imager on the lido deck, so AUTO knocks him aside and hits the button to retract it. WALL-E blocks it from retracting with his body. AUTO hits the button again, and when it still hasn't gone down, he hits the button so hard and rapidly it cracks. AND THEN TASERS IT.
- You can see the beginnings of his breakdown when he sics huge numbers of Steward bots on the heroes.
- There is also a fanfic
 where the author humanizes all characters. And Human!AUTO's breakdown is... well, it's a much worse version of this, since he's an indoctrinated officer, bent on following orders completely. He isn't sane already and, seeing the orders he was raised to follow being broken isn't very good for temper and mental health. Humanizing him made his breakdown much scarier.
- General Hein in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was never the most balanced individual, but he rapidly loses what marbles he did have when given permission to fire the Zeus Cannon. He continues to fire the cannon even though it is overheating, ignoring all warnings:
Warning: System Overload
Hein: I know.
Warning: System Overload
Hein: I Know!
Warning: System Overload
Hein: I! KNOW!
- His persistence, at least, is admirable: he is still firing the cannon as it explodes around him and only death manages to finally stop him.
- The villain in Kickboxer 3 has a downright pitiful breakdown, as his empire falls apart around him and he is reduced to trying to hold onto a teen prostitution ring, acting as if he deserves something to start over with. His last words are a dull, "How could this happen?"
- Adolf Hitler in virtually the whole of Downfall (past the opening Pet The Dog interview with his new secretary), but most notably when he's told that one of his generals could not muster up enough forces to halt the Allied offensive on Berlin. Hitler quietly orders everyone except his top people out of the room, and then completely loses his shit, ranting and raving so loudly they can hear him outside a steel door. Has provided hilarious spoof material for Gag Sub Youtube videos, such as this one with Hitler getting banned from Xbox Live.
- And he has another one when he learns that Himmler, his most trusted underling, has betrayed him to the Allies by offering to negotiate a peace settlement... and before that, when Herman Goering says that if he doesn't get a reply by 2200 hours (10 pm), he'll assume Hitler incapacitated and take over. Let's just say that in the week leading up to his death, Hitler has a lot of breakdowns.
- The 1939 film Mr Smith Goes To Washington ends with a Villainous Breakdown. The secondary villain Senator Paine, previously conflicted but standing firm on staying on the side of evil, finally snaps when Jeff Smith collapses from the exhaustion of his ordeal. Senator Paine rushes out of the senate room, tries to shoot himself, and when that fails, he runs back into the senate room screaming the truth regarding the corruption that he is a part of, giving Smith the victory.
- Star Trek (2009). Nero's "Fire everything!" when he realises Spock is doing a suicide run. But Ayel also has one when we first see him, upon realising he's arrived 25 years too early. This is in contrast to Nero who commonly speaks very little or else says things like "Hello Christopher. I'm Nero."
- He also has a Khan moment after he learns that Spock has just ruined his plan to destroy Earth the way he earlier destroyed Spock's home planet. "SPOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOCK!"
- Magnificent tyrant Khan has had a few of these. The most notable one occurs before the beginning of Star Trek, when an Apocalypse How ruins his world and kills his wife. He has another when his two puppet-controlled assassins fail to kill Kirk. And of course his last one is when his attempt to destroy the Enterprise in a Nebula fails. Strangely enough, Khan quickly regains his composure and goes back on the offensive in line with the Magnificent Bastard he is. But it's clear that his psyche is damaged by his constant need to dominate.
- Khan's death is a minor-key version of this, as the clearly unhinged and critically injured Khan drags himself to the Genesis Device's control panel in a last-ditch bid to destroy the Enterprise by using the Genesis Device as a bomb and blowing up the entire area. Watching the Enterprise slowly limp out of the nebula, he loses the last of his sanity and begins quoting the Famous Last Words of Captain Ahab during that character's own Villainous Breakdown.
- In Tim Burton's remake of Planet Of The Apes, the last we see of General Thade is him completely losing his sanity upon being trapped up inside a spaceship cell, reverting to a primal, screeching ape.
- Well, that's not the last we see of Thade . . .
- President Evil Idi Amin in The Last King Of Scotland. Trying to track his Breakdowns can be... challenging.
- Thrax has a subtle breakdown during his final confrontation with Osmosis. His normally slick dreadlocks fall out of place, his voice gets rougher, and his Evil Laugh gets creepier. It does escalate to a This Cannot Be moment just before he falls into a beaker of alcohol.
- Happens toward the end of Training Day, when Alonzo Harris realizes that the neighborhood he used to run as a corrupt cop will no longer play along with his criminal enterprises after his partner Jake subdues him in the middle of the street.
- The exact same ending happens in Pride and Glory!
- We already know James Cagney's character in White Heat is dangerously unpredictable, but he reaches new heights in the infamous prison cafeteria scene. Upon hearing of his mother's death, Cody Jarrett begins crying and screaming uncontrollably; he leaps up on the table and stumbles in panic toward the door, managing to knock no less than four guards unconscious before being subdued and carried out bodily, still sobbing at the top of his lungs.
- Elle Driver from Kill Bill, very much the Smug Snake during the course of the two movies, has a pretty epic one of these after the Bride snatches out her remaining eye and crushes it underfoot in Volume 2, reducing her to little more than a wailing, screaming and thrashing lunatic.
- This performance was similar to Pris' death rages in Blade Runner.
- Towards the end of Return To Oz, the Nome King suffers a breakdown when Dorothy manages to finally beat him at his own game- three times in a row: for every victory, the King loses both his temper and a little of the humanity he'd gained from the contest, gradually transforming from an Affably Evil humanoid to a gigantic Earth Elemental. He even destroys his pipe with a blast of magic, ends the contest in a tantrum, and goes on to destroy his entire palace in his attempt to kill Dorothy- which would have been successful had Billina not laid an egg.
- Speed Racer: On the final lap of the Grand Prix...
Royalton: STOOOOOOOP HIIIIIIIM!!!!!!!
- Falling Down is essentially one of these spread throughout an entire movie.
- In the 1930s and 1940s, any villain played by Tod Slaughter could be counted on to have one in Every. Single. Film. Fortunately, he was talented enough to make this work, since his villains were all different in motivation and action.
- The Violator has a minor one in the middle of the Spawn movie. Upset that Malebolgia chose Spawn to lead the armies of the damned instead of him, Violator throws a hissy fit, whining that it isn't fair. He catches himself in the middle of his rant, realizing that his whining really isn't making him look any better in front of his boss. This growing frustration with this apparent snub, his own hatred of the Clown guise, and Spawn's constant refusal to cooperate eventually drives Violator to ditch all subtlety and just beat Spawn into submission with his true power.
- "Who cares about Derek Zoolander anyway? The man has only one look for Christ's sake! Blue Steel? Ferrari? Le Tigre? They're the same face! Doesn't anybody else notice this?! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills! I invented the Piano Key Necktie! I invented it! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE, DEREK?! NOTHING! YOU'VE GOT NOTHING!! NOTHING!!!"
- Clue: " I killed Yvette! I hated her... so... much, It* it... the f* , it* flame... flames... flames on the side of my face, breathing, breath... heaving breaths... heaving..."
- Obadiah Stane remains on a pretty even keel throughout most of Iron Man, including the ending. However, well before the finale, when his evil plans have been stonewalled, there is a scene where he snaps under the pressure and throws a tantrum. You know the one.
- Commodus in Gladiator after learning of his sister's betrayal. "AM I NOT MERCIFUL?!?"
- Jackson Rippner in Red Eye loses his suave, intimidating demeanor just after Lisa stabs him in the neck with a pen.
- In The Departed when Sullivan (The Irish Mob's Mole inside the police) is finally caught by Costigan, He tries threatening and intimidating Costigan out of arresting him, then, nearly in tears, he starts begging Costigan to "Just kill me. Just fucking kill me!"
- "I am killing you."
- Frank grew less stable as the film went on, too. "Don't laugh! This ain't reality TV!"
- In No Country For Old Men, Anton Chigurh has a very subtle one in his encounter with the wife of Llewelyn Moss, who he promised to kill if Moss didn't get him the money. He decides to place her fate on a coin toss.
Chigurh: This is the best I can do. Call it.
Carla Jean: I knowed you was crazy when I saw you settin' there. I knowed exactly what was in store for me.
Chigurh: * smiling* Call it.
Carla Jean: No. I'm not gonna call it.
Chigurh: * smile fades* ...Call it.
- Deliberately exacerbated by Mameha to Hatsumomo in Memoirs Of A Geisha.
Gamebooks
Literature
- The climax of Piers Anthony's Blue Adept sees Stile, in order to win his Great Game match against Adept Red (A dance competition in which Red was demolishing Stile due to Stile wrecked knees) throws himself into a self-induced trance to see Red as his true love, Lady Blue. Red, who had just confessed that she Does Not Like Men, completely loses it over his show of affection and goes into an Unstoppable Rage right on stage.
- Having a breakdown is quite literally the last thing that the usually stoic King Haggard does in Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn.
"THE LAAAAAAST! I KNEW YOU WERE THE LAAAAAAST!"
- Although he hasn't been the most composed guy over the course of the book, Grevane in Dead Beat by Jim Butcher has a Villainous Breakdown that saves Harry's (or maybe Ramirez') life-right at the instant of his death. Through the entire time he's been trying to fight Harry he's been continuing a major necromantic working, and when Ramirez strikes the killing blow, his mind snaps and refuses to accept that he's dead. As a result, he keeps trying to finish the spell, instead of casting a Death Curse that would take Harry with him.
- Artemis Fowl's "lollipops" moment in the first book.
- Not to mention Briar Cudgeon in The Arctic Incident, Spiro's when Artemis apparently disappears in The Eternity Code, Abbot's in The Lost Colony and Opal Koboi's in The Opal Deception and The Time Paradox.
Speaking of The Lost Colony, don't forget Billy Kong's protracted loss of composure, which eventually ends with him getting beaten halfway to Hell by Butler in a Taiwanese skyscraper.
- Will Elliott's The Pilo Family Circus, Kurt Pilo has a particularly spectacular breakdown; convinced that his underlings are turning traitor on him and overcome by rage, he begins mutating into a monstrous demonic reptile with a habit for giggling insanely under his breath. Then, he proceeds to kill just about every single carny in his path, before coming face to face with his less-than-approving Employers.
- Gonko, the normally cool-headed leader of the Clown Division has one halfway through the book, when he discovers that someone has stolen his trousers — which are, in fact, enchanted to produce any number of useful items via the pockets. However, since most of the clowns seem to be insane to a certain degree, this is less of a mental breakdown and more of an explosive temper-tantrum. Nonetheless, whilst obliterating all furniture within reach, he screams this:
Gonko: If I find the motherfucker who took my pants— I DON'T CARE WHO YOU ARE: CLOWN, ACROBAT, BELOVED FRIEND OR RELATIVE, AN INANIMATE OBJECT... AN ASTRAL BODY... ME MYSELF... A ROCK OR A BOWL OF PICKLES... SOMETHING UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE TO KILL, LISTEN UP: I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU! I'LL FIND A WAY, IF IT TAKES ME A HUNDRED YEARS... I'LL FIND... A... WAAAAAYY!
- Mugabo, the Circus Magician, apparently has one every once in a while: being a gifted sorcerer and pyromancer he feels degraded at having to perform the "bunny trick," and breaks into fiery temper-tantrums when pushed into it. However, when the Freedom Movement sabotages his tent and scrawls graffiti all over his equipment near the end of the book, he enters a fully-fledged pyrokinetic psychotic episode, resulting in the death of several carnies and the utter astonishment of the circus-goers.
- One of the creepier moments in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere comes when the Angel Islington, who has been nothing but calm, reserved, and beatific, wheels on Richard and screams, "They deserved it!" when asked about what happened to Atlantis. The book compares it to lifting the lid on a container and seeing something writhing underneath. Richard notes that "in a time of scary things, it was the scariest thing [he] had ever seen."
- Emperor Jigang goes through one in Pillars of Creation when, upon arriving at the Confessor's Palace in the Midlands capital, he finds the head of his friend and mentor, stuck on a pike in front of the palace, perfectly preserved by a magic spell until he approaches it, whereupon it decomposes in seconds.
- Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher sometimes has to cope with these.
- In Murder in the Dark, the Man Behind The Man literally foamed at the mouth after The Reveal and was well on the way to being committed to an asylum.
- In Murder on the Ballarat Train, the killer finally let go with one of these complete with a Nietzsche Wannabe speech.
- In Queen of the Flowers, the two thugs whom Phryne's friends had been tracking down for information were soon being hunted by a ruthless mob boss, thanks to some remarks she'd made about them. When they later turned up, one got peacefully drunk, but the other went into a screaming tantrum while waving a loaded shotgun.
- Most of the villains in Redwall books.
- Gabool the Wild in Mariel of Redwall does it most obviously and impressively. He goes from being evil but reasonably lucid to a gibbering insomniac who can't tell his followers from his sworn enemies and starts to believe that a plundered church bell understands what he's saying and rings itself to mock him.
- Slagar the Cruel in Mattimeo is already crazy at the start, blaming Matthias and the Redwallers for the horrible scarring on his face. By the end, he's pretty much raving, frantically reassuring himself that however events turn out, he will "win" somehow. He even plans to steal Matthias' sword, now convinced that it is magic and grants victory to whoever wields it.
- Tsarmina in Mossflower also does this. Granted she's being driven insane by a constant dripping noise and the fact that everything she tries to destroy the resistance fails.
- Randall Flagg from Stephen King's The Stand goes through a slow but steady Villainous Breakdown about midway through the book. A series of mishaps, such as his agents' bomb failing to kill all the leaders of the Free Zone, his destined wife goading him into killing her, his attempts to deal with the Free Zone's spies all failing in one way or another, and his idiot savant weapons expert going nuts and blowing up all his jets and pilots all take their toll on his Dark Messiah persona. Near the end, when the same idiot savant brings back a nuclear warhead that's leaking radiation, interrupting Flagg's staged execution of two Free Zone members that was meant to boost the morale of his followers, he's so unhinged that he's reduced to pathetically whining to his right hand man to get rid of the warhead.
- So Tropetastic it's featured at least
twice thrice several times in the Discworld:
- Lord Hong in Interesting Times goes from a smooth, scheming, would-be Vetinari of near-perfection to just another raving tyrant.
- Wyrd Sisters had Duke Felmet, who becomes more and more unhinged as the story progresses from the guilt of killing his brother for the throne of Lancre. And from the fact that everyone seems to know, but not care. The citizens of Lancre are more the sort to think that king being killed in usurpation really does count as "Natural Causes" than the sort to rise up in arms over a beloved ruler's death only to be tragically put down. They don't even seem to care that Felmet and his wife are ruling the land with an iron fist: "You couldn't oppress a people like that any more than you could oppress a mattress."
- Reacher Gilt in Going Postal goes through a subdued form of this trope, going from the perfect con man to someone realizing he's been duped by the ultimate con.
- And then in Making Money, Cosmo Lavish (who had admittedly been going a bit rancid about the whole situation) finally, completely snaps when Moist pulls off his glove, exposing the stygium ring to sunlight which bursts into flame (notably, the ring that was cutting off circulation to his finger by being too tight and causing his finger to die and start rotting, which may have had something to do with the whole matter), Cosmo not even noticing as he finishes his descent into believing that he is Vetinari.
- He'd arguably already snapped the night before, finally succumbing to his insanity when Moist and that clown, you know the one, completely upended his schemes in public court. All it took was for Moist to identify him as Lord Vetinari for him to finally dive over the edge. The surgical removal of Cosmo's finger only served to save his life from gangrene and yuck.
- Count Magpyr in Carpe Jugulum is a polite, urbane sort who is almost able to convince you that he really is working for the common good in having people queue up to have their blood drunk. After he's been Weatherwaxed, and the villagers turn on him, his control starts slipping, until he reaches the point of threatening babies and killing dogs.
- Happened to the villain of Illusion by Paula Volsky. The book is a fantasy loose retelling of the French Revolution and the Terror. As the Robespierre Expy loses his absolute control, he loses his sanity.
- Prince Xizor in Star Wars Expanded Universe novel Shadows Of The Empire. At numerous earlier points points in the novel, Xizor is shown to consider himself superior to "mere humans" because his literally cold-blooded nature leaves him incapable of going into an uncontrollable rage. Turns out it's not that he can't, just that it takes a lot longer. As his palace collapses underneath him and Darth Vader lets him know that he's quite aware of Xizor's attempt to kill Vader's son, he starts to get a little... antsy?
- Tarkin has a very brief one at the end of Death Star, when he is simply refusing to accept that his prized station has a weakness even when Luke has fired the kriffing torpedoes in. Essentially, it boiled down to "Unthinkable. Unthinkable-" boom.
- A very, very minor one in The Thrawn Trilogy. Grand Admiral Thrawn was able to anticipate and counter almost anything the Rebellion and anyone else did. Almost. His reaction when those things he hadn't anticipated all came together to thwart him was to get maybe a little flustered, a little distracted, enough so that he didn't see the Bodyguard Betrayal until it was too late. Though, to his credit, after being stabbed he smiled and said "But... it was so artistically done."
- Thrawn's fellow Big Bad, Joruus C'baoth, has a more traditional one after Mara kills the Luke clone. Somewhat unusually, the normally unstable C'baoth actually becomes much calmer and more controlled as he's in the process of finally losing it. This just makes it creepier.
- The real bad guys, at least for the characters in the main plotline, of the Hand Of Thrawn duology are the Big Bad Triumvirate of Moff Disra, Major Grodin Tierce, and the Con Man Flim. They work to make it look as if Thrawn has come Back From The Dead. When Pellaeon exposes their whole plot at a crucial moment, Tierce has an incredibly sudden, violent breakdown/Motive Rant where it's revealed that not only is he secretly a clone, but a clone with a bit of Thrawn engineered into his brain. If you read carefully there are hints of this, like the way he very slowly changes over the course of the novel and the way he comes up with tactics becomes creepy.
- It apparently happens to Ysanne Isard in slow motion during The Bacta War; someone has broken out of her secret prison, parts of the Empire she rules are splintering off, and she's been forced off of Imperial Center. The Dragon notices her changing, she notices it too, and soon the captain of one of her Star Destroyers is defecting to the New Republic and sending her a message where he calls her insane. Apparently she's better by Isard's Revenge, though.
- Nope! She's composed, but still quietly obsessing over her defeat, so that the next stage in her plan is easily predicted, to her ultimate downfall.
- Karos Invictad in Reaper's Gale, 7th installation of the Malazan Book Of The Fallen as Tehol Beddict continually outwits him, really losing it when Tehol demonstrates his superior intellect by solving a puzzle he deemed impossible (and that Tehol created, incidentally).
- In Saga of the Seven Suns, Basil Wenceslas is a classic of this trope. When things stop going according to plan, they Ski Down The Slippery Slope. I call it thus because they stop just short of jumping off entirely, but still make an impressively rapid descent.
- In The Riddles of Epsilon, The Lady Yolande goes through one of these, betraying the proper choice as it screams at the protagonist to quit hesitating and choose one faction or the other, and threatening to kill the protagonist if she doesn't give it the tooth.
- Harry Potter always has Voldemort close to the edge but somehow maintaining his cool... until Deathly Hallows at least, where Voldemort has so completely ripped his soul apart from his repeated killing and use of Horcruxes that he completely loses it on several occasions, at one point killing everyone in the room because a helpless goblin delivered some bad news. Even when he BSOD's during the final fight against Harry he transfers the shock of that into rage and denial.
- In Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, Zhou Yu is completely unhinged by the failure of his last plan against Zhuge Liang. This was probably part of Zhuge's plan: Zhou Yu's rage causes a wound to reopen and he sickens and dies shortly thereafter.
- The Big Bad of one series of Star Trek tie-in novels starring Q, the Q-level being known only as 0, goes through a few of these. In the series of flashbacks that Q shows Picard, 0 spends decades "testing" the mettle of a powerful civilization known as the T'kon empire. As the T'kon continue to overcome everything 0 throws at them, he gets more and more pissed off, and in a childish fit of pique, triggers a supernova in the middle of their empire, completely wiping them out. In a flashback set not long after that, 0's defeat at the hands of a regretful Q drives him completely insane; he goes from a "charming" rogue to a deranged madman obsessed with revenge and crooning little ditties to himself. His state of mind can best be seen in the following:
0: Q WILL PAY. ALL THE Q WILL PAY. Q AND Q AND Q AND Q AND Q AND QQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQ...
- And yes, this is the "dangerous" version.
- Must be endemic to villains in Q-related novels. Q-Squared, by Peter David features the return of General Trelane, an antagonist from Star Trek The Original Series. Trelane manages to set himself up as quite the Magnificent Bastard... until Picard faces him in a duel, and, upon figuring-out that the Captain is only playing with him, he throws a temper tantrum and reveals himself to be the Psychopathic Manchild he really is.
- "Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee!"
- Warrior Cats: Sol, aka the king of Dissonant Serenity, loses his temper exactly once for less than half a second. It's not pretty.
- Not really a breakdown, but he does seem somewhat emotional when telling the Three about his plans in Sunrise.
- How could have we gone so far without mentioning:
- In The Color Purple, Albert experiences this after Celie calls him out. He just loses his cool, stammers incoherently, and suffers a mental collapse. Ultimately, this forces him to change, turning him from a Complete Monster to a legitimately nice individual
- In the Outlander series, Captain John Randall normally, in all his villainy, has two main expressions: arrogant calmness, and being annoyed. The first time he's shown to completely break down sobbing is when he confesses to Jamie that he loves him, and goes completely psycho when Jamie refuses to respond in the affirmative when he orders Jamie to tell him that he loves him too.
- In War of the Dreaming, Azrael de Gray has a combination Villainous BSOD and breakdown during the second book, eventually leading to a Heel Face Turn.
- Hatsumoto from Memoirs Of A Geisha already started losing it when she found out Mameha had taken Sayuri as her little sister and training her to become a geisha, trying several tactics to beat Sayuri, showing just how desperate she was, but Mameha would find ways to best her instead. Once Sayuri became a much more successful geisha than her at such a young age, Hatsumoto really does lose it. And Mameha had no trouble deliberately driving her further off the edge. Which she would eventually succeed.
Live Action TV
- In Cold Case, George Marks, the Smug Snake and Complete Monster serial killer undergoes this in the season 2 finale. Lilly refuses to let George get to him, and after confronting him with his mother's crime she rips apart his god complex saying that all George is is a scared little boy who's mommy never loved him. George proceeds to loose his cool and screams at Lilly to shut up repeatedly. After watching him walk away in a previous episode, witnessing him loose his cool was kind of satisfying. In the season 1 finale, the villian Jim Larkin (another Complete Monster) keeps his cool until they reveal that they have dna evidence linking him to the crime, at which point he completely drops the facade and screams about how both of his targets were supposed to have died that night. John Smith also experiences this twice; first when his target avoids being broken, and the second when the detectives figure out where his victim is being held in time to save her.
- Near the end of the third season of Lost, Ben became increasingly unnerved by the fact that he wasn't recovering from surgery as fast as he should have (people aren't supposed to get sick on the island — or something like that), as well as his people becoming more and more drawn to Locke. He finally snaps in his spotlight episode, shooting Locke and returning to camp acting quite erratic. Oddly enough, even though things have gotten a lot worse for him since then, he's managed to keep his cool.
- He snapped for real when Keamy killed his adopted daughter Alex in season four.
- And once again in "The Incident" thanks to Jacob's enemy, who manipulates him into killing Jacob.
- Doctor Who:
- Season 3 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Mayor, upon seeing Faith in a coma, shows rage for the first time and tries to smother Buffy in her sleep and attacks Angel in front of civilians, going so far as to break his foul language etiquette. He regains his composure for the final showdown though, his last words being "Well, gosh!"
Angel: Hadn't any plans to weep over that one.
Mayor: Well, I'd get set for some weeping if I were you. I'd get set for a world of pain! Misery loves company, young man, and I'm looking to share that with you and your whore!
- A minor example can also be found in the first episode of season 3. "Humans don't fight back! Humans don't fight back! That's not how this works!"
- The Master has one in the pilot after he senses that Luke - the key to his plan to free himself - has been killed.
- Faith has one herself in the spinoff show, [[Angel]], where she carries out an elaborate charade to get Angel to kill her.
- In The Prisoner episode "Hammer into Anvil", No. 6 makes the new No. 2 have one of these, convincing him there is a plot against him with some irregular acts and fake messages, ultimately ending with No. 2 getting rid of everyone, accusing them of being traitors, before collapsing into tears; No. 6 convinces him to resign.
- Adriana Godán in the Chilean telenovela Los titeres has a particularly memorable one: her plans wrecked, she regresses to childhood, revealing that she tried and failed to get her father's love, but he wanted a boy, jumps into a pool and starts playing with her old dolls. Apparently, "to comb the doll" is now slang for a breakdown in Chile.
- For three seasons, The Wire's Marlo Stanfield was completely calm and unflappable, even when things weren't going well for him. In the second-to-last episode, he even seems to take being thrown in jail in stride. Then he finds out his rival Omar had been talking trash about him and completely flips out. This is the only time he even raises his voice. It even turns out his subordinates knew all about it and kept it from him, since they knew he'd have this reaction.
Chris Partlow: It's some bullshit man. You don't need that shit on your mind.
Marlo: What the FUCK you know about what I need on my mind, motherfucker?!! My name was on the street! When we bounce from this shit here, y'all go down on them corners and let them people know, word did not get back to me! Tell em' Marlo step to any motherfucker, Omar, Barksdale, whoever. MY NAME IS MY NAME!!
- In Farscape, the Big Bad of a particular season or plot arc will always suffer one of these at some point; Captain Bialar Crais of the first season began cracking up almost immediately after we met him, and went on a Roaring Rampage Of Revenge for the accidental death of his brother, which wasn't to end until Peacekeeper High Command removed him and he was forced to become a hero.
- Scorpius suffered his own at the end of Season Three, when Crais sacrificed himself to destroy Scorpius' commmand carrier. It involved a stunned and somewhat Cutler Beckett-esque stroll through his exploding ship, wandering through hordes of evacuating Peacekeepers until he encountered John Crichton, wearily explained he had no plans for revenge, and vanished- until the next season, of course.
- Commandant Grayza's was quite severe, given that unlike the other two villains, she had very little to make her likeable or sympathetic (the date-rape had plenty to do with it). After being captured by the Scarrans and seeing all her negotiations for her vaunted alliance fail, she attempted a suicidal charge on the Scarran base that would have resulted in the death of all who were still loyal to her. However, Mauve Shirt Captain Braca decided she'd gone too far, and arrested her, allowing Scorpius to retake the ship.
- And just to illustrate how badly she was doing, we had this exchange:
Grayza: All that astonishing wormhole knowledge and still you will not share it with us. You came in here big and bold, dancing on tabletops. And look at you now; begging for scraps.
Crichton: I may be jammed, possibly dead. But I am not begging- you can get that fantasy out of your head.
Grayza: (Forcefully) In my hands, you can have peace! I can have peace!
Crichton: I have been in your hands. There's no peace there... just power.
Grayza: You are so self-righteous! I have used all my skills, my resources for one perfect chance at peace! AND BECAUSE OF YOU, IT IS GONE AND I AM—
(She stops, almost in tears, trying to steady herself.)
Crichton: (Coldly) Frelled? Screwed? Raped? Welcome to the universe, Commandant.
- Simon Elder on Dirty Sexy Money finally gets control of his rival Trip Darling's business, only for all the major stockholders to refuse to work with him and abandon the company. When one of his employees has trouble turning off the television, playing news of the company's catastrophic stock drop, Simon throws a champagne bottle into the TV. In the middle of a board meeting. Ironically it turns out this wasn't a Batman Gambit on Trip's part as Simon assumed at the time; he had genuinely given up and was just as surprised at the stockholders' actions.
- The usually cool, calm, and collected Manipulative Bitch Saffron/Bridget/Yolanda from Firefly suffers this in the episode Trash during a confrontation with her ex-husband when she and Mal are caught in the act of stealing from him.
YoSaffBridg: Durren, you have no idea what he's forced me to... Durren: Yolanda... stop. Just... stop. [Gives her a Puppy Dog Eyes look] YoSaffBridg: [Lowers the gun she'd been pointing at him] Don't look at me like that. [Raises the gun after a second and points it at him angrily while screaming] I SAID DON'T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT!!!
- And we can't forget "Objects in Space." Even through most of River's Hannibal Lecture on how sick he really is, Jubal Early stays cool and collected, until he suddenly realizes she's been on his ship the whole time! And she's fiddling with those shiny buttons! Oh Crap! Cue panic attack.
- Although not exactly a villain (more of a neutral, amoral antagonist), Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister is usually smug, cool and collected. When he's in charge, that is, which is most of the time. However, when events occur that he did not expect, or someone actually manages to get one over him, his typical response is spluttering, panicked incoherence (not helped by his Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness). See 'The Skeleton in the Cupboard', where an old cock-up he made comes back to haunt him. Or 'The Key', where a threat to his job (and power-base), coupled with being deprived automatic access to the Prime Minister, leads to him desperately climbing out of his window and up a drainpipe in order to see him.
Hacker: We will still be able to destroy Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad...
Humphrey: Yes, BUT THAT'S ALL!
- Every Law And Order Criminal Intent culprit goes through one in their episode's Denouement. This applies to most of the culprits in the Law And Order franchise in general, but the Criminal Intent culprits' breakdowns really stand out.
- Tom Zarek of Battlestar Galactica has one of these during the back end of Gaeta's mutiny, losing his cool completely as things fell apart. For his part, Gaeta also had one, but his was the shocked silence and vacant gaze kind.
- The day started so well for Gul Dukat in the episode "Sacrifice of Angels" of Star Trek Deep Space Nine: After months of work he finally destroyed the minefield in front of the wormhole, which allows him to recieve massive reinforcements that will turn the slow going war against the Federation and the Klingons into a very one-sided Curb Stomp Battle. But then the wormhole opens and not a single of his ships comes out, the entire fleet apparently vanished from existence and his expression rightfully turns into a full blown BSOD. Then his highly beloved daughter tells him she won't come with him when his remaining troops have to retreat and that she helped the saboteurs to stop his plans. Then his second in command Damar shots her in the heart because she's a traitor and Dukat slips completely into insanity, oblivious of whats going on around him.
- To say nothing of when he freaks out and decides to destroy Bajor: "I'm so glad we had this time together, Benjamin. Because we won't be seeing each other for a while. I have unfinished business on Bajor! They thought I was their enemy! They don't know what it is to be my enemy, but they will! From this day forward, Bajor is dead. All of Bajor! And this time, even their Emissary won't be able to save them!"
- Khan Noonien Singh in the Star Trek The Original Series episode, when the crew refuses to bow down to him even as he's slowly killing Captain Kirk in the decompression chamber, even prompting him to yell: "It's so USELESS!" to nobody in particular.
- Doctor Janice Lester grows increasingly unhinged and insane while in Kirk's body, her irrational behaviour causing the rest of the crew to be suspicious. By the time she returned back to her own body, she was sobbing hysterically and screaming about how she wanted Kirk dead.
- In "The Conscience of the King", actor Karidian's daughter Lenore after revealing she had killed seven of the nine witnesses who knew her father as Kodos the Executioner ran out to the stage with a phraser, trying to kill Kirk, one of the witnesses. The mad glint in her eyes pretty much told us that she lost her mind. And when she accidentally killed her father, she broke down into tears and later on, she insistantly believed that her father was still alive and still performing.
- Sylar in Heroes Volume 4. After stealing a shape shifting power Sylar begins to suffer a severe case of MPD as his body begins shifting and changing against his will, altering his DNA to new and unfamiliar patterns. It's not long before he's imagining that he's talking to his dead mother, shape shifting into her to talk to her and breaking down sobbing about how no one loves him and how alone he is. This only gets worse as he then tries to seduce Claire, believeing her to be "Destined" to be his because the two are immortal, while plotting to be president just so he can feel special and loved for a little while.
- See also: Samuel Sullivan. The crumbling starts when the chink in his armor (his murder of his brother) is finally revealed before an audience, and he just comes more and more undone as the other carnies — whom he considers his family — desert him, causing him to lose the source of his power, until it finally all falls apart and he collapses. Major points to Robert Knepper.
Samuel: They can't have all left... they're here somewhere... you can't leave me... you COWARDS! Where are ya?? ...Come back here! You're NOTHING without me!! (collapses into Villainous BSOD)
- In Kamen Rider Kabuto, Tendou basically annoys the sanity out of Yaguruma (then Kamen Rider ZaBee and the respected commander of Zect's elite force Shadow). He finally completely loses it in the middle of a battle, making him ignore the fact that the Worms (the series' token evil monsters/aliens) are massacring his underlings because he's consumed by the desire to defeat Tendou. It leads to him losing the ability to transform into ZaBee, to him being disgraced in front of his former team (later), and eventually to his return after taking a level in badass. Technically, Yaguruma is more an Anti Hero than a villain, but the trope applies.
- In Kamen Rider Dragon Knight, General Xaviax is starting to show signs of this once the Advent Master appears and starts undoing his work by bringing back Ventara's fallen Kamen Riders. All this following the fact that Xaviax's corrupt Kamen Riders from Earth have all been vented.
- Very common in Mission Impossible, when the Big Bad's scheme has been derailed, a public confession has been engineered, etc.
- Ming gets this quite a bit in Sci-Fi's Flash Gordon. The best is the series finale, when all of the heroes join forces to bring down Ming's regime once and for all. Aura opts to ally herself with her brother and betray her father at least, but still can't resist trying one last time to explain to him how she still loves him despite all he's done and begs him to just surrender. Ming looks moved and acts like he's about to stroke her face. Cue a few scenes later when Flash runs in to find Ming strangling Aura, muttering how he should have killed her as a baby. He then releases her and goes full nutty trying to chop Flash up with a sword.
- The Rogue Power Jasmine from Angel flips out after the heroes break her power over humanity making everyone sees her as a hideous monster. She tries her very hardest to kill Angel, all the while ranting and screaming about how she sacrificed so much to offer humanity peace and love. Now she only wants to kill all humans after being rejected. In the end she's reduced to begging Connor for help. The disillusioned Connor finishes her off instead.
- Agent Aburera starts out as a cool, calculating Man Behind The Man at the beginning of Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger, but gets increasingly twitchy as more and more of his deals are scuttled due to the titular team's interference with his clients' schemes. Eventually, he starts gunning for the Rangers himself, first through indirect assaults using hired thugs and attempting to discredit their integrity, then by attacking them himself in a personal confrontation. It's only at the end, after his black market empire is in shambles and he's out of options that he executes his ultimate plan: invading the Rangers' base directly with an army of Mecha Mooks, taking control of it, trouncing around the city causing massive destruction, and using the mayhem to lure the rest of the SPD fleet to their doom, all while raving about how he will pave the way for a galactic criminal paradise with their ashes. And after that plan fails, his final words are a Hannibal Lecture about how his dreams aren't dead, and that There Is Another that will take his place and avenge him and bring forth his twisted utopia.
- Adelle De Witt, the Anti Villain / Anti Hero (sort of) of Dollhouse, has a variant in the episode "Stop-Loss," where she begins to drink heavily due to realizing she has no life outside her job and that she's rapidly losing control even of that. Good-guy Boyd snaps her out of it by reminding her of her true nature...but in a Subversion, she only gets more villainous, since she now remembers what a Magnificent Bastard she can be.
- A few instances in ER. Chief nurse Eve, though not really a villain (the rest of the ER cast might disagree), loses her ruthless, cool head when she gets dumped from her boyfriend and fired from her job on Christmas Eve. She promptly snapped at Kovac, who had warned her about her impulsiveness for punching out a patient, and Sam, arguably the only person who tried to stick up for her.
- Another instance was a former patient Curtis Ames, who had lost the use of his right arm under Kovac's care. He would subsequently be divorced from his wife, separate from his kids, watch his kids call another man "dad" and lose his job. When he brought the kidnapped Kovac to his old house, he started laughing maniacally and mentioning how he shouldn't call the run-down, filthy house "beautiful". And in the scene where there were police lights outside his house, he started yelling at the flashing lights to leave him alone.
- In the Columbo episode "Dagger of the Mind," Lt. Columbo plants evidence implicating a Shakespearean actor in a murder, causing him to go mad. But it's okay.
- Robespierre in the BBC adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel is almost always chillingly calm and formal, even if he's ordering mass executions or plotting to violently crush insurrections. Merely getting flustered and impatient is a sign that he's about to retaliate with drastically excessive force, and when the Pimpernel's antics finally make him lose his shit you know everyone's gonna be in for a rough time.
- The Criminal Minds episode "Parasite" starts with the villain in the midst of his breakdown, and he just gets worse as it goes on.
- In fact they have a Real Life term for this, "devolving," and killers are most dangerous when they start spiraling into this.
- In the final episode of Ashes To Ashes, Magnificent Bastard / Trickster DCI Jim Keats has a spectacular one when he loses his patience with the people he's trying to turn against Gene Hunt, beats Gene to a pulp, and breaks the illusion of CID to expose the true nature of Purgatory. It seems like he's going to win, but Alex fixes the world, the team rallies together, and Gene helps them all cross over. He then has another, less badass one when he breaks down upon being beaten by Gene, to the point of laughing in a deranged fashion, speaking in random, babyish sentences and stumbling off in no particular direction.
- V-2009: Anna has a positively epic one at the end of the first season after Erica destroys nearly all her soldier eggs culminating in her going "Rocks Fall Everyone Dies" on the entire planet.
- Batiatus from Spartacus Blood And Sand has these with increasing frequency as the series goes on. His wife Lucretia and resident Rich Bitch Ilithya also get in on the act at least once each.
- Bob Moon, the villain of Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie The Beatniks, gets a pretty Narmful one: "I KILLED THAT FAT BARKEEP!"
- Shun Sugata's performance as Tokusou Robo Janperson's Ryuzaburou Tatewaki demonstrates how to destroy your office while screaming the name of your archenemy over and over and then burn his picture in the paper while cackling like a madman and sticking out your tongue.
Professional Wrestling
- A notable case of this trope was the feud Edge had with The Undertaker in 2008. He went from a rather calm and collected fellow into an Ax Crazy raving lunatic.
- Eddie Guerrero used this as part of a Face Heel Turn in 2005. He claimed to be the biological father of Rey Mysterio's son, Dominic, among other things. It was truly a sight to behold, since Eddie had been a face for so long that he had to nearly take Rey's head off to get fans to boo him.
Theater
- Shakespeare - Claudius in Hamlet goes from a politically savvy, brilliant villain, to ending up in a religious crisis, to coming up with the worst poisoning scheme in literary history.
- Macbeth in Act 5, making this Older Than Steam.
- His wife gets it even worse:
- Archetypal Machiavellian Magnificent Bastard Richard III goes through a Villainous Breakdown just before the play's final battle, hallucinating that the ghosts of everyone whose deaths he's caused are visiting him and telling him to despair, and ultimately realizing that after everything he's done, the entire world (including himself) hates him utterly.
- Not to mention when King Richard lashes out at a messenger bringing news of his enemy Buckingham... only the message turns out to be that Buckingham's army has been defeated.
- The Wizard has a very quiet dignified one of these at the end of Wicked where he learns that the Wicked Witch whom he believes was successfully assassinated on his orders was actually his daughter. He sinks to the ground completely ignoring both his ally and the returned and angry Glinda for a long while.
- Sweeney Todd has a pretty epic one right in the middle of the play after his first attempt at revenge on Judge Turpin goes awry. The result is the awesome "Epiphany" number that marks his transition from Anti Hero to Villain Protagonist.
- And it happens again at the end of the show when he finds out that the beggar woman he just murdered was his wife Lucy, that Mrs. Lovett knew she was alive the whole time, and that she lied to him. He promptly mourns dramatically, goes fake happy and kills Lovett in a psychotic rage, and then slips in a Heroic BSOD (or Villainous BSOD) as he cradles his wife's lifeless body, not even bothering to do anything as little Tobias comes and slits his throat.
- In One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, McMurphy spends most of the play trying to make this happen to Nurse Ratched.
- Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar. Same as in The Bible, he is Driven To Suicide but the rage in his My God What Have I Done? number lands it solidly here.
- Salieri from Mozart L Opera Rock, notably in the showstopping "Le bien qui fait mal" number, which combines him going insane with jealousy with some intriguingly sadomasochistic lyrics ("it feels so good to sufffer", "real delights require torture", "I love having [this insanity] inside my skin", etc.) He's a special sort of guy.
- Though he's not really a villain per se, Inspector Javert gets a pretty spectacular breakdown in Les Miserables because he doesn't understand why Valjean didn't kill him when he had every right to.
Video Games
- In some games, the main villain is able to broadcast messages to the hero over the course of the game, and they'll eventually lose it and start broadcasting more and more desperate pleas/insults/bribes to you as you get closer to them.
- Bioshock does this with both Andrew Ryan ("Does your master hear me? Atlas! You can kill me, but you will never have my city!") and Frank Fontaine ("I'm gonna splice, and splice, until THERE'S NOTHING LEFT TO SPLICE WITH!!").
- Dr. Breen in Half Life 2 ("Look, Gordon, look at what you are throwing away. Is it worth it?").
- Another (albeit somewhat milder) Half Life 2 example: In Episode One, the Vortigaunts manage to break through the G-Man's power and rescue Gordon, which somewhat intimidates the G-Man in response. ("We'll see... about THAT!")
- Glados in Portal ("Turn back now or I will kill you! ...I'm going to kill you. And all the cake is gone. You don't even care, do you!?").
- Bob Page in Deus Ex's final mission. ("Go ahead! Blow this place sky-high... You might get rid of ME, but you'll take down Aquinas, the power grid, the whole electronic infrastructure. Is that what you want? Are you completely nuts?")
- Nicole Horne in Max Payne ("What do you mean, 'he's unstoppable'?")
- Umineko: Bernkastel went through it several times.
- The deity in Tower Of Heaven ("How dare you... How dare you continue to live? Is it merely to spite me? You damn fool. Those covetous enough to seek my reward deserve only fiery torment. You will share that fate soon enough.")
- By the end of Halo 3, the Gravemind has gone from calmly taunting the Master Chief with visions of Cortana and statements of his complete inability to stop the inevitable to rampant screams and roars of protest — though it kind of makes sense, as the Chief is about to fire Halo right in his face.
- Even then, when the Flood are about to be eradicated, Gravemind suggests that all the Chief will succeed is delaying the inevitable.
- Gravy's breakdown actually starts in the previous level. He taunts the Chief as you move through a extremely Flood-infested High Charity, then goes to threats, then to demanding that you die, then to outright enraged yelling.
- The Prophet of Truth also goes through this. As the humans and Elites (who are now working together) get closer and closer to beating him (having annihilated his forces over the course of the game) his preachings as the Chief and the Arbiter come closer and closer to his location get less religious and "ascending to godhood" to more "THIS IS ALL THE HERETICS' FAULT!!!". His last words are "I...AM...TRUTH! THE VOICE OF THE COVENANT!" after he's finally cornered with the Covenant completely destroyed and the Chief shuts down the Halo rings.
- And of all places — Kirby Super Star, as Kirby's systematic demolition of the Halberd is accompanied by running commentary from Meta Knight and his crew, with increasing alarm.
- Not an entire game, but during Chapter 2 of Paper Mario, this happens with Tutankoopa as you progress further and further through the Dry Dry Ruins.
- Subverted in Chapter 5 of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door; most of the dungeon has you hearing moaning messages from Cortez in the same vein as those of Tutankoopa (complete with a gradual breakdown), but when you arrive at Cortez's chamber, he says that he's sick of putting up that ruse, since "Pirates don't moan!", and starts showing his real personality - which is about what you would expect from a Pirate King and hasn't been broken down at all.
- Arcturus Mengsk in Starcraft II after Raynor broadcasted his controversial recordings to the Dominion
Mengsk: YOU jackals think you can come here and question ME?
- All of the villains from the Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney games. The expressions on their faces as you gradually tear apart their arguments and prove their guilt as the true murderers is part of the reward, as is their final breakdown and subsequent Motive Rant. It's so universal, in fact, that when one character DOESN'T have a spectacular breakdown Phoenix lampshades the tropes and begins to question whether they were actually guilty. (Which they weren't, at least for that particular crime.)
- None of them broke down quite as spectacularly as Von Karma. Especially when you get to rub in his face the fact that he never would have been caught for the original DL-6 murder if he hadn't been obsessed with getting revenge on Edgeworth by manipulating Yanni Yogi into the present day murder, therefore drawing attention to the original case and allowing Phoenix to solve it. Oh, and it's hard not to enjoy watching him ram his head into the wall.
- Truly, the most spectacular breakdown is Damon Gant's. No one else's breakdown involves their hair turning into lightning. Followed by six screens of him laughing insanely and clapping wildly once he's finally defeated.
- How about Matt Engarde? You get to choose which verdict he receives, Guilty or Not Guilty — but he's screwed either way, because you've just turned the assassin he hired against him. If you choose Not Guilty, Matt BEGS to go to prison. Oh, and he claws his eyes out.
- Double Subversion: When you back Luke Atmey into the corner during the burglary trial in Case Two of Trials and Tribulations, he pulls off a total nervous breakdown, complete with lapse into Talkative Looney status. He's faking it; the burglary charges are his alibi for the murder he committed that night. Once you catch Mr. Atmey as the murderer in the case's second trial, however, he repeats the breakdown word for word - and this time it's real.
- Apollo Justice has another satisfying one, involving Kristoph Gavin. He taunts you about your lack of decisive evidence, but when he's told that a jury is deciding his fate, he completely loses his shit and starts raving about how their inferior intellects can't decide his fate. Then you get to vote on whether or not the defendant is guilty or not. You later find out he was pulled from the courtroom, laughing like a madman.
"The record will show that when the verdict was announced, special witness Kristoph Gavin... laughed. A laugh louder than any ever heard before... or since. A laugh that echoed in the halls of justice, lingering for what seemed like hours."
- And the crowning moment of that particular breakdown came when Apollo mentioned that Phoenix Wright planned the whole thing. His hair goes straight up, and he writhes about, screaming Wright's name. It was completely unexpected, awesome, and probably the biggest "holy crap" moment in the entire game.
- One of the most EXCESSIVE breakdowns is Dahlia Hawhorne, and even then, not in the first case where you essentially nail the final nail into her coffin OR the fourth case, chronologically the first where's she's up for potential murder, but she manages to slither away because of Walter "Terry" Fawles' suicide... IN COURT, no no no no ladies and gentletropers, case five in which she reveals herself to be channelled by Maya Fey, and Phoenix, Godot and Mia show her that for a Big Bad she's pretty pathetic, because every single last one murder she attempted to further herself in life eventually backfired in this massive Thirty Xanatos Pileup, and that she never actually managed to kill anybody worthwhile personally.. the bitch FREAKS and gets sent to Hell screaming, with the Fey Magatama logo rising up in those Japanese style spirit flame things. Ah jah. ... And the case goes further still, putting the character arc of a certain prosecutor to rest..
- Winston Payne in his prime, though he's not exactly a villain. But he gets a mention here due to his rapid hair loss after being defeated by Mia. So much for being a "Rookie Killer"!
- "My...hair...is...flying...AWAY!"
- Happens in Ace Attorney: Investigations too, probably the best example being Ambassador Alba seemingly losing entire portions of his face. Ick.
- That's not the half of it. The already-old man ages about 20 years in a matter of seconds.
- Final Fantasy IX's own White Haired Pretty Boy Kuja spends a good portion of the final part of the game hopelessly insane with rage upon discovering he's mortal and will eventually die, and was just a temporary tool of The Man Behind The Man (and that the protagonist Zidane is essentially a far more advanced model of what he was supposed to be.) Kuja ends up blowing up one world and very nearly blows up another in quick succession.
- Final Fantasy XII has Vayne. After the rebel forces and his own brother Larsa beat him up, he goes One Winged Angel and orders Larsa's bodyguard Gabranth to protect Larsa while he deals with the rebels: Gabranth decides to help the rebels defeat him instead. Beaten a second time, all Vayne has to say at this point is "BURN IN HELL, GABRANTH!" as he tries to strike him down. Vayne then limps away, bemoaning his plans and empire are crumbling around him.
- Zexion of Kingdom Hearts: Chain Of Memories, in both versions, though it's easier to see in the Remake, what with the better animation, new and modified scenes, and quite good voice acting. The deceptive Zexion, who hates getting his hands dirty, has been spending the game flinging his comrades before him to take the fall. He slowly grows more insecure as everyone else dies, and he completely loses it as Riku sees through his tricks and defeats him in combat. Being that he was rather something of a Smug Snake, this was a very satisfying lead-in to his demise.
- Master Xenahort in Birth By Sleep is a completely composed Chessmaster who only raises his voice in joy at how well his plans are going and even in battle is very laid back and not particularly aggressive. Until he finally takes Terra's body as his own and seconds later is attacked by a newly formed Lingering Sentiment. This is the first time in the game he's truely pissed "Even though you've been reduced to memories YOU STILL WISH TO DEFY ME!" and the resulting boss fight has him constantly pounding away at you in your face with no mercy as opposed to casually hanging back and flinging spells as before.
- Hades is, of course, known to snap if things dosen't goes his way or when somebody insult him to his face. Usually, he often calms down immediately after his snappings, but in his final showdown against Sora he don't; when Sora, Donald and Goofy released Auron from Hades' mind controll, and so saved Hercules' life, Hades went pissed but remained in controll, but when his attempts to kill Hercules by throwing Meg into the river of Styx failed, and the heroes laughing at Hercules' joke afterwerd, he began to screaming: "HOW DARE YOU GET A HAPPY ENDING?! HOW DARE YOU?!" and went ballistic on them by screaming and throwing fires everywhere.
- Saix, while shown as a calm individual through most of the game, becomes utterly psychotic under the moon's influence late in the game, savagely attacking Sora and his allies during their final battle.
- In Command And Conquer: Tiberium Wars, Kane is cool, calm, and absolutely collected throughout the entire game, mercilessly taunting GDI and generally seeming totally unflappable until Killian Qatar allies with GDI. His response to this is to flip the fuck out and order the player to Nuke Em. After Killian's subsequent execution he calms back down and resumes his usual magnificent bastardry.
- Stalin in the first Red Alert game is like this as well, going from confident and snide to drunk and slightly unhinged, to breaking his subordinates' necks with his bare hands.
- Basically anyone on Nod's side who isn't subtly assassinated gets one of these. Particular mention goes to Vega, Kilian, the Nod Warlord in Rio (real name unknown), Alexa, and CABAL (to a degree, he just went batshit crazy for no apparent reason in the last mission).
- Director Boyle, the man in charge of GDI during Tiberium Wars, has one in one of the later missions. Normally he's a sly talking politician who gives off an air of both class and arrogance, but nearing the end, he meets with the commander secretly and discusses (read: rants) about how Granger is trying to take his political position.
- Both the fake and real Overlord Xenon in Disgaea 2. Fake Xenon's starts with Etna thoroughly handing him his ass, and then peaks when Axel broadcasts his location on a to everyone in the Multiverse, sending nearly every single Overlord to his front door, ready to rip him in two. As for the real Xenon, hers begins when Adell makes it clear that he has no intention of fighting her.
- In Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, Brauner snaps when Jonathan reveals to him that his daughters aren't really his. "Snaps" is apropos, as part of the breakdown is that he presses his cane hard enough into the floor that it breaks.
- Myst IV: Revelation: "No, you fool! My performance was perfect!"
- Saavedro of Myst III: Exile comes pre-broken due to being trapped on two small islands in Narayan and J'nanin for upwards of twenty years. He breaks again when the player manages to deactivate the outer ice shield that's isolated him from the rest of Narayan, allowing him to see that at least one city has survived and possibly his family with them, but he can't get to them without the player's help and a third time when the player stabs him in the back and traps him between the two ice shields. "No! NO! No, no, no, no, no, no, no..."
- In Devil May Cry 3, through most of the game, Vergil acts as an Aloof Big Brother and Evil Twin to Dante, remaining menacing and softspoken even as he shoves a katana into Dante's gut. He then tries to open the portal to the Demon World with the Perfect Amulet and his own blood. When that fails since Lady's blood is also needed, something Arkham left out on purpose, Vergil's composure cracks.
Vergil: Why isn't this working?!
- Another Capcom example in Resident Evil 5, when Wesker's overconfidence allows him to get injected with an overdose of the virus he uses to control his superhuman abilities, causing him to lose control and composure. When the heroes stop his scheme at the last minute, he exposes himself to the Ouroboros virus, mutating into a menace full of one-hit kills and screaming "CHRIS!" with vindictive rage. As Wesker had been a magnificent bastard for something like nine games to this point, it was quite a remarkable breakdown.
- Wesker's breakdown arguably started when he found out he was just a manufactured sock puppet of Ozwell Spencer. He goes from being an enigmatic Man Behind The Man subtly aiming for power in the shadows to declaring himself to be a god and inflicting a bio-organic weapon on the entire world.
- Ramon Salazar in Resident Evil 4. Though his calm and jovial demeanor is intimidating at first, eventually, after repeatedly being foiled in his attempts to kill Leon, he snaps when Leon saves himself from the pit trap in the throne room, and shrieks at one of his lackeys to "KILL!"
- The Crusader games feature two different versions of this.
- In No Remorse, the Silencer's continued reversals of most of The Mole's early successes results in The Mole challenging the Silencer, a bona fide Super Soldier, to single combat. (It doesn't matter that the deck is stacked, because anyone rational would have seen the character had just walked through ten levels of decks that aren't nearly as well-stacked.)
- In No Regret, the Resistance strikes a major blow after the sixth mission. The LMC strike back in the next mission, but not as effectively as they'd hoped. Chairman Draygan decides to bring in an entire troop carrier of elite soldiers...and the Resistance shoots it out of the sky. He then tries to blow up the Lunar base, while he's on it. The Resistance stops the reactor overload, and he's told by the WEC's President that he's not getting off the moon until he gets the situation back under control...so he pulls all troops back to the headquarters, leaving the majority of the Lunar base under Rebel control, and starts fortifying. He then tries to take the Silencer on in single combat, which worked about as well for the bad guys as it does in the first game.
- Ganondorf is surprisingly calm and calculating in The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker; killing Link isn't even a priority for him anymore. This all changes when the King of Hyrule snatches the completed Triforce from right in front of him and uses it to sink Hyrule once again. Ganondorf's response is to let out some insane Evil Laughter, afterwards mocking the King's wish to "give Zelda and Link a new world", and proceeds to attack Link and Zelda.
- Zant goes through a rather sudden breakdown when you battle him in The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess, changing from a very calm Evil Overlord to a spastic, shrieking mess in the blink of an eye. He went through something similar in the game's backstory, after being denied the throne to the Twili Kingdom, which may explain the sudden breakdown when you face him; it was always there and he was just holding it in (which wouldn't be that hard to do, since everything was going his way and he had no need for a breakdown...until Link and Midna storm his palace and break down his front door, that is.)
- Near the end of Baldurs Gate II the protagonist finally learns what happened to Big Bad Jon Irenicus and what his plan entails. After being foiled he comes face to face with his former lover and loses control for the first and only time in the entire game.
Irenicus: I... I do not remember your love, Ellesime. I've tried. I've tried to recreate it, to spark it anew in my memory. But it is gone... a hollow, dead thing. For years, I clung to the memory of it. Then the memory of the memory. And then nothing. The Seldarine took that from me, too. I look upon you and I feel nothing. I remember nothing but you turning your back on me, along with all the others. Once my thirst for power was everything. And now I hunger only for revenge. And... I... Will... HAVE IT!
- Notably, in Irenicus' subsequent appearance in Hell itself, he is once again calm, if not altogether there.
- For the first time, there's also a hing of uncertainty in his threats before the fight begins, given that by this point you've already thrashed him in battle a couple of times.
- Sendai in Throne of Bhaal has a rather amusing sequence where she sends villain after villain after the protagonist, growing steadily more freaked out as no matter what she does she can't seem to stop the protagonist.
- Each encounter with Seifer in Final Fantasy VIII shows him edging a few steps further along a downward spiral; he starts out proclaiming himself a heroic knight pursuing a romantic dream, and ends up trying to sacrifice his former girlfriend to an insane sorceress in order to bring about The End Of The World As We Know It, purely because by that point he felt like he'd gone too far to turn back. His slow breakdown is reflected visually by his long white coat, which starts off as a Badass Longcoat but is tattered and shredded by the last encounter. Unlike most villains, Seifer gets better; during the ending cutscene, Seifer's coat is back to the way it started out.
- NSE Director Hanson has one at the end of Second Sight: normally a self-assured and frustratingly patient villain, he begins to lose his cool when John Vattic manages to infiltrate his underground base, to the point of snarling "I'm tired of picking through this crap!" when asked to review Project Zener's files again. This is taken a step further into near-megalomania while observing the battle between Vattic and base security, as he is clearly very excited about the demonstrated uses of psychic powers. However, the final stage of his breakdown is when he realised that Vattic and the other psychics have managed to kill every last soldier at his disposal, and when he discovers that while the window he's hiding behind is bullet and psi-proof, the frame supporting it isn't. In a matter of seconds, he goes from a smirking, self-satisfied manipulator to a frightened and helpless tourist surrounded by mutated psychic children who want to eat him alive. His last words say it all:
No... no, stay back... what do you want?! Stay away from me! I said STAY AWAY! Don't touch me— AH, YOU BIT ME, YOU LITTLE BASTARD, YOU AAAAAAARGH NOOOOO AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGHHHH!!!
- Done by Caulder/Stolos of Advance Wars: Days of Ruin/Dark Conflict, pleading for help as he dies in the destruction of the Owl's Nest. The NA Version makes the breakdown even more apparent:
Caulder: N-no... NO! What have you done?! I'm...I'm dying... I'm DYING! I have killed so many clones, but I am different! I am unique! I am ALIVE! Help me! Please! Someone! Help me! I don't want...to die...
- In the ending of Sonic and the Secret Rings, Erazor Djinn taunts Sonic about his immortality and how he can come back again and again... Until Sonic pulls out his lamp, reversing Erazor's grin. After Erazor is forced to bring back Shahra and reverse the damage he's done via two wishes, Sonic makes the third wish, to seal him in his lamp forever. This is where Erazor REALLY breaks down:
Erazor: Shahra, I know you're there! Please, stop him! We can start over, the two of us! I swear it! I swear it...! THE WORLD IS MINE! I CANNOT BE DENIED BY THAT FILTHY RAT! WHHHHHHYYYYY?!?
- Ramirez, Skies Of Arcadia's Dragon, really doesn't take it well when his boss, Lord Galcian, bites it.
- Prince Lacroix of Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines suffers breakdowns in three of the five available endings.
- In the Anarch or Lone Wolf endings, after being slashed half to death by the PC and left for dead in his penthouse suite, he finally opens the Ankaran Sarcophagus with the key that the PC was kind enough to leave him. However, when the lid sides back, he discovers that the Sarcophagus has been filled with explosives, all set to detonate in ten seconds; Lacroix has just enough time to let out a long drawn-out burst of maniacal laughter before he vanishes in a fireball.
- And in the Camarilla ending, the PC refuses to give him the key; after Lacroix's attempts at dominating you fail, he falls to his knees, begging and sobbing for you to give him the key, raving about the imminent destruction of all vampires in Los Angeles. He eventually falls silent when your new Camarilla allies arrive to arrest him.
- Andrei the Tzimisce suffers his own breakdown when the PC meets him for the second time, ranting and raving about Gehenna and accusing the PC of being a puppet, before transforming into a monstrous war-form and attacking in a frenzy.
"I will do it myself, if I must... and you, you will be purified. It is the blood he is speaking through, the blood of all the pawns... IT ALL MUST BE PURIFIED!"
- Oh man, Sakaki of ''.hack//G.U.' goes through this TWICE.
- I guess doesn't help that he's really a kid pumped full of AIDA, but he had it coming.
- Rugal Bernstein of The King Of Fighters fame has a healthy helping of TWO of these, in 94 and 95. In 94, beat him and in a rage, he blows up his own aircraft carrier with himself on it. In 95, beat him and as the Orochi power consumes him, he screams in indigation at his fate (compounded by Iori telling him he wasn't of the bloodline os he couldn't control it).
- "Even with my new power I lost. What? My body.....????? NO! To meet such a fate! But I'll be back... YOU JERKS!
- Goenitz in 96 subverts this in almost all of the endings, even when he's beaten, he retains a Smug Snake demeanour. Its played straight in the Kyo/Iori/Chizuru ending, however, when Kyo and Iori deliver the coup de grace on him, he screams out, wondering why there's no wind blowing.
- Then there's Clone Zero in 2000. Once beaten, he tries to kill everyone in his hideout with the Zero Cannon....,which isn't working. He's constantly asking why it won't work, all while hammering the activation button repeatedly.
- Igniz in 2001 + defeat = Indignant rage + A God Am I = Colony Drop
- In the backstory of Diablo, King Leoric is possessed by Diablo and effectively starts having a Villainous Breakdown while he's still a good guy. Of course, he doesn't remain good for long when that happens. He starts getting increasingly paranoid and less sane, until finally when Diablo leaves him, unable to take over completely, he's a raving madman who has to be killed by his own most loyal knights.
- Sakura in Fate Stay Night. Going from zero self esteem up to being able to say A God Am I justifiably did give a major confidence boost. Yet, when Tohsaka without having the power of the Grail to draw on still effortlessly matches her, she freaks even more than she was before. In a manner of minutes while Tohsaka casually blasts all the shadow giants she makes one by one, she's reduced to an incoherent screaming wreck about how it was pure chance that made it her that lived among the Matou and not Tohsaka. Her will to fight is seconds from vanishing utterly when Tohsaka eggs her back into fighting spirit. She gets better.
- At the end of Need For Speed: Most Wanted, Cross, the cop who's been after you for the whole game, gets one (even though he's not really villainous). Bonus points for being a Shout Out to The Professional:
Cross: You had the most wanted street racer in Rockport in your hands... and he got. Away? (turns to his partner) I want everyone after this guy.
Partner: ...everyone?
Cross: EVERYONE!!!
- In fact, he then calls you in the middle of the ensuing chaos (you're being chased by every police unit in the city with no chance of proper escape) to rant about how he's going to take you down, and it's surprisingly not at all calm. In the sequel, Carbon, he ends up quiting the police department to become a bounty hunter, just so he can take you down.
- In Batman Arkham Asylum, the Riddler goes from insulting you to accusing you of cheating to threatening to blow up Gotham as you solve more and more of his riddles. Also, the Scarecrow pretty much panics as Batman manages to shake off the effects of enough fear toxins to drive ten men insane. The entire climax also basically stems from Joker throwing a tantrum and accusing Batman of 'spoiling my fun!' when Batman refuses to succumb to the Titan strain that Joker has infected him with and become a monster.
- As if the Soulstorm expansion to Dawn Of War weren't So Bad Its Horrible already, as the Chaos stronghold mission progresses, Carron, supposedly a powerful Chaos Lord of the Alpha Legion, actually breaks down crying as his shrines are destroyed and the enemy advances, culminating in him snivelling and whining some nonsense about flowers and fleeing the battle. Contrast with Eliphas, who remains serene and mocking throughout, Crull, who remains psychotically insane throughout, and Bale, who merely gets angry when Sindri betrays him.
- Although there isn't much room for it in the Metroid series (outside of possibly Prime's Pirate logs), the 1994 Super Metroid comic features one of these later on, when Ridley is informed of Samus's progress. He actually leaves the planet and abandons his command, telling his informant that they should all just listen to Mother Brain instead.
- Cyrus in Pokemon Platinum might apply, especially in the Distortion World. He spends half the game saying he's disregared all emotion, seeing them as weakness and useless. Of course, one can't blame him for losing it, being dragged into that world by Giratina.
- There's this, which he says before he utterly deolishes your team in the Distorion World:
Cyrus: "Why should I run and hide from the world and have to wait quietly? My aim is to rid our world of the vague and incomplete thing we call spirit. By freeing ourselves of that, our world can be made complete. That is my justice! No one can interfere! I won't lose! Not to that shadowy Pokemon! Not in any worthless world!
- And when you do managed to defeat him, he has this to say.
Cyrus: "... Don't think that you can defeat or capture that Pokemon. This bizarre world is none other than that Pokemon itself! Capturing it or defeating it will make this world disappear! Very well! Do what you will! Rather than repairing the world, you're going to destroy it for me! Do it. You inherit my legacy."
- Plus this, once the player defeats/captures Giratina.
Cyrus: "That Pokemon... That shadowy Pokemon was captured/defeated?! Your doing so means that this irrational world will remain in existence! Does that make it impossible for me to create a new world? Even if I made new Red Chains, the new world can't be made! Why?! What compels you to protect the two worlds? Is spirit, a vague and incomplete thing, so important to you?! Silence! Enough of your blathering! That's how you justify spirit as something worthwhile?! That is merely humans hoping, deluding themselves that they are happy and safe! The emotions broiling inside me... Rage, hatred, frustration... These ugly emotions arise because of my own incomplete spirit!"
- And finally, we have this last bit of cold fury after the initial Motive Rant and Villainous Breakdown. It can't only be described as cold fury, as it basically implies that he is threatening the player character to A Fate Worse Than Death.
- Comrade Black from de Blob. He really starts to freak out near the game's end.
- Overlord GAIA from Digimon World 2. He was able to (though not perfectly) form coherent sentences when he is first encountered. However, he seems to break down after Akira defeats his first form.
Overlord GAIA: "I... am the most powerful... the most powerful... the most powerful... the most powerful... the most powerful..."
Akira: "Is it still capable of fighting?"
Overlord GAIA: "I... am ultimate... I... ultimate... I... ultimate..."
- Sly 2: Band of Thieves has a very nice example in the form of constable Neyla. All through the game she plays everybody off of everybody else in order to get what she wants. The more you foil her plans and gather the Clockwerk parts for yourself the more short tempered and less composed she becomes until the grand finale she's screaming with rage, swearing to hunt you downa nd kill you in your sleep.
- Erol started the second Jak And Daxter game as Baron Praxis' cruel and confident Dragon. However, his creepy obsession with Jak caused him to snap and drive into a shipment of Dark Eco in an attempt to kill Jak. He then comes back as an Omnicidal Maniac bent on destroying the world.
- Mithos Yggdrasill in Tales Of Symphonia combines this with Laughing Mad when his older sister Martel tells him he was wrong to try to find her a new body, and that she was horrified and saddened by the things he'd done.
- After spending two entire games as a masterful, unflappable manipulator, Nyarlathotep from Persona 2: Eternal Punishment starts to lose it after the party penetrates the numerous illusions and mind games he scatters throughout his lair. He's reduced to incoherent screaming by the end of his boss fight, still convinced he's unbeatable.
"I WON'T ACCEPT IT! INVINCIBLE! INVINCIBLE!"
- Adachi in Persona 4, despite being both a Smug Snake and a Complete Monster, manages to keep his cool right up until the protagonists find him. Even then, he manages to remain composed enough to berate and mock them. However, when he is repeatedly called out for being nothing more than a criminal, he finally breaks down and starts cursing and yelling at the protagonists, telling them "[They] have no idea of what kind of shit I've had to go through!" And then he summons his persona and the boss fight begins.
- Teryn Loghain in Dragon Age Origins slowly loses it throughout the game, but really flips out if you turn the Landsmeet against him. He calms down again after you kick his ass and is even willing to accept execution since he now believes that the Grey Warden really can defeat the Blight.
- In the freeware RPG Last Scenario, the Big Bad's whole motive is being powerful enough that he doesn't need to rely on other people, since he was helpless to protect his hometown from being destroyed. When the heroes defeat him for the first time, he takes it so badly that he loses consciousness for days. When he wakes up, he learns that he only managed to get away thanks to the Villainous Valor of the Quirky Miniboss Squad, and one of them was forced to perform a Heroic Sacrifice. Not helping, guys.
- Actually, it's the second time you beat him that he has the breakdown. He takes it in stride the first time because he was holding back and didn't count it as a true defeat.
- The two villains from the Modern Warfare series have both done this. In the first game, Imran Zhakaev tried to start a global war, starting in the Middle East. After his son commits suicide after you have him cornered, he tries to NUKE THE EAST COAST as payback. In MW 2, Shepherd's plan goes perfectly until Soap and Price escape the trap he laid for them at the boneyard. Cooperating with Makarov, the two find Shepherd's hideout and go on a rampage through it, thwarting every attempt made to stop them, Shepherd finally resorting to BLOWING UP THE BASE with his soldiers still inside in order to kill them.
- Colonol Volgin of Metal Gear Solid 3 becomes increasingly erratic and paranoid as Snake progresses. By the end of the game, he's degenerated into a full-blown ranting lunatic, driving the Shagohad through his subordinates and laughing maniacally.
- I am Soverign, and this station IS MINE!
- In the Paragon ending for the Overlord DLC, Doctor Archer desperately and frantically tries to justify putting his brother through the titular horrific experiment. When Shepard angrily rebukes it and states that he/she intends to take David away so he can get treatment, Archer finally snaps and pulls a gun. Needless to say, it doesn't work.
- In Final Fantasy VII, Professor Hojo starts off as a calm, composed and ruthless scientist. As the game goes on however, he gradually starts to begin more and more unhinged, ultimately culminating in him going completely insane, willingly attempting to destroy Midgar to help Sephiropth, and even goes so far as to inject himself with Jenova cells, fighting the party as a pseudo-Eldritch Abomination, all while giggling madly.
- How many characters from The Witcher? The Reverend, The Professor, and the hammiest of all, Jacques de Aldersberg.
- World Of Warcraft gives us a memorably subtle example in the form of Algalon The Raid Destroyer. Algalon, while not exactly a villain spends most of the fight explaining with a polite and calm voice why the planet must be destroyed. As for what happens when you defeat him... well, you may as well read it on the Quotes section. Let's just say the monotone flies out the cosmic window.
- Heavy Rain employs this trope if Ethan doesn't show up at the warehouse of the final chapter, but Madison and Norman do, either together or separately. Basically put, the Origami Killer flips since such a scenario goes against all of his plans.
- General Adams from Killzone has one when one of his lieutenants informs him that the player's squad has destroyed an important bridge, leveled a supply base and killed an entire platoon. He then introduces the lieutenants head to his desk. Repeatedly. And not very subtle.
Web Comics
- In the Sluggy Freelance story arc "That Which Redeems", Horribus becomes increasingly obsessed with catching Torg as the story progresses, to the point of jeopardizing his invasion of another world. By the end of the story, Horribus is curled up in the fetal position, gibbering about how Torg's behind everything wrong in his life.
- In Its Walky, Sal has a series of these after the appointment of Linda Walkerton as the head of SEMME drives her to make a Face Heel Turn. This culminates in what amounts to a Villainous BSOD when her attempt to blow up the world using the Power Booster Rod is interrupted by the arrival of Danny, the only person left that she has enough feelings for to not be psychotic enough to kill. Prior to that, Sal's Villainous Breakdowns tended to not immediatly proceed her capture because she is super-strong, and so even thrashing about in a blind rage, she tends to beat people.
- Dr Merlot seemed to take news of Miss Clay's true identity rather badly.
- Damien of El Goonish Shive has an absolutely EPIC breakdown when, during his battle with Omega Grace, he realizes that he was very likely created in a lab like Grace in the others (as opposed to his initial belief that he was a god that was summoned to this world), and ends up self-destructing in an attempt to kill Grace.
- WHO JUST STOLE MY KILLS?!?!? The Monster in the Darkness did it.
- Start of Darkness spoiler: Of all things, he also loses it shortly after turning into a lich, when he realizes that he can't taste coffee anymore.
- There are at least two characters from Kid Radd who seem to be likely candidates for this treatment, but the ultimate breakdown goes to somebody else. The Seer does not take holes in its omniscience very well. Not well at all.
- In The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob, the first time Bob beats Fructose Riboflavin, Riboflavin is disappointed but takes the defeat fairly gracefully. The second time, though, he collapses in tears, sobbing that he's been trying to conquer the Empire for centuries and he just can't do itâ** and Bob proves himself a nice guy by trying to cheer the villain up.
- King Radical hasn't been the same since he learned the doctor has the unicorn motorcycle Sparklelord.
Web Original
- Terrence in KateModern — goes from smug, quietly intimidating badass in series 1 to raving, giggling psychopath by the end of "Precious Blood".
- The Shadow and Rupert van Helden have also suffered this by The Last Work.
- In Dr Horribles Sing Along Blog, the main character is shown as a Technical Pacifist and Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain who states that killing isn't his style. However once his Jerk Jock archnemesis Captain Hammer states that he's going to steal the girl of his dreams just to torture him, he then goes into a Villain Song where he swears to kill him.
- In The Spoony Experiment review of Street Fighter 2010, Doctor Insano suffers a breakdown after failing to create the ultimate being (instead producing a cute pink blob thing). He begins crying about how his science never works and nobody loves him before his new "son" cheers him up.
- Dio in Jojos Bizarre Adventure Abridged has a notable, albeit brief, one when he realizes Jotaro can out-Time Stop him.
No... No... No, no, no, no, NO! MOTHERF* CKER!!! NO!! NO! NO! NO! BULLSH* T!! BULLSH* T!! BULLSH* T!! Okay, okay, okay. Calm down, Dio. Calm down. Calm down.
Western Animation
- President Lex Luthor seems to be suffering from one of these at the beginning of the Justice Lords arc in Justice League. As the alternate-dimension League close in on him, he's cryptically mumbling "They couldn't see the beauty! No imagination! It could have been so perfect!" We never learn exactly what Luthor was up to prior to this, but the way normally cool-headed Lex seems to be coming apart indicates it was an outcome he obviously didn't plan for.
- It's hinted heavily that his actions involved trying to start some kind of Nuclear War. So yeah... he's pretty damn crazy by this point.
- Azula becomes progressively more unhinged throughout the Grand Finale of Avatar The Last Airbender, kicked off by the betrayal of Mai and Ty Lee. She really starts going nuts when her father Ozai tells her to stay in the capital as acting Fire Lord, goes ever farther when she hallucinates a conversation with her mother, and climaxes after Zuko and Katara interrupt her coronation and defeat her in an Agni Kai. Her last scene is of her bawling, screaming, and writhing on the ground; chained, and pathetic. Word Of God has stated that she's now in the nuthouse and is supervised around the clock (not that it makes the breakdown any less disturbing to watch).
- Ozai himself undergoes this. At the start of his battle with Aang, he's smug and confident. But after Aang achieves the Avatar State, Ozai is visibly terrified and tries to FLEE. After Aang strips him of his powers, Ozai is simply a wretched shell.
- Aku, the evil shapeshifting demon/wizard, does this in episode 13 of Samurai Jack in which he tries to convince the children of the world that Jack is the true villain and Aku is actually a hero. He does this through telling modified Fairy Tale where Jack is the bad guy. After being interrupted and contradicted a bunch of times during the fairytales by some terrified witless children, he starts to completely mix up fairy tales in an increasingly hysterical, convoluted (and incredibly hilarious) ways. Finally, it ends with him shouting that this was the true way history happened and swirling away.
- In The Spectacular Spider Man, when the Master Planner's (alias Doctor Octopus) master plan falls apart, and he is briefly overwhelmed by information to boot, his reaction is relatively subtle. Rather than visibly lose his composure, his voice becomes frighteningly quiet and deranged (if his eyes were visible, they would probably be bulging) as he does everything in his power to sentence Spider-Man to his doom.
- Magnacat in Monster Allergy gets this after becoming bankrupt.
- Moog Magister when he destroys the fair and the presents due to unable to get the monsters.
- Batman The Animated Series: Riddler gets one after Batman escapes from what was supposed to be his last Death Trap, then tricks Riddler into revealing what he did without upholding his end of the deal of telling Riddler how he managed to escape, in essence ruining Riddler's already failed attempt at reform. The episode ends with him screaming wildly in his cell in Arkham:
"It's impossible, I tell you! Impossible! My trap was perfect! How did he do it? I must know! SOMEBODY TELL ME! IT'S NOT FAIR! THERE WAS NO WAY, I TELL YOU, NO WAY HE COULD HAVE GOTTEN OUT! SOMEBODY TELL ME! DO YOU HEAR ME?! SOMEBODY TELL ME HOW HE DID IT! I HAVE TO KNOW! I HAVE TO KNOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW!"
- In the Season Two finale of Danny Phantom, Vlad's most desperate plan to obtain Danny as his son has him building a perfect clone of him with plans to kill the original one after. As if that wasn't crazy in itself, everything was going great until Danny's Opposite Sex Clone does a Heel Face Turn (because Vlad threw off a Rant Inducing Slight) and teams up with the hero to destroy the clone lab, including the perfect clone. Vlad, once calm and preserved, goes batshit insane, delivers a very emotional Big No, and was downright close to murdering everyone if not for a timely rescue by Danny's friends.
- And it's permanent. Oh so painfully permanent. In season 3 it's shown that Vlad's attitude towards Danny has drastically changed. Vlad used to think that of Danny as a son who needed to be convinced into joining him. After that breakdown, Danny became an all-out enemy, and Vlad wanted nothing more than to destroy him and see him suffer.
- Sykes in Disney's Oliver And Company. While he's mainly calm throughout the movie, in the climactic car chase he pulls down the gear stick so hard it breaks off, and punches his hand through his car's window to get at the heroine.
- Derek Powers has one spanning the entire first season of Batman Beyond after he's turned into Blight... culminating in an enraged psychotic break that brings whole new meaning to "having a meltdown".
- Henry Peter Gyrich of X-Men was always a little unhinged, but after years of being on the losing end of an on-and-off conflict with Professor Xavier, topped off by weeks of (offscreen) struggling with him to ratify the latest anti-mutant bill, he finally cracks in the last episode. This turns out to be the "dangerous" version, as in the space of a minute, he throws his whole reputation out the window to make things go very, very bad.
- This was deliberately induced in Graydon Creed. Throughout Season 2, he's a Smug Snake bigot, leader of KKK expy "The Friends of Humanity" and displays no emotions beside contempt... until Wolverine shows up and recognizes Creed as the son of Sabretooth. Confronted by an image of his abusive father, Graydon falls to his knees, screaming and weeping about how he's "not like him" and how he's "normal" before grabbing a gun and shooting the hologram, even though he knows it isn't real, howling that it isn't his father. Let's not even think about what Creed endured with Sabretooth as his dad, to provoke such a strong reaction.
- "YOU'RE NOT MY FATHER! YOU'RE NOT MY FATHER!!"
- In his last appearance in the series, he's pretty much lost it, and his fellow FoH members are tired of his failures. They offer him one last chance to redeem himself by ordering him to kill his mother Mystique and his brother Nightcrawler. When he messes that up, they punish him by leaving him at Sabretooth's doorstep. The last that is heard of Graydon Creed in the series is his pitiful whimpering as his father grabs him and says "Come to papa..."
- Megatron from Transformers Animated is probably the most Dangerously Genre Savvy incarnation yet. He's manipulative, charismatic, and utterly Badass. But in the series finale "Endgame" he loses his cool when his "ultimate weapons", the "Lugnut" Supremes, are damaged and lose their flight capabilities, thus stuck on Earth.
Megatron: Lugnut! This field test has been a complete failure! Order the clones back to the moon!
Lugnut: I am sorry, master. The clones' flight capabilities have been disabled—
Megatron: Then destroy the Autobots! Destroy the city! DESTROY ANYTHING THAT'S NOT ME!!!
- The Megatron of Transformers Armada has the "catatonia" kind of breakdown after Optimus Prime's death. Without a Worthy Opponent to challenge him, he's so despondent that he can hardly be bothered to do anything anymore.
- In the miniseries GI Joe: Resolute, Cobra Commander is a little... "off" to start with, but by the end of the series, he hacks an entire roomful of his own men apart and paints a cobra symbol on the wall in blood because one guy had the nerve to tell him that the death ray was not fully charged at the time.
- In South Park, the guy-with-no-life Jenkins in "Make Love, Not Warcraft" does the "shutting down" version when his character is finally killed in World Of Warcraft. We don't get to see what he does after those first few seconds, as he's only ever shown in-game and in brief flashes sitting in front of his computer, almost reacting to what happens there. Being defeated makes him... flinch.
- When Cartman learns that he murdered his own father he simply stares in empty shock and doesn't even resist when Scott rams his head into a chilli bowl.
- Note that, it being Cartman, the cause of his BSOD is the discovery that he's actually part ginger.
- Exo Squad's Big Bad Phaeton loses it after he contracts automutation syndrome in the aftermath of a battle with J.T. Marsh. He becomes more enamored with doomsday weapon projects, abandons all subtlety, and resorts to grandiose speeches and rants as everything falls apart for the Commonwealth due to his increasingly irrational command decisions. One of the more justified examples since the automutation syndrome is gradually liquefying him. That can't be good for one's sanity.
- Though it doesn't occur in the movie, the Broadway version of The Lion King has a Villain Song sung by Scar which is basically about him slowly going insane from paranoia and arrogance while being king. It's called The Madness Of King Scar.
- Does nervously backing into a corner while frantically trying to explain to your former Mooks that are about to kill you that you didn't mean to pin all the blame on them count as a form of breakdown?
- At the start of The Venture Brothers season 4, Phantom Limb shows up utterly batshit crazy, with a "Revenge Society" consisting of a toaster, a coffee mug, and a black patent leather Ferragamo pump.
- To top it all off The pump belonged to his ex, Dr. Girlfriend was was by then Mrs. Monarch.
- At the end of Disnty's animated The Great Mouse Detective, Ratigan goes from being a smarmy, smug intellectual to a feral, crazed rat, savagely attacking Basil. Although he does have quick seconds of losing his cool throughout the film, he is just as quickly able to recollect himself as calm and collective. Until the end, of course.
- On My Life As A Teenage Robot, Vexus falls from power in The Movie. The next time she's seen, she's gone insane, planning to blow up the asteroid she's trapped on and escape in a ship made out of a coffee can.
- Beauty And The Beast: Gaston increasingly goes from being a Jerkass Stalker With A Crush into a murderous Yandere through the course of the movie. It's especially evident after Belle keeps refusing him.
Gaston: I'll have Belle for my wife!! Make no mistake about that!
- In The Princess And The Frog, Dr. Facilier loses his cool a few times when it looks like his plans aren't going to pan out (and he won't be able to pay off his "debt" to his "Friends on the Other Side"). He loses it completely at the end of the film, when Tiana destroys the talisman he needs to complete his plan, and his "Friends" show up to collect that debt... by dragging him to his doom through a hellish portal. "Are you ready?!" "NO! I'm not ready at all!"
- Hilariously subverted in Disney's Hercules after Hercules survives the River Styx and frees Meg's soul from Hades:
Hades: This is... this is impossible! Y-y-you— You can't be alive! You'd have to be a-a-a—
Pain and Panic: A god?!
Hades: [flaming] EEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH, AAAAAAAAAGH!!! HERCULES, STOP!!! YOU CAN'T DO THIS TO ME, YOU CAN'T— [Herc punches his face inwards] Fine. Okay. [his face pops out again] Okay, well, maybe I deserved that.
- On Jimmy Two-Shoes, Lucius loses his mind when he finds that Miseryville has been turned into the perfect, happy Smilesville as part of a prank against him. The episode ends with him in a padded cell. He's fine the next episode, however.
- Fantastic Mr Fox had Farmer Bean do this to a response to Fox's letter. He responds by trashing everything his office in front of his Farmer co-horts and then goes outside to smash more things before getting his next evil scheme.
- Robotnik in Sonic the Hedgehog. In the very last episode, as everything is going to hell around him and his base is exploding, he escapes in a pod, never to be seen again, yelling repeatedly how he "HATES THAT HEDGEHOG!".
- In Spongebob Squarepants, Squillium experiences this in Band Geeks. After setting Squidward up to fail for shits and giggles, seeing Squidward's band succeed causes him to stare in empty shock before HAVING A HEART ATTACK. Never has a Smug Snake been more brutally taken down.
- While Nox in Wakfu was always pretty crazy, he snaps near the end of episode 26 after the Eliacube uses up all of the Wakfu he spent 200 years collecting in order to travel back in time to save his family — and only goes back twenty minutes. After a Big No and angrily demanding answers from the Eliacube (which he actually believes can talk), Nox almost literally shuts down. His breakdown is reflected by the fate of his creations: bereft of the Eliacube's Wakfu, all of them shut down and fall apart. The ending credits of episode 26 reveal that he was Driven To Suicide. Granted, he wouldn't have lasted much longer anyway without the Wakfu of the Eliacube to sustain him.
- The villainous monster in human clothing V.V Argost had one of these in the final episode of The Secret Saturdays where he makes a planetwide broadcast for the world to yield to him as his army of cryptids are terrorizing the earth, and the Saturdays interrupt him by appearing with their own army. Argost's reaction was quite amusing.
Argost: THAT...WAS...MY...MOMENT!
- Icy from the Winx Club undergoes this after Bloom regains her powers. For pretty much the whole season she's a smarmy, psychotic Smug Snake; after Bloom gets her powers back she loses her cool, progressively screaming more and more until finally getting knocked out of the sky.
- Butters AKA Professor Chaos has this in "The Simpsons already did it" where after watching every Simpson episode to make sure one of his plans won't be a ripoff of an episode and leaving to inact it, he hears a commercial of Bart doing the same thing. He then hallucinates of every place and person looking all like simpsons characters.
- In the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles incarnation, the episode "Insane In The Membrane" serves as a whole episode Villainous Breakdown for Baxter Stockman. His punishments for his constant failures was Shredder to reduce him to a brain in a jar, so he made himself a new body. Unfortunately, the new body begins to rot when he's in it. What is apparently hours or days later, the now half rotted and green-skinned Stockman begins having hallucinations about his childhood and his mother dying. He is also convinced that April is his mother and for some reason must kill her. So Stockmanstein breaks into her apartment, takes her back to his lab, and yeah more weird stuff involving a cable car.
Real Life
- Although Adolf Hitler had long been stubborn about listening to advice and had long been something of a megalomaniac, he took both of these traits to pathological extremes after the war's tide turned against Germany and after the failed attempt on his life. He became so obsessed with his program of genocide that he insisted on allocating as many trains as possible for deporting Jews to the death camps, instead of transporting troops into battle as his advisors urged. This probably hastened Germany's defeat as their forces became increasingly overextended and outnumbered. In his final weeks, as the Allies closed in on Berlin, Hitler issued orders to destroy as much of Germany's infrastructure as possible. Although his stated reason was that the Allies would be denied any spoils, some have speculated that his real motive was that if he had to go, then Germany had to go too (the order was ignored in any case).
- Not only Germany - the whole conquered Reich. The general in charge of the defense of Paris notoriously had standing orders to blow it sky high and burn the city to the ground rather than surrender it. Hitler even called him on the phone personally and repeatedly, to make sure his orders were understood and obeyed. Thankfully, von Choltitz didn't do it.
- Charles Edward Stuart . If I've understood the history correctly, during his rebellion, when his followers decided to travel back to Scotland rather than continuing to London, he started making a lot of questionable decisions (ignoring a lot of advice from his most skilled military commander, for examples). Certainly, after the rebellion failed, he ended up as a drunk. This could be a Villainous Breakdown, Heroic BSOD, Villainous BSOD or something in between depending on politics and such.
- Maximilien Robespierre. Starting his career before the French Revolution as a much beloved counsel for the poor (who always lost), Robespierre became important during the French Revolution. Afterwards, he was appointed to Chief of National Security and started the original Reign Of Terror, which allowed the execution of anyone suspected of counter-revolutionary activities with virtually no process of law. In 1794, after he had obviously gone crazy, he was sent to the guillotine, but not before he shot his jaw off while trying to commit suicide.
Wait...you finished the page? All of it? Do all those Pot Holes count for nothing? But...THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE! NO! ARRRGH...
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