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Pay Evil Unto Evil / Anime & Manga

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Paying evil unto evil in anime and manga.

  • 18if: In his journey across the Dream Land, Haruto finds that the Witch Mana has been killing people in her dreams, which has the effect of killing them in the real world. Thing is, Mana's victims are the same people who killed her family For the Evulz and got light sentences for being minors. When he catches up to Mana, he doesn't even attempt to stop her, he even helps her kill the last man when he attempts to fight back and even expresses his intention to use the dream world as a new way to kill people. Haruto even comes to the realization that killing those people is the only way Mana will get closure for her family's death.
  • Akame ga Kill! follows a group of assassins who only kill people who have proven to be guilty of crimes not punished by the corrupt government they live under, such as human trafficking, murder, torture, and human experimentation. They do not sugar coat what they do. They are murderers, killers, and sinners, and in no way, shape, or form are they the good guys, even if what they do is good. They are also perfectly willing to kill anyone they have to, including guards, servants, and relatives of the people they kill, even if they are loosely connected to the crime. They also only kill those they have been paid to, and many of their clients work themselves to death raising the money.
    • In the manga version, Everyone in the Imperial Capital gets to do this to Prime Minister Honest, the corrupt ruler of the Empire. They have him tied down and take turns ripping him apart one piece at a time, making Honest feel the pain of all the people he's made suffer under his reign. In the anime version, Leone brutally beats Honest to death herself, slowly and painfully.
    • Akame does this to Izou of Wild Hunt as he is dying from a wound she inflicted on him. Said katana wielder is a mass murderer was responsible for killing a fellow Night Raid member. So when Izou asks Akame to take his katana, she responds by cutting his chest open while he's down, brutally refusing his final request. It's very cathartic.
  • The titular Akumetsu's modus operandi. Corrupt politicians get buried in bridges, injected with tainted medicine, thrown off buildings, shot, or just hacked to death with an axe.
    • So much Nightmare Fuel. The last 'normal' Akumetsu he does involves entombing alive an old guy whose sin was apparently not being corrupt or evil or twisted but really liking highways, and building unnecessary ones with public monies. Not only that, the old guy doesn't even get the chance to go out in privacy, he has to deal with a camera and a smirking Akumetsu who's just going to have his consciousness copied into a new body when he dies, and so isn't actually sacrificing much. Good thing the yakuza weighed in at this point.
    • The axe guy, on the other hand, was repulsive in every possible way, and made a pretty good debut. Given our viewpoint character was the first-day-as-a-teen-prostitute girl he was making lick his sweaty feet when Akumetsu came in, we were so glad to see his head split.
  • Eren in Attack on Titan, when he kills the first two traffickers that kidnapped Mikasa. It establishes that Eren was never completely pacifistic, but the victims really had it coming to them. By the way, Eren was seven when this happened.
    I merely put down some rabid dogs. Sometimes they just happen to look like people.
    • Eren's goal eventually changed to destroy Marley entirely by instigating a war that lead to the deaths of thousands of civilians (including children). It got even worse when he decided to activate the Rumbling (aka genocide by millions of Colossal Titans trampling everyone) on not only Marley, but everyone outside of Paradis, in the hopes of ending the oppression of the Eldians forever.
  • In Baccano!, two separate gangs try to take over the same train independently, and neither side is worried about innocent casualties (the black suits were actually planning to kill everyone whether their demands are met or not). Claire Stanfield proceeds to kill them all in some of the most gruesome ways possible — but he remains one of the most popular characters in the series.
  • Berserk: Guts does terrible, terrible things to those he kills. Said things are The Legions of Hell, humans who sold themselves to the lords of Hell, or worse. It's hard not to cheer.
  • Black Clover: One of the reasons Licht wants to destroy the Clover Kingdom is because its corrupt rulers have perpetuated discrimination in the country by background and magic. He wants to accomplish this by killing every human in the kingdom.
  • Bleach:
  • Bokurano has Chizuru slaughtering her rapists with Zearth's lasers. While they had it coming, she goes straight into Kick the Dog territory when she notices that one of her attackers is carrying his young daughter and vaporizes him anyway, presumably killing the kid as well.
  • In the h-manga Bullied Revenge Hypnosis, Akitaka Kazaki is photographed skulking the girls' locker-room by Izumi Nagami, and her cohorts, Minako Sanada and Sae Hinata , the most feared students due to their wanton use of of Blackmail to belittle and demean those they see as beneath them, including adults. When Akitaka can't afford the extortion fee, they try hypnotizing him into humiliating himself, but when it doesn't work they order him to try hypnotizing them, feeling he has no choice or they'll show the picture of him in the locker-room, he hypnotizes them. Surprised to see them in a trance, he implants the command that they want to bear his children as a way to turn them into his personal harem. When the hypnosis briefly wears off, he manages to break their will and becomes their demented overlord while telling them their reign of terror is over. At the very end, the girls give up their bullying ways and they give birth to one baby each. However, in the epilogue, he begs him to let him rest as he's about to collapse from exhaustion, but they remind him he implanted the command they wanted to bear his children.
  • Captain Tsubasa: Defied in the Japan vs. Sweden match during the World Youth arc. Stefan Levin fully declared his intent to destroy (as in, injuring them so they cannot play) his rivals with his signature Levin Shot (a shot that sacrifices speed in exchange for impact power) to win the match and the tournament. After the Japanese defender Tomeya Akai takes three of Levin's shots at point-blank range to protect his goal and goalkeeper, Tsubasa recovers the ball and then moves it to give a similar rotation effect like Levin did before, making him think he was doing to pay him back the same way. However, Tsubasa was only distracting him, and while running with the ball to start the counterattack, he states that "the ball is [his] friend, not a weapon to hurt others". This ends up paying off, as it triggers Levin's Heel Realization.
  • After he stops killing clones en masse in a "level up" experiment, Accelerator from A Certain Magical Index pretty much decides on this when dealing with anyone he sees harming innocent people, usually ending in a swift or painful death, and he holds little remorse for it.
  • As Ogami Rei's motto states in Code:Breaker, "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, evil for evil".
  • In Code Geass, Lelouch vi Britannia has moments of this. The first and foremost example of this is how he turns a terrorist group into rebels with good publicity by convincing them to attack anyone who abuses power, as opposed to simply attacking the government and letting Britannian casualties fall where they would (as they had in the past).
  • Code:Breaker: the male lead does this for a living. He describes it as "garbage collecting".
  • Death Note:
    • Light Yagami murders dozens of people on a daily basis in spasms of Unholy Satanic Glee because they're criminals...or someone said they're criminals. It goes downhill from there.
    • L locks people up in solitary confinement and uses sensory deprivation on them for months on end in order to get a confession, and he has few qualms about letting a few dozen people die in order to catch his man (although when presented with a less objectionable option, he did accept it with enthusiasm of an undetermined sincerity level).
    • Teru Mikami believed this even without the super-temptation book of When All You Have Is a Hammer…. When he got one, he did something similar to Light.
  • Delicious in Dungeon: Dungeon Crawling relies heavily on state-sponsored "corpse retrievers" who resurrect dead adventurers for a fee. Kabru's team encounters a corrupt corpse retriever squad that deliberately gets adventurers killed to get more business; they find it so egregious that they massacre the corpse retrievers and dump the bodies somewhere unrecoverable.
  • Masaru and ShineGreymon from Digimon Data Squad finish off Kurata as he's pleading for his life. Normally, trying to kill someone who is begging you for mercy is a sign you're either a villain or at best, an Anti-Hero. However, when that someone is the biggest bastard in the history of Digimon, circumstances are different — all his friends cheered him on and told him to kick Kurata's ass.
  • Don't Meddle with My Daughter!: In chapter 16, Hana explains that the Japanese government had Zenovia shot down, as she descended to Earth. After capturing her, government officials had her repeatedly gang-raped by supervillains and extracted her ovum each time she was impregnated, until they had an army of super beings. Zenovia was eventually rescued and turned against all of humanity for what was done to her.
  • Dragon Ball:
    • Goku was merciless towards his enemies when he was a child. If you harmed his friends, someone he liked, or just got him mad enough, he paid it back with violent retribution, not really caring if he ended up killing or crippling the person. If you, god-forbid, actually killed someone he cared about, then your life was practically forfeit. He hunted down and killed Demon King Piccolo and all his children after they murdered his best friend, Krillin, and father figure, Master Roshi. Although Goku is much more chill as an adult, some of this attitude still remains. This can be seen with his fight against Frieza. Frieza's entire fighting style is torturing people to death by physically overwhelming them with his power and pushing them to utter despair by making them die knowing that they never stood a chance against him. After Goku becomes a Super Saiyan, he spends almost the entire fight toying with and brutalizing Frieza just as he had done to his victims. The only reason why Goku tries to spare Frieza is because he sees letting Frieza live with his pride shattered is the cruelest punishment possible.
    • His son, Gohan, wholly embraces this mindset after becoming a Super Saiyan 2. He didn't just want to beat Cell, he wanted to torture the Bio-Android to death and have him die in despair for the crimes he committed. It backfires when Cell decides to blow himself and the Earth up, which not only makes Goku sacrifice himself to relocate Cell, it lets Cell come back strong enough to challenge Gohan and kill Trunks on the side. And Gohan very much realizes it's his fault. Thankfully, Gohan turns it around when he manages to destroy Cell in the final battle.
    • After becoming mostly good, Piccolo takes up this mantle. He will kill his enemies without hesitation and will sometimes do it in a most brutal manner, such as cutting Doctor Gero's hand off and slicing Babidi in half.
    • Vegeta was essentially this trope incarnate during the Namek and Frieza sagas. When he wasn’t searching for the Dragon Balls to become immortal, he was assassinating Frieza’s henchmen left and right, who were every bit the asshole he was if not more so. Jeice and Android 19 stand out as some of his cruelest murders; while both deserved their fates, they spent their last moments begging for their life and running away in terror respectively.
    • When he returns to the future much stronger after the Cell Games, Future Trunks subjects the future Androids 17 and 18, two Robotic Psychopaths who rampaged across the Earth for twenty years killing whoever and whenever they wanted, to this. He even states outright that he's doing to them exactly what they did to Future Gohan, his mentor/surrogate brother: making them feel completely outmatched, helpless, and afraid before killing them.
    • The Tuffles were reduced to near-extinction by the Saiyans in the aftermath of the Saiyan-Tuffle war, forcing them to throw away their morality for survival and revenge against the Saiyans. As a result, the last two survivors of the Tuffle race, Dr. Lychee and Baby, are utterly dedicated to total genocide of the Saiyans as a necessary goal to the revival of the Tuffle race.
    • In Super, there's Beerus' execution of Zamasu. It is one of the cruelest deaths in the series, given how Beerus slowly atomized him to the point that Zamasu is left screaming in anguish, even with his head gone. However, given that Zamasu tried to kill his master and was happy to hear that his future counterpart has been murdering mortals in the future, it's hard to feel sympathy for him.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist:
    • Scar's mission upon gaining his alchemic right arm from his brother is to use alchemy itself (stopping at the second out of the three stages, Destroy, so as to not go against his religious beliefs) to kill all the State Alchemists in vengeance for the mass genocide they committed against the Ishvalan people.
    • This is the comeuppance of Envy. He's slowly and methodically tortured by Roy Mustang, and despite him completely deserving the pain he goes through, it's still unnerving to see Mustang like this. Roy is ultimately subject to the What the Hell, Hero? treatment from all his nearby allies that shames him out of taking the final blow.
  • Togusa in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: 2nd Gig tries, but fails, to defend a woman from her cyborg boyfriend while off-duty. During the subsequent trial, the man's lawyer attempts to make Togusa look bad by claiming Togusa acted out of hatred for cyborgs. Following the trial, the lawyer and the convict get into a serious car accident, which is implied to have been set up by Section 9.
  • Goblin Slayer features the titular goblins, a One-Gender Race of violent, depraved sadists with no redeeming qualities who burn down villages and rape women to death, who in turn are brutally butchered by the dozens by the titular Goblin Slayer, who has no qualms with literally bashing in the brains of goblin babies just to ensure that none of them will live to consider avenging their families.
  • Great Teacher Onizuka:
    • Onizuka sometimes does this, and it happens all the time in GTO: The Early Years. One particularly memorable time is when he gives Swirlies to sex traffickers (and these weren't the kind school bullies do, this was slamming their faces into the urinals).
    • It's hard to argue that the Brute Club didn't deserve the No-Holds-Barred Beatdown Ai Tokiwa gave them, given how they were attempting to rape her and may have already done the same to other girls.
  • Hell Girl runs on this trope. For the most part, the people getting sent to Hell are Asshole Victims and are sent by someone they tormented.
  • Alucard in Hellsing (the TV version) fits... maybe until near the end. Not so much in the manga and OVA where he's a little less discriminating (as some hapless SWAT soldiers find out).
  • Invoked by Yuu from Holyland before he fights Taka in Masaki's stead. "All I know is that I will answer malice... with violence."
  • Ino-Head Gargoyle: Kamata, Saejima, Nakajo, and Akutsu show no mercy to Shidou, cutting his Achilles tendons and breaking both his arms. This is the guy responsible for the Murder by Suicide (via drugs) of dozens of people, and beating Kamata's brother into a coma when he tried to investigate. Note that Saejima (and nominally Kamata) are cops.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind: This mindset determines how Chariot Requiem responds to interference. If it's just an obstacle, it'll walk around it or gently nudge it aside. If it is attacked though, it will turn the attacker's stand against them, and will charge at anyone trying to grab the Arrow.
  • Knight Hunters: The basic premise of the assassin organization Weiß Kreuz is to commit sinful murders to "deny these evil beasts their tomorrows". (Almost subverted, however, since the organization is extremely indifferent, and barely better than the villains it sends our assassins to kill.)
  • The premise of Kurosagi is about a man who commits fraud to cheat, humiliate and otherwise destroy people who had defrauded others first. Likewise, his Worthy Opponent is a large-scale swindler who goes after "rotten" companies that ruin its employees' lives.
  • Maria no Danzai is a psychological thriller about a School Nurse looking to get brutal revenge on a Gang of Bullies who got her son killed. Maria brings judgement upon the bullies by using their flaws, sins, and crimes to destroy them systematically, and when she goes for the kill, the bullies are crushed emotionally and die terrifying and painful deaths. As horrifying as it is to see the lengths she would go to in order to destroy her son's bullies, it's hard to feel sorry for her victims given how all of them seem to still be remorseless, unrepentant psychopaths who go so far as to curse Kiritaka and blame him for their impending deaths, so the readers can't help but cheer as they see the bullies being destroyed.
    Mari Nagare: Mere revenge is too soft. They deserve judgement.
  • Moriarty the Patriot portrays Moriarty as a Justified Criminal who murders evil nobles who would have otherwise gotten away with their crimes due to their status as nobility.
  • Thoroughly deconstructed in Monster, although it is played straight in the first couple of episodes when Tenma, in a fit of rage, declares that his superiors should die. They indeed do so, whereupon the trope is deconstructed since it is the audience, not the characters, who wholeheartedly approve of the act.
  • In My-Otome, Tomoe was probably the evillest character in the series, up to arranging an Attempted Rape on Arika because she saw her as a threat to her True Love for Shizuru. When Tomoe finally joined the enemy, she was "rewarded" with Shizuru as a Sex Slave, a job which Shizuru not only wanted (because it put her where she needed to be for the Grand Finale) but thoroughly enjoyed while she had it. When it came time for the finale, Shizuru openly told Tomoe that, yes, she'd been using Tomoe the whole way, and maybe that would teach Tomoe not to play with people's emotions. If Tomoe had been an ounce less evil, that would have come across as undeniably vile behavior.
  • Overlord (2012):
    • Ainz, after No Selling Clementine's attacks, grabs her and slowly bearhugs her to death as payback for her killing of the Swords of Darkness, especially torturing Ninya to death. Given her nature and actions, it's rather cathartic to see her helplessly struggle against her impending doom against an enemy she can't possibly defeat (something she herself enjoyed forcing on others).
    • Also applies to the soldiers attacking Carne Village who seemed to have no problem slaughtering unarmed civilians... until Ainz shows up and destroys them all.
    • Sebas' raid on the Eight Fingers brothel, in which he punches a man to death (said man was in the habit of beating prostitutes to death) and later disintegrates their enforcers in less than ten seconds. The surviving Eight Fingers are allowed to continue living as Nazarick's agents... after they go through a little light torture in the form of having their organs eaten by cockroaches from the inside, healed by magic, then having their organs eaten by cockroaches from the inside, healed by magic, and so on. After the ordeal, not only are they incapable of eating solid food, they wouldn't dream of disobeying Nazarick but also make sure no one else in their organization gives Nazarick cause to apply the same treatment to them.
    • Viciously subverted during the Invaders arc, where we're introduced to the Workers (adventurers who take on less legal but more rewarding jobs) and the entirely reasonable and sympathetic motivations for why they agreed to investigate a newly-discovered ruin called Nazarick. Unfortunately, Momon takes them at their word when they simply reply "Money" as their motivation, and what follows is a relentlessly brutal Mook Horror Show starring the laughably outmatched workers (even the Token Evil Teammate suffers a death that is merely humiliating rather than horrifyingly painful or sentenced to be tortured for what's left of their lives).
    • The Crown Prince attacks Carne when they refuse to let him in (so he won't see they now have goblins and ogres working alongside them). As he's already considered a waste of oxygen by his own allies, no one mourns when he ends up killed by a goblin army and Lupusregina.
  • In Pokémon: The Series, Ash and friends are normally perfectly content to allow the Big Bad to be quietly arrested, but in dealing with Grings Kodai, the Big Bad of Pokémon: Zoroark: Master of Illusions, they, and even the cops, arranged for him to watch as his Evil Gloating is broadcast live on his own TV station, pretty much forcing him to watch his public humiliation. While harsh for them, Kodai was an absolute sociopath who committed the anime's first true murder of a Pokémon and electrocuted a baby right in front of its mother with no remorse.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion ends with Kyubey being beat up to pulp after his experiment goes wrong, before becoming Homura's servant by the end of the movie.
  • Very occasionally done in Ranma ½. It's full of Jerkass characters, so there's rarely a shortage of asshole victims, but very few actually practice this MO, mind you. Ranma is the straightest example and once, he mastered the Hiryuu Shoten-Ha to use against Happousai. Mousse, Kuno, Principal Kuno, and Gosunkugi all charge into the battle to beat on Ranma; nice guy that he is, Ranma hesitates to use his new attack out of concern they'll all be caught in the massive blast. Then he remembers how the same four characters had earlier viciously ganged up on him when he was too weak to defend himself. He promptly launches the attack.
  • In Rurouni Kenshin, the philosophy of Historical Domain Character Saito Hajime, "Aku Soku Zan", can be loosely translated as "Slay Evil Immediately". A great many evildoers that crossed him didn't survive the experience. Though he himself is more of a Noble Demon, not wholly on the heroes' sides. At the beginning of the series, he's a police officer with apparently a covert license to kill, offing a corrupt official. He's like a saner Kurogasa, really, without the nihilism. (The real Saitou spent a considerable period with the police, but he appears to have been quite an ordinary member of the force.)
  • In Saint Beast, purging angels is about the worst thing you can do to them, and Zeus does it to make heaven pure.
  • Kazuma in Scryed at times, particularly after Kimishima is killed and he decides to go wreck the nearest unit with a HOLY emblem on it.
  • Sword Art Online:
  • Lunatic from Tiger & Bunny is a big subscriber to this philosophy, and will even kill criminals who have already been arrested and/or imprisoned if he decides they're sufficiently heinous. On the other hand, his sense of honor is strong enough that he goes out of his way to protect Kotetsu when the latter is falsely accused of murder.
  • Tokyo Ghoul: Kaneki develops this mentality after enduring ten days of Cold-Blooded Torture at the hands of the psychotic Ghoul Yamori and escaping, starting when he beats Yamori into submission, eats his kagune, and leaves him to the mercy of the CCG.
    Kaneki: Remember, you're the one that tried to eat me first. So, you'll get what's coming to you... when I eat you instead.
  • In Toriko, Zebra of the Four Emperors was imprisoned for life for single-handedly hunting 26 different species to extinction. However, we later find out that they all messed up the ecosystems they were in, and quite possibly they were vicious, mindless living weapons sent there by an enemy. He doesn't exactly do this intentionally, though.
  • Zig-zagged in Yu-Gi-Oh!, especially in the early installments, back when the series was still intended to be a horror story and Yami Yugi was a dark avenger, taking on a variety of bullies and crooks on the behalf of Yugi and his friends, frequently with Penalty Games. It's ambiguous whether any of them died from the treatment, but more than one would be hospitalised. The adults are usually either too powerless to help, and the police don't seem to exist. This character habit is later toned down when the move towards tournament arcs takes precedence, and the character needed to evolve from an anti-hero to a generally mysterious hero. Bakura later points out in Millennium World that the Millennium Items themselves are a compass between good and evil, and can corrupt the people trying to use them to do 'justice' of any sort. The one exception to this treatment is Kaiba — Yami's second penalty game is designed to give him a spiritual rehabilitation, after some effort.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! GX has a more infamous example of this trope - after Brron sacrifices four of Jaden's friends, the Slifer loses it and sends Neos after the Mad King three times in a row - once with the Assault Armor Equip Spell on, another time with the Equip Spell off, and the third and final time with the spell card Battle of Sleeping Spirits, sending Brron's life points down to 0, and subsequently killing him too. Of course, this is the action that leads into Jaden's path towards the dark side... with some support from his past incarnation.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V plays with and discusses this trope. Several Anti-Hero protagonists follow this trope, and while the main character is morally opposed, he has a Superpowered Evil Side that plays this straight. Occasionally when there's a particularly obvious example, the protagonists will usually have an inner monologue or talk with each other about what happened and how they think the situation should have been handled.

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