Pay Evil Unto Evil / Literature

Paying evil unto evil in literature.

---

• Animorphs:
  • Jake, before ordering Ax to flush the Pool into space, killing 17,000 helpless Yeerks, decides that Yeerks are subhuman parasites who deserve nothing but cold, frozen death: "They could've stayed home, I thought. No one had asked them to come to Earth. No more than they deserved. Aliens. Parasites. Subhuman." This comes at the end of a long, brutal war for humanity's freedom, and is later referred to as a war crime.
  • Also, Marco isn't very good at hiding the fact that he takes pleasure from killing Yeerks. In #19, he tells Cassie, "You don't make peace with parasites. You don't turn them around. You bury them." It eventually subsides, though, as part of Marco's Character Development; over the course of the series he becomes much less emotional, which makes him a more effective strategist.
  • In book #6, the Animorphs deal with a hot tub being used as a Yeerk pool in a hospital by setting it to boil.
• Bazil Broketail: The slaves revolting in Tummuz Orgmeen mercilessly slaughter all their overseers and every hman or imp fighting for the Doom, since all helped enslave them.
• Carrie:
  • Admittedly, some of Carrie White's classmates had treated her very badly. However, her vengeance on them was probably well beyond what they had actually deserved. And when she goes on to bring Armageddon to the rest of the town, well...
  • It's worth noting, however, that Stephen King never depicts her revenge as being justified; instead her actions are considered extremely disproportionate.
  • Her abusive upbringing hasn't really encouraged a sense of moral distinction, especially when her mother was Ax-Crazy to begin with.
• In R.S Belcher's Brotherhood Of The Wheel, Brethren squire and Blue Jocks biker, Hector "Heck" Sinclair has overpowered the brutal Wald Scode and needs the location of where he's holding two college kids that are going to be sacrificed to a dark god. Hector tortures Wald with a blowtorch that Wald had intended to use on him. After getting the info, Heck executes Wald...by resuming burning him with the blowtorch (Heck isn't completely human so he struggles to control his worst inclinations).
• In Chrysalis (Beaver Fur), the Terran seeks to scour the Xunvir and their host worlds into total extinction and uninhabitability, just as they did to Earth. They try to retain a measure of their humanity, but after a crushing loss that decimates their army and nearly kills them, they find themself edging closer and closer to evil.
• Raffles is Affably Evil, but he still draws the line...while he's normally not one for murder, he comes close to killing a blackmailer, and after his return, has no remorse for inadvertently causing the deaths of some Camorra men who'd captured him.
• The Sword of Saint Ferdinand: Pedro de Guzmán is a hateful, double-faced asshole who -among other things- has tried repeatedly to destroy the lives of people who never wronged him out of spite, has murdered at least one innocent old man to cover his schemes up, and has betrayed his country for money and power. So old soldier Fortún Paja does not feel particularly remorseful abut killing him and dumping the corpse into a river.
• Arguably Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights begins like this. When he returns to Yorkshire after Catherine's wedding, the first thing he does is swindle his alcoholic foster brother Hindley out of ownership of the house. While Heathcliff's later actions are inexcusable, many readers will argue that Hindley deserved what he got for having turned him into a servant and thwarting his love affair with Catherine in the first place.
• In Tom Clancy's Without Remorse, John Kelly is an ex-Navy SEAL who falls for an ex-prostitute/drug mule and rehabilitates her, only to see her raped and murdered by her former pimp. He spends the next year hunting down and brutally executing the entire drug ring, working his way up the chain one pusher/pimp at a time. This comes to the attention of the CIA, who are simultaneously recruiting him for a Vietnam rescue mission; when they find out what he did, they arrange for his "Kelly" identity to die in an apparent suicide, and they give him a new identity as "John Clark". Much later in the series, the President of the United States pardons him.
• The later Sword of Truth books feature, among other things, the hero leading a charge through peace protesters with, essentially, this justification (said protesters, it should be noted, were guarding an army of monsters, but Richard could have made an effort to Take a Third Option), and sending his army to attack cities and other settlements that are supporting the Imperial Order, basically a strategy of total war. The justification given is that it would be impossible to beat the Order in a straight up fight, since they're outnumbered 100 to 1. Richard notably orders his troops not to kill civilians if it can be avoided, but that they should still make them afraid of the D'Haran troops.
• In Fantastic Mr. Fox, the eponymous hero is nearly hunted down by Mr. Boggis, Mr. Bunce, and Mr. Bean for simply providing food from his family, which is by stealing. The three men decide to use heavy equipment to further succeed in eliminating the fox and his family, not to mention half the countryside of good land (and every other animal, as well)! What does Mr. Fox do? He and his children dig and tunnel their way to each of the three men's farms and steal from them, Stalag 13-style... while the three nasty farmers wait around the hole where the fox is supposed to pop up at!
• Harry Potter:
  • In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the Imperius and Cruciatus curses. When they're first introduced, it's stated that using these curses wins the caster a one-way ticket to Azkaban, and Barty Crouch is portrayed in a bad light for authorizing the Aurors to use the spells in exactly the same way the heroes eventually do. It's just a little disconcerting to see, for example, McGonagall tossing around Imperius because she couldn't be bothered picking up two wands herself. The use is seen as somewhat morally ambiguous, and it functions as a slow buildup — with Harry having used two of the three "Unforgivable Curses" by the climax of the book, it's reasonable to expect he'd use the last one, the Killing Curse, to finish off Voldemort. He doesn't. Voldemort dies as a result of his own actions.
  • Gryffindors also take the opportunity to pay evil unto the oft-deserving Slytherins. James and Sirius bully the racist and dark-magic-obsessed Snape, and Hagrid and Fred and George punish Harry's bullying cousin Dudley with jinxes, although Arthur Weasley doesn't find his sons' behavior funny. Also, Sirius treats Kreacher quite nastily, an odd case as Kreacher is one of the most unlikable victims in the series, but also served as one of the examples where the good perpetrator was seriously criticized for his bad actions, because Sirius is in a position of authority over Kreacher (Kreacher, as a house elf, is magically impelled to obey him).
  • Hermione hexes the girl who sold out the DA, and in doing so left Hogwarts under the control of a sadistic teacher who tortured children, by raising pimples on her forehead which spell out that she's a traitor, and last for several months at the least. J. K. Rowling confirmed that Marietta's pimples faded but left a few scars. Hermione also lures said sadistic teacher into being attacked by centaurs, although admittedly that went further than Hermione had originally intended. She also blackmails Rita Skeeter for writing a false article that caused Hermione to be showered with hate mail. Don't mess with Hermione Granger — she's got a ruthless side.
• The Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot". Holmes lets the murderer go free when he realizes what a monster the victim was.
  • Conan Doyle uses this trope several times, when his sympathies lie with the criminal rather than the victim. Other stories that use it include "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange" (The murdered husband habitually battered his wife) and "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" (because he knows who the killer is, why Milverton was murdered, and that he was a blackmailer of the vilest sort, he declines to even assist the police).
    • Actually in "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange", you could make a pretty fair case for self-defense.
    • In the Milverton case, Holmes himself was Paying Evil Unto Evil—at the moment the crime was committed, he and Watson were in the middle of burgling Milverton's house to get rid of his blackmail material. Holmes knows who the murderer is, but revealing her identity would mean revealing that he too was very much on the wrong side of the law.
  • Then there's "The Speckled Band", where Holmes's actions mean that the murderer and would-be double murderer ends up getting Hoist by His Own Petard. He says he won't let it affect him too much.
  • Another time Holmes himself attempts this is in the story "The Five Orange Pips", in which Holmes, after identifying the murderer, sends him the same death threat that had been sent to all of his victims. However, before Holmes can actually carry out the threat, the murderer dies in a storm at sea.
• Agatha Christie used this in her novel And Then There Were None (and all of its other titles) and in all of its adaptations. The murderer who kills most (or all) of the villainous characters on the Island is a Hanging Judge a psychopath who decided to only harm the guilty.
• This plot is interestingly played with in the Ripliad novel Ripley Under Water. While the book follows a sort of Psycho for Hire terrorizing a murderer and career criminal, Ripley the "hero" is the murderer and career criminal and the story is told in a way that he comes across as a sympathetic victim while his tormentor is the villain of the novel.
• One of this trope's best examples occurs in the Hercule Poirot novel Murder on the Orient Express. It turns out that the victim had been guilty of the kidnapping and murder of a small child years before. Poirot not only declines to turn the murderer over to the police, he offered a theory of how the murderer escaped the train which was as plausible as it was false.
• In both the book and the film adaptation of Let the Right One In, a gang of teens finds out the hard way that the price of bullying a vampire's best friend is being literally torn to shreds.
• In The Dresden Files, the perception of such things as a first step on the Slippery Slope is the main reason for the uncompromising reaction of the White Council to breaches of the Laws of Magic — sure, that guy you just killed may have been a bad guy, but killing with magic changes the soul, and they think it'll make you want to do it again... Whether this is justified or not is one of the major questions of the series — particularly as Harry himself murdered his Evil Mentor Jason Du Mourne prior to the series's beginning.
  • Harry Dresden does this in basically every book. Most of the time, it comes off as morally upright; Harry has been known to ask villains to surrender when said villain has summoned demons and sent them against Harry and his friends. In the third book, however, vampires kidnap his girlfriend and he torches the entire building — including quite a few of the bums and teenagers the vampires were keeping around as snacks. Harry angsts over this quite a bit, especially due to the "Law of Three" (anything you do with magic supposedly returns threefold). Michael reassures him with a quote that's on the quote page. It helps, to a point.
    • Beating Cassius with a bat, and several books later impaling the Red King's eyes before setting them on fire. Both had it coming to them, and the latter was a monster beyond description.
    • In a training camp in New Mexico two children were killed and eaten by a ghoul. He severed the ghoul that did it in half, set the fat and nerves of its upper body on fire, like a candle, and threw it down a mineshaft. He then returned to the captured ghouls who surrendered to him and told him where to find the children in exchange for being allowed to live, and buried one of them up to its neck, melted the ghoul's face and melted the sand around it into glass, then poured a trail of orange juice from its head to a fire ant nest. He let the other ghoul go, minus an arm and a leg, to carry the warning. In this instance though, it's established later that he was slightly Drunk on the Dark Side at the time (there was a fallen angel in his head influencing his actions and empowering his spells with hellfire).
• In the third book of the Inheritance Cycle, the main character Eragon does some pretty heinous things. He wipes out what is apparently the last of a dying race, Mind Rapes a Jerkass from his hometown who stabbed his friends and family in the back (literally with one guy) and mercilessly slaughters a group of conscripted soldiers who were Just Following Orders. His feelings on each of the separate matters...vary.
  • He feels no guilt at all for wiping out the Ra’zac, seeing them as nothing more than a race of monsters. Which is not quite true. They’re undoubtedly evil, but that’s at least partially due to Blue-and-Orange Morality. The last one's death showed that it was at least capable of feeling sadness, but it showed no remorse for all the people it and its family had killed over the years.
    • In regards to the Ra'zac, they could never coexist with humans unless one of two things happen: either they would need to find a new food source, or the humans would have to agree that they are allowed to feed on humans.
  • His feelings on Mind Raping Sloan is... not a shining example of morality. The dude was an Asshole Victim and Knight Templar Parent who chose to betray his peers (and murder one of them) when his daughter didn’t obey him. But he pretty much got what he had coming to him at the hands of the Ra'zac. Eragon feels no guilt at all for piling the Mind Rape on top of the torture, starvation, and blinding he had already suffered.
    • However, he gave said Jerkass a chance improve his life and remove the Mind Rape, if he can genuinely change. The fact that he gets to live in a magical forest and the elves will tend to his every need changes this into Stupid Good.
  • On the other hand Eragon does feel guilty for slaughtering the conscripted soldiers. Not enough to spare their lives, but he honestly regrets having to kill them. From his perspective, it’s somewhere between Shoot the Dog and I Did What I Had to Do, since the conscripts are magically bound to report his presence.
• The Han Solo Trilogy: Rebel Dawn has a sequence where Jabba's assassins commit a series of brutal murders with all kinds of methods ranging from blasters to poison to arson to stringing sharp wire across a path a speeder will take. However, their targets are priests for the Scam Religion that had been grooming slaves for decades, so the reader is unlikely to feel much sympathy.
• The Saint: In the stories by Leslie Charteris, the title character targeted criminals and other evil characters for justice, including sometimes killing them.
• Shotgun Nun: Sister Eloise, after recovering from a vicious assault, decides to buy a shotgun and seeks vengeance on her attackers. After she succeeds, she goes on a crusade of hunting down and murdering any criminals (or "sinners" as she calls them) she comes across, regardless of how sympathetic they may or may not be.
• Travis McGee: McGee goes after the worst of the worst, and, though he's only supposed to get back stolen/defrauded property, he often ends up killing his targets.
  • Travis is quite aware of this trope and works hard to avert it whenever possible; in almost every case, he kills strictly in self-defense and his narration usually remarks that It Never Gets Any Easier. In one instance, when he has to kill several people who are part of a terrorist group who would kill him in a second if he didn't agree to help them, he eliminates them all and suffers a Heroic BSoD immediately afterward.
• Artemis Fowl may no longer be a Villain Protagonist, but he still commits crimes against criminals.
• The Divine Comedy: In various parts of the Inferno, Dante kicks, beats, or swindles the damned souls, always with the approval of his guide Virgil. Justified (in the context of the poem, at least) in that the victims genuinely are damned souls who have been condemned by God for their sins, and pitying them would be an act of impiety.
• Subverted in The Hobbit, which quite possibly was the most important act in the series. After getting away from Gollum using the Ring to become invisible, Bilbo has a perfect chance to kill Gollum for trying to kill and eat him after losing the riddle game... But chooses not to after realizing what a miserable life the creature had. This act of admirable pity is vital in forming his character during the ownership of the Ring and the future of Middle-Earth.
• Played straight in Red Seas Under Red Skies. When Locke needs to commit a very public bit of villainy, he heads straight for the disgustingly decadent Salon Corbeau and sacks the city.
• Corwin of The Chronicles of Amber describes his attitude at one point:
  In the mirrors of the many judgments, my hands are the color of blood. I am a part of the evil that exists in the world and in Shadow. I sometimes fancy myself an evil which exists to oppose other evils. I destroy [them] when I find them, and on that Great Day ... when the world is completely cleansed of evil, then I, too, will go down into darkness, swallowing curses... But whatever... Until that time, I shall not wash my hands nor let them hang useless.
• In Shutter Island, one of the things that haunts Teddy is the massacre of the surrendered guards at the death camp. He basically says that it was sheer murder what they did, but the press called them heroes for it because it was Nazis.
• Jenna receives a lecture about the importance of doing this in the Great Alta Saga, but still refuses because, well, she's seventeen and has lived a fairly sheltered life up until that point. As a result, one of her best friends is killed.
• Fully justified in The Godfather. While the two boys that savagely beat Bonasera's daughter to the point that "she will never be beautiful again" are implied to get what they deserve in the movie, the novel goes into detail. It would fall under Extreme Mêlée Revenge, except that that requires the revenge to go well beyond what is deserved, and there's little doubt that these two deserved every bit of it. Skipping over the details, the young men are said to need several months of hospital care and extensive reconstructive surgery.
  • Subverted in later chapters, when Michael goes to Sicily and sees the end result of an entire society dedicated to this. This is a huge part of what drives his attempts to drive the Corleone Family into legitimate enterprises.
• File this one under Older Than They Think: One of the stories in Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co. (published in the 19th century) involves the hero and his pals taking on the school bullies... at the suggestion of their priest.
• Lisbeth Salander from the Millennium Series. She started this as a child when being assaulted by a boy far bigger and stronger than herself. On a following day, she took revenge by hitting him with a baseball bat. When her guardian rapes her, she has her revenge by incapacitating him with a taser, torturing him, and forcing him to watch the recording of her rape. She then threatens to make the recording public unless he arranges for her to have permanent control over her money. Finally, she tattoos "I am a sadistic pig, a pervert and a rapist" in large letters on his torso. She's also revealed to have set her abusive father on fire (hence aforementioned court-ordered guardianship), and in the book proper she simply sits and watches as the villain burns to death in his car after crashing during a car chase with Lisbeth.
• Retconned with Lestat in The Vampire Chronicles when we find out later that the only people who he's ever outright killed have been evil people of some sort.
• In The Oathbreakers, from the Heralds of Valdemar series, Kethry works a powerful sorcery that gathers the combined rage of her mercenary company and uses it to punish the rapist/murderer of their former captain in a massively Karmic way. She specifically states that the magic is as close to evil as it's possible to get and she has to walk a very fine line between just retribution and cold-blooded vengeance, lest she fall to The Dark Side in the process.
  • Talia from the original Arrows trilogy did something similar. When she discovered a man who had raped and abused his stepdaughter, she used her empathy powers to trap him in the worst of his stepdaughter's memories, forcing him to experience what he did to her over and over. She did set things up so that it would end if he truly felt guilt for what he'd done, but the fact remains that she pulled an almost literal Mind Rape.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: This trope is common to cultures and religions on both sides of the Narrow Sea. The North of Westeros on both sides of the Wall even codifies it in explicit language — to deliberately not seek the active revenge of wrongs done to you is to anger the Old Gods and bring ruin to you and yours. This attitude tends to feed back into bloody cycles of violence without the Starks or other lords regularly stomping out fires.
  • The Mereenese Grand Masters welcome Daenerys by nailing a bunch of disemboweled slave children on columns beside the road with their fingers pointing to Mereen. Later, they end up the same way on the main square of Mereen. (In the TV series at least, her advisers suggest this may not be the wisest course, and sure enough it's later pointed out to her that one of the guys she did this had spent his life working to improve the lot of the slaves, lampshading the negative side of the trope.)
  • In A Storm of Swords, Vargo Hoat, leader of the Brave Companions, a foreign band of mercenaries whose whole strategy can be summed up as terrorize the smallfolk and inflict atrocity after atrocity on their enemies, finds himself abandoned by Roose Bolton and Tywin Lannister, the man whose son he maimed. He ends up being tortured to death, having his limbs cut off slowly and fed back to him over a span of weeks by the Mountain.
  • Speaking of the Mountain, Gregor Clegane. Another monster in Lord Tywin's arsenal, the 8-foot giant set off to rampage across the Riverlands, leading to more devastation at Lannister hands. Became infamous during the Sack of King's Landing, when he killed the infant heir to the Targaryen kings, then brutally raped and murdered the mother, Elia of Dorne. After defeating Oberyn, Elia's vengeful brother in a duel, he slowly succumbs to Oberyn's poisoned spear, which tormented him over the span of several weeks, leading to his exceptionally gruesome death.
  • In Dances With Dragons Wyman Manderly secretly kills three Freys and cooks them into three huge pies to serve to the Boltons and Freys, as vengeance for their role in the Red Wedding.
• In the Dale Brown novel Wings of Fire, Chris Wohl's killing of Pavel Kazakov, two stabs to the diaphragm that fill his lungs with blood, followed by a stab-and-slash to the throat, is vicious by any objective standard, but considering the evil scum he was doing it to...
  • In Executive Intent, after Somali pirates attack a Chinese vessel, the Chinese carry out a massive aerial and amphibious assault and takeover. But nobody likes Somali pirates so that's okay. One character even compares it to a Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work moment, noting that the Chinese had spared the rest of the world doing what everyone had secretly wanted but couldn't bring themselves to do.
• In Rainbow Six, one of the Basque separatists kills a Littlest Cancer Patient on live TV. Homer initially isn't allowed to take the shot because of fears that the plan will be screwed up; when he does get to take it, he goes for a liver-shot that will make the separatist die slowly and painfully. Ding gives him a perfunctory dressing-down afterwards, but no one is really complaining.

• Sisterhood Series by Fern Michaels: Overuse of this trope combined with Disproportionate Retribution is a major cause in making villains Unintentionally Sympathetic. Vendetta has the Sisterhood capture the Chinese ambassador's son who drunkenly killed Barbara Rutledge and her unborn child in a hit and run, and was not punished due to Diplomatic Impunity. They punish him for this by skinning him alive. He was a creep and not a nice guy, but he simply did not deserve that level of punishment.
• In Robert A. Heinlein's The Number of the Beast, the Burroughs' discover an Alternate History United States who's justice system is based on "An Eye for an Eye". Someone who's careless driving caused another person to lose a leg has his leg removed and has to wait the exact time his victim did before medical help will proceed to help him. Murderers are killed, arsonists are burned to death and it is suggested that rapists are raped (somehow).
• North from Of Fear and Faith is a firm believer in this, often bringing him into conflict with Phenix, who is much more merciful.
• Jack Reacher is a firm believer in this, which is the main thing that keeps him a sympathetic protagonist; while he frequently kills people in cold blood (Lee Child himself describes it as murder in interviews), they're all human traffickers, paedophiles, and serial killers.
• Brown's Pine Ridge Stories: Defied in the fourth story. The young Gary wants retribution for Ole Strawberry's Death, but his father quickly rebukes him stating that it is the duty of the Justice system to try and punish the offenders.
• A politicized kobold gets to put the case against "delving and discovery" (i.e. dungeon raiding) in Tales of MU. Magisterius University does, of course, have a big D&D faculty.
• Crime and Punishment - One of the antagonists of the novel, Porfiry, works as a police officer and interrogator, which usually would qualify as a good-aligned job. As you further witness this officer's tactics in catching criminals, you see him commit to bribery, thievery, death-threats, and psychological torture to force an admission. Furthermore, he seems to actually enjoy it, toying with amateur criminals like a cat torturing a wounded mouse. The justification, of course, being that the victim of this was a murderer, and therefore deserves it.
• The Hunger Games: Discussed all the way through Mockingjay, and reaches its culmination when President Coin suggests either executing all Capitol citizens or forcing their children into the Games.
• A large part of the Honorverse is a conscious deliberation on the concept, its reasons and outcomes, with the overall tone that it is somewhat satisfactory, but ultimately counterproductive approach, that might have its uses, but generally not worth it and is best avoided.
  • The Public Safety Committee revolt in the Haven Republic has had a genuinely noble goal of overthrowing the corrupt and cretinous Legislaturalist regime, but just as its historical prototype slipped into a bloody tyranny really fast largely because its perpetrators couldn't keep themselves from taking their revenge on the Legislaturalists, and it kinda went downhill from there.
    • W.E.B. du Havel lampshades this later, noting in his lecture to the other characters and the readers that this is the reason that the most post-revolutionary systems quickly fail or at least devolve into the civil wars: most revolutionary movements are created in a response to some intolerable condition of regime, and are more concentrated on fighting it than the rather technical needs of governing the post-revolutionary society that resulted from their victory.
  • Jeremy X, a former Mesan slave and the leader of the anti-Mesan group Audubon Ballroon, is described in-universe as a man who does Very Bad Things to the Very Bad People, and is an extremely ambivalent figure to say the least. He's at least sees where this could lead and later "settles down" a bit Minister of War for Torch, where Berry Zilwicky exerts a moderating influence on him.
  • Havenite secret agent Victor Cachat is a man that thinks entirely nothing on this concept^note And indeed is noted in-universe as one of the very few men able to kill and torture at the proverbial drop of a hat, and then go on to have a lunch with his girlfriend with nary a second thought., but that's exactly the thing that makes him the scariest sonuvabitch in the whole Galaxy. After all, his true introductory short story is named "Fanatic" for a reason. Though it also helps that this ability is, in reality, a sort of a Superpowered Evil Side for Cachat, and it takes a lot to make him slip into it, while he is generally a nice, fair, and dorky young man of somewhat naive upbringing and a strong moral compass.
  • Manticoran commodore Sir Aivars Terekhov has long struggled with conflicting feelings of his responsibility before his nation and his subordinates, Survivor Guilt borne from his early defeat where he thought he failed them, and the ruthlessness growing out of them; until he met brigadier Francisca Yucel, late of Solarian Gendamerie, in The Shadow of Freedom, and had the sort of epiphany that the Good Is Not Soft and sometimes it is okay to be The Unfettered, so long as people like this exist.
• One Nation, Under Jupiter: Diagoras pummels Odia after seeing the things she'd been doing at Camp Piety.
• The Count of Monte Cristo operates on this trope. While the original novel presents the count's acts as heroics of a Magnificent Bastard, as some adaptations play them straight, pointing out that the innocent lives destroyed as collateral make the Count no less evil than the ex-friends he seeks revenge on.
• Kvothe of The Name of the Wind is singled out for public embarrassment by a petty professor; Kvothe uses this to justify public magical assault of that professor.
• The Crimson Shadow: Oliver justifies his stealing from rich merchants this way, as they've grown rich by collaborating with the evil King Greensparrow who rules over their people.
• Karsa Orlong, a Villain Protagonist and walking Barbarian Hero deconstruction from the Malazan Book of the Fallen, is not an innocent boy scout himself, but he is quite fond of dishing out karmic deaths to paedophiles and slavers indiscriminately, since he finds their practices appalling. When he learns that the High Mage Bidithal raped Felisin Younger, he rips off his privates and shoves them down his throat.
• Vorkosigan Saga has captain Negri, chief of Imperial Security, whose job was assassinating people who wanted to assassinate the emperor.
• In Seabury Quinn's Jules De Grandin series, the title character often deals with various very awful people in truly brutal fashion. Like the Necromancer in one story who uses his undead slaves as concubines and later has them murder a three-year-old. De Grandin ends up trying to arrest him alongside a local cop, but he "fell down the stairs and broke his neck." The officer adds "He had to do it twice, the first time wasn't enough."
• Deconstructed in the Sophie Hannah novel The Carrier, concerning a mystery about why Tim Breary confesses to murdering his wife Francine, but claims he doesn't know why he did it. It turns out that it was actually Francine's caretaker, Lauren, who decided to put Francine out of her misery because Tim and his two best friends, Kerry and Dan, were endlessly abusing Francine, who had a stroke and was bedridden, unable to move or speak and justified it to themselves because of Francine's former Domestic Abuse towards Tim that culminated in Tim trying to kill himself. When Gabrielle, the story's protagonist and Tim's former Love Interest, discovers this, she realises Tim takes the fall for Lauren because he realises that he was basically torturing a victim who could not fight back and, regardless of her treatment of him, realises that he had no way of verifying Francine was the same person after having her stroke and that he'd become no better than his former abuser and thus, unworthy of Gabby's love.
• Zack, the central character of The Mental State, has two approaches to dealing with bad people. If they are redeemable, he will impose a barbaric amount of tough-love on them until they see sense and hopefully pull a Heel–Face Turn. If they are irredeemable, he will simply delight in turning all of their friends against them and torturing them. Believing that it is better to let his victims suffer indefinitely, he only ever kills one person over the course of the story, and only because they were psychotic and well beyond the point of saving.
• In the Sonja Blue series, Blue is a vampire-hunting vampire whose ultimate quest is to find and destroy the Master vampire who created her, and changed/ruined her life forever.
• Project Tau:
  • Kata, when he kills Mason for taking him prisoner and reducing him to the level of an animal.
  • Averted with Tau, who does kill Dennison but doesn't take any real pleasure in it.
• This is Ryn's philosophy in The One Who Eats Monsters. She, by the way, is the one who eats monsters. She's a primordial deity of darkness and vengeance, and she takes great pleasure in literally tearing her victims limb from limb and devouring their hearts.
• Fire & Blood:
  • An extremely negative example at the start of the Dance of the Dragons, when Prince Aemond Targaryen kills his nephew in revenge for cutting out his eye, when his nephew is travelling as a diplomat. This, understandably, pisses off Lucerys's mother, and makes her declare open war. Her husband, meanwhile, hires two cutthroats to sneak into the Red Keep and force Queen Helaena to chose which of her three kids they'll kill. As a result, any possibility of diplomatic accord between Aegon and Rhaenyra's side go right down the privy.
  • During the war, a group of Rhaenyra's supporters corner Criston Cole, and refuse any offer of settling things peacefully before having Criston shot full of holes. Ordinarily this would be a violation of chivalry, but they hold Criston as being entirely responsible for the war, which Cole has spent burning down whole villages, and want no romanticising of his death.
    Pate of Longleaf: I'll have no songs about how brave you died, Kingmaker. There's tens o'thousands dead on your account.
  • After the war, Lady Joanna Lannister has a beef to pick with the Greyjoys, who've taken up raiding the coast, including killing a few Lannisters. She decides the best course of action is go to the Iron Islands and kill every man, woman and child she can find. She just settles for burning a lot of things and abducting one Greyjoy, gelding him and turning him into her fool.
• When the Angels Left the Old Country: Little Ash eats the soul of Reb Fishl, who had extorted countless people and even murdered some. Uriel kills the demon doctor Serial Killer, but doesn't eat the soul. Little Ash also kills one of Sullivan's men and Sullivan himself.
• One of the first real signs that there's something wrong with Turin in The Children of Húrin is his treatment of Saeros. Saeros made racist remarks about Turin's people at dinner (claiming that their women must run through the woods nude), which caused them to come to blows, as Turin took it as an insult to his mother. For Turin's insolence, Saeros decided to murder him in the woods. However, when Turin outfights Saeros and turns the tables, having the elf at his mercy, rather than bring him before the king to stand trial, he strips Saeros naked and chases him through the woods with his sword out—something that leads to Saeros's death when he panics and makes a jump that leaves him at the bottom of a river with a split skull. Though even King Thingol admits upon hearing the full context that Turin was hardly unprovoked and pardons him, characters refer to his recklessness and his cruel humiliation of an elven lord as "orc-work."
• In The Pillars of the Earth, this is William Hamleigh's rationalization for most of his violent acts, although the audience would not be expected to agree, whether he is seizing a man's castle (and later raping his daughter) because the latter dishonored his family by spurning his marriage proposal; burning a neighboring town because it infringed on his economic rights as lord; or raping and killing his own serfs for failing to pay their debts to him.
• "El Inquisidor De Mexico": Jacobo arranges the death of Don Domingo's daughter, Sara, because he executed Jacobo's brother and wife.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa: Akella and Megs justify torturing an Order of Taghren member (who are witch assassins) this way. Linna doesn't agree, saying it just makes them evil too.
• In The Water-Babies, this is the job of the fairy Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid. Her main targets are people who have mistreated children.
  • When Tom first arrives at St. Brendan's Isle, he likes to play mean tricks on the local sea life, including feeding pebbles to the anemones. When Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid gives sweets to all the other water-babies, she only gives Tom a pebble.
  • She punishes doctors who have subjected children to Harmful Healing by pulling their teeth, bleeding them, and forcing them to take disgusting substances like calomel and jalap.
  • She punishes mothers who lace their daughters' stays too tight and put them in too-small boots in order to be fashionable by dressing them in equally uncomfortable clothes and then forcing them to dance.
  • She sticks pins in careless nurserymaids, straps them tightly into perambulators with their heads and arms hanging out, and pushes them around for hours.
  • She hits Sadist Teachers with rulers, canes, and birch-rods and orders them to memorise 300,000 lines of Hebrew.
  • Tom used to work as a chimney-sweep for a cruel master named Mr. Grimes. After Mr. Grimes drowns, Tom travels to the Other-end-of-Nowhere and finds him working as a chimney-sweep in a giant prison.
• Only Villains Do That: This is the modus operandi of the Anti-Villain protagonist.
  • Uncle Gently sold five orphans to Lady Grey, who then stabbed them to death and displayed the corpses around the city. Seiji responds by crucifying the former (after setting him on fire repeatedly) and waterboarding the latter for about five minutes while reciting a corny monologue.
  • Hoy is one of the biggest narcissistic bullies in the entire series, using his army as cannon fodder while constantly screaming childish threats at them. Seiji crushes him with a truck.^note Keep in mind, Medieval Stasis means nobody on the planet has seen a truck, so it's like getting charged and mauled by an Eldritch Abomination.

---