Basic Trope: An evil thing is imprisoned and gives up being evil by the time its imprisonment ends.
- Straight: The Evil Wizard was imprisoned by heroes long ago. After a thousand years spent contemplating his mistakes, he's decided that his younger self was selfish and short-sighted, and it's a lot smarter and more moral to try to cooperate with civilization instead of tyrannizing it.
- Exaggerated: Gh'shrgh'grx the Incomprehensible was an Almighty Idiot who devoured worlds until it was sealed to keep it from eating the world. Over ten thousand years of watching the rest of the world that it was originally going to eat go by, it grows a consciousness and becomes very fond of it and its inhabitants and appoints itself as their protector when its seals inevitably break.
- Downplayed: The Evil Wizard is still amoral, unpleasant and unsettling, but he's decided that a global takeover is a fool's errand and doomed to fail and would prefer to just settle down to study magic by himself.
- Justified: The Dark Wizard's world conquest failed disastrously the first time — after all, that's why he was imprisoned to begin with — so why try again now after a thousand years of magical and technological advances?
- Inverted: The Goddess of Light was magically imprisoned by ambitious wizards and rulers who resented the limits she placed on their power. After millennia of stewing in there, she's decided that humans evidently can't be trusted with much freedom and tries to enslave humanity after being freed.
- Subverted: As it turns out, the Evil Wizard's change of heart was just a ploy to lull society into trusting him while he prepared for another power grab.
- Double Subverted: ... except that Good Feels Good, and the Wizard finds himself liking being part of peaceful society too much to go through with his plans, resulting in him Becoming the Mask.
- Averted: When he comes out of his can, the Evil Wizard is precisely the same tyrannical monster as he was when he went in.
- Lampshaded: "I don't know what I expected from the Scourge of Empires and Blotter of Light, but peace-and-love pacifism... wasn't it. Not that I'm complaining, mind."
