Basic Trope: A villainous character was at one point a normal, innocent child.
- Straight: Jeff Slaughter, the Big Bad, was once a friendly and ordinary little kid.
- Exaggerated: While he was a cheerful and saintly child, Jeff becomes a monster of Corrupt Bureaucrat Evil Old Folks who destroys planets for kicks as soon as he hits adulthood.
- Downplayed:
- Jeff was a good, but not great, kid, and as an adult, he's a bit of a jerk, but not completely.
- Jeff was an All Loving Child Prodigy when he was young, but he grew up a lot more cynical as times go on.
- Justified:
- Even villains were innocent at some point in time. Something had to make them bitter and twisted.
- Tragic Villain
- With a name like Jeff Slaughter, he was pretty much bound to live up to his name.
- Inverted:
- Jeff is an Evil Overlord as a baby, but calms down and becomes good when he grows up.
- Jeff was The Bully at school, but as an adult he is a pretty decent and amiable person.
- Subverted:
- The heroes learn that Jeff tortured animals as a child and cheerfully engaged in sociopathic behavior.
- Jeff Slaughter just turned creepy and weird for effect. He's still a decent person.
- Double Subverted:
- As a baby, however, Jeff was completely innocent. Parental Abandonment turned him to this disturbing behavior as a young boy.
- That was a ruse to deceive his enemies.
- Parodied:
- As a little kid, Jeff liked to play with butterflies, teddy bears, sing praises of Jesus, heal cancers and stand around being all beamy and smily. Until his eighteenth birthday, when he immediately became an Omnicidal Maniac.
- Jeff is a normal, unassuming teenager, but the exact moment he turns 18 he becomes a gun-wielding, chain-smoking dude.
- Zig Zagged: Jeff Slaughter, as a child, liked to draw war machines, not out of malevolence, but because he liked to invent things. His parents took this as an alarming sign, mistook him for a Creepy Child and shunned him. As a result, Jeff became really disturbed.
- Averted:
- Jeff's childhood is never shown.
- Jeff was evil since birth (or even before that).
- Enforced:
- "What was Jeff Slaughter like as a baby? He wasn't evil then, was he?"
- How shall we make Jeff's Heel–Face Turn towards the end of the story more convincing? Why, by showing that he was capable of decency in his past, of course!
- Lampshaded:
- "You don't know what I was like as a child! I was happy then! They made me what I am today!"
- "It's amazing on how much people can change."
- Exploited: The heroes successfully talk Jeff down by reminding him of his childhood.
- Defied:
- Jeff destroyed all evidence of his childhood when he became evil.
- Iron Woobie
- Discussed:
- "Hey, Hero, what was Jeff Slaughter like as a kid? He wasn't always evil, was he?"
- "Yeah yeah, Used to Be a Sweet Kid and all that. I've heard it a million times, Slaughter. Now, You Do Not Have to Say Anything..."
- Conversed: "It's creepy to think that Jeff Slaughter was a kid like you and me once." "Yeah, Children Are Innocent, right?"
- Deconstructed: As a child, Jeff Slaughter was good-natured and was completely harmless. However, all the abuse he put up with slowly drove him to take out his anger on the world. He destroyed his memories of the past and became the Big Bad.
- Reconstructed: Jeff Slaughter secretly thinks the best years of his life were when he was younger, and kept a single toy to remind him of his previous goodness.
- Implied:
- Jeff's lair has several photos of a happy family.
- Jeff's Supervillain Lair is filled with photos of himself in happier times, in contrast to the death traps and torture devices he has developed since then.
- Untwisted: Jeff is seen a child to be a cruel bully, until his meek victim Bob snaps and stabs him to death. From them on Bob deliberately styles himself after his former tormenter as Jeff Slaughter.
Too bad about Used to Be a Sweet Kid... It used to be such a nice trope... *sniff*
