Punch Clock Villain / Literature

"A megalomaniac spends millions building a criminal empire only to have someone like Connie waltz in and bring the whole thing crashing down. If that megalomaniac survives, they often come back to me with renewed ambitions. If they perish, there's always someone else eager to fill the void. Connie and her heroics are great for my bottom line. I'm the very best in my field, but it's a speciality that wouldn't be much use if any of my clients actually succeeded."

— Patty Perkins, Constance Verity Destroys the Universe

Examples of Punch Clock Villains in Literature.

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• Adventure Hunters: Zambwe is hired to capture the adventurers. He has no grudge against them nor any stake in the Evil Plan. Once he has been paid for this job he disappears from the narrative.
• Yassen Gregorovich from the Alex Rider series. While he works as a Professional Killer for SCORPIA, a Nebulous Evil Organization that hires out its employees to commit assassinations, terrorist plots, and other atrocities for whoever pays them, he's only in it for the money and is something of a Noble Demon. He even sacrifices himself to save Alex in Eagle Strike, when Big Bad Damian Cray kills him as punishment for refusing to kill Alex, which he does because Alex's father saved his life once.
• American Gods
  • A disturbing example in the form of a glance inside the head of a kindly Nazi working the gas chambers in a concentration camp: "... and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy as the earth is cleansed of its pests."
  • The antagonists of the novel (the modern Anthropomorphic Personifications like Media and the Technical Boy) also turn out to be this in the scene at the hotel. It turns out that they aren't evil, or at least not any more so than the old gods. The whole conflict is a set-up by Wednesday and Loki.
  • Czernobog is almost a literal example. Every winter he becomes dark, bad-tempered, and fond of caving in heads with hammers, and is the incarnation of a rather nasty god — although not evil in the strictest of senses, being still relatively friendly to the heroes. When springtime comes he transforms into his much nicer brother Bielebog.
• "An Irish Airman foresees his death" by William Butler Yeats can be both this trope and Punch-Clock Hero, depending on whether you're an Irish airman or an adversary of an Irish airman. It has this as the third and fourth lines:
  Those that I fight I do not hate,
  Those that I guard I do not love.
• Gand Ioratth in Voices, the second in the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy. He's the leader of the occupying Ald army in Ansul, which is incredibly oppressive (books destroyed, religious freedom crushed, women raped and old men beaten, etc), so naturally most of the population hates him and the local Rebel Leader wants him dead. The first time Ioratth appears in the flesh, though, he's being impeccably courteous to Orrec (the previous book's hero), shows vocal disdain for his rude, zealot son, and we're told that he treats his Ansul lover well. Ioratth is actually quite pleased when he gets orders telling him to be less oppressive because he considers the whole venture to be a waste of time; he's only doing it because he's an Old Soldier following orders.
• In Apollo's Grove, a mercenary band attacks the temple of Apollo at Delphi in order to kidnap the Oracle. The captain of the band kills a temple priest without a second thought and threatens to massacre the entire temple group. But he does so with no hostility, explaining that everything he's doing is a business decision. He also urges the priests to bury their dead colleague, as he died with courage and conviction.
• Aubrey-Maturin: The British heroes and their French opponents often enjoy each other's company when on land or after one of them has surrendered. One reoccurring friendly enemy is Captain Christy-Palliere, who eventually becomes their ally in The Hundred Days when the French military forces split between Bonaparte and Louis XVIII.
• The Bartimaeus Trilogy: The demons, or spirits as they like to be called, are portrayed this way. At least until the third book.
• As unpleasant as he can be, Jerome Facher, the main antagonist of A Civil Action and the film based on it, is just a lawyer representing his client to the best of his abilities. Had the other party retained him, he would have probably represented them with the same determination and competence.
• Comrade Death: Hector Sarek once sold farm equipment for his company and when they became a weapon manufacturer he started selling guns instead. It was just his job until it became his life's work.
• Constance Verity Destroys the Universe: Patty Perkins herself isn't an evil mastermind, but more of a "supervillain enabler" (as Byron describes her), making a living helping wannabe masterminds become a genuine threat to world peace. She doesn't even mind Connie constantly thwarting their plans all that much, seeing her as beneficial to an industry that would crumble if any of her clients actually succeeded in their endeavors.
• Derk from Dark Lord of Derkholm is this trope in the extreme. He's a completely sweet and loveable wizard whose only wish is to work on his experimental creatures, but due to the extremely oppressive "boss" of his entire world, he's forced to play the Big Bad in his world for "tourists."
• In The Dark Tower (the final book of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series), it's revealed that many of the Big Bad Crimson King's Minions were in actuality obliviously evil, with the most prominent example being the decent, devoutly religious warden of the prison community where the "Breakers" — psychics who work to "break" the beams that hold all existence together — are held. He fully expects to go to Heaven once the job of destroying the Multiverse is complete, and to be well-received there.
• From Discworld:
  • As seen in the main page quote, the torturers of the Omnian Quisition in Small Gods. In the torture pits of the Omnian Inquisition, among the implements of painful death are the odd holiday nick-knacks, etchings, and mugs saying "World's Best Dad". As a matter of fact, the head of the Exquisition (the people who come in after the Inquisition have done their stuff) approves of Punch Clock Villains more than Psychos for Hire, because it proves that what they do to people is right.
  • Count Bela de Magpyr from Carpe Jugulum, sure he's a neck biting vampire, but in the words of his Igor "only adventurouth femaleth over the age of theventeen and looking good in a nightie" is who he goes for, and it's soon revealed that he has quite a camaraderie with the townsfolk, and actually likes phoenixes, who themselves hate evil. He makes a point of filling his lair with anti-vampire weapons that make it convenient to kill him temporarily, which he treats like a long nap and gets cranky if he's resurrected too soon. This was largely Pragmatic Villainy; he knows that if he's enough of a nuisance the villagers would start fighting back seriously he wouldn't stand a chance, as his successor learns the hard way.
  • Also the original incarnation of the Cable Street Particulars. In Night Watch, they're a branch of the police accountable to no one where the stories about what goes on behind those doors are usually pretty accurate. Eventually, Vimes (alias John Keel) barges into their headquarters and demands of a man "WHAT DOES DADDY DO AT WORK ALL DAY, MISTER?" In spite of the man's protests that he's only a clerk, Vimes is still inclined to hold him accountable for the horrors perpetrated.
    • The guy who actually performs the tortures is this too; Vimes recognizes the sort of thug for whom this is just a job, and stops the younger Vimes from beating him to death upon seeing what he has done.
  • In Making Money, the villain has a "cleaner" on payroll for him who spends the book killing everyone who unknowingly assisted his boss in his scheme to become Lord Vetinari. When not killing, the assassin seems a normal enough guy and has an interest in reading for pleasure. The villain's other employee finds this more worrying; if the guy was The Brute, he'd at least be understandable.
  • Not quite a villain but Professor John Hicks — er, Hix, Head of the Department of necro- er, Post-Mortem Communications, is required by University Statute to commit moderately evil acts. These include pressuring people to attend community theatre productions. He's also required to make tasteless remarks and use Brutal Honesty in staff meetings. His department is surprisingly popular with students, partly because part of the job is hunting down unofficial evil wizards and enforcing the monopoly (i.e. you get to throw fireballs at people) and partly because nobody expects them to obey the whole "wizards are celibate" thing.
  • Both the Thieves Guilds and Assassin's Guild are made up of punch clock villains; the former exists because Vetinari believes that if there's to be crime, it should be organized, sees off-hours thievery as one of the greatest offences against the guild rules, and makes a habit of helping beggars and taking in orphans. The latter provides the best education and tailoring on the disc, and its members are perfectly average aristocrats and the like who just, every once in a while, get paid to kill someone. Just business, I'm sure you understand.
    • Many of the Assassins just go the the school for the education, and because they are aristocrats and thus potential targets of assassination, so knowing the tricks of the trade helps them defend themselves. Most drop out before the final examination, and even those who go through with it discover that the target they've been ordered to "inhume" is a dummy, so it's entirely possible to graduate without ever having killed someone.
• In Divine Misfortune, The Great Serpent Jörmungandr from Norse Mythology is briefly woken up when all the collective gods from the Court of Divine Affairs nuke Gorgoz, only to fall back asleep when he sees that Götterdämmerung isn't set to go off for at least 2,000 years.
• Doctor Who:
  • "Engines of War":
    • The Castellan, who helps use the mind probe on Cinder on Karlax's orders but is clearly very upset about doing so and shows the Doctor where Cinder is. Later he helps the Doctor escape Gallifrey, despite knowing he'll probably get executed for this.
  • In "The Resurrection Casket", the hideous interdimensional monster Kevin is not evil or ravenous, or anything a monster is. He'd be entirely content simply hanging out at a pub and watching a football game with his pals, but when someone is given a cursed piece of paper, he's duty-bound to kill them, or he'll be sent to a hell dimension until called back.
• The Dresden Files
  • Turn Coat: The summoner-for-hire Binder. He's not exactly a villain, he just wants the bounty on Morgan. Technically the people hunting for Morgan are actually the good guys. Regardless he doesn't have anything against anyone there personally, it's just that our heroes happens to be on the other side of the issue. Harry lets him walk away from the whole thing for this (and other) reason(s).
    • Binder makes a return in Skin Game, where he ends up on the same team as Harry (not entirely voluntarily on the latter's part). He gets enough screen time to establish that he really does practice what he preaches: he's in it for the money, personal sentiments beyond that are unprofessional. When, to no ones surprise, the whole job becomes a mess he gets frustrated at the general lack of professionalism (including that of his former partner) and helps the heroes make a clean getaway. In exchange for his share of the money, of course.
  • Subverted by some of the other creatures Harry encounters. They try to play this card with varying success over the course of the series.
• In Raymond Briggs' Fungus the Bogeyman, Bogeymen scare people because it's their job. The eponymous Fungus has a bit of an existential crisis about it, wondering "what's it all about".
• The Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) official novelization portrays Alan Jonah's subordinate eco-terrorist mercenaries in such a light. During the Osprey ride to Outpost 32, they're chuckling and talking with each-other like ordinary work buddies, until it's time for them to massacre another Monarch outpost, and then they become all-business; something which greatly disturbs Madison. Jonah's right-hand Asher in the novel makes it clear that while he believes in Jonah's cause and will kill as many people as Jonah tells him to, that doesn't mean he'll enjoy it.
• Good Omens
  • The Chattering Order of Saint Beryl, a group of Satanic nuns who are fairly ordinary people aside from helping to bring about Armageddon (via swapping the Antichrist for the baby of another family), and who regard Ax-Crazy animal-sacrificing Satanists in the same way that most moderate Christians regard certain "fire and brimstone" extremist Christians. This is played for ironic laughs at the moment when the nuns do the switch, when the text informs us that it's possible that the nuns, as part of some dark satanic ritual, did something so terrifyingly horrible and evil to the baby who was swapped for the Antichrist that we would be horrified to our souls to hear of it; however, we can imagine that they made sure that the baby was given to a lovely family who would raise him well if we want to make ourselves feel better. It was later revealed to be the second option all along.
  • Aziraphale and Crowley, an actual angel and demon respectively, consider fundamentalists and Satanists as a Vietnam veteran would consider a civilian who walks around wearing camo. Crowley himself has a job that involves tempting mortals into sin and bringing about Armageddon, but when he isn't working, he just likes to feed ducks in the park. Similarly with the nuns, he has a throwaway thought about Satanists who weren't crazy murderers, but did their rituals and went on being otherwise normal people. Then there's the fact that he didn't fall so much as saunter vaguely downwards.
  • Crowley himself has reflected that while the wages of sin are Death, you get to clock off early on Fridays and as Sloth is a Sin, nobody bothers if you take the occasional duvet day.^note Or in his case, a duvet century. Crowley skipped a whole hundred years of the mediaeval era by being asleep and left the humans to get on with it, unassisted.
  • Three of The Four Horsemen work regular day jobs. They still spread misery, but mostly just to pass the time until they are needed. War is a war correspondent journalist who has the uncanny ability to get there before the fighting starts, Famine runs a fast food company and gives dietary advice that are all extremely unhealthy, and Pollution (Pestilence retired due to penicillin) works a string of jobs that just happen to result in environmental disasters. Death is always working as Death, but departs without a fight when it becomes clear that the apocalypse has been cancelled.
• Every baddie in The Grapes of Wrath, as lampshaded in a tragicomic scene where a fellow who's been forced off his farm tries to figure out who to shoot in revenge.
• The Great Greene Heist: In To Catch a Cheat, villainous hacker Kayla Hall is laidback whenever she's not helping the Big Bad with his schemes in order to finance her computer upgrades and doesn't hate any of the heroes besides Megan (who once got her banned from a robotics tournament and then gloated about it). She is willing to talk shop and share cookies with her antagonists, tells them that she has a contract that forbids her from naming her employer, and then goes back to trying to set them up for her boss after that meeting.
• This is a huge part of the premise to Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea Of Stories. Big Bad Katham-Shud's henchmen are all unimpressive clerks who are doing very boring-looking jobs that just happen to be ruining imagination as we know it. Inverted by Katham-Shud himself, who looks like a Punch Clock Villain but is more of a Card-Carrying Villain.
• After Voldemort's Death Eaters take over the Ministry of Magic in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the normal Ministry workers become this. They publish anti-Muggle propaganda and persecute Muggle-born wizards, even if they don't believe in it themselves.
• Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest:
  • Clifford is a Cyclops that Questers who come to Gateway, Nevada have to fight as part of their quest. He's actually a Nice Guy in his off-hours, the grand battle treated like a day job at a local attraction than a genuine battle between good and evil. When Helen and Troy first encounter him, they actually find him on his lunch-break and hold a conversation with him.
  • It's normal for questers to have adversaries of some kind chasing after them for one reason or another. When the Wild Hunt gang try intimidating a waitress in a diner in Gateway, she remarks that she's served things from talking dire wolves to armies of the undead, so a biker-gang of orcs won't intimidate her.
• In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
  • The Vogons are a whole race of these. They're not actually evil, just officious, bureaucratic, bad-tempered and callous. They've managed to levy their sluglike determination into being "professionally unpleasant" for the entire galaxy. Ford tries talking one young Vogon out of throwing him and Arthur out of the nearest airlock, but while he's momentarily tempted he figures he'd best get back to work, which in this case involves throwing them out the airlock and getting on with some shouting he's got to do (which he enjoys).
  • The cops towards the end of the book are "a couple of intelligent caring guys that you'd probably quite like if you met us socially!"
• A Hole in the Fence: The cops stopping the main characters from sneaking into the forest bordering the Forbidden Zone are only doing their jobs; they would not even care about people going to the place if their livelihoods were not depending on keeping them out. This is shown when brigadier Beauras sees Basile and Rafistole openly walking into the Zone...and he gives a friendly greeting. Since he has just been promoted, he happily declares he no loger cares about people going in and out of there.
• Humane Tyranny: Executing people for having the rotten luck of having their Social Security Numbers randomly selected through the Lottery of Doom is just a job for Harvey and many others at the Population Reduction Agency.
• Probably most of the Capitol citizens who work for The Hunger Games as stylists, beauticians, escorts, etc. They may be involved in the politically oppressive annual murders of teenagers, but they didn't establish them, they don't rule Panem, and in the grand scheme of things, are basically just government employees. There's also the fact the government expects obedience out of everyone: them included.
• In If This Goes On— a science fiction novella by Robert A. Heinlein, our hero is captured by the evil government. He notices that the several torturers for the government show no pleasure in their job, they are strictly business. It is implied that anyone who likes to inflict pain is not permitted in that job, as they are supposed to get information, not necessarily hurt people (although that is always an option if they think it will help).
• In Death: Sylvester Yost from Betrayal In Death is very much this. He kills people because he's paid to, and he looks at what he does as a job in which he puts a number of years into it, and then he can retire and live in what he considers relative peace. Don't believe for a minute that he's a great guy, however. On the job, he rapes his target and strangles him or her with silver wire. He is The Sociopath and needs to be stopped.
• Lampshaded in Ivanhoe. It is noted that the Templar guards will execute Rebecca in a heartbeat but will not allow Bois-Guillbert to sexually harrass her before her sentence.
• In Kafka on the Shore, the character reads about Adolf Eichmann's trial. The man calmly planned the logistics for the Holocaust, but thought of himself as just a clerk doing his job.
• The Last Adventure of Constance Verity: Connie once ruined a first date by assuming that the suave man she was seeing was The Hyena, an infamous assassin. While she was right on his identity, she was wrong in that he wasn't sent to kill her; he actually was going on a normal date that just so happened to be with Constance Verity and wasn't planning on killing her. While she apologized for the injuries that ensued, he didn't return her calls.
• Lost Stars: Wedge Antilles finds out that not all people view the Rebel Alliance as heroes and saviors, especially those with family and friends in the Imperial Army who were killed by them. While they are fighting an oppressive government, many of the cogs within that government are simply common decent folk who are trying to make a living.
• The poem "The Man He Killed" by Thomas Hardy shows this view of the rank and file of one's enemies in wartime, as a way of pointing out the downsides of war.
• Meg Langslow Mysteries: A year before "Some Like it Hawk", a departing Corrupt Politician mortgaged all of the county buildings and then embezzled the mortgage money, causing a sleazy company to foreclose on the jail and other county buildings. The county clerk barricaded himself in the courthouse basement to delay the foreclosure and the company couldn't force him out without damaging their own infrastructure and causing a legal hassle, but by the time the book starts they are they keeping the (known) exits to the basement under tight guard and trying to make him leave through unscrupulous means while hiding the fact that their own legal claim to the property is based on sketchy documentation. However, several company employees aren’t malicious people and are only opposing the protagonists due to their jobs, get along with the townspeople (one guard is even dating a local girl with no ulterior motive), and, in some cases, quit by the end of the book. They include a falconer hired to kill the clerk’s carrier pigeons (he wasn’t told they were pets until later on), some but not all of the security guards who are watching the barricade (a few were even fired on suspicion of helping the clerk because they were playing cards with him through his barricade), the Honest Corporate Executive Victim of the Week, and a Private Investigator the company hired to find out how the clerk is still sneaking food in.
• The Mental State features a character called 'Big Billy'. He serves as The Dragon to his brother, 'Little Mickey'. Although he is willing to beat up anyone who opposes his brother, he only does this because he promised one of their relatives that he would protect Mickey at all costs. He even has a daughter that he cares about deeply.
• The Murderbot Diaries: The Barish-Estranza squad in System Collapse are just there to do their job and maybe earn a bonus. That job happens to be to convince, con, or coerce the colonists into de facto slavery as indentured labourers through any means necessary.
• Andrei Belyanin's On-call Demon has the protagonist Abifasdon working as a collector for those who have sold their soul. His wife is working in Hell's Temptation Department, seducing humans and getting them to sell their souls for pleasure. Abifasdon's best (and only) friend is a SWAT-type angel who beats up Abifasdon every day. The main plot of the novel? Abifasdon and his wife trying to have a baby.
• A lot of side characters in Richard Stark's Parker novels (though not Parker himself) are just people happen to making a living through thievery. Most notable is Alan Grofield who thinks of himself as an actor, not a thief. Robbery is just what he does to keep his summer stock theatre company afloat.
• In Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure, the hero is once approached by a well-dressed man who introduces himself, informs him that the Assassin's Guild has taken out a contract on him, and asks him to roll up his sleeve. Hilarity Ensues.
• Inigo Montoya even points out his own status as a Punch Clock Villain in The Princess Bride, telling Westley that "there's not a lot of money in revenge."
• Prisoners of Power aka Inhabited Island briefly explores the chilling effect of this trope being played seriously. A captured insurgent sneeringly tells his interrogators that their hate and passion makes them ineffective at cracking him, because it's just too easy for him to see them as enemies who must be defied. Now, when he had been tortured by some small-time drones, who didn't give a shit about him or the reasons he'd been tortured for, and showed more passion at filing the accompanying paperwork or cursing their wretched pay than at sawing off his arm, then he'd been terrified to the bone.
• In Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, a former concentration camp guard is on trial as a war criminal, mainly because she was given the task of making sure that none of her prisoners escaped during a march. On an overnight stop, the prisoners were locked in a church, which caught on fire. Rather than risking disobeying orders by showing the prisoners mercy, the guards chose to leave them locked inside while the building burned to the ground. When confronted about it, she seemed confused that she was on trial despite having followed her orders, and asked the judge, "What would you have done?" This from a woman who had at other times shown kindness to the prisoners.
• REAMDE: Sokolov is a Russian mercenary who takes a job as security for a Mafiya boss that ultimately requires him to engage in kidnapping and worse. Zula recognizes that he's different from the other mob thugs and might help her when push comes to shove. Indeed, from Sokolov's point of view, we find that he's ashamed of working for such crooks and decides to help Zula if his employers try to harm her.
• Damon "Demon" Larkham in Matthew Reilly's Scarecrow. He runs a ruthless, highly efficient (they exterminate the Taliban) and technologically advanced band of mercenaries (called IG-88), but he still gets beaten by the heroes. At the end of the novel, he and his men corner Aloysius Knight. Just as Knight has a huge Oh, Crap! moment, Larkham gives a short speech about how "what happens on the field stays on the field," congratulates Knight, then walks away.
• Ben's stepbrother is this in the children's novel Skymaze, as the Matrix-esque game makes him a villain and forces him to try to kill Ben every time they play.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Bronn has almost no scruples and will do just about anything for money, whether it's heroism or skulduggery.
  • Most Lannisters who are not in the main line of succession are more affable and sympathetic than the descendants of Tywin Lannister. They basically carry their tasks out of duty to their household.
  • There are a fair number of Freys who are not particularly proud of their roles in the Red Wedding, but still carry out their household duties.
  • Sandor Clegane is an example of an originally innocent and still rather kind-hearted individual who was molded into a villain out of continuous sheer abuse from a young age, specifically to serve his lord as The Brute — he both hates it and hates himself for also loving it on some levels. He might have gotten some redemption by shunning his Hound persona and (purportedly) becoming a grave-digger.
• Sergeant Zim and the other Boot Camp NCOs from the book Starship Troopers. While not technically evil, their job is to make sure that the 90% who can't cope with being in the M.I. or don't want the franchise bad enough drop out as early as possible. It is stated that the suffering they induce is too impersonal to be the work of a bully, that "Basic training is made AS HARD AS POSSIBLE, and for good reasons", and that all NCOs are decent (by NCO standards) to the ones who are left, when they know they are going to hack it. It's even pointed out that bullies tend to make bad instructors, since people who dole out misery for their own pleasure might get bored of it and start goofing off.
• Some of the Star Wars Legends novels which focus on people working for the Empire embrace this trope.
  • Star Wars: Allegiance has five stormtroopers whose consciences eventually override their willingness to take orders, though admittedly they didn't have a choice about leaving.
  • Death Star is about a collection of people working on, well, the Death Star. A trooper, a gunnery officer, a cantina operator, a couple of convicts, a surgeon, a pilot, a librarian. It's also about Admiral Motti, Grand Moff Tarkin, and Darth Vader, so it's partly a Villain Protagonist novel, but the other characters all assumed the Death Star would never be used on an inhabited world. As the surgeon tells Leia while he's treating her after torture, he can't leave.
  • The gunnery officer who hit the final button to fire the superlaser was one of the main characters. He is immensely humanized; we learn that what he'd always wanted was to fire the biggest gun, that he sort of cheated in arm wrestling because a tendon had been torn and reattached in a stronger place, that he backed up his fellow gunners. He also followed orders. The prison planet, well, it was inhabited almost entirely by convicts, but some of them had been political prisoners or wrongfully convicted or guards. He saw Alderaan, though, as his personal Moral Event Horizon, making him one of the biggest mass-murderers ever, bringing him misery beyond his wildest dreams. He was the one saying "Stand by" when the Death Star was in range of Yavin — he knew that if he refused they would just get another gunner and give him a death mark, but he desperately didn't want to fire again and was fervently hoping that something would come up. And it did. Poor bastard.
    • Lampshaded by Randall and a passing customer in Clerks, considering the deaths of civilian contractors on the half-built second Death Star. Although it's played with as the passing customer, himself a building contractor, brings up the example of a job he turned down for a prominent mobster that a friend of his took instead, only for his friend to be killed in a drive-by shooting targeting the mobster. The contractor argues that just as his friend knowingly took a dangerous job for a person targeted by powerful enemies despite being fully aware of the risks he might face, so to did any independent contractors working on the Death Star knowingly take a job working on a massive battleship during a civil war despite being a huge target for the other side, and so should have accepted any risks that came along with it.
  • Also, from the New Jedi Order books is Yuuzhan Vong Shaper Nen Yim. While most of her colleagues are straight Mad Scientists, Nen Yim is legitimately trying to produce useful research that will help save her species from extinction, and she bears the victims of her experiments no malice or real ill-will. She ends up doing a Heel–Face Turn after realizing that her people have gone very wrong in the distant past and will rush headlong to their own self-destruction if they keep going like they have been.
  • All the others keep telling the non-Mad Scientists that they have a god-provided Great Big Book of Everything which includes every design they could possibly ever need and the means to repair anything. Turns out that their current tech level is as far as the book goes, and there's no workable tech to repair what is already dying. When Nen Yim finally finds this out she very nearly gets a permanent home on the funny farm.
  • The Old Republic: Deceived has Vrath Xizor, a mercenary working for a Hutt cartel. In his very first scene he develops some respect for Zeerid Korr, as both are former soldiers, and is not pleased that he may have to kill him. And in his very dark final scene, long after Vrath has already completed his objective, Zeerid outright murders him anyway after he fails to convince him he is no longer a threat.
  • The Mandalorians are an odd case of this to the Empire. Sure, they contract with the Sith as hired guns, but it's a Stealth Insult. Their true motive is to test their might against the best — the "best" in their eyes are the Republic and the Jedi, who they will praise to the hills as being Worthy Opponents and honorable fighters. The Sith and the Empire? Meh. They're good for a paycheck, and slightly better about honoring contracts than the Hutts.
• Most of the henchmen of Hellion's Henchmen from Super Minion. Some believe in the organization (which does a lot of good, for all that they are technically criminals) and a few are interested in climbing the ranks and becoming full supervillains, but for most of them it's just an occasionally-scary job that pays well.
• Tales of Kolmar has the villain hire mercenaries to go after someone. She is defended by an ex-mercenary who sees through their attempts to get casually close and warns them that they can leave now and it'll be fine, but if they go after her they're all dead, and urges the youngest one to leave the profession. The mercenaries do go after their target and are repelled, losing several of their own. After that, shaken, the youngest one decides that he's had enough and quits, and all the older mercs are pleased for him, but they won't quit a contract. All of them get killed.
• In The Two Towers, Sam reflects over a fallen foe (a member of an army marching in support of the Dark Lord, not an orc), "He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace." A version of this rumination was given to Faramir as a speech in the Extended version of the movie.
  • The Orcs are a subversion. At first, they sound for all the world like grousing Tommies straight out of Rudyard Kipling, grumbling about the lack of entertainment and decent food... until you realize they tend to alleviate both by torturing a captive to death and eating him.
• Lewis of Touch certainly seems to be this. He makes a point that his work as a tracker is something he does only to get the various factions of New York to leave him in peace.
• In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout-as-narrator explains that children of lawyers often assume that whatever colleague their parent goes up against in court is a bad guy, only to be mystified by the sight of them acting like friends when court's not in session. By the time of Tom Robinson's trial, Scout and Jem have outgrown this, and they're familiar enough with the prosecutor, Mr. Gilmer, to recognize and appreciate the tricks he employs, all in the spirit of a fair trial. Neither of them is quite old enough to realize until the guilty verdict that that's not what's going on this time, and for the case of a black man accused of raping a white woman, no one's bothered hitting any punch clock. There is also a subverted example: upon witnessing the way Mr. Gilmer speaks to Tom Robinson, a sickened Dill storms out of the courtroom. Scout attempts to explain to him that Gilmer is only doing his job and is attempting to rattle Tom; Dill immediately retorts that he's aware of that, but Gilmer's job certainly doesn't require him to be so racist and dehumanizing towards Tom, and that Scout's father Atticus never resorted to such tactics in his own cross-examinations.
• Toy Academy: The residents of Evil Toy Academy are taught to be the bad guys of their respective toylines. However, while "bad guy" is the role they play, they never actually do anything too evil in the story itself. The worst thing they do is chase Grumbolt back to Toy Academy when he infiltrates their school. Even though Commander Hedgehog claims that this puts his students in danger, the Evil toys don't actually attempt to hurt anyone.
• Kronmir of The Traitor Son Cycle isn't antagonistic to the Red Knight - he's simply been hired by his enemies, and is simply doing his job. Even the Red Knight understands it — when Kronmir realizes just how off his rocker his employer is and bails out, the Knight employs him.
• Military thriller Victoria treats many of the soldiers and law enforcement officers fighting for the corrupt federal government this way. Most of them are actually either sympathetic to the secessionists, or if not that then largely neutral, and stay on the job only to feed their families in an economically corroding dystopia; only a small minority honestly believe in the unrealistic ideologies their superiors adhere to.
• Captain Ramballe of the French army that invades Russia in War and Peace is very much this. He sits down with Pierre in occupied Moscow and offers him dinner and wine, discussing how the Russians performed splendidly at the Battle of Borodino, commending them for such a fine job at defending their own country.
• While some of the Black Ajah in The Wheel of Time are genuinely evil, many joined it only for the opportunities of power it gave, and are not particularly keen on that whole world-destroying stuff.
• In Theodore Cogswell's short story Wolfie, Dr. Arsoldi is a sorcerer (in denial as to his accomplice's demonic nature) in New York City specializing in helping murderers commit the perfect crime. He also has to stand security; if the murder falls through, it's off to Hell he goes. At the time the story starts, he's already had one close call. Naturally, the next job is a textbook case of Epic Fail.

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