Exploring various Start of Darkness scenarios in Fan Works.
Crossovers
- Flat Dreams is a Gravity Falls prequel fic written as a possible origin story for Bill Cipher. It is also a crossover- in this version, Bill is originally from Flatland.
- Invoked by the Joker in A Frog in Arkham Asylum: he murdered Jade's parents, then framed her and gets her thrown into prison, all in the hopes of driving her past her breaking point.
- Guardians, Wizards, and Kung-Fu Fighters: When Nerissa killed Yua the Banshee on a mission before learning that her actions were due to a plague that had been affecting the people of her world (Yua being the bearer of her world's Heart), which led to her slowly becoming a Knight Templar before eventually crossing a line by killing all the Great Barons of Creznac, which caused her to lose the Heart of Kandrakar, attacking and killing Cassidy in response. Then, after the Mage freed her, hoping to help reform her, Nerissa repaid her by killing her and stealing her identity.
- Magical Girls Unite Retransformed: Whenever Seinaru purifies a Magi, he sees a vision of their final moments before becoming a witch.
- Oni Ga Shiku Series: Mikumo Akatani's life was never stellar since he was a quirkless anti-social bullied teen with the grand total of three friends (out of which only his crush treated him like an actual friend), but he had a supportive mother and a goal to get into UA. Then, he fails the UA entrance exam, his mother dies, and none of his friends show up in the funeral or ever contact him after middle school. What happened afterwards is unclear, but years later he is a Manipulative Bastard and an Omi Alliance Patriarch, serving as the Knight of Cerebus in Izuku's story. In fact, part of his plot against Izuku is to emulate the circumstances that led to his Start of Darkness by kidnapping and then pretending to murder Izuku's mom. He almost succeeds too.
- Respect shows how the sweetest, most timid character of her respective series goes from bully-bait to Magical Girl to rampaging villain.
- Stars Above: Homura first explains how her timeline's Kagami got started in Chapter 3. Chapter 9 serves as a Whole Episode Flashback to further flesh out those events.
- There's a Tumblr roleplay that crosses over X-Men: First Class with the alluded-to-in-canon 1960s era of Watchmen, which means that Magneto and Mystique's fall to villainy is played out right alongside, and in some cases interactively with, Ozymandias and Rorschach's own slides into Anti-Villain status.
- The Shadow Queen's journey From Nobody to Nightmare is told in two non-consecutive chapters of Yu Gi Oh! The Thousand Year Door: Redux. The protagonists hear the first part in Chapter 36
from a descendent of a survivor of her atrocities, and the Queen herself decides to tell them the rest later, in Chapter 42. It's a long, sad, tragic story that started with a poor beggar being neglected, losing her two brothers, and ending up making a Deal with the Devil after falling into a Despair Event Horizon.
- Queen of All Oni: The fic is all about Jade's Queen persona re-emerging, and her desire for power driving her further into the realm of dark magic. And then an Evil Sorcerer kidnaps and tortures, the PTSD from which slowly drives her insane, until she snaps completely in the final chapters of the story.
- The Cosmos: Lila Used to Be a Sweet Kid, until she was misdiagnosed with a rare, terminal illness. Rather than supporting her in her time of need, all of her supposed friends turned their backs upon her... and after she learned about the mistake, accused her of faking her illness for attention and sympathy points. Despite the utter Lack of Empathy they'd shown.
- Villain Of Your Own Story:
- As the new Hawk Moth in the post-Wish world, Alya has one, though she doesn't recognize it as such: her family was forced to move after she spread Malicious Slander on her blog, tarnishing their reputation. Upon finding the Butterfly Brooch, she was eager to become a real-life superhero, only to find that the Brooch was meant for support. So she decided to become a 'fake supervillain', luring out others with more action-oriented Miraculous in hopes of stealing them for herself and becoming a real hero.
- Adrien, meanwhile, blames the rest of Ms. Bustier's class for Chloe's legal troubles, dismissing their honest accounts of how she bullied them as Malicious Slander that landed her in juvie. Furthermore, without the Butterfly Miraculous, his father was left using the Peacock Pin to try and achieve his goals; as a result, he ended up comatose, leaving Nathalie as Adrien's legal guardian and the future of his family's fortune in doubt.
- A Breach of Trust: When Teruki was ten, Claw decided that the best way to force him to join their organization was to ensure he had nobody else he could turn to. So they forced evil spirits into his parents and teacher, making them utterly despise Teruki and start abusing him. Even after he discovered the plot, getting rid of the evil spirits didn't erase the hatred they's instilled into their unwilling hosts, to the point where his mother wasn't able to look at him anymore.
- Abraxas: Empty Fullness: The third one-shot, "Damnatio Memoriae", covers Ghidorah's early backstory: from how Ichi, Ni and San were captured and inhumanely experimented on by Abusive Precursors, to when Ghidorah killed an entire planet in a desperate effort to make the Old Noise stop screaming in their heads night and day... only for the Old Noise to start coming back afterwards, putting Ghidorah on the path to killing its former jailers and killing many more planets, again and again, in a vicious cycle in the futile hope that they might one day make the Old Noise stop permanently... until, by the time that the passage of millions of years has made the Old Noise fade, Ghidorah will have gotten so used to devoting their every waking hour to finding and killing everything in sight for so long, that killing and tormenting things has become all they know and live for anymore.
- Discussed in With Confidence; Nedzu scolds Izuku for not considering the full potential repercussions of his Laser-Guided Karma against Hada. By using Hada's own actions to ruin his chances of making it into a hero school, he unintentionally causes the regular schools to follow suit. With his future effectively destroyed, Hada could easily see villainy as his only way out.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
- In Ace Combat: Wings of Unity, the Big Bad, Aurora Starlight, was intially a curious unicorn filly. When she heard about the alicorns and got additional information from Princess Celestia, things began to go downhill. Her attempts at gaining wings were met with Celestia's disapproval, she was banished from Equestria for life, because her experiments were perceived as dangerous. For the next 50 years, she was planning revenge against the princess she used to adore.
- Aviators' "Ashes" describes how the MLP villains Discord and King Sombra became evil.
- In Bride of Discord, Discord explains his backstory to Fluttershy, revealing that as a child, he was left as the Last of His Kind and when he tried to befriend ponies, he was ostracized by pony society for his appearance, leading to him becoming a recluse living out in a cave. But Discord didn't become the fiend he was when her and her friends first met him, until Princess Celestia, after hearing of his great magical powers, came to him offering friendship and asking him to use his powers to help pony-kind, with Discord implying he developed a crush on her. But they quickly had a falling out after Discord's attempts at "helping" ended up just creating more problems, causing Celestia to snap at him. He did not take the one pony to offer him compassion in his life snapping at him well, at all.
- How I Lost My Mother is an Origins Episode for Cozy Glow which details how she was disowned and Un-Personed by her own mother, Princess Celestia, who was trying to prevent a troubling prophecy from coming to pass. Despite eventually realizing that this might have been a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Celestia refuses to recant; learning this fully solidifies Cozy Glow's desire to take revenge upon her mother.
- Inner Demons:
- The original Queen of Darkness was an Alicorn named Midnight who was spawned in Tartarus, but upon seeing the light and beauty of Equestria, fell in love with it and eventually became its benevolent queen. Then the denizens of Tartarus tracked her down and demanded that she become their ruler and destroy Equestria. This caused Midnight's subjects to betray her, which in turn caused her to become the Queen of Darkness and try to destroy her former kingdom, until the pony who would become known a the Master of Harmony rose up against her and destroyed her with the Elements of Harmony. With her last breath, Midnight swore to return and have her revenge, and eventually she was reincarnated as Twilight Sparkle, who in turn was therefore destined from birth to become the next Queen of Darkness.
- The sequels expanded on this a deal further. It turns out another reason Midnight fell was because after she rejected Tartarus, her subjects, egged on by a Stalker with a Crush, killed the pony she loved, and her former friend Vale turned on her for being a demon. Twilight Sparkle remembers some of this, and is still pissed off at Vale for it.
- The Nuptialverse has Metamorphosis, which explains the origins of Queen Chrysalis. She was originally one of Commander Hurricane's chief lieutenants, but her refusal to make peace with the other tribes and personal thirst for power led to her being kicked out. She then made a deal with Discord to gain great power, which he twisted to make her the first changeling and his dragon. She and the changelings were sealed with him when the Princesses defeated him, and then kept sealed by him upon his release to be set free as a backup plan in case he was defeated again. Of course, Chrysalis has no intention of continuing to serve him.
- Pony POV Series:
- The series has the Origins arc, which shows the backstory of Celestia, Luna, and Discord, and therefore serves as the latter's Start Of Darkness. Discord was never quite right to begin with, as it's shown that the draconnequi were like the Shiva of The Multiverse, performing Cosmic Retcons in order to prevent worlds from ending, with Discord enjoying it far more than his siblings, who were only doing their jobs. That being said, in the grand scheme of things he was just a bully and a brat — until an act of defiance on Celestia's part triggered a series of events that not only led to Discord embracing his sadism, but began a war between the Alicorns and Draconnequi, during which he was further mentored in evil by the Fallen Alicorn Morning Star. When the war ended, Discord was reborn in Equestria as a mortal (along with Celestia and Luna) with no memory of his past existence, leading to him becoming an odd, but ultimately kind-hearted being... until his true personality resurfaced and consumed his good one. From that point on, he was the Big Bad from canon and the rest of the series. Oh, and bonus points, it's shown at the end of the arc that when the Princesses defeated and sealed him away, his last act was to plant the seeds of doubt that led to Luna becoming Nightmare Moon. So he's responsible for her Start Of Darkness too!
- "Fading Futures" was a fan-made ending to the (at the time) unresolved Bad Future, that involved Twilight Sparkle becoming the vengeance-crazed Nightmare Purgatory and then having a Heel Realization. However, when the Bad Future was officially revisited in the Dark World Series, it was eventually revealed that the Greater-Scope Villain is Purgatory's evolved form Paradox, at which point Alexwarlorn (the primary author) released an altered version of "Fading Futures" called "A Fading Future", edited so that there was no Heel Realization and showed Purgatory/Paradox starting her revenge plan, making it a proper SOD.
- Chrysalis' start of darkness is covered as an addendum during the short arc that followed the end of Dark World: back at the Dawn of Time, a younger and more Hot-Blooded Cadence became convinced that magic was inherently evil and tried to kill Amicitia (the Magician Alicorn) in order to prevent its existence. After Amicitia nearly killed Cadence in self defense, Cadence's Light of Existence went to live a mortal life to teach her how wrong she was, leaving behind her Shadow of Existence... which, against every rule of the POV universe, somehow clung to sentience and a sense of self through sheer force of will. Pandora was impressed enough by this that she helped the Shadow gain its own Light, turning it into Chrysalis, who was sent into the mortal world. And then there's her Origins Episode, which shows her childhood after being reborn and how she eventually became Queen of the Changelings by killing their previous Queen, Cocoon.
- Shadows provides one for King Sombra. He not only Used to Be a Sweet Kid (Celestia's, in fact), but he actually wasn't all that different from Twilight, being a kindhearted academic with a close-knit circle of friends. However, watching his father Star Swirl the Bearded grow old and die, he became terrified by the thought of death, and obsessed with achieving immortality. This obsession led to him driving away his friends, creating the Alicorn Amulet to try and boost his power to god-like levels, and ultimately his Moral Event Horizon crossing of conquering the Crystal Empire.
- In Split Second, Sparkle got her powers at age eight, discovered she could kill magically at nine, given a reason to dislike ponies at ten, created zombies by eleven, had her mentor die at twelve, ate her first soul at thirteen, and was abandoned (sort of) by her sister.
- War of the Biju: The Gold and Silver Brothers started down their dark road during the Warring Clans era, when Madara and a few other Uchiha massacred the majority of their clan.
- In Which Guzma Is Frustrated is a prequel to Pokémon Sun and Moon about how Team Skull formed. It shows how and why Guzma became a criminal. After being frustrated that he couldn't become kahuna, he began acting out and bullying others.
- In the doujin "I'm working at a mahou shoujo recruitment company, but I think I may be at my limit" by Momiji Mao (NSFW warning for ads, since the doujin in question is on Danbooru), Kyubey is a worker at a magical girl recruitment company and down on his luck, such that his boss is threatening to terminate him if he keeps dragging down the company. The only people who believe in him are his wife Kyuko, who is three months along with Kyubey's baby, and his work buddy Kyuzo, the only one in the workplace who knows he is trying his best. Bolstered by this, Kyubey works extra hard, even pulling all-nighters, and manages to get ten new magical girls into the fold. But then it's revealed that not only did Kyuzo screw Kyubey over by taking all the credit for his accomplishments, but when Kyubey calls Kyuzo up and demands an explanation for this shit, that's when he (and we) learn that this isn't even the half of how Kyuzo's betrayed him — Kyuzo is in bed with Kyuko when he gets the call, and it turns out that he's been banging her on the side for at least three months, because that kid that's three months along? It's not Kyubey's. With everything good in his life taken away from him in one fell swoop, Kyubey snaps and goes postal on everyone before burning his workplace down. He makes a resolution that the next time he meets someone, he should give them the same cruel lesson that he believes Kyuzo and everyone else were trying to teach him.
- In Here There Be Monsters, Dr. Sivana's eldest son figures out his father's descent into villainy was a combination of his wife's death and being turned down by everyone when he tried to make money legitimately.How their father had managed to manufacture them, he had never been certain. He had reportedly given their mother a shot of something, with her concession, that would produce magnificent physical specimens in their offspring. Mom had agreed to it. After all, who doesn't want beautiful children? But Magnificus's birth had taxed her, and she never quite recovered from bearing Beautia. Within two months of the girl's birth, their mother was dead.
He figured that had something to do with how his father turned out in later years. That, and the perpetual wall of NO his father had run into, every time he tried to sell his new theories of industry to the barons of commerce and manufacturing.
- In Superman of 2499: The Great Confrontation, Adam Kent broke a crook's hand smilingly when he was training for becoming the next Superman. His father took him aside, reprimanded him and punished him by giving his brother the Superboy outfit for four months. Adam felt his own father had turned on him and taken his birthright away, and started developing his "I WILL have my way or else" mindset.
- Prior to the start of Black Wings, Black Sails, William Laurence was just as he was in Temeraire canon- an honorable naval captain with a strong moral compass in the service of king and country. But the loss of his dragon and nearly being brought to partake in penal slavery, and being mutinied against over it, are what turn him over to fighting the slave trade through piracy.
- Franchise/Transformers Mosaic gave one to Abraham Dante in "Way to Fall". A man who sought Immortality and Power even at the cost of his own humanity. He made a deal with Skorponok for that immortality."And so little by little the monster inside his soul would wake up. Little by little he would change his outer appearance to match what his soul had gotten dark with: rage, hate, and fear..."
"That's the Story of a man... who wasn't."
- In Through a Diamond Sky, Clu is a Jerkass, but not the dog-kicker of the film. At the end of the story, he's turned the torture devices from the Resource Hog base into the "repurposing" racks and uses the captured Hogs as the first test subjects. It's also the fact that he was jealous of his creator when it came to Jordan, saw that the Isos could reproduce, and saw Kevin and Jordan being in awe of the new Iso child. Having Tron blow off his fears and scold him didn't help.
