The Corrupter / Literature

• Wyrm in The Book of the Dun Cow uses his Dream Weaver powers to persuade the old rooster Senex to father a son, although Senex is infertile, and makes the rooster desperate and dangerously obsessive. This son turns out to be the monstrous Cockatrice, who eventually murders Senex when he realizes that Wyrm tricked him. Senex's corruption allows Wyrm to begin freeing himself from his prison beneath the earth.
• The Chaos Cycle: Demons prey on the emotions of humans in order to get them to kill others. The demons use their prey's insecurities or feelings and then amplify them with manipulation to get the prey to cause death and destruction.
• Calesta from the Coldfire Trilogy.
• The Big Bad himself, Kullervo, from Companions Quartet has this kind of effect on others having been able to convert the Seagullls, Cassandra Lang, and the Chimera amongst others.
• The point of Agatha Christie's Curtain. The person displaying this trait is actually an extremely timid person on the surface, taking revenge on others for being physically weaker than them this way.
• Sang-drax from The Death Gate Cycle, who is evil incarnate (or rather, a piece of it) and feeds off of hatred, fear, and suffering — convincing mortals to do evil is his equivalent of popping a frozen dinner into a microwave.
• An interesting use of this by the hero, explicitly called out by the villain in Harry Harrison's The Horse Barbarians aka Deathworld 3. Temujin is a charismatic and intelligent leader who unites a large group of nomadic tribes, and is effectively raiding pretty much everything in sight, making it difficult for Jason and the Pyrrans to do business. Jason manipulates Temujin into raiding the cities, and Temujin realizes too late that by corrupting the tribe's leaders by exposing them to the soft life of living in a city, as opposed to the hard life of living as a nomad, Temujin has effectively doomed his own way of life. Temujin does not take it well, requiring Jason to be rescued by the Pyrrans.
• The Diaries of the Family Dracul: Vlad takes this role towards the firstborn Tsepesh son each generation, as part of his covenant with the Dark Lord entails that the firstborn son must be willingly corrupted to ensure Vlad's immortality.
• Bergdahl in The Dinosaur Lords to Falk. He manipulates him into going further along with the plan, riles him up to rape Melodía (which is the only thing Falk resists) and pushed Falk further down the slippery slope whenever the man hesitates to Kick the Dog.
• Discworld:
  • "Mayonnaise" Quirke was this to the original Night Watch, being eminently corruptible and more than willing to get his subordinates to play along to mask his own corruption. However, Quirke is portrayed as not a charismatic charmer, but a sleazy, slimy emitter of low-grade evil that doesn't charm his surroundings as much as taint them by his mere presence.
  • Vorbis, a brutal Church Militant and Big Bad of Small Gods, is explicitly noted to cause other people to become like himself. Even Simony, who loathes Vorbis, winds up thinking like him when he considers allowing Brutha to die in order to infuriate the Omnian civilians into rebellion against the church.
• A Dowry of Blood: Dracula comes across a dying woman whose family had just been slaughtered by raiders. He sires her as his bride, rechristens her as "Constanta" and sets about molding her as his own evil image. He first has her kill her family's murderers before bringing her screaming victims to practice how to kill and feed off life.
• In the Dreamblood Duology, the Prince does his best to make Ehiru stray from Hananja's path. Since Ehiru only escaped being killed senselessly as a child because he had already been chosen by Hananja, the prospect of stopping the internal infighting of the royal family has its appeal. However, his brother's methods go against everything Ehiru believes in.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Fallen angels and their hosts are frequent corrupters of humanity.
    • Lucifer is described as this to the group of Fallen Angels he convinced to join him in his war against God. He also recognizes the danger that thirty of these angels now possess towards him. He just convinced them to go against the Father and they all failed in one form or another. They could easily question if they should follow him and might plan a coup, so he sends them on a mission to Earth to corrupt there to keep him secure from their treachery.
    • Nicodemus Archleone is the longest living human host to a Fallen Angel, working with Anduriel, Lucifer's top captain. He prides himself on his ability to read people and which Fallen coin he should give a mortal to ensure their corruption into an intelligent and capable tool. When Harry faces him in the tenth book, Harry acknowledges this and keeps his apprentice who has had problems on how far is too far with magic, far away from Nicodemus' position out of fear she could be tricked into his service.
    • Lashiel's shadow fills this role, as her goal is to turn the human host she possesses to fully take up the Coin holding the complete Lasciel. Although Harry corrupts her, for lack of a better term, more than she does him, because while the true Fallen is an absolute and unlikely to be swayed by one tiny mortal, the Shadow is as malleable as the domain she lives in. She lives in Harry's mind which when she states can be turned to darkness he counters that means she can be changed as well. And where the Shadows typically exist for a few weeks at the longest before people succumb for one reason or another, Harry has endured her for years. Harry recognizes the Shadow now as a distinct being and gives her a Name of Lash, which inadvertently gifts her part of his soul, changing her not back into an angel but something else with Freewill, even just a sliver of it, and in the end she pulls off a Heroic Sacrifice for him.
  • Cold Days reveals that the Man Behind the Man for most of the series is the Outsider saboteur, Nemesis, whose machinations turned a good man into an abusive husband, four good FBI agents into vigilantes addicted to their new power, and turned two Fae Queens into threats against the natural world.
• In Book II of The Faerie Queene, the "god" Mammon spends three days trying to convince Guyon to serve him and abandon moderation. He does this by slyly offering Guyon mountains of gold, a betrothal to Ambition personified, and even a Forbidden Fruit from the garden of a goddess. Still, Guyon politely refuses him at every opportunity and leaves without falling prey to Mammon's guile.
• The Fell of Dark: Rasputin runs a corrupter cult called the The Mystic Order of the Northern Wolf. The Order brings in disenfranchised people and has them turned into evil vampires who serve Rasputin.
• Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead dedicates himself to dragging the talented into averageness.
• In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, it's strongly hinted that Ghidorah's lingering subconsciousness in its skull has been corrupting Ren Serizawa's personality over the course of Ren's trial runs with the Mechagodzilla psionic uplink, although it's ambiguous whether or not Ghidorah's mind or Soul Fragment knows it's doing this.
• Humorously subverted with Crowley from Good Omens: he was the literal snake in the Garden of Eden and as a demon, corrupting hapless mortals is sort of his job description. He just goes about it in a very half-assed sort of way.
• Harry Potter: Lord Voldemort recruited Quirrell this way, and presumably some other followers as well.
• The resident Villain Protagonist Aur from How to Build a Dungeon: Book of the Demon King does it with an incredibly perverse touch, some women join his cause (and harem) because they don’t like humanity either or are just indifferent towards them; women who saw Aur as they evil being he is however are met with many phases of brainwashing through sex, Aur implants them memories of him always being a lover of theirs, or impersonates their actual lover if the woman in question is already engaged, at any case it ends with the women falling to perverse lust and seeing Aur as the only man in their lives, completely agreeing and assisting him with his evil deeds.
• I, Lucifer a novel written from the devil's perspective details his various efforts to corrupt mortal souls.
• I'm the Villainess, So I'm Taming the Final Boss: Lilia Reinoise, who was the heroine of the original game the series is set on, but her reincarnated self wanted to get her harem ending no matter what, is this to Prince Cedric, Marx, and Selena Gilbert, characters who initially were the "heroes" of the otome game series. Thanks to her influence, they all ended up becoming much worse people than their game counterparts.
• Melisande Shahrizai in Kushiel's Legacy. She excels at corrupting powerful men and pushing them into committing treason.
• In Lucifer's Hammer, Sargent Hooker and his cannibal army qualify as this. People who they capture are forced to choose between helping to kill and eat other captives, or be killed and eaten themselves. Once they've done this, most don't ever feel they can go back, so they survive by committing themselves to their new comrades. (An interesting example, because we get to see how the army becomes corrupted, then becomes the The Corrupter in order to gain new recruits.)
• The Crippled God from Malazan Book of the Fallen specialises in bringing out the worst in people, typically offering them exactly what they want in exchange for their inclusion in his House of Chains. He has taken up the cause of recruiting 'broken' individuals that can emphasize with him, but if the victim isn't broken already he has no problem breaking them.
• Mark Twain's "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" centers on a stranger who was snubbed by the people of this "incorruptible" town. The stranger takes vengeance and shows them all how arrogant they are with nothing more than a sack of gold and a promise for it to be given to a person who would know a key piece of advice.
• Calabah, from The Mark of the Lion, fulfills this role in Julia's life by making immorality seem glamorous; it's implied that she has done this to many other young women.
• The philosophy of the central character in The Mental State, Zack, is that the reason so many people in prison become violent and refuse to reform is because they are exposed to people he refers to as 'Irredeemables'. These are people who are pathologically incapable of reforming, only care about themselves and serve as appalling influences on criminals who have understandable motives for doing what they did. Zack even refers to a specific type of 'Irredeemable' by this name. He spends most of his time in prison trying to find these people and turn everyone against them so that conditions inside the prison can improve.
• Ruin from Mistborn isn't exactly encouraging people to be evil (he considers himself Above Good and Evil), but he does work to make them more destructive, which usually amounts to the same thing. Even the heroine was one of his pawns, at least for a while and without knowing it.
• First Mate Cox in Nation. He makes other people like himself.
• Eugen von Frenzel in A Pearl for My Mistress, being a Nazi propagandist, acts this way towards Lady Lucy — a curious, intellectual young noblewoman.
• Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray is a questionable one.
• Rebuild World: While Carol and Viola are introduced as Vitriolic Best Buds who joke about one another and themselves being a "Bad Girl", during Carol’s Origins Episode, she reveals that many of her more unscrupulous habits as a Predatory Prostitute came from Viola’s influence. Since Viola traffics in Indentured Servitude, and Carol forces hunters into debt by getting them addicted to her and then doubling her prices, Carol being that way certainly brought a lot of benefits to Viola who collects said debt.
• The Rising of the Shield Hero:
  • Malty is personally responsible for each of the Heroes awakening their Curse Series, resulting in three temporarily going insane and Motoyasu going permanently bonkers. The extent of her involvement in the King's fall from grace and Tact's insanity are uncertain.
  • In the web novel, Medea acts as this on a global level, corrupting the defenders of all eight worlds to weaken them through in-fighting. Even her own minions are corrupted, rendered insane and dangerous to everyone except her.
• The unnamed demon from Terry Brooks' Running with the Demon and the changeling from its sequel A Knight of the Word. The demon in particular seeks to corrupt all of humanity as part of The Void's plan.
• Explored in detail in The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis.
• The Secret of Crickley Hall: Brother and sister Augustus and Magda Cribben, with fanatical discipline, terrorise several Blitz Evacuees — except for Maurice Strafford, whose tendency to snitch Magda "rewards" with nightly copulation; and which masochistic Augustus "rewards" with having Maurice flog him with a steel-studded cane. Whereas Augustus hones in Maurice an insatiable sadism, Magda lures Maurice into the assisted murder of tutor Nancy Linnet.
• Sepulchre: Felix Kline, psychic adviser to mineral corporation Magma, employs various miscreants in nurture of their respective foibles — a devotee of Sumerian god Bel-Marduk, Kline venerates "the superiority that comes from corruption."
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Cersei Lannister is this to her brother Jaime. He isn't the nicest person anyway, but where she is concerned his moral compass (such as it is) shuts down completely. Once he's separated from her for a long period of time, he begins to become a much better person.
  • Littlefinger is taking this role in regards to Sansa Stark, teaching her how to evolve from pawn to player in the "Game of Thrones". This in itself is a metamorphosis of sorts for Littlefinger, as judging by his backstory, he Used to Be a Sweet Kid and was corrupted by his severe Break the Cutie process and the general Crapsack nature of Westeros.
• The Un-man from The Space Trilogy, which is fitting, since he's Satan possessing a human, in a sci-fi setting.
• In The Spirit Thief, the Master of the Dead Mountain corrupts, or at least tries to corrupt, all demonseeds, starting with offering useful advice and bursts of power and slowly increasing both until the target surrenders to Demonic Possession.
• Randall Flagg in The Stand, who is very much a Devil-figure in the novel and the evil behind many of Stephen King's most diabolical villains.
• Sword Art Online: PoH founded Laughing Coffin and convinced several people to join and kill other players even though this will kill them for real as well, stating they'll get off scot-free because Kayaba will get the blame for any deaths. His influence ends up cultivating a number of potential real life Serial Killers, as shown in the Phantom Bullet arc; Death Gun is a Collective Identity used by XaXa and Johnny Black, two former Laughing Coffin members who want to continue the death game in GGO, and do so by killing players in-game while the other goes to their real-life homes and kills them for real.
• Tales of Kolmar: Berys managed to become Archchancellor of the College of Mages through demon-summoning, and regularly when seeing students and established healers frustrated by their limits he would offer them greater power in exchange for a lock of hair and the promise of aid when he needed it. He never tells them that said aid takes the form of sudden Demonic Possession and their magic feeding his, whenever he wants it.
• Those That Wake has Man In Suit, who corrupts people through hopelessness.
• Tolkien's Legendarium
  • Melkor is the epitome of this in Middle Earth. From corrupting Sauron from a beautiful servant of the Valar to the nightmare he is now, to torturing elves into orcs in some versions of the story, all the way to pouring his will into Arda so that it has more potential for evil to rise and flourish.
  • Sauron — not so much in The Lord of the Rings, but definitely in the Downfall of Númenor chapter in The Silmarillion — stripped of all other resources, his last resort is to corrupt the entire Númenórean Empire and then sit back and watch their civilization spectacularly implode (unfortunately on top of him). He also corrupted the nine mortal kings who would later become the Nazgûl.
  • The very essence of the One Ring is to bring out the worst in a person by catering on his/her desires and twisting them into selfishness and narcissism. Sauron is through it more of a Deceiver and a Corrupter than ever.
  • Gríma Wormtongue was corrupted by Saruman who was corrupted (somewhat indirectly) by Sauron who was corrupted by Melkor. Suffice it to say, Tolkien was fond of this trope.
• Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs: In the Marie Route Alternate Timeline, the Vengeful Ghost possessing Olivia corrupts Julius into an Evil Prince using withholding affection from the madly in love Julius to manipulate him until the point he’s a Laughing Mad Yandere with Chronic Backstabbing Disorder.
• The Dark Forest cats in Warrior Cats have been convincing Clan cats to train with them and betray their Clanmates by joining their army. Out of all the Dark Forest trainees, only two stayed evil: Redwillow and Breezepelt.
• In the third book in the Wayside School series, while the teacher is pregnant, there is a substitute teacher who fulfills this role, turning all the students against each other and creating a very tense and hate-filled classroom.

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