SPOILER WARNING: The nature of this trope means that spoilers abound. Tread carefully.
Then Let Me Be Evil moments in Literature.
- Atlas Shrugged is, in a way, about a group of very rich people — business owners, tycoons, etc., who got so tired of being called greedy and selfish by people in society who were mooching off them that they just "Hang it. You want to call us greedy and selfish? Fine, then we'll go off on our own where you can't find us and be exactly that and you can just see how you do without us. Goodbye."
- The Bad Guys:
- This is one of the reasons Mr. Snake insists that he can't be a true hero. He was seen as a bad guy to start, so he doesn't bother to change his reputation. This slowly starts to crack away throughout the series, as he becomes a truer hero.
- "Superbad" reveals that the members of the The International League of Heroes were bad guys before they met each other, purely because others saw them like that to start, so they decided to fit the mold others saw them as.
- Khalil Gibran's The Criminal has the title character declare "I asked for bread in the name of mercy and love, but humanity did not heed. I shall take it now in the name of evil!"
- In The Dresden Files, Harry Dresden himself gets villains pointing this out to him, and, once or twice, almost considers it. But he's too stubbornly good to be intentionally evil, though Jumping Off the Slippery Slope is occasionally a concern.
- Fate of the Jedi has Vestara, who pulls a Heel–Face Turn after being born and raised in a Sith society in large part thanks to her love for Ben. Towards the end of the series, she, Ben, and another Jedi are trapped in some caves on a world strong in the Dark Side, and confronted with a monster that seems impossible to kill. While Ben is unconcious, she sacrifices the other Jedi to save Ben, and decides that this puts her past the Moral Event Horizon. She then breaks free of the Jedi as soon as possible. To make it especially tragic, Ben and Luke might have forgiven her had they had the chance.
- Piers Anthony's For Love of Evil has Parry, in the office of Evil known as Satan, trying to work fairly with the other Incarnations, but due to most of their past experience with the last office holder, Beelzebub, they treat Parry like dirt, humiliating him whenever he tries. Finally, he becomes even worse than his predecessor.
- In Jerry Spinelli's Fourth Grade Rats, a boy nicknamed Suds faces peer pressure from a friend to be mean and unruly, compounded by younger kids' assumption that he already is, simply because he's reached the fourth grade. After one prank too many, he declares, "You want a rat? You've got a rat!" And acts accordingly.
- In Frankenstein, the title character abandons his newly-made creature in disgust at his uncanny looks, and everyone else who ever sees the creature reacts with horror. Eventually the creature decides to stop hoping for the best and start inflicting pain instead.
- The Golem and the Jinni: In Schaalman's youth as an aspiring rabbi, his dream of an edenic garden is cut off by a voice proclaiming "You do not belong here". Whether or not it's divine in origin, he interprets it as God rejecting him and takes up self-serving villainy without a backwards glance. Turns out that his previous incarnations were just as depraved.
- In the Gotrek & Felix novel Manslayer the mastermind behind an evil plot to sabotage the Empire's army with demon possessed siege engines is an engineer who has no particular affinity for Chaos. However, he's secretly a mutant, and knows he'll be killed if the truth is ever discovered, so his only chance at lasting survival is for the invading armies to defeat the Empire. Several of his allies and followers are also mutants in the same position.
- Grendel is a Sympathetic P.O.V. reinterpretation of the famed Beowulf legends. In this version, Grendel begins as a Byronic Hero who develops a Nihilist worldview over time. This stands in contrast with the Danes, who are deeply religious and keep attacking him in the name of their King and God. He initially relates to them since he can understand their language and is emotionally swayed by their poetic songs, but turns on them in part because they keep attacking him.
- This is the plot of I Am Mordred. The writer even includes an author's note in which she decries the assumption that kids are all budding juvenile delinquets and argues that treating them like criminals can only be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Huckleberry Finn, sick of being treated as a "wicked" boy who will never amount to anything, eventually declares "All right, I'll go to hell!" and "take[s] up wickedness" by helping his best friend Jim escape from slavery. Huck faces the moral quandary of sending a letter to Jim's owners telling them where Jim can be found, or tearing up the letter and going to free Jim. Huck finds himself unable to send the letter, simply because he and Jim have been through so much that Huck simply refuses to betray his friend's trust. He believes he's 'bad' because he's defying the rules and will be punished, because he's coping with higher morality on an emotional level but completely lacks the vocabulary to deal with it. But Huck decides if this is being bad, then "I might as well go the whole hog" and be bad for the rest of his life.
- Joel Suzuki: Autistic teen Felicity is highly unpopular both in her mainstream classes and in the special classes, where she's the only girl. Eventually she decided that, as she tells Joel, "If people think I'm a witch, I'm just gonna go with that and actually be a witch." She acts rude and abrasive towards everyone, and it's several weeks before she and Joel start to become friends.
- In Journey to Chaos, recovery from the mental effects of mana mutation ("monsanity") is so rare that some people who sees Eric post-treatment think he's still a monster and could go savage at any moment. When even his Love Interest shouts "You're not Eric anymore!", he finally snaps and says they're right. This leads to an epiphany about how he is both a monster and Eric Watley.
- The short story La Patente ("The Licence") has a character named Rosario Chiarchiaro, who has a fame as The Jinx, and because of this he was fired from his job and his family has had their lives ruined. The story is his attempt to get a sympathetic judge to give him a trial that will end with him declared a jinx, so he will be able to claim a Jinx Licence and make them all pay.
- In Market of Monsters, the International Non-Human Police in charge of "unnatural" affairs maintain a Dangerous Unnaturals List — a list of species whose very existence (theoretically) requires killing humans and so killing them is classified as "preemptive self-defense", meaning it's not a crime. Adair helps the heroine Nita see that the logic behind the list is a load of crap, that the species on it don't match up with the purported definition, and it's really pull and popularity that gets someone automatically declared a monster worthy of death based solely on what they're born as. Kovit is a zannie (an unnatural who needs to feed on human pain), one of the species on the list, who decided as a child that if the world is guaranteed to see him as a monster because of his DNA, he might as well be one and torture innocent people for his food instead of finding passive ways to get it.
- No Beast So Fierce focuses on Max Dembo, a recently paroled ex-convict trying to reform and find a legitimate job. After his attempts to reform are met with nothing but constant humiliation and failure, culminating in him being left in jail for three weeks by his parole officer for suspected drug use even after he was proven innocent, he snaps and decides to embrace being a criminal.I was going to war with society, or perhaps I would only be renewing it. Now there were no misgivings. I declared myself free from all rules except those I wanted to accept - and I'd change those as I felt on a whim. I would take whatever I wanted. I'd be what I was with a vengeance: a criminal.
- At the start of One Lonely Night, Mike Hammer is in a funk thanks to "The Reason You Suck" Speech he got from a judge after shooting someone. He spends the novel angsting over this, then he gets his hands on the MacGuffin the Dirty Communists were after and thinks how everyone will see him in a different light when he hands it over to the FBI...until he gets a phone call telling him they have his secretary Velda hostage and want to trade. Mike then decides that the judge was right and he is the evil that is used to destroy other evil men. Which he does.
- Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain: After the main cast accidentally become supervillains, they try to clear their names, but fail. In the end, Penny decides that being a villain isn't so bad after all.
- Post Mortem (2022): When Ralph discovers that he was a serial killer before losing his memory, he is horrified at first, but quickly decides to embrace it.
- The eponymous Outcast of Redwall suffers from this. A foundling infant from one of the Always Chaotic Evil vermin races (specifically, a ferret) is raised in the Abbey and grows to be quite the troublemaker as a child. Even so, he is treated with little more than suspicion and prejudice by most of the local populace, and rarely, if ever, given the benefit of the doubt, even for his motivations (backfired attempts to do good are still punished without consideration). Ultimately, the message boils down to him still being responsible for making his own immoral choices; but he at least got more sympathy than any other vermin character when one considers what a slim "chance" the Redwallers ever gave him. His surrogate mother never gave up on him and her life is saved by his Heroic Sacrifice.
- Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Flashbacks in volume 3 (mainly episode 14 of the anime) show how Arc Villain Ophelia Salvadori was raised to be a sexual predator by her abusive mother in service to the family's eugenics experiments, but at Kimberly Magic Academy she sincerely tried to get away from her family legacy and be a normal girl. Unfortunately, despite the efforts of her friends in the Campus Watch to keep her sane, a year and a half of sexual harassment by various bullies culminated in her embracing her succubus side: she seduced and raped multiple members of the Watch, and when this was discovered, she fought with Tim Linton and her crush Alvin Godfrey and fled into the labyrinth beneath the school to continue the family's work.
- C. S. Lewis uses this in a speech given by Senior Tempter Screwtape in an epilogue to The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape comments that one of the results of the "You're no better than me" school of thought will be to turn anyone even remotely different from the mass public against them. If I will be called a fascist or a monster, I may as well be hanged for a ram as for a lamb, and become one in reality.
- A Song of Ice and Fire:
- While it's hardly the only factor, this is one of the main reasons why Jaime Lannister became the cynical and amoral monster he is at the start of the series: The kingdom looked down on him for breaking his oath and killing the Mad King Aerys, giving him the mocking name of Kingslayer and an undeserved reputation as a scheming, treacherous backstabber — even though Aerys was about to have all of King's Landing (the capital city, with a population of about 500,000 people) burned down out of spite. After years of being called a monster for what he rightly considers his "finest act," it is not hard to see why he eventually became one, although what fans sometimes seem to forget is that no-one knew what Aerys was about to do and Jaime never bothered to tell anyone (maybe they wouldn't have believed him, or discounted it, but he could have tried — his father could also have used influence to spread the true story and temper the hatred, had he known). It also happened at the same time as his father sacking the city after the war had in effect already been won at the Trident, making it look like a patently obvious attempt to get on the good side of the rebels and a pointless betrayal; another theory suggests that despite the killing being a good act, Jaime must have felt deep down he deserved the scorn for the betrayal regardless, or he would have attempted to defend himself at least (possibly because he felt guilty for having stood by for plenty of Aerys' other horribly insane and cruel acts). Recently, it seems like he might finally be turning his life back around, eschewing his family's toxic influence and taking a newfound pride in his honor as a knight.
- Jaime's younger brother Tyrion Lannister seems to be heading down this road too. After being treated as a perverted monster for much of his life, he was eventually framed for murdering one of his nephews, denounced by most of his family, and branded an outlaw. This has caused him to lash out in vengeance, to kill some of his former loved ones, and to join with other outcasts.
- Sandor "the Hound" Clegane is the younger son of a knight, but he was physically abused and scarred by his older brother Gregor Clegane during their childhood. Sandor has a jaded view of the world, and initially seemed content with being a hired sword for whoever happens to be in power. After losing his position in the court, he found himself targeted by people blaming him for either crimes which he committed while following orders or for the crimes of his brother. Despite his villainous reputation, Sandor is not nearly as ruthless or cruel as some of the other "knights" in this war. His reputation got even worse when a genuine serial killer impersonated him for a while.
- The titular Space Brat, Blork, from Bruce Coville's series. He was labeled by the computer nanny as a brat soon after hatching from his egg, all due to his having a piece of shell stuck behind his antenna and crying in pain because of it. Since then, he was the boy who cried wolf, and constantly marked as an easy person to stick the blame on. After putting up with it for a while, he winds up throwing a temper tantrum at how unfair it all was, which was unheard of for his species. Which then gives him a very easy out for whenever he gets blamed for something from then on, leading to this trope.
- In Steven Brust's To Reign in Hell, Satan follows a similar trajectory — pushed into his "evil", oppositional stance by the way Yaweh's followers have treated him. (But Brust masterfully makes this happen without any evil intent on Yaweh's part; in fact, Yaweh's plan is unquestionably a good one.)
- Aeduen from The Witchlands has this moment in his backstory. Because of his peculiar brand of witchery, he's considered a demon by a lot of people, and his treatment in the Carawen monastery — supposedly a place that accepts everyone — made him decide that he might just as well embrace the reputation.
- In The Obelisk Gate Nassun, a young girl, says "I've done bad things, Daddy, like you probably thought I would. I don't know how to not do them. It's like everybody wants me to be bad, so there's nothing else I can be." Right before she kills him in self-defense.
- James Baldwin, in one of his autobiographical works, described encountering a waitress who treated him as a Scary Black Man. Baldwin wrote that "I felt that if she found a black man so frightening I would make her fright worthwhile."
