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Well-Intentioned Extremists in Webcomics.


  • SUEPR Team One, from City of Reality, attempts to protect Reality's world by destroying the entirety of the neighboring World of Magic, which has threatened to wreck their way of life. The protagonists are forced to try to stop them, despite nearly falling victim to the very same cynicism.
  • Michael Kappel in Collar 6 just wants to end the silent cold war between the world governments because their hostility is creating a shadow blight that is poisoning the world (not to mention causing a lot of collateral damage). But he thinks the only way to do it is to De-power everyone but his loyalists and take control of the world himself.
  • Celesto Morgan in Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire. Compare him to the far more ruthless (and detestable) Knight Templar Raf Maliksh, who tries to kill Celesto for being insufficiently fanatical.
  • In El Goonish Shive, Abraham vowed to destroy anything created by someone using the Dewitchery Diamond. This is understandable in most circumstances since the use of the diamond usually creates monsters that are embodiments of curses. However, he takes it too far when he decides to kill Ellen even though the "curse" that she is an embodiment of is simply a spell to turn someone female and not at all monstrous. What causes his Heel Realisation is Nanase pointing out that by following his vow to the letter, he’s violating a more important oath that motivated this one in the first place: to protect and preserve innocent life.
  • Ian Samael from Errant Story comes from a culture where Elven oppression is common and many Elves wouldn't think twice before wiping him out. His goal to keep his people from being hunted down by Elves is fine; pity that he tries to do so by attempting to wipe out the Elves himself.
  • Filth Biscuit: In the story Red Kate, the titular heroine tuns a western town upside-down in her pursuit of an egalitarian, socialist paradise.
  • The robot Blunt in Freefall just wants to protect humanity... and has no problems with a greedy businessman's plan to lobotomize millions of robots for their money, since that would remove the chance that any of them could harm a human. When that plan falls through, he starts arguing for robot genocide. When that doesn't work either, he appoints himself in charge of ensuring the newly freed robots don't endanger humanity...and his first idea for doing so is a set of rules that wouldn't be out of place in a Police State, including indefinite detention and on-demand memory grabs, and is only prevented when his assistant Edge points out that those rules could also be used against them.
    Blunt: I seek to destroy. All nonhuman. Threats. To our creators. That hardly makes me a villain.
  • Girl Genius:
    • Baron Wulfenbach, absolute ruler of Europa. He demands obedience of his subjects, kidnaps the children of notable Sparks to his floating citadel in the sky, sends criminals and troublemakers to the Castle Heterodyne to repair it, despite nobody even possibly knowing how to, and has burned entire towns down to the ground to contain unmanageable problems within. He's also absolutely fanatical about keeping the Heterodyne bloodline under control, which puts him at odds with the protagonist Agatha, herself the last known heir of the family. The thing is, he has a point. Prior to his taking control, Europa was a chaotic, feudal place of madness where most Sparks ran wildly and warred against each other with their insane creations, the worst of which included the exceptionally powerful Heterodyne family, which for at least fifteen hundred years had been, with two very notable exceptions, irredeemably evil warmongers single-handedly capable of bringing Europa into ruin. Everything Baron Wulfenbach has done, however horrific, has been to restore peace and order to the country, and he did a damn good job of it, too. Not only that, but once he freezes himself along with the entirety of Mechanicsburg in a bid to keep Agatha from reclaiming the seat of her power, Europa quickly descends once again into a terrible anarchy unmatched by any before.
    • Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer!, has the same goal as the Baron, but a different method: he plans to kill every Spark in the world, ending with himself, due to the sorry state Sparks have left the normal folks of Europa in. As a result, he's a hero to the common folk and non-sparks, while the sparks (including our protagonists) all despise him and tend to throw him out of airships.
    • Pretty much every Spark (who isn't already a full-time villain) is, at one time or another, one of these. It goes with the Sparkiness. Even Agatha, as demonstrated here.
  • Psionic Minmax in Goblins wants to reduce the amount of suffering in the world... and considers triggering a Class 6 Metaphysical Annihilation, completely unmaking reality so that suffering doesn't have anywhere to take place, to be a perfectly reasonable way of achieving that goal.
  • Homestuck:
    • It's been stated that Roxy Lalonde doesn't really plan her actions often, and they tend to do more harm than good. But she usually means well and enjoys helping her friends, even though she's done things such as blowing up her best friend's computer and coercing her into revealing her feelings for Jake.
    • A clear example is Aranea, who wishes to create an alternate timeline where the Big Bad never comes to power, and then use her unique abilities to make that timeline become the main universe. Of course, in order to do so, she is willing to kill anyone that gets in the way, including those opposed to the very Big Bad she's trying to stop.
    • Feferi Peixes planned to reform her entire society to become more compassionate to others if and when she became empress, even though said compassion is shown to be more than a bit condescending. In an Alternate Universe, she succeeds, but creates a Crapsaccharine World that had no hope of beating Sburb.
  • Herman Steward from Housepets!. Initially hired as a steward to the wealthy Milton Ferrets, he approves of Keene Milton's goal of bringing equality between animals and humans. However, he grows quickly annoyed by Keene being Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense, repeatedly wasting his money and squandering his chances to actually create progress. Steward begins plotting to put someone more capable in his spot, first by aiding another member of the Milton family. He gets fired for his insubordination, and cursed into the form of a badger. Going on the run, he turns in desparation to utilizing magic(k) and the demonic to get his way, still believing fully that he's in the right even as he starts to Become His Own Antithesis.
  • Young Jeong from I Don't Want This Kind of Hero. Everything she does is for the ultimate good of the world. What she does, however, involves deliberately letting Baek Morae run free (which included letting all of Dune's comrades die), having Songha betray Spoon to join Knife, and driving Naga's emotional stability into the ground, among other things. In particular, she despises the Small Steps Hero, which should speak volumes about how she perceives morality.
  • Weijuaru of Juathuur basically wants to make every juathuur a god, because that would mean absolute freedom.
  • In Kid Radd, GI Guy believes that humans and sprites are too far predisposed to hurting each other to hope for peaceful existence, and that a mercy-genocide is in order to stop the suffering.
    Radd: He was just... well, like a lot of madmen. Somewhat accurate view of the problem, really insane view of the solution.
  • Darkbringer from Lightbringer strongly believes that the only way to fight evil is to embrace its ways, abandon all hope, and give himself up to darkness and despair. He believes that Lightbringer's actions give people false hope, so he wants to kill him.
  • Mag Isa: The school shooters in this comic are well-intentioned extremists. They honestly believe that by shooting up a school, they help create a world of love and peace.
  • The Order of the Stick:
    • Redcloak, if one reads Start of Darkness, falls squarely into this at first. He wants to improve life for the goblinoid races, but attempts to do so by putting down the other humanoids via divine blackmail, instead of by actually helping the goblins improve their lot. However, when he's given an option that would allow him to get everything he wants without having to resort to blackmail, he chooses to risk sacrificing all the living goblinoids, the world, and potentially the god he claims to serve by rejecting the offer from Thor, just to not have to admit that everything he did up to that point (including killing his own brother) was for nothing.
    • Even more so, Miko Miyazaki. A case study in what Lawful Good can do, when taken to its extremes. Justice untempered with Mercy, blind to the possibility that she could ever be or do wrong, even when her own gods explicitly condemn her actions as going too far by stripping their blessings from her.
    • On the heroic side, Vaarsivuus was heading in this direction as well, as their Survivor's Guilt after the Battle of Azure City and injured pride push them to increasingly extreme and ruthless actions in service of doing the right thing. Even ditzy Nice Guy Elan, who is The Heart of the group and reluctant to ever believe anything bad about his teammates, could see what was happening and called V out by pointing out their increasing similarity to Belkar. Eventually a genuine threat to V and their wounded pride led them to make a literal deal with the devil in pursuit of the ultimate magical power that they always wanted, with the rationale that they can use it for good, but they are barely able to contain their own anger and desire for cruel vengeance. It takes a brutal loss to and a "The Reason You Suck" Speech from Xykon to make them realise that might does not make right and begin to try to mend their ways, even though later revelations about the nigh genocidal consequences of their Deal with the Devil might make true redemption impossible.
    • If the Snarl breaks out, it's believed that it will not only destroy the universe, but render its victims Deader than Dead. As such, half the gods are actually in favor of destroying the world now, so that their followers will at least get an afterlife. There are good and evil gods on both sides of the debate.
  • Paranatural: One of the themes of the comic is extremists using good intentions to justify evil deeds... even if the deeds have nothing to do with their good intentions.
    • Spender is a lesser example of this theme. His goals are still unclear, but he discusses killing one of his coworkers to keep things hidden, and Isabel's grandfather claims that one day someone more heroic than him is going to end up killing him. Spender's boss knows he's obviously up to something, but also knows that not everything he is hiding is important. She jokes that she doesn't even know his middle name.
      Boss Leader: I suspect he keeps secrets from me more out of habit at this point.
    • Forge is a powerful fire spirit who did many terrible things when he was younger in pursuit of the greater good. While he claims to have changed, and has come to Mayview to serve "the angel" since her moral compass is far more reliable than his own, he still hasn't learned his lesson. He scratches a near-mortal wound in the Ghost Train merely as a distraction, and then blames Spender when this action puts Spender's kids in danger.
    • Hijack is a spirit who can puppeteer human bodies. He takes control of Jeff partly because he needs to get inside the teacher's lounge, but also because he feels bad that Jeff was bullied and wants to give him some vengeance. Except then he attacks Max (in order to get in trouble and get sent to the teacher's lounge), despite Max having done absolutely nothing wrong. Max calls him out on this, saying he's just another bully. Isabel says something similar.
      Isabel: He has fun hurting people, so his evil heart tells him it's for a good cause.
  • Parodied in this PvP strip.
  • VespAvenger from Questionable Content is a well-intentioned extremist who doles out rather extreme punishments to those who mistreat their girlfriends.
  • Dr. Deathe from Recursion only wants to end the suffering caused by genetic diseases. To that end, she's willing to murder millions in a bid to take over the galaxy, in order to force prospective parents to undergo invasive genetic screening before being allowed to have a child.
  • Schlock Mercenary:
    • The F'sherl-Ganni as a species implemented a technological lockdown on the Galaxy through their Portal Network and Clone-And-Interrogate process, which killed the equivalent of the Galactic society's total population several thousand times over in Expendable Clones. They did all this to prevent the Pa'anuri from restarting their war on the Milky Way, as well as to keep forbidden technologies that inevitably start pan-galactic wars (like Long Gun tech) out of the hands of the newer races. Even the Fleetmind finds it difficult to fully condemn them after their system is dismantled.
    • General Xinchub is in charge of humanity's immortality project, which will ensure humanity's future for millennia to come if successful. He is willing to do absolutely anything to keep those secrets safe, and somewhere along the way he started to enjoy it. By the time the story starts, he's a shameless Card-Carrying Villain with only a few brief glimpses of any nobility underneath, but he sells the project to Petey when he becomes convinced that his own government is too incompetent to get the job done. Part of Petey's conditions are that Xinchub will undergo rehabilitation so that he won't be acting like a mindless psychopath any more.
    • Shufgar, a minor villain from one arc, is fighting a guerilla war against his government, apparently for the cause of democracy. We never get a good look at his politics, though, and we just see him engaging in torture and mayhem whenever the mood strikes him. In the end, the heroes see both him and his government as jerks, but the government are the ones paying them.
    • Admiral Emm, Xinchub's replacement, takes over the project with the same stated goals. For the most part, she is more competent and engages in more Pragmatic Villainy; she prefers carefully-placed Clone by Conversion sleeper agents rather than rolling in with warships and vaporizing everything. She also often expresses disapproval at the glee with which her subordinates carry out their terrible orders. Of course, as one subordinate points out, she is still giving those terrible orders, and seems more interested in covering up the project than actually advancing it. When the heroes finish the project, she is left with an opening: She can either get behind them and become a hero who saved millions of lives (though she will have to kill a lot of conspirators), or she can desperately try to cling to what power she has left. She chooses the second option, and is permanently killed by one of her subordinates shortly after.
    • Professor Pau discovers a new type of Nanomachines that can cure any illness and repair any injury. They are so successful that he has to start altering the census data in his space station because no one is dying any more. Unfortunately, they can only grow in human hosts, so he has to kidnap large-mass men, hook them up to machines, and use them to breed more of the nannies. Turns out that he was actually being sabotaged by his Dragon Max; the whole thing was a social experiment for the Laz'R'us immortality nanites that Xinchub and Emm worked on. Once Max is removed, the human hosts are easily replaced with racks of hydroponic watermelons, and Pau takes a lesser, advisory role in the new organization.
  • This is exactly how the main character was going to turn out in To Prevent World Peace. Until her Face–Heel Turn, anyway. In fact, before she goes Anti-Villain Protagonist, all the Magical Girls are destined to turn out like this.
  • Trevor (2020): Dr. Maddison wants to stop the Super-Soldier project he’s been forced to go along with, and instead of a mundane solution like leaking info to the press to turn public opinion against the military, he opts instead to orchestrate Trevor’s escape, so Trevor can kill the other members of the medical team, and (presumably) wait for the military to sweep in afterwards and clean everything up.
  • Unsounded: Bastion thinks Prakhuta is planning an Inak revolt to gain his people their freedom, but really Prakhuta has lost any such noble ideals long ago and is planning to kill everyone. Bastion is quite disappointed when he realizes the why of Prakhuta's brutality and cruelty, but does nothing to stop him.
  • In The Warrior Returns, this is revealed to be the ultimate motivation of one of the fallen Warriors, who wishes to end the "Groundhog Day" Loop that Seongjun's powers have trapped the world in by turning Minsu into a Demon Lord who can kill him. But to achieve this goal, he willingly plays the part of a villain responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths and displacing countless others.
  • Many, many villains from White Dark Life are like this. To wit...
    • Mysto Majora Kijadhimov is the Hero To Her Hometown variant. Using her innate power to travel through time, she has witnessed the Catholic Church's ruthless persecution of various pagan religions, including her own, and she is fiercely determined not to let it happen again. The problem is that she believes the only way to accomplish this is to utterly obliterate the Abrahamic religions.
    • Dr. Eggman turns out to want to conquer the world largely to establish a scientific utopia and prevent any incidents like the ARK massacre from happening. Because his motives are so similar to Mysto's, the two are firm allies.
    • Malthus and the Light Demons want to preserve the ecosystem... by wiping out most of the world's population. (Malthus being named after Thomas Malthus isn't an accident.)
    • The Trophic Blenders seek to solve world hunger and eliminate violence... by making everyone photosynthetic. note  To this end, they kidnap people and forcibly breed them with Seedrians in order to generate a "master race" of plant-animal hybrids. Thankfully, their extremism is greatly toned down post-Time Skip.
    • The crowning example is arguably Drathilox, who hails from an unpublished Kirby fanfic. Drathilox, like the Trophic Blenders, seeks to eliminate violence. But where the Trophic Blenders see competition for food as the root of all violence, Drathilox instead blames prejudice, bigotry, and hatred. To eliminate prejudice, Drathilox seeks to transform all beings into Drathlingsessentially his mental slaves. Drathilox firmly believes that stripping away the distinctions of race — and free will along with them — is the only way to abolish violence.
    • While it's not touched on much, even Bowser has elements of this, as it's implied that the Mushroom Kingdom persecuted the Koopa Kingdom long ago, up to and including murdering Bowser's first wife.
    • Last but certainly not least, we have Altair, a Catholic fundamentalist who seeks to cleanse the world of sin... which, to him, means slaughtering anyone who doesn't fit his definition of a Christian. He's responsible for both Mysto's Start of Darkness and Artemis's insanity, as he murdered their loved ones in cold blood. Despite his bloodlust, he genuinely believes he's following the will of Yawheh (a.k.a. God). Much like Miko Miyazaki above, even being stripped of his power and flat-out ordered to stop his asshattery by God Himself doesn't get Altair to realize he's wrong. God does eventually find a use for Altair, though, by setting up a Xanatos Gambit in tandem with Triglav in order to push Mysto towards redemption.
  • As shown somewhat earlier in the strip, Miranda West of The Wotch walks full stride into Well Intentioned Extremity in a recent arc, where she punishes Ivan for being too intrusive in his desire to discover Anne's secrets, also condemns two innocents, and then refuses Ivan's plea that he has (apparently) learned his lesson, as well as refusing to help the ones who had nothing to do with her concerns, threatening him when he calls her out on it. But her status as a Well-Intentioned Extremist comes not just from her actions, but also from her attempt to justify it to her familiar (and herself).
  • Professor Broadshouders in Zebra Girl has made it his life's mission to rid the world of demons — and doesn't care who he has to hurt, damn, or kill to get the job done, up to and including himself.
  • Zoophobia's Adina believes that she is purifying the world by destroying those she deems "evil", which more-than-often includes those who aren't truly evil.


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