Yandere / Comic Books

"With great beauty comes many yanderes."

Click here to go back to the main... No! I will never let you go!

Oh, you and your silly Western comics, dear... I'll let you and Mr. Stark have fun for now~!

---

The DCU

• Batman:
  • The Reveal of Death of the Family is that the reason The Joker constantly obsesses over Batman and constantly targets and torments him is that...he loves him, and believes Batman loves him too. Scott Snyder has said that it isn't necessarily "love" in a sexual or romantic sense, but it's still there.
    Scott Snyder: People, I think, mistake it for a more literal kind of love. They'll ask me, like, "is Joker serious when he's like, 'we're married' and whatever?" But it's not really that. I think the Joker has a love for Batman and he perceives a love for Batman, whether or not it's true, that transcends the kind of definition of love that we have, but that you can begin to understand if you look into that kind of twisted mind and see him as somebody who believes that love is almost a religious and unequaled kind of devotion to someone else, where you'll do anything it takes to make them a better person and a better version of themselves. And Joker sees himself as doing that for Batman by bringing horrifying things to life for him that he's afraid of.
    • Lex Luthor taunts the Joker about this, when the latter has captured and is torturing him:
      Lex: He'll never love you, sweetheart! You can keep screwing with his city, but he's never going to take you to the prom!
  • Harley Quinn may seem cute, but anybody who gets between her and "Mistah Jay" will regret it...if they live long enough.
    • An issue of the BTAS comic book switched the roles. Joker is rendered sane and gentle by intense electroshock therapy, and actually starts treating Harley with affection. She can't stand it and tries to get him to return to his old personality, but he has no interest in violence and mayhem anymore. But when Batman shows up and Joker refuses to fight him, Harley announces that she loves Batman. Wherepon Joker says that he'll "just have to rip Batman's lungs out" to keep her, and immediately returns to his old self.
    • This trait is carried over in the DC Reboot even though Harley and Joker are in different series. Harley is first seen hunting down and murdering the lawyers who put Joker away over the years in a desperate bid to get his attention after he left her.
  • Bromantic example also involving the Joker in Gotham City Sirens. Gaggy, Joker's pre-Harley sidekick and former best friend, is so damn jealous and resentful of Harley for supplanting him that he not only tries to murder Harley, but is also willing to take on Catwoman and Poison Ivy when they get involved.
• The DC villain Zoom (Hunter Zolomon) is sort of hero-Yandere for The Flash. He kills others so that Wally West will "understand loss and become a better hero." He made Wally's wife miscarry.
• Green Lantern: The Star Sapphires represent love — a dark, dark take on it. The original, parasitic Star Sapphire crystal specifically empowered females who had been unlucky in love. As a result, every Sapphire was some unholy combination of Clingy Jealous Girl, Stalker with a Crush, and Yandere. Not surprisingly they also indulged in If I Can't Have You… and Murder the Hypotenuse behavior. And they all had superpowers. And the embodiment of love (a being that serves the same function as Parallax, Ion, and Nekron to the Sinestro Corps, Green Lantern Corps, and Black Lantern Corps respectively)? It's called the Predator.
  • Fortunately, once the Sapphires organized into a Corps, their matrons, the alien Zamarons, externalized their power, swapping out the parasitic crystal for a ring and power battery like the Green Lanterns, allowing the Star Sapphires to maintain more of their normal personality. The Violet Light of Love still alters their behavior more than all of the other lights except Red do, however.
• In DC's Identity Crisis, Jean Loring, Ray Palmer's (the Atom) longtime ex-wife, has a nervous breakdown and becomes one of these for her ex-husband. While maintaining a facade of being contently divorced, she planned to put superheroes' families in danger so that all heroes (including Ray) would run to their loved ones, ending in the deaths of three people. She was only slightly unhinged until she accidentally killed Sue Dibny, at which point she completely lost it.
• In Secret Six Black Alice goes Yandere for Ragdoll. Calling him beautiful, inviting herself over to his place, declaring that Ragdoll is her boyfriend, turning into a demon and attacking his lesbian teammate Scandal because she thought Scandal was making a move on Ragdoll... as Ragdoll himself puts it: "I'm not the one being creepy here."
• Superman:
  • Supergirl (2005): Power Boy became a Yandere for Supergirl when he laid eyes on her on Apokolips. He was so obsessed with her that he couldn't even eat or sleep after she left. He traveled to Earth and played the role of a superhero hoping he could get her to fall for him. His act was so good that Supergirl actually dated him for a few issues. Then his jealousy over Supergirl's friendship with Captain Boomerang Jr. reached a peak and drove him to assault and imprison her. Supergirl, understandably upset, promptly broke free of her restraints and ended their relationship — with a Groin Attack. In his latest appearance he's shown regularly having sex with women who look like Supergirl - and at his insistence, wear the costume the whole time.
  • Superman has had two Yanderes after him:
    • The first and most prominent was Maxima, Queen of the planet Almerac. Maxima learned about Superman after viewing a transmission of outer-space gladiator games that Superman was forced to take part in, and set out to make the Man of Steel her mate. Since Superman rejected her advances, Max periodically attempted to wreak revenge, including an alliance with his nemesis Brainiac. She had also been known to set her sights on other heroes, sometimes in less violent ways (her attempted romance with Amazing Man during the period she was a reformed heroine), sometimes much more so (kidnapping Aquaman).
    • The second was an Earth woman named Dana Dearden. She always fascinated by the legends of ancient gods. Since the Man of Steel is more-or-less a modern-day god, she transferred her interest to him, filling her room with various news clippings and other memorabilia of him. After stealing some ancient coins at the local museum, she gained superpowers and donned a hero costume of her own, insisting that she was Kal-El's Super-Woman. But not only did Superman deny her the love she sought, she was quickly given the somewhat irritating name "Obsession." In her fury, she destroyed an oil tanker, and disappeared for awhile. And when Obsession resurfaced during Superman's split into Red and Blue versions, she ran up against Maxima, who wasn't interested in Dana's suggestion that there was now one Supes for each of them. In the end, though, Obsession's love for Superman proved 100% true, when she sacrificed herself to save him from a magical attack.
• Wonder Woman: While Hera always has some measure of this quality, notably knocking Themyscira from the sky in Wonder Woman (1987) when she caught Zeus using a scrying pool to watch the Amazon Artemis bathe, she is at her most jealously horrible in Wonder Woman (2011) where she's killed or inflicted fates worse than death on every one of the women Zeus has cheated on her with those of his illegitimate children she knows of.
• Robin (1993):
  • Darla Aquista tears cars apart and threatens former classmates to get Tim Drake's new address when she realizes he's moved and responds to Superboy interrupting her "date" with Tim by blasting him several blocks away in an attempt to kill him. Kon is still limping from her attack by the time Tim manages to slip away and track him down to apologize and thank him.
  • Tim Drake's Young Justice teammate Secret repeatedly attacks his girlfriend Stephanie, even breaking into her bedroom to do so, because she wants Robin for herself even though Tim is not interested. In the final arc she goes so far as swallowing her whole after Darkseid convinces her to pull a Face–Heel Turn.

Marvel Universe

• Malice from Black Panther was a former member of the Dora Milaje named Nakia, who ended up going Ax-Crazy after T'Challa spurned her advances. Note that T'Challa was entirely justified in this case, as Nakia was underage and had previously tried to kill his ex-girlfriend Monica.
• Iron Man:
  • Tony’s armor became Yandere towards him at one point after it achieved sentience. Jocasta had accidentally infected the armor with Ultron's AI, which was altered when the suit was struck by lightning. While it initially proved far superior to his other suits, it made the Venom symbiote look positively tame in comparison, although it eventually sacrificed itself to save Tony's life after accidentally beating him to death.
  • Whitney Frost aka Madame Masque almost makes the Venom symbiote tame when it comes to how absolutely and violently obsessed she is with her Old Flame Tony Stark. Having showed her compassion and love despite her Facial Horror Whitney became smitten with Tony and as such felt utter betrayal when he wouldn’t free her scumbag villainous father Count Nefaria. Over the next spanning decades she wildly bounces between wanting Iron Man dead and wanting him back in her arms (taking any chance to lay on top of him in a fight). She also naturally despises all of his love interests, having tried to kill Pepper personally and even throws out the classic If I Can't Have You….
  • Kathy Dare, who starts as a Stalker with a Crush to Tony, who is too polite to simply tell her to stop following him, even as her actions get more and more alarming, such as following him across the world and claiming they're in a relationship. Rhodey accurately sums her up as being not right in the head, but both men underestimate how screwed up she is; when Tony finally reaches breaking point after Kathy hijjacks his emergency hotline just so he can pick a dress for her, she then breaks into his house and shoots him. Later on, when Tony fakes his death, she commits suicide to be Together in Death.
• In the "Dead End Kids" arc of Runaways, Spieler still holds a torch for Victor Mancha, even after a century has passed, and devises a whole scheme just to have him and his teammates go back in time so that she can have another chance at wooing him.
• Spider-Man:
  • The Venom symbiote is a total Yandere for Spider-Man. Its thought process can be summed up as "That bastard! How dare he kick me out! Didn't he realize how awesome I was?! Well screw him! I hate him, I hate him, I want him to die! He deserves to suffer for hurting me! But then... I won't have him! I know, I'll kill off everything he loves and then force him to take me back! Then it will just be us together forever...". It's even been discussed once in Marvel Age Spider-Man and in The Spectacular Spider-Man, in which both times Peter pretends to apologize to the symbiote and asks if it wants him to be its host again, which it does, and both times Peter mentions that it's acting like a jealous ex-girlfriend. Also, take a look at the What If? take on The Other storyline, where Peter doesn't come back to life and the symbiote immediately abandons its current host to merge with Peter's body, becoming a new monstrosity called "Poison". It wants Peter so badly it doesn't even mind that he's dead.
    • On the flip side, Brock is this to the symbiote itself. Or rather, was. As Anti-Venom, he's now dedicated himself to destroying it. and even before that, he hated all other symbiotes (and with good reason, because Carnage was a killer who sickened him) and he devoted himself to killing them.
  • Carnage: Cletus Kasady and his symbiote have this relationship, with the latter willing to do whatever it takes to reunite with its beloved host when they're separated.
  • Spider-Man's former wife Mary Jane was actually plagued by two male versions of this trope, which were, oddly enough, connected. The first, and more obvious one, was her wealthy and Axe-Crazy landlord Jonathan Caesar. His first attempt to kidnap her failed, leading to his arrest and imprisonment, but even while behind bars, he was able to use his money and influence to make her life miserable, blacklisting her among the modeling profession until she managed to gain a role in the Secret Hospital soap opera.
    • The second one was much more subtle. After Caesar was paroled, a few folks who assaulted or abused Mary Jane (including a deluded fan of the soap opera and her angry director) were either murdered or assaulted. Mary Jane suspected it was Caesar's doing, especially when Peter himself was almost a victim, but Peter tended to doubt it, claiming that the attacks didn't fit his MO. Peter turned out to be right. The true culprit was the second Yandere (known only by his last name, Goldman) who had claimed to be a policeman, but was really only a clerk working for the NYPD. When Caesar made a second attempt to kidnap Mary Jane, Goldman murdered him in cold blood, and when Mary Jane rejected him, tried to shoot her too. But she tricked him into to getting close by offering to reveal the future plot of the soap (saying they'd have to change it if she were dead) and was able to knock him out with her purse. (Kind of makes you wonder what she kept in it... Bricks?)
  • One of the worst involved with Spider-Man's life is possibly Miles Warren, the orchestrator of everything that went down in The Clone Saga. He has always had one motivation for everything, and that is his unhealthy crush on Gwen Stacy. He seeks revenge on Peter not only for her death, but for having loved her when he couldn't. Ben seriously calls him out on this during the Final Battle, telling him, "Get this through your sick head, the Green Goblin killed her, Peter did not!" and Peter himself, during the Dead Man's Hand one shot, tells him, "Still hung up on Gwen, huh? Some things never change." The biggest irony is, Gwen's clone eventually fell in love with and married a far-more lucid clone of Warren (which the real one had abandoned as a failed experiment) so it's possible if Warren had not been such a lustful madman, the real Gwen might have been more accepting (or maybe turned him down in a way he could have accepted).
• Amora the Enchantress from The Mighty Thor. She has the usual mountain-sized ego associated with gods, but even moreso in regards to her beauty, and her self-image as a irresistible seductress. Will often fall into a screaming tantrum if she is rejected by someone she wants, or a murderous, jealous rage if some other woman takes someone she considers her rightful property. This is often the motivation for her attacks on female superheroes, or the girlfriends of male ones.
• X-Men:
  • In Uncanny X-Men (Chuck Austen), the already unstable Lorna aka Polaris got turned into this over her boyfriend Alex aka Havok, going so far as to threaten the other girl (Nurse Annie) with magnetically controlled scalpels the day she arrived in the mansion. Then, when it turned out Annie and Havok had been having a psychic affair during Alex's time in a coma, and poor Polaris got dumped at the altar by him, she went the If I Can't Have You… route and tried to kill them both in the wedding party; Lorna then got locked up and put into therapy, while Annie and Alex ran away from the country. Austen later attempted to justify this by claiming that Polaris had already been driven insane by being forced to watch the genocide caused by Cassandra Nova's Sentinels, but nobody bought it, and once he was off the title, later writers made big efforts towards putting Lorna back together, driving Annie and her telepathic son David as far away as possible and ignoring the whole relationship as much as they could.
  • Mystique. In the X-Men story arc "Kill Or Cure" she obsessively pursues her ex-lover Iceman; she throws him out of the Blackbird, tries to poison him in hospital where he is recovering, and blows up a truck he is hitching in, culminating in a tearful confrontation on top of the San Francisco Bay Bridge: when Iceman refuses to join her in a suicide pact, she throws herself off (a typical last desperate gesture); she survives.
  • Zig-zagged with Bella Donna towards Gambit her childhood sweetheart and almost-husband, her Establishing Character Moment was attacking him and his Love Interest Rogue while they were cuddling each other. However, afterward, Bella Dona explained herself and she and Rogue became friends before Bella Dona did a Heroic Sacrifice against the Brood. Later on however, Bella Dona was enraged that Rogue had accidentally taken her memories and began to antagonize and attack Rogue which puts her at odds with Gambit. Bella Dona even kidnaped Rouge's comatose first love Cody so she could lure her into a trap and kill her, though that plan failed. It's more blatant when she forms a relationship with a guy called Bandit who is eerily similar to Gambit but drops Bandit as soon as Remy himself comes back into town. Thankfully Bella Dona has mellowed out and does support Gambit and Rogue's marriage albeit half-heartedly.
  • A truly bizarre example takes place between Nate Grey and Madelyne Pryor. The very short version is that Nate is an alternate counterpart of Cable from Age of Apocalypse reality. That being said, unlike Cable, who's the son of Scott Summers and Maddie Pryor, Nate was created from the DNA of Scott and Jean Grey, who Maddie was cloned from, meaning they're also half-brothers. Okay? This is where it gets weird...
    • Nate, physically about 17, crossed over into the 616 reality by accident, and subconsciously reached out to Jean, having met his version once and felt an unexplained connection to. Given that Nate is a nascent Reality Warper, he ended up not only reaching the psychic ghost of Maddie, but resurrecting her as a psychic construct. Maddie is, physically, in her late 20s. Thanks to what happened, there's a psychic connection between them - they're drawn to each other. Oh, and she doesn't remember who she is, beyond her name and a few buried memories.
    • A lot of UST and more than one Almost Kiss ensues, while Nate avoids the X-Men after a very unfortunate early encounter with Charles Xavier, meaning he doesn't meet Jean. He also develops a connection with Threnody, a reluctant servant of Sinister, who is both drawn to Nate as a person and as a source of the death energy she feeds off thanks to his vast power and the fact it's killing him, as well as seeing him as someone she can use to get free of Sinister. Maddie starts getting her memories back, has a run-in with Selene who recruits her in Paris, leaving a very confused Nate high and dry. Then, she pops up again, discovers the truth about herself via Threnody after going on about how she needs Nate in a mix of 'drug addict' and 'jilted lover', which Threnody wryly empathises with, and kills her in a Villainous Breakdown after Threnody reveals that she's a ghost dependent on Nate's power to exist. Her and Nate encounter Jean, who Maddie predictably tries to murder while mocking her with how easy it is to wind men around their fingers ("I have lived the darker side of us"), while Nate tries to stop the fight and gets understandably very confused.
  • Once he figures out the truth, he tries to uncreate Maddie, believing (with good reason) that she wants Jean's life (even though she hates Scott... sort of). Maddie manages to steal enough from him to maintain an independent existence. She promptly flies off and spends her time flitting in and out of Nate's life, helping or hindering him (even outright betraying him) based on whatever she feels like at the time, and treating him as an odd substitute for both her son and her husband. While Nate backed off on that aspect of their relationship as soon as he figured out their connection, Maddie? Not so much. This culminated in the infamous cover of Issue 41 of X-Man which has a giant Maddie licking her lips at Nate in her grasp, with the words, "IF MADDIE CAN'T HAVE NATE... NO ONE CAN!" Between that, 'Queen Jean' impersonating Maddie and trying to make him her slave (yes, that includes sex slave), and everything with Threnody, it's no wonder the first rule of the Age of X-Man reality was "No Relationships."
• Doctor Doom is this to the entire population of Latveria. Doom protects his people from all oppression and exploitation, even from their own, should any of them wish to leave.

Other Comics

• In Anya's Ghost, it's part of the twist ending that Emily lied about her past, having in fact killed her would-be boyfriend and his actual girlfriend out of jealousy.
• In Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, our main character Nny is on a date with a girl named Devi, who soon becomes a reoccurring character. He feels very happy when he's near her, his conscience starts to tell him (through his two only friends the Doughboys) that this moment will eventually end and he will just be miserable again. In desperation, he makes the irrational decision to kill Devi in order to "immortalize the moment". Devi manages to escape and kick Nny unconcious in the process. In addition, Devi was the only character in the series to survive his malicious intents.
• Judge Dredd: Judge Joe Dredd, who is a committed Celibate Hero, has had a stalker by the name of Bella Bagley. At first she was just a particularely delusional suitor who tried to jump off a building when Dredd declined. She returned several times to force Dredd to "admit his love" by taking hostages, before finally just attempting to stab him (mistaking one of Dredd's clone brothers for him) for rejecting her.
• In the 2014 Holiday Special Comic for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW), The Cutie Mark Crusaders becomes one. Well, a non-romantic example. When Applejack, Rarity, and Rainbow Dash spend more time with Sunset Shimmer than they do with them, the CMC plot to pose as a leaker of their private information and frame it to look like Sunset did it. While they succeeded, they regretted it and confessed their crimes.
• Played with in Yoko Tsuno's story The Pray And The Shadow. The Yandere is actually an adult man in his late 40's, Mac Nab, who as a youngster was spurned by his crush Lady Mary and showed up at her wedding to curse her and her new husband, Brian, and predict that they'd never be happy. Brian died within the year, Mary almost fell into madness and some years later died in an accident, and everyone blamed Mac Nab, who was barely able to clear his name yet was ostracized by the community, living alone in a small house and keeping a mannequin that looks exactly like Mary and wears her wedding dress. The truth? William, Brian's brother and Mary's second husband, set up poor Mary for death and made it look like an accident, then brewed an Evil Plan to kill Mary and Brian's daughter Cecilia so he could get her huge inheritance. Mac Nab was still a Yandere for Mary, but once he learned the truth he remained focused enough to join Yoko's plans to rescue Cecilia (as well as her Body Double Margaret) and use the mannequin as a Spanner in the Works.
• Knives Chau from Scott Pilgrim, to the extent of not only stalking him, but attacking Ramona (Scott's Current Girlfriend) twice and building a shrine to Scott. She got better, though.
• Mercy Mayrock from Howard Chaykin's The Shadow miniseries. A former beauty queen turned game show host whose violent on-air meltdown ruined her career...until she met quadriplegic billionaire Preston Mayrock, the real Lamont Cranston, and married him. She's also completely obsessed with the Shadow (eventually attempting to rape him at gunpoint and telling him to keep his costume on) and is sexually aroused by nuclear weaponry and explosions.
• One issue of The Simpsons had Mr. Burns fire all his workers and replace them with clones of his assistant Smithers. The clones took their genetic template's obsession with Burns to an unhealthy degree. After fighting amongst themselves for things as trivial as possession of a tissue that Burns sneezed on, they collectively decided to kill "Smithers Prime" (or at least drive him out of the plant) and clone Mr. Burns so they can each have unfettered access to a Burns of their own. And when it became apparent that they can't draw the blooded needed to clone Burns using a needle, they decided to get it by dismembering him with a buzzsaw instead.
• Rosy the Rascal, the Anti-Amy Rose from Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics). Amy's The Ingenue compared to her!
• Veronica Pace in Strangers in Paradise. After the Big Bad's "suicide," her former chauffeur Veronica takes over the remains of her organization, gives herself an Evil Makeover and begins to show signs of Ax Craziness. Before her defeat, she reveals that she did it all because she was obsessed with Katchoo.
• Kriss de Valnor from Thorgal proves to be one in Shaigan story arc. She has a crush on Thorgal and just cannot take that he loves Aaricia and won't return her feelings and tried to murder her at least once. After Thorgal suffers complete amnesia thanks to the gods, she convinces him he is Shaigan the Merciless, ruthless pirate and her lover. That is understable, if evil. However convincing him to attack vikings from his home village, knowing very well that it will result in Aaricia's and her children being exiled, then kidnaping Aaricia and her daughter and, by holding the latter hostage, forcing the former to serve her and amnesiac Thorgal, who doesn't even recognize his own wife, as a slave and be forced to watch them making love every night, all just so Kriss can rub in her face that she had stolen her man - that's full yandere. It's a little wonder that French collected edition of the Shaigan arc is titled In the Claws of Kriss.

---

You... you're cheating on me with that Graphic Novel whore, aren't you?! Back to yandere or I'll tear your pages apart!

---