History Main / AmbiguousStartOfDarkness

* ''[[https://archiveofourown.org/works/53913826/chapters/136464688 The Tale of a Cat Most Curious]]'': The [[WebAnimation/{{RWBY}} Curious Cat]] wonders internally: were Teams RWBY and JNR always the selfish, hypocritical assholes who fuelled General Ironwood's {{sanity slippage}} and sacrificed an entire kingdom for their own gains even as far back as their Beacon Academy days, and the post-Fall of Beacon events simply brought it out even more? Or did RWBY/JNR only transform for the worse due to the post-Beacon mounting trauma, pressure and a sore lack of discipline from all the authority figures around them?

* In ''Manga/DeathNote'', it is ambiguous whether or not Light was a sociopath even before he obtained the Death Note. It is both possible that he numbed himself as a defense mechanism to help cope with killing, even if for good reasons, or if he was always heartless but never had the means or reasons to kill anything. Especially called into question during the MemoryGambit due to AmnesiacDissonance. For his part, Near is convinced that Light was ''always'' messed up in the head, and argues that he wouldn't have used the Death Note like he did if that wasn't the case.

* ''Film/TheDarkKnight'': The moment that pushes Harvey Dent into supervillainy is [[spoiler:his fiancée getting murdered]] and half his face burned off, driving him mad with despair and unleashing his vengeful alter ego Two-Face… but there's quite a few hints that Two-Face, or the seeds that would become Two-Face, might have been lurking within Harvey for a ''long'' time prior to that, such as his [[JackBauerInterrogationTechnique frightening interrogation]] of one of Joker's henchmen or his venomous, seething hatred of cops. Deleted scenes, included in the novelization, make this more pronounced with Batman investigating Harvey's past and learning that despite his charismatic and cheery personality, he actually had a ''horrifying'' [[DarkAndTroubledPast background]]; his abusive, alcoholic, and mentally disturbed father was a policeman who would regularly beat him and his mother and then bully other cops into not doing anything about it (and mostly succeeded because said cops disliked his mother for once being "[[PoliticallyIncorrectVillain one of them]]"), culminating in both his parents dying in what might have been a murder-suicide. That itself was shortly followed by Harvey going to law school to try and escape his family's reputation, only to find out that people there saw him as having no prospects beyond his handsome face, objectifying him as a pretty boy sleeping his way to success. While Harvey doesn't ''outwardly'' show any signs of emotional or psychological scars from all of this, it's hard not to imagine he wasn't already a little emotionally unwell beneath his "Gotham's white knight" public image, and the death of his parents particularly was never solved, raising questions of where precisely the Two-Face persona came from and how long Harvey has had that darker side.

* ''Manga/AttackOnTitan'': [[spoiler:Eren Yeager]]. The conventional thinking would be that TheReveal that [[spoiler:humanity was in fact not extinct outside the three walls, and that the Titans were sent by an outside force determined to exterminate the people within the walls]] caused him to JumpOffTheSlipperySlope, which ultimately resulted in him becoming an OmnicidalManiac. However, [[spoiler:Eren]] always had a violent and aggressive streak to him, having few friends as a child and engaging in TroublingUnchildlikeBehavior, such as when he [[spoiler:eagerly took on and killed two grown men and showed no signs of angst afterwards, as well as his hatred of and obsession over killing Titans, even before they killed his mother]]. Therefore, there's an argument to be made that nothing about [[spoiler:Eren]] changed; he was always someone who was determined to wipe out anyone or anything that stood in his way, and he didn't stray from this path even when his enemies switched from mindless monsters to [[spoiler:other humans]].