Create Your Own Villain / Live-Action TV

Times where the hero creates their own villain in Live-Action TV series.

---

• Arrow:
  • It turns out that Season 5 Big Bad Prometheus a.k.a. Adrian Chase came to be because Oliver killed his father during the events of Season 1, prompting Prometheus to want to punish Oliver/Green Arrow for it and show how Oliver infects anyone he knows. Prometheus was also trained by Talia al Ghul, whose father was also killed by Oliver.
  • In Season 6, Cayden James was little more than a hacktivist, fighting against corporations and trying to have a relationship with his son. Then A.R.G.U.S. agents arrest him before he can attend his son's basketball game and treat him like a terrorist (even though all he did is make sure that a pharmaceutical company doesn't profit from illegal activities). Then he finds out that his son has been killed, and he snaps. Subsequently, Ricardo Diaz slipping him a doctored video of the Green Arrow accidentally killing his son turns Cayden into Team Arrow's latest villain. Nice job, A.R.G.U.S.!
• In an episode of Barney Miller, Christopher Lloyd plays a man who blames Captain Miller for ruining his life and turning him to a life of crime after Patrolman Miller stopped him years earlier, making him miss and lose an important job interview. His crime — Littering: Dropping a hotdog wrapper on the ground in Central Park.
• Batman (1966): In the backstory to episode "Instant Freeze", Batman turned Dr. Schiml into Mr. Freeze by accidentally knocking a beaker of Instant Freeze on him, which warped his mind and turned him to a life of crime.
• The Boys (2019): Homelander engineers a plan to distribute Compound V to the terrorists around the world and soup them up with the drug, creating supervillains for Vought to send the Seven after and justify Supes enlisting in the United States military.
• Buffyverse:
  • The Trio was created because of Buffy. Admittedly, Jonathan (who would have killed himself if it weren't for her, the Ungrateful Bastard) and Andrew were just in it for the taking over Sunnydale part, but Warren wanted to kill Buffy due to her tracking down the origins of his sexbot April which caused his girlfriend to leave him (what some fans saw as mean, but actually was done in order to save people from his romance and sex slave gone overboard, actually long past his true Moral Event Horizon). Over time he becomes worse and worse, going from jerkass to evil Jerkass to homicidal evil Jerkass to murdering evil Jerkass to his Season 8 appearance as a genocidal skinless Jerkass.
    • Warren is both on the creating and created side, really. He attempts to murder Buffy and accidentally kills Tara, sending Willow, one of the most powerful witches in existence, into a Roaring Rampage of Revenge that including Warren being flayed alive. However, Warren survived the skinning due to another witch, Amy, who had turned evil out of jealousy for Willow having so much power without having to work at it (so Amy's another example). Warren then changed his hatred for Buffy into hatred for Willow.
  • We have Holtz, who wants Angel dead for what he did as Angelus, killing the man's family and forcing him to dust his own daughter.
  • Wesley was responsible for turning Faith to villainy by having her locked away because he didn't trust her, even though the gang was trying to help her get better.
  • Angel, having spent 200 years as a psychopathic murderer, has a few of these, usually vampires he sired, who either want revenge, or Angelus back killing. (Most of his human enemies from that era are of course long dead either by his own hand or by old age; Holtz is the exception as he was brought to the modern era via Time Travel.) For example, Drusilla (Angelus visited upon her every mental torment he could devise, ending up with...well, a pretty deranged supervillainess, all told), Spike (sired by Drusilla, but Angelus taught him how to be evil), Penn (from "Somnambulist") and Sam Lawson (from "Why We Fight"). James from "Heartthrob" is a special case — while Angel didn't sire him (at least, it's never said), he tries to kill Angel and Cordelia because Angel stakes his One True Love. There's also Lindsey McDonald, who was introduced as a Amoral Attorney, but for whom Angel makes their battles personal when Angel chops off his hand at the end of Season 1.
  • Spike has created at least one villain: Dana, from the episode "Damage". This one is albeit only indirectly Spike's fault. Dana was kidnapped as a little girl by a human psychopath, implying sexual assault. Later in life, Dana's Slayer visions (allowing her to have psychic dreams and access to the memories of former Slayers) activate. Since Spike has chased around and killed two Slayers he's in a lot of the Slayer memories, leading Dana's damaged mind to substitute him for her actual childhood abuser. When it was all done he even hypocritically told her "I've done a lot of horrible things, just not to you" — though at the end of the episode, he remarks to Angel that it doesn't matter that he wasn't her childhood abuser, he did just as bad or worse to plenty of others.
  • Then there was Giles in "The Dark Age", who had to face the demon he summoned as a teenager that was now killing his former friends. Since a lot of characters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel were The Atoner, or at least had a Dark and Troubled Past, this trope turned up a lot.
  • Buffy unknowingly unleashed Angelus, Season 2's Big Bad, and he never tired of reminding her about it.
• Chuck: Season 3 reveals that Sarah killed the wife of Daniel Shaw years ago as her final exam. After finding this out, Shaw betrays the CIA and joins The Ring to avenge his wife's death leading him to try to drown Sarah (though she was rescued by Chuck) and killing Chuck's father. Had the CIA not assigned Sarah to kill Shaw's wife for her training, Shaw would have probably remained a member of Team Bartowski making Sarah responsible for his Face–Heel Turn.
• Dollhouse: Has Echo, the main character being an Create Your Own Hero who takes down the people who forced her into becoming a doll. Echo has Bennett, who she accidentally created as Caroline, making a Heroic Sacrifice for her (the aforementioned being made a doll) which was sadly seen as abandonment, causing Bennett to hate Caroline/Echo for abandoning her and making her lose her arm.
• Firefly: In a bit of Role Reversal, The Alliance does this, cutting up River Tam's brain, turning her into the insane, psychic, badass 16-year-old Phlebotinum Rebel that she became. In other news, Joss Whedon REALLY loves this trope. It's in all of his works.
  • As would be later revealed in the Firefly film Film/Serenity, the Alliance was also responsible for creating the Reavers by testing a chemical pacification agent on a planet which pacified 99.9% of the planet so much they just gave up on life and died and the remaining 0.1% of the planet's 30 million people has the opposite reaction, becoming increasingly savage and violent killers that would strike fear in everyone the galaxy.
• The Flash (2014):
  • While Leonard Snart has been a criminal since he was little, the most he does is robbery. In fact, he usually insists on not killing people to avoid starting a manhunt (he actually has no compunction about killing). After being stopped by the "Streak" (Barry's original nickname), he becomes obsessed with one-upping him and manages to get his hands on Cisco's cold gun. He then thanks the Flash for helping him up his game. There's also a minor tidbit where Cisco's penchant for naming Barry's enemies gives Snart an idea to call himself "Cold", becoming a typical supervillain. He is one of the most recurring villains in the show, first coming back with his partner Heatwave, and then adding his also sociopathic sister to the team.
  • Savitar is Barry's time remnant, created to stop Savitar (your head hurt yet?). After surviving the failed attempt to stop Savitar from killing Iris, unlike the other time remnants, the time remnant is treated like crap by Barry and everyone else, not realizing that he was also hurting from Iris' death. So, he eventually decides to become a god, as gods can't be hurt. So, when he told Team Flash that he created himself, he was speaking the truth, in a way.
  • Many of the villainous metas in season 3, such as the Rival, gained their powers in the first place because of Barry creating Flashpoint. The same thing happens in season 4, as Team Flash pulling Barry out of the Speed Force gave powers to passengers of a nearby bus.
  • A number of metas blame Harrison Wells for their new condition. Farooq Gibran (AKA Blackout) accidentally kills his friends after becoming a meta, so he naturally goes after Wells to avenge them and nearly kills him. Later on, Griffin Grey goes after "Harry" Wells (the Wells of Earth 2) in the mistaken belief that he's the same Wells responsible for the particle accelerator explosion.
• Game of Thrones: Cersei Lannister does this a few times.
  • Even she finally catches on the fact that her methods of raising Joffrey didn't pan out so well. Not to mention applying a little bit of incest in his actual creation.
  • Blaming Tyrion for Joffrey's murder with no evidence and doing everything in her power to see him convicted drove him into the service of Daenerys. They may not have liked each other prior, but at least Tyrion didn't have any intentions of removing her from power.
  • She learned in a hard way that giving power to religious fanatics is not a pragmatic thing to do, especially if you were bedding your brother and cousin.
  • In the final season, by having Rhaegal and Missandei killed in order to spite Daenerys, Cersei contributes to the Trauma Conga Line which causes Daenerys to snap and burn King's Landing to the ground, ultimately killing Cersei.
  • In the prequel series House of the Dragon, while Otto Hightower is certain their will be a succession crissis once Viserys dies, he practically ensures it will happen by trying to displace Rhaenyra with Aegon, his grandson.
• Harper's Island: Sheriff Charlie Mills turns his wife's obsessive ex-boyfriend John Wakefield into a psychopathic serial killer by having him beaten up and framing him for the attempted murder of a police officer. He serves 17 years of a life sentence for something he didn't do. He kills Sarah Mills as soon as he gets out and Sheriff Mills seven years later, in the present story.
• Heroes: In Season 3, it's revealed that Batman-like Anti-Hero Mr. Bennet had a hand in turning nerdy watchmaker Gabriel Gray into the series' archvillain, Sylar. Specifically, Bennet (under orders from The Company) manipulated Gabriel into killing again, thus removing the last of his moral inhibitions and completing his transformation into Sylar, who would go on to cause no end of trouble for Bennet and his family.
  • Not only was Sylar manipulated, he was actually about to hang himself, unable to cope with killing another person for his power.
  • Also, in Season 2, Hiro's attempts to turn Adam Monroe/Takezo Kensei into a legendary hero (and get busy with Kensei's girlfriend) ends up pushing him from a goofy, drunken mercenary into the season's immortal, Misanthrope Supreme Big Bad.
• Exaggerated and played for laughs in The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret when Todd Margaret and Brent Wilks unknowingly make an enemy of David Mountford when they are rude to him in bar.
  • In Season 3, Todd believes Dave, again is evil — suffice it to say due to the Mind Screw-y nature of that season. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as Todd torments him into becoming the man he imagined him to be.
• Julius Caesar (2003): During the Gallic campaign, Caesar's soldiers ransack a village when he orders them to spare the life of a humble farmer. This man turns out to be Vercingetorix, who will unite the Gallic tribes against the Romans.
• This is the origin of the Bugsters in Kamen Rider Ex-Aid. They were programmed as villains in their respective video games and decided to take revenge against their creators after gaining sentience.
• Lost: When the main characters time travel to 1977, Sayid takes initiative and shoots a young Ben Linus, hoping to kill him to prevent him from becoming the monster that causes them so much trouble later on. Jack agrees with this decision. However, Jack refusing to treat him results in Kate and Sawyer taking him to the Others to heal him, driving Ben down the path to becoming the man Sayid wanted to kill in the first place.
• Merlin: King Uther Pendragon manages to do this in his kingdom, when he orders a genocide of all magic users. He's consistently being attacked by magical people as a result, but he always manages to escape punishment and considers the attack evidence that magic is evil. This finally ends in the Series 3 finale when his daughter Morgana is revealed to have magic, takes over Camelot with an immortal army, and gives him a "The Reason You Suck" Speech on his treatment of her people. This breaks him completely, and he spends the rest of his life as a fragile shell of his former self.
• Person of Interest: Peter Collier joined the privacy terrorist group Vigilance after his brother was detained without charges for associating with a man whose cousin had ties to a terrorist group — who ultimately turned out to be simply his AA sponsor with no terrorism ties — causing his brother to go into a downward spiral that resulted in his suicide. The government's complete lack of remorse for this screwup (it's even implied that the man responsible was promoted) sealed the deal.
• In Quantum Leap (2022), the recurring villains in the first two seasons were both a result of the Quantum Leap project itself:
  • "Leaper X" may have found his way to that role in the future because Magic and Jenn tried to steer him away from it in the present.
  • In Season 2, Ben uses his knowledge of the future to save a man's life. He warns Hannah about her husband's heart condition, but this sets events in motion that lead to him dying less than two years later, traumatizing their son Josh, who pieces together what happened, grows up to become Gideon Rydge and takes over the Quantum Leap project.
• Revolution: As revealed in Episode 3, Miles was the mentor to Jeremy Baker, and aided Monroe is starting the militia.
• Sleepy Hollow: So far, all of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse were formerly people Ichabod and Katrina had angered for some reason. Death a.k.a. Abraham van Brunt sold his soul after Katrina broke off her engagement to marry Ichabod, and Ichabod chose the exact worse time to tell him. War a.k.a. Jeremy Crane hates both his parents for abandoning him, but while this is reasonably justified in Katrina's case, Ichabod is blameless since he died before Jeremy was born.
• Smallville: While John Corben was actually turned into Metallo by Zod, he already had a hatred for the Red-Blue Blur after one of the criminals saved from a prison bus crash by the Blur murdered his sister.
• Stargate Atlantis:
  • Half-human/half-wraith hybrid Michael, the series' most frequently recurring villain, was originally created by the Atlantis Expedition in their attempts to create a virus to turn Wraiths into harmless, amnesiac Humans. Michael was quite pissed upon learning he had been manipulated by the team, and very pissed when the team's response to learning that their pet Human-Wraiths were turning back into full-blown Wraiths was to nuke em' all. Before this, there were indications that Michael had standards and would have been willing to work with Atlantis, but too many betrayals turned him into a monster.
  • And though they didn't create the Wraith and the Replicators, they woke up the Wraith, who'd been dormant, and turned the Replicators into a scourge against humanity. The heroes programmed them to take out the Wraith; they decided the best way was to eliminate their food source — humanity. Brainwashing for the Greater Good never works in SGA. The Atlantis crew has a very bad habit of Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.
    • It should be said that unlike the Michael example, they were genuinely ignorant of the situation (and thus, the potential consequences) with the Wraith, having only just arrived in Pegasus when they were attacked.
    • As for the case of the Asurans, that's not quite so black and white either: they met them expecting surviving Ancients, got imprisoned and mind-probed, then had to deal with the Asurans' spirited attempt to destroy Atlantis, and at the request of Niam, an Asuran among a significant faction, tried to remove their aggressive tendencies (which they'd begged the Ancients to do once before). This failed. The Asurans then took Atlantis after it had been reclaimed by a crew of Ancients, then tried to strike at Earth, then tried to destroy Atlantis again. Brainwashing for the Greater Good was pretty much the only option open to the Atlantis team — though they probably should have guessed that the Asurans would take to wiping out human worlds to stop the Wraith.
  • The Ancients however created both the Wraith and the Replicators. And then failed to stop either.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Cardassians did this twice. In full use of their Nazis IN SPACE tendencies, they annexed Bajor and brutalized it's population for fifty years in a manner reminiscent of occupied Poland. They ended up creating the Bajoran resistance, which Major Kira was a part of that eventually drove them off. Proving that they don't exactly learn from the past, when Federation colonies ended up in Cardassian space as per a new treaty, they immediately started treating them like they used to treat the Bajorans, and got the Maquis for their trouble.
• Supernatural:
  • In season five, the Winchesters hunt a ghost at their old high school and discover it’s one of Sam’s former classmates, a bully whom Sam stood up to and humiliated in front of the other kids. Although the kid was a bully and Sam wasn’t necessarily in the wrong for standing up to him, it’s revealed he had his own issues and that an Embarrassing Nickname from Sam’s "The Reason You Suck" Speech persisted and was one of a number of contributing factors to the boy’s suicide. Sam feels bad and apologizes to the ghost, pointing out that they were all just kids, all with their own issues, and they took them out on each other.
  • Played with in the season six finale – the Big Bad was already on a dangerous course of action the heroes opposed, but was of the Well-Intentioned Extremist variety and initially had no interest in harming the heroes and in fact was trying to protect them and the rest of the planet. It’s the heroes’ angry rejection and denunciation that leads him to feel deserted and betrayed, making him much more mentally unstable and willing to commit worse acts than before. It’s unknown if he might have been less violent and more amenable to reason after absorbing the Purgatory souls if he’d instead had their support. Although he obviously knew they wouldn’t like his plan, or he wouldn’t have kept it secret from them.
  • Season ten introduces brief antagonist Cole, who shows up for revenge on Dean because Dean killed his (monster) dad when he was a kid. Demon!Dean says he doesn’t even remember the guy, beats the crap out of him, and laughs. Normal!Dean remembers the exact day, explains things gently, and sends Cole off without further violence.
• Xena: Warrior Princess: Xena apparently obliviously did this to Callisto, though this is before Xena's Heel–Face Turn. Callisto believes that until she becomes a goddess and goes back in time to the day her parents were killed. It turns out that the future Callisto was the one who murdered her own parents, but her dazed past self assumed Xena was to blame. Given the chance to undo her past, after an accident she instead made sure it happened, making it clear that one more Never My Fault villain actually is the way she is by choice. She took her mother and her younger self into a barn to protect them. When he father (thinking that the strange woman is one of Xena's Mooks) tries to attack her from behind, she throws a dagger at him without looking. Realizing that she can't change the past, she reluctantly incinerates her own mother with a fireball. In a last-ditch effort, she tries to kill her younger self by setting the barn on fire, but the girl is saved, swearing vengeance against Xena.

---