From Nobody To Nightmare / Western Animation

This is what happens when everyone wants to be your enemy.

Examples of From Nobody to Nightmare in western animation.

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• Action Man (2000): Quake was just an overweight sleazeball before he stole a Powered Armor suit that can create earthquakes to become a supervillain.
• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: Jimmy Neutron once had Carl unwittingly expose Libby to a dose of "Megelomanium" (created by Jimmy), resulting in a Bad Future where she became an Evil Overlord. A fashion-obsessed Evil Overlord.
  • Jimmy gave Sheen a brain enhancement to help him pass a test. It worked, but the experiment worked too well and he went on a power trip.
• Adventure Time has the Ice King, who was just an ordinary antiquarian before The Great Mushroom War but is now one of the series recurring villains.
  • The Lich is heavily implied to have once been an ordinary person before the Mushroom Bomb's fallout mutated him into an undead monster.
• Allegro non Troppo: The "Bolero" segment has an evil black-eyed monkey who starts off as a shadowy figure before eventually becoming a towering man who kills off all the animals, thus halting evolution.
• The Amazing World of Gumball has Rob who, after coming back from the void but not remembering who he is, literally calls himself "nobody". Darwin and Gumball suggest he strive for a new place in the world as "the worst person the world ever made". Rob then remembers who he is and how they left him behind in the void, and swears to take revenge by destroying everything they care about and taking away everyone they love.
  Rob: I will be your worst nightmare. I will destroy everything you care about! I will take away everyone you love! I will be your own nemesis!
  • Somewhat subverted in the episode "The Nemesis", where he is shown to be a Harmless Villain, even needing assistance by Gumball and Darwin, who were his enemies. He became more of a threat by the end of that episode though. Double Subverted later in "The Bus" and "The Disaster"/"The Rerun", where he's a genuine threat.
• Arcane: Powder is introduced as a sweet-natured Tagalong Kid whose homemade bombs hardly ever work, and she frequently ends up being The Load during her siblings' heists. After the Time Skip, she's become the Mad Bomber Jinx and serves as The Heavy; not only have her bombs drastically improved in destructive power, but she's become quite deadly and greatly feared in the Undercity.
• Zoltan and the Gang of Five from Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! were comic relief sidekicks in season one until they mutated into serious threats in the second season and succeeded in taking over the world.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Azula figured Long Feng out from the get-go. The latter started out as the son of a middle-class merchant. With hard work and careful manipulations, he took over the Dai Li, turned the Earth King into a political figurehead, and became the Big Brother-like ruler of the entire Earth Kingdom. Unfortunately for him, this came back to bite him when Azula convinced his minions that a ruler who works for power is inferior to a ruler who's born with it. He lost at his own game. Or, in Azula's words, he was never even a player.
    • Hama started out as a normal waterbender from the Southern Tribe, but after being imprisoned by the Fire Nation, she developed a truly terrifying new skill — bloodbending (manipulating another being's bodily fluids) — that she used to exact revenge on her enemies. Her last act was to pass on her abilities to Katara (much to the latter's horror).
  • The sequel series The Legend of Korra has a few:
    • In his fake backstory, Amon was just the son of a farmer who was badly burned by a rogue firebender who killed the rest of his family, and after Walking the Earth was chosen by the spirits to receive the power to take away someone's bending. In his actual backstory he was a young waterbender named Noatak, whose father was once an infamous criminal. When Noatak started developing waterbending abilities, his father forced him and his brother Tarrlok to learn the forbidden art of bloodbending. After years of such training, Noatak was fed up with it and ran away from home, convinced that all bending was evil, even implying that he contained self-loathing for being a bender. He would eventually form the Equalists, who sought to rid the world of benders and tore Republic City apart, socially and politically.
    • For a heroic variant, there's Wan, a petty thief who eventually became the first Avatar and the progenitor of the Avatar Cycle, essentially making him a god by fusing himself to the spirit of light and peace.
    • In her backstory, Kuvira was an abandoned child taken in by Suyin, later becoming Suyin's apprentice. In Season 3, Kuvira was first established in the series as an occasionally seen Mauve Shirt and Suyin's security chief. In Season 4, she's the Big Bad, a Knight Templar at the head of a massive, well-organized army bent on forcing the fractured Earth Kingdom back together, a mission which includes reconquering the United Republic, a now separate nation that was originally part of the Earth Kingdom.
• The Batman:
  • Killer Moth started out as some pathetic schmo in a badly designed costume who was The Load. That was until he accidentally gets mutated into an actual giant killer moth.
  • Judging from this brief scene in the episode "Strange Minds", it's heavily implied that unlike his previous incarnations, The Joker of all people was this; a plain office drone who dreamed of making people laugh, until that "one rotten day" transformed him into the crazy crime clown we know now.
• Batman Beyond:
  • Willie Watt was a nobody who was picked on by the jocks and shunned by all the girls until he was given a visor that allowed him to control a mini-Kaiju-sized, remote-controlled robot by his overly-aggressive and never satisfied father, to fight back with against the bullies. Willie then donned the visor and essentially went mad-crazy with power, successfully getting back at the people who wronged him until Terry/Batman intervened, destroyed the visor and short-circuited Willie's brain. Then at the end of the episode with Willie in juvenile detention, he found out he had gained psychic powers. THEN in one episode in the following season, Willie was released from juvie with a noticeable change in appearance (i.e. buff) and started getting his respect and trying to take Blade, the girl who had rejected him before. Now he was a jacked-up, psychotic psychic Somebody.
  • Then there's Shriek. He was once Walter Shreeve, a phonologist, sound studier, and engineer. But when he was told his funding would be cut, Derek Powers offered to let him continue if he would kill Bruce Wayne. After his initial battle against Batman, Shriek lost his hearing and began using his powers like any supervillain. And he was one of the more dangerous ones that Terry had to face; at one point, he put a Curse of Babel on the whole city in an effort to get them to hand over Batman to him.
  • Ira Billings would come to be known as Spellbinder. He was at first a bitter and underpaid psychologist at Terry's school. To gain some cash, he used his self-made VR technology to get students to steal for him. After being arrested and escaping, he began making even stronger VR simulators giving runaways and unwanted kids a perfect life for a short time in exchange for stealing, knowing they would overdose in time and didn't care. He also got a city-wide manhunt going against Batman by making people think he killed one of his Rogues Gallery in cold blood.
• Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Bullies used to pick on him because he sang in choir, but something very strange occurred when he kept singing higher! The ruffians around him quickly fell into a trance, and it was then, with wicked glee, he made those puppets dance! He's the Music Meister!
• Big City Greens: Chip Whistler is a mild example. By the point we meet him, he's the manager of Wholesome Foods and the son of the CEO. But after getting his tooth chipped, he starts like a "joke" like Cricket would call him, he goes from an incompetent guy whose only intentions are making the Greens have a bad day to a monstrous businessman who threatens to destroy the legacy of the Greens. In season 1, he was more like a bully/nuisance for the Greens and Gloria, his plans included trying to steal a coffee bag from Cricket and Gloria out of pettiness and waging a food war with Cricket, which culminates in him pelting Cricket with produce even after he surrendered and when this fails he tries to eat the Green family produce so they can't sell anthing. Then in season 2, he manages to fake kindness to trick his dad and the Greens into believing he changed for the good and uses his newfound CEO power to rid the Greens out of Big City for good. Not only in latest appearance he leaves Gloria jobless and many innocent people homeless for his revenge (his plan is to build another "Wholesome Foods" supermarket in the street the Green family live and turn the family's home into a parking lot, out of spite to them), but he also makes fake petitions so he can destroy their house and makes the Greens belive that Big City hates them, imprisons Nancy again when she tries to fight back and even after his plan is foiled and gets banned from Big City forever, he attempts to murder the Green family with the blades of his helicopter as a last ditch effort, since he had nothing to lose.
• Abijah Fowler from Blue Eye Samurai. Once a starving peasant boy forced to eat his dead sister's corpse just to stay alive, now a powerful arms dealer.
• The toads in Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars! where initially a race of decadent hedonists, who decided that even running their own society was too much work, so they created an A.I. to run it for them. The A.I. decided it wanted to rule the universe, turned toad culture into a militaristic nightmare, and went on to try to conquer everything.
• Once, a lost baby girl was found in Argentina and taken to a remote island that belonged to VILE, a criminal organization. The girl was raised, later took interest in attending VILE's academy for trainee thieves, and proved to be really good at it. But one day she found out that VILE is a lot more dangerous than she thought, so she escaped the island and became the notorious thief known as Carmen Sandiego, opposing them since then.
• Isaac from Castlevania (2017). His backstory has him start out as a slave. By the end of the season, he’s wiping out entire bands of slavers and adding them to an army of slaves he has planned. And by the end of the series, Isaac defeats Carmilla and is now ruler of Styria.
• Wrath-Amon from Conan the Adventurer used to be an ordinary Gila monster. After Ram-Amon used the Black Ring to turn him into a lizard man, Wrath-Amon stole the Black Ring from him and took control of the cult of Set.
• The alternate universe of Danny Phantom if you think about it. The title character was an average unpopular kid who suddenly gained superpowers and became the local superhero, only to lose his humanity in an attempt to dull the pain of losing his friends and family, and willfully caused The End of the World as We Know It.
• Jimmy from Ed, Edd n Eddy is a downplayed example. In early seasons, he's more of a meek, sensitive Nervous Wreck who was prone to bullying and slapstick. As a result, he becomes more of a clever Bitch in Sheep's Clothing in later seasons. Due to being trained by Eddy, he retains this knowledge and uses it against the Eds many times.
• The Fairly OddParents!
  • The episode "Father Time" where Timmy mucks around with a footrace from his Dad's childhood, revealing a Bad Future where he becomes an evil dictator. Also, Mr. Crocker, and how he became evil (he originally had fairy godparents, but a semi-Stable Time Loop resulted in him losing them).
  • That said, Mr. Crocker is still a nobody, but he's also come closest, several times, to revealing Timmy's secret, and in The Movie, Abra-Catastrophe! got himself Powered Armor from a wishing muffin, and it promptly allowed him to Take Over the World until he was defeated.
  • A similar event happened with Vicky in Channel Chasers in another Bad Future after changing history with a magical TV remote, and an older version of Timmy must travel back in time to stop her from doing so. She took over the world again in the episode "Vicky Gets Fired".
• In the Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes episode "Puppet Master" the titular villain goes from a frustrated artist to being a legitimate threat to a superhero family.
• Thanks to the Nanite event in Generator Rex, every living thing on Earth (except White Knight thanks to a near-lethal accident) has the potential to become a horrible monster.
  • The first EVO threat seen in the series was an ordinary guy who spontaneously transformed into a several stories-tall Kaiju that only The Hero Rex (a more advanced EVO) can defeat without nuking the area.
  • Special mention to Van Kleiss, who was a minor lab technician at the facility that invented the nanites before the event, and is now a Magneto / Orochimaru hybrid leading the largest organized group of malevolent EVOs.
  • Alpha from the Heroes United Crossover was a freaking Nanite that eventually became a menace capable of destroying the entire world.
• Gravity Falls: While it's not dwelt on much in the show, Bill Cipher was apparently once an ordinary inhabitant of a 2-D Space Alternate Dimension, which he then destroyed after having "too many bad days." From a meta-perspective, his first appearance in "Dreamscaperers" had him in the position of the Villain of the Week, and he was seemingly defeated at the end of it, before his appearances in later episodes suggested that he had a bigger role to play in the story.
• Alastor, AKA The Radio Demon of Hazbin Hotel. He arrived as just a rank and file damned soul in Hell. And in disturbingly short order, toppled powerful demons who had been ruling for centuries. The entire underworld is rightfully wary of getting his attention.
• Iron Man: Armored Adventures: Arthur Parks started out as a bottom-run Maggia flunky who'd been verbally beaten down by everyone his entire life. Than he happens upon a high-tech suit that winds up turning him into an insanely powerful Energy Being who gives Iron Man the fight of his life on more than one occasion, nearly obliterates Manhattan by turning himself into a Kill Sat, and became a hero who saved Tony's life, twice-over.
• Invader Zim:
  • Miss Bitters, Dib and Zim's supernatural monster Sadist Teacher is implied in several episodes to have once been either a happy little girl caught in a freak accident or a fairy princess who was hit by a bug zapper. We're not sure which.
  • Gir in the episode "Gir Goes Crazy and Stuff." Usually a Cloud Cuckoo Lander who can briefly shift into a serious mode, this episode has Zim Mode Lock Gir in serious mode. Gir goes from crazy but mostly harmless to downright psychotic, seeing Zim's incompetence as the greatest threat to their mission. Fortunately, Zim is able to restore Gir back to "normal" by the episode's end.
• Justice League:
  • John Dee, a prison inmate with delusions of grandeur in the episode "Only a Dream", follows this trope when he becomes Doctor Destiny. Batman, being Genre Savvy and who had dealt with several nobodies who became nightmares before, investigates him precisely because he is a nobody.
    Green Lantern: Whatever he (Dee) is, he's not in the same league as Grundy and the others. He's a nobody.
    Batman: Ever read the Odyssey? After Odysseus was caught by the Cyclops, he told it that his name was 'Nobody', so when he poked its eye out and his friends asked who did it, all the Cyclops could say was "Nobody."
  • The same episode gives us this dialogue, with Dee's literal transformation From Nobody To Nightmare:
    Dee's wife: John? What are you doing here? Get out!
    John Dee: Y'know, I never liked that name. It's so... ordinary. Especially for someone with such big things in store. You know, a destiny? Ooh, I like that. Dr. Destiny. What do you think?
    Dee's wife: I think you're crazy!
    John Dee: [transforming into Dr. Destiny] Maybe. Or maybe you're just seeing the real me. And now that I'm a doctor... [turns into a grinning skull] I think I'll perform some surgery.
  • David Clinton, an inventor from the Batman Beyond era who appears in the first season finale of Unlimited, "The Once and Future Thing". After single-handedly creating a time travel suit, he started building a collection of historical artifacts. At first, he only took things that wouldn't be missed, but after spending six months as the prisoner of a Wild West thug he went flying off the deep end. He used technology from the future to make a League-killing army of the Jokerz and filled Gotham with stolen landmarks from other time periods, polluting history so much that time itself started unraveling.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Trixie was a loud egotist whose boasts way exceeded her actual power level, a foil to the immensely powerful but humble Twilight Sparkle. After her home got destroyed and she got laughed at by the whole of Equestria, she acquired a powerful and corrupting artifact, which let her trounce Twilight and enslave Ponyville. She gets better by the end of the episode, once the heroes manage to remove it from Trixie's possession.
• The Owl House: Emperor Belos, the evil overlord of the Boiling Isles, started his life as Philip Wittebane, a 17th century human who became trapped on the Isles when he followed his brother Caleb there. Both of them were raised as Witch Hunters, but while Caleb saw the good in the denizens of the Boiling Isles, Philip remained steadfast in his conviction that all witches are evil and need to be eradicated, even if he had to use magic himself to do so. After finding out that Caleb married and had a child with a witch woman, Philip stabbed Caleb to death, and with the help of the Collector, devised a plan to commit mass genocide on every witch on the Boiling Isles. Through fearmongering and other trickery, he formed a cult that would eventually become the Emperor's Coven, eventually taking over the entire Isles. By the time he finally set his plan into motion, the people he was there to kill worshiped him as a god.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): Dick Hardly starts as merely a greedy jerk, lacking any superpowers or supertech. However by the end of his episode, he's proven himself to be the darkest threat The Powerpuff Girls have ever faced.
  • Even the main antagonist, Mojo Jojo (Jojo) was originally a chimpanzee that Professor Utonium kept in his lab for some reason. When he caused a ruckus that lead to him getting blasted by Chemcial X, Jojo gained super-intelligence and snuck away to begin his villainy. After successfully conning the Powerpuff Girls into helping him develop his base and acquiring more Chemical X, Jojo then mutates a whole zoo's worth of monkeys and apes before using the last of the chemical to turn himself into a King Kong Copy. Considering Fuzzy Lumpkins, the Gangreen Gang and the Amoeba Boys never got very far while HIM and Princess Morbucks already had the resources they needed, it's safe to say Mojo Jojo has earned his status as the Powerpuff Girls' greatest foe.
• Mayor Jones of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated; he started out as a smart kid who got into a good college...then he discovered the treasure hidden in Crystal Cove, setting him down the path that would lead to him being one of the most evil characters in Scooby-Doo history. From there, he screws over the original Mystery Incorporated and Professor Pericles by becoming The Freak of Crystal Cove, and then he kidnapped Brad and Judy's son to keep them from getting revenge on him. When Fred Jones Junior found out, he was the angriest people have ever seen the character in any incarnation of the series.
  • Also, many villains the gang encounters turn out to be relatively unremarkable or humble folk:
    • The Ghost Clown: A circus hypnotist seeking revenge for his imprisonment.
    • Captain Cutler: A fisherman posing as his own ghost to steal expensive yachts.
    • Space Kook: A farmer trying to take control of his neighbors' land.
    • Que Horrifico: An arrogant schoolgirl who thinks she's more fit to run town than adults.
    • The Fright Hound: A stay-at-home mom who's pissed off that her son is an outcast.
    • Char Gar Gothakon: A nerdy college student with an unhealthy Cosmic Horror obsession.
    • Night Fright: A rejected stage assistant turned into a demonic movie monster.
    • Professor Pericles: An ordinary parrot and Team Pet to the original mystery Inc before he was betrayed by the aforementioned Mayor Jones, he turned into a criminal supergenius and later becoming the vessel for a world-devouring Eldritch Abomination.
• South Park:
  • This show has always showed us that whenever Mr. Garrison has been given a position of high power, this simple 3rd/4th grade teacher is going to abuse it to his heart's content.
  • An example of such is when Eric Cartman ends up in the Bad Future, he finds out that one of the original founders of worldwide atheism was Mrs. Garrison, his school teacher.
  • Though, that's not nearly as bad as President Garrison. He went from fourth grade teacher to insane president of the United States.
    President Garrison: Do you remember the day you fired me, PC Principal? [...] I was upset because a bunch of immigrants were changing my class and I believe your response was that I needed to go and "learn their language", "be more open-minded". [...] Are you really? Are you really sorry? Because you see PC Principal, you helped create me. You insisted that I was a bigot, that I was an intolerant relic left over from another time. But now, I'm your president.
  • Heidi Turner starts out as an intelligent, occasionally mean-spirited but overall sweet kid who rarely does anything wrong beyond typical spiteful school-age girl things. Then she begins dating Cartman and, despite at first changing him for the better, is ultimately corrupted by him and becomes effectively a female Cartman: fat, belligerent, bigoted, obnoxious, cruel, and outright violent and abusive. Listening to one of her rants and then hearing her described by Mr. Mackey as "being like Cartman except able to follow through" is enough to outright terrify P.C. Principal. She eventually has a Heel Realization and gets better.
• Otto Octavius in The Spectacular Spider-Man starts out as a brilliant scientist and inventor at OsCorp who spends his days bullied by his Mean Boss Norman Osborn in-between being forced to create supervillains for the mob. One experiment gone wrong later, and he's got four mechanical tentacles welded to his spine and all his inhibitions removed and spends the rest of the series trying his hardest to conquer the world as Dr. Octopus.
  • If the series continued, this trope would apply to Harry Osborn.
• Hydro-Man in Spider-Man: The Animated Series. According to him, he was a "nobody" and was expelled from school for causing a lot of trouble. His parents sent him to the navy where they hoped he would straighten up. During a voyage, he accidentally fell into ocean water tainted with some strange mist from a fissure which "turned [him] from a nothing... into a something!"
  • Numerous TAS villains fit. The Hobgoblin was a petty street thug who was granted superpowers by Norman Osborn and turned into a lethally dangerous Psycho for Hire. Venom, aka Eddie Brock, was a failed reporter, before his acquisition of the alien symbiote turned him into one of Spider-Man's worst enemies (his successor, Carnage, averts this, as Kletus Cassady was a Mad Bomber long before he got his symbiote). And then there's Spider-Carnage. Take a badly unhinged kid. Give him Spider-Man's powers. Then, after a long bout of emotional trauma involving clones and an identity crisis, attach the Carnage symbiote to him. Hello Omnicidal Maniac.
  • The Kingpin. When Smythe asked about his past, he explained he was once a mobster's son named Moriarty Wilson (or Willie as he was called by his father). Because of his weight, he had no friends and his father considered him weak and useless. During adulthood, Willie tried to help his father in various crimes, with little success. On one robbery, he was forced to take the fall for his father, who then abandoned him. Now all alone, Willie realized that he was gonna have to learn to take of care himself if he was going to survive. Once out of jail, he had learned everything one needs to learn to become a criminal. Over the years, he created the greatest criminal empire on the East Coast with thousands of criminals working for him and now calls himself Wilson Fisk A.K.A. The Kingpin. And as both an attempt to sever his ties with the past as well as payback for his abandonment, he had his father brought to him so he could see with his own eyes what his son had become before being executed.
• Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends:
  • In "The Fantastic Mr. Frump!" Mr. Frump goes from being a nobody to a Reality Warper.
  • In "Swarm" a harmless bee hive becomes the menace of Swarm.
  • In "Attack of the Arachnoid" chemist Zoltan Amadeus mutates into the monstrous Arachnoid.
• Static Shock: Ivan Evans was a thug who was desperate to break into major crime and join the big leagues. Then the Big Bang happened, and he became Ebon, Static's Arch-Enemy. That's why, when a cure is found, he tries to get his powers back -- he doesn't want to be a nobody again.
• Tangled: The Series: The first season Big Bad is Varian, a somewhat ditzy Gadgeteer Genius humorously placed in a fantasy setting. He was an ally of Rapunzel and helped her try to solve the mystery of the black rocks... but in the process of his experiments, accidentally trapped his father in a giant block of unbreakable amber. The royal family kept putting him off, and he became more and more unhinged as his own attempts failed.
• In Teen Titans (2003) Johnny Rancid was the lowest tier criminal to ever appear; just a violent jerk with a motorcycle and a small laser gun. Then he gets the power to rewrite the rules of reality and turns the world into a gothic hellscape.
  Raven: Cool... I mean oops.
• Wasp, of Transformers: Animated, started as just another Autobot recruit, albeit a bit of an asshole. Then he got framed for espionage and went insane in the stockade, before breaking out years later with vengeance on his mind. And after that, Blackarachnia gets her hands on him and mutates him into the techno-organic Waspinator, which leaves him with uncontrollable electrical powers and makes him even crazier.
  • This one's a bit of a meta example, too. There was another, very similar Waspinator in an earlier Transformers series, Beast Wars... But that Waspinator was The Chew Toy.
    • Until Beast Machines, where it's revealed his spark was used to create the much more competent and dangerous Thrust, the longest-lasting and most dedicated of Megatron's Generals.
  • The Transformers: Prime version of Megatron was once just a simple Gladiator in the harsh pits of Kaon. That simple warrior would eventually plunge an entire planet into darkness and destruction.
    • And before that, like his IDW counterpart, he was a miner, this one a victim of Cybetron's corrupt caste system and a nobody who didn't even have the luxury of a name.
• The Venture Bros.:
  • Henchman 21 starts out as an overweight Mauve Shirt who's only valuable asset is his Joker Immunity and a little bit of Genre Savvy-ness. Then his only friend 24 is killed right before his eyes and he undergoes Training from Hell to become Two-Ton 21: a huge, muscle-bound man who can put up a decent fight against (and even earn the respect of) Brock Samson.
    Brock Samson: Well, I'll hand it to you, you really can deliver a pretty decent beating.
  • Played for Laughs with Brick Frog, a low-ranking supervillain who had a few appearances here and there with his Establishing Character Moment being denied entry into the Revenge Society because of how pathetic he was. In the Grand Finale, the Big Bad turns him into an Unwitting Pawn for her Evil Plan by giving him and a few other no-name villains high-level technology and mooks to terrorize New York with.
• Wakfu:
  • Noximilien Coxen was an unassuming watchmaker and a family man. Then he accidentally got his hands on a little something called the Eliacube...
  • Ogrest was originally a relatively harmless baby accidentally created when a piece of candy fell into the Ogrine that the alchemist Otomai was using to forge a new heart for Dathura. Then Dathura manipulated him into gathering 6 of the Dofus for her. The power of the 6 Dofus transformed Ogrest into an incredibly powerful and insane monster whom even the Twelve Gods could not defeat and flooded the entire world with his sobs.

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