Kamen Rider is a franchise which plays around with this trope quite a bit. One of its central tropes is the Phlebotinum Rebel, the man who has became monstrous against his will and uses his new power for good. As a result, they're regularly contrasted with humans who are not monstrous yet are more evil then the actual monsters. At the same time, humanity itself is prized as an ultimate good which the protagonist strives to hold on to in spite of their modifications. By contrast, the majority of the villains seek to transcend humanity and make themselves monstrous in pursuit of their goal, which usually involves subjugating their fellow humans.
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- Showa-era series have an interesting take on this trope. Most of their villains started out human but converted themselves into kaijins in order to attain superiority, the message being that trying to attain a Master Race status is inherently immoral because doing so requires casting aside your humanity and committing cruelties upon other humans. By contrast, the protagonists, despite also being superpowered cyborgs, are able to prevail because they hold onto their humanity.
Heisei-era series
- In the backstory of Kamen Rider Kuuga, the Grongi are revealed to be humans who were affected by a meteor and transformed into demonic monsters. A fragment of the meteor is used to make the belt our hero Yusuke has to use against them. However, the Grongi are attacking of their own free will, as part of a game to see who can wipe out the most humans, or Linto, and the worst of them all appears as a normal human man.
- While Mirror Monsters serve as the standard Monster of the Week in Kamen Rider Ryuki, all of the major antagonists are other Kamen Riders, who are also human. This is handily pointed out when Takeshi Asakura/Kamen Rider Ouja is called a monster by Ren Akiyama/Kamen Rider Knight, using the same terminology used to describe the Mirror Monsters. And the ultimate Big Bad was a human who didn't care how much death and destruction he wreaked so long as he could save his sister.
- Masato Kusaka of Kamen Rider 555, the signature user of the Kaixa Gear. Nominally on the heroes side, that's as heroic as he really is. In truth, he's a conniving, gaslighting, manipulative Yandere and xenophobe. While both of those traits have understandable roots, the kindness of Mari during their orphanage school years and the attack on their high school reunion by the Dragon Orphnoch, respectively, he's taken both extremely far, being hyper-possessive of Mari, and hating any Orphnoch, even if they are benevolent. What makes him count as this trope is that normal humans are not exempt from his machinations; they are conveniences at best, but ones he has no qualms discarding if they get in the way of his goals of eradicating all Orphnochs and getting Mari to finally love him, whatever it takesnote . A primary example is his animosity and scheming to deny Takumi any ally or friend at many points just for being close to Mari, even long before it's revealed that Takumi is an Orphnoch himself. Like Asakura above, this has made him one of the most popular villains in the franchise, and his actor Kouhei Murakami and creator Toshiki Inoue have consistently gone out of their way to quash any notion that Kusaka is genuinely decent in any way, ensuring this trope.
- In Kamen Rider Double, Kamen Rider Fourze, and Kamen Rider Zi-O; all the monsters are humans who have been transformed. Some didn't know what they were getting into, or they meant well before their power corrupted them; but others were perfectly willing to throw away their humanity for power. The former two series' Big Bads were the ones who created the Transformation Trinkets, humans in full control of their minds and who were willing to corrupt innocents and ultimately destroy entire populations if it meant their Well-Intentioned Extremist goals were met. Meanwhile, Zi-O's Big Bad is a simply a sociopath who is obsessed with gaining power for its own sake and its Greater-Scope Villain is the evil future self of the hero.
- In Kamen Rider OOO, the Big Bad Ensemble of Greeed (not a typo) were created hundreds of years ago by an ambitious human king in a bid for world domination. They suffer from the need to be 'complete,' made impossible by their creator (ten 'core medals' make up their selves; they wouldn't come to life until given need through the removal of one of those medals). Therefore, they seek what they think will fulfill them, ever more ravenously as it proves to never be enough. But while the Greeed are willing to screw everyone else over to fill their desires, the final villain is Dr. Maki, a nihilist who turned himself into a Greeed in order to end everything. The Greeed are Tragic Monsters acting out their nature; the bad humans who are the authors of all the major problems have no excuse.
- In Kamen Rider Wizard, most Phantoms just act out their nature, trying to hatch other Phantoms from the human hosts in which they incubate. What they do is cruel, but they're born seeing humans about the same way a bird sees an eggshell. The most genuinely evil Phantoms were so bad because they retained their human selves:
- Wiseman turned himself into a Phantom in order to give himself magic powers to revive his dead daughter, and then kicked off the plot by committing mass human sacrifice in an occult ritual. And when that didn't work, he manipulated both Wizard and the Phantoms created by the ritual in order to set up an even bigger mass sacrifice.
- Another example is Sora the Gremlin Phantom, the only victim to survive the ritual instead of die and be replaced by their Phantom. He turns out to have been a figurative monster way before becoming a literal one, being a sociopathic serial killer. His transformation didn't affect his personality in the slightest.
- In Kamen Rider Gaim's conflict, the world is facing being overrun by invasive species, but most of the problems come from human antagonists trying to take advantage of the situation, who manage to make the Eldritch Abomination of the story seem much less evil in comparison (it helps that its avatar is friendly and even helpful at times to the hero).
- Kamen Rider Drive is another show which plays with this. The Roidmudes start off artificial life forms trying to supplant humanity, but evolve and turn good gradually after becoming more advanced in their understanding of human emotion. By contrast, the true villain of the show (who deliberately corrupted the Roidmudes to be evil, and whose abuse of them is what convinced them that humans were evil and deserve to be overthrown) started off human, but lacks in any empathy or other positive human traits and by the end of the show is more inhuman than the Roidmudes, having converted himself into a Virtual Ghost and cast aside his human form in a bid to become a god.
- Played with in Kamen Rider Ghost: The Gamma monsters were originally presented as demonic spirits, but it was later discovered that they were humans (or Human Aliens) making use of soul-manipulating technology, thereby playing the trope straight. However, all of the Gamma turned out to either be good, decent people, or redeemed themselves into becoming so by the end. The true threat came from the Gammaizers, artificially-created enforcers who enacted a Zeroth Law Rebellion. The theme of the season was "bonds between people", so it makes thematic sense that the villains were beings who had no such bonds.
- Kamen Rider Ex-Aid has a similar example to Drive. The Bugsters are mainly evil because they're video game enemies brought into the real world, and as such lack a true understanding of concepts fundamental to human existence like life and death. Being shown what death is is enough to make the Bugster executive Parado realize his wrongs and turn good. By contrast, the most evil villains in the show (Kuroto Dan and his father Masamune Dan) start off human but work with the Bugsters to terrorize and subjugate their fellow humans for their own selfish gains, and both end up casting aside their humanity in the name of their god complexes.
- Kamen Rider Build has a more Showa take on this trope. The show has plenty of human villains willing to exploit and trample on others in pursuit of ultimate power, but the Big Bad turns out be an alien life form named Evolt, who draws out and preys on humankind's worst impulses to manipulate them. Even though the heroes have to deal with power-hungry politicians and an amoral war profiteer, Sento repeatedly affirms his belief that humans are fundamentally good and refuses to entertain Evolt when he tries to invoke this argument.
Reiwa-era series
- Kamen Rider Zero-One:
- MetsubouJinrai.net might be the central antagonist group with the main goal of humanity's extinction by hacking HumaGear androids into Magia Killer Robots, but in turn they are victims of Gai Amatsu, a Corrupt Corporate Executive responsible for tampering its "leader" AI Ark with with information regarding criminal psychology and human history of wars, leading to its hatred toward them and its plot of their extinction; hence the creation of said cyber-terrorist and its crusade against humanity. He did all this just to undermine a rival company that manufactures HumaGears; and while Gai talks big about how he wants to prove humanity as superior to machines, his real goal is almost purely corporate greed mixed with some revenge against a (now-dead) former friend and business partner. He cares little about the lives ruined by the threat he created and ultimately treats people little better than the robots, as he reveals that he's been using cybernetic implants to control the actions of two of the heroes without their knowledge and boasts about them being soulless tools.
- That said, even Gai has a Heel Realization near the end of the series, and since the Ark has been destroyed by that point, the thing presented as the "real monster" to defeat was not a human or a non-human but the very concept of hatred itself. Both humans and androids are equally susceptible to hate, and the faction leaders on both sides found themselves needing to break The Chain of Harm before the situation spiraled out of control.
- Kamen Rider Saber: The two biggest villains in the series, Storius and Isaac, are both humans (or at least once were), corrupting people and creating monsters for their own selfish ends. While Storius is trying to end the world in an extreme bid to Screw Destiny, Isaac abandoned his solemn duty to protect people and became an Omnicidal Maniac simply because peacetime was boring. The other lead villains, Storius' compatriots Legeiel and Zooous, were also once human; if manipulated into villainy by Storius.
- Kamen Rider Revice: Zigzagged; while most of the show is dominated by human villains, the Big Bad is a demon named Giff. But Giff justifies his actions by pointing out the evil in humanity — he's an Emotion Eater who consumes "inner demons" (negative thoughts and attitudes) and thinks humanity's demons are delicious thanks to how vile we are, and he claims we'll destroy ourselves if not kept in check. One of his followers even claims that he had once tried to coexist with humanity, only for us to label him a "demon" and seal him away. And just look at how many people throughout the show willingly bowed to worship him and embrace their demons, or otherwise tried to exploit demonic power.
- Kamen Rider Geats has the Earth under attack by Jyamato plant monsters, and the Desire Grand Prix is a Deadly Game organized to find worthy heroes to fight them (and reward them appropriately). But it soon becomes clear that the Jyamato aren't the real threat, and ultimately they're just pawns of people who are:
- The truth about the DGP is that it's an Immoral Reality Show from the future, messing with the timestream and putting people at risk in the name of entertainment; and they're growing Jyamato in a greenhouse specifically for the purpose of being the game's antagonists. Even worse, the Reality Warping they use to reward the winners is courtesy of a Captured Super-Entity and fueled by those who die in the course of the game, or as the show phrases it, stealing happiness from victims to give it all to the winners. Though the final episodes suggest that the turn towards bloodsport is an in-universe case of Pandering to the Base, and a sizable portion of the DGP's audience is actually not happy that it became a Sadist Show.
- To say nothing of the DGP's players. There are some decent people competing, but others are Jerkasses who will lie, cheat, and steal as much as the rules will allow them to in order to get the prize. Even the title character is a Smug Super and Manipulative Bastard. One particular player was a misanthrope who would have asked for the extinction of humanity if he had won.
- Kamen Rider Gotchard presents the trope more strongly than usual. The series revolves around "Chemy" Mons created by Alchemy, and while they're described as disruptions to the natural order, they're generally peaceful. The problem comes when they Fusion Dance with evil humans to form Malgam monsters, but this is catalyzed by the humans' own malice and is unwilling on the Chemies' part. Main hero Hotaro wants to protect everyone, but he tends to emphasize protecting the Chemies from evil humans as opposed to the other way around. Sure enough, Gotchard broke the Hate Sink record that was previously held by its predecessor, with almost every Monster of the Week host prior to the Big Bad showing his face being a detestable scumbag with no positive qualities. And then there's the main villain himself, Geryon, who is very much the epitome of this trope. Based on the series' own principles, he's pretty much nothing but a walking, talking, and dangerous storehouse of pure malicious intent.
Remakes and spinoffs
- Kamen Rider Amazons runs on Gray-and-Gray Morality with even the Monsters of the Week being primarily Tragic Monsters who would rather live normal lives than eat people if it wasn't literally hardwired into their existence to do so, no matter how much they don't want to. However...
- The single most vile character in the series is a perfectly normal human, Takaaki Tenjo, the head of Nozama Pharmacy. Not only does he intentionally endanger countless lives by covering up the Amazons' existence solely to keep the Amazon Cells the Pharmacy's property, he released them to begin with solely to create a Social Darwinist manmade ecosystem of humans killing Amazons or being killed by them, resulting in untold numbers of deaths and every bad thing in the entire series. Despite being more or less physically harmless due to being an Evil Cripple, Tenjo comes off as more of a monster than the Amazons.
- While Takaaki Tenjo is considered to be the Big Bad of the series, there's another human who manages to make him and the Monsters of the Week look likable by comparison. Soji Shitashimo. He beats women out of pure sadism and when he's done using his fists, he uses a pipe to finish them off. Soji's abuse towards Nozomi was enough to make Haruka want to kill a human for the first time.
- In Kamen Rider BLACK SUN, the monsters are just people with weird genetics and they're no threat at all; they're the victims of Fantastic Racism. It's the humans that are calling for their deaths as an unsubtle civil rights allegory.
- The plot of Kamen Rider Outsiders is a deconstruction of this trope. The anthology deals with an artificial intelligence called Zein that seeks to cleanse the world of evil, with its methods being borderline tyrannical but a necessary evil. Given the main characters are the villains themselves and most of them are (and a few, used to be) human. The good guys, on the other hand, are more than willing to have humanity submit to a Knight Templar A.I., going so far as to donate their powers so Zein can use them to stoke fear and terror to put the villains and the entire human race on notice. The real kicker, Zein would turn out to be the real villain, It's narrative of goodwill and Humans Are Bastards worldview come off as the superficial pretenses of a Holier Than Thou Hypocrite with a god complex and forcing humanity to kill one another, going so far as to use a Deadly Game to enact its Final Solution to eradicate malice.
