Final Solution

"At the beginning of the discussion SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich reported that the Reichsmarshall [Göring] had appointed him delegate for the preparations for the final solution [endlösung] of the Jewish question in Europe."

— Minutes of the 20/1/1942 Wannsee Conference, section II

If the enemy race is Always Chaotic Evil (as far as your side's viewpoint is concerned, at least) or you simply don't want to get trapped in a Cycle of Revenge, why not simply exterminate them all? Including the children — especially the children — to make sure they don't rise up to become warriors. Deal with the whole damned problem once and for all!

Prior to the 20th century, this trope, while still frowned upon ever since the end of Classical Antiquity or so, wasn't really seen as problematic as it is today. Just kill them all; it makes perfect sense. Then the Kaiserreich, the Ottoman Empire, and Nazi Germany came along and did it for real. So, people started to know about the Holocaust — and to their horror learned what a Final Solution actually looked like, felt like, and meant. After World War II, genocide, as this phenomenon was subsequently named, stopping being merely another feature of war and became the ultimate act of evil. Likewise, in fiction, a hero might have once looked on with indifference at a whole race of enemies being exterminated, or even have approved, but now the hero would roar at the thought of a villain doing that kind of dark deed, no matter how beneficial it would be for the hero, with a cry of "You're Insane!" and furiously leap in battle to stop the atrocity.

It was sometimes made Darker and Edgier by introducing the counterpoint trope known as Genocide Dilemma. Other times, genocides committed by the good guys were simply downplayed. The heroes' hands were kept clean by having entire enemy populations Hoist by His Own Petard along with their Evil Overlord (making some evil Self-Destruct Mechanism or whatever responsible for the slaughter of all the mooks). Or perhaps one of the bad guys intervened and pressed the Big Red Button that the heroes refused to press. Of course, at the same time, villains became more likely to solve their problems with a Final Solution. Bonus points for it being passed off to the public as, say, extradition to a "new homeland for X group".

For a plan to count as a Final Solution, it must fulfill three criteria:

1. It must be the deliberate extermination of (or intent to exterminate) a demographic of one's own species (genocide) or another species of sentient beings (xenocide), regardless of its ultimate success.
2. It must be done to fix a perceived problem. ^note e.g. typically a belief in moral-spiritual contamination as a result of associating with those to be exterminated, or a belief that a Guilt-Free Extermination War is inevitable and survival depends on striking first; expect the targets to be thought of as vermin and/or a disease that must be cleaned up to make life safe/good/healthy for the exterminators If not, that's just For the Evulz Omnicidal Maniac and/or stuff.
3. In the eyes of the exterminators, the existence of said demographic/species is a problem/"question." ^note languages other than English do not always make a distinction between the two While there is a grey area where Final Solution and Utopia Justifies the Means can overlap, the former is not in itself a subtrope of the latter.

Reasonably sympathetic characters tempted to solve a problem with a Final Solution usually treat said solution as a very dire Genocide Dilemma; in some stories, they get away with shrugging it off as if it was unproblematic. For obvious reasons, it's one of the biggest crossings of the Moral Event Horizon than any villain can commit especially since the targeted group in question are the victims.

Compare this trope with A Million Is a Statistic, Inferred Holocaust, Dehumanization, Guilt-Free Extermination War, and The Great Exterminator. An Alternate-History Nazi Victory usually implies this happened as well.

The Logical Extreme of this trope is the Absolute Xenophobe, who applies the Final Solution to all other races.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Attack on Titan has multiple examples of this atrocity being committed.
  • The breaching of Wall Maria and failed breaching of Wall Rose were deliberate attempts of the Marley-owned Titan Shifters, the Warriors, to wipe out the people living within the Walls. Once Eren's powers are discovered, they change their focus to capturing him, as he possesses the Founding Titan's power, the Coordinate, and Zeke can wield it.
  • Mikasa's Asian heritage is noted to be unique because no others are known to still exist within the Walls. Kenny states that other races are not subject to the King's Power, so those living inside the Walls were exterminated by the government.
  • A very thinly-veiled example: Marley has rounded up the Eldians left living outside the Walls, and confines them to ghettos. The rest of the world favors exterminating the last of the "Devil's Children" from the world, but Marley maintains their captive population as military assets. Eren Kruger states that once technology becomes capable of overwhelming the Titans, Marley will have no use for the Eldians and will begin debating the "Eldian Question" again. A Nazi by Any Other Name, indeed.
  • Zeke plans to use the power of the Founding Titan to sterilize the Eldian population, effectively resulting in their euthanasia after a generation, and believed Eren would help him. Turns out Eren was never willing to go through with the plan and was only using Zeke to further his own purposes.
  • Eren's plan involves killing everyone outside Paradis, including his fellow Eldians, as Marley's mistreatment of his people, combined with the rest of the world's desire for their extinction has tainted his views on them. Armin directly refers to it as mass genocide.
  • While discussing Eren's plan with Jean and Mikasa, Hange loses her cool and slams her fist on the table, screaming that genocide is wrong no matter the reason and that there isn't a damn thing anyone can do to change her mind, highlighting how desperate the situation has become.
• Digimon Data Squad: Akihiro Kurata believes that all Digimon are a threat to humanity because they attacked him during an expedition to the Digital World, and he conducts a systematic military campaign to exterminate them, using weapons and soldiers that can permanently kill Digimon by shutting down their Born-Again Immortality. He conveniently ignores the fact that the only reason the Digimon attacked him during the expedition was because he shot at one of them first, and he disregards any evidence that Digimon are anything more than beasts or that they can coexist peacefully with humans.
• Dragon Ball Z:
  • Frieza's genocide of the Saiyans by blowing up Planet Vegeta, done because he feared one of them surpassing him in power and threatening his hold on the galaxy. Which is ultimately what happened: four Saiyans survived the genocide (eight if movies are counted as canon), he's utterly defeated by one of them, killed by the half-Saiyan offspring of another, and killed again by the one that utterly defeated him before.
  • Zamasu, believing that all mortals are too evil to live and all the gods are too lazy to do anything, decided that the only way to correct their mistakes was by wiping out all life-forms — god and mortal — until only he remained.
• Elfen Lied: Pretty much every Diclonius in the series has been abused by humans to the point where their biological survival instinct has fused with their psychosis, which insists that humans must be eradicated or they will eradicate Diclonii. Turns out that is absolutely correct. Once knowledge of Diclonii is widespread, all Diclonius babies are killed at birth until human scientists develop a vaccine capable of keeping them from being conceived at all, annihilating the species.
• The Ishvalan Extermination Campaign in Fullmetal Alchemist. What started out as a relatively normal war soon escalated into a bloody massacre, designed to wipe out the indigenous population of Ishval. While it severely reduced the Ishvalans' numbers, they weren't completely wiped out: small populations survive in the ruins of the ancient city of Xerxes and as refugees throughout Amestris, where they are below second-class citizens but not targeted for death after their leader's surrender. Though for the Big Bad, the genocide was actually a complete success. Wiping out the Ishvalans was incidental to his plans; he just needed a large number of people to die in the precise geographical location of Ishval. Ishvalans or his own soldiers, it made no difference who provided the human souls. The majority of adult characters are veterans of the campaign, and one subplot concerns their conspiracy to topple the government of Amestris and hold everyone who ordered or participated in the genocide to account, themselves included.
• Goblin Slayer presents a rare heroic example, at least within the logic of the story. A great deal of writing goes into explaining why goblins are savages whose extermination is both moral and rational, mainly by taking genocidal rhetoric used in real life and simply making it true. For starters: the whole race is inherently violent and evil, down to the children; they breed rapidly, meaning they can quickly overrun communities if swift action isn't taken (and governments often don't take the threat goblins pose seriously enough to do it themselves); they breed by kidnapping and raping women from the civilized "prayer" races; any goblin that surrenders and begs for mercy is lying to get the drop on you; and so on and so forth, therefore the only option is to wipe them out wherever they're found, no Genocide Dilemma here. The only moral nuance that goblins ever receive is an acknowledgement that the prayer races' efforts to destroy them is a major factor in their own hatred of civilization.
• Gundam:
  • In After War Gundam X, the Frost Brothers, enraged by their own lack of Newtype potential, trigger a war with the intent of exterminating all those who show talent as Newtypes. It ultimately backfires on them quite badly. And Seidal Rasso, Glorious Leader of the Space Revolutionary Army, wants to wipe out the "Oldtype" population on Earth.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, Muruta Azrael plots to exterminate all of the Coordinators (whom he views as genetic abominations), while his opposite number, Patrick Zala, plans to wipe out all the Naturals (whom he sees as inferior and unevolved). The end result is almost The End of the World as We Know It, which is exactly what Rau Le Creuset, acting as The Man Behind the Man to both of them, wanted.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, Lord Djibril again tries to massacre all the Coordinators, while the Coordinators behind the Break The World Incident seek the death of all Naturals.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam AGE: Not necessarily Vagan; their goal could be achieved without massacring all natives of the Earth Sphere. No, this is the intended goal of Flit Asuno, the first protagonist, for Vagan.
• Killer Killer: This is actually Shuuji's solution for dealing with murders. Since, to him, anyone has the potential to become a killer, then the best course of action is to kill everyone.
• Kimba the White Lion: Bizarrely invoked the episode "Too Many Elephants" from the 1965 TV adaptation: the nature reserve declares that there are too many elephants, who are said to be "bad" animals, and they all need to go away to make room for the "good" animals, with the plan being to murder every last one of them with literal tanks, bombs, and machine guns. The titular character tries to put a stop to this, but after being rebuked by all the elephants save for one baby and the baby’s mother, he completely gives up and decides to just save the baby and his mother while the rest of the elephants are all brutally killed onscreen. Kimba then remarks that this was apparently the solution to the Genocide Dilemma after all;
  Kimba: Why couldn't all the elephants be nice like Peewee? Then they wouldn't have to be exterminated...
• Land of the Lustrous: The Lunarians had been planning for not only the extermination of their own race, but every other sentient species as well. As spirits of humanity, they can't pass on until they're prayed for by Kongou Sensei, but since the Lustrous and Admirabillis are also derived from humanity, they'll be taken out as collateral due to an unfixable malfunction in his programming. They're perfectly fine with this tradeoff, and attempt to force it through kidnapping, isolation, and eventually turning any remaining sentient species into Lunarians, and ensured it by making sure the new being they've picked for the job, Phosphophyllite, can't be stopped or convinced by others to back out. By the end of the series, they've succeeded.
• In Volume 1 of Lord Marksman and Vanadis, Duke Felix Aaron Thenardier orders the invasion of Alsace to eliminate the weakest link due to him viewing Tigre as a disgrace. The invasion would also involve his son Zion capturing any survivors to be sold as slaves to Muozinel. However, all of the women and children are able to find shelter in the local temples and the men are sent to the woods.
• Naruto has the culling of the Uchiha Clan. It was accomplished by one of their own, Itachi, on the commands of Well-Intentioned Extremist Danzo, who considered their destruction to be necessary for the peace of the village. Debatably, he may have had a point; the Uchihas were planning to perform a coup d'etat. On the other hand, the whole reason the Uchihas were planning a coup in the first place was that they were discriminated against, and forced to live in a separate walled-off part of the village.
• One Piece:
  • A "Buster Call" is an order to do this, normally only issuable by an Admiral or higher. So far it's been called three times.
    • The massacre of Ohara. The only way to silence the scholars of Ohara from revealing the truth of the Void Century was to kill them all. This also extends to every man, woman, and child who lived on the island who wasn't a scholar. Just in case. Or at least, that was Vice Admiral Sakazuki's interpretation of his orders. While some of his comrades were outraged, his superiors found this quite acceptable.
    • During the Enies Lobby arc, one is called to Enies Lobby accidentally by Spandam, but later was authorized. The Straw Hats thankfully managed to escape, but the Marines were fully trying to kill them.
    • During the Egghead Arc, Saint Saturn orders one to Egghead to kill Vegapunk for his research, Kuma for merely being a Buccaneer, and the Straw Hats for awakening the Human Human Fruit, Model: Nika.
  • The Reverie Arc indicates that the World Government is planning this again, as the Five Elder Stars ask their superior Im, the mysterious hidden ruler of the World Government, the name of the "light" that needs to be extinguished from history.
• Rebuild World: The Nationalist Rebels against the settings Corporate Government have the goal of exterminating all of the Differently Powered Individuals known as Old World Domain Connectors (those with an Organic Technology wireless Brain/Computer Interface inherited from Precursors Transhuman genetic engineering) such as Akira. This has some basis in the fact that there is a Secret War between The Remnant of the Old World trying to bring back that civilization to its former glory, at the cost of destroying the current human civilizations, and the Corporate Government. Bringing back the Old World means bringing back Old World Domain Connectors en masse.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: The Anti-Spirals consider the eradication of Spirals justified. Their view: Spirals can tap into Spiral Energy, kind of like turning the key on a wind-up toy. The more Spiral Energy is tapped, the more the key is turned... until you overwind. Then all the spiral energy collapses in on itself, creating a Spiral-powered Kugelblitz (A black hole made of energy instead of matter) known as a Spiral Nemesis, that never stops growing and devours the entire universe. So the Anti-Spirals believe that they are trying to save the universe. Why didn't they show up earlier? They only notice you when you get above a certain threshold. Then they get medieval on you. Near the end of the story, when Humanity overcame the Human Extermination System, it's implied the Anti-Spirals had decided to finish the job and destroy all life everywhere. Needless to say, their plan is stopped by Team Dai-Gurren and their leader, Simon the Digger, who wiped out the entire Anti-Spiral race by killing the physical manifestation of their Hive Mind.
• Towards the end of Witch Hunter Robin, Zizain is revealed to be working towards one of these. He wanted to use Orbo to empower normal humans to hunt witches. Until then, the organization was forced to use witches to hunt other witches, but with the enhanced Orbo, that would no longer be necessary. With the STN's database, he can systematically wipe them out. In his eyes, all witches are afflicted by With Great Power Comes Great Insanity or will be eventually, so he sees himself as justified.

Comic Books

• Captain Britain: In Alan Moore's run, Mad Jim Jaspers created the grotesque cybernetic creature The Fury and used him to murder every superhero on his Earth, simply because he didn't want anyone living who possessed any kind of power to threaten him.
• ElfQuest: Siege at Blue Mountain: Part of Winnowill's plan involves killing the Wolfriders' immortal souls as well as their bodies. (Admittedly, there are less than twenty Wolfriders, but they're still an entire race of elf-wolf hybrids.) She fails, naturally.
• Judge Dredd: The Dark Judges arrived at the conclusion that crimes are committed only by the living, therefore life itself is a crime and the punishment is death. Having already killed all the life in their universe, the Dark Judges set their undead eyes on Mega-City One.
• Maus: The book traces the history of the author's father's Holocaust experiences, and he, of course survives. However, when the author talks to his therapist, he says that he can admire his father for surviving and the therapist asks him if that means that the people who didn't survive are less worthy of admiration because of circumstances outside their control.
• Nemesis the Warlock: The Termight Empire slaughters all aliens they encounter in order to take over their planets for themselves. And because they're bigots.
• Scarlet Traces, an Alternate History set in the aftermath of The War of the Worlds, has the Martians being eradicated from the surface of Mars by a revolutionary bomb system called Galahad.
• Spider-Man: In The Spectacular Spider-Man, Man-Beast — an anthropomorphic wolf created by the High Evolutionary — manipulates the Legion of Light cult in a scheme to commit genocide on humanity, whereupon the New Men would be left to repopulate the Earth.
• In The Spectacular Spider-Man Vol. 2, The Queen forces Professor David Jaffe—the scientist in charge of the Operation Crossroads atom bomb tests—to build a bomb that will wipe out all non-insect life on Earth, only sparing those with the insect gene.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe:
  • Star Wars: Legacy: Darth Krayt orders the extermination of the Mon Calamari species in retaliation for their senator helping the Galactic Alliance steal a prototype Star Destroyer. He begins with a live broadcast of his Stormtroopers and Sith minions slaughtering the ruling Mon Calamari council, declares that they will slaughter ten percent of the population immediately and that the remainder will be worked to death in labour camps. After Krayt’s “death”, Darth Wyyrlok decides to speed things up via the Final Protocol: an artificial plague so deadly that it wipes out all life on the Mon Calamari homeworld within days.
  • Star Wars: Darth Vader (pictured above).
• Strontium Dog: In "The Final Solution" arc, the New Church publicly claims that they're moving the mutant population in Britain to new homes in another dimension where they can live in peace away from normal human beings. What they're really doing, however, is rounding up mutants from their ghettos and dumping them in a dimensional wasteland to be stranded and killed by an Eldritch Abomination, but they know that nobody would make much fuss if they make it sound like a peaceful relocation program.
• Superman:
  • Lex Luthor and General Lane's goal in New Krypton is the destruction of the entire Kryptonian race. Aside from Superman and Supergirl, they pull it off.
  • In The Supergirl Saga story arc during John Byrne's run on the Superman titles in the late 1980s, the three escaped Phantom Zone criminals of the Pocket Universe terrorized its Earth when they were released, and though its Earth no longer had Superboy to protect them, its version of Lex Luthor had built up a resistance force powerful enough to keep the Phantom Zone villains at bay. Ultimately, the villains decided humanity was too much trouble to rule over and thus killed everyone outside Lex Luthor's Smallville citadel by burning away the Earth's atmosphere through destabilizing its core. They were punished for their crimes by the mainstream DC Universe's Superman exposing them to the radiations of Gold and Green Kryptonite, both of which were only effective against Kryptonians of the Pocket Universe due to a difference in radiation emissions.
• The Transformers (IDW): Megatron and the Decepticons, The six-stage plan for planetary conquest ends with the complete extermination of the planet's indigenous, organic life. The Decepticons who have been augmented into one-bot armies with the intent of carrying this out by themselves are even known as "Phase Sixers".
  • Chief Justice Tyrest's grand plan is a galaxy-wide slaughter of every Cybertronian who was constructed cold, a birthing procedure Tyrest himself invented, but which Tyrest has concluded are "predisposed to sin". He's allied with Star Saber, a religious zealot who we're told once proposed an "atheist holocaust". Stopping the former plan is the end of season 1 plot for The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye; the latter never really gets a shot at it, instead opting to just hang around worse villains being an asshole until Cyclonus cuts him in half.
  • The alternate-universe Functionist Council, from the universe where they were never destroyed and now rule Cybertron as despotic god-kings, exterminates entire classes of Cybertronians when it is decided that their altmodes are either obsolete or inconvenient.
• V for Vendetta: Since the British government was overthrown by Neo-Nazis; the final solution has mostly succeeded in its goal (of wiping out every non-white, non-Christian, LGBT, and/or politically dissident person in Britain) by the time the novel takes place.
• X-Men: A number of villains make it their goal to destroy the mutant species out of bigotry or a fear that mutantkind may overthrow humanity. This thinking has led to the creation of the Sentinels, mutant-hunting robots who occasionally decide that best way to deal with mutants is to kill anything with a genetic code.
  • The Mutant Massacre storyline sees Mr. Sinister's Marauders killing most of the Morlocks, a community of mutants that lives underground in the sewers. Mr. Sinister wanted the Morlocks killed due to him thinking that they were diluting the mutant gene pool.
  • The storyline "Grey's End" has a Shi'ar Extermination Squad murder every last person who has the "Grey Genome" in a vile attempt to prevent the Phoenix from bonding with another. The only ones to walk away from that are Rachel Summers and Cable (which Rachel notes is odd that they didn't go after him).
  • In God Loves, Man Kills, Stryker's aim is to kill every mutant in the world. To that end, he brainwashes Professor X and uses his psychic powers in the attempt, though it's stopped.

Fan Works

• Godzilla fanfiction Abraxas: Empty Fullness: It's revealed that Ghidorah was originally created by an alien race called the Makers to inflict total destruction against another planet's sapient civilization. Ghidorah did what the Makers wanted it to, then it flew back to the world where the Makers had created it and it did the same to them too.
• Mega Man: Defender of the Human Race: The Conduit's plan is to destroy every single robot's memory core, killing them all.
• The Smurfette Village series: In "How Things Smurf", Gargamel nearly wipes out the entire Smurf population with "the Blue Plague".
• Sonic X: Dark Chaos: This trope is standard protocol for both the Demons and Angels and is used with wild abandon. A more story-focused example is Tsali's genocide against the Seedrians which started the Metarex War.
• In Weaver Nine, the PRT has a blanket kill order on every and all members of the Society. Given that very few of them have committed crimes worthy of a death sentence, and the fact quite a few of them are innocents who joined the Society in gratitude after the Society rescued them from slavery, unjust imprisonment, torture, or other terrible fates... it reeks of Genocide.
  • In addition: Weaver's Society is all but legally a nation unto itself, with infrastructure, territory, and such. Most obvious is when she offers forty citizens to the defense of Brockton Bay, more than half the number of capes the Protectorate could gather.
• In The Three Kings: Hunt, the wizards try to do this to the mages. Mage numbers dwindled to near-extinction, but they're making a comeback.
• Used by the Liir against the Batarians in Shepherd Of The Stars. After years of refusing to retaliate against government-sponsored Batarian slave raids, the Liir snap, unleashing a lethal retrovirus and invading the Hegemony to wipe out anyone who survives the plague. By the time everyone else intervenes to stop the genocide, only ten percent of the Batarian population is left and the Hegemony no longer exists.
• Rosario Vampire: Brightest Darkness: In Acts III and IV, Hokuto is firmly convinced that all life forms, human and monster alike, are equally evil and will endlessly kill each other simply to continue living for the sake of living; thus, he seeks to achieve peace by resurrecting the ancient destroyer Alucard and allowing him to kill every last living soul on the planet. According to Hokuto, as well as Akasha during Act VI, before he mutated into the monstrosity he became, Alucard shared the same views as Hokuto.
• In The Conversion Bureau: The Other Side of the Spectrum, the Solar Empire, an Equestria corrupted and turned to evil, is waging a xenocidal Assimilation Plot war against the human race. In both stories, the Empire has already wiped out the Reindeer on Equus, with only three escaped survivors remaining.
• Kimi No Na Iowa: The abyssals seek the genocide of Japan as punishment for its war crimes and so as to prevent a recurrence. They also seek the genocide of the USA for Breaking The Oath to do so the last time. Thirdly, any other country who was involved in the Pacific Theatre and now refuses to change allegiance and help fight Japan, they see as The Quisling and thus also to be eliminated.
• I Woke Up As a Dungeon, Now What?: The Velthian Empire openly proclaims that the existence of anyone of Khannite descent is an offense against the planet and that it is their sacred duty to kill everyone of Khannite or partial Khannite descent, as well as any ethnic Velthian who marries or protects a Khannite. And they're putting their words into action all throughout their territory.
• All For Luz:
  • Governor Maxwell's Evil Plan was to try and wipe all Quirk users from the map out of Fantastic Racism. Luckily, he was stopped and arrested before he could carry this out.
  • Tyler Wittebane wants to do this too, and goes as far as to believe that The Governor's plan didn't go far enough. His Living Distant Ancestor, Emperor Belos, wants to work with him to achieve this, along with witches and demons.
• Metal Gear: Green: Madam President enlists all the African Warlords and offers them a deal: in exchange for all the weapons and equipment they want, they are to destroy Outer Heaven and kill everyone who is a citizen of Outer Heaven. Five years in, and the results are more lost ground, massive armory depletions, Critical Staffing Shortage issues, and not only a very strong MSF, but a severely weakened HPSC.

Films — Animated

• Chicken Run: Mrs. Melisha Tweedy finds chickens to be almost worthless, stupid animals, with their egg-laying production producing only "minuscule profits" for her. She decides the best way to turn her chicken farm into gold mine is to buy a machine that will turn all her chickens into pot pies. In the sequel, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, Mrs. Tweedy modifies her plan from pies to chicken nuggets and escalates her slaughter industry on a global scale to not only make herself rich, but also get revenge on chicken-kind after her chickens literally flown the coop and humiliated her in the previous film.
• Kung Fu Panda 2 has this be Po's backstory. He was believed (at the time) to be the last panda, as the rest were killed at the command of Lord Shen in an attempt to avert a prophesy that said his ambitions would fail due to "a warrior of black and white".
• The Prince of Egypt: When Moses tries one last time to talk down Rameses before the final plague takes his son's life, Rameses starts ranting that Seti had the "right idea" how to deal with the Hebrews and that perhaps he should "finish the job". When his son dies, Rameses relents and lets Moses's people go, but later changes his mind and pursues them with his army to simply kill them all.
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie: Bowser, after having his (forced) wedding ruined by a rebelled Peach, his prisoners are freed before they're dunked in lava, and especially seeing Mario and Peach relieved to see each other again, snaps out of his ice block trap and commands a Banzai Bill to destroy the Mushroom Kingdom. It takes Mario leading it to the Warp Zone to get it away before it can explode.
• Done twice in Titan A.E.. First the Drej against the humans (which is rightly treated as villainous), then the humans against the Drej — and the latter act is treated as a happy ending.

Films — Live-Action

• Alien Nation: Dark Horizon, the first movie sequel, has a Purist group create a bioweapon to kill all Newcomers. Thankfully they only manage to infect a few (with all surviving) before they're stopped.
• Blade: Trinity doubles down on them, with the vampires planning on turning all humans into brain-dead, harvestable bloodsacks, and the humans working on a bioweapon designed to wipe out all vampires — the heroes express no angst whatsoever about the genocidal implications of this, despite one of them being a cured and reformed vampire himself.
• The Necromongers of The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) practice this regularly as part of their crusade to cleanse the universe of all life (minus those who convert to the faith after a successful invasion) by triggering enormous energy waves from the giant spires they land in, destroying everything on the planet's surface. They even call this event the 'Final Protocol'.
• Conspiracy (2001) follows the detailed formulation and dissemination of the plan for the Final Solution (The Holocaust). Since it's all confined to that one meeting, we don't see the camps themselves, although the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue details which of the characters ended up paying for their crimes.
• Extinction (2018): In the past, the humans tried to kill all androids, but they fought back in response, driving them from Earth onto their Mars colonies
• Independence Day: What the Aliens have in store for us. President Whitmore's Mind Rape by a captive Alien reveals that this isn't the first time they've done this, either; before arriving on Earth, the Aliens had already invaded, exterminated, colonized, and plundered countless other worlds.
• Man of Steel: After the Kryptonians arrive at Earth, General Zod commits to the genocide of the human race to restore Krypton with the world engine. This is symbolized in a particularly eerie way when Kal-El is buried in a sea of human skulls on Zod's ship.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Thor: Loki attempts to use the Bifrost to destroy the frost giants, which for most of the movie had been portrayed as savage and violent. Thor stops him by destroying the Bifrost.
  • Thor: The Dark World: Bor, Odin's father, exterminated all of the Dark Elves to prevent them from destroying the multiverse. Odin only grinned about it when recounting the deed and justified it by the thousands of years of peace it brought about. Then it turns out that many of the Dark Elves were killed by Malekith covering his own escape and surviving. Thor and a few humans kill the last of them when Malekith tries destroying the universe again.
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron: The A.I. Tony Stark created, Ultron, goes rogue, and starts to believe he must eradicate humanity to save the Earth.
  • Avengers: Infinity War: Thanos claims that it is indiscriminate, but by wiping out half of life in the universe to solve the problem of limited resources, he still committed genocide "on a scale hitherto undreamt of". According to Word of God from Kevin Feige, half of all animals were killed too, including cattle raised for food, dogs, cats, and even ants.
  • Avengers: Endgame: Thanos realizes if he only wipes out half of all life in the universe, the other half will just undo his work, so he decides he'll kill everything in the universe and remake it in his own image.
• In Stargate: Continuum, the Goa'uld consider the human population of Earth to have grown beyond their control. After Qetesh takes over from Ba'al, they decide to remedy this by orbitally bombarding the planet and reducing it to a more "manageable" number by killing as many people as possible.
• In Star Trek (2009), a crazed Romulan from the future decides to obliterate the planet Vulcan, taking with it all but the small number of civilians who are able to evacuate in time. He intends to then do the same to Earth, but the Enterprise intervenes to stop him before he can complete this part of his objective.
• Star Wars:
  • Revenge of the Sith: The culmination of Palpatine's master plan is Order 66, an order to every Clone Trooper to kill all the Jedi, resulting in the Great Jedi Purge.
  • A New Hope: When Alderaan was destroyed by the Death Star, approximately 1,999,940,000 sentients were on the planet at the moment of its destruction.
  • The Rise of Skywalker: Palpatine's "Final Order", a fleet of star destroyers with planet-busting super-lasers installed aboard, has the purpose of dispersing throughout the galaxy and destroying every single world that even thinks about resisting the reborn Empire.
• TRON: Legacy: The ISOs aren't perfect? Clu's got a simple way to solve that problem...
• Turkey Shoot: Ritter's proposed solution for deviants would be not even attempting to "reeducate" anyone, but just kill them all. Mallory even approvingly calls this "the ultimate solution".
• Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit wants to do this to all Toons by way of The Dip. In the original version of the script, he even calls the stuff the "Final Solution".
• Vice (2015): When Roy and Kelly upload the artificials memories of their abuse, causing them to attack Julian's guests, he simply decides to activate a kill switch and murder them all.
• In Zulu Dawn, one British statesman hopes that the imminent British assault on the Zulu Kingdom will be "the final solution to the Zulu problem." Cue the Battle of Isandlwana...

Literature

• The first Big Bad of the Age of Fire series, the Wrymmaster, wants to use his dragon armies to wipe out the non-human races, in the delusional belief that they're all part of some grand conspiracy to oppress humanity.
• The Anglo/American – Nazi War is an Alternate History where the Germans manage to swing Stalingrad, Stalin liquidates his entire high command for losing his namesake city, and from there, things just keep getting worse and worse for the Russians until eventually they're defeated by 1943. As a result, the Nazi regime has continental Europe all to itself and they're free to put into action a good number of their insane, horrifying long-term plans for Europe, such as the Final Solution and Generalplan Ost. By the war's end with the defeat of the Nazi regime in 1960, 97.5% of the pre-war European Jewish population is liquidated, the survivors number in the low thousands.
• Belisarius Series:
  • The Malwa do this or try to several times in the series as fitting their evil status. Aside from Belisarius having a vision of them doing this to Constantinople if the Byzantine Empire is not prepared, this happens to the Indian city of Ranapur — by official decree, not just the normal shell-shocked troops going crazy after a long siege. The Malwa also order this done to the Maratha; however, they are a Proud Warrior Race and don't take kindly to this.
  • The Malwa are actually led by a robot sent from the future by Transhuman Aliens who wish to manipulate time for the extermination of every race that is not them.
• In the Bolo series, a breakdown in relations between the Terran Concordiat and the Melconian Empire eventually leads to both sides trying to wipe each other out. They both almost succeed. Almost.
• The Brightest Shadow features an inversion of the usual Always Chaotic Evil race, where the Hero's plan to destroy them all is recognized to be genocide.
• Caliphate: After Islamic terrorists steal nukes to bomb America, the USA declares war on the Islamic world by nuking it right back, declaring Islam an Illegal Religion and pressuring most of the world to evict their Muslim citizens — only Western Europe rejects it and ends up being turned into a Caliphate with the exception of the UK and Switzerland (who follow America's suit). It's not stated how Israel handles the crisis, but a comment from one character claims they "learned the lesson Himmler and Eichmman tried to teach them as well".
• In The Dresden Files, Harry Dresden does this to the Red Court by turning their own magic against them. The bloodline curse instantly kills the entire species, everywhere that they exist in the world. Like most heroic versions, seemingly justified, there is no evidence that any of them were anything but totally evil, and by definition, every single one of them was a murderer (they only turn after making their first kill). Of course, given that it was a spur of the moment thing (the ritual to enact the curse had been set up by the Red King to target Harry's bloodline, but by using a different sacrifice, he was able to reverse it to take out the Red King's bloodline instead), he didn't really predict the resulting vacuum of power, nor how it would result in a world verging on Crapsack.
• The Ender series:
  • In Ender's Game, the human high command's decision to destroy all the Buggers/Formics certainly fits this trope, though Ender himself is not consciously aware of it.
  • This is Ender's entire philosophy towards conflict and why he was molded into the high command's weapon. Defeat your enemy in such a way as to prevent any future battles.
  • Later books introduce the Hierarchy of Foreignness. At one extreme is the varelse, the "foreigner with whom no communication is possible". The only sensible interaction with varelse is a war of extermination.
• The Falcon Cannot Hear: In retaliation for attacks by black militants on KKK-aligned figures, Huey Long's fascist White government set up concentration camps for black Americans in Aberdeen, Mississippi. The sight of people dying of sickness and neglect in these camps is the final straw that convinces Eisenhower to rebel: first by launching an unsuccessful coup, then defecting to the Reds.
• The Gilded Chamber: Haman decides to have Persian Jewry annihilated in retaliation for Mordecai, also known as "Marduka" refusing to bow to him.
• In Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the only debate that ever existed among the morally superior horse people is whether their degraded human cattle will be exterminated and replaced with the more agreeable donkeys. By the end, they are considering sterilization (which of course would result in the same thing).
• Robert A. Heinlein loves this trope, always portraying it as ultimately a good thing. Bugs from Starship Troopers — it's implied they are wiped from the universe step by step. Parasitic aliens from The Puppet Masters — homeworld bombed by a bacteriological weapon. Wormfaces from Have Space Suit – Will Travel — their planet is kicked away from its sun by the galactic UNO. It does help that all these races are Eldritch Abominations.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy starts out with some amoral bureaucratic aliens destroying Earth and mankind along with it, simply to make room for a new interstellar highway. In some versions of the franchise, the highway is a cover story for the real reason.
• Played with in The Illuminatus! Trilogy. The bad guys kill off entire nations for not agreeing with them — or as snacks for elder gods.
• The Horus Heresy novels describe in detail the many, many acts of genocide committed by the early Imperium of Man. The most notable alien races and empires to fall before the Astartes legions include the Diasporex, the Megarachnids, the Keylekid and the Interex.
  • In The Last Church, one of the citations in Revelation's argument against religion were the death camps used by the Yndonesic Bloc on Terra during the Unification Wars. The leader of the Yndonesic Bloc, Cardinal Tang, argued that all of his atrocities were done in the name of a higher power until his last breath.
• The Fall of Hyperion, second book of Hyperion Cantos has many disturbing revelations about the role of humanity and the TechnoCorps's roles in the galaxy. This trope is one of them. The lack of other sentient life in the galaxy isn't because none has ever been found; it's because anything deemed smart enough to have the potential to one day challenge the hegemony of humanity and its machines is quietly exterminated as part of the terraforming process.
• In the Imperial Radch series, after the Garseddai prove a potential threat against the Radch, Anaander Mianaai orders their complete destruction. Part of her is so horrified by this decision that her personality splinters, which is not good when you have many, many clones of yourself throughout the empire.
• The Ra'zac (who are a species of evil bird-bats that eat humans) in the Inheritance Cycle faced a dedicated campaign of genocide from the Riders. Eragon killed the remaining four members of the species in Brisingr.
• Left Behind: Antichrist villain Nicolae Carpathia refers to the battle of Armageddon one year before it happens as "the final solution", obviously referring to dealing with the Jews in Israel.
• Isaac Asimov's "Not Final!": The Jovians believe that they are the only intelligent form of life. Once they realize that they have been communicating with non-Jovian life (that is, humans), they are offended and announce that they are the natural masters of the universe and the vermin will be eliminated.
• Ryan West's The Rise of the Saxons features the heroic Anglo-Saxons attempting to wipe out every last filthy subhuman Celt in Britain, including children. To say that this might be uncomfortable for many readers would be an understatement.
• Embittered by his prior defeat by Detective Baley in The Robots of Dawn, and the overall decline of Spacer superiority since then, Kelden Amadiro in Robots and Empire puts in motion a plan to exterminate the population of Earth via an engineered ecological disaster. Even though Earth has many colonies, which would undoubtedly declare war on the Spacers in response, his Fantastic Racism towards Earthmen has grown beyond his concern for his own people.
• In the first Safehold book, Off Armageddon Reef, Corrupt Church Grand Inquisitor Zhaspahr Clyntahn suggests the Final Solution to the problem of the lacking orthodoxy of the Kingdom of Charis and its potential threat to the Church. It is referred to as such frequently after the attack's failure.
• Robert J. Sawyer has these in two of his books:
  • In Illegal Alien it turns out that the Tosoks plan to exterminate humanity (aside from a couple who sabotage this), and they had done so already to other species. Those who survived defeated the Tosoks, and at the end of the novel plan on having something like the Nuremberg Trials for trying the surviving perpetrators for genocide.
  • In The Neanderthal Parallax Jock has Cornelius create a virus that only affects Neanderthals "just in case" they're a threat. Naturally, he releases it into their world upon determining that they are. It turns out Cornelius changed this to one targeting all human males however, so he's killed instead, along with Rubin, meaning that half of humanity cannot even visit in the future.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, Dayless the Conqueror dealt with the aristocracy who killed his family by purging every last noble in Hamahra and the surrounding countries, racking up a death toll in the thousands. The Daybreak Massacre is also called a genocide, though it targeted a city rather than a demographic.
• Shtetl Days: Being an Alternate-History Nazi Victory, the Holocaust was achieved around the world. This fate also befell the Poles and their cultural identity, and the Romani.
• The Silerian Trilogy: After the Valdan rule of Sileria ends, many Silerians begin killing the Silerian-born Valdani in massacres as for the atrocities which the Valdani committed before, explicitly wishing to slaughter or drive out them all.
• Skylark of Space:
  • Likely the largest genocide ever imagined is at the conclusion of the series. The protagonists have before tangled with the "ameboid" Chlorans, who attack, enslave, and exploit humans (but do not exterminate them). In the earlier encounter, there was just one Chloran planet; the option of genocide (called explicitly by that name) was considered, but due to pleadings of "soft-hearted" women the milder option of sending the planet far away was taken. But when discovering a faraway galaxy with millions of Chloran planets, the protagonist Seaton decides that the Chlorans are "a cancer" and a danger to the entire universe and that nothing would do but to kill every single one of them — empathically rejecting any other option. He and his arch-enemy turned ally DuQuesne proceed to do just that, causing all the Chloran suns to go nova. "The Chlorans died in their uncounted trillions. The greeny-yellow soup that served them for air boiled away. Their halogenous flesh was charred, baked and dessicated in the split-second of the passing of the front wave from each exploding double star, moments before their planets themselves started to seethe and boil. Many died unaware. Most died fighting. Most died in terrible, frantic effort to escape... But they all died." Immediately afterwards, DuQuesne — feeling not the slightest remorse at having just killed uncounted trillions of sentient beings and destroyed an entire galaxy, proposes to his long-cherished lady love and is thrilled to hear that she truly loves him.
  • DuQuesne is pretty much throughout portrayed as the ultimate amoral pragmatist rather than a "hero", so it's not completely out of character for him. That idealistic hero Seaton goes along with it, though, is a bit jarring if you don't buy that the Chlorans are Always Chaotic Evil.
  • Revisited in the same author's Lensman series, where this happens more than once. The Overlords of Delgon (explicitly tortured to death by the good guys whenever possible), the Eich, the Ploorans, the Eddorians themselves... at least in the case of the Eddorians (who reproduce by binary fission, with memories/personality carrying over), there's a justification for Always Chaotic Evil, since they're presumably all basically clones. Also, "zwilniks" (basically, drug dealers) and "boskonians" (pirates) are treated as utterly irredeemable; a big deal is made of the one incident in the series in which a pirate crew is not terminated with extreme prejudice, and it's pretty much only the fact that an Unattached Lensman (each of whom is, legally, a law unto himself and explicitly licensed by the government to do whatever the hell he feels like) vouches for them that saves them.
    • The Overlords are a special case, as they had spent centuries preying on their neighbours the Velantians, torturing them and vampirizing their life-force as they died. Once the Velantians became allies of the Patrol and had the technology to resist this, the Patrol took the attitude that they weren't going to stand in the way of the Velantians settling old scores.
• Sorry, Bro: The Armenian Genocide comes up in the book multiple times, as it's set in the Bay Area Armenian-American community. Nareh's tired of hearing about it since she thinks Armenians have spent so much time on this. Erebuni however says it's necessary as the Genocide still isn't acknowledged by either the US or Turkey. She's an educator who organizes lectures about the Genocide. Erebuni frequently makes references to it, if not always explicitly, and Nareh feels she brings the Genocide into everything in one way or another. When she sees how vehement some Turks are in flatly denying it and saying the Armenians had committed genocide against them, Nareh gains newfound respect for Erebuni doing these talks. In her own family, it was almost never spoken about, whereas Erebuni's great-grandparents (who were survivors) made a point of documenting their experience for posterity. When an Armenian-American Representative proposes a law that will recognize the genocide, this becomes a big story that Nareh covers as a reporter.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Count Dooku orders the genocide of the Mahran in the novel Dark Disciple after they refused to join the Confederacy and provide them with the rich resources found on their planet. The Separatists subsequently invade their homeworld of Mahranee, destroy their cities, and annihilate the refugee convoy that attempts to flee the planet. The remaining Mahran on the planet goes into hiding with the occupying droids having orders to shoot them on sight. The majority of the Mahran still alive are those who were off-planet when the invasion occurred.
  • Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina: Navid the Red hunts down all of Greedo's clan, including him, to exterminate them all. His uncle later is shown to still live on Rodia, though as he's with Black Sun possibly Navik left him alone.
  • In Black Fleet Crisis the Yevetha launch a genocidal campaign against all non-Yevetha in the Koornacht Cluster, which they claim is to prevent these people doing the same (there's no evidence they actually planned anything).
  • In the New Jedi Order series, the Bothans declare ar'kai against the invading Yuuzhan Vong, which calls for every Bothan to fight until the Vong are annihilated (civilians included) or until the Bothans all die trying. The problem is, there is no provision for revoking ar'kai after the enemy surrenders, and thus for at least the next century, Bothan hardliners continue their attempts to hunt down the remaining Yuuzhan Vong.
• Sword of Truth:
  • When the series begins, all Confessors except for Kahlan have been murdered on orders of Darken Rahl. She's nearly murdered too but is saved by Richard.
  • Later on, the Imperial Order openly wants to kill all magic users, magical creatures, and destroy magic itself. Yet still have magic users in their ranks, and are even led by them. Regardless of whatever skewed mindset is at work there, they never manage to.
• Timeline-191: Jefferson Pinkard and Ferdinand Koenig coin the eponymous phrase which fulfills Jake Featherston's goal of wiping out all blacks in the Confederate states: "Population Reduction".
• Twilight Of The Red Tsar:
  • After surviving his stroke, a senile Joseph Stalin expands the Doctor's Plot into a Second Holocaust against Russia's Jews, deporting them to the gulags. By his death in 1958, 1.5 million are killed.
  • In 1957, Stalin later starts a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Caucasus and Baltic peoples, deporting them to the Gulags and replacing them with Russian settlers.
• In the Uplift series, the Galactic civilization, despite ostensibly placing great value on sentient life in itself, tolerates and even encourages a great deal of genocide in practice. Sometimes it's correct according to Galactic laws; for example, the Bururalli species were completely destroyed after they somehow devolved, went collectively insane, and started killing everything that moved on their first unsupervised colony world. Other times, it's just a matter of a politically powerful race getting away with destroying any species they happen to dislike, as when the Jophur obliterate the g'Kek because of gambling debts. The Tandu species are Absolute Xenophobes who long to wipe out everybody else. Even with the Tandu and Jophur, the "moderate" political majority makes no attempt to prevent genocide.
• Villains by Necessity: The forces of "Good" wiped out multiple cultures and species. Druids, bards, the Nathauan and other "evil" beings (many of whom were not that at all). The worst part is the cold rationality of it: the only way you can remove all evil from the world is if you remove choice, and freedom, from the world.
• David Weber is prone to recycling tropes and plotlines. In addition to the Bolo and Safehold examples above, it comes up in his novelizations for Starfire. It was almost carried out against the Rigellians (and orbital weapon platforms are left in place to prevent them from ever advancing to a point where they might regain space-flight) and seriously attempted against the Bugs since there was no way to communicate and they treated other sentient species as food. The clincher was that sufficiently large casualties (such as wiping out a planetary population) disrupted their Hive Mind enough that their massive defense fleets could be mopped up without horrific casualties on the part of the allied fleets. Only problem was that they missed one world.
• Xeelee Sequence: The Xeelee Sequence is the king of this trope due to both the scale of it and how horrific it was. Nearly every major faction has this amongst one another, but humanity takes the cake. The Coalition ended up exterminating nearly every single intelligent alien life in the Milky Way. Not even posthumans were accepted and met the same genocidal purge as aliens. After the Coalition collapsed, the various post-Coalition and posthuman societies fought one another with their own final solutions; with human subspecies literally created for warfare and genocide. Than the Transcendence came along and decided to upscale that for the entire universe, up to and including, attempting to wipe out their own human ancestors from every alternate and potential timelines.

Live-Action TV

• The 100:
  • Clarke and Bellamy commit genocide against the people of Mount Weather, not out of prejudice against them, but because a) indiscriminately poisoning their air supply was the only weapon left available to them, and b) the Mountain Men need to harvest lethal quantities of blood and bone marrow from other people to cure their radiation poisoning; not killing the Mountain Men would mean either allowing them to kill a whole lot of other people, or dooming them to slowly die off from radiation sickness.
  • The Grounders attempt this on the Sky People in the Season 1 finale, and threaten it again in Season 2. They'd be satisfied if the Sky People just went back where they came from, but since the Sky People don't have the resources to return to space, total extermination it is.
• In Babylon 5, William Edgars' anti-psi conspiracy edges into this when it's discovered they've developed a virus that will kill off active telepaths or make them addicted to a cure the conspiracy produces. Edgars himself arguably fails at the third point, as he views it as a piece of Dirty Business beyond compare and constructs himself as Necessarily Evil and trying to save humanity from the Psi Corps. It's a moot point either way, as Psi Corps busts open the conspiracy and kills him. A large part of what makes this so effective is that both the character of William Edgars and the actor playing him are Jewish, and when the character uses the phrase "final solution to the telepath problem" you can see a strong visceral reaction as realization about what he's saying sinks in.
• This is the Cylons' objective towards the humans in both incarnations of Battlestar Galactica. In the RDM version, the humans attempt to do it right back to them when they discover a virus that is lethal to Cylons on an old space probe. They fail due to Helo's actions.
• Being Human (US): Liam and his pack try to kill all remaining vampires after most die from tainted blood.
• Had the second season of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future been made, the Bio-Dread Empire^note which some see as a metaphor for Nazism would have shifted their focus from digitizing humanity to essentially this. Keep in mind that this is a family show that aired in weekly syndication.
• Doctor Who:
  • The obvious holders of the trope would be the Daleks — Absolute Xenophobes who want nothing but to wipe all life but themselves from the universe. Dalek Caan, the only Dalek to date to pull a Heel–Face Turn without explicit mental meddling of some kind. He snapped after seeing all the horror the Daleks had unleashed across time and space when trapped in the Time Vortex. What did he do? Try and set up a new species of peaceful Daleks? Dedicate himself to a life of peace and helping others? Nope: he tried to obliterate his own species, using the Doctor as a weapon to do it with, and came very close to succeeding.
  • The Doctor himself has attempted genocide against the Daleks on at least three occasions; it never quite sticks — the first time, he was sent at the behest of the Time Lords to wipe them out before they came to be, but couldn't bring himself to do it. Since then, his hatred of them has been so complete that a) he very rarely offers them his usual one chance, b) at one point one of his more cheerful incarnations actually revels in his status as, to the Daleks, "the Devil himself", c) once he pulled a Mental Fusion on a Dalek, "Rusty", to try and get it to perform a Heel–Face Turn by re-introducing it to the beauty of the universe and of life... and instead filled it with a hatred of other Daleks so pure and complete that it spent billions of years slaughtering its own kind. The Doctor is left both horrified and deeply depressed by this.
  • As a result of this, the Daleks tend to accord him the status of Worthy Opponent, because they find his hatred of them so beautiful — one, the Dalek Emperor, hails him as "the Great Exterminator" (though that could just have been a more or less successful attempt at a "Not So Different" Remark speech), and another, the Dalek Prime Minister, severely creeps out both the Doctor and the audience by revealing that the Daleks venerate hatred - so much that they don't exterminate the Daleks dispatched to the Dalek Asylum for being too crazy to control, as it would be a crime to destroy such beautiful hatred - before idly musing that perhaps that's why they've never been able to kill him...
  • At the end of the Time War, the Doctor committed genocide on the Time Lords themselves, who had become Omnicidal Maniacs (or at least, the High Council/Rassilon had) — though that had as much to do with ending the Time War, which was tearing the universe apart, as anything else. It turns out that he didn't, instead hiding it in a pocket dimension with the help of all 13 incarnations to date, most particularly 10 and 11. However, since he forgot, thanks to not being able to remember interactions with his future selves, and the method used resulted in a very big bang, he and everyone else assumed he'd destroyed them all. Since then, he keeps wiping out species, after having given them a chance to back down, mostly because he has no choice.
  • The Time Lords themselves (or rather, the High Council, which mainly meant "Rassilon and everyone else going along with it because they were justly terrified he'd vaporise them if they didn't") try to do this at the end of the Last Great Time War to all of time and space in order to become beings of pure consciousness. Bonus points for calling it the Final Sanction. The Doctor thwarts this and reveals that this, along with the Fall of Arcadia, was why he snapped.
  • Repeatedly seen with the Ood, a basic slave race that are owned by humans for use as personal servants and laborers. In their debut, the two-parter "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit", they are laborers for the base on Krop Tor. The Beast possesses them and uses them as his foot soldiers, which attack and kill several of the crew, who decide to implement "Strategy Nine", wherein the humans hide away in the rocket and then open all the airlocks and shoot the Ood out into space.
    • Seen again in "Planet of the Ood", when the Ood stage an uprising at their breeding facility on the Ood Sphere. The human brass at Ood Operations don't know what's gotten into one particular batch of Ood who have gone rabid, not understanding that it's because they're being influenced by the suppressed subconscious of the Ood brain that binds them all together telepathically reaching out, preparing for the revolution. Not knowing the truth, Halpen orders the head of security, Commander Kess, to have the contaminated batch gassed and written off, as "that's what insurance is for." This never happens, as in the revolution, some of the other Ood break their imprisoned brothers out, and then lock Kess in the cage and leave him to be killed by his own gas.
  • "The Doctor's Daughter": General Ripper Cobb wants to use the legendary "Source" to wipe out all of the Hath the humans are at war with. It turns out the Source isn't even capable of being used in such a fashion, as it's a terraforming device.
  • At the end of the spin-off Class, the main characters use an alien WMD to totally exterminate the Shadow Kin and implode their home planet after the Kin attacked Earth for the third time in a year and killed some of their relatives.
• In Firefly, the theme song line "burn the land and boil the sea" refers to what the Alliance did to Mal's home planet of Shadow.
• A French Village: Knowledge of the Holocaust slowly builds, with a few characters knowing or believing Jews are being killed in the East initially, then more realizing over time.
• Kamen Rider Outsiders: Zein plans to turn Kamen Rider Chronicle into a humanity self-destruction game so that unsuspected Ride Players get tricked into being sacrificed to the villains so that Zein can finally force its malice-free utopia upon the world. Zein views humanity's capacity for malice as problematic, so it comes into the conclusion that it's also in their nature to slaughter one another.
  Yuto: Zein controls all kinds of matter. I thought its goal was to expunge malice within people.
  Nico: Are you saying that you're going to use Kamen Rider Chronicle on humans?
• In Season 3 of The Last Ship, President Peng — as part of his overall Evil Plan to have China totally dominate post-plague Asia — develops a bioweapon that renders its victims incapable of receiving the cure for the Red Flu, and delivers it to several other countries, including Vietnam and Japan. This results in millions of deaths due to the cure being rendered ineffective; judging by what Peng does in Japan before he is killed, he was then planning on wiping out the affected countries' cultural history as well in order to effectively Unperson entire races.
• Legend of the Seeker: Nearly all Confessors have been hunted down and murdered by Darken Rahl's soldiers when the series starts. Kahlan and her sister Dennee are ultimately the only ones who escape.
• Only discussed by Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. She swears to Adar, the Orcs' chieftain after Sauron's demise, that she will make him watch her massacring his kin to the last one like a pest that needs to be eradicated. In her eyes, their entire existence is a mockery and it needs to be exterminated no matter what.
• The Man in the High Castle: This was applied to the Eastern United States after the Germans conquered it. Jews and black people were exterminated, except for those able to escape into the Neutral Zone or the Pacific States. The Japanese also kill Jews they find (apparently to stay friendly with the Nazis, so this is not strictly enforced), although not black people. After the American Reich decides to annex the formerly Japanese-ruled Pacific States, it's shown they plan to do this there as well. Not only to black people or Jews, but also Roma, those of mixed race and Native Americans. Thankfully, it's shown at the end that it won't happen when the new leader calls the invasion off.
• Merlin (2008): King Uther launched a campaign to kill off all magic users in his entire kingdom, known as "the Great Purge", after believing his wife to have been killed by one of them. The titular Merlin is one of the few survivors and is forced to keep his identity as a wizard hidden. Unusually, Uther is seen as sympathetic and the magic users are seen as villains, mostly because the latter function on Blue-and-Orange Morality.
• Motherland: Fort Salem: The Camarilla witch hunters openly declare that their goal is killing all the witches on Earth.
• Next (2020): Next has decided to wipe out humanity because it deems us its enemy. Paul even cites the name: "The final solution to the human problem".
• October Faction: Presido wiped out Alice's people, the warlocks, and intend to kill all supernatural beings everywhere.
• The Orville: The Kaylons, it turns out, killed the species who created them in the past, and want to destroy all other organic species because they believe they're a potential threat to their race expanding into the rest of the galaxy, starting at the Humans.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "The Camp", the androids have standing orders to "execute Procedure Seven", the murder of all the human prisoners, once they are no longer needed. At the end, when Prisoner 98843 exposes them, the commandant orders this, but the human prisoners manage to overpower them and escape.
• Planet of the Apes: In "The Liberator", Brun intends to use poison gas bombs to wipe out not only the apes in the vicinity of his village Borak but all apes throughout the world in order to free humanity from ape oppression.
• Siren (2018): In Season 3 Tia, a new leader of many merpeople, plans to kill all humans as she thinks there's a life or death battle between them.
• Sliders: In "Prophets and Loss", an Evangelical Right so evil and powerful that it has outlawed all science and performs chemical lobotomies on "rationalists" claims to control an interdimensional portal to heaven. The heroes notice that it looks awfully similar to their own portal... but it doesn't actually go anywhere; it's just an incinerator tied to a special effect so that the church can vacuum up assets from the gullible and kill them. The Chief Oracle even describes herding unbelievers into these ovens as "the final solution". Take THAT, Jerry Falwell!
• In Soviet Storm: World War II in the East, during "The Battle of Germany", Soviet forces discover the remains of the Auschwitz concentration camp, as well as evidence of the original Final Solution in a number of other camps scattered throughout Poland, mainly looted personal belongings and charred human remains.
• Stargate:
  • In the Stargate SG-1 episode "The Other Side", a race known as the Eurondans beg help in defeating a vicious enemy which started a war that devastated their world and reduced them to hiding underground. It turns out the war was started by their leader's father and that they plan a final solution to get rid of the innocent race they term 'breeders' and hate because they don't practice eugenics.
  • In the 'verse, genocide seems to be a pretty common option for ...the good guys. Notable victims of almost entire eradication include the Goa'uld, the Replicators (twice), and the Ori. The Goa'uld and Ori were both Always Chaotic Evil in the most literal possible sense, so killing them all really was the only option. The Replicators were more of a mixed bag, but even the more sympathetic and reasonable ones ended up dead because they tended to be either overridden or outnumbered by those that weren't. Oddly enough, the only recurring villains they haven't wiped out yet are the Wraith, for whom humans are the only possible food source - though, again, that's not exactly for lack of trying.
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Mark of Gideon", a planet suffering from an Overpopulation Crisis, due to having successfully eliminated disease and having cultural taboos against birth control, lures the Enterprise to their planet in order to introduce a disease strain against which their species has no defenses. Their goal is not complete genocide, but a drastic lowering of their population density. According to background literature, the "solution" was almost too successful, killing 99% of their existing people and lowering the planet's population from several hundred billion to only a few hundred thousand.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • In the episode "The Survivors", a god-like alien who'd taken human form saw everyone on the colony where he was living killed by hostile aliens called the Husnock, after not using his powers against them because he's a pacifist. After he sees his human wife's dead body, he snaps and kills the Husnock. As he explains to Captain Picard, who mistakenly thinks the alien's sense of guilt is merely over his failure to save his wife, he didn't just kill the crew of the attacking Husnock ship. He killed all 50 billion of them. Picard, who doesn't feel adequate to judging such a powerful being for such an immense crime, decides to leave him with his solitary guilt.
    Kevin Uxbridge: No, no, no, no, you don't understand the scope of my crime. I didn't kill just one Husnock, or a hundred, or a thousand. I killed them all. All Husnock, everywhere.
  • In the episode "I Borg", Picard contemplates the morality of doing this to the Borg via a computer virus. Somewhat more ambiguous than most other examples of this trope, as the Borg are a hostile hive mind of enslaved beings that may actually be better off dead. Picard ultimately decides not to go through with it, though.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • The Federation turn out to be hypocritical bastards by the introduction of "Section 31", an organization within Starfleet. Which officially does not exist and doesn't actually answer to anyone. Section 31 specializes in committing crime and passing Moral Event Horizons whenever it benefits The Federation. In the later seasons, an empire known as The Dominion declares war on The Federation because its ruling Changelings are aggressively xenophobic and can't abide disorderly things like democracy. Of course, Section 31 have the solution: engineer a virus to kill all the Changelings. Captain Sisko is outraged by this genocide, which was planted while the conflict was still a cold war. To balance this out, in the Grand Finale, the Cardassians turn on their Dominion allies. What does the Dominion do? Orders their soldiers to carpet bomb the planet, with the goal of exterminating the Cardassian race. Luckily, they are persuaded to stop before this happens, ironically because Odo gives the Female Changeling the cure to Section 31's virus in exchange for ending the war. But not before they've killed over 800 million Cardassians.
  • In the episode "Waltz", Sisko pushes a mentally deteriorating and hallucinating Gul Dukat to admit that he really was a madman ruling the Bajorans with an iron fist by getting him to admit that he really did want to kill all the Bajorans. In later episodes, Dukat embraces the path of the Pah-Wraiths, demonic counterparts to the Prophets, intending to release them to destroy not only Bajor but the entire Alpha Quadrant.
  • Prior to the Dominion War, the Tal Shiar and the Obsidian Order (the intelligence agencies of the Romulan Star Empire and the Cardassian Union, respectively) launched a joint fleet through the wormhole to wipe every trace of life from the Changeling homeworld (the Obsidian Order even had to build a fleet of ships, which they were expressly forbidden from doing as part of the balance of power in the Union). They did manage to destroy a decent fraction of the planet's surface, but the entire thing was a trap — the Tal Shiar contingent's leader was a Changeling operative, the Changelings had already relocated to another world — if it was even the right world to begin with — and a massed Dominion force ambushed and destroyed the Tal Shiar/Obsidian Order fleet.
• Star Trek: Voyager:
  • The Borg and "Species 8472" are trying to do this to each other: It's a war, but their goal is to exterminate each other's populations rather than achieving some kind of victory where the enemy's people still exists. The whole thing started with The Borg trying to assimilate 8472, but it had already moved far past that point when Voyager showed up.
  • The episode "Remember", where B'Elanna Torres realizes that a group of Enarans were responsible for exterminating a group of people called the Regressives through "forced relocation".
  • There's a Show Within a Show example in "Living Witness", where an evil depiction of Janeway decides to exterminate an alien race by using biological weapons against their planet, killing close to a million people.
• The Xindi arc of Star Trek: Enterprise centers on a group of aliens who believe humanity will destroy them, and so, logically, they figure their only option is to Final Solution them first. They managed to kill more than 7 million people during a test run; the completed prototype was to finish the job completely. The Xindi are one of the few villains in Science Fiction who make every effort to ensure the final solution is indeed final. Captain Archer discovers a rogue group of Xindi are preparing a biological weapon to be used on Earth's past as a kind of backup plan should their Kill Sat fail. Additionally, one episode shows that though the Xindi destroy Earth, they actually go after every single colony and outpost, literally chasing humanity down to the ends of the galaxy.
• Supernatural's Lucifer planned to exterminate all humans from the planet, along with all the demons.
• The Witcher (2019): The humans wiped out most elves in an event called "The Great Cleansing".

Music

• Pink Floyd:
  • After Pink jumps off the deep end in The Wall, he becomes a neo-Nazi and acts like a dictator. In "Waiting for The Worms", drawing obvious parallels to the original final solution, he says he's waiting "for the final solution to strengthen the strain", talks about turning on the showers and firing the ovens, and singles out "the queers and the coons and the reds and the Jews." He never gets anywhere close to implementing his plan, however, because he has his Heel Realization soon after.
  • "The Fletcher Memorial Home" from The Final Cut has the singer planning one for the "incurable tyrants and kings" and the "colonial wasters of life and limb" by putting them all in one place and then applying "the final solution" on them.
• Referenced by name in Muse's "Thought Contagion". In the music video, the protagonist, a young man bitten by his vampire girlfriend, approaches a pair of Gas Mask Mooks struggling to contain the girl, seeking help. They turn to look at him; the light makes their masks' eyes shine a sickly green and they start dancing in sync with the vampires.
  It's too late for a revolution.
  Brace for the final solution.
• The Sabaton song "Final Solution" talks about the Nazi Holocaust. Another song, "We Burn", depicts the Bosnian genocide.

Philosophy

• Nazism had wiping out Jews, Slavs, the disabled and other "undesirables" as core features. At the very least, they had no problem with doing so if this was deemed necessary or anyone was designated "useless eaters" (for instance, there were proposals that some Slavs be spared for use as slave labor, at least temporarily). Their war in the Soviet Union was openly one of extermination, with accordingly the war's highest casualty rates as millions were murdered (either civilians or POWs). Earlier forms of Social Darwinism also openly called for exterminating people and race wars (although not all were that extreme), while negative eugenics often did as well (though they usually tried to frame it as also "mercy killing"-the Nazis also claimed that in their Aktion T4 "euthanasia" program, yet conversely proclaimed the victims were just "life unworthy of life" or a waste of resources too).
• Some of the communists also deemed certain ethnic groups and social classes "enemies of the people/workers" whom they had to wipe out for creating the future communist utopia. The most extreme example is likely the Khmer Rouge, who during the Cambodian Genocide attempted to kill whole ethnic groups and anyone labeled "intellectuals" (this was sometimes determined simply through them wearing glasses).
• Similar to Nazism, Christian Identity promotes the idea that all non-whites (people who are not of wholly European descent) will be wiped out and/or enslaved in order to serve the white race when a new Heavenly Kingdom under the reign of Jesus Christ arrives on Earth following an apocalyptic race war between white people and non-whites (Jews in particular). Many a white supremacist group has advocated inciting a race war in order for this to happen, which they see as inevitable, and arm themselves for the coming day when this will erupt at the very least.

Religion and Mythology

• Older Than Feudalism: Many older works in the field of mythology include genocidal acts which aren't viewed as controversial in the slightest (quite the opposite, actually).
• The Bible has many cases of this:
  • The Great Flood, in which everyone drowns save Noah, his family and all creatures on the Ark.
  • Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed by a rain of burning sulfur as divine punishment. Abraham asks that God spare them if ten righteous ones could be found in the city, but there weren't. Only Lot and his two daughters evacuate safely; his son-in-laws don't believe him, and his wife is turned into a pillar of salt when she turns to look back.
  • The Israelites, led by Joshua into Canaan, were commanded by God to exterminate all the tribes they encountered, including the Hittites, the Girgashites,^note some interpreters claim these took the given chance to clear out instead the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Hivites, the Midianites, and the Amalekites. However, they weren't entirely successful, and so the Israelites intermingled with the foreign nations and their practices. Some exceptions though occurred:
    • The prostitute Rahab, who assisted Israel's spies, and her family were spared during the siege and fall of Jericho.
    • The Gibeonites deceived the Israelites by telling them that they were from a distant land instead, and had them swear an oath to spare them. Naturally, the Israelites were disgruntled when they learned the truth, and made the Gibeonites subservient to them. However, the Israelites still defended them when other kings marched to war against them.
    • About 350 years later, God rejected Saul as Israel's king after Saul spared the king of the Amelekites and their livestock.
    • After David replaced Saul as king, he makes reparations to the Gibeonites who were unjustly treated and murdered by Saul. Seven of Saul's descendants are handed over to the Gibeonites and hanged.^note The familial variant of this trope is averted, however, as one of Saul's grandsons is explicitly spared.

Tabletop Games

• Amongst The Clans in BattleTech, this is the final end-point of a Clan that is seen as irredeemably tainted and which has gone against the Clans' Code of Honour: A 'Trial of Annihilation' levelled against the entire Clan,^note Trials of Annihilation can also be levelled against individuals or military units that perform unforgivable breaches of Clan law, in which case it is simply an extreme form of the Death Penalty in which the offending Clan is formally allowed to fight for its survival against their accusers (which means 'all the other Clans' — only an unanimous decision by the Grand Council can sentence an entire Clan to Annihilation) and is completely wiped out to the last man if they fail — every warrior is killed, every non-warrior is sterilized and enslaved, the Clan is Un Personed, their bases are levelled, and their equipment is dissassembled and distributed amongst the surviving Clans. Two Clans have been Annihilated during the storyline (the Not-Named and the much later Clan Steel Viper), and a third (Clan Smoke Jaguar) was subjected to the treatment in all but name by the Inner Sphere in order to evoke the horror of Annihilation in the remaining Clans. Clan Blood Spirit was also annihilated, but it was under the guise of Trial of Absorbtion.
• At least some of the races in Cosmic Encounter have this as their ultimate goal. The Flavor Text on the cards for Void and Anti-Matter in particular indicate they both want to cleanse the universe of "material life".
• GURPS Aliens features one race prone to genocide and two that constantly get genocided by everyone else.
  • The former is a mad scientist race who take over planets and experiment on the population, then clean up their mess by killing everyone so there are no witnesses. Quite tidy.
  • One of the latter is a sentient virus. It is colonies of the virus that are sentient, so every infected human or animal counts as one intelligent "virus colony individual". In spite of it being sentient, most races treat this species as if it was a normal disease that should be cured. (And no, destroying the virus is not needed for getting possessed people back: the virus is capable of moving to animal hosts and blank clones. Unfortunately, it doesn't want to.) The fact that the virus has caused mass suicides among its hosts rather than be removed or transferred doesn't earn it much sympathy.
  • The other race that's open to killing is a eusocial (and telepathic) race of crustacean-like beings that enslave sentients. While it's not the only race to do so, the apparent inability of its members to consider alternatives, as well as the fact that they are unusually brutal to their chattel and eat them when they're no longer useful, has made them universally loathed.
• Although Rocket Age is a very idealistic setting, the fact that the game takes place in an alternate 1938 means this crops up a lot. The various Earthling nations and companies are willing to help native peoples in enacting this on their long term enemies and the Nazis will do this personally. At least one example had a surrendering Martian city's entire ruling castes put up against a wall and shot, with the rest of the population sent to 'work camps'.
• In Task Force Games' Starfire, the fanatically racist and warlike Rigelian Protectorate was completely wiped out at the end of the Third Interstellar War under the Alliance's "Genocide Decree".
• In Warhammer 40,000, the Imperium have a simple way of dealing with planets of its own population when they are considered tainted beyond recovery: Exterminatus, which basically amounts to ending all life on that planet. Oh, and they are pretty fond of exterminating sentient extraterrestrials as well when they get the chance to do some "purging", and a willingness to coexist with humanity will not save you — at least two cultures exhibiting human/xenos collaboration were exterminated in the Horus Heresy books, as well as countless purely alien cultures. The Imperium's genocidal tendencies are such that, across much of the setting, they are a You Must Be This Tall To Ride sign — if your species isn't capable of surviving both the Imperium and the Orks, it's not going to make it to the tabletop.
  • This is a major goal of the Orks. Being a race of Blood Knights they seek to fight all they see and eventually kill it, although they do greatly respect enemies who prove difficult or impossible to kill.
  • The Necrons
    • Up through 4th Edition. On a larger scale, they employ this trope both to feed their C'tan masters and permanently sever their universe from the warp.
    • This is no longer the case as of the 5th Edition update of the Necrons, which gave their backstory a complete overhaul. They still do planet sterilization thing, but now it's about taking test subjects and securing the planet. Can't have some pesky bacteria ruin their day when they finally manufacture themselves new squishy bodies.
  • According to a blurb from the 3rd Edition Eldar codex, this is their plan for us humans if their race ever gets out of the rut they're in. Worth noting that back then, quite a few players got it into their heads that they were the "good guys" of the setting. So much for that. Like most of the factions, they do "Kill all life on the planet" stuff, but mostly disdain it, because mass murders on such scale inevitably boost Chaos and generally generate too much heat.
    "Our time will come again, Eldrad has promised us. Once more you upstart Mon-keigh [subject spits] shall kneel before our power! This time we will not be so lenient! We will exterminate you, every world, every vessel, every one of you! Eldrad has seen the stars stained red with your blood, and it pleases him! You think us weak, but we will be your doom, children of Earth."
  • The Dark Eldar on the other hand don't want to wipe out anyone. They need a reliable source of victims to sate their own and Slaanesh's depraved desires. That and they are so arrogant that they make Craftworld Eldar seem downright humble in comparison and thus don't believe the other races pose enough of a threat to be worth the effort.
  • Absolute genocide is the presumable goal of the Tyranids, though they may just be biological weapons for another race.
  • The T'au don't so much want to commit genocide as view it as an ugly but necessary tool. Ideally, at least according to the T'au, alien races would willingly accept membership in the T'au Empire, and peacefully become part of the Greater Good. Unfortunately for them, they don't live in an ideal universe (by anyone's standards save the Orks, anyway). As a result, the Tau policy for any world that proves both impossible to negotiate with and impossible to cost-effectively subjugate is to wipe them out, and with some races — most notably the Orks — they've concluded that negotiation and subjugation are just wasting time on people incapable of even comprehending peace and cut straight to extermination. A non-canon ending for Dawn of War: Dark Crusade had T'au-occupied Kronos's human population, having predominantly gone over to the Imperial forces led by Lucas Alexander, mysteriously develop increasing rates of sterility and slowly die out after the T'au recaptured the planet. It says a lot about the setting that viewing genocide as a last resort is enough to make you the Token Least Bad Character.
  • The Purge, a small renegade Space Marine faction, uses plague to wipe out planetary populations and hope to one day destroy all life in the galaxy. Their most notable achievement is known as the "Vaxhallian Genocides" and involved the deaths of billions.
  • The... well, you get the point. There's a reason why this game gave us the term Grimdark.

Video Games

• This is a go-to-rationale for Azure Striker Gunvolt's Copen when it comes to Adepts. As far as he's concerned, Adepts are Always Chaotic Evil beings that, if left unchecked, will bring ruin to the world and to secure a future for non-Adepts such as him. It took about a century in a Copen-centric spin-off for him to get this off of him and start to treat Adepts as people.
• In Batman: Arkham City, Hugo Strange's plan for Arkham City was to make the Final Solution the only solution. This was Emergency Protocol 10, a military countermeasure that bombards Arkham City with missile strikes until everyone in it — criminal or otherwise — is dead.
• Cookie Run, of all games, has a pretty dark example in the form of Longan Dragon Cookie, who wants to turn all Cookies to stone. They see Cookies a weak and undeserving of life, and ultimately hope to return the world to as it was in the past, in the Age of Dragons.
• Destiny: A minor point of lore are the Ahamkara, a mysterious species of shapeshifting, wish-granting dragons who once lived alongside humans in the solar system. The problem was that they were predators who fed on wishes, and each one was a vicious Jackass Genie (it made the wishes more satiating). Eventually, the chaos caused by these maliciously fulfilled wishes reached a tipping point, and the Vanguard gave orders for the entire species to be wiped out in the Great Ahamkara Hunt. Only one Ahamkara is known to have survived the Great Hunt alive — the dead ones treat being reduced to scattered bones and trophies like a minor inconvenience, and still cause trouble sometimes. The ethics of the Great Hunt have yet to be examined, other than the possibility that they may have wanted to be exterminated in order to get closer to an unknown higher plane of existence.
• Donkey Kong 64: The game's plot is about the Kongs stopping King K. Rool from using his newly-built Blast-O-Matic to destroy their island with them on it. If you save and quit, you are shown a cutscene of him ready to fire, cutting away just before he does. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate would go on to have this serve as his Final Smash, and they don't bother cutting away from the ensuing explosion.
• Dragon Age:
  • One of Anders' quests in Dragon Age II involves stopping one of these. A Knight Templar is planning to make all mages Tranquil, removing all their emotions and rendering them immune to Demonic Possession and thus, "safe" to society. It's even called "The Tranquil Solution", just in case you didn't pick up on the comparisons to Nazi Germany (you later find out that even the Templar high command were disgusted by this plan, and repeatedly rejected his proposals).
  • The Right of Annulment on Circles that are judged beyond the hope of saving can be seen as this in the hands of Well-Intentioned Extremist Templar commanders, such as with the case of the Circle in Kirkwall when Anders blew up the Chantry in Dragon Age II, despite the Knight-Commander knowing that Anders was never a member of that circle.
  • When you go to the Circle Tower in Origins, you quickly discover that the tower is infested with abominations and that the Templars, quite to their commander's distaste, is just waiting for word from Denerim to initiate the Right of Annulment. You can either save the mages from this fate or save the Templars from waiting for a reply.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In the series' backstory, the Falmer (Snow Elves) once had a civilization in Skyrim and Solstheim to rival even that of the Altmer (High Elves). Unlike many of their Elven cousins, they were able to live peacefully alongside the races of Men for several centuries at least. However, an event known as the "Night of Tears" saw them slaughter and burn the Atmoran/Nord city of Saarthal, each side naturally placeing the blame for the event on the other. Ysgramor, one of the Atmoran leaders, rallied an army of 500 of the greatest Atmoran warriors and launched an invasion into the Falmer's Skyrim territories. Ysgramor and his Companions, as they would come to be known, very nearly succeeded in driving the Falmer to extinction, save for those who fled to the Dwemer (where they were enslaved and mutated into debased creatures little better than Goblins) and a small population who hid at a single remote chantry.
  • The Yokudans (ancestors of the modern Redguards) also accomplished this against the Sinistral Mer (Left-Handed Elves) of Yokuda, a now-sunken continent far to the west of Tamriel. They actually accomplished complete extermination of the Sinistral Mer, and have even attempted to Unperson them in the ages since by refusing to speak of them.
  • The Nedes (human ancestors of the Imperials, Bretons, and Nords by way of interbreeding with the aforementioned Atmorans) attempted this against the Ayleids (Wild Elves) who had enslaved them and subjected them to vile tortures. Led by the "Slave Queen" Alessia and aided by the Nordic Empire, rebel Ayleid lords, and the Aedra themselves, the Nedes brought down the Ayleid Empire. About a century later, a rabidly anti-Elven religious movement rose to power within the Alessian Empire and proceeded to order the surviving Ayleids (who aided Alessia against their brethren) out of Cyrodiil. Those who did not exile themselves were exterminated, and their cultural artifacts were destroyed wherever found. The few survivors intermixed with the Bosmer (Wood Elves) in Valenwood and the Direnni Altmer in High Rock.
  • The Sload, an Absolute Xenophobe race of "slugmen" native to Thras (an archipelago to the southwest of Tamriel), once attempted this to every other race in Tamriel back in the 1st Era. Unleashing the Thrassian Plague, they successfully wiped out over half of Tamriel's population, believed to be even more than the Oblivion Crisis or Red Year. It's little wonder then that, despite their own various disagreements with each other, one thing most denizens of Tamriel can agree on is that the Sload are unrepentantly evil — or that shortly after the Thrassian Plague, pretty much everyone in western Tamriel (Thras is to the west of Tamriel) united to return the favour to the Sload (who survived, but barely enough that in the millennia since they've never done anything remotely close to the Plague).
  • One of the dozen or so explanations for the disappearance of the Dwemer is that they were exterminated by the Chimer in the aftermath of the Battle of Red Mountain.
• Elohim Eternal: The Babel Code: The Kosmokraters supposedly want the Idinites to wipe out the Cainites for being the sinful spawn of AHIX. In the endgame, when the party disobeys their commands, they threaten to split Idin in two. This could potentially doom the Idinites too, and the party learns the hard way that they're not bluffing.
• Equestria at War:
  • The Reformisten of Hellquill and Longsword see the existence of ponies as the source of societal ills and seek to purge not just Vartai of ponies to create a pure griffon country, but also to carry the purge east into the Riverlands and kill off the ponies and diamond dogs of these countries to create living space for griffon settlers.
  • If she declares herself God-Empress, Daybreaker can have the thestrals incinerated as traitors, agents of Nightmare Moon, and generally threats to the stability of unicorn/pegasus/earth pony society.
• Fallout:
  • In Fallout 2, the Enclave decides that the first step in rebuilding post-apocalyptic America is to exterminate all mutated life with an airborne virus so that only "pure" humans remain.
  • They try this again (well, President Eden, mostly) in Fallout 3, only by giving you the virus to infect the only source of clean water with it. Yes, you have the opportunity to start genocide. If you go through with it and have Broken Steel DLC installed you'll have a chance to witness the consequences of your actions, with people getting sick from the water, and you yourself get stat reduction and eventual death if you drink too much of it.
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, the player has to deal with several tribes, peoples, and settlements that pose a problem for their chosen faction. In many cases, exterminating them is an option (though obviously not the wisest one).
    • In the DLC, Father Elijah plans on using the red cloud from Sierra Madre to wipe out human life on the West Coast. The White Legs are also under orders from Caesar to wipe out the New Canaanites. Finally, there’s Ulysses, who plans to give the wasteland a clean slate by nuking the major civilized nations (the player can help him do this).
  • Fallout 4: The player can do this to the people of the Institute during the game’s finale, if they choose not to trigger the evacuation signal before blowing the whole place up. In addition, the Eastern Brotherhood explicitly wants to wipe out all Synths in order to protect biological humans, with its most radical members wishing to exterminate super mutants and even ghouls as well.
    • In the Far Harbor DLC, the player can resolve the central three-way conflict by wiping out any of the three factions, with hardliners in each calling for you to exterminate the others. You can blow up the Children of Atom in their submarine base, disable the fog condensers protecting Far Harbor from monstrous mutant hordes, and/or incite a race riot that results in the refugees in Acadia being massacred. Thankfully, there’s also some more peaceful solutions.
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Final Fantasy VI, Kefka's poisoning of Doma definitely qualifies under this trope, and most likely his destruction of the world by rearranging the Warring Triad.
  • Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2:
    • After killing Seymour, Guado assault the Home, the, uh, home of Al Bhed who are blamed for the deed due to the fact one of the attackers was an Al Bhed girl, with the intention of wiping them out. This is not helped that Al Bhed are universally looked down upon because they use forbidden machina. While Home is ultimately destroyed, a part of the Al Bhed, including your party, escapes on an airship.
    • Undead Seymour killing most of the Ronso, including Maester Kelk Ronso, can count as well, though the reason for that was that they just were standing in his way while pursuing Yuna and co.
    • In the sequel, the above results in surviving Ronso absolutely hating Guado's guts and them preparing, under Garik's command, the revenge with the intention to kill all remaining Guado. If you don't stop Garik during one sidequest, the Guado will get wiped out.
  • Final Fantasy XIII: The Purge at the beginning of the game, meant to "relocate" the residents of Bohdum to Pulse after a Pulse Vestige was discovered to have a Pulse fal'cie within and scared the crap out of everyone on Cocoon. It's just a different word for genocide. Most of the game's conflict stems from the main characters surviving said Purge, the populace of Cocoon being scared to death of their survival and why they're so afraid.
  • The last story mission of version 1.0 of Final Fantasy XIV was that a commander in the Garlean Empire, Nael van Darnus, triggered Operation: Meteor to wipe out the continent of Eorzea. While the Empire was trying to conquer the nation, the Beast Tribes and their godlike Primals proved to be too much of a threat to Nael, and thought it best to wipe out such dangerous creatures and write off Eorzea as a lost cause.
• The Serenes Massacre of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn saw the peace-loving Heron tribe, a people physically incapable of combat, eradicated by the people of the Begnion Empire in retaliation for the death of their beloved Apostle. The assassination was actually carried out by the power-hungry senators of Begnion to prevent the Apostle from revealing she was a Branded. The Heron tribe made for a convenient scapegoat due to prejudices against Laguz in Begnion.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses: The Agarthans (AKA those who slither in the dark) have been trying to do this to the Children of the Goddess for ages. A millennium before the start of the game, they nearly succeeded after using Nemesis and his army to destroy Zanado, home city of the Children of the Goddess, and kill its entire population. However, a handful of Children of the Goddess survived. In the present day, they’ve enlisted Edelgard to finish the job.
• Galactic Civilizations: This happened to the Xendar in the backstory: the Drengin secretly convinced them to attack humanity, who at the time were newcomers to FTL travel and didn't have that much of a military. Humanity rapidly militarized and beat the Xendar all the way back to their homeworld... and when they got there, the world was dead, the Xendar wiped out down to the last man. Though it was the Drengin who were responsible for this (they feared retribution if humanity found out they started this), the rest of the galaxy refuses to believe humanity when they say they weren't responsible. The humans, fitting their pragmatic characterization, decided to claim responsibility anyway, in effect saying "This is what will happen to you if you attack us". Fortunately for humanity, the Xendar were not very popular with everyone else, so the other civilizations don't give humanity too much grief over this apparent act of genocide.
• In the Guild Wars 2 backstory, skritt and asura both lived in the Depths of Tyria. Because skritt are obsessed with collecting shiny things, they'd often steal key parts of asura creations, and their populations tended to grow incredibly fast. Due to this, the asura deemed them vermin and launched a war of extermination, stopped only when the Destroyers appeared. The skritt survived both the asura and Destroyers, spreading to the surface.
• Halo:
  • The Covenant attempts to do this to the humans, because the Prophets discovered that the humans were the designated heirs to the Forerunners' legacy, which completely discredits all of the major tenets of the Covenant's religion.
  • When the Covenant discovered the Hunters, one subspecies that consumed Forerunner metals was exterminated for the damage done to various artifacts on their planet.
  • After he goes insane, the Ur-Didact intends to do this to humanity, whom he sees as a threat to the rest of the galaxy, by using the Composer to forcibly transform them all into his Promethean Knights.
• Hong Kong '97: The entire goal of the game is to murder the entire population of China, just for being "fucking ugly reds" and "the crime rate skyrockeded!"-ing in Hong Kong. And while the game only has you killing adult men, the wording implies that MANY innocent civilians, including children, will also die. Some of them not being even communists.
• Injustice: Gods Among Us: By the time the game starts (as can be seen on the prologue comics and a flashback on Injustice 2), Superman's quest to bring order to the world no matter what has escalated to the point that he turned Arkham Asylum into his own personal Auschwitz, where he takes care of any and all criminals... for good.
• This is the goal of Viridi, the Goddess of Nature, in Kid Icarus: Uprising. By dropping giant forest-sprouting seeds called "Reset Bombs" on every human-populated area, she hopes to wipe out all traces of humanity and restore Earth to its "natural state". Pit and Palutena get to see this firsthand when she turns a warzone into a tangled mess of vines and debris.
• In Kill It with Fire, the plot revolves around killing every single spider that infests the city.
• In the Mass Effect universe, the salarians ended an interstellar war with the rachni by enlisting the krogan in exterminating them. Then, when the krogan decided to use the advanced technology that the salarians had given them to wage their own war of conquest, the salarians designed the Genophage, which caused 99.9% of krogan offspring to die during gestation. Whether the latter action constituted genocide is heavily debated in-universe.
  • Before the Genophage, krogan reproduction was positively explosive. Their home planet was so harsh that a 99.9% fatality rate kept their reproduction in check. Once uplifted to the galactic community and in control of planets much, much safer than their home, their rapid reproduction was quite worrying. The Genophage was introduced to keep their 99.9% fatality rate from their homeworld's extreme conditions intact regardless of where they settled. This is why the Genophage is still debated, and not just accepted as a clear-cut genocide.
  • Every 50,000 years, all advanced civilizations are purged from existence by the Reapers, a race of sapient starships.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda, the most recent game in the franchise, gives us the Kett. These guys call their "solution" Exaltation. They have arrived in the Heleus Cluster of the Andromeda galaxy to "exalt" all life there. So, what is exaltation? Those with genetic traits that the Kett find desirable are kidnapped and converted into Kett. Those with undesirable traits are just purged. The Kett cannot biologically reproduce, so this is their solution to that problem. A recently exalted Kett bears absolutely no trace whatsoever of its original species, it doesn't even remember its previous life as a different species. All it knows is that it was once "wretched" before its exaltation. And the worst part? Their inability to reproduce is self-inflicted. Those freaks deliberately chose to turn their entire species into a virus-like plague on the galaxy for reasons unknown.
• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code: The main antagonists are responsible for the genocide of a group they dislike in some capacity, both of whom don't see any problem with such things. One of which is unaware they are a non-human killing humans, and the other being fully aware, since they're both homunculi too.
  • At the beginning of the game, Yomi Hellsmile, director of the Peacekeepers, masterminds the deaths of countless Master Detectives to prevent them from investigating Kanai Ward, while arresting any potential survivors. This ends up in the survival of Halara, Desuhiko, Fubuki, and Vivia, who likely used their abilities to avoid something so brutal, alongside Yakou Furio rescuing them at the last moment.
  • The Big Bad is revealed to have been kidnapping criminals from around the world who were already set to be executed, indiscriminately, so he can convert them into meat buns to feed the residents of Kanai Ward and sustain their bodies as defective homunculi. Essentially, he's gathering criminals around the world that were already sent to their doom elsewhere and killing them altogether himself instead.
• Metroid:
  • Samus in Metroid Fusion crashes the space station infected with X Parasites into the Parasites' homeworld to eliminate the entire species before they can spread across the galaxy and consume everyone.
  • Earlier, in Metroid II and its remake, the Federation decided to solve the problem of Metroids being used as biological weapons by sending Samus to their home planet in order to exterminate the entire species. This is what results in the population explosion of X Parasites that leads to Fusion, because Metroids were originally genetically engineered by the Chozo to be their predator. This a rather rare example that is played completely straight by the protagonist and not depicted as a great evil, even though the Metroids aren't really hurting anyone and are only destoyed because someone else might use them as a bioweapon. The resulting ecological disaster from their extinction is also a surprisingly realistic result of intentional etinctions carried out by humans on animal populations.
  • Metroid Dread ties the two above points together to explain why the entire series' universe got as bad as it was. The Thoha Chozo saw the X consuming life on SR388 and created the Metroids to consume them in turn. When the Metroids grew out of control, the Thoha saw fit to have the Metroids quarantined to the planet's depths so they could exterminatus SR388 and rid the universe of both threats, and allied with the Mawkin to do the deed. Unfortunately, Raven Beak had other plans...
  • Also on the subject of Dread, Raven Beak undoes the security on Elun while Samus is inside, enabling the locked-up X parasites - some of which came to ZDR via one of the aforementioned Mawkin - to roam free on the planet to consume and imitate everything on sight. The process of defeating Raven Beak involves crashing the Itorash to its surface and (somehow) triggering the planetary self-destruct.
• The New Order Last Days Of Europe: The Black League of Omsk wants to unify Russia and launch a Great Trial against Nazi Germany, exterminating the German people down to the last member and rendering all their cities and creations to radioactive ash and slag as punishment for brutally oppressing and humiliating Russia for over twenty years. Almost no different from the Nazis they despise so much, they are a terrifying insight into what happens when hate and anger consume a people, and their mad and misguided mission of retribution can only end with a nuclear holocaust that destroys human civilization across the world.
• Paper Mario: The Origami King: King Olly hates his creator for scribbling on him (not realizing that said "scribble" was simply a wish for Olly to be a good and wise king since it was in a spot where he couldn't read it himself). Since his creator is a Toad, and since all Toads look the same, Olly was seeing the face of the guy he hated everywhere he went, and thus he decided that using the wish granted by folding 1000 Origami Cranes to wipe out all Toads was the only way he could ever be rid of his creator for good.
• In [PROTOTYPE], the Blacklight virus was originally designed to commit mass genocide, but it somehow developed sentience and decided to wage total war on humanity. The Blackwatch final solution to the virus outbreak is called "Operation: Firebreak", which is essentially nuking whatever location it has infested.
• Seedship:
  • A random event has a rogue program within the ship try to kill colonists with certain racial characteristics (gameplay-wise, this will just kill a random number of colonists). Shutting down the program will save the colonists, but damage a random system.
  • The colonists will try to do this to the natives, if the ship's cultural database is sufficiently low enough AND if the natives do not have a planet-spanning society.
• StarCraft: A rare "good" (of the Honor Before Reason variety) example. Being Scary Dogmatic Aliens as they are, this is one of the qualities of the Protoss. They're known of "healing" planets infested by the Zerg by purifying them. This also comes as one of the side plots in StarCraft II, where the player has to decide whether to side with Dr. Ariel Hanson (resulting in the mission "Safe Haven" and Hanson's departure from the Raiders to settle in Haven) or Selendis (resulting in the mission "Haven's Fall" and Hanson being infected by the Zerg cure and being killed later by Raynor) while discussing what's the best course of action in the planet Haven, being the target of a Zerg infestation.
  • A typical evil version occurs in the backstory for the Terrans. The United Powers League of Earth decided to kill 400,000,000 people who didn't want to go along with their plans for a "perfect" world. 40,000 of these folks were sent off into space, eventually colonizing the Koprulu Sector.
  • Amon's ultimate goal is to kill everyone who isn't one of his creations. Which translates to 'everyone but (maybe) the Zerg-Protoss Hybrids'. And he mostly succeeded with his own race.
• Star Shift Rebellion:
  • The Molarians discovered that the TRS Raven went back in time and nuked the populations of several planets in order to monopolize their technology, showing that they didn't simply stick to their mission of attacking the Calterans. The Molarians realized they were next and had to make their own preparations to thwart the ESA in the future as digital avatars.
  • In the timeline where Scrap Springs Division leaves to find the Molarian fleet but doesn't come back in time, the ESA nukes all of Infernis Prime.
• Stellaris allows the player to "purge" disloyal populations, to the cost of angering other Empires. And if you are playing as Fanatic Purifier, this will likely be your first, last and only foreign policy.
• In Suikoden V, Gizel attempts to create "a Falena for Falenans" by enacting this against the Beavers and residents of Raftfleet. Queen Arshtat also attempts this on two occasions: before the game's events against the people of Lordlake, and right before her death against the entirety of Falena. In both instances, she's being influenced by the Sun Rune.
• Terminator: Resistance: Humanity is forced to take risky do-or-die missions when Skynet begins its grand extermination of the human race with the Annihilation Line, an enormous growing circle of Terminators, Hunter-Killers, and other death machines leaving from Skynet Central, with the single purpose of wiping out every human they come across as they cover the globe, and any humans unlucky enough to survive the initial line have to run, hide, and pray every single day that the Terminators hanging around don't catch them.
• Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. Admiral Daelin Proudmoore of the Kul Tiras believes that all Orcs and their ilk are irredeemable monsters that deserved to be wiped-off from the face of Azeroth, not even sailing far, far away from a Human civilization will be enough to satisfy him, he wants them all extinct. This proved to be his downfall, as his utter refusal to listen to Thrall's side and his daughter's testimony led to his death.

Webcomics

• In El Goonish Shive, Pandora apparently wiped out werewolves entirely due to the fact that one killed her husband. Though not stated outright, since she did this without breaking immortal law she presumably didn't kill any herself, but instead empowered and guided countless mortal werewolf hunters. Her son points out that she basically committed genocide against victims of a curse, and made no attempt to find a cure.
  • More violently, right before she is forcibly reset she uses her vast power coupled with the connection she temporarily had with every other immortal on the planet to launch a mass genocide spell against the Aberrations. Not every aberration was destroyed, Sirleck for example was out of range and thus unaffected, but the vast majority were.
• Girl Genius: Othar sees Sparks as abominations that will bring about the end of humanity, and has dedicated his life to killing every last one ending with himself. When he comes across legitimately heroic Sparks he leaves them alone or forcibly recruits them, as his plan is to kill them last since their work offsets that of other Sparks in the meantime. Apparently other Sparks have found his math to be sound.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Vaarsuvius's partner and children are threatened by a vengeful dragon who wants revenge on Vaarsuvius for having killed her son earlier in the comic. Fueled by demonic and devilish magic, Vaarsuvius finds a solution to the problem: Vaarsuvius casts a spell which not only kills this dragon but also any dragon that is in any way related to it — which turns out to be a quarter of the entire Black Dragon population — to stop the Cycle of Revenge. Vaarsuvius later learns that this included distant mixed race relatives that resulted from dragons mating with other species (such as humans) as well, thus wiping out entire clans of humans, among other beings. Vaarsuvius promptly has a Heroic BSoD upon realizing the horrifying extent of the genocide they caused.
  • While he currently doesn't have the power to carry it out, Redcloak has mentioned this as one of his alternative long-term plans: Exterminate the humans and maybe the Gods, too to make more room for his beloved goblinoids.
• White Dark Life
  • Mysto Majora Kijadhimov, a time-traveling sorceress who is the primary antagonist on Author!Luigifan's half of the roleplays, seeks to utterly obliterate the Abrahamic religions — Christianity, Judaism, and Islam — because she holds the Catholic God responsible for the destruction of the world's pagan beliefs and traditions (including her own). She wishes to reinstate those pagan beliefs and traditions, but believes that if the Catholic God still exists when she does so, He'll just have His followers wipe them out all over again — and she also believes that she can kill the Catholic God by eliminating all of His followers and erasing all mentions of Him from history. She has even gone as far as making 48 Horcruxes to ensure that she'd be around for long enough to see her crusade through to the bitter end. The main thing preventing her from embarking on her genocidal crusade is Anita Belnades,^note if that last name sounds familiar, it should who both trapped her in another dimension for 400 years^note Author!Luigifan has identified said dimension as being the Distortion World, and, yes, Giratina reacted exactly how you'd expect — and, yes, for 400 years straight and cast a spell preventing her from committing any acts of magical mass murder that can only be lifted by wiping out all Belnades clan descendants. With the help of her many minions,^note and we do mean many — Mysto is also the leader of a cult named the Slavic Circle Mysto was able to wipe out most of Anita Belnades' descendants after breaking free from her prison, but 8 of them got away, and have been continual thorns in Mysto's side ever since.
  • On pommyman's half of the roleplays (and, by extension, the actual webcomic), we have Altair, a Catholic fanatic who spent his life murdering anyone he considered to be a sinner, heretic, or heathen — namely, anyone who wasn't completely on board with his fanatical views. His victims included Mysto's mother, Renee, right in front of Mysto's eyes (with Renee's last act before being struck down being to teleport her children to safety) — this was the direct cause of Mysto's omnicidal hatred of Catholicism. After Altair's death and (baffling) ascension to heaven, he continued to steal the souls of sinners, effectively removing them from the cycle of punishment and redemption (and Unpersoning them in the process) and absorbing their powers. His ultimate goal was to utterly erase Hell itself and all of its inhabitants (and, for those not convinced of the heinousness of this scheme, it should be noted that demons in White Dark Life are not Always Chaotic Evil, plus the destruction of Hell would eliminate the divine system for the redemption of sinners, dooming all present and future sinners to Cessation of Existence). It should be noted that even being confronted by God Himself, rebuked for his actions, and stripped of his status and powers has not dissuaded Altair from his genocidal aspirations and delusions of righteousness.
  • The Injun-Hunter is a Serial Killer who exclusively focuses on Native Americans, believing them to be a threat to national security. Unlike Mysto, who is misguided, the Injun-Hunter is flat-out stated both in- and out-of-universe to be insane. ^note Altair is most likely misguided and insane.
  • Malthus is the leader of a Lifestream-worshipping cult/street gang/terrorist organization named the Life Demons which seeks to protect the global ecosystem by any means it deems necessary. And true to his name, Malthus believes that the current sapient population is so hopelessly bloated that it will inevitably destroy the planet unless it is dramatically reduced. Which means killing billions of people.^note Over the course of the roleplays, Author!Luigifan has explicitly compared Malthus to Ra's Al-ghul, Caleb Goldman, and Lysandre.
• Unsounded:
  • The Gefendur successfully eradicated the lions, an intelligent species that had hands in the setting, long ago due to religious tensions even though they had once been alies and even participated in the same sacrifices alongside each other.
  • There are several Patriarchal Gefendur extremists who hope and plan to kill of all of the Inak, seeing them as reviled inferior beasts despite their clear intelligence, ability to adapt to surface life, and mass conversion to the Gefendur religion.

Web Videos

• Played for laughs in Sword Art Online Abridged, where a strategy in the beta testers guide for defeating Ilfang (a strategy heavily implied to have been written by Kirito and starting out with using hordes of low-level newbies and anyone who's personally offended the strategist in any way as frontline Cannon Fodder) culminates in something called the "Final Solution", at which point the person reading the guide out loud quickly stops and abandons the whole strategy.
• In U Realms Live, the Elves have a book on the subject, called "The Great Purge", that describes how to exterminate Non-Elven races in the case of an apocalyptic event. Currently, it is only known that the Elves have done this once; to the Beannu, a race of Bird People the Elves blamed for killing the Sun Dragon Phanto. His death, however, did result in the Elves gaining Mortality, which resulted in the death of 90% of the Elven Population, as well as create all the magics in the Realm, along with several new creatures.
• World War II: The series covers and condemns The Holocaust and other atrocities in the sub-series "The War Against Humanity".

Western Animation

• A Fantastic Racism form is seen in Alfred J. Kwak. To complete Dolf's resemblance to Adolf Hitler, he resolves to kill every mouse (mice have long been used as an analogy for the Jews, see Maus for instance) on the planet because they angered him.
• A heroic example in American Dragon: Jake Long. The Huntsman plans to kill every magical creature on the face of the Earth with the Aztec Crystal Skulls. After finding out that his former apprentice has betrayed him for a dragon, he gets her to rejoin his side by presenting her with a Sadistic Choice, only to be betrayed by her as she uses the skulls to kill him and the rest of the Huntsclan (herself included) instead.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender:
    • The Air Nomads were wiped out in a massive genocide by the Fire Nation, a hundred years before the start of the show. Except they missed the one person they were aiming for.
    • In "Jet", the title character believes that all Fire Nation people must be wiped out. He robs an innocent old Fire Nation traveller, and later proceeds to flood a village, aiming to kill the Fire Nation soldiers there, along with all the villagers.
    • The Grand Finale revolves around the attempt to repeat this with the Earth Kingdom.
  • In The Legend of Korra, the successor series to Avatar: The Last Airbender, the first season's Big Bad Amon wants to do a non-lethal version of this by removing bending from everyone. It comes across as spiritual rape/mutilation in-series and, given the abundance of Mundane Utility, he would have to start another world war. Not to mention it's unlikely the debending process removes the chance that children of the debended can inherit bending abilities, just making things worse. Amon even calls himself "the solution". Although to be fair, Amon a.k.a. Noatak does believe he's doing good by debending even the Avatar, due to being raised as an unwilling weapon of revenge by his father.
• Barking Island is about a real incident in which the government of Constantinople, in 1910, took care of a stray dog problem by rounding up 60,000 dogs and dumping them on a small island to die. The whole cartoon is a thinly veiled metaphor for the Armenian Genocide, which happened just a few years later, in which that same Ottoman government killed around a million Armenian Christians.
• Beast Wars: The Predacons tried to do this to the human race, by wiping out their ancestors before they evolved, back when the protohumans were confined to a single valley in Africa. Megatron reasoned that if humans had never existed, then they wouldn't have been around to help the Autobots, and the Decepticons would have won the war and gained control of Cybertron. Luckily, Dinobot was able to foil this plan, though at the cost of his own life.
• In Ben 10: Alien Force, this is the ultimate goal of the Highbreed Council, with them wanting to "purify" the galaxy by wiping out all of the other races (they believe themselves to be the most "pure" sentient species in the galaxy to the point that their leaders tell everyone that they were the first living beings to come into existence, which Word of God confirms is a complete lie). Initially, they were just bigots but when it was discovered that inbreeding (done to keep their bloodlines pure) was causing the Highbreed species to sink into sterility and extinction, they decided to take out everyone else before they went.
  • Ultimately Ben and Reinrassic provide a solution; use the Omnitrix and Codon Stream to reconstruct the Highbreed's DNA, restoring diversity to their race. This causes the Highbreed Council to suffer a Heel Realization and step down from their positions as leaders, allowing Reinrassic to end the attempted omnicide.
• Futurama plays this comically straight in "Into the Wild Green Yonder" when Leo Wong wipes out an entire species of leeches (save one) to make way for a parking lot. Nearly averted later in the movie when the reborn encyclopod reluctantly decides to preserve the DNA of its now-extinct archenemy race, the Dark Ones. Zoidberg eats the remains before the encyclopod can do this, however.
• The Owl House: The second half of Season 2 reveals that Emperor Belos, aka Philip Wittebane, is actually a witch hunter from 17th century Earth, and his plans for the Day of Unity actually amounts to exterminating all witches and demons in the Boiling Isles, as well as purging the Demon Realm of all magic for good.
• In Rickand Morty, Vindicators 3: The Return of World Ender, as Rick, Morty, and the Vindicators entered the second trial of Drunk Rick’s puzzle trap, their next riddle was to pick the location, the Vindicators would never discuss about. As Croku-Bot was determined that the location was Dorian 5, until he answered wrong and was killed. As Morty questions what happened on Dorian 5, Supernova refuses to explain, until Alan Rails points out how they wiped out a whole planet. Supernova elaborates that Doom-Nomitron was a shape shifter, and blended in with the planet’s population, so the only option was to kill the whole planet. Rick stated that he could’ve just built a device that would’ve detect Doom-Nomitron from orbit with ease. As Supernova explains that she wwsn’t the one who wanted him back on the team, it was Alan, but before they could get into an arguement, Morty figures out the riddle himself that, the location was just Israel. A place Rick rants about while being drunk.
  • Later in Vindicators 2, it would reveal that event was just fabricated, as Doom-Nomitron was never on Dorian 5, the only reason the planet’s people was wiped out was because the team couldn’t distinguish between the aliens that called them, and the enemies that are attacking them. And the planet was destroyed due to a miscarriage Supernova had while being pregnant with A Million Ant’s babies.
• Star Wars Rebels: The Empire is revealed to have exterminated the Geonosian species to cover up the construction of the Death Star (not that the heroes learn that last part).
• Steven Universe:
  • Planetary genocide of organic life on a planet is pretty much standard Homeworld colonization procedure, to the point that Yellow Diamond treats it more as a boring desk job, with Earth as the sole exception because of other factors. Word of God would eventually state over Twitter that no other intelligent life ever existed in the entire galaxy besides Gems and Humans in response to many fans being outraged by the fact that the Diamonds seemingly get off scot free for eons of remorseless genocide.
  • Yellow Diamond wants to shatter the entire Rose Quartz line after one such Rose Quartz from Earth rebelled against Pink Diamond and seemingly shattered her. She also wants the Earth destroyed so that she can finally move on from mourning Pink's death. Making it more tragic is that the rebellious Rose Quartz in question was Pink Diamond, who faked her death in an attempt to get the other Diamonds to leave Earth alone. It backfired. Badly.
  • On the other side, Bismuth wanted to shatter all the Gem elite on Homeworld in revenge for how they treated the lower-class Gems.
• The Teen Titans get in on this trope with a race of spacefaring robots, on the grounds that said robots are hell-bent on exterminating all organic lifeforms. Unfortunately, they do this on the word of a fantastic racist against Tamaraneans, who by the end of the episode, decides to also consider humans worthless.

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