Memetic Psychopath

aka: Memetic Monster

So happy to smash U!

The video: extremely sweet and every age-friendly.

The comments: W A R C R I M E

— Duy Thuc, A Youtube commenter on Mio Honda.

Sometimes the internet hivemind will take a normally friendly character or a more mild antagonist, and depict them as an Ax-Crazy psychotic killer, usually Played for Laughs of the Black Comedy sort. This could be the result of stalker behaviour or creepy expressions, or a character's mental state exaggerated to horrible conclusions.

Subtrope of Memetic Mutation. Related to Memetic Badass. Compare and contrast with Ron the Death Eater. Both are about depictions of characters being evil, this trope is generally more silly and light-hearted, while Ron the Death Eater is much more serious and often stems from unironic hatred of a character. Those with Clingy Jealous Girl, Cute and Psycho, And Call Him "George", or Yandere tendencies are common targets. Even particularly weird Cloudcuckoolanders can end up with this reputation. Just as damaging to a character's reputation as the Memetic Molester, who is depicted as a rapist/molester figure for laughs rather than a murderous psychopath. Related to Never Live It Down in some cases. Compare with Memetic Troll who's depicted as being a troll by the internet, and the Memetic Loser, who is depicted as more pathetic.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Thanks to several Remix Comics on Cracked by Seanbaby, Popsicle Pete (a mascot for a brand of popsicles) has been turned into this, a Creepy Child who murders indiscriminately and incites children to follow, and is possibly the herald to an ancient evil. His catchphrase is "NONE OF YOU ARE SAFE!"
• McDonaldland:
  • Thanks to YTMND, Mac Tonight is depicted as a violent, racist criminal known as Moon Man. Over the years plenty of "Moon Man Raps" have been made using text-to-speech in which the mascot sings about killing ethnic minorities.
  • Ronald McDonald too, perhaps inevitably, used to have this reputation, not only due to the obvious "no clowns are trustworthy" phenomenon, but also from the commercials where he frequently appeared randomly in children's houses and did unusual things with them and the bizarre "Ran Ran Ruu" Japanese remix videos featuring him, often to the tune of menacing Final Boss themes. He has, however, been almost entirely eclipsed in this regard by the Golden Arches' new mascot, "Happy◊", usually depicted as a soul-stalking demon straight out of a survival horror game — and honestly, it is really not hard to see why.
  • "Uncle O'Grimacey was dropped because of an incident relating to the IRA" story mentioned in the Pop Culture Urban Legends entry has circulated on Twitter a few times, leading to lots of comments portraying O'Grimacey as an outspoken, perhaps even violent, Irish nationalist.
  • The Grimace himself is often parodied as being some sort of Blob Monster or Humanoid Abomination that eats people rather than the adorable Big Fun fuzzball he's known as. This is something of a sly reference to the character's original conception, as he was initially a villain like the Hamburglar, with four arms and goat-like legs who tried to steal all the milkshakes in McDonaldland before McDonalds realized that they made him into Accidental Nightmare Fuel and changed his character to be Lighter and Softer. According to Clerks: The Animated Series, nothing can kill the Grimace. This saw a revival in 2023 with the "Grimace Shake" meme where drinking the titular shake would suddenly kill the consumer because it contains the Grimace's unholy essence, or summons the Grimace himself to do the deed, or because the shake is too unhealthy, or some other deranged thing.
• The mascot character Kumamon (a mascot for the Kumamon prefecture in Japan) is depicted as a violent minion of Satan as the result of a certain picture in front of a bonfire from Funny Junk in late 2011.
• Pizza Hut as a whole business; their slogan is "Nobody outpizzas the Hut", which resulted in memes about what happens to people that do outpizza the Hut.
• The gorilla mascot from some Gorilla Glue commercials. Said commercials involve someone needing a strong adhesive to fix a broken object, prompting the gorilla to appear and give them Gorilla Glue. That's all fine and dandy, but the commercials also for some reason have people be realistically scared by the gorilla's sudden appearance, making it all too easy to edit the videos in such a way as to make them look like a horror movie about a Killer Gorilla going on a rampage.

Anime & Manga

• Attack on Titan: Eren's intense Titan hatred and murderous tendencies already as a child gets blown up in a lot of parodies, even some official ones. The usual scenario is that simply mentioning Titans is enough to hit his Berserk Button. The final arcs of the manga have not helped at all, considering that he escalates to the role of the Big Bad and becomes an Omnicidal Maniac.
• Azumanga Daioh:
  • Osaka became one in a Never Live It Down sort of way after the "wake up frying pan" fiasco. She wanted to use a frying pan to wake Yukari up, but she accidentally brought a knife. While she has such an odd thought process that she occasionally veers into being a Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant, she's ultimately harmless.
  • Yomi to a lesser extent, mainly when it comes to furries.
• The Dangers in My Heart: Anna Yamada's Clingy Jealous Girl's tendencies towards Ichikawa mixed with her occasional and uncharacteristically cold Death Glare has lead to some fans playfully painting her as a blatant Yandere that will kill any girl that even dares to be close to Ichikawa, even if it's from her own family or friends, with common jokes that she was the true tortured soul with murderous impulses all along that Ichikawa deluded himself to be.
• Mr. Popo from Dragon Ball Z started to get a reputation for psychopathy as the result of Dragon Ball Z Abridged. It's gotten to the point where the latter version of the character has his own page on the villains wiki. To be fair though, we have no true gauge for Popo's power level, as he was fending off Goten and Trunks in their SSJ state without any difficulty.
  • Dragon Ball Super has him outright evict Vegeta from the Lookout when his over-training destroyed the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, in a pretty similar manner to the extremely famous 'PECKING ORDER'.
• Shou Tucker from Fullmetal Alchemist quickly became the poster boy for child abuse and bad parenting thanks to turning his daughter into a chimera. Not helping was all of the general memes around the event in question, and the fandom frequently makes jokes about what a terrible dad he is. He notably represents a rare variation of this trope where the character genuinely is psychopathic and their actions truly heinous, but their sheer infamy amongst fans is taken to ridiculous extremes; i.e. many would, jokingly or not, describe Tucker as potentially the most evil anime character ever, surpassing countless mass murderers and worse, and the event is one of the most (in)famous things about the whole series specifically due to how much its shockingness has constantly been played up in outside contexts. This is backed up by the fact that in the manga omake "In Memoriam" panels, he is the only dead character ever shown falling down to hell, when every other character is shown flying up to heaven, even ones who had committed heinously villainous acts.
• Gundam Build Divers Re:RISE has Captain Zeon, who is supposed to the The Cape and The Paragon, particularly in the area of fair play and good sportsmanship. He is first shown scolding some griefers about not being assholes (blocking spawn points, seal-clubbing newbies for easy wins, selling free items for huge markups to naive players) and punctuates his lecture by using his Finishing Move on them... dropping the fucking Axis colony from Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack on them. Despite the fact that this is a game and the worst penalty the griefers got was having to lose Diver Points and respawn, the audience found this level of Disproportionate Retribution to be hilarious and have gone on to suggest that Captain Zeon is actually a Sociopathic Hero who solves all of his problems by throwing increasingly large space objects at them, Collateral Damage be damned.
• Lyrical Nanoha:
  • Nanoha Takamachi gets this trope to a minor degree due to the "befriending" meme, which involves bombarding the target with nuclear-level magic that can level cities and use that as a means for friendship. She is also depicted as being overly eager for any battle opportunities and will go full-out. Fandom refers to this side of her by her Fan Nickname, the "White Devil". Canon supports this; in one of the supplementary manga, it was revealed that one of the times Nanoha and Signum sparred, they got a little too into the fight, complete with a panel showing the two with Devices caught in a blade lock and Nanoha sporting a very fierce Slasher Smile.
  • There's also Nanoha as an instructor In canon, Nanoha gives out grueling training- but never excessively so, lest her trainees overwork themselves like she once did- but is laid-back and friendly, even letting her students call her by her first name. She did blast Teana into unconsciousness when Teana charged her recklessly, but that was after trying to talk her down, and she hadn't even raised her voice when lecturing Teana over nearly hitting Subaru by mistake during the battle at the hotel. Fan works, however, often portray Nanoha as a Drill Sergeant Nasty.
  • Some of the shipping Fan Dumb has also made this for Fate Testarossa, turning her from the sensitive and motherly woman she is into a deranged Yandere obsessed with Nanoha and a burning desire to brutally murder Yuuno Scrya. Scarily enough, the faction that does this is the self-proclaimed "militant" Nanoha/Fate shippers...
• In One Piece, due to several of his opponents in one-on-one fights happening to have dark skin (e.g. Mr. 5, Mr. 1, Pica, King) in addition to his Accuser of the Brethren attitude towards Usopp during the latter's 10-Minute Retirement, Roronoa Zoro is portrayed as a Politically Incorrect Hero who gets a kick out of killing black people. The fact that his Establishing Character Moment in the live-action adaptation had him facing off against yet another black man didn't help matters.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • Cilan is often depicted as a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing psychopath who murders and eats his Pokémon, due to his catch phrases, "It's tasting time!" and "I caught a/n [X POKÉMON] with good taste!". Episode 19 introduced his rival Burgundy, who claimed that Cilan was a monster when she battled him, complete with Slasher Smile. Naturally, this got more notice from the fandom: when he's not portrayed as her rapist, he's thought of as a psychological torturer. For the longest time a lot of fans thought his game counterpart was a Shadow Triad member. This only put fuel on the fire, with a lot of people having him as the Token Evil Teammate who betrays Ash.
  • And then there's Serena. One of the memetic depictions of her is nicknamed Yanderena. While this depiction is quite common among fans (from things like wanting to murder anyone who tries to get in Ash's pants), it exploded when a certain VA retired from voice acting. Said VA, Saori Hayashi, provided voice for Miette/Millefeui, a recurring character who knows about Serena's crush on Ash and teased her repeatedly to the point that she threatened her that if she doesn't make a move, she will steal Ash from her. Prompt an image of Yanderena superimposed against the news.
• Pretty Cure:
  • Cure Black and Cure White from the original Futari wa Pretty Cure has fallen into this given its Early Instalment Weirdness, in which they are sometimes portrayed as the most brutal Destructive Saviors of all the Cures that came after (rivaled only by their direct successors Cure Bloom and Cure Egret). It helps that they're one of the few Pretty Cure teams to have an active body count throughout the series, as instead of depending on purifying Finishing Moves, all Cure Black and Cure White has are their fists, legs, and the equally destructive Marble Screw... and they'll be damn sure to let their enemies know just how deadly they are with just those three tools.
  • As of Healin' Good♡Pretty Cure, Cure Grace has joined this group due to her refusing to Save the Villain when said villain was actively asking for her help, owning up to how he was responsible for crippling Grace for most of her life. Fans took this as Cure Grace being the No-Nonsense Nemesis and a Combat Pragmatist to the rest of her fellow Cures, especially in direct comparison to the more easy-going Cure Star, with immediate jokes involving Grace trying to find a way to kill Ophiuchus for good rather than let the infamous Easily Forgiven ending of Star Twinkle play out.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica; Kyubey gives us an interesting case, as he was widely thought to be evil from episode one, and an old growth forest's worth of Poison Oak Epileptic Trees sprung up surrounding him from the minute he was revealed. Then it was revealed that Kyubey is both more insidious than had been expected, but at the same time is a Well-Intentioned Extremist with an alien moral outlook. The fandom tends to simply ignore these good intentions and portray him as utterly evil.
• Ranma ½, pretty much any character in the whole cast can swing between this and Ron the Death Eater in fanfics, Depending on the Author. To provide two examples out of the pile:
  • The Tendo Sisters. Akane devolves into a paranoid, smash- (or rather, mallet- happy) violent maniac who can turn a simple 'good morning' into an example of the hentai conspiracy (especially if it's given by Ranma). Kasumi is, whether for good or evil (awesome optional), an example of Beware the Nice Ones, and Nabiki... well, she's more of a Memetic Sociopath (in canon, manga most specifically, she's The Barnum... and an astonishingly amoral one, by the way).
  • Shampoo. Her 'obstacles are made for killing' attitude is present in Anime and Manga, but fanfic twists it into her wanting to kill anybody who she could classify as an 'obstacle', regardless of of how reasonable that is, or how good her odds are.
• Speed Racer has acquired this reputation due to many short out-of-context clips in which he shows no hesitation when it comes to letting people die just so he can win a race, or even where he appears to straight up murder people in the name of winning.
• Transformers: Car Robots: In Japan, Fire Convoy is memetically not an "Autobot Supreme Commander" like the Convoys of other series, but an "Autobot Emperor of Destruction". Among other things, the series includes scenes in which Convoy flies into an Unstoppable Rage against ineffectual sympathetic villains who are also described as his childhood friends. This is worsened when the Big Bad creates a team of evil Transformers, and the accidental copy of Fire Convoy turns out to be more evil than the Big Bad himself. Script changes in the dub Transformers: Robots in Disguise meant that his counterpart Optimus Prime never really developed a similar reputation.
• Yami Yugi from Yu-Gi-Oh!. He was notably a Pay Evil unto Evil extremist in the original manga, but received character development and toned down, with his dangerous side all but ignored in the second anime. Still, fans remember his early manga/Toei anime behavior and joke about how he's planning on torturing his next victims, often in detail. The Abridged Series popularized this interpretation.
• Yuya Sakaki of Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V. While his Superpowered Evil Side (Awakened) is more creepy and disturbing, it has only caused little or no actual damage beyond hitting people and winning duels. Yuya himself is the least threatening of the protagonists, as his main goal in the series is to bring peace and happiness to everyone. Nevertheless, Yuya is often depicted as a dangerous, world-ending psycho who will lapse into his crazy side and kill everyone if left unchecked, or he'll murder people who disagree with his well-meaning views.

Comic Books

• This is the purpose behind the website Superdickery — portraying Superman (and occasionally other superheroes) as complete psychos for laughs by purposely taking things out of context. Of course, the source material makes it pretty easy...
• Archie Comics: The 40s-60s era version of Betty is often referred to as a yandere. Prior to her mellowing down into a tomboyish "girl next door", Betty was varying degrees of obsessed with Archie (even when he only dated Veronica).
• Batman:
  • Batman is sometimes portrayed this way, as a sociopath using his riches to beat the crap out of criminals instead of investing in social programs. In recent years it's been exaggerated further by having memes depicting him as an All Crimes Are Equal lunatic hospitalizing people for petty crimes. Then there's that whole "train a twelve-year-old in combat, then shove him in front of armed criminals wearing nothing but tights, repeat as necessary" thing.
    Linkara: He's a cowardly criminal degenerate, AND I WILL DESTROY HIM BLARGHARGHARGH
  • To a lesser degree, Alfred when he's had enough of Bruce's crap, as the following joke puts it:
    Alfred: Master Wayne, do you know what happened the last time someone treated me with disrespect?
    Bruce: No...
    Alfred: I hired a small-time criminal to shoot him, his wife, and his son in a back alley as they were leaving a movie theater.
• Civil War (2006): Tony Stark got this during the period right after Civil War, mainly because of the tie-ins of the event derailing him into a pseudo-fascist.
  • After Civil War II it was Carol Danvers' turn.
• Iron Man: Ironheart fell into this trope in the recent relaunch of Invincible Iron Man in which we learned that Riri, upon telling her teacher that she wanted to be a scientist, is shocked that she isn't being told off for wanting to be such a thing and the teacher realizes this and amends it to her not being able to be Tony Stark. Combined with a few other incidents, some have made her out to be a person who didn't become a superhero out of the kindness of their heart, but to spite a teacher over a comment made.
• Sonic the Comic: Sonic is a jerkass who acts rude to his friends, is prone to dry sarcasm, and acts like a Big Brother Bully to Tails. It's, however, common practice to take panels out of context and portray him as a Sociopathic Hero and borderline Villain Protagonist (or at least a very dark Anti-Hero).
• Wonder Woman: In recent years, Wonder Woman has begun to be jokingly depicted as a murderous sociopath, mostly as a way of mocking the tendency of bad writers to portray her as casually murdering villains. Her breaking people's necks is something that is thrown around frequently.

Comic Strips

• Garfield has seen the titular cat increasingly interpreted as some kind of horrifying Eldritch Abomination that just snaps one day, and starts taking its true form as a lasagna-seeking horror that will destroy everything Jon loves if he doesn't get it. It's extended enough it's gotten a dedicated subreddit, and this video by animator Lumpy Touch.
• The Comics Curmudgeon has caused many comic strip characters to be subjected to this, thanks to his famous penchant for Alternate Character Interpretation. Amongst other things:
  • Slylock Fox is a corrupt, bloodthirsty Dirty Cop who enforces a hellish Police State where animals have supplanted mankind.
  • Marmaduke is a ravenous, uncontrollable hellhound who torments his owner and regularly devours townsfolk.
  • Mary Worth is a manipulative, bigoted harpy who compulsively meddles in the affairs of others.
  • The Keanes are part of an ultra-fundamentalist, Jonestown-esque cult.
  • Dick Tracy is an authoritarian tyrant who believes brutal violence is the solution to all problems.
  • Margo Magee is a psychotic murderer who considers neck-snapping everyone she meets.
  • Hägar the Horrible acts like a real Viking; which is to say, he constantly goes on Rape, Pillage, and Burn sprees against hapless villages.

Films — Animation

• Big Hero 6:
  • Hiro due to the "Baymax, destroy." scene.
  • Baymax himself to, partly due to the prior-mentioned scene, partly just as a joking subversion of his super-caring personality, or simply removing it, or replacing it with a killer robot chip.
• Chicken Little: Buck Cluck, the father of the titular character, is loathed by viewers, as despite being a case of Parents as People, he comes across as a neglectful jackass who is embarrassed by his son's existence and lets him get bullied. Thus, his negative flaws get highly exaggerated by the Internet to make him guilty of the worst crimes imaginable.
• Despicable Me:
  • The Minions instantly became this as a race when their spin-off movie revealed that their goal is to work for the evilest and most fearsome organism they came across. This predictably led to cynical viewers morbidly joking about how they without question worked for the most depraved human beings, the most popular being Adolf Hitler. While the writers had the Minions isolate themselves in an ice cave after pissing off Napoléon Bonaparte's army, people have simply pointed out that if the Minions needed to be conveniently written away from human society during the time of the Third Reich, it just further proves that they would have been Nazis.
  • Gru also became this trope once people realized that if the Minions have stuck with him since the sixties, he must have been worse than every evil human being who came after, with Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden being the most joked-about.
• Frozen:
  • Thanks to various versions of "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?"—namely, both this horror/G-Major remix and "Will You Help Me Hide a Body?", Princess Anna is starting to become this. In the first, the fanon that Tumblr came up with is that she dies from the accident and her undead self stalks Elsa, but the second is where her Memetic Psychopath self really shows through—not only does she start asking Elsa to help her hide bodies in caves when she's five, but by the time she's fifteen, she kills her parents and threatens to come after Elsa next. In the sequel song "Let Them Run", it's revealed that she did indeed follow through on her threat to kill Elsa. And she chases people to kill them because she thinks it's ''fun''.
  • The fandom absolutely adores portraying Elsa as outright evil or as a dark Anti-Hero. The amount of fanfics, Fan Art, and fan-videos are astounding. Elsa was written as an antagonist to Anna until late into development but was changed into a more sympathetic character later. Those scant seconds of her looking smug in "Let It Go" are leftovers from that period, and ironically people overuse them for all they're worth in "evil Elsa" AMVs.
• Sleeping Beauty: Aurora is often reinterpreted as a villainous character, especially in fanvids. Her expressions and movements translate easily into a snide antagonist.
• Frequently in memes, Miguel O'Hara aka Spider-Man 2099 from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse goes from being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who had valid reasons for keeping Miles Locked Out of the Loop to a violently racist Jerkass to One. There are also memes that have him stop time-travelers from preventing historical or world-changing tragedies, condemning many people to suffer, under the pretense of them being "canon events".
• Turning Snow White from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs into a creepy, often Ambiguously Evil (if not outright evil), Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette is common. It's heavily in part because the original fairy-tale is prone to grimmification.

Films — Live-Action

• Macavity the Mystery Cat in Cats has "broken every human law". Hmm, when they say "every", are they including violent crimes, sex crimes, hate crimes, and war crimes? Because that's the message Internet users are getting.
• Bilbo Baggins' surprisingly terrifying attempt to grab the Ring back from Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring has been memeified as "Scary Bilbo".
• Kevin McCallister from Home Alone is often portrayed in fanon as a violent, sadistic psychopath who genuinely enjoys the pain he inflicted on Harry and Marv in the first two films, along with him using the Angels With Filthy Souls movie to scare the pizza delivery guy for no real reason ^note Though in Kevin's defense, letting strangers know you're home alone is probably not a smart idea.. Not helped by the fact that an abandoned idea for the third film was an adult Kevin going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against a now-reformed Harry and Marv. Along with these two videos courtesy of Macaulay Culkin and Daniel Stern.
• Star Wars:
  • The Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. After all, they were going to cook and eat the heroes until Luke's Force abilities scared them off. And who knows what they did with the bodies of those Imperials they killed?
  • In 2019, LEGO Yoda inexplicably became the focus of a series of memes casting him as a violent, bigoted, and perverted ketamine addict. The memes depict him as so depraved that subreddits devoted to them were repeatedly shut down.
  • Many haters of Jar Jar Binks like to portray him as a Dark Side user more evil than Palpatine himself. This ended up spawning the famous "Darth Jar Jar" fan theory.
• Transformers Film Series: The series' depiction of Optimus Prime is remembered more for his brutal fighting style and take-no-prisoners attitude than for his heroic qualities. His Pre-Mortem One-Liner against The Fallen became a popular meme for how hilariously savage it was coming from the Big Good of the franchise:
  Give me your FACE!
• The Oompa-Loompas from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory have inspired many memes due to the song and dance numbers they perform whenever a misbehaving child suffers an accident, which exaggerates them into celebrating the deaths of innocent children.

Literature

• Harry Potter:
  • The Dursleys, the Hate Sink family, already abusive to the Nth degree are commonly portrayed as even worse, such as raping Harry or subjecting him to Cold-Blooded Torture.
  • As a result of Ron the Death Eater, Dumbledore is also commonly portrayed as a sociopathic Manipulative Bastard who not only ruined Harry's life, but also did countless other atrocities for no real reason.
• Warrior Cats: Thanks to a popular AU, the Too Good for This Sinful Earth Spottedleaf is often depicted as either yandere for Firestar or The Chessmaster who orchestrated numerous deaths because she was afraid of being forgotten in StarClan and ceasing to exist.
• Nevermoor: In canon, Ezra Squall is a quiet, calm, Faux Affably Evil sociopath who inspires fear in everyone he meets, and is one of the few characters with no moments of humor or levity. In fanon, however, he's an absolutely gleeful, Obviously Evil fountain of Black Comedy, often with the heroine Morrigan playing the Straight Man. Many jokes have him as a Harmless Villain for added humor, something he decidedly is not in canon.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Greg is an awful kid to be sure: he's mean to people, he's selfish, and he's oftentimes willing to throw people under the bus. However, several moments throughout the series show he isn't heartless. This doesn't stop fans from running with his aforementioned negative traits and generalizing him into The Sociopath. Similarly, his Bratty Half-Pint little brother Manny is often portrayed as Ted Bundy in a three-year-old's skin. Flanderization turning him into a brat who'll let his family freeze to death because they didn't teach him how to tie his shoes doesn't help.

Live-Action TV

• Arrowverse: In a "Ron the Death Eater treatment towards The Scrappy" case of this, Felicity Smoak in-canon is meant to be an Endearingly Dorky Nice Girl and Playful Hacker, but she has so many cases of being Unintentionally Unsympathetic, born from being a Creator's Pet who often grabs the Conflict Ball with a very frequent tendency to be casually cruel to people, that the fandom has reinterpreted her as an uncaring, selfish and self-serving jerk who is manipulating everyone around her to fulfil a Self-Insert Fic-style fantasy between herself and the dark antihero protagonist, and will let the world burn and abandon everyone and everything just so they can be together.
• In the Doctor Who canon, companion Dan Lewis is a happy-go-lucky Scouser. On the internet, however, in the "Evil Dan" theme he steals soup from starving people and murders people with woks, all accompanied with the Master's Leitmotif.
• The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: It is shockingly easy (and fun) to take out-of-context clips from the show and edit them in such a way as to make Uncle Phil look like some kind of deranged, sociopathic Serial Killer. So that's exactly what people do. It doesn't help that James Avery had a really deep and intimidating natural speaking voice, nor that the show had a few Imagine Spots that seem to lean into this idea:
  Silence! If I want your opinion I'll beat it out of you!
• Game of Thrones: Aerys Targaryen's madness was so horrifying that it reached very horrifying memetic levels in-universe. He's now the go-to comparison for when you really want to offend someone, or want to make a really dramatic point. This is shown a few times throughout the show — firstly, when Ned Stark says that Robert's and his council will be little better than the Mad King should they kill Daenerys and her unborn child. The second time is when Cersei is on the brink of an emotional breakdown, recognising that her incestuous affair with Jaime has created another Aerys.
• Sesame Street: Bert, namely the "Bert Is Evil" meme. Elmo gets this sort of mutation as well (especially after the "Rocco" skits exploded in popularity in 2022), and it later comes to a head with Bert Strips, which depict everyone on Sesame Street as some kind of amoral lunatic who exists only to torment other people For the Evulz.
• Hooch in Scrubs is an in-universe example.
  Everybody: Hooch is crazy!
• Late Show With David Letterman had a recurring bit called ''Dr. Phil's Words of Wisdom," which were quick out of context clips from his show, including such quotes as "Let's just kick her ass," "Children hate me," and "I would eat some Fruity Pebbles if I got hungry enough." Usually, Letterman would end the bit by saying, "Someday they're going to close down that little parlor game and put that man in jail."
• Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation, who in canon is an Ideal Hero, being a deeply philosophical and empathetic man who prefers diplomacy over conflict in almost any situation, is portrayed as this in several different series of fan recuts on YouTube. The humor in these videos is derived from recasting such a moral person as an Ax-Crazy monster who casually abuses and murders his own crew, destroys entire civilizations for fun, is a sadistic rapist, a cannibal and Child Eater, and completely revels in his own villainy. Some of his colleagues get an almost equally bad upgrade: Riker becomes a Serial Rapist, Data is a Robotic Psychopath, Dr. Crusher a Mad Doctor, and Worf gets his Proud Warrior Race Guy personality ramped up to where he'll take over the Klingon Empire and launch a genocidal war against humanity over an insult. Other Starfleet captains are still heroic, however.
• Captain Kathryn Janeway of Star Trek: Voyager is hit with this quite hard in the fandom, stemming from what's viewed as reckless behavior on her part that frequently puts her crew in unnecessary danger, breaking the Prime Directive repeatedly without much thought, her aggressive interactions with various alien species, and, most infamously, her handling of the Tuvix situation. It's pretty common to see her jokingly portrayed as a complete loose cannon committing genocide left and right and who has a pathological, irrational hatred of Tuvix in particular.
  • Taken Up to Eleven in SFDebris reviews, where Janeway is portrayed as a sociopathic Mad Scientist who plans to conquer the galaxy and even freaks out the Borg Queen.
• Thanks to the Funny 115, Survivor's Matthew Von Eltferta has become this, though only how he came off on the show.
• The obscure, super low-budget 1972 Toku series Redman (from Tsuburaya Productions, the creators of Ultraman) features the title hero doing battle against monsters (mostly from the Ultraman franchise) in five minute shorts featured on a children's variety show. It would have been forgotten, but when Tsuburaya Productions began uploading the shorts to their official YouTube channel in 2016, it caught on amongst the Toku and Kaiju fandom by storm due to the sudden nature of the battles, the hero's brutal fighting style, and shaky cinematography. Thus a popular Alternate Character Interpretation of Redman and his foes was created with the hero becoming a crazed murderer stalking the Japanese wilds in search of hapless monsters to slaughter in cold blood.
• LazyTown has Stingy, after the infamous line "All your feelings are mine" from the "Mine" song and him running over Sportacus with his car, twice. Of special note is the scene where he asks the mayor some questions about sports and the conversation takes a rather unexpected turn.
• Several characters from shows for very young kids are given this treatment as Periphery Hatedom collides with the internet's urge to corrupt everything harmless:
  • Barney & Friends is a standout in that regard. Purple and cuddly or not, many people have pointed out that Barney is still a dinosaur, and a T-REX at that, leading to depictions of Barney doing significantly more gruesome things than singing to kids about how he loves them and they love him. Sometimes he is depicted as a more realistic-looking T. rex, just recolored pink. Works such as the Day of the Barney Trilogy, meanwhile, go even further by portraying the seemingly harmless pink host as a demonic entity that preys on children.
  • The Teletubbies also get in on the action. Picturing them either as hostile evil aliens or as outright nightmarish Eldritch Abominations is disturbingly common, to the point that Cracked has mentioned the trend in an article. The Unintentional Uncanny Valley likely plays a significant role in this, as does the characters' rather bizarre design in general, and their extraterrestrial origin can't be helping matters either.
• In 2020, a trend appeared on YouTube. The german kids show "Willi Will's Wissen" made a comeback through compilations that make the host Willi Weitzel seem like an ableist, sexist and downright crazy guy, who jokingly asks a kid in a wheelchair if it could run quickly. This footage wasn't edited though but as kids, the viewers didn't noticed Willi's questionable remarks every than and now. But bundled up in a compilation and exaggerated with wacky effects, it's hard to ignore.
• Murder, She Wrote: Because of all the people that drop dead around her, Jessica Fletcher is often portrayed as a serial killer who actually killed every victim in the show or hired the culprits herself to do the deed.
• The Office (US):
  • It is a recurring joke within the show's fandom that Toby is secretly the Scranton Strangler, citing that it would serve as an outlet for his stressful work environment with his unreciprocated romantic feelings for Pam and having to deal with Michael wailing on him at work.
  • Creed. Not exactly unfounded given that he is shown to be a repeat criminal offender, who is implied in the show to have committed murder more than once. He is even considered one of the biggest alternatives to Toby as the true identity of the Scranton Strangler.
• In the late 2010s/early 2020s, a trend picked up to portray and reinterpret the main casts of popular sitcoms like Friends and How I Met Your Mother as actually being groups of codependent, selfish, sex-obsessed psychos and would-be sex criminals. This is largely due to many sitcoms employing Protagonist-Centred Morality (which, in fairness, they often lampshade), so the joke is based on looking at them critically and pointing out the unintended implications of their casual cruelty.
• Sam Hyde from the Sketch Comedy World Peace has for several years been the subject of a trend in which he's credited for every high-profile mass shooting, terrorist act, or war story. Funnily enough it's become so widespread that politicians and news outlets have spread it by mistake.

Pro Wrestling

• Former ECW wrestler New Jack qualifies, though the "Memetic" part is debatable. He claims to have been a Bounty Hunter in his youth and to have committed four' justifiable homicides. He has assaulted a 17-year-old untrained kid, leaving him in a pool of his own blood ^note Though said 17-year-old had lied about his age and consented to the blading, evidently not knowing what he was in for stabbed a man several times in a match, threw another man off of a 20-foot balcony and so many other things.

Sports

• Any sports mascot with a creepy-looking costume usually ends up as one of these, both among the opposing team and sometimes even among their fans. The undeniable champions of this phenomenon are usually agreed to be the original Pierre the Pelican and the King Cake Baby (both of them, oddly enough, mascots for the New Orleans Pelicans.) Fortunately, the Pelicans quickly responded to Pierre's negative reception and so he got a new, much more friendly and cartoony-looking design. Unfortunately, King Cake Baby did not.
• Gritty, the new 2018 mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers, developed this perception within mere hours of his debut, thanks to a combination of his bizarre appearance and on-ice antics, including apparently shooting a man in the back with a T-shirt cannon. Unlike most examples, the Flyers quickly started playing into his terrifying reputation, including having him send a veiled death threat to the Pittsburgh Penguins mascot - a move which, ironically, seems to have redeemed the character in the eyes of many fans.

Tabletop Games

• Downplayed with Kharn the Betrayer from Warhammer 40,000. In canon he is the single most psychopathic Blood Knight Super-Soldier in the galaxy, but Fans love to portray as a Cloudcuckoolander/Psychopathic Manchild who wants to have fun butchering the servants of the false Emperor in the name of Chaos, like playing wishbones with a commissar ^note not with the commissar, he and another World Eater each grab a leg and pull, the winner is the one with a bigger chunk of commissar, grabbing the commissar's cap and using it to slaughter half his men, sticking explosives on his side's transports as a prank, spelling amusing messages with dead bodies, making carnage angels, etc. If ever you see Kharn's name followed by "What a guy!", it's a reference to this view.

Toys

• The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic toyline has a pony called "Firecracker Burst". Nothing is known about her in canon but fans looked at her name and rolled with it. Firecracker Burst is a pyromaniac according to fanworks. Her personality differs from fan to fan but she's always chipper.
• Furby has a reputation for being creepy, and as a result there are a lot of memes and jokes online about them being monsters or serial killers. Fictional Furby parodies are often portrayed in a similar way, to the point that Furby was the inspiration for Tattletail, a horror game, and The Mitchells vs. the Machines had the titular family being attacked by an army of them, including a giant one that shoots lasers.

Video Games

• Haru Okumura, AKA Noir from Persona 5. However, unlike most examples on this page, this actually suits her well, because it isn’t far from the truth. She’s seen as this due to her...interesting Mementos dialogue, among a few other things, which hints at her having some sadistic tendencies. There's also what happens if you decide to cheat on her during Valentine’s day. It’s not pretty. There are a few hints and indications of this being true in-universe as well, especially in the spinoff material, where several characters (especially Ryuji) show signs of being afraid of pissing her off. Because of all that, Haru is commonly depicted in fanart and fanfictions as a merciless sadist who enjoys the suffering of her enemies.
  Haru: Why is it that I get a shiver of excitement whenever the Shadows plead for their lives?
  Futaba: Ooh, ooh! What was that called? Sadies? Saddest?
  Makoto: Noir, I'd appreciate it if you held off on the homicidal remarks until after you put your weapon down.
  Ryuji: Oh, you're...one of THEM. Great. I'm just gonna...stay over here.
  • Strikers is basically Atlus being aware of the memes regarding Haru and deciding to have some fun with them via good-natured trolling. Notable examples include Haru’s newfound love of wood chopping and a legendary scene where Haru Drives Like Crazy.
  • Word of God and Word of Saint Paul explains the canonical reason for Haru’s behaviours mentioned above is really just venting/stress relief as the result of all the crap she takes from her horrible father and especially her Jerkass fiancé Sugimura.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • The Villager from Animal Crossing, after his unveiling in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U. It took all of two hours post announcement for him to develop this reputation. This was referenced in a poster for Bayonetta.
  • Isabelle got similar treatment with the release of Ultimate, with interpretations ranging from her beating up other characters to unwind from the stress of her job, to her doing it as a form of training so she can overthrow the mayor and take over the village for herself.
  • The Wii Fit Trainer saw similar Memetic Mutation due to her bizarre fighting style of beating up people with yoga moves (albeit not to the same extreme as the Villager).
  • For Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, newcomer Simon Belmont is often portrayed as a Knight Templar committing Van Helsing Hate Crimes against the Dark Is Not Evil cast members and anyone he mistakes for one of the monsters he fights.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Cream the Rabbit, despite being a 6-year old rabbit girl, is often mutated into Cute and Psycho or an Enfant Terrible. This has no basis in how she's depicted in the story, but instead in her novice-oriented gameplay style that allows her to effortlessly defeat most boss enemies just by pointing her pet, Cheese the Chao, at them.
  • Shadow gets this treatment quite often in fanfic. When he's not being a Serial Killer, he's being a Serial Rapist. Even when he's not either of those things (and especially when he is), he still tends to be portrayed as having a Hair-Trigger Temper, which usually results in Stuff Blowing Up.
  • Tails Doll from Sonic R is almost universally portrayed as a sadistic monster who drives players insane before brutally killing them. Needless to say, Tails Doll displays none of these traits in-canon. Even Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) referenced this.
  • Amy is either a Yandere who will do anything to get to Sonic, or a hammer-wielding psycho who smashes anything or anyone that ticks her off. This was based off her exaggerated behaviour in games such as Sonic Heroes and Sonic Battle.
  • Miles "Tails" Prower, or at least his Tails Adventure incarnation, is considered this compared to most other versions, as in this game, his reaction to an army of birds invading his island with firebombs is to wage war with an assortment of explosive weapons and gadgets that happen to include napalm bombs. He also drops a rock on one Kukku scientist's head and seemingly kills the guy, whilst not displaying any reaction to this whatsoever. All because those damn birds disturbed his beauty sleep. Here's a fan animation showing this version of Tails at work.
  • Since Sega decided to split 'classic' and 'modern' games as Alternate Continuities, some fans started to believe that the real classic Sonic who's been missing since 1998 has been replaced for recent productions by an imposter named Santiago, a lookalike who apparently is responsible for having burned down houses and the Amazon, stolen the Krabby Patty secret formula and taken a candy from a baby.
• Touhou Project fandom does this to nearly everyone eventually, but a few of them get it on a regular basis:
  • Flandre Scarlet is frequently portrayed as a blood-thirsty mass-murderer who'd destroy the planet if she was denied a piece of cake. In canon she's described as a bit crazy, but this craziness primarily takes the shape of her being unable to coherently articulate herself. Touhou Chireikiden ~ Foul Detective Satori ultimately proves a lot of Flandre's "crazy" fandom portrayals completely wrong, as it turns out that she willingly stays in the basement of Scarlet Devil Mansion even though she could very easily break the locks if she wanted to, but doesn't since she prefers to stay out of the sunlight, and Sakuya already brings her all of her meals so there's really no need for her to go out. She's also shown to be cunning, fully aware of what's going on around her, and able to have reasonable (though still slightly offbeat) conversations with others. True, she did jump at the opportunity to strangle Meiling when under the impression that she had tried to murder Patchouli, but the others also managed to talk her down from this by explaining that the real culprit was an evil spirit that had taken possession of Meiling to carry out its crimes.
  • Yuuka Kazami is often portrayed as violently torturing anyone who hurts her sunflowers, or just for the heck of it, no thanks to her "genocide is just a game" joke in the PC-98 game and Akyuu's claim that she immediately vaporizes anyone who intentionally screws around with her garden. Commonly titled the "Ultimate Sadistic Creature" within the fandom. At least it's more flattering than the (just as common) Memetic Molester portrayal.
  • Kaguya Houraisan and Fujiwara no Mokou get this in regards to their centuries-long grudge, where they (futilely) tried to kill each other. In canon, Kaguya viewed their cycle of revenge murders as a game and Mokou kept it up as a way to pass the time. Not quite perfectly sane, but nowhere near the Psycho Bitch vs Rageaholic relationship that fanon tends to portray.
  • Sanae Kochiya, the newcomer shrine maiden. Due to one of her routes in Touhou Seirensen ~ Undefined Fantastic Object where she's a bit...overenthusiastic in her youkai hunting, fans run off with her characterization and she's often depicted as addicted to "youkai extermination" (a bit like Reimu herself in early installments). She's either a complete sadist like Yuuka or just downright murderous towards all youkai. Her most frequent victim is Kogasa.
  • Seiga Kaku got this within days of Touhou Shinreibyou ~ Ten Desires' release. It helps that she's a literal Card-Carrying Villain who in the past manipulated a nation for her own ends and looks to do the same to Gensokyo. That she's a necromancer in a series with a very shipping happy fandom (meaning that she usually gets paired up with her undead minion) might've also contributed a bit.
  • Koishi Komeiji, being a mindless girl acting solely on subconscious urges, is a literal psychopath; lacking enough real emotion to feel empathy or guilt but not having any real reason to commit any serious crimes. Fanon, however, has a habit of depicting her as an Ax-Crazy maniac that kills people for fun. What is it with green-haired girls being depicted as killers in Touhou fandom?
    • This has even started getting referenced in canon: in Urban Legend In Limbo, Koishi's associated urban legend is one about a phone call warning you "I am behind you" just before you die, and her Limit Break gives us this lovely image◊ of Koishi with a Thousand-Yard Stare and a slightly disturbing smile brandishing a large knife. As is often the case in Touhou, this ends up being played humorously. Far from actually being murderous, Koishi is just trying to prank people by spooking them, and isn't even having much success at that — Gensokyo, being the mostly-medieval Fantastic Nature Reserve it is, having a serious shortage of denizens who've ever even heard of phones.
• It's common to refer to the main cast of Octopath Traveler as a bunch Comedic Sociopaths, since you can do things like have Olberic and H'aanit beat up townsfolk, use Ophilia and Primrose's recruitment skills to take family members away from each other, or literally have Therion steal candy from children.
• This continues in Octopath Traveler II, as all of the original morally-questionable skills return, but are accompanied by even more of them. Osvald's Mug and Temenos's Coerce get the most jokes, as they're essentially beating the crap out of NPCs for items/information. Then there's Castti's Soothe (which is basically drugging townsfolk for the sake of getting into new areas) and Throné's Ambush (which also exists purely to knock out NPCs).
• Paleo Pines: Due to their ominously stoic personality and being the only person in the game who sells carnivore food, there are a lot of joke-theories that Corlan is a serial killer. The developers noticed this and released several pieces of merchandise with the text "Where does the meat come from, Corlan?" on them, such as shirts and mugs.
• Pokémon
  • Magikarp appears in so many memes of this type. The joke works three ways: 1) Magikarp is feeble. 2) One day, Magikarp won't be so feeble. 3) It's often implied that Gyarados is such a nutter because he was abused as a Magikarp. In short, Magikarp is depicted as a psychopath that plots revenge to unfurl when it evolves.
    Magikarp: I swear to God when I evolve, I'M GOING TO KILL YOU ALL!
  • Likewise with the Fairy-type Pokémon revealed at the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo. Fairy-Types were announced to be Super Effective against Dragon-type Pokémon, who for 5 generations prior, only had Ice-Types as a minor weakness (apart from themselves). Within a few hours of the announcement, memes and artwork started popping up depicting these extremely menacing looking, huge, tough dragon-types being made the collective bitches of all these pink and adorably cute Pokemon.
    • Played up by the Sylveon Trolls series, wherein the eponymous Pokémon, normally a Deadpan Snarker, turns into a Nightmare Fuel psychopathic borderline Animalistic Abomination whenever the topic of Dragon Pokémon is brought up. This is actually supported by a few of Sylveon's canonical Dex entries, such as "Once a fight breaks out, it will unflinchingly charge at dragon Pokémon that are many times larger than itself" or "Its ribbonlike feelers give off an aura that weakens hostility in its prey, causing them to let down their guard. Then it attacks."
  • Fletchling, the adorable tiny robin that's described as being friendly and having a beautiful birdsong, but "relentless" and "ferocious" in battle. Naturally, people took this all the way and repainted it as a ruthless, demonic murder machine.
  • Hypno, who's often portrayed as a child murderer. Or a rapist. Or both. The latter wasn't helped in Fire Red and Leaf Green, where one stalked a little girl lost in the forest.
  • Vivillon's National Dex number being #666 has led to more than a few jokes portraying it as an ardent Satanist eager to torment the souls of sinners for all eternity in Hell.
  • Ghetsis Harmonia is a certified sadist and sociopath. Fans who don't think that's evil enough take him into outright complete psycho territory, depicting him in fanarts as being a guy who will feed people to his Hydreigon or even kill Pokémon and eat their hearts. That's not even mentioning how people exaggerate his Abusive Parent qualities.
  • Espurr, in canon, is a slightly unnerving bipedal kitten with powerful psychic powers. Fandom portrays it as anywhere from a Creepy Child to an outright Animalistic Abomination.
  • When Heart Gold and Soul Silver came out, quite a few Japanese fan artists liked portraying Lyra as a creepy girl with a constant grin.
  • Trainers in general are this. The concept of humans putting animals into small balls and forcing them to fight for money is a common joke, though it is also often a Fandom-Enraging Misconception, as many people unironically compare Pokémon battling to dog or cock fighting.
    • Lance in particular gets this treatment due to how he seemingly gets his Dragonite to kill one of the undercover Rocket Grunts by using Hyper Beam on him — it did not take long for people to start portraying Lance as a Hot-Blooded-bordering-on-Ax-Crazy Unfettered Blood Knight who delights in violating Thou Shall Not Kill as much as possible.
    Jaiden: Lance walks up to us ((her and Alpharad)), goes "Hi, I'm Lance.", grabs us by the wrist, kicks down the door to the Mahogany Town 7/11, kills one of the guys in there, and runs into the Rocket Hideout where he continues to wipe out any living organism he finds down there! ...Classic Lance.
  • As mentioned above, Cilan (and by extension Cress and Chili). It's for different reasons than the anime. Many fans thought behind their sweet personalities they were really working for Ghetsis. This could mean anything from them being moles of similar temperament to Ghetsis to them being more sympathetic and regretful of their actions. This was jossed in the sequel games. However, some fans still insist that the trio is just lying, pulling this trope back in full force.
  • Mr. Mime has always rubbed people the wrong way, mainly because he's so humanlike compared to other Pokémon. It's common to joke that he's not really a Pokémon, just a crazy guy dressed in a mime outfit acting like one to get near kids. Not helped by a scene in Pokémon Detective Pikachu where a Mr. Mime gets interrogated by the police.
  • Hattrem and Hatterene. They have cutesy and elegant designs. However, their Pokédex entries also describe them as violently beating people for feeling too strong an emotion and literally tearing people apart for making too much noise. Therefore, they are sometimes depicted as Misanthrope Supremes pummeling into submission (or death) anyone experiencing a strong emotion or making a loud noise around them.
  • The so-called "Ball Guy" (a person with a Poké Ball for a head). Their constantly smiling face combined with their masculine-looking body make them unsettling, with many online articles pointing out their creepiness. And he's always hanging around kids.
  • Nurse Joy. She always ends her Pokémon Center dialogue with, "We hope to see you again!", Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver notwithstanding. This has been interpreted as, "We hope to see your precious Pokémon seriously injured again!", becoming the source of many jokes, such as this fan comic strip.
  • Gloria, the female protagonist from Pokémon Sword and Shield, is a cross between this and a Memetic Badass, often being depicted as a foul-mouthed, drunken Violent Glaswegian capable of beating a Gyarados to death◊. The joke, of course, is that these are things nobody would expect from a cute little girl.
  • With the reveal of the Retraux Super-Deformed overworld models in Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, it became a trend to depict Dawn, the female protagonist of the remakes and original games, as this, sometimes as a Psycho Knife Nut to boot.
  • Pokémon Legends: Arceus has many wild Pokémon that will actively chase the player down and attack them. However, the undisputed king of this trope is the Paras line. They're fairly common in the starting area of the game, have a long line of sight, and once they spot you, they will hunt you down and attempt to kill you with poison spores. Similarly to the Gloria memes above, part of this stems from the fact that no one expected a relatively weak Com Mon to be that aggressive.
    • Volo's Togepi (later Togekiss) being just as sadistic as her trainer, given that the line normally evolves due to friendship.
  • Pokémon Scarlet and Violet introduces Tinkaton, a small, pink Pokémon that wields a giant hammer. According to the Pokédex, it commonly shoots Corviknight out of the sky using its hammer. It is even the reason why Corviknight taxis aren’t in Paldea, since a Tinkaton might attack it mid-flight, endangering the passenger. This has inspired many fans to portray Tinkaton as a violent maniac who will brutally beat up any Corviknight that comes across its path.
  • The Paradox Pokémon Iron Bundle is a Future Badass version of Delibird so powerful it got banned by Smogon within weeks of the games' release. Fans interpret it as a Bad Santa to the extreme, who's out to murder everyone on its "naughty list". (Which is everyone)
  • Also from Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is Nemona, a girl who just loves battling the player and explicitly gets jealous when she hears about them battling others. Fans quickly started portraying her as a Blood Knight Yandere who is completely obsessed with battling the player and threatens them or others if she thinks they're "being unfaithful."
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy's black mage is often mistaken for 8-Bit Theater's Heroic Comedic Sociopath Black Mage, despite (or because) actual Final Fantasy player characters having no personality.
  • Final Fantasy VII: In March 2024, a couple weeks after the release of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, it became a meme to insert Sephiroth into every video game under the sun, leading to him being viewed as an unstoppable menace who will invade any and all worlds in order to bring them despair.
• Mahatma Gandhi's Civilization incarnation, known as "Nuclear Gandhi." Back in the first entry of the series, nuclear-armed leaders would boast that "Our words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!", which was noted by players as humorously out-of-character for India's great pacifist (and erroneously attributed to an overflow glitch). "Nuclear Gandhi" has since become a running joke amongst the fans and developers, with future games intentionally making him a very big fan of the Nuclear Option. In Civilization V, Gandhi's willingness to use nukes is a hard-coded 12 out of 10, so even with slight random deviations it'll always be maxed out. Civ VI meanwhile makes Gandhi more likely to draw the "Nuke-Happy" leader agenda, which combined with his pacifism means he won't start a war, but by Vishnu, he will finish one.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Link is often portrayed as a psychopathic kidnapper when it comes to keeping a Fairy in a Bottle, including how he uses them. He's also portrayed as liking to break things a bit too much and being a Blood Knight. After the trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild revealed that Link could start forest fires, the fandom wasted no second in portraying this Link as a mad arsonist who only wants to watch the world burn. And for those who believe that the game is a prequel to The Wind Waker, that putting out all the fires Link started was the true reason for the Goddesses to flood Hyrule. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom only exacerbates this portrayal of Link, now that he can build tanks, flying bombers, mechas, and all sorts of bizarre death machines to torture Koroks and wreak havoc on all of Hyrule.
  • From the same series you have the Cuccos. Chickens that simply mind their own business until they're attacked. After that, they'll call on a horde of Cuccos to attack the unfortunate provoker in a maelstrom of feathers. The fact that they can't be killed, will kill Link very fast and that they will never cease to chase you made fans portray them as powerful and bloodthirsty beasts that even Ganondorf is deadly afraid of, while masquerading as innocent farm animals.
• Teemo from League of Legends is an adorable yordle scout, but due to his strong hatedom among the players in terms of cuteness and the gameplay mechanics, he's often treated as a psychopath within the fandom, or occasionally being called or depicted as Satan (it also noted that according to the lore, due to his isolationism in his scouting missions, his mentality was slowly breaking apart to the point that he would go insane, although he has taken steps to prevent that by befriending Tristana).
  • On top of that, Teemo has now received a "Little Devil Teemo" skin, essentially making this canon.
• It's common in the Metroid fandom to jokingly portray Samus as psychotic bounty hunter who actively seeks out destruction and planets to blow up.
• Slowbeef and Diabetus like to portray Cowboy Cop Jack Slate as a mix of this and Memetic Badass (mixed in with some Memetic Loser thanks to his constant failed attempts at Bond One Liners) during their Let's Play of Dead to Rights, thanks to his over-the-top disarms and inability to leave a room without killing everyone inside. They even named their Wrongpurae of the unrelated Crime Patrol "Jack Slate's First Day on the Force", due to its protagonist also being a cop who does almost no police work in favor of shooting everything that might be a threat to him.
• Super Mario Bros.
  • "Weegee" from the PC version of Mario Is Missing! is something of a Memetic Eldritch Abomination, as his blank stare apparently has the ability to turn other people into Weegee, and he is out to turn everyone into Weegees like himself.
  • The normal Luigi is also subject to this trope, especially in Mario Kart 8 where Luigi will give a scary Death Glare to other racers when they pass each other.◊
  • Waluigi is often given this interpretation due to part of his characterization showcasing him as a mischievous trickster who thrives in causing chaos, with these aspects simply being played up.
  • Princess Daisy and even Baby Daisy are also joked about to be downright terrifying should they lose to opponents.
  • Mario himself. Watch any Mario parody video and chances are he'll be portrayed as an Ax-Crazy serial killer (Racist Mario and Mario Goes Berserk are great examples of this). There are also jokes about him actively bullying Luigi and him abusing Yoshi. The Game Theorist's YouTube Channel explains in a two part series how mental Mario is.
  • Even Yoshi gets this treatment. Not helping is that in the games, he's able to swallow most of Mario's enemies whole and has a seemingly infinite appetite, so it's not hard to turn him into a vicious predator that'll eat everything in sight, even Mario, often as revenge for the so-called "abuse" above.
  • On a different, lesser note, thanks to spinoffs of the original "Kirby Does His Taxes" meme, Yoshi has acquired a reputation as a serial tax evader who has abused every trick in the book to avoid giving the government a single coin.
  • The tongue-in-cheek Super Mario 64 conspiracy theory/"every copy of Mario 64 is personalized" memes turned Wario into this thanks to the "Wario Apparition", a "theory" that claims that a giant version of Wario's head that traps and kills Mario when triggered is hidden near the entrance to the Dire, Dire Docks stage.
    "YOU WANT FUN? WARIO SHOW YOU FUN!"
• Manny Pardo from Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. In-canon, he's about as close to being a Cowboy Cop as you can be while also being a Rabid Cop, and also a serial Killer Cop with severe Attention Whore and Glory Hound tendencies who reminds people about the menacing Miami Mutilator (which he is) at every turn. In fandom... not much changes, but his mental instability is always the first thing people bring up. It's the foundation of the "pardoposting," meme, in which someone posts in the style of Manny himself, trying to direct any subject at hand to the Miami Mutilator. It helps that he is based on an actual cop turned spree killer.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Because the remake of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light requires that characters die in order to unlock side content, Marth is sometimes painted as a cruel commander who treats his troops as expendable.
  • Sumia from Fire Emblem: Awakening, due to her DLC conversation with Miriel where she admits to faking her clumsiness to get men's attention, which is followed by an evil laugh. It turned out to be a hallucination Miriel was having due to the heat. There was also a "Sumia is Yandere!" meme due to a glitch with her appearing randomly during the scene where the older Lucina reunites with Maribelle if Maribelle is her mother.
  • Eirika from Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones in her second unit version in Fire Emblem Heroes, as she's wielding a tome that is unique to Knoll. The fandom has joked that she was jealous of Ephraim getting his unique lance in Heroes while she got nothing, so she bashed Knoll's head in and stole his tome.
• Mei from Overwatch is often portrayed◊ as a psychopath because of her in-game ability to freeze other players in place, allowing her to freely stick an icicle into her enemies' skulls. Everyone who's played the game has been killed this way many, many times, and there's a slight delay as the head-shot alternate fire charges up, giving the impression that Mei likes to torment her 'victims'. What solidified her status as this is the blink-and-you-miss-it Slasher Smile just before she delivers the killing blow.
  • This portrayal is the basis for Mei's appearance in the Overwatch vs TF2 machinima. Her confrontation against the Scout is played like a horror movie, with her being the monster.
  • Ganymede, the adorable little bird that always pals around with Bastion, is often portrayed as being a corrupting influence on the otherwise Gentle Giant, telling it to gun down everyone in sight.
• In Team Fortress 2, given the fluid "canon" (or lack thereof) of the game, as well as all in-game characterization restricted to automatically generated responses, Fanon for the various classes range from this, Memetic Molester, Fandom Bicycle, or any combination thereof.
• In Stellaris, the available appearances for species are in no way linked to actual ethos, which can lead to any mixture of Cute Is Evil and/or Dark Is Not Evil as the player desires. Even so, the cute butterflies◊ added in Leviathans are especially popular for making Hegemonic Imperialist or even Fanatical Purifier species. This is further enforced by the Priki-ti-ki, a race of adorable gecko-people, who have a chance to randomly spawn into any game as an independent faction when they break out (or are released from) the planetary shield imprisoning them off from the rest of the galaxy. Being Fanatical Purifiers, they will immediately raise a massive navy in an effort to scour the galaxy of all other sentient life.
• Splatoon:
  • Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion's C.Q. Cumber is a helpful sea cucumber who serves as the conductor of the Deepsea Metro, and guides Agent 8 through its numerous test chambers. If the player fails one of these tests, however, he detonates an Explosive Leash filled with toxic ink on Agent 8's back, splatting them instantly. This isn't quite as bad as it sounds; it's been well-established by this point that being "splatted" is a functional Non-Lethal K.O., and Agent 8 can regenerate with relative ease in order to attempt the test again. Still, the sheer Mood Whiplash of watching your character explode for the first time because you let an 8-ball fall (combined with how frequently you'll see it happen again) has earned C.Q. Cumber the reputation of a trigger-happy psychopath, waiting for the slightest excuse to deliver swift Disproportionate Retribution on unsuspecting cephalopods.
  • Splatoon 3 has O.R.C.A., the AI governing the Alterna facility. If one excludes the fact that it's a computer overseer compared to his predecessor, it's exactly like C.Q. Cumber with one exception: if you fail a test, instead of blowing up an ink bag on your back, it drops a giant bucket of ink on you like you just said "I don't know" on You Can't Do That on Television. Expect to see this happen often.
• Kirby:
  • Kirby himself, for the same reason as Yoshi: Because he fights by eating people and animals alive, many fans (and Brentalfloss) treat him as a cannibalistic spree killer who murders countless people because someone stole his cake.
  • Kirby's adorable new friend Elfilin in Kirby and the Forgotten Land had this reputation among Kirby fans even before the game's release. Thanks to prior characters like Marx and Magolor pretending to be Kirby's friend only to string him along as part of a plot to Take Over the World, the fandom simply did not consider him trustworthy, with many theorizing that he would turn out to be the evil Final Boss or some kind of unholy abomination. Once the game released, Elfilin was revealed to be a missing piece of Fecto Elfilis — specifically the omni-benevolent potential for good that Elfilis left behind so it could become an alien invader — that got separated from it in a lab accident. He helps Kirby out throughout the game before being assimilated back into Fecto Forgo, the remaining part of Elfilis, and is even willing to give his life to save the world after Kirby saves him. It is safe to say that thanks to this, Elfilin's "evil" reputation has mostly died out among the Kirby fanbase.
• Lily in Dragalia Lost. In many of Cygames works? A sweet and adorable Cheerful Child Nice Girl that wants to help others and make friends. The Dragalia Lost fandom? A murderous psychopath that brings nearly all the Flame attuned bosses to their knees thanks to her introductory Memetic Mutation quote, "Ring a ling! Lily's here!" when she first debuted in her summoning banner and being one of the best Water attuned ranged DPS characters.
  • Chelsea became this as a Yandere Stalker with a Crush to Luca who believed when he invited her to the Halidom, he was PROPOSING to her! It also doesn't help that she has been struck dead by lightning and told death to go piss off cause she has a date with Luccy or she'll stab it. Her Valentine's portrait veers into Nightmare Face, making it look like it's melting.
  • Karina is this by virtue of being a Game-Breaker when fully leveled up, mana spiraled, augmented and has her Infinity +1 Sword. With the Agito of Fire Ayaha and Otoha being evil brats, the fandom makes her look like a cruel stepmother or like she's about to murder some younglings.
• Duo, the Duolingo owl mascot, has been portrayed as a crazed stalker who hunts down anyone who fails to complete their language lessons, due to the app itself often pushing borderline passive-aggressive reminders to the user's phone if they forget to do their daily lessons. Duolingo itself has noticed, making an April Fools' Day video about "Duolingo Push", where the owl appears in person to remind the app users to continue their lessons.
  It's simple, spanish or vanish.
• There is an overwhelming amount of fanart of Ralsei — normally the sweetest and most wholesome character in Deltarune — wielding a gun and not being afraid to use it.
  • Speaking of Deltarune, Susie is basically this In-Universe among the students of the school main character Kris goes to. When Kris gets paired with her for a group project, other students react like they are marching to their own execution. Susie is undoubtedly The Bully and frequently threatens to eat people's faces off, which she definitely has the maw for, but judging by the fact that she's still allowed to attend school, it's presumable that she has yet to put any such threats into action.
• Animal Crossing:
  • A popular interpretation of Tom Nook (the friendly tanuki who builds your house and runs shops) is an evil, greedy slumlord who traps you in a cycle of perpetual debt in order to force you to work for him. He's actually very generous when it comes to loans, never requiring interest or deadlines, and whose insistence on being repaid comes from wanting the player to learn responsibility and the value of hard work. In fact, this interpretation started to die down in New Leaf as a result of a change in Tom Nook's dialogue and his overall kinder characterization and has become a Discredited Meme as of New Horizons. The worst thing he actually does is force you to upgrade your house prior to New Leaf.
  • Zipper T. Bunny became reviled in New Horizons due to the reworking of Bunny Day which makes eggs spawn instead of fossils, wood, and fish for days on end. This bizarre magic caused speculation on Zipper being an Eldritch Abomination. His Uncanny Valley rabbit mascot costume that would look right at home in Five Nights at Freddy's ^note and hilariously enough, one that immediately brings to mind the Big Bad of Five Nights At Freddys VR Help Wanted: the virtual manifestation of a Serial Killer taking the form of yet another creepy bloke in a rabbit mascot costume also led to fans turning him into a Faux Affably Evil serial killer who wants to murder the villagers with infinite eggs.
• KanColle:
  • Ooyodo is portrayed as a "helper" character who, among other things, manages the player's quests. The fact that one of the game's daily quests involves dismantling two of your shipgirls means that Ooyodo is sometimes portrayed as routinely egging on the player to murder the rest of the fleet.
  • Gotland is an outgoing Nice Girl who seemed to adapt to living in Japan faster than the other foreign shipgirls. This initially led to jokes that Gotland had actually been at the base from the start, only to mutate in jokes about Gotland being a Yandere for the Admiral and trying to brainwash them into seeing her as their beloved childhood friend.
  • Jingei in-game is a Team Mom for the submarines who tends to be rather forward with her affections for the Admiral and several lines implying she has a jealous streak. It's common to find fanart portraying Jingei taking a kitchen knife to the Admiral for daring to look at another girl.
• Deep Rock Galactic: The Driller's independent, high-damage and highly aggressive playstyle tends to attract some of the game's craziest players, leading to the general belief all Drillers are absolutely insane. They're the ones leaping into unexplored caverns headfirst (or drillfirst) to set everything there on fire, they're the ones pulling most of the insane stunts you don't need a grappling hook for, and they're definitely the ones that will bomb the hell out of their own teammates with a Satchel Charge if they don't get out of the damn way while he's doing his thing, or just because. The developers have joked before that Driller is the game's PvP mode because of that last one. Almost as if to support this, the Driller's entire arsenal is full of blatant war crime generators (like a flamethrower, a toxic waste cannon, neurotoxin gas grenades, an experimental plasma launcher, and even a microwave gun that cooks enemies from the inside out), so there's precedent for psychopathy in there.
• Genshin Impact:
  • Klee is your standard Cheerful Child character...except her Vision allows her to generate nearly endless amounts of bombs to throw, and she frequently causes wanton destruction with them (since she doesn't know her own strength, being a child and all). Not only that, but the Primo Geovishap, a King Mook with metric tons of health that requires a shield to beat, is canonically one of her confirmed kills (an in-game mail was sent out on her birthday containing a part dropped from the boss). And she did it all by herself. Needless to say, people started seeing her as a bomb-slinging madwoman who arrives to destroy everything, much like the dreaded Bazelgeuse.
  • The Electro Archon, Raiden Ei, once resided in the real world, but once she got scared of dying after the original Electro Archon, Raiden Makoto was slain in battle, she instead packed up shop and moved to her Plane of Euthymia and left Inazuma to the Raiden Shogun, a robotic puppet she built to serve as her physical body if need be. During the protagonist's very first encounter with the Shogun, she attempts to murder them, deeming them an "exception" to the directives pre-programmed into it, then attempted to do so again after disintegrating La Signora after she was defeated by the Traveler. Not helping the robot's reputation is that due to the aforementioned fact, she has the first confirmed on-screen kill. Because of this, people have started seeing the Shogun not as the robotic Emotionless Girl she was designed to be, but a bloodthirsty mechanical warlord with more than a few screws loose that tries to murder anything that gets in her way. Also, it's just plain funny juxtaposing this interpretation of the Shogun with the person she was meant to replace, as Raiden Ei is a mostly harmless Hikikomori.
• Uncharted: Protagonist Nathan Drake is a charismatic thief and Deadpan Snarker but is still a Nice Guy in-canon who doesn't technically kill people outside of self-defence, however the game regularly has the player (and thus, Nate) get into shoot-outs with large numbers of enemy mooks, sometimes with the player unable to progress without first dispatching of everyone in an area. The resulting dissonance of his fun and light-hearted personality mixed with the brutality of how players will end up dispatching of enemies leads to Nate coming off as an unfeeling psychopath with zero remorse for the lives he takes.
• The player character of Factorio has no characterization to speak of and no real objective or motivation beyond building up enough of an industrial base to launch a rocket and get theirself off the planet they crash-landed on. Nevertheless, thanks to the dirty, polluting methods to your industrialization, as well as the weapons you can eventually develop to drive off the native fauna, including flamethrowers and portable nukes, many players have come to see and play them as a ruthless, savage Captain Planet villain with everything else being a detour to the real goal of causing as much environmental devastation as possible. Players have spent significant hours researching the most efficient methods possible to clearcut entire forests, automate the genocide of the native population, and develop inventive new ways to produce as much air pollution as possible just for the sake of it. Even the developers have leaned in on this:
  "We see the biters as a production problem. The real enemy is, of course, trees."
• The main characters of Fuga: Melodies of Steel are Reluctant Children Forced to Kill waves of Berman soldiers and generals in a war-torn world to rescue their friends and family after they've all been kidnapped. The fans would want you to believe that they are all Blood Knights that would not hesitate to kill anyone and everything any chance they get. Naturally, CyberConnect2 took notice of this, and ran with it in regards to Jin in the "Comedies of Steel" webseries.
• Bunji the frog from The Gigglebone Gang, a series of Edutainment Games, was intended to be harmless and quirky. However, when Vinny from Vinesauce played the games, he was horrified by Bunji's tendency to eat anything, even living things like cats and hedgehogs. As a result, Vinny's fanbase has twisted Bunji into a voracious cannibal and serial killer. Bunji appears as an enemy in some Vinesauce fangames, such as Supra Binyot Lande, where he can perform a One-Hit Kill on Binyot by eating him alive.

Visual Novels

• Higurashi: When They Cry, although most of the cast except Mion have times when they do go crazy:
  • The biggest victim of memetic exaggeration of psychopathy is Rena, who's normally energetic, cheerful, but a bit bi-polar. She's also considered a Memetic Molester over her urge to "take things home with her".
  • Shion has it pretty bad though it's not without its truths. She is a lot more aggressive than Rena on default, being the most genuinely yandere about her loved ones even when not hit by the Hate Plague and having attacked Satoko in nearly every world. But she still gets this treatment way too much. Shion's normal persona is sincerely loyal, loving, and highly protective of her loved ones but she also has some major anger issues when it comes to protecting said loved ones. She'll never live down her rep in Meakashi-hen while Rena is pretty well-known for being cute and nice.
• Clover from the Zero Escape series. In one Bad Ending in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, everything she's endured over the course of the game finally catches up to her, and she snaps. In her paranoia that everyone in the cast is going to turn against her, she lashes out and attacks everyone with an axe. Despite this only happening once, and Clover's normally sunny and jokey disposition, this became the dominant interpretation of her in the fandom.

Web Animation

• RWBY:
  • Neopolitan; while she certainly always did show off some elements of Cute and Psycho, fans often exaggerate this, with Neo randomly murdering people in horrible ways on a whim. Some portrayals even have getting sexually excited when she kills people, usually Yang, for that time Neo tried to skewer her◊.
  • Also Nora, out of the memetic "We'll break his legs!" line. Many a fanworks make Nora out to be a violent person who gets off on injuring or murdering random people on a whim and someone who frequently encourages her friends to do the same. This is always Played for Laughs, and even encouraged by her appearances in RWBY Chibi which portrays her as a Stalker with a Crush towards teammate Ren, ready and willing to resort to kidnapping and imprisonment to secure her love (though Chibi is explicitly an Alternate Continuity that's heavy on the Character Exaggeration).
• "Papa" from the Johnny, Johnny videos. In canon, he's supposed to be a stern parent who still cares about his family and simply disapproves of them eating sugary foods. This has spiraled into him refusing his family to eat period, an interpretation that the videos don't exactly disencourage...
• Despite being generally pleasant, certain hololive talents built up a reputation for Comedic Sociopathy when gaming becomes involved:
  • Suisei Hoshimachi's penchant for violence in video games (especially multiplayer games), paired up with a particularly memorable killing spree in Project Winter where she single-handedly brutalized the survivors, led to her earning the Fan Nickname "Suicopath" among English-speaking viewers especially. Suisei herself takes it in stride, alternating between pretending not to know what the fans are talking about and proudly declaring that she wants to kill one million people in Grand Theft Auto V.
  • Pekora Usada's trollish antics towards her peers and her shenanigans in Minecraft (involving experimentation on villagers and building death traps among other things) led to the fanbase branding her a war criminal. Hololive themselves eventually got in on the joke by giving her a prison uniform as an alternate outfit.

Webcomics

• Fanart depicting the canonically annoying-but-harmless Kankri Vantas of Homestuck torturing resident Jerkass Cronus Ampora is quite popular.
• The eponymous character of minus. is usually described as an almighty sadist who will inflict a Fate Worse than Death on any poor sap who happens to upset her at the time. The inspiration comes from the third ever strip, in which she turns a balloon vendor into one of his wares after he yells at her. Overlooked is that she has such an extreme reaction only because she doesn't know any better, on account of being a small child. Once she makes a friend, who disapproves of her excesses and warns her about her powers' unforeseen consequences, she develops into a more typical Cheerful Child and largely loses her vindictive streak (with the exceptional cases generally being temporary or accidental) and so she really isn't any crueler than any other kid her own age.

Web Original

• Due to the Streisand Effect, 4chan's /pol/ has turned obscure political cartoonist Ben Garrison into the Chuck Norris of violent racism, waging an entire misinformation campaign to persuade the public that abhorrently racist edits of his comics are "the originals" being censored by The Powers That Be.
• Later perspective-flipped, in that the mainstream media and even Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign did the same, this time with Pepe the Frog (a harmless cartoon frog notable for his adaptability into just about any context, and popular on social media of all types), whom they deemed an oppressive symbol of racism, sexism, etc., which naturally had the opposite effect and basically turned Pepe into a symbol of the counter-culture instead.
• The fan-made Translation Train Wreck of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door called Book of Mario: Thousands of Doors changes every character into Cloudcuckoolanders, but one character became a source of memes: Koops, or more exactly, Carbon. While the original was a shy Socially Awkward Hero who joins Mario to save his father then stays with him to save the world, Carbon is a sociopath who wants to end all fathers, destroyed his home town, has an attack called "Nuclear Noise", and has sympathies for Big High Grodan, the leader of the Iranian Nazi Community.

Web Videos

• Notepad and Tony the Clock from Don't Hug Me I'm Scared are creepy but only Ambiguously Evil. Fans exaggerate this into them being Ax-Crazy.
• Rooster Teeth:
  • Before he was removed from their content, Ryan Haywood was often characterized as a psychopathic serial killer in Achievement Hunter Let's Plays, largely because of the way he kept Edgar the Cow in a hole under his house in their Minecraft series, something he began to lean into in the rest of their content. These jokes immediately stopped after his sex scandal, however; with the seriousness of what Ryan was accused of, almost everyone took his apparent genuine psychopathy completely serious, and now he's an Unperson.
  • Jeremy Dooley, due to his scary level of skill at deception-based games, where he's always able to completely fool people into thinking he's on their side before stabbing them in the back. The result is Jeremy being joked as being a ridiculously efficient sociopath who can't be trusted. Besides this, he's also hands down the best player at Dead by Daylight, and is seemingly good at playing any of the game's killers, on top of being good at impersonating or crafting fun-yet-fittingly frightening personalities for them. As such he's the most effective and the scariest player at the game (when they're not playing with Meg Turney, anyway).
  • Alfredo Diaz gets a bit of both this and Memetic Badass. Alfredo, similar to Jeremy, is noted for being very good at deception-based games (in large part because he can play idiot really well, and is enough of a troll when he's innocent that when he's genuinely sabotaging someone, he's suitably well obfuscated), but is also equally known for his ridiculous Improbable Aiming Skills when it comes to shooters. The two combined make him a serious threat in Gmod Let's Plays as he can generally take out every other player on his own if he wanted, yet has the freedom to choose to play mind games for fun.
• Jerma985: Jerma himself has been this in-universe since around late 2017, with fans playing him up as a bloodthirsty sociopath while he himself chimes in by killing people in-universe.

Western Animation

• Arcane: While Jayce immediately regrets his accidental murder of a child worker during his and Vi's attack on a Shimmer lab, many jokes were made about Jayce hating children or devolving into wanting to kill all Zaunites, with edits made of him in place of Anakin Skywalker when he murders the Younglings.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Pinkie Pie, (no) thanks to Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles). After the episode "Party of One", where her poofy mane deflated into a straight one when her Sanity Slippage was at its fullest, it gained another level: Straight-haired "Pinkamena" is (memetically speaking) practically a character unto herself. Sometimes she's just sad and insecure (as Pinkie was in the actual episode, her hair deflating just before she started talking to her "new friends" — inanimate objects — as she thought her real friends didn't like her) or sometimes she's Cupcakes Pinkie with the basement torture chamber to prove it. However, her "Party of One" personality isn't in Cupcakes itself — it's the fact that Pinkie acted (and presumably looked, as "Cupcakes" is older than "Party of One") just like her normal, cheerful self even as she tortured Rainbow Dash to death that makes it either so amazingly, awesomely hilarious or so amazingly, awfully horrifying depending on your temperament.
  • Princess Celestia has three fanon personas that fit this: Trollestia (an exaggeration of her canon The Gadfly tendencies), Tyrantlestia, and Molestia. Sometimes two or more of these are combined.
  • Big Macintosh also got this reputation after "Sweet Apple Massacre". Unfortunately, this was an example that was not funny; it was Big Mac as a Torture Technician played almost entirely straight.
  • Fluttershy, due to a brief bout of Yandere in "Best Night Ever".
  • "Lesson Zero" made sure that Twilight Sparkle will never live down this reputation. "Clock is ticking, Twilight ... clock is ticking!"
  • Rainbow Dash, despite not having any major in-show freakouts (except maybe Tanks For The Memories), was still depicted in Rainbow Factory as an Ax-Crazy, Social Darwinist Corrupt Corporate Executive who liberally utilizes Pony Resources. It's not quite as popular as Cupcakes Pinkie, but it's up there.
  • Starlight Glimmer comes off as this due to showing symptoms of having mental illnesses and using uncomfortably realistic brainwashing and borderline torture tactics in the episodes when she was still evil.
  • This is deconstructed in the infamous "Darker Side of the Fandom" video, in which a clueless individual asks Nicole Oliver, the voice of Celestia, about the reputation of her character in the fandom, during a crowded convention panel. Upon mentioning that she's sometimes characterized as a molester, the announcer flinches, interrupts him, and shoos him away; Nicole then sternly declares that "the darker side of the fandom is... not part of what the show's about."
• Donald Duck, if the Dolan meme is anything to go by.
• Goofy is memetically a vicious child abuser via the "It's Goofy Time" meme. There are also several memes where he is depicted as a murderous psychopath, like the infamous Goofy's Trial by Filthy Frank, or this dub where he plays the part of The Joker from the eponymous 2019 film. It probably doesn't help how easy it is to make his Signature Laugh sound incredibly deranged in the right circumstances.
• Mickey Mouse is very regularly portrayed as the physical embodiment of the Disney company, so it's not uncommon to make him act like a maniacal Corrupt Corporate Executive when it comes to the company's increasing foothold on the entertainment industry and its other morally questionable practices.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Avatar Kyoshi as a sort of Never Live It Down example. By her own admission, Kyoshi was a pragmatic woman, willing to kill a dictator ^note Technically, she didn't kill him; she just let him die. But still, as she herself pointed out, dead is dead. to stop his reign. She didn't help her case by bluntly telling Aang that she would kill Fire Lord Ozai without a second thought were she in his shoes. Still, fans like to jokingly portray her as someone who thinks Murder Is the Best Solution and bathes in the blood of her enemies. This is taken further by many fans, who think she knows Korra and revels in her destructive behavior, even dispensing advice.
  • From a single screenshot from "The Invasion", featuring Katara with an oddly disquieting look on her face where she seems to be staring directly at the camera, there has arisen "Creepy Katara". Apparently, it is impossible to look at her for very long without being creeped out. And she is everywhere. There are frequently shades of The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You. (Not surprisingly, she's also about two turns from Memetic Molester.)
• Arthur: Mr. Ratburn is something of this in-universe, particularly early-on in the series before Arthur and his friends get to know him a little bit better.
• Chopper from Star Wars Rebels. Mainly due to a scene where he disables an Imperial droid, then hides it in a nearby sewer like he's trying to cover up a murder. The large amount of oddly violent pranks he's committed in season 1 just made it worse, and many have started speculating that he's actually an assassin droid who had his central processor placed into an astromech body. In season 2 he suggests blowing up an Inquisitor's TIE Fighter even if there's a baby inside it.
  • The writers seem to have picked up on this. In a Season 3 episode, when told to find explosives to blow up a building, he not only shows delight at getting the order but does the astromech equivalent of cackling and giggling manically while he's planting the bombs.
  • This was also given a nod in X-Wing Miniatures. The Chopper Astromech upgrade (discard an upgrade to regenerate a shield) came in the same pack as a Courier Droid Crew upgrade (modifies a ship's initial deployment and nothing else). The latter's artwork features Chopper waiting to pounce in the background, while the former features Chopper tearing a Courier Droid in half.
  • In Ahsoka, he suggests shooting down a massive transport over a crowded industrial area on Corellia, with absolutely no regard for the lives of the civilians below.
• The titular Care Bears get this. Part of it is due to the common fannish want to make cute and cuddly things Darker and Edgier, while others find them ominous and think their Care Bear Stare is too akin to brainwashing.
• Steven Universe:
  • The "Steven's Knife" meme, where the titular character, canonically a Nice Guy, goes around stabbing people in Beach City with a knife.
  • The "Murdercock" meme can take this form sometimes, be it with Greg obliviously or even deliberately "killing" gems the same way Rose ended up dying from her pregnancy, or be it with Greg's actual cock being a malevolent entity that wants to keep lethally impregnating gems much to Greg's chagrin.
• Luan Loud from The Loud House is often portrayed as a yandere, though she has acted somewhat psychotic at times in the actual show, particularly in "April Fools Rules" and "Fool's Paradise".
• Hey Arnold!:
  • Helga Pataki gets the Yandere treatment due to her obsessive crush on Arnold which includes a Stalker Shrine, a locket with his picture in it, and the tendency to try and scare off Arnold's love interests. It's usually Played for Laughs (as she's only nine years old) in the series and Helga truly doesn't mean to harm Arnold, but let's just say the fans have a field day exaggerating this and the writing staff gave them a ton of material to work with.
  • Lila Sawyer is also seen as this in the fandom, due to her being portrayed as a sweet, seemingly perfect girl with an unemployed father and horrible insecurities, later being flanderized into a Parody Sue who would occasionally come across as passive-aggressive or manipulative when dealing with Arnold's unrequited crush on her. The most damning reason of all being that Craig Bartlett confirmed that Lila had a repressed dark side.
• King of the Hill: Hank Hill had a pretty bad temper in the early seasons and while his angry outbursts are often justified, they are easily taken out of context and edited into YouTube poops that make him look like a physically and verbally abusive nutcase.
• The Owl House: Many people regard Owl Tube Hooty as a psychopathic Eldritch Abomination who hides under a clueless ditzy mask for goals beyond comprehension. Though he is a bit of an eldritch abomination in the show, he's more of a heroic one who can kick butt but is well-meaning.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • A common fan theory is that SpongeBob and Patrick are actually psychopaths who use a childish/idiot facade as an excuse to get away with annoying and torturing people. Both are also prone to having breakdowns over minor things.
  • Sandy as well, especially with how berserk she went when SpongeBob and Patrick made fun of her home state of Texas. When Hurricane Sandy hit, many people joked online that someone must have made fun of Texas.
  • Mrs. Puff probably qualifies after the episode "Demolition Doofus", where she outright attempts to kill SpongeBob for accidentally rupturing her inflation sack.
  • Bubble Buddy spent most of his episode acting as an inanimate object, only to reveal that he was fully sentient and capable of movement during the ending. Fans realized this meant Bubble Buddy was responsible for Scooter drowning to death, as he did nothing when the tide came in while he was buried at the beach.
  • Mr. Krabs' Money Fetish is often exaggerated to make him a bloodthirsty psychopath who'll attack anything and anyone for the hell of it; his threatening to tear a man's arm off over a dime in "Born Again Krabs", elbow-dropping a baby (who was actually Plankton in disguise) in "Plankton's Pet", and an edited meme comic of him killing Pearl's mother to adopt her as his own are all iconic examples.
  • A crossover example when a Legend of Korra episode aired, an "Up Next" banner popped up just as Korra was falling showing a laughing SpongeBob, screenshots making it look like he was laughing at her misfortune.
• Invader Zim: Since the show doesn't have enough legit psychopaths already, "Pilot Dib" has taken on this role, as both his design and personality are a bit creepier than Dib in the actual show.
• VeggieTales: Mr. Nezzar, no thanks to his debut appearance, in which he was genuinely psychotic for most of the episode and tried to have three workers at his chocolate factory murdered for not bowing down to and singing praises of his bunny-shaped idol. Note that he only behaves like this in one episode, and yet the fandom constantly sees him as inherently violent in nature. Once Done, Never Forgotten, indeed (not that it didn't earn him a following).

noreallife

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