Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist

Clank: There must be another way to make a home for your people!
Chairman Drek: You think that's what this is about? Who do you think polluted our last world? I did! This is about one thing and one thing only: cash, and lots of it. See, I've been paid for every square inch of my new world. Once the new inhabitants move in, I'll begin polluting this world as well, and the whole thing starts all over again. Ah... brilliant.

— Ratchet & Clank

So you have a villain who professes a noble goal but goes overboard achieving it. They may sack some villages, murder some people, perform some unconstitutional actions, and/or may be obtaining more emergency powers than necessary... but at least they have good intentions, like they said, right?

Unfortunately, pretty much every extremist claims to have good intentions.

This trope is the Faux Affably Evil subversion of the Well-Intentioned Extremist, who is sincere but does horrible things in the name of whatever it is they fight for and by default will have a good point to make. This villain, by contrast, only claims to be well-intentioned, but in actuality has much more selfish and evil motives for what they are doing.

A character who falls into this generally comes in one of the following flavors:

• They knowingly lie about having good intentions as cover for their evil actions.
• They have valid rationales but use them as an excuse to carry out self-serving goals. See Dog-Kicking Excuse.
• They sincerely believe their actions are just but they are only just to their warped/self-serving standards. See Moral Myopia and Blue-and-Orange Morality.
• They genuinely started with good intentions but lost them over time. See Jumping Off the Slippery Slope and The Dark Side Will Make You Forget.

These characters have a good chance of being a Hate Sink as lying about doing evil for a good cause is considered more slimy than doing those evil things anyway but at least being up-front about their selfish motives. If their true intentions go far enough, a character like this has a good chance of being a Complete Monster.

May overlap with Motive Misidentification and Disappointed by the Motive when characters assume they have sympathetic motivations and are saddened to learn otherwise respectively. This trope often helps writers to pull a Debate and Switch.

Compare Not in This for Your Revolution and Dragon with an Agenda. Contrast Believing Their Own Lies and Secretly Selfish, when they're unaware or in denial of how self-serving their actions truly are.

For obvious reasons, No Real Life Examples, Please! noreallife

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Example subpages:

• Anime & Manga
• Comic Books
• Fan Works
• Films — Live-Action
• Video Games
• Western Animation

Other Examples:

Audio Plays

• Big Finish Doctor Who: In the Unbound audio "Full Fathom Five", which depicts an alternate reality from the main series, the alternate Doctor argues that his actions are always justified in the name of preventing scientists carrying out dangerous scientific experiments, but as a particular example of his ruthlessness, at one point this alternate Doctor kills a man just on the chance that another scientist's work will be continued based on analysis of the man's condition. Considering that his victim had regained control of himself after the initial traumatic transformation and made it clear he just wanted to find a cure, it's hard not to feel that other Doctors would have been more willing to take the risk of other scientists trying to copy that research in the name of an innocent life.

Films — Animation

• Antz: General Mandible insists that his actions are for the good of the colony. Those actions involve drowning the queen and everyone loyal to her so that he can start a new colony of soldiers loyal only to him. When Colonel Cutter calls him out on this, Mandible insists "I am the colony!"
• Bartok the Magnificent: Ludmilla attempts to usurp the throne after calling Prince Ivan out on not taking his royal duties seriously. While she is right about Ivan, she really wants to take over the kingdom for her own benefit.
• Beauty and the Beast: Once he finds out about the Beast and Belle's feelings for him, Gaston immediately rallies the villagers to storm the Beast's castle and kill him, painting him as a threat to the village who needs to be taken down. Of course, it's very clear that his true motives are just to Murder the Hypotenuse.
• The Bob's Burgers Movie: Grover's plot to kill his cousins to inherit their fortune is so he can get rid of Wonder Wharf and replace it with his own "Mega Park". He views this as a good thing as it'd bring life into their struggling tourist town. Not only is he also willing to murder the Belchers when they discover his plot, but he also plans to bulldoze various homes and local businesses to make room for parking, which would limit the number of people who would need the profits of his park, showing he's just in it for money and a vendetta against his cousins.
• In Cars 2, both the Big Bad and his Dragon are this:
  • Sir Miles Axlerod pretends to be looking out for the lemon cars as their kingpin, and claims that increasing reliance on oil will make them respected. In truth, he is the inventor of Allinol, the very fuel he's using to sabotage the reputation of alternative fuels, and mainly concerned with profiting off oil.
  • Though Professor Zündapp positions himself as wanting to help the marginalized lemon cars, he's really just a power-hungry sociopath.
• Frozen II: King Runeard claims that the reason why he wants to conquer the Northuldra tribe is to protect the people of Arendelle. However, this argument completely falls moot, as his true motive is to secure his own position as King of Arendelle because he believes that they could potentially overthrow him due to them being magic-users. Dangerous Secrets even shows that the reason why Runeard came up with this ideology is that he wanted someone to blame his own faults on instead of maturing and taking responsibility for them, meaning he just wanted the easy way out, and the war he created led to the deaths of dozens of soldiers on both sides, leaving many of the children orphaned.
• At the climax of Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa, Big Bad Dietlinde Eckhart claims that her desire to destroy Ed and Al's world is out of fearing their alchemic abilities and the possibility of them conquering her world. Besides her being a literal Nazi, her intent to use mystical powers to conquer her own world only serves to make her completely and utterly hypocritical.
• Gundam:
  • Played with in Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack. While Char publicly instigates the conflict in that movie under the justification of fulfilling his late father's ideals, other statements he makes and actions he takes throughout imply he just wanted one last battle against his old rival Amuro. At the same tie, other things he says in private seem to indicate he believed dropping Axis onto Earth and forcing humanity to migrate into space would be better for them in the long run. At the very least, regardless of how much he personally bought into those things, his main drive seems to have been to finally settle the score with Amuro, with achieving his father's dream being second in priority.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz, Dekim Barton banks on Treize's reputation as an extreme yet principled man to raise his army with the claim that they're following in his footsteps. Dekim, however, is just a power-hungry selfish man piggybacking on the Khushrenada legacy for his own ends.
• In How to Train Your Dragon 2, Drago Bludvist claims that he wants to create a world where people no longer have to fear dragons. Hiccup calls him out on this as an excuse to simply control everyone. Drago admits it too.
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney): Frollo claims that he wants to purge the world of vice and sin. However, his real motive seems to be genocide against all those that he considers as sinful for living outside the natural order of things (aka his order). Later on, after a good deal of Sanity Slippage, his primary goal becomes satisfying his lust for Esmeralda.
• The Incredibles:
  • The Incredibles: While Syndrome's Engineered Heroics are unsavory no matter how you look at it, the second part of his plan — selling his inventions so that "everyone can be super" — doesn't sound that bad... until, of course, you remember that he's doing it simply out of a petty grudge against Mr. Incredible and superheroes in general. In short, his goal is not to uplift the common folk, but to drag superheroes down.
  • Incredibles 2: The Screenslaver's true plan. Or rather, Evelyn's plan, as Screenslaver was a pizza guy she hypnotized into acting a villain. She claims her plan is to make Supers illegal permanently, as her father's Holding Out for a Hero got him killed by home invaders and her mother died from heartbreak soon after, seeing that Supers only cause more harm than prevent. However, her plan has endangered innocent people, including the pizza guy she framed. Also, she doesn't even suggest how to prevent crises without Supers, meaning all it turns out to be is just Misplaced Retribution.
• The Iron Giant: Kent Mansley seeks to destroy the Iron Giant, believing it to be a threat to America, but he's motivated first and foremost by furthering his own career. While he does have a point that Hogarth knows little to nothing about the Giant, like where it came from and why it's on Earth, he ruins his own case by acting so paranoid, reckless, and ruthless about the situation. His willingness to threaten to separate Hogarth from his mother, chloroform him, and potentially endanger his life by lying to General Rogard that the Giant killed him proves he'll go to any lengths to get what he wants. He finally unveils his true colors as a coward and a hypocrite to everybody when he recklessly orders a nuclear strike on the Giant, forgetting that the latter is still in town and everybody, including himself, will be caught in the blast radius. Once he fully comprehends that this will also mean his death, he renounces his patriotism and tries to flee for his life.
• Lightyear: Zurg's motivations for the crystal Buzz has is, at first, genuine. He is an older Buzz who is still fixated on getting everyone home and has developed a time machine to make it happen by undoing the crash. However, it's growing increasingly clear that obsession has corrupted him and fixing that mistake to help everyone is just an added bonus. His real goal is to once again be looked up to by everyone as a hero. He dismisses his past self's disapproval at causing everyone in this future to be Ret-Gone, especially Alisha's granddaughter, by stating she won't miss someone who never existed.
• Monsters, Inc.: Randall Boggs claims that he's going to revolutionize the scaring industry which most of the time would mean that he just wants to prevent Monstropolis from going down under due to scaring energy slowly faltering, but in fact he's only doing it for personal recognition and is more concerned with filling his pockets and getting to become the CEO of Monsters, Inc. than any legitimate saving as a stark contrast to Mr. Waternoose's genuine intentions of saving his company.
• Naruto the Movie: Legend of the Stone of Gelel: Haido claims he wants to use the titular stone's power to create a utopia, but this turned out to be lies to attract followers. His real goal was to use it to become too powerful to stop in a bid for world conquest.
• Next Gen: The Big Bad Ares's plans of creating a world without conflict by killing all humans rings hollow when he's shown to be a sadistic egotist willing to kill his own robots should they ever get in his way.
• Pokémon: Secrets of the Jungle: Dr. Zed claims that he wants to gain access to the healing energy to help countless humans, but it's speedily made clear that he's only interested in his ego and proving himself right. The superiors he murdered to reactivate the project even told him they would restart it once they found a safe way to extract the energy without compromising the Zarude's home, but he simply couldn't wait or let go of his obsession.
• Psycho-Pass: Sinners of the System: In Case 1: Crime and Punishment, Kyoka Tsujigai runs the rehabilitation ward Sanctuary and applies horrific Brainwashing for the Greater Good to reform criminals, while having anyone who knows the truth assassinated, all of which she claims is necessary to maintain order. Then it turns out she herself has been using her brainwashed slaves to carry out illegal activities like disposing of hazardous nuclear waste, and making a huge profit from it, exposing her real motive as simple Greed.
• Recess: School's Out: Phillium Benedict insists his plan to create an Endless Winter and end summer vacation is motivated by wanting American kids to have higher standardized test scores since going to school year-round will supposedly make children smarter. While he's not lying about this and genuinely believes he's in the right, he's not doing it for altruistic motives. In reality, he just wants to use the praise he thinks he's sure to receive to further his political ambitions.
• Shrek: Lord Farquaad attempts to justify his authoritarianism and oppression of fairy tale creatures as him trying to create a perfect world. But it's blatantly obvious that he's just a power-hungry bigot trying to compensate for his own insecurities and force his dominion to be how he wants it to be.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem: Superfly plays off his plan to disperse mutagen over the entire Earth as the only way mutants can live free, even at the cost of humanity's collapse and subjugation. As the film goes on, however, it becomes clear that he cares only about causing as much death and destruction to humanity as possible, even attacking normal, non-mutated animals for the sake of power; he doesn't actually give a crap about mutant freedom.
• Wreck-It Ralph: King Candy claims that isolating Vanellope and not letting her race is for her own good and makes a good enough argument to convince Ralph (essentially, since Vanellope is a glitch, her racing would cause players to think the console was broken, and the arcade owner would shut it down), but that's not the real reason he does it. He is actually the one who doesn't belong, and if Vanellope were to race, the game would notice that he wasn't supposed to be part of the game and that Vanellope was, and the subsequent debugging would restore her rightful place in the game and reveal him as Turbo.
• Zootopia: During her We Can Rule Together speech to Judy, Bellwether, the Big Bad, tries to pass herself off as a Well-Intentioned Extremist, believing that all predators are just strong and loud but because prey is 90% of the population, they can unite against a common enemy and come out on top. However, as Judy is facing seemingly certain death from a savage Nick, she cuts to the chase, asking "So that's it? Prey fears Predator and you stay in power?" To which Bellwether replies "Pretty much."

Literature

• The Amy Virus:
  • At first, Cyan's father seems like he genuinely believes that the Good Brain Diet is helping Cyan. He even points out that autistic people are less likely to be hired for jobs. However, as the story goes on, especially after it's revealed that Cyan's parents know that the Good Brain Diet is a total quack, it becomes clear that Cyan's father doesn't want her officially diagnosed with autism because he wants complete control over her life.
  • Another example is how Cyan's father insists that his daughters become doctors because he believes it's the only guaranteed way to make a living in the 2010s economy because other jobs are being shipped overseas and/or being lost to younger competitors. While those are genuine concerns, the fact that Cyan's father actually lost his old IT job because he screwed up some code and tried to blame someone else for his mistake and won't consider that there are other ways to make a decent living ^note for example, Tam wants to go to Rhode Island School of Design to study Industrial Design, a major that helps those who achieve it find good high-paying jobs demonstrates that forcing his daughters to become doctors is just another way he enforces his control over his family. This point is also well demonstrated by the fact that he insists they attend Caltech for their undergrad despite there being other good colleges that can help one get into medical school and the fact there's no guarantee they can get into a high-level college like that.
• Assassin's Creed : Forsaken: Reginald Birch upholds this, by now standard, excuse for all his atrocities of being genuinely well-intentioned to Haytham even right at the end. What makes this different is that it's pretty obviously a self-delusion and neither Haytham nor Jenny believe a word of it and see right through him as nothing more than a self-deluded madman only using the Templar ideology as an excuse to claim more power for himself.
• Blood After Midnight: Kelvin presents himself as a benevolent cult leader who claims to be killing people in order to resurrect the demon Shadoth so that he can use the beast's power to eradicate technology and secure jobs for his followers. Ultimately, this proves to be a lie, as Kelvin's nothing more than a selfish sadist who eradicates his own followers once his plans have been achieved, and is only using Shadoth to conquer the world for himself.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses: Tamlin's desire to get Feyre, despite what she herself wants, leads him to support the King of Hybern, who wants to enslave all of humanity again.
• Date A Live: Isaac Ray Peram Westcott states that he wants to purge the world of mankind for being a cruel and failed race to create a new world where mages will rule in peace without wars, conflicts, and fights with humans. Curiously, over the series, Westcott showed to be even more sinister and cruel by unleashing all kinds of disgusting and brutal crimes that humans can evoke upon the world. Not to mention that Westcott is willing to use even the members of his own race as pawns just like he do to humans, manipulating and discarding them like garbage just like he always did. He also seems to be more focused on becoming an Inverse Spirit to give him powers of a God to rule the world and change the concept of life and creation according to his own image, thus ruling over reality like its new God after unleashing chaos and destruction to wipe out all humans. To achieve his goals, Westcott caused mayhem and misery to all major races of the series: from Spirits, Quasi-Spirits, Wizards, Irregulars, Humans, Inverse Spirits, and even Mages. At the end, Westcott is not a saint who is fighting to save his own race but just a selfish bastard who thinks only of himself.
• The Empirium Trilogy: Corien does genuinely want to restore his brethren, the angels, to flesh and blood. However, the reason he's doing this isn't entirely selfless: he views humanity as an inferior species and yet is also jealous of their power over the elementals — something that the ancient angels cannot even claim. As such, he'll happily kill all humans to make room for the angels. It's also suggested, if not outright stated, that he's angry with God and will move heaven and earth to go against Him in any way he can.
• The Expanse:
  • In Cibola Burn, Murtry is certainly right that the whole Ilus conflict between the first-wave colonists and Royal Charter Energy's scientific expedition (which Murtry joined as a chief security officer) was ignited by a terrorist group from the former side detonating the landing pad right under one of the latter side's shuttle, but Holden and Amos see him as someone just looking for an excuse to establish a dictatorship far away from anyone he would have to answer to. In the climax resembling a Showdown at High Noon, he basically confirms these suspicions when, among other things, he bluntly tells Holden how settling new territories will always outpace establishing laws.
  • The Free Navy is a group of Belter guerrillas carrying out acts of terror against "Inners" in retaliation for corporations from Earth and Mars treating Belters as cheap, disposable Asteroid Miners; and then thwarting these corporations' attempts at settling many resource-rich Earthlike planets that become easily available once a Portal Network connects the Sol System with them, giving them even less reasons to provide crucial support for Belters and thus leaving them to become a mere footnote in history... but over the course of Babylon's Ashes, it becomes apparent their leader, Marco Inaros, sees those real problems as just an excuse to establish himself as a dictator of all the outer space; he will gladly hog crucial resources for himself,^note He orders all the loot they plunder from the Inners' ships (supposedly to redistribute among the Belters who need them) be launched at trajectories known only to his inner circle. show no regard for Belters' future^note He scoffs at an economic expert on his team who tells him that their monumental achievement of sending an asteroid cluster towards Earth has essentially doomed Belters by depriving them of vital resources that can be produced only on Earth, which won't be supplying with its hands tied with radar-absorbent asteroids that could strike any time. and throw them under the bus^note The moment he learns that they're no longer keeping Inners in check, he orders what amounts to fleeing the enemy forces while stripping all the friendly, defenseless colonies of their own vital resources while demanding their absolute loyalty^note When his acquisition officer grows tired of this aimless fleeing and decides to actually distribute those top secret resources among the Belters, Marco immediately declares war on her and her followers too, just for daring to disobey him. Even his son says him so and he doesn't object! so he can use them to settle petty vendettas.^note Near the climax, he appears to plan a grand assault on a space station controlled by his enemies, only to cancel it the moment he learns that his ex-girlfriend (whom he rejected for not being as manipulable as he wanted) is somewhere else.
• Fixed Damage: Valery turns on and betrays Chrome because the forbidden spell "Chains of Despair" has the potential to be the power they need to defeat the Devil King. While that does ultimately prove true, it isn't long before the so-called heroes she "helped" in this manner prove that they're not worthy of it. Her P.O.V. side-chapter reveals that this was just a cover story. What she really wanted was to bring [Darkness] into the world for research data, and didn't care at all about the Devil King, Chrome, Yuno, or anyone else.
• The Genius Prince's Guide to Raising a Nation Out of Debt (Hey, How About Treason?): Despite claiming that she's trying to save people by converting them to Levetia's teachings, Caldmellia seems to also believe that destabilizing the continent and taking advantage of conflict is the best way to make them desperate for "salvation." When Wein offers her a solution that will both save the city of Mealtars from the feuding princes and allow the Church of Levetia to take credit for helping them, Caldmellia considers refusing because this plan wouldn't result in the bloodshed she wants. Her inner thoughts reveal that she enjoys death and chaos so much that she wouldn't mind dying in any conflict she starts. To further illustrate this, she figured out the intention of Wein's book, "The Dignity of Imperial Court," but wants to spread its message so that the masses will hate their rulers for their mismanagement, making the masses easier to convert to Levetia.
• Goblin Slayer: The Guard Captain of the Desert Kingdom claims to have done what he did for the good of the country, but the more his internal monologue goes on the clearer it is that he cares about nothing but his own aggrandizement.
• Harry Potter: In Order of the Phoenix, Umbridge tries to come off as committing her horrible deeds from a sense of loyalty to Fudge and as protecting the British Wizarding community from Dumbledore and Harry's self-serving lies when she is just doing whatever she can to grab power for herself and cheerfully serves in the Voldemort-controlled Ministry in Deathly Hallows.
• Heavy Object has these three people from the Legitimacy Kingdom, the protagonists' faction:
  • Chancellor Flide, Big Bad of Volume 2, claimed that trying to get the male protagonists, Qwenthur and Havia, killed by an object and setting up the four super country alliance (including his own soldiers) to get wiped out in a trap was for the safety of his country, but in actuality, he wanted to protect his position and preserve the power balance decided by objects with no regards to the innocent lives lost.
  • Prizewell City Slicker, Big Bad of Volume 3, claims to be preserving the Legitimacy Kingdom's official language, but he's really nothing more than a xenophobic hypocrite who sees nothing wrong with his own men dying, not to mention the fact he wants to reinstate slavery.
  • Flag Eggnog, Big Bad of Volume 11 and the first prince of the Warta District, claimed that his constant gaffes and wars were beneficial to the country, but Havia didn't buy it.
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Archbishop De Ville, unlike the rest of the warmongering Terraist Church, only pretends to care about their cause of making Earth prosperous and populated once again, but he's just in it for power. This is particularly demonstrated in one scene where he preaches purity, only to enjoy a bottle of whisky when no one's looking.
• The Lord of Bembibre: The various Spanish kings and lords claim to want to destroy the Templars in order to punish their corruption and greed...as dreaming about taking over the Order's wealth and lands.
• Cassius the Elder in Lucifer's Star is the leader of the Free Systems Alliance and claims everything he does is to bring about freedom for all the worlds conquered by the Commonwealth. He actually turns the majority of his volunteer soldiers into nano-technology zombies and plans to surrender the entirety of human space to the alien Community. He plans to rule as The Quisling and take advantage of Elder Race technology so that he can live forever to boot. All things point to him being a vain, power-hungry, psychotic hypocrite without an ounce of shame.
• Agatha Trunchbull from Matilda justifies her abuse towards her students by saying it's for their own good, insisting that it prepares them for the real world and teaches them to be proper adults. But it's blatantly obvious that she's just a cruel Child Hater.
• Moribito II: Guardian of the Darkness: Yuguro Musa plans to overthrow the Mountain King and gain free access to luisha against tradition, which would enrich the poor people of Kanbal. He actually cares more about achieving eternal glory for himself than the lives of his people, including his family and followers.
• The Mortal Instruments: Valentine Morgenstern expresses hatred and disdain for the human-demon mixed-breed Downworlder species, and contends that the Shadowhunters must keep the world safe from demons even if it means committing genocide against all Downworlds. But he deliberately taints his own son with demon blood, making him into a strange human/angel/demon hybrid, and even tried using demon blood to change himself with unclear results. He also readily summons and uses large numbers of demons to fight for him, as well as dealing with the powerful Greater Demon Lilith. And finally, he attempts to summon and forcibly enslave the angel Raziel (the patron angel of Shadowhunters), to say nothing of Valentine's earlier role in the torture of another angel. Raziel calls Valentine out on much of his bullshit and the fact that Valentine is really just a monster of a Glory Hound hiding behind a veil of righteousness, before killing Valentine pretty much on principle.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four: Like any dictatorship, the Inner Party presents itself in propaganda as a benevolent force that wants to rule the citizens for their own good. Winston initially assumes that the Party's ruling ideology is some horribly corrupted attempt at the greater good mentioned in their propaganda, only for O'Brien to tell him that's all a lie and that the Party was founded solely to cause as much suffering as possible to as many people as possible because that's the only way to keep it running perpetually. O'Brien all but says there is no point or lofty intention behind their atrocities: the Party are just power-hungry thugs running a system built on eternal subjugation. The second twist is that the Inner Party are so careful to only select the people who truly believe in the system of eternal subjugation, and who police their inner thoughts so strongly to avoid heresy, that they end up acting identical to a normal well-intentioned extremist. Such is the power of Double Think.
• The Otherworld: Giles Reyes presents himself as a messiah figure who will help supernaturals come out into the light and take over the world, which he claims is rightfully theirs. In reality, all Giles really wants is to rule the planet and couldn't care less about the well-being of supernaturals, even willing to test out a deadly virus on his own men and killing and experimenting on supernaturals en masse in his bid for world power.
• Reincarnated as a Sword: Murellia makes herself sound, and believe, that her actions are all for the best interests of the cat-kin, but all she really cares about is being in charge and ruling the world with the power of evil.
• The Rising of the Shield Hero: When Naofumi, Glass, L'arc, and Theresa meet Kyo Ethnina at the Spirit Tortoise's core, he throws Glass's own extremism back at her, stating that he's also trying to save their home world by sacrificing the world where the main story takes place. In reality, he's using the Spirit Turtle's own soul-harvesting mechanic to purely to power his own experiments and actively enjoys seeing the victims trampled.
• Scrapped Princess: While Steyr claims that the Peacemakers are to prevent humanity from destroying itself, she is really just looking for an excuse to kill as many as she wants.
• In the backstory of The Sorcerer's Daughter, Brother Aloisio of the Inquisition stated that King Roberto is too good at healing for an ordinary human, therefore, he is a sorcerer, therefore, he must burn. Insane Troll Logic, of course, but something more or less to be expected from a Knight Templar inquisitor, right? Then it's revealed Aloisio was actually involved in a political plot against the queen, and most probably was in league with the sorcery-practicing Gottwald in the latter's plan to frame Roberto.
• Star Wars: The High Republic:
  • The Nihil fight against the Republic under the claim of fighting against those who would encroach on their personal freedoms. As the Nihil are an organization of Space Pirates, the personal freedoms in question are the power to raid and pillage those they view as weak. Their leader Marchion Ro makes similar pronunciations, but in truth, he's an egomaniac that simply despises being told what to do. After the destruction of Starlight Beacon at the end of Phase I, he publicly reveals himself to the galaxy as the leader of the Nihil and claims the station's destruction as his victory (selectively not crediting the Nihil as a whole). In Phase III, he's set up an anti-hyperspace wall that has divided the galaxy in two. After the establishment of the Occlusion Zone, Marchion calls it a place to be free... as long you swear loyalty to the Nihil.
  • The Mother, the head prophet of the Path of the Open Hand, rose to power after claiming to have received messages from the Force validating the Path's beliefs and takes her cult from simply abstaining from Force usage to trying to "liberate" it from those who would abuse it, which is just about every other Force user in the galaxy, and sought to bring about that goal by weaponizing the Nameless against them. In truth, not only is she a Force user herself (albeit a very unremarkable one) that has been using her powers to sway the hearts and minds of her followers, she's been selling most of the Force artifacts she "liberated" on the black market to amass funding for both her cult and construction of their flagship, the Gaze Electric. She's also willing to kill anyone that isn't part of the cult, proves to be a liability to the cult, or questions her motives, and feed even unknowingly Force-sensitive Path members to the Nameless. Elecia Zeveron has also been using the cult as a means to get revenge against the Jedi for picking her sister, Oliviah, for training over her, ultimately making her the very thing she's preaching against.
• The Stormlight Archive: King Taravangian proves willing to sacrifice his life for his cause. He reveals his hand while he is in Dalinar's power, after having made himself useless as a hostage and disassociating himself from all his friends and family so that he can't be used against them. He points out that this is proof of his sincerity; Dalinar, on the other hand, says that he's just trying to martyr himself and become known posthumously as the one who did everything to save what he could. Dalinar believes that, despite what he says, Taravangian wants to be proven right in his extreme measures more than he wants to be proven to be a good person. When push comes to shove, when he kills Rayse and becomes Odium and therefore gains the power to end the war with minimal trouble... he decides to continue with Rayse's plan to conquer the Cosmere. This ultimately shows that Dalinar was right — Taravangian really does only want power in the end, he just doesn't go about achieving it in the way that most warlords and dictators do.
  Dalinar Kholin: I think you saw a chance to be an emperor, and you took it. You wanted power, Taravangian—so you could give it up. You wanted to be the glorious king who sacrificed himself to protect everyone else. You have always seen yourself as the man who must bear the burden of leading. [...] Because you like it. [...] Because you want to be known as the one who saved us.
• Sword Art Online: Quinella, the Big Bad of the Alicization arc's first half, claims that her turning the people of UW (including her Knights) into sword golems was for their own safety, but it's made clear that she's nothing but a narcissistic Control Freak who's no better than any of the other psychotic villains Kirito has faced, such as Sugou Nobuyuki or the Laughing Coffin guild. Quinella's refusal to allow the existence of any military force that she can't control has doomed the realm of humanity, and this realization helps Kirito win Alice over to his side.
• Tolkien's Legendarium: In The Lord of the Rings and The Fall of Númenor, it is told that Sauron started off as a Control Freak who wanted to bring order upon all of Middle-earth and thought only he had the ability to pull it off. However, as time went on, his motivations devolved into something more self-serving in nature. By the time of the story, Sauron has lost sight of all his noble albeit immoral intentions and now only wants power for power's sake as the ultimate Evil Overlord. The only thing still keeping him somewhat better than his old boss Morgoth is that Sauron still wants to rule the world while Morgoth long ago wanted to just destroy everything.
• Ultimate Antihero: The United World Government plans to unite all the remaining nations under five larger ones seemingly for the sake of world peace, but it's really a power grab for the top five nations.
• Ulysses: Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knights:
  • Count La Trémoille talks a lot about how France must surrender to England if they want to survive, but it's very obvious his main concern is becoming the guy that will be remembered as "the savior of France". The final proof is that he attempts to sabotage Montmorency's efforts to liberate Órleans, which would a major victory for France, because if they win it there is no way he will get his so-called "peace talks" with England.
  • Enlil claims to be exterminating humanity in order to create a peaceful utopia, but his idea of a utopia is to rule it as their leader and inhabit it with figures with no free will of their own.
• Warrior Cats: Tigerstar justifies his attempts at forcibly unifying the Clans by saying it'll finally bring an end to the brutal competition and violence between them. In reality, he just wants to put himself in charge of everyone, and his persecution of halfClan cats for their supposed divided loyalties shows that he doesn't actually believe in the high-minded ideals he espouses.

Live-Action TV

• Angel:
  • In the episode "Sanctuary", Buffy chases Faith down to L.A. after her recent antics in Sunnydale, during which Faith used a device to switch bodies with Buffy and used it to her advantage to sleep with Buffy's new boyfriend Riley... only to come into conflict with Angel, who's firmly convinced that Faith can be rehabilitated. At the end of the episode, when Faith turns herself in to the LAPD, Buffy insists to Angel that she came to help him because he was in danger (Faith had previously been hired by Wolfram & Hart to assassinate Angel), but Angel doesn't buy it for a second, pointing out that he's in danger every day, and knows she was just using that as an excuse to come to L.A. for vengeance on Faith; Buffy doesn't deny it and states outright that she's entitled to revenge.
  • Jasmine, the Big Bad of Season 4, claims to want to save the world, but her methods of doing so are very brutal; along the way, she killed several thousand innocents, conjured a rain of fire over LA, and unleashed Angelus once again. Not only that, but her idea of a perfect world is an Assimilation Plot that completely removes free will and makes everyone on Earth mindless drones who worship her endlessly. When Angel thwarts her plans, she decides that if she can't rule the world, she's going to destroy it.
• Arrow:
  • In the first season, Malcolm Merlyn claims that he wants to help his city by destroying the crime-ridden Glades. It turns out that he only came up with the plan after his wife was murdered there, something that he himself could have prevented by answering her desperate phone call instead of ghosting. When finally beaten by Oliver, he spitefully has half the Glades destroyed even when his plan is already foiled. Later seasons have him throw out any pretense of good intentions and betray and/or murder anyone for his own sake.
  • Damien Darhk claims that he wants to make a utopia and that sacrificing the majority of the world's population is a necessary evil for this to happen. Not only does he have way too much fun torturing and killing people for this to be completely true, but he eventually decides to just try wiping out the entire planet wholesale after Team Arrow foils his plans once too many and his wife is killed by Anarky. In Legends of Tomorrow, when he gets hold of the Spear of Destiny and gets to make any kind of world he wants for himself, he can't think of anything bigger than becoming the tyrannical mayor of Star City and keeping Sara and Amaya as his molls.
• In an episode of The Blacklist, a priest has assembled a group of followers, all of them convicted child molesters, whom he's told can atone for their crimes by killing their own kind. In fact, what he's doing is having them kill his business rivals, which the FBI doesn't figure out straight away because his latest victim also happened to be a child molester.
• Breaking Bad: Walter White originally turned to cooking crystal meth to pay his hospital bills and provide some extra money for his family should he die, but his motivations increasingly turn to serving his own ego and hunger for power. As early as season 1, he is given an opportunity to make more than enough money by taking a high-paying job at his old company, but he refuses because he sees it as charity — i.e., he could have solved his problems in a perfectly legal manner long before he involved himself in the criminal underworld, but he doesn't because his pride is worth more to him than his family. In the finale, he finally admits to Skyler that cooking meth was something he did for himself, and his family was always just an excuse.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • During her days as the vengeance demon Anyanka, Anya describes herself as a righteous sword for all Woman Scorned, but her behavior is more along the lines of a Jackass Genie rather than the "patron saint of scorned women" she claims to be. She essentially tricks women into inflicting Disproportionate Retribution on former loved ones, and in "The Wish", when Cordelia's wish that Buffy never came to Sunnydale (because Cordelia blames her failed romance with Xander on his association with Buffy making him marginally cool enough to date) leads her to create a Crapsack World where vampires rule the town with no Slayer to keep them in check, Anya takes open pleasure in the results. A cut line from the script also has Alternate Giles tell her about the fact Cordelia died because of the wish, and Anyanka shrug it off, saying, "It happens."
  • The same holds true for other vengeance demons like Anya's friend Halfrek, who grants wishes to punish parents and guardians who are disappointing (and prefers to be called a "justice demon"), and especially the head vengeance demon D'Hoffryn.
• Criminal Minds: A number of UnSubs qualify.
  • The BAU chases all the vigilantes regardless of whether their victims deserved it because while the public may project noble desires onto them, they are ultimately killing to make themselves feel better, and eventually suffer Motive Decay and get someone undeserving killed.
  • "The Tribe": Jackson Cally made an Apache Cult to initiate a race war for power, racism, and manipulation, but tricked everyone into thinking it was to get non-Apache out of the desert.
  • "Legacy": Charles Holcombe is a "housecleaner", killing those he sees unfit to live: junkies, homeless, prostitutes, etc. He claims to be doing a favor to the world, but between the Death Course he puts them through, and false promise of a chance to escape, this is clearly just a rationale for his own sadism.
  • "Amplification": Chad Brown launches Anthrax attacks to, as he boasts, provide warning about the United States Government's laughable lack of preparedness for bio-terror, but once the BAU analyzes his reason to attack said locations, it turns out that he chooses his attack locations as revenge for minor slights (bookstore that he was fired from, park that he was dumped on, and the Army base that constantly refused to accept him because he never learned that he was not supposed to check "yes" in the test's question whether The Needs of the Many require the death of civilians).
  • "To Hell..."/"...And Back": Quadriplegic Mason Turner manipulates his mentally handicapped brother to murder people, and claims he's conducting experiments to find a cure for his condition. Garcia and Rossi immediately call BS — the setup he has is nowhere near sophisticated enough to conduct any experiments. He's just a sadist who gets sexual pleasure from the suffering of others. Emphasizing this, he has a number of mirrors set up to allow him to see the murders from his bed.
• Princess Catarina of Artena in Deus Salve O Rei claims to have her kingdom's safety in mind when plotting and backstabbing people, but deep down, she wants to fulfill her ambitions of power to the point she engineers a war with a neighborhood which results in Artena destroyed, just so that she can come out on top.
• Dexter: Dexter Morgan's methods certainly are extreme, and his target selection ensures that he's probably a net positive force in the universe, but he doesn't do it to make the world a better place, he does it because he needs to.
• Doctor Who:
  • Rassilion seems to want to end the Time War but his actions show he simply wants immortality and power, no matter the cost. Over the course of the Time War between Time Lords and Daleks, Rassilon opts for a final solution: to wipe out all of space and time so the Time Lords will remain as pure consciousness, yoked to his will because he doesn't see any other way to end it, even killing any of his minions who want to intervene just to preserve his power, not caring about the cost.
  • Davros claims that he's doing a service to his race, the Kaleds, by replacing them with or transforming them into the Daleks, and believes that the latter's Omnicidal Maniac tendencies will bring an end to the thousand year war between Kaleds and Thals on the planet Skaro. In reality, he's motivated by a god complex and cannot fathom an actual peaceful solution.
• In an episode of Elementary, a woman commits a series of murders that at first appears to be a protest against an airline's calculation of the value of a human life. In fact, she's gaming the system in order to get a payout.
• ER's Kerry Weaver joins the staff and almost immediately sets about making everyone miserable with her strict insistence on abiding by rules and policy. It soon becomes clear that what she really enjoys is lording her authority over others as well as presenting herself to her superiors as the perfect doctor, especially as her hypocrisy is frequently displayed—whereas she would severely reprimand/punish those who broke the rules, she never has any problem doing so herself. There's also the storyline where she contrives to get two other doctors fired/demoted for their role in a patient's death. Ostensibly because of their errors, but in truth, to keep her mistakes from being discovered.
• Farscape: There are arguments on either side as to whether Scorpius genuinely believes that he has to save the rest of the galaxy from the Scarrans, or whether he's seeking selfish vengeance on them for his horrible childhood and doesn't give a crap about anyone else. Wayne Pygram, the actor, definitely thinks the latter.
• The Flash (2014):
  • During the two episodes in season 3 regarding Gorilla City, Grodd lures Team Flash to Gorilla City only for them to be captured and imprisoned with an impending death sentence on their heads. Grodd justifies himself by saying that he got Barry and friends purposefully imprisoned so he could get them to kill his hated superior Solovar, who according to Grodd is planning on invading Central City and laying waste to it out of paranoia, with his reason for helping being that he doesn't want to see his true home be destroyed. But as Barry soon finds out for himself, Grodd is a liar. He is the one who wants to invade Central City, and by manipulating the Flash into fighting Solovar, he spreads fear and distrust among the apes and gets to usurp control from Solovar. After revealing his deception, Grodd goes on to try to nuke Central City, and when that fails leads an army of gorillas to assault the city, purely out of hatred and spite towards the humans living there. Grodd eventually has a Heel Realization in later seasons.
  • Season 4's Big Bad, The Thinker, sets out to cause "The Enlightenment". At first it seems he has noble intentions despite what it amounts to, causing all humans' minds to effectively restart, wiping away intelligence, emotion, and even free will. His aim is to help humanity move away from distractions like technology to achieve its intellectual potential. However, as his plans succeed, he continues to grow drunk with power and leaves a trail of innocent people dead in his wake. Before the season ends, it turns out he abandoned this goal a long time ago and is now aiming for world domination, wanting to remake the world with him in power as the only intelligent mind.
  • In the "Armageddon" five-parter that opens Season 8, a powerful alien named Despero shows up, intending to prevent the eponymous Armageddon from destroying Earth, with a target on Flash's back because Despero believes he will be responsible for it. Despero genuinely does want to prevent Armageddon, but only so Earth still exists for him to conquer afterwards.
• The Good Place: John Wheaton was a massive Jerkass gossip who constantly harassed the Spoiled Sweet Tahani Al-Jamil and excuses his constant mean-spirited attacks against her and the rest of the Fiction 500 by claiming that he was "speaking truth to power" and calling out the rich for living needlessly extravagant lifestyles. However, he eventually goes through a Jerkass Realization where he confesses to Tahani that in reality, he was just a horrible gossip and he picked on Tahani in particular because he was childishly jealous of her getting to live the high life while he had to desperately scrape a living by through running a crummy gossip blog. Him confessing this and admitting that he now feels guilty for having treated her so terribly helps him and Tahani spark an Odd Friendship and inspires him to become a better person.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kamen Rider: Skyrider: The Great Leader of Neo-Shocker claims that Neo-Shocker's goal is simply to cut the human population by 1/3rd to prevent the planet's resources from being over-used and save humanity from eventual extinction. However, when confronted by the Riders, he tries to wipe out all of the Earth's oxygen which would wipe out all life on earth, including all of humanity, just to spite the Riders showing ultimately his claims of good intentions are false.
  • Kamen Rider Ex-Aid: Masamune Dan claims that, at first, all he wants to do is help balance Kamen Rider Chronicle and save the lost players within the game, even going as far to seize the ultimate power of the game, which is needed to clear it, to give himself an edge as he interferes. Later on, though, it's revealed that this isn't his intention at all; his true plan is to market the game worldwide to goad everyone in the world to play it, die in battle, and be transferred into data he may control and possibly never let go. Indeed, when he has no chance of worldwide distribution of the game, he simply decides to cause human genocide by infecting everyone on earth to turn them into data.
  • Kamen Rider Zi-O: Swartz claims to have brought about the creation of Oma Zi-O so that he could steal his powers and save his timeline, which was doomed to perish because of having no Riders in it. As soon as someone else from his timeline gains Rider powers, however, Swartz goes berserk over this, demonstrating that it was all about his own personal power and glory all along.
  • Kamen Rider Zero-One: The Ark's servants claim that its interest in starting a robot uprising is because humans are a selfish, violent species that will destroy all other life on Earth unless they're stopped by any means necessary. While this was its motivation when the Ark first started its rebellion, a decade of solitary confinement at the bottom of the ocean after its initial defeat means that by the time its servants manage to dredge it up from the bottom of the sea, its motives have decayed into simple hatred of everyone and everything.
  • Kamen Rider Dragon Knight: Xaviax claims his intent is to save his dying world. However, the only reason it's dying in the first place is because of a war he himself was a part of and saw kidnapping people of other worlds as slave labor was the best solution. It gets increasingly clear Xaviax only really cares about conquering other worlds rather than saving his own.
  • Kamen Rider Outsiders: Zein seeks to assess the good intentions of humanity and seeks to establish a utopia of eternal benevolence and order, to the point of gathering every heroic Kamen Rider into surrendering their powers to oppose the eponymous Kamen Rider Outsiders. However, as the anthology progresses, Zein's goals of subjugating humanity to enforce its idea of good takes on a darker light as it actually seeks to use the powers of every Kamen Rider to stoke fear and terror to put both the villains and the entire human race on notice, and plans to use a Deadly Game to create a cannon fodder of players to be used as Sacrificial Lambs against the Outsiders, manipulating humanity into setting up their own self-destruction out of the belief that humans only care about slaughtering each other because of their capacity for malice.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
    • Garrett vaguely mentions HYDRA's aims but it quickly becomes clear he joined HYDRA purely for his own selfish goals.
    • Hive claims to want to unite the world by transforming them into Inhumans it can "sway", and refuses to harm Inhumans. Essentially his plan is to remove The Evils of Free Will, though the people swayed retain some free will (their personalities are unchanged and one of the first things an infected Daisy does is to correct Hive when it uses her old name), plus everyone will have superpowers. Then the doctor it has working to create Inhumans unintentionally transforms a test group into feral subhumans — but because Hive can control them, it declares this a success and refuses to let the doctor refine the process. It also tries to drain Daisy fatally to expedite the process of making more, demonstrating that world domination is its only real priority.
  • Daredevil (2015): Wilson Fisk wants to destroy Hell's Kitchen so he can build over it, believing he is doing the city a favor as the area is rampant with crime and poverty, but his true motive is that he's traumatized from bad memories of growing up there and thus wants to destroy an entire town to give himself a sense of peace. In order to do this, he has amassed money and power by becoming a powerful crime lord and allying with violent Russian gangsters and two factions of the Hand as well as getting a full third of New York's police department to become dirty cops on his payroll; he sets off a gang war when the Russian gangsters annoy him too much, murders everyone who crosses him along with their friends and families, and purposely exacerbates the crime and corruption of the Kitchen in order to justify tearing it all down, up to and including terrorising the residents and even bombing several buildings. When he is finally arrested for his crimes and on his way to court, he reluctantly admits to the armed police escorting him that he always thought of himself as the Good Samaritan — as in, explicitly comparing himself to the Bible parable — but now accepts that he is actually the men of ill intent who attacked those the Samaritan saved... like, say, armed police escorting a crime lord down a road that they should not have been on.
• In Nikita, Michael helps Division force teenagers to carry out dangerous missions, but it turns out he acts less out of loyalty to the United States and more out of the hope that enough work for Division will help him kill the one responsible for the death of his wife and child. Once he finds out his own commander, Percy, was the one responsible for their deaths and used his fragile emotional state immediately afterward to convince him to join Division, Michael changes his ways and joins Nikita.
• In the Person of Interest episode "Legacy", a man who's running a scam involving framing ex-cons in order to get their kids into foster care claims that the kids are better off there. Even if he believes that, a cynical person might say that the money had more to do with it.
• The Shield: Vic Mackey claims that his corruption and involvement in Farmington's drug trade is motivated by his desire to protect innocent people, but it's clear that he's motivated more by lining his own profits than anything else. However, he does show a genuine desire to help innocent people... which gradually fades as he becomes increasingly consumed by his greed and desire to avoid facing punishment for his crimes.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: Enterprise: The Xindi-Reptilian leader Commander Dolim is (mis)informed along with the rest of the Xindi leaders (there are five extant Xindi races: Reptilians, Primates, Arboreals, Aquatics and Insectoids) that humanity will destroy them in the future, so they engage in a pre-emptive strike against Earth in preparation for building an even stronger weapon to Kill All Humans. The Xindi are actually being manipulated by the extradimensional Sphere Builders, a shady cabal from a future timeline who want to prevent the rise of the Federation that will one day fight off the Sphere Builder invasion of the galaxy, but when Dolim learns of this, he greedily accepts their offer to make the Reptilians the dominant force of a new Xindi empire and turns on his allies, proving that his actions were never about protecting the Xindi, just about securing his power.
  • Star Trek: Discovery: In Season 4, Ruon Tarka initially presents himself as a ruthless pragmatist who wants to stop the planet-destroying Dark Matter Anomaly by any means necessary. It's later revealed that his true objective is to gain control of the Anomaly so that he can use its energy to transport himself to what he believes will be a better alternate timeline, and by the end in pursuit of this objective he's repeatedly betrayed people who trusted him, nearly started an intergalactic war, endangered many billions of people, and finally attempted to commit genocide on an entire sentient species.
• Supernatural:
  • In the season 4 finale, as explained to Dean by the top angel Zachariah, it's revealed that Heaven has allowed the Apocalypse to unfold because they desperately want to defeat Lucifer and his demons and finally create paradise on Earth. However, while Zachariah's boss the Archangel Michael is a genuine Well-Intentioned Extremist who believes it is his destiny to slay his brother and deeply regrets it, Zachariah himself doesn't give a damn about any cosmic plans and is only going along with it to further his own advancement in the angel hierarchy while feigning good intentions.
  • The British Men of Letters in season 12. The original purpose of the Men of Letters was to simply research the paranormal and pass that knowledge on to hunters who would kill any threats to humanity. After the American chapter was wiped out by demons, the British Men of Letters were determined to avoid the same fate. So they made a deal with the King of Hell that he could make demon deals for souls as long as demons never attacked the island of Great Britain and they began killing all monsters there whether they were harming humans or not. 50 years later they get tired of watching the American hunters, who by now had never even heard of the Men of Letters, flounder on their own, so the British Men of Letters invade, try to force their system on the entire US hunter network, and when it is forcefully rebuked as far too brutal, they decide to eliminate the American hunters. Over the year the British chapter is in the US, they murder as many, if not more, humans than the monsters do, including murdering the very hunters they were meant to help!
• Tensou Sentai Goseiger: Brajira of the Messiah, the show's true villain after spending most of the series as his Buredoran disguises, finally reveals his motivations that the world is corrupt and the Gosei Angels are growing ineffective at protecting it from itself and that the way to rectify it is to restart it anew. The problem is that he wants it recreated into his own image where he would be worshiped as messiah (hence his name), making his so-called noble intentions ultimately self-serving. His lack of remorse for his crimes or the crimes of the other villains in the show and his Chronic Backstabbing Disorder also brings his intentions into doubt.
• The Radical Destruction Bringer in Ultraman Gaia is a cosmic entity that sent monsters and aliens to invade Earth to destroy humanity because it views them as a threat to universal peace. Come the last few remaining episodes of the series, it's unveiled to be nothing more but a hypocrite with a God complex as an excuse for Fantastic Racism against mankind, enslaving creatures and destroying planets.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • In the third case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies, Aristotle Means claims that, to fight the rampant corruption in the Dark Age of the Law, you have to use corrupt means yourself (“the ends justify the means” is his personal motto). However, it's later revealed that he is the one who framed Juniper for the murder of Courte, who discovered Aristotle accepting bribes from O'Conner's parents. Aristotle, upon being discovered, says that the dark age of the law was beautiful and not to be fought at all. Athena is quick to chew him out on it.
    Athena Cykes: They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but not yours! You never had good intentions, only lies to protect yourself with while blaming another. You, professor, are the embodiment of the dark age of the law!
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice: Queen Ga'ran Sigatar Khura'in, dictator of the Kingdom of Khura'in, is the creator of the Defense Culpability Act, which punishes defense attorneys of convicted clients with the same sentence their clients had. When first met, she paints the DC Act as something that is cruel but necessary for order to be held in the country. In reality, it's all a blatant power-grab in order to keep herself in power, as shown when it is revealed that she usurped her sister, the rightful ruler, to become queen in the first place.
• Chaos;Head: While Genichi Norose, president of NOZOMI, claims to have good intentions, in that he wants to create a utopia by mind-controlling humanity to quash their primal urges, the fact that he's a Straw Nihilist pursuing his goals to horrific extremes fueled by a god complex make him just as bad as the humans he despises. In the end, he just wants power.
• Danganronpa: An implied version. The Big Bad of the series perceives herself as some sort of "savior" by trying to get people to "face despair before they're disappointed by hope", and seemingly thinks that she, Junko, is doing something good by saving the world from disappointing itself completely, possessing a very nihilistic viewpoint of humanity. That would be more apparent if she didn't resort to constant mass murdering and favorable manipulation of events with no way for her victims to hope to escape her grasp in the first place. She also claims that she kills and abuses her loved ones because she wants to allow them to empathize with the despair she's felt her whole life, but the sincere apathy she demonstrates towards their lives shows that her love is superficial, and only wants to force her idea of that love onto others; that unfortunate sense of apathy she has prevents her from understanding what love actually is.
• Mystic Messenger: The Savior/Rika/Mina, leader of the cult Mint Eye, institutes a horrific regime of torture and brainwashing, while also having followers drink an elixir that breaks down their sanity and trying to destroy the Rika Fundraising Association. In V's route, the Savior claims, when conversing with the heroine, that this is all to create a paradise where everyone in the world can be happy and free from pain and suffering, and no one will have to suffer the bad childhood that the Savior did. However, in Ray's route, the Savior drops this rhetoric and reveals it to be a cover for being The Social Darwinist who believes the strong should dominate the weak. In the end, the Savior simply wants to dominate others as payback for being dominated and abused as a child.

Web Animation

• Meta Runner:
  • Derek Lucks claims to have noble intentions, but he has done a lot of unscrupulous things, up to directly hurting people, such as allowing Sheridan to enact Project Blue and almost kill Lucinia in the process, lying to and manipulating everyone so they wouldn't leave him because of the truth, abusing all of his employees, and even willing to kill a child, all for his own benefit.
  • Dr. James Sheridan exceeds Lucks in that he keeps claiming his actions will change the world, but in the end, it causes more harm than good.
• Red vs. Blue:
  • When the audience is first introduced to the Director of Project Freelancer in The Recollection, he seems to have genuinely good motives behind his actions, wishing to use the project for the sake of preventing human extinction. However, later revelations, as well as flashbacks in The Project Freelancer Saga, would show that when he realized the possibility of using the project to bring his deceased wife Back from the Dead, that became his biggest priority. While he might have had selfless goals at first, that isn't the case by the time we finally meet him.
  • Season 15 has one in Mark Temple, leader of the Blues and Reds. After his Freudian Excuse is shown, one can't help but have some sympathy for what made him into the monster he is now since he's completely right to be furious about him and his friends being used as a Redshirt Army and target practice by Project Freelancer, and also about the UNSC sending them off to Project Freelancer in the first place. Unfortunately, it's hard to feel bad for him when it's revealed that not only his reaction to that aforementioned torment is to degenerate into an Ax-Crazy Serial Killer who has been tracking down the remaining Freelancers (and while It's Personal against Tex and Carolina, both of whom played a part in his friend's death, he goes after every agent indiscriminately, including Washington, the guy who brought down Project Freelancer) and subjecting them to horrific deaths by armor lock-induced dehydration and starvation, but that he also wants to forcibly dismantle the entire UNSC, a galactic federation full of countless innocent civilians that will be slaughtered in the crossfire.
  • Zero from season 18 talks a big game about the corruption of the Alliance of Defense and their countless "experiments and manipulations", but at the end of the day, he's just out for revenge because he feels cheated out of being the leader of the original Shatter Squad and is basically throwing a gigantic tantrum over it.
• RWBY:
  • Blake originally believes that Adam Taurus shares her idealism for a world where humans and Faunus are equal and peaceful; even after she abandons him in the Black Trailer for not caring if humans die during their train heist, Blake still assumes he's just gone too far in pursuit of a noble goal. When they confront each other at the end of Volume 3, Blake understands for the first time that Adam never shared her future vision, believes peaceful equality is impossible, and instead wants to enslave humanity and destroy everyone and everything Blake loves as punishment for abandoning him. He later murders and usurps his boss, Sienna Khan, with a smile, because she isn't ruthless enough to lead the Faunus into a war they can't win against humanity. Later on, when Blake turns many Faunus against him, he tries to kill them all, and his own followers, with explosives, rather than admit defeat.
  • The Albain brothers share many of Adam's same goals for Faunus supremacy but come off looking slightly better because they're not selfish assholes murdering people for petty spite. Much of their time is spent translating Adam's angry rants and needlessly cruel orders into something that sounds clever and pragmatic, which the rest of the White Fang will accept more readily.

Webcomics

• I Don't Want This Kind of Hero: Baek Morae's goal of giving Raptor a future might seem understandable on paper; as he points out, she's an orphaned, crippled, and uneducated hybrid, meaning her job prospects are bleak once superheroes are no longer needed. However, as Naga retorts, Raptor is surrounded by loved ones and a strong support system, and so Baek Morae's ultimate goal is nothing more than self-satisfaction.
• Redcloak in The Order of the Stick may tell himself that everything he does is for the good of goblins as a whole (and he is quite correct about them having a crappy deal), but he's prepared to let them all die rather than admit the Plan isn't going to work because ultimately this is about him, his Sunk Cost Fallacy, and getting revenge on the gods and the Player Character races. He and Oona have a conversation about it where she notes that Redcloak is torn between his Well-Intentioned Extremist goals and his Not-So ones, but this only lasts so long as both goals are somewhat compatible; once he's forced to make a choice, he'll always choose selfishness, which is why Oona is helping him with his good goals so as to postpone that choice for him.

Web Videos

• Dream from the Dream SMP claims that all he wants is for the server to come together as one big happy family, with no factions or nations or conflict. In his attempts to create this happy family, Dream has waged war against a nation of pacifists, given Wilbur the TNT needed to destroy L'Manburg (and basically commit suicide in the process), had Tommy (who was 16 years old at the time) exiled to a faraway beach and abused him so badly that he almost killed himself, manipulated Tubbo into giving him Tommy's disc and then carpet-bombed L'Manburg down to bedrock, commissioned Pandora's Vault, a massive prison that he purposefully made as hellish as possible, created a massive vault to put everyone's pets and most valuable items into to use as blackmail, and would've forced Tommy to watch him murder Tubbo for not being fun or useful anymore, and locked Tommy up in Pandora for the rest of his life, if the rest of the server hadn't intervened. Keeping this in mind, it's pretty obvious that what Dream really wants is control.
• Jreg: In the Centricide saga videos, most of the extremists have good intentions, at least from their own perspectives. However, for all his rhetoric about changing the world, their leader, Anti-Centrist, doesn't seem to have much of an end goal besides eliminating the centrists and becoming a "real political ideology". One of his own subordinates, Ancap, points out that he doesn't appear to really have a motive or game plan regarding the world as a whole outside of "blind political chaos". Radical Centrist, meanwhile, implies that he may have an even more sinister objective that he's not telling anyone about. Turns out, he's right: Anti-Centrist's real goal is to summon Accelerationist and corrupt or destroy all other ideologies.
• Played for Laughs in the Solid jj video "The Empire Did Nothing Wrong" parodying Return of the Jedi. In it, Darth Vader doubles down on his We Can Rule Together attempt on Luke by giving a series of Dog Kicking Excuses for everything he did (that Luke knew about). He decries the Rebels as terrorists and justifies blowing up Alderaan for harboring them, asserts that aside from that the Death Star was only ever meant to be a scare tactic, says killing Obi-Wan was self-defense, and Lovable Rogue Han was wanted for a whole laundry list of crimes and he did the galaxy a favor by selling him out to Jabba. Luke's unable to see the flaws in his logic and starts to come around... until Obi-Wan shows up and brings up all the kids he killed in Order 66, horrifying Luke and leaving his father without a snappy retort this time.

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