Moral Myopia / Video Games

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• Played for Laughs in Advance Wars: Dual Strike with Grimm. When you first meet him and Sensei, he demands a test battle to see how good the Allied Nations really are. However, when you meet Green Earth and Javier demands the same thing, Grimm is the first person to complain about it. Max immediately calls him on it:
  Grimm: Test battle? We got an audition for these two? The nerve of some people.
  Max: Keep your trap shut, Grimm!
• Conrad Marburg in Alpha Protocol. In Rome, circumstances can lead to him shooting an unarmed woman — your friend and possible love interest — in the back, right in front of you. His attitude could be described as flippant if the guy emoted very much. In the subsequent boss battle, if you kill one of his men, he'll go completely berserk, leave cover, and try to beat you into the ground with his fists. In fact you can call him out on his double standards, and depending on your previous relationship with him he'll either flee to kill/recruit you at a later date, or have a total breakdown and abandon his escape plan to have a second shot at you.
• In ADOM, one of the toughest opponents towards the end is the Cat Lord, who will attack you if you've ever killed so much as a single feline during the entire game so far. If you're not a druid, you'll have been attacked by hundreds of wild cats and cave tigers and whatnot by this point. (This is effectively a bonus challenge to not to kill any felines, since if you don't, the Cat Lord will give you an awesome ring. It's still actually better to kill and eat him for stat boosts, provided you have a way of getting rid of bad karma. And provided the corpse drops.)
• Due to how the game engine in Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura works, your good-aligned allies can come across as this. If you provoke a good-aligned NPC into becoming hostile (such as by botching a pickpocketing), your allies will immediately attack them, but your good allies will chastise you for this. Even though you had no intention of attacking them and might not even be fighting yourself.
• Assassin's Creed: The Templars live here. Everything they do is to bring about their perfect world, including murdering anyone who dares oppose them, or looks like they might potentially oppose them. Whenever the Assassins come calling to stop their deeds, they tend to rant about how the Assassins are ruining everything.
  • The Assassins themselves sometimes lampshade this among themselves. They pursue peace, but use murder as their primary method of achieving their goals. Sometimes their actions lead to far more harm than good, such as when Ezio Auditore hand-waved destroying an entire underground city and leaving a district of Constantinople devastated in order to find some ancient keys and kill the Templars guarding them.
• In Baten Kaitos, The Great Mizuti outright states as such about herself when she joins your party, which she believes is justified owing to the nature of her Top Secret Mission and their mutual quest to Save the World: she states that while she may need to lie to Kalas and his friends, they must never lie to her. Kalas and his friends let this pass without mention since it's among the least strange aspects of their new ally.
• Batman: Arkham City: Talia is fully onboard with her father Ra's' plans to cause millions of casualties while culling the world's overpopulation, but the moment he's willing to sacrifice her life, she deems that a step too far. The moral hypocrisy is lost on her as scores of people are dying to Protocol 10 all around her.
• Bioshock: Andrew Ryan founded Rapture on strict secular Objectivist principles, a society where free market capitalism is the only morality, to the point that one of the first things you see in the game is a slideshow he used to greet newcomers with about how evil the governments on the surface were for interfering with taxes and laws. That is, until Frank Fontaine showed up and started to outshine Ryan's own businesses and threatened his power over the city, at which point Ryan ended up nationalizing Fontaine's businesses and branded him a criminal. In all fairness, Fontaine WAS a criminal, but Ryan never had any official evidence of that, and pretty much just flushed all his principles because he didn't like not having all the power himself. Plus, the only difference between a criminal enterprise and a corporation is... approval by the government.
  • During the lead up to the fight with Fontaine, he calls you up on the radio and angrily insists that you should be thanking him for being the first person in your life to ever be honest with you, since by orchestrating your return to Rapture and by leading you around by the nose through the city in order to kill Ryan, he "showed you who you are"; never mind the fact that he's spent much of the game up until this point pretending he was a person who didn't exist, lying to you about a family he never had, and acting as though he was your trusted ally before betraying and attempting to kill you once the charade was no longer necessary and you were no longer useful to him.
• This is more or less Handsome Jack in a nutshell in Borderlands 2. As a narcissist, he seems incapable of caring for anyone else but himself, and is convinced that because he's "the hero" he's justified in treating his employees like dirt, abusing Pandora's citizens (because they're all "bandit scum"), and despoiling the planet's ecosystem (because the place is already a death-trap). He's even convinced that forcing his daughter Angel to be his personal supercomputer and force-feeding her Eridium until she literally can't live without it was honestly him being a good father.
• In City of Heroes, it is not uncommon for crazy cultists who are in the process of sacrificing random people they kidnapped to shout "Intruder! How dare you disturb us?!" when a hero arrives in their underground temple to save the civilians.
• Cyberpunk 2077: Goro Takemura has excellent reason to display loyalty and genuine affection to the Arasaka corporation and the Arasaka family for taking him from the slums where he grew up and giving him a chance to rise, eventually becoming Saburo Arasaka's personal bodyguard. However, this loyalty has blinded him completely to the fact that the Arasaka corporation is a blight on the planet responsible for creating the slums he grew up in and that most people on the planet have very compelling reason to hate Arasaka with the fury of a thousand suns. Directed towards anyone else, Takemura's loyalty would be admirable, but as things stand he is a walking illustration of the difference between living by a code and actually being a worthwhile human being.
• Intentionally used by the Eldar in Dawn of War, especially in the sequel. They actively sabotage and kill Imperial troops, but will whine like unholy mothers if you defend yourself — screeching about how you could have spent the time fighting Tyranids. Bastards.
  • In the sequel, they try to sacrifice a number of Imperial planets (with trillions of inhabitants) to the Tyranids to protect their own Craftworld (an artificial space habitat). When you are stopping them, they will yell at you for being a stupid idiot. After all, what is a dozen human worlds in comparison with just one Eldar Craftworld? This is very common behavior for Eldar (and, for the record, humans as well), but it gets even more ridiculous. See, the humans plan to kill the Tyranids with a virulent bio-weapon after they cull the advancing hordes to draw out the hive ships; the Eldar plan to just stall the Tyranids for a couple of years and most likely die to the 'nids anyway.
• Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony features this dilemma crop up with Kirumi Tojo, the second killer. Her motive as a wholesale ties to The Needs of the Many with her being able to save Japan if she escapes, even if it's at the cost of the smaller group she's in as well as taking advantage of a fellow classmate's psychological issues. This is something that's flipped in on herself when the group catches her for killing Ryoma that she needs to be the one to die so everyone else can live. Kirumi's response? Not only vote for Shuichi in a last-ditch effort to take him down with her and try to weasel her way out and manipulate the others to taking the fall for herself, but when that fails, she's the only killer in the series so far to outright try to run away from her own Execution. Despite touting how much the greater group would benefit from it, Kirumi doesn't at all get why her death in that scenario would benefit the greater group on that scale.
• Dead or Alive: The Mugen Tenshin Clan has shades of this. Raidou, the Big Bad of the first game, had previously raped Ayame, the wife of his brother (and then-leader of the clan) Shiden, stolen their most sacred technique, and put Hayate into a coma, and the clan decides to just move on and forget it ever happened. However, when Kasumi decides to do something about Raidou herself and ditches the clan, she is immediately declared a traitor and Marked to Die.
• During the not-so-backstory of Max Payne 3 you become the target of the ire of a mid-class mob boss for killing his son. The same mob boss, of course, who probably murdered many to get in his position and likely commits a number of atrocities, even if by association, on a daily basis. And said son was waving a gun in Max's face and would have killed a innocent bystander for standing up to him had Max not gunned him down.
• In DmC: Devil May Cry, Mundus is absolutely pissed when Dante and Vergil kill his unborn heir and flat-out asks why Dante did it. Never mind that Mundus himself brutally murdered Eva right in front of Dante, subjected Sparda to a Fate Worse than Death, and has been trying to hunt down and kill Dante himself ever since.
• Doom II: The Arch-Vile is Hell's healer. It screams "why?" as it dies, because it has no idea why you wanted to kill it. After all, it surely can't be those deadly fire spells it was attacking you with. The creature is also puzzled as to why you don't want it to revive the fallen demons, ignoring that said demons have tried to kill you.
• Dragon Age:
  • In Dragon Age: Origins Loghain will never forgive Orlais for "enslaving" Ferelden, yet insists his selling Ferelden elves into actual slavery was Necessarily Evil. Even worst, some NPC's can be heared mentioning that Loghain is starting to behave just like the same Orlesians he's always complaining for.
  • Anders in Dragon Age II never misses a moment to admonish Merrill for the use of blood magic and consorting with demons, certain that she would end up causing harm to herself and others. However, he turns a blind eye to the fact that he himself willingly chose to become an Abomination, allowing the Spirit of Justice to inhabit him, only to accidentally corrupt it with his anger into a Demon of Vengeance. Merrill on the other hand, has avoided this danger since she treats all spirits as dangerous, without dividing them into "good" and "bad" ones.
    • Anders ultimately makes everything that Merrill did pale in comparison. While Merrill endangered her own life and soul, causing the death of her mentor who tried to protect her, Anders partakes in a deliberate and successful attempt to incite a World War between the Mages and Templars. Even before that, he can be delivering his "you're a monster and blood magic is evil" speeches after his own possessing spirit caused him to murder an innocent young mage.
    • Fenris is another example. He hates slavery, but because he thinks Mages are dangerous he thinks the mages don't deserve their freedom. The only reason Fenris comes off as more sympathetic than Anders is because, unlike the Anders example, Fenris never actually commits wrongdoings because of his moral myopia, and in fact, if Fenris sides against you in the endgame, pointing out that he would be helping Meredith sell mages into slavery causes him to come back to your side.
• In Dynasty Warriors for Ma Chao. Cao Cao kills Ma Chao's father for attempting to assassinate him? He is a villain and must die! Wang Yi's clan is destroyed by Ma Chao's rebellion leaving her a woman with vengeance and nothing else? Well, that's too bad, but he can't die yet.
• Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG:
  • In an inversion of Ape Shall Never Kill Ape, Asterisk holds the party in contempt for killing Gemini by shattering her Zodiac stone. When the party retorts that Gemini was planning to kill the other Zodiacs, Asterisk states that it's okay for archdemons to kill each other and that they've done so in the past, it's not okay for mortals to do so. It's implied the archdemons are incapable of permanently killing each other even if they wanted to, though Asterisk made sure to create Faceless clones as backups in cased an archdemon actually dies. Strangely, this sentiment isn't shared by archdemons Libra and Leo, who believe the party was justified in killing Gemini.
  • After the player defeats Detritus Seven, they can view Zazz's logs on the Detritus robot series. Zazz programmed Eleven's AI to be capable of empathy and morality because he believes humanity needs a hero of justice to lead them. Unfortunately, Zazz despises sapient non-human species and is annoyed that Eleven shows compassion to them. In his logs on Seven, Zazz writes that he would be considered the worst mass murderer in history for allowing Seven to slaughter so many people, but he doesn't consider any of Seven's victims to be people because they're non-humans. When the Vulcanite Resistance manages to defeat Seven and leave him for dead in the mines, Zazz has the gall to be offended.
• In Fallout: New Vegas, Caesar's Legion will hate you and call you a murderer if you kill Vulpes Inculta, whom you encounter when he and his squad are finishing up on their complete destruction of the town of Nipton and all its inhabitants. Vulpes will also accuse the citizens of Nipton of being treacherous, depraved and morally bankrupt, when his elaborate execution by lottery is stomach-turning in its sadism. (And their demonstration of depraved treachery, by luring several NCR soldiers in with offers of sex and fun and then killing them, was his plan to start with.) Your reputation will only drop further as you keep murdering the honorable four-man execution squads the Legion keeps sending after you, squads that have no problem attacking and killing civilians should there be any around when they find you.
• In Fallout 4, the Institute are a group of underground scientists who by and large believe the civilizations of the Commonwealth surface world to be doomed to destruction. Father, the director of the institute, declares that the Institute is the best hope for humanity because of the lack of future for the surface world; yet, one of biggest reasons the Commonwealth has yet to rebuild is because of the infestation of super mutants that the Institute themselves released. The other would be the Institute Synths they keep sending out to impersonate ordinary wastelanders via Kill and Replace, sowing distrust and paranoia among the populace.
• Dragons have an issue with this in Final Fantasy XIV, since their nigh-infinite lifespans inform their worldview. Since time never seems to pass to a dragon, any sleight is as fresh today as it was a thousand years ago; yet with mortals being so fleeting, they apply Sins of Our Fathers in exacting their vengeance. That said, since these descendants weren't the ones who wronged the dragon, they cannot possibly understand what happened with enough weight to ever be able to atone and mollify the dragon. The Dragons themselves explain this and see no hypocrisy in feeling justified continuing a war of slow genocide because humans keep committing grievance after grievance in self-defense, even when they admit in the same breath that most of the victims have no idea what the war is actually about as the truth was intentionally buried. Hearing this naturally scuttles any chance of Ishgard-Dravania peace talks, as when one side can only extend the options "roll over and die" and "literally anything else", it's hard to not justify fighting back as hard as possible.
• Played straight in so many ways in Final Fantasy Tactics with Algus (along with many others), who while not evil, is plays the Blue Blood to a "T" and has a very low opinion of commoners.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening: While Male Morgan avoids this for the most part, this ends up being Played for Laughs with Female Morgan. She's oftentimes cheerfully insensitive (innocently or otherwise) with regards to how she mistreats some of her party members (in particular Inigo and Yarne), but ultimately tends to internalize and get really offended when she feels nobody cares for her, not really understanding a causation with her actions and outlook.
  • Fire Emblem Fates: Something that's called to attention in her supports with Beruka is that Oboro is grievously unaware or even uncaring of the harm and Vicious Cycle of Revenge she perpetrates through her bloody involvement in the Hoshidan-Nohrian feud, yet if you asked her, to her the day she lost her parents to bandits is the most traumatic event of her life. It's especially notable in her supports with Jakob, where she chews him out for how "dishonorable" killing wounded Nohrian soldiers after clean up is, despite how oftentimes murderous she is towards Nohrians in general (to the point her hatred ties into her Personal Skill).
• Freedom Planet: Brevon, the main villain, constantly tries to portray himself as a victimized Well-Intentioned Extremist and that the heroes' misfortunes are their own fault for getting in his way. Needless to say, this really rings hollow, especially since he tries this justification after turning Milla into a brainwashed monster purely out of spite.
• Fuga: Melodies of Steel has a perfect example in Flam Kish. Her father Colonel Pretzel was killed by the children riding the Taranis, and when she first crosses paths with them, she proclaims her desire for revenge. However, new recruit Jin angrily points out that she had just wrathfully executed his own father for defiance, compared to how the kids killed Colonel Pretzel on the battlefield in self-defense (and by accident). Flam is completely unfazed by this remark, and calls Jin arrogant for thinking his father's life held anywhere near as much weight as a Berman person's.
• Invoked by the developers of Game Dev Tycoon: the cracked version includes in-game pirates who will steal your product, and it has been observed that real-world pirates are complaining about it. Which is even more morally dubious considering Game Dev Tycoon's developers stole the vast majority of their ideas from another game company (Kairosoft), including the basic concept and the majority of the game mechanics.
• Kratos from God of War has never once showed any compunctions against killing people brutally if it'll get him closer to his vengeance, or launching full campaigns of war even if they displease the gods. But the source of most of his angst stems from how he was tricked into killing his wife and daughter (while he was out massacring a village in Ares' name), and his personal war against Olympus in the second and third games happened after they tried to kill him for his excessive warmongering.
  • This is a major part of Thor's character in God of War Ragnarök. He has been harboring a grudge on Kratos and Atreus for killing his sons Magni and Modi in the previous game; The sons who, in that last game, were sent to kill Kratos and Atreus by Thor, where Kratos kills Magni in self-defense. Modi escapes, wherein Thor beats him within an inch of his life for abandoning his brother; when Kratos and Atreus find him, Atreus killing him is no better than a mercy kill, and yet Thor still blames the duo for their deaths, something Kratos calls him out on in his boss fight. On top of that, Thor sees no problem with killing Atreus in Revenge by Proxy, despite him being much younger than Thor's sons.
• Niko Bellic in Grand Theft Auto IV, who has a small circle of people he considers family. These people are sacred; harm any of them, and you can expect to die very painfully. Anyone else is fair game, casually killed in the cause of "I need money". When he finds the man who betrayed eleven of his friends to their deaths for a thousand dollars, he gets called out on this.
• In Half-Life, you overhear a couple of soldiers complaining about the dozen or so scientists they slaughtered not putting up a fight (despite them not being trained and likely thinking the soldiers are there to rescue them). Later the soldiers express their outrage at Freeman for having killed so many of them (despite them trying to kill him and his coworkers). Lampshaded in Freeman's Mind:
  Freeman: (immediately shoots them several times in the back) There, that's for trying to guilt trip me! Yeah, (in a mocking tone) the Big Bad Freeman, Of course! You guys didn't start shit!
• In Halo, Dr Halsey is eventually arrested by ONI and charged for her methods in creating the Spartan-IIs, which were indeed appalling as it involved kidnapping children and placing them through Training from Hell and dangerous augmentations. But Halsey also cared for her Spartans, doing her best to keep as many alive as possible, and her work ensured humanity's survival. In fact, her methods were nothing compared to ONI's methods in creating Spartan-IIIs, most of whom were all-but-conscripted orphaned children treated as elite cannon fodder who were mostly killed by their early teens. Of course, this being ONI, it was more to get Halsey out of the way, turn her into a scapegoat, and punish her for some personal slights against her boss than any moral issue.
  • Nowhere is this more evident than the mind of Admiral Margaret Parangosky, the Director of ONI who authorized both Halsey's arrest and the SPARTAN-II and SPARTAN-III Programs. When Halsey goes behind Parangosky's back to replace the kidnapped Spartan-IIs with flash-clones that would eventually die to prevent their parents being tormented by their disappearance, it's condemned as an unforgivable crime that forced 75 sets of parents to watching their children die slowly. When Parangosky commits actual treason by going behind Fleet Admiral Terrance Hood's back to instigate a Civil War among the Elites he's trying to negotiate a meaningful peace with (in fact, Parangosky's plan ends up hurting the pro-human Elites more than the anti-human ones), it's about trying to neutralize a threat.
• In Iji, on a violent playthrough, Iji's enemies berate her for solving all of her problems with violence... despite the fact that all of Iji's problems are trying to solve her with violence, and kinda-sorta blew up her planet while she was taking a cryo-nap.
• Injustice: Gods Among Us: Superman is pushed down a path of villainy and rises as the autocratic dictator of Earth following the destruction of Metropolis and the death of his wife and child, which causes him such catastrophic trauma that he vows to never allow another atrocity like this to happen again. Then he suffers a Villainous Breakdown after being foiled by the resistance and decides to destroy both Metropolis (again) and Gotham City to teach Batman and his allies a lesson. And when Shazam protests, Superman kills him in cold-blood meaning he has no problem killing a child himself, despite the death of his own unborn one.
• In Kid Icarus: Uprising, the gods talk a good game about humans causing nothing but pain, suffering, and war, but this calling out becomes moot — especially in the subject of the nature Goddess Viridi, who decides to wipe out an entire section of civilization with her Reset Bomb to pave the way for a human-uninhabitable nature haven. Some of these people do get called out on this, but sometimes it's never even addressed.
• Knights of the Old Republic: The player character is offered a chance to murder several targets on behalf of a mysterious group of assassins known as the Genoharadan. Your targets are murderers, terrorists, slavers. In short, unsavoury people. Yet the Genoharadan are perfectly content with murdering these people in exchange for "preserving the Republic."
  • One of the targets, Lorgal, refers to himself as a "great liberator." He questions why it's okay for someone to kill millions of people with warships and be hailed as a war hero, and yet he is regarded as a terrorist for killing hundreds with explosives.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords: Kreia frequently criticises the Jedi Order's teachings, accusing them of being set in their ways, arrogant and narrow minded. Of course, if you ever question her teachings, you immediately lose influence with her, meaning she's just as narrow minded in her own way.
• In the Mass Effect universe, the krogan universally decry the actions of the Galactic Council in infecting their species with the genophage. However, what makes this a case of this trope is exactly why it happened: at the end of the Rachni Wars, a grateful Council gave the krogan multiple new planets to colonize. Then it turned out that being freed from their Death World of a home planet allowed the krogan's Explosive Breeder tendencies to kick into overdrive, and they soon ran out of living room. So they started taking over more worlds to give themselves more living space, which only fuelled their growth. When the Council demanded they stop this behavior and start controlling their population growth, the krogan laughed at them and then declared war, seeking to exterminate the other races and colonize the entire galaxy themselves. As the turians and salarians point out, the genophage was an alternative way to end the war without committing total genocide against the krogan, who were already committing atrocities like bombarding planet-side cities with massive orbital strikes. Indeed, Mordin Solus, a salarian scientist who worked on the genophage whom you recruit in the second game, points out that the genophage was carefully tailored to simply drop krogan population growth to just a little more than they had back when they were confined to their homeworld — and it would have been a lot easier to make it a true "sterilize them all" plague. The krogan are a Dying Race because they've refused to learn from their mistakes, and are continuing their self-destructive methods despite no longer having the constant reinforcements to replace their dead. It isn't until the fourth game that we finally meet a krogan who's willing to admit that they brought the genophage on themselves.
  • Another example involves the asari. As the de facto leaders of the Council, they've made it a point of Council rules that discovered technology like the Prothean beacon should be shared among Council members. Yet in the third game it's revealed that they've been secretly sitting on a functioning beacon on Thessia since the last Reaper cycle and the knowledge they were able to extract from it is the reason why they were the first major spacefaring species in the current cycle. It takes the actual Reaper attack on Thessia before they admit what they have.
• Unsurprisingly, Dr. Wily from the Mega Man franchise has this in spades, such as in Mega Man 11 when he steals the 8 robot masters and reprograms them to be used against Mega Man and Dr. Light, and then turns around and is genuinely cross at Mega Man and Dr. Light for stealing his Double Gear system and using it against him. While they were using his original prototype (and how it's the only other reason why he loses again), Wily was the one who threw it away years ago in a fit of anger. Light simply kept and repaired it as a Tragic Keepsake that he never thought would come in handy.
• Mega Man Zero:
  • In 3, Copy X accuses Ciel and La Résistance of being extremists for not giving up the alternate energy system she had developed. Never mind that not only was Copy X the one who started the mass extermination of Reploids in Neo Arcadia in the first place, albeit for ensuring the comfort of the human population, but he also had no qualms about destroying an entire human residential district with a missile holding Omega, just to get the Dark Elf, meaning he can't even claim being a Well-Intentioned Extremist anymore.
  • Dr. Weil has a terminal case of this. He often goes off about how reploids deserve to be enslaved for their actions in the Maverick Wars and that humans deserve to be punished for giving him The Punishment when he was just attempting to deal with the reploid problem. Thing is, Weil's "solution" was to start an even bigger war that killed off 60% of the human population and 90% of the reploid one with a mass Mind Control device in the form of the most powerful and destructive Reploid in existence that ruined the planet's environment in the process.
• In Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, the terrorist Dolzaev calls Raiden a murderer for killing Mistral, upon which Raiden calls him out for the hypocrisy of saying such while being involved with Desperado.
• In the post-Good Ending cutscene of Oddworld: Soulstorm, second of the post-reboot Oddworld titles, the last newspaper title shown notes that the Glukkons are completely clueless as to why their Mudokon slaves are abandoning their positions in ever-increasing numbers. The same slaves they subject to hideously unsafe working environments, mercilessly abuse, and whose entire culture they have all but destroyed in the name of first spite and petty jealousy, and then later pure corporate greed.
• In Pokémon Sun and Moon, Lillie calls out her mother for treating her Pokémon like they're nothing but objects that she can use and discard as she pleases. In response, Lusamine snaps back that Pokémon Trainers essentially do the same thing as they regularly remove Pokémon they no longer have any use for from their party. Played for Drama as the "storage system" here is Poké Pelago, a series of islands where the player's Pokémon can hang out and do different activities.
• Portal: GLaDOS constantly calls Chell "monster" and accuses her of breaking her heart and/or trying to kill her...despite the fact that she's killed hundreds if not thousands of people in the past, would do it again in a heartbeat if she could get her hands on more humans(which she does at the end of CO-OP mode. Thousands more. She kills them all in less than a week), and spends a good chunk of both the first game and the sequel trying to kill Chell.
• In [PROTOTYPE 2], the first Orion Super-Soldier you fight calls James evil for killing his friend when said person was most likely just another dog-punting Sociopathic Soldier like so many Blackwatch men, and what's to say the Orion wasn't the same before his improvement?
  • Heller himself is also a major example of this; he is tearing apart the entire military (and possibly civilians as well,) primarily as a Roaring Rampage of Revenge on Mercer and Blackwatch for causing the disaster that he thinks got his daughter killed, with The Virus-caused Zombie Apocalypse Mercer's spreading and the indiscriminate violence towards civilians and Sociopathic Soldier tendencies of Blackwatch being of secondary importance.
  • Mercer too. In the original game he wakes up amnesiac and determined to get to the bottom of what happened to cause the outbreak in the first place... by hacking away mercilessly at Blackwatch and the Marines. The Marines are legitimately are trying to save Manhattan, and Mercer spends a significant amount of the game sabotaging their efforts in order to get at Blackwatch and Gentek. And in a comic series bridging the two games, he decides to destroy humanity based on his view that they are self-centered and unworthy of continued existence... despite the fact that he was just as self-obsessed and violent as any of them.
• Resident Evil Village
  • Lady Dimitrescu becomes more and more aghast at you ransacking her home and killing her daughters, despite the fact that those daughters attacked and kidnapped you with full intention to exsanguinate Ethan, and the whole reason you're there in the first place is that she has a piece of your baby daughter, and yet Lady D acts like she has been nothing but a gracious host.
  • Mother Miranda has a hard time understanding that the reason Ethan is so hell-bent on killing her, and how he's so unstoppable, is that she kidnapped his daughter Rose. During her boss fight, she seems baffled as to why he is trying to prevent her from resurrecting her own daughter using Rose as a vessel, convinced that he would just lay down and die after his "role is fulfilled", and doesn't realize she's trying to do to him what happened to her.
• RuneScape has developed a particular taste for this trope, particularly where the Black Knights are concerned. They detest the White Knights for unjustly exiling them from Falador and smearing their good name, but think nothing of their own efforts in doing the same to the followers of Zaros. Their leader, Lord Daquarius, treats his men as family and will do anything to protect even one of them from "unjust" killing... but you don't even have the option of mentioning what Daquarius personally did to the Sonde family just for being nobility, or why Sir Owen Sonde, a child at the time his family was massacred, is now baying for his blood, nor of what Daquarius thinks of nepotism in his ranks (here's a hint: he sicced an assassin who dissolved the benefactor in acid, alive).
• In Sam & Max Hit the Road, the following exchange occurs during the intro, after the Freelance Police realize they forgot to get rid of a time bomb during the opening credits:
  Sam: Max, where should I put this so it doesn't hurt anyone we know or care about?
  Max: Out the window, Sam! There's nothing but strangers out there.
  (Sam chucks the bomb out the window, whereupon it explodes)
  Sam: I hope there was nobody on that bus.
  Max: Nobody we know, at least.
  • Well, the series does run on Rule of Funny and Comedic Sociopathy...
  • Pretty much summed up with this quote from Culture Shock.
    Max We punish people who do it who aren't us.
• Septerra Core: The Chosen suffer from this trope. Azziz said it best to Maya about the Chosen's attitude towards other people, "No, my dear. They hardly notice us at all. We are like ants to them."
• Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time: Le Paradox fully expects his various partners and flunkies to help him in his Evil Plan, but whenever they ask him to return in kind, he blows them off.
• Multiple times in the Starcraft series, Arcturus Mengsk will condemn someone for the death and destruction they've caused, ignoring that he's not only a fascist tyrant, but that he rose to power by using Psi-Emitters to make the Zerg kill his opposition, including the entire planet of Tarsonis. The latter is considered a Moral Event Horizon in-universe since, while previous uses were a single Psi-Emitter used on a military target, Mengsk had several used on Tarsonis then had the Protoss Fleet sent to kill the Zerg eliminated to insure the entire planet was wiped out. Best summed up in StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm just before his death.
  Mengsk: I made you into a monster Kerrigan!
  Sarah Kerrigan: You made us all into monsters.
• Sonic Adventure 2: Gerald Robotnik blamed his rampage on GUN and the rest of the world for ruthlessly purging his orbital station, including civilians like his granddaughter... except in Shadow the Hedgehog, it turns out that G.U.N. was Properly Paranoid after it turned out that Gerald sold out to aliens and created a supersoldier (Shadow) out of alien genetics with the support of a galactic conqueror, meaning anyone on the station could have been infected or secretly an alien spy because of Gerald.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: There's a lot of this going around. The Sith are of course the absolute worst, but the rest of the Empire isn't much better, the Republic has its own problems, and even the Jedi aren't immune.
  • The first chapter of the Jedi Sentinel story focuses on Darth Angral, who wants revenge on you for killing his son. This despite the fact that his son was a spy working on a planet-killing superweapon for the Empire, and he only died because he refused to surrender. You can point this out multiple times, but Angral always ignores you.
  • On Alderaan, the various houses are absolutely convinced that the only people opposing them are pure evil. They will call you out on fighting to stop them from executing False Flag Operations, torturing semi-sentient animals, and just plain disagreeing with them. Conversely, if you're a Jedi, the leaders will point out the hypocrisy of claiming that you're there to save someone's life after you just slaughtered all their guards.
  • This is pretty much the core theme of the Bounty Hunter storyline — After the Hunter executes a contract on a single Jedi Master during the Great Hunt, Jedi Master Jun Seros proceeds to first lay a trap to arrest the Hunter (seemingly with the expectation for it to turn into a firefight and presumable death of the Hunter), then kills several of the Hunter's associates, and follows it all up with framing the Hunter for enough charges to make them the Republic's Most Wanted. Because when bounty hunters go after specific individuals, it's murder, but when Jedi do it, it's JUSTICE!
• Tales Series:
  • In Tales of the Abyss, we have Arietta the Wild. "You shot fire... at my friend! I'm really going to make you pay now!" Um, sweetie, your friend tried to snatch him off a roof, presumably to be killed. The fire was self-defense. Granted, she at least has an excuse, having been raised by monsters, and so not really having a chance to develop much empathy for other people.
    • She also holds it against you for killing the liger matriarch and her cubs, despite the fact that the first things the cubs would do (and this was explicitly stated) is raid the nearby village and eat every human in sight.
    • Then again, the whole incident was Mieu's fault in the first place: the young Cheagle accidentally caused a fire in the forest where the ligers lived and forced them to recuperate at the Cheagle Forest. Luke even lampshades in a skit that if Mieu hadn't done that, they wouldn't have been forced to kill the liger matriarch, and later get Arietta to bear a revenge grudge on the group in the next dungeon.
  • Forcystus from Tales of Symphonia once put a bloody end to an army of humans responsible for genocide against Half-Elves. By the time we see him, he is a Desian Grand Cardinal and he punishes the death of a few of his soldiers by burning down the hero's hometown and turning a helpless old woman into a monster and forcing two of the protagonists to kill her in a boss fight.
    • This could apply to the Desians as a whole. They're allegedly inspired to join because of the persecution half-elves suffer at the hands of humans, but treat the humans in their custody as little more than cattle, slinging around "inferior being" as a synonym for "human." The game is not shy either about the Vicious Cycle nature of how so many humans hate half-elves because of how the Desians treat humans.
• In the "Old Wounds" comic for Team Fortress 2, the Classic team Heavy is infuriated that the mercs killed some of his teammates namely the Classic Pyro, Spy, and Demoman, and hopes that most of the modern team suffers. He himself had no qualms with gunning down one of their teammates, then having a second tortured and setting Gray Mann's blood-sucking robots on the mercs.
• This trope is endemic to Touhou Project, and rather perplexing considering Gensoukyou is regularly portrayed as a paradise. It ranges from small, rather insignificant details (for example Sakuya being annoyed that Reimu and Marisa are invading Koumakan, her home and place of employment, but sees nothing wrong with herself invading Eientei) to massive, potentially horrifying things (for example youkai eating the human residents of Gensoukyou is abhorred, but abducting humans from outside of Gensoukyou and eating them is perfectly fine).
  • A lot of it stems from Gensoukyou being portrayed as a paradise for Youkai. Almost all of said youkai have their own systems of Blue-and-Orange Morality, which aren't consistent with each other, let alone a human's values, and the Fridge Horror is largely intention. In-Universe, the Hakurei shrine maiden is supposed to be an active force keeping the youkai in line so the human residents have a sense of security, but... well, see the next point.
  • Reimu's memetic reputation as a bitch stems from her impersonal treatment of everyone, which is either to rudely dismiss them or blow them the hell away. She doesn't even bother with her duties as shrine maiden unless an incident directly involves her, and then wonders why she doesn't get donations from the humans she's not protecting from youkai.
• In Trauma Center, the Big Bad Adam believes that medicine goes against the "right order" of the world and unnaturally prolongs human life. Yeah, sure. This coming from the guy who made himself immortal through his own man-made viruses. Nothing unnatural about that, right? He justifies this by claiming he has placed himself outside the cycle of nature, not giving and not taking anything from the world...
• In Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, Nathan Drake — who has spent the entire franchise killing thousands of people over treasure — has this to say when he destroys an ancient statue: "I hope I’m not going to hell for this."
• View from Below:
  • The Crimson Skulls like to play the victim whenever anyone fights back against them and always swear to avenge their brethren, even though they're performing human sacrifices to gain the blessing of their god and have killed eleven humans so far without a shred of mercy.
  • The Crimson God condemns Delilah's fellow townspeople for killing her, even though he was the one who manipulated her into performing human sacrifices to revive him.
• In Watch_Dogs, you play as Aiden Pearce, who can be easily described as a shameless, remorseless thief, con artist, fraudster and a murderous criminal, which shows little compunction towards working with mobsters, torturing his enemies or simply killing anyone who gets in his way. However, you spend much of the game taking out other thieves, fraudsters and murderers in a way that implies Pearce somehow has the moral high ground, with him living up to the title of "vigilante". It is jarring that you get points for beating up pickpockets, but there is little to no comment on Pearce draining innocent peoples bank accounts or stealing cars. It's hard to walk away from the game not feeling like a massive hypocrite.
• The Witcher: Defied by Geralt of Rivia. In the first game, he's asked why he's missing his silver blade by Shani, who says that his silver sword is for killing monsters and his steel sword for killing humans — Geralt corrects her, saying both can be for monsters. He eventually proves this by skewering the Big Bad with his silver sword in the middle of the villain's ironic protest "but, that sword's for monsters!" In the trailer for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, he collects a contract on a beast killing innocents for food, takes the coin and then murders his employers, as they're witch hunters in the middle of beating and lynching an innocent girl themselves, delivering this exchange:
  Witch Hunter: Wh-What... What are you doing!?
  Geralt: Killing monsters.
• World of Warcraft:
  • D.E.H.T.A. is horrified at the cruel treatment that the wildlife of Northrend suffers at the hands of Nesingwary's hunters, and respond by sending the players to kill the hunters. They seem fairly reluctant about having to kill Ned's pet rhino Lunchbox along with him, but show no qualms about killing the rest of the hunters, and will attack any player who approaches their camp covered in animal blood, even if the player killed the animal in self-defense. You can also trade with them for items and buffs, using hunter's ears as currency.
  • Many of the conflicts between The Alliance and The Horde often seem to boil down to this. On the Isle of Thunder, Taran Zhu berates Jaina Proudmoore and Lor'themar Theron to stop their fighting so no more retaliations will happen, citing that each reaction is seen as a new hostile action by either side. There are still dozens of other focal points of war and contention between The Alliance and The Horde, however, where each cries foul over the other's actions.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: A number of the people on both sides of the Keves-Agnus conflict, even a few of the main characters at the beginning, suffer this to varying degrees. To sum up both their perspectives; you and your people live for only ten years, and your nation can only survive by attacking a neighbouring one and killing as many of their people as possible so you can absorb their life into your Flame Clocks. The people of the nation you're attacking decide to fight back and kill your friends and comrades? Well, then they clearly deserve getting wiped out and having their life force drained for your nation's use.

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