- Shockingly, the WDOW in Cave Story vs. I.M. Meen is, in fact, literally none other than DeviantArt itself, in the exact same fashion as Ballos; as self-punishment for allowing extremely unhealthy and gratuitous amounts of Rule 34 to spread virally and plague the Internet like a disease, he has permanently locked himself inside the Zeal Chamber, deep down in the darkest depths of Internet fanfiction hell, with his inner pervertedness and fetishism growing by the minute to the point of becoming a Superpower Meltdown when Jack finally reaches his lair and attacks him.
- Child of the Storm has the usual example of Magneto, though he's mostly reformed (but definitely not tamed).
- The Winter Soldier, having been brainwashed and broken into the greatest nightmare of the Cold War. Thankfully, there is a good man underneath, though it takes time to get to him.
- Maddie Pryor a.k.a. Rachel Grey is a particularly horrific case of this, having been kidnapped from her cradle the night that she and her twin sister, Jean, were born, by Sinister and raised from the start as a Living Weapon, experiment, and tracker/enforcer. Oh, and she thinks that she's artificial, a clone of some kind.
- Harry, after suffering just a little bit too much and suffering an epic Break the Cutie in being transformed into the Red Son, the next generation Winter Soldier, finally snaps. Cue... the Dark Phoenix.
- Paradoxus: Later in the plot, Trisha turns into one. This character has witnessed her own mother's assassination in a gruesome way while still a little girl. She has been through Training from Hell since then, has awful mental health (PTSD, Survivor's Guilt, low self-esteem, and severe, chronic depression), is probably overworked, is hated by her people, and has to wage a nearly lost war to protect those same people. The nail in the coffin happens when her mother's nemeses torture her into insanity to get payback to a dead woman and so, she decides to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge and die in the process, or kill herself once she has eliminated the last of her enemies. This involves burning several cities down.
- There Was Once an Avenger From Krypton: Vilgax is a maniacal tyrant who conquers worlds and slaughters all who get in his way, but it's hard to dismiss the circumstances that made him that way. Born an orphan and remade as the greatest champion and warrior of his homeworld, only to fail in his duty of protecting it from Thanos. He was then forced to watch as the Mad Titan razed his planet to the ground, leaving him as the last of his people, having nothing left but a burning desire for vengeance against Thanos. Even though Ben states that it excuses none of his actions, he still can't help but feel sorry for him, even promising Vilgax a shot at killing Thanos when the time comes.
- Light is Ret Conned into being one in the The Art Of Drowning—he becomes Kira because he wants to avenge his long lost childhood friend Lawliet.
- In Constant Temptation Light is Ret Conned into one again—he is given the Back Story that his father and role model growing up turned out to be a Dirty Cop and raging homophobe who arranged the deaths of all Light's past Love Interests. Light figured out that his father was behind the deaths and blamed himself for it because he wasn't able to protect them. Light came to the conclusion that there was no justice in this world but no one should suffer as he did, he wished there was some way he could protect everyone... and then Light found the Death Note...
- Light/Kira and Mello in A Cure for Love. L even calls them on it:L (to Mello): Kira is vengeance. Selfish vengeance. You're just two people who have thrown their toys out of their cot because they feel injured. Kira is angry at the world as he saw it and you're angry at him.Mello: I'm nothing like Kira.L: No, you're the same. Same motivation, different scale of destruction.
- Light as Kira is this in Solitude — acting as Kira allowed him to take back control that was taken from him though he gets better in the end.
- Forward has Inducer One-One-Nine, who is a type of psychic that is capable of Mind Manipulation. One-One-Nine is also a nine-year-old girl named Kathryn Wade, who was driven to insanity by her experiences at the Academy, to the point that in her fear of being recaptured she took control of a town and turned them into her personal killing horde, and later wiped out a space station with nearly a thousand people on board.
- Freedom Dies With Me has War Lilac; the whole story is more or less how she got to that state. She gets continuously thrown head-first through the wringer and, upon snapping, embarks on a long four-year rampage that leaves Planet Avalice a wasteland. Somewhat deconstructed; by the end of the story, she has grown weary of the grief and has become a full-on Death Seeker.
- Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): It's eventually revealed in Ghidorah's Backstory before it came to Earth that Ghidorah is this by origin. As described in Chapter 10 and further elaborated on by the author; Ichi, Ni and San were originally just three critters in an alien ecosystem fighting to survive, but they were captured by advanced alien Abusive Precursors who forcibly transformed the trio into the three-headed Ghidorah to be a Bioweapon Beast, tortured them and hardwired Terrible Ticking into their three brains which commanded them to "Kill Them All". Due to Being Tortured Makes You Evil, Ghidorah's middle head (Ichi, the "Eldest Brother") grew to hate any reminder of the now-dead Abusive Precursors with a white-hot passion, whilst the right head (Ni, the "Elder Brother") grew perpetually angry. Ghidorah Turned Against Their Masters and exterminated them almost as soon as they set it loose on its intended targets. When vengeance didn't satisfy the "Kill Them All" Ticking, Ghidorah tried inflicting destruction again and again to make the Terrible Ticking stop. After billions of years, the Ticking faded to a tolerable level, but by that time, Ghidorah had long since suffered Slowly Slipping Into Evil which had made it the gleefully-sadistic and psychopathic Omnicidal Maniac it now is.
- Harry in Heir— the severe abuse he receives from the Dursleys (along with the goading from the Tom Riddle horcrux in his head) pushes him over the edge. Also Tom Riddle / Voldemort is one because it's implied he had a psychotic break back when he was a boy attending an Orphanage of Fear when a girl posse killed his baby snake in front of him ala Elfen Lied.
- Harry Potter / Tristan Winter in The Jaded Eyes Series Since the only thing Muggles ever gave him was abuse and scars he brings about a Class 3 Apocalypse How against the Muggle world.
- Harry in Paradise Lost
. He learns dark magic in order to survive, comes to sees no point in fighting for a world that has forsaken him, and refuses to be manipulated or bent to the will of anyone ever again. - Harry again in Rise of the Wizards when he discovers that everyone he thought he could trust was lying and manipulating him. Over the course of the story he becomes darker and more paranoid as he is convinced that everyone is out to get him until he eventually seizes control of the wizarding world and becomes the next Voldemort in all but name.
- This is humanity's hat in Renegade Reinterpretations. The First Contact we had with the galaxy at large was with the batarians, and several centuries of effective enslavement and guerrilla warfare later, we aren't quite out to enslave the universe before it does the same to us, but we don't particularly take well to aliens telling us what we can and cannot do (the response to the Citadel telling us to avoid vaporizing the batarian homeworld was us building a record-breaking fleet to do exactly that). Because of this, the hypothetical Alternate Universe game has the Karma Meter, instead of Paragon and Renegade options, has "Assimilationist" ("We know better than you because we've suffered more, now hand over your government"), and "Xenonationalist" ("Leave us the hell alone, and we will return the favor"). Notably, it's said the asari favor us as lovers because of the redemption factor.
- In Mega Man: Defender of the Human Race, the female Robot Master in the beginning of episode 8 is activated by mistake, feels pain almost immediately upon waking, is unable to speak, overhears Wily talking about wiping her memory, and doesn't get a name before running off. She also has a mean shockwave that demolishes parts of Skull Fortress.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
- The story Faith and Doubt has the main villain Doubt as this. Doubt, at first glance, appears to be just another Enemy Within, whispering to Twilight and tricking her into being bad. It is only later that we learn that Doubt is a tragic figure who is the 6th Element of Harmony who lost his memory due to Celestia's actions. While he has the power to destroy the world (he can create alicorns on a whim) he gives the characters every chance to make things right and actually guides them towards stopping him. By the time the 19th chapter roles around and he is dying, all the characters have come full circle and now stand at his bedside, trying to save him. He gets better, reverting to his original form as Faith due to Twilight.
- Rarity in The Secret Life of Rarity counts as this. At first she is merely a serial killer for the fun of it when she discovers that she gets a power fix when she murders, but eventually she turns into one when it begins to affect her friends and family in a negative way. By then she can't stop because she has become so addicted to the power rush she gets when killing. It gets to the point where she hates herself after killing but she has so little control of her urges that she has to keep going when she sees somebody hurt her friends and family.
- Friendship is Witchcraft:
- Fluttershy, of all ponies. A Devil in Plain Sight and leader of the Religion of Evil, she also suffered from a very Abusive Parent that left her with issues. (It involved being found by robot wolves as a child. Who were built by her father. So he could murder them while leaving a disturbing message about love. With that message causing her to be viciously attacked by insects.)
- When Sweetie Belle gets upset at her sister, she threatens that if she can't be loved, she will make the world fear her and her (robotic) wrath instead. (Rarity mocks it, and Sweetie Belle storms off in a huff instead.)
- Inner Demons: One could argue that following the awakening of her Queen persona and her subsequent Face–Heel Turn, Twilight Sparkle qualifies, from her own perspective at least — she's convinced that her beloved mentor deceived her (which actually is true), and that her friends and brother abandoned and betrayed her (which is actually sorta true), so she's lashing out in anger at the world around her. And even if she didn't qualify beforehand, she definitely does qualify after Trixie — the only pony left she felt she could trust — is accidentally killed by Apple Bloom; after that, what little sanity she had left goes completely out the window, her powers fully consume her and transform her into an Alicorn, and she decides that rather than being Equestria's ruler, she'll be its destroyer. Celestia actually lampshades the definition of this trope when telling Shining Armor that his sister can still be saved from herself:"There is a difference between a monster and a destroyer. A monster has no heart, a destroyer may just be heartbroken."
- The Midnight Star has Midnight Star, an alternate version of Twilight Sparkle that lived in a true Crapsack World. In her world, Discord and Nightmare Moon joined forces to banish Princess Celestia to the sun, only to turn on each other and force ponies to fight for them for centuries until Discord eventually won. Most ponies fled to the forests filled with monster to escape his rule. Midnight's father died when she was three years old, her brother vanished when she was five and she watched her mother being eaten alive by a hydra a year later. This drove her insane and she took over Equestria and made it an even worse place to live in, following the ideal that all good things must end.
- The Pony POV Series has the second Big Bad, Princess Gaia/Nightmare Whisper who is actually Fluttershy's Superpowered Evil Side brought on by her "daughter" Fluttercruel (whom she's Sharing a Body with) accidentally performing the Break the Cutie her "father" (Discord) couldn't do in a well intentioned attempt to teach her about nature's cruel side. As a result, Fluttershy becomes Nightmare Whisper in the same way that Luna became Nightmare Moon and tries to take over the world in an attempt to make it a utopia. She's ultimately saved by the others, thankfully.
- Equestria's First Human: Hellfire had once been a proud soldier in Celestia's army, until a dragon burned his wife and child alive. Celestia dismissed his desire for vengeance. Hellfire faked his death and slaughtered the dragon. However, feeling dishonored by Celestia, he decided to murder her and use forbidden spells to take over Equestria, his actions quickly shredding all sympathy for him.
- Harmony Theory: Charisma, a Psycho for Hire and The Dragon to one of the stories two Big Bads, is revealed to have been driven insane by her own special talent for killing, which is constantly demanding that she kill everyone around her, and telling her the best ways to do so. Not only has this pretty much destroyed any chance she had at a healthy relationship, but it also drove her into murdering her own brother and being disowned by her family, at ten years old. Later, after Charisma has reached adulthood, she is so far gone she practically has an existential crisis when she doesn't want to kill her Love Interest. Chapter 33 reveals that she is so far gone, the only way she can see being at peace is to kill ''everyone'' and with a little help from the inverted Element of Loyalty, she can.
- Her Inner Demons: Sci-Twilight had endured bullying and abuse throughout her time at Crystal Prep. But the moment she became this was when Cinch and the Shadowbolts began pressuring into unleashing the magic, or face the loss of Everton and more scorn from her classmates. The stress and fury of defeat and losing her dreams pushed Sci-Twilight over the edge and turned her into Midnight Sparkle.
- Heir of the Nightmare: Luna endured antipathy from ponies who feared her night. She was pushed over the edge when the Knights of Ra, a group of Celestia-worshiping fanatics, kidnapped and tried to murder her daughter Twilight. Luna chose to become Nightmare Moon, and strike down Celestia, so that she would be so feared that nopony would dare touch Twilight.
- In Team 8, The possibility of Naruto becoming one of these is discussed. Itachi is attempting to break Kurenai's mind with his Dojutsu by making her live and relive the killing of herself and her team by a mob. She breaks it by forcing the illusion to faithfully recreate Naruto's likely reaction if he were to see Hinata killed: releasing the Kyuubi of his own will and letting it destroy the village.
- Kazama eventually becomes one in Echoes (Kagaseo).
- Rosario Vampire: Brightest Darkness Act VI has one in Talon Ryashen, the "Fairy Tale killer." He was just an ordinary boy until Fairy Tale kidnapped him off the streets and used him as a Super-Soldier experiment, turning him into a Half-Human Hybrid by injecting him with Alucard's blood. He escaped the facility when the experiments were completed, and was rejected by his family because of what he had become; as a result, he has embarked on a crusade to kill anyone and everyone who is or was part of Fairy Tale, including Unwitting Pawns, receptionists, and those who turned on the organization, such as Dark, Akua, and Kahlua Shuzen. As he puts it, Fairy Tale took everything from him, and he has nothing left to live for but revenge on the organization.
- Through Her Eyes: Ruby isn't one of these yet, but with her powers she very could well become one, and everyone in her life is trying to prevent it: she's a young girl with an incredible power - the ability to summon Creatures of Grimm - that she has very little control over, and is forced to hide for fear of the violence people would inflict on her if it ever went public. While everyone acknowledges that Ruby is a fundamentally good person, she could be a walking apocalypse if ever pushed too far, something Roman and the White Fang witness first hand in the climax. Ozpin reflects that they're very fortunate she grew up in a relatively happy, loving, and financially stable household, rather than being forced to experience the kinds of cruelties some other children are exposed to and giving her a reason to be bitter.
- May Marigold in both Blackened Bluebird and Holding the World On Their Shoulders. She suffers intense dysphoria for years, living in a deeply traditionalist society in an even more conservative and abusive family that meant she could never transition or live authentically as herself without being at beast cast out and disowned by her family. Then the well-intentioned but misguided actions of her Only Friend leads to her, through different but both tragic circumstances, being cast out of Atlas and left to suffer in a hopeless situation with no way out. Finally, she's rescued by Salem, a Manipulative Bitch who plays on May's desperate need for approval and affection in order to make her a fanatically loyal servant. She may be a Villain Protagonist, but it's impossible to not feel for her considering how hellish her life story is.
- Jimmy's Visit With Dr. Franklin: Jimmy Osgood, He was forced to watch his own twin brother, Johnny get tortured and blamed himself for it and the only way he thought he could make it up to him was to revive him via the Quantum Vapor and to kill The Meta-Breed before then so they won't try to kill him again.
- The End of Ends tries to pull Beast Boy off as that, after he falls for the power of the Dark Prognosticus and tries to destroy the universe. His motivation for doing so is because he can't take life anymore after Terra does not want to come back to the team, following the ending of the show. Subverted heavily by the fact that he comes more off like a whinny little child who thinks breaking up with a girl is worse than losing your parents (or to compare to the Whole-Plot Reference, losing your love) and wants to see everyone suffer.
- Touhou Project fans love interpreting members of the massive cast as some form of this trope:
- Touhou Tonari has Yuyuko Saigyouji not able to control her powers over death while she was alive, which caused her to commit suicide.
- Touhou Ibunshu has Remilia, Flandre, Mokou and Yukari as varying flavours of "death to everyone" due to a long life (or unlife, in the case of the former two) of despair.
- Subverted in Imperfect Metamorphosis with Rin Satsuki, who despite suffering so much pain and abuse from nearly everyone around her since childhood she still doesn't want to hurt anyone, and her first action in the story is simply to discover why she had to suffer. It's everyone else who thinks she's this trope.
- As the story goes on, she seesaws further into and out of the "Destroyer" bit, thanks in part to a) the aforementioned witch hunt, b) her isolation induced mental instability, and c) having absorbed a particularly sadistic Fallen Angel. After devouring Nue and Mamizou she very definitely qualifies for this trope.
- In Paradoxus, Bloom's youngest daughter, Trisha, becomes a Woobie at a fairly early stage of the plot when she witnesses her mother's assassination and nearly dies herself in the same incident. Also, Training from Hell and being seen as an unworthy heiress by Domino's people. When her older sister is lost/dead in the past because of a failed time travel, Trisha gains the title of Destroyer of Worlds by going in a Roaring Rampage of Revenge to eliminate every single person that is to blame for her situation. She levels cities and sets them on fire and all.
Unsorted
- New Dawn has a surprising one: Andras the Devourer. At first, he seems like an expy of Lavos, complete with a countdown to a catastrophic awakening event, and being the source of a type of magic. Specifically, a type of magic that relies on turning your pain into destructive power. It turns out, though, that Andras has a very, very good reason for wanting the universe gone. First, he was a human bully who did all he did because his father never acknowledged him, he was a product of an affair, and his mother was always absent and inferred to be "selling herself". He became "strong" in order to make sure he could never be hurt by his peers. And then he falls into the Magic Side. He is abducted by Queen Anathema, given a very sloppy brainwashing that results in painful clashes between his new and old identity, he is the most abused of her "knights", he was hated by all the other ones, and then he was thought dead when she dropped him into "The Devouring Pit", a pit full of demonic entities. What happened was much crueler than if he was just killed. The creatures bound themselves to him and "he sank down into a lonely hell, a place where his only company was the echo of his screams". His own misery results in even more monstrous things merging into him in the course of his madness, resulting in the entity that would come to be known in the future as Andras the Devourer, or The Forsaken King. He is tortured, day by day, with even more Lovecraftian Superpower through the constant elevation of his power. By the time his arc comes around, he just wants it all to end.
