What is Dark Messiah?

Just to be clear, how are we defining Dark Messiah now? Depending on the case, a description rewrite may be in order.

Yeah can someone write a description for Dark Messiah that we all agree with?

Ah, geez. Let me try.

Dark Messiah (as currently described): The Messianic Archetype's Evil Counterpart. Just like Messianic Archetype, this is not necessarily a supernatural person, what is important is that they are presented as messianic in some form. They invariably want to change the world according to their vision and might even want to "save" it from a perceived evil, but the difference between it and Messianic Archetype is that they and their objective are portrayed as bad and something that the heroes need to stop.

Again, I feel the need to stress that this trope really requires people around the Messiah who believe in their cause, because otherwise every example of Well-Intentioned Extremist/Visionary Villain Big Bads would fall under this trope. Ra's al Ghul is a Dark Messiah, but Ozymandias is not. He's just a Well-Intentioned Extremist with a Bright Is Not Good outfit. Same deal with Korvac, though he at least has godlike power.

If they are backed by the resident forces of evil of the setting, they might also be The Antichrist.

tl,dr A Dark Messiah must be a Messiah first, and Dark second.

Edited by DBZfan102 on Sep 18th 2020 at 5:33:44 AM

First, I would like to apologize for saying Anakin is a Dark Messiah. At the time, I was thinking of Dark Messiah as a term, not the trope. I've since removed his entries on both pages that listed him as one since everyone here agreed that Anakin isn't a Dark Messiah, including me after second thoughts. Now for some responses.

We seem to be defining a Dark Messiah as a villain or Anti-Villain who presents themselves as a savior and preaches about creating a utopia; all the examples we agreed on in this thread fall into one of those categories. The people who follow the Dark Messiah sincerely believe in the message, but the Dark Messiah believing what they preach or not is optional. One thing that isn't clear to me yet is whether or not we agreed that a Dark Messiah can be heroic, although anti-heroic would be a more appropriate word here since a Dark Messiah must always be ruthless. If we agree that they can't be anti-heroes, then the second paragraph on Dark Messiah should be rewritten or deleted entirely because it states that heroic versions of the archetype exist. The first sentence of the fourth paragraph would also need to be rewritten because saying that there's a villainous version implies the existence of a heroic one.

I think changing their civilization/society would be more accurate in some cases than world, but I do agree with the sentiment of them wanting to change things and "save" people. Agree with everything else. By the way, I noticed the changes you made to The Antichrist pages the day you made them; I should've thanked you for that earlier, but better late than never.

I'm considering creating a sandbox dedicated solely to cleaning up Dark Messiah's description. Does anyone else think it's good idea, or is doing so (for now at least) unnecessary?

Edited by Kevjro7 on Sep 21st 2020 at 7:53:26 AM

I'd agree with the sandbox.

Btw, False Prophet has been made.

I don't know the troper that decided to launch False Prophet …But He Sounds Handsome. And just to be absolutely clear, my version of Sandbox.Dark Messiah Description Clean Up would only be about cleaning the description, not the examples—we can handle the cleanup one step at a time. I'm gonna wait for the others to respond first before creating the sandbox.

Edited by Kevjro7 on Sep 20th 2020 at 11:08:27 AM

I also think a sandbox would be a good idea.

Since 2 other tropers support it, and since nobody has made any objections yet, I'll create Sandbox.Dark Messiah Description Clean Up tomorrow. And we should see if Quotes.Dark Messiah needs cleanup work as well.

I've created Sandbox.Dark Messiah Description Clean Up. Do you guys think the laconic is good?

I know this thread is 2 years old but I stumbled across it and wanted to share my thoughts.

The way I understand it a Dark Messiah can be summed up as "A villain (or morally grey character) who sees and/or presents themselves as a saviour".