Moral Event Horizon/Literature

"Jake: "He's right. We have to win." Rachel: (Narrating) "I know how the others think of me. I know that I sometimes... get too involved in the killing. But even I know that the words 'we have to win' are the first four steps down the road to hell.""
 * The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; clearly, when Hyde brutally murders Sir Danvers Carew for absolutely no reason, he has reached this point. However, Jekyll crosses it himself in his decision to continue using the formula, despite knowing his actions have made him a brutal killer as a result.
 * Frankenstein: When the Monster kills Victor's younger brother and frames his nanny for it, that is indeed evil, but is as least partially an accident. However, the monster truly crosses the line later by maliciously murdering Elizabeth.
 * On the other hand, Victor crosses it simply by allowing the poor nanny to hang for a murder he knows she's innocent of. Sure, nobody would believe him if he told what really happened, but he doesn't even try to suggest the poor woman was framed.
 * In Tolkien's The Silmarillion, Melkor's destruction of the Two Trees, murder of Finwë and theft of the Silmarils. After this, he can never again take a form that looks anything other than completely evil, and is named as Morgoth, the Dark Enemy of the World.
 * In the Akallabêth, after the Silmarillion but before the events of the The Lord of the Rings, Sauron crosses it when he engineers the destruction of Númenor by corrupting its king; like Morgoth, after this action he can never again take an appearance that is not evil.
 * Saruman in The Lord of the Rings crosses the Moral Event Horizon at the very end, when does everything possible to destroy the Shire out of pure spite. Up until that point, he'd done plenty of awful things, but had continually been offered (and refused) opportunities for redemption. The destruction of the Shire shows that he's irrevocably fallen from a wizard who was once great and wise to a bitter man with nothing left but hatred and the desire to harm others as much as possible.
 * While never a morally upstanding guy, Turin is one of the few sympathetic characters in Middle Earth to pass this, at the climax of The Children of Hurin when he murders a lame man in a fir of rage, leaving even himself so disgusted that he commits suicide.
 * Kinpatsu Sakamochi crosses it when he reveals to the class that he raped Shuya and Yoshitoki's caretaker. Just to add insult to injury, he.
 * Even if it wasn't fully intentional, Badrang certainly crossed this in Martin the Warrior when he  Martin must've been aware of this, since he wasted very little time
 * Vilu Daskar from Legend of Luke also qualifies. He had done many evil deeds in his time, but the worst chronicled was the incident where he promised a family of hedgehogs he'd release them, if they showed him the hiding place of their secret stash of grain - then "released" them, tied up in their own grain sacks, weighted down with stones! He also murdered, laughing his head off all the while!
 * In the Harry Turtledove novel The Guns of the South, the AWB crosses this when they gun down Robert E. Lee's family in the middle of a crowd. The fact that they would be so single-mindedly callous turns pretty much the entire Confederacy against them.
 * It wasn't just the collateral damage, or even the fact that President Lee lost his wife, it was the fact that the AWB tried to "undo" a democratic election by assassination that was the MEH.
 * Driving the point home is the fact that Nathan Bedford Forrest, Lee's opponent in said election in an alliance with the AWB, requests permission to lead the Confederate Army against them. Which means they must REALLY have crossed the MEH: Forrest is generally regarded as a real life Complete Monster.
 * The AWB was too violent and too racist for one of the real-life founders of the Ku Klux Klan. The mind quite frankly boggles to think of it.
 * In Modern Faerie Tales there is an interesting example: Roiben, a noble knight of the seelie court, is mystically compelled to obey the commands of the sadistic unseelie queen. Her idea of a good time is forcing him to make sadistic choices that often require crossing the line in such a manner.
 * Starting from Dark Moon in The Firebringer Trilogy, the once-honorable and noble unicorn king Korr starts getting... a little crazy. At one point, he charges two innocent mares, with the clear intent to kill at least one of them. But he truly crosses the line when his own daughter steps in front of him... and he doesn't so much as falter.
 * In Chung Kuo, rebel leader deVore crosses the moral event horizon in an infamous scene and never looks back.
 * The famous Swedish Millennium trilogy has a both gruesome and realistic crossing of the Moral Event Horizon. From his first appearance, the lawyer Nils Bjurman is smug and arrogant. He is the legal guardian of the protagonist Lisbeth Salander - she is borderline-insane and thus declared unfit to be independent. Bjurman gradually abuses his position more and more: first interrogating Lisbeth about her sex life, then blackmailing her into giving him a blow job. However, on their next meeting he crosses the Moral Event Horizon in a spectacularly disgusting way: he binds and handcuffs her to a bed, then anally rapes her all night. He really gets what's coming to him though.
 * In the Eternal Champion novella, the human military commander played near it when he . But, the main character Ekrose crossed this firmly when he.
 * Chris Hargensen attained this status in Stephen King's first novel, Carrie. It's made clear in dialogue and descriptions that she is a cruel, manipulative, sadistic creature (one of her earlier exploits involved putting a firecracker in another girl's shoe, nearly causing the girl to lose some toes) who has never really faced consequences because of her father's status and willingness to use it. She sets off the destruction of the whole town with the Prank Date she arranges, and nobody is sorry when she finally gets it.
 * Her boyfriend, Billy Nolan, takes part in the lethal prank too. And we shall not even get into Margaret White's treatment of her daughter...
 * When Dolores Umbridge takes over, she spends most of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix finding new and more creative ways to Kick the Dog (usually Harry). Her Moral Event Horizon probably comes when she forces Harry to write lines using an enchanted quill that repeatedly carves the words into his own hand, until it won't stop bleeding; if not, it's after she becomes Headmistress when we find out she's using that punishment against students basically indiscriminately for minor offences. Then she gets worse in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
 * Dumbledore invokes this trope himself in relation to Voldemort, describing the as "moving beyond the realm of what we might describe as 'usual evil.'" Considering the implications of, this is probably justified.
 * Also crossed when Bellatrix, Barty Jr., and two other Death Eaters subject Alice and Frank Longbottom (Neville's parents) to a Fate Worse Than Death - prolonged torture by Cruciatus curse until they became insane, unrecognizable vegetables. It's even worse that they did it after Voldemort was gone.
 * Wormtail is an instructive example of where true event horizons lie. While  was certainly evil, he could have still been redeemed. But after he  he had crossed the line permanently.
 * I'd say, after the initial betrayal he at least had a meager chance to start the life anew, probably in another country. When he resurrected Voldemort, he truly cemented his place in darkness and ensured that the casualties would be much worse than those he caused himself.
 * Vincent Crabbe, along with Goyle and Malfoy were mostly ineffectual rivals to our trio, but towards the end, even when Draco is dead set against it.
 * In Catch-22, the character Aarfy is portrayed as a bumbling fool, more of a constant nuisance to the protagonist Yossarian than anything else. Throughout the book the reader is given very small glimpses and hints that he may be more than a little odd in the head. This finally culminates in Aarfy raping and murdering a woman, and getting off unpunished.
 * One could also point to Milo Minderbinder. He's a sleazeball war profiteer from the beginning, but he really crosses the horizon when he arranged for his own base to be strafed. He is rather smug and amused by the incident, too.
 * The strafing thing started after he finished blowing up the base, which would allow him to once again sell his overstock cotton at a profit. He also gets the dead man in Yossarian's tent killed and tries to get rid of all that cotton by making the other officers eat it, while fully aware that you can't eat cotton. And he revealed this plan to Yossarian during a funeral.
 * Needless to say, he eventually get the cotton sold to Germans - to the enemy. On the condition that they strafe their own base.
 * Jefferson Pinkard remains a sympathetic character for amazingly long in Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 series, despite being a member of the Nazi-equivalent Freedom Party, as we've known him since long before he joined and understand exactly why he's bitter enough to do it. At most, the reader is probably hoping for a while after he joins that he'll realize the path he's on before it's too late. However, when he comes up with a way to mass murder black people using truck fumes, the line is finally crossed definitively.
 * In my opinion, he'd crossed the line before that, given the way he treats his wife earlier in the series. You could say his actions are somewhat justified, as he walked in on her cheating on him, but he hadn't stayed true to her either, which blows his reaction waaay out of proportion. I personally wasn't at all shocked at his masterminding the Freedom Party death camp policies by that point.
 * Darth Caedus, the villainous Jacen Solo, was apparently intended, to be morally grey at first, sliding down into worse and worse acts of Necessary Evil until the Evil overwhelmed the Necessary. It didn't really turn out like that, considering what he did, including Fans lost all sympathy for him long before this was intended to happen.
 * Interestingly, what his family considered to be his Moral Event Horizon was comparatively minor,
 * Also from the Star Wars Expanded Universe, we have an in-universe example with Kyp Durron, a young Jedi who in the Jedi Academy Trilogy gets influenced by an ancient Sith spirit to steal a superweapon out of the heart of the local gas giant and go on a spree with it, causing supernovas which kill the populations of various planets. He then flies to a training camp planet supporting about twenty-five million people where his brother had gone to train, was told by an Obstructive Bureaucrat that his brother had been killed during this training, and fired a nova-causing missile at the sun. Then it turned out that the bureaucrat had simply lied, and the brother was flown over to try and stop him, but it was too late; the only survivor in the entire system was Kyp, safe in his superweapon. Later the main characters found him and convinced him to stick the superweapon into a black hole, which almost resulted in his death; instead he lived, recovered, and went back to training at the Jedi Academy. Because the worlds he'd killed had been Imperial worlds, and he felt bad about killing his brother, and he'd supposedly been possessed by a four-thousand-year old Dark Lord who made him do it, all was forgiven. Later books called him on it and called it hard. He'd been influenced, not possessed, or he would have actually killed Luke Skywalker instead of knocking him out. These had still been people who, as the Fix Fic type novel I, Jedi says, had had nothing in any reality to do with him. It became something he could never live down, sometimes making him The Atoner, sometimes making him tired of being reminded of something he did as a teenager when he was in his forties, trying to be a respectable member of the Jedi Council. Some characters are never able to forgive him.
 * Thrackan Sal-Solo crossed the horizon in the eyes of the peoples of the Corellian system, especially the Selonians, by holding his first cousins once removed hostage (as leverage on their mother, the Supreme Chancellor) and then trying to vape them.
 * The destruction of Alderaan is an in-universe Moral Event Horizon for a number of characters. It caused a lot of Imperials to defect to the Rebellion, which even before then was largely composed of people who had been Imperial citizens or soldiers at some point. They accepted this new influx, even knowing that some of these ex-Imperials had fought against and killed them. After that, though, ex-Imperial recruits were regarded with more suspicion, many Rebels wondering why they hadn't left the Empire earlier, like right after the news about Alderaan got out. Staying in the Empire's service became a subjective Moral Event Horizon; the longer someone had been with the Empire after Alderaan, the less moral they were seen to be.
 * This is a plot point for how other characters treat Baron Soontir Fel in the X Wing Series, who left almost a year after the Emperor died, and who had been the Empire's most dangerous pilot in that year. Wedge Antilles trusted him instantly, and a pilot who had survived being shot down by him similarly welcomed him, but almost everyone else either was slow to warm up to him or outright refused to trust him. He killed too many Rebel pilots and didn't see what kind of monster he served until far too late.
 * In Allegiance, we see that while the viewpoint stormtroopers were just as shocked by the reports as anyone else, official Imperial policies were confused, some saying that the Death Star had been hijacked by Rebels, some saying that the entire planet had been populated by Imperial sympathizers, some saying that Tarkin had gone power-mad. Sure, the Rebellion had its own claim, but the Rebellion was a terrorist organization, and while they were starting to think that the Empire had some deep flaw, they didn't see any better alternative. Until their unit was sent to slaughter an entire village, and later one of them was threatened by an officer because he aimed to miss unarmed civilians.
 * Alderaan's destruction is a Moral Event Horizon for the man who pulled the trigger, too. In Death Star, we have Tenn Graneet, head gunner on the titular superweapon, who for most of the novel has his character built up. He always thought the Death Star would never really be used on a living planet, just on really big ships and bases and the like. When it comes to it, he follows orders. He realizes that as word gets around, even people serving with him on the Death Star treat him strangely, and knows that someday everyone will know, and everyone will loathe him as both the biggest mass murderer of his or possibly any time, and as someone who always, always followed orders. Unusually, and unlike Tarkin, who gave the order, he sees his action as a Moral Event Horizon, thinking that they would be right to hate him and one day kill him. The guilt doesn't let him sleep, and he knows he will be commanded to do worse -- if he doesn't he'll just be killed for disobedience and they will get another gunner and he will do it -- and, when they are in range of Yavin and his hand is at the final button, he desperately stalls while telling everyone to "Stand By," hoping that something would happen to stop him. And it did. Poor bastard. If he ever had a chance at redeeming himself, this would be it--his successful attempt to stall the destruction of Yavin long enough to allow Luke Skywalker to blow up the Death Star would be a remarkable example of Redemption Equals Death.
 * In the current series, Fate of the Jedi, Daala initially seems fairly reasonable -wrong, but reasonable- about the Jedi and their role in the Galactic Alliance, especially considering the actions of Jacen Solo. She even shuts down her "Jedi Court" when the parents of one of the Jedi that went berserk revealed that it's head judge was using the imprisoned jedi as wall art. Then, in Allies, she attempts to force the Jedi to bend to her will and surrender all Jedi that have snapped (despite the Jedi Temple being far better equipped to hold a mad force user.) by laying siege to the Temple with a Mandalorian Battle Fleet, with orders to "do what is necessary." The Jedi respond by sending out the Grand Master's personal assistant, a young apprentice (on the grounds that nobody could possibly misconstrue it as an attack, but she has the standing in the order to show good faith), wearing no armor, carrying no weapon, intending only to negotiate. The Mandalorian Commander, after ascertaining that she is neither of the Jedi he was sent to "arrest", calmly informs her that "My orders make no provision for negotiation." and pulls out his sidearm and shoots her down without warning. He then proceeds to announce that if the mad Jedi are not turned over promptly, he will order his fleet to vaporize the entire temple, and that anyone who tries to leave will be slaughtered without warning. Daala's response, on seeing the LIVE BROADCAST TO THE ENTIRE GALAXY, in which troops operating under her direct orders shot a teenaged girl down in cold blood and then threatened to massacre thousands of people? "Good. Now they should take me seriously." These words make her administration look like a terrorist organization.
 * That is a good example of why Daala is an evil ruler, but she crossed the Event Horizon long before that. She had standing orders from Tarkin himself to watch over a secret weapons facility situated in a black hole cluster, so when he died on the Death Star these orders were never replaced. So decades went by with she and her group of scientists completely unaware of outside events, such as the fall of the Empire, until Han Solo and some others stumble upon the facility. After realizing that her orders no longer matter, she takes her few Star Destroyers and sets about attacking civilian outposts and peaceful planets throughout the galaxy as a show of rebellion against the New Republic. Her targets? One is a completely unarmed and helpless outpost on Dantooine, simply because they had ties to the New Republic, and they are killed to the last citizen. Later on, she sees a Jedi of a particular species (ironically, the only member of that species that is even connected to the New Republic), decides that the entire planet is in bed with the Republic, and razes some of its major cities to the ground, killing countless civilians. She represents the worst that Imperials had to offer: completely amoral with a preference for killing civilians to make a point.
 * The entire Yuuzhan Vong race in the New Jedi Order series goes about crossing the MEH wantonly. Aside from the killing off of many major characters, some of their things involve going against their word and destroying an entire planet's ecosystem despite losing a contest for its fate, intentionally attacking/destroying civilian targets in order to burden the New Republic with billions of displaced refugees, spreading a lethal disease among civilians, breeding a toxic animal specially designed to butcher Jedi, and butcher hundreds of Jedi, many young adults and teens, sacrifice millions to their Gods, as well as horribly mutilating and exploiting anyone who joins them.
 * Joruus C'baoth cements his status as an Ax Crazy monster when he Mind Rapes General Covell into a mindless extension of his own will, and reveals his plan to do the same to the rest of the Empire.
 * In Michael Crichton's (may God rest his soul) second-to-last novel Pirate Latitudes, the Governor's new secretary, Robert Hacklett, At least he gets his due when
 * Zhaspar Clyntahn, Grand Inquisitor of the corrupt Church of God Awaiting, has managed at least one crossing of the horizon per Safehold book:
 * Off Armageddon Reef: On little more than a whim of paranoia, convinces his fellow leaders to authorize the (attempted) destruction of the Kingdom of Charis.
 * By Schism Rent Asunder: When that doesn't work out, has men under his command turn what should've been a bloodless seizure of Charisian merchant ships into the "Ferayd Massacre."
 * In-Story, the Charisian response to this act, the execution of the sixteen priests who instigated the massacre, is this for those loyal to Mother Church.
 * By Heresies Distressed: Orders the assassination of with the expectation that Charisian Emperor Cayleb take the blame.
 * A Mighty Fortress: Upon learning of a Reformist movement within the Church of God Awaiting, orders the arrests everyone directly involved he can get to, their families, every member of their personal staffs, and their families.
 * Arrested, tortured and executed by torture or by burning at the stake. Almost three thousand people died in various horrible ways... some of them as young as 14 (Worse, Safehold years are shorter than Earth-standard; chronologically, some of those kids were only 12). Oh, and he shows "mercy" by not executing the babies and toddlers--he just has them sent to extremely strict monasteries.
 * So heinous is this particular Moral Event Horizon that the long-awaited declaration of Holy War against Charis is rendered an afterthought by comparison.
 * But Clyntahn then rises to the challenge of finding something worse to do by... to be honest, I don't want to type the complete list because its that long and that horrible. So, skipping to the highlight, Clyntahn manages to -- on a lost colony world where the entire history of the human race prior to its founding has been entirely erased and literally zero precedent exists for his actions -- spontaneously re-invent the Nazi extermination camps, then throws over seven million people into them. In addition to deliberately sabotaging as much of an entire nation's harvest and transport network as he can immediately before a long winter begins, specifically to cause mass starvation. By the time he's done over fifteen percent of the entire population of the Republic of Siddermark will be dead, and it can be stated without sarcasm that Zhaspahr Clyntahn has reached a point where the only succinct summation of his character would be 'Adolf Hitler, only without the redeeming features.'
 * On top of reinventing Nazi-esque ethnic cleansing Clyntahn also reinvented terrorist suicide bombing and Stalin-esque police state terror and purges. Again, on a world that had never before known their like in either its history or its culture. The man managed to reproduce at least half of the greatest horrors of human history, all by himself, and all spontaneously without any prior examples to work from. Even Sauron needed prior inspiration to come up with some of his crap, for God's sake.
 * High Lord Kalarus of the Codex Alera charges straight across this and never looks back. He spends most of his first appearance finding inventive ways to be a sexist pig and belittle slaves, and his second involves attempting to kill a couple of 17-year-olds because his Smug Snake son tried to kill them and failed, and he doesn't want to look bad because of it. But we only really get an idea of how disgusting the man is in the book after that, when we learn . If the fact that he was isn't enough to make you hate him, the fact that he later  should definitely do it. He also had his Legions target orphanages when he attacked another city, just to draw the defenders out. Oh, and that
 * In The Dresden Files, Nicodemus Archleone comes off as Affably Evil and even portrays himself a Noble Demon...except  At this point, while he's still very affable and polite and erudite, there's no doubt that he is not sympathetic at all.
 * A later book in the series reveals that he actually crossed the MEH centuries ago. By unleashing something terrible on the world. Even if you haven't read the books, you've probably heard of it. It's called the Black Plague.
 * His wife Tessa has also crossed the line both before the first appearance and after she
 * This trope is notably averted by "Gentleman" Johnny Marcone. At first, he seems to be an irredeemable heartless mobster, who is willing to murder his enemies in cold blood. But every now and then, Marcone shows that there are lines that he is not willing to cross (e.g. hurting a child) and Harry realizes that Marcone can't simply be dismissed as a complete villain.
 * In the short story Aftermath, Murphy deals with what appears to be a mob of nasty fish-people called the Fomor. The lead Fomor callously tells it's Mooks to kill
 * Also in The Dresden Files the Grey Wardens believe that any breaking of the Laws of Magic constitutes crossing the MEH, as the Warlock will time and time again fall back to their law breaking ways; even the character Harry was dating implied that she and her fellow Wardens comisserated the day he was spared, since all Warlocks are destined to be repeat offenders. From what we've seen with Molly and even Harry they might not be totally wrong about this.
 * The villains of the book Arianna Ortega and the Red King easily cross the line soon after they are introduced. Arianna kidnaps Harry's daughter Maggie (while also having Maggie's foster family massacred) to use her in a sacrificial ritual. The reason she wants to do this? Harry's grandfather killed her asshole of a husband; the kicker is that Arianna didn't even love her husband (in fact she outright hated him.) She just felt that Harry and Ebeneezer had insulted her. She finally crosses it for good when she not only announces that she plans to go through with murdering a child in a few minutes while also saying that it's essentially "just business". Needless to say her Cruel and Unusual Death was VERY WELL DESERVED. Her Daddy the Red King manages to be even more repulsive; at first he appears to just be a Caligula style junkie (he even manages to help Harry out by ensuring that Harry not only gets to face Arianna before the sacrifice, but also ensures that the weapons to be used will be ones that will give Harry a fighting chance). Then, he reveals that it's essentially a massive act; he can actually speak perfect english which means that his junkie temper reactions to Harry's insults were all staged. He then tries to sacrifice Maggie himself just to gain the prestige Arianna would have gained. And he's the one who orchestrated the Red Court system, meaning that all of their atrocities (which include centuries, maybe even millenia) of slavery, murder, and torture of the people of South and Central America are his doing. Needless to say, the King's death at the hands of his own Bloodline Curse is also very satisfying. Both of these villains only show up in person in less then 100 pages (Arianna appears in two chapters, the Red King in five,) yet they still manage to be greater Complete Monsters than even Tessa and Nicodemus.
 * Count Olaf of A Series of Unfortunate Events arguably crosses the line with his habit of abusing children (both mentally and physically), blackmailing, murders and attempted murders of numerous people (if we count in those who he burned to death), multiple hoaxes and kidnapping of at least three people, while one of them being about 2-years old toddler. And who knows what else he got up to before the books.
 * In-Universe, the narrator implies that Count Olaf crossed the MEH when he slapped Klaus in the first book. But then again, that might just be by Lemony Snicket's standards.
 * Achilles from the Ender's Shadow series is decidedly a Complete Monster who kills out of the most psychopathic need to prove his own superiority to his victims. He enters the Moral Event Horizon as soon as he kills Poke. But before he kills Poke, and to any character who doesn't know about his killings, he seems normal enough that the people worried about him killing someone appear to be the paranoid ones.
 * In Rainbow Six, one member of a group of Basque separatists seeking to spring prisoners from jail coldly murders a Littlest Cancer Patient on live TV. No one really objects, though Ding does give a perfunctory dressing-down, when one of the team's snipers puts a round through the killer's liver so that he bleeds painfully to death rather than taking a Instant Death Bullet Boom! Headshot!.
 * The main villains also definitely count for
 * Comrade Death: Hector Sarek starts as merely an unscrupulous businessman in an immoral industry.
 * The God of Small Things: Baby Kochamma.
 * Percy Wetmore in The Green Mile. Being an obnoxious prick who hides behind his connections in a Depression-era Georgia prison? There were probably a few of those types back then. Killing a prisoner's pet mouse on the eve of their execution? Harsh, but luckily, it got better. Making it so said prisoner would be roasted alive in the electric chair as payback for laughing at him? There we go. Good enough for not only the guards to put him in a straitjacket and lock him in a storage room, but for John Coffey to risk his life using his healing power to punish him. And the anvil that hits him immediately afterward was a nice touch.
 * The Christopher Pike teen horror novel Chain Letter 2 is all about invoking this trope. Each of the protagonists is given a task to complete which will push them over the horizon. If the task is not completed, the character in question will be killed, effectively giving each of them the choice between death and damnation. The tasks given ranged from the truly horrific to the What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous?.
 * Napoleon of Animal Farm has crossed the line several times, such as by, but his definitive crossing of the Moral Event Horizon, the moment when you know he has become no better than Farmer Jones, the animals' original oppressor, is when he in a cruel and heartless You Have Outlived Your Usefulness moment. At least in the Animated Adaptation,.
 * The Death Lands: Many radiers, mutant bands, and others quickly tumble through this
 * In the Father Brown story The Sign of the Broken Swords, we learn that And as if that weren't bad enough,
 * In Star Trek: A Time to Kill, Prime Minister Kinchawn crosses it rather early, after he uses his illegally-acquired weapons to shoot down 10 Klingon ships in orbit of Tezwa, killing 6,000 warriors. If this didn't represent his crossing the line, his casual willingness to see millions of Tezwans killed in a Klingon counterstrike, including his own family, certainly does. What makes it worse is his apparent self-image as a Well-Intentioned Extremist, when he's really totally Drunk with Power. He sees his own children's death as merely a means to acquire more sympathy and thus more support and power, and seems to truly believe this is somehow reasonable.
 * For Esteban Garcia in The House of the Spirits it probably happens when he molests, and likely rapes, Alba when she is still a little girl. But if that isn't enough he helps to organize The Terror. During that which he find her again. This time we know for certain that he rapes and tortures her and at least threatens to let his men rape her too.
 * Needful Things Leland Gaunt seems like an Affably Evil Magnificent Bastard up until Crossing the MEH by long-distance?
 * from the Brother Cadfael novel Saint Peter's Fair has already stooped to murder to get his hands on . crosses the Horizon when he . The readers cheer when
 * This is how Beringar regards in The Hermit of Eyton Forest.
 * In Remote Man, if you don't think Frank Laana has crossed the line with his wildlife smuggling operations, you will when he beats the crap out of the teenage protagonist in a parking lot. While Ned has been investigating his activities for some time, the most Laana has to go on is that he looks like some kid he talked to for two minutes in an art gallery in the Northern Territory, and that for some reason he was sitting in the Concord Prison reception area. Aside from that, we are told of a particularly brutal smuggling job in which he had drugged a large number of birds to transport in a small suitcase. The drugs wore off too early, and the results were not pretty. It's this story that ultimately keeps Ned from giving up his plan.
 * In Robots and Empire, Kelden Amadiro and Levular Mandamus are already skirting pretty close when they, but then, at the moment when the plot is ready to be executed, Amadiro insists on literally turning the dial to twelve, which would Mandamus is suitably horrified by Amadiro's attempt to fulfill his quest for revenge by.
 * In A Song of Ice and Fire, Tywin Lannister crosses this before we even properly meet him. We hear in the backstory how he order the sacking of King's Landing which killed hundreds, but it gets worse when Tyrion tells the story of . It's made even worse when we later find out.
 * Don't forget the Ur Example of Literature's Caligula: Joffrey Baratheon, who decided to.
 * It could also be argued that Joffrey's MEH came much earlier, when his lie caused the deaths of.
 * Gregor Clegane's MEH came before the start of the series, when he
 * One of the most chilling MEH's of the novels comes when we find out what happened to Ramsay Bolton's wife: He locked her in a tower with nothing to eat. They found her with no fingers and blood around her mouth.
 * Once upon a time, Walder Frey and his brood were obnoxious hillbillies that the rest of Westeros had to tolerate because they held a major crossing. Then they decided to Now readers cheer when random Frey children and grandchildren end up killed and used as the filling for delicious pies.
 * In-universe, the two crimes that the people of Westeros see as crossing the moral even horizon are kinslaying and breaking guest-right.
 * Also played with early in Game of Thrones when Jaime Lannister . This seems at the time to be a definite moral event horizon, but Jaime later becomes a gradually more sympathetic character after he undergoes extreme suffering over the course of the story, which prompts definite change in his moral character for the better. Whether he is likable after this and/or deserves forgiveness for his previous atrocities is a matter of opinion.
 * It is also worth noting that Jaime didn't  out of pure self-interest of For the Evulz, but to prevent him revealing him information that would lead to the deaths of his love and her children.
 * For many characters in-universe, Jaime crossed this line before the series even started, when he.
 * The Libertines in 120 Days Of Sodom are perhaps the most sadistic characters in classical literature. They kidnap several people, including their own daughters, and subject them to 120 days of violent, nightmarish psychological, physical, and sexual torture just For the Evulz. They go as far as to, and the author treats the characters as heroes with minor quirks!
 * The author in question is none other than the Marquis de Sade, whose very name gave us the very word "sadism." And there's quite a bit more where that came from -- in the Sade novel Philosophy in the Bedroom, Eugenie crosses the Horizon with the horrors that she, Dolmance and the other libertines visit upon her own mother, Madame De Mistival, who came to try to rescue her from her corruption, up to and including.
 * Invoked in-universe in the Coldfire Trilogy. In his backstory, Villain Protagonist Gerald Tarrant wanted to make a Deal with the Devil for immortality, but the entity he was bargaining with demanded he commit the worst act he could imagine in order to "sacrifice his humanity"- which he did by cold-bloodedly murdering his wife and children whom he genuinely loved..
 * Alongside being killed and failing to save their planet, crossing this is one of the Animorphs greatest fears.


 * Whether or not you think Thomas Covenant crosses this in the first book of the Chronicles when he rapes Lena is down to personal opinion. If you do see it as the MEH, you'll probably stop reading there.
 * In Warrior Cats, Scourge claims that his was killing a cat for the first time. He says that when he did it, he got a cold feeling in his belly, and it just got colder and colder and never warmed up again... and he welcomed it, as it made it easier for him to earn respect as a fighter.
 * In Death: Rapists will automatically be considered to have crossed this. Murderers (unless they are in the group of Sympathetic Murderer) will be considered to have crossed this as well.
 * In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian has done some pretty fucked up stuff, most of which we don't know about -- but when he murders his best friend, Basil Hallward who genuinely loved Dorian and believed he could be redeemed, Dorian's well and truly crossed the line. The worst thing is that he isn't even guilty, just worried that he'll be caught.
 * He later  That makes Dorian even more dispicable, indeed.
 * Some people considered Dorian gone well before that, when he drove Sybil Vane (a Teen Genius actress and local Girl Next Door) into madness and finally into suicide with a very cruel Hannibal Lecture that totally smashed the kid's self-esteem into tiny pieces. And when he tries to feel guilty about it, it's revealed that he's only worried about it due to his own pride.
 * Jim Taggart, Orren Boyle, Dr. Ferris, Wesley Mouch, and Mr. Thompson from Atlas Shrugged were just really annoying Obstructive Bureaucrats to start with but they cross into Complete Monster territory with the Orwellian Directive 10289, a bill they pass preventing all originality, innovation and creativity, essentially destroying the common man's chances for success. After that they just keep going with Project X and torturing John Galt. Jim Taggart breaks down during the torture scene however so Even Evil Has Standards. Similarly, one of the Directive's drafters, Mr. Thompson, tried to oppose any plan to kill or torture John Galt.
 * Jim Taggart starts off as a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds but takes a flying leap over the Moral Event Horizon and into Complete Monster territory when he cheats on his adoring wife, Cheryl with the vile Lillian Rearden because he's jealous of Cheryl's moral and intellectual superiority and when she discovers them, lays a savage Reason You Suck Speech on her that surpasses Dorian's Hannibal Lecture to Sybil Vane. This results in Cheryl having a complete nervous breakdown while fleeing through the city in an absolutely gothic sequence that culminates in her comitting suicide. At this point, most readers are thinking "Die Jim, die."
 * Sisterhood series by Fern Michaels: A number of villainous characters are considered to have crossed this by the Vigilantes. Senator Webster from the book Payback is an interesting example. Maybe you don't consider his actions of unknowingly giving his wife Julia Webster AIDS to be crossing this. Maybe you don't consider his actions of cheating on her with multiple women to be crossing this. However, the minute he, in a drunken rage over the fact that his affairs are being broadcast live, goes wife-beater on Julia is the minute you know he has finally and truly crossed this!
 * A number of readers are convinced that the Vigilantes themselves crossed this in Vendetta. John Chai, son of the Chinese ambassador to the USA, had drunkenly hit-and-run Barbara Rutledge and her unborn child, killing them both. He then pulled a Karma Houdini with Diplomatic Impunity. The Vigilantes decide that the best punishment for the guy is to skin him alive! Certainly, he was a creep, and was being used by the author to personify Yellow Peril, but his deeds simply did not warrant that level of Disproportionate Retribution! Not only that, but the Vigilantes just shrug off what they've done afterwards. The fact that they are basically Villain Protagonists who become Karma Houdinis themselves, and the author expects readers to see them as heroes fighting injustice wherever they see them just makes it worse!
 * In The Tomorrow Series ,  looks like nothing but a Jerkass at first...but rapidly speeds past the Moral Event Horizon when it's revealed that so far from being a member of La Résistance, he's an enemy collaborator, before advancing to full Quislinghood.   Nobody who reads the books feels sorry for his eventual fate.
 * Drake from Gone (novel) probably crossed it offscreen before we saw him, but when he happily goes off to kill an autistic four-year-old, and we get into his head and see how delighted he is with the prospect, there is no going back.
 * Caine probably crossed it when he was too apathetic to stop a bunch of coyotes from feeding on young children when all it would've taken to stop them was asking them nicely. An alternate one would be his treatment of Diana in Plague, which, although not anywhere near as bad as what he'd done before, was destroying the one thing that kept him human.
 * Diana herself sees  as her own MEH, but, seeing as it partially prompted her   possibly not.
 * In Richard Wright's Native Son, Villain Protagonist Bigger Thomas is from the beginning kind of a sleazeball, what with committing indecent exposure and feeling up an unconscious girl, but he truly vaults over the line when . Wright's point is that the true Complete Monster here is the corrupt system that allows people faced with crippling poverty to become this bad.
 * Invoked at several points in The Monk, but when Ambrosio makes his Deal with the Devil, it's obvious that according to the rules of the story, he's gone too far.
 * In Legend, Commander Jamerson was already portrayed as someone suspicious, but it's only near the end of the first half of the story is where her true colors are revealed. Case in point,