Driven to Villainy

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"My call? NONE OF THIS WAS MY CALL!"
—Electro, in The Spectacular Spider-Man

Sometimes, your villain isn't the Mad Scientist who wants to poison the city, or the Corrupt Corporate Executive who wants to control the world, or the greedy bank robber who's on a crime spree. Sometimes, your villain's just an average guy who's brought into villainy against their own will or control. This isn't Mind Control or possession, this is a truly insane villain, but here, it's because they've been warped by events around them, and forced into villainy by forces outside their control. A broken shell of a human being, the only thing left is insanity.

To alter an old saying: "Some people are born into insanity, others have insanity thrust upon them." While their villainous actions have no excuse, their cause for becoming villains was entirely (or mostly) out of their hands.

It's actually pretty rare to find a villain who is truly blameless in their origin, though it does happen. Even origins that lament the cruelty of fate, like The Joker's in The Killing Joke, eventually reveal that the origin is still largely due to the character's choices anyway. Indeed, a villain who is fed up with abuse by others or out for revenge is still making the active choice to be villainous, and if it is still clear that the villain made the choice to be evil themselves rather than have it made for them, then they're not exactly broken, just enraged to the point of vengeance.

However, the trend seems to be that, the more arbitrary their fall into villainy seems to be, the more psychotic they become, as those screwed by the world become angry at the world, and seek to inflict their new madness on everyone. The end result of being Driven to Villainy is not a good person forced to do evil, but a legitimately evil villain, tragically warped by things they never had any control over.

A Sub-Trope of Anti-Villain. Compare Freudian Excuse. Such a character may become a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. See also From Nobody to Nightmare.

Examples of Driven to Villainy include:


Anime & Manga

  • Quite a few examples in Naruto, whose author Kishimoto has turned traumatic childhoods into a fine art.
    • Gaara comes to mind - upon birth, a demon was sealed inside him, with his mother becoming a sacrifice, so that he could become his ninja village's ultimate weapon. But said demon also makes everyone in the village terrified of him, and he grows up reviled as a monster. Finally, his own father (who arranged the whole thing in the first place), finding him growing unstable, sends assassins to kill him. The first assassin is his beloved uncle, the only one who seems to care for him, who reveals that he's actually secretly hated him all these years for killing his sister (Gaara's mom, the one who was sacrificed to make him what he was), and that his mother had died cursing the village and hoped that Gaara killed them all - his name, given by her, means "The Demon who loves only himself". Naturally, he finally snaps, and spends the next few years killing everyone he runs across as a way of proving that he exists. Oh, and the demon in question prevents him from sleeping, less it starts eating away at his mind.
    • Sasuke is an even more literal example, as from a certain point of view his entire life has been orchestrated by at least two major villains for the purpose of making him evil, for their own ends, namely, Orochimaru and Madara; Itachi is either an anti-hero or a third major villain, depending on your POV and to what degree Madara is telling the truth; Danzou might qualify as yet another villain guilty of this, except that he didn't really care about Sasuke and saw him as collateral damage at best for his plans. The massacre of his entire family and clan by his beloved older brother (who brutalized him, and told him to hate more and murder his best friend), at the age of 8, was only the beginning of that. At present, the plan is working quite well indeed.
  • Hayate Yagami from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's? She is de jure the Big Bad, since all the fighting takes place for her sake but de facto she doesn't even know that her servants (whom she considers her family) are committing crimes for her and joins Team Nanoha immediately after The Reveal. Also, very much an example of Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.
  • Johan Liebert from Monster. No, really. Hard as it is to imagine, he was once a frightened little boy clinging to his mother's leg before he was systematically warped by secret psychological torture that actually happened to his sister, and that he managed to accidentally create as a false memory for himself and then even more brainwashing to become the perfect little East German super-soldier. While he was already a full-on Enfant Terrible by age six or seven, he wasn't born that way, and would not have become the Complete Monster he ended up without these traumas.
    • It's implied that what actually broke him was, at the age of six, realizing that his mother favored one of the children more than the other when she willingly handed one over to Bonaparta. The knowledge that people were inherently different and that favouritism could drive people to do things like that
  • Mao, from Code Geass. A male Yandere who shoots C.C. and proposes taking a chainsaw to her in order to make her 'compact' for a trip to Australia, as well as attempting to blow up Nunnally. Also adept at Hannibal Lecture-slash-Mind Rape, which he uses twice. However, he is also completely barmy because he cannot shut off the thoughts of others, thus mitigating his moral culpability for his above acts, as C.C. hints at before blowing his brains out.
  • Aion in the manga version of Chrono Crusade was badly psychologically damaged after discovering the Awful Truth—so badly that it even had a marked physical effect on him. That event warped him into the Well-Intentioned Extremist we see him as in the series.
  • Ken Ichijouji from Digimon Adventure 02 wished his older brother would disappear, and eventually had to cope with his death in a car wreck. A Compelling Voice brought him into Another Dimension and he finally lost it, becoming The Digimon Emporer.
  • Almost all of the Black Lagoon cast not in major leadership positions. Hansel and Gretel are a particularly sad example.


Comic Books

  • Spider-Man is loaded with these: The Lizard is another example, as long as you don't count that time where they implied that Conners was in control the whole time (neither the fandom or writers do, however). Norman Osborn has gone so far as to feign that this is the cause for all his crimes.
    • In the Spider-Man comics, the Hobgoblin from the year 2211 is revealed to be this. She's the daughter of that years' time traveling Spider-Man, who is forced to arrest her due to crimes that she would commit in the future, and placed in a virtual reality prison, which is programmed into her brain to keep her in a fantasy world. Her boyfriend tries to free her with a computer virus, which instead adversely effects the fantasy, warps her mind and drives her completely insane. True to form, her imprisonment is what caused her insane criminal spree in the first place. She uses her knowledge as an inter-dimensional researcher to create time traveling equipment and goes on a history-erasing rampage through time.
  • Before it was retconned that he had actually been possessed the whole time, Hal Jordan's Face Heel Turn into the Knight Templar supervillain Parallax was portrayed as this, having gone insane with grief over the annihilation of his hometown of Coast City.


Film

  • The Dark Knight's Harvey Dent/Two-Face. Given that he got his new worldview from The Joker while lying medicated in a hospital bed recovering from both a disfiguring injury and a horrible tragedy, you almost feel sorry for the guy as he performs his horrible acts throughout the rest of the film.
    • Though arguably, at first, he's perfectly sympathetic, until he crosses the Moral Event Horizon by targeting Gordon and his family. Targeting Gordon would have been, while not OKAY, at least understandable given his skewed perspective on things. But going after his wife and kids was just too far.
  • Francis Dolarhyde out of the Hannibal Lecter film Manhunter:

Will Graham: As a child, my heart bleeds for him. Someone took a little boy and turned him into a monster. But as an adult... as an adult, he's irredeemable. He butchers whole families to fulfill some sick fantasy. As an adult, I think someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks.

Literature


Live Action TV

  • A character in an early episode of Smallville was mutated by a combination of Kryptonite and hypothermia. In order to prevent freezing to death, he had to drain people of their body heat (which, if he waited too long to do it, would result in their deaths) in order to survive, and a case could be made that he wasn't truly villainous, and was forced to kill people in order to survive. However the guy was made such a self-centered, vindictive psychopathic Jerkass that the point became moot.
    • Another episode had a girl who had to regularly eat human flesh to prevent from starving to death (regular food didn't work). She never actually killed anyone, just left them near death from the damage to their bodies. This was clearly a case of Horror Hunger, and in at least one instance, she urged a potential victim to run away.
    • For real tragedy, see Davis Bloome in Season 8. A Nice Guy paramedic, Davis suffers from constant black outs and discovers that he has alien Serial Killer and Person of Mass Destruction Doomsday trapped inside him, and that the only way to keep the monster from taking over and slaughtering dozens of people is to kill individual victims. He thus becomes a Pay Evil Unto Evil-type Anti-Hero, murdering those he considers to be deserving of it in order to keep his inner monster trapped. This eventually drives him completely insane, and results in his descent into true villainy.


Video Games

  • Fou-lu in Breath of Fire IV is pretty much the very walking definition of this trope. He is a Physical God who is also the King in the Mountain for the country he founded as a God-Emperor (after being summoned there by a Vestigial Empire--who buggered up the summoning leading to aforementioned Physical God developing a Literal Split Personality that ends up displaced 600 years in the future). Unfortunately, said empire has become The Empire over six hundred years of hibernation, The Emperor doesn't want to give up his seat, one of The Emperor's main assistants is Mad Scientist and Complete Monster Yuna who convinces him he can kill a god, and this ends up in increasingly more extreme methods by The Empire to kill Fou-lu (eventually culminating in the use of a Fantastic Nuke which runs on literal Nightmare Fuel created the the Cold-Blooded Torture and Human Sacrifice of people with very close connections to the target...with Fou-lu's girlfriend used as the Thermonuclear Country Girl because aforementioned Fantastic Nuke also works on the principle of Love Hurts). This cascading Pain Train Breaks The Cutie to the point Fou-lu ends up a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.
  • Prototype has Alex Mercer, who wakes up in a morgue to find out that he has Easy Amnesia and has been turned into a horrifying Voluntary Shapeshifter. Cue Roaring Rampage of Revenge. This is played straight, subverted, and then inverted: Upon waking, Alex does horrible things like eat consume people in order to figure out what the hell is going on. It's hard to blame him too much for being batshit crazy, though, considering he's been turned into a living virus and has no memory of who he is or what happened to bring him to this point and people have been trying to brutally murder him since he woke up. That's the played straight. It's then subverted when it's revealed that Alex himself is the one who released the deadly virus, dubbed "Blacklight", that turned him into a monster and is currently decimating New York state. Flashbacks show you that Alex is a sociopath who deliberately engineered an already deadly virus to become ten times more dangerous, and then stole a sample and unleashed it upon the general populace when he was shot dead with the mindset of "If I'm going down, I'm Taking You with Me." That's the subversion. Now the inversion shows up in this way: It turns out that Alex isn't the one who released the Blacklight Virus. Well, he is, but the twist is this: The Alex you've been controlling isn't the real Alex Mercer. When he was shot dead, he was actually Killed Off for Real. Turns out that the Alex you know isn't even human; he's the Blacklight Virus itself in a human avatar. The reason this is an inversion is because it/he goes from originally being the Mad Scientist that the real Alex was, to a Sociopathic Hero, to a person who becomes empathetic enough over the course of the game to actually express disgust over who the real Alex was and risk its life to save Manhattan from being nuked.
  • Myst III: Exile has Saveedro, who's entire homeworld was apparently destroyed and who now wants to force the man he blames to see what happened, so he steals a book from him. When he finds out the player isn't the person he's looking for, he kills you if he gets the opprotunity.
  • Keiichi, Shmion, Rena, and, to an extent, Satoko in Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. They don't choose to become villains when they do start killing people, as it's caused by a combination of the Hate Plague, Hinamizawa Syndrome and some overall bad shit that happens to them.
  • Bernkastel in Umineko no Naku Koro ni. She's essentially an incarnation of all of the Rikas who died in Hinamizawa as her friends went insane and killed each other and the entire village was destroyed. Well, it's no wonder that the combination of all of that had some mental damage. It's the "having the power to screw around with other worlds" part that causes the problems.
  • Morinth from Mass Effect 2. You spend some time tracking her down, an when Samara finally confronts her, she screams that she never had a choice because of the genetic defect that Samara passed on to her. Although, she may have just been trying to get to her for a chance to escape.
  • Isair and Madae, the Big Bads of Icewind Dale II. While their origins—half-demon half-elves shunned and misunderstood or manipulated by everyone, whose mother committed suicide when she first saw them—are undeniably tragic, it's very clear they've crossed the line into choosing villainy at the point the Legion of the Chimera started burning and looting the Ten Towns.


Webcomics

  • MAG-ISA: Kyle, Alice, and Chu were pretty much forced by their tragic childhoods to join the cult known as "The Order".


Western Animation

  • Electro is done this way in The Spectacular Spider-Man. While working in Curt Connors' lab, he falls victim to an accident that leaves him charged with electric energy, unable to live safely without a suit covering him at all times. Over the course of the episode, his mentality degrades more an more as he fails to deal with the loss of his humanity and is repeatedly attacked by Spiderman (who doesn't realize the situation), and the cops (who do, but deal with it too harshly). His first criminal act is merely to try to hold Connors hostage until he can come up with a cure, but he eventually goes completely insane and detaches himself completely from himself and his sanity.
    • An even better example is John Jameson from the same. After piloting his spaceship safely back to Earth, he is exposed to alien spores, which infect his body and increase his size and strength. His father convinces him to become a superhero, but the spores eventually effect his mind, making him more aggressive and filled with rage, eventually causing an extreme personality change . After Venom, acting as Spiderman, attacks him, he flies into a rage and goes on a rampage to kill Spidey. Though he is ultimately cured, the experience took its toll; the spores had him enough that, with them gone, he is obsessively addicted to them. He's last seen in an insane asylum, with a cell next to Electro, who echoes his position. If he appears again as a villain, the cycle will be complete. This is somewhat more evident as this than Electro, as, in this case, Jameson was one of the more heroic supporting characters in the series.
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