He Who Fights Monsters: Difference between revisions

Not to be confused with [[Complete Monster]], although somebody can become this by fighting complete monsters. See also [[Cycle of Revenge]], [[Protagonist Journey to Villain]], [[You Are What You Hate]], and [[Then Let Me Be Evil]]. If this trope happens to a child, it can be used as a [[Freudian Excuse]]. Compare [[And Then John Was a Zombie]], where the character becomes a literal monster. [[If You Kill Him You Will Be Just Like Him]] is pretty much a sped-up version of this. Common in politics, as [[Reign of Terror]], [[Full-Circle Revolution]] and [[Meet the New Boss]] indicate. If the monster in question is an animal, that's [[Animal Nemesis]]. Subtrope of [[Slowly Slipping Into Evil]].

 

 

{{examples}}

* [[Space: Above and Beyond]] gives us Col. Ray Butts, who apparently was born mean and became meaner from being a Marine lifer—he's racist against [[In Vitros]], picks pointless fights with the Wildcards, antagonizes McQueen by taking the squad away from him for a mission he won't explain to anyone, and changes mission parameters mid-mission, again without any sort of explanation. It gets to the point where the squad briefly wonders if he might have killed his previous squad members when they fight a dead marine's body on the planet. {{spoiler|the squad was actually killed by chigs when they wanted to wait for reinforcements--causing Butts to leave them in disgust to do the mission on his own}}

* ''[[Cheese in the Trap]]'': To protect himself from those seeking to exploit him for being a rich man's son, Jung becomes a [[Manipulative Bastard]] whose actions also alienate and hurt those close to him.

 

== [[Music]] ==

* The Taliban formed their base of power around being sane, religious people external to the civil war that had raged for decades, who could bring order and safety. This got them around a third of Afghanistan before the stresses of trying to fight equally powerful coalitions and the temptations of being a bunch of young men with a lot of power and the level of socialization you'd expect from a bunch of semi-war orphans ('talib' is a student of religion; they recruited mainly from the refugee schools over the border in Pakistan) got to them. Not that they were ever really ''nice'', but they were trying to sort things out for the general benefit. Tyranny, as usual, ensued.

* This is why therapists have to see therapists themselves; because talking to crazy people for a living can take a toll on one's sanity.

* Hollywood got its start because numerous filmmakers moved there in an effort to avoid Thomas Edison's iron grip on film patents and his licensing fees. The MPAA was formed as an effort to push back against government censorship. Nowadays, it's the big movie business that's pushing to strengthen intellectual property enforcement and censorship with proposals such as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOPA SOPA] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACTA ACTA].

* William "Billy D" Usher created the ''One Angry Gamer'' website to fight back against the rampant and blatant left-wing political activism that he felt had taken over the gaming news media. When gaming journalism apparently moved to a more centrist position, he then started grasping at the tiniest of straws in order to stay relevant. He eventually reached the point of ''manufacturing'' controversies and essentially becoming a terrible ''right''-wing activist who wrote primarily angry political rants punctuated with only the occasional decent gaming news article once in a blue moon.

* The subreddit [https://www.reddit.com/r/StormfrontorSJW/ Stormfront or Social Justice Warrior?] collects examples of times when it gets alarmingly hard to tell whether a talking point comes from far-right fascist supremacists or the far-left radical progressives ostensibly opposing them.

 

{{reflist}}