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He Who Fights Monsters: Difference between revisions
fixed double "the"s
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{{trope}}
{{quote|''"[[Trope Namer|He who fights monsters]] should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, [[In Soviet Russia, Trope Mocks You|the abyss gazes also into you.]]"''
|'''[[Friedrich Nietzsche]]''', ''Beyond Good and Evil''}}
Sometimes the villain chides the hero by saying the two of them are [[Not So Different]]. Usually the hero rejects this claim, but occasionally, it's a valid point, as some heroes degenerate into something that really ''is'' [[Not So Different]].
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** A fact that former Nazi Red Skull pointed out. [[Arson, Murder, and Admiration|It should be worth noting, though, that Red Skull was sincerely trying to praise Magneto.]] [[Your Approval Fills Me with Shame|He somehow didn't know that he was a Holocaust survivor.]]
* Rorschach from ''[[Watchmen]]'' describes this in great detail, recounting how he became a dark and gritty [[Anti-Hero]] first (though he had a violent childhood) by brutally taking out his anger and disgust on a {{spoiler|kidnapper who had butchered and fed a little girl to his dogs}} by {{spoiler|setting him on fire.}} It even affects Rorschach's psychologist. The chapter in which we learn this is even called "The Abyss Gazes Also" and ends with the Nietzsche quote above.
** Indeed, this trope also features in the ''Tales of the Black Freighter'' sub-comic: a lone, marooned sailor, convinced
** Ozymandias could count toward this as well, seeing as {{spoiler|his solution to keep Russia and America from wiping each other out with nuclear strikes was to kill three million people before the missiles could be launched. Veidt strongly hints in his last conversation with Jon Osterman that he has nightmares of being taken into a ghost ship to be surrounded by murderers, in exactly the same manner as the ending to ''The Black Freighter.''}}
* General "Thunderbolt" Ross from ''[[Incredible Hulk]]''. This is made especially clear in ''Hulk: Gray'', where many parallels between Ross and the Hulk are drawn and Ross grows more and more fanatical in his pursuit of the Hulk as time goes on. Eventually, in his pursuit to defeat him, he became what he hunted: {{spoiler|a Hulk}}. He even lampshades it.
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* 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].
* Jeff Gerstmann was fired because of the corrupt state of game journalism, and the cause of his firing was brutally censored by his former employer. He went to found his own site, where he went on to found his own site, drawing many viewers for claiming to stand against this corruption. The next decade when another story of journalistic corruption breaks, he's brutally censoring any discussion of it and defending the corrupt.
* 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
{{reflist}}
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