Well-Intentioned Extremist/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A character uses wholesome ends to justify their villainous deeds.

  • Straight: Bob seeks to maintain order in society...by installing a totalitarian dictatorship in which he is the sole ruler.
  • Exaggerated: Bob seeks to find the meaning of Life, The Universe, and Everything by mass murder, torture and genocide.
  • Up to Eleven: Bob seeks to eliminate human suffering and bring the humanity a paradise... by turning all living beings into orange juice and forcefully merging their souls.
  • Justified: Bob is deluded.
    • He actually has a point after all.
  • Inverted: Selfish Good
  • Subverted: Bob lied about his intentions.
    • Bob is revealed to be not that extreme.
    • Bob's order is orderly, all right, but it's a lawless, untrustworthy and warlike order, so the content of peace and law he says is part of order is gone if it ever was there before. His government is too inept and faltering to keep order everywhere in the country, so the mafia that funded his campaign keeps order where he can't go, does the things he can't do, knows the things he can't find out, and stops the things he can't stop. His backers have been fighting each other for as long as anyone can remember, and the history books all say that his country has always been at war against its former allies, which fought for the country and many of which fought the country using the very arms and training they deliberately gave them. Bob despises law and peace, and cares little for victory, preferring to embolden his enemies by, and into, committing atrocities and not really trying to avoid getting caught. He promotes adversaries like this so that both sides come together as countries and so that the eventual victor wins despite fighting the losing side to the last. All of this is carried out as a pork barrel project. He gives a speech about sovereign immunity to his enemy, Alice, that you can't take the law into your own hands, that he knows that his country is imperfect, but once you take up arms, then you are the scofflaw because he makes the law. Unmoved, Alice is neither impressed nor convinced in the slightest.
  • Double Subverted: Bob claims to have lied about his intentions, because the greater good involves him seeming like "the bad guy".
    • That was a lie.
  • Parodied: Bob wishes to save the world...by ripping the tags off of every mattress in the world.
  • Deconstructed: Despite his good intentions, many people turn on Bob for his actions.
    • In the end, Bob goes down in history as a Complete Monster of a ruler.
    • After being defeated by Alice, Bob realises all the sacrifices he made were for nothing because his plan failed, and has a Villainous BSOD as he reflects on what he's done.
    • Bob's extremism ends up causing the exact thing he wished to avoid.
  • Reconstructed: Bob is OK with the world hating him, so long as the world he creates is a better one in the end.
  • Zig Zagged: Depending on the writer, Bob's motive for his tyranny ranges from simple lust for power to desire to create an orderly society.
  • Averted: Bob is a Card-Carrying Villain.
  • Enforced: "If we want our show to have more depth, we should give our 'villains' an understandable motivation and at least partially sympathetic goals."
  • Lampshaded: "I killed millions...to save billions!"
  • Invoked: Shoot the Dog
  • Exploited: Turns out, Alice is a Complete Monster, and is using Bob's Well-Intentioned Extremist tendencies and (Anti-) Heroic Zeal to make it easier for her to Kill'Em All.
  • Defied: "There are instances in which the means are too rotten to be justified by any ends."
  • Discussed: I Did What I Had to Do
  • Conversed: ???

Should you not go back to Well-Intentioned Extremist, the world will no doubt suffer for it...and I shall see to it that you will not live to see such a tragedy take place.


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