Well-Intentioned Extremist/Playing With
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
- 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.
- Bob is a Knight Templar who only thinks that his goal is good.
- 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.