Times where a villain's attempt to Screw Destiny and solve their problems through mass-murder completely backfires on them in Literature.
- 1632: Thanks to the presence of 20th century history books, Charles I of England gets it into his head he can prevent his overthrow and execution in the English Civil War by rounding up and imprisoning/executing the men who would do it. In the process, he ends up killing Oliver Cromwell's wife and son, and Cromwell (who at the time had not even entertained the thought of rebelling) decides to get things started earlier once he escapes.
- The Belgariad: the line of Riva was supposedly killed off by Queen Salmissra. One prince survived, and his descendants were hidden by Polgara and Belgarath.
- The Broken Earth Trilogy: Syl Anagist actually did manage to get rid of all of the Thniess/Niess. However, they then tried to genetically engineer racial caricatures of the Thniess to use their powers for energy generation, to show the world how thoroughly they had dominated them and those people violently turned against them.
- The Calf of the November Cloud: One of the tales of Konyek's grandmother involves one devil devouring one whole village and then getting killed by one single survivor:He feared as well the devils his grandmother had told him about, and that he might meet one in the rain and in the dark. They were half man, and half lion, and they would call out to passers-by and beg them to help carry a bundle of wood. If the passer-by were foolish enough to stop, the devil would kill him with a pointed stick and devour him. Once such a devil had killed and devoured the inhabitants of a whole village, save for one woman and her son who had run away and hidden in a cave. When the boy grew up, Konyek's grandmother had said, he made bows and arrows, and the arrows he poisoned. One day, the devil saw smoke coming from the fire the boy had lighted, and came to eat him. But the boy was waiting for him, concealed in a tree, and shot the arrows at him. At first the devil thought he had been stung by gadflies, but when he was dying, he gave the boy secret directions how to recover the people of the village he had killed, and all their cattle as well. And in their gratitude, when the villagers came to life again, they elected the boy as chief.
- In C.S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy, the immortal and extremely narcissistic Magnificent Bastard character of the series left one of his children alive when he slaughtered his family to make a pact with a demon. His descendants were free to live without being troubled, provided they never laid claim to his title as the Neocount of Merentha. If any of the male descendants did so, then The Hunter would again lay waste to his entire family, save one. He was vain enough that he always left the one descendant who looked the most like him alive. Of course, this bit him in the ass when the survivor of the last generation played a key role in the Patriarch's scheme to destroy him.
- Played with in Jack Vance's The Demon Princes. The hero wouldn't have had any reason to devote his life to tracking down and killing the titular villains if they had chosen a different space colony to raid on that day.
- Also different in that it was the other survivor, his grandfather, who groomed him to be an instrument of justice. The hero may have just gone off to life peacefully somewhere else if given the chance early on.
- Dune: the Baron Harkonnen kills his rival, Duke Atreides, and attempts to do the same with his only son, thus wiping out the Atreides family line and ending the millennia old Atreides/Harkonnen blood feud. At first he thinks he's successful, but they never find the boy's body...
- In the first book of Laurie J. Marks' Elemental Logic series, a whole tribe is killed off because of a prophecy that indicates Bad Things for the invading army if a single member of the tribe survives. Of course, one (and only one) tribe member escapes...
- Happens lots of times in David Weber's Empire from the Ashes, as the omnicidal Achuultani, themselves a last remnant from a campaign of genocide by a hostile power in their own galaxy, have nearly wiped out humanity several times. We now have planetoid dreadnoughts whose star drives can cause supernovae when used too close to a star, and each has combat capability equivalent to hundreds of thousands of Achuultani ships. Oh yes, and we know where they live.
- On the positive side of things for the Achuultani, due to certain plot developments and revelations, it is quite likely the eventual human counter-attack will include willing Achuultani participants seeking to free their fellows from the AI that has effectively enslaved them via the cycle of near-genocides and a liberal definition of crisis.
- In The Graveyard Book this is the reason why the Jacks of All Trades killed Bod's family.
- Harry Potter: Lord Voldemort's reason for targeting the Potter family was because of a(n incomplete) prophecy stating that he would mark a child as his equal and decided to try and avert it by killing said child. When Lily Potter died for her son, that sacrifice enabled Harry to survive the Killing Curse and rebound it back to Voldemort, with the only injury baby Harry received being his famous lightning bolt scar, and thus, Voldemort ended up fulling the first part of the prophecy.
- The Duke in the Healing Wars trilogy burned an entire city to the ground in an attempt to get rid of his brother Bespaar and secure his claim to the throne. Bespaar was killed and the spine of the resistance effectively broken...but the Duke's mistake was assuming Bespaar's son had been killed too. As it turns out, Jeatar is the missing nephew, who has been building up an underground resistance incognito and eventually takes over the throne when Nya defeats the Duke.
- In R.A. Salvatore's Forgotten Realms novel Homeland, one Dark Elf house in Menzoberranzan is punished for failing to kill off all of a rival house's noble family by the Decadent Court, which sentences the attacking house to be exterminated properly. This is built into their "law"; total extermination is fine, just don't leave any witnesses. However, only surviving nobles count as witnesses, not ordinary underlings.
- Last Legionary: The Big Bad deciding the Legions of Moros were the major obstacle to him conquering the galaxy and that eliminating was the best course of action? Doesn't work out so well. The Legions weren't even aware of the Warlord's existence prior to the attack that left Keill the only survivor of his race.
- The Night Angel Trilogy: It's implied that Garoth Ursuul commits genocide often enough that he actually has a list of rules, among them is "You will always miss one." This is never shown to actually come back to haunt any Ursuuls in the book, however.
- In The Once and Future King, Arthur was convinced by his advisers that as the bastard of a King and a child of incest, the baby Mordred had to die. Unable to locate the target, Arthur had every child of the correct age in the area placed on a ship that was then sunk with the all aboard, turning Mordred permanently (and not unreasonably) against him.
- Implied at the end of Out of the Dark, again by David Weber. The Shongairi announced themselves to Earth with a series of Colony Drops on Earth capitals, and when controlling Earth proved to be impossible tried to exterminate mankind with a biological weapon. They failed, and at the end Humans knows how to replicate Shongairi technology and where they live.
- An Outcast in Another World: The Humans, facing extinction at the hands of the other races, give a final fuck-you to the world by sacrificing themselves to unleash The Cataclysm, which ravages the lands and almost ends civilization.
- RCN: Referenced. In the Backstory, Daniel Leary's father, former Cinnabar head of state Corder Leary, ordered the beheading of Daniel's now-friend Adele Mundy's entire family on charges of treason.note Adele, who survived due to having left for an offworld university a couple days earlier (the Cinnabar Senate later dropped all charges against survivors), comments once in her Internal Monologue that if she's ever in the same room as former Speaker Leary, she won't bother with the formality of a duel. Fortunately for all involved, Daniel and Corder Leary are on such poor terms he's only appeared in one scene, for which Adele wasn't present.
- Redwall: Ublaz Mad Eyes sent a group of corsair minions to destroy Holt Lutra (a community of otters) in order to procure a special set of pearls that he wanted for his crown. Unfortunately for him (and a lot of other people), Grath Longfletch, the leader of the group's daughter, just barely survived, and when she recuperated, dedicated her life to killing every corsair she could find. She is ultimately a key member of the group from Redwall that travels to his island and defeats him. Although she doesn't actually know who he is, and is not personally responsible for his death — Martin has that honor.
- In The Riftwar Cycle novel Talon of the Silver Hawk, the eponymous character is almost the Last of His Kind, and ends up working (under the name Talwin Hawkins) for the guy who ordered it in a long-term plot to bring him down.
- In Jacqueline Carey's The Sundering, the Anti-Villain Satoris wipes out a desert tribe that sent a child to destroy him. Unusual in that the child had already been dispatched by that point; however, he had nothing in particular against Satoris until his village was destroyed, and it's strongly implied that he could have been talked out of his quest if that atrocity hadn't been committed.
- Tolkien's Legendarium:
- The Lord of the Rings: Sauron believed that he had killed off the line of Isildur. He forgot about Aragorn.
- Beren and Lúthien: Sauron wipes out the Men of Dorthonion, but he fails to catch Beren. Cornered by Sauron's forces, Beren flees into Doriath, meets Lúthien, and steals one Silmaril from Morgoth's crown to earn the right to marry her. Seventy-six years later, Beren and Lúthien's granddaughter Elwing and her husband Eärendil use that Silmaril to reach Aman and ask the Valar help to crush Sauron's boss, Morgoth.
- In The Fall of Gondolin, Morgoth sends his army to wipe out the Hidden City. His legions of orcs, balrogs, dragons and war machines slaughter hundreds and burn the city to the ground, but they are unable to prevent a group of survivors from escaping beyond the mountains. One of those survivors is Ëarendil, who several years later will cause Morgoth's downfall.
- The Fall of Númenor:
- Sauron engineers the destruction of the civilization of Númenor, but a remnant of Númenoreans survives and founds the kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor which will keep Sauron at bay during two Ages and help their final defeat.
- Sauron's own forces include descendants of the peoples who survived through Númenor's stage of brutal colonialism and slave trade. Gondor was founded by the sane Númenoreans who refused to engage in their country's violent imperialism, but the Easterlings and Southrons don't know that.
- A small-scale version of this is the core plot of Mercedes Lackey's first Vows & Honor short story Sword-Sworn. A large force of bandits, with the aid of a wizard to strike down the sentries, ambushed the Shin'a'in clan Tale'sedrin on the way back from a horse fair and killed every one of them... save the skinny teenager they did not bother making sure of after strangling and gang-raping her.
- Wraith Knight: Jacob Riverson is uninterested in starting a war with the entirety of the Southern Kingdoms due to the fact that he used to be a resident and knows how many thousands of people will die if he does. He also thinks its a waste of resources that could be better spent developing the Northern Wasteland into a proper society. Instead, the Nine Heroes, afraid of Jacob invading them, plot to kill everyone in the Northern Wasteland. This, of course, convinces Jacob they have to defeat them in war. Also counts as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
