Jumping Off The Slippery Slope / Video Games

• In AFK Arena, no faction is truly "good". But some characters have a more sharp descent from grey to black than others.
  • Thoran, formerly The Good King of Bantus who led his ordinarily war-loving subjects to prosperity, was betrayed by his brother who didn't approve of his departing from their old ways. After he became a Graveborn, he took the throne back by force, forced all of his subjects to pledge their souls to the ancient necromancer Qaedam, and if they refused, he had their heads cut off so that, even if they were reanimated, they would be unable to communicate. To this day, he remains a despicable and paranoid tyrant who throws any Graveborn that he even slightly suspects of being not entirely, unquestionably loyal to him and Qaedam into the Black Prison — a construction specially designed to torture the souls of the dead. There is absolutely nothing left of the good king he once was.
  • Lucretia was a human woman whose husband, Zaphrael, was ascended to godhood. The next time she saw him was appearing to seemingly rescue their Hypogean-possessed son from a cult that had kidnapped him, only to incinerate him with a lightning bolt instead. Lucretia willingly offered herself as a host for the Hypogeans instead in retaliation, described in their Hero Union story as mowing her way through innocents in order to get to him with her new powers. She isn't even corrupted — she's just that angry.
• Adele in Arc Rise Fantasia jumps right off the slope and onto the crazy train the very instant she finds out that she's an Unlucky Childhood Friend, taking this trope to a terrifying degree.
• BattleTech:
  • The first, and main, example of this in the game is of Captain Samuel Ostergaard, who starts off as a relatively reasonable and calm commander of a small Taurian fleet. When his son killed by the heroes when the player raids an illegal gun-running facility, he is consumed by rage at the player and their allies. Afterwards, his navy is called in to fight the protagonists' faction due to attacks on his home planet (that were actually staged by the main antagonist in order to start a war), he sends wave after wave of soldiers after the heroes. While he's still somewhat stable at this point he fully loses it soon afterwards. When the truth that his "allies" framed the protagonists for attacking the civilians on his homeworld is revealed and is ordered to cease his attack, he starts a mutiny and seizes command of the fleet, barricades himself in the control room, and attempts to use the fleet to kill the protagonists, disregarding the order to stand down. After the heroes use a certain Chekhov's Gun to thwart his attempted attack by remotely detonating the fleet's fuel reserves, he dies when his ship collides with the planet he was going to attack - all to "avenge" the loss of his son.
  • The other example is played rather sympathetically. Victoria Espinosa starts off as a loving cousin of the player's friend, Queen Kamea Arano. When her father seizes power from on Kamea's coronation day, she ends up becoming Kamea's fiercest enemy. She participates in the aforementioned attacks on civilians, which takes a heavy toll on her. When her father surrenders and orders her to stand down, she snaps. Killing her is the final mission of the game.
• BioShock:
  • Harvesting even one of the Little Sisters gives you the bad ending; it is simply implied that you jumped off the slope and became ADAM- and power-hungry the moment you first harvested.
  • Andrew Ryan. The whole point of Rapture was to create a utopia where individuality and free enterprise were unrestrained by the government. Once Fontaine began to rise in power though, paranoia and a fear of losing his city turned him into an iron-fisted, totalitarian dictator, the exact opposite of what he set out to become.
• BioShock 2:
  • If the player jumps off the slope so does Eleanor.
  • Sophia Lamb believes that humanity's root problem is that everyone is genetically predisposed to be self-serving, and happens to have taken over a city that has all but perfected genetic engineering. Does she work on developing a gene tonic that would cure the user of their selfishness? Nope, her plan is to turn the city into a hivemind, with her own daughter serving as its mother brain against her will.
• Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare: Irons is a firm believer that Hobbes Was Right, and plans to unite the world under Atlas after toppling the world's governments. After a conventional invasion of the United States fails and the free world unites against him, Irons' next course of action is to hit every military installation in the world with biological weapons that'll kill anyone not registered with Atlas.
• In Criminal Case: Mysteries of the Past, Justin Lawson is a district attorney who, after the death of his fiancee at the hands of the gangs, decided to embark himself on a quest to get rid of crime in the city altogether by any means necessary. Unfortunately, him growing disillusioned with the corrupt police system and the nigh-useless politicians endorsing criminals over the course of the story leads to him becoming a ruthless dictator when he becomes city mayor in the final arc of the game, creating a State Sec in charge of limiting civil liberties and reinstating the death penalty regardless of offense to deter anyone from even thinking about committing a crime.
• So many in Dragon Age II, a game where no one is really evil and no one is truly good. By the end of the game, both of the leaders of the two warring factions give into their inner demons with Meredith, the Knight-Commander of the Templars calling for the execution of all mages in the city of Kirkwall for the actions of just one rogue mage who also jumped off the slippery slope and First Enchanter Orsino, leader of the mages, using Blood Magic in an act of despair. Both slopes were greased with phlebotinum in this case; Meredith was being corrupted by the lyrium idol in addition to her own paranoia, and the rogue mage was possessed by a demon of Vengeance.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VII - Sephiroth is initially the best SOLDIER in the world, but after finding out a certain fact about himself, he becomes a murderous psychopath, slaughtering the population of a village and burning it to the ground, and then sets out to destroy the world.
  • In Final Fantasy XI after the woman that he loved was killed and he was left for dead by Ulrich during the Multinational Expedition to the Northlands, Raogrimm kills Ulrich. Then he hunts down and murders the rest of the people in the Multinational Expedition because they knew that Ulrich had done something and didn't say anything about it. Then he gets a giant "Slip 'N Slide" and whisks down the slope gleefully as he declares war on the human nations and nearly destroys the world. Mind you, some of it may have been the Dark Divinity Odin fanning the flames of his rage, but still... Although, Ulrich's actions during the Multinational Expedition could be considered the ultimate slippery slope since they were the cause of pretty much all of the major, world-threatening troubles that Vana'Diel has faced in the following 30 years were stemmed from his (accidental) murder of Cornelia.
    • Subverted in the Rise of the Zilart expansion as Kam'lanaut and Eald'narche were always trying to "open the Gates to Paradise".
• Fire Emblem:
  • In Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, the country of Crimea is good with bits of gray, Daein is dark gray but with evil leaders, and conservative Begnion was in the middle with its corrupt Senate but well-intentioned leaders. When the sequel rolled around and Begnion became the main antagonist, it became more ruthless.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses: If Byleth does not ally with them after the Time Skip, both Edelgard and Dimitri succumb to their extremism and insanity, respectively. This ends up resulting in their deaths. Unfortunately, Byleth can only side with one of them.
• God of War: As shown in the prequels, Kratos was always a Sociopathic Hero on his very best of days, but he was perfectly capable of compassion and feelings of camaraderie. But then his mistakes start to add up, he spends every waking second being pushed and prodded and tormented by the gods, he loses half the things he cared about to his own failings and the other half is taken away. As of the second game, he's devolved into a straight-up Villain Protagonist. The game opens up with him waging war alongside the Spartans in Rhodes, and after Zeus betrays him, the man just snaps. It's all downhill from there.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, while it's debatable how moral Tommy Vercetti is, the mission "Messing with the Man" has him go around causing destruction in the city and killing innocent civilians just to prove to a biker gang that he is badass enough and gain their trust, and having no problem with it whatsoever.
  • CJ and Niko Bellic from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto IV, respectively. Let's assume that they're good-hearted people at the start (if the cut-scenes are any indication), and let's assume the player doesn't do any killing not encouraged by the storyline (which is a stretch but go with it). Now watch how their lives unfold. CJ, in particular, goes from "I guess I'll kill this guy since he's been screwing with my gang" to "guess I'll just kill all these guys for no apparent reason" so quickly it might make you wonder if you're still playing as the same guy. By the end of the game, at least, he gets to see the awful results of his actions, and he tells his family outright in the final cutscene that they need to rein it in and be more subtle. It helps that he was being blackmailed for the entire game. His brother has fewer excuses, and the other Grove OGs have none.
    • Well, Niko may seem pretty nice at the beginning of the game, but the plot eventually reveals that he is a war criminal out to kill other war criminals. So there's a good argument that he starts the game as a major bad guy, and indeed committed even more horrible acts before the game started than you can ever do in it.
• Minister Caudecus in Guild Wars 2 was always a political rival to the heroic Queen, casting him in a negative light. However, his political stance often made a good point about things that were going ignored. Even when he revealed himself to be the leader of an evil organization, he was still pointing out flaws in the heroes and was revealing actual truths about the past. Once he's actually confronted, among other things, he reveals that he backstabbed his own wife, shoots his own daughter dead, and is cackling about how evil he is, dispelling any ambiguity in bringing him down.
• Halo:
  • The Ur-Didact, the villain of Halo 4. In the first two novels of The Forerunner Saga, he starts off as a conflicted general who strongly disliked humanity and believed that the Forerunners were the rightful masters of the galaxy, but nonetheless also grew to respect humans as fellow warriors, and believed that the Forerunners also had a responsibility to protect and preserve even those species who would stand against them (except the Flood, obviously), opposing the firing of the Halos to stop the Flood precisely because it would kill off all sentient life in the galaxy. And then he gets Mind Raped by the Flood Gravemind, an experience which magnifies his Forerunner supremacism and dislike of humanity into A Nazi by Any Other Name levels. Afterwards, he comes to the conclusion that the only way to defeat the Flood without using the Halos would be to transform his Promethean followers into robotic abominations; when he starts running out of volunteers, he begins forcibly converting humans (making him not that different from the Flood), with the intent to eventually wipe out all humans and any other species who oppose Forerunner rule. The Ur-Didact's transition from tragic hero to genocidal dictator in skeleton armor is covered in Halo: Silentium and the Halo 4 terminals.
  • The Reveal of Halo 5: Guardians pulls this with your AI companion Cortana, who in the previous game remained the Chief's friend even as her digital body collapsed and she struggled to remain sane, eventually doing a Heroic Sacrifice with the last of her strength. In the following game, she turns out to be alive and supposedly repaired, but now she's at best Well-Intentioned Extremist who's going to take over the galaxy with her army of enormous Guardian machines. While she keeps insisting that she has good reasons for doing so, it's clearly bordering on Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide", especially when she imprisons Chief and Blue Team in a Cryptum so they won't interfere with her schemes.
• Injustice: Gods Among Us has a lot of this: Superman doesn't just jump, he flies down the slope at Mach speed after being tricked into killing Lois and then killing Joker in retaliation, establishing a totalitarian dictatorship where in exchange of his "protection", everyone that even dares to protest his methods gets a swift death, as exemplified by what happened to that universe's Green Arrow and later Shazam, and according to the backstory, Hawkman, causing Hawkgirl to retaliate in vengeance, only to be Brainwashed into servitude. He does it a second time when he goes from maintaining order with an iron fist — and demonstrably creating a peaceful world at the expense of a few lives, and freedom of course — to flattening cities himself because people don't agree. Via backstory, we see the only surviving Teen Titans being Cyborg and Raven; both end up disillusioned and Raven ends up giving in to Trigon's influence, gaining a lust for torture and becoming Trigon's worshipper instead of trying to prevent his coming. And while Damian Wayne did accidentally kill Dick Grayson, he didn't look back in regret and goes far worse than before because Superman, being his 'new father figure', convinced him to continue his extremist ways. Meanwhile, Wonder Woman is unquestioningly convinced of Superman's "logic" for some reason, even after it gets clearly obvious she's doing the things he's supposed to be preventing.
• The Illusive Man from the Mass Effect trilogy takes a flying leap off the slope in Mass Effect 3. Whereas before he was a Well-Intentioned Extremist who tended toward a lot of Shoot the Dog moments in his zeal to protect humanity, in the third game he flies straight off the rails and starts using Reaper technology to assemble a massive army of Brainwashed and Crazy Mooks, ordering the murders of civilians, and actively working to undermine the Alliance and the Council in their efforts to defend the galaxy against the Reapers. Eventually, it's revealed that he has completely hurdled the Moral Event Horizon with Sanctuary, a supposed safe haven for refugees from the Reaper attacks, which turns out to be a laboratory where the refugees are forcibly converted into Husks as part of his research into finding a way to control the Reapers. Explained by the fact that he was indoctrinated by the Reapers for the entire game.
  • Jacob's loyalty mission in Mass Effect 2 involves looking for his father, Ronald, and answering a distress beacon on a planet. Jacob discovers Ronald was put in command of a ship following a crash, and that the local food on the planet made people have memory issues. Ronald decided to make most of the crew eat the local food, keeping the ship's food supplies for himself and the officers, specifically so they would have their wits about them long enough to build a distress beacon. However, when the beacon was finished, Ronald did not activate it, and within a few weeks had the other officers killed, so he could rule over the others like a king.
• Mega Man X8 has Lumine, a New Generation Reploid, and director of the Orbital Elevator project. He's the Big Bad, not Sigma this time. It doesn't help that the whole of Lumine's tale plays on the game's subtitle, Paradise Lost. Lumine is the analog to Satan, rising against his creators and their vassals. He even seems to have enough truth in his words to shake up X into being completely unable to attack.
• In Mitadake High it is common for someone to RP themselves going insane as a result of the madness going on around them. Unfortunately, not everyone is any good at it.
• In Neverwinter Nights, Aribeth leaps quite quickly down the slippery slope (partially excused as Morag is messing with her brain and her intentions).
• Helgenish from Octopath Traveler was already an asshole for his horrendous treatment of his dancers, treating them like Sex Slaves. However, he eventually murders Yusufa for helping Primrose escape his tavern. This is when Primrose decides that Helgenish is too dangerous to be allowed to live.
• Overwatch: the first truly evil thing we see Reyes do is to get in a fight with Jack Morrison that destroys Overwatch's Swiss HQ and "kills" them both, all because Reyes was passed over for leadership of Overwatch. This is what leads him to become the terrorist and master assassin Reaper. It's especially jarring given that, from what we see of Reyes in the "Uprising" event and corresponding comic, he's downright amicable if a little unhelpful, but certainly a far cry from the soul-stealing, death-obsessed maniac that is Reaper.
• Case 03: True Cannibal Boy: Marty goes from being willing to bury any evidence incriminating Sally to killing innocent women to give Sally a new body.
• Portal 2's Wheatley does this as part of his Face–Heel Turn after a core transfer with GLaDOS gets him Drunk with Power. He calls the escape lift to let Chell go, gushing over how cool his new body is, but when Chell is almost out, he starts laughing. The music turns dark, his laughter turns into a downright Evil Laugh, and the lift starts lowering again. He starts monologuing about how HE did all of this, and when GLaDOS points out that it was CHELL who did all the work, Wheatley gets so mad, he takes GLaDOS apart and sticks her in a potato battery, showcasing that the cute little personality core he'd been for the entire duration of the game has turned into a sadistic monster.
• [PROTOTYPE]: In the first game, Blackwatch was at least attempting to contain the infection, if in a brutal, violent, and ruthless manner. By the second game, they've reached the point where they're deliberately kidnapping civilians just so GENTEK scientists can run "experiments" on them involving throwing Infected beasts at them and watching them get shredded. Dialogue from the Blackboxes also further underscores Blackwatch's expanding psychopathy, including a recording of a Blackwatch soldier shooting an autistic boy on the mere suspicion that he was infected, another Blackwatch soldier shooting a woman immediately after warning her he was authorized to use lethal force if she didn't step back, an officer threatening to discharge another Blackwatch trooper for saving a woman from being raped, a recording from Colonel Rooks explicitly stating that it isn't their responsibility to police the refugees even when they start killing each other, and an officer berating a subordinate for shooting an entire family because he was wasting ammo.
• Subverted in Rondo of Swords. After a very harsh Friend-or-Idol Decision that ends up on the favor of the Idol, Serdic experiences an immediate Karmic backlash, complete with title change, power swap, and costume switch to reflect his dog shooting. While his True Companions repeatedly accuse or suspect him of jumping off the slope, Serdic experiences no lapse in emotional or moral health. The epilogue also reveals that he was a just and well-loved ruler with a happy marriage.
• The Protagonist from the Saints Row series gleefully leaps headfirst off of the slope, and then proceeds to nuke it. In the first game, you start off as a (mostly) silent henchman who more or less indifferently does what Julius, Gat, Lin, Troy, and others tell you without hesitation, and you seem to be a pretty sane individual. While you are killing, you're killing the other gangs for peace, and the cops you kill are corrupt anyway (of course, not counting civilian casualties in your gameplay rampages). But in Saints Row 2, after being betrayed by Julius and being blown up and disfigured to the point of needing severe plastic surgery (which is really just an excuse to make a new character), it's implied that you went insane and very much stated that you're paranoid, corrupt with power, take deep pleasure in murder, is only after the city, and nothing short of evil- the only people outclassing you are the gangs you fight and their leaders, but not by much. As the game goes on, it becomes clearer and clearer that you're not very interested in wiping out the city for peace anymore as your actions become more and more violent and crazy, especially after two of your homies, get murdered. The only person who ever stood a chance of stopping you, your old boss Julius, turns out to have done it because he realized that you were a dangerous person; you kill him while happily stating you have full intentions of taking over the city in any means necessary.
  • Saints Row: The Third plays this with most if not all of the main characters, and they each suffer for it. Boss, Gat, Shaundi, Loren, Killbane, Kiki, Temple, and Kia are just some of the names who are guilty of this, and all either die or, with the exception of Boss, can be killed. Boss arguably gets it even worse if s/he chooses to jump off the slippery slope: s/he reverts back to being worse than ever, and a thoroughly despicable person.
  • This prominently applies to Cyrus Temple, the commander of STAG. Initially, he appears to just be a Hero Antagonist, using military force to get rid of the gangsters fighting one another in the streets of Steelport. But as the game continues, his actions grow increasingly harder to justify. He raises the bridges to Steelport, ensuring that any civilians who couldn't vacate the premises beforehand are left at the mercy of the gangs, his soldiers capture Saints members and detain them without due process (twice), his subordinate Kia holds the Saints captive at the Magarac Island statue along with Mayor Burt Reynolds, planning to blow the statue up and paint the Saints as terrorists, and (depending on the player's decisions) he ends up bombing half the city just to get rid of a few gangsters. By the (canonical) opening of Saints Row IV, after being humiliated and discharged from the military for his actions, instead of having a Heel Realization, Cyrus teams up with a bunch of Middle Eastern terrorists and fires a nuclear missile towards Washington DC, purely to spite the people who he feels "ruined America" (even though that's basically what he's going to do). Needless to say, no tears will be shed for Temple when the Boss kills him by shooting him so that he falls into a vat of liquid metal, and then destroys his nuke in mid-air.
• Saya no Uta has the revelation that the "fruit" Fuminori had been enjoying eating is actually human flesh. This presents two options for the player: have Saya fix your screwed perception of reality, which leads to an early end to the story; or embrace your newfound taste for cannibalism, which continues the story.
• Shin Megami Tensei V: Dazai stays neutral for most of the game, having a reverence for Abdiel without truly subscribing to her ideology. The events at the Bethel summit before the last act of the game are the tipping point, and the next time the player encounters Dazai he's entirely committed to Abdiel's Law faction.
• Spec Ops: The Line: The entire game's events have been one long one for Captain Martin Walker, with this game being about him becoming a Villain Protagonist. Starting out wanting to be a hero with a seemingly well-meaning goal of saving Dubai, he continues to make things worse for Dubai until he becomes its greatest threat; the "enemy soldiers" he's been killing throughout the game were soldiers trying to protect the surviving civilians, or civilians manipulated by government agents to act as the resistance. Walker's most infamous feats throughout the game are killing dozens of soldiers and civilians at a refugee camp with white phosphorus, and later helps destroy Dubai's water supply, and ultimately leads his own unit to their deaths. All the while he continues to blame Konrad so he can find some way to justify his deeds or ignore his conscience. When finally confronted by the hallucination of Konrad - a manifestation of his conscience - Walker has the choice to accept or deny responsibility for what he did, and can ultimately slaughter a squad of soldiers expressly trying to help him.
• StarCraft:
  • Arcturus Mengsk of started out as a dashing rebel leader who saved you and Jim Raynor from the Confederacy for killing Zerg. The first time he used a psi emitter to summon the Zerg it was a military target and the rebels helped the majority of civilians flee. Then he dumped several on Tarsonis, a planet with a population of two billion, before attacking the Protoss who came to stop the Zerg, using the orbital defenses to stop anybody from fleeing, and abandoning his second-in-command to the Swarm (admittedly, said second-in-command was the assassin who'd murdered his family, setting him down the path of vengeance even though she didn't remember it). And it doesn't stop there: while he didn't count on Kerrigan returning from there as the superpowered leader of the Zerg, it leads to him using ever-more desperate measures to kill her:
    • Setting an imprisoned pal of Raynor's free in exchange for her death (even after seeing her restored to human-ish form);
    • Attacking a ship carrying his own son due to Kerrigan being onboard;
    • Relocating the artifact that has a huge anti-Zerg effect (crippling his own army);
    • Working with mad scientists to create Protoss-Zerg hybrids, inadvertently furthering the local Eldritch Abomination's plan to destroy Terrans and Protoss;
    • Blowing up a prison ship (with the crew still onboard) trying to kill Raynor and Kerrigan;
    • And finally, dropping nukes on his own home Planet Ville once the Zerg make landfall. Note that after his rebellion (caused by his family's murder), Korhal was nuked by a thousand full-strength missiles by the Confederacy, an event so horrific it rendered the planet uninhabitable for years and used as the justification for the Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke (while one Brood War mission had him use nukes on Korhal, it was still radioactive desert then). Talk about Became Their Own Antithesis...
• In the Star Trek Online: Delta Rising mission "All that Glitters", Vaadwaur leader Gaul lures you to a meeting with what sounds like an offer of a peace settlement, with the stipulation that the Kobali release to him the cache of stasis chambers containing Vaadwaur soldiers from the 15th century whom they've been using as reproductive stock. Sounds perfectly reasonable at first, but then he says he wants the Alliance to pull a Face–Heel Turn. Upon being informed that the Federation-led alliance wants actual peace, as in an end to the Supremacy's war of conquest, he loses his shit, starts gunning down Talaxians, and blames you for it.
• Super Paper Mario: Blumiere's father started out as a Control Freak who refused to let his son leave the castle. When he found out his son fell in love with Timpani, he blackmailed her into breaking up with him from behind the scenes. When that failed, he finally took a direct approach in an attempt to keep the union of his son and her from diluting his tribe's bloodline. He cursed her to wander between dimensions, almost killing her in the process.
• In Terra Invicta, the Protectorate start out as the more reasonable of the two Vichy Earth factions, compared to the cult-like Servants. They're cautious but reasonable bureaucrats who want to avoid a war with an interstellar species. Their goal is to prevent as much human loss of life as possible, and preserve everything humanity has built. It doesn't take long for them to fall into denialism and authoritarianism, dismantling everything they claimed they were trying to protect to appease the aliens. In the end, the Servants are the ones who prove to be A Lighter Shade of Black.
• It used to be that when the Warcraft series needed a new villain, Blizzard would seem to throw a dart at a character board and have the one they hit go insane.
  • Kael'thas Sunstrider's goal was originally to improve his suffering people, and despite their re-branding as blood elves, they were a shining example of Dark Is Not Evil. Even when he allied with the naga, and the partially demonic Illidan, it was a move of desperation and managed to be the moral center of the group. In Burning Crusade, he's killed as part of Illidan's army, but then he Came Back Wrong to reveal he had betrayed him to the Legion and was trying to summon Kil'jaeden so the Burning Legion can destroy Azeroth, killing his own people when they tried to stop him. It's heavily implied that point either the feel magic reanimating him just threw him completely off the slope, or his corpse was just being used by a demon that took on traits of his personality and memory.
  • Illidan was always a self-serving Jerkass, but he had a more gentle side to him and never intended his collateral damage. After nearly being killed by Arthas, though, that gentle side was replaced in Burning Crusade with paranoia, insanity and a desire to crush anyone he deems as a threat, which happens to be everyone not on his side. The jump was severe enough that Blizzard went on record expressing a desire to bring him back for a proper redemption. He finally returns in Legion once more a morally ambiguous character whose positive sides are seen in the greater light. At one point, it seems a little exaggerated; there's a whole questline mostly dedicated to an Energy Being explaining everything in Illidan's past in a positive light as possible. However, when it actually encounters Illidan, it's shown that the god-like Energy Being is just being kind of dumb, and he doesn't conform to its expectations. He wants to be an Anti-Hero, not The Chosen One by someone else's rules.
  "The Light will heal your scars."
  "I am my scars!"
  • Malygos from World of Warcraft goes from a dragon who wants to rein in mortal spellcasters because he disapproves of their methods to a dangerously extreme tyrant who, driven by the idea that widespread overuse of magic will destroy Azeroth, engages in a plan to redirect and control magic that has an excellent chance of destroying Azeroth faster.
  • Garrosh Hellscream was always a jerkass with Daddy Issues, but when Thrall put him in charge of the Horde, he began committing war crime after war crime (eventually addressed in the novel appropriately titled War Crimes). The most notable jumping point though was probably using a mana bomb (essentially a nuke, complete with its own analog for radiation) on Theramore, a city that was founded on and campaigned for peace. Just in case that wasn't enough though, he essentially says to heck with his own people, restores the heart of an Eldritch Abomination at the cost of a sacred location, and declares war on the world.
  • The Scarlet Crusade, at least those located within the Scarlet Monastery in Tirisfal Glades can be accused of this. This in contrast to their forces in the Eastern Plaguelands, who can be sorta excused for their most evil actions due to their leader being actually a Demon, who was manipulating them to fight the Scourge and the sentient undead of the Forsaken, and then following his Villainous Breakdown outright kills them all and raises them as undead.
  • And, while we're on Warcraft games, as you play the human campaign of Warcraft III, Arthas starts out as a dedicated disciple of Uther Lightbringer (even though Arthas is a prince, Uther's military rank is higher than Arthas's, and they both respect that) but gradually starts getting more and more desperate in his fight against the Undead. Eventually, he betrays Lordaeron, dons an evil looking armor, and murders his own father. In his case, though, while he had a decline, the jumping point was the result of taking up a cursed sword that he was too desperate to realize was a trap that stole the soul of anyone it touched.
  • Also happened to Sylvanas between Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm, although she was already on the thin line between Token Evil Teammate and Nominal Hero before. Long story short, she died, didn't like what she found there at all, and has done everything she could to avoid dying again ever since. In service of this, she's entered a pact with the ruler of the afterlife she witnessed and has begun providing him souls, starting with the civilian population of Teldrassil.
• The ending of the white chamber reveals this as what started the plot: It began with one completely accidental killing, then killing the person who found the first victim's body, then killing the people who found them, then eventually killing people out of sheer paranoia and suspicion that they might know.
• The Witcher games might as well be called "Radovid of Redania Jumps Off the Slippery Slope". In the first game, he's a pragmatist who seems genuinely horrified by what his allies of convenience got up to. In the second, he's a ruthless bastard who tortures people and takes every opportunity to expand his domain. In the third, he's a murderous fanatic who even makes Nilfgaard look good by comparison. All of this takes place over less than a year of in-universe time.

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