Driven to Villainy

"Are people born wicked? Or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?"

— Glinda, Wicked

Sometimes your villain isn't the Mad Scientist who wants to poison the city, the Corrupt Corporate Executive who wants to control the world, or the greedy bank robber who's on a crime spree. Sometimes, your villain's just an average guy who's brought into villainy against their own will or control. This isn't Mind Control or possession, it's because they've been warped by events around them, and forced into villainy by forces outside their control. A broken shell of a human being, the only thing left is villainy.

To alter an old saying: "Some people are born into villainy, others have villainy thrust upon them." While their villainous actions have no excuse, their cause for becoming villains was entirely (or mostly) out of their hands.

It's rare to find a villain who is truly blameless in their origin, though it does happen. Even origins that lament the cruelty of fate eventually reveal that the origin is still largely due to the character's choices. Indeed, a villain who is fed up with abuse by others or out for revenge is still making the active choice to be villainous, and if it is still clear that the villain made the choice to be evil themselves rather than have it made for them, then they're not exactly broken, just enraged to the point of vengeance.

However, the trend seems to be that, the more arbitrary their fall into villainy seems to be, the more psychotic they become, as those screwed by the world become angry at the world, and seek to inflict their new madness on everyone. The end result of being Driven To Villainy is not a good person forced to do evil, but a legitimately evil villain, tragically warped by things they never had any control over.

A Sub-Trope of Anti-Villain. Compare Freudian Excuse when older psychological harm is the driving force, and Then Let Me Be Evil when enough people assume someone is a villain that they run with it. Hero-to-villain Mistreatment-Induced Betrayals can apply if the mistreatment is severe enough. Contrast Trapped in Villainy. Such a character may become a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. See also From Nobody to Nightmare. The more mundane version of this trope would be Society Is to Blame.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Black Clover: The leaders of the Eye of the Midnight Sun (particularly Licht and the Third Eye) speak rather enigmatically of getting their revenge on the Clover Kingdom, and it's not until the truth of their origins is revealed that any light is shed upon their motives: Licht and the Third Eye are elves who reincarnated following the massacre of the elves at the hands of human nobles 400 years ago, and who created the Eye of the Midnight Sun as a front for their scheme to reincarnate the rest of their fellow elves and wipe out every last human in the Clover Kingdom in revenge. Except even they do not know the full truth of what happened that day...
• Almost all of the Black Lagoon cast not in major leadership positions. Hansel and Gretel are a particularly sad example.
• In The Boy Who Swore Revenge On The World, the main character, Hardt, was an innocent boy in a backwater village, sent to a church to learn his god-given [Ocupation], hoping to be of use to his mother. For no explained reason, he is arrested, tortured, taken back to his home village in a cage, and his friends and neighbors are forced, at sword-point, to stab him with a dagger, to prove their "innocence". Then his mother is summarily executed for the "Crime" of giving birth to him. Since the goddess herself is after him, he now has no choice but to deliver vengeance on the world.
• Aion in the manga version of Chrono Crusade was badly psychologically damaged after discovering the Awful Truth—so badly that it even had a marked physical effect on him. That event warped him into the Well-Intentioned Extremist we see him as in the series.
• Mao from Code Geass. A Yandere who shoots C.C. and proposes taking a chainsaw to her in order to make her 'compact' for a trip to Australia, as well as attempting to blow up Nunnally. Also adept at Breaking Speech-slash-Mind Rape, which he uses twice. However, he is also completely barmy because he cannot shut off the thoughts of others, thus mitigating his moral culpability for his above acts, as C.C. hints at before blowing his brains out.
• Happens midway through Cross Ange with Chris, who had been resurrected by Embryo after being shot in the head by a Misurugi soldier and left for dead. Embryo, on top of saving her life, had fed her issues of resentment and fear of abandonment regarding Hilda and Rosalie, making her hate and desire to kill them, and gave her the attention she desired for so long. All of this, combined with the Ragna-mail he grants her to help destroy the people she felt had abandoned her, earns him her allegiance.
• Ken Ichijouji from Digimon Adventure 02 wished his older brother would disappear, and eventually had to cope with his death in a car wreck. A Compelling Voice brought him into Another Dimension and he finally lost it, becoming The Digimon Emperor.
• In Fixed Damage, the protagonist Chrome, and later a female knight named Sena, are forced into villainy in order to survive. Chrome is betrayed by his "hero" companions and cursed with "The Chains of Despair" which not only steal away his strength, stamina, and magic talent but force him to live on The Power of Hate, his only hope of getting the curse broken is delivering graphic vengeance on the ones who inflicted it on him, especially the "hero" Yuno who stole his fiance, in addition to his very life. Sena, the knight, had her elder sister raped and murdered by Yuno's party member, The warrior, Riot, and his male knight subordinates, for the "crime" of refusing to let herself be sexually exploited, and when introduced, said male knight subordinates had her cornered, planning to do the same to her. Sena had no choice but to deliver graphic vengeance if she didn't want to wind up sexually tortured to death too.
• Hayate Yagami from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's is de jure the Big Bad, since all the fighting takes place for her sake, but de facto she doesn't even know that her servants (whom she considers her family) are committing crimes for her, and she joins Team Nanoha immediately after The Reveal. Also, very much an example of Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.
• Maria no Danzai: Mari Nagare crosses the Despair Event Horizon after helplessly watching her son Kiritaka die in front of her eyes the night of his birthday and later learning that apparently he committed suicide due to Abusive Parents, which makes Mari blame herself for his death. Then she finds Kiri's diary and learns from reading it that in truth he was horrifically bullied at school by Okaya and his gang; Mari puts two and two together and realizes that Okaya's gang sent Kiri to his death before covering their tracks to make it look like a suicide. This serves as the last straw in Mari's Trauma Conga Line, after which she decides to personally hunt down and murder Kiri's bullies in the most painful way possible. Two years later, once she's completed her preparations and finally gets around to doing it, Maria Akeboshi is all too aware of how it's negatively affected her, but is determined to see her revenge through to the bitter end.
• Johan Liebert from Monster. No, really. Hard as it is to imagine, he was once a frightened little boy clinging to his mother's leg before he was systematically warped by secret psychological torture that actually happened to his sister, and that he managed to accidentally create as a false memory for himself and then even more brainwashing to become the perfect little East German super-soldier. While he was already a full-on Enfant Terrible by age 6 or 7, he wasn't born that way, and would not have become how he ended up without these traumas.
  • It's implied that what actually broke him was, at the age of six, realizing that his mother favored one of the children more than the other when she willingly handed one over to Bonaparta. The knowledge that people were inherently different and that favouritism could drive people to do things like that
• Quite a few examples in Naruto, whose author Kishimoto has turned traumatic childhoods into a fine art.
  • Gaara comes to mind - upon birth, a demon was sealed inside him, with his mother becoming a sacrifice, so that he could become his ninja village's ultimate weapon. But said demon also makes everyone in the village terrified of him, and he grows up reviled as a monster. Finally, his own father (who arranged the whole thing in the first place), finding him growing unstable, sends assassins to kill him. The first assassin is his beloved uncle, the only one who seems to care for him, who reveals that he's actually secretly hated him all these years for killing his sister (Gaara's mom, the one who was sacrificed to make him what he was) and that his mother had died cursing the village and hoped that Gaara killed them all - his name, given by her, means "The Demon who loves only himself". Naturally, he finally snaps and spends the next few years killing everyone he runs across as a way of proving that he exists. Oh, and the demon in question prevents him from sleeping, lest it starts eating away at his mind.
  • Tobi aka Obito Uchiha is an even more literal example. As in the previous example he endured a bad childhood, but he all the same remained a kind and responsive child. But after his entire right side was crushed by a boulder while saving Kakashi, he took to himself Kakashi's promise to protect Rin at any cost. Later he was rescued by Madara, which decides to put him through Despair Event Horizon in order to make him the perfect accomplice for his plan, so he took various shinobi under his control, including Rin, to create a situation where Obito would witness the death of the one person who made his life worth living. Ultimately, Obito witnessed how the love of his life was killed by his best friend who promised to protect her at any cost (though Madara himself admitted that it was only a happy coincidence), and despite easily being the most decent of all the Uchihas in the series, not even Obito was immune to the clan's most fatal flaw: their ability to love more deeply than anyone else. If anything, it was worse for him, seeing as he was the most idealistic and emotional of all the Uchihas, and thus his sense of love was far deeper than the norm for his clan. And also, if we take into account that Madara placed a seal on Obito's heart which would have prevented him from killing himself, should he have abandoned the Moon's Eye Plan and opted for an easier way to end his suffering... you really can't blame the guy for going insane.
• The protagonist Kyrie of Revenge of the Teapot Hero was a simple village girl who was summoned to the royal capital of her nation, after an oracle declared her The Hero. When her power proved to be nothing more than the ability to boil water, she was ridiculed and sent home. She enjoyed one last day with her friends and family in blissful ignorance that the king had sent an elite unit to wipe her and her home village out, to make it look like an attack by nameless bandits, so the gods would choose a new "hero." She is forced into acts of vigilante vengeance in order to survive.

Comic Books

• The Boys: The Homelander was never a saint, but he was driven to become a monster because he believed he was already hopelessly murderously insane when he saw images of himself committing horrible crimes (like baby-eating) that he didn't remember. His clone Black Noir dressed up as him and framed him for his crimes to drive Homelander crazy so he could fulfill his purpose: to kill Homelander.
• Green Lantern: Before it was retconned that he had actually been possessed the whole time, Hal Jordan's Face–Heel Turn into the Knight Templar supervillain Parallax was portrayed as this, having gone insane with grief over the annihilation of his hometown of Coast City.
• My Little Pony: FIENDship Is Magic: King Sombra sways between being this and a Tragic Monster. Although actually an Umbrum that is inherently evil, he was born an innocent with a good heart and mainly driven to evil due to the inaction of Princess Amore who secretly knew the truth about him but did nothing, and ultimately was driven right into the clutches of the red crystal that awakened the evil within him and sent him after the Crystal Empire. Even at his worst, though, he still couldn't bring himself to harm his one friend Radiant Hope.
• Spider-Man: The series is loaded with these: The Lizard is another example, as long as you don't count that time where they implied that Conners was in control the whole time (neither the fandom or writers do, however). Norman Osborn has gone so far as to feign that this is the cause for all his crimes.
  • The Hobgoblin from the year 2211 is revealed to be this. She's the daughter of that year's traveling Spider-Man, who is forced to arrest her due to crimes that she would commit in the future, and placed in a virtual reality prison, which is programmed into her brain to keep her in a fantasy world. Her boyfriend tries to free her with a computer virus, which adversely affects the fantasy, warps her mind, and drives her completely insane. True to form, her imprisonment is what caused her insane criminal spree in the first place. She uses her knowledge as an inter-dimensional researcher to create time-traveling equipment and goes on a history-erasing rampage through time.
• X-Men: Perhaps the best example of this trope is Max Eisenhardt a.k.a. Magneto. His origin story is enough to drive anyone to villainy, and yet, throughout the comics (and the movies) he is shown as not fueled by revenge, blind hate against humanity, or the desire to do evil. His ultimate motivation is to fight for his own kind - the Mutants - which he sees as persecuted by the common humans for being different and perceived as dangerous.

Fan Works

• Heirverse: Jac was actual a pretty decent king before the shinigami killed Maria and Carlos
• Jimmy's Visit With Dr. Franklin: After Ebon killed his brother Jimmy Osgood became determined to bring his brother back to life and protect him, even if that meant committing a mass shooting, hoping to kill all of the Meta-Breed.
• Izuku in Mastermind: Strategist for Hire accidentally gives a villain the perfect plan to kill Mt. Lady after All-Might crushes his dream. Afterwards, Izuku tries to get a regular job only to learn no one wants to hire a Quirkless teen, eventually causing him to hire himself out as a strategist for villains.

Film

• Magneto from the X-Men Film Series. See Comic Books entry above.
• The Dark Knight's Harvey Dent/Two-Face. Given that he got his new worldview from The Joker while lying medicated in a hospital bed recovering from both a disfiguring injury and a horrible tragedy, you feel sorry for the guy as he performs his horrible acts throughout the rest of the film. Though there was some foreshadowing that he was walking along the slippery slope before the Joker gave him the push.
• Francis Dolarhyde out of the Hannibal Lecter film Manhunter:
  Will Graham: As a child, my heart bleeds for him. Someone took a little boy and turned him into a monster. But as an adult... as an adult, he's irredeemable. He butchers whole families to fulfill some sick fantasy. As an adult, I think someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks.
• In the Spider-Man Trilogy, both the Green Goblin and Doc Ock had elements of this. The former was driven insane by an untested Super Serum, and the latter by an AI wired directly to his nervous system coupled with a Fail Safe Failure.
• In Pain & Gain, Paul objects to Daniel's kidnapping plan from the start and only goes along with it after he's promised that they won't physically hurt anyone. From there he gets progressively dragged further into the scheme and is eventually urged to kill the victim. His ensuing addiction to cocaine makes him spiral further out of control until he atones for his crimes and professes his guilt to the authorities.
• This seems to be the case with Major West from 28 Days Later. Though it doesn't even come close to justifying the horrible things he wanted to do, he seems as if he was a decent person once and a Father to His Men who had crumbled under the pressure of the apparent post-apocalyptic hell they now lived in and been driven to horrific extremes to keep his men from losing hope and (in one case) attempting suicide.
• Played With in Joker (2019). Arthur Fleck repeatedly frames his transformation into the Joker as this, but the reality is more like a potential monster slowly becoming more comfortable about actually being one. While there are multiple reasons why Arthur falls into villainy, it should never be forgotten that Arthur is personally responsible for a number of choices that compel him to further give in to his darker traits. He pursues the last Wayne employee on the subway and brutally guns him down when he should have let him go. He indulges his ego when protestors use his clown schtick as a symbol of rebellion against the upper class. The atrocities he commits in the latter half of the film are under the influence of no one and he revels in the damage he causes because it just feels so good to get back at the society that hurt him.
• Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings reveals that Xu Wenwu (aka "The Mandarin") was a Double Subversion of this. He did begin his millennium of conquest through the Ten Rings of his own volition and desire for power, but he eventually grew tired of it, and once he found genuine love with Ying Li, he chose to relinquish his villainy and retire to a life of normality and peace. However, after Ying Li's premature death, Wenwu relapsed into villainy and reinstated the Ten Rings in the modern day in the name of revenge, as well as an attempt to reclaim her from the underworld.
• Downplayed in Turning Red. Mei is in no way "evil", and doesn't really want to rebel against her mother, until Ming refuses to let her go to the 4*Town concert in spite of how hard Mei has worked to meet Ming's expectations, and even managed to control her panda transformations. At that point, Mei's desire to see 4*Town, combined with her budding teen rebelliousness, drives her to decide (with her friends' strong agreement) that if all her effort isn't going to be rewarded no matter what she does, then there's no point in being obedient or trying to live up to Ming's expectations anyway.
  Mei: We need to see this concert! Why doesn't my mom get that?! I never ask for anything! My whole life, I've been her perfect little Mei-Mei! [...] We've been so good! If they don't trust us anyway, then what's the point?!

Literature

• ALiCE (2014):
  • Morgan is forced to drug Matthew to keep him from killing himself and tries to rape Christopher, though it's implied that he didn't have control over his own actions.
  • This could apply to Prima and Terceira because, despite the fact that they were both serial killers, Christopher wasn't their typical target and they were trying to kill him to stop the cycle from repeating, even though it would have been ineffective anyway.
• In Aunt Dimity Goes West, it is revealed that an infamous local mine disaster was due to sabotage caused by a disgruntled employee who had owned the claim originally, sold it for a pittance ($5,000.00), and later learned it contained a rich vein of gold (worth $200 million!). It also turns out that his wife committed suicide, his son was sent to an orphanage, and his great-grandson later reopened the mine and set a bomb in it to destroy the house built on the site by the owner's descendants.
• In the prequels to The Belgariad, it is revealed that Zedar's Face–Heel Turn was not a voluntary action of joining Torak, but rather a case of Torak incurably mind raping him.
• Kissin' Kate Barlow in Holes by Louis Sachar was a sweet schoolteacher until the town she taught in lynched the man she loved because he'd kissed her, and they were different races.
• In Horus Heresy, Magnus is actually trying to warn his father of Horus' treachery, but the Emperor disbelieves him and sends Leman Russ to capture his Legion. On the way, Horus tampers with orders to make them say "kill" and to save the Thousand Sons, Magnus is forced to pledge loyalty to Tzeentch.
• Lewis seems to be very much this in Touch (2017), stating outright that he only acts as a tracker for the various criminal organizations of New York because it is what his mother did before him, and he was never allowed the opportunity to keep his powers to himself.
• The prequel to The Walking Dead, The Rise of the Governor reveals the backstory of what was a monster in the comics and makes him out to be a Tragic Villain.

Live-Action TV

• Smallville
  • A character in an early episode was mutated by a combination of Kryptonite and hypothermia. In order to prevent freezing to death, he had to drain people of their body heat (which, if he waited too long to do it, would result in their deaths) in order to survive, and a case could be made that he wasn't truly villainous, and was forced to kill people in order to survive. However, the guy was made such a self-centered, vindictive psychopathic Jerkass that the point became moot.
  • Another episode had a girl who had to regularly eat human flesh to keep from starving to death (regular food didn't work). She never actually killed anyone, just left them near death from the damage to their bodies. This was clearly a case of Horror Hunger, and in at least one instance, she urged a potential victim to run away.
  • For real tragedy, see Davis Bloome in Season 8. A Nice Guy paramedic, Davis suffers from constant blackouts and discovers that he has alien Serial Killer and Person of Mass Destruction Doomsday trapped inside him, and that the only way to keep the monster from taking over and slaughtering dozens of people is to kill individual victims. He thus becomes a Pay Evil unto Evil-type Anti-Hero, murdering those he considers to be deserving of it in order to keep his inner monster trapped. This eventually drives him completely insane, and results in his descent into true villainy.
• In the Criminal Minds episode "True Night", we see a comic book artist become a serial killer after he survived an attack that killed his (pregnant) fiancee, with his inability to protect her being the root of his villainy.
• Regina from Once Upon a Time was a normal young woman who rescued the child of a king from a spooked horse. The king offers to marry Regina, which Regina's mother Cora gladly accepts. Regina confides to the young girl that she is in love with the stable boy, and the girl, believing she can make everything right, tells Cora about the situation. Cora responds by ripping the poor boy's heart out in front of Regina, and Regina never forgives the young girl who ruined her life and who is now her stepdaughter, Snow White.
  • Rumplestiltskin was one of the main villains of the series. He committed many terrible crimes and screwed people over, but the reason he became the Dark One in the first place was to save his son Baelfire. His son would have been forcefully recruited to fight a losing war against ogres on his fourteenth birthday (the reason kids were fighting is that so many people were killed that they were running low on troops). He was manipulated into becoming the Dark One by the previous one, who was tired of doing the job himself. The power eventually corrupted Rumplestiltskin so badly that Baelfire abandoned him.
• Many criminals from The Wire are born into unrelenting and abject poverty, have no positive figures such as caring parents or role models around them, and the societal systems that are supposed to help them (schools, police, social services) are crumbling or being outright dismantled by Sleazy Politicians and the like. Is it any wonder many of them turn to theft and drug dealing?
• The Devil Judge: As a child, the now-devilish Sun-ah got into fights and got bullied and stole due to poverty and hunger. She claims she didn't have a choice.
• River Song in Doctor Who was engineered all her life to be a psychopath to kill the Doctor. In the end, it was the suit she was in that actually murdered the Doctor, not herself. Or something. Then she and the Doctor got married.
• Soaps like to pair this with Derailing Love Interests, when it becomes obvious that reason that the love interest in question went off the deep end is that they finally snapped after months or even years of being jerked around by their lover—As the World Turns Julia became a Yandere as her boyfriend and later husband Jack constantly flip-flopped between her and Carly.

Theme Parks

• Cindy Caine from Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights was already mentally unstable, but it was abuse from the other children at the orphanage where she lived that drove her into full-on murderous insanity; she proceeded to burn the place down, killing everyone but herself.

Video Games

• Fou-lu in Breath of Fire IV. He is a Physical God who is also the King in the Mountain for the country he founded as a God-Emperor (after being summoned there by a Vestigial Empire—who buggered up the summoning leading to aforementioned Physical God developing a Literal Split Personality that ends up displaced 600 years in the future). Unfortunately, said empire has become The Empire over six hundred years of hibernation, The Emperor doesn't want to give up his seat, one of The Emperor's main assistants is Mad Scientist Yuna who convinces him he can kill a god, and this ends up in increasingly more extreme methods by The Empire to kill Fou-lu (eventually culminating in the use of a Fantastic Nuke which runs on nightmares and created the Cold-Blooded Torture and Human Sacrifice of people with very close connections to the target...with Fou-lu's girlfriend used as the Thermonuclear Country Girl because aforementioned Fantastic Nuke also works on the principle of Love Hurts). This cascading Pain Train Breaks The Cutie to the point Fou-lu ends up a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.
• [PROTOTYPE] has Alex Mercer, who wakes up in a morgue to find out that he has Easy Amnesia and has been turned into a horrifying Voluntary Shapeshifter. Cue Roaring Rampage of Revenge. This is played straight, subverted, and then inverted: Upon waking, Alex does horrible things like eat consume people in order to figure out what is going on. It's hard to blame him too much for being batshit crazy, though, considering he's been turned into a living virus and has no memory of who he is or what happened to bring him to this point and people have been trying to brutally murder him since he woke up. That's the played straight. It's then subverted when it's revealed that Alex himself is the one who released the deadly virus, dubbed "Blacklight", that turned him into a monster and is currently decimating New York state. Flashbacks show you that Alex is a sociopath who deliberately engineered an already deadly virus to become ten times more dangerous, and then stole a sample and unleashed it upon the general populace when he was shot dead with the mindset of "If I'm going down, I'm Taking You with Me." That's the subversion. Now the inversion shows up in this way: It turns out that Alex isn't the one who released the Blacklight Virus. Well, he is, but the twist is this: The Alex you've been controlling isn't the real Alex Mercer. When he was shot dead, he was actually Killed Off for Real. Turns out that the Alex you know isn't even human; he's the Blacklight Virus itself in a human avatar. The reason this is an inversion is that it/he goes from originally being the Mad Scientist that the real Alex was, to a Sociopathic Hero, to a person who becomes empathetic enough over the course of the game to actually express disgust over who the real Alex was and risk its life to save Manhattan from being nuked.
• Myst III: Exile has Saveedro, whose entire homeworld was apparently destroyed and who now wants to force the man he blames to see what happened, so he steals a book from him. When he finds out the player isn't the person he's looking for, he kills you if he gets the opportunity.
• Keiichi, Shmion, Rena, and, to an extent, Satoko in Higurashi: When They Cry. They don't choose to become villains when they do start killing people, as it's caused by a combination of the Hate Plague, Hinamizawa Syndrome and some overall bad shit that happens to them.
• Bernkastel in Umineko: When They Cry. She's essentially an incarnation of all of the Rikas who died in Hinamizawa as her friends went insane and killed each other and the entire village was destroyed. Well, it's no wonder that the combination of all of that had some mental damage. It's the "having the power to screw around with other worlds" part that causes the problems.
• Isair and Madae, the Big Bads of Icewind Dale II. While their origins — half-demon half-elves shunned and misunderstood or manipulated by everyone, whose mother committed suicide when she first saw them — are undeniably tragic, it's very clear they've crossed the line into choosing villainy at the point the Legion of the Chimera started burning and looting the Ten Towns.
• Kael'Thas Sunstrider in World of Warcraft. His homeland was wrecked, his people's allies in the Alliance turned on them, and long-term exposure to the Sunwell followed by its' removal had given his people addictions to magic. The only way to escape the Alliance general hunting him was to flee to Outland, and the only place to get large amounts of magic in Outland was to absorb it from demons. Tragically, Fel energy is even more addictive than normal magic and makes one Drunk on the Dark Side, to the point where Kael is willing to align with the same Demon Lord who ordered his homeland destroyed in the first place to get more power.
  • Kael's boss Illidan a debatable example. His entire life consists of Well-Intentioned Extremist actions and being punished for them until he finally flees Azeroth altogether and builds an empire in Outland in an attempt to escape the Burning Legion's ire. Like Kael, the influence of Fel magic made him more and more willing to enslave and slaughter anyone who didn't fall in line.
  • The Zandalari trolls maintained strict neutrality for millennia until the Cataclysm caused their homeland to begin slowly sinking into the ocean. Realizing that the other troll civilizations were on the verge of extinction as well, they rallied the tribes in an attempt to build a new troll empire. They even allied with the Mogu and the Thunder King in hopes of finding a new homeland in Pandaria.
• The two evil gods in the Disciples series didn't get this way on their own. Bethrezen was once an angel of Highfather, and Mortis was once known as Solonielle, the goddess of the elves and the merfolk. However, Bethrezen was misblamed for creating the world of Nevendaar as a Crapsack World (the other angels screwed it up out of jealousy and blamed him), and Highfather imprisoned him forever in the molten core of Nevendaar. Naturally, Bethrezen grew to hate Highfather and his own creation, eventually creating a race of demons to free him and destroy the world. Solonielle's lover Gallean was brutally killed by Wotan for daring to suggest that Wotan's dwarves pay for slaughtering innocent elves. Wotan threw Gallean's heart into the sun, and Solonielle managed to catch it, but her flesh was burned off as a result. Thus she became the fleshless goddess Mortis, who massacres a magical people and turns them into her undead minions. After finally reviving Gallean, he takes one look at her and leaves. Basically, all gods are jerks.
• Grand Theft Auto 2: The manual jokes that the Krishnas went crazy on account of being run over all the time.
• Many of the demon hordes from Nexus Clash were mortals who were hunted by Knight Templar angels for not being sufficiently Good, who in turn said Then Let Me Be Evil and made bargains with the Dark Powers to gain the power to fight back.
• Baten Kaitos Origins reveals that Geldoblame was this prior to becoming the sadistic megalomaniac he was by the time Baten Kaitos rolls around, albeit for somewhat shallow reasons. Initially he was a genuinely good man, if a little too unhealthily obsessed with Quaestor Verus (to the point of Ho Yay), and learning that Verus was the true Big Bad, a genuine monster who was only using him, was too much for him. Que a beautiful cackling swan-dive off the slippery slope.
• The antagonistic humans in Alien: Isolation are all driven to kill and attack purely out of the building desperation, paranoia, and Sanity Slippage caused by just trying to survive the Xenomorph and the aggressive Working Joes. You even hear them reassuring and trying to comfort one another and sometimes overhear them rambling about how they just want to see their families again, and some groups of survivors will only attack if you bother them or try to steal their stuff.
• Billy Yoder pulls a Face–Heel Turn and betrays the other survivors in Jurassic Park: The Game after snapping when he finds his buddy D-Caf in a catatonic Chest Burster scenario and learns that and all the gruesome deaths of the other InGen mercenaries were more or less the direct result of Dr. Laura Sorkin's increasingly stupid decisions to save and study the dinosaurs, such as secretly keeping the trodoons alive for study rather than euthanizing them as ordered. Dr. Sorkin refusing to even accept blame without being threatened at knife-point and the other survivors effectively siding with her certainly doesn't help either.
  Billy: You knew about those damn creatures all along while we were out there, exposed, humping around like idiots looking for our pilot! We were nearly killed by one of our own men. Probably bitten by one of those things just like D-Caf. Who knows where his catatonic body is now? Both our teams are dead! Oscar is DEAD! All because of your dinosaurs. ALL because of you!
• Just like in the comics and TV series, this pops up as a recurring theme in The Walking Dead (Telltale) as well. William Carver is remarked on as "probably being a decent guy once" by a character warning Clementine of someone else's slip into villainy, and David García is defended as being a good guy by his brother until Clementine coldly says "people change".
• The country of Thracia in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War. After a civil war split it and Manster, it was left with unfarmable mountains. This drove most of the men to hire out as mercenaries in foreign lands so that they could keep the country fed, but this led their foreign employers to sneer at Thracia as bloodthirsty sellswords. The Thracians worship Travant for his dedication to improving their lot in life, regardless of his ruthless tactics. Seliph laments having to continue battle with them, but he has to do it so that Travant, allied with Grannvale, won't rip the rebel army apart.

Web Animation

• RWBY: Ilia Amitola joined the White Fang after her parents were killed in a Dust mine and her human friends laughed about it, leading to her beating them up and breaking their teeth. She argues that the White Fang terrorism against humans is acceptable because there's no such thing as innocent humans — they either actively hate Faunus or stand back and let the hate happen. She's therefore willing to follow Adam's more extreme path to a world where the humans are broken and enslaved to the Faunus. She only comes to her senses when Blake uses her parents against her, asking what Ilia thinks her parents would say if they could see what their daughter's turning into.

Web Comics

• In The Order of the Stick, The Dragon Redcloak's race (goblins) was, at least according to his god, created for the sole purpose of being slaughtered for easy XP by the PC races. In his Start of Darkness prequel, Knight Templar good guys destroyed his home, nonchalantly killing noncombatants such as children and old folks, including his entire family except for one of his brothers. So when a vision from his god showed him how he could potentially make the lives of his people better, he took it, despite it having the risk of undoing creation if it fails. As author Rich Burlew put it in the introduction:
  There are people in this world who are driven to evil because of what their life has forced them to endure; Xykon is not one of those.
  Redcloak might be, though.

Web Original

• In Worm, this is the case for many of the villains. Bitch never had an opportunity to be anything more than a villain after she killed her abusive foster mother, Regent was born to a family of villains and forced to commit crimes with them from the moment he got his powers, and Skitter started out as The Mole before being screwed by Armsmaster and realizing that the system was broken.

Western Animation

• Electro is done this way in The Spectacular Spider-Man. While working in Curt Connors' lab, he falls victim to an accident that leaves him charged with electric energy, unable to live safely without a suit covering him at all times. Over the course of the episode, his mentality degrades more and more as he fails to deal with the loss of his humanity and is repeatedly attacked by Spiderman (who doesn't realize the situation), and the cops (who do, but deal with it too harshly). His first criminal act is merely to try to hold Connors hostage until he can come up with a cure, but he eventually goes completely insane and detaches himself completely from himself and his sanity.
  • An even better example is John Jameson from the same. After piloting his spaceship safely back to Earth, he is exposed to alien spores, which infect his body and increase his size and strength. His father convinces him to become a superhero, but the spores eventually affect his mind, making him more aggressive and filled with rage, eventually causing an extreme personality change. After Venom, acting as Spiderman, attacks him, he flies into a rage and goes on a rampage to kill Spidey. Though he is ultimately cured, the experience took its toll; the spores had him enough that, with them gone, he is obsessively addicted to them. He's last seen in an insane asylum, with a cell next to Electro, who echoes his position. If he appears again as a villain, the cycle will be complete. This is somewhat more evident as this than Electro, as, in this case, Jameson was one of the more heroic supporting characters in the series.
• Deconstructed with Demona from Gargoyles. If you ask her about it, she would certainly tell you at length about how humans have always hated, feared, and mistreated gargoyles. She would also claim that all of her evil actions are justified to protect her race from the human threat and that she has a thousand years of tragic backstory to back it up. A closer examination of said backstory, though, shows that Demona's own track record of phenomenally poor decisions is responsible for at least as much of her suffering as outside agency (indeed, many of the incidents resulting in humans massacring gargoyles were in retaliation to things she did in the first place) and that her real motivation is somewhere between revenge and misdirected self-loathing which manifests as Fantastic Racism against humans. Ultimately, it is her inability to recognize her own culpability in the suffering of herself and those around her- and as a result, her inability to move on- which is the true tragedy of Demona. Even her loneliness, which drives some of her decisions, is the result of Demona having alienated most of her former allies.
• Similarly deconstructed with the various Rogues Gallery of Batman: The Animated Series in Trial when the new district attorney of Gotham Janet Van Dorn is a firm believer that Batman is directly responsible for the super criminals and that he has driven them to commit their crimes. Inspired by this said criminals take over Arkham Asylum and put Batman on trial for this, with Two-Face the prosecutor and Janet as Batman's attorney, telling her that if Batman is found guilty then both he and her will be put to death. After going over the evidence, Janet comes to the conclusion that all of these criminals chose their life of crime because that's just the kind of people they are, and while Batman might be responsible for inspiring or escalating them to their specific gimmicks, they would have ended up criminals of some sort even without him. She finishes by pointing out that, if anything, the criminals created Batman, and the jury actually finds Batman innocent. Naturally, Judge Joker decides that, because they're such rotten scum like Janet says, they're going to kill her and Batman anyways for the hell of it.
• Trixie in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic was originally a loudmouthed Stage Magician who told tall tales to boost her ego as part of her show, which lasted until she went to Ponyville, a pair of kids in the audience actually called her bluff and brought an Ursa (a gigantic spectral bear) to town for her to vanquish, resulting in her wagon and home being destroyed and her being inadvertently shown up by Twilight Sparkle who actually was able to (albeit peacefully) vanquish it. This of course resulted in her career being destroyed, her becoming a laughing stock, ponies from Ponyville actually following her around to taunt her and vandalize her wagon, and her ultimately being driven to do menial labor on a rock farm just to make ends meet. She might not have always been the nicest person but she nevertheless made a genuine attempt to just move on with her career and forget about what happened in Ponyville, but it's surprising she went as long as she did without getting her hooves on an Artifact of Doom and coming back for revenge. Unfortunately for everyone involved, herself included, said artifact corrupts its wearer and makes them worse and worse by the hour along with amplifying their power.
• Depending on who you ask, Varian from Tangled: The Series could be considered to have been driven to villainy. At the very least, he considers himself this. After accidentally encasing his father in amber, Varian blames Rapunzel for not helping him in his time of need (she was busy with another urgent matter). He later kidnaps the queen, Rapunzel's mother, as revenge and also to use as bait to lure Rapunzel to his lair so he can force her to help him. He even references this in his Villain Song with the lines "I'm the bad guy, that's fine! It's no fault of mine!"
• Dick Dastardly on Wacky Races outright blames the other racers for him becoming a villain ("Super Silly Swamp Sprint"), although a reason for becoming a villain was never brought up for discussion. Maybe they just needed the token Failure Is the Only Option element among those racing legitimately (give or take a rule bend).
• Yam Roll: Yam Roll, after being mistreated despite being a decent guy, decides niceness isn't worth it and tries to become a bad boy by wearing black and putting on shades. No one is fooled.

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