From Nobody to Nightmare

Used to be a slave, but now you are a conqueror.

"He was always such a… little man. This was finally something that made him feel big."

— Fox Mulder, The X-Files ("Pusher")

A Sister Trope of Start of Darkness that involves a non-badass normal taking numerous levels in badass, whether instantly or over the course of a story, thus becoming essentially nothing but a giant walking, talking bucket of Nightmare Fuel.

Through a series of unlikely coincidences, or through accidental or unknowing actions on the part of the heroes themselves, or as a result of things someone who might have stayed an insignificant nothing is transformed into a nightmare that grows and grows, absorbing the power to rend civilizations to dust and bring universes to their knees.

For some reason, it seems that From Nobody To Nightmare villains are always more powerful, terrifying, deadly, and threatening than your typical Diabolical Mastermind. In scenarios where the villain rose by their own effort, this often a case of I Did What I Had to Do, Jumping Off the Slippery Slope, and maybe a few Angst Nukes thrown in for good measure. This may owe itself to the shock value of the idea that anyone and anything can become the Big Bad under the right circumstances; it's much more comforting to believe that only long years of Card Carrying Villainy could possibly breed that kind of person.

Compare the Diabolus ex Nihilo. If the character was already a bad guy previously but never a serious one, it's Not-So-Harmless Villain. Heroic versions may still find themselves wondering, "Dude, Where's My Respect?". (Or becoming He Who Fights Monsters.) Frequently, the details of this process are uncovered in the villain's Start of Darkness. Contrast From Zero to Hero. Also see Who's Laughing Now?, Malignant Plot Tumor, and Magikarp Power. When a villains power gradually escalates into a nightmare, see Snowballing Threat.

Note that being a villain is not necessarily a requirement for this trope, even though most who fit the trope are. Anyone who is feared or dreaded by someone (even if the "someone" in question is the cruel and tyrannical government that the heroes oppose) can qualify. In such a case, the inverse trope is Villain Decay.

noreallife

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Work subpages:

• The DCU
• Marvel Universe

Example subpages:

• Anime & Manga
• Fan Works
• Films — Live-Action
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Tabletop Games
• Video Games
• Western Animation

Other examples:

Comic Books

• Astro City: "The Eagle and the Mountain" gives us the story of a lowly slave named Kiyu, and how he eventually becomes Infidel, the reality-shattering Evil Sorcerer Arch-Enemy of Samaritan.
• Black Moon Chronicles: Wismerhill starts out as a This Loser Is You type who fights rabbits with a joust. During his journey he gains more power and followers, eventually becoming the commander-in-chief of the Army of the Black Moon and emperor of the new world after the death of the old one.
• Cerebus the Aardvark: The Cirinist were originally a group of mothers who worked together to help their community. Over the course of the first 1/3 of the series they go from a creepy Monster of the Week to a major political party to an oppressive matriarchy and eventually the closest thing to a Big Bad the series has.
  • New Joanne was originally a writer for a religious magazine but by the end of the series she runs the oppressive matriarchy that rules the world and is arguably worst than the Cirinists.
• In Chronin, the Big Bad Azai turns out to be a younger son from a minor and impoverished samurai family who thanks to cunning, fighting ability and knowledge of the future managed to scheme his way into power and then grow that power until he occupied a position of great power in the shogunate. As Magistrate of Kyoto, he is exceedingly effective in his efforts to both counter and quash the revolutionaries and to play the delicate and dangerous game of politics in the shogunate. Fortunately, as capable and ruthless as Azai is, he's also reasonable, and Mirai manages to convince him that he has no chance of accomplishing his goals for reforming Japan by working with the shogunate, and in the end he crosses over to the side of the heroes.
• The ultimate Big Bad of the CrossGen multiverse, Charon of the Negation Universe, was an ordinary archaeologist who had the good(bad?) luck of discovering Atlantis and its Ascension technology. When his comrade Apollyon activated it, they were both flung into the Negation Universe as partially ascended near omnipotent godlike beings. Charon became so powerful that the mere fragments of his madness which he expelled from himself became twisted Eldritch Abominations called the Lawbringers that are powerful enough to fight and kill The First and Sigil-Bearers.
• One memorable twist in Larry Hama's run on the G.I. Joe comic book was revealing that the Cobra Commander was... a used car salesman driven to madness by personal loss and misfortune, who built his terrorist army through propaganda and the proceeds from Amway-style pyramid schemes.
• Khaal: The Chronicles of a Galactic Emperor tells the story of a street urchin living in a harsh and brutal planetship who is discovered to have superhuman powers, and uses them to become a fearsome warlord whose aim is to gather as many resource, slaves and females. When super-advanced aliens attack their ship and try to invade it, he manages to kill their leader and take their place, becoming a Galactic Conqueror in the process who leaves barren and ruined planets in his wake. At the end of the comic he invades Earth and successfully conquers it, being revered as a God-Emperor in the process.
• Haazen from the Knights of the Old Republic comic series. He goes from failed Jedi padawan loser to a powerful Manipulative Bastard and would-be Sith Lord.
• Lady Death's villain Purgatori was a mere slave girl in Ancient Egypt whose job was to grind corn under the desert sun. One day she caught the eye of the Queen Ostraca, who was well known for her love of women and enchanted by her beauty, made Sakkara her newest concubine. However, after being pressured by her generals to slaughter her harem, Ostraca betrayed the girl who sought a vampire to turn her and give her revenge. The vampire's blood and her own were mixed and she was turned into a unique creature half-vampire, half-demonic who would eventually pay back against the Queen and unleash a vicious bloodbath upon the world.
• Tokuga in The Legend of Korra: Turf Wars is a hyper-competent villain who uses hookswords, chi-blocking and fearful tactics (think a mix of Ty Lee, Jet, and Azula) to attempt to overtake the city. Tokuga is unique in his entire past and character are a mystery. Nobody knows where the hell he came from. According to two-toed Ping, he showed up, bumped off Viper and took control of the Triple Triads. Up until him, gangs were a bit of a joke in the Avatar universe, but Tokuga reminds the audience that gangs are indeed a serious threat who should not be taken lightly.
• While not a villain in the proper sense, Lenore the Cute Little Dead Girl from the eponymous comic series is pretty horrifying at times. She was apparently a mostly normal child before catching pneumonia, dying, and rising from the dead as an adorable little abomination.
• Razzia (aka Korbo the Red Shadow) in Les Légendaires. As a child, he was a far bookworm fascinated with adventures novels who didn't like fighting and required assistance from his younger Cool Big Sis Sheyla when bullied. Then his village got slaughtered, and the wrath caused him to grow up as a Conan-like warrior who slaughtered a one-thousand army of his own and eventually joined the Evil Sorcerer Darkhell as The Dragon, becoming famous as one of Darkhell's two deadliest henchmen (the other being his Dark Action Girl daughter Tenebris, who became Korbo's girlfriend). Fortunately, Razzia eventually had a Heel–Face Turn and became a hero.
• The Secret Service shows Gary's transition from a random street punk to a world class spy.
• Scourge The Hedgehog from Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) is most definitely this. In his own words, he was an evil alternate dimension counterpart of Sonic, who was nothing but a minor annoyance. It was only when he became super-charged with energy from the Master Emerald that he became a monster — to the point where he actually took over his home planet just because he could. It's also implied that he's a Self-Made Orphan.
  • Doctor Finitevus. Ordinarily a brilliant mind from the Echidna city of Albion, an incident involving Chaos Knuckles, Saffron and Charmy Bee, and an invention of his own creation led to his transformation into one of the worst villains Mobius had ever seen. Dangerous and manipulative, he nearly brought about The End of the World as We Know It by using Knuckles, and was directly responsible for Albion's destruction and the deaths of hundreds of Echidnas.
• Sonic the Comic: Chaos started out as a Drakon Prosecutor from ancient times, during the war between the echidnas and the Drakon Empire capture by echidnas not long after its imprisonment, a squad of Drakons attacked the camp in order to take back the Chaos Emeralds that the echidnas had stolen from them. During the fight, a discharge from a Prosecutor's battle-staff struck the Chaos Emeralds, causing the Emeralds to 'leak' pure Chaos radiation. The energy mingled with the water in the tank containing the captive Prosecutor, which absorbed the energy and was mutated in a terrifying monstrosity, the creature Sonic would come to know in the future as Chaos.
• Coach Boss from Southern Bastards was a skinny kid who repeatedly failed to get in the football team. He goes on to become the crime boss of the entire town.
• Star Wars: Legacy features two that go from the same start to the same position, but on opposite sides of the moral spectrum; Darth Krayt started out as A'sharad Hett, a survivor of Order 66, and ended up as the ruler of the galaxy. K'Kruhk also survived Order 66, and ended up as one of the three Triumvirs who ruled the galaxy.
• In most versions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Baxter Stockman tends to start out as an ordinary scientist who is mistreated or wants to flaunt his genius-level intellect by using dubious methods. After being foiled by the Turtles, he gradually loses his humanity until he becomes completely ruthless. Several instances of this also involve him turning into a mutant flyman or a cyborg in the process of it all. Bonus points if he goes insane on top of that.
• IDW's The Transformers - Megatron: Origins, details the origins of... Megatron. The evil warlord who has terrorized the Galaxy for countless eons... was once a miner earning dirt pay who got laid off, didn't take it lying down, and was arrested for killing a security officer in self-defense. Later issues reveal that he was also a staunch opposer of Cybertron's current government regime but was never able to get his message across because of his peaceful, nobody nature. Then he got pissed, built and attached a fusion cannon to his arm, and the rest was history.
  • The comics further show that the Decepticons had to come from somewhere, and the corrupt government had many of the Cons coming out of the Lower-classes. Of the Big Three: Soundwave was a vagrant with no memory of his past, Starscream was a test pilot, though it's downplayed with Shockwave who was actually a prominent senator who was Punished for Sympathy and had his emotions stripped from him, becoming the un-empathetic Mad Scientist he is today. All the other cons had mid to low level jobs, Blitzwing was a security officer, Needlenose was a salesman, Rumble and Frenzy were miners, though this is inverted with Drag-strip who went from a famous racer to a fairly low-level Decepticon.
  • Thunderwing started out as a small Decepticon scientist, trying to get both sides to understand that Cybertron was on its last legs thanks to the war. When his proposed method of surviving was rejected, he decided to put it into practice... and became an utterly unstoppable monstrosity that took the combined power of both armies, include such 'bots as Trypticon and Omega Supreme, to stop. And that still didn't actually kill him.
  • It applies to some of the less pleasant Autobots, too. Whirl, one of the Autobots' craziest Blood Knights, was a clockmaker ^note Whirl plays with this trope a bit. While a clockmaker is a fairly humble profession, his claim to fame would be his defying the Functionist Council and changing professions from something his alt-mode seemed built for, making him defying what was tantamount to religious dogma at the time. It's why he was on the Senate's hit list to begin with. Then the Senate took his dexterous hands away with the punishment known as empurata, giving him claws and a single eye. His life went...downhill after that, but hey, he gets a lot of opportunities to hurt people and some funny one-liners, so...there's that.
  • Nova Prime started off as another soldier in Prima's army. Then Alpha Trion decided that with the Thirteen gone, he'd make a good Prime. And then it turned out Nova was a far bigger bastard than he'd let on, allowing for the rise of Functionism and the corrupt Senate that gave birth to the Decepticons. Whoops.
  • Arcee and Galvatron, who is not a reformatted Megatron in IDW 2005, started out as siblings in the gladiatorial slave pits. After Megatronus, AKA the Fallen, overthrew their leader and recruited them into his military, Galvatron would become a genocidal warlord who became the first person to kill a Prime without being one. Following a stay in the Dead Universe, he would nearly destroy Cybertron, then become the leader of the post-Megatron Decepticons and prove to be so dangerous that even Optimus Prime opted to Shoot the Dog rather than accept his surrender. Arcee, meanwhile, had her gender affirmation surgery go badly thanks to consulting a Mad Scientist over it and would spend the period after her release from spark containment as a rampaging killer who viewed repeatedly dismembering said mad scientist as a form of therapy prior to eventually calming down and moving on with her life.
  • Transformers: Wings of Honor: Inverted: Before the war, Strika was a security guard assigned to a scientific outpost, at the end of the Autobot-Decepticon war she's one of the Autobot's top Generals and Co-leads the Autobot/Decepticon alliance against the Cybertronian empire.
• The Umbrella Academy: Vanya went from a mousy, shy, withdrawn, ordinary woman to The White Violin, Apocalypse Maiden, who nearly ended the world, only failing because of Klaus' telekinesis.
• Basically everyone in the The Walking Dead is like this, as all the survivors were more or less just normal people until the world ended. Rick was just a smalltown cop, Michonne was apparently a lawyer, Maggie was a farmer, Glenn was a pizza delivery boy, and even infamous Big Bad Negan was a simple used car salesman. Now, several years after the end of civilization as we know it, all of them have become some of the most capable, dangerous, and canny individuals around. Special mention though goes to The Governor, Philip Blake, who was a meek, ineffectual, divorced failed businessman cum music geek named Brian before becoming the sadistic, raping, power-crazed, insane, mass-murdering tyrant who would cripple Rick, rape and torture Michonne, and kill off fully half the cast during his notorious assault on the prison in Made To Suffer.
• In Wanted, Wesley Gibson started out as a weak-willed and pacifistic individual and eventually becoming a monster with his father's Improbable Aiming Skills. This was all masterminded by his father, who hated how Wesley's mother raised him and wanted him to "man up" by embracing his supervillain heritage. Arguably the film version is a less evil variation, where Wesley just becomes a badass instead.

Films — Animation

• Beauty and the Beast: Gaston is by no means considered a nobody in his village, but he hardly appears to be a threat in the grand scheme of things. He's just a smug Jerkass and a sexist, controlling egomaniac... but his obsession with Belle and his refusal to accept she doesn't love him eventually drives him first to blackmail and then to form an angry mob to attempt to kill the Beast. One of the animators sums it up best:
  "He goes from a buffoon and a jerk to a murderer."
• Heavy Metal. In the "Captain Sternn" segment, Hanover Fiste starts off as a milksop weakling and is mutated by the Loc-Nar into a gigantic, vicious muscle-bound brute. Interestingly, in the comic he can Hulk Out at will.
• Tyler from Heavy Metal 2000 was a simple miner before he had the misfortune of discovering the Loc-Nar. All he did was touch it, and it immediately drove him insane, turning him into a bloodthirsty psychopath who seeks the sealed off source of immortality-granting water and rule over the universe.
• Buddy Pine from The Incredibles was just an annoying little Fanboy who refused to leave Mr. Incredible alone, then he had one little misunderstanding with the hero. When Mr. Incredible sees him again years later, he's become the supervillain Syndrome and has already murdered a large number of Supers. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
• Megamind:
  • Megamind himself is an alien who is sent to live on Earth by his parents. But he was raised in prison, unlike Metro Man, who lived in a mansion with a happy family. This jealousy eventually leads to him becoming a supervillain after all attempts to be good goes wrong for him.
  • Hal Stewart started off as a clingy, socially-awkward cameraman with a crush on Roxanne Ritchi, but obtained superpowers via Megamind and became the supervillain Titan, a brutish Psychopathic Manchild who is willing to obliterate an entire city just because Roxanne won't give into his even more disturbing advances.
• Constance from Monster House was a large obese woman who was part of a circus group and was always ridiculed for her appearance. Once she met Mr. Nebbercracker, the two got married and were prepared to live happily together, until she accidentally fell to her death to the basement of her own home when trying to scare some teenagers away. Her spirit takes over the entirety of her house, becoming a monster who attacks anyone who or anything that comes near her.
• Randall Boggs started out as a nerdy college student before he fell in with a bad crowd. His Start of Darkness is only hinted at in the prequel Monsters University, but by the time Monsters, Inc. rolls around, he's become bitter and violent.
• Tempest Shadow, from My Little Pony: The Movie (2017). She began her life as an ordinary unicorn filly with dreams of attending Princess Celestia's school. Then she was attacked by an Ursa Minor, breaking her horn and scarring her face. Her unstable magic caused her to be abandoned by her friends, leading to her losing her faith in friendship and abandoning Equestria. By the time she returns as an adult, she's a cold, hardened army commander under the employ of the Storm King, having razed the lands beyond Equestria and now seeking to steal the Princesses' magic.
• NIMONA (2023):
  • In-universe, this is how The Director paints Ballister after the Queen is killed: he was a commoner, and now has become the greatest villain in the kingdom.
  • In the past, Nimona was this: she only wanted a place to belong, and once she thought she'd found it, was persecuted and driven out by the people she thought had accepted her, leading her to adopt a mindset of Then Let Me Be Evil.
• Agatha, from ParaNorman, had some powers during her lifetime but these didn't appear to extend beyond speaking to the dead before she was executed as a witch.
• Douche from Sausage Party was originally an ordinary feminine hygiene product who fell out of a shopping cart and got his nozzle broken. Furious at losing his chance to get bought and used (and aware that, unlike the food characters, he wouldn't be eaten when he was bought) he took out his anger on the foods, eventually declaring himself a "god" as he began eating them.
• Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island: Simone and Lena were simple Louisiana colonists until their village was destroyed and their friends murdered by Morgan Moonscar. This drove them to become cat demons to get their revenge, only to be permanently cursed and required to drain the life force of visitors every harvest moon to preserve their immortality.
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: The true identity of the Spot ends up being Jonathan Ohnn, the Alchemax scientist at whom Miles threw a bagel whilst escaping from the company's facility in the first film. The explosion from the collider at the end of the original movie permanently transformed Ohnn's body into a vessel for interdimensional portals. Miles has no idea who the guy is, while Spot credits Spider-Man for ruining his life. To make matters worse he started off as an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain, but after Miles calls him a "Villain of the Week", he snaps and, with a little bit of figuring out the full potential of his powers, becomes a truly terrifying threat who could threaten to destroy the entire multiverse.
• Toy Story 3: Lotso was once a soft-spoken, gentle, lovable teddy bear who first started out as a Christmas present for Daisy, a young kind-hearted girl who immediately became overjoyed the moment she unwrapped him. Along with her other two toys, Big Baby and Chuckles the Clown, she had so much fun playing with them, as she loved all three of them equally. But, according to Chuckles, Lotso was unique to her most of all. Things suddenly take a dramatic turn when on a family trip, as Daisy happily played with her toys, including her very special Lotso, she fell asleep after lunch, accidentally leaving her toys behind. Lotso and his friends decided to go back home afterwards, but by the time they got there, it turned out Daisy bought another Lotso to compensate for the original one she lost during the trip. Right when Lotso saw this, something snapped inside him that day... which cumulated in him turning the daycare into his own prison. It should be noted, that Daisy only bought another Lotso because he symbolized how much she truly loved her original. As pointed out by Woody, it was Lotso who abandoned Daisy to begin with.

Music

• Clamavi de Profundis: Oshrjad Bonebreaker began life as a stunted, abandoned orphan, but eventually grew to be a feared and powerful warlord leading a great orcish horde.
• Evillious Chronicles: Duke Venomania, otherwise known as Cherubim, as expanded in The Lunacy Of Duke Venomania, the tie-in to the song of the same name. He's a deformed guy who was locked in the basement because of this, and only two people actually cared about him...and then the girl he loved rejected him. So he murdered his entire family, made a Deal with the Devil, and raped pretty much every character in that story arc. Not to mention all of the murders and brainwashing he committed to keep it quiet.
• Gloryhammer, as revealed in Keeper Of The Celestial Flame Of Abernethy the Big Bad of the whole saga, evil wizard Zargothrax, was once a simple peasant, who used his magical abilities for weaving baskets. Then his home was destroyed in building Kingdom of Fife, prompting Zargothrax to forge a pact with chaos, becoming a mass murdering Evil Sorcerer and greatest threat to the world across space and time.

Mythology & Folklore

• "The Lambton Worm": The Worm starts out as a tiny, harmless fish caught by John Lambton while fishing, small enough to be handled with ease and casually tossed down a well. The Worm then spends years growing within the well, and by the time it crawls back out it's a huge, powerful, terrifying monster that can hold all of the countryside in terrified thrall.

Opera

• In Wagner's Ring Cycle, Alberich is just a lovesick dwarf until he gets hold of the Rheingold and makes a ring which makes him a threat to the gods themselves.

Podcasts

• The Hunger in The Adventure Zone: Balance started out as John, a motivational speaker in his home plane who was struck with extreme nihilism. In time, his conviction of the multiverse's meaningless spread to every single thing in his entire plane, down to the last straw of grass or grain of sand. Because of a depressed motivational speaker, an entire plane turned into an Eldritch Abomination out to consume the multiverse in order to force it to have meaning.
• Cute swamp monster Theodora, from roleplaying podcast Dice Funk, goes from a bit character in the previous season to a main character in the next one...a main character in Faustian service to a God of Abominations. By the time the other characters realize that she's Not So Harmless and sweet, Dora has become the living avatar of a dark god and sacrificed everything she's cared about on that god's altar. Worse yet, she accomplishes exactly what she'd set out to do, killing dozens and trapping thousands of innocent people in a Fate Worse than Death inside of ironic hells that they can no longer escape. Ever.

Professional Wrestling

• Triple H started off in WCW as just another long-haired meathead (who wasn't even that meaty) with a silly Wrestling Doesn't Pay gimmick during a time when these gimmicks were a dime a dozen. He got squashed by The Ultimate Warrior during his first WrestleMania match, then the curtain call happened... But by 1997, he was randomly^note There was nothing random about it, Triple H and Shawn Michaels were and still are best friends off screen and Shawn asked to be paired with HHH paired up with fellow long-haired Kliq member Shawn Michaels to form D-Generation X. From there, he would go on to marry the boss's daughter both in storyline and in Real Life, win both world championships over a dozen times, and become one of Professional Wrestling's nastiest tyrants, earning himself monikers such as 'The King of Kings' and 'The Cerebral Assassin'.
• Jimmy Jacobs started his career off in Ring of Honor as a jobber in fuzzy boots, then as a lovesick emo-teen. Then he snapped, formed the viscous Age of the Fall stable. Since then he was a major player in the S.C.U.M faction and became the Big Bad in Chikara as the leader of the Flood (he was later revealed to be The Dragon).
• The Miz. When he first appeared on television in the summer of 2006, it was merely as the obnoxious emcee for that year's Diva Search (which Layla El won, by the way). He eventually started wrestling, but almost everyone (except for Michael Cole, which Cole himself would Lampshade years later) thought of him as a joke who had only been offered a contract with WWE because he'd been on so many reality shows. (Outside of Kayfabe, of course, he'd been the second-place contestant on Tough Enough, which did him no favors with the fans since the fan-voted contest winner was unceremoniously booted from the WWE) He remained essentially a "curtain-jerker" for his entire first year on TV, even getting eliminated from his first Royal Rumble Match after only seven seconds! It was only after he was drafted to ECW on SciFi in the summer of 2007 and paired with John Morrison in a heel tag team that he started to emerge as something resembling a threat. Fast-forward three years and several titles later, and suddenly Miz is "Mister Money in the Bank" and eventually "the most must-see WWE Champion in history!" And, of course, "Awesome."
• The WWE NXT season one rookies were just some wet-behind-the-ears, fresh-out-of-training nobodies — maybe something someday, but for now not worth much. Then they banded together to form The Nexus and completely tore apart Monday Night Raw. For a few months after that, they were "the biggest threat WWE has ever faced" — bigger than The Alliance, bigger than the nWo, bigger than the McMahon-Helmsley Regime, you name it. Ironically, their undoing came when Daniel Bryan, the only rookie who actually had a good amount of experience before coming on NXT, and who had been expelled from the group for showing remorse, joined the WWE wrestlers in the fight against The Nexus.
• Mark Henry spent the better part of 15 years as a midcarder, best known for his angle with Mae Young, and was considered an oft-injured bust who the WWE only hung onto to justify the untold millions they (over)paid him. When the company was short on monster heels, they turned to Mark Henry to see if he could fill that role finally. With strong booking that had him decimating upper midcarders and main eventers alike, coupled with a rejuvenated Henry in the ring and on the mic, he was able to finally be convincing as one of the most dangerous men in the company, if not THE most dangerous.
• Cody Rhodes made his WWE debut back in July of 2007 as a generic babyface who teamed up with veteran Hardcore Holly to win the World Tag Team Championships later that year. But Rhodes would turn on Holly at Night of Champions in June of 2008 by revealing himself to be Ted DiBiase Jr.'s mystery partner. Both DiBiase and Rhodes would spend the rest of 2008 to early 2010 as Randy Orton's Legacy henchmen who did all of Orton's dirty work. By spring of 2010 when Legacy disbanded, many experts predicted that DiBiase would be the breakout star of Legacy while Rhodes would be stuck in WWE Superstars-land. But it would be Rhodes who would become one of the WWE's top heels as well as one of the longest-reigning Intercontinental Champions while DiBiase faded to obscurity.
  • Despite optimistic predictions, Cody never really made it out of the midcard marsh in WWE, leading him to eventually leave the company to seek his fortunes on the indies and in smaller promotions like ROH and NJPW. It was during his time in NJPW that he ended up joining Bullet Club and eventually ousted the famous Kenny Omega to become leader of the hottest stable in the wrestling world. Eventually Cody and his friends in The Elite (Omega and The Young Bucks) had amassed enough clout to hold their own indie PPV, All In, where Cody won the esteemed NWA World Championship, the same title his legendary father Dusty had once held, and they parleyed this success into founding their own promotion, All Elite Wrestling, which has quickly managed to become one of the hottest wrestling promotions in the world, with Cody as its top massively-over babyface. To call his post-WWE career "prolific" would be an understatement of the highest order and he's the unquestioned poster boy for a wrestler leaving WWE to become a bigger star outside of it than they were allowed to become within it. He's probably the biggest arch-enemy Vince McMahon has had since Eric Bischoff (even more so than Jeff Jarrett); how appropriate that he's called the American Nightmare.
• A.J. Lee started off as the adorable, nerdy Geek Goddess who won the crowd by being tiny, cute, and easy to relate to. Once she hooked up with Daniel Bryan, her popularity grew... and then he dumped her and she lost her mind, turning her into the crazy Wild Card who brutally abused her former best friend, won the Divas Championship and held on to it for longer than anyone before her, running right over the top of the other Divas in the process.
• Kenny Omega was a Fun Personified kid best known for pretending to Hadoken people during matches. Then he joined the Bullet Club and reemerged as "The Cleaner" a Psycho for Hire brought in to take out all of the wrestlers in New Japan's junior heavyweight division. He then ascended even further up the ranks after AJ Styles left at Wrestle Kingdom 10, now the new leader of the Bullet Club, he has become one of the strongest wrestlers in the world, being the first gaijin to win the G1 Climax and is now the US Champion of NJPW as well as gaining mass amounts of media coverage for his matches against Kazuchika Okada at Wrestle Kingdom 11 and Dominion 6.11.
• Bray Wyatt. Originally Husky Harris, filler for CM Punk's iteration of the Nexus, he later on became "possessed", now the Ax-Crazy leader of a backwoods cult, who may or may not be the vessel for the devil himself. He got worse after becoming a Depraved Kids' Show Host.
• As an unusual heroic example (or straight example, depending on how you feel about his career), the big man himself, John Cena. Cena's first appearance as a pro wrestler was on a Discovery Channel show called Inside Pro Wrestling School, which caught on camera his first day as a wrestler-to-be^note Right around this same time he also made a very brief uncredited appearance in Ready to Rumble, the film best known for making David Arquette the world heavyweight champion of a major wrestling promotion (as in on the actual wrestling show, not in the movie). That major wrestling promotion would be out of business a little over 9 months later.. He eventually evolved a rather corny gimmick called "The Prototype" (basically a Terminator-pastiche that derided everyone on their physique, building on Cena's past as a bodybuilder), which he kept up until he made his WWE main roster debut against Kurt Angle in 2002 (at which point he began using his real name). Anyone watching back then would have brushed this guy off as another face in the crowd, not expecting him to become the biggest thing the industry has ever seen since the days of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin.
• Initially on NXT, and to an extent even going back to her indie days as Davina Rose, Bayley was a character that lived on the intersection of "hopeful and positive role model" and "naive fangirl", who often got beat up whenever she approached a heel or anti-hero and more often than not would get beaten decisively in matches. However, through her time in NXT, she developed and adapted to the treachery of her peers, becoming a competent and even dangerous foe who would go on to capture every available women's championship in the company, all while maintaining her optimistic approach. However, as the drama of competition on the main roster threatened to throw her back into the shadows, 2019 saw her take on an increasingly edgier attitude, first declaring that she was done hugging, then allowing her morals to be distorted to help her best friend, before finally completely breaking into a self-justified loner.
• Tropes Are Tools: This was part of the reason Jinder Mahal failed as a WWE Champion. Throughout his career, he had been portrayed as a jobber who never won at anything. Then, within a month, he has managed to get his hands on a pair of flunkies who propelled him to a shot at the title and won- but being a jobber throughout his career made it impossible for people to take him seriously as a champion.

Roleplay

• Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues:
  • Simon in the present is a regular boy with an evil personality that's satisfied with cruel but petty crime. Flashforwards have shown that Simon becomes the head of an FBI division dedicated to capturing and persecuting superheroes, while the Dark Dragon moniker is formed into an evil organisation that kidnaps and tortures the superpowered kids.
  • Barbra, a perfectly average girl in the present, is implied in flashforwards to have mutated into a horrifying monster as a result of her Adaptive Ability.
  • Two minor examples are Eddie, a chill workman-cum-drug-dealer, and Esther, a kindly investigate journalist. Both are shown in the future to work as lackeys for the Post-Human Division and are set on detaining the superpowered characters.
• Frequently used in The Gungan Council for villains. Better examples would be characters that managed to fly under the radar for a year or two before everyone realized how nightmarishly involved they were in all of the galaxy's problems.
• Survival of the Fittest provides plenty of opportunities for (mostly) normal high school students to become multiple murderers. J. R. Rizzolo, in particular, went from being a regular guy who liked playing Guitar Hero to a sadistic, deceptive loony who offed his former classmates without a trace of guilt.

Theatre

• Heather Duke from Heathers starts out as a Beta Bitch consistently silenced by Alpha Bitch Heather Chandler, and appeared rather meek compared to the person protagonist Veronica refers to as a "mythic bitch." When describing Heather Duke, Veronica even comments about how she seems to have no discernible personality in comparison to the other Heathers. However, after Heather Chandler's death, Heather Duke takes over as the new Big Bad of the school and is arguably even worse despite lacking the charisma to strike other students with the same feeling of fear that Heather Chandler did. She goes so far as to spread false rumors in order to completely smear Veronica's virtuous reputation, where as Heather Chandler had merely threatened her with social isolation.
• In The Devil's Disciple, Rev. Anthony Anderson goes from being an anonymous provincial priest to the man who almost singlehandedly destroyed General Burgoyne's American campaign.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • Joe Darke was an ordinary office worker, until he killed someone with his car. This led to a chain of events that made him an infamous Serial Killer.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: The beginning has Miles Edgeworth. He's known as the Demon Prosecutor who is said to do whatever it takes to get his guilty verdict, including forging evidence (though Case 1-5 verifies that particular rumor was untrue) and who never lost a case before going up against Phoenix. It's later revealed though that Edgeworth used to be a perfectly normal kid, albeit one very interested in being a famous defense attorney. Character Development in later games makes him less of a nightmare, though.
  • Simon Keyes (aka Souta Sarushiro) was really just an unlucky boy orphaned by his parents, under which his dad who only used him as a taste tester. He ended up orchestrating many, many events in Gyakuten Kenji 2, to the point that his meekness (at that point, pretended) really did fool Edgeworth into thinking he was innocent at first. To put it in context: the person we are talking about was working as an animal trainer in the circus.
  • A heroic example to any of his opponents is Phoenix Wright. Phoenix was actually an art major in college when he decided to change careers and start studying law. By the time of the fourth and fifth games, he is known as a Living Legend and a respected figure in his field (though he still has his moments of being a Butt-Monkey).
• Boyfriend To Death: Ren starts off as a helpless and defenseless whelp completely at Strade's mercy. Years later, by the time of the sequel, Ren himself has become an highly unstable individual perfectly willing to kill. And decades later, as The Price of Flesh shows, Ren grows up to be an influential Human Trafficker in his own right, a far cry from his early days as a slave.
• Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair:
  • The students of Hope's Peak Academy's 77th class (excluding Chiaki) were all fairly normal, if somewhat messed up, high school students before they became members of Ultimate Despair. Afterward, they were responsible for the murders of their families and friends, terrorism, coup d'etats, wars, the massacre of countless innocents, and even destroying their own bodies through self-inflicted mutilation. The finale anime describes them as million-class murderers.
  • Hajime Hinata takes the cake among the cast, starting off from someone with no talent being selected by Hope's Peak for an experiment. Said experiment erased his memories and personality to make him multi-talented for the sake of creating Ultimate Hope... but the aftereffects made him a prime target to become the Ultimate Despair, triggering The End of the World as We Know It.
• Discussed with Dennis in Double Homework. According to Marco, Dennis used to be a quiet kid who fixed everyone’s computers for free. However, this might be a subversion considering some of his hobbies....
• Fate/stay night:
  • Sakura Matou goes from the cute girl with a jerk brother who gets kicked out of all the routes early, never does anything important, Cannot Spit It Out and more Shrinking Violet traits to an all-powerful dark mage with the exact magic traits needed not only to be able to be the host of the (sort of) devil but also express its power. And also to keep her mind (to a certain extent). Oh, and she can eat Servants or corrupt them as she pleases, has an immense Healing Factor, and a bunch of other nifty moves. The one thing it doesn't do for her is improve her self image, causing her to believe that Rin (her sister) doesn't care about her (Rin's rather cold statements don't exactly help matters...), and to worry that Shirou might abandon her for Rin.
  • Avenger/Angra Mainyu started off as just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill Mesopotamian villager. After being randomly picked to be a scapegoat for "all evils of the world", he ended up being summonable for the Holy Grail War, but even there he was still pathetic, being one of the weakest Servants imaginable. However his spirit then went inside the Grail where he made a wish to truly become the manifestation of evil for revenge on humanity, and that's the reason the Grail has been corrupted ever since.
• In Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star, The King was once a depressed quail whose otherwise-uninteresting life was so horrible that he became a Well-Intentioned Extremist Eldritch Abomination in the afterlife; he refuses to let himself be reincarnated and creates a fake fairytale kingdom where he steals the souls of all visitors, forcing them to become part of his hive mind so that nobody in the kingdom disagrees or is reincarnated, and they "happily" stay in his false paradise forever.
• Higurashi: When They Cry: All the secondary antagonists/ironic members of the main set of True Companions.
• In Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, Akane goes from being a sweet little girl to masterminding a second Nonary Game to get revenge on the four men that caused her death, as well as to get Junpei to show her the solution to saving her life.

Web Animations

• Animator vs. Animation: The villain of the episode 6 saga, who owns a powerful megacorporation and has the means to torture the most powerful characters in the series to a standstill? That would be Alan's first victim, who was made solely to be tortured and presumed deleted after the first episode.
• Madness Combat: Tricky the Clown starts out as a random Mook in the Sheriff's employ, but then assimilates reality-warping technology and becomes the setting's most enduring villain. As of Expurgation, he's reached Humanoid Abomination status as "The Thorn in Reality's Side".
• Red vs. Blue
  • The Big Bad of The Chorus Trilogy and the series' overall Greater-Scope Villain, Malcolm Hargrove, was originally the PA to the chairman of the UNSC Oversight Subcommittee. He proceeded to become the actual chairman of the subcommittee, and would later become the CEO of Charon Industries, using his new power to try to wipe out an entire planet's population and then claim ownership of the planet's invaluable alien artifacts afterwards.
  • The Big Bads of Season 15, the Blues and Reds are this, especially their leader, Temple. Similar to the Reds and Blues, the group started as lowly Simulation Troopers designed as living training dummies for the Freelancers, only to end up Taking a Level in Badass and becoming competent soldiers in their own right. However, whereas the Reds and Blues ended up becoming war heroes, the Blues and Reds became revenge-driven murderers out to personally kill all the remaining Freelancers as well as the entire UNSC.
• RWBY:
  • Cinder wants to be strong, powerful and feared because she came from nothing, and has clawed her way into the position she now holds as The Heavy to the Big Bad. An orphan who was bullied by older, bigger children, she was bought by a wealthy Atlesian hotelier to function as a slave. A sympathetic Huntsman, Rhodes, secretly trained her to become a Huntress so that she could escape when she came of age; however, years of abuse took their toll on Cinder, who snapped and murdered her step-family. When Rhodes tried to arrest her, she killed him, too. Now she's obsessed with gaining power at all costs, and treats others as abusively as her step-mother once treated her.
  • Neopolitan started life as a child imprisoned in her own home by parents who pretended she didn't exist. Attempts to use her Semblance to teach herself how to escape and steal resulted in her banishment to a boarding school that secretly trained her in combat and espionage until she encountered Roman Torchwick, the first person to ever allow her to become her true self. She comes to the heroes' attention once she starts helping Torchwick's crimes, proving a far stronger fighter than her boss. After Torchwick's death, she becomes hellbent on killing Ruby in revenge. Once the Ever After powers up her Semblance to Reality Warper levels, she becomes unstoppable, easily overpowering the realm's most terrifying threat^note albeit said threat was barely at Mook level and successfully driving Ruby to such despair that she attempts to take her own life.

Web Comics

• Darths & Droids takes this a step up from the source material: the planet Tatooine and Anakin himself were made up on the fly by the GM, with Anakin not even having had a name until Sally (playing Jar-Jar) asks what his name is. Then he gets a blood transfusion from Obi-Wan, and Annie starts playing him... Long story short, he gains incredibly powerful Force abilities, becomes unstable frighteningly quickly, manipulates Senator Palpatine (who was originally a genuinely good person in this continuity) into wiping out the Jedi and becoming a dictator, later driving him insane by haunting him as a Force ghost - sorry, midichlorian cloud, pushes Padme over the slippery slope into becoming Darth Vader, and is still out there somewhere as a midichlorian cloud, just as evil as ever.
• Karnak from Dominic Deegan was a human orphan raised by orcs. Through a Heroic Sacrifice to save Miranda Deegan, he was transformed into a semi-demon and gradually slaughtered his way up the ranks to become the only Demon Lord in Hell.
  • Most Infernomancers in the series fit this trope as well. And Necromancers. And maybe Siegfried. Yeah, Mookie sort of loves this trope.
• In Drowtales, Quain'tana would be this from the perspective of the Blue Blood Sharen clan. She started out as a lowly orphaned Street Urchin, forced to steal food in order to survive and nearly dying at the hands of a Sharen dragon knight over it. But in time, she was able to build up enough power to become their bitterest foe for authority and survived all of their attempts to crush her. By the end of the Time Skip, she overthrows their reign over the city-state of Chel and completely topples their sense of reality.
• In 8-Bit Theater, as it turns out The Onion Kid becomes Sarda, Reality Warper extraordinaire.
• In El Goonish Shive, this is why the government puts so much effort into maintaining The Masquerade that keeps regular people from realizing magic exists (and, more importantly, how easy it is). Ordinary jerks with just a taste of magic can turn into psychotic monsters.
• Girl Genius has Baron Wulfenbach. While not quite nobody, Baron is one of the lowest ranks possible in Europe, and his family historically ruled a single town without much invasion of anyone else. His greatest personal claim to fame was essentially as a recurring sidekick for the two legendary heroes of the era. He disappeared for a few years, during which time the heroes disappeared (maybe killed), attacks from their arch-enemy the Other had left Europa in ruins. By the time he came back, all the good he accomplished with his heroic friends was in shambles and every Mad Scientist on the continent was running around trying to kill or conquer each other again. He dealt with this by rolling up his sleeves and conquering the entire continent in a matter of years. Then he held it all together for well over a decade with a delicate balance of soft-touch and iron-fist policies summed up as "Don't make me come over there".
• Guilded Age has Penk, who starts out as a drummer and herald with strong ideals but not much else, and then becomes an avatar of his god, gaining increased strength, resilience, and senses, and takes on leadership of the World's Rebellion's response to the Gastonian Peacemakers.
• Coyote of Gunnerkrigg Court believes that etheric beings like himself only exist because of human belief. Assuming his theory is true, he was once an ordinary coyote until a delirious dying human saw him as a deity.
• Jack Noir of Homestuck starts out as just an unwilling Obstructive Bureaucrat in the kingdom of Derse, but ends up becoming the comic's Disc-One Final Boss after killing the Black Queen and takes the prototyping rings for his own use.Takes a whole another level when he successfully kills an entire universe
  • Eridan Ampora is a competitor for fastest jump from Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain to a serious threat with his plan to join Jack, the murders of his love interest and best friend, and causing the extinction of his species. Right after pathetically thanking said best friend for being the only person to show faith in him.
  • For straight-up old-school shiver-inducing terror try Gamzee's about face. He starts the comic as an unimportant Flat Character based on a parodic Deconstruction of a Insane Clown Posse video - an attempt to imagine what a character holding the beliefs implied in the video would actually be like (a Monster Clown with a tough upbringing, but also a sweet-natured, totally chill, Stoner Love Freak who is probably the nicest person in the comic). The fanbase loved him and produced gag fanworks based on him, which made it all the more hilarious when he was described as "the most important character in Homestuck", and then flipped out and started murdering all the other trolls due to a religious crisis.
  • ...and now we have Aranea Serket, whose whiplash-inducing Face–Heel Turn is enough to break one's neck. Making it worse? The action that put her over the Moral Event Horizon was "healing" Jake's emotional trauma, allowing him to use his powers against everyone else in the session on her behalf—against his will. The fallout? Considering he's a Page of Hope, explicitly stated on several occasions to be one of the most powerful classes, not exactly pretty. Her actions end up causing the failure of the entire original timeline, needing a large scale multiversal retcon to fix.
  • And finally, in an exceptionally spectacular example: Caliborn. He was little more than a brat on trapped on a room, but ended up turning into the ultimate omniversal terror, ruler of paradox space, and unquestionable master of time; the all-mighty Lord English.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: Six of the Seven Black Emperors come from humble origins and obtained their god-like powers through Regicide^note Mammon bought his first key, but presumably murdered his way to several others. Mottom and Jagganoth were born peasants in backwater worlds, Solomon David was a farmer and citizen-soldier, Incubus was an orphaned War Refugee, Mammon was a beast of burden and Gog-Agog wasn't even sentient. Jadis is the only one of them to avert this, as she came from a noble family of Philosopher Kings, but even so it's a long way from 'noble' to 'The Omniscient' and 'Physical God'.
  • All Devils, save Himself, begin their lifecycle as Pale Devils and work their way up the hierarchy of devilry by making deals, obtaining new names and discarding old and unusable ones until they find their one true name and become Ebon Devils. This means every Ebon Devil has at one point been a mute servitor, The Imp, The Brute, and so on. It's believed Himself was a Pale Devil as well once, but went from absolute Nobody to absolute Nightmare in one fell swoop: He broke the fundamental rules of the setting, named Himself with just that single name, and that was that.
  • Maya was the daughter of a noodle vendor. Rather than remain one, she became apprenticed to Meti-ten-Ryo, the greatest Master Swordsman ever to live, and became a master of Sword Law. She was the original holder of much of Incubus' Key of Kings, and conquered 20,000 worlds during the Universal War, though she's since retired.
• Nearly all of the Demans in Lessa are this. Most of them started as nobodies, and now they're the ones terrorizing Hexagon Island.
  • Ares was a child slave in Ancient Egypt. By present-day, he's the leader of a race of genocidal monsters.
  • Among the Second Generation — Demans who Ares personally converted — Bach was also a former slave, while Belle was an ordinary villager who crossed the Despair Event Horizon after her daughter was murdered under suspicion of being a witch. There's also Ryan, who was a sickly author before Ares rescued him.
  • To a lesser extent, the Third Generation — White and Mindy-Mindy — are mostly composed of abandoned children who thrive as Demans through survival of the fittest.
• The Order of the Stick
  • On the prequel book Start of Darkness, Redcloak goes from a cleric initiate to vessel of his god's will and earthly power simply by donning his mentor's Crimson Mantle.
  • His master, the Dark One, started off as a regular purple-skin goblin before becoming a powerful warlord, and eventually a god.
  • Xykon goes from being an unfocused thug with no real long-term goal other than just wanton murder and destruction to an undead monstrosity that threatens the entire world.
  • Tarquin was once a small-time adventurer who tried to set up his own nation on the Western Continent. However, he joined together with his old friends and engineered a conspiracy which controls most of the Western Continent. He is now the de facto ruler of the Empire of Blood, as well as the other two Western Continent superpowers
  • The Snarl started out as a tiny piece of creation that embodied the pantheons' disagreements over how the universe should work. It was so insignificant that the gods either didn't notice or didn't care about its existence. Then it got bigger and meaner to the point that it could curbstomp entire pantheons. It is now supposedly the greatest threat to all existence, with the entire series revolving around efforts to control or seal it.
• (Mostly) heroic example in Schlock Mercenary:
  • Petey, near the beginning of the comic, was merely the AI of one of many of the Ob'enn warships, and thus just an assistant to a race of Omnicidal Maniac koala-like bears. But he proved to have both unparalleled tactical genius, a fondness for baryonic life as a whole and a bit of a god complex. All of this together led to some complex trickery on his part to take over his own ship, and later employing our protagonists in a variety of missions to spread his influence further, along with making some tactical advancements of his own. By the latter chapters, he's become the closest thing to a god the setting has, the commander of the greatest known fleet in existence, and the Milky Way's self-appointed protector.
  • A similar example, including the (mostly) heroic part, is LOTA. LOTA was initially built as a longshoreman, albeit an overengineered one, built with off-the-shelf tank parts and LOTA's AI built by one of the greater experts in the matter. But still, a longshoreman. Some skillful maneuvering, journalist call-outs, and colony-saving later, LOTA ended up in charge of the entirety of the Credomar station, with millions of (now happy) humans to rule over and one of the galaxy's most dangerous weapons at LOTA's disposal.
  • Ennesby, by the end of the series. He started out as an AI controlling a holographic boys' band, moved down to ship's mascot, up to pilot of a small mercenary ship, and has been bouncing up and down since. Until the end of the series (BIG SPOILER) when he gains control of the Andromeda galactic power core.
• In There's Something About Tails, Tails gets possessed by a soldier from another universe and turns into a badass.
• Tower of God:
  • Several centuries before the start of Tower of God, Hoaqin was originally just an ordinary Regular from the 10 Great Families. After fusing with his siblings to become more powerful and taking on the guise of White, he climbed up the Tower, became a Ranker, and eventually became one of the most infamous and feared FUG Slayer in the history of the Tower. His crimes and actions were so severe it took the efforts of the Jahad Princesses to put him down for good. Or so they thought...
  • Hell Joe was a sort of magical sewer repairman before he gained the power of the Red Thryssa — the spawn of the dead Administrator of his floor — and, after progressing from frustrated idealist to villain, became the undefeatable Evil Overlord of half the floor.
• Unholy Blood: The Starter Villain Byeongsu starts off as a lazy and dickish bully but nothing worse than that, but upon becoming a vampire he's become one of their most psychotic, with even his sires finding him extreme.
• Unordinary: As Isen finds out, John used to be classified as a measly 1.2, until at some point in middle school his power level skyrocketed mysteriously and he became violent and uncontrollable.
• Pretty much the main story arch of Zebra Girl. the series began when a random magical accident transformed an ordinary tech support specialist into a demon with a soul. From those humble beginnings, she has gradually lost her humanity by inches, and has spent the past several months of the comic gleefully and unrepentantly terrorizing the inhabitants of her hometown as the living embodiment of fear. Basically, she has become a better-looking version of Freddy Krueger with longer claws.

Website

• After two online users, ghettofinger and GirlVinyl were kept from creating a Wikipedia article about a certain LiveJournal user, they went on and created their own wiki so they could get away with it. The result: The infamously offensive (and Nigh-Invulnerable) Encyclopedia Dramatica.
• The Queen of Pain from Orion's Arm, an Eldritch Abomination that was once a perfectly normal cat.

Web Original

• Lightning Sentai Blitzenger: Mimi Kuroda was once just another no-name slovenly Internet user before she was recruited into the Underworld Society. Now, as Doctor Waruko, she is one of their biggest assets, heavily contributing to their goal of destroying humanity by regularly providing them with Underworld Specters.
• The Count of Years, the in-universe mythology for the Constructed World of Almea, has the Satan-figure not be the creator of evil Ecaîas, greatest of Iáinos’s creatures, but instead another spirit who witnessed his deed, called Amnās. Amnās starts out as such a minor spirit that he isn’t included in the roll call of all the spirits and their tasks, even though a pre-fallen Ecaîas is, and instead is one of the countless spirits of the night sky who would be hardly known to the Thinking Kinds if not for him resenting his first, minor scolding so much that he dedicates the rest of his existence to ruining Iáinos’s creation, going farther than Ecaîas in that he focused solely on making the Thinking Kinds suffer, not animals, and creating Slave Races to serve as his Evil Minions and corrupting Iáinos’s own Thinking Kinds to his service. For that last one, and for causing nine world wars (and one additional, minor war) he is reviled as the Arch-Enemy of life itself.

Web Videos

• Channel Awesome:
  • Ma-Ti goes from the Butt-Monkey of the group in the TGWTG Year One Brawl to the Big Damn Hero in Suburban Knights to the Big Bad in To Boldly Flee.
  • Atop the Fourth Wall has The Entity, a terrifying, universe-devouring Eldritch Abomination that motivated Lord Vyce to become The Dreaded across the multiverse just to stop it. The identity of the Entity? Missingno, a relatively harmless video game glitch which only becomes creepy when Fridge Logic is applied to it. Also counts as Adaptational Badass.
• Coyle Command found its origins as a laundromat. Its leader, Coyle Commander, had the job of opening and closing it every day.
• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog goes this route with the main character. In the prequel comic released, he was merely a geeky kid who was inspired by a Mad Scientist's moment of triumph to be a Supervillain (albeit one with good aspirations). He consistently remains unsuccessful at impressing his superiors and is eventually shoehorned into a situation where he must commit a murder or be executed for incompetence. Eventually with the accidental murder of Penny, the girl he loved, he becomes a true supervillain in both position and personality.

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