Hate Plague

Galvatron: The Autobots are acting like madmen!
Rodimus Prime: It's a madness plague, Galvatron. If one of those Transformers touches you, you're infected.
Galvatron: You're lying!
Rodimus Prime: Fine. Whatever makes you a happy Decepticon. Just watch your rear thruster.

— The Transformers, "The Return of Optimus Prime: Part One"

A plot wherein the characters are affected by a force unknown to them and become increasingly snappish and disagreeable to each other, sometimes escalating to outright murderousness. This is often a subtle plan by the Big Bad of the story who figures that it's easier to just let the heroes kill each other off. Naturally, the heroes realize it just in time. This is sometimes a way for characters to vent hitherto unmentioned grievances. Ironically, despite the use of Applied Phlebotinum, this is a more believable version of Toilet Seat Divorce and Jerkass Ball, since everyone is Not Himself.

In video games with Status Effects, this can show up as an actual game mechanic, usually called "Confusion" or "Berserk."

The Trope Namer is the plot of The Transformers cartoon storyline "The Return of Optimus Prime", a red glowy virus transmitted by touch that affects human and robot alike.

Sub-Trope of Emotion Bomb. Contrast with Love Is in the Air. Compare Apple of Discord and Psycho Serum. See also Mind Virus and Artifact of Attraction. Frequently overlaps with Technically-Living Zombie. May lead to a Powering Villain Realization.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School, it's shown that Junko Enoshima turned the planet into a Villain World filled with murderous Nightmare Fetishists by using subliminal messaging to leave half of humanity Brainwashed and Crazy.
• Doraemon has a scientific equivalent, a pill that makes anyone who consumes it hated by everyone around them. One story has Nobita try to distance himself from Shizuka after failing his latest exams and realizing he's not worthy of her friendship. Near the end of the story, noticing Shizuka running to see him out of worry after finding out the cause of his depression, Nobita desperately asks Doraemon to give him something that can drive her away, leading to Doraemon bringing out a pack of said pills. Driven by desperation and despair, Nobita takes the whole pack (when Doraemon told him to consume only one). The pills cause Nobita to emit a extremely disgusting stench, driving Doraemon and Nobita's mother away instantly, while Nobita gets paralyzed due to overdosing. Shizuka manages to overcome the stench and saves Nobita by making him throw up those pills. Stand by Me Doraemon adapts this episode, but with the pills replaced with a spray-type potion.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean has Survivor, a Stand that invokes this in a maximum security prison ward, causing all the prisoners and guards to brutally fight to the death. Despite its potential for causing chaos in enemy ranks, DIO considered this to be the weakest Stand ability as its effect doesn't distinguish between friend and foe, making it impossible for allied forces to function as a group.
• In Macross Delta, the Brisingr Globular Cluster is swept by a mysterious disease called Var Syndrome, which causes people to behave violently, even making them commit acts of terrorism. It also renders them susceptible to the Wind Singer's mind control, whose homeworld of Windermere has been deliberately spreading Var Syndrome for this very purpose.
• My Bride is a Mermaid: Lunar Edomae's go-to Magic Music is the aptly named Song of War, which transforms anyone who hears it into a mindless berserker.
• In R.O.D the TV, one villain uses two kinds of sounds to protect his base as the heroines try to infiltrate it, both of them out of the range of normal hearing: one is a subsonic hum that enhances depression and melancholy in people who are already disposed to it, and the other is a supersonic hum that makes more excitable people angrier and more irritable.
• In the first Star Trek manga, a man and a woman who were once lovers (and who had a bit of a falling out) come on board the ship. They end up making all the men and women on board turn against each other merely from their presence.
• Starzinger: Planet Amuru is cursed by Golga to have a mind disease where it's various inhabitants fight to the death for no reason at all. Kugo is horrified to find out that the fight he witnessed between two Amuru men was actually between a father and son, especially since they were close to dying had he not broken it up.
• Tiger & Bunny: Gregory Sunshine has the ability to cause any NEXT he hugs to go into a berserk fury and begin lashing out at everything they see with their powers.
• Episode 10 of Umi Monogatari has Sedna's influence spread over the islanders, making them argue and say how they really feel about others. It ends up subverted, as Kanon realizes that the negative emotions were always there, waiting to come out.
• Yubel uses this in duels to great effect in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX. While she's on the field as a monster, she can force monsters to attack her; she takes no battle damage, and inflicts the same damage to her opponent in retribution. She calls this effect "Nightmare Pain." Shortly after Yubel reveals herself in Season 3, Judai's closest friends are also infected with a Hate Plague against him, which was quite effective in bringing out his Superpowered Evil Side, especially when followed by their apparent deaths.

Audio Plays

• In Passage to Moauv, a Star Trek audioplay from 1975, the Enterprise is transporting a sort of alien cat called a waul to its owner. When it (inevitably) escapes their custody, its frightened yowling has the crew hissing and snarling at each other like angry cats until Lt. M'ress comes along. It takes to her immediately and begins purring.
• In the Big Finish Doctor Who War Doctor story A Thing of Guile, the Doctor is part of a Time Lord task force sent to obtain a weapon called the Anima Device, although the Cardinal who sent them isn't entirely sure what it does. The Doctor quickly realises that it's a psychic weapon that causes the task force to become increasingly argumentative. In The Neverwhen, Cardinal Ollistra develops a plan to combine it with the time-bending Neverwhen to not just plunge Skaro into civil war, but to make it so that the Daleks had always been in a state of civil war. The Doctor attempts to reverse the effect to make the Daleks and Time Lords trapped in the Neverwhen effect pacifistic, even stablising the Neverwhen's timeframe to an Arcadian period when Gallifreyans and Kaleds were both farmers, but the imprint of the subjective centuries they'd spent fighting is too much for it.

Comic Books

• In Aquaman: Andromeda, the Darkworld stirs up hatred and paranoia among the crew, leading them to turn on and attempt to kill one another.
• In one issue of Archie Comics, a flower putting off purple "bad vibe lines" causes nearby people to start acting meanly and selfishly. Naturally, it is passed around town for a while during the course of the story, making as many people as possible get into shouting matches.
• In Asterix and the Roman Agent, Tortuous Convolvulus has the ability to cause discord by his presence alone (indicated by Speech Bubbles gaining a green background), which he complements with a good deal of mundane skill in psychological warfare and sowing mistrust and fear, allowing him to quickly escalate situations into shouting and fistfights. He also had been sentenced to death at the Colosseum, and is alive at the beginning of the book due to making even the lions attack one another.
• In Astro City, when Black Velvet is mortally wounded by Jitterjack, her body releases black energy that infects the populace and starts a riot.
• Black Gas: The gas operates via progressive brain damage, eating away at the parts of the brain responsible for people's inhibitions.
• Crossed is centered on a virus that causes its victims to turn into predatory sadomasochistic psychopaths, though given how gleefully the infected take to their atrocities, it's more of a "sadist plague".
• Darkwing Duck: The Phantom Blot has created an inky mind-altering substance to create new rogues in St. Canard, and which is also briefly used to control the populace.
• The DCU:
  • Batman: Jekyll and Hyde has a Psycho Serum that is described as unifying the conflicting halves of a person's identity. Apparently, everyone secretly wants to murder, torture, and/or cannibalize the nearest primate. Huh.
  • Blackest Night: The Psycho-Pirate induces this in Smallville, heightening minor feelings to killing urges via his mask's ability to influence any nearby target to near-suicidal hatred, uncontrollable fear or demented avarice.
  • JLA (1997): In the grand finale of Grant Morrison's run, this turns out to be the nature of Mageddon: a hate plague on a global scale that eventually causes all sentient life on a given planet to wipe itself out.
  • Justice League (2018): In "Cold War", the influence of The Spectre results in every rivalry on Earth, from soccer fans to siblings to UN ambassadors, blowing up into violence.
  • Legends has Glorious Goodfrey use his powers of persuasion to manipulate the average citizens of the DC Universe to fear and hate the world's superheroes.
  • Suicide Squad:
    • This is one of the powers of Badb, one of the later members of the terrorist-for-hire group the Jihad. She possesses powerful telepathy, and is able to mentally dominate others by manipulating their emotions and fears. She can read the minds of others to project fearful or hateful imagery into their minds, and force them to harm themselves or others. And she revels in the chaos she causes.
    • In The Rebirth, the Black Vault causes everyone in its proximity to become insane and homicidal... Except for Harley Quinn. As she's homicidally insane under normal circumstances, the Black Vault instead causes her to become calm and rational.
  • Superman:
    • In the Action Comics story "Luthor's Hammer of Hate", Lex Luthor realizes that his hatred of Superman is getting in the way of his schemes, so he uses Percussive Therapy to transfer his rage to the eponymous hammer, which he then fires at Superman, causing the latter to become enraged at the mere thought of Luthor.
    • In The Day the Cheering Stopped, King Kosmos brainwashes Earth's people into fearing and hating aliens, even heroes like Superman or Supergirl.
  • In the first Titans series, the Gargoyle slowly began to spread his influence on the Fab Five to the point that Nightwing sealed himself off in a cave because he was sick of being compared to Batman. After being trapped in a Lotus-Eater Machine dimension and reverted to their teenage forms, they assumed apologizing would get them out, until Roy Harper realized they were going in circles and admitted that real friendship is about being honest with your friends when they're acting like assholes and glorifying everything your friend does is not helping. Roy got the point across by punching Nightwing in the face, who seemed to be the focus point due to the Gargoyle's immense hatred of him.
  • Wonder Woman:
    • Ares tends to incite rage in order to start wars and skirmishes.
    • Wonder Woman (1942): Mars' lieutenants are sent to earth specifically to spread hate, mistrust and an inclanation towards violence among men in their spectral forms.
    • Wonder Woman (1987): Eris has a whole bushel of Apples of Discord served at a political dinner on Themyscira which don't function as an Artifact of Attraction like in the original myths instead spreading a blind hate and distrust among those who eat them.
    • Wonder Woman (2006): The villainess Genocide has powerful energy blasts. Anyone lucky enough to survive the explosion gets consumed by rage and paranoia.
• Dirty Pair: In "Fatal But Not Serious", a minor villain releases one of these in the middle of the huge "Kei'n'Yuri Con", an event set up to honor the protagonists. For added flavor, it makes infectees specifically hate Kei and Yuri (as opposed to just everything and everyone available), so they have countless former fans out for their blood.
• Hellblazer: Inverted in "The Red Right Hand", in which the plague makes its victims incredibly empathic. Unfortunately, it takes hold in Glasgow, and so everyone begins to share one another's guilt and misery, culminating in mass suicides.
• The comic "Hanna-Barbera Presents: Frankenstein Jr. and The Impossibles" features Feedback, a supervillain whose guitar-playing causes people who hear it to begin arguing and violently attacking each other. Unusually, this is shown as being able to affect individual body parts, starting fights between individual limbs on the same person .
• Judge Dredd:
  • East Meg One used a literal Rage Virus as a precursor to invading Mega City One.
  • Later, the remnants of East Meg One (which was mostly wiped out after the aforementioned invasion attempt) had another go with the Chaos Plague, which also caused eventual death. This one worked slightly better, relatively speaking, killing about 350 million in the end.
• Marvel Universe:
  • AXIS starts with the Red Skull using Professor X's brain to spread one of these across the globe. Not even the heroes are immune. In the Loki: Agent of Asgard issues, the "heroes" (as much as Loki, Verity, and Valeria Richards can be called that) use Doctor Doom's science equipment and Gram the Sword of Truth to create a "Truth Wave" to counter it. It works.
  • This is the main shtick of the Captain America villain named the Hate-Monger, whose original M.O. is spreading bigotry and aggression with his "hate-ray", usually directing people's hatred towards minorities. His consciousness eventually becomes a more literal Hate Plague, able to spread his evil ideals more directly. Fitting, given that he's the disembodied, body-hopping mind of the infamous real-life hate-monger Adolf Hitler.
  • The Psycho-Man, a Fantastic Four villain, uses a gadget that can inspire three different emotions in those it's used on — fear, doubt, and (of course) hate. On one occasion, he induced a more conventional hate-plague in New York City by disseminating inflammatory pamplets coated with psychoactive chemicals, with the aid of a new Hate-Monger, an android of his own creation with hate-inducing Psychic Powers and the ability to shapeshift (allowing him to infiltrate and encourage multiple hate groups of different denominations).
  • Marvel Universe vs. the Punisher features Frank Castle attempting to navigate a psuedo-Zombie Apocalypse caused by Survivor 118, a bioweapon that mutates the heroes and villains of the Marvel Universe into violently insane, tribalistic, territorial cannibals.
  • An alternate version of New X-Men: Academy X, set in the House of M universe, deals with Wallflower, a mutant with pheromone powers, causing Sooraya to engulf her best friend Jubilee in a sandstorm that likely would have shredded her body to its bones if given time.
  • A third, non-Hitler Hate-Monger appears in The Punisher as the leader of a racist organization. Frank Castle infiltrates the group but discovers that his final initiation is to beat a Hispanic reporter investigating the group to death. Unfortunately, by then he's succumbed to the Hate-Monger's Hate Plague, and he goes through with it. Doubly unfortunately, she's the girlfriend of Frank's current tech guy. Needless to say, there is a falling-out and a rare bout of guilt for Frank.
  • The Spider-Man storyline Maximum Carnage has Carnage's partner Shriek increase the hatred in everyone in New York to start mass riots throughout the city.
• My Little Pony Generations: In Issue 3, Twilight and Pinkie look into some streamers that Violet Shiver made and find themselves suddenly arguing until Zecora arrives and takes the streamer, after which they calm down and realize that the dark magic within it set them arguing and further was the cause of the recent rash of disagreements, fights and discontent in Ponyville.
• In another comic of Garth Ennis, Rover Red Charlie, the premise is that one day the whole human race got hit with strange plague which results in "feeders" all (apparently) killing each other and/or committing suicide in many brutal ways. The focus is instead on a trio of dogs who are left to inherit the world humans left behind.
• In The Savage Dragon #55, a massively powerful mind-controller unintentionally sends everyone in Chicago into a murderous rage the moment he steps out of his bunker.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
  • The evil wizard Ixis Naugus can amplify peoples' emotions. This is hinted to be the driving point for the Great War between the Mobians and human-esque Overlanders, and then the Mobian/Robian civil war. He later uses that same magic on the citizens of New Mobotropolis, magnifying their mistrust of NICOLE (following her stint of being brainwashed by the Iron Dominion) into full-blown paranoia, so that they will view her as a threat, and him as their "savior".
  • In the rebooted run, Dark Gaia energy functions like this. Though it only appears at night, the gas induces aggressive tendencies when inhaled, best demonstrated when Sally and Dr. Ellidy lash out at each other over NICOLE.
• Spirou & Fantasio has the mosquito from the Valley of the Banished: Those it stings become murderously insane and turn on their friends.
• Transformers:
  • In The Transformers: All Hail Megatron, Frenzy constantly emits a signal that drives everyone who hears it, including himself, into a mindless berserk fury. Only Soundwave is somehow immune. This has subsequently been ignored in every appearance he's had since.
  • One issue of Transformers: Generation 2 features black energy goo beings that induce and live on other creatures' aggression.
• Zombies Christmas Carol combines this with a Zombie Apocalypse, as Scrooge's bitterness and callousness towards others, particularly those he cared for, causes and spreads the infections. Conversely, after he reforms, his kindness towards those he spurned heals the zombies.

Fan Works

• In Harry and the Shipgirls, anyone who draws Juuchi Yosamu becomes completely overwhelmed by anger, as was demonstrated when she was left with the French Malfoys, and overnight, the head of the family wiped out his whole bloodline before taking his own life. The only exceptions are the Potters, who can tell that the hatred inflicted is not their own and reject it.
• Kaiju Revolution: The monster Jyarumu gives off prion-like particles that induce a rabies-like effect in humans and animals. According to his bio, even he isn't immune to it, but his species has evolved to embrace the frenzied aggression it causes. The only thing that can counteract it are the scales that drop from Mothra's wings.
• LISA: The Pointless: The Infinity Franchise is a potentially supernatural murder-cult that sprung up thanks to unearthed boxes ofbootleg jerseys with no original. Anyone who wears one ends up becoming extremely homicidal, killing in order to reach different "folds" of infinity for no real reason than to keep killing^note although Arnold Shpitz’s One-Winged Angel from implies there’s genuine abilities one gains from the Franchise. The Franchise sweeps over Downtown Olathe during Alex and Joel’s travel through it, turning previously friendly NPCs hostile and wiping out the inhabitants, with the ending sequence implying they moved on to terrorizing the surrounding territories.
• The Omnitrix Hero: In the chapter "Love Lost" this is the main plot of Devious and Chrysalis. Using a combination of Devious' magic and some science chemicals, he and Chrysalis create an "anti-love potion" that turns whoever is affected by it against the one they love the most and disperse it throughout Canterlot with some aerial dispersal devices from Chrysalis' company. This causes everyone in the city to suddenly feel intense hatred for whoever it is they love the most, whether it is a romantic partner, a best friend, a family member, or a special pet. However, their feelings towards everyone else remain unchanged, allowing Twilight to create a cure after examining the magic powder the potion dispersed as. Since everyone effected by this potion only turns against one specific person, this ends up revealing Flash and Adagio don't consider each other the most important person in each other's lives, nor does Twilight consider Timber this, which leads to both couples breaking up, albeit the former on much better terms than the latter.
• Over the course of the Big Storm Episode in Prehistoric Park Reimagined, several of the rescued prehistoric carnivorous animals end up unexpectedly infected with a mysterious virus that causes them to act unnaturally aggressive and violent while also being bloodshot eyed and frothing at the mouth. This naturally causes them to prove to be a very dangerous threat over the course of the Prehistoric Park staff's efforts at resolving a power failure caused by the storm that has also allowed the park's animals the ability to escape their enclosures.
• The Secret Return of Alex Mack: One of the more horrifying weapons developed by the Collective is a prion disease that spreads through the water supply, causing infected people and animals to become obsessive, ultra-paranoid killers — without losing all reasoning ability, which makes them extremely dangerous. Such as the lady who greets some FBI agents investigating the disease, tells them that she has cookies in the oven, "can't keep 'em waitin'", then pulls a gun out of the oven and shoots the agents. While continuing to repeat, "Can't keep 'em waitin'."
• In the Magical Girl Crisis Crossover Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights, Viluy concocts a "pseudo-virus" for Alph that acts like a Hate Plague. She mentions that it's supposed to simulate the effects of "Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, canine distemper, the effects of methamphetamine abuse, and Rabies lyssavirus." At first it seems like Alph shakes off the effects by transforming into her wolf form, but it only slows down the virus's progression. By the time Homura pulls her back to the Arthra, she has become The Berserker, unable to recognize anyone except Fate, her master... and eventually, even that recognition fades.
• In Chapter 30 of Twinkling in the Dark, Majorina's Bad Energy spell causes Miki and Sora to bicker with each other, leading to an all-out brawl between them.

Films — Animation

• In Batman vs. Two-Face, Two-Face uses a gas to turn most of Gotham City's citizens into Ax-Crazy Two-Faced maniacs.
• Both The Care Bears Movie and Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation show the villains having a dark influence on surrounding people — the kids at the amusement park where Nicholas and the evil book are become rotten little monsters, and so do the kids at the camp where Dark Heart sets up shop.
• Lupin III: Dragon of Doom has the main villain attempt to finish off Lupin and his cohorts this way, by exposing them to a gas that makes anyone who breathes it a psychopathic murderer. Jigen, Fujiko, and Goemon all become Ax-Crazy and Laughing Mad, but Lupin holds his breath long enough to find a way to vent the gas and restore everyone to normal.
• My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Rainbow Rocks: The Dazzlings trio use their magic and music to turn the students of Canterlot High against each other. The heroes are immune because of their innate magic, but the Dazzlings are eventually able to turn them against each other the old-fashioned way, leading to a Near-Villain Victory.
• My Little Pony: The Movie (1986) has the Smooze, which, in addition to making everything putrid and covering the land in a thick layer of concrete-like substance, makes characters touched by it aggressive, spiteful, and pessimistic.

Films — Live-Action

• 13/13/13 has people losing their inhibitions and having their aggression ramped up. They generally find some sort of a narrative to make sense of it, but it results in a lot of killing.
• 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later revolve around a sort of Zombie Apocalypse caused by a literal Hate Plague, the Rage Virus. The resulting Infected acquire blood-shot eyes and become consumed with murderous rage, violently attacking any non-infectees on sight. However, they do retain some basic reasoning skills during the second outbreak, possibly as a result of the virus mutating because of a Typhoid Mary.
• The Knell segment of ABCs of Death 2 involves a woman watching an apartment across from hers have its inhabitants go into a violent frenzy by an Eldritch Abomination... before it goes after her.
• A literal example occurs in Antisocial; the unnamed disease causes those infected to display various symptoms, the most prominent of which is uncontrolled violence.
• In Apollo 13, the astronauts getting increasingly snappish with each other is discovered to be induced from the high carbon dioxide levels in their cabin. They then have to work together to prevent the CO2 from getting any higher. (Doesn't count as a Real Life example, because the real astronauts confirmed the arguments were made up by the film for Rule of Drama.)
• Utilized by Loki through his scepter in The Avengers (2012) to make the already volatile team turn on each other so as to distract them from his assault and unleash the Hulk upon S.H.I.E.L.D.'s helicarrier. Unbeknownst to him, the scepter with the Mind Stone also fuels his own hatred of Thor and humans of Earth (or so Marvel's site says).
• In The Crazies (1973) and the 2010 remake, an Army plane carrying a bioweapon crash-lands near a small town, infecting the water supply with a virus code-named "Trixie" which is highly contagious and causes victims to either die or become hysterical and homicidally insane. In a somewhat different variant, the infected often retain coherence and elements of their personality, unlike the mindless fury of the 28 movies and [REC].
• In The Children, the titular children are infected with an unknown sickness (one that causes vomiting and strange flickering visions) that causes them to be murderous and kill their parents and every adult around.
• In Ghostbusters II, the sewers of New York City become filled with an ectoplasmic sludge that absorbs emotions. The Ghostbusters discover it while it's been negatively charged, and after they end up covered in it, they briefly end up going at each other's throats. Egon discovers the malleable nature of the slime, however, and in order to break through a barrier of negatively charged slime, the Ghostbusters positively charge some of it through a combination of the song "Higher and Higher", and the most inspiring thing they can find in Manhattan: the Statue of Liberty.
• In Jacob's Ladder, Jacob learns that his unit in Vietnam was secretly drugged with "The Ladder", a powerful hallucinogen which massively increases aggression, which caused several soldiers to turn on each other in a homicidal frenzy. Upon learning this, Jacob is hit by The Reveal that he wasn't stabbed in the belly by a Vietnamese, but by a fellow crazed-out soldier.
• In Kingsman: The Secret Service, Valentine's weaponized SIM cards emit a signal which drives up aggression while removing inhibition.
• Mayhem features a very common in-universe one, which infects an office building and forces its quarantine at the start of the film. The ethics and legal issues raised by a disease that lowers inhibitions is discussed and becomes an important issue to the plot.
• One of the "non-lethal" weapons employed by the good guys at the end of Mystery Men is a ray (the Blame Thrower) that can cause angry arguments amongst whomever gets hit with it. A rare case of the protagonists employing such a tactic as psychological warfare.
• In [REC], a reporter and her cameraman record the horrifying outbreak of a disease that turns humans into vicious cannibals. The sequels follow the spread of the disease.
• In the movie Return In Red, a government agency uses sound waves to induce insanity and homicidal urges in the people of a small town.
• Serenity: The Reavers (murdering, raping madmen who terrorize the fringes of Firefly's 'Verse) are revealed to be the victims of a government-sponsored mind-drug experiment on an entire planet's population Gone Horribly Wrong. The Pax, as the drug was called, was meant to weed out aggression in the population. Instead, it made the majority of the population so passive that they couldn't even be bothered to take basic measures to continue living, while it became a Hate Plague for a fraction of a percent of the population. They proceeded to wipe out whoever was left, and then start recruiting.
• The infection in Train to Busan causes blind homicidal rage in the infected.

Literature

By Author

• James Herbert:
  • The Fog (1975) is about the eponymous mist, a bioweapon that turns half of England insane and depraved in a manner very reminiscent of The Crazies (1973).
  • The Dark uses a more supernatural version of the same trope, with similar results.
  • In Ash (2012), Comraich Castle, site of a brutal fourteenth century clan dispute, and currently an expensive retreat for people whose misdeeds range from sordid to sinister, has seen a recent surge in spectral activity — which includes enhancement of occupants' aggression.
• Brian Keene:
  • The short story "Purple Reign" features purple rain that causes Ax-Craziness in everyone who gets wet; it affects animals as well as humans.
  • Jack's Magic Beans takes place in the same universe as "Purple Reign", but this time, the Hate Plague has no detectable cause and doesn't appear to affect animals or people who take Prozac.
• Stephen King:
  • In The Tommyknockers, a crashed spaceship begins to affect the area around it, causing the inhabitants of the nearby town of Haven to start changing, mentally and physically, into aliens like the spaceship's inhabitants, the "Tommyknockers". Tommyknockers have incredible technical skills, but also quick tempers and no common sense. Anyone who crosses a Tommyknocker, even in the smallest of ways (say, stealing pennies by cheating at poker), invites harsh punishment (like being sent to a distant, nearly airless planet).
  • In Needful Things, the Big Bad Mr. Gaunt (a demon, if not the devil himself) manipulates the town into destroying itself through a series of escalating "pranks".
  • In Cell, a signal (possibly sent by terrorists) broadcast over cell phones strips away the higher functions of the brain, leaving just a state of murderous rage. The infected then progressively evolve into an organized, non-raged Hive Mind and develop Psychic Powers.

By Work

• The Avenger: The story The Hate Master uses a serum that can be injected or ingested to create this effect. A politician takes advantage of the fact that he has the antidote to create trouble that he can then smooth over, proving his diplomatic skills.
• In Beautiful Chaos, the spell Ridley casts on everyone during Savannah Snow's party amounts to basically this, and it causes everyone in the party to start screaming at each other.
• H7D3 in the Black Tide Rising series ultimately turns the infected into feral, non-sapient cannibalistic animals who are human only in a biological sense and will attack anything that draws their attention.
• In Blood Crazy by Simon Clark, everyone over the age of twenty-one becomes overcome with a killing rage.
• Carnage in New York and its sequel Goblin's Revenge feature Spider-Man fighting to prevent a Psycho Serum that causes anyone exposed to it to fall into a murderous frenzy from being unleashed on the public, first by Carnage, and then both Carnage and a new Green Goblin (who's actually the Chameleon in disguise).
• The Chaos Cycle: Abaddon is a malovolent spirit with the ability to bring out the worst in people and is seemingly behind the fact that the townsfolk for centuries have been killing any young women that go into the woods. However, it's revealed that while Abbadon does occasionally influence people to be the worst, he's not actually controlling them, but instead their murders are often not even his fault and just due to their pent up paranoia about the unknown coming out.
• The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness has a few Hate Plague-inducing things, including the Fire Opal and soul-sickness.
• One of the Dinotopia companion novels (The Maze) includes a heavier-than-air Hate Plague-inducing gas as one of the obstacles en route to the center of the titular maze. The raptor of the trio is driven out of the group first and decides to go up the walls, clearing his head. He then manages to take advantage of the gas' effects to dare the other two to stay together and not kill each other until they get out of the hazard zone.
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
  • In the Doctor Who New Adventures novel Original Sin, icaron radiation triggers "beppled" (cosmetically altered) humans to commit acts of violence at the slightest provocation.
  • This is the ultimate weapon of the Arms Dealer in the New Series Adventures novel Silhouette. The Doctor manages to counteract it by first creating a pocket of resistance with a circus, and then getting the empathic Human Weapon the villain uses to collect the anger to collect the happiness from the circus audience and releasing it into the rest of the city.
  • The antagonist of the Past Doctor Adventures book The Hollow Men utilizes one of these in the climax.
• In the short story "Down by the Sea near the Great Big Rock" by Joe R. Lansdale, a family on vacation camps out near the titular rock. Over time they become increasingly snappish with each other and thinking violent thoughts. It culminates in a bloody massacre off-screen whose aftermath horrifies one of the investigating detectives. The story ends with the great big rock sprouting flippers, the slaughter having sated its hunger, and swimming into the sea. The fish that swim near it start fighting each other.
• The Elenium:
  • The negative influence of the MacGuffin/Sealed Evil in a Can, the Bhelliom, causes the heroic Five-Man Band to start getting mutinous.
  • The Bhelliom gets far nicer in the Tamuli, though. You'd be nasty, too, if you'd been used and abused and tortured by blood-stained jewels for thousands of years. When Bhelliom was actually addressed properly, like a person, a lot of misunderstandings got put to rest.
  • Countess Bellina afflicts the minstrel with such a plague.
• The Executioner: In Able Team #8: Army of Devils, a drug capable of creating instant rage in the user is smuggled into Los Angeles in an attempt to create a race war in the United States.
• The first book in The Familiars series has a cursed location called the Bridge of Betrayal. As the name suggests, anyone who crosses the bridge with others will betray their companions.
• The Fury: This is essentially what the Fury is. The presence of the main characters triggers an immediate violent reaction in any other person within a twenty-meter boundary — people in their lives, even their loved ones, suddenly attempt to kill them, and then go back to their normal lives as if nothing happened. This is due to the fact that they are all hosts to angels, and humans are unable to overcome the compulsion to purge the Eldritch Abominations within them.
• A milder example in Galaxy of Fear: The Planet Plague. Tash's illness makes her more irritable and impulsive, and gets her to dwell more on thoughts of Revenge — and negative emotions make it progress faster and will speed her transformation. Calming herself and focusing on positive emotions helps with the symptoms but doesn't cure her.
  "Your body has a certain temperature, and usually it creates certain kinds of chemicals in your blood, your brain, and all the different parts of your body. But when your body changes — as when you are angry, or sad, or when you are sick — your body temperature changes, and your brain sends signals to produce different chemicals. Somehow this virus affects those signals and feeds off of them."
• Genocidal Organ is about the hunt for an American linguistics expert called John Paul, who has discovered a language of genocide and is using it to start ethnic conflicts in Third World countries.
• In The Golgotha Series, one of the evil artifacts kept secured in Golgotha is the Skull of the First Murderer. If it were to be broken, it would unleash a hate plague that would cause everyone in the world to murder one another.
• Grounded for All Eternity: Parris' influence has this effect on the residents of Salem. While it initially only manifests as mere losses of inhibitions, as he gains power, he begins to more overtly take control of the townsfolk and turn them into an Ax-Crazy mob out to kill the heroes.
• In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the Slytherin Locket Horcrux has this effect on Ron, turning his frustration over their ordeal, concern for his loved ones and all his insecurities about Harry and Hermione into fury and envy and leads him to leaving the group for a while.
• In Hater and its sequels, a virus causes people to murder their loved ones and anyone else in their path. The local media even calls the infected people "haters".
• Implied Spaces features 'zombie plagues', nanotechnological infections that drive victims into a murderous rage, and rewrite their brains so they can't be in any other state.
• The Cunning Man from I Shall Wear Midnight is an embodiment of this. He's the ghost of a witch hunter whose hatred for witches is so great, wherever he goes people become more suspicious and angry with witches.
• In Kim, the Old Soldier who accompanies Kim and the Lama to the Grand Trunk Road claimed the Indian Rebellion of 1857 was this. According to him, the gods sent a curse that drove his countrymen to violence against their British overlords. And that though he at first sympathized with them, he lost that sympathy when they started killing the women and children, and went on to fight in its suppression, even if that meant killing his own brethren.
• Lilac Sphere is about an artificial virus (stored in the titular container) which causes unnatural hatred in anyone infected. The developers got infected, they killed each other off, and the rest of their planet's biosphere evolved into a Death World over the millennia. What's worse, they've left one such time bomb on Earth, and the heroes only have two weeks until it breaks open.
• In The Long Last Call by John Skipp, the Devil goes to a strip club, where his tainted fifty-dollar bills inspire murderous rage in the employees. Yes, even the girls. Especially the girls.
• In The Maze Runner, the Flare has those infected show symptoms of paranoia, hallucinations and extreme, unwanted violence before eventually descending into madness and gruesomely attacking anything that moves, even resorting to cannibalism.
• "My Dinner with Ares": Being a War God, Ares's presence tends to cause humans to become irritable and prone to fighting, a problem only compounded by Ogbunabali's aura of death making everyone on edge.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street: Perchance to Dream has the main character use his powers to suppress the dreams of the townspeople, in order to protect them from Freddy. Unfortunately, this has the unintended side effect of gradually causing everyone to become violently unstable, and begin lashing out at random. A few incidents mentioned by the police include a student stabbing a teacher in the eye with a pencil over a bad grade, and a man shooting his wife because she was "vacuuming in a really irritating way".
• In Night of the Assholes, Assholeness is a contagious zombie-virus-like epidemic which turns anyone who catches it into an over-the-top caricature of a person out to make all non-assholes miserable. They all behave like low-functioning sociopaths, ranging from waiters who intentionally get your orders wrong to dumbass jocks catcalling you to full-on Leatherface-esque Serial Killers out to feed you your own eyeballs in the streets.
• The novel One Rainy Night by Richard Laymon is about a bizarre black rain that causes Ax-Craziness in everyone who gets wet.
• The god of war Ares in Percy Jackson and the Olympians radiates an aura that makes people around him more susceptible to violent impulses. It's not quite a weapon, but it means the characters have to be more careful around him since he is always looking for an excuse to start a fight.
• In James Tiptree Jr.'s short story "The Screwfly Solution", a mysterious plague spreads outward from the equator, turning male sexual urges into murderous violence against women. The protagonist speculates this is meant to depopulate the Earth so aliens can move in after humanity has died out.
• In the Star Darlings franchise, starting with the second book, Libby and the Class Election, something in Starland has been causing the girls to argue amongst themselves. The exact cause isn't discovered in the book, but is implied to be the flowers in the girls' rooms.
• Star Trek Novel 'Verse:
  • The entity from "Day of the Dove" (as outlined in "Television" below) figures in the destruction of the Tkon Empire in The Q Continuum, mainly by inciting war between the outer planets and youths and the elders and the home planet.
  • Played with in Star Trek: A Time to.... It sort of happens on the planet Delta Sigma IV, in A Time to Love and A Time to Hate, only with a twist. The plague isn't really causing the hate and violence—in fact, it's curing the populace of a mind-altering drug that kept them peaceful. Suddenly confronting emotions such as hate and rage for the first time, the Delta Sigma inhabitants can't cope, and old racial tensions erupt into violence. Riots soon spread across the planet.
• In the Tales from the Flat Earth novel ''Night's Master', a character named Qebba is so consumed by hate that after he dies, the hate lives on and infects the world, causing death and destruction to the point that the human race nearly goes extinct.
• The Arthur Machen story "The Terror" features this as a possible explanation for the titular event, a contagion of hate born of the monstrosity of World War I infecting nature.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The One Ring in The Lord of the Rings has this as its natural side-effect, turning people against one another by playing on their lust to use its power. The One Ring is so purely evil and so powerful in its corrupting influence that it can twist even the noblest desires into arrogance and narcissism and gradually makes the Wearer feel more and more entitled to it and greater than all the others which is the first step towards isolating him. And any ambitious desire will do perfectly. Faramir eg who proved resistant(in the original text, anyway) just wanted to live his life, and if he happened to be some sort of hero it would only be because he had to. Boromir wanted to be a big famous hero, cast down Mordor, restore Gondor and Arnor to their former glory. Certainly not a bad ambition, but the Ring can latch on to that to start its Hate Plague after taking hold, which it does to him since he shows hints of being tempted during the council scene, immediately upon being faced with the ring. Nothing demonstrates it better than its primary victim: Gollum and the flashback to Deágol and Sméagol finding the Ring while fishing. Within minutes Sméagol (Gollum) has killed his relative in order to possess the Ring. When it all comes down to it Sam proved to be the most resistant when he used it to rescue Frodo, since he had no desire for power whatsoever, while one reason that Faramir escaped the Ring's lures was he was smart enough to avoid ever even seeing it, telling Frodo to not even show it to him. Boromir wasn't so smart.
  • Morgoth in The Silmarillion eventually became capable of sending these off with his will, although he was just as good at using rumor and misdirection to accomplish the same end without sorcery.
• In Twilight Sparkle and the Crystal Heart Spell, Prismia caused one for an earth pony village nearby.
• In the second Uplift trilogy, the Rothen try to use a psi-emitter to stir up conflict among the six races of Jijo.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • The dagger from Shadar Logoth is so tainted with evil that his carrier becomes paranoid and hateful, and then starts to infect other people.
  • Padan Fain, a recurring villain partially possessed by the spirit who created Shadar Logoth, also has this effect — people who spend too much time in his company become increasingly paranoid, ill-tempered, and generally corrupt. When he gets the dagger back (another character carries it for a good chunk of the early books) his powers are increased dramatically.
• Wonder Woman: Warbringer: The Warbringer's abilities manifest as this, eventually causing large-scale war when said Warbringer comes of age. After Alia has been captured by Jason's men, she finds out that she can consciously do this, and uses it to distract them.
• In Worm, a more subtle form of this is present. It turns out that the thing that gives the superheroes their powers is a nigh-omnipotent being that uses its influence on said powers to psychologically Chessmaster every single parahuman into subconsciously desiring, seeking and creating conflict. Every. Single. One.
• Xanth features the Goblinate of the Golden Horde: the most hated and hateful goblins in the land, so much they make Goblin Mountain (pre-reform) look genteel in comparison. The centerpiece of their village is a rare Hate Spring that inflicts the trope on anyone who steps in it. The Goblinate get their kicks throwing victims into it and watching them kill each other in blind hatred.
• Played with in James Patterson's Zoo, in which a Hate Plague that affects all mammals except humans appears to be triggering an escalating global epidemic of animal attacks. It turns out that, while animals' behavior is indeed being altered, it's more of a Hate Me Plague: thanks to pollution plus radiation from cell phones, humans have begun emitting pheromones which incite other mammals to attack them.

Live-Action TV

• The 100 has Sanctum suffer from this periodically: when its suns eclipse, all the plants release a chemical that makes all nearby animals become delusional and violent. This affects both the native lifeforms as well as humans, though some notably turn suicidal rather than homicidal. Luckily, once the eclipse is over and the plants stop releasing their chemicals, the effects wear off pretty quick.
• The 4400:
  • In "Lockdown", T.J. Kim, who disappeared in 1998, has the ability to drive men into a homicidal rage with a high-pitched frequency. During her quarterly checkup at the Seattle NTAC headquarters, she uses her ability on all of the men in the building. They immediately begin fighting each other over trivial matters, resulting in Nina Jarvis being shot by Agent Park and several people being killed before Marco manages to find the frequency that counteracts its effects.
  • In "The New World", having gone off the promicin inhibitor, T.J. has learned to focus her ability and uses it to induce Dennis Ryland's lawyer to stab him with a letter opener multiple times during a congressional hearing.
• In Agent Carter, it turns out that Howard Stark accidentally created a gas form of this (it was intended to allow soldiers to avoid fatigue and not have to sleep as often, but it ended up causing symptoms similar to those of extreme sleep deprivation). When the villains get a hold of it do a few tests, all hell breaks loose.
• All of Us Are Dead takes place in a Zombie Apocalypse where The Virus, in the moments before the infected fully turn, makes them angry and aggressive.
• In Alphas, the villain of the week Matthew Hurly has the ability to release pheromones that causes the people around him explode in homicidal rage.
• Angel:
  • The episode "Billy" had a variant: Billy Blim, a vicious misogynist, caused any man he touched to hate and attack any woman they came near. Angel was immune, since even as Angelus, he never felt hate toward his enemies.
  • In another episode, the bizarreness of the week causes people to bleed from their eyes and go into a murderous rage about whatever they feel.
• In one episode of Batman (1966), the Riddler spikes the lemonade at a fancy party with "Temper Tonic", which causes the party guests to have an all-out brawl with each other.
• One of the Gelliant Gutfright sketches from A Bit of Fry and Laurie features the "Fighting Buttercup", a flower which causes anger and aggression for about five minutes and then explodes.
• The Kid from Castle Rock seems to have the power to bring out the worst of anyone who touches him or even goes near him. One example is Zalewski, the prison guard the Kid befriended while in Shawshank. After giving the Kid a fist bump, Zalewski goes on a shooting rampage in the prison, killing all of the other guards, before being gunned down himself. In the next episode, the Kid enters the home of a family celebrating their son's birthday. As the Kid walks around the house, we can hear the family's love for each other turn into hate as the parents start arguing and get violent with each other.
• Charmed (1998):
  • One episode gets as "realistic" as you can with this trope. A demon is killing Sandmen to collect their magical sand; as the Sandmen's numbers dwindle, they're unable to spread positive dreams throughout San Francisco. As time passes, the citizens become angry and short-tempered with one another, and one of the surviving Sandmen explains that humans need to dream to work out their problems and aggression subconsciously; if the demon succeeds in wiping out his kind, humanity will destroy itself in unchecked rage.
  • A more concentrated example happens in "Sin Francisco", which focuses on the Seven Deadly Sins in the form of seven small crystal orbs. The person infected with the Wrath orb becomes violent and uncontrollable.
• In one episode of Crusade, the crew visits a planet that is boobytrapped with a means of driving visitors into murderous rages. Afterwards, they have no memory of the event and instead remember seeing a shadowy figure performing the act, leaving the victim unaware that they were the actual attacker. Of course, it isn't really a plague, but rather Techno-mage nanites.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "The Awakening", a sentient alien WMD that is both the cause of and empowered by Hate Plagues is awakened in a British village.
  • In "Midnight", the Monster of the Week manipulates a group of ordinary humans into coming within a hair's breadth of killing the Doctor by amplifying their fear, suspicion, and irritation with his ego into a willingness to commit murder. One of the many unanswered questions from the episode is whether the creature is telepathically manipulating them or whether it's able to do it through mundane psychological methods. It clearly has psychic powers of some kind, given its ability to steal people's words, but at the point of its near victory, it hasn't provoked any reaction from the bus passengers that couldn't be achieved simply by playing on the escalating mob mentality.
  • In ''The Giggle", the Toymaker uses a puppet called Stooky Bill, whose image and Signature Laugh (the eponymous Giggle) has been burned into every television, screen, and monitor by 2023, to induce a plague upon humanity where they always believe they're right and become borderline psychopathic in the face of literally any confrontation. This plague doesn't force humanity into madness, however, only makes them refuse to back down from what they believe in regardless of logic, rationality, or even their own safety. The Doctor gives humans quite the speech about this halfway through the episode.
• In the Eureka episode "All the Rage", a device designed to calm people down instead turns GD into "a Romero movie".
• The Farscape episode "Crackers Don't Matter" has a highly amusing Hate Plague: light from a nearby star causes several characters to become obsessed with ensuring their fair share of crackers, to the point of barricades and gun battles. Technically, only D'Argo becomes more aggressive while Rygel gets greedier and Aeryn becomes more paranoid, causing the three of them to fight. Chiana instead gets hornier, and Zhaan, being a Plant Alien, has a lot of fun times. Crichton is the only member of the crew who's immune, due to humans having significantly worse eyesight than any of the other species.
• The Flash (2014): The episode "Flash vs. Arrow" has a metahuman whose power is this. It only works if you look him in the eyes, though, and the effects only last a couple minutes.
• The Tetch Virus from season 3 of Gotham both lowers the inhibitions of anyone infected by it and can exaggerate parts of their personality with many being driven to extreme rage some time after. Considering the kind of city Gotham is, this leads to a lot of death and destruction when it's weaponized and spread via a bomb during the season finale.
• Grimm: The Yellow Fever has this effect on Wesens.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kamen Rider Fourze: A variation of this is the Capricorn Zodiart's special ability, triggered by his music. Those affected by it go berserk, but not necessarily in a violent manner: some of the protagonists affected by it are compelled to perform an outlandish rock song of their own. The music also doesn't grant any additional energy or protection from an adrenaline crash, so the infected collapse from exhaustion within about a day.
  • Kamen Rider Build: The activation of the Pandora Box at the start of the series infected everyone present at the event, including most of Japan's leadership, with an energy that made them aggressive and power-hungry, including gaining an obsessive need to possess the Box. Nebula Gas, the Applied Phlebotinum released as a consequence of the Box's activation, also has this effect when injected at high enough volumes into humans who haven't built up a sufficient tolerance for it.
• In Lost Girl, Kenzi accidentally invokes Baba Yaga and causes one of these specifically targeted at Dyson, causing all women to hate him on sight.
• Lucifer (2016): Azrael's blade becomes this in the hands of a mortal. It stokes the human's anger into murderous rage over the slightest of grievances. Dan Espinoza is the only person who proves able to resist the blade's effect. He briefly holds the blade to Lucifer's throat over the latter stealing his pudding cups but eventually admits that the real problems in his life are things he brought on himself. The realisation allows him to drop the blade without hurting anyone.
• The Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The episode "The Suburbia Affair" centers around a plot like this — the electric lights in a suburban neighborhood vibrate on a frequency that caused the people living there, including our undercover heroes, to become irritable, suffer headaches, and fight amongst themselves. A mob scene is narrowly averted at the town meeting.
• The Millennium (1996) episode "Sense and Antisense" has Frank Black tracking down a man supposedly infected by a hate virus. At the end, we see a photograph of the man posing with military personnel marked "Kigali, Rwanda, 1994".
• Motherland: Fort Salem: One of the spells Nicte casts in "Delusional" affects Raelle, Abigail and Scylla by turning them aggressive toward each other, which starts with simply insults then escalates to physical combat until Tally breaks it.
• One episode of Night Visions has an odd variation; a timid man is cursed by an angry Russian (for bumping into him and spilling his coffee!) to uncontrollably inspire homicidal hatred in others. This gets him fired, assaulted, forced to kill his girlfriend in self-defense, and shot dead by the police. It turns out that some novelist's book came to life and picked this poor chap as a victim. Yeah, Night Visions is weird.
• Once Upon a Time: During the Frozen (2013) arc, the Snow Queen's "Spell of Shattered Sight" is evidently meant to function in this manner. In a flashback scene set in Arendelle, it's proven to be powerful enough to briefly turn Anna against her sister Elsa.
• Power Rangers:
  • The Hate Master, one of the many Monsters of the Week that the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers had to deal with, has this as its primary ability.
  • "A Season to Remember", the Christmas episode of Power Rangers Zeo, has this as a plot. The villains beam the rangers and their Jewish friend with a hate ray, causing them to squabble and fight about which cultural holiday is better. Ultimately, the day is saved by a little girl singing sappy Christmas songs about love and friendship, causing the effects of the ray to wear off.
  • One of Divatox's plans in Power Rangers Turbo involves releasing a brand of jackets that increase the anger of whomever wears them and turns them into a huge jerk.
• Not quite a hate plague but a spiritual sister to the trope would be the depression toxin from the Red Dwarf episode "Back to Reality".
• The Sarah Jane Adventures: The episode "The Curse of Clyde Langer" has a single-target variation, as anyone who hears or reads the name "Clyde Langer" turns against Clyde.
• In the Sherlock episode "The Hound of Baskerville", the CIA develops a hallucinogenic drug that also functions as this, giving those it's forced upon images of horrible monsters... and then making them want to murder them.
• Stargate SG-1:
  • An early episode subjects the team to subsonic frequencies that make some of them very irritable, resulting in a shouting match and a delightfully awkward non-apology apology afterward.
  • A minor one is caused by withdrawal symptoms from some creepy Goa'uld light in the episode "The Light". Similarly, Daniel's withdrawal from the sarcophagus in "Need" has him almost shooting Jack in one scene.
• Star Trek: Enterprise:
  • In "Singularity", the closer the ship gets to an undetected singularity, the more the crew start to freak out, basically giving them a nuclear version of Obsessively Organized tendencies.
  • "Bound" reveals that this is one of the possible effects of Orion pheromones on men.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation also dealt with this a couple of times.
  • In "Sarek", where it was caused by an aging Vulcan telepathically "leaking" his suppressed emotions into the minds of the crew. Said aged Vulcan is Spock's father, and he has, basically, Vulcan Alzheimer's Disease. Picard puts his mind at risk by letting him "absorb" some of his willpower because if anyone finds out, the treaty he has been working on for years, if not decades could be at risk. By the by, the effects on Picard really gave his actor, Patrick Stewart, a chance to shine.
  • "Night Terrors" sees the Enterprise trapped in a Negative Space Wedgie that drains power away from the ship's reactor and leaves them stranded, and the crew begins to experience increased irritability, paranoia and eventually hallucinations. It turns out that the crew of another ship trapped in the same way is trying to contact them telepathically to propose a means of escape, but their method is preventing most of the crew from entering REM sleep; the Hate Plague in this case is simple sleep-deprivation. Despite the relatively mundane explanation, this episode has some of the most genuinely creepy moments in the series.
• Star Trek: The Original Series:
  • In "This Side of Paradise", an anger-inducing sonic broadcast is used to counteract the effects of tranquility-inducing spores.
  • In "Day of the Dove", an Energy Being that feeds on hate brings the Federation and the Klingons, who are trying to abide by the peace treaty, into conflict. It goes as far as implanting False Memories so that the manipulated will have an extra source of conflict. An interesting part of this trope in Star Trek is that those who are killed are somehow brought back to life with their fatal wounds healed to fight again. Once they all figure it out the creature is repelled from the ship by laughter. Lots and lots of laughter.
  • In "The Tholian Web", a Negative Space Wedgie drove the crew of one starship to kill each other, and then begins to drive the Enterprise crew to outbursts of anger.
• Supernatural:
  • The Croatoan virus, which is later part of Pestilence's plan to release it nationwide as part of Lucifer's endgame.
  • Pestilence's older brothers War and Famine get in on this action, too. War is a Master of Illusion who can, with a twist of his ring, cause paranoia and hallucinations in people until they divide into factions and start killing each other. Famine has a variation: his very presence drives up people's natural hungers (for food, sex, money, etc.) to a point that they lose all control and start doing anything to get a fix, even if it means literally killing themselves (i.e., a pair of lovers start going at it on a diner table while the waitress cleans out the register and the short-order cook, apparently addicted to fatty food, plunges himself into the fryer to get to it). Even the heroes suffer the effects: Castiel (or, more accurately, his host body) craves red meat to such an extent that he eats hundreds of burgers and is rendered powerless by a tempting tray of raw steak, while Sam's addiction to demon blood rears up and has him killing monsters left and right. Only Dean is immune, but as Famine cruelly pointed out, that isn't any sort of Heroic Willpower: rather, he's so depressed and listless after his trip to Hell that he's unable to fill the void inside himself with anything; as the Horseman puts it, "You're already dead."
• Multiple monsters in Super Sentai possess the ability to sever bonds of friendship and/or love. Most of them are based on, or use sharp bladed objects to metaphorically cut these bonds. Naturally, destroying the monster instantly repairs all the damage it caused.
  • Both Ninpuu Sentai Hurricaneger and Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger had a scissor based Monster of the Week, who could sever bonds of friendship by cutting them with their scissors.
  • Mahou Sentai Magiranger had a Samurai based Monster of the Week possessing a sword that could, according to him, cut through anything. This included the bond of family the rangers had, causing them to severely dislike each other.
  • Towards the end of Ninja Sentai Kakuranger, it turns out that Big Bad Daimaoh, the leader of the Youkai, is the physical embodiment of human hatred, and if the Kakurangers were to kill him, he would turn into this, making him more dangerous dead than alive.
• Taken: In the final episode "Taken", Allie tells John that she was sorely tempted to use her powers to make Clauson and the other men who threatened them at the gas station (as seen at the end of the previous episode "John") fight each other.
• Teen Wolf: The primary monster of the final season, the Anuk-Ite, caused terror across the entire town, which manifested in the humans as hate for their supernatural neighbors.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In the episode "The Encounter", a racist World War II veteran and a young Japanese-American man who came over to do housework are trapped in the veteran's attic by a samurai sword that belonged to a Japanese soldier the veteran killed. The sword bears an inscription "the sword will avenge me". And it does, as it brings out the darker sides of both men, culminating in a violent struggle that ends with the veteran accidentally impaled on the sword and the younger man throwing himself out the window in a fit of suicidal guilt.
• Ultra Series has a few here and there.
  • In one of the first and best-known episodes of Ultraseven, the alien Metron laces cigarettes with an extraterrestrial crystal that causes humans to go berserk after smoking them in his scheme to take over Earth. This was later homaged in Ultraman Max when he comes back to do it again with cellphones.
  • The monster Nova from Ultraman Leo is able to breathe red gas that drives humans into violent insanity, causing city-wide riots as it rampages around Tokyo.
  • Ultraman Tiga have one of its Monster of the Week, Enomena, who is capable of generating high-energy electromagnetic pulses which can drive people insane and into serious violent tendencies. Naturally Enomena uses this attack to cause riots across the city as diversion, while it attempts stalk and hunt its prey, a harmless alien child called Deban.
• In Westworld, Charlotte has her techs rig one of the android hosts to transmit a program that will drive all hosts violently insane. It only works within a few meters of the carrier.
• The X-Files:
  • In "Ice", an extraterrestrial parasite causes an Arctic research team, and later the investigating team, to turn on each other by increasing their paranoia.
  • In "Red Museum", as part of a Government Conspiracy, the children of a town are infected with alien DNA which causes increased violent behaviour.
  • Used for humorous effect in "Syzygy", in which a rare planetary alignment causes strange behavior in a small town, and even Mulder and Scully begin to snipe at each other.

Music

• In the music video for "Follow You" by Bring Me the Horizon, it is implied that a Hate Plague has turned everyone in Oli's neighborhood (and possibly beyond) into cackling, murderous psychopaths except for maybe three people (Oli, an elderly woman who may be his grandmother, and a woman trapped in her car as a pack of psychos hammer on it and ultimately blow it up). A man in a hazmat suit is visible during the final sequence.
• This is the theme of the Title Track from Cannibal Corpse's 2009 album, Evisceration Plague.
• In The Mechanisms "Ulysses Dies at Dawn" (a science fiction retelling of the Odyssey), the Trojan Horse is changed to a statue that broadcast a signal that drove people to madness, leading to everyone in Troy tearing each other apart. At the beginning of the album, Ulysses is driven to drink over designing it.

Tabletop Games

• Some Apostates in Black Crusade can 'Inspire Wrath' in people against specific targets, with just a few words. It makes Player Characters more determined, and so more likely to, hit the subjects. NPCs are a little less predictable.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition:
    • Mind flayers are given magical stones that could potentially have this result in the supplement Lords of Madness.
    • Elder Evils has the Hulks of Zoretha, whose awakening causes the Blood Moon to rise and brings one of these upon the world. Initially, it's just an additional degree of hostility to every interaction, but as it moves on, everything on the planet that is alive and thinking must make a daily Will save or start attacking everyone in sight until someone dies. Once they're fully awake, those that fall to this wrath will become superhumanly strong, but eventually pass out from sheer exhaustion in trying to kill things.
  • Forgotten Realms: Dracorage is a murderous madness periodically magically induced in dragons worldwide. Designed by ancient elves to break dragons' control over the world, a later magical device was hijacked and used by Sammaster to convince evil dragons that becoming The Undead with his help is their only option to avoid insanity and then ignominious death.
• GURPS: One of the horrors described in the sourcebook Creatures of the Night is the Dread Blossom, a flower that makes people exposed to its scent paranoid and xenophobic.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Red is the color of passions and emotions, which while it does have its positive sides like creativity and love it also includes hatred and warfare, which is what ends up being portrayed the most in cards (it is a battle game, after all). Canonically, the Nobilis of War induces this to feed itself, which is why Shadowmoor will never know peace.
  • The red creature card Keldon Warlord's toughness and power are equal to the total number of creatures in play. In the lore books this is explained as the Warlord having the supernatural ability to induce a battle rage just by commanding people to fight. It’s so powerful even mothers slay their newborn children with their bare hands.
  • The Cult of Rakdos from the plane of Ravnica has this effect on those who visit their establishments; whether they be carnivals, theaters, or restaurants. Most of the cult is full of sado-masochistic serial killers who have no problem tearing each other apart, but it does tend to get worse when the higher ranking demons of the cult can drive regular citizens to participate in the bloodlust.
• Promethean: The Created has Disquiet, an instinctual reaction by all living things towards the titular creatures that makes them gradually desire to destroy them-even if that isn't normally in a person's nature (several times, the book features humans going into jerk-mode towards Prometheans, then wondering exactly why they were doing that a moment later). Is it any wonder that a Prommie's quest To Become Human makes perfect sense? There are three things that don't instinctively hate Prometheans: vampires, werewolves, and Beasts. Instead, vampires and werewolves find Prometheans so unsettling that it actually becomes harder for them to resist their Unstoppable Rage—meaning that they'll quite likely end up killing the Promethean anyway, along with any other allies or innocents that are unfortunate enough to be there at the time. Beasts, on the other hand, are downright immune to Disquiet.
• Secrets of the Synod Horrenda introduces an undead monster called the Nightrager, which drives nearby creatures into a homicidal frenzy.
• Shadowrun: Wraiths can cause uncontrollable aggression in those near them.
• Traveller: In the adventure Leviathan, when the PCs explore the world Pa'an, the natives will use their psionic powers to inflict telepathically induced aggression toward other party members. The crew will begin by feeling antagonistic and short-tempered with each other, and within one to six hours will be actively engaged in trying to finish each other off.
• Villains & Vigilantes: In the adventure Devil's Domain, when the PC's are fighting at the Stonehenge tower, killing a demon will cause it to explode in a cloud of demon ichor, which becomes a toxic brown smoke. After the battle is over, if the PC's didn't destroy the smoke when it was created it will cause inhabitants of the nearby town to converge on Stonehenge in a killing frenzy directed at anyone who isn't infected.
• Skarbrand in Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 has a special rule which causes everyone around him to reroll misses in close combat due to amplifies hate. Some version even forbid nearby units (friend or foe) from falling back or breaking off combat without a difficult leadership roll, forced to tear their opponents to shreds or die in the attempt by Skarbrand's rage.

Theatre

• Black Friday: The Tickle-Me-Wiggly Dolls bring out the worst in everybody, leading to several arguments, and physical altercations that quickly escalate into a nasty Retail Riot. This is at first assumed to be because they're the hot ticket Christmas item everyone wants, and there's a very limited supply. But then Lex hears it talking to her... It turns out Wiggly is an Adorable Abomination who preys on the greed, insecurity, and desperation of average people, and convinces them (either subtly or directly) that they need this toy, and if they just buy one, all their problems will be solved. For example, Lex is compelled to steal and sell one online to get money so she and her sister can run away from home. Tom is absolutely convinced his son wants one for Christmas, and will do anything to get it — even though, as it's later revealed, his son doesn't even care about the toys. In fact, none of the children do; the mind control only works on adults, which Lex theorizes is because "adults have more holes." Once Wiggly has a hold on someone, however, logic and compassion will go out the window in pursuit of getting a doll, with many of them being perfectly willing to kill to get one.

Toys

• BIONICLE:
  • The Dreaming Plague's first symptoms included irritability, which then grew to hatred and violent behaviour, finally leading to complete insanity followed by death. The Plague turned out to be a side-effect of Annona eating people's dreams, forcing them to release their pent-up frustration in real life.
  • The Kurahk breed of Rahkshi has the power of anger that it can spread with its staff, causing its targets to turn on each other. The Makuta species who create the Rahkshi possess this ability as well, though they don't need a staff to channel it.
  • Although not demonstrated in the story, the Mask of Shadows can also turn friends into enemies.

Video Games

• In BioShock, the Enrage plasmid causes splicers to go crazy (well, crazier than usual) and attack anyone — you, their fellow splicers, or even Big Daddies. BioShock 2 gives us a potential origin story for the Enrage plasmid and why the splicers in the first game are too angry to come up with any kind of plan against a juggernaut: the ADAM slugs love to eat a deep-sea plant that secretes red chemicals. This could be considered a passive-defensive mechanic, as anyone who consumes the chemicals from the flowers becomes really, really violent, and addicted to the stuff. You find one of Lamb's science staff, Gilbert Alexander, violently insane and addicted to the scent of the flowers in the area.
• In Cave Story, Mimigas which eat a certain type of red flower instantly turn into gigantic, mindless killing machines. They did this in their past, on purpose, to prevent killer robots from annihilating them — and the Doctor plans to use this trait to turn them into an unstoppable army.
• In City of Psychos, the world has been infected by a virus, "Corips-21", which affects the human mind. The infected "Psychos", as the survivors call them, become extremely aggressive, mentally unstable, lose the lion's share of reason and memories, but usually have echoes from the past life. They mostly experience aggression only to healthy people.
• Command & Conquer:
  • Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars:
    • In Kane's Wrath, the Brotherhood of Nod's Humongous Mecha the Redeemer can cause enemy units to go into a rage; attacking anything within sight (including their allies), but only after they finish off their current target first.
    • Black Hand Confessors can throw hallucinogenic grenades, which cause any infantry caught in their area of effect (including friendlies) to attack their own allies. Unfortunately, it doesn't affect vehicles.
  • Similarly, in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 — Yuri's Revenge, Yuri's faction has the Chaos Drone, which emits a psychedelic gas with a similar effect — or to be more exact, the gas causes units affected by it to prioritize targeting friendlies over targeting foes, with an extra helping of doubled rate of fire.
• The violence of Condemned: Criminal Origins and Condemned 2: Bloodshot centers on this. The reason why the city's homeless people attack you on sight is because they're being driven insane by unusual sonic frequencies emitted by devices built by an ancient cult.
• The Infected of Dead Island react to the outbreak as such. Unlike the standard zombie Walkers or painfully self-aware Suiciders, they are locked in a permanent Unstoppable Rage a la 28 Days Later, intent to kill everyone and everything they possibly can.
• Deadly Premonition: A purple gas produced from the Red Seeds that drives people into a murderous rage was responsible for the Original Raincoat Killer incident. It happens again during the last mission of the game. Killing the Final Boss puts a stop to it, though.
• In Dead Space, this is the usual effect that Markers have on humans: they drive humans violently insane through hallucinations and induced paranoia. All the better to cause humans to slaughter each other and gain dead bodies which can then become Necromorphs. Certain smarter humans can resist the effects to some degree (with a very rare few completely immune to them), but the Markers can instead manipulate these individuals into performing other useful tasks for them.
• Although not necessarily a plague in it's own right, Mia Yung's blowpipe and poisoned darts can wreak havoc on unsuspecting enemies en masse in Desperados, one tiny dart will send them into paranoid homicidal rage, opening fire on anything that is caught in their path, usually causing multiple deaths before the infected will either pass out or be gunned down by their former comrades.
• In the lore of the Diablo franchise, the demon Vidian is said to be able to manipulate whole armies into destroying themselves through infighting, and make even the most loyal soldier question their superior's orders, thanks to his mastery of the sin of Envy. Fortunately for the angels, his dislike of following orders meant he was rarely deployed against them during the Eternal Conflict, and fortunately for the player, the powers he uses don't reflect the stories about him when he's fought as a boss in Diablo III.
• Dragon Age II and Inquisition feature Red Lyrium, which is basically regular lyrium on steroids or rather, the Blight and induces paranoia and delusions of power in those who come into contact with or even remain in close proximity to it for too long.
• In EarthBound (1994), Giygas' evil influence breaches the barriers of space and time and manifests itself in humans, animals, plants, and even inanimate objects all for the explicit purpose of destroying you.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The series has long included the Status Effect "Frenzy", which can be achieved by spells in the Illusion school. This effect causes the target to attack anything in sight, including members of his own faction. The results are even better when the spell has a large area of effect, enabling you to turn entire groups against each other.
  • By Skyrim, there is a version of the spell powerful to an affect an entire town, causing them to turn on each other.
• The Epic Battle Fantasy series has the Berserk skill, which inflicts Berserk on its target. It was limited to targeting allies in its debut in Epic Battle Fantasy 3, but it would gain the ability to target foes in Epic Battle Fantasy 4. Epic Battle Fantasy 5 would add a multi-target version, called Raging Force.
• In Evil Genius 2, Emma's personal Doomsday Device is V.E.N.O.M., a poisonous madness-inducing chemical weapon meant to plunge the world into anarchy.
• EXTRAPOWER: Giant Fist: The mysterious bracelet unearthed at the start of the game has this effect on animals, driving them into blind rampage (it's okay, the player characters only give them a little Get A Hold Of Yourself Man and they scamper off). In general, humans are immune to this effect... unless they happen to be descendants of the ancient Latour warriors.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 3:
    • Vault 108, a social experiment where the interior was pumped full of hallucinogenic gases to see how the inhabitants would react. Result: everyone had gone insane and killed each other.
    • Vault 92 as well. Using the internal PA system, everyone was subjected to low-frequency white noise with combat suggestions hidden in it. After a while, everyone who heard it gone berserk and brutally killed the nearest person.
  • Fallout 4: Entering the HalluciGen building finds a group of Gunners going nuts and shooting at each other in a thick fog while alarms and warnings of a chemical leak sound. Turns out the Gunners accidentally activated one of the company's products, an experimental pacifism drug. It also turns out that HalluciGen was really bad at their job, which is why said drug is has caused the Gunners to go berserk and kill each other.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The "Mist" in Final Fantasy IX causes this effect on the entire world. It's mild and most people have moved to places where the Mist doesn't lie, but it's nonetheless lead to increased wars over history, which is actually part of the Big Bad's plans.
  • In Final Fantasy X-2, the Den of Woe consists of a large cluster of pyreflies that were infected by Shuyin's spirit and corrupted with his hatred. They will possess anyone who goes near them and cause them to slaughter everyone in sight. They wind up possessing Yuna, Rikku, and Paine late in the game, but Yuna is able to eventually fight off the possession and free both Rikku and Paine.
• It's revealed in God of War III that this is the reason why the Olympians suddenly Took a Level in Jerkass after the first game. When Kratos opened Pandora's box in order to gain its power to defeat Ares, he accidently released the evils sealed inside it, allowing them to possess and consume Zeus and his fellow Olympians and turning them into paranoid, hateful and cruel tyrants.
• In Grand Theft Auto III, there's a cheat that makes all of the citizens attack each other. There's also a cheat that arms all of them. Use both cheats, find a good place to hide, and Pass the Popcorn.
• Kingdom of Loathing: Almost everything that increases monster leveling has a description to that effect. The Annoy-o-Tron, the badly tuned radio, the Canadian Mind Control Device which takes it up a notch... even, as a Shout-Out to Nethack, a ring of conflict. Most infamous is the hockey stick of furious angry rage, which is imbued with everything that makes hockey hockey.
• In Kirby Star Allies, one is caused when the Jamba Heart shatters, its pieces raining down on Dream Land and causing everyone they touch to behave incredibly aggressively (including Dedede and Meta Knight). Luckily, Kirby is hit with a pink heart instead, giving him the power to cure others of the pieces' effects.
• Left 4 Dead doesn't actually feature the undead, but rather "infected" humans, in the vein of 28 Days Later, which the developers cite as an inspiration. Taking them further from the zombie stereotype is that they don't eat human flesh, or anything, for that matter, if a certain piece of safe room graffiti is to be believed.
• Legacy of Kain:
  • In Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, the player can generate this effect with the 'Inspire Hate' spell, causing all nearby Mooks to ignore the player and attack each other. The description of the spell specifically states Kain's sadistic amusement with the effect this has on the survivors...
  • Kain gains the same ability in Legacy of Kain: Defiance. In both cases, it's related to the pillar of conflict.
• In Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, one temple provides the spell "Rage of Krolm" which promptly fills your heroes with an unstoppable rage that gives them bonuses to fighting ability.
• Mega Man
  • The entire Mega Man X series started because of Zero's body spreading a computer virus that caused robots to turn Maverick.
  • This is the main goal of Dr. Regal in Mega Man Battle Network 5: Team Colonel and Team ProtoMan: Combine the Soul Net (unifying all hearts) with the power of the Dark Chip (makes people evil). We see a little bit of the effects during the cutscene before the Final Boss.
  • Mega Man Star Force
    • Gemini Spark's evil plan in the first game is to attach a virtual plus or minus to each person, invariably attaching the same sign to two friends, lovers, spouses, etc. so that they'd argue with each other. The game never explored the effect of two people with opposite signs...
    • It's pulled again at the end of the second game. The villain gets away with it for a while, too, and this time without the awkward positive/negative questions.
    • The Bonus Dungeon of the same game is a twisted Bad Future in which the villain's plan actually succeeded and humanity was completely wiped out. The result is a rather depressing dungeon where you wander around a world without life or hope, kill insane versions of your allies from the normal timeline, and eventually confront a Superboss whose sole intention is to escape to your world and wreak havoc on it as well.
  • One of Omega's powers in Mega Man Zero is his ability to turn normally sane reploids into murderous psychopaths. This power combined with his bloodthirsty desire to kill is ultimately what caused the deaths of 90% of reploids and 60% of humans in the Elf Wars. Not surprising, considering that it's the Maverick Virus from Mega Man X taken to its logical conclusion.
• Monster Hunter 4: The Gore Magala is an Elder Dragon-like monster that spreads a special substance called the Frenzy Virus to sense its surroundings. This substance also has the debilitating side-effect of turning monsters who breathe it in into Frenzied specimens, who are in constant pain, extremely aggressive, can infect other monsters, and gain greater power. Then, as shown in the expansion 4 Ultimate, those who survive turn into Apex monsters, Typhoid Mary carriers of the Frenzy who can deflect almost any attack without the aid of a Wystone and are even more powerful than Frenzied monsters. It isn't that deadly to humans, though, even providing a temporary attack boost when you shrug it off. The Gore Magala does this so that it can molt into Shagaru Magala, who spreads the same substance to keep any other Gores in the area from molting properly, turning them into Chaotic Gore Magala, and to nip off competition for resources from any other monsters.
• The infectious "kombat rage" spreading from Dark Kahn's mere existence in Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe is a straight example, though this is also subverted when Superman and Raiden eventually realize that they can focus their rage towards what they see as the invaders rather than each other. During gameplay, it also serves as a literally Unstoppable Rage.
• In Nethack, there is a "ring of conflict" that, when worn, makes every creature (including peaceful creatures and the player's own pets) start attacking the player and each other.
• In NEO: The World Ends with You, Plague Noise are able to enter RG people's minds, cleaning their minds out and leaving them completely empty of thoughts or emotions. They can also affect Players, though the effect is incoherent hatred and hostility while the Plague Noise is dwelling within their minds. It is possible to save the host from succumbing to memory loss, but it must be done soon, or else the host may die from the "exorcising".
• The main idea behind Shadow Pokemon in Pokémon Colosseum and its sequel Pokémon XD. These Pokemon have had their emotions and compassion artificially switched off, leaving only their primal bloodlust. They'll attack anything, and they sometimes go into uncontrollable rage fits.
• In Postal 2, when you complete all of your tasks on Friday, you suddenly get a newspaper highlighting how a Hate Plague has instantly affected the whole town. Now you have to make it back home amidst the chaos, which includes raining dervish cats. At least everyone's usually focused on killing each other instead of you in particular.
• Resident Evil 4 has this introduced instead of the zombie plague in all the other games in the form of Las Plagas, which (in their normal form) are only able to make their victims more aggressive, albeit controlled. Experiments show how much worse this can actually be for its victims.
• Rimworld: A few of the Psycasts in the Royalty expansion take this form, inducing an instant Berserk mental break on the afflicted, causing them to immediately attack the closest available individual. Berserk for singular targets, Berserk Pulse if you want a small crowd affected, and if you really, really want to turn the entire map into the church brawl from Kingsman: The Secret Service to the point you don't mind a three-hour windup and a three-day cooldown coma (and the echoes pissing off everyone in the world very slightly), there's Neuroquake. On a more mundane level, there's also the "manhunter pack" events, in which a number of animals (often ordinarily non-aggressive ones like alpacas or cows) will spawn in and start attacking any human on the map. From v1.1 onwards this is explicitly a result of a literal plague, a rabies-like disease called scaria that also has a chance to make the animal's flesh inedible, represented as instantly going from alive to "rotting". This last part was added as an explicit Nerf so that a pack of manhunting chinchillas or whatever was no longer an easy source of free meat.
• The Delphinus Parasite in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is effectively this, though they have difficulty even finding out a physical vector for the disease... because it does not have one, effectively being an avatar of Asura.
• In Sly 2: Band of Thieves, Arpeggio's ultimate plan is to unleash a hypnotic light show over Paris, inducing people who ate spice-laden food into a furious rage, which he will then absorb to fuel his new Clockwerk body, achieving immortality.
• Vitiate, the one-time Sith Emperor in Star Wars: The Old Republic, has a deep, disturbing love affair with this trope — possibly because he can (we think) grow more powerful when people die, especially in painful and shocking ways. He first tested the technique on certain Children of the Emperor, then had one of his disciples attempt to induce the entire population of the planet Voss to kill each other. (Then the Jedi Knight player character killed the Emperor and he had to take a few years off.) Most recently he turned his attention to Ziost — the capital world of his own empire — and systematically took over the population one by one, forcing them to kill each other. It's implied that he could have unleashed the World-Wrecking Wave he uses to simply kill the entire planet much sooner but the wanton, piecemeal slaughter appeals to him. His disciples, the Dread Masters, prefer to inflict, well, dread, but they're perfectly capable of pulling this, too. Unlike the Emperor's variant, they tend to plant hallucinations that cause their enemies to become paranoid and turn on each other.
• Used in spell form in Suikoden III, during the attack on Karaya Village, which results in Chris killing Hugo's friend Lulu, and Boris going berserk on unarmed civilians. Naturally, the bad guys did this to sour relations between the Grasslanders and the Zexens, so as to be able to conquer them both later on without any troubles.
• In Third Super Robot Wars Z: Tengoku-hen, Barbiel's Sphere (the Resentful Scorpion) awakens the latent hatreds and resentment in other people, depriving them of their higher reason. When it is unleashed upon the people of New Japan during Sidereal's conquest, Zero had to use his Geass to stop them in their tracks before things got too out of hand.
• The early stages of The Testament of Sherlock Holmes introduce a nasty poison that causes the victim to go literally insane with rage.
• According to most Touhou Project fanon, this is how Parsee's "power of jealousy" works. Well, that and Bullet Hell... Used in the first half of the game Touhou Kishinjou ~ Double Dealing Character. The power of the Big Bad was causing usually calm youkai to become angry and seek a fight.
• Trauma Center (Atlus): In Trauma Team, almost all of the case solved by Naomi involves the victim being infected with the Rosalia virus. Though it isn't straight up hate, but rather a result of frontal lobe tumors causing dementia among with other symptoms. One of the cases involves the murderer being infected with the virus and thought she was trying to save her family from a Fate Worse than Death due to the hallucinations she was having.
• In Twilight Heroes, some items that raise foe toughness have descriptions of this flavor. In some cases, your equipment makes you look like such a smug jackass that your opponents become stronger just from the desire to beat the smugness out of you.
• In Vampyr (2018), Dr. Edgar Swansea tries to cure the Spanish Flu via injecting a patient with vampire blood and accidentally ends up creating a supernatural plague that turns people into hate-fuelled, usually only semi-cognizant, vampire-zombie creatures.
• This is a major side effect of Joy from We Happy Few. Joy alters one's ability to comprehend and understand reality, locking them in a near-constant state of ignorant bliss and happiness. Some cannot take it at all, their bodies and minds reject it, resulting in permanent brain damage (leaving them as Wastrels). Unfortunately, these are the least of its devastating side-effects. Those who take Joy too often (a.k.a. Wellies) become completely dependent on it to function, and become dangerous psychotic messes that cannot tolerate unhappiness or even normal people who aren't taking their Joy (a.k.a. Downers). Rather than simply ignore what offends them, they will actively hunt down and destroy anything that upsets or brings them off their high.
• In World of Warcraft's fifth expansion, the Sha are creatures born of negative emotions that take possession of their victims and make them living avatars of the power they represent, which include anger, doubt and hatred among others.

Visual Novels

• The song of Ginseigo from Full Metal Daemon Muramasa is one of the reasons to why she is so dangerous. Wherever she goes, the song is heard. And whoever hears the song is reduced to a feral state that seeks only bloodshed. By the end of the story, things get even worse as she gets powered up from fusing with Konjin, the God of Metal, which now allows the song to be spread globally, leading to wars and slaughter all around the world. And the sad part is that the song was originally meant to be a tool for peace, to spread the ideal of the Law of Balance, to teach humanity the folly of murder and war. However, needless to say, things went horribly, horribly wrong.
• Gnosia has the Gnosia infection, which causes people to become murderous. If they are not all confined to cold sleep, they will kill everyone in the ship.
• In Higurashi: When They Cry, the plague is known as Hinamizawa Syndrome, and it's been what's driving characters to paranoia and murderous tendencies; as a result, anywhere from more than half of to the entire cast winds up dead at the various ends. It's actually more of a Paranoia Plague than a Hate Plague, with a side order of hallucinations, but it gets the job done. For example, in the first arc, Keiichi hallucinates normal conversations as being suddenly ominous and threatening (such as imagining the opposite party as their eyes dilating and speaking unemotionally), and it culminates with him killing his friends out of the belief he was protecting himself from them. Normal things like Rena seeing him at the grocery store and not saying hi, or giving him spicy riceballs, are perceived as being threats on his life. Keiichi thinks Rena is stalking him, and with the riceballs, he hallucinates that there's needles in it instead of hot sauce. Whether shown or not, most of the arcs end with the entire town dead as the military rolls in and kills everyone, ostensibly to stop a sudden mass outbreak of Hinamizawa Syndrome. One character does have it figured out in every arc (and a few more know about it but don't find out about specific instances until too late). Unfortunately, by not fighting against it aggressively enough, she produces the same effect as if she hadn't known about it at all, which is to say none, and still gets to watch her friends descend into violent madness. In Kai, the heroes finally learn about the plague in question and conquer it with the Power of Trust.
• Hajun from Kajiri Kamui Kagura takes this to an utmost extreme. He is able to create a new natural law where all living beings, regardless of their scale and family relation, would begin to kill each other. From human, to animals and even insects. A World filled with slaughter and exclusion. It would keep going until all life apart from Hajun himself would have been killed, leaving only him.

Webcomics

• Blood Bank features a deadly perfume that causes all vampires in the vicinity to lose their minds and slaughter each other.
• In Cloudscratcher, the Sky Kingdom (the former name of the Margoth Empire) wiped out the Avian enclaves with a chemical weapon called Toxic Toast, which incites anyone affected by it to attack all others in a mindless rage, especially those who aren't affected. It's still present in the ruins, though fortunately it's degraded over time.
• Frenzy from The Daemonslayers. According to his DeviantArt page, the Dire Unicorn is constantly surrounded by a blood-red mist that makes any who breathe it overcome with violence and bloodlust that forces them to turn upon their fellows and tear each other apart. Those who survived and regained their senses often lost their minds anyway due to retaining the memories of what they saw and did under the effects of the rage. Despite his awful power, Frenzy is ironically one of the most peaceful of the dire unicorns and refuses to harm other mortals because he is still able to remember his name and former life as a noble unicorn, unlike his other brethren(such as Knightmare, who is currently the capricious mount to darkest Anti-Hero Blackjack) who were tortured into becoming evil perverse beings by the Demon Queen Shine. However, because Frenzy lives in a Crapsack World, he has absolutely no control over his powers and the effects of the curse that travels with him has caused him to slowly lose his mind and has now become quite insane. All this makes Frenzy (and every other decent person in the Daemonslayer universe, including even Blackjack) complete Woobies.
• EarthBound: The Chosen Four has the heroes going through one of these by the Plague Rat of Doom, Ness and Paula have a falling out, Jeff and Poo argue with each other.
• In Grrl Power Vehemence gains power from violence. And once he's absorbed enough power he can create an aura that causes those in it to become violent to the point of attacking friends/allies.
• In The Order of the Stick, Xykon used this against the Sapphire Guard by casting a Symbol of Insanity onto a bouncy ball and flinging it into the throneroom upon his entrance. Nearly all of the affected paladins slaughtered each other in a fit of madness, and, when the spell wore off, the last survivor committed seppuku out of grief.
• Schlock Mercenary:
  • The "Random Access Memorabilia" storyline uses a nanite-based version of this, corrupting genetic engineering done to add variety to some members of over 950 million wormhole gate clones (It Makes Sense in Context) so that they get turned into Super Soldiers serving an underhanded faction of the UNS after being killed.
  • Played with to some extent in the "Barsoom Circus" story arc, involving elephant sophonts. Musth is rather akin to a mating period, wherein the affected species become extremely violent and territorial. The cause of this is generally unknown, though some hesitant efforts have been made to identify it. In Schlock, there are a set of elephants afflicted by something akin to it, but it's caused by nanites instead.
• In Sluggy Freelance, "Hate", several characters in an area are affected by magic that makes them get really angry and then turn into plant zombie monsters. It's really the doing of a plant-themed demon, and those who are affected are people who were already killed and now are waiting for the seed of hatred that will consume their souls and turn them into monsters. The last survivor among those affected is, not coincidentally, someone who can use emotion-calming magic.
• Spinnerette has something in the water at the Canadian headquarters...
• The nation of Alderode in Unsounded possesses an unusual version in the Etalarche curse, reserved against heinous traitors as the greatest possible punishment it can inflict, and even then the ethical concerns are such that it took ten years of debate to authorize its most recent usage. It permanently alters the minds of everyone connected to the Dammakhert — almost the entire country, man, woman, and child — to make them hate the cursed one with single-minded, murderous intensity, regardless of any relationship they used to have. It's named after Ssaelism's Judas analogue, Etalarche, who was hunted down and ripped to pieces by the followers of Ssael after betraying him to his death, and those targeted by his curse usually suffer the same fate.

Web Original

• In Atop the Fourth Wall, the Gunslinger traps the cast in their apartment and sets up a device that lowers their inhibitions and increases their anger; between the tension of the situation and pre-existing conflicts in the group, the situation shortly gets violent.
• In Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Tie-Die has some sort of strange incense powers that can make hippies evil and violent.
• The Cure from Ruby Quest initially caused violent outbursts in those who'd taken it. Ruby, under the influence of the Cure, murdered her boyfriend Tom and gave Red a Glasgow Grin. Those who it has mutated enough also become violent, as seen in Stitches, Daisy, and Filbert, though this is reset once they die and resurrect.
• The SCP Foundation has a handful:
  • SCP-923, a Kill Sat which works by driving Ax-Crazy everyone at the targeted location. At it's most intense output level it permanently damages the fabric of reality, as if it were driving reality itself insane.
  • SCP-053 is an apparently ordinary three-year-old girl, except that anyone who is around her for more than a few minutes at a time becomes hyper-aggressive and homicidal toward her. This phenomena began happening after an incident where she may have been brought back to life or did not die when she was supposed to. The one thing that didn't want to kill her and actually befriend her was none other than SCP-682. This is very confusing otherwise it is an Omnicidal Maniac that tries to kill everything it sees. Some have speculated that the irrational hatred humanity has toward her is the same that 682 has toward humanity because both find something fundamentally wrong with the target's existence.
  • SCP-114 is somewhat similar to the above: she is an adult Afghani woman that fosters conflict in those around her. However, unlike 053, that conflict is aimed at each other rather than at the SCP, and has more reach and no defences against it, resulting in much steeper and isolating containment procedures.
  • SCP-2089 is John_████████_Is_Here, an Internet blogger who drives viewers of his content into prejudice towards him, posting hateful content about him (comments expressing dislike, fan art of him being harmed, encouraging him to kill himself). Combined with his inability to die, his condition is exploited to provide entertainment for other users by self-harm or suicide.
  • Played for Laughs with SCP-2513, an enchanted Roman bridge built during the Punic Wars that makes anyone who crosses it homicidally angry at Tunisia (formerly Carthage). The Foundation later determined that if they were to simply destroy the bridge, it would infect every bridge in Italy and cause the nation to go to war, triggering massive geopolitical turmoil.
  • SCP-3852 is a corpse that manifests outside a random Everytown, America, taking on the appearance of a resident believed to be guilty of a crime by the other locals. The affected residents believe that person to be dead and perceive them as their own killer, forming an Angry Mob to brutally murder them and anyone who gets in their way.
  • Inverted by SCP-4266, which reveals that virtually all human aggression is the result of an airborne pathogen endemic to Earth's atmosphere that alters brain chemistry and is discovered after mankind starts colonizing space, leading the Foundation to gradually evacuate Earth altogether in favor of the Colonized Solar System. However, it's shown that without it humans become inclined to Suicidal Pacifism, leading to a contingent of Foundation personnel staying behind on Earth to perform the testing and harsh decisions the others are no longer capable of.
• The Veil of Madness causes this. It's a section of the galaxy that drives anyone who stays in it for enough time violently insane. Any race unfortunate enough to evolve in it (except humans, who are immune to the effect) gets a generous helping of In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves.
• Worm: The entire story is based on the fact that all superpowered individuals have a literal spaceworm in their heads that makes them use their powers for punching instead of...well, literally anything useful. There are some other attempts to explain why Reed Richards Is Useless, such as the precog kaiju that will kill you if you try to be useful. On the other hand, said kaiju was either unconsciously created or controlled by a super who was so desperate to be able to continue punching things that he created them/used them to commit mass murder so that he could heroically stop them.
• The Red Horse virus in the Year Zero ARG is a weaponized hemorrhagic virus that causes violent psychosis, encouraging the spread of a disease that would otherwise be self-limiting given its extreme virulence.

Western Animation

• In Adventure Time's "Elements" arc, the effects of Flame Princess' elemental powers transformed the Fire Kingdom into a giant burning crater where the fire people endlessly fight because her influence turns people into battle-crazed Blood Knights. Cinnamon Bun is the only Fire Kingdom resident immune to her influence (because of his flame shield), but refuses to try to help because FP and her people are so aggressive that there's no point trying to reason with them.
• A recurring villain in Atomic Puppet is a giant slug-like monster with the ability to shoot slime from his body pores. The slime causes people hit by it to become angry at each other, and in one episode, it broke Joey and AP apart.
• Batfink featured main recurring villain Hugo A-Go-Go creating "hoke", a combination of hate and smoke. After it was released, the eponymous hero and his sidekick began arguing, including placing a lampshade on the overuse of the hero's "My wings of steel will protect me" catchphrase, with the henchman replying, "Yeah, yeah, why don't you get some new dialogue?"
• The Biker Mice from Mars episode "Test of Friendship" featured a villain named Evil Eye Weevil, who was able to fire a hostility ray from his eye, which made people become temporarily angry and aggressive. The hostility ray was used on the Biker Mice, which caused them to split up after getting into a fight so that it would be easier for the main antagonist Lawrence Limburger to defeat them. Thanks to the hostility ray's temporary nature, however, the Biker Mice manage to patch things up and foil Limburger's schemes as usual.
• In an episode of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, some squishy, triangular parasites possess the heroes by latching onto the back of their necks and manipulating the synapses between their host's primary emotions and impulsive, spontaneous action decisions. They increase their threat manifold by reproducing asexually and very, very quickly.
• Captain Flamingo: In "Change of Heart", after Milo's Fuzzy Wuzzy Pal landed on a grape soda fountain after Milo accidentally trips over a bottle of grape soda, the bear becomes neutralized, causing it to become hateful instead of lovable, as it will make anyone you give it to start hating each other, instead of falling in love with each other. This later caused all of the girls falling in love with Milo to start hating him after the sparkles from the bear hits them.
• Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix: Alex Taylor has his men distribute high-tech Kenny Omega-themed sunglasses to the human audience members of a wrestling match. He then broadcasts a signal which makes anyone wearing the glasses see hybrids as horrific monsters that must be destroyed. The result is an orgy of violence where the brainwashed humans massacre every hybrid in the stadium before spilling out into the streets to attack every hybrid in sight.
• Care Bears (1980s):
  • One episode featured a mysterious meteorite infecting a small town, making the surroundings dull and gray and the citizens depressed and apathetic. Then it started affecting the Care Bears and their Cousins, but fortunately they were able to Care-Bear Stare the meteor into a deep hole on the outskirts of town.
  • The Thanksgiving episode involved an evil pie maker named Sour Sam, who bakes a bunch of "crabby apple pies," that causes anyone who eats them to act like grumpy jerks, and the only thing that snaps them all out of it is a young boy's speech about what Thanksgiving is all about.
  • In another episode, a variation occurs: on a rainy day, a demon of boredom appears and hits Hugs and Tugs Bear with a magical dust that drains them of their enthusiasm, making them dull and whiny. An Aesop about all of the fun you can have with your imagination serves as a helpful antidote.
  • And another episode features No Heart conjuring magical bubbles that can imprison living things and amp up their anger, turning them into bitter, destructive monsters. The only cure was a rare type of gem called Caring Crystals, which Grumpy Bear had to collect while the others held back the bubble onslaught with a force field.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog:
  • In "Curtain of Cruelty", Courage faces a literal sweeping Hate Plague called the "Cruelty Curtain". This energy barrier causes anyone it touches to become ridiculously rude to the point that benevolence is considered a crime. Courage manages to re-wire the Curtain so that it turns people nice — even its evil creator, who is later elected mayor. Eustace is nasty enough that he isn't affected, and when the effect is inverted, he's still a big jerk.
  • A variation occurs in the two-parter "The Tower of Dr. Zolost". The titular doctor develops bombs that, when fired, cause anyone they hit to turn green and become deeply unhappy ("depressed" might be a better term, as they lose all motivation to do anything and simply slump to the ground, unmoving). Thankfully, Muriel's "Happy Plum" recipe proves an excellent cure.
• Happens in two episodes of Class of the Titans. The first time was in the Valentine's Day Episode "Bows and Eros", where Cronus mind-controls Eros (Cupid) to spread hate on Valentine's Day instead of love. The second time was in "Applet of Discord", where Eris the goddess of strife spreads strife with a ringtone that encourages fighting. Both times, they break up the seven heroes for a time until they realize whats up.
• Cyberchase:
  • In "Harriet Hippo & the Mean Green", Hacker attempts to take over Cyberspace with the "Spell of the Mean Green", which can turn entire worlds mean and green. First person to be infected: Motherboard. Oh, dear.
  • This happens again in "Hackerized!". The plague is pretty much limited to Sensible Flats... but works on Matt and Jackie!
• One episode of Dungeons & Dragons (1983), featuring the usual "get to the one-chance exit back home" set-up, forced the kids to go through a maze to reach a portal. One part of the maze made all the kids become very aggressive, tetchy and downright bloodthirsty, which almost resulted in a nasty fight. Fortunately, Hank was able to snap everyone out of it.
• The Fantastic Four (1978): The episode "The Frightful Four" at one point has the Wizard use a gas to make the Fantastic Four become hostile toward each other.
• Futurama: As a satire of the COVID-19 Pandemic, "Rage Against the Vaccine" has a mutant virus called "Explovid-23" sweep across Earth, with the main symptoms being a mild cough and explosive anger. Since everybody on Earth is so busy fighting each other over minor provocations, the Omicrons seize the opportunity to invade... only to become sick and disagreeable as well.
• In the Justice League episode "Secret Society", supervillain Gorilla Grodd uses his mental abilities to give the team's minor issues with each other a little push, much to their embarrassment.
• Happens in the Valentine's Day Episode of Miraculous Ladybug courtesy of the Villain of the Week Dark Cupid, who fires arrows shaped like black roses that invert people's feelings of love (romantic or platonic) into hatred.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In "The Return of Harmony", Discord inflicts most of the main characters with the opposite emotions from their respective Elements of Harmony. The honest Applejack becomes a chronic and impulsive Bad Liar, the merry Pinkie Pie becomes deadly serious and repeatedly grouchy, the generous Rarity becomes self-absorbed, the kind Fluttershy becomes a total Jerkass, and the loyal Rainbow Dash deserts her friends. Eventually Twilight Sparkle became affected, no longer caring about friendship. This lasts until Princess Celestia sends back Twilight's friendship reports, which breaks Twilight's corruption and reunite her friends.
  • In the episode "All Bottled Up", Starlight, who was angry at Trixie for using a spell that teleported the Cutie Map to who knows where and acting like she doesn't care that it could get them both in trouble with Twilight, uses a spell that bottles up all of her anger in a jar. But then the jar breaks, and all the anger infects Bulk Biceps, Granny Smith, and a pony who works at the jewelry store, who all go after Trixie and start yelling at her about all the stuff she did to make Starlight mad.
• Happens in the Mysticons episode "Quest of the Vexed." Fed up with Arkayna's treatment of her, Emerald hides her frustration by using canisters that bottle up one's anger. She ends up losing a canister in Centaur Park and it soon malfunctions, spreading Em's anger to other citizens in Drake City.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998) has the episode "Tough Love", in which HIM replaces everyone's love for the girls with hate, causing them to turn against the girls — even the narrator is affected. It really hits when the girls go to see the Professor; imagine all the love that a parent has for their children magically swapped with hate.
  Professor Utonium: [groans] How many times do I have to tell you girls not to come barging into the lab like that? [turning to face them, face red with anger] IT'S NOT NICE!
• In the The Secret Show episode And That's For Helsinki, Doctor Doctor creates a mind bomb that causes an entire country to develop unbinding hatred towards whoever's image was on the bomb prior to its detonation. The main characters Victor and Anita don't remember why because they were at the center of the bomb's explosion trying to disarm it and had to have an mind washing in a washing machine in order to prevent them from killing each other.
• The Smurfs (1981): The Root Of Evil in the episode of the same name. The Yellow Hate Disease in "Hefty's Heart" would also count, as would Chlorhydris' black-heart arrows which Cupid accidentally fires in "Chlorhydris' Lost Love".
• South Park: The climax of the Valentine's Day Episode "Cupid Ye" has Cartman's eponymous alter ego (a Take That! at Kanye West) shoot arrows of antisemitism at the elementary school students. This most manifests as the students ganging up on Kyle and complaining about movies to him because they think he runs Hollywood. Cupid Ye gets better after taking psychiatric meds, using his arrows to spread love instead.
• In SpongeBob SquarePants' second Christmas special, It's a SpongeBob Christmas!, Plankton obtains a mineral called Jerktonium, and laced it on a loaf of fruitcake, so that whoever eats the cake become jerks. And so, everyone in Bikini Bottom (sans Squidward, he was already a jerk) eat the fruitcake and become jerks. The only exception was SpongeBob, eating the tainted cake doesn't affect him due to his tiny brain and pure heart.
• In Star Trek: Prodigy, the Living Construct is basically this trope meant for Starfleet. After the Vau N'Akat civil war, caused by First Contact with a Starfleet vessel, the survivors got their hands on the USS Protostar and intended to send it back in time to turn Starfleet ships against one another, thus preventing first contact and averting the civil war. In the season 1 finale, they succeed in unleashing the weapon, causing untold destruction, which is only stopped when the crew of the Protostar manage to destroy the Construct by scuttling the ship.
• In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) episode "Splinter No More", Shredder secretly plants a device to increase a mutant's hostility to keep the Turtles from following him. When they eventually arrive where the device is planted, the Turtles' attitudes quickly degrade and they begin fighting each other until April is able to snap them back to their senses by asking them what Splinter would think of them acting like this.
• A more family friendly version is see in Theodore Tugboat, in the debut episode of Guysborough the Garbage barge. His grumpiness gets Theodore in a bad mood, which puts Emily & George in a bad mood, and so on until the entire harbour becomes snappy with each other.
• In an episode of Toad Patrol, the toadlets enter a cave which is filled with red crystals that, once touched, begin turning the toadlets against each other by making them argue over the smallest of things.
• The Trope Namer is the Hate Plague in The Transformers. Also occurred as one of a small handful of Shout Outs in Beast Machines.
  • Despite the name, it doesn't really fit. The infected often initially become violent, but will then begin to work together with other infected. In the second of the two-parter that introduced the plague, Cyclonus commands the other Decepticons to retreat after coming under fire from the Autobots, and they follow his orders unquestioningly. It's more of a "Lack of inhibitions" plague than a "hate" plague. They also seem intent on spreading the plague, as the simple-minded Sharkticons are yelling "infect them all" when chasing an uninfected Quintesson, and Cyclonus infects a human, and then tosses her aside to concentrate on Galvatron, saying "Join us, Galvatron!"
    • One example of the afflicted cooperating are the combiners. In spite of fighting amongst themselves minutes earlier, the Aerialbots re-combine into Superion. They later infect Defensor. Defensor immediately collapses into the 5 Protectobots; the five fight amongst themselves. When Galvatron raids the lab containing the plague, Menasor and Bruticus are touched by afflicted Autobots and don't collapse into 10 brawling Transformers, but stay combined.
    • The Decepticons' cooperation could be Fridge Brilliance at work, as hatred had already been a part of their driving motivation, so wouldn't necessarily alter their behavior as much as it does, the non-villainous characters'. Doubly so for Menasor and the Stunticons, whose bios indicate that the Stunticons operate on a level that barely makes it up to Teeth-Clenched Teamwork, while the Combaticons' more military mindset gives them a more "get the job done" mindset that powers through the plague. The Predacons are also shown to have been infected and still able to become Predaking because their shared love of the hunt is so strong that it focuses the Hate Plague into their hunting instincts and lets them work together even better (Predaking's bio explicitly marks him as one of the best-integrated of all the combiners).

Real Life

• Mob mentality can often resemble this.
  • Historically, the mob mentality revolving around the Witch Trials of Salem, Massachusetts are said to have been amplified from ergot poisoning, caused by a bread mold found on rye bread with symptoms including mania and psychosis, making it a bit more literal.
  • 'Propaganda machines' have been known to pour fuel on the fires of hate, if genocides in recent history are anything to go by.
• In the right doses, the right drugs can induce a psychotic episode, which can lead to explosively violent outbursts. However, the victim is just as likely to pass out, have a heart attack, or go on a bad acid trip instead, so the effect can't be used reliably as a weapon.
• Methamphetamine abuse and production. Methamphetamine abuse tends to lead to aggressiveness coupled with anger and paranoia (and in some instances can create a psychotic syndrome called amphetamine psychosis, which is almost indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia except that violence is far more likely in response to perceived threats, whereas most paranoid schizophrenics would want to run from or cower in fear before an imagined threat rather than fight it). When you add in the paranoia induced by the illegal status of meth use/abuse, this creates a volatile situation where people (especially users and cooks) are willing to hurt anyone who angers them/whom they see as a threat to their business or freedom. Breaking Bad is often an understatement of how horrifying "meth culture" can be.
• Many illnesses, such as rabies or brain tumors, often result in mood swings and sometimes increased aggressiveness. Rabies is a real life Rage Plague, as it causes an aggressive, feral mentality in order to spread itself, through biting, and also causes the host to avoid basic survival instincts, in this case, drinking water, which leads to eventual death. Compare with the Rage Virus of 28 Days Later and the occasional side effects of G-23 Paxilon in Serenity.
• Dogs (particularly English Springer and English Cocker Spaniels) can have something called "Rage Syndrome" which does resemble Hate Plague. Fortunately, it's rare and it only lasts a few minutes, and can, in most cases, be controlled with medication.
• Lead poisoning can lead to bouts of aggression and reduced inhibitions, and it is theorized that large amounts of lead exposure (particularly through leaded gasoline) may have been party responsible for the rise in crime in the 60 and 70s, including, but not limited to, serial killers.
  • It is also theorised that the Romans may have had some of their more bloodthirsty and unrestrained cultural aspects (gladiators, horrifically torturous executions, gluttonous orgies among the rich etc.) amplified by their drinking water being brought to them via lead-lined aqueducts.

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