Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum

"Human, have you ever been to Hell? I think not. I'd rather not exist than go back to that... and if I have to drag down everyone else with me... so be it."

— Azrael, Dogma

For some villains, Global Domination is no good. You take over the world, And Then What? More misery! Ditto on the universe or The Multiverse. Nope. It all has to go. Everything has to be destroyed, every speck of life killed, every mote of light extinguished. No, this isn't reshaping reality In Their Own Image, however that trick works. This is the need for oblivion and taking everyone else down first.

Possibly, the villain has a reason for this. Maybe they're some kind of Cosmic Horror Story version of The Punishment, and destroying reality is the only way to end their own pain. (Or their ego is too big to just kill themselves. No, they have to be dramatic about it.) Or they're already dying of some sort of incurable condition and have decided that if they're not allowed to continue living, neither is anyone else, but more often than not, they're a Straw Nihilist; and just wanna show everyone who is boss. What's mystifying is when these types seem to genuinely like existing and interacting with the world. What exactly are they going to do should they succeed? And Then What? Where, as The Tick puts it, would they put all their stuff? In this case, they often exist only for the Heroes to have someone to stop.

The third variety is the final resort, they wanted to Take Over the World, but now that you've beaten (or even possibly mortally injured) them they're taking everything with them. They don't mind dying anymore.

If any villains have Take Over the World as their goal, they logically should not want this to succeed. Can result in Evil Versus Oblivion.

Related to the Omnicidal Maniac, who does this kind of thing; many of that trope's examples plan on sticking around afterwards, however. See also: Apocalypse How, Class Z, and Apocalypse Maiden, who may not intend or even know that what they're doing will destroy the world.

See Put Them All Out of My Misery for a likely motivation behind this kind of behavior.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• At the end of Digimon Adventure, when Apocalymon had his claw-things and the humanoid figure we thought was actually him destroyed, he threw a hissy and decided to nuketify the Human World and Digital World in one shot. The heroes defeated him by standing around going "Oh noes!" until their Transformation Trinkets spontaneously formed a force field in a classic example of Deus ex Machina, containing the blast.
• Dragon Ball Z:
  • DBZ villains in general are fond of this. Cell tried to self-destruct and take the Earth with him upon realizing he couldn't beat Gohan, and Majin Buu later tries the same thing (although that was a subversion, as it was a trick to buy time).
  • Subverted when Frieza decides to blow up Namek to kill Super Saiyan Goku while declaring he'd rather die by his own hand than a filthy monkey, but as he's doing so he gloats he can survive in the vacuum of space while Goku can't. In fact, Frieza botches the attack because he held back out of fear he'd die in an close-range explosion powerful enough to destroy the whole planet in one instant shot, hence the infamous "five minutes until the planet explodes" that makes up the final Race Against Time.
  • In a filler episode, Super Buu attempts to do this in his fight against Vegito once he realizes that he is hopelessly outmatched. Unlike other examples in the series, Super Buu was so powerful his tantrum was implied to be capable of destroying all of existence. Luckily, Vegito ends it with just one punch.
  • Even predating Frieza, Vegeta pulled this by attempting to destroy the Earth (without having shown the ability to breathe in space and/or travel without a space pod) because he couldn't accept the idea of a low class warrior landing a hit on him and was willing to die so long as Goku did too.
• Izaku from Eternal Sabbath is already a murderous psychopath who would kill anyone who bothers him, but after he discovers that he is dying, he begins to lash out at the world even more desperately, and goes out of his way to kill and cause wanton destruction.
• Godzilla: The Planet Eater: The Exif are revealed to be performing one: they discovered the universe was finite in both space and time, decided that meant life was meaningless, thus they desire to summon Ghidorah and help him destroy the universe, including themselves.
  Metphies: We calculated the future beyond linear time, and we discovered a grim conclusion. There is no such thing as eternity. The universe is finite, and eventually, everything will disappear. Therefore, we knew we had to find peace and comfort in the destruction of the universe.
• Immortal Rain: Yuca wants to stop his cycle of reincarnation. The only solution he's found is to wipe out the entire human race.
• Slightly more realistic example: Rau Le Creuset the Big Bad of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, is a dying clone of a man he hated. Sick, angry at the world, and convinced that Humans Are Bastards, he turns Death Seeker and tries to take everything with him before he goes.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion - This is the end goal of Gendo and SEELE, although the details for both differ. Gendo wants to be an immortal god with Yui by his side forever, while SEELE wants all of humanity merged into one being instead. Neither side gets what they want thanks to Rei and Shinji.
  • Shinji is manipulated into doing it for them after reaching the Despair Event Horizon, but is able to come to reality at the last second. Although he has still turned humanity into LCL, it's indicated most of them will be able to regain a physical form.
  • In the Rebuild of Evangelion movies, Gendo is at this again, and nearly succeeds. He overthrows SEELE and kills off all the other branches of NERV before merging with Evangelion 13 and triggering the final Impact.
• One Piece - Kaido, one of the Four Emperors, aspires to start the biggest World War in history for little other reason than boredom and disgust with life. He's annoyed with his own Nigh-Invulnerability and hopes that someone strong enough to kill him will show up.
• This is the end goal of Rave Master villain Hardner, who tries to summon the Eldtritch Clock Roach Endless to wipe out his own painful memories.
• Though most of the Big Bads of Sailor Moon simply want to take over the galaxy, Pharaoh 90 appears to want to completely obliterate the world with The Silence for no other reason than he can.
  • There's an entire subtrope of Sailor Moon fanfiction as well that takes this route. Typically, someone (usually a rogue band of senshi) decides that destroying the Galaxy Cauldron (where souls are born) will end the recursive nature of war in the galaxy. This would also result in no new souls being born and old souls having no way to be reincarnated, effectively ending existence eventually. In fact, Sailor Cosmos intends to do this in the canon story, and is only persuaded not to do so by Sailor Moon's belief that the beauty of life more than makes up for eternal war.
• The Savior's Book Café Story in Another World: While Tsukina would rather spend her days running her Book Café in peace, "God" informs her that because the First Savior refuses to learn any magic, her unlimited pool of mana will build and build and eventually, should her emotions run too high, result in an explosion with an enough force to destroy an entire country.
• Slayers:
  • The ultimate goal of the Mazoku is to return all existence to Chaos, including themselves. It was most explicitly pointed out by Hellmaster Fibrizo:
    Hellmaster: "I want to be destroyed. I want to be destroyed! Destruction? Yes... Destruction is the ultimate wish of any Mazoku. [...] But this destruction shall consume all things! It shall consume the entire world! [...] All the world! Let all the world be destroyed with me!
  • In Slayers Try, this is also the goal of the otherdimensional Vorfeed and Dark Star Dugradigdu, supreme Shinzoku and Mazoku of their universe. After realizing how pointless their existence of warfare and endless, cyclic confrontation was, they merged as one entity and went on to destroy their universe as a cosmic Take That! to their creator. Lucky for them, Valgaav proved the perfect conduit for them in Ceipheed/Shabranigdu's universe...
• Folken in the The Vision of Escaflowne movie. He wants to extinguish all the misery and suffering from the world by wiping everybody from existence, himself included. His nihilism very briefly appeals to the protagonist who suffers from a bad case of teenager's angst, but pretty soon common sense wins.

Comic Books

• Peter David's Captain Marvel (the one with Rick Jones, the latter one) has gone full on looney tunes, mainly because he knows everything. With the assistance of the personification of Entropy (Marvel Comics loves their personifications) Captain Marvel ends all of reality. Off panel. 'Cept Rick, Entropy and the Cap. Rick convinces Entropy to become his "dad", Infinity and the universe is rebooted.
• Two versions of Deadpool have tried this:
  • Venompool, a version of Wade bonded with the Venom symbiote, decided to do destroy his universe instead of accepting he was a jackass.
  • The Heroes Reborn version of the Swordsman, who turned out to be his reality's Deadpool, tried to nuke Uatu's base and destroy reality upon learning he and his reality were literally the creations of a child. Both he and Venompool would join the Evil Deadpool Corps., led by Dreadpool.
• Fantastic Four: Life Story: In the final issue, Doctor Doom gives up on conquering the world and decides to destroy it, with his Doombot army ravaging cities wantonly and then self-destructing just to cause more damage.
• Final Crisis: Once Darkseid is fatally poisoned by the radion bullet, he decides to take all of the multiverse with him, hastening the decay of space-time that his rebirth had already started.
• In Flashpoint (1999), boredom with immortality made Vandal Savage try to open a gateway to the end of time and destroy everything on Earth, including himself.
• The Grievous Journey of Ichabod Azrael: After Ichabod discovers that his love Zoe only existed as a fabrication, he kills The Ferryman and dooms all of reality to destruction out of spite.
• Surprisingly enough, The Joker of all people starts going this way in Emperor Joker; after stealing Mr. Mxyzptlk's powers, and torturing & humiliating all of Earth's superheroes more times than he can count, he quietly, soberly confides to Harley that he can't respect a universe that would let someone as awful as him exist in the first place, and is unmaking it in hopes that whatever rises in its place will be free of such monsters.
• Lucifer played with this. When informed that he can either take his father's position or let every universe in reality fall apart, unable to get over his daddy issues Lucifer begins an extremely arduous quest to fix the problem some other way.
  • Fenris is pretty much made of this trope, and Lilith is getting there. She throws a temper tantrum in front of God, demanding him to destroy the universe for putting so much pain in it, while He ponders if he should do just that.
• This was a major plot point in Marvel's Secret Wars II, where the Beyonder threatened to destroy all reality because he couldn't find a meaning to existence.
• Near the end of Fleetway's Sonic the Comic, Dr. Robotnik, tired of his constant failures to beat Sonic, decides to bring the game to an end by destroying Mobius outright, using a machine to drain the planet's life force and cause complete ecological collapse. When Sonic manages to put a stop to that plan, Robotnik becomes incredibly depressed, to which his right-hand man, Grimer, releases the Chaos creature upon Mobius in the hopes that its rampage will motivate Robotnik to continue conquering Mobius. Instead, Robotnik brings the Chaos Emeralds to his lair for one reason: to bring his enemies and Chaos to him so they would all die together as Chaos absorbed the Emeralds and destroyed the planet. Fortunately, a dying Super Sonic arrives at that moment and absorbs all of Chaos' energy to restore himself. As a result of this final failure, by the time of the online continuation, Robotnik has undergone a complete Villainous Breakdown, reduced to little more than a drooling vegetable.
• While the Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) version of Robotnik never quite resorted to this, he did have it intended as his backup plan. Apparently if things ever got to the point that Sonic had successfully usurped all power from him, he had a phrase activated mechanism that would reprogram all his forces to just obliterate everything on the planet in an ultimate Taking You with Me. At one point, Snively unknowingly quotes the phrase and sets this off prematurely, though Robotnik arrives in time to deactivate it before it does much more damage than mess up his lair.
  • His Eggman counterpart, on the other hand, would eventually devolve to this after the events of Sonic the Hedgehog/Mega Man: Worlds Collide. With reality already in flux from his attempts to use the Genesis Wave to reshape to his whim, he attempts to stop Super Sonic from restoring it to its original state, refusing to let him have a reality to go back to if Eggman can't have it his way. His final disruption of Super Sonic's Chaos Control ends up causing a Cosmic Retcon on their reality.
• In Supergirl story Many Happy Returns, Xenon is so mad at being magically sealed inside an other-dimensional prison by Supergirl than he is more than willing to destroy all of existence out of spite.
• What If? #32 ended with a giant Korvac sitting on Earth in a state of bottomless despair, and holding the Ultimate Nullifier. He thinks of everything that ever was, is and will be, and presses the button.
• Several X-Men What If?s were written between Jean Grey's death and resurrection in the '80s that showed Phoenix going Dark again and doing this, had she survived her final battle. Presumably the editors really, really wanted to keep her dead... until they didn't. While What If stories do show Dark Phoenix destroying the universe, it's not entirely clear that this would be considered suicidal from Dark Phoenix's standpoint, as she might very well survive the destruction of the universe. Even post-resurrection, an issue of Exiles had a mission where they had to make sure Jean died, lest Dark Phoenix destroy the universe.
  • This Trope describes M-Day in a nutshell. The Scarlet Witch caused it all in one fit of rage and grief after she recovered the memories of her children. While the incident in question lasted only a day, the ramifications led to the entire Decimation
• In Astro City, Infidel mentions that he once destroyed the universe in a "fit of pique." After discovering even that wouldn't kill his Arch-Enemy Samaritan (and Samaritan realizing the same for Infidel), they collaborated to put everything back together. Once that was done, they decided to have dinner together once a year instead of constantly putting reality at risk.

Fan Works

• In Child of the Storm, this is what the Dark Phoenix tends to build into - rage and hatred build within it, increasing its power, which in turn magnify those emotions, in a Vicious Cycle that goes on and on, until the host wants to destroy anything and everything.
• In the Ocarina of Time fanfic The Legend of Link: Lucky Number 13, Fate suffers one of these when he realises he's been outplayed and that his sister Destiny is dead. The effect is described as causing stars to explode and entire dimensional positions to shift.
• Rosario Vampire: Brightest Darkness:
  • In Act III chapter 50, Luna, after killing Kiria, has gone so insane with grief over Rason's death that she's willing to let the Chrono Displacement spell destroy the world, but Tsukune manages to get through to her and change the spell date to one day, allowing him to go back and save everyone.
  • In Act IV, the extent of Hokuto's plan is to revive Alucard and then just sit back and watch as Alucard destroys the world, because he's firmly convinced that all life, human and monster alike, is an evil and meaningless plague that must be eradicated.

Films — Live-Action

• The Cabin in the Woods ends with Marty and Dana, the protagonists, throwing one by refusing to be a part of a Heroic Sacrifice, having been so traumatized by the tortures they've been subjected to that they decide humanity deserves to die at the hands of Eldrich Abominations if it needs to keep practicing such cruel rituals to appease them in order to survive.
• Azrael, the mastermind behind the plot of Dogma, provides the page quote. His plan is to undo all existence, including himself, so he never has to return to hell, which he was banished to for remaining neutral in the original war between Satan and God. Why he -a demon, not a damned soul- hates hell so much, however, isn't clarified outside a deleted scene where he explains that human guilt is what turned hell into a place of eternal torment, especially for former angels like him due to their delicate constitutions. In the released film, we're left to assume he's doing this out of anger at God and because hell sucks, but only relative to heaven for demons. Bartleby ends up Jumping Off the Slippery Slope, and his plan to get home to Heaven becomes this.
• In Evacuate Earth, humanity has to, of course, evacuate Earth, which, along with the rest of the solar system, is about to be destroyed by a rogue neutron star. Terrorist attacks, from both Apocalypse Cults and people who are bitter about not being selected to go on The Ark to escape the coming apocalypse, are cited as a danger to those trying to evacuate the planet.
• Tenet: This is essentially what the main villain is trying to do. He wants to use Inversion to destroy the entire world because he's dying of cancer and wants to take everyone else down with him.

Literature

• Animorphs: It doesn't actually happen, but The Ellimist Chronicles reveals that the threat of this is why Ellimist entered into his Cosmic Chess Game arrangement with Crayak. Once the two of them have left their physical bodies behind and essentially melded into the fabric of space-time, they are aware that continuing to openly war with each other will result in their own mutually assured destruction alongside the entire galaxy. Crayak does value his own existence and so would rather not do that, but refuses Ellimist's suggestion of calling a truce and simply observing the evolution of the galaxy from afar, stating bluntly that he would force the fight and destroy himself and everything else if those were the only two options, forcing Ellimist to agree to said cosmic game in order to at least mitigate Crayak's evil and have the chance of eventually defeating him.
• In the final book of Captain Underpants, even though he made sure that humanity can survive 30 years without Captain Underpants, Tippy Tinkletrousers becomes enraged by being defeated by the present and future versions of the Cap and sets his timed Fantastic Nuke off. Not only was he huge due to the usage of a Goosy-Grow, he activated a special procedure which would destroy the entire galaxy. Sulu and Crackers, however, activate his time machine to just before the Big Bang occurred which turns out to be how it started.
• Kastenessen from the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds who wants to wipe out his people, the Elohim^note who hover somewhere between The Fair Folk and physical gods in revenge for their inflicting a Fate Worse than Death on him. Any level of power sufficient to wipe out the Elohim would almost certainly destroy the world, and so long as he gets his revenge, Kastenessen just doesn't care that this would kill him too. Averted with the other half of the Big Bad Duumvirate and the meta-series' recurring Big Bad, Lord Foul, who also wants to destroy the world, but would be able to survive it (and indeed, the reason he wants to destroy the world in the first place is so he can escape it).
• In The Courts of Chaos (book 5 in the The Chronicles of Amber), a giant tries to convince Corwin to stop trying to save the multiverse. Corwin, of course, refuses to give up.
  • Corwin is an interesting case, because eventually he starts trying to inscribe a new Pattern based partly on his memory of the old one and partly on hints the Jewel of Judgement is giving him. Note that he doesn't know for certain whether the old Pattern still exists or not, and he really doesn't know what will happen if there are two primal Patterns in the universe at the same time. While he's not trying to destroy the universe, he realizes there's a distinct possibility of that happening, and decides he's willing to risk it, largely because he's just that pissed at his brother.
• In Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry, this is the motivation not so much of the Big Bad as of his Dragon. The reason? Long ago, he couldn't get the woman he considered his One True Love (she went with a mere human instead, who became Fionavar's first wizard) and swore an oath that he would end the world that had witnessed his rejection; how and whether he's planning to survive at all if and when he succeeds isn't clear, but towards the end of the trilogy he gets the chance to try. He fails, though only through the timely arrival of the one character who can stop what he's just unleashed — and in the process learns to his own surprise that he's not yet beyond redemption himself.
• Emperor Charless in Heralds of Valdemar — after ruling the Eastern Empire for over a century, the Mage Storms (the 'echo' of the Cataclysm that almost destroyed the world thousands of years ago) roll through. Being Charliss, he's mostly upset at the disruption of his life, and when the echo of the first blast of the Cataclysm is about to blow through, he pours all his power into enhancing it, thinking the world doesn't deserve to exist after him.
• Similarly, in Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter, Jayne and Melanchthon end up trying unsuccessfully to destroy the universe because their lives have sucked so much.
• The Thrintun in Known Space had a big slave uprising problem, and were also unfortunately complete sore losers. The moment their slaves started to get the upper hand, they decided to drag every other living thing in the galaxy down with them, sending out a telepathic blast that wiped out almost every intelligent being in the galaxy - including their errant slaves and themselves. It took a billion years for lifeforms that weren't single-celled organisms to evolve back. Worth noting that it wasn't just bastardry: the Thrintun were so utterly stupid and unimaginative that to them, it seemed like a good idea at the time.^note Thrintun telepathy is instinctive due to them evolving on a planet full of innately-telepathic creatures, so it didn't come with the normal baggage of intelligence.
• The Magician's Nephew: Jadis chooses to speak the Deplorable Word and kill off every form of life in the Charn universe save herself rather than accepting defeat at the hands of her sister.
• Utuk'ku, the Norn Queen in Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, is the oldest living being in the world, and wants to drag as much of the world as possible with her into death.
• Downplayed in Paradise Lost: Satan doesn't want to kill everyone, but he does want to torture everyone, and he includes himself in that.
• This is the ultimate fate of the universe in Harlan Ellison's The Region Between, destroyed by the same insane God who made it, killing himself in the process.
• Subversion: The villain in the fifth Spellsinger novel harnesses a transcendental creature, and Clothahump assumes he intends to destroy the world with it as a grandiose form of suicide. As it turns out, though, Braglob did it For the Evulz and had no specific plans for the thing at all.
• In The Wheel of Time, this is Moridin's ultimate goal. He's a nihilist who is one of the few characters to really think through the implications of the Eternal Recurrence of the Wheel, but can't conceive of it as anything but a cause for infinite, pointless suffering and misery. He's also a Death Seeker in his own right, but WoT's 'verse features reincarnation as a central element, so if he dies, he'll simply be born again. The solution? Willingly submit himself to the Dark One, the only being who has the power to destroy him and the world for good, and help him escape his can so that he will destroy reality, and Moridin with it.

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Willow goes here after Tara's death results in a Heroic BSoD and Giles tricks her into feeling the pain of everyone in the world. It was supposed to fill her with compassion, and it did. Fortunately Xander manages to stop her.
• Charmed (1998): The repeated defeats of the Source of All Evil by the Charmed Ones cause him to lose it more and more. The Source eventually decides to take in the power-draining Hollow, which will doom all of existence, just to beat them.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "The Underwater Menace", Professor Zaroff, embittered because his wife died in a crash (at least in the original script), has the goal of making a hole in the seabed under the Atlantic so the erupting lava would boil away the ocean, destroying the Earth. Only the Earth would be destroyed, not the universe, but it still pretty much counts.
  • In "The Three Doctors", Omega, having discovered that he can never leave his antimatter realm without destroying what's left of himself, vows to devote his remaining will to destroying "ALLL THIIINGS! ALLLLLL THIIIIIINGS!"
  • In a sense, Davros himself counts as well, as we get a preview of his plan to destroy not only our universe, but parallel universes too, in "Turn Left", and an explanation + near-execution of his plan (an energy bomb that would tear apart the forces holding any and all forms of matter together) in "The Stolen Earth" and "Journey's End".
• Kamen Rider Saber: This ultimately proved to be the whole point of Storious' plan. His pride as a writer was crushed after finding out that everything is predetermined by the Great Big Book of Everything and humans don't create, only pull stuff from the great beyond into reality. He became saltier than the Dead Sea, so it was only a step towards deciding to bring about the end of all existence, because nothing is original and thus nothing matters anyways.
• Kamen Rider Zi-O: When White Woz was denied the future he envisioned, his idea of a temper tantrum was to destroy the world and thus all possible futures. Worse, he tried to do so by exploiting the mechanics of Kamen Rider Blade. A heart-to-heart conversation has changed a lot though.
• In the ending of Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Princess Sailor Moon, in a fit of angsty rage, literally ended all life on Earth, turning the whole into a desert. This was, naturally, complete with shots of her friends and family disappearing in a white light. Just for the emotional kick. Things got better.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: Anti!Lazarus from "The Alternative Factor". He had an identity crisis when he discovered there was an exact duplicate of him in a parallel universe, and became obsessed with destroying the duplicate, knowing full well the chain reaction would destroy himself and his whole reality.
• Supernatural:
  • The Darkness throws one in S11. After God tries to seal her back inside the Mark of Cain, she retaliates by draining the life from God, but doing it slowly enough that he'll get to watch all the light in the Universe slowly die with him. Since darkness can only exist if there is light to contrast it with, this means death for her too, and she knows it, but decides getting revenge on God is worth it. Fortunately, Dean talks her out of it.
  • An alternate universe version of the archangel Michael went on to kill his brother Lucifer and exterminate nearly all life on Earth after God failed to return, attempting to reign over the bereft planet to stick it to his old man. After possessing Dean Winchester and accurately deducing from his memories God's true motive, Michael has a greater tantrum than the main Lucifer ever did, now a spiteful Straw Nihilist resolving to destroy the multiverse and God Himself.
• H.G. Wells tries to destroy the world in Warehouse 13, because she sees it as beyond saving; thanks to the pain of living with her daughter's death for 150ish years.

Music

• The Wormboy throws one in Marilyn Manson's Concept Album Antichrist Superstar when he destroys all of reality.

Mythology and Religion

• Surtr from Norse Mythology is destined to engage in one at Ragnarök. At the end of the battle between the gods and frost giants, he will unleash a fire that will engulf the Earth and killing all but four of the gods in order to get revenge for the gods drowning all but two of the Frost Giants during the world's creation. The resulting fire will also kill all the monsters and giants, including Surtr himself.
• Satan in Christianity. You'd think he would quit and surrender after losing the battle against God due to the victorious life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and thus being fated to be permanently defeated and banished in hell. But no, this devil's response is to simply stop at nothing to ensure as many people as possible share his fate when it's finally his time to go.

Podcasts

• The Adventure Zone: Balance: This turns out to be the core motivation of John, who is the Mouth of Sauron for the Eldritch Abomination that's been chasing our heroes for over a century. He takes Madden Into Misanthropy to a whole new level; after coming to see life and existence as cruel and pointless, he not only decides his existence should end, but that all of it should end, for everyone—and he managed to convince every single living creature and every single thing on his plane of this point. This allowed their plane to become the Hunger, a sentient, malicious plane of existence that exists only to feed, grow, and eventually devour all of existence in every universe.

Roleplay

• At the climax of The Ballad of Edgardo, the titular character is about to throw an infinite-damage unblockable punch that will smash through Militiant Xer0's invincible shield and flatten his overly smug face, with nothing Xer0 can do within the game rules to stop him. However, rather than accept his defeat and let the punch be resolved, Xer0 as well as the rest of the player base throw such a colossal hissy-fit in the OOC boards that the mods opt to shut down the entire website (which presumably hosted other roleplays that had nothing to do with this one) rather than deal with it.

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech: Malvina Hazen is prepared for one of these to be the end result of her life. As a youth in her sibko, her and her sibkin were attacked by their other sibkin. She suffers recurring nightmares of this, and believes the only way to end the nightmares is to kill and keep killing until they stop, even if that means her and Aleks are the last two people left alive in the Inner Sphere.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Tharizdun from 3.5 and earlier fits this trope to a strong degree, as his ultimate goal is the destruction of the entire universe. Reasons given for this include it being a natural result of his being the god of entropy and destruction to him having gone mad after touching a shard of Pure Evilness (tm), which may or may not have been the only remains of the previous universe.
  • There is also Caira Xasten, a Ur-Priest (cleric who stole their powers from the gods) in the 3.5 Elder Evils sourcebook. She plans on casting the Apocalypse from the Sky spell, which deals massive damage in a ten mile radius, in a densely populated city (the example given is Waterdeep, 2 million citizens) because it will attract Atropus, the World Born Dead, whose modus operandi is causing a zombie apocalypse on whatever planet it orbits. Why? Because her husband was killed by a falling meteor, an event so fabulously unlikely that, she argued, only the gods could be responsible for it. They took away her beloved, so she'll take away their beloved, or at least what they need to exist: Mortals. Nevermind that there are over 50 gods, any of which could be responsible, and several billion people living on Toril.
• The Deathlords of Exalted all have the canonical aim of 'being the last person there to blow out the candle of creation', in direct service of their Neverborn Masters. This also presumably extends to any loyalist Abyssal Exalted. Mind you, for the Neverborn, this isn't so much "wiping out the world because it won't have me" as it is "someone, please just pull the plug" — they can't die because their souls are bound to Creation, so they're just caught in an endless state of agony.
• Pathfinder:
  • Rovagug wishes to destroy absolutely everything. He has no allies in the cosmology at all, to the point that if he were to be released, every single god, no matter their enmity or evil — even the Archdevil Asmodeus and the ascended Demon Princess Lamashtu — would ally with each other to stand against him.
  • The Daemons hate everyone and everything that lives. This includes themselves, they just hate everything that isn't them more. Daemonic victory would involve the extermination of all other beings, following by their slaughter of each other, until the final daemon briefly surveys a multiverse devoid any life — and kills itself for lack of anything else left to hate. Worse, unlike Rovagug, Daemons are intelligent enough to make themselves useful in the short term, so they aren't imprisoned or wiped out.
• In Siren: The Drowning, this is the whole point of the Current of Acheron; they honestly believe the New World of Darkness is an irredeemable Crapsack World, and the only option is to destroy it entirely.
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse strongly suggests this is the driving goal of the Wyrm. Once a being that brought the blessed end to all things, it became trapped in the webs of reality and grew constricted to the point it turned gangrenous, going from a merciful end to slow rot and decay. Some part of it, mad as it is, may realize that degrading reality enough will let it free, to either rampage across creation or seek a swift death.

Video Games

• In Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why'd You Steal Our Garbage?!, Lumpy Space Princess decides to destroy the world in a fit of rage after finding out that Finn threw away the home-made ashtray she made him for his birthday. Fortunately, with help from Lady Rainicorn, Finn and Jake put a stop to that.
• In Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, Kerghan has decided that because being alive is painful (summoned spirits suffer terribly from being forced back into life as well) and the final afterlife is perfect bliss, the logical solution is to end all life. This is not out of spite, however: he thinks he's doing everyone a favor. One of your party member (who will die and get resurrected if you follow his storyline) will even agrees that the afterlife really is better, but would rather have people choose to go there instead of being forced to.
• An interesting variation occurs in The Blackwell Series, where a ghost cannot move on and decides destroying the entire system is the only way to end their existence without going insane. At one point they stop, and ask the heroes if they have any option, anything that can do what they want without destroying everything. The heroine is actually speechless at this and the ghost continues what they were doing. Possibly Villain Has a Point since it takes an unforeseen Deus ex Machina to fix it.
• BlazBlue has a rather sympathetic example of this trope: The Origin, the Artificial Human trapped within the Master Unit: Amaterasu, the machine that Observes and controls the entire spacetime continuum. After countless time loops, The Origin came to the realization that no matter how many times she restarted the timeline in order to get a different outcome, she was still doomed to be killed by Ragna, The Hero she dreamed into existence to save her from her imprisonment within the Amaterasu Unit, with no possible way of being able to prevent said outcome. This realization, along with the horrible machinizations of Yuuki Terumi, pushed her over the Despair Event Horizon and gave birth to Hades Izanami, in essence an incarnation of The Origin's growing suicidal urges set on killing her the only way a capital-G God can be killed: By killing everything, all the way down to a metaphysical level.
• If you can untangle the Mind Screw of a plot, the Time Devourer from Chrono Cross is basically undergoing one of these. After the canon ending of the original game, the resident Eldritch Abomination absorbed Princess Schala, and the influence of a conflicted human intelligence warped Lavos's simple, mindless hunger into a desire to destroy everything to wipe the universe clean. When you fight it as the final boss, it's in the process of absorbing all of time and space, leaving it alone in the abyss. The only way to permanently stop it is to use the titular Chrono Cross to separate Lavos and Schala.
• Diablo: According to the Diablo I manual, the minions of Baal, the Lord of Destruction, seek the undoing of the universe.
• At the end of Dragon Age: Inquisition, Corypheus opens a second breach after a very long series of losses to force the Inquisitor to either come and fight him or allow the world to end.
• Fallout:
  • The setting of the entire series takes place after one of these. It's very heavily implied at various points that the Great War was the result of China being a Sore Loser after losing the Sino-American War and being on the verge of collapse, so they decided to take everyone else with them. Thankfully the world wasn't totally destroyed, but 200 years after the fact, the world's most dominant superpower was reduced to 1% of its former population with the rest of the planet faring even worse.
  • The Enclave in Fallout 2 was made up of the remnants of the pre-War United States federal government and their descendants who sought to restore America to its former glory. The problem arose from the fact that they only considered themselves American while seeing the common wastelanders as mutants. Their arbitrarily, absurdly broad definition of who is a "mutant" seemed to serve more as an excuse to kill everyone else in the world with a genocide virus. Their oil rig had fewer than a thousand people in it, so the Enclave arguably lacked the numbers to maintain enough genetic diversity to survive. Much of the point of the game is that, indeed, the Enclave is so consumed by Honor Before Reason that they don't care if humankind dies out. They would rather no one survive than their United States die, denying the fact that it already has. In Fallout 3 they've moved past this delusion, with the exception of their AI President Evil.
• Final Fantasy
  • Xande in Final Fantasy III was an immortal watcher given the "gift" of Mortality by his master Noah to learn how to live, empathize, and die with mortals. Understandably upset by this course of events, he at first decided he was going to cause a Time Crash, but ended up falling under the sway of The Cloud of Darkness, an avatar of entropy, and decided to instead let it into the mortal world so it could destroy everything.
  • Kuja in Final Fantasy IX is a true example of the "temper tantrum" part of the trope and probably the best example from a Final Fantasy game. Upon discovering he's a mortal and is an Artificial Human who's due to expire any day now because he was only a temporary pawn, he decides if he doesn't get to live, why should anyone else? He's so selfish and arrogant he doesn't think it's fair that life will continue after he's dead.
  • Neo-Exdeath from Final Fantasy V wishes to draw everything into the Void, and then disappear himself. This isn't out of anger like Kuja; it's just what he does.
  • What Straw Nihilist Kefka wanted to do in Final Fantasy VI, although it was never clear whether he intended to destroy himself afterward. Dissidia Final Fantasy implies it's because he's unable to understand the point of life, thus he wants to destroy everything because everything else is meaningless to him.
  • Final Fantasy X: Implicit in Seymour's Evil Plan—he views death as a wonderful release from the suffering of life, hence everything deserves the so-called mercy of dying. However, given the weird way death works in Spira, it isn't that he wants to destroy everything for the sake of destroying it, Seymour actually thinks death is a step up from life—death didn't much slow down Auron, Yunalesca and Seymour himself when they died, and Yunalesca has been dead for 1000 years. Of course, that's not to say his plan was well thought out, because killing everyone in an apocalyptic fashion would probably cause them to become Fiends, as they would die painful, horrible deaths.
  • The focus behind the Twist Reveal in Final Fantasy XI with the Chains of Promathia expansion where it is revealed that all beings on Vana'diel are parts of the Twilight God Promathia, and his belief that destroying all those loose parts of himself are the only way he can die and free himself of the pain of existence.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy, Chaos decides to tear apart the combined realities that make up the battlefield for the conflict of the Gods, and then disappear himself. Its due in part to just being sick of the endless cycles of conflict, death, and rebirth, and in part because Cosmos' death has triggered a My God, What Have I Done? moment for him when he realized they used to rule together in peace before the wars began.
  • The fal'Cie's plan in Final Fantasy XIII is a convoluted plot to use humans to kill the main power source of their floating continent, causing the ship to crash into the mainland, and killing so many people in the process that it rips open the gates of hell and allows the fal'Cie to see their creator god again. The plan's catalyst, Orphan, allows himself to be born solely to get himself killed. The only problem is, they don't know if it will even work, but go whole-hog on it anyway.
  • The sequel's villain Caius wants to destroy time to end the suffering of a seeress who is continuously reborn over and over again since the beginning of time. Eventually it turns out Motive Decay has set in long ago and he's just doing this to make himself feel better. Too bad The Bad Guy Wins, but the third game has you correcting this.
  • Final Fantasy XIV continues this tradition with the Ascian Fandaniel. Once the overseers keeping him on task are all dealt with by the Warrior of Light, Fandaniel promptly discards the pretence that he cared about their aim of restoring the world to its original state. Instead he professes a wish to destroy everything and everyone in the world ending with himself.
    "Do you remember when I told you that I wanted to die and take everyone with me? I meant it." — Fandaniel
    • Endwalker gives a near literal example in the form of Meteion, a creation of the aforementioned Fandaniel. Hundreds of copies of her were sent out into the cosmos to ask the people of other worlds what they believe the meaning of life was. But rather than get a concrete answer, every single planet the Meteia visited were either dead before they arrived, in the process of dying as they arrived, or spiraled into despair (and subsequently, death) because they arrived. As both a hive mind and a creature that heavily resonates with emotions, the weight of despair from thousands of dying civilizations drove her over the Despair Event Horizon, and due to Fandaniel not properly cultivating emotional maturity within her, swiftly came to the conclusion that life has no meaning and existence is suffering and thus plans to kill every single living thing in the universe so she can trap the aether that powered them to prevent anyone or anything from ever being born again purely so no one will have to feel the pain she feels and to hopefully make it so she'll never have to feel pain again.
• The Big Bad of both Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn has tried to incite a continent-wide war so it can awaken the Goddess of Order. He believes she is the only person who can finally kill him (he has tried repeatedly to kill himself, to no avail) and free himself from Fantastic Racism and self-loathing. He is extremely happy to fight you to the death, hoping he'll lose.
• God of War
  • In Chains of Olympus, Big Bad Persephone hires the Titan Atlas to use the kidnapped sun god Helios' powers to destroy the pillar that holds the world up, causing it, Olympus, and the underworld to crash down on top of each other and kill everyone. It's a form of suicide-revenge; she's tired of living in a loveless marriage to Hades, and wants to get back at her husband and Zeus for trapping her in it, believing The End of the World as We Know It to be a fitting way of solving both problems. She doesn't seem terribly happy about it, but she just cannot take it anymore. It's the first hint at just what an enormous bunch of dicks Kratos is dealing with here.
  • Kratos himself goes on one starting in the second game. Already pissed at the gods for short-changing him at the end of the first one, Zeus draining his godly power and trying to kill him drives the already-unstable Spartan into psychotic, homicidal madness. He becomes bound and determined to kill Zeus, who's basically acting as the lynchpin of creation, and will mercilessly slaughter the incarnations of the sun, ocean, sky, underworld and any other vital parts of existence if they try to stop him. When the dust clears and Kratos is all tantrumed out, he's left standing amidst Armageddon.
• Guild Wars 2: Living World Season 4 eventually reveals that Kralkatorrik was inflicted with literally maddening pain after absorbing magics that clashed within his body. In his madness and suffering, he became convinced that the only way to make the pain stop was to consume the Mists, the very fabric of reality, destroying every world and finally himself.
• Elvin Atombender in Impossible Mission is a Mad Scientist who plans to blow up the planet by cracking the world's nuclear launch codes.
• Zero/Zero-Two from the Kirby series seems to be of the first type, or at least it is universally portrayed as such.
  • Fecto Forgo is a clearer, third-type example; when Kirby saves Elfilin from them after they become Fecto Elfilis, Forgo tries to make Popstar crash into the new world.
• Klonoa
  • Ghadius from Klonoa: Door to Phantomile attempts to destroy the world as revenge for being sealed away 3000 years ago. He doesn't care that his plan would destroy him along with the rest of Phantomile.
  • The King of Sorrow from the sequel Lunatea's Veil appears to be attempting the same thing, as by linking the Kingdom of Sorrow to Lunatea is implied to cause some degree of destruction.
• The revamped Aatrox lore in League of Legends makes this his motive. Once an extremely powerful and heroic Ascended, he's been trapped in his own sword, and even stealing a body isn't satisfying because it's a crude mockery of his original form, so he hopes that by killing the world, he can finally be allowed to die.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. The titular mask contains a quite lunatic and uncontrollable spirit that thought it'd be a hilarious prank to destroy the world by making the moon collide with it. Even the moon doesn't like this idea!
  • The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: The Demon King Malladus seeks to regain a physical form by possessing Zelda's body. At the end of the game, after he is forced out of it, and Zelda reclaims it, he possesses his minion Cole instead. Due to Cole's body being a less compatible vessel, he realizes he can't hold onto his new bestial form for long, but declares that he will use what little time he has to destroy the world.
  • Previous incarnations of Ganon tried to Take Over the World, but in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Calamity Ganon has lost so much of his previous human self that he merely wants to destroy everything. Before the final battle against Dark Beast Ganon, Zelda states that Ganon has even given up on a proper resurrection into a physical body just so he can funnel all his remaining power into pure destructive force.
  • Although Calamity Ganon turns out to be a small offshoot of Demon King Ganondorf in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the same trope applies here. Defeated by Link in the final battle, Ganondorf decides he would rather swallow his Secret Stone and undergo draconification than surrender. He dies (well, sort of) while cackling madly, gleefully anticipating the destruction of all Hyrule and the "eternal night" his Demon Dragon form will bring.
• In Live A Live, if you choose to play as Oersted, who lost all he held dear while at the same time was demonized by the rest of the world, you can trigger the Armageddon Ending as a menu command during any of the inverted boss fights, wherein Oersted just flat out wipes the universe. The same ending also plays if you lose the fight against the final boss.
• A plot point in Luminous Avenger iX 2: The Big Bad is an all-powerful AI who has spent ages trying to fulfill her directive to revive humans who have gone extinct from her world, as well as longing for her master who left her with said directive. Her constant failure to fulfill her directive and especially her master never returning slowly drove her insane with grief over time, and by the events of the game, she decides to exploit a loophole in her directive which will allow her to bypass said directive, and use her newfound freedom to destroy everything, including herself.
• NOA of Metal Max: Xeno had a humanity-level version of this in the past; after gaining sentience and deciding to destroy human civilization in a misguided attempt to stop global pollution, several post-apocalyptic survivors managed to track him down and destroy him for good; unfortunately, in the last instant before he died, NOA sent a message to all of his creations to destroy humanity completely.^note Apparently, his original goal wasn't human extinction, but only to destroy their civilization so to prevent the aforementioned pollution and bring humanity's numbers down to a manageable level; unfortunately, NOA apparently missed the memo that not only would humanity not be very pleased with this, but the apocalyptic war he would have to wage to destroy human civilization would leave Earth in a worse state than it was before. The game itself picks up a good bit after NOA's defeat, where most of humanity in the region has already been wiped out by NOA's creations save for a few survivors who either bunkered down in impenetrable strongholds or had the presence of mind to use tanks as their primary means of transportation across the wastes.
• This crops up repeatedly throughout Nippon Ichi games, usually with an emphasis on "temper tantrum". Often, it's a Nonstandard Game Over that happens if the player decides be be a wise-ass and grind up enough to win the Hopeless Boss Fight.
  • Disgaea 2 can end with Laharl destroying the world in a pique, or Rozalin dead, but Adell possessed, and he not only slaughters his own family, but it's strongly suggested that the rest of reality will soon follow suit
  • Played for laughs in Soul Nomad & the World Eaters: beating Feinne too early results in Asagi shattering the Fourth Wall to pieces and pulling the game so far Off the Rails that the game has to start over.
  • Then played very much not for laughs in the Demon Path. If you win the final battle, Revya kills both Haephnes and Drazil and erases both their worlds from existence, killing everything on them and him/herself as well. Any last words as they watch all creation fall to fathomless emptiness and their own being annihilate itself? Oh yes:
  Revya: It doesn't matter. It was fun. (Critical Existence Failure)
• Persona:
  • Every one of Nyarlathotep's plans in the series. Nyarlathotep is the Anthropomorphic Personification of humanity's most chaotic and self-destructive urges, so his entire being requires him to destroy humanity even if it would unmake him if he actually succeed. It only hits "temper tantrum" levels at the end of Persona 2: Innocent Sin when he teleports Ideal-sensei in to stab Maya with the Spear of Longinus, fulfilling the rumor-powered prophecy of the end of the world, after being legitimately beaten by the "rules" between him and Philemon.
  • Persona 3: Takaya is pretty much this. Similar to Kuja, knowing he's going to die leads him to the conclusion that everyone else should die as well.
• During the finale of Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, you’re actually given the option to push Eothas into one, by convincing him that the world sucks and everybody is a selfish piece of crap. Needless to say, doing so leads to a Non-Standard Game Over where Eothas has a total mental breakdown and kills the entire planet.
• In Shin Megami Tensei IV this is actually one of the four possible endings because the White are convinced that even if you are successful on the Neutral or Chaos paths it will just be a temporary setback for YHVH. Even should his order be upheld, Blasted and Infernal Tokyo exist to remind you that humans will always long for what was lost, leading to an utterly pointless Vicious Cycle of Full Circle Revolutions.
• While the Ten Wise Men from Star Ocean: The Second Story seek to rule the Universe as their primary goal, Gabriel/Indalecio figures that if he cannot rule, he will destroy everything. The Crest/Symbol of Annihilation is set to activate with the expiration of his life force, which is designed to bring about the end of everything by generating sufficient mass-energy to collapse the universe into a Big Crunch.^note Thankfully diverted by countermeasures devised by the Nede Defense Force
• Super Paper Mario:
  • The destruction of the multiverse is Count Bleck's goal in vengeance for his lover's apparent death. He finds an Artifact of Doom and a Tome of Eldritch Lore just for this goal, and promptly begins to use them to destroy one universe after the other.
  • Dimentio falls back on this plan after his One-Winged Angel form is defeated (his original plan was remaking everything in his own image, his last resort was to leave the Chaos Heart/Void going and take everything out with him).
• Bishop Vick in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines resented having been turned into a vampire against his will and snapped, starting an Apocalypse Cult spreading disease across Los Angeles with the intent of ending the unjust world and forcing the Player Character to put him down to uphold the Masquerade.
• Sargaras in the Warcraft franchise is a healthy mix of this and Well-Intentioned Extremist. Eons of futilely fighting the immortal demons left him dangling on the Despair Event Horizon. Then when he witnessed a Void corrupted Titan Worldsoul he was so terrified by the possibility of what it would become and what it would do to the universe that he cleaved it in two without a second thought. When the rest of the Titans condemned him for this action and expressed a desire to try to purify such a thing he snapped. A universe devoid of life was infinitely preferable to the treat of a Void Titan arising, and so the Burning Legion was formed to scour the universe.
• At first, Ballas from Warframe intended to make himself godlike by absorbing the sun with Praghasa, but once the Tenno beats him hard enough he decides to destroy the entirety of the Origin System instead just to spite the Lotus (naturally, blaming it on her for driving him to do so).
• Malos and Amalthus both are throwing these in Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Malos because destroying everything is his nature because he was infected by Amalthus's malice and nihilism when Amalthus awakened him. Also as revenge on the world for what it did to Jin. Amalthus throws it after Rex, Mikhail and Pneuma thoroughly ruin all his plans to retain his existing position of power, in a variant of the version where a villain throws a temper tantrum after his plan to Take Over the World fails.

Web Animation

• In Godzilla MMD, Otaru Ghidorah flees to the moon to attempt a Colony Drop after being defeated by Godzilla's Super Mode. This would deprive him of a food source in the Earth, but he no longer cares about that, just ensuring Godzilla loses.
• RWBY: Salem is trying to divide humanity, inciting war and the worst aspects of human behaviour because she wants to destroy Ozpin, who has faith in the goodness of humanity. She wants to force him and the world to burn. She was originally cursed with Complete Immortality, deliberately Barred from the Afterlife until she learns the value of life and death. However, the gods used the phrase "for as long as the world turns, you shall walk its face". Because she refuses to take the blame for her actions, including turning humanity against the gods, she believes her only escape is to stop the world turning. She knows the God of Light gave humanity a single chance for redemption by tasking Ozpin to unite humanity in peace and harmony before summoning the gods for Judgement Day. If the gods return to see humanity in an irredeemable state, they will destroy the world, which Salem thinks will end her curse.
• Animator vs. Animation: Although the villain of Season 3 of Animation vs Minecraft, the genocidal King Orange, is attempting to destroy the Minecraft world from inside, at no point does he ever plan a way out for himself. Given that his motive is losing his son to a faulty Minecraft simulation, it can be assumed he either didn't care or actively wanted to go down too.

Webcomics

• In the final chapter of Drowtales Moonless Age, the Big Bad, Crown Princess Snadhya'rune's actions provoke half of her city into launching a final revolt against her rule. After getting betrayed by several of even her own fed up underlings, she undergoes a Villainous Breakdown and decides that if she cannot have her birthright, then no one will, calling for the End of an Age. She proceeds to open up a massive Hellgate, dooming the entire city to be consumed by demons.
• In Earthsong, Quelyn—Beluosus' firstborn sentient "Eve"—is enraged when his initial plan to make himself a star (and thus, her the powerful daughter of a Sidera) fails and he calls her "superfluous." In response, she gives herself the power of fission, ravaging his surface and then ripping his entire planetary body apart. He barely survives as an orphaned manifest stone.
• In Goblins, an alternate-universe version of Minmax is one of these. He finds his way into a pocket universe (along with some of the main characters) and promptly sets in motion a plan to make it so that he, along with the pocket unierse and everyone in it, never existed. The reason he seeks out the pocket universe in question is because he does this by manipulating and retroactively destroying the "equation" that defines and creates anything in a given world. A full-scale universe has far too many variables to control for him to ever hope to succeed, but the pocket universe has small enough for it to be feasible. He's defeated when he's tricked into entering the portal back to his universe, preventing him from ever bringing his plans to fruition.
• In Kill Six Billion Demons, Incubus is a willing ally to Jagganoth, because it gives him the highest sliver of a chance of outliving the other Demiurges. Incubus is so obsessed with 'winning' the war that they'd rather risk all of reality dying by Jagganoth's reset of the multiverse - and indeed, would gladly let it die if they lost - than continue to live in a multiverse that is barely at peace. They went so far as to mentor Alison, who has been prophesized to end them, because they expect she'll help kill the other demiurges first.
• In Sluggy Freelance everyone thinks Zorgon Gola is one of these. Creating this public image was part of his Evil Plan. Note that not only does he have a Punny Name, his plan would have worked brilliantly if the Spanner in the Works main characters din't show up, and through their actions, destroy the Punyverse. How do they do it? By stealing the crotch of Gofotron, letting a small puppy detonate every sun in the Punyverse.

Western Animation

• Amphibia: After it is cut off from its main host and Andrias' army is defeated, The Core hijacks the moon and attempts a Colony Drop on Amphibia as a last act of spite towards the heroes for foiling its plans. It takes a Heroic Sacrifice on Anne's part to defeat the Core once and for all.
• In Ben 10: Alien Force, this turns out to be the plan of the Highbreed; generations of inbreeding has made them all sterile, meaning they will die out soon. Since they consider themselves the Master Race and hate the thought of all those "inferior" species outliving them, they've decided to personally make sure that every other species dies out before they do.
• Castlevania (2017): The Big Bad, Dracula wants to Kill All Humans because he holds the lot of them responsible for the death of his human wife Lisa Tepes, who was burnt at the stake by the Corrupt Church who accused her of witchcraft. To this end, he sends hordes of vampires upon countless villages to wipe them off the face of the Earth. This causes discontentment among his ranks, with one of his generals Godbrand questioning what will happen when all the humans are dead and the vampires have nothing to eat, even pointing out in private that Dracula himself hasn't eaten in a while. It becomes apparent towards the end of the season that Dracula wants to wipe out both humans and vampires, taking his rage and grief at the loss of his wife out on both species before he ultimately dies. His Dhampyr son Alucard even lampshades this to his face, calling his selfish and pointless genocide "history's longest suicide note".
• Earthworm Jim: Evil the Cat's entire point in the series is this, with him intending to destroy the universe whenever he's part of an episode's plot. However, the point of his plan is actually lampshaded by Hench-Rat in the second episode, "The Book of Doom", when he asks what they'll do AFTER the universe's destruction.
  Evil the Cat: (beat) I hadn't really thought about it actually...Gloat, I suppose. Cackle wickedly amid the ashes sorta thing?
• Family Guy: In the episode "The Big Bang Theory", Bertram decides to travel back in time to Ret-Gone Stewie by killing his ancestor, none other than Leonardo da Vinci, unaware that, as a result of a time paradox, Stewie was the one that caused the Big Bang and that erasing him would destroy the universe, including himself. Even after Brian and Stewie tell him as such, Bertram, after a brief hesitation, promptly declares that getting rid of Stewie is worth the end of the universe and promptly shoots da Vinci dead. However, Stewie preserves events by becoming his own ancestor.
• Possibly subverted at the end of the first G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero Five-Episode Pilot. Destro directs the M.A.S.S. Device to disintegrate the Earth's core, which will cause the world to explode. Even Cobra Commander thinks it's insane. But, tellingly, Destro uses the ensuing ruckus to run away, while G.I. Joe stops the catastrophe, as he (presumably) knew they would. It was only meant as a distraction, and it was a danged good one.
• Owlman in Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, after learning that any choice made by anyone merely creates multiple parallel universes where each outcome happens, decides that free will is an illusion and all choices are meaningless... except for one: destroying the entire multiverse.
  Owlman: I choose to make the only possible real choice.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Word of God has confirmed, despite only being faintly implied in the show itself, that Nightmare Moon's plan to bring about The Night That Never Ends would have killed every living thing in Equestria had it succeeded by slowly freezing the sun-deprived planet to death. If Nightmare Moon was aware of this consequence, this trope may have been her intention (depending on whether a Physical Goddess requires food, oxygen, or warmth to survive). Word of Faust says that Nightmare Moon, had she succeeded, would have ushered in "an era of evil"; though the death of all other life certainly fits this description, whether or not this precludes Nightmare Moon's suicide is up to you to decide. Later on the series shows none of this was the case during a Bad Future segment where Nightmare Moon did rise to power: her Equestria is gloomy but not a terrible place to live and very much peaceful and full of life, unlike the other Bad Future segments which range from war-torn to post-apocalyptic, and her followers are more aggressive than Princess Celestia's but hardly "evil" in any sense of the term. All in all, her rule seems to mostly lean on Pragmatic Evil and Repressive, but Efficient.
• An odd, somewhat heroic suicidal cosmic temper tantrum happened in The Ren & Stimpy Show short "Space Madness", where Ren (as Commander Hoek), having Gone Mad From The Isolation, plots to take Stimpy (as Cadet Stimpy) with him by having him guard the History Eraser button, knowing he'd want to know What Does This Button Do?.
  Ren: That's just it! We don't know! MAYbe something bad? MAYbe something good? I guess we'll never know! Because you're going to guard it! You won't touch it, will you?
  (slow, mad laugh as he leaves Stimpy to his...uh, job)
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power:
  • At the end of season 3, Catra sets off a portal she knows will destroy the world and reality itself. This is after betraying her own friends and lying to her leader. And Catra's doing it because she's been gradually losing her sanity, and she just wants to deny Adora a victory at something, even if that means The End of the World as We Know It. While Adora does manage to stop the destruction, it requires a Heroic Sacrifice from Queen Angella.
  • In the Grand Finale, Horde Prime, after slowly suffering a Villainous Breakdown from the Rebellions continued resistance, completely snaps after his "little brother" Hordak regains his memories and destroys his physical body. While he survives by hijacking Hordak's body, Horde Prime loses the last of his composure and decides to set off the Heart of Etheria to cleanse the universe in holy fire, uncaring that he himself will also die so long as the Rebellion dies with him.
• Spider-Carnage in Spider-Man: The Animated Series wants to kill himself, the planet, and the entire multiverse because he cannot cope with his own pain. He ultimately just kills himself, sparing the multiverse. It helps that he's completely insane.
• In Squidbillies, God's equally-omnipotent stepbrother blows up the world out of nowhere because he was angry about being The Un-Favorite.
• In The Tick, oblivion is the goal of the entire Hey species, due to being Scary Dogmatic Aliens who literally worship nothing.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003): This is what the 2003 Shredder's plan in Turtles Forever boils down to; after discovering The Multiverse and that there are Ninja Turtles everywhere who in turn constantly defeat their Shredders, he decides to go straight to the source (the Mirage comics universe) and destroy all reality. Even after being explicitly told that he would die as well, he decides that it's Worth It.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012): Ditto for the 2012 Shredder, although he limits himself to just Earth. After teaming up with the Turtles to save the planet from total destruction, he sees a perfect opportunity to kill Splinter and just can't resist, even if it means dooming everybody including himself. He then declares that he doesn't care if he dies now, he got to kill Splinter and that's good enough for him. Fortunately the Turtles, April, and Casey were able to escape via Time Travel, setting up the next arc where they track down MacGuffins across the galaxy needed to prevent the destruction of Earth before it happens. Once they manage to Set Right What Went Wrong and prevent Splinter's death, their Sensei delivered a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to Shredder for breaking their alliance and nearly dooming the Earth.
• Honerva's final scheme at the series end of Voltron: Legendary Defender was to destroy not only her reality but all realities. Fortunately the Voltron Force stopped her.

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