The Evils of Free Will in Anime and Manga.
- In Android Kikaider: The Animation, Golden Bat considers the Gemini circuit, which gives Jiro a conscience and the ability to refuse orders, a tragedy for Jiro. The circuit compels Jiro to fight against his robotic kindred while his status as a robot alienates him from humanity, leaving him an outcast.
- In Appleseed, mankind has grown tired of constant warfare and created biodroids to act as mediators, together with an AI to act as an overseer. The main conflict revolves around whether humanity is unfairly being suppressed in the not-quite-utopia, salvageable through the aid of the biodroids or are they the only stain left in an otherwise perfect society.
- This is basically what Schneizel el Britannia of Code Geass believes, and intends to have any revolting nation nuked by FLEIJA from the nigh-impenetrable floating fortress Damocles.
- Also there was Charles zi Britannia's plan of destroying the "gods" to merge every person, living and dead, into one being. This would effectively remove any free will and make sure nothing ever advanced.
- Light Yagami's plan for the world in Death Note (before things spiraled further down). People can be bad if they really want to, but it's always paid back by death, unrelenting and immediate. Anything that goes against Light's high standards - even, eventually, being lazy - earns the dissident a heart attack and vilification for standing in the way of justice.
- The Arbiters from Death Parade are set up like this. The set of rules they operate under dictate that they can never stop working or they will cease to exist, and that they cannot feel emotion, “for they are merely puppets.” A rule gets added at the end of the series that they cannot work hand in hand with life, “for that will ruin them,” implying that any development or progress the cast makes in achieving free will may have terrible consequences on them and on the system as a whole.
- Super Android 13, the Funimation dub of the 7th Dragon Ball Z movie does this. When Trunks gives the villain, an android who wants to kill Goku simply because he was programmed to, a Reason You Suck Speech for having no free will and therefore pursuing a meaningless goal, said villain takes offense and counters that at least he's being evil because he has no other choice while humans and saiyans do evil things because they want to; he even argues that creatures with free will do worse things than he'd ever be capable of doing.
- The goal of the Claw in GUN×SWORD is to overwrite the mind of every human being with his own, so that everyone is the same and there can be no disagreement.
- Gundam:
- Gihren Zabi of the original Mobile Suit Gundam gives a little speech about this, implying Democracy Is Bad. He then goes onto talk about how the weak and poor must be culled.
- This is the singular objective of Gilbert Durandal, one of the two Big Bads of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny. His Destiny Plan involves using genetic determinism to decide the roles of each and every person living in the Earthsphere in order to prevent free will from causing people's differing ideas from causing any more wars. It's also a source of contention over the plot by many in the community, for various reasons.
- It's interesting to note that Durandal never claims to be making a Utopia. Quite the opposite; He knows full well that he's basically ushering in a totalitarian state, and potentially a Dystopia, but he believes such measures are the only way to keep mankind from destroying itself.
- In Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom, we learn that the Kingdom of Foundation runs on Durandal's Destiny Plan, leading to Coordinators ruling over Naturals and those who protest against this are killed. They seek to implement this both on Earth and in the PLANTs and even try a coup on Aprilus 1 to allow this to happen.
- Naruto revealed that this is the ultimate plan of series Big Bad Uchiha Madara. The one who executed this plan is not the real Madara but the real Madara had the same plan before he died.
- The true big bad, Kaguya Otsutsuki, shares the same goal, but their variation of the goal involves turning every shinobi on the planet into obedient White Zetsu soldiers.
- Ultimately the plan of the British Library in R.O.D the TV. An interesting wrinkle is that the people instigating the plan also planned on being rewritten along with everyone else.
- This is the driving force behind Faceas/Faysus Clay in the Strider manga: a sociopath with no regards for others and a preference for machines over human companions, he compares humanity's potential for doing evil to a computer glitch left behind by a careless God, and plans to "fix" this "factory error" by taking over humanity's free will through a mind-control weapon, creating an utopian world with equality and no conflicts under his guidance.
- The Anti-Spirals from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann want to wipe out Spiral Energy from the world and destroy the free will, motivation, and emotions from humankind. However, they have a good reason for doing it: overuse of Spiral Energy will result in Spiral Nemesis, which will destroy the universe. It's just that they see terrorism, brainwashing, and scare tactics as the way to prevent it from happening. Their methods are underhanded and soul crushing because the opposition is powered by determination and bravery. Meeting them head on with violence is like fighting a fire with gasoline.
- This is the purpose of the Superior Domination system in Toward the Terra. When humans had free will, they rendered Earth uninhabitable through reckless greed; the obvious solution is a computer-run police state In Space. The character arc of the Anti-Villain rests on his complex and fluctuating relationship with this trope.
- This is one of the main driving forces in Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS as the Knights of Hanoi believe that giving the Ignis free will, they will turn against the human race. The main antagonist thinks of free will as a mutation and can't comprehend why the other Ignis chose to side with humans, so he wants to unite all Ignis and enslave the human race to prevent this.
