Imagine. I now possess the power to end hunger. To abolish disease. To eliminate crime. To establish a perfectly content, perfectly ordered world - all under the benevolence of MY IRON WILL!
Well-Intentioned Extremists in Comic Books.The following have their own pages:
Other Comic Books:
- In Black Magick, Aira is a witch hunting organization that executes witches on their own authority, but they acknowledge that magic is not inherently evil and explicitly only target black magic users.
- John Horus, from Warren Ellis's Black Summer. As many characters note, he just wants everyone to be good. It's fine that he thinks the US government has perpetrated an illegal war, and as a condoned costumed vigilante, he may be expected to act against it, but he decides the best way to deal with this is to kill the president.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
- Buffy Season Eight reveals that all of Angel's actions as Twilight (including being the head of an anti-Slayer military organization and putting Buffy and her crew through all sorts of hell) were all to prevent anything like the Fall of Los Angeles (as detailed in IDW's After the Fall) from happening again. Of course, the higher being that convinced him to do so had also duped him into thinking it was good when it wasn't.
- Likewise, both Buffy Season 8 and Angel and Faith feature Whistler as one, first with his involvement in the Twilight apocalypse (which he freely admits to Angel would have resulted in the deaths of at least two billion people), and later his plan to "evolve" the world with a magic plague. Despite the heavy casualty risk in both plans, Whistler truly believes that what he's doing is necessary to preserve the Balance Between Good and Evil and save the world. Angel is actually sympathetic to his cause in the latter, but simply refuses to help him harm any more innocents or cause any more collateral damage than he has already.
- Headmaster Gentis from Darth Vader and the Ghost Prison was motivated with the desire to stop the constant warmongering of the Galactic Empire under Palpatine's command after he witnessed several dead imperials being incinerated by the minute. His method of doing so was by orchestrating a Military Coup against the Emperor with False Flag Operations, one of which also involved releasing a poisonous gas that severely wounded Palpatine; it didn't kill him thanks to his use of the Dark Side of the Force.
- The Disney Ducks Comic Universe has a few villains with surprisingly good intentions:
- The Hypercommander of the Tz'oook wants to conquer Earth... Because Earth was their homeworld to begin with and they've been wandering the universe for literal millions of years, and he wants to get everyone back home, no matter if he has to wipe out most of humanity or execute pacifists in his own numbers to do so. Notably the Junior Woodchucks thwart the invasion not by defeating him but by proving that the Tz'oook have accidentally crossed the dimensional barrier and are in fact not from the planet he was attacking but an Earth in a parallel universe, at which point he has absolutely no problem calling off the invasion.
- Professor Fairfax in Paperinik New Adventures. The problem: as the years go on, overpopulation and dwindling natural resources will become more and more of a problem. The solution: using earthquake machines to raise a large section of the Pacific Plate above sea level, freeing up space for new cities and farms. Never mind that the ensuing earthquakes and floods will all but wiped out the entire west coast of the United States. As one character puts it: "If you think about it, his plan isn't illogical at all: he's simply willing to kill millions of people to give billions of people a better future."
- Rayek in ElfQuest claims to want what's best for all of elfkind, but is also convinced that he's the only one who knows what's best for them, in spite of all arguments to the contrary. This comes to a head when, in an attempt to correct a Time Paradox, Rayek takes Leetah, Skywise, Ember, Suntop, and Picknose and his family ten thousand years into the future in the Palace - leaving Cutter and the rest of the Wolfriders stranded in the present.
- Winowill starts out as one of these. She just wants to keep all the "real" elves nice and safe, even if it means keeping them locked in perpetual stasis and committing genocide on the Wolf Riders. Later, she just becomes plain out and out Ax-Crazy evil.
- The major turning point seems to be the time she drove her own son insane in order to cover up the murder of her troll lover. After that, there were no limits to what she'd stoop to.
- Winowill starts out as one of these. She just wants to keep all the "real" elves nice and safe, even if it means keeping them locked in perpetual stasis and committing genocide on the Wolf Riders. Later, she just becomes plain out and out Ax-Crazy evil.
- Enginehead is extremely simple in his "programming", with the single-minded directive to "fix" humanity by eliminating "flaws". When he sees that someone is "broken", he "fixes" them by tearing them limb from limb. His genuine inability to fully understand the ramifications of his actions causes Dr. Grass to peg him as not a superhero, but a new breed, here to save us all by scorching the earth until none are left standing.
- To give an example: when he discovers his brother romancing a schoolgirl, he realizes that he's "broken" and "fixes" him by rearranging his face, tearing off his genitalia (and legs), and crudely stitching his body back together before altering his brain so he can't commit violent acts. Sam was a freak, but goddamn, overboard much? Later, when he hears of a drought in New Jersey, he fixes it up to the point that it becomes an equally debilitating water surplus.
- Newspaper Comic Minimum Security has Kranti, who thinks the best way to save the earth is to eliminate 99% of humanity and return to a hunter-gatherer society (well, mostly gatherer since Talking Animals exist). Anyone who wants to do anything less is considered weak and ineffective. Fortunately, Kranti herself is weak and ineffective, and probably crazy, now that she's decided to murder the CEO of a power company to stop a nuclear power plant being built.
- Kranti is the strip's protagonist, not a Cloud Cuckoo Lander or Anti/Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain, and the only character who regularly encourages her is Bunnista, an anarchist bunny rabbit who loves Stuff Blowing Up. Recently, her brother's boyfriend has joined her cause, as has a revolutionary guinea pig, although they're far more reasonable than Bunnista. Her creator shares this view, even though she knows she wouldn't survive whatever kills most of humanity, or live off the land afterward.
- Ruby Mosely and the AI Overlords of Mosely believed that they are helping humanity by controlling them and even getting into their minds. Even her anti-AI father, Mosely, admitted that she thought she was doing the right thing.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): In "All in Moderation", Temperance just wanted to stop people from feeling as sick and unhappy as she did when she first had sugar, but her mission turned into a fanatical crusade to ban all sugar everywhere. She eventually comes to realize her warped standards of healthy living are causing people to be both unhappy and unhealthy.
- Rainmaker from PS238. The namesake of the Rainmaker program, which was intended to discover the cause of superpowers by experimenting on metahumans that couldn't fight back, he was treated more as a lab rat than a child to be taught, and ran away after a lab accident gave his powers a boost. After finding out that the titular school has re-instituted the Rainmaker Program, the Rainmaker invades the school facility and disables several of the teachers and students in an attempt to 'rescue' the participants in the program. The Rainmaker program turns out to have changed a bit in 40 years and is now a volunteer school program for grooming metahumans with non-combative abilities for work in the private sector.
- In Rainmaker's defense, though, he had been, ah, influenced by the head of Dr Irons, who was not acting with the best of intentions.
- Also, the Headmaster of Praetorian Academy just wants to keep metahumans from evolving to the point where they're powerful enough to destroy the world.
- Dark Annisia is introduced in Red Sonja: Queen of Plagues at the head of an army aggressively fighting a mysterious plague ravaging the land. They do so by slaughtering entire cities if anyone shows signs of infection to prevent it from spreading.
- Shakara: Dr. Lara Procopio was convinced to design the Red Death virus to wipe out the Shakara only because of the merciless way that they had imposed their own rigid sense of order on the rest of the universe, and she thought it would be better off without them. She became The Atoner when the alliance that originally opposed the Shakara proved to be far worse than them.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
- Dr. Finitevus views the world as corrupt and wants to "purify it with fire".
- Geoffrey St. John's Face–Heel Turn and subsequent aiding of Ixis Naugus in becoming king is explained as him honestly believing that it's for the Republic of Acorn's own good. He's since seen what Naugus is capable of when Sonic and his friends can't actually stop him, and regrets what he's done. His attempt to appeal to Naugus's better judgement to make amends for what they've done didn't go so well.
- Dr. Ellidy in the post-reboot universe is a minor one. His daughter Nikki was dying of an incurable disease and Professor Charles the Hedgehog (that's Uncle Chuck) couldn't get the roboticizor working in time. Thus, he used his digitizer in a desperate attempt to preserve her mind, only for it to fail and end up with an emotionaless AI. On the plus side, that AI was given to a young Princess Sally, who would help lead to the AI's evolution into Nicole the Holo-Lynx.
- The Transformers (IDW):
- There are a band of aliens called the Reapers (not those Reapers), who all seek to end war in the universe by eliminating any violent races and destroying any thing worth fighting over.
- Megatron, whose motto, "Peace through tyranny", seems to ring truest in this version. He started the Forever War to bring down the corrupt Cybertronian regime that condoned abuse of second-class citizens like him, but his Roaring Rampage of Revenge went on for so long that he lost sight of why he even fought to begin with. He eventually has a Heel–Face Turn in the Sequel Series The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye.
- Prowl has become one in recent storylines. Destroying the incriminating dataslug that Ironfist sacrificed himself for in Last Stand of the Wreckers for instance is a great example of how far he's wiling to go to end the war.
- Jei-san from Usagi Yojimbo wants to rid the world of evil. Unfortunately, in his Milky White Eyes, everyone is evil. It's not really his fault, though.
