Well-Intentioned Extremists in the Marvel Universe.
- In Avengers Academy, Jeremy Briggs unveils "Clean Slate", a formula that will take away superpowers which at first seems great as it allows Mettle and Hazmat to be human again. However, Briggs reveals he plans to fire off missiles to spread Clean Slate around the globe and take away everyone's superpowers. He says this will stop the massive battles and destruction of cities and he'll give powers back to those he thinks are worthy. Of course, the fact that Briggs is a sociopath and his view of "worthy" is warped to say the least, the team realize they have to stop him, no matter how right he claims to be.
- Somewhat-recurrent The Avengers villain Korvac. He wanted to create a universe of everlasting peace, but in the process of trying to change the current universe to fit that vision, his actions so horrified his girlfriend Carina that it gave him a Heel Realization and he was Driven to Suicide.
- An alternative ending for his story told in the pages of What If? #32 sees Korvac take this even further - realizing that a universe of eternal order is not possible so long as anything other than nothingness exists within it, he uses the Ultimate Nullifier to cause a Class X-4 on the entire universe he inhabits, turning it into a World of Silence and emptiness... his universe of complete order achieved at last.
- Another Avengers baddie, Kang the Conqueror, wants to Take Over the World (of course!) — more specifically, the world of the 21st century, to prevent its multitude of potential Bad Futures, or so he claims.
- The Captain America villain Flag-Smasher thinks that the only way to end humanity's problems is to dissolve all governments and unite Earth in a One World Order. Unfortunately, he chose terrorism as the way to get his views accepted, doing things like destroying national symbols, assassinating world leaders (especially symbolic leaders, like monarchs) and naturally, fighting Captain America, the living symbol of America. During his first fight, Captain America tried to talk him into becoming a hero; let the world see how his world government views inspired him to acts of heroism, much like Cap's own views did for him. He didn't listen. Even worse, he leads a whole organization of lunatics with this belief named ULTIMATUM.
- To be fair to Flag-Smasher, he is very devoted to his ideals; he once worked with Captain America to thwart his own scheme after he realized that he'd received subtle support and resources from the Red Skull, as Flag-Smasher felt that accepting aid from a national symbol like the Skull would have made him a hypocrite.
- The Ultimate Marvel take on Nuke is basically the Ultimate Marvel Flag-Smasher. Essentially created as the Captain America for The Vietnam War, he eventually felt his country had betrayed him and the very values it claimed to stand for, walking off into the jungles and disappearing. When he resurfaced, he was trying to create Super Serum to give a new army of super soldiers with which to tear down the irredeemably corrupt America that had arisen, and deliberately tried to break Captain America by confronting him with all of the atrocities that the USA has performed and the corrupt governors that have arisen, including Richard Nixon and his illegal campaign of carpet bombing in Cambodia and Laos and the C.I.A.'s ousting of a democratically elected president of Chile to install the corrupt regime of Augusto Pinochet.
- Baron Helmut Zemo is a rarer example where we actually see him become this from an outright villain. His original motivation was to avenge his evil Nazi father, and general take over the world shenanigans, he saw this change during his time on the Thunderbolts. He had put this team together with the idea of faking being heroes to take over the world. Yet when most of his team mates genuinely liked becoming heroes, he changed his motives. While not reforming in standards to be a true hero, he found a lot of his ideas as a "take over the world" plan could instead be a "save the world plan".
- Problem of course with this being he's not nice enough to be a "hero" per se even though at times he has clearly chosen to do the right thing. But in the ultimate showdown, when he had the power to actually go about changing the world his teammates turned on him over not trusting him to actually do what he was saying he meant. His could have been last words interestingly were more of "I wouldn't hurt the world" instead of a "screw you" had he really just meant to go all bad again.
- Despite this Character Development when the decision came to make him more straight villain than he had been they went about it in a standout way. He leaked the Winter Soldier's identity to the press and essentially ruined his life... because he had genuine moral outrage over the fact that a former Soviet assassin was being allowed to wear the Captain America costume. Especially after everything he had done since the Thunderbolts to his favor, yet Bucky was seemingly forgiven so much easier. Yes, you read that right, Zemo's back in the villain chair because he had a very bad reaction to a What the Hell, Hero? moment.
- He's been ping-ponging back and forth on this. He later tried to use a virus created from an Inhuman boy to sterilize most of the humans around the world, sincerely reasoning that this would put an end to the problems caused by overpopulation and the planet's dwindling resources.
- Norman Osborn during the Dark Reign saga saw himself as this, as we see in his "monologue" at the end of Siege. He says that his idea was to make a safer world by not letting just anyone put on a costume and decide to save the world by themselves, since they would end up causing more harm than good, knowing that, someday, the mutants would turn against mankind, or the Hulk would snap and go on a rampage that could kill millions. And he used the Superhuman Registration Act in his attempt, since it would be the perfect excuse — whoever was against him was automatically labeled as "non-sanctioned" and hunted down.
- Foolkiller. After all, who doesn't sympathize with a guy who kills fools? Just make sure you're not one. To give you an idea of how Ax-Crazy he is, when he fought Spider-Man, the hero started to trounce him good, and an onlooker commented that the guy was a fool for thinking he could beat Spider-Man. Apparently, the Foolkiller thought the guy had a point, and tried to turn his weapon on himself. (though, fortunately for him, Spidey stopped him and he was hauled to an asylum.) The thing is, Foolkiller is not one person; several criminals have held the identity over the years, and each one has a different definition of what a "fool" is. It's very doubtful they'd all agree with each other if they were all in one place.
- The Deacon from Ghost Rider just wants everyone to go to Heaven and be at peace. So he kills them to expedite the process.
- The Incredible Hulk: The Leader is most often portrayed as this. He wants to conquer the world and solve all of its problems (in some cases, he doesn't even want to conquer the world, just set up his own utopia). Depending on the writer, he may or may not want to turn everyone in the world into a gamma monster like himself and the Hulk, as well.
- Grant Morrison's Marvel Boy is a good example of this. The miniseries' alien protagonist, the extradimensional Kree, Noh-Varr, has his ship shot down and the rest of his crew killed by a supervillain that wants to make a profit off of his technology and dissected remains. As such, he winds up understandably pissed at the human race (to the extent that he knocks down buildings to spell out "F#$k you" to the human race in letters several blocks high, though he herds the inhabitants away so there will be no casualties). Noh-Varr finds Earth's social ills to be ridiculous and unreasonable and intends to make war on Earth and "terraform" it to be like his home planet, Hala. He would be a classic Villain Protagonist, but genuinely does seem to believe that what he's doing will better Earth for its inhabitants.
- Colonel Nick Fury (Sr.) is most definitely this. He is a Control Freak constantly looking for ways to know all the secrets and destroy all the threats (which considering that some of said threats include Doctor Doom it's not completely wrong), and on a good day his pawns at least get to know he is tossing them into the fire so they can pretend there is a choice. Original Sin is when he finally lost it and he kills Uatu the Watcher so he could harvest his eyes and know literally all the secrets, causing chaos of cosmic proportions and not really caring. Dum-Dum Dugan finally reached his Rage Breaking Point after countless years of being Fury's yes-man and discovering that he was not the real Dugan but a Life-Model Decoy Fury built after the real Dugan died some time ago and chewed out Fury for thinking that he and he alone in the whole wide Earth was allowed to be "the hard man who made the hard choices".
- Subverted in Runaways. The members of the Pride keep talking about building a better future for their children, but it turns out that their plan is to help some ancient monsters wipe out all of humanity in exchange for granting their offspring eternal life. Plus, the original deal was that half of the Pride would get to live forever in paradise, so their motivations were purely selfish to begin with. Only one couple, the Yorkes, seem to genuinely think that they're doing the world as a whole a favor.Stacy Yorkes: Before my dolt of a husband totaled our 4-D portico permanently, we visited thousands of possible futures, each worse than the last...The next generation deserves something new...and that's exactly what we're going to give them.
- Spider-Man's enemy, the Vulture, is a good example of the other type of this trope. Many years after his debut, he was given a backstory in which an unscrupulous business partner cheated him out of the proceeds from his inventions. He wrecked said partner's business, stole back his money, and discovered that he enjoyed the thrill. Eventually, the partner surfaced, and the usually not-murderous Vulture went after him; Spidey stopped the Vulture but taped the partner's confession.
- Spider-Man has often fought a high-tech Knight Templar called Cardiac who targets people who commit evil and immoral acts, but find legal loopholes to escape justice (for example, Cardiac's first target was a company that produced a drug that could have saved his brother's life, but his brother died because the company withheld putting the drug into mass production until it was more economically profitable). Let's face it; a lot of people would take Cardiac's side here. His victims are horrible men who rob people blind and cause innocents to suffer, but find ways to legally do it, always with selfish goals in mind. Even Spider-Man, who tries to stop him when he can, can't help but admire him a little sometimes.
- The Squadron Supreme limited series was built on this trope, as the Squadron vows to use their super-powers to cure all of society's ills — even if it requires restricting civil rights and individual liberties to do so.
- Ultimate Marvel
- Ultimate Reed Richards is willing to kill his own family to fake his death, attacks organizations that he feels are repressing science's potential for their own corrupt reasons, and tries to Take Over the World so that he can finally "fix things" the way he always knew he could. Afterwards, he creates a utopian civilization in another dimension, then brings it back and tries to wipe out humanity to replace it with this "better" version.
- The Ultimates: Gregory Stark's big goal is to get current S.H.I.E.L.D. leadership out of the way so no one can intervene in his planned revolutions to overthrow the dictatorships in the Middle East and North Korea.
- Magneto in X-Men is one of the archetypal examples in the medium. He wants peace and safety for mutantkind — but he's willing to achieve it at the expense of humanity at large. Magneto's characterization varies wildly depending on who is writing him, but the most influential version is the one envisioned by Chris Claremont and fits this trope to a tee.
- Cyclops took this role after the events of Avengers vs. X-Men, having killed Professor X and dedicated himself to starting a new Mutant revolution. He's been explicitly compared to Magneto by both supporters and detractors and was already a fully fledged Magnificent Bastard — which is more than a little comical since a reformed Magneto is a member of Cyclops' team of rogue X-Men, having joined because he genuinely admired Scott, and in which capacity he occasionally remarks on how Scott sounds like him, or reprimands him for it.
- Nate Grey a.k.a. X-Man danced on the edge of this from his Shaman era onwards, with elements from the very beginning in his obsession with preventing the rise of Apocalypse as in his home reality. However, he really jumped in feet first after he got his full powers back and cranked up to eleven in Uncanny X-Men (2018), a process which was also killing him - he started by converting Magneto, Angel, Blob, and Omega Red into his 'Horsemen of Wellness' and kidnapping various characters to serve as an advisory council (and Apocalypse, to serve as a wall decoration), all as part of his attempt to make Earth a utopia before he died. When the X-Men kept throwing everything at him (and because of how obscenely powerful he was, achieving absolutely nothing beyond Legion performing the incredibly ill-advised act of a) trying to trap the world's most powerful telepath in his head, b) mashing every single one of his Trauma Buttons), he ended up apparently killing them and himself... and created a warped and well-meaning Gattaca style utopian reality of which he was the Fisher King to try and give them all their dearest wishes. While not all of it was by any means bad and he meant well, Be Careful What You Wish For was very much in play.
- Dr. Bolivar Trask, the renowned anthropologist, became an early X-Men villain when he publicly voiced his fears that superhuman mutants might take over the world and enslave humanity. Considering what mutant supervillains have been up to before and since in the Marvelverse, it's not quite fair to say that he was entirely wrong. Nevertheless, his proposed solution — to launch an army of Sentinels to contain and neutralize the mutants — qualifies him for this list.
- Trask's son Lawrence basically continued his father's plans, with the added motive of revenge for his father's death. Later, government scientist Steven Lang launched an operation similar to Trask's, for much the same reasons.
- Wolverine also qualifies as this. While he does tend to have good intentions he tends to use murder, mauling, and more murder to achieve them. He once stabbed Rachel Summers in the heart and lungs to keep her from killing Selene. Keep in mind that Selene is a millennia old unrepentant murderer and an energy vampire, who then went on to immediately kill more people right afterwards! While his stated motives were to prevent her from going Dark Phoenix, this didn't hold massive amounts of water given how stabbing a Phoenix host is generally less than effective. It's also worth noting that this is his go-to solution with Phoenix hosts and it never, ever works. Wolverine also set explosives on an island that not only contained the entirety of the mutant race at the time, but also incapacitated people in the infirmary and multiple prisoners. He did this in order to try and blow up a killer robot, but still, what would have happened if everyone hadn't been evacuated on time?
- Arguably, most human X-Men villains qualify, as they're basically Magneto in reverse: Ordinary humans looking after human interests and not wanting to be dominated or exterminated like rats by a super-powered caste of mutant overlords. (Which has actually happened or nearly happened a number of times in the comics over the years.) Though like the mutant supervillains, some are less "well-intentioned" and more "extreme" than others, and vice versa.
