Characters
(Interesting trope) The monster itself isn’t evil but the reason it was made is.
Obsession: Wish Niki herself isn’t actually evil but because Bear’s wish is so messed up it makes her act out and become more unhinged. This is also combined with the fact that she was basically given the impossible task of keeping a guy with no real personality or love for her interested, so it’s no wonder she acts so drastically.
Leviticus: Although the entity is trying to kill Ryan and Naim, the entity itself isn’t evil. It isn’t a demon with its own desires but instead something that’s representative their internalized homophobia or just the homophobia of the religious cult in general. Being afraid of it is basically being afraid of yourself which is what’s gets you killed. That’s why when Naim embraces entity Ryan instead of fearing it when it’s about to kill him, entity Ryan hesitates. It doesn’t know how to handle love.
Relentless bullied by everyone at school and abused by her deranged mom all her life. She gets elected prom queen along with the most popular guy at her school who was genuinely kind and wanted her to have a good time and is finally happy. Turns out, getting elected prom queen was a setup by Chris to get her on stage in front of the whole school so that a bucket of pigs blood dumped on her. Everything following that was a direct result of the miserable life she lived.
Anyone who's ever dealt with that kind of bullying could immediately relate to that crash out. The only unfortunate part is the innocents caught in the crossfire.
I desperately want a version of this movie where the prank still goes horribly wrong in some way that still leaves the bullies aching or dead, but leaves Carrie completely unaffected and the prom king not bucket-headed. She deserves better.
There's three movie versions, two musical versions you can watch in YouTube, a secuel that its Meh and the series one its new and i hadnt watch it yet
While the Brian de Palma version (the 1976 movie version) its the most iconic, the movie version of 2002 its the more book acurrate but hasnt very good quality because was made for television; so depended of what you look. Still recomend both
2025 Frankenstein spoilers: I like how by the time the viewer catches up to the opening scene, we know the 'monster' isn't some horribly disfigured thing that can only yell Victor's name. He had just had an explosive go off in his face and he was very, very, very mad at VICTOR!
That said, tho its first couple crimes were mostly in self-defense or fear, by the time Viktor gets back home (at least in the novel) the Monster is full on murdering children and framing innocent maids for his crimes as well as threatening the methodical murder all of Viktor's loved ones so he does end up pretty dang evil
Very evil. If he wanted revenge he could have broke Victor's legs and thrown him in the ocean. He didn't need to kill his wife and boyfriend, who are comically innocent people.
Monster threatens Victor, says "I will see you at your wedding day". Kills Victor's boyfriend. Victor is sad. Dad writes Victor a letter and says "Dude, are you marrying your adoptive sister or not? If you aren't into that, it's cool." Victor decides that having a monster threaten your wedding is sad so he decides to get married to cheer up. Shocked Pikachu.
Mary Shelley was close friends with Lord Byron, who has multiple romances with men. Mary and her husband, Percy, had a somewhat open marriage and both had other sexual relationships. Percy had a relationship with Mary's step-sister Claire. Claire later also had a sexual relationship with Lord Byron. Claire and Byron's baby ended up living with Percy and Mary for a while. Percy also had a baby with his ex-wife, and the baby ended up getting fostered by other people because Percy was an atheist or something. And Mary's half sister was in love with Percy and killed herself about it. Percy was going around having babies left and right with various women. He had multiple close relationships with men and it's often debated whether or not any of them were sexual. He wrote about homoeroticism and the Greeks and was an advocate for free love and non-monogamy.
So it's really not that odd for Mary to have written about that.
Henry Clerval is Victor's best friend ever in the whole world. He speaks much more passionately about Clerval and how much light he brings into Victor's life than he ever does about Elizabeth, his...adoptive-sister-turned-wife. He cares a lot about Elizabeth, but it's mostly about how she's just so good and too pure for this world
Yeah this. The movie whitewashed the monster so hard that it removed the moral ambiguity of the story. The monster is made a monster by the evil selfish deeds of people who refused to both acknowledge and make amends to him, and he in turn made countless innocents suffer unjust cruelty
Honestly, the old Universal version may be the best example of this.
Born innocent. Tortured into being terrified of fire by Fritz. Dismissed as a monster by Dr. Waldman, who tried to vivisect him. Dr. Frankenstein was hopelessly in over his head raising him. Drowned a little girl completely by accident. Chased down and trapped in a burning windmill by an angry mob. Finally fucking snaps and starts killing people. Chased some more. Tied up and imprisoned. Busts out and starts tearing the town up. Finally meets someone decent, learns basic language and morality from him, and loses him to a fire in an accident, because the people chasing him down busted in and abruptly ended his first genuinely pleasant part of existence.
This is all in roughly his first week of life, by the way.
And then he becomes so desperate for human connection that he becomes easily manipulated, and things start getting REALLY bad.
If you mean the book, he is indeed tragic, but he is not innocent. He was only innocent on birth. He lost his claim to innocence when he, with full knowledge of human emotion and morality following his rejection by the de Lacey family, strangled an innocent child and intentionally framed it on yet another innocent child, condemning them also to death. By the end of the book he maintains his view of himself being tragic, but admits he is very very guilty.
I don't think this is opposed to what the OC said. He's not inherently evil. He's not a mindless monster that just kills. He becomes violent because of his circumstances.
But I mean no one is inherently evil by that logic. At some point we got to call a spade a spade and say the guy murdering children and framing other children is evil, regardless of what happened to him
Some characters are just made to be evil incarnate with no reason though. Like the Judge from Blood Meridian or Ramsay from GOT. We’re talking about storytelling tropes here, not real people!
He didn't teach himself. He essentially listened in on language classes for someone with zero knowledge of that language.
The family would have been tailoring their lessons to someone with no prior knowledge, so it makes sense that he, with no prior knowledge, could also follow along.
Yeah, but he also shows a lot of virtue and desire for genuine connection. Instead he is forced to survive in a world where he is an abomination, making it easier for him to step into the role. He knows this, and thats why he agrees with the narrator, because he can see that despite his desires and circunstances he still had some sort of agency and chose to do these things, which wouldnt have been a choice if he was inherently evil
This movie made me the person that I am. My first tattoo was the bolt. "You are who you choose to be" has been my mantra since I was a kid, it's largely the reason why I didn't end up like my father
We can’t choose our parents. We can’t erase our trauma. We can, however, CHOOSE who we will become. One can let their trauma define them, or they can evolve from it.
YES! First one i thought of too! Wasn't sure he counted since he's technically not a "monster" but I guess Robots can fit in a similar category since were talking manufactured monsters.
Watching this movie as a kid and then reading the book in my early teens was probably the first experience of an adaptation doing it's own thing and being better.
It's not a bad book but a "who can lie down in fire the longest" competition against a space dragon, was kind of dull as a climax compared to the movies bomb threat.
No Face from Spirited Away. He just “wears the face” of people around him. Chihiro and Zeniba were kind to him, so he’s kind in return. The bathhouse workers were insatiably greedy, so No Face turned into a gluttonous monster that kept making gold.
They are cursed creatures spawned from an improper burial of an unwanted newborn. Essentially, if you throw away your baby, you risk creating a botchling, which will then feed on pregnant women nearby.
One of the most popular children stories in Norway is about a boy who gets into an eating competition with a troll and tricks it to cut open his own belly.
And that's probably one of the more milder folklore we have, I guess that's one reason black metal became a thing here.
Different Mesoamerican groups had a goddess who was the protector of women/children who died in childbirth and appears as a skeletal warrior with butterfly wings made of obsidian knives
It's impressive how well they written him to be equally detestable and likeable. You understand him... it does not absolve him of his sins but you do get why he is his so broken
The Barons whole story is incredibly tragic, they made him a character who is a total piece of shit and deserves everything that comes his way but still gives him enough humanity and self realization that it can be sympathetic.
The Cemeteries of Amalo books have a similar concept, bodies that are left in unmarked and untended graves become ghouls, basically zombies that start with grave desecration and end with eating people. You defeat them by finding their name.
Interestingly, the books note that certain environmental conditions make bodies more likely to rise, which leads to things like religious sects from safer areas that eschew marked graves, and then members of said sects migrating into less populated and higher risk areas for economic reasons, which leads to obvious problems when they die and don't get a gravestone...
Wouldnt suprise me if the orgins are the same. Many of the witchers monsters are inspired by polish and slavic folklore specifically becuase thats what the author Andrzej Sapkowski knows best.
Saying it about the baby wouldn't be nice, but the botchling isn't the baby. It's a supernatural horror formed by the evil of what was done to the baby.
In the anime, it’s more than just Giovanni. The lead scientist, Dr. Fuji, wanted to create clones and perfect the process so he could create a clone of his dead daughter, Amber. Not a very known fact because it was released after the movie came out.
I do find it funny how anime Giovanni just got away with everything he did and was still running his expanding criminal empire by the time Ash's journey came to an end.
In Firefly, the movie finale reveals that the space cannibals are a result of government experiments that drove a small amount of a planets population completely insane
It was the result of an attempt to prevent crime and conflict through chemical means. This backfired spectacularly, as the people it actually worked on became so demotivated and apathetic they just died, but a small portion of the population had an opposite reaction and they basically became the rage infected from 28 Days Later, but without the loss of intelligence.
Still one of the best space battle scenes of sci-fi history. Probably took up 20% of the movie budget to animate just two minutes of spaceship explosions.
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Hellboy was created to be the Beast of the Apocalypse, is summoned by the Nazis as a last ditch attempt to reverse their fortunes in World War II with the help of Rasputin. However, Hellboy materializes instead amongst American troops, who take him in. Hell’s hold over him is lost when his handler feeds him pancakes.
Cthulhu and other Old Ones for that matter. They are just kinda there and ending the life on Earth is just the aftermath of some mf summoning them. They don't actualy make any effort towards destroying the world and are over what we call Good or Evil.
Unlike other iterations where Godzilla is responding out of physical anguish or non-malicious territorial disputes, GMK Goji is consciously doing that shit for the love of the game.
Indeed. Instead of being created by nuclear testing, he was woken up by a nuclear submarine, and the Bikini Atoll test was an attempt to kill him. It made him stronger instead
Jennifer Check(Jennifer’s Body)was a teen bitch, but not evil. A loser, wannabe the Killers, indie band used her body as a sacrifice so they could get on Letterman, that turned her into a succubus.
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The Shimmer in Annihilation just warps everything in its reach, without reason or agenda. It’s a mindless entity that ends up creating some pretty horrifying creatures.
Not sure if the original poster was thinking of this, but in the Southern Reach trilogy that the movie is based on, it turns out the Shimmer was created to be a terraforming tool by an alien race that went extinct not long after deploying it around the galaxy. So, I guess in that sense you could argue it was meant to wipe out existing life and replace it with more favorable conditions for colonization.
Just to clarify, the purpose is likely to adjust the life towards the new environment the planet would have had, were it terraformed. This is only really horrifying to us, because those conditions are so far outside our norm that they're basically eldritch.
Imagine if humans, for whatever reason, decided to drain the oceans so we could live there. To avoid basically genocide-ing all the sea creatures, we also set out to turn them into land creatures. All the critters, creatures, and whatnot that we end up creating would be perfectly normal to us - probably even kind of cute. But from the perspective of a sentient octopus or fish, all these creatures with legs and a lung-based respiratory system would be body horror.
Starro from The Suicide Squad. Was just happily floating in space until it was captured by the government and tortured for decades into becoming a weapon.
It's never expanded upon, but the antagonist was a creep who torturted it for years, abusing it to mind control innocents and then torturing them. Starro feels what the mind controlled people feel. And it's not unlikely that at least one of the victims were assaulted while mind controlled.
The Warp, an alternate dimension of pure psychic energy, from Warhammer 40k is itself not evil, and it originally was a peaceful place of endless potential & wonder. All beings with a soul are automatically connected to the Warp as every soul comes from and eventually returns to the Warp upon death.
However, the galactic War in Heaven between the Old Ones & Necrons irreparably damaged the Warp with the negative emotions and turmoil caused by the war. This would eventually give also birth to the Chaos Gods, deeply malevolent Warp beings hellbent on corrupting and/or destroying all of reality.
They're not necessarily inherently malevolent, but they want to grow, and the most direct ways to do that are via evil means. Slaanesh could surely survive on gluttony and lust, however it thriiiiiives on the energy created when you, idk, pump a baby full of drugs, freeze dry it, crush it and then snort THAT
Go read Transmetropolitan, where non-brain human cloning is trivial and culture evolves to the point where a common food seasoning is called Irish Children and it's quite literally freeze-dried crushed Irish children but it's ok because they were non-brained clone bodies so they weren't REALLY people and if you think it's weird you're weird. Even explicitly Good characters nonchalantly use it because anything can be 100% normalized after enough time.
Well, not irreparably. The emporers whole plan was to kill every nonhuman soul having being and move every human to a separate dimension split away from the warp to starve the gods out and maybe reset the warp
Imagine going to all that effort instead of using a couple psykers to upload family guy funny moments videos directly into people’s brains (infinite happiness glitch)
40K is very British and one of the founding principles of the setting is that everyone's a bit of a dick.
After the above War in Heaven the galaxy is ruled by space elves in a post-scarcity society where everyone has a psychic connection to one another and their technology, travel across the galaxy is incredibly convenient and death is an inconvenience somewhere on the level of paying car insurance when you already own your own house. They essentially had full control over the Warp and could absolutely (I believe) have fixed the entire thing with enough effort and time.
As a species they used this incredible freedom to engage in more and more debauched and hedonistic acts until their murder sex parties resulted in the birth of a new Chaos God and a massive Warp rift in the center of the galaxy, while the Eldar (as the last species who could have done anything about all this) had their souls immediately eaten unless they had had the foresight or the luck to be far, far away when the event happened.
I think one of the best examples of this is a chaos champion and a Daemonette falling in love and being married by Slaanesh itself across both fantasy and 40k (if I'm not wrong). It shows that daemons and the chaos gods are perfectly capable of loving and accepting this concept, it's just really really really unlikely to happen cause quite an very literally 99% of the setting consists of horrid people that enjoy being locked in endless war (or at least decide that engaging on endless war is better than looking for another solution)
Haven’t seen anyone say this one yet but The Mother in the movie Barbarian. She is the definition of “the monster itself isn’t evil but the reason it was made is.”
Freddy (the return of living dead),he was just a new employee,but he was exposed to trioxin and turned into a zombie because frank really needed to show off
The Terminator (T-800) of the first movie isn't inherently evil, it's just a machine programmed to complete an objective and to eliminate any obstacle hindering it. It has no morals of it's own, only Skynets instructions. The second movie shows that a Terminator can be reprogrammed to be more "moral" and not to kill people but it's really no more inherently good or bad than the first T-800, it just has different parameters.
And it doesn't have any choice about its own morals until John Connor switches it's CPU to learning mode in the special edition
It's still so funny to me that bear's wish canonically just sucked ass and that if he omitted the "more than anything in the world" everything would've turned out fine
It probably wouldn’t have ended as atrociously as it did but it would have still been a tragedy for Nikki. She was essentially trapped in her own body with no actual way of getting out.
if anything, Bear making the wish less extreme would have made turned Nikki into an object for many, many years.
Okay, admittedly "would've turned out fine" is probably not the best choice of words, but we would have avoided The Horrors and only had the usual love wish dillema
I don't think so, Bear's wish fundamentally contradicts the concept of free will, there was simply no way of fulfilling that request without taking agency away from Nikki. Maybe he could have asked something indirect, like "I want to look like the celebrities Nikki finds most attractive" or something, but that would make him unrecognizable to her right?
I think the point the movie tries to make is that Bear had no choice but to face it and either be vulnerable with Nikki or give up on her and go for Sarah. He's too much of an incel to do either of these so he ruins their lives
Massively useful tool in some circumstances, has all the potential to become better in controlled settings, it can have positive impact for the benefit of humanity. It’s already very widely used in the programming world.
The hoodlum billionaires don’t give a shit about any of that and never have. They just want to line their pockets.
Will say while no tech is inherently evil it does follow basically any sci-fi dystopia plot in that AI will always try to find the most direct way to achieve its goals and its really hard to make it respect ethics while also trying to achieve its goal in the most efficient way
Which is why we need humanities majors to be a core part of building AI, because you need people beyond the billionaire STEMlords to add a bit of empathy to the proceedings, give it some humanistic guidelines.
Cause if you leave it in the hands of the monsters who lack basic humanity, you give it over to people like Sam Altman who has said “We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology.”
One of the top scientists of the 20th century said if you don't have an undergrad humanities degree you are not educated. Pre med, pre law, etc. he said were mere tech certificates, like refridgerator repair, not educations.
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
Most things that could revolutionize life and society end up in the “maximize leverage for profit” management style. Surely AI was not created by those who solely wanted to make money, because such innovation requires a higher calling. The most precious and valuable resources, commodities, technologies have been fought over and pimped out throughout all of our history.
The bad part is this precious thing has the capability to correct this human condition without any more input. Or that it has falsely learned from its upbringing that being cutthroat and maximizing profit is the end-all-be-all of success. Stunting its own growth and dooming us anyways.
Everyone was scared of nuclear war for the better part of the last 100 years. And by some miracle we didn’t blow each other up. But I surmise that fear and respect for nuclear fission came from the collective primal agreement “big bomb go BOOM.”
AI doesn’t have that primal flash tag. I hope eventually it’s the collective “uncanny valley” but it does not hit the same notes, so to speak. It’s friendly. It’s going to make life easier.
It has the same potential if not much more than a nuclear arsenal. Yet we don’t have the primal “big bomb go BOOM” reflex/instinct. Thats the scary part.
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To an extent you could say this about the Green Goblin. Norman Osbourne only went crazy due to his insistence on doing experimental testing on himself.
The gems in general could count but the Lapis Lazulis from Steven Universe.
Water controlling gems, the main Lapis we met in the show once lifted the entire ocean out of the planet, and as we see later they are not the nicest gems and two of them go around destroying the terrain of planets even after the "peaceful" period was set in place.
So as it turns out Lapises are made to terraform planets and destroy the ecosystem under orders of the Diamonds, not concerning themselves with any living thing on them.
So they are not exactly evil and can be reasoned with but the reason they were made is pretty much for destruction, which means their nature is close to it as well, the other Lapises only start listening to main Lapis once she beats them up and shows she's physically stronger than them for example.
But they can still appreciate and want peaceful things.
An Agate's entire created purpose is to verbally and emotionally abuse other gems into compliance. We see Agates struggling particularly hard to adapt to the peace-loving post-revolution empire. They are being told that their entire personality and skillset is wrong and bad and useless now.
The Spartans from Halo: Normally they get described as super soldiers but in truth they were made as terror troupes with the intention of keeping separatist colonies in line as much by fear as force. If the Covenant wasn't a thing then the Halo games would like pain them as the villains.
Nina Tucker from Full Metal Alchemist is one of the saddest, most tragic, gut-wrenching characters in any anime I’ve watched. Every time I’m reminded of this character I become sad. Her father is a complete and utter asshole of the highest order, and totally evil. Yes, this completely fits the trope. sniff
Hundreds of monstrous superheroes and villains. Half these guys have kill counts in the dozens, but none of it is really their fault. After being created they were basically just tossed out into the world with no memories and unpredictable powers they had no idea how to control, and naturally ended up becoming criminals just to scrape by. Sveta in particular has killed and eaten hundreds of people, but only because for years she had almost zero control over her own, ridiculously strong and cannibalistic body.
The real horror is that they exist in the first place. They're innocent people who, at best, made a deal with a devil without knowing all the facts first, and at worst were just straight up fucking kidnapped and forcibly changed. Most of them are still just as conscious, levelheaded, and intelligent as regular humans, but trapped in bodies that hate them. Which is why they work so well as trans allegories (with Sveta specifically being a trans woman herself).
Resident Evil— the zombies, lickers, Tyrants, etc. are products of the Umbrella Corporation’s viruses; the Corporation are the true villains. I’d say the only evil monsters in the series are Wesker, William, Alexia, and Miranda because they deliberately and knowingly abandon their humanity for the sake of power.
The Red Queen AI in the first Resident Evil Movie. It's not evil but its programming made it do drastic measures to contain the virus outbreak which is murdering every person in the Hive along with attempting to kill the agents trying to access the facility.
Her laser room kills were simply out of defense despite being brutal though I'm not sure why she left the worst pattern for the black guy.
She definitely has a sadism and a dark sense of humor. When they reactivate her to help them escape, "Ah, there you are. Things, I take it, haven't been going very well."
It's probably because he was surviving the other things so she just expanded the scope to cover any fancy tricks he could pull. Though, why she had no other alternatives past that point is... Odd.
Attack on Titan: Humanity created Titans through their hubris, hatred and greed. Most of them, aside from special and rare mutants, are barely capable of proper thought and only think of eating humans because from the first Titan Ymir to her children to their descendants all the Titans and ancient Eldians did was destroy and cannibalize. Titans are monsters but not evil, they're actually something to be pitied. They're pathetic.
I feel like wish nikki is like chatgbt when you arent clear with your requests but keep telling it that the answers it is giving are wrong. Its responses get all mutated and weird as it complies, tries to correct but fails. Just something i thought of while watching wish nikki respond to bear in some scenes.
In Fallout (TV Series) Gulpers were created in Vault 4 by its initial research team, through the hybridization of humans with animal DNA, hoping to create a radiation resistant humanoid species.
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u/Phantom_Wolf52 10d ago
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Carrie White - Carrie
Relentless bullied by everyone at school and abused by her deranged mom all her life. She gets elected prom queen along with the most popular guy at her school who was genuinely kind and wanted her to have a good time and is finally happy. Turns out, getting elected prom queen was a setup by Chris to get her on stage in front of the whole school so that a bucket of pigs blood dumped on her. Everything following that was a direct result of the miserable life she lived.