Bad guys you quickly/later realized weren't actually evil.

Extra-Ordinary

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Title pretty much says it: Give me a person or group from a game that who you initially looked at as the bad guys, and either sooner or later, realized that they weren't evil at all. Maybe they have done a few things to get in your way, but they're not really your enemy.

I was playing Dead Space 2 and instead of trekking forward, I decided to stop at the orientation room in the temple of unitology. Now, for a long time, I looked at unitology as some of the bad guys in the game; they worshipped a monolith thats' very existence causes death and destruction at an unstoppable rate because it "spoke" to a now-deceased geophysicist in the same way it's giving you hallucinations of your dead girlfriend. This thing is causing you so much trouble and these people worshipped the d*mn thing. For a while, that made them the bad guy to me, they're praying before the cause of all this blood, murder, and chaos. But when I looked at the little orientation video, I realized the unitologists aren't evil, they're just misled. Hell, they weren't even misled, they just misinterpreted the Marker's message. They had good intentions, but the Marker didn't.

The video said: "One body, one mind, one soul." I realized they weren't evil when I really stopped and thought about what unitologists were following. They were following the Marker's message: One body, one mind, one soul. Convergance will cause this.
At first, that sounds great.It sounds like a poetic way to say that all people, everywhere, were coming together to live in peace. And end to discrimination, racsim, sexism, and bigotry in general. Personally, I would give a lot to see that happen.

Problem was, when the message read, "One body, one mind, one soul," that was EXACTLY what it meant. It meant that when Convergance occurred, all available bodies were going to be morphed together into a titanic frankenstein. One body all right, Altman be praised.

But the unitologists didn't know this, when they would read, "make us whole," they saw, "everybody just get along," in a message that actually was, "get squished up into a giant monster". I didn't find it right to label them as the bad guys when all they did was forget to read the fine print. Okay, they did screw over Isaac a couple of times, but they never really looked at Isaac as their enemy. In fact, you're praised almost as much as the Marker is in Dead Space 2, but that's another story.

Anyway. Pick someone you labeled as somebody you thought was the bad guy, then later realized that this person wasn't guilty of anything. Explain how you learned they weren't your enemy, and if/how your opinion of them changed.
 

3 legged goat

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Feb 28, 2010
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The Empire in Skyrim. They are made to be the bad guys in the beginning but they are actually trying to do their best to maintain stability. All the bad stuff that the Empire does is because of the Elves. Ulfric Stormcloak is the real bad guy.
 

irishdude

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Feb 4, 2009
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the dark ones in metro 2033 if you read the book or get the so called good ending in the game they where only trying to help the humans
 

way2sl0w

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Jan 29, 2012
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when the antagonist from Catherine explained why guys were dying in their sleep I was like 'omg you're totally right' Vincent's such a d-bag and deserves to die too.
 

Azure-Supernova

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Aug 5, 2009
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Yeah, Kessler from inFamous really comes to mind:

He screwed up his life hard. It took him to lose everything he had to realise what he needed to become to fight back against The Beast, but it was already too late for him. But what he could do was send himself back in time and shape the past Cole into the hardass he needed to be to fight The Beast.

Right up until the end I hated Kessler, never understood his angle or why he was toying with Cole and twisting his life.
 

The Night Angel

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Dec 30, 2011
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Loghain in DA:O, he honestly did think he was doing the best thing for the kingdom, so if you succeed with the persuade challenge at the end, he realises he was wrong, and dies to save you :)
 

x EvilErmine x

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Apr 5, 2010
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Your brother from Fable 3

You find out that he was only driving the people so hard because he needed the money to pay for the army and forces that would stand against the shadows that would kill them all. So yeah he was a right bastard but his intentions were good. That's why I let him go in the end

Edit

Also Saren from Mass Effect for similar reasons.
 

Rheinmetall

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May 13, 2011
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Sorceress Edea in Final Fantasy VIII, who was at first presented in the game as the ultimate villain. Not only she wasn't evil, but for a short period you could have her fight along with your party. That happened because she was possessed by some demonic power, and somehow she was freed. I don't quite remember the details.
 

Therumancer

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Nov 28, 2007
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torno said:
Title pretty much says it: Give me a person or group from a game that who you initially looked at as the bad guys, and either sooner or later, realized that they weren't evil at all. Maybe they have done a few things to get in your way, but they're not really your enemy.

I was playing Dead Space 2 and instead of trekking forward, I decided to stop at the orientation room in the temple of unitology. Now, for a long time, I looked at unitology as some of the bad guys in the game; they worshipped a monolith thats' very existence causes death and destruction at an unstoppable rate because it "spoke" to a now-deceased geophysicist in the same way it's giving you hallucinations of your dead girlfriend. This thing is causing you so much trouble and these people worshipped the d*mn thing. For a while, that made them the bad guy to me, they're praying before the cause of all this blood, murder, and chaos. But when I looked at the little orientation video, I realized the unitologists aren't evil, they're just misled. Hell, they weren't even misled, they just misinterpreted the Marker's message. They had good intentions, but the Marker didn't.

The video said: "One body, one mind, one soul." I realized they weren't evil when I really stopped and thought about what unitologists were following. They were following the Marker's message: One body, one mind, one soul. Convergance will cause this.
At first, that sounds great.It sounds like a poetic way to say that all people, everywhere, were coming together to live in peace. And end to discrimination, racsim, sexism, and bigotry in general. Personally, I would give a lot to see that happen.

Problem was, when the message read, "One body, one mind, one soul," that was EXACTLY what it meant. It meant that when Convergance occurred, all available bodies were going to be morphed together into a titanic frankenstein. One body all right, Altman be praised.

But the unitologists didn't know this, when they would read, "make us whole," they saw, "everybody just get along," in a message that actually was, "get squished up into a giant monster". I didn't find it right to label them as the bad guys when all they did was forget to read the fine print. Okay, they did screw over Isaac a couple of times, but they never really looked at Isaac as their enemy. In fact, you're praised almost as much as the Marker is in Dead Space 2, but that's another story.

Anyway. Pick someone you labeled as somebody you thought was the bad guy, then later realized that this person wasn't guilty of anything. Explain how you learned they weren't your enemy, and if/how your opinion of them changed.
Well, the Unitologists sort of threw me for a loop on some levels. See, having watched the "Dead Space" animated movie and followed the game, I wasn't 100% sure if the Marker was good or evil. Indeed through part of the game, and in a lot of the animated movie, it looked like a case where the marker was actually being used to imprison the Necromorphs, and it was people screwing around with recovering it that kind of let this threat out. I was thinking that since it seemed to keep the necromorphs out of it's immediate proximity in the tie in movie (which just turned out to be awful) that it was just kind of limited in whatg it could do at that point, being a stationary obelisk, and while it wouldn't care about sacrificing humans as need be towards it's purpose, it ultimatly was sort of the solution to the problem.

The Unitologists being presented as the bad guys or creepy, especially on "no known survivors" (the site) and such made me think that for once it was going to be the wierd cult that actually would wind up being your ally and having it's act together.

Needless to say my initial theories proved to be really wrong... Dead Space 2 made that about as clear as it can possibly be if there was any remaining doubt after the first game.

I've mentioned something to this tune not too long ago in another thread, odd to be discussing the same thing again so soon.

-

I think everyone can empathize with the bad guys at one point or another. I can't think of any specific examples off the top of my head at the moment where I have, but believe it or not that's an intended part of the story sometimes... especially in the case of series where you have an honorable enemy trope in play or something similar.

In some cases it's a matter of bad writing as well, while I can't finger any specific examples, there have been a few cases where when watching a movie the "bad guy" is merely a ruthless guy doing some bad things to deal with an even worse situation, and the hero that intervenes does so out of a sense of morality with no real plan. Say, preventing some bad guy from sacrificing innocent people as part of a "kill a few to save a lot" mentality, because of a universal declaration that "killing innocent people is wrong", but without any better ideas. Especially if that even worse thing the bad guy wants to prevent happens, causing a dramatic situation with the hero needing to stop it, but in doing so there is like 10x more damage than the sacrifice of innocents or whatever would have prevented. I'm being generic, becaue I'm exhausted and my brain isn't working.... I have several examples of that kind of thing on the tip of my brain but I keep losing them before I can type them Ugh. In many cases though I don't think it's so much a problem of the bad guys really not being bad guys so much as the script writers not thinking things through and hoping the audience won't either. You know, hero prevents a human sacrifice intended to prevent a monster from appearing, as a result the monster appears, the hero fights and defeats the monster but not before two thirds of downtown tokyo is leveled with a deathtoll in the tens of thousands. If you put your brain in neutral that's a great movie, if you really think about it, who was a bigger idiot the priest guy who wanted to kill one person, or the hero who arguably just killed thousands for a moral principle that it was wrong to sacrifice one person to save a lot. Written properly a movie shoudn't have you thinking that stopping a human sacrifice was the wrong thing to do, yet similiar things have happened (to use a generic-type example since I'm spacing for some reason), but yet sometimes in cases like that I can't believe what I'm seeing and wind up cheering for the bad guy simply because he manages to come accross as being less of an idiot than the hero.
 

Dandark

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The Dark ones in Metro 2033 and the Empire in Skyrim.
Also Jim. I thought he was evil but now I have seen the light and know that he is our glorious savior.
 

Ilikemilkshake

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In Starship Troopers, it was only after i watched it for the first time not as a kid, i realised that the humans were the aggressive militaristic douchebags and that the Bugs weren't the bad guys. Although while the films are (meant to be) satire i've heard the books are actually Pro-Military, which would make the humans the good guys.

The Empire in Skyrim were this way for me aswell.. i started off wanting to join the Stormcloaks (naturally, after the display at Helgan) however it turns out this is pretty much the only bad stuff the Empire does, seemingly only put there to trick the player into thinking the Stormcloaks are the good guys... By the time i got to Windhelm i was pretty disgusted with how the Stormcloaks behaved, so i turned around and went to Solitude to join the Empire.
 

Don Savik

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Any Warhammer or 40k game would have you trust in the God Emperor and the Imperium of Man as its riteous guardians of all that is awesome and good.

Wrong.

Orks is best. If you lot fink uddawize I got a tad bit uh *pulls out shoota* persuasion fer ya.


hurr hurr hurr
 

Ilikemilkshake

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x EvilErmine x said:
Your brother from Fable 3

You find out that he was only driving the people so hard because he needed the money to pay for the army and forces that would stand against the shadows that would kill them all. So yeah he was a right bastard but his intentions were good. That's why I let him go in the end
The game had to go and ruin it when you take over by saying that making people work so they would live was "Evil" but letting everyone run around in blissful ignorance to their doom was "Good" meaning you had to go with "Neutral-i-suppose?" funding the damn kingdom on your own if you didn't want become your brother/let everyone die.

Also I had thought the same about Saren, how he was just trying to impose some kind of damage limitation on the Reaper invasion.. Which is true but then i remembered him killing hundreds of people on that mission with Anderson 20 years ago and how he's pretty much always been a dick, indoctrination or not... So he's a Bad guy who does bad things.. but some of those bad things are for a good but ultimately misguided cause.
 

BathorysGraveland

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Azar Jahved and The Grandmaster of the Order in The Witcher. Through most of the game you are led to believe that Salamandra is a terrorist organization with complete evil purpose, most likely world domination shit. However, when you finally meet and converse with The Grandmaster, you learn that, while their methods are morally questionable, their goals are well intentioned.

The Professor was just an evil bastard through and through, though.

Letho in the second Witcher also comes to mind. He actually swayed me so much that I let him leave in peace on my playthrough. CD Projekt really has a way at making great antagonists.
 

Dandark

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Don Savik said:
Any Warhammer or 40k game would have you trust in the God Emperor and the Imperium of Man as its riteous guardians of all that is awesome and good.

Wrong.

Orks is best. If you lot fink uddawize I got a tad bit uh *pulls out shoota* persuasion fer ya.


hurr hurr hurr
There is only one faction in the 40k universe that can be considered good, and it is impossible to argue against them as their methods of persuasion are incredibly effective.

 

Cyrus Hanley

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Oct 13, 2010
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Big Boss of the Metal Gear series.

I learned he wasn't the real "bad guy" with the prequel trilogy (Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker). Going back over the old games (Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake), all the evidence (or lack thereof) was there. The only reason I ever perceived Big Boss as a bad guy was because the United States government painted him as such and it wasn't until I got to play as him that I saw how much assholery he had to put up with. And, to grind salt into the wound, they were still assholes to him when he left the military and formed his own globetrotting mercenary group.

Eventually, he manages to create his own independent nation and, 21 years later, they send his cloned progeny to infiltrate his compound in South Africa and fuck shit up because they're afraid of the weapon of mass destruction he hasn't even finished constructing, their own WMDs notwithstanding. Then they act surprised when he escapes and creates another state in Asia, kidnaps a scientist who created algae that can produce cheap oil and holds the world's oil supply hostage because he's fed up with their bullshit. So, again, they send Solid Snake to infiltrate the fortress only this time he burns Big Boss to a crisp with an aerosol can and a cigarette lighter. But, instead of killing him, they keep what's left of his body in limbo between life and death, presumably because they get some kind of sick thrills out of it.

TL;DR He wasn't a bad guy at all.
 

nuba km

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3 legged goat said:
The Empire in Skyrim. They are made to be the bad guys in the beginning but they are actually trying to do their best to maintain stability. All the bad stuff that the Empire does is because of the Elves. Ulfric Stormcloak is the real bad guy.
yea I never got why people sided with the storm cloaks, they are a bunch of racists that want to kick the other races out of skyrim and ulfric just killed the king and hence claims the throne. The empire doesn't even like the group of elitist high elves they just use them to piss of the storm cloaks.

OT: I am normally in the middle of playing or watching something when I realize the 'bad guy' is actually the good guy, sometimes I realize straight away.
 

Squilookle

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At the risk of opening a big can of worms here:

Just about every regular Joe German soldier in every WW2 shooter I've played.

Yeah, I went there.
 

pffh

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Squilookle said:
At the risk of opening a big can of worms here:

Just about every regular Joe German soldier in every WW2 shooter I've played.

Yeah, I went there.
Went where? To the the fact that most german soldiers weren't Nazis but normal scared human beings and that neither sides soldiers really wanted to fight? Well that is fairly common knowledge that only an idiot would try to refute.