r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Outrageous_Gene_7652 • 20h ago

Characters A genuinely good hero gets crushed by responsibility and slowly goes insane

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Hal Jordan (Green Lantern): Civilian life in shambles, overworked superhero life, spiralling mental health for years and unable to cope with the fact that he was'nt able to save his city because he was on another mission, Hal loses his mind, literally trying to bring back the dead, killing the entire corp and later literally erasing space and time to rewrite the universe

Zero (To Be Hero X): Being the first hero of the world and being worshipped for being so since he was 10, Zero achieved Godhood as a 15 year old but ultimately the pressure got to him and he went mad at 17 and nearly caused the end of humanity.

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u/BlankHeroineFluff 17h ago

The Plutonian/Dan Hartigan/Tony (Irredeemable) plays this straight while also being a subversion of it. He was once hailed as humanity's greatest hero until he fell from grace after cracking from the responsibility plus several other reasons and became a murderous monster responsible for wiping out tens of thousands of people for petty reasons. You later learn that this guy didn't do all those heroic deeds for altruistic reasons but out of a selfish and pathological need to be loved, which would be sympathetic in most cases, but in his case, it only serves to reinforce just how monstrous and egotistic he is considering the lengths he went to terrorize people because he couldn't handle criticism, big or small.

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u/Thamnophis660 15h ago

So essentially he's TV show Homelander

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u/BlankHeroineFluff 15h ago

Basically, yeah. TV Homelander got most of his characterization from The Plutonian, not the other way around. Though in terms of sheer scale in atrocities, Plutonian still comes off as the worse one between them (there's nothing topping Plutonian pettily killing billions of people in Singapore by sinking their country just because their ambassador lied to him out of fear and desperation) despite having a more sympathetic backstory than Homelander since after Plutonian's massive crashout, not much can have the power to rein him in unlike TV Homelander.