Heinousness Retcon

6 Following

• Baki the Grappler: Early on, Baki's dad Yujiro Hanma is portrayed as a vile, remorseless sociopath who does whatever he wants For the Evulz, including such irredeemable acts as killing the mother of one of his sons while said son (who Yujiro had just brutalized) watches helplessly, and raping the mother of his other son to conceive him, and who doesn't hesitate to turn either of said sons to paste, all while sporting a disturbing Slasher Smile, and the story treats him accordingly as a horrible monster. Later on, though, Yujiro gets portrayed relatively more sympathetically as someone who's both Lonely at the Top practicing some Tough Love so at least one of his sons will reach somewhere near his level of strength, and kinda-sorta philosophical about the whole thing, with himself having had a complicated history with his own dad, while his earlier atrocities get swept under the rug and are quietly forgotten, EVEN BY HIS VICTIMIZED SONS.
• Ludwig Revolution: Early in the series, jealous of Lisette's (Red Riding Hood) closeness to Wilhelm, Prince Ludwig tricks her into killing her parents by making her believe they sold her and her grandmother as sacrifices to the Wolf, in exchange for a bag of gold. Realising this made the character come across as irredeemable, later works retconned her parents into being horrifically abusive towards her, even forcing Lisette into prostitution from a young age.

• Aquaman: Black Manta subverts this. In the 2000s, he was retconned to have a case of Hollywood Autism, which seemed to be the root cause of his villainy, along with the horrible treatment he received because of his disorder as a child. All of this served to make Manta for once seem like a sympathetic villain who was pushed into evil by elements out of his control, and after being magically cured of his autism he willingly chose to become an ally of Aquaman. Only for Manta to turn traitor and backstab Aquaman at the first good opportunity, revealing that his villainy actually had nothing to do with his autism at all.
  Black Manta: Y'see, deep down, in my most secret heart of hearts, I'm still a totally depraved sonofabitch whose main goal in life is to watch you die. Slowly and painfully. Just like your kid.
• Batman:
  • Batman (Tom King): In the "War of Jokes and Riddles" storyline, when she is recruited onto Riddler's side for the gang war, Poison Ivy murders a group of assassins — all of whom had loved ones and families — sent by Carmine Falcone to kill the Riddler. In the "Everyone Loves Ivy" storyline not so long after, Ivy is portrayed explicitly as having been a victim of the Riddler's manipulations, and was disgusted by all the senseless death and violence that happened as a result of the war. And in the end, Batman determines that Ivy never killed anyone to begin with; Riddler was the one who actually executed all of the assassins, and framed Ivy for it.
  • The Killing Joke: In a possible backstory before becoming the Joker, he was shown to be a loving and caring husband and one of the key things that caused him to snap was the loss of his wife and unborn son, and Alan Moore's notes state he didn't think of the man Pre-Joker as abusive. Batman: Three Jokers presents this backstory as true for the "Comedian" Joker — and that he was indeed abusive to his wife, resulting in her faking her death, so she could leave him and raise their son without him.
  • The New 52 version of Mr. Freeze controversially retooled his backstory to make him far less sympathetic. He maintains his motivation of wanting to cure his cryogenically frozen wife Nora, but anything noble about this goal is just a self-aggrandizing lie: in fact, New 52 Nora is not his wife, but a random cryogenically frozen woman he had become obsessed with, to the point of deluding himself to believe they were in a relationship. And even before he became a supervillain, Freeze was a disturbed individual who killed his own mother by shoving her into a freezing lake. Once the DC Rebirth era began, these nastier elements to Freeze's character were done away with and his original sympathetic motives of saving his wife were restored.
  • The 1987 graphic novel Batman: Son of the Demon had Bruce and Talia conceive a child. When Bruce nearly dies protecting her and the baby, Talia lies that she suffered a miscarriage and puts the baby up for adoption. When Grant Morrison integrated the events of this story into main continuity, they retconned Talia into drugging and raping Bruce to conceive Damian whom she raised with the intent of him taking over the League of Assassins.
• Eclipso: After spending the first three decades as a C-list villain and the dark half of Dr. Bruce Gordon, he was retconned in the '90s as actually being the immensely powerful Spirit of God's Wrath (making him the Evil Counterpart to The Spectre, the Spirit of God's Vengeance). Initially, it was claimed he was only pretending to be a minor threat to throw the heroes off guard, though in later appearances this was forgotten and he was treated as always being a serious deal.
• The Immortal Hulk: In his initial appearance, the Devil Hulk was represented as the darkest part of Bruce's psyche, a twisted monster who wants to destroy the entire world to "protect" Bruce, who he addresses with Terms of Endangerment. In this series, it's revealed the Devil Hulk legitimately cares about Bruce, whose fears and desire for Brian's love warped what Devil looked like (something he's tremendously irritated about). The part about destroying the world was still true, though, and not entirely metaphorical.
  Devil Hulk: Suddenly I'm a giant lizard person and everything I say comes out creepy. I blame Sunday School.
• The Incredible Hulk (1968): During Bill Mantlo's run, Bruce's abusive father Brian Banner is introduced, and it's made clear he hit both Bruce and his wife Rebecca. Peter David's run a few years later upped this to Brian flat-out murdering Rebecca when she tried to escape with Bruce, making his later defensiveness about his father even more alarming.
• Justice League of America: Whilst Dr. Light was always a supervillain (including being a literal case of Light Is Not Good, given not just his power, but the fact he's a scientist named "Arthur Light"), in an attempt to explain his drop from being a formidable adversary of the Justice League to an idiotic punching bag, Identity Crisis (2004) retconned him to have originally been a monstrous Serial Rapist, explaining that In-Universe his Villain Decay over the years was the result of a group of Leaguers' effectively lobotomizing him in response to him raping Sue Dibny.
• Spider-Man:
  • Norman Osborn killing Gwen Stacy just to hurt Spider-Man was bad enough, but Sins Past retcons the reason behind this action to being even more heinous. It is revealed that Norman had an affair with Gwen while both were in emotional turmoil — Gwen due to her father's death and Norman because of his son Harry nearly dying from a drug overdose. This affair resulted in Gwen giving birth to twins which aged faster than normal due to a mutation in their DNA they'd inherited from Norman; with the implication made that Norman's actual motives for killing Gwen were to cover up their affair and gain sole custody of their children, rather than just doing it to hurt Spider-Man. After Gwen's death, Norman found the twins, raised them as assassins, and poisoned their minds against Spider-Man making them believe he'd killed their mother. Sinister War would undo this with its own retcon that Harry was The Man Behind the Man (more or less), having arranged Mysterio to hypnotize Fake Memories of the affair into Norman and Mary Jane Watson, when the children were actually clones created from Norman and Gwen's DNA.
  • Doctor Octopus's first love was a woman named Mary Alice who later died of HIV. In Superior Spider-Man Team-Up Issue #11-12, it is revealed that Norman Osborn was the one who infected her with HIV because he saw her as a distraction to Otto.
• Teen Titans: Geoff Johns' run revealed that not only was Deathstroke behind Cassandra Cain's Face–Heel Turn by brainwashing her with a special drug but he had also done this to Tara Markov in order to use her against the Titans. Keep in mind that in the original story, Slade was in a sexual relationship with the teenage Tara yet the story treated him as the more sympathetic of the two.
• X-Men: During the 1980s, Magneto joined the team, and while uncertain about it his inner monologue makes it very clear it is genuine. During the 90s, a change of writer occurs, and it's claimed during this time Magneto was secretly swiping stuff from the X-Mansion.

• Super RWBY Sisters: During his stint as the Big Bad of "RWBY: Winter's Dusk", Dr. Eggman's plot is treated by everyone, both by the narrative and the heroes, as yet another Take Over the World scheme where Eggman doesn't care who he ends up hurting so long as he gets Eggmanland in the outcome, doing things such as turning people into brainwashed robots or forcing a Brainwashed Pyrrha to nuke her hometown. "Frontiers" reveals that, in actuality, Eggman was being a Well-Intentioned Extremist, thinking that the only way to keep everyone safe from Salem was to turn them all into robots and nuke Remnant in order to hopefully kill her and he was not the one to give the order to nuke Argus. This makes his decision to become a Retired Monster and assist the heroes until Salem is beaten easier to swallow.

Infinity Train

• Infinity Train: Voyage of Wisteria: Throughout Blossoming Trail, The Apex were presented as The Dreaded, widely feared and despised for their tendency to murder Denizens for their own sick amusement. Come the sequel, however, Charlie and Vaggie investigate and discover that most of these claims were Malicious Slander... and many of the actual instances of them killing Denizens were done in self-defense.

Miraculous Ladybug

• Karmic Backlash: The context for Marinette and her group's actions in The Karma of Lies has been changed in this story a bit, putting their actions in a more negative light:
  • In the original, Adrien went into the final fight against Mayura without anyone else around to back him up, thus taking a huge risk just so he could show off and convince people he was still heroic. As a result, when Mayura stole his ring, there was nobody who was close enough to see what really happened; Juleka and Rose only saw the theft by watching Nadja Chamack's helicopter broadcast, and Marinette and the other heroes only heard about the theft second-hand after Juleka phoned them. In this story, however, the original events are retconned such that Juleka and Rose were indeed close enough to the fight that they not only saw Adrien losing his ring in person but also saw that Mayura stole it (as opposed to Adrien just handing it over, which is what the people watching the broadcast thought happened). Juleka and Rose thus look more heinous for not saying anything since, in this story, they had firsthand knowledge that Adrien was innocent.
  • The story uses a direct quote from the second-to-last chapter of the original where Marinette says "that's before you lost the ring" to point out that Marinette at least had suspicions that Adrien had been tricked or didn't give the ring willingly. This makes her look worse for not correcting the record, since she showed that she likely knew, or at the very least suspected, that Adrien was innocent in abetting Hawkmoth and Mayura.
  • At the end of the original story, Marinette told Luka that she was unable to come up with the evidence needed to have Lila arrested and so had to settle for just pulling a Paranoia Gambit on her. In this story, however, it's explicitly stated by several characters that Marinette could have had Lila arrested by using her magic powers to come up with evidence (e.g., by using Fluff to go back in time and videotape Lila doing the thefts, or by creating an akuma or sentimonster with the power to find stolen goods and/or proof of crimes) but simply chose not to, which makes Marinette come across as more callous than in the original.
  • Karmic Backlash has characters say a few times that Marinette's situation in the beginning of the original story wasn't nearly as bad as the situation that Adrien wound up by the original story's end; her class had been turned against her but she wasn't hated or even disliked by all of Paris, while Adrien ended the original story despised by virtually everyone. A major point in the original story was that Marinette's situation was awful precisely because it could result in her being akumatized, which would add in some additional major trauma. It was stated that the fear of being akumatized itself caused Marinette immense additional pain and angst in the first chapters of the original story, even pushing her into implementing a last-ditch all-or-nothing gambit to stop Hawk Moth for fear that, if she didn't do it, she would eventually crack, get akumatized, and bring Hawk Moth closer to permanent victory by giving him her Miraculous. Therefore, the story justified that Adrien's suffering, as bad as it was, only took place after Hawk Moth was safely defeated and there was no chance of Adrien being akumatized, making it less bad than Marinette's in at least one major respect. Karmic Backlash points out two potential problems with this stance: First, as stated by Alix, that fear of getting akumatized was actually the perfect loophole for Marinette to use her miraculous to expose Lila's lies without counting as abusing it, since it would be to prevent the saviour from falling prey to the villain. And second, Adrien points out that if nothing else, Marinette could have switched classes or schools earlier to escape her toxic situation if it really was that bad, instead of just staying in it waiting for something horrible to happen.
  • Plagg also gets hit with this due to being in a position to know that Adrien wasn't trying to give his Ring to Mayura due to likely being able to see Adrien's expression of betrayal before Mayura fused his and Dussu's powers. It's framed in the story that Plagg didn't say anything to Marinette about this as part of Adrien's "The Reason You Suck" Speech to him, making him look worse in the context of this story.

• Saw: Zig-zagged with John Kramer. In the first three films up to his death, he was consistently depicted as a fearsome yet professional mastermind who abducted people who had done something "wrong" but relatively light in their life, taunted or showed notable sadism about their struggles and (almost always) incoming fates, and wasn't above putting victims' relatives and children in harm's way. What was described of his backstory did little to garner him sympathy. Starting with the flashbacks he appears in from Saw IV onwards, while his previous acts and events are still acknowledged from time to time, he's portrayed in a more sympathetic light, with extensions to his backstory that Retcon supplementary details from the Saw: Rebirth comic, and him appearing to have more genuinely good intentions as he's said or shown to be more restricted to outright criminals for the most part. That said, the present plots clarify (likely unintentionally on the producers' part) that he's noticeably gotten even worse, having pettier targets and more Kick the Dog acts in his posthumous schemes.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek (2009): Nero is a Romulan miner driven mad by Romulus's destruction from a supernova, who tries to kill Spock Prime, whom he blames, along with the Federation, for leaving his people to die, in a fit of rage and despair over the destruction of his homeworld, only to be dragged through a singularity over a hundred years into the past. Instead of realizing that he has a chance to save Romulus, he instead comes out of the rift swinging, destroying the Kelvin before retreating to search for Spock Prime, stewing in his hatred for twenty-five years so he can inflict the same pain on him, culminating with destroying the planet Vulcan. Later, Star Trek: Picard revealed that the Federation really did leave the Romulans to die, a decision that disgusted now-Admiral Picard so much that he resigned from Starfleet. Meaning Nero's hatred, though seriously misplaced, isn't unjustified.
  • Star Trek Into Darkness: Khan Noonien Singh is accused by Spock of having intended eugenics-motivated genocide on all those he considered inferior during his reign. This contradicts his presentation as a Benevolent Dictator in his introduction in "Space Seed", with it being stated that under his rule there were no mass killings and no wars that weren't started by other parties, his status even being a plot point as it causes the crew of the Enterprise to underestimate how ruthless and power-hungry Khan really is. That the events take place in an Alternate Timeline should have no effect on this as Khan's time was centuries before the Point of Divergence (Nero travelling back in time and destroying the U.S.S. Kelvin).
• Star Wars: The Sequel Trilogy does this with Ben Solo, aka Kylo Ren. The Force Awakens states that Ben's fall to the Dark Side involved him attacking his teacher Luke Skywalker, and leading the Knights of Ren in slaughtering all of Luke's other students. Then The Last Jedi reveals his attack on Luke wasn't unprovoked. Luke had sensed the Dark Side within Ben and considered killing him just long enough to ignite his lightsaber, before thinking better and lowering his weapon — but that was still enough to make Ben think he was being attacked and lash out. The movie mocks the idea that this sympathetic backstory absolves Ben of his later crimes. Upon learning about Ben's past, Rey becomes convinced she can redeem him, and this fails spectacularly. Then the tie-in comics leading up to the release of The Rise of Skywalker further absolved Ben Solo by revealing he didn't actually kill Luke's other students. The Knights of Ren did that without Ben's input, aided by a sudden thunderstorm (implied to be caused by Supreme Leader Snoke). Presumably, this was done to make Ben's actual for-real redemption at the film's end more palatable to audiences.
• Thor: In the first Thor film Loki appears to have been a decent kid and maintained a close relationship with his brother, only growing treacherous in adulthood due to a combination of envy, a misguided attempt to restrain his brother, and to appease his father. Both Thor and the Warriors Three express disbelief in the first film at the possibility that Loki could be a traitor. Come Thor: Ragnarok it's claimed that Loki has always had a treacherous side since childhood, with Thor relating an incident when they were 8 and Loki stabbed him as a "prank".

• Alice, Girl from the Future: The recurring Space Pirates duo Rat and Jolly U are a lot crueler in the first three books that feature them. They use blackmail and torture, occupy peaceful planets, and even try wiping out entire planets' populations. Further on into the franchise, they suddenly become much nicer without anyone In-Universe acknowledging it. In the later books, for example, Alice muses that Rat and Jolly U would never imprison anyone for the sake of obtaining secrets of new technology (never mind that it's exactly what happens in The Voyage of Alice), and Rat is furious at planetary tyrants who spent their lives conquering and oppressing others (having apparently forgotten he did the same some books earlier).
• The Belgariad: A frequent criticism of the books was that the series treats Zedar, one of Big Bad Torak's Disciples as unredeemable, even though it seemed apparent that he was under Torak's control and even though the series takes place in a universe where You Can't Fight Fate, and therefore his worst actions had to happen in order for the good guys to triumph in the end. David and Leigh Eddings thus felt compelled to address this in the prequel, Belgarath the Sorceror, which reveals that Zedar was always arrogant and obsessed with power, even back when he was a Disciple of Aldur, and then he was the one responsible for driving Belmakor, a briefly mentioned Disciple of Aldur, to suicide.
• Brig Scarlet Flamingo: In the earlier version, the crew of the eponymous ship, whilst always charming Corsairs, suddenly becomes a lot more moral at the end of the first part. In particular: in the first chapters, their captain has to stand guard over the female passengers of plundered ships, but starting from around chapter fourteen, the whole crew suddenly completely agrees that Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil. Especially noticeable is the case of Joseph: in chapter eight, he laments that he couldn't get his hands on a pretty girl like Yvonne, and in a prequel, written later but taking place weeks earlier, he admires her friendly, gentle personality as much as her looks and ceases all thoughts of even flirting with her when he finds out she is happily engaged. Word of God admits their plans for the story were altered mid-writing and they opted to write new chapters rather than revise the existing ones.
• Kate Daniels: Hugh D'Ambray starts off as The Dragon to Kate's evil estranged wizard-king dad Roland, who is, while honorable in some ways, a brutal and ruthless killer who will not stop at torture to get what he wants. When Hugh becomes a more sympathetic character, new details are added that soften the worst of his actions (ie, he wasn't actually torturing a teenager, he just told Kate he was in the hopes she would reveal herself by coming to stop him), and play up the extent to which Roland mind-controlled him.
• Land of Oz: In the second book, it's revealed the Wizard overthrew King Pastoria in order to rule Oz and gave away the infant Princess Ozma to an old sorceress. When he reappears in the fourth book, it was retconned such that it was the Wicked Witches who did the evil deeds and all the Wizard did was rule Oz in the royal family's absence. This inconsistency was a long-standing mystery in the Oz Books; Hugh Pendexter III, in his short story, "Oz and the Three Witches" (published in Oz-Story 6, by Hungry Tiger Press, in 2000) manages to come up with a reasonable explanation.
• Warrior Cats: In Thistleclaw's first appearances, he's simply a bit of a War Hawk who, despite his aggressive nature, truly loved his mate and son and was loyal to his Clan in his own way. Fans were surprised when he ended up in the Dark Forest, so the authors made a point of explaining why he'd be there: in later books taking place in the same time period, he was depicted training in the Dark Forest while alive and using the illegal moves he learned there, encouraging his apprentice to blind his own son, calling his mate weak and not long after her death trying to persuade a she-cat younger than his son to be his new mate.

• Battlestar Galactica: Brother Cavil is introduced at the end of Season 2 as an Affably Evil Cylon who whilst still a murderous Knight Templar (like all Cylons), still comes across as friendly and even helps Deck Chief Tyrol come to terms with his psychological issues whilst undercover as a human clergyman. Come Season 3, he's now a vile, sociopathic piece of work who is suddenly torturing people and ordering mass executions at the drop of a hat, which gets to the point that other Cylons call him out, with no one remarking on this drastic change. Season 4 takes it even further by introducing major retcons that make him the true mastermind and Big Bad behind the Cylons' genocidal attack on humans and he generally Kicks the Dog as much as possible, doing utterly horrific things like gouging out his "father"'s eye and then raping his "mother" out of spite.
• Blindspot: In his first appearance, whilst still goofy and fun-loving, Rich Dotcom is presented as a falsely charming, somewhat creepy criminal mastermind who casually executes one of his own loyal henchmen on the spot for an apparent failure, and is even described by Patterson as one of the most dangerous men alive. Come all subsequent appearances (before his Heel–Face Turn) and he's presented as a genuinely friendly wisecracking hedonist whose crimes are centered in cerebral trickery and avoids violence at all costs, with no one ever remarking on this change. No doubt his unexpected popularity (leading to his drastically increased role) led to this softer characterization.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Warren Mears. When he was introduced in Season 5's "I Was Made to Love You", he was an awkward nerd who made a "perfect" devoted robot girlfriend named April to cope with his loneliness, then callously ditched her upon finding a real girl (whom he eventually managed to alienate), and later was intimidated by Spike into making a robot Buffy. He was, at worst, obnoxious, cowardly, and a bit misogynistic. In Season 6, however, he reappears and takes a deep dive into evil, being the worst member of the Trio and a self-proclaimed Supervillain who becomes an attempted rapist of his ex-girlfriend Katrina, nearly kills Buffy, and actually kills Katrina and Tara. No one ever remarks on his change, with Buffy treating him suddenly trying to kill her as not surprising in the slightest. Originally the writers had intended for him to be a lackey to Tucker Wells, who unlike him (and Jonathan) had been truly malevolent in his introductory episode, but Tucker's actor was unable to reprise his role leading to Warren being drastically rewritten as the leader and Tucker's previously unseen brother Andrew becoming the third member of the group.
  • Amy Madison goes through this in the comic continuation. Although she Took a Level in Jerkass in the last two seasons of the show, her worst actions were trying to ruin Willow's attempts to quit using magic and casting a spell on her that turned her into Warren Mears, which were petty attempts at revenge on Willow for taking so long to undo the spell that turned Amy into a rat, being more powerful than Amy, and being forgiven by everyone for going dark side and trying to destroy the world, but didn't really do any lasting damage. In Season 8, she's retconned as having resurrected Warren and been dating him and acting on his orders during Season 7 and joins the Twilight Group, attempting to kill the Scoobies and the rest of the Slayers, with nobody acknowledging that this is in any way a step up from her previous villainous acts.
• Criminal Minds: Season 1's "The Fox" saw the team facing Karl Arnold, a family annihilator who took families he considered dysfunctional hostage, forced them to treat him as the head of the household for three days before killing them. He's presented as living out a fantasy (his own family leaving him due to his obsessive-compulsive behavior) and killing them in the end due to subconsciously understanding it can't last. Come his return in Season 5's "Outfoxed" Arnold is now also a pedophile who sexually abused the children he took prisoner and it's stated his crimes were purely sexually motivated.
• Desperate Housewives: While he was alive, Rex cheated on Bree, didn't appreciate all the work she did as a homemaker, and was a little too quick to believe she tried to kill him. However, he was still sympathetic because he was proven right that Bree would judge him for his interest in BDSM, her obsessiveness made her housework feel like a burden on her family, and the evidence implicating Bree was compelling. After he died, it was revealed that he used to avoid his mother and make her think Bree was the one cutting her out of his life, flashbacks showed that Rex belittled Bree when she thought she could write a cookbook, and then it was revealed that he had a secret son.
• Doctor Who: This trope hit Sabalom Glitz badly in his third appearance. In his first two appearances, both during the The Trial of a Time Lord arc, he was a Loveable Rogue and Dirty Coward who was there mostly for comic relief. However, in Dragonfire he still has the same characterization but is stated to have sold his crew into slavery and in supplemental materials to have potentially committed statutory rape upon Ace, the Doctor's new companion. Although the Doctor's departing companion Mel goes off with Gltiz at the end of the story despite this. The role was originally written for a completely new more ruthless character (a Space Pirate Razorback) but John Nathan-Turner opted to bring him back as Glitz was popular, leading to the jarring inconsistencies.
  • For at least the first half of Glitz's debut story, he's a Psychopathic Manchild who plans to murder the Doctor as soon as he sees him simply because "I hate competition", cheerily recalls trying to kill a prison psychiatrist and contemplates clearing the way to the Matrix secrets by gassing to death all the innocent people in the way, so his characterisation in "Dragonfire" is probably less heinous!
• Frasier: In a Season 2 episode, Frasier claims that when he first saw his son Frederick, Lilith had threatened to kill Frasier if he went anywhere near the baby. In the episode of Cheers where Lilith gave birth, she said no such thing, as they were depicted as Happily Married. The absolute most she did was tell Frasier she wasn't going to let him live down missing out the birth.
• General Hospital: Soap operas are infamous for their never-ending character retcons, but Franco on General Hospital is a particularly egregious example. Originally created as a means for James Franco (the actor) to have some fun with daytime TV, Franco (the character) was introduced as a sadistic Serial Killer gleefully messing with peoples' heads when he wasn't messing with their lives and bodies. After the character supposedly died and Franco (the actor) had had his fun, the writers decided to revive Franco (the character) as a series regular worthy of some audience sympathy. To that end, a lot of his supposed crimes were revealed to have either been acts of defense or simply not happened. The rest were explained away by a brain tumor, showing Franco really wasn't so evil and sadistic after all!
• Jonathan Creek: Patrick Tyree the antagonist of "The House of Monkeys" is a cerebral extreme animal rights activist who murders Doctor Eliot Strange by sending him a self-titled letter laced with a powerful hallucinogenic that would infect him when he licked the seal. Come his return thirteen years later in "Daemons' Roost" he's now a huge, thuggish psycho whose plan for revenge against Jonathan is no more complicated than stalking and attempting to gut him and his wife with a knife. Likewise, Jonathan and Polly's reactions to simply hearing his name suggest he had always been like this.
• New Tricks: Whilst Ricky Hanson's vicious personality and criminal nature are consistent throughout all his appearances, in Season 4's "Casualty" when breaking into a hospital to kill Jack Halford whilst he's recovering from his injuries, to get to him whilst he's sleeping Hanson attacks the nurse on duty, with there being a clear shot of her lying facedown unconscious or dead before he attempts to suffocate Jack. Yet when Hanson goes to trial for the events in Season 5's "Spare Parts" the entire affair with the nurse is completely forgotten about with not even the heroes bringing it up, enabling Hanson to lie about his intentions and get off due to lack of impartial witnesses.
• Oz: Downplayed. Scott Ross is a total Jerkass and a Neo-Nazi who's a lecherous pervert to boot, but after he died it retroactively became a character trait that he was a compulsive liar prone to outrageous boasts, something he never demonstrated prior.
• Silent Witness: Nikki Alexander's father Victor was a minor recurring character between Season 11 and Season 15 where he's presented as a deadbeat schemer, cheater, and gambler, who is responsible for costing their family everything forcing them to leave South Africa and abandoning them when Nikki was a child. In the present, he is a remorseful man who wants to reconnect with his daughter but can't overcome his old bad habits right up until his death. Come Season 23's "Seven Times" he's suddenly a vicious brute who regularly beat Nikki's mother whilst they were together, despite nothing like this even being hinted before especially in the many times Nikki called him out. Handwaved as Nikki being too young at the time to recognize the signs and only realizing it now due to similarities to the case. Although for several fans this was still hard to swallow, especially considering the number of other cases she'd handled that involved domestic abuse before this one (and the number of explicit flashbacks the episode showed).
• Star Trek:
  • Every subsequent appearance of the Terran Empire after Mirror Mirror tends to dial up its level of evil.
    • Initially they are presented as ruthless space pirates where assassinations are viable means of promotion, but only when it's justifiable, like Kirk defying orders, and failure is disciplined with casual, yet proportionate, implementation of torture.
    • In Star Trek: Enterprise, the crew of the NX-01 are practically at each others throats 23/7, and xenophobia is rampant among the officers who look down on the non-human crew.
    • Star Trek: Discovery ups the ante further, showing the Emperor actually dines on sentient species.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Ferengi go through several versions of their villainy potential getting continually downgraded during the show's run, mostly due to initial plans for them to be the main antagonists of ST:TNG falling through.
    • In "Encounter at Farpoint" it's heavily implied they're notorious for eating other sapient species, something which is never mentioned again throughout the entire franchise (save one novel that retconned it as part of a propaganda campaign to make them look fearsome in preparation for meeting what they believed was a truly insane faction).
    • In their first appearance "The Last Outpost" the Ferengi are effectively caricatures of the worst parts of humanity (to contrast with how advanced and enlightened the crew of the Enterprise is) and presented as manic, vicious, greedy warriors, who are openly hostile and hell-bent on attacking the crew then looting the corpses. Following it being realised they were nowhere near intimidating enough to work in this role, later episodes switched to presenting them as, whilst still potentially dangerous and obsessed with greed, an overall cowardly race who only attacked when they clearly had the upper hand, and whose tactics leaned towards deception, subterfuge, and illegal activities.
    • Come Star Trek: Deep Space Nine the Ferengi were completely reimagined as a Proud Merchant Race whose only focuses are on economic pursuit and profit (albeit with not many moral scruples), with Quark outright boasting that the Ferengi had never engaged in active warfare during their entire existence, instead using their economic skills to force any opponents into making quick (and often highly profitable) deals. Neither Chief O'Brien nor Worf, both of whom were aboard the Enterprise and involved in several Ferengi attacks, ever called him out on the discrepancy.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • Joran, the secret former host of the Dax symbiont, whilst always a murderer and presented as psychologically unstable, in his origin "Equilibrium" was a regular killer with only one victim, someone he'd had a motive to kill. In all his later appearances he has more victims and is full-blown deranged, with even Quark somehow knowing it, to the point that Ezri summons Joran to help her get an insight into the mind of a psycho when there is a Serial Killer loose on the station.
    • During Season 4, the Klingon chancellor Gowron starts a war with Cardassia, convinced that they've undergone a Dominion-engineered coup, and then starts a simultaneous war with the Federation when they refuse to support him. In the Season 4 finale, "Broken Link", Odo joins the Great Link and learns that Gowron has been replaced by a Changeling impostor. So, Season 5's premiere episode, "Apocalypse Rising" has Sisko and several officers, including Odo, infiltrating a Klingon space station to expose Gowron as an impostor. But Odo discovers that Gowron's military advisor, General Martok, is in fact the true Changeling impostor, realizing the Dominion wanted to turn the Klingons and Federation against one another so that they'd both be too weak to defeat them, and the Martok Changeling gets killed. Later that season, Worf and Garak discover that the true Martok is alive in a Dominion prison camp, who's rescued and eventually becomes Worf's blood brother. And chancellor, after Worf defeats Gowron in combat.
  • Across the entire franchise, Khan Noonien Singh gets this. In his first introduction in TOS's "Space Seed", he's presented as one of several 20th century despots, albeit the most successful one of his time period. There's an implication he was even a bit of a Benevolent Dictator, with Scotty and Kirk both expressing admiration for the man. Bones goes out of his way to mention that "There were no massacre under his rule". He's also such small fry that figuring out his identity takes the bulk of the episode (and Khan's not putting a lot of effort into hiding who he is, basically just refusing to give his last name), and the crew has to hold a presentation to fill in everyone on just who the guy is. Basically, he's an historical footnote. One of many dictators during a troubled period of history. This continues into Wrath of Khan, where anyone not familiar with the events of "Space Seed" doesn't know who he is - like Chekov's new captain. Later series paint him as Trek's version of Hitler. His name and deeds are now infamous among the Federation - particularly humanity. They basically are a byword for evil. He's so horrible that centuries after his time, Starfleet still has laws on the books against genetic engineering just because they don't want another Khan to occur. In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Una recounts how the prejudice against genetically modified people is so strong she and her family endured enough persecution to meet Starfleet's criteria to count as refugees. La'an, Khan's descendant, mentions how her family name got her bullied in school despite not being an augment herself, and she has a lot of baggage about augments due to said bullying. Federation Admirals admit that the Federation's laws against genetic modification are discriminatory, but humanity is still too traumatized by Khan's actions (which, again, took place centuries ago) that removing them is just not feasible. A time travel episode features an alternate timeline where the Point of Divergence is that Khan was killed as a child, and the absence of his reign apparently changed history so much that the Federation never formed, and Earth is a wasteland due to wars between humans.
• Supernatural:
  • "The Kids Are Alright": Upon being prompted to investigate them by Ruby, Sam discovers that Azazel had his mother's family, the Campbells, massacred to the point where he can't find any members who are still alive. Come Season 6 and suddenly there are quite a lot of living Campbells, with them being able to pull together at least a dozen or so members, and at least two being specially stated to be the brothers' third cousins. At no point does either brother ask how they survived or even bring up the massacre.
  • "Are You There God? It's Me, Dean Winchester": The Vengeful Ghost of Victor Henriksen claims that Lilith slowly tortured him and all the other innocent officers to death after Sam and Dean left them in the police station, especially mentioning one poor woman she brutally flayed before his eyes. However, whilst very much in character for Lilith, when we saw the event play out in the previous season's "Jus In Bello", she simply blew up the building they were in, killing everyone instantly.
• Timeless: Flynn, the main antagonist of Season 1, is presented as an international terrorist who attempts to undo several major historical events and casually murders several innocent people, sometimes for no reason. Come Season 2, the protagonists learn that Flynn did all that he did in an effort to defeat the true villain of the show, the Rittenhouse organization. Flynn and the protagonists then join forces, and all of Flynn's past crimes are mostly swept under the rug. From that point on, Flynn is much less bloodthirsty, and some of the other characters even develop a close friendship with him.
• Veronica Mars: In Season 1, Veronica investigates the circumstances around the night she was raped and confronts Cassidy Casablancas, one of her initial main suspects. He admits that his Big Brother Bully tried to pressure him to do it, but he couldn't go through with it. This is accepted, with him just being a secondary character who is quickly dismissed from the investigation and has no further role in the plot. Come Season 2, and Cassidy is revised to now be the calculating Big Bad of the season who is the mastermind behind several murders. With Veronica randomly realizing that he was lying to her before and really did rape her, all delivered in a single line.
• Young Sheldon: In The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon reveals that he always knocks three times because he accidentally walked in on his father, George, having sex with another woman, suggesting that he was a cheater. In the final season of Young Sheldon, we find out that the other woman was his mother, Mary, who was wearing German clothing and a wig and was roleplaying, so Sheldon assumed she was another woman since it was in the dark and he couldn't see. In general, George is subject to this a fair amount, as Big Bang Theory Sheldon often talks disparagingly about his father as a raging alcoholic who shoots television sets with firearms, while in Young Sheldon, George is kind-hearted and perhaps the most level-headed member of the family.

• Magic: The Gathering: Vraska's early appearances painted her as a straight villain, with one story having her try to force Jace into helping her take over Ravnica, with the implication she's just power hungry. In Ixalan, however, she's retconned as being more of a Well-Intentioned Extremist who wants to fix the very real systemic problems on Ravnica, but believed Jace would never willingly help her do that, and from then on she's portrayed as more of an Anti-Hero and a champion of the oppressed. She still killed a lot of people, however.
• Warhammer 40,000: Early editions strongly implied that the Imperium of Man was quite sexist (Sulla is said to be the first woman to attain the rank of Lord General after ten thousand years of the Imperium existing, a blurb in one of the first Dark Eldar armybooks was from an imperial character treating men and women fighting on the frontline of the Dark eldars as "further proof of their degeneracy", and so on), only for later material to show women in various positions of power as well as serving on the frontline without facing much, if any, prejudice for it, and no mention of the sexism of earlier editions.

• Simon Boccanegra: Paolo Albiani is introduced as a cunning politician, morally grey but ultimately good enough for Doge Simon Boccanegra to make him his trusted advisor. A Time Skip of twenty-five years later, he is suddenly so evil that he kidnaps Amelia Grimaldi when the latter refuses to marry him and then poisons Simon after the latter condemns the kidnapping. And on top of that? Apparently, his villainy is so obvious that when Amelia first meets Simon and tells him Paolo is a wicked Gold Digger (and at that point, she has seen Paolo in person for several seconds), Simon immediately believes her, even though before the Time Skip, he treats Paolo as firmly an ally.

• Ace Combat has very different portrayals of the nation of Belka in different games.
  • In their first appearance in The Unsung War, they're Always Chaotic Evil sore losers who nuked their own cities rather than accept defeat, and have worked ever since to corrupt the victorious nations of Osea and Yuktobania, and set them against each other with a series of False Flag atrocities (including civilian targets).
  • The next game, The Belkan War, is a much more nuanced look at Belka: it did invade its neighbours, but Osea opportunistically turned their "liberation" into an excuse for a full scale invasion and land grab of Belka in turn, and forced them to accept a deeply one-sided treaty that failed to solve any of the economic issues that set off the war to begin with.
  • Skies Unknown features a pair of Belkan characters who worked for a similar conspiracy to the one in The Unsung War, but reject their ultranationalistic ideology after witnessing the sheer devastation their role in the Lighthouse War has caused and being subjected to a Breaking Speech.
• Donkey Kong Bananza darkly retcons the motivations of King K. Rool. In the Donkey Kong Country games, K. Rool and the Kremling Krew were obsessed with stealing the Kongs' banana hoard for no adequately explained reason. Bananza definitively establishes that K. Rool's motivation for his various banana thefts is that he loves eating them, much like Donkey Kong himself — only he enjoys overripe, rotten banana mush. So much so that his ultimate goal is to use the power of the Banandium Root to turn the entire planet into banana mush for him to devour.
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard does this to various factions from the Dragon Age franchise's past.
  • The Antivan Crows are presented in Dragon Age: Origins as a group of assassins who buy child slaves, force them into becoming assassins, with the threat that they will be murdered in turn if they ever fail a contract. They will take any contract so long as the money is good. By comparison, in Veilguard, they are shown mostly as La Résistance and most of their assassination targets we hear about are really bad people who deserve it. The game does try to square the difference by mentioning that the events of Origins lead to a shakeup in how the organization is run, and the specific House Zevran came from is not shown in Veilguard.
  • Tevinter in previous games is presented as heavily xenophobic towards Elves (whom they regularly enslaved) and Qunari (whom they've been at war with for centuries), to the point where members of either races should feel unsafe traveling the streets of the capital. Slavery is also widespread and so omnipresent that in Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dorian, who is otherwise very critical about his own country and an outspoken reformist, struggles to see Slavery as a moral evil (he does get there eventually). Similarly, Blood magic is widespread, even if there's a taboo about discussing it publicly. Tevinter also holds great resentment and posturing towards Southern Thedas, seeing them as primitive and backwards. In Veilguard, a lot of these elements are downplayed since the only area of Minrathos available to explore is Dock Town, the poorer side of the capitol which has Elven and Qunari residents aplenty who go about their day without discrimination, showing the social divide in the Imperium. While slavery is still mentioned as a common practice the only on screen slave owners and traders are all Venatori, an extremist faction of Tevinter supremacists.
• Fire Emblem:
  • The remake of Fire Emblem Gaiden, Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadow of Valentia, establishes that the gods Mila and Duma were succumbing to madness by the time of the story and no one noticed, making Rudolf's actions look much more Necessarily Evil than they did in the original.
  • Zig-zagged with Ashnard. Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance implies that he instigated the Serenes Massacre as part of his plan to get Lehran's Medallion and a Heron who could release the goddess within. The sequel, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, reveals that it was actually the Begnion Senate who orchestrated the massacre (which is more understandable, given their already established Fantastic Racism and Heron slave trade). However, Radiant Dawn also establishes that the "plague" Ashnard engineered to get rid of everyone else in line for the throne was via Blood Pact, meaning a lot of innocents must have died in the process, far more than previously implied. It also establishes he was an Abusive Parent who married a Dragon Laguz in hopes their child would be powerful, and when the child seemed normal he abandoned them both. So while his heinousness was downplayed for one event, it was ramped up in other ways.
• Half-Life: Alyx depicts the oppression of the civilian population of Earth by the Combine as not nearly as overt as in Half-Life 2. While citizens are still mostly limited to eating meager rations and live in fear of the police, they're not forced to wear uniforms like in 2, seem to have the ability to live private lives and keep pets, and are generally less apprehensive about walking the streets and mingling with each other. Such a detail might be attributed to Alyx taking place earlier in the Combine's occupation.
• The Legend of Zelda: Ganon/Ganondorf is the only recurring character to be the same guy (barring the rare occasions of being him being reincarnated) throughout the centuries of the convoluted Zelda timeline. This means, however, that his heinousness is subjected to revisions and retcons from Nintendo trying to fine tune the definitive depiction of the Great King of Evil.
  • In The Legend of Zelda I and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Ganon is depicted as a generic Maou the Demon King bent on taking over Hyrule through his army of monsters.
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past reveals Ganon's backstory as being once a human thief who was transformed into a Pig Man demon after touching the Triforce. The game's manual elaborates that Ganon, as Ganondorf, was so evil that he murdered his own followers to claim the Triforce uncontested and nearly wiped out the Hyrulean Army with his huge army of monsters to conquer Hyrule before being sealed away by the Seven Sages.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time takes place in A Link to the Past's backstory, showcasing how Ganondorf stole the Triforce in the first place. However, the game downplays or outright omits Ganondorf's heinous actions. He mostly works alone to steal the Triforce, never needing to shed the blood of his followers to get it, and he easily takes over Hyrule by chasing everyone out of Hyrule Castle Town with his newfound powers. Though he delights in terrorizing the people of Hyrule, he mostly leaves them alone and only fights Link rather than the Hyrulean Army before the Seven Sages sealed him away. Even the Gerudo tribe that he came from is depicted being less evil than what A Link to the Past described them as, with a small faction loyal to his Number Two secretly in opposition to Ganondorf's villainy and others seen celebrating his defeat at the end of the game. Supplemental materials such as The Legend of Zelda: Encyclopedia add that, after Zelda sends Link back in time, the Gerudo even collectively denounce Ganondorf once his schemes are discovered, and they end up reforming and becoming unambiguous allies of Hyrule by the time of The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures several centuries later.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker adds a wrinkle to Ocarina of Time's Ganondorf by revealing that Ganondorf desires the land of Hyrule for being a peaceful and lush place that offers more than the harsh desert he grew up in. In contrast, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess depicts Ganondorf in a far darker light, with him being described as a "Dark Lord" and "Demon King" who seemingly is destined to bear the Triforce of Power as part of the reincarnation cycle that binds him to Link and Zelda. Some of this can be chalked up to how these are two different incarnations of the same person whose experiences and motivations diverged due to the timeline split: The Wind Waker Ganondorf is one who was sealed away and humbled by his defeat in Ocarina (resulting in a more philosophical and pragmatic — but still quite evil — take on the character), while the Twilight Princess Ganondorf was subjected to Precrime Arrest before he could obtain the Triforce, abandoned by his people, nearly successfully executed by the Sages, and then trapped in the Twilight Realm for a century or so as he bided his time and fed upon the hatred of the Twili. As such, while one Ganondorf has had time to reflect upon his actions (despite it doing nothing to curb his lust for power), wants to bring back Hyrule no matter the cost, and has a surprisingly impersonal conflict with the latest Link and Zelda, the other is a ruthless, self-absorbed Card-Carrying Villain who is literally Made of Evil, focused entirely on revenge and turning Hyrule into an even bigger hellhole than what was seen in Ocarina's Bad Future.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword doesn't feature Ganon but shows his predecessor, Demon King Demise, placing a curse upon Link and Zelda, swearing that "an incarnation of his hatred" will forever torment them till the end of time. It's heavily implied (in the English version^*as explained here, the Japanese version leans more towards a Buddhist-inspired Eternal Recurrence) that Ganon is that incarnation of hatred, recontextualizing him from a mere mortal who gained godhood to The Antichrist of the entire franchise. This, in turn, makes the endgame speeches and final words from the Twilight Princess Ganondorf retroactive Call-Backs, with that Ganondorf mentioning how hatred sustains him and promising that the conflict between light and shadow would not end with his death.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (as well as the Creating a Champion companion art book), Calamity Ganon was initially described to be the ultimate fate of the original Ganondorf, having been driven so insane by the cycle of death and resurrections that he's devolved into an all-powerful but mindless evil bent on destroying everything in sight, explaining why he would switch from world domination to world destruction. However, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild, retcons that by revealing that Calamity Ganon is actually The Heartless for a new incarnation of Ganondorf who is a much viler interpretation of the character, lacking all potential redeeming qualities of the original Ganondorf.
• The Longest Journey: In Dreamfall, Roper Klacks is a genuinely reformed villain whose cordial with April Ryan, holding no hard feelings over being imprisoned in a calculator. But when Zoe meets him in Chapters he can't even mention April's name without spitefully calling her a bitch, his previous affable personally was apparently all an act, and he's been helping the Big Bad the whole time.
• Metroid: Ridley started as one of the many Space Pirates bosses of the earliest games (the 1986 original and Super Metroid in particular), and this depiction remained unchanged for a time, with no direct connection between him and Samus. However, partially due to his popularity and as his role was expanded upon, later media rewrote Ridley to give him a much more personal connection to the heroine:
  • Metroid Fusion: The Japanese-exclusive Child Mode was the first entry to show Ridley leading the Space Pirate raid that destroyed Samus' home planet and left her an orphan.
  • Metroid (Manga): Building upon the first example, the manga specifically has Ridley murdering Samus's mother, and being the cause of her father's sacrifice. Not only that, Ridley would kill Gray Voice, Samus's adoptive parent, many years later. The manga is stated as canon, and thus later media such as Metroid: Other M and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate would openly acknowledge Ridley as responsible for leaving Samus an orphan and killing her parents, giving them a deep connection for their enmity.
    Pit: So what's the story behind him and Samus?
    Palutena: Ridley killed Samus's parents when she was young.
    Pit: That's messed up!
• Puyo Puyo: Lemres goes through this during the installments despite not appearing until the sixth installment. In the fifth installment, Ocean Prince's transformation from a prince to a fish is first explained as the result of a curse against his will. However, when Lemres is introduced in the sequel as the wizard who did it, the prince says he asked to be transformed so he can escape his princely duties, lessening Lemres's responsibility (though he's aware that turning someone into a fish is not something that is praised). In the later series, his backstory is expanded to reveal that he never liked being a dark mage, and seeing the prince happy with his transformation made him realize that he wants to bring happiness to others with his magic.
• RuneScape: The main three Gods of the setting, Saradomin, Guthix, and Zamorak, were the Gods of Order, Balance, and Chaos, and were generally treated as good, neutral, and evil for most of the game's early history. Around the release of RuneScape 3 in 2013, aspects of siding with factions and making different moral choices in quests were made more central to the game's story. In order to make multiple factions look supportable, Saradomin's "Order" was re-interpreted as showing signs of tyranny, and Zamorak's "Chaos" was re-interpreted less as pure evil and more as subversiveness and creativity, and Guthix was Killed Off for Real. The alternate light on Zamorak and his follower's nature doesn't mesh well with some older quests and lore (some of which were outright replaced, like the Black Knight's Fortress quest with The Death of Chivalry), particularly in the case of the Kinshra which Jagex have tried in several cases to re-interpret as misunderstood and noble.
• Shadow Hearts: In Shadow Hearts 1, Cardinal Albert Simon, who went by the name of his mentor Roger Bacon, successfully summoned a biomechanical fortress known as the Neameto Float to call forth the God from beyond the stars to cleanse the world as he believed that mankind was beyond salvation. In Shadow Hearts: Covenant, this was retconned to be a misguided attempt to stop a former ally of his, Rasputin the Mad Monk, an actual warlock with dark powers in this continuity, from enacting his own evil plot that involved summoning another biomechanical fortress from which he planned to vent the flames of the ongoing World War I and watch the ensuing carnage for his own amusement.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: In his introduction in Sonic Adventure 2, it's implied Professor Gerald Robotnik built the Eclipse Cannon as a Weapon of Mass Destruction either due to the loss of his granddaughter Maria driving him to insanity (or else he was mad even before her death), with the twist being he planned to destroy the planet via crashing his space colony into it. Come Shadow the Hedgehog, it's revealed the Cannon was in fact created for a good reason: to destroy the Black Comet — as Black Doom offered his blood for the creation of Shadow the Hedgehog, in exchange for the Chaos Emeralds to conquer the planet. Of course, then Maria gets killed by G.U.N. and Gerald in his grief and madness decides to repurpose both the Eclipse Cannon and the ARK...
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: The main story implies Mobius N destroyed the first City, killing all its inhabitants, on Z's orders in exchange for resurrecting M. This is treated as something of a Moral Event Horizon for N in-universe. Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed reveals that the first City's destruction was an accidental side effect of stopping Alpha's evacuation of its people, which would've killed everyone else in Aionios if it succeeded. By extension, Z's ordering of this becomes a case of Evil Vs Oblivion rather than pure sadism.

• Ace Attorney:
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney implies that Miles Edgeworth frequently used forged evidence in his days as an "undefeated" prosecutor. The bonus case "Rise from the Ashes", which was added to re-releases made after Edgeworth's Heel–Face Turn in later games, has Edgeworth state he never knowingly forged evidence, it was all just rumors. Emphasis on knowingly, however.
  • Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Gambit: Downplayed with Manfred von Karma. A flashback to the case that led to the DL-6 Incident reveals that the forged evidence von Karma used in the trial was prepared by someone else and he wasn't aware of the forgery. At the same time, he's still very much the same Amoral Attorney he is in the present, and it's still implied he forged evidence in past cases, and the flashback case also reveals he had the defendant interrogated non-stop to the point where his hair turned white, which is what he actually received his one penalty for. It's also implied that, through the events of this game, Franziska finally comes to terms with how horrible her father was.
• Danganronpa: A significant plot point in Danganronpa Zero is that Enoshima isn't able to enjoy the Despair caused by the deaths of the student council because she doesn't really know any of the students involved and isn't personally attached enough to despair over their deaths. Danganronpa 3 completely ignores this, reintroducing her by randomly murdering a taxi driver just because she can.

• Spooky Month: When introduced in the first episode, the then-unnamed Bob Velseb was little more than a gag, holding Lila at knifepoint but happily letting go once Skid reminds them both that it's "Spooky Month" and Lila offers him some candy. In his second appearance in the fifth episode, "Tender Treats", Bob is revealed to be a serial killer with a high body count and taste for human flesh, and a flashback to the first episode shows that Lila called the cops on him moments after Skid left the house.

• The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Choices", Nicole's parents appear to be straight up Abusive Parents with no redeeming qualities. Mary, in particular, seems to relish her daughter's success for selfish reasons. It's also implied that they disown Nicole for getting together with Richard and refuse to attend their wedding. However, in "The Parents", they come off more as Parents as People, as it's shown that they pushed Nicole because they wanted the best for her. It's also revealed that they did try to go to Nicole's wedding, but they got the directions wrong. They also actually tried to contact their daughter, to no avail. The episode ultimately ends with them reconciling.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: While Firelord Ozai was always portrayed as an Evil Overlord, "Zuko Alone" hinted that he at least loved his wife, Ursa, as he's seen looking off into the distance after her disappearance. "The Day of Black Sun" would cast doubt on this, however, as after Zuko announces his intentions to join Aang and end the war, Ozai openly admits to having her banished after killing Firelord Azulon, without any hint of remorse. Post series comic The Search would later reveal that Ozai's treatment of Ursa was emotionally abusive, putting to rest the idea he ever truly loved her
• Castlevania (2017): When she's first depicted in the show's third season, Lenore, while initially seeming to be A Lighter Shade of Black proceeds to gaslight, dehumanize and abuse her prisoner Hector, even having dubiously consensual sex with him and enslaving him via magic during the act before going on to declare that she will make him her full-time Sex Slave. The fourth season, however, has Lenore and Hector on friendly terms, with Lenore being a Sympathetic Slaveowner and the two of them seem to get along just fine. The Sex Slave bit is of particular note, as Hector seems not to have been abused and is in fact happy to make innuendos toward Lenore, implying that Lenore was bluffing. The fourth season ultimately defangs Lenore's previously vile nature so much that Hector saves her life from Isaac's invasion and she ends up killing herself in an Alas, Poor Villain moment.
• Futurama: During the Fox seasons, Fry's parents were depicted as quite cold and emotionally abusive, with his father berating him and his mother ignoring him in favor of sports. When Fry initially learns he'll never see his family again in the pilot, he cheers. Even when Fry's mom says she misses him in a flashback, she also remarks that all his "crap" is still in the house. The first movie and episodes in the later Comedy Central seasons depict Fry's experiences with his family as much happier. "Cold Warriors" still depicts Fry's dad as harsh but gives him the excuse of trying to toughen Fry up through tough love. "Game of Tones" is much more sentimental, as Fry gets to relive the last time he saw his family and has such a lovely time that he doesn't want to leave them, especially his mother. In the end, Fry ends up in his mother's dream, and it's made more obvious that she still loves him.
• The Simpsons: Kamp Krusty as a whole undergoes this in "Kamp Krustier". In the original "Kamp Krusty", the campers were treated genuinely cruelly, being forced to eat gruel, sleep in freezing barren shacks and manufacture wallets in what Lisa described as "a Dickensian sweatshop", with Mr. Black, the camp's owner, being a Card-Carrying Villain who revels in his awful treatment of the kids. In "Kamp Krustier", despite the premise being them being traumatised by the experience, the camp's actual cruelty and slave labour are forgotten about and the kids' bad memories of it are reduced to Faux Horrific Poke the Poodle offences like having to watch a bad production of The Parent Trap with the one seemingly genuine trauma a kid drowning trying to escape, turning out to be a mistake, while Mr. Black is nowhere to be seen and never mentioned. Also, Jimbo, Dolph, and Kearney are depicted as having taken part in the rebellion against the camp when in the original episode, they were the counsellors that the other kids were rebelling against following suffering their vicious abuse.
• Star Wars Rebels: In the Season 1 episode "Droids in Distress", Agent Kallus gloats to Zeb about how he took a bo-rifle (a weapon only wielded by the honor guard of Zeb's species, the Lasat) from a Lasat he killed, and that he was the one who gave the order for the Imperial forces to use the T-7 ion disruptors (weapons meant to take down starships) to decimate the population of Lasan. However, during an Enemy Mine situation in the Season 2 episode "The Honorable Ones", Kallus admits that he was given the bo-rifle after defeating its owner in combat (as per Lasat tradition). It is also revealed that Kallus wasn't the one who gave the order to use the disruptors, and had only claimed credit to make Zeb angry.
• Voltron: Legendary Defender: From the third to fourth seasons, Prince Lotor is depicted as a Noble Demon who, while cold and often ruthless, prefers to take planets with minimal bloodshed, and whose evil paled in comparison to his father Zarkon. The fifth season even has Lotor seemingly perform a Heel–Face Turn upon killing his father. The show's sixth season then reveals that Lotor was performing horrific experiments on the surviving Alteans, all the while making their home a tribute to him due to extreme narcissism with his Quintessence-gathering being part of a plan to rewrite reality itself and wipe out the Galra Empire entirely. Thanks to these events, those who loved Lotor or at least respected him are horrified and feel betrayed, and Shiro even mentions that Quintessence, previously framed as a corruptive source of power, only brings out What You Are in the Dark to drive the point home that Lotor is viler than anyone could have predicted. The show then proceeds to re-retcon this in later seasons; while Lotor is dead, characters frequently express sympathy for him, and his Well-Intentioned Extremist and Tragic Villain traits are considerably emphasized.