Ron the Death Eater

"Ok, Ron is acting really dumb...but it’s my story. Ron is my least fave character and I make him how I want him to be dumb cuz he is. Sorry for the inconvenience."

—A fic that is no longer available

The result of shoehorning a good canon character into being a villain or making a villain significantly more evil than in canon is Ron the Death Eater, the inverse of Draco in Leather Pants.

This can be seen as a kind of deliberate Flanderization—Often, in creating Ron the Death Eater, a fanfic writer spins his canonical (non-evil) actions into evil acts, and every possible negative trait of the character is exaggerated until they become a Complete Monster. A measure of ruthlessness becomes complete and utter sociopathy, a tendency towards holding grudges becomes an obsessive hatred of anything they dislike, slight denseness becomes raging stupidity, et cetera.

This is often the result of a Draco in Leather Pants, but it doesn't have to be—some characters inspire this sort of hatred on their own, either by their canon merits or by being a romantic rival that interferes with the writer's One True Pairing, especially if the subject is part of an Official Couple.

In other cases, it seems like the target character, regardless of their original characterization, will simply default to one of two stock personalities, based entirely on their gender. Basically, male characters end up as drunken rapist assholes while female characters end up as manipulative vindictive bitches.

The fic may also have other characters who are canonically friends of the victim act as though he or she has always been an object of justified loathing, rather than going the "shocked at betrayal" approach. Or, even if these characters end up siding with the Draco in Leather Pants, they are subject to some Ron The Death Eater-ness themselves by way of "I was stupid to love him and not you".

In a number of cases however this is deliberately invoked by fans who think a good character looks better evil. This is quite common in doujinshi where an otherwise normal male character suddenly becomes a psychotic rapist or where a female character becomes a sadistic bitch who gets other girls raped.

Named for the tendency in Harry Potter fanfics where Draco turns good and hooks up with Hermione to have Ron—who in Canon is a decent, upstanding sort of fellow firmly on the side of good (he might be occasionally crass, boorish, or foolish but his ethics are firmly sound) who happens to have a long-standing enmity with Draco—lose his mind and, often, join Lord Voldemort just for a chance at killing the sainted Malfoy.

A Sub-Trope of Demonization.

Compare Die for Our Ship (which is a major cause of this trope), Historical Villain Upgrade, and Adaptational Villainy.

Contrast Draco in Leather Pants.

And last but not least, fandoms that have so many examples of this that they needed to be moved to their own pages:

• Axis Powers Hetalia
• Gundam
• Harry Potter

Examples (sorted by the original canons' media):

Anime and Manga

• Dragon Ball:
  • Those Magical Three Years (found here) uses this on Yamcha, turning him into an abusive drunken rapist.
  • Free treats Yamcha the same way.
• Haruhi Suzumiya's rabid Hatedom (perhaps even Hate Dumb) goes so far that when Noizi Itou (the lady who illustrates the light novels) made an art of Haruhi to be auctioned in support of the people affected by the Kanto Earthquake, a rabid Haruhi hater actually whined about it.
• Death Note:
  • In Constant Temptation Light's father Souichiro becomes an Axe Crazy Abusive Parent, Dirty Cop, and raging homophobe who had Light's past boyfriends killed and this is what really drove Light into becoming Kira.
  • Here's another fic where Souichiro becomes an Abusive Parent: What Is Justice?, in which Souichiro regularly beat Light and Sayu throughout their childhood. It's also implied he had their mother killed. This fic makes another Ron The Death Eater with the surprise plot twist where sweet little Sayu becomes Kira.
  • Mr. Yagami is the resident homophobe again in A Cure for Love. However he is portrayed more sympathetically or at least with more complexity than in some examples. Though he is prejudiced he is well-meaning and he does genuinely care about his son and gives his life for him. But because his son has written him off as "against him" and "evil," he doesn't care.
  • Mr. Yagami AGAIN in Death Note the Abridged Series Kpts 4 tv where he is a homophobic Abusive Parent Axe Crazy Pyromaniac Gun Nut. "I Have No Son. I have two daughters." He seems really eager to get rid of his kids, he tries to crush Light's unmentionables with his ESP powers, and when Sayu gets kindapped he's about ready to "cut his losses" until Light convinces him otherwise and even then he only decides to rescue her because he believes that she's been impregnated with alien spawn and intends to sell her into medical experimentation. Also he has burned down a building for insurance money which resulted in the destruction of a nearby orphanage. It's pretty clear where Light gets his crazy genes.
  • In Death Note the Abridged Series Team Dattebayo Light and Misa don't want to go to McDonald's and so Mr. Yagami decides to shoot them.

Souichiro: Pray that there's a Taco Bell in Hell!

• • In Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami Souichiro becomes an Axe Crazy Cowboy Cop that swears on a regular basis. In one scene, he interrogates Mikami by holding a knife to his neck like The Joker.
• Cori Falls's fanfiction loves this trope. Jessiebelle, James's fiance, is portrayed as a Complete Monster who would murder Jessie in cold blood just to be able to keep James chained to her forever. In a non-shippy sense, Ash Ketchum is made into a holy terror whose only purpose in life is to ruin the trio's.

Comic Books

• Parodied in The Unwritten, about a son of a writer who got famous after creating a series of novels very similar to Harry Potter. The first two start with fragments of those books, and the third with a fragment of Frankenstein. The first page of the fourth issue shows Harry's counterpart slaughtering Ron's and Hermione's counterparts in a really terrible way, only to have it turn out on the next page that it's a Dark Fic.
• The entire League of Extraordinary Gentlemen seems to be based around this trope. Mina, who at the end of Dracula was happily married to Jonathan Harker at the end of Dracula divorces her husband and presumably abandons her child prior to the beginning of the first volume The upstanding Great White Hunter Alan Quatermain is an opium addict. Perhaps the most extreme example is from Black Dossier. The comic features a violent, sociopathic, date rapist version of James Bond in a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo. Jonathan Harker goes from a loving and fiercely devoted husband to dumping his wife for being 'soiled goods'.
• Tron: Ghost in the Machine (based off the Alternate Continuity of Tron 2.0) depicts Alan as somewhat callous, work-driven, and harsh towards his son. Of course, his circumstances in the 2.0 timeline suck worse than his circumstances in the Tron: Legacy one - Flynn still vanishes, but he's been relegated to a lab instead of the boardroom, and while Lora's alive in Legacy, she died in 2.0 - but the depiction really goes off the rails when he was shown murdering his wife in a jealous rage. Granted, it was just an attempt to Mind Rape Jet, but...
• Pete "the Pounder" Parker is your typical Jerk Jock beating up poor Eddie Brock.
• X-Men fandom sees a lot of this. Those most often targeted seem to be Jean Grey, Cyclops, and Professor X. Oddly enough, the character in X-Men with the largest Hatedom, Wolverine, doesn't get it nearly as much... likely because Wolverine's haters also tend to be the sorts that hate on fanfiction.

Film

• The Joker movie by Todd Phillips reinterprets Thomas Wayne, a widely beloved and good-hearted man in the original Batman comic books, into a very archetypal upper-class asshole whose good PR is all based on a facade he maintains to look better than he really is. Even his famous assassination is treated as him getting what he deserves.

Literature

• Ron Weasley from Harry Potter and other characters get it so hard, it gets its own subpage. Please add any more examples there.
• This trope is Older Than Steam: Greek heroes from The Iliad and The Odyssey often become outright villainous in Roman works (the Romans imagined themselves to be of Trojan origin):
  • Vergil and Ovid both portray the Greek heroes at Troy mostly in terms of their post-victory atrocities.
  • Medieval European writers usually knew Latin but not Greek; as a result, they tended to inherit the Romans' bias. Dante places Odysseus in the eighth circle of Hell, and both Chaucer and Shakespeare are merciless to the Greeks in their versions of Troilus and Cressida.

Live-Action TV

• The Friends fic Somebody Save Me (found here) has portrayed Richard—a perfectly nice, well-loved guy whose relationship with Monica only broke up because of May–December Romance problems—as a drunken, selfish, physically and emotionally abusive rapist who does not care for Monica at all, so that Chandler can be there to protect and rescue Monica from her evil abuser. Why an OC abusive boyfriend could not have been made up, seeing as Monica dates dozens of men throughout the run of Friends, is a mystery. It's not the only one of its kind either.
• One particularly bad and extremely unsettling NSFW Degrassi fic called The Junkie Journals turns Riley Stavros into a rapist, MindRapeist, gay basher, drug addict, Jerk Jock, Villain Sue, and Karma Houdini. He's such a Complete Monster that people walk away from the story feeling like they've come across the seedy underbelly of the world. All of this without warning or explanation. The main character of the story is also rescued by Peter but it's a mystery why the so-called "author" couldn't just make up an OC who's a Complete Monster instead of having to defile Riley's character.
• Allecto's controversial critiques of Firefly are something of an extreme example of this; the actions of several of the characters (and especially the white male ones) are often twisted in order to fit an extreme feminist reading, thus unfairly painting them as evil.

Theatre

• It's semi-canonical, in that the text can be interpreted in different ways, but a lot of productions of The Merchant of Venice (notably that with Laurence Olivier as Shylock) not only make Shylock as sympathetic as is possible, but also chose the most unflattering interpretations of the protagonists' characters.

Video Games

• Nerf Now did this to The Legend of Zelda series star Link, and made it look easy. In the comments, readers are seen not only developing the theme, but approving "Hey! Listen!" in more than one way.
  • A later comic did the same thing to Megaman and Dr. Light.
• Touhou:
  • The Chinese Touhou doujin Yuyuko's Yukkuri Farm goes to the extreme and has Yuyuko as a literal baby eater (warning: link is to Danbooru and has NSFW ads).
  • A dark fic author by the name of Stripe Pattern believes Byakuren, one of the unambiguously good characters in Touhou, is a psychotic monster in the doujin Love and Peace.
• Spyro the Dragon: Ember was included in The Legend of Spyro: A New Dawn mainly to defy this trope because the author was sick and tired of her getting this treatment by the fandom. Quite a few readers agreed and she ended up being the Ensemble Darkhorse.
• This artist from Deviant ART writes the eponymous protagonist of Mega Man this way simply because he destroys their favorite robot master(s).
• Endlessly done to Luigi in Super Mario World ROM hacks. Some examples:
  • SMW YEAHHH has him as the true villain and final boss
  • Brutal Mario looks to be the same, as implied by this early final overworld map. Note him riding in the clown car and the giant neon letters on the castle. Also, it does the same to Peach (who's shown to be working with Luigi, and can be seen as an unfinished boss in game) and Mario (who's apparently trying to take back the kingdom he ran as a dictatorship beforehand).
  • S Mario has this, according to the translation raocow is working with. -->Luigi: "Brother, I've become a wielder of Black Magic."

Web Comics

• Bro Strider, Dave's badass older brother in Homestuck, is subjected to this by fans who take his over the top Training from Hell of Dave too seriously and treat their relationship as down right abusive in one way or another, nevermind there is little to no evidence of this and Dave obviously loves and respects his older brother. A good example of this attitude is in Out of His Depth A Dave/Tavros fic, where he is both abusive and a homophobic jerkass who's only real purpose in the fic is to provide a reason for Dave to be reluctant to admit his feelings and someone for Tavros to stand up to. This is a bit Hilarious in Hindsight as the fic was written before the Alpha Universe versions of the kids' Guardians were introduced and Bro's own counterpart Dirk is revealed to be both a pretty nice guy and, more importantly, openly gay.

Western Animation

• In the Teen Titans fic Intertwining Hearts (found here), Robin behaves like a jerk when Starfire tells him she wants to include Raven in their relationship (normal for Tamaran). So instead, Starfire and Raven include Beast Boy in their relationship. Robin is not that evil, however (though he does briefly attempt breaking up Starfire and Raven), and the fic ends with him having an emotional breakdown.
• My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic:
  • Pinkie Pie. Typically insanely happy-go-lucky, the infamous fanfic Cupcakes caused a good chunk of the fan base to derail her into a psychopathic killer who goes by her full name, Pinkamena Diane Pie.
  • Rainbow Factory does this to Rainbow Dash, who in canon is a brave, loyal Jerk with a Heart of Gold who would never abandon her friends. Rainbow Factory!Dash is an Ax Crazy Complete Monster who not only oversees the deaths of failed fliers, but callously murders Scootaloo.
  • Pattycakes inflicts this on Fluttershy, turning her from a Friend to All Living Things who is able to resist Discord's Hannibal Lecture through Incorruptible Pure Pureness into a creepy "age play" fetishist who brainwashes Rainbow Dash and her other friends into an infantile state.
  • A number of fics involving Princess Celestia, who in canon is a kind, laid-back, accessible Reasonable Authority Figure who loves her subjects and sometimes engages in lighthearted mischief. In fanfic, "Trollestia/Molestia" is a cruel and shameless prankster, a manipulative bitch, a tyrant, or worse; examples include:
    • Pony Psychology Series, at first.
    • Past Sins, at least until the revision, debatably.
    • In Severing and Reconnection, Princess Celestia tells Twilight to kill all her friends. Yeah.
    • Frigid Winds and Burning Hearts, wherein the entire history of Equestria is apparently a lie to keep Celestia in power.
  • Miss Cheerilee in Cheerilee's Garden, in which the titular Cheerilee, a school teacher, becomes depressive and psychotic when her class of small children have the audacity to act like a class of small children. Her answer to this crime? Murder all of them in front of the town in the guise of a "play".
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Infamous example: Mai in the fan comic How I Became Yours. Because how dare the woman be angry that her husband cheated on her and had a kid with another woman, clearly she deserves to be killed.
  • Aang in this Toph/Katara fic, Do you hate me?, is twisted into a swearing, angry jackass who throws rocks and hurts Toph on purpose. Granted, this does take place during "The Desert" and he was angry at Toph for not saving Appa, but he'd never go out of his way to hurt her. He, in fact, became upset after intentionally hurting creatures that are a combination of buzzards and wasps.
  • Embers. Katara's season three rage over Zuko getting Aang mostly-killed after she'd started to trust him is transposed into a season one homicidal fury that Zuko is of the Fire Nation and has the nerve to be a better healer than she is. Since then, Katara has been publicly humiliated by the amazing Zuko in three or four different ways and has been reclaimed as an acceptable being, but is being used as a prop in the new goal of showing that Aang is a horrible, selfish boy who is deeply intolerant of everything that doesn't fit into his childhood culture (which by the way is secretly evil).
• X-Men: Evolution:
  • Not Just A Sleepover (found here) depicts Cyclops aka Scott Summers as a humorless, oppressing, and incompetent would-be dictator who just hates the Brotherhood for no reason at all.
  • Tsunami (found here) depicts Jean Grey as a cliché Alpha Bitch, with everyone vocally denouncing her as a two-faced bitch, all while her powers are degraded to Pre-Claramont Comics!Jean level in order to "fix" how "perfect" she is.
  • In Diamonds Are A Fuzzy Dudes Best Friend (here ^{[dead link]} ) Scott and Jean get this treatment.
  • Logan Vs Lance (here) has Lance portrayed as a cheating, abusive, Bastard Boyfriend to motivate the X-Men to beat him up so Kitty would have a reason to break up with him.