Van Helsing Hate Crimes

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"To you, these monsters are just evil beings to be vanquished. I'm the one standing there when they die... and become the men they once were."
—Gabriel Van Helsing, Van Helsing

On this end, we have The Hunter. The man who stalks the night, armed to the teeth, ready to mow down vampires, zombies, werewolves, or vampiric undead werewolves. And on this end we have the Friendly Neighborhood Vampires. The guys and girls who keep a nocturnal schedule, stop over at the blood bank for a quick snack, and do their best to help the community.

There are going to be some interesting philosophical questions when these two meet. (Or not.)

Van Helsing Hate Crimes are what happen when a medium that includes monsters and/or monster hunters calls attention to the fact that, in that 'verse at least, not all monsters are, well... monsters. Some of them are perfectly decent folks trying to fit in who happen to get lumped in with the one or two bad apples, like Dracula. Of course, this will result in the monster hunters either learning An Aesop or turning out to be those who fight monsters... oh, you know what I mean.

Compare Fantastic Racism, which is like this only on a more wide-spread, societal scale. Also compare Zombie Advocate, who argues in favor of monster's humanity, and Inhumanable Alien Rights when the hunter is a government agency of some kind. See also Stages of Monster Grief, for monsters who may or may not like their condition. See also Burn the Witch.

Not to be confused with what happens when Van Helsing turns Lawful Neutral.

Examples of Van Helsing Hate Crimes include:

Anime and Manga

  • Witch Hunter Robin does this a lot in the second season. Every witch encountered by Robin thus far goes power mad and evil... but then she begins encountering witches who engage in moral shades of gray, and finally, witches who are guilty of nothing but being picked out by her organization. And they're the humane ones; it's implied organizations outside of Japan kill witches flat-out, and the only reason her organization keeps witches around is to produce the magic suppressor "Orbo" from their bodies.
    • In one episode, it's implied that the organization systematically destroyed the career, marriage and finances of a potential witch who had never even used his powers. Destitute, he's forced to use his power to defend himself from some thugs and is taken in, put through some kind of magic lie-detector and given the choice to admit he is evil and join them or die for using his powers.
  • Inuyasha plays on this occasionally; all humans fear youkai and hanyo, but not all youkai and hanyo want to hurt humans. One example is the "Spider-Head" arc, where the girl Nazuna exhibits considerable prejudice towards Inuyasha and Shippo, despite Inuyasha having saved her from a fall. The Gentle Giant hanyo in a side story also counts. He's generally too gentle to hurt anyone intentionally (unless they're hurting his human mother).
    • In another episode, they meet a morally gray demon hunter who condemns Rin and Kagome for even associating with demons/youkai/half-demons/hanyou. This trope is even inverted with a villain who is convinced that all humans want to hurt demons.
  • In Hellsing, the Catholic-founded Iscariot Organisation sees vampires as an abomination and affront to God that needs to be wiped out, even the vampires that are hunting other vampires for the sake of humanity. It loses its edge, however, when you consider that, until Seras came along, there was only one such vampire, and he's a sociopathic slaughter machine that is only held back by a very mortal woman.
  • The demon hunters in Omamori Himari seemingly want to eradicate all demons, with minor exceptions (currently only one) like the Amakawa family, who have some demons as servants.
  • In contrast with Hellsing, in Chibi Vampire, vampires usually only take enough blood to make the person feel anemic and drained of emotion (which can actually be a good thing, if a person has a lot of negative emotions). So it's not surprising that Vampire Hunters are portrayed as Knights Templar.
  • Likewise, in Rosario + Vampire, monsters have isolated their population centers and disguise themselves as human so that they can survive alongside them. In particular, Witches have so suffered from persecution and habitat loss, some other monsters essentially consider them an endangered species.
    • Witches suffer from this in both directions, because many monsters are prejudiced against them for being "almost human".
  • Bleach has Ichigo and co. acting like this when they meet Nell Tu and the others. Ichigo comes very close to killing the Hollows, which is understandable, due to the Hollows chasing Nell as a game of tag. Once the misunderstanding is cleared up, they join forces, despite the previously-held belief that Hollows were Exclusively Evil. Apparently, the Hollows are just mostly chaotic evil.
    • It later turns out that they are not in fact pure hollows, instead being Arrancars. Though this still qualifies since Arrancar were believed to be just as Chaotic Evil as the Hollows they came from.
  • The Paper Master exorcist Yang Kailen from Hell Teacher Nube, who vowed to exterminate all supernatural creatures because of his Dead Little Sister, eventually arrives at Domori looking for the ultimate Youkai-killing weapon: Nube's Oni left hand. And along the way, he massacres and violently slaughters innocent, benevolent, cheerful, and even divine creatures that Nube was friends with.
    • Izuna, the amateur exorcist, also had a bit of this going when she first met the Sorcerer Kitsune Tamamo and the Snow Maiden Yukime. But these two are far beyond her level and handily humiliated her before Nube set her straight. Unlike Yang Kailen, though, Izuna is a lot more open minded (she keeps and breeds her own Tube Foxes) and gets over herself.
    • Nube's father is also guilty of this, to the point of attacking Yukime on sight merely because she's a Youkai and he's an exorcist.
  • Once it's clear demons are infiltrating human society in Devilman, humans start military actions against them. The problem is that they don't know and later don't belive in Devilmen - humans who bonded with demons and retained their good nature, killing them alongside real demons. They're also willing to kill anyone even suspected of being a demon and those accused of helping them.


Comic Books

  • The comic book series Wolff and Byrd has a restraining order served to a woman whose "sacred duty" is to hunt down and kill vampires, in what's obviously a take-off on Buffy.
  • Captain Britain and MI-13 recently[when?] had an arc where Blade (yeah, that one) joins the team to deal with a supernatural menace. Spitfire, who shows vampiric traits due to a WWII-era attack by a vampire, is on the team. When Blade first meets her, he tries to stake her. They soon end up in an Enemy Mine situation (Dracula launching vampire missiles at Britain from his castle on the moon). They later start dating, making the attempted staking an unorthodox Meet Cute.
  • After being paralyzed by Shockwave when the Decepticons attacked an advanced oil rig she was working on in the Transformers comics, Josie Beller developed an advanced suit that allowed her to walk as well as granting her superpowers. As Circuit Breaker, she vowed to take the fight to the heartless machines that had crippled her. The problem was, she neither knew nor cared that there were two factions of robots, and that one of them was trying to help the humans. Her hatred did not distinguish between Autobot and Decepticon, and she often wound up doing more harm than good, especially as the Autobots refused to harm her.
  • The Termight Empire in Nemesis the Warlock is built on committing these. There are genuinely malevolent aliens out there, but they are very much in the minority, and in no way justify the Empire's policies.

Films -- Live-Action

  • The vampire movie Blood Ties (no, not based on the Canadian series) takes this trope to a whole new level, with a group of vampire hunters who appear on a Jerry Springer knock-off and sound a hell of a lot like the Klan.
  • Clive Barker's Nightbreed, where the monstrous and reclusive Midianites are attacked by human cops who refuse to leave them alone. The psychiatrist helping the police also happens to be a Serial Killer. And he's played by David Cronenberg.
  • Averted in Van Helsing (ironically enough), where Van Helsing is reluctant to kill Frankenstein's monster because he can see he's not actually evil, and Van Helsing does seem to feel remorse for having to kill people who've become monsters, like werewolves and Dr. Jekyll.
  • The core aesop of Disney's Beauty and the Beast. The Beast is the horrible monster that Gaston, the Hunter, ends up trying to slay. Except that Belle has seen the Beast from a different perspective and has fallen in love with him.
    • The core aesop is about vanity and selfishness, and not getting obsessed with appearances. Gaston riled up the crowd to this trope, but he himself is not guilty of it. He wants to kill the Beast because he sees him as competition for Belle. He also has no trouble believing the Beast is harmless, but, being a Jerkass, he actually mocks him for it.
  • I Am Legend was intended to lead up to this, and still does in the alternate ending on the DVD release.
  • The Paladins in Jumper.
  • In Lucio Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling, the townspeople blame a string of child murders on a reclusive, unpopular, Hollywood Homely witch and lynch her based on zero evidence. The murders continue.


Literature

  • The Dracula Tape by Fred Saberhagen, wherein Dracula is a mostly harmless individual who's harassed by the Harkers (who are clueless) and Van Helsing (who's a religious fanatic). Which means that is a case of a Van Helsing Hate Crime committed by... Van Helsing.
  • Dealt with extensively in one section of Night Watch. Forces of darkness and light exist, but have a treaty keeping each other in strict balance. Enter a guy who only knows that he can sense evil and it must be eliminated... It doesn't help that he's part of the dark Light side, and in this universe, you can't switch sides.
  • The issue ... comes up, shall we say, in Liz Williams Snake Agent (her first Detective Inspector Chen novel).
  • A major plot point in the Kitty Norville series. It takes place in The Unmasqued World, and a lot of people aren't happy to know that werewolves and vampires (and a lot of other things) are out there. At least four of the novels so far have featured normal humans treating Kitty like she's a monster, from accusing her of mauling cows with no evidence of it to trying to kill her.
  • The titular Night Huntress is convinced that all vampires are bloodsucking demons. After she learns that not all of them are evil, she realizes that some of the vampires she killed may just have been looking for a snack and a one night stand, and killing them may not have been self-defense.
  • The Palatine Guard of Meg Cabot's Insatiable series see nothing wrong with torturing a captive vampire, especially since nothing short of outright killing one would leave any evidence. Alaric Wulf, one such Guard, repeatedly makes the argument that since the Big Bad who gravely injured his partner is a vampire, he is fully justified in summarily killing any and all vampires he meets, not to mention any human who dares harbor one. In the first book, during the climactic battle against the Big Bad and his minions. the Palatine Guard repeatedly shoot the vampire protagonist Lucien in the back (He survives because he is just that badass. For some reason that will presumably be explained in the next book, all this inspires the female protagonist Meena to join the Palatine Guard.
  • Happens in P N Elrod's book Quincy Morris, Vampire, which follows the story of the man who killed Dracula when he rose as a vampire himself. Trying to convince Van Helsing that he only drank animal blood wasn't very effective. In story his type of vampire is compared to a hunting dog vs Dracula's vicious wolf.
  • I Am Legend is the Trope Codifier, if not the Ur Example. Robert Neville, the last human on Earth, spends his nights being tormented by vampires trying to get into his house, and his days finding and slaying the creatures in their sleep. The title of the book comes from the end, where Neville discovers that some of the vampires have learned to stop acting like monsters, and have begun to form a new society. Since Neville was unaware of their presence, and he's been slaughtering vampires indiscriminately for years, he's slain a large number of the good vampires. Neville realizes to his horror that they view him as a monster, and he takes a suicide pill before they can execute him.
  • This is raised by Peter in Moon Over Soho along with the thorny problem of Inhumanable Alien Rights when it comes to sapient individuals who are carrying out paranormal crime. He makes the point that the courts are the place to deal with them, not just arbitrarily hunting them down and executing them. Ultimately the author chooses to Take a Third Option in resolving it.
  • In the Lonely Werewolf Girl books the guild of Werewolf Hunters has no backstory to explain exactly why they are hunting werewolves, so tends to come across as this. Especially since their targets include a fashion designer, a pair of tourists, a pair of punk singers, and their manager.
  • Tanya Huff's Blood Trail centers around this. The protagonist is called in to discover who's been murdering the local pack of werewolves; it turns out to be a religious neighbor who'd discovered their nature and decided to do God's work by killing the soulless abominations; when one of them saves his life, he realizes how badly he was mistaken and, unable to deal with it, kills himself.
  • Discussed in the Discworld Watchmen books, most reciently with Goblins in Snuff.


Live-Action TV

  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer mostly ignores this in the earlier seasons, until it was tackled head-on with the Initiative in season 4. They lumped every non-human under 'evil', even going as far as experimenting on an untransformed, conscious werewolf.
    • Before this there were plenty of online fora debates about whether Buffy was right to kill vampires when one (Spike) displayed the capacity for redemption; if one can, they all can, and therefore Buffy is wrong to deny them that opportunity, ran the argument.
    • The episode "Phases" had Buffy going up against a werewolf hunter who saw nothing wrong with the fact that a werewolf is human 28 days of the month, but he was more of an amoral, greedy monster hunter than a bigoted, fanatical monster hunter.
  • Angel, on the other hand, dealt with this trope head-on, when it turned out that Gunn's old demon-slaying gang had started turning its sights on all demons, no matter how harmless they were.
    • The above wasn't the only example. As the series progressed, Angel in a lot of ways became like a Gothic version of Star Trek, in the sense that demon was a catchment word which described a lot of different species; and even though plenty of them were evil, in some cases the word demon didn't rightfully imply anything negative about them at all. In the case of characters like Lorne and (later) Illyria, the value-neutral term extraterrestrial would have been a lot more appropriate.
    • Holtz, who—well, suffice it to say, Angel's vampirism is only Holtz's second most pressing reason for wanting him dead. Holtz is fully aware of Angel's curse, but unlike most other characters, he denies that this makes any ethical difference: "I will never agree that he has somehow been absolved from the past by the presence of his soul." Given his historical timeframe, this is pretty accurate for Holtz. Angel and Angelus are, essentially, the same being to him. That Angel feels bad is fine and good, but it's really up to God to forgive him if God feels Angel's suffered enough. Until then, Angelus has escaped mortal judgment time and again, and is still an abomination.
      • Holtz's attitude is actually very similar to Angel's own - both consider Angel responsible for what he did as Angelus. It's just that Angel is trying to make up for it while Holtz thinks he needs to die. Angel can never really make the claim that Holtz is wrong for pursuing his vendetta.
    • The First Season Episode in which a gang of Demons arrive in LA and start killing 'Abominations'. That is, any demon who is even slightly Human or half human, like one of the main characters, Doyle, or any vampire at all. According to the previous Buffy Finale, they weren't purebloods themselves, either. The Nazi analogy isn't all that subtle, is it? This is the Angel theme. Some monsters aren't so bad!
    • Another episode has him kill the last defender of a pregnant woman, who was a Buddhist monk to boot. Until he takes up the role himself of course (protector, not Buddhist).
  • Supernatural goes on the assumption that all monsters are naturally evil, but occasionally throws a curve ball, like when Sam and Dean encounter a group of vampires who abstain from human blood and feed on cattle. Gordon Walker, however, sees no difference between them and any other vampire, and Sam and Dean have to stop him from killing them all. However, later seasons have stressed the moral issues of the job of hunting, as it has been revealed that most of the major threats, including demons, were human at some point
    • Supernatural also contains an example in Sam, who is eventually revealed to have psychic powers and demon blood in him. Although Sam is a hunter with good intentions throughout (even if those good intentions don't always bring good results), Gordon is dead set on killing him because he makes no distinction between good and evil when it comes to the supernatural, and cannot be convinced that Sam is on their side. This eventually leads to Gordon's death. By barbed-wire decapitation.
  • On Big Wolf on Campus, "Muffy the Werewolf Slayer" showed up intending to hunt down and kill the protagonist; she was eventually convinced that, no, honest, Angel Tommy was a good vampire werewolf, though she found the concept pretty freaky. (Every other werewolf seen on the show is at minimum a Punch Clock Villain and more likely a man-eating psychopath, so her surprise is understandable.)
  • In an unique variant, Friday the 13th: The Series once featured a hunter who killed humans in order to empower a cursed cross he could wield against vampires. Granted, the vampires in question weren't necessarily of the Friendly Neighborhood variety, but this guy's priorities were clearly whacked.
  • True Blood is an HBO series based upon the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris. Harris's vampires have "come out of the coffin," politically speaking, and since, naturally, "God hates Fangs," there are more than a few religious types who find this disturbing.
    • They're completely justified, however, regardless of how stupid they are portrayed. Vampires almost to a man consist entirely of murderous blood-crazed psychopaths (not unlike the vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer). The vampires who are main characters are the only ones who demonstrate any kind of self-control, and even then they freely kill anyone who threatens them or their lovers. It should be noted that in The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries, the Chaotic Evil types are the exceptions and are despised by "mainstreaming" vamps like Eric and Bill. Though, with a few exceptions, even the mainstreaming vamps can be utterly ruthless in pursuit of their (usually nebulous) goals.
  • The UK miniseries Ultraviolet centers around the moral progression of the main character after he kills his friend-turned-vampire and joins up with the people hunting them. According to them vampires, or Code Fives, are a "public health problem" who must be neutralized before they can organize any further. When it's revealed that the Code Fives don't actually murder their prey, but even more importantly are close to designing viable synthetic blood Michael's role begins to change.
  • The Van Helsings in Young Dracula towards Vlad.
  • A Grimm inevitably has this reputation among the creatures hiding their presence by living among humans. As Grimms have the ability to see them for what they really are if they lose control, they've historically been known to mercilessly hunt and slaughter non-humans. Nick, however, being a police officer, tries to treat them as he would anyone else once he figures out what's going on, and even prefers to arrest the ones who break the law whenever possible, rather than hunting them.
    • That said, even the ones who legitimately try to live normal lives can be extremely dangerous. Even Monroe, the Friendly Neighborhood Big Bad Wolf only says that he doesn't kill people anymore, and ended up ripping a guy's arm off when he lost control in a fight.
  • Father Kemp of Being Human (UK) has no qualms in killing most of Bristol's vampire population, kills werewolves under the guise of helping them, and forcibly exorcises ghosts. He does this in spite of good number of them actually being decent people just trying to live a normal life.
  • Vampire Diaries plays with this a great deal - on a few occasions, ruthless vampires framed more peaceful ones for their crimes and let the town's undiscriminating Council kill them. Of particular notice is Bill Forbes, who attempted to torture his daughter in an attempt to teach her not to be a vampire. More recently,[when?] the repeated deaths of Alaric Saltzman allowed the ancient witch Esther to turn him into one of these, to the extent that he brutally murdered other Council members for their failure to kill every vampire.

Tabletop Games

  • The World of Darkness in general is a big fan of this.
    • Hunter: The Reckoning and its spiritual sequel Hunter: The Vigil explore these themes, as they're part of a larger cosmology where the monsters can very well be either good or evil.
      • In Reckoning, viewpoints aim from "Kill 'em all" (Avenger) to "Kill 'em when they threaten humanity" (Defender) to "Study them, and use that to your advantage" (Visionary) to "Some of them can be cured" (Redeemer) to "They can be good people, too" (Innocent).
      • In Vigil, the Compacts and Conspiracies range from new media visionaries who wish to study and expose the paranormal, to fundamentalist Christians who want to "redeem" monsters, to Church Militants who view monsters as demons, to debauched aristocrats who kill monsters because it's fun.
    • Even outside of direct hunter-monster interactions, werewolves in the Old World of Darkness are strongly encouraged to destroy anything associated with the Wyrm and quite capable of dusting vampires, even though not all vampires in the setting are reliably evil; in the New World of Darkness, they're no longer encouraged about "kill anything with fangs", as the mythology supporting it was dropped in the changeover.
    • The Technocracy in Mage: The Ascension were initially played as The Hunter gone Knight Templar, but Character Development in later editions revealed that they're not so reliably bad.
  • Likely to pop up in Exalted (another fine White Wolf product).
    • Most player characters, larger-than-life heroic badasses by default, are pretty much bound to have to deal with the fact that a great many people consider them demonic 'Anathema' out only to tempt them into straying from the one true (Immaculate) faith... and that there are quite a few powerful individuals and factions around who'd just as soon see them safely dead once they learn of their existence. All this while trying to save the world from all sorts of genuine threats...
    • This can also happen to Abyssal and Infernal Exalted, which are usually the evil champions of said genuine threats. Not all of them are bad, however—it's possible to play either type as a hero or anti-hero. But other Exalted, even outside the Immaculate catchism, may well decide to fight them as part of the general struggle against the Deathlords, Neverborn, and Yozi. It doesn't help that Abyssals are largely Walking Wastelands whether they like it or not, and the Infernal Green Sun Princes are all slowly turning into Eldritch Abominations.
  • Treated oddly by Unknown Armies, especially with the Order of St. Cecil. They're religious fanatics who kidnap, brainwash, or kill anything that smells of Demonic Possession. That includes helping your group take down really nasty monsters, frying creeps fresh out of a Religious Horror flick, or kidnapping and stealing the magic from the cute bibliomancer one of the players was hitting on earlier. On the other hand, they are interested in justice and saving living things. Sometimes the 'cured' adepts are happy about it, knew they were mad, and are better off afterwards.
  • Rudolph van Richten, Ravenloft's greatest monster-hunting expert, could have gone down this path, but chose not to let hatred rule his life. His books on ghosts, werebeasts, witches and Vistani address the possibility that a "monster" may be inoffensive and/or unwilling; other Ravenloft monsters are so irredeemably evil and destructive that the Hate Crimes are justified in their case.
  • The Imperial Inquisition in Warhammer 40,000 occasionally has this trope called in. The Inquisition's usual response is to execute everyone involved and resume the hunt. Given the universe they live in, and the dangers they typically deal with, this is usually the correct response.
  • The Anvilicious Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game) adventure 'Gothic' from the modern day Goatswood campaign book, in which the scenario writer clearly states that the PCs are expected to sympathise with a couple of vampires who 'just happen to be' gay. Quite apart from issuing victim status to a pair of undead parasites, the scenario then goes on to indicate that all of their antagonists are raving bigots and to give us all a large dose of Christianity Is Catholic in a way that doesn't sit too well with its rural English setting. Needless to say this adventure takes a lot of re-writing to be playable.
  • Witch hunters in Witch Girls Adventures range from comparatively decent sorts who try to target witches that are actually a problem for people and are willing to let children off with a warning, to the Malleus Maleficarum, who take Van Helsing Hate Crimes into Complete Monster and Knight Templar territory, being perfectly willing to kill (relatively) harmless witches and children, and whose ultimate goal is the complete genocide of witches.
  • Dungeons & Dragons. Despite supplements that directly oppose this, many gamers assume that Evil=Ok to kill, with or without another reason.
    • Some supplements that oppose the idea of killing evil do so by assigning the evil alignment (in terms of a statistics block) to characters who are in no way evil in thought or deed. So they don't really oppose the idea that evil = okay to kill so much as they dispense with any meaning behind the terms "good" and "evil," beyond how they affect spell mechanics.
    • In older versions of D&D, "Lawful" implied good and "Chaotic" implied evil. "Old School" D&D derivative Lamentations of the Flame Princess uses Lawful to mean "assigned a destiny by higher powers" and Chaotic to mean "aware of incomprehensibly powerful cosmic forces that could engulf our world any day now". There's no moral code or philosophy attached to either alignment; spells that detect "good" or "evil" merely detect entanglement with these powers/forces, although characters might not see it that way. Notably, all Clerics are Lawful and all Magic-Users (and Elves, who use MU spells) are Chaotic.
    • A slightly less common, but still all too regular occurence, is for players to forget that there aren't actually all that many races that are all Evil. Killing evil without other provocation may be borderline, but killing someone without provocation because you wrongly assume that they are evil...
  • Deadlands has this in spades. There are plenty of nasty bugaboos running around in the Weird West. Most of them are pure unadultered evil, but some just want to get on with their lives, and some have volunteered or been strongarmed into becoming Men In Black or monster-hunters. You can even play an undead MIB if you want to.


Videogames

  • The Stranger in Terminal Realitys awesome game, Nocturne; is a prime example.
  • In Castlevania Judgment, Sypha Belnades (herself a witch) spends her time hunting vampires, werewolves, and those who wield Dracula's power. Unfortunately, her targets turn out to be Alucard, Cornell, and Shanoa, all of whom oppose Dracula just as much as she does. The game tried to justify it by having Sypha come from the timeline before Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse began, thus having not yet met or allied with Alucard.
  • In both Baldur's Gate games, the protagonist has to (if so chooses) save Viconia, the drow elf - once from Knight Templar and once from burning at the stake. Possible subversion, because Viconia is Neutral Evil.
  • In The Witcher there are High Vampires running a high-end brothel who drink the blood of customers without turning them and a Batmanesqe, crime-fighting werewolf. Both present conflicts for Geralt, s Witcher, whose sole purpose is to destroy monsters.
    • In the book, Geralt clearly states at a few points that his moral codex does not allow him to kill sentient beings (like vampires, werewolves and dragons) without provocation or evidence of their evildoings.
      • And Geralt's explanation for why peasants keep believing in monsters imagined by themselves (while still existing in fantasy setting)? They want to know there's something more monstrous than them.
        • Actually, in the books it is stated that vampires are simply another race that came there during Conjunction, and that they reproduce 'normally' (Blood for them is only an equivalent of alcohol, and can be eliminated from diet completely.)
  • The Forsaken in World of Warcraft complain about the Alliance not making much of a distinction between them and the Scourge. But considering how many times the Forsaken are caught poisoning, killing, mutating or otherwise experimenting on the dog, this is partially a case of My Species Doth Protest Too Much.
    • The Worgen of Gilneas have a bit of this as well. Most Worgen are beasts, though often cunning ones, while the Gilneans have found a way to retain a human mind. The people of the town of Darkshire, however, still sees the Worgen as a whole as monsters to be exterminated, so the Gilnean Worgen who maintain their non-human forms have set up their base some ways away from the actual town and those within it maintain a human form around the locals.
    • The Scarlet Crusade, a band of zealots who are determined to wipe out the undead, but they also attack innocent people who they suspect as undead, or undead sympathizers, or just kill them to be very sure.
  • Reimu Hakurei was quite prone to this in early Touhou games. Over time, she softened up a little, going from Heroic Sociopath to Blood Knight. Sanae, on the other hand, is growing into this...
    • This trope is the central premise of Touhou 12: Undefined Fantastic Object. Player characters whack decent people who only want their saintly leader back.
  • Shades of this appear in later Mega Man X games; the Maverick Hunters dutifully destroy any Reploid that goes "Maverick", according to their standards...which would be fine, if those standards were limited to those Reploids actively infected with The Virus or deliberately causing grievous harm to humanity and/or Reploidkind. Unfortunately, it seems to encompass any form of resistance against the natural order of things, including otherwise non-hostile acts like peacefully exiling themselves to their own space colony (MMX4) (though Repliforce was implicated in the deaths of several million people and refused to clear their names in because it would involve doing things that would conflict with their martial pride, namely: disarming and coming in for questioning) or merely having traits that could potentially cause problems with controlling them (MMX6). In fact, it's revealed in MMX5 that the Maverick Hunter commander in charge during X4 retired in disgrace for misapplying the label of "Maverick" on RepliForce, and thus causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Reploids. Doesn't stop X or Zero from blowing away their Designated Villain targets, though.
  • In Runescape there is a series of quests in which the player helps save pacifist goblins from a group called Humans Against Monsters.
  • Master of the Wind plays around with Fantastic Racism a lot, and while vampires generally are Exclusively Evil, undead are not. So when bad guys decide to remove undead hero Stoic when he becomes an inconvenience, they just tell the Knight Templar priestess/mage Gabriella Robin where he'll be and wait for her to do their job for them.
  • In Divinity 2: Ego Draconis, the Dragon Slayers have been systematically exterminating all the dragons and Dragon Knights because a Dragon Knight betrayed and murdered The Divine One during a confrontation with Damian, the Damned One long ago. Not only are the dragons mostly innocent of this (the murderer was corrupted and controlled by Damian at the time) but they have been hard at work preventing Damian from destroying the world ever since then, a task not made easier by having an entire organization dedicated specifically to your personal annihilation.
  • The Reveal in Nie R reveals that the shades, aka Gestalts, that the player has been killing are far from being just evil monstrosities. In fact, they're the true humans while the humans we've seen are mere "Replicants", shells for the Gestalts to bond with once the millennium-long plan to save humanity from extinction has come to fruition. However Nier, in his tireless quest to save his daughter has ensured the extinction of humanity. To be fair, the Gestalts have no normal way of communicating with the Replicants (who were not supposed to be sentient in the first place) and many of the Gestalts have gone insane.
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim introduces the Silver Hand, a group that hunts werewolves. It wouldn't be a problem... except they don't make any distinction between werewolves who are a problem and those who just want to live.
  • Vanda Hellsing from Dead Hungry Diner. Initially protecting the town of Ravenwood from zombies by fighting them, when the main characters Gabriel and Gabriella find a peaceful alternative she's disgusted and starts trying to kill their monstrous customers.


Web Originals

  • In the Whateley Universe, there's the ongoing conflict between Carmilla and the Reverend Darren Englund and his student posse. So far, he's been behind at least two attempts on her life. (To be fair, Sara is generally depicted as one of the good guys right now, but it's easy to see why even characters rather less fanatic than Englund might worry that there could be a Face Heel Turn looming in her future—and as she's a budding Cosmic Horror, that would be decidedly bad news.) Even better, there's a Whateley student named Nightbane. She's an Exemplar blonde and good religious girl whose powers are ideally suited to fighting creatures of the night. She's basically the bad guy, since she's trying very hard to kill Carmilla.
    • She's a descendant of Shub-Niggurath on her father's side and of Cthulhu on her mother's side. She is foretold to be the thing that wipes humanity off the face of the earth and replaces us with her spawn. As The Kellith, she has has an evil cult that numbers in the thousands. She has Combat Tentacles as well as Naughty Tentacles. If there weren't stories told from her point of view, no one would think the Reverend and his monster hunters were in the wrong.
  • The SCP Foundation is determined to contain every abnormal being they come across, even if they're completely harmless. One of its rival organizations, the Global Occult Coalition, plays this straighter as they are dedicated to destroying every SCP they can find.
    • Partly subverted in that "contain" has a flexible meaning based on just how harmless a given SCP is; so for SCP-682 contain means "keep in a suspended-animation state of near-death so as to prevent SCP from murdering humanity", for the tickle monster that once managed to subdue 682, it just means "keep fed and happy".
    • Some, like SCP-085 (The 2D woman) and SCP-507 (Dimensional Shifter) are quite friendly with staff members. 507 even gets (monitored) internet access.
    • Others (the coffee machine) get put in the break room.

Webcomics

  • The Order of the Stick deals with this occasionally. The world mostly operates on the convenient D&D Exclusively Evil (and even Color Coded for Your Convenience) rules for creatures, but occasionally questions are raised, especially in the "Start of Darkness", where we see the Sapphire Guard slaughtering a peaceful goblin village, and learn the reason why some fully sentient species are Exclusively Evil in the first place (hint: gods are jerks).
    • In fact, most times Redcloak gets a significant portion of dia/monologue with the heroes he spends time pointing out these kinds of things.
    • Also lampshaded when the plot first arrives.
  • And Shine Heaven Now brings this up a lot, especially when it comes to the difference between Hellsing and their Catholic counterparts Iscariot. They do the same things (on occasion), but for very different reasons.
  • Exterminatus Now goes so far as to have a zombie shout "HATE CRIME!" at the heroes after they shoot it. That said, this zombie had just been having a conversation with his buddy about how he'd murdered a few of the living (and yet, still portrayed himself as the victim), so this wasn't exactly undeserved...
  • In Sluggy Freelance Riff has occasionally been cast in this light when it comes to Sam (a vampire) and Aylee (an alien). He cools down on it a little when Torg points out that Riff's own Mad Scientist experiments are just as likely to cause mass destruction and death as any monster.
  • Goblins: Life Through Their Eyes is built on this trope. It takes place in a universe where the traditionally evil races of D&D are *not* always chaotic evil, but still have their traditional reputation. Enough fantastic racism is in place that the "good" races are perfectly willing to slaughter them now and cast spells that reveal alignment never.
    • To drive the point home it introduces members of the "good" races, such as Kore, Dellyn Goblinslayer, and Saral Caine, who are amoral at best and at worst far more vile than any characters from the "evil" races. Kore is a paladin who kills a dwarf (human?) child because prolonged contact with "evil" contaminated him, and Dellyn's actions sicken even Min-Max, a brainless fighter who (at the time) had no problem killing monsters.
  • In Scary Go Round, the West Yorkshire Anti-Zombie Unit leap into action when they meet Zombie!Shelley (long story), but soon have the error of their ways pointed out to them. Ashamed, they decide to be a "more caring group, rehabilitating offenders in the community", because "Just because someone doesn't have a soul, doesn't mean they don't have a heart".
  • In Slightly Damned, most warrior angels attack demons on sight, due to generations of conditioning from the Great War. Notably the seraph Denevol, who tried to kill "Demons and traitors", aka completely inoffensive protagonists Buwaro and Kieri.
  • Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name features Abner Van Slyk, a Punch Clock Villain who doesn't care much about the difference between Adelaide and Conrad.
  • Eerie Cuties introduced Tiffany Winters, an obvious Buffy Expy, along with entire academies of monster-slayers in Magick Chicks spin-off. The faction dynamics (and "what really goes on" in general) is unknown, but while at least the head of Artemis Academy seems to be on good terms with the principal of Charybdis Heights, no one tries to teach young slayers that most monsters nowadays are not ravening, murderous beasts. Granted, when someone like a succubus loses control, this get very dangerous, very quickly.
    • Not that she really have anything against vampires, seeing how she's clearly disappointed when not bitten, but Tiffany knew Layla and was out to stake her. She "forgot" to do this after their concert playdate and later invariably got so... distracted that she herself wondered whether she became a "bite junkie", into "sexy vampire bities" or it's just with Layla, her "sworn best frienemy". This turned ludicrous quickly - Layla "got lucky the last 12 times... in this park", and so on. Mostly, it looks like Tiffany's "hunt" is but a pretext to meet Layla again and Layla seems not to suspect Tiff is anything but her best friend - they have similar tastes and are giddily happy to be around each other.
    • In Paranormal Mystery Squad crossover guest comic, Layla became an "old friend" of another hunter just as effortlessly.

Western Animation

  • Doctor Von Goosewing from Count Duckula keeps coming after the titular Count, despite the fact that he (the Count) is a vegetarian (Actual Vegetarian - not just a Vegetarian Vampire).
  • An interesting variation of this trope occurs in The Real Ghostbusters. While many of the supernatural entities the Ghostbusters came across were as evil and dangerous as one might typically expect, and had to be busted in one way or another, sometimes the ghosts, vampires or other beings were in fact the ones who needed the Ghostbusters' help. Whether it was a family of suburban spirits hiring the Ghostbusters to get rid of the malign demons that infested their house, ghosts who were causing trouble for the living but only needed the Ghostbusters' assistance to complete their Unfinished Business to be able to rest in peace, or a clan of vampires that fed on synthetic blood needing help with some overzealous vampire hunters who wanted to kill them even when they weren't a threat, the Ghostbusters could just as easily be helping the supernatural as fighting it.
  • The first Big Bad in American Dragon: Jake Long was an organization called the Hunts Clan, which was dedicated to destroying all magical creatures, and especially dragons. The Dragon (who is, of course, not an actual dragon) is a girl named Rose, and Jake is both her main target (in his identity as a dragon) and her love interest.
  • Valerie Gray from Danny Phantom who is fully convinced all ghosts are evil. Her primary target is the not evil half-ghost hero Danny Phantom. For that matter, the series also has also shown Danny isn't the only good ghost around, but that sure as hell won't stop her!
    • Or will it? Danny was able to convince her to help free another half-ghost. Perhaps there is hope for her after all.
  • Hoss Delgado from The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy is a spectral exterminator, hunting down the supernatural. While sometimes his targets are truly evil, sometimes he targets the (mostly) benign Grim Reaper, or other fairly harmless, kind hearted supernatural being. He targets anything really, one point he mentions he killed a bunch of lawyers because he thinks they're not human.
    • That said, by the end of the series, Hoss has hooked up with Eris, Goddess of Chaos. It Makes Sense in Context—or, rather, it makes exactly as much sense as one would expect it to.
  • Similar to the Huntsclan, Juniper Lee had H.A.M. (Human Against Magic) an organization that hunted monsters regardless of their alignment. They're not exactly fond of humans that help them either, a.k.a Juniper.
  • Happens a lot in Gargoyles. The species was almost wiped out by humans. Specifically, there was The Hunters and The Quarrymen; however both exist because of Demona, who actually is evil.
  • Ben 10 Ultimate Alien the Forever Knights are out to hunt down every alien on Earth, regardless of whether they're good or bad. They spend most of their time attacking the good ones.
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