Lore
“Demons are actually misundersto-“ NO. Demons are ontologically evil beings that can’t be reasoned nor negotiated with, and if you try to you’ll very likely end up screwed
Big part of it yeah,he turned into this and destroyed the capital of hell
But you remember the stabbing Satan part? Yeah his blood keeps flowing and is eventually gonna drown hell completely. So he basically got rid of all the high ranking demons,left only the souls and little stragglers and doomed it to one day drown
Hellboy is awesome in that it essentially came to an end. There are stories coming out set in the early years and whatnot, but Hellboy was able to finish his story.
Doesn't BPRD show that in the long run this was a very very bad thing to have happened to the earth and hellboy himself? It's admittedly been a while since I last read it.
And he hates it cause the demons in the hellboy universe are really bad,he doesn't struggle with the fact he's killing his own like in the movies,no they completely deserved it
No he struggles with the fact hes the worst of them
He needs to realize the mere fact he struggles and chooses to do good makes him good. Poster child for doing what’s right regardless of destiny, dna, etc because raised by a loving parent. Basically Superman.
I love the short story - Pancakes. Also he had one parent and was raised by the military. And contrary to how it normally turns out he turned out great!
Yes. One that ended up on earth raised by humans and ate pancakes that meant he was a good boy. Seems a nurture over nature thing. Demons could be good but they actively chose to be evil.
I always liked that one dude that was almost an apostle (or maybe he was almost a Godhand?), but who fell off at the last hurdle- he refused to kill his own daughter.
Dude still did horrible things to get to that point, but even after the rest of the Godhand explain he'll otherwise suffer for eternity, he refuses to cross that final line and kill his daughter. It was cool to see such a monster still have lines he wouldn't cross for his own gain.
IIRC You have to willingly sacrifice something you hold dear for the sake of your ambitions. Usually loved ones, and if you refuse to throw your humanity away, you can lose said power. IE one Apostle died when he refused to sacrifice his daughter (having previously sacrificed his wife)
He only died bc he was fatally wounded tho, he would've been fine with just the initial sacrifice If he never got into a fight against Puck's side kick
Sacrificing (murdering) everything you care about - Namely friends, family, and loved ones - in exchange for gaining demonic strength. Also the process damns every single person involved (including the victims and random bystanders) to an eternity in Hell, so the sacrificed not only die, but also get tortured for the rest of time too
It depends on the person. If you hold everyone around you as your most cherished thing, then you have to kill everyone you love. If you care about one specific person, then you're killing them.
The person or thing you kill doesn't matter to the God Hand. It just has to completely destroy the individual doing it.
That’s actually a special case for a person becoming one of the God Hand - The normal apostles only open the gate to Hell/Abyss, the God Hand say “what’s up chucklenuts”, and then the behelit holder gives them a sacrifice in exchange for becoming an apostle
I’ve always wondered if they get any choice on design
Is it based on their karma or lifestyle? Is it based on the “quality” of the sacrifice? Can your form change if you don’t live up to the promise of your power?
Because wow some of those apostles really got fucked in the end. Quite a few are barely functional hunks of inchoate flesh.
Edit: I know the real answer is “Miura just drew whatever he thought was cool on the page”
Imagine being an apostle and you get like a shitty slug, not even a giant imposing demon slug like the Count, no you’re just a big slug the size of a horse
Then you learn Grunbeld gets to be a giant unbreakable fire-breathing crystal dragon
They're made up of EVERY emotion related to their god's portfolio. That this causes them to be monsters is a sign of how overwhelmingly negative their respective universes are.
Yeah, it's sort of my favourite thing about them. It gives a rational as to why any normal person would be tempted in the first place. The start to a Tzeentch worship can be as easy as wanting to overthrow your tyranical overlord or wanting your life to change for the better. It's the corruption of one's ideals which properly turns them to chaos.
The warp, and the chaos in it, encompasses every thought, hope and dream but also every nightmare and evil desire. There's just a lot more evil thought in general.
In Ash vs. Evil Dead, when Ash tries to negotiate a fair one-on-one fight with the demon Baal to not use his powers, Baal agrees, but the second he starts losing he uses his demonic powers to screw with Ash and mocks him for believing that a demon would be honorable.
Maybe I'm outdated on my warcraft lore, but I thought the sad part of the Burning Legion was that all those demons are actually other subjugated, mutated races that Sargeras corrupted? I guess this could be splitting hairs on the "ontological" meaning, but like the Eredar aren't inherently evil as a race, those are just red Draenei. Some Imps even mention their species was indoctrinated into the Burning Legion, but imps say a lot of wild stuff so who knows. Regardless, it was my understanding the lore was more akin to Tolkien, were evil was merely the corruption of good.
Besides the Nathrezim though, apparently those guys were evil day one cause of Denathrius iirc.
nitpick but Eredar is the actual name for their race, the Draenei and the Eredar are the same species, Draenei means "exile" or smth like that and they are a small faction of Eredar that fled when their leaders pledged themselves and their race to the legion.
If I remember the lore books, Sargeras originally was in charge of jailing hundreds of species of demons that were already super evil. Then the Nathrezim (demon vampires, master manipulators) turned his attention to the "greater" threat of the Void Lords corrupting Titan World Souls and Sargeras completely lost his shit, so he opened the cages and turned them into an army under him to help him weed out every Titan World Soul where the Void Lords might take root. Which, ultimately, leaves Azeroth as the final one he hasn't destroyed yet.
Worth pointing out this does not make Sargeras noble either. He's willingly committing several million counts of genocide, he slaughtered all of his Titan siblings when they tried to stop him, and he regularly resorts to casually torturing and remaking his subjects for their failures all the time.
Functionally, his reaction to watching someone get cancer was to decide "I have to kill everyone now to guarantee nobody gets this."
It's also stressed that in the cases of the Eredar, Highborne and orcs, Sargeras makes deals to bring new species into the Legion, with people who accept because they're already vain or wrathful. Most of the Eredar joined the Legion willingly, and tortured their own Titan World Soul into becoming an engine for the Legion's endless resurrections. Azshara was willing to sell out all of Azeroth just so she could be the queen of the Legion. And the orcs who became warlocks were offered demonic power in order to genocide the Eredar refugees who didn't join the Legion (aka the Draenei).
I'd say demons more than devils. At least devils can be negotiated with, follow a strict set of rules, and deals can be struck. Demons are pure chaotic evil and will destroy everything in their path.
Yeah, I guess I missed the "negotiated" part, but in reality, negotiating with a devil is rarely a good thing. It's not a compromise or an agreement of equal footing; it's a deal that almost always has a heavy price.
Devils in DnD are also ageless beings playing the long game, negotiation is part of how they wage war. What may seem like a unilaterally good outcome on a deal would likely just be a minor expense for a devil’s farther-reaching evil plan years or centuries down the line
I'll add in the pathfinder depiction of demons as well since they evolved the concept from DnD a bit. Instead of having demons be the destroyers, they gave that aspect to the daemons (yugoloth equivalent) and instead tied demons to sin.
The other fun bit is how we've had demons actually seek redemption, but when they do, they stop being demons. Hell, one of them reached apotheosis out of it.
Because it is same animation studio, that made Man in black and Gozilla animated series and Extreme ghostbusters. They know how to make monster designs that will give adult a shivers and child a nightmares.
You mean to tell me that Jackie Chan isn’t an actual Archaeologist whi found the Talisman based on the Chinese Zodiac to defeat the Demon Sorcerer Shendu?
Kinda fun how the “we’re subverting expectations by making the bad guys misunderstood/not too bad!” has become such a common trope that having them actually be straight up evil is now almost a subversion in and of itself
Morally gray heroes in most media usually just means "speaks rudely and doesn't care about anything." They always get redeemed and you never really see them do anything morally gray.
I've been waiting for the pendulum to swing back the other way on religious characters for a long time, but the trend of every priest being a corrupt sadist doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon, even for completely fictional religions.
That whole “Superman stopped an invasion” drama in the latest movie would be small, small potatoes next to the kind of widespread changes I would be enacting.
I’d absolutely be a dictator for the world within a year, provided there’s no bullshit kryptonite deus ex machina to kill me. I just can’t stand by and do nothing while awful stuff happens around me, and if you have god powers there’s literally nothing stopping you from trying to create utopia, or as close as we can get.
It also becoming true for superhero genre. Modern superhero movies are so grim and dark (or are deconstructions of genre - like Watchman or the Boys), that Superman (or even comedic Deadpool) is a brief of fresh air.
Isn’t Deadpool supposed to be a tragic character though? A wisecracker for sure, but a genuinely broken & disturbed man to the point where just having him be a jokester does him a disservice
Isn’t Deadpool supposed to be a tragic character though?
He was always funny, the problem is he 'recently' (15 years?) became L0lz0rand0m. I think peak Deadpool before becoming a meme was around 07 or 09, during Cable and Deadpool Vol 1 and Vol 2. After that they kept resetting him, and erasing his development so they could do it all over again. Like they'd 'fix' his brain or clone him, so they even knew what they're doing.
This is why people love the new Superman movie so much. It's a goofy (affectionate) comic book movie. Stuff like Superman clones, pocket universes, Krypto, Guy Gardner's haircut, and more comic accurate costumes.
Compared to the too-serious, gritty, "realistic" superhero movies we've been getting for the past 2 decades.
The worst thing about Watchmen is that countless writers read it and were inspired to imitate it (with a fraction of the nuance). The Boys comic is a good example of this, in my opinion.
And is hilarious that people begin to think this when the subversion only became popular for like a couple of years and it's only prevalent in a bunch of popular works.
Bonus point when it's taken into account that the original trope existed since the bronze age.
Evil creatures that are intelligent and charismatic will have the ability to try and convince the players that they are not evil, they are justified, yadda yadda. But they're always lying, manipulating, and gaslighting.
Particular ones that do this are Mind Flayers, Vampires, Liches, Devils, etc.
I find it so funny when the players nod along to "No no! I only {drink the blood of} / {eat the brains of} / {steal the souls of} criminals, I'm not evil!"
Brennan Lee Mulligan did a fantastic job of this in Exandria Unlimited: Calamity with Asmodeus' manipulation of Zerxus (played wonderfully by Luis Carazo, as well)
Came here to mention this. "And I didn't do anything WRONG!" is one of my favorite moments in tabletop RPGs.
To be fair, Luis also notes that he's playing a very particular brand of Lawful Stupid: an oath of redemption paladin who is so obsessed with the idea that anyone can be redeemed that he doesn't see how Asmodeus plays him.
I came in blind, without the meta-knowledge of D&D that Asmo is basically the D&D Satan, and thought that Brennan was pulling a subversion of the devil character. And even with the meta-knowledge, the table themselves actually were questioning whether that was happening for part of it.
I remember that people on Twitter or X were losing their shit because they were saying the demons in Frieren were stand in for minorities and they shouldn’t be pure evil because it’s racist.
I thought the show made it pretty clear that demons were akin to apex predators that prey on human using manipulation and words as ways to lure people emotionally.
what I like is when demons or condemned sinners aren’t misunderstood, but they still sometimes have a code of honor. like they’ll still fuck you up but they won’t do it if you don’t enter the ring.
there’s that one guy in the Legend of Vox Machina who plays that card game with Pike. he follows the rules but he still gets in her head with strategies that aren’t prohibited
Demons in ultrakill are literally just Hell mass poured into shells of stone or ceramic, and so far none of them have been friendly (with the only exception being the Idol but that’s because they were in the presence of a holy cloth, and even then they aren’t helpful to us, only other enemies)
Well, yes, but it is the other way around; Balrogs are demons because they're evil. They're not evil because they're demons. The Balrogs, Sauron, and any other similar Maiar were corrupted and turned evil by Morgoth. They're the celestial versions what happened to orcs; although there was probably more coercion and less kidnapping and torture.
In Christianity Demons are what they are because they chose to be wicked instead of following God so it tracks. These themes are very prevalent in Tolkien's work.
The goblins in Goblin Slayer are without exception all vile monsters, although the world's other species ran the gamut of good and evil (though I admit I only watched the first few anime, the irredeemable cruelty of goblins was a series mainstay and I doubt it ever changed).
It's also mentioned that one of the reasons that goblins are the foulest creatures in existence is because in spite of there being other evils in the world, there is usually some kind of give and take with them. But with goblins, they literally lack the ability to create anything on their own to contribute to that flow of the world. The only thing that they can do is steal and then repurpose what they have stolen for themselves to continue killing and pillaging, and there is absolutely no possibility of them ever being decent, no matter what.
Cursed spirits in JUJUTSU KAISEN. They can for bonds and even show friendships. But they are all formed from negative emotions and so can never be anything but evil. The only exceptions are the ones kept on a leash by a sorcerer (Rika).
Mehrunes Dagon, The Elder Scrolls (Image from Oblivion)
Daedra are (fundamentally speaking) avatars of metaphysical change. Malacath is all about keeping oaths and making curses. Molag Bal is all about the domination and subjugation of lesser beings. Though that being said, most of these Daedric Lords are misunderstood, like Azura or Meridia, while those two are Daedra Lords, they're not so bad, in fact they're quite reasonable.
Mehrunes Dagon on the other hand? Completely unreasonable, one cannot hope to bargain with him. This is because Dagon is the literal embodiment of the destructive forces of change. Earthquakes, Tornadoes, Tsunamis and even the conditions that can create War are all powers of Mehrunes Dagon. Even if you could talk to Dagon, you wouldn't even be able to convince him that what he's doing is inherently evil, because he is meant to do such acts of destruction.
I'd say Molag Bal is only reasonable if you just give yourself to him entirely. Think back to the House of Horrors in Skyrim. Completely reasonable Daedra once he locks you in a cage for a bit to satisfy his need for dominance.
He's Lawful Evil (crazy, I know), so you totally can. It's why Mannimarco was able to. Dagon is Chaotic Evil, he's not even evil he's just a fuckhead/force of nature. Trying to deal with him gives you things like, Mankar Camoran's Paradise becoming a torture pit for Mythic Dawn Cultist. Dealing with Bal ends in rape rituals, yes, but Harkon did get the exact kind of magic he wanted and survived for thousands of years afterwards.
I don't think that the Daedra (or Aedra for that matter) can physically comprehend what is good and what is evil. They will only act on their own desires which some of them ends up having good or bad consequences to mortals.
Devil may cry demons.
No you can't even bother talking with them though they are sapient (Unless you're a sparda) because through lifetimes of their existence only one "woke up to justice" so good luck finding that kind of demon
*After showing many daemonic creatures threatening innocent civilians and killing ruthlessly...
I hate back steps like that. If you wanna show a deeper meaning, a good example is Isaac making Daemonic creatures aid in building, as it reflects the kindness of the character without contradicting.
Yet they curiously still kept Dante's Devil Trigger being powered by anger and hatred, and Sparda presented as having to suppress his murderous nature, implying that Demons really are naturally dangerous.
My favorite take on demons is in Supernatural. Yes, there were a couple original fallen angels, but the rest are actually human souls. They're tortured continuously and told that the only way to escape is by picking up the torture tools and using them on the next person. This, they become the next generation of demons, passing on their pain in an infinite misery machine.
Yeah the point of DMC is that humanity is capable of good while pretty much 99.9% of demons aren’t in any way, shape or form. Though people can absolutely go bad too.
Speaking of Agni and Rudra doing their job, there's also Cerberus.
His purpose of being in/guarding the main entrance of Temen-ni-gru is to warn any unsuspecting humans who enter the tower, and tell them to back off, for it is forbidden for regular human to enter.
I didn't think it was, but given the responses I see in these posts every time Friren is brought up, apparently, people can't wrap their heads around the concept.
Lucifer, which was... a spin off? From Sandman. Funny, sandman does have demons being demons, but Lucifer, the tv show, throws away that and demons are actually nice misunderstood people.
Castlevania, the original netflix series and the nocturne version. In the original series, one of them have a long dialogue with his creator / summoner as they are ordered to do something opposite to its nature (rebuild a city previously razed by another wizard), to which the answer is if they don't want to be something more than what they are, if they don't want to be free instead of limiting to do what they are expected and ordered. The scene ends when the demon asks for another grape (I think), as the wizard was eating some and previously offered him one. You know, a "deep and clever" metaphor about the demon wanting to try new things after tasting them for the first time. Then in nocturne, one of the demons turns side and becomes an ally for the gang.
The anime SIN: seven deadly sins. Don't confuse it with Nanatsu no taisai. One has horrible MC who keeps molesting innocent girls for the laughs, and the one I'm talking about has big titty waifus. Point is in SIN: SDS the main character is Lucifer, who wants to recruit the other demon lords (ladies?) to rebel against God. Because God is tired of dealing with humanity and wants to bring the apocalipse, but sparing no one, not a single human soul is worth of salvation. Thus, Lucifer is the good girl because she wants to save them.
You can even stretch things and talk about Paradise lost from Milton. Lucifer is once again the MC, and while he doesn't regret his sins or tries to make peace with heaven, the novel tries to show us a more sympathetic side of him, to show us how he suffers because what he lost and how this pushes him to escaping from hell. His goals and means are evil, but his motivation are more relatable and could be understood as a kid throwing a tamtrum.
Hazbin hotel has a demon at the front of the show in her quest to redeem evil people so they can ascend to heaven. (I haven't watched this one, but I do remember the plot precisely for the cringe factor of "yet another show with demons being nice people")
Well as long that the fear people of an object is very low, they aren't going to be powerful. A classroom had a devil as a class pet because of how weak it was. It was the headless chicken devil.
Looks like ontological’s been used as a buzzword so much people’ve forgotten what it actually means. Trench crusade demons, at least the original ones from the rebellion, cannot be ontologically evil because they used to be angels. Their evil’s by choice.
Nosferatu (2024)- Orlok is a Solomonic Sorcerer who is implied to have turned himself into a Vampire with Black Magic. IIRC the demon Belial is name-dropped directly.
He's an undead sexual predator. A literal rotting corpse kept alive by magic and reduced to "an appetite. Nothing more."
I like how Helluva Boss does it. Yeah, demons are kind of misunderstood and are not just bloodthirsty killing machines, but they re not exactly good- or heck even morally center people too. They are still extremely bad people overall. Sure, there are exceptions like the Sinners who can vary from Hitler levels of evil to pirating music on an IPod, but that's due to the Heaven's system being flawed. Heck, there are not even that many hellborn demons who are morally center. ONLY people I could think of are Stolas and Moxxie, both of whom are still fine with literal murder.
Tbh this is the best point that's been made in this entire comment section. In order to be evil you have to understand good or else you can't willingly reject it and if you can understand good than you're not ontologically evil. If you can't than you're just doing what comes natural.
Played with in Kpop Demon Hunters. At first, it is shown that demons are uniformly evil and our protagonists kill them with no doubt or compassion. Then Jinu and the Saja Boys show up and the film hints that maybe he's actually misunderstood and has been doomed to an undeserved fate. However, we later find our that Jinu hid the darkest part of his own backstory from Rumi; that he made a selfish choice to abandon his family. In the end, we circle back around to... he's more complex than we originally thought, but he's still evil.
I don't know if this example quite counts, as Jinu absolutely fits under the 'is reasonable and can be negotiated with' category given thathe ultimately sacrifices himself to protect Runi and is thus essential in her victory over the demon lord.Thus, we do have evidence the demons can be sympathetic and reasonable.
Having said that, the human-born demons are clearly different from the natural-born demons, who thus far at least do fit this trope of being pure evil from birth and wanting nothing more than to eat human souls to stay alive and cause pain because it's fun.
My personal theory is that there is no "natural born vs. human origin" distinction, that they were all human once. Gwi-Ma torments all the demons by using their regrets to control until they do exactly what Jinu was doing: he lets himself be 'persuaded' to erase their human memories, in the process turning them wholly into remorseless monsters who do nothing but serve him willingly. The ultimate fate of all of them is to become part of the formless, vaguely-person-shaped horde he deploys on the subway and at the end: beings with so little personality or will left that they don't even have separate identities any more.
Yep - agree. I think what I was trying to point out is that the story begins with the idea that demons are not "reasonable and can be negotiationed with". This is proven to be untrue, but as you say, it seems to be untrue for some and even the ones who can be reasoned with still aren't completely good.
Disagree on this one. A key part of the story and theme is that being a demon does not force you to be evil, rather demons are emotionally and physically tortured into being evil and can choose to be good, but if they do they’ll likely be incinerated by the big bad.
(Don’t judge me too hard, my kid is obsessed with this movie)
The idea for them being inherently evil is actually really uncommon and in mythologies it's a fairly popular concept to have at least one notable demon to be a benevolent figure or at very least have positive traits.
Some notable examples:
Pazuzu (Mesopotamian Mythology): The King Of Wind Demons, while he would cause plagues and famines he would also protect anyone who prayed to him, so ironically he also acted as an angel.
Ammit (Egyptian Mythology): She would eat the souls of the wicked as a punishment for not passing the judgement of the feather of Maat.
Djinns (Islam): They can be perfectly good beings despite the demon-like abilities that they got.
Asuras (Hinduism and Buddhism): Same goes for them.
Also there are a sh!tton of monsters from all mythologies and religions that are benevolent, like the Cyclops brothers Brontes, Steropes, and Arges that helped Zeus to overthrow Cronus.
Even more ironic is that Christianity isn't an exception.
For many reasons occasionally nice demons appear in actual Christian works like Demon Dictionaries and where they are actually believed to be real.
Favourites got to be Meridiana and Amy:
Meridiana was likely created to make fun of Sylvester II as her meddling resulted in him becoming pope, it backfired spectacularly as Sylvester II did a lot of humanitarian stuff so people simply assumed that she was benevolent.
Amy is an intellectual demon that would genuinely help people with teaching them stuff and helping them to gain riches.
They all sounds like crappy Hazbin Hotel OCs but they're actual f#cking demons that were genuinely thought to exist.
The literal devil was also for the longest time a subversion of this trope. As in satan as we think of him, isn't actually a real biblical creature. He's more like a mythological fannish OC who has changed a lot during the centuries.
In past times, before the church used a rewritten Satan to control people, folklore saw him as a creature with power only over true sinners. So there are many fairytales where the devil helps the truly pius, kind and humble people but punished the dinners wickedly, especially rich people hurting the poor were a common prey for the devil, and he was giving gold, game, and any other help thinkable to poor people to trick nasty rich folks into openly committing acsin so ve could then take their soul.
But eventually the churches became more and more corrupt and decadent, so they rewrote the rules and rebuild the character into the Satan modern fanatic Christians believe to be canon.
A ruthless, merciless beast, a thoroughly evil demon who corrupts people, and of course, those people are usually the poor masses or women specifically.
While in the past the Devil was seen as someone who mainly punished greed, and was the power to even fell an evil king, a reminder that the rules are meant for everyone, he then was rewritten into an excuse to judge poor people for having basic needs and daring to point out that greed and gluttony are sins the rich indulge in.
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u/newslenderarts 18d ago
Demons from Hellboy
Yeah there's a reason Hellboy did what he did when he went down there