• Ah! My Goddess: In the anime, when the bug infestation was intensifying due to Belldandy and Keiichi being together. Skuld unsympathetically tells Keiichi that it is for the good of the world if he were not to see Belldandy anymore. Sure she says this, but she also uses it as an excuse to break them up and bring her sister Belldandy back home. Urd angrily calls Skuld out on her childish selfishness, saying she doesn't seem to care if Belldandy will be miserable for the rest of her life, just as long as Skuld herself is happy.
• Azumanga Daioh: Mr. Kimura is at first glance an obnoxious creep who pervs on teenage girls. Then it's shown that he donates to charity, picks up litter, wishes for world peace and has a wife who loves him. When the other characters think for a moment that perhaps he's not so bad after all, he immediately spews a disgusting comment or makes a pass as if that's all he knows how to do, showing all these good qualities mean nothing when the man himself is such a boorish pervert. It may actually just make him worse.
• Berserk: Griffith is more of a bastard than a quasi-sympathetic jerkass, but every once in a while he releases the jerkass within. One moment happens when he rescues Princess Charlotte from the clutches of the Emperor Ganishka in a very romantic and fairytale-ish way. Unfortunately for her, Charlotte has been crazy in love with Griffith ever since she first lay eyes on him, and Griffith has been using her feelings for him ever since in order to get closer to the Midland throne.
• Bleach: Mayuri has no hidden heart of gold because everything he does is For Science!. When Szayelaporro resurrects himself by draining Mayuri's daughter and lieutenant's life-force, Mayuri initially seems shocked and dismayed as he crouches over her withered body. A moment later, instead of showing remorse or swearing revenge, he grins broadly and compliments Szayelaporro on possessing such a fascinating technique. This gets zigzagged from there as what does basically set him off is Szayelaporro claiming to achieve perfection, as to him, science is about making further research and improvements, which can't be possible if something is already perfect. Later on, where he does actually show concern for her at some points and is genuinely shocked to see her actually get killed, prompting a small Heroic BSoD that inspires him to create a new daughter where he can further improve on what she managed to accomplish.
• Cross Ange: Embryo, full stop. He saves Salia from drowning, heals Chris when she's fatally shot in the head, resurrects the school girls under Ersha's care, and also saves the lives of Tanya and Irma, all to get them on his side while also preying on their emotional vulnerabilities. However, when the schoolgirls are killed a second time and Ersha begs Embryo to revive them again, he callously says they have no place in his new world, and then nearly strangles Ersha herself to death when she protests further. Embryo belittling her for being understandably upset over the deaths of the children is what spurs Ersha to turn back to the side of good. Later, Embryo has no qualms about ditching Salia, Chris, Tanya and Irma when he finds himself cornered, leaving them all to die at the claws and teeth of the DRAGONs while he tries to save his own hide.
• Death Note: Whenever Light Yagami does a "good" act, it's just a front for his own selfish purposes or murder plots. He even goes so far as to think to himself he's willing to kill his sister or father if it will assist him in becoming the new God. While his father is killed, he's not the one who did it, but he does ultimately insult his memory near the end by remarking how his idealist nature made him a fool in such a Crapsack World,and ends up pissing off Matsuda for his trouble. But he was remorseful at the end of the anime.
• Dragon Ball Z:
  • Vegeta was very much like this after going into an Enemy Mine situation with the heroes but before undergoing a genuine Heel–Face Turn, several times surprisingly helping the heroes but only doing so for his gain. The most notable case is when he saves Gohan and Krillin from being killed by Guldo and Gohan thanks him — Vegeta specifies he wasn't saving them, but rather using the fact that Guldo's guard was down to eliminate one of the opposition.
  • Freeza, however, plays it straight. Even when forced to help Goku and the others in the Tournament of Power (to the point of even contributing energy for Goku's Genki Dama, and delivering the final blow against Jiren right alongside him), he's immediately back to his old tricks, conquering planets, trying to steal the Dragonballs, and recruiting Broly to try to kill Goku and Vegeta.
• The Five Star Stories: Decors Weissmel is a complete dick, who just sometimes gives the Noble Demon vibes. But in the end, this is just because he's Lawful Evil, and has the principles that he tends to adhere to — not just some hidden nobleness of his thoroughly evil heart.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Shou Tucker is introduced alongside an unsettling recount by Mustang of the fate of his first talking chimera, but he appears to be a soft-spoken Nice Guy desperate to provide a good life for himself and his daughter. Then it's revealed that he turned his own daughter and dog into a second talking chimera out of desperation to keep his status as a State Alchemist, and that the first one was made using his wife, which is how he first got his status. After being unmasked, he expresses an inflated sense of self-importance, as well as no remorse for his atrocities.
  • When Mustang finds out King Bradley is a homunculus, he calls the individual in question out on a seeming Pet the Dog moment earlier in which Bradley was trembling at Hughes' funeral. Bradley reveals that rather than being sad, he was shaking with rage because Hughes' daughter was making such a scene.
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), the Elric Brothers discover Psiren the Phantom Thief's Secret Identity to be a nurse. The brothers decide to let her go when she tells them she just steals to keep the hospital from closing down. Sometime later the hospital is torn down anyway and Psiren is now a nun claiming to steal to save a church from closing down. After that is demolished she's claiming the same thing as a teacher at a school, after which even Al won't deny that she's just stealing for herself. It's ultimately subverted in the end, though, as she is acting as a thief for a good cause, just not the one she initially claimed to be fighting for: the town she operates in is one with an incredibly poor economy, and her acts are such a spectacle that they've been drawing tourists in just to see her in action, which in turn helps keep the place afloat.
• Ginga Densetsu Weed: Toward the end of the anime, Jerome sees Hougen dragging Reika back to land when they're caught in a raging river. It looks like Hougen may have a Pet the Dog moment...but then he uses Reika as a stepping object to get himself back onto land, leaving her to be swept away.
• He Is My Master: While there are a few instances that might border on true Jerk with a Heart of Gold status in the anime (definitely not the manga), Yoshitaka pulls these moments all the time.
• Hot Gimmick: Ryoki was already established as a Jerkass due to the cruel and abusive way he treats his girlfriend/slave Hatsumi. It seems like he's not so bad when he saves Hatsumi from being raped but his qualifying status is reinforced when he immediately forces a kiss on her afterward and habitually sexually assaults her.
• Hunter × Hunter: Gyro's father is a neglectful, abusive drunkard who hardly acknowledges his son besides ordering him around, beating him if he doesn't obey, and reminding him not to cause trouble with people. However, Gyro believes that he loves him deep down, as he presumably took care of him when he sick, and took his words as wanting to ensure his son's safety. This idealistic view ends up being shattered when a bully reveals that Gyro's father didn't actually took care of him when he was sick since he was passed out drunk (an old neighbor did so instead), and has previously stated that he doesn't care if Gyro dies or not. The bully's words would ring true when Gyro's father callously abandons him, causing Gyro to realize that when his father told Gyro not to cause trouble for others, he was only referring to himself, and he never cared about him as a son, much any less as a person.
• Kimba the White Lion: Viper Snakely. Just when he was about to give up hunting and retire for the sake of his daughter (in the manga version), he finally earned a crumb of sympathy from the audience... and then proceeds to lose it entirely when we learn what his job was before he became a safari hunter; he was an SS Officer posted in an internment camp.
• Kuroko's Basketball: Makoto Hanamiya. When Kuroko asks him why he uses such foul and underhanded tactics, he starts getting emotional, and it appears he is going to reveal some tragic backstory — then he interrupts himself and starts laughing, explaining that he only does it because he enjoys crushing people's dreams.
• One Piece:
  • Klahadore, Kaya's butler. At first glance, he seems like a jerk who doesn't like Usopp, simply because Usopp's father is a pirate. Then it's revealed that he takes serving Kaya very seriously since her father took him in and gave him a job when he had nowhere else to turn, and he's overprotective of Kaya because he couldn't bear the thought of anything happening to Kaya. Then he turns out to be Captain Kuro, who'd been planning to murder Kaya and steal her inheritance to live comfortably, and when Kaya confronts him to negotiate with him, he reminisces about their time together before saying how humiliating it was for him.
  • Donquixote Doflamingo is introduced as the kind of villain who'd cut loose anyone who fails him or is no longer useful, and doesn't seem like the sort who'd inspire much loyalty. In the Punk Hazard and Dressrosa arcs, the readers see some of his higher-ranking followers, who seemingly treat him like family. Eventually, though, it's revealed that Doflamingo gathered together people who'd willingly sacrifice themselves for him, and sees no problem in using his Bird Cage to gradually crush the nation of Dressrosa, killing everyone inside — his enemies, innocent civilians, and even his companions.
• Pokémon: The Original Series:
  • Pokémon S1E11 "Charmander – The Stray Pokémon": Damien, Charmander's original trainer, abandoned Charmander for not meeting his exacting standards. He returned, but only because he saw Charmander defeat Team Rocket and thought he was useful.
  • Good 'Quil Hunting: Koji is searching for a Cyndaquil and aggressively demands that Ash stay of out his way (definitely an Entitled Bastard). When Ash ends up catching Cyndaquil first, Koji bullies him into battling for it. Ash wins, and Koji attempts to steal Cyndaquil in a net, which results in the small pokemon blasting him with Flamethrower.
• Ramen Fighter Miki: A hilarious Deconstructive Parody of the Fighting Series and so it gives us protagonist Miki Onimaru, a Heroic Comedic Sociopath who has Chronic Hero Syndrome (so she can slack at her work), battle Delinquents (just For the Evulz), and is The Bully to her unfortunate friends.
• Reborn! (2004): Kyouya Hibari. Half carrying Gokudera to find Tsuna in Kokuyo Land, how nice of him. Not. He throws Gokudera aside afterward, and it turns out he only helped the latter so they could be "even". Don't even get started on the countless times he turned up to kick enemy butt and then says 'They were crowding'.
• Rent-A-Girlfriend: Mami Nanami, oh so much. Every single time it seems she's not so bad deep down, she throws everyone for a loop by showing she's even worse. Later chapters reveal she does have a Freudian Excuse (in the form of her controlling parents who forced her to break up her relationship to get her into an Arranged Marriage) but she's still twisted and manipulative to the core.
• So I'm a Spider, So What?: The self-proclaimed Evil God "D" enjoys watching Kumoko struggle and is more than willing to mete out fear and pain if slandered. Despite this, she was responsible for creating the System meant to save the world, hinting she's not that bad. And then it's revealed she could have just fixed the problem instantly. The System was created solely to amuse "D" by making a bunch of humans live inside what amounts to a fantasy RPG world and forbid anyone from fixing the fundamental problems (read: Kill Potimas) so that it would have a reasonable chance of working. Then she got bored and stopped paying attention and is only "helping" a second time because she found a way to wring more entertainment out of the situation.
• SPY×FAMILY: Fiona Frost, AKA Agent Nightfall. At face value she is a Cold, Emotionless Spy who is abrasive towards others, but she is a member of <WISE>, one of the operatives helping Operation Strix and an ally of Loid Forger (Agent Twilight), whom she secretly loves. However, none of that changes the fact that deep-down Nightfall is a selfish, immoral, ruthless, and callous woman who doesn't give a rat's ass that her actions would harm others, and will do anything to get what she wants. She wants to be Loid/Twilight's wife, but she loathes Anya and Yor with a passion even though he's grown close to them and desires to break-up the family he created for the mission just to have him for herself. In one of her earlier appearances, Fiona/Nightfall returns Anya's Magnifying Glass at the Forger Household... just so she could A) get Loid/Twilight's approval, B) enter the household to learn Yor and Anya's weaknesses to exploit, and C) lie to Yor claiming that Loid regularly badmouths her behind her back, which she hopes will convince Mrs. Forger to divorce him.
• A Timid Woman Longing For Her Delivery Girl: Aida, Takase's former coworker. When Takase starts, Aida appears rather friendly and supportive, telling off Kazama when he flirts with Aida. However, when Kazama pushes his luck too far and gets fired for sexually harassing Takase, Aida badmouths Takase behind her back, saying Takase should have been fired instead and being more concerned about how the incident affects her than about Takase. After Takase quits her job to become a freelancer, Aida encounters Takase by chance and claims to have been worried about her before making backhanded remarks about her using her looks to find a rich husband. By this point, Takase realzes that Aida doesn't care about her at all, and her new friend Rinko immediately realizes Aida is a bad person.
• Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-: Fei-Wang Reed spends the entire series manipulating the main characters and making their lives a living hell, all while preparing to rip all of the space-time a new one to further his plans. Then it's revealed said plan is about bringing somebody back to life. With motivation like that, he probably has some kind of tragic, sympathetic backstory, right? Nope. He just wants to accomplish something that Clow Reed couldn't to prove his superiority.
• Tweeny Witches: In episode 15, Sigma does save Eva from the warlock army, though he is not hesitant in telling Arusu and Sheila later on that she is The Load on the team. Saving her from the warlock army wasn't a genuine act of kindness; he only did that so he could win Sheila's trust. Subverted when he turns out to be Good All Along and Took a Level in Kindness for real.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: Gozaburo Kaiba, Seto and Mokuba's adoptive father, is definitely one of these. Psychologically abusive in the extreme, his ego is matched only by his wealth, which he thinks makes him the most powerful person on the planet. While Seto is no saint himself, he does have a surprisingly ironclad moral code, and his love for Mokuba immediately places him a step above his stepfather.

• Asterix: When Vitalstatistix calls Chief Whosemoralsarelastix out on getting along well with the Roman invaders in Asterix and the Cauldron, Whosemoralsarelastix admits that he does indeed sell wares to Romans - but demands twice the price he'd take from Gauls. Then immediately he notes that the Romans buy everything he has.
• Captain America: Invoked. Nick Fury claimed this for himself back in the '70s Captain America 1954 comic. After he'd spent a whole issue getting The Falcon pardoned for his criminal past, Cap remarked, "Fury, under that rough, unshaven exterior..." Fury interrupted, "There's an even rougher, unshaven interior!" Of course, in this case, it's very blustering; while later writers did make Fury genuinely amoral, around this time he was still straightforward heroic.
• Deathstroke: In Deathstroke (2016), Slade is an awful human being who manipulates and cons everyone around him. Flashbacks show he was always an abusive deadbeat to his sons, and nearly every interaction he has in the modern day with Joseph and Rose is brimming with insults. It's outright stated that he is incapable of having a healthy relationship; and even if he does care about someone, doesn't mean he won't hurt them very, very badly. Among his other actions include putting a hit out on his own daughter because foiling it meant he could spend time with her; killing the dog of a teenage superheroine who had been unwittingly helping him in order to get her to hate him and burn whatever emotional ties he had with her; and risking time itself in an attempt to save his son.
• The Eltingville Club: Joe Gargagliano showed himself throughout the comic series to be a toxic, greedy, selfish jerk who would mistreat his comic customers and scam them by selling comics at higher prices by manipulating them. In "This Fan... This Monster", Joe shows some humanity for the first time by telling Bill, one of his frequent customers, that he just hired, how, as a teen, a kind elderly couple took him in. He helped the old couple at their comic book stand, where he first developed his passion for comics, to the point that he considered them his true family. But tragedy strikes with the old man's suffering a heart attack, and the old man dies on Joe's 21st birthday. Bill tries to offer his condolences, only for Joe to admit he was glad for it, and he outright says it was the best thing that ever happened to him because he took advantage of the widow's grief to buy her comic book collection for a very low price, which enabled him to open his own store, ultimately showing that even if Joe does have some affection for the people, he cares about he ultimately cares more about himself, not caring that someone he actually consider family like his father figure died and taking advantage of the woman he considered a mother figures grief to scam her out of comics for a cheap price so he can open his own store.
• Empowered: Oyuki-chan is a ninja who owes a debt to Ninjette, and has helped her more than once. She had to be blackmailed into helping further, and a brief Imagine Spot shows her gloating over Ninjette's "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
• Exit Wounds: Koby Franco is a curmudgeonly cab driver who expresses indifference to the possibility that his estranged father might be dead. After spending much of the book with his father's girlfriend who insists that he was a good person (and his other relatives, who think Koby is too hard on him) and finding out he may very well be dead, Koby softens up a little. Only to discover that his father isn't dead — the handmade scarf the girlfriend made that they found at the scene of the bombing was a gift from him to another girlfriend. Koby realizes to his disgust that the reason for their poor relationship is that his father has always been a serial philanderer who doesn't care about how his actions affect the people around him. Which extends to the present day — his new wife, a devout Orthodox Jew, thinks he's out at night so often because of "prayer meetings".)
• Hellblazer: John Constantine is often a remorseless jerk to anyone he meets especially if they are a supernatural or authority figure. He may pretend to be different as a means to manipulate someone into doing what he wants only to betray or turn on them when it suits his purposes as former friends and/or allies Gary Lester, Zed, and the succubus Ellie found out. To his friends, he is usually a Jerk with a Heart of Gold but can turn on them too if he is in a bad mood or it again suits his purposes.
• Iznogoud:
  • Often Played for Laughs, where the title character, an Evil Chancellor trying to overthrow his Caliph and possessing seemingly no redeeming qualities, often willingly saves his assistant Wa'at Alahf from certain death, only to reveal when thanked by him that he did so because he required his help for things such as carrying important files or cleaning his shoes. In contrast, he often is willing to use Wa'at as a lab rat for his various plans.
  • In "Iznogoud's Childhood", Wa'at Alahf asks him his motivations for being Caliph in the place of the Caliph:
    Iznogoud: To make reforms! For example, this law to cut off a fruit thief's hand is absurd! That will never stop him from stealing fruits: we need to cut off both of his hands!
  • During "Who Killed the Caliph", Iznogoud seems to care for Wa'at and saves him from execution after he has been mistaken for a spy. He catches the Executioner trying to get Wa'at to pay him for mercy, and angrily states that mercy should not be bought. He then notices a tortured prisoner and orders the Executioner to release him, causing Wa'at to wonder if he's having pity after all... then he appoints the prisoner new Executioner, and orders him to torture the former one.
• Marshal Law: as stated in one story, when you first look at him he appears to be a brutal thug. But when you look under his tough exterior, you see that he's really... a brutal thug. Marshal Law is full of examples. At another point in the same story, when he's in a cemetery full of the bodies of his victims, he points out that he used to come there once a month... to "gloat", bringing a flask and a sandwich and "making a day of it."
• PS238: Dax-Ra starts as a short-tempered and jerkish Knight Templar who imprisons Ron and attacks several of the children. Once Atlas shows up he cools down significantly and displays a much more reasonable side... Which turns out to have been mainly a front to manipulate Atlas. Once he depowers Ron as a hostage he goes full-on Smug Snake.
• Spider-Man: J. Jonah Jameson constantly flip-flops between this and Jerk with a Heart of Gold Depending on the Writer; Stan Lee himself referred to depict Jonah as a jerkish Scrooge who feels that appearing to have a heart of gold is the best way to make money. To drive this home, he was once offered a deal: if he stopped bashing Spidey every time he needed an editorial, he'd get an exclusivity deal with the New Avengers. He even got to hear Captain America tell him Spidey was a hero rather than a monster. His response? After shaking hands on the deal, he promptly went back to not only committing libel but making accusations of bribery and digging up things like "wanted murderer" (Wolverine), "terrorist" (Spider-Woman), and "convicted drug dealer" (Luke Cage, who was framed and exonerated). One of the guidebooks describes him thusly: "Under his rough, crusty and rude exterior... You'll find that he's even worse!"
• Sub-Mariner: Namor the Sub-Mariner is all over the line between this trope, Jerk with a Heart of Gold, and Noble Demon.
  Doctor Strange: I've known you long enough... and well enough... to know that beneath that rude and arrogant exterior — lies an even ruder and more arrogant interior. But in all things, Namor — you are an honest.. and honorable... man.
• Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade:
  • Belinda seems to try and apologize for bullying Kara... to bait her into ranting about how the whole class bullies her, while she records the whole discussion then broadcasts it in class to humiliate Kara further.
  • Mr. Mxyzptlk says he got heartbroken when Alura grounded Kara... and then he explains he took her from her parents because it suited his plans.
• Superman:
  • In Kryptonite Nevermore, Superman used to think that Morgan Edge was a jerk. He has reassessed his judgment since their first meetings. Mr. Edge is a rotten, gigantic asshole. Subverted when it is revealed that Morgan Edge was a clone created by Darkseid, and the real Mr. Edge is a jerk with a heart of gold.
    Clark Kent: Edge is the kind of man you don't like at first... but gradually, you get to hate him!
  • In The Death of Superman (1961), Lex Luthor finds a cure for cancer, making people think he may not be completely evil after all. Then he reveals he cured cancer just to lull Superman into a false sense of security and kill him.
• Ultimate Spider-Man (2000): Unlike his original version, Ultimate Flash Thompson remains an unsympathetic bully from start to finish. The one time he shows another side of him, is after Gwen Stacy's death, when MJ realizes he genuinely liked her, and had been attempting to to talk to Peter about asking her out, which they always assumed was just him picking on them as usual. She tries to help him open up about it, but Flash storms off, rejecting her sympathy. His friend Kong proceeds to defend him, saying Flash isn't really a bad guy, which in turn prompts Peter to firmly state that no, Flash is a genuinely bad person and while merely a Jerk Jock now, because people let him get away with his behavior, he'll eventually grow up into someone truly awful.
• The Ultimates (2002):
  • When Tyrone Cash, who faked his death, is told his family misses him, he just casually brushes it off. He also grabs a plane mid-flight, smashes it against War Machine, and taunts him about it. When Fury instead tells him that he will personally let his family know that he's still alive... he timidly complies.
  • The Chitauri do not have time to harmonize earth anymore, so they'll blow it up, and good riddance. Herr Kleiser thinks that this is a terrible, terrible shame... now he won't be able to experiment shapeshifting into a female form.

Crossovers

• Group Chat: Adam Smasher initially comes off as more of a Punch-Clock Villain who follows Blue-and-Orange Morality, and is even able to befriend some of the others in the titular group chat. Then comes Chapter 64, wherein he brutally murders Michiko and attempts to frame the crew for his misdeeds.

Danganronpa

• In Danganronpa: Last Hurrah, there's Jirou Katashi, the Ultimate Mathematician. Early on, he establishes himself as an Insufferable Genius, but gradually reveals something of a redeeming side in his interactions with the others. However, he turns out to be the second murderer, and has the least sympathetic motive out of all of the killers. He seemingly redeems himself in his final moments by having a Heel Realization and giving the group a clue as to a murderer in their midst, but it later turns out that he faked his death and is the mastermind, meaning that his Heel Realization was a lie, and his clue was likely intended to incite another murder.
• Where Talent Goes to Die: Sora Hoshino is a brutally honest jerk who nevertheless has a fair number of good points about the killing game. In spite of that, he's still entirely out for himself, and murders two classmates who'd done nothing to deserve it in an attempt to graduate (which would result in the other students being executed), simply because he gave up hope of escaping.

Danny Phantom

• Danny Phantom: Stranded: Colette Bevier:
  • While she was already a Rich Bitch and Big Sister Bully, the earlier stories hinted Colette at least cared about her stepmother Stella to a degree as a parental figure. "Blackmailed" reveals that she NEVER cared about Stella or any of her previous stepmothers, and just uses them as a means to an end, which is why she stays in contact with the women after they leave.
  • Misty suggests that Colette's father, Jean-Luc, is the only parent she wants around because he was the only one who never actually tried to parent her, and thus required no effort to manipulate.

The DCU

• In Shazam! fanfiction Here There Be Monsters, Ibac and the Acrobat gang up on Captain Marvel and manage to make him pass out. In the wake of his victory, the Acrobat is going to kick Marvel's head, but Ibac stops him. It looks like he is showing respect towards a downed adversary... until it's stated he simply doesn't want Acrobat to rouse Marvel by accident.
• Kara of Rokyn: Villain Blackflame, who has always been a manipulative jerkass, befriends Jara and claims to be trying to help her become the best wrestler, but it's soon made clear she is trying to manipulate her into killing Jara's rival and Blackflame's enemy Kara.

Dexter's Laboratory

• Throughout CORE, Mandark acts kind and supportive towards Dee Dee, pointing out how poorly Dexter treats his sister and how he only seems to care about her when he's impacted by her problems. But all of his kindness has ulterior motivations, as he's trying to manipulate her to his own ends.

Disney Animated Canon

• The Ice Behind Bars: Jamie may claim that he is doing everything to Elsa for the "good of Arendelle", but it becomes more and more obvious to the readers that he just wants to punish her for his own petty reasons. When he finds out his other daughter, wife, and sister are still alive, all of which he claimed to love, rather than being happy, he is furious at them for letting him think they were dead and decides to torture/kill them all.
• Little Brother (samasim) has Huey, Dewey and Louie's father, a deadbeat dad who makes no effort whatsoever to see his kids, even when he's visiting Duckburg.
• On Trial: James the guard, full stop. He's a nasty person who uses his position as a guard as an excuse to abuse and terrorize the prisoners, believing that they all deserve the worst the justice system can offer and refusing to treat them like people. He beat up Varian when he was imprisoned and does the same to Cassandra when she's arrested. When he's later arrested after his crimes against Corona are revealed, he gets little to no sympathy from anyone (even though his treatment is better than what he gave to his prisoners).

Dragon Ball

• Super Kami Guru from Dragon Ball Z Abridged. At first, he seems like a jerk. Then, when Freeza threatens to kill Nail, Guru passionately stands up for Nail (even if Nail initially doesn't want him to) and psyches him up, telling him he's The Paragon of the Namekians and challenges him to kick the crap out of Freeza. Nail, psyched up, challenges Freeza to a fight, only for Guru to reveal via Internal Monologue that he knows perfectly well Nail hasn't got a chance of winning and that Guru knows a technique that would let Nail have a chance but never taught him it because... Guru's a jerk. He also died while Gohan and Krillin were summoning the dragon simply because it would be "a dick move".

The Fairly OddParents!

• Never Had a Friend Like Me: Amanda's parents are outrageously neglectful toward her. Amanda herself claims that they are just busy people who simply don't have time for her. Throughout the story, it becomes clear that they do have time and money to spend on Amanda, but they choose not to. After they coldly reject her Christmas present and make her cry, and then straight up admit that they only kept her to get an inheritance, it becomes clear they truly have no love for their daughter.

Family Guy

• A Sit Down with a Therapist: When even Brian decides that Peter is too much to put up with, the former leaves the latter in disgust. Unfortunately, soon after he moves in with Lois, he shows that he has made no improvement with how he tried to rape a purebred dog, and the only thing he earns out of it is homelessness after getting exiled from the mansion.

The Ghost and Molly McGee

• The Friend She Needed: Every moment of apparent kindness the kidnappers show towards Darryl and Andrea turns out to be either Pragmatic Villain or deliberately messing with their captives for their own entertainment.

The Loud House

• First Love: Ryan initially seems like a nice boy who's just a bit arrogant, but then it turns out that he groped Lynn, and apparently wants to take her virginity.

Miraculous Ladybug

• Scarlet Lady: After his son is turned into a glittery statue by Style Queen, Gabriel Agreste shocks everyone by showing up to the fashion show in the aftermath and giving Adrien a hug. Adrien notices how badly his father's shaking and thinks that he was truly shaken by his brush with death... but in actuality, Gabriel's just mourning how he spent months designing that akuma, only for her to fail just like all the others.
• Wed Locked: After Marinette's family is forced to move to Coccidellenae while she's forced to participate in Altar Diplomacy, Gabriel Agreste arranges a trip to the country and agrees to take Adrien and the rest of the class along. However, this is because he intends to exploit their misery over the whole situation to akumatize everyone.

My Hero Academia

• Throughout Cain, All Might tries to give Katsuki a chance to properly "prove himself" and demonstrate why he's so keen on becoming a Pro Hero. Eventually, he concludes that Katsuki isn't driven by any sense of compassion or moral fortitude; he's simply a Spoiled Brat who feels entitled to everything he wants, along with spitefully wanting to ensure his favorite victim Izuku remains utterly miserable. As Toshinori puts it, it's not enough for Katsuki to "win"; he also wants Izuku to "lose".
• We're Not Friends Kacchan revolves around Class 1-A learning about Katsuki's history of bullying, as well as how he'd "advised" Izuku to "take a swan dive off the roof." Aizawa and Eijirou are especially shaken to realize that while they'd given him the benefit of the doubt, Katsuki was really just a cruel piece of work — one who refuses to show any remorse for his misdeeds.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

• Dark Spectrum: Public Enemy: The changeling that was disguised as Rainbow appears to show genuine sympathy to Rainbow Dash, telling her she has great friends who care about her. It only said that to guilt trip her into turning herself in.
• Played With in Glory: Prince Blueblood views himself this way due to his low opinion of himself... and all other ponies who aren't the Princesses.
• Pearl Necklace from Inner Demons. She makes a scene at her husband's funeral when Diamond Tiara's friends try to comfort her, then demands to leave before the ceremony's even over.

Naruto

• Civilian Pianist has Hitoshi Satoru, who temporarily joins Team Minato for their Chunin Exams. When Tomoko mistakes him for being a reincarnation of her old boyfriend, he insults and berates her in front of everybody in Nagareboshi Café over the misunderstanding. His jerkish behavior eventually reaches the point that Obito, Rin and Kakashi kick him off the team.

The Octonauts

• Junior Officers: Deborah's father, a notorious misogynist, immediately accepts his illegitimate granddaughter Stacy. Seems sweet... until you realize that he's only so understanding because it was his son David who brought her home and not either his eldest daughter Margaret or his youngest, Deborah.

OMORI

• Time to Disinfect: The first time Rin hits Mari, she acts stunned and tries to reach out to Mari for a moment, implying that she might feel remorse for letting things go that far. Her future appearances, however, have her refusing to apologize or admit what she did, lying about the incident to cover for herself instead. And once she hits her Rage Breaking Point, she becomes far more violent without hesitation, suggesting that previous "moment of remorse" was either faked or an Ignored Epiphany. Flashbacks to Mari's earlier childhood go on to make it clear that Rin was always the selfish, controlling jerk she is now, so if she ever had any regret for how she treats her daughter, it's long since been snuffed out.

Pokémon

• AAML: Diamond and Pearl Version: Ash repeatedly gives Paul the benefit of the doubt, believing that he's ultimately a good guy who really cares about his pokémon deep down. Similarly, Paul's older brother Reggie doesn't realize just how cruel he is... until he witnesses his brutal behavior during his Full Battle with Ash at Lake Acuity, where he actively aims to maim as many of Ash's pokémon as possible, forcing both to realize that the only thing Paul cares about is winning. That, and taunting his victims.

Rango

• Benjamin Hares, the estranged husband of Grace Glossy from Old West. He charmed Grace to rush with him to the altar, but then he suddenly left his pregnant wife penniless to escape the debts he had hoarded as a Con Man. Ten years later, he suddenly appears back on her doorstep, acting like he's sorry and wants a chance to make up things with Grace and their son. He then tries to sell Grace's lands behind her back, claiming he wants what's best for her, but in reality, it's just so that the Big Bad would settle his debts. When Grace confronts him, he destroys any credibility of sincerity by returning to his old ways of trying to guilt-trip Grace over his undoings. When she tells him they're done and tries to throw him out, he assaults her without shame, proving himself worse than just a liar and a coward. It leads to his well-earned death at the vengeful fangs of Rattlesnake Jake.

RWBY:

• The Makings of Team CRME:
  • The Black Hearts: Marcus Black claims to be trying to train his son to survive on his own and thinks that Mercury won't make it, but Mercury quickly calls him out on it by saying that he's just a terrible teacher since he doesn't actually teach anything and only takes it as an opportunity to beat up Mercury. He's not trying to do the best for his son; he's just a dick. Even his acceptance of his son's homosexual behavior is just him not caring about him in general rather than actual acceptance of Mercury's sexuality.
  • Roman's Empire: Kincaid has a fondness for Roman and treats him nicely, but he sees right through it and knows it’s because she wants to get in his pants. She confirms this years later. She is also nice to Dwight, but it’s simply because he’s an associate of Roman’s, as he points out years later.
  • CRME:
    • Melanie Black comes back just as abrasive as ever, but then she reveals that she wants to take Mercury home to keep him from being an assassin like Marcus. This would be the first time that Mel has shown genuine care for Mercury... only slightly undercut by the fact that she threatens to kill him if he doesn't come with her.
    • When Roman brings up Kincaid's advice about going in and shooting your lover if they're held hostage to Cinder, she says she'd never do that to Emerald. Her Semblance is too useful to let go. In general, any altruism that Cinder shows is purely for her benefit.
• A Rabbit Among Wolves: While Elizabeth Tanner traps her faunus employees in cycles of debt, forcing them into backbreaking labor, she initially appears to be somebody that Jaune can reason with... until she attempts to force herself upon him.
• Vale's Underground portrays Cardin Winchester as a police officer, but he is by no means an Adaptational Nice Guy. The story still portrays him as a complete asshole. He constantly sexually harasses female co-workers, including lesbians Ruby and Blake, while not caring about anyone's feelings. He even calls them dykes when he rejects them and says that they'll turn around with "a good dick". In his introduction, he's already pretty bad. However, that's only part of the story. The reality is that he's actually worse. The next chapter reveals that he's also a Dirty Cop who works for the Big Bad.

A Song of Ice and Fire

• A Caged Songbird: Joffrey seems to care about his daughter Joanna, whom he named after his grandmother... but only because he sees her existence as proof that he's truly a Baratheon.

South Park

• Outcasting English: When he witnesses Kenny sexually assaulting Pip, Cartman reacts with disgust... due to his homophobia. Pip's pleas for help are dismissed because he doesn't want to ruin his friend's "fun".

Star Wars

• The Goal Is Not to Fall: Governor Pryce proves herself this on several occasions: she has no problem with killing/harming innocent civilians to find the rebels, she yells at subordinates with no restraint, and when Kallus tried to offer condolences for her friend Konstantine's passing, she slapped him. Zeb admits that he believes Pryce survives on "nothing but protein cubes and spite".

Total Drama

• Total Drama Pahkitew Island Reordered: When Amy thinks she almost killed Dave and Sammy, she's horrified at what she's done... only because if the latter died, she wouldn't be able to rub her victory in her face. In Sammy's ending, when she tries to reconcile with her, she tries to justify all her past actions towards her with numerous excuses such as Tough Love. Sammy then tells her that she'll only accept her apology and share some of her prize money with her if she records a video of her apologizing and posts it to YouTube, to which Amy furiously refuses.

Touhou Project

• Suikakasen: After Seiga's Establishing Character Moment, it is made very clear that she is very twisted deep down despite seeming friendly, but several moments suggest a possible change of heart. It doesn't come to pass. After Yoshika gets rejected her opportunity to become a hermit by the reikon and begs Seiga to help her so that she can keep her promise with Kasen to meet again as hermits, Seiga says that she will ask the reikon once more and returns with a red pill. Yoshika takes this red pill by Seiga's instruction and the episode's Creative Closing Credits begin to play, telling us information about the characters and related concepts like usual by starting with humanizing Seiga by detailing her falling in love with a man named Kan Kaku and being forced to leave him while being heartbroken... and then it tells us that the red pill is mercury sulfide poison. Things still don't look too bad, with the scene cutting back to Seiga beginning to cry at Yoshika's deathbed, suggesting that it was a regretful Mercy Kill... but then Seiga's tears turn into a Slasher Smile and she laughs. And then she calls Yoshika an idiot and mocks her for wanting to become a hermit for Kasen's sake, throwing away any possibility that she cared for her and is perfectly fine with ruining Yoshika's life despite being in a similar scenario of being separated from a loved one. All of this is just buildup for a certain Foregone Conclusion regarding Yoshika.

Touken Ranbu

• Himetsuru Ichimonji in Tales of the Undiscovered Swords bravely protects his friends from the enemies on his own while flat-out saying he does so because he still considers them beneath him and that it's his duty as a "princess" to protect his "people". To top it off, when he's treated for his injuries after the battle, he still acts like a petulant Royal Brat.

The Vision of Escaflowne

• Vision of Escaflowne Abridged: Played for Laughs. Hitomi thinks Van is a nice good guy deep down inside when he brings her and Merle some medicine, but is Instantly Proven Wrong.
  Hitomi: Aw, he pretends to be a self-absorbed jerk, but he really does care about...
  Guard: Raise the alarm! The Zaibach are invading!
  Van: Oh, thank God! I was about to go insane from boredom back there!
  Merle: You were saying?

• Judge Claude Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame appears on the surface to be simply an arrogant, priggish tyrant. But then, his belief that the world is full of wickedness is the reason he gives for keeping Quasimodo shut away in the cathedral bell tower, telling himself — and Quasimodo — that he's just keeping him safe from the outside world. But, of course, it becomes clear early on that Judge Frollo is a genocidal lunatic, scheming to kill all the Gypsies in Paris for their "thieving" and "witchcraft" — and the only reason he's taking care of Quasimodo is that he fears to go to Hell for his attempt to drown Quasi when he was a baby solely because of his appearance. Any torment Frollo ever feels — particularly about his lust for a Gypsy girl he's become obsessed with killing — evaporates pretty quickly.
• Igor: Dr. Schadenfreude’s evil girlfriend, Jaclyn, is described as one, by her own boyfriend, no less!
  Dr. Schadenfreude: My girlfriend, Jaclyn! You know, she may seem like a shallow, conniving wretch…That’s all I got. That pretty much sums her up.
• Jack Horner from Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is an unrepentantly evil crime boss. However, when the Ethical Bug asks why he's so cruel, he obliges, confiding what he believes is a Freudian Excuse and what he intends to use the titular wish for, only to reveal he's exactly as monstrous as he seems.
  Jack Horner: You know, I never had much as a kid. Just loving parents, and stability, and a mansion, and a thriving baked goods enterprise for me to inherit. Useless crap like that. But once I get my wish, I'll finally have the one thing that will make me happy!
  Ethical Bug: (perks up) Oh, well, what's that?
  Jack: All of the magic in the world, for me. And no one else gets any. Is that so much?
  Ethical Bug: YES!
  Jack: Agree to disagree!
• Shark Tale has Lola's paradoxical line, "Deep down, I'm really superficial."
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie: Bowser appears to genuinely love Peach at first, even singing about her and acknowledging that she despises him. As the film progresses, however, his love for Peach is revealed to be entirely possessive and self-serving, and it's so shallow that he has no problem trying to kill her the instant she turns him down during their wedding, only ever voicing affection for Peach again after his defeat, as a way to beg for mercy.
  Koopa Troopa 1: Doesn't she hate you?
  Bowser: Of course she hates me! But that makes me love her all the more. Her heart-shaped bangs, the way she floats in the breeze, her immovable tiara. And when she sees this star... Oh-ho-ho-ho, wedding bells!
  Koopa Troopa 2: Well, what if she says no?
  Bowser: [torches the Koopa into a Dry Bones] THEN I WILL POWER UP WITH THIS STAR AND DESTROY THE MUSHROOM KINGDOM!
• Mother Gothel in Tangled manipulates Rapunzel into staying in the tower not because the world is a dangerous place or because she loves Rapunzel, but merely so she can keep Rapunzel's fountain-of-youth hair to herself.
• Wakko's Wish: King Salazar initially seems distraught at Dot's seeming death. But not long after, he heartlessly tries to kill Wakko.
• The Willoughbys: For a minute, it looks like the Willoughby parents have finally decided to change their selfish ways and be better parents towards their children after they confess their feelings about their behavior towards them and how they long for a proper family, and even that they were the ones who "orphaned" themselves. But, as it turns out, they didn't.
• King Candy from Wreck-It Ralph tells Ralph that he keeps Vanellope from racing to protect her. If she got to race and players saw her glitching, they would think the game was broken and it would get unplugged. As a glitch, she would not be able to leave her game, meaning she would go down with the ship. It's true that she'd go down, but that's not why he wants to keep her from racing. It turns out that Vanellope was never a glitch, but the rightful main character of Sugar Rush. King Candy, in fact, is actually Turbo, the lead character from an older, unplugged game from the arcade, who snuck into Vanellope's game and changed its code to usurp her and hide everyone's memories. It also turns out that if Vanellope manages to finish a race, the game would reset and all of Turbo's alterations would be undone, which is the true reason why Turbo refuses to let her race.

• Aliens: Carter Burke seems like a slimy, shady, greedy corporate suit scumbag, but as the film goes on, he does have a few notable moments of competency and sympathy that make him seem like he might be, in his words, "an okay guy": he sympathizes with Ripley after telling her that her daughter perished whilst she was in cryo-sleep (though in a self-serving way), he puts Gorman in his place when he tries to stop Ripley from rescuing the marines and he proves himself useful in other ways: fighting the fire in the APC, assisting in carrying a wounded Gorman back to base and helping fortify the base against the aliens. However, any and all good-will he builds up with the audience evaporates the instant it's revealed he sent the survey team to find the ship and then deliberately looses two facehuggers on Ripley and Newt to try and get some embryos back to the company.
• Addison DeWitt in All About Eve. Don't let his smug, disdainful, misanthropic exterior fool you. Underneath it all, he's a sociopath.
• Guy from Annie (2014). Unlike Grace, he never tries to get to know Annie for herself. He only sees her as points on the polls for Stacks, to the point of treating her almost like she's not even human at all.
  Guy: You don't pay me enough to worry about her.
• Beyond Loch Ness: Brody bullies Josh and gets more handsy than appropriate with Zoe early on. He also risks his life by throwing rocks at the monster to divert it away from Chad and compliments Josh during his efforts to Bring Help Back. However, when he thinks Josh died and won't be back, he loses that sense of gratitude and calls him a "pansy."
• Vanessa, the Wrong Girl First of the Adam Sandler megahit Big Daddy (1999). From the very first moment we see her, she establishes herself as an angry and unpleasant person, to the point where one has to wonder what Sonny ever saw in her in the first place. Of course, the characters do mention that Vanessa "worshiped" Sonny back in college, and Sonny himself hints that even when things started to go sour between them, for a while she was antagonistic in more of a sexy way than an annoying way. In any case, the Wrong Genre Savvy Sonny is convinced that Vanessa's heart will melt as soon as he introduces her to the 5-year-old boy he has adopted for them to raise together — and, just for a second, it does look as if a Pet the Dog moment is about to occur — but then, less than a minute later, we learn that Vanessa left Sonny (without telling him they were permanently breaking up) not because she was fed up with his lifestyle and wanted to resolve their relationship, but because she wanted a much older and more financially responsible boyfriend, and is not sorry at all when Sonny finds out about this and even tells him that it's all his fault. Talk about a Bitch In Steel Wool... She's an interesting contrast to Corinne, Sonny's future sister-in-law, who is pretty much the direct opposite: polite to most people she encounters, rude to Sonny (since she can't stand him), but ultimately willing to admit that Sonny is a good father when he puts his mind to it.
• The 2012 movie Chronicle manages to do this with Richard Detmer, Andrew's father, all in a single scene. He reveals Andrew's mom has died, cries... but then blames his son for "killing" her, and tries to attack Andrew. Who was not only in the hospital and apparently in a coma, but his retaliation is catastrophic. Also showing how much of a pathetic coward his dad is when he screams for mercy moments later.
• Subverted in Cruel Intentions by Sebastian Valmont, who does become the Jerk with a Heart of Gold he's been pretending to be, because of Love Redeems.
• Dead Poets Society: Neil Perry's father is intensely involved in his son's studies, insistent that he goes to Harvard and become a doctor and treats anything not directly part of that path as an obstacle. Nevertheless, Neil decides to pursue a longtime passion with acting, being cast as Puck in a local production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, despite his father's objections. And as Mr. Perry shows up, and sees his son get a standing ovation for his performance, instead of showing any support at all, he forcibly takes him home and tells him he's going to transfer him to a military school, instead. Neil, heartbroken that his father refuses to understand him, commits suicide shortly afterwards, and Mr. Perry blames it entirely on Neil's English professor, Mr. Keating, instead of admitting that he was wrong to have been so controlling of his son's life and so inconsiderate of his son's desires.
• In The Help, Skeeter is set up on a date with an alcoholic, rude, arrogant soldier. After coming to her house to apologize for his behavior, they discover they have a lot in common. Their relationship goes well until Skeeter's book is published and he dumps her for supporting the rights of African-American maids and disrupting the status quo.
• The Iron Buddha, a wuxia martial arts film, have this trope as a major defining characteristic of it's main villain, Xiao Tian-Zun. Introduced as a thief and rapist stopped by a benevolent kung fu expert named Liu, who used to be a close friend of Tian-Zun's father, Master Liu accepts Tian-Zun's surrender and promise to turn over a new leaf. For three years, Tian-Zun follows a training regime of discipline in Liu's school, and after a three year-Time Skip with Tian-Zun graduating as one of Liu's top students, reveals his true colours that he never have any intentions to be good, immediately usurping Liu's position, having all his ex-classmates massacred, and going on a killing spree in the martial world. There are a few moments throughout the movie where it seems like Tian-Zun will stop being evil, but he quickly subvert it at the last minute.
• Kingsman: The Secret Service:
  • Charlie. In case you thought him training to be a Kingsman indicated some inherent need to do good in him, not only does he spill all their secrets to save his skin in a Secret Test of Character, but he also joins Valentine's faction in the end and gives up Eggsy who's managed to infiltrate Valentine's secret base.
  • Arthur. Even as the leader of the Kingsmen he comes across as very snobby and elitist, thinking the lower-class Eggsy shouldn't be included in their ranks. Following Harry's death, he offers Eggsy a glass of brandy that the Kingsmen use to toast fallen members despite it being against tradition for non-Kingsmen to drink. Then it's revealed the brandy is poisoned and Arthur's teamed up with Valentine.
• Knives Out:
  • Hugh Ransom Drysdale is a loud-and-proud asshole when first introduced. Then, he seemingly earns the trust of Marta to help her get to the bottom of the case, only to be revealed later on to have framed her for the murder of Harlan Thrombey out of greed and never indicates that forcing Marta to kill her best friend/his grandfather which would ruin her life and then, when he finds out she avoided his trap, framing her for the crime is something he has any compunctions about.
  • Played with in regards to Walt Thrombey. He comes off as mostly pathetic and blind to his son's alt-right habits. He's a much less bad person than his racist wife, whom he attempts to stop from going on a racist rant, and Nazi son who he's willing to come to blows with Richard over. He even suggests bringing Marta into the family and taking care of her along with Meg and comforts a mourning Linda in one scene. He doesn't do anything wrong in the film until his conversation with Marta when it's clear he's threatening her with her mother's deportation, though a deleted scene indicates that even this is brought about more by desperation than outright villainy.
• Lake Placid vs. Anaconda: After witnessing another girl getting crushed to death while hiding in her car, Alpha Bitch Tiffani appears to be horrified and distraught.
  Margo: Hey, you did everything someone like you was willing to do.
  Tiffani: What am I going to tell my dad? He just bought me that car.
• Mars Attacks!: After the president's big speech, the Martian Leader sheds a tear. He still kills the president anyway.
• In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thaddeus Ross was very much a jerk in The Incredible Hulk (2008), but when he reappears in Captain America: Civil War he initially interacts with the Avengers by casually telling them a story of his heart attack during a round of golf and undergoing a triple bypass, seemingly appearing to have Took a Level in Kindness. As he lays out the Accords, he brings up good reasons behind them, such as the collateral damage the Avengers have caused on missions, but notably, he does not bring up his own mistake back during the events of Hulk that also caused collateral damage. Later on, he assigns Tony to arrest Captain America and Bucky, gives out a short deadline, and threatens to prosecute Stark if he fails. Even after Bucky is proven innocent of the bombing and Stark gives evidence that Zemo is behind it, Ross refuses to release the anti-Accords Avengers and go after Zemo. From there on it's clear that despite having better manners and being more subtle in attitude, Ross has not changed his mindset one bit. Avengers: Infinity War follows this with ordering Rhodey to arrest Captain America's team in spite of Thanos' forces already invading Earth. Rhodey then refuses, hangs up on their call, and takes the court-martial he immediately gets in stride. It isn't until Avengers: Endgame where he apparently really does something decent this time by attending Tony Stark's funeral alongside all the other heroes and not bothering to have any of them arrested.
• Motherless Brooklyn: Tony constantly mocks Lionel and cares more about continuing to make money than investigating Frank's murder. He also tells Lionel to tell Julia Minna that her husband's last words were about her, stopped an abusive Catholic school teacher from beating up Lionel when they were kids, and begins to show some respect for Lionel's deductive skills. But at the end of the day, he's sleeping with Frank's wife, sells out to Frank's killers without a trace of remorse, and tries to strangle Lionel to keep him from warning Laura that her life is in danger.
• My Super Psycho Sweet 16 has Madison Penrose, the Alpha Bitch holding the Sweet 16 party. During the climax, she and Skye have been tied up by the killer, Skye's father Charlie, who cuts Skye free and asks her to kill Madison. Madison desperately tries to apologize to Skye in order to convince her to instead kill Charlie and let her free, and it works, with Skye stabbing Charlie in the leg and letting Madison free. Then Madison pushes Skye out of the way in order to get to the door quicker. When Charlie grabs Madison's leg long enough for Skye to get to the door first, Skye decides to lock Madison in with Charlie and let him kill her in response.
• Tyrone Power's character in Nightmare Alley (1947) is a hard-nosed jerk among his fellow carnies — but when he leaves the carnival with his loving wife, he displays new levels of deep jerkassery. (In dealing with the suckers, he plays the angel and is a master Bitch in Sheep's Clothing.)
• Pain & Gain (2013): Victor Kershaw shows moments of sympathy towards Paul to get him to care only to drop the act at the right moment. This is what causes Paul to snap and beat Victor.
• The humans in Predators. Most characters have a few moments where you think they're not so bad, and then the movie calmly reminds us that they're all awful people with them calmly pointing out traps and discussing war crimes they've committed. Ultimately, only the two who are alive by the movie's end go beyond this into Jerk with a Heart of Gold, if only because they cared enough about someone else surviving (the Spetznaz man was one of the most outwardly moral among them, but he had pulled a Heroic Sacrifice near the end of Act 2).
• Shoot to Kill: The killer has one moment of near-decency, which quickly turns into a major Kick the Dog moment. When Norman nearly falls off a cliff, the killer scrambles to save his life despite having nothing to gain from this. Then the killer murders him dropping the gun he's been hiding in front of Norman. Seconds later, he kills the other three fishermen even though they bought his story about Norman's death being an accident. He has an opportunity to kill them (relatively) quickly and painlessly with his gun but instead sadistically throws them over the cliff one by one to save bullets.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024): Gerald Robotnik is shown to be even crueller than his game counterpart, to the point of putting Ivo's villainy to shame. Even then, he at least tried to bond with him, as shown in a montage. Unfortunately, the climax reveals that Gerald views Ivo as a disappointment, and he even tells him that he's "no Maria".
• Star Wars:
  • The Last Jedi
    • The film seems to be setting up DJ to not be all that bad when he returns Rose's necklace to her and tells her he never intended to keep it. When Finn, Rose, and DJ get captured by the First Order shortly afterward, DJ doesn't hesitate to sell the entire Resistance out to the First Order to save his skin, with his only defense being "They blow you up today, you blow them up tomorrow." ...Well, he also just doesn't see one side as being better than the other.
    • Kylo Ren. Rey briefly blames Luke for his turn to the Dark Side and thinks that she can turn him back to the light. He rescues her from Supreme Leader Snoke and they work together to kill Snoke and his guards. However, he soon reveals that he had no plan to return to the Light and only used Rey to kill and replace Snoke. He does offer her a chance to join him, but he makes it clear that he's already made up his mind about staying on the Dark Side. It isn't until The Rise Of Skywalker that this gets subverted when he finally decides to pull a Heel–Face Turn.
  • The Rise of Skywalker: General Hux becomes The Mole for the Resistance... not out of any sense of conscience, but because he really hates Kylo Ren and wants to spite him.
• Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines: Downplayed with Major Digby in the sequel. He's not a villainous character, but he spends most of the time being haughty and mildly xenophobic. Then he sacrifices a lead to save Scofield's life, only to say later that it was a mistake after failing to regain his lost position.
• Caledon Hockley in Titanic (1997), who saves an abandoned, crying child for his selfish purposes. After he no longer needs the child, he quickly hands her to someone else and forgets about her. To make matters worse, he’s last seen pushing other people out of the (almost empty) boat. Imagine if he pushed the little girls parents…
• Tremors 6: A Cold Day in Hell: Cutts is introduced as an abrasive, shifty government agent suspected of bio-engineering Graboids as weapons. Then it turns out that he has nothing to do with the Graboids and is in the Arctic trying to find a way to harvest Arctic ice to decrease the risks of global warming and provide a bigger supply of drinking water. He also is outraged when his best scientist is eaten by a Graboid and sets out to seek revenge and help the trapped heroes. Then he admits that he is interested in using Graboids as bio-weapons now that Burt has suggested it and cowardly kicks away one of his men who grabs at Cutts for help while being dragged to his death.
• For a humorous example, Naomi of Waiting... is a constantly ticked-off, misanthropic, 'been at this too long' server who's always going off at coworkers and belittling customers behind their backs. Bishop, the dishwasher, offers her some genuine advice, and for a moment it seems like her angry personality is based on exhaustion and substance abuse...until she mockingly thanks him and screams at him to do her dishes.
• What's Love Got to Do with It (1993) portrays Ike Turner this way. After he starts to abuse Tina Turner, he's shown giving a few Pet the Dog moments, before abusing her again. This becomes less and less so as the movie progresses until she gets feed up, fights back and leaves him. One telling scene happens after she leaves him. Ike tries to act nice and apologetic, but shows his true colors once he sees she's is not buying it.
  Tina Turner: Hello, Ike. I was wondering when the real you would show up.
• The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz: Assistant Minister Klaus is introduced as a snide, slightly misogynistic man who is bored by Paula's efforts to talk for herself. Later, he tells her that he agrees with her about feeling stifled by East Germany's society, but this is just part of a sleazy effort to trick her into being his mistress.
• In X-Men: Days of Future Past, after Young Magneto gets into a fight with Young Charles on the plane over the events and aftermath of First Class (and Mags losing control of his powers when he loses his temper nearly causes it to crash), Wolverine remarks that he's always been an asshole. Which is pretty funny, considering who it's coming from. Not that Wolverine isn't perfectly aware of the implication.

• Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men has a classic example with Willie Stark, a candidate for governor in an unnamed southern American state who comes to feel ashamed about cooperating with an elitist and very crooked political machine. So he rebrands himself as a "man of the people" and wins the election by promising to improve the lives of the lower classes...and then turns into an egotistical power-mad dictator once he's in office. He can be as charming and personable in some cases as he can be bullying and vindictive in others, but even with the former it's nearly always in service to his own largely selfish agendas. He does still have some good left in him, but it's deeply submerged.
• In American Dirt, Lydia comes across Lorenzo, a teenage sicario for the very cartel she and her young son are trying to flee from. Instead of killing her, Lorenzo tells her that he's leaving Los Jardineros behind, and is just another migrant to el notre like her. Lydia is very hesitant to believe him, especially with his brash and uncaring attitude. Even so, she comes to believe his story of being a teenage boy who just got involved with the wrong group. When she warns him that Los Jardineros are near them and he seems to show genuine fear, it solidifies her trust in him. Then in the last leg of his journey, he tries to rape Rebeca. After Soledad kills him, Lydia discovers by looking through his phone that he was selling her and Luca out to the cartel boss the whole time.
• Dex in Below comes off like a wild psychopath, but he plays it up to hide the fact that he's a pretty good self-taught amateur in a field normally controlled by a guild. He ends up helping the party in multiple ways even his boss didn't expect. Yet he's still a complete Jerkass to the core, and can't be trusted around women.
• Bret King Mysteries: While most villains are quickly established as rotten people, many of them go on to act like they might be Red Herrings with some grace and affability before it turns out that is an act, and they are indeed unrepentant criminal Jerkasses. Perhaps the most notable example is the Big Bad of Blizzard Mesa, who is introduced nearly causing a plane crash and not even bothering to apologize or help, then does apologize during his next scene while pledging to help a business associate through tough times before it becomes clear that he caused those tough times and is deliberately making them worse for his own benefit.
• Cat Chaser: Mary decided to marry Andres because she assumed there was a soft side underneath his cold personality, unaware of his past as a war criminal. It turns out he was just as bad as he seemed.
  Mary: I thought, well, assuming there's a person under that cold, formal exterior, why don't I try to bring him out?
  Moran: How'd you do?
  Mary: Well, the only thing I can figure out, he puts on the front so no one will know what an asshole he really is.
• In the Christopher Anvil novella The Day The Machines Stopped, Carl Jackson is introduced cruelly taunting his romantic rival Brian over Carl's higher salary. Carl quickly admits this was a low blow, though, and displays a lot of bravery after the fall of society. Then he knocks Brian unconscious and leaves him behind as their group heads for Montana while spreading lies that Brian abandoned him when a mob attacked them. After a warlord takes their friends prisoner, it seems like Carl will redeem himself by helping Brian rescue them, only for him to knock Brian unconscious, abandon him again, and steal the credit for the rescue.
• Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid: Most of the book is stories about Greg harassing Rowley and getting him in trouble For the Evulz. However, one anecdote revolves around a substitute teacher who gives all the students the same grades, seemingly not even reading the assignments. Greg stands up for Rowley and says he worked harder on it than most people, which actually makes the teacher raise his grade. Unfortunately, he immediately says that Rowley owes him a lot for this good deed, despite already having taken advantage of him before this and not stopping after.
• In the Discworld series, Death's manservant Albert claims to be one of these: "It's no good thinking you can appeal to my better nature under this here crusty exterior, 'cos my interior's pretty damn crusty as well."
• Earth's Children: For one small moment in The Clan of the Cave Bear, it seems that Broud might be able to let go of his Irrational Hatred of Ayla after he learns she saved his son's life, even expressing gratitude for it. But when he learns that Ayla saw him being chewed out by Zoug when she watched the hunters practicing to learn how to use a sling (which is how she was able to save his son), he swiftly loses any sliver of respect or goodwill he had started to feel towards her...in fact, he arguably hates her even more. He pushes for Ayla to be cursed with death as punishment for using a weapon and later rapes her multiple times purely to spite her.
• The Everything Box: Nelson is first framed as a jaded Cowboy Cop with a Hidden Heart of Gold to go with his rookie By-the-Book Cop partner. However, it soon becomes obvious that he's every bit the obnoxious, drunken, spiteful, amoral asshole he looks like, and his misbehaviour escalates until he pulls a gun on Coop and gets shot dead by his own partner.
• In the original trilogy of The First Law series, there's Bayaz. He has a bit of an ego and can be quite demanding of others at times, but the fact that he opposes Khalul, who is the true leader of an empire that partakes in slavery and plans to destroy the Union, and is responsible for the creation of an army of Humanoid Abominations, shows him in a more positive light. That is until The Reveal comes along and we find out that the First of the Magi is just as bad, if not worse than his nemesis.
• Harry Potter
  • As per Word of God, Severus Snape. He bullies Harry, Neville, and other students, outs Remus Lupin as a werewolf (forcing him to resign and live in poverty), mocks members of both the Order of the Phoenix and Death Eaters, and invented new methods of Dark Magic, etc. Though the seventh book reveals he loved Harry's mother and did everything he could to honor her memory and sacrifice. J. K. Rowling affirms that he unfairly hated and resented Harry and would have done nothing to help him if it weren't for his mother. Snape himself affirms the same to Dumbledore. To sum it up, Snape is an absolute dick to everyone not named Lily Evans.
    J.K. Rowling: I don't really see him as a hero. He's spiteful, he's a bully, all of these things are true of Snape, even at the end of the book.
  • Draco Malfoy. Despite a few Jerkass Woobie moments in the later books, Malfoy is still an unrepentant Upper-Class Twit Dirty Coward school bully, even when the war against Voldemort begins raging. When the chips are down, Malfoy runs to hide behind someone else, whether it be his two burly cronies or his father. The only time Draco shows any sort of respect to Harry Potter at all is when Harry saves Draco's life three times in the final book, and even then, it's a Grudging "Thank You".
• In Just Ella, after she's thrown in the castle dungeon, Ella tries to reason with Quog. She hopes to fish for better treatment by asking if he had a bad childhood. Quog replied that he did... because back then, he couldn't have all the women he wanted, but now he can, which simply establishes him as a creepy rapist.
• Edmund Pevensie for the first half of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Some people might think he has some forgivable excuse for bullying his little sister and betraying his siblings to the Big Bad, but he hasn't. Just as he reveals, he's just sick of his oldest siblings being the ones who give all the orders and make all the decisions. He's just a vicious, greedy, spiteful kid who believes he'll get up to the level of the other two by putting down Lucy. Fortunately, he does a Heel–Face Turn after he discovers evil doesn't taste so good after all.
• While Jace from The Mortal Instruments unquestionably cares for some people, he also considers hurting them emotionally an acceptable outlet for his own Mangst. Also, he can remain prejudiced easily even if the basis of his prejudice towards the target changes. For example, he seamlessly switches from calling Simon "mundane" to "vampire" as if he simply cannot remember the personal names of anyone who is not a Shadowhunter.
• New Jedi Order: Drathul is introduced as a power-hungry jerk amidst the Yuuzhan Vong upper echelons. The final book reveals that he's part of a faction that opposed going to war in the first place (and was largely purged for that belief) and that he hates his master. Nonetheless, none of that stops him from opposing the Shamed Ones rebels and trying to have the Solos killed on a sacrificial altar.
• The Prettiest: Brody is introduced as a superficial boy who is Not Good with Rejection and quick to make weightist, ableist, and misogynistic comments and is also suspected of writing the offensive list in the first place. The more time he spends with Eve and Nessa, the more they recognize how he is a skilled, Genre Savvy, and passionate theater kid who feels shunned by his dad and likes to open up for them while feeling a bit pressured by his peers. Nonetheless, at the end of the book he has learned little to nothing and also shows himself as a classist and a liar who subjects Eve to harsh shaming by lying that she wrote the list just because he's mad that she dumped him.
• The Reynard Cycle: Tybalt. Whenever he gets even remotely close to petting the dog, he finds another one to kick.
• Torol Sadeas from The Stormlight Archive. He's ruthless, racist towards darkeyes, and frequently sacrifices his own men without batting an eye. However, he appears to be genuinely loyal to his kingdom and has a mutual friendship with Dalinar. However, Sadeas later attempts to have Dalinar killed and reveals he intends to do the same to the current king, and it's revealed he was only friends with Dalinar because he had been a ruthless warmonger prior to being given Laser-Guided Amnesia.
• Teen Power Inc.:
  • In The Ghost of Raven Hill, Terry Bigge is a greedy developer who makes some condescending remarks about the kids, but he loaned a lot of money to his old acquaintance Zim and seems to be his ally throughout difficult times. He is really pitilessly betraying Zim, planning to use the loan to take over his paper and sell it to Zim's hated rival. And if that's not bad enough, he caused Elmo's grandfather to have a fatal heart attack while trying to steal a Lost Will and Testament from him.
  • In The Missing Millionaire, rude and miserly hotelier Bruce Piggot seems to have a soft spot for his neighbor, the cheerful and generous plasterer Albie, whom he plays cards with and speculates on lottery numbers with. However, however real their Odd Friendship may have been beforehand, it does not survive their lottery ticket winning $2,000,000 while Albie is laid up in bed. Piggot decides to hide the fact that their ticket won and keep Albie's half of the money for himself. He acts like a caring friend who wants to make sure Albie gets better through rest, when he really just wants to keep Albie in bed until the lottery number stops appearing on the news.
  • In Dirty Tricks, Mr. Kelly the assistant librarian is often rude, arrogant, and humorless, but he accepts a painting that his fired colleague Mark Raven made even when no one else likes it and says that he knew his boss, Ms. Spicer, was pulling literary-themed pranks to attract tourists and that a lot of his tirades about the prankster were a subtle way of trying to warn her to stop before she got into trouble. Then it turns out that he has been trying to get Ms. Spicer fired through unethical means the whole time, and one of his schemes involves destroying Mr. Raven's's painting (which Kelly likely only accepted for the library in the first place because he knew Ms. Spicer would hate it).
• In the La Vita Nuova, Dante maintains that anyone who does not remember Beatrice and mourn must have a heart made of granite with no space for goodness.
• In Warrior Cats, several of Tigerclaw's followers in ThunderClan were generally jerks, but they remained in the Clan when his treachery was revealed: Dustpelt and Longtail proved to be loyal warriors and grew to treat Fireheart with respect. Darkstripe, however, only refused to join Tigerclaw because Tigerclaw hadn't told him about conspiring with Brokenstar, and later continued to work for him while still in ThunderClan, until he was caught and exiled himself. After Tigerstar's death, Darkstripe joined up with Tigerstar's killer, Scourge, to destroy the Clans.
• Wear Your Soul Round Your Neck: Thyssa grows up hearing gruesome stories about a mad scientist who does evil experiments trying to turn malforms into girls. Wanting to be a girl herself, she seeks out the mad scientist. She turns out to be a gentle woman named Lili, reluctant to experiment on Thyssa for fear of hurting or killing her, and only going through with it when she sees how desperate Thyssa is to escape her body. When the experiment does work, Lili treats her almost like a daughter...almost. Although she likes the idea of Thyssa, she hates everything about her that doesn't fit her fantasy, such as her craving meat or still longing for her malform family. Although she set out to prove malforms can be integrated into human society with love and care, being exiled for this fringe theory has given her a misanthropic streak, and she now cares about vindicating herself more than actually helping malforms. This leads her to negligently put Thyssa in a dangerous situation, handing her over to Dr. Goodfellow for an "assessment" of her psychological stability that turns out to be him blackmailing Thyssa into sexual behaviour in exchange for a clear report...at whatever point he's done with her. When Thyssa panics and kills him in a dissociative fit, Lili takes this as proof that Thyssa was a bad candidate, not listening to her side of the story and trying to change her back into a malform. Ultimately, Lili turns out to be every bit as bad as the stories told about her, albeit for vastly different reasons.
• Near the end of Wonder, Julian's friends seem to warm up to deformed August, and you'd think he would eventually too, but nope! He ends up being the only kid in the school to still resent August. At least until the next school year, anyway.

• 24 usually has whoever is in charge of either CTU or someone else in the government be a complete pain in the ass for several episodes before either revealing that despite their controversial decisions they are a good person trying to do their best to stop the terrorist attack of the day, or undergoing a tough set of circumstances that ultimately sees them become more sympathetic. Then Day 5 comes in and gives us Miles, who is brought in from Homeland Security to take over CTU after it gets hit by a terrorist attack. He follows the usual pattern: gets in the way of Jack and Chloe, gets Bill Buchanan fired from CTU, and generally acts like a dick. But his Homeland partner Karen Hayes insists that when the chips are down he is someone who can be counted on, and when it comes down to it brings him into the loop so he can help expose President Logan as the true mastermind of Day 5, and it looks like he's going to mellow out. Instead, he almost immediately switches sides and destroys the evidence that could expose Logan all so he can get a promotion.
• When Peter Dragon, the Jerkass protagonist of Action, finds out that he might have cancer, he gives a touching speech to God about wanting to see his daughter grow up and wanting to go out on a hit and promises to turn his life around. He also throws out a tobacco executive who wants to use product placement to market cigarettes to teenagers. After he finds out that his mole is benign, Peter tracks down the executive and makes the deal.
• Vera Claythorne in And Then There Were None (2015). She's accused by U.N. Owen of murdering her lover Hugo's nephew Cyril so that Hugo would gain Cyril's inheritance, but her flashbacks of frantically running out into the ocean after him imply that she had second thoughts about her plan and genuinely tried her best to save Cyril and lived with soul-crushing guilt when she failed to do so. This is likely what happened with Vera in the original book... but in this miniseries, a later flashback shows that Vera swam out after Cyril only after she'd deliberately waited a very long time until it was certain he'd already drowned and she was even the one who verbally encouraged him to swim out as far as he could. Her true Manipulative Bitch nature only becomes even clearer when the Poetic Serial Killer confronts her and she, in a desperate bid to save her skin, offers to help them pin all their murders on Lombard, her lover who had tried to genuinely help her mere minutes ago, and makes it clear that she knowingly lied through her teeth to the police about Cyril's death and would do it all again in a heartbeat to save herself.
• Bad Monkey: A speech smarmy, election-obsessed Sheriff Sonny Sommers makes to Rogelio about knowing Yancy is incapable of murder and wanting to help him is a trick to make Rogelio admit he knows where Yancy is and threaten him into revealing where.
• Best Friends Whenever: Shelby believes she was responsible for The Rob being the jerk he is now when she found out he had a crush on her once and she unknowingly turned him down. After accidentally creating a Alternate Timeline where she dated him whilst trying to undo her mistake, it turns out he was a jerk all along.
• Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory held a grudge after Wil Wheaton snubbed him at a convention in The '90s, and was determined to get back at him in a Mystic Warlords of Ka'a tournament. During their match, Wheaton said that he couldn't make the convention because his grandmother had died and he had to be with his family. Sheldon forgives Wheaton and throws the game, then Wheaton tells him he made the story up just to get Sheldon's guard down.
  Wil: [in a later appearance] What, you think I'd break up a couple just to win a bowling match?
  Sheldon: Well, I guess not...
  Wil: Good. Keep thinking that.
• Blackadder:
  • Discussed in Blackadder's Christmas Carol:
    Ebenezer Blackadder: My what a jolly fellow.
    Baldrick: Looked like a fat git to me.
    Ebenezer Blackadder: Yes Baldrick, but if one peels away the layers of a 'fat git' you'll probably find a...
    Baldrick: Thin git!
  • Lord Flashheart of Blackadder Goes Forth.
    Lord Flashheart: I think I'm beginning to understand.
    Captain Blackadder: Are . . . are you?
    Lord Flashheart: Just because I can give multiple orgasms to the furniture just by sitting on it, doesn't mean that I'm not sick of this damn war: the blood, the noise, the endless poetry.
    Captain Blackadder: Is that really what you think, Flashheart?
    Lord Flashheart: [while holding his pistol at Blackadder] Course it's not what I think. Now get out that door before I redecorate that wall an interesting new colour called 'hint of the brain'!
• The Boys:
  • While The Deep is established from the get-go to be a neurotic Serial Rapist, later seasons reveal he has his own Freudian Excuse (albeit one that none of his victims accept as justifying his actions) and that he is capable of doing genuine good, albeit mostly for the benefit of sea creatures instead of humans. Whenever he's given the chance to improve as a person, though, he consistently dials down on his repulsive behavior, which simultaneously erodes his sympathetic traits. Season 4 has him finally cross the point of no return by leaving his octopus girlfriend to die after destroying her tank, after which he fully embraces his sycophancy to Homelander by saying he would murder every fish in the ocean for the stronger supe, when previously his one redeeming trait was his genuine love of marine life.
  • The Season 3 Arc Villain and Fake Ultimate Hero Soldier Boy tries to convince Hughie that he's not the monster everyone says he is, but not too long after this he mocks M.M. over his role in his family's death before maiming multiple bystanders during his Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Things only get worse from there as he's revealed to be an even worse narcissist than his son Homelander as he had a long line of physical and emotional abuse directed towards everyone in his life, before attempting to kill his own grandson. Well-Intentioned Extremist Butcher in the end decides that his Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Homelander isn't worth letting a monster like him run loose anymore.
• Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul:
  • Don Eladio, Bad Boss of the cartel, presents himself as a fun guy to hang out with almost like a goofy uncle, but is deep down a dishonorable, greedy bully who arrogantly picks on his subordinates.
  • Walter White himself becomes this in Season 5 of BB. He's so short of Pet the Dog moments that don't have some sort of ulterior motive by then, especially to Jesse, who is becoming increasingly traumatized as time goes on.
  • Chuck McGill, Jimmy's older brother, insists that he only sabotaged Jimmy's legal career so that a former con artist would not be able to abuse the law for his benefit. As the story goes on, however, especially in Seasons 2 and 3 of BCS, it becomes clear that Chuck's animosity towards Jimmy is much more personal than that, and that he is not above abusing the law himself in his crusade against his brother.
• Choujuu Sentai Liveman: Compared to his compatriots Dr. Obler and Dr. Mazenda, Dr. Kemp is a pure asshole who shows no qualms with any of Professor Bias’s machinations. In one episode, he gets reverted physically and mentally to a 16 year-old… and acts exactly the same.
• Control Z: Pablo is worried when Isabela tells him that she intends to tell Natalia and María about her gender identity, arguing that if one knows then the whole school will. Later on, when the hacker leaks Isabela's secret before she herself has a chance to do it, Pablo pushes Isabela away and publicly breaks up with her feigning ignorance about knowing her secret all along. He also does the same to María, who turns out to be the Honey Bunny, after breaking the news to him that she's pregnant and that the baby is his. In response, he cruelly ditches her and tells her that she's far from being a saint for "stealing" him from Isabela. In addition, he willingly admits to being an "asshole" after being called this by María.
• In Season 3 of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rebecca tries to convince her coworkers that Nathaniel is this (in practice he is a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, but he's closer to this trope than most):
  He's the new guy, you can't trust him.
• On Deadwood this was, perhaps, the crucial difference between Al Swearengen and Cy Tolliver, both jerkasses capable of incredible cruelty. Al might not have qualified as a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, but little moments sprinkled through the series suggested that he did care about Trixie, Dan, Jewel, etc. Cy, however, even when he tries to seem caring, comes across as faking it so people will continue to do what he wants. His Jerk With A Heart Of Jerk qualities leads to disloyalty among some of his people.
• Doctor Who:
  • Margaret the Slitheen in "Boom Town". She spares a pregnant woman and later when the Doctor is about to lead her to her execution, she brings this incident to prove that she can change for the better. The Doctor correctly deduces that she only did it to counterbalance the murders she committed and is going to. And indeed, she was trying to destroy the Earth to get back home.
  • "Voyage of the Damned": In the end, Rickston Slade solemnly thanks the Doctor and hugs Mr. Copper, then proceeds to gloat about how rich the Titanic disaster has made him before leaving. The Doctor can't help but be disgusted at Slade's behavior.
• Sherlock of Elementary warns Watson at one point that if she's looking for his softer, inner personality, she'll be disappointed. He is a jerk, through and through, and the only reason he relates so well with her is that, because he finds her "exceptional", he makes a significant attempt to be personable with her.
• Eureka: Dr. Parrish is a jackass and a half; if he can say something to get Fargo's goat, or try to sleaze his way in between Fargo and Dr. Martin, he'll do it, and if he can do it in a way that makes it look like he was about to have a Jerk with a Heart of Gold moment, he'll enjoy it. Averted after Holly dies and he genuinely comforts Fargo.
• Marie from Everybody Loves Raymond is this, at her worst. At times she'll play up Jerk with a Heart of Gold persona to guilt people into doing what she wants. In "Thank You Notes", Marie tries to guilt Amy into writing thank you notes to Lee and Stan who bought candles for Amy and Robert's wedding. At the end of the episode, it's revealed Marie helped Lee and Stan pick out the candles in the first place.
• Knight Titus in Fallout. A Knight for the Brotherhood of Steel, Titus takes deuteragonist Maximus under his wing as a squire for a mission and is shown to be aloof towards others, especially to Maximus, treating him rather poorly. At first, it appears that he is just being a tough-but-fair mentor towards Maximus like the rest of the Brotherhood are. However, once Titus and Maximus encounter a Yao Guai (a violent, mutated bear), Titus tries to flee for his own life despite being clad in BoS Power Armor that would enable him to fight it off. The Yao Guai catches up and severely injures him, forcing Maximus to shoot the bear dead. But Titus is not even remotely grateful towards Maximus for saving his life, continues pettily insulting the squire, states he's going to have Maximus executed for not saving him sooner, and has the gall to demand Maximus to treat his wounds. It's incredibly apparent that Titus is nothing more than an Arrogant Coward who uses his status as a BoS Knight to abuse those below him. Unsurprisingly, once Maximus sees Titus for what he really is in embodying none of the Brotherhood's ideals, he opts to let him die from his wounds.
• Basil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers. Basil desires to move up in social standing and attract a better class of customer to his hotel. But he's also verbally abusive to the help, only superficially nice to his guests, and his Hair-Trigger Temper and persistent zany schemes built on webs of lies keep getting him into all kinds of trouble. The few times it looks like Basil is trying to do something nice — such as plan a party for his wife or treat a guest with genuine respect — there's always some ulterior motive behind it. And the moment that Basil's plans begin to unravel, his true colors come out to show what a petty, shallow, self-centered gasbag he really is. Were Basil simply more honest and maybe a little cooler-headed, most of his problems would disappear, but any attempts to dig beneath the surface show there's not much else to him besides a barely-contained contempt for the world around him. However, all of this is Played for Laughs since Basil is an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist who always gets his just desserts for his attitude.
• Sunny Capaduca on 15/Love. Occasional Pet the Dog moments aside, anything decent that Sunny did was inevitably revealed to have sinister motives, while her usual persona was half Spoiled Brat half Creepy Child.
• Lou Smith in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air abandoned Will when he was only four years old then returns to him fourteen years later to fix their strained relationship. Will openly accepts him and believes that his father has changed. Then, Lou bails on his son again when some "important business" comes up and he can't make time for his son. After completely abandoning Will for the second time in his life, the audience gets the most heart-wrenching scene in the series.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Lord Tywin Lannister occasionally says something that might indicate that he's not as bad as people think but he usually tells them in no uncertain terms his entirely pragmatic reasons for saying it if he's questioned about it.
  • Queen Cersei Lannister is vicious and hostile by default, petty, vindictive, and an overall despicable person to be around. It goes without saying that she Hates Small Talk and openly hates anyone that's not her children or her Lannister family (with the exception of Tyrion, of course). In the second half of the final season, she decides to let Tyrion have an audience with her in an effort to end the war before innocents are slaughtered in King's Landing, with both of them knowing that Cersei has contempt for her subjects. She stops for a moment to consider his words, and specifically his promise that she and her unborn child will be protected if she steps down. She even refuses to take the opportunity to kill her hated brother right then and there. And then, following a brief moment of consideration, she executes Missandei and dooms the city to violence, just in case you needed a reminder about what kind of person she is.
• The George Lopez Show: Zack Powers is a nasty little prick who smashed up his father's factory to spite him (costing people their wages), got a girl pregnant, and gambled with company money. Of course, he had a pretty awful home life, which causes Carmen to fall for him, thinking there is some good underneath him. In reality, he is just playing this up just to screw Carmen and then ditch her, something he smugly admits to George.
• House: Dr. House. Just when it looks like he's about to Pet the Dog he'll add a moment of unbelievable jerkassery. Some people (in story and out) believed that his crankiness is because of his leg problem — and then it's shown that he was a jerk even before that. He has later gone through therapy, gotten clean, and has become slightly but consistently less of a jerk who even starts subconsciously manipulating others to their benefit, rather than his own.
• Happens to Barney often in How I Met Your Mother, and usually it's Lily who temporarily thinks he's done something caring.
  • For example, the time he's detailing all the subtle signs that indicate that a nearby girl at the bar has been recently crying, and he seems sympathetic at first, but it turns out he's just analyzing her vulnerability to being manipulated into sex.
  • In one Thanksgiving episode, Ted and Robin decide to help out at a homeless shelter on the holiday, where they find that Barney is the model volunteer there in his spare time. They spend the entire episode completely dumbfounded by the fact that he is capable of good deeds until they discover that he's there as part of court-mandated community service for drunkenly urinating on a church.
    Ted: You are evil!
    Robin: All is right with the world!
  • In one episode he tells his friends how he went to see the woman who broke his heart years ago and quite wistfully talks about how she's a mother now, how she was sorry for what she did to him, and how all he has is a closet full of suits and a string of one-night stands. When his friends show sympathy towards him, he laughs and says that what he meant was that she had become incredibly lame and he is still awesome, reveals that he had sex with her afterward and secretly recorded the tryst, and then forces his disgusted friends to listen to her moans and screams.
  • "The Scuba Diver" play is based pretty much entirely on this. In one of the most magnificent Magnificent Bastard plots Barney's ever conceived, he tells Lily in advance about a play he's going to run, which she uses by getting a friend to pretend to fall for it to steal the Playbook. Then he announces that he's going to run a play called "The Scuba Diver", which Marshall notes isn't anywhere in the book, piquing their curiosity. They run down to the bar to inquire about it, and he only points out his target, who Lily decides to warn off. But after the rest of the gang relates the story to the girl, they still want to know what the play is, so they approach Barney, who starts in on some spiel, stops, and says some stuff about how the plays were just a way to get his mind off his breakup with Robin. Then Lily talks Barney up, saying he's a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, and he leaves with the girl, then texts the gang telling them to look under the table, where the play is taped to the underside, describing all of this. All that just to invoke this trope.
• Jay from The Inbetweeners switches between this trope and Jerk with a Heart of Gold. At the start of the show, he is mostly this trope, and at the end of the third series, he is mostly the latter (by the time of The Movie, he seems to have become a permanent Jerk with a Heart of Gold). The formula is usually like this: Will thinks Jay has finally done something just slightly thoughtful or said something non-stupid, and Jay proves him wrong or follows the thoughtful action up with something that is assholish. However, it is largely Played for Laughs, so Jay is in general more sympathetic than many examples of this trope.
• Intimate: Oskar is an ass in general and a particular one to Keno, the nerdy son of his landlord who looks up to him. Twice, Oskar has to spend time with Keno so he won't get kicked out of the apartment, and both times he does something semi-nice at first (giving Keno advice on how to approach his online girlfriend after inviting her over; accompanying him to a LARP game and giving him the shield he finds, which qualifies the player for the final duel) only to screw him over later (when the girl shows up and turns out to be attractive, Oskar claims to be Keno; when he discovers there's a pretty maiden to be "won" in the LARP game, he destroys the shield while Keno's not looking). None of the five protagonists are great guys at all, but they usually don't go out of their way to be terrible like Oskar does.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: The Gang is a group of five utter scumbags who are entirely self-centered. Whenever they do something even remotely heroic, it is always for purely selfish reasons.
• Finch on Just Shoot Me!. In one episode, he admits to Maya that he has to hide his sensitive side in public. She hugs him and he takes the opportunity to feel her up. When she looks shocked, he just smirks and says "it's me!"
• Justified:
  • Arlo Givens, Raylan's Archnemesis Dad, was hellishly abusive of Raylan and his late mother, and is just as sleazy and violent with everyone else. He does show a softer side and even remorse for his treatment of his son on occasion, but it's almost always a way to manipulate people. The one time he does something genuinely, unarguably good by talking down a suicidal war veteran, he follows it up by trying to kill Raylan to save his own skin.
  • Daryl Crowe styles himself as a loving family patriarch, but every time he shows a softer side it turns out to be manipulation. In truth, he sees his family as nothing more than tools he can exploit.
• The Last of Us (2023): Lee is a Smug Snake even when he's trying to act nice, but he expresses seemingly genuine concern for Joel and warns him to lay low while FEDRA cracks down on the Fireflies. Then he catches Joel, Tess, and Ellie outside the border and threatens to execute them all on the spot if they don't bribe him. He tops it off by to trying to murder Ellie (a teenager) out of spite when she stabs him in the leg to stop him from killing Joe..
• Anthony Cooper, Locke's dad from Lost. He can screw Locke over again and again because he's very good at faking Pet the Dog moments. To say nothing of the whole Sawyer incident.
• Marina on The Magicians is this. She claims to try to help Julia while having selfish motivations and Chronic Backstabbing Disorder. Later, timeline 23 Marina claims to be helping because it's the right thing to do, then blackmails the group by threatening to turn them in to the Library if they don't steal more magic for her than she'd get as a reward.
• M*A*S*H: Frank Burns is a thoroughly unpleasant individual, with a poor bedside manner who treats patients and other members of the 4077 with contempt, except for Margaret Houlihan for the first couple seasons. After Houlihan dumps him and marries another officer Burns becomes even more unpleasant, especially towards Houlihan. Suffering a mental breakdown after Houlihan's wedding, he is transferred back to the states.^note Burns actor Larry Linville said Burns had a very dark aura around him and decided against renewing his contract at the end of the fifth season, having become tired of playing such a cartoonish jerkass. By then, Linville was so tired of his character being the butt of so many jokes that he had stopped attending dailies.
• The Mentalist, although Patrick Jane usually has a heart of gold, his amnesiac version in Fugue In Red falls into this trope. Basically this version of Patrick Jane is based on when he was a scammer, but without taking into account the love for his family, to the point that he has no problems abusing Cho's trust to escape, nor does he have problems stealing half of the money that he was supposed to return.
• In one moment of The Middle, a lazy teenage guy named Axel is dateless on Valentine's Day. He says he doesn't care because he's with the woman that means the most to him, his mother. His mom is so happy, and then he bursts out laughing and says he can't believe she believed that.
• Once Upon a Time (2011): Both Regina (The Evil Queen) and Gold (Rumpelstiltskin) show signs of this. Both genuinely do care for certain people (Henry and her father for Regina and Belle and Baelfire for Gold), but both often treat these people cruelly (Regina even kills her father). They are also Magnificent Bastards who managed to trap all of the fairy tale characters from their world in an Identity Amnesia curse, both acting for selfish reasons, and every time they have Pet the Dog moments it's ruined either in the same episode or in the very next. Regina generally grows out of it over the course of the series. Gold...not so much.
• Oz:
  • Kenny Wangler is set up as having the potential for redemption, but it eventually becomes clear that he's little more than a bullying thug. Any sympathetic moments he gets are quickly subverted; even his love for his infant son is undercut when he yells at the boy to "be a man" die crying.
  • All of Vern Schillinger's redeeming qualities are shown to be either shallow or overridden by his disgusting racism. Even his various attempts at redemption are shown to be ultimately shallow and self-serving.
• The Sheriff of the 2000s Robin Hood series, in his own words. At one point, he tells an underling he suspects of betrayal that a confession might prompt some mercy. "Underneath this harsh surface, I'm deeply sensitive." One confession later, he stabs the guy. "I Lied. Underneath this harsh surface, there's just more harsh surface."
• A Saturday Night Live skit had Jon Bon Jovi and Ritchie Sambora (playing themselves) acting this way toward the DeMarco Brothers (Chris Kattan and Chris Parnell) when they are auditioning to be backup dancers for the band. After repeatedly insulting the brothers' rehearsal and finally driving them to tears, Bon Jovi and Sambora appear to feel bad about what they have done and called the brothers back... only to tell them to "take [their] boombox and get out." Then they do this to them three more times. Worst of all, they get no comeuppance for this and the audience (as always) just laughs at the DeMarcos.
• Scrubs:
  • This is Dr. Cox's view of most people, himself included:
    Dr. Clock: Oh, Dr. Kelso's all bluster. I bet underneath it all, he's a sweetheart.
    Dr. Cox: Oh no. underneath it all, he is pure evil.
    Dr. Clock: Perry, no one's pure evil. I mean, yeah, some people have a hard outer shell, but inside, everybody has a creamy center.
    Dr. Cox: There are plenty of people here, on this particular planet, who are hard on the outside and hard on the inside!
    Dr. Clock: So they have more of a nougaty center?
    Dr. Cox: Lady. People aren't chocolates. Do you know what they are mostly? Bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling.
  • Dr. Clock then spends the entire episode proving that not only Dr. Cox, but the even bigger jerk Dr. Kelso both are bastard coated bastards with a creamy center.
• The Sopranos: The main character, Tony Soprano, initially appears to be a Tragic Villain who's kept sympathetic by numerous moral boundaries, a genuine love for his family, and seeming to make an effort to change his criminal ways. However, as the show goes on, it shows that, although he does have some sympathetic moments and traits, deep down he is a selfish, hypocritical, and violent thug wants to be told he's better without doing anything to earn it, because he loves being feared as a mob boss and would rather die than give that up, no matter how many people he cares about are killed or ruined as a result of his criminal activities. By the end of the show, the only thing that keeps Tony from being completely loathsome is that he still cares about his immediate family, even if he's also a terrible husband and father.
• Harry Mudd in Star Trek: Discovery. Unlike the Lovable Rogue he would become in Star Trek: The Original Series, this younger version of him is perfectly happy to spy on his cellmates for the Klingons and steal their food. Later on, he goes murder-happy all over the Discovery and spends 54 of his "Groundhog Day" Loop cycles killing Lorca in increasingly creative (and painful) ways. It seems initially that he's just pining for his lost love Stella, but it's eventually revealed that he ran away from Stella, as he only wanted her father's money. It's at least known he'll eventually grow out of this.
• Supernatural:
  • Zachariah and Ruby. Zachariah is a smug douchebag but gets a Pet the Dog moment when he tries to show Dean that his life's not as bad as he thinks and get him to accept his mission to save the world. Ruby is as snarky and manipulative as demons are expected to be but are willing to lay down her life to protect Sam and Dean. And then it turns out both of them were Evil All Along and were trying to get Sam and Dean to start the Apocalypse the whole time.
  • But the biggest example of this trope by far, which is seriously saying something, is none other than Lucifer himself, probably to no one's surprise considering he's the friggin Devil himself. Every time he seems to show a humanizing or sympathetic quality he subverts by doing something utterly heinous. For example, in Season 5, he says that he genuinely cares for Sam and wants him to be happy, but it's revealed in Season 11 that he never really liked him. Near the end of the same season, he seemingly reconciles with God and makes a Heel–Face Turn… but then when God leaves earth with his sister The Darkness, what does he do? Possesses a Rockstar and kill dozens of people for fun. When asked why he is doing this, he says that he's pissed because God didn't say goodbye to him when left, and is taking out his anger on innocent humans. But by far the biggest instance of this trope happens in Season 13 when he fathers a Nephilim son named Jack, which once again brings up the possibility that he has some humanity in him, and is even willing to join forces with the heroes once more, so he can bond with him. But in the season finale, Jack finds out that he killed an innocent girl named Maggie and even enjoyed doing it proving once and for all to Jack (and the audience) that Lucifer is nothing more but a pure evil monster. How does Lucifer react when his son rightfully calls him out? By stealing his grace and then abducting both Jack and Sam, and attempting to force a Sadistic Choice upon them by trying to have the two kill each other, even stating to his son, right to his face, that he can always have another child.
• True Blood has Maxine Fortenberry. Once in a while, she'll show her soft side, such as genuinely loving Tommy and attending his funeral and consoling his brother Sam. But Maxine is a very cruel racist person who would rather kill a non-human (vampire, shifter, etc.) with a big smile on her face when given a chance, regardless of who they are. Such as Sam whom she sold out and attempted to murder with the rioting townsfolk in Season 7, despite telling him that he is part of the family a few seasons ago.
• In the Waking the Dead episode 'Waterloo' shady property developer Martin Barlow becomes a foster father to an orphan and then raises him to be a mole inside the police force.
• The Governor in The Walking Dead (2010) was previously established as one of the most feared villains in the series, but after losing to Rick and his group of heroes he becomes a broken man struggling to survive the Zombie Apocalypse. When he runs into a family who opens up their hearts to him and forms a new group with him as the leader he... uses the new group to get revenge on Rick and his friends. He even kills one of the family members who took pity on him in front of everyone.
• Mr. Diperna, the bullying junior high assistant principal on The Wonder Years. It's not unusual for Diperna to listen to Kevin's (or someone else's) explanation with a thoughtful look, only to then tear into that person, often for a very minor infraction.

• At AWE Night of Legends, Kevin Nash and Ricky Morton face each other to settle a grudge between them.^*Match was originally a tag match between Nash/Mystery Partner vs. The Rock and Roll Express, but Marvin Ward had other ideas. Near the end, Nash grabbed a mic and asked Morton why he hates him. Morton explained that Nash was an asshole who was Only in It for the Money, not for the love of wrestling like he was. Nash said that if it was only about the money he would've retired by now before concluding that they "don't have a problem." As Morton went to shake his hand, Nash blindsided him with a Jackknife Powerbomb.
  Nash: And you're damn right it's about the money! Why the hell else do ya go to work?
• A staple of the Heel–Face Revolving Door trope endemic to Professional Wrestling: a long-term villain will begin to have Pet the Dog moments, or perhaps show a slightly softer side, maybe even defending their family's honor or confronting an ally who's going too far. Then, whoop, it turns out it was all a big scheme to get the good guy to lower his guard and as a matter of fact, they're not only still the scum-bag they always were, they've been hiding HOW much of a horrible person they are. A great example of this was TNA's Bully Ray. After being arguably the worst of all the villains in TNA for the past two years or so, he gets jumped by the Aces And Eights gang and joins the babyfaces in an Enemy Mine scenario. He teams with Sting and other faces for several months, slowly making a face turn (while still officially being a heel because he's dating Hulk Hogan's daughter, much to the disapproval of the Hulkster). Then, when he gets an opportunity at Jeff Hardy's world championship and Aces & Eights appears on the scene to throw him a weapon, he takes his opportunity and steals the title, revealing that he was controlling Aces & Eights all the time and had secretly ordered them to attack him multiple times in a very un-Heroic Sacrifice.
• The Foreign Wrestling Heel Maryse Ouellet seemed to have undergone a Heel–Face Turn when she befriended Gail Kim. But all the time she was saying friendly things to Kim in English, she was saying mean things about her in French.

• Sir Gregory, the head of General Assistance Department in The Men from the Ministry is one in and out. While he may be pleased and friendly in some episodes, it's only because of some outside event giving him a good mood and makes no secret that he hates One and Two for their incompetence.
• On the surface, Thomas Quentin Crimp in Old Harry's Game appears to be a selfish, greedy, and petty businessman. But underneath all that, he's a pervert and a murderer as well. At one point, the other characters think they have found a Freudian Excuse in Thomas' childhood as an unpopular schoolboy... until they learn that, while still a child, he murdered all the kids who considered him unpopular.

• Warhammer 40,000: The Emperor of Mankind. In the Horus Heresy novel Master of Mankind, he is callous and uncaring, his affection for his sons being just an act to maintain their loyalty while mentally he refers to them by their legion numbers.

• Melissa in Abandon All Hope starts off this way — her brash demeanor seems to stand in contrast with her social advocacy and humanitarian ideals, but when push comes to shove, she's ultimately just looking out for herself. She gets better.
• Professor Callahan in Legally Blonde starts as a textbook Amoral Attorney, cold, condescending, and dismissive. Over time, he seems to soften towards Elle, and even stands up for her a couple times... only to turn right around and kiss her against her will, implying heavily that the only reason he wanted her on the team of interns was that she was a hot, leggy blonde.
• Demetrius in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Sure, he goes back to Helena and repents of the inhuman way he treated her — but that's just the love potion talking.
• In A Streetcar Named Desire just when it seems that Stanley might not be as much of an asshole as he seemed to be at first he goes and rapes Blanche to insanity and then lies that he never once touched her afterward.

• Absented Age Duology: In Absented Age: Squarebound, Fuji is harsh on the Sado Band Club for causing noise with their activity even though they're supposed to be doing tea ceremony instead of music. While he initially seems like a strict school official who is just doing his job, he turns out to have an ulterior motive. He wants to tear down the Sado building in order to make room for a campus museum, and went as far as to frame the club for smoking. Even when Mr. Minami counters all of the vice-principal's arguments about the Sado Band Club's activities, the latter still tries to threaten to suspend the club members and ruin their permanent records. He gets worse in Absented Age 2: Ghostbound, where he orders Rumi and Kazuki to use Misfortune Plumes to petrify the Sado Band Club members. He only starts to improve himself after the Sado Band Club and Brass Band Club steal his plumes, causing his ego to be deflated. He eventually decides to support the Sado Band Club out of pragmatism, but still struggles to understand where he went wrong.
• Baldur's Gate III has Aradin, a racist, brutish thug encountered at the start of the game. While he's obnoxious to the point of getting decked by Reasonable Authority Figure Zevlor (or even the Player Character if they're feeling Chaotic), talking with him reveals he cares for the safety of his people and sees it as his responsibility to keep them safe, and is very distraught that so many of them died in a pointless job. However, when met again in the third act he reveals he's not above hiring Cannon Fodder, or human trafficking for that matter.
• Borderlands: Handsome goddamn Jack. In a series with Grey-and-Gray Morality and Comedic Sociopathy galore, Jack stands out for his sheer bastardry. He styles himself as a hero and gets deeply characterised over several games, but every time there's a hint of him having a soft spot or doing the right thing, his true nature will rear its ugly head even if it actively impedes him. His first chronological appearance has him on his best behaviour, but that doesn't take long to fall apart and anyone who's played 2 knows the absolute hell he's putting his daughter through in the background from the word go.
• In Child of Light, Aurora eventually finds out that her stepsister, Norah/Nox, is the Queen of the Night's youngest daughter who had been manipulating her under the guise of a loving family member. When they betray her, they "apologize" and act remorseful, but when Aurora presses the matter further, they quickly back-pedal and reveal that they actually enjoy breaking the adorable little girl. This, as well as them imprisoning and leaving Aurora's friends in the Forgotten Tower to die, convinces Aurora that they are Beyond Redemption.
  Aurora: What are you doing!? Family first, now and forever!?
  Norah: I am sorry, Aurora. We are not together.
  Aurora: Sister, Norah...
  Nox: (Slasher Smile) Nox is my real name. You I admire, but you are not family.
• Disco Elysium: As the game allows you to play in a fairly freeform manner, you can opt to be this. If you follow this path your own mind will ask you to take a look at yourself and say what you see. If you decide there's a good person underneath it all it'll retort that if the good guy never comes out, then you're just a bad person.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition: Magister Livius Erimond, Smug Snake par excellence who happily aids Corypheus so he can rule as a god-king. When one of your companions asks Cole (Spirit of Compassion and All-Loving Hero who can find something to sympathize with in Corypheus) if Erimond has some hidden pain motivating him, Cole bluntly states that no, he's just "an arsehole."
• Dustborn: Desmond is irritable and impatient, ostensibly because he's concerned about the crew's urgent schedule. He also brings Nainai and asks the crew to recruit her, making it seem like he believes in rescuing Anomals. In reality, he sold out to Justice and is luring the crew into a trap.
• Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG:
  • President Zazz is presented as a demanding and controlling boss, but he seems to at least have a benevolent goal of vanquishing demons and reviving the original humans. He even pays for Akira's party despite being irritated by their desire to retire. Then he reveals that he intends to displace the non-human citizens in favor of the humans, and that he plans on conquering other countries to further expand his human supremacist state.
  • Prime Minister Morgalia is the ruthless pro-occupation ruler of Vulcanite whose Establishing Character Moment is killing one of her bodyguards on live television for annoying her, but she does seem to genuinely miss her daughter Chase. Unfortunately, the story reveals that she executed Chase's lover for being part of the Vulcanite Resistance and kicked Chase out of the house for siding joining the Resistance, and she feels entitled to forgiveness despite not changing her ways. Later, she agrees to have Clyde brainwash Chase into loving her again, showing that she's a Control Freak who is incapable of truly reconciling with her daughter.
• Preceptor Seluvis in Elden Ring starts out as a pompous, irritating mage and the least friendly of Ranni's allies - though doing him certain favours will have him warm up to you more...and when he does, you realize that he's even worse than he appears to be at first, as he's a freaky pervert and a "puppet botherer", and those 'favours' involve unwittingly tricking you into drugging a girl in the depths of despair so that he can turn her into a puppet and his personal Sex Slave, as he already has on several other people, and one path of his questline involves trying to do the same to Ranni, the demi-god he serves. Thankfully, regardless of how you conclude his questline, he gets his just desserts one way or another.
• Master Neloth in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's Dragonborn DLC. He's an Insufferable Genius and magical Mad Scientist who truly believes Its All About Him, and even believes that the return of the Dragons is an attempt to kill him by one of his many enemies. Much of what he does is simply For Science! and he has very little respect for any other mortal, including a world-saving hero like the Dragonborn, who is forced to aid him significantly in the DLC's main quest. If you visit him after ending the DLC questline, he will immediately examine you to ensure you don't have any remains of Hermaeus Mora's influence. When you answer him he doesn't need to worry about you, he will quickly respond that he wasn't worried, just interested.
• Elohim Eternal II: Son of Man: Pontius Pilate, the second-in-command of Pleroma, appears to be one of the more reasonable members of the ruling class, as stated by Joseph, the governor of Nazareth. Although he's condescending towards the Zealots when he defeats them in Azar combat, he seems gracious enough to let them flee. He claims to be regretful of the Time of Tribulation and is seemingly willing to accept a non-lethal surrender of the Zealots if Judas sells them out. However, he breaks his promise and has most of the Zealots killed, wipes out much of Nazareth's population, and crucifies Jessua to Make an Example of Them, making it clear any prior mercy he showed towards Joseph was a ploy to keep him obedient. In reality, he dehumanizes the Shemerians just as much as the rest of the Pleroman ruling class.
• Won Kyun from the Korean campaign in Empires: Dawn of the Modern World is presented as so incompetent that it borders on treason. He disregarded the reports of Japanese military buildup which led to the Koreans being unprepared when the invasion came. He then withdrew his forces and allowed the Japanese to march inland unopposed. He returns with the help of the Chinese, only to reveal that he is planning to split Korea into Chinese and Japanese protectorates with himself as king.
• Fallout:
  • John Bishop, one of The Dons of the Wretched Hive of New Reno in Fallout 2. He's a terrible person and an even worse husband and father, but through a little digging, the player can learn that he's a steadfast ally of the New California Republic. However, he cares little for the nation itself; he only sides with them because he'll become more powerful by doing so and arranges the assassination of both a congressman and their Vice President to facilitate this. In the end, the Bishops canonically became a powerful NCR family who use their influence to protect gambling and prostitution rights for the city.
  • Caesar of Fallout: New Vegas. At first, his Legion appears to be nothing more than a band of arrogant and brutal organized raiders. But then the big man himself invites you to his fort for a chat and pardons you for any crimes you have committed against them, and the man sounds like an intellectual Anti-Villain who has an elaborate plan to create a civilization that won't destroy itself... And then you find out that behind the veneer is an ill-tempered sadist who commits genocide over minor slights, has tortured people to death for disturbing his sleep, and berates you for not executing a defenseless (though hardly undeserving) man.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem Gaiden/Shadows of Valentia: King Lima IV was one spoiled hedonist who reflects the worst effects of Mila's influence on his people and treated woman as objects of his lust, and, in a seeming act of kindness, he offered food to Rigel, whom was facing a famine, if they surrender the woman who would birth his child Conrad and subverted the kindness by refusing to send the food anyway. This pretty is much one of the reasons his surviving offspring basically disowned him as well as his death being written off as a reason to fight his killer who has proven himself no better than the deceased Lima.
  • Fire Emblem Heroes: At first, Njörðr comes across as a very strict king, but with a softer and caring side by attempting to help the Order of Heroes to stop Gullveig, heal Heiðr with the light from his Ár, and create a better future for their realm. Turns out he was manipulating Seiðr and Heiðr the whole time for his own selfish goals, wanting to turn Seiðr into Gullveig by tricking her into killing Heiðr, and purposely turning the latter into a monster to do it.
• Caius from Frozen Essence.
  • He initially appears to be a typical Troubled, but Cute Loveable Rogue who claims that he's helping the protagonist Mina just because it benefits him and doesn't care if she gets herself hurt or not only because of his Dark and Troubled Past. Except that in most paths, it turns out that he wasn't lying about looking out for only himself and killing being the only thing he cares about after he joins the enemy's side and attempts to kill his former companions without a shred of hesitation or remorse. He does prevent the Big Bad Oryon from recapturing Mina and Rune in Rune's path, but only because he wants revenge on Oryon and to be the one who kills Rune in the end.
  • Even in his path where he takes Mina to a safe place and nurses her back to health after she saves him, he makes it quite clear to her that he's keeping her alive as a "hostage" to deter the White Order from killing him and mocks her for believing that he would thank her for saving him. When he seems to be developing genuine feelings for her after becoming frantic when she's severely injured and having a heartfelt conversation with her about their similar situations, he immediately begins plotting to use Mina's power to kill people more effectively the moment he learns about it and comes close to crossing the Moral Event Horizon when he begins draining her of her life essence while taunting her and ignoring her screams of pain. However, in his Lightpath, he does become a Jerk with a Heart of Gold at almost the last minute when it looks like Mina is going to die partly because of what he did.
• Ryder in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is one of the more troublesome members of the Grove Street Families, often high, always sarcastic, and excessively rude to everyone, especially CJ. However, he puts in work for the gang and does his part (though he always seems like that guy people keep around to kick around). And then it turns out he had betrayed the Grove Street Families and Big Smoke, had a hand in the death of Sweet and CJ's mother. CJ easily takes him out either alongside Cesar or by himself after a boat chase. Even if he still feels a little bad about having to kill him.
• Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy: Dr. Cube's past self, Dr. C, is a member of the KRC and initially seems to be a case of Good Is Not Nice, since while he's a jerk, he's still doing his job for the organization for the greater good. Then it turns out he's in league with his future self in spreading misinformation about the Kaiju heroes, and is also embezzling donations that should have went to the KRC. After losing to the heroes and being abandoned by his future self, Dr. C gives the heroes the location of Cube's pollution scheme, but this is out of spite towards his other self rather than an actual Heel–Face Turn.
• Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep: The Big Bad, Master Xehanort, is said to be a formerly well-meaning Fallen Hero... yet ruins his one opportunity to show said sympathetic traits. During a flashback, his Training from Hell experiments on Ven leave the latter in a near-death state — so Xehanort, despite being the one to abuse him to that point, takes him to the serene Destiny Islands so he can at least die in peace. However, after Ven soon recovers, Xehanort doesn't hesitate to just continue exploiting him as usual.
• Last Elysium: Queen Yana is utterly unsympathetic towards the people of Iria who are suffering under Lotrec's rule. However, she seems to have enough sympathy for the people of Yabari Island to send Velka to assess their damage. However, Elys realizes this is really an excuse to have Velka spy on the party, and in the endgame, Yana takes the Sword of Biliel from an unconscious Lotrec in order to begin her own ambitions for world domination.
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds: Yuga is supposedly loyal to Hilda who wanted to save her world despite his actions, but in reality, he wants the entire Triforce for himself with no regard for what happens to Hyrule or Lorule.
• Lonely Wolf Treat: In the sixth game, when Mochi returns to Frosting to investigate a crime, she is joined by Juju, her overprotective and racist cousin who caused Mochi and her friends a lot of trouble in the past. Juju seems to show genuine concern for Mochi when she suggests they get help from Senbei, a popular rabbit who knows everybody in Frosting. At Senbei's house, however, Juju makes an excuse to leave Mochi behind so she can talk to Senbei in private. When she comes back, it turns out she was just enjoying a romantic moment with Senbei and didn't ask him about the crime at all. To say that Mochi gets a bit upset would be an understatement.
• Manafinder: Azain is very insulting towards the recently deceased Soren, but he gives Lambda a manastone seemingly out of goodwill. It turns out he tampered with the manastone so that it would allow him and the nomads to breach the Settlement's defenses.
• Ambassador Udina in Mass Effect is perfectly happy to compliment Shepard on a job well done right before he gets back to the backstabbing. Goes all the way in the third installment, wherein Udina seemingly devotes himself fully to aiding Shepard against the Reapers instead of furthering his political ambitions, but then he decides to use Cerberus to assassinate the other Councillors so he'd be the sole surviving head of the Council is a better idea than going along with Shepard's alliance-building. His behavior in the third game, however, is more ambiguous; no characters seem to truly think he acted from pure ambition, and it's perfectly possible that he took part in the Cerberus coup attempt because he was desperate to get reinforcements to Earth, and the other races were refusing to help. It's also not clear whether he was trying to kill the Council or just capture them to force their compliance, or whether he knew how bloody the coup would be. Granted, even the best interpretation of his actions leaves him guilty of errors in judgment and callousness towards the other races, but such a perspective would put him into Well-Intentioned Extremist territory rather than this trope. The characters also wonder if Udina may have been indoctrinated, which would mean that his actions may not have been his choice in the first place.
• Metaphor: ReFantazio: During the second arc of the game, Bardon, captain of Martira's guard recruits the party's help to find someone who is kidnapping children within the city, but his subordinate Morris is immediately hostile to the party, treating them with disdain. As the party begins their investigation, Morris, in an uncharacteristically helpful moment, offers them a hint as to how to approach the suspect's hideout- go during the sandflash, when the monsters are asleep. This not only turns out to be a lie that is intended to get the party killed, but Morris is working for the true mastermind out of pure greed.
• Octopath Traveler II: Harvey burns down Osvald's house, killing the latter's wife and daughter in the process, steals his research out of petty jealousy, and has him framed and sentenced to life imprisonment. However, he's later shown musing over what he should get his daughter for her birthday, suggesting that he's at least a decent father underneath everything else. Except it turns out that "his" daughter is actually Osvald's daughter, who Harvey has brainwashed into forgetting about her real dad so he can use her blood in an experiment.
• Overwatch: Shion is a cruel, brutal, and violently unhinged Yakuza elder who revels in the terror and suffering she inflicts on innocents for the sake of satisfying her own bloodlust and need for control, using methods such as assassinations, kidnappings, blackmail, and torture to keep them under her heel. The closest thing she has to compassion is her seeming care for Mizuki, having taken him in after his father died. However, her physical and psychological abuse of Mizuki and possessiveness towards him make it clear that Shion only cared about turning him into a unfailingly loyal weapon fit to serve the clan's ruthless agenda. Even her brief moments of motherly care towards Mizuki are nothing but emotional manipulation to gaslight him into returning to her side.
• In Persona 5, Principal Kobayakawa is aware of Kamoshida's abuses but turns a blind eye to them. After Kamoshida is exposed in the Royal Updated Re-release, the principal hires a school councillor, ostensibly to help the students through their trauma... but it's clearly just a desperate attempt to save face and salvage the school's reputation. And that's before he's revealed to be part of The Conspiracy, though he was killed not only for his failure, but also planned on telling the truth about them to the authorities. While it's possible he could have been a Dirty Coward who was too afraid to face them anymore, his exact reasons remain a mystery.
• The Voice from Pyre starts as hostile and rude to the Player Character. As the game progresses, he begins to warm up to you and encourages the Nightwings to keep competing, making him seem like a Defrosting Ice Queen. Then Volfred joins your party and the Voice loses his shit. For the rest of the game, he does nothing but hurls cruel insults and threats at the Nightwings, and once you learn you learn who he is and why he hates Volfred, it becomes nearly impossible to see him in a sympathetic light.
• Restoring Falmay: After the Final Boss fight, Zithrel kills Symmetra and tries to justify this deed as being a Mercy Kill, since Symmetra's corruption will never be cured. This makes her seem like a Pragmatic Hero at first, but after the Shard of Light purifies the forest, Zithrel runs off with the shard and reverts to her true form: Matria, the Big Bad of the series. In reality, she only killed Symmetra to tie up a loose end.
• Hiro from Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair. He's rather narcissistic and arrogant, but one might imagine that he does have some redeeming qualities since Momoko and Runa love him. However, in the good ending, it's revealed that he not only callously dumped Runa when he found out her family was poor, but he was planning to do the same with Momoko to get together with her best friend Kamen. Even after Kamen refused, Hiro continued to send her texts, including some that badmouthed Momoko. Momoko finding those text messages was what led her to plot a Murder-Suicide with herself and Hiro to frame Kamen for the murders.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: Dr. Eggman's default persona is that of a condescending egomaniac who abuses animals and antagonizes Sonic and friends on a daily basis, and any politeness he exudes serves as a mere extension of his narcissism. Although he has teamed up with Sonic many times over the years, this is only for his own personal benefit, and he always reverts back to villainy once they've won. In particular, he acts as a begrudging, yet cooperative ally to Sonic and Tails when the Deadly Six took over as the main threat throughout Sonic Lost World and is rather polite and affable towards them as the game goes on, to the point that he even saves Tails' life from Cubot attached to a still-brainwashed Crabmeat's body… only for him to betray them the moment they're no longer useful so he can reclaim his Empire and take over as the Final Boss after they defeat the Deadly Six and try to shut down the Extractor, only to find out it was already shut off.
• Starlight Legacy: King Lennox is presented as a bigoted and ruthless king who discriminates against the Sky Province, but he seems to love his daughter Esther, going as far as to remove the seal on the Eternity Tree when General Caden takes her hostage, even though this allows Caden to destroy the tree. However, it turns out he wanted the tree destroyed so that he has an excuse to seek the Starlight Relics, meaning Esther's safety wasn't his real reason for complying with the hostage situation. Additionally, Lennox has been turning people to stone in order to unleash the full power of the Starlight Relics, including his wife, and he planned on sacrificing Esther too. The party notes that in the end, his hatred of the Lusorians and his lust for power overrides any affection he might have for his family.
• In Tales of Symphonia, Aifread gives you quite the runaround during an optional quest, forcing the party to pursue him all over Sylvarant, but it turns out that he wants Colette to understand what her decision to abandon the journey of regeneration has cost Sylvarant and apologize to his crew, who died when the great Kharlan tree went out of control, something that the party caused. It's a harsh but understandable point, even if Aifread is completely unwilling to listen to Lloyd's side of the story, and establishes that Aifread's a decent person. But then he has one last letter to give to his apparent girlfriend Lyla. It turns out that Lyla's a loan shark, and the letter claims that the party will pay off Aifread's debts with their money, showing that Aifread's motives are perhaps not as selfless as he let on.
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater: Eric Sparrow from Tony Hawk's Underground. Just when you think he'll have a change of heart, he'll leave you behind once more for the sake of his career, which he puts above all else.
• Sebastian LaCroix from Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines starts the game on very bad terms with the Player Character. Viewing you as a blight on his reputation, LaCroix tries to kill you twice in the game's opening (once by beheading and then with a blatant Uriah Gambit) and only fails because the Anarchs stick up for you. Once you come back from his first few missions LaCroix begins opening more up and begins viewing you as Surprisingly Elite Cannon Fodder, giving you several vital missions on his behalf he wants you to survive. Then, late in the game, you piece together that you were an Unwitting Pawn in a scheme to ally with the Kuei-Jin to throw the Anarchs under the bus, and then became his main hitman in a scheme to backstab the Kuei-Jin to obtain the Ankharan Sarcophagus. When LaCroix realizes you know too much of his dirty secrets he immediately goes back to sending you on another Uriah Gambit, calls a Blood Hunt on you, and becomes the Final Boss for three of the game's Multiple Endings.
• View from Below:
  • Rose seems to want to befriend and spare Ash during the events of Chapter 5, but in the next chapter, not only is she planning to sacrifice Melody to get her wish, she also uses Ash's life as leverage to manipulate Bell into helping her. This shows that despite having some empathy for Ash, she ultimately puts her own ambitions ahead of everyone else.
  • The Crimson God seems to lament Delilah's death and tragic circumstances, to the point of using her death to justify his own genocidal goals, but he has no problem manipulating her and her soul pieces for his own benefit.
• Dio from Virtue's Last Reward. From the moment he first opens his mouth, he makes it clear to absolutely everyone that he is a huge asshole. He does have a few apparent Pet the Dog moments like his apparent care for Quark after he caught Radical-6, but it's all just a facade. In reality he's even worse than he initially seems. Not only did he murder the old lady in order to take her place in the Nonary Game, but he's also a devout cultist and terrorist who rigged the entire facility to blow up. In one route, he even holds the cure to Quark's Radical-6 hostage unless Sigma agrees to vote Ally against his Betray, even though this will drop Sigma below 0 BP and kill him.
• Good Ol' Wario. He fights an evil army, takes a demon pirate king in single combat, and even though he wants his money, still spares the Queen of the world a smi—wait what DUDE. She just spent a nightmarish stretch in a hideous monster's captivity, and Wario introduces her to the paneling up-close when she keeps him from his money just five seconds more. Princess Shokora, this is not. However, he can also be a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, as seen when he helps Luigi and co. (including Wario's rival, Mario) rescue Princess Peach after being saved by Luigi in Super Mario 64 DS.
• Dickson from Xenoblade Chronicles 1 comes off as a gruff asshole, but one who is dedicated to helping his war buddy, his adopted son, and the people of Bionis. Eventually, he shoots his adopted son and reveals he was only supporting the party to manipulate them into reviving his megalomaniacal god, Zanza.
• The Laughably Evil Nopon villain Bana from Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is shown to care greatly for his father and even regularly sends him money. Until a late-game sidequest reveals his father is an even worse crime boss than he is, and all those donations were directly financing terrorism.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links: With ARC-V World continuing the story of Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, the now free Yuri, who was purified by the end of the series, retains his jerkass Smug Super personality he had prior to his unification with Yuya, but worse of all, he doesn't see the point to apologize to the people he wronged (which includes the girls he kidnapped or the people he sealed in cards). Instead of apologizing, he uses either Just Following Orders as an excuse or he blames his victims for losing to him in a duel, or both. Despite this, he does have indeed lost his Ax-Crazy tendencies and while he's still doing things for his own amusement, it's not For the Evulz anymore.

• The Amazing Digital Circus: Invoked and Deconstructed. Jax is characterized by his sheer disregard for others and willingness to target people who can't fight back against him for the pettiest of reasons. He is also quite uncaring towards the fact that other people besides himself are trapped in the Digital Circus and constantly pursues his life as an avatar joking at other people's expense. However, by "Untitled", he comes to develop an Odd Friendship with Pomni and seems to enjoy having fun with her on their next adventure in "They All Get Guns". This only pushes him to immediately try to drive Pomni away by claiming that he is a heartless bully who has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, deliberately seeking to hurt her by lashing out at her insecurities of being forgotten before bluntly saying that he only "befriended" her as manipulation and doesn’t care for her or any of the others in the circus. Pomni doesn't truly buy it, but it deeply hurts her and damages their budding friendship all the same.
• Felix from Red vs. Blue. He initially comes across as a Stepford Smiler Broken Bird to the teams, with some abrasive and greedy moments, and different priorities than his employer, but ultimately willing to see the war through. Turns out he's working for the then-unknown third faction who intends to kill all life on the planet, and he is having the time of his life doing so. When his status as a False Friend comes out, he mocks the Reds and Blues for buying his "charismatic mercenary with a heart of gold" act.
• Let Me Explain Studios: Rebecca's High School Drama Teacher, nicknamed "Medusa". ^note  Becca points out that the title of "Medusa" really was the teacher's genuine nickname, and she wore it like a badge-of-honor Throughout Becca's time in High School, Medusa had a tight grip on the school theatre department; she was ill-tempered, prone to mood-swings, incredibly superficial, and often was verbally abusive towards several of her students, while playing favorites with others (who were always the popular and pretty students). She was especially abusive towards Rebecca, whom she regularly talked down to and overlooked in castings. But she always gave Becca Straight-A's for being a good student and actress, which made Becca believe that Medusa will treat her with respect and give her a decent role one day. Then during Senior Year, when Rebecca was auditioning for the lead-role that she greatly desired in a play, was the most qualified for in the entire school, fit every necessary criteria, had senior-year student casting priority, AND was the only senior-year girl in the class... Medusa still refused to cast her in ANY part for the play out of sheer contempt for her, which she casually tells other students, even saying she views Becca as nothing more than a friendless loser who was "not one of the group". Upon learning this, Rebecca quit her class for good then-&-there.
• Meta Runner: Greater-Scope Villain Dr. James Sheridan tries to convince MD-5 that he does care for Tari and Lucinia and want to help them. And while he does want to revive Lucinia, it's made obvious that he only cares about using her for his own selfish desires.
• RWBY:
  • Adam Taurus is a high-ranking member of the terrorist organization, the White Fang. During the Black Trailer, he's painted as having a sympathetic side towards his partner, Blake, who he saves from being crushed by a giant spider robot. Then during Season 3, he's revealed to be violently possessive of Blake and now seeks to kill her and her loved ones as retribution for her defection, showing that his earlier rescue of her was done in service of his possessiveness.
  • Whenever Cinder Fall does something decent, it's all for her own selfish purposes. She recruited Emerald on the promise of never going hungry again solely to use her Semblance to carry out Salem's mission; despite Emerald's loyalty, Cinder treats her abusively, including hitting her if she's disobedient. At the end of Volume 8, Cinder apologizes to Neo for denying her a chance to gain revenge on Ruby and compliments Watts' hacking skills. This is a ruse to gain their cooperation; as soon as she's achieved her objectives and no longer needs them, Cinder personally throws Neo into the Void Between the Worlds and traps Watts in Atlas' Command Center to burn to death.
  • Jacques Schnee is first established to be a Corrupt Corporate Executive who is said to have a difficult relationship with his daughters and is responsible for many of the Schnee Dust Company's controversies. When Jacques arrives to Beacon Academy to take Weiss home following the Fall of Beacon, seemingly out of care for her personal safety, he eventually points out to her that he only cares about his company's reputation rather than his daughter's dreams and ambitions.
• Helluva Boss:
  • Mammon is shown constantly in his debut episode to be a Bad Boss looking to exploit his star Fizzarolli. When Fizzarolli has a panic attack caused by a run-in with an obsessive stalker, Mammon at first seems concerned and gives him time to "get [his] shit together." Seconds later, he repeats "Get your shit together" as a threatening command, making it clear that he doesn't actually care about Fizzarolli's health and just wants him to keep up the public image he has for Mammon's own profits.
  • Crimson is Moxxie’s Abusive Dad and The Don of Notamafia Town in the Greed Ring of Hell, and quickly establishes both of these traits in his debut episode “Exes and Oh’s”. In a later short “Whacked Off”, Moxxie decides to help his target, the son of a mob boss leave the life of crime after assuming the target and his father must be like himself and Crimson, believing that being a shitty parent and a mob boss go hand in hand and that he’s giving his target the way out that Moxxie himself didn’t get until much later. When it turns out that Luigi is in fact a good parent who’s willing to sacrifice his own life to protect his son Paulie, who’s an Ungrateful Bastard that wants his dad out of the way so he can be boss, Moxxie is left shaken by the Awful Truth that Crimson didn’t have to be an evil parent despite being a mob boss and was simply evil on his own.
• In the Jonny Ethco video Santa's Last Stop, Santa upon hearing that the reason Billy had been misbehaving was because of the death of his mother. Santa apologizes to Billy for the loss of his mother and for the rude things he said. He gives him a present and as he leaves and Billy opens the present, it turns out to be a bomb that explodes and kills both Billy and his dad. Santa as he flies away in his sleigh laughs in triumph and calls Billy a cock-sucker after telling him to say hello to his mother for him. Though since Billy did kill and injure half of Santa's elves with the anthrax and mousetraps he sent, he honestly had it coming.

• 8-Bit Theater: Black Mage subverts any attempts to redeem himself. He found in the Castle of Ordeals that the only thing that could represent the weight of his sins was... himself. He then began to remind his 'evil' self of further atrocities that he had recently accomplished, thus making his doppelganger grow even more powerful until even it started thinking like Black Mage himself. BM then killed it with a sneak attack and wondered for a moment if killing the personification of his sins meant that he had cleansed his soul. He then promptly absorbed all the powers of his evil self, gleefully lampshading the fact that this would deny him any chance of redemption later. He then had sex with the corpse, solely because he wanted to find a way to turn self-love into a crime. Wow.
• Gunnerkrigg Court revealed little about Anthony Carver for a good while in the comic's run. Hints were occasionally dropped that he was a Well-Intentioned Extremist, some characters placed trust in him being a good guy. Then he finally appeared in Chapter 51 with an opening of total dick move towards Annie, seemingly landing right in this trope... And then later yet we saw why he did that — part of it was the best he could do for her as she would've been expelled otherwise, part of it was him being unable to deal with his complexes in her presence, and he knows he's in the wrong for the latter.
• Doc Worth of Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name described this way on the cast page description. (He does seem to have some sort of soft spot for Hanna, at least enough to join an effort to save his life. But he's still a dick while doing it.)
  "Worth is obnoxious, crude, abrasive, and borderline disgusting, and underneath his grungy exterior and antagonistic behavior he still is just a dick."
• Played straight, and then subverted, by King Marcus Quimby in the semi-canon forum game. In describing General Esteban, he says that "underneath that loud, grouchy exterior is another angry person. Underneath that is a kitten though."
• The Order of the Stick has Xykon, who is irredeemable through and through. Author Rich Burlew commented on this in the introduction of the book detailing Xykon's origin story, noting that such things tended to make the villain more sympathetic, and he wanted the opposite to happen. It worked.
• In Phoebe and Her Unicorn, Phoebe asks Dakota why she bullies her. Turns out that there is no reason for it (beyond mere malice) or deep-rooted psychological issue that motivates her; she's just a jerk who doesn't care or think about how she hurts others. And she's equally cruel to her "friends".
• Mike Warner of the Walkyverse. Although fans would like to think otherwise, Word of God insists that he's just an asshole with no justification. This is somewhat muddled by the fact that he becomes nice when he's drunk. One example of this is when Ethan quits the store and walks out. Mike calls after him to wait, making it seem like he wants him to stay... then simply kicks him in the nuts. "Okay, now you can go".
• Hyeonjin from Weak Hero, Gerard's bandmate back when he was in middle school. His genuine love and talent for music make it seem like he might have a more sentimental side underneath his insufferable persona... right up until he quits the band and confides in Gerard that he never gave a shit about it in the first place. Though it's later muddied with the revelation that he went out of his way to save Gerard from a burning building, injuring his hands to the point that he can't perform for a year. So even more of a jerk than initially presented, but not completely irredeemable.

• Jake Hurwitz, one of the hosts of If I Were You, describes himself as a "peanut M&M" on the show. In his words, to most girls, he's a heartless womanizer with a hard, rough exterior, like a candy shell. But any girl brave enough to dig deeper will find that beneath that hard shell is a soft, warm chocolatey center. However, they'll also find that beneath that is a shitty little peanut.
• July of May Xnocens wants to keep Idius March from killing all the ogres. Because if they're dead July can't use them as his underpaid henchmen.
• Noob: Gaea is showing a pattern of doing this:
  • The webseries version of the death of Sparadrap's pets, which was a Break the Cutie moment for her Manchild guildmate, had her call the culprits monsters... because they had just destroyed something she was planning to steal and sell for a fortune at some point.
  • The comic had her promise Sparadrap to get him a pet for each point he scores in a Fluxball game. She quickly explains to another character that she has no intention of paying for the pets herself but using the (constantly in Perpetual Poverty) guild's common fund.
  • In the novels, she promises that she showed up to help restart the guild after Arthéon disbanded it in a fit of rage by pure friendship. It doesn't take long for the narration to reveal that she still has every intention to treat the guild common fund as her bank.

• In Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog Captain Hammer, who Dr. Horrible/Billy's crush, Penny, thinks of as sweet on the inside, despite being a bit full of himself. The truth is Captain Hammer is only being nice to Penny to get in her pants and simultaneously piss off the eponymous character. Lampshaded when Penny states that he must have a deeper layer that's different from the one on the surface, Billy replies that he sometimes there's a third, even deeper level and that one's the same as the top surface level... like pie.
• Epic's Gameshows had DevinWithDevin, who was a relentless bully who showed no signs of kindness or an improved attitude as the season went on.

• The aptly named "Magic Man" from Adventure Time. In his first appearance, he goes around the world turning people into giant body parts. Finn thought it was to teach them some sort of lesson (Finn had helped Magic Man when he appeared as a starving old man, but only because he figured he would be rewarded), but it appears it was simply for not "appreciating" how much of a jerk he is. It's not until he accidentally loses his powers in the Season 6 episode "You Forgot Your Floaties" that he starts to mellow out.
• The Amazing World of Gumball: "The Wicked" focuses on Darwin trying to find something good about Margaret Robinson or some sympathetic reason she would be so horrible. He finds out she's been awful since she was a baby, and when he pretends to choke as a Secret Test of Character (and ends up actually choking because of her), instead of helping him, she just watches him suffocate with glee. Summarized by her husband Mr. Robinson: "Sometimes man just wants to watch the world burn."
• Roger on American Dad!:
  • He frequently teases a sympathetic depth to his usually sociopathic self, but the large majority of times it is complete lies (e.g. a convoluted scheme in which he claims to have a shy crush on a girl, this reverts to him being attracted to Hayley and Francine instead, leading to a violent feud, that Roger tapes for a competition to get a free T-shirt). He does have genuine Pet the Dog moments on rare occasions, however.
  • "Ricky Spanish" applies this trope to one of Roger's fake personas. Ricky is a pariah because he has personally wronged nearly everyone in town. Steve decides to help redeem "Ricky" by helping him do good deeds for the people he harmed in the past. As soon as "Ricky's" reputation is rehabilitated, he teams up with a former partner in crime to perpetrate a heist and frame Steve for it.
• In As Told by Ginger, Ginger becomes concerned about the pranks that her classmates are planning to pull on their evil substitute teacher Mrs. Grimley. Ginger tries to talk them out of it, saying that Mrs. Grimley doesn't deserve to be pelted with raw eggs. On the night of the pranks, Ginger defends Mrs. Grimley from the other kids throwing raw eggs. It turns out that Mrs. Grimley doesn't care at all and punishes the entire class on Monday (including the students not involved in the prank). Ginger stands up for her class by delivering a "The Reason You Suck" Speech and promptly getting detention. Mrs. Grimley is never showed being punished for her harsh treatment of Ginger's class.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force:
  • Master Shake is a sociopathic Jerkass and a Know-Nothing Know-It-All who constantly screws over his so-called friends for a quick buck or his own amusement. However, sometimes he will do legitimately good deeds… but always so as part of a scam, a lead-up to screw with his friends, or just so he can get attention. He can have sincere Pet the Dog moments and does love his friends… he just loves himself more.
  • Carl as well. He's a misogynistic, abrasive pervert and all-around creep, but he will at times do legitimately nice things for the Aqua Teens… but only if he's being paid or has some sort of reward. He's perfectly happy to screw them over otherwise. And while his constant misfortune makes him seem sympathetic, Carl constantly proves to be just as depraved and cruel as Shake when he has someone at his mercy.
• Batman Beyond displays this perfectly with Derek Powers/Blight. Whenever he does something "decent", it's all for his self-serving goals, and he's just as likely to turn around and Kick the Dog.
  • In Meltdown he not only funds the project that gives Mr. Freeze a new body but also personally oversees his rehabilitation into this new world. However, he's only doing it as a test run to see if he can transfer his own mind into a clone body due to his own condition worsening. When Freeze starts to deteriorate, Blight has no problem with having an unscrupulous scientist biopsy Freeze's organs.
  • While he tells Walter Shreeve his invention is ultimately impractical and redundant, he's still willing to give him another way to use his talents… provided he kills Bruce Wayne first.
  • When it becomes clear how much worse his condition is growing, he brings his distant son out of exile, tells the truth about him, and steps down as chairman so his son can take over. Except that's only because he wants to use his son as a puppet through which he can control the company from the shadows. Unfortunately for Blight, his son is just as ruthless as him and orchestrates a way to take out his old man for good.
• Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Scarlet Scarab of the Injustice Syndicate is shown to be one of the team's most bloodthirsty and sadistic members, though he objects to destroying Batman's world with Silver Cyclone's bomb as part of the Syndicate's Plan B. When Blue Bowman questions this, believing that his cohort is having second thoughts, Scarab happily clarifies that he couldn't imagine any other crime topping it if the team goes forward with the plan.
• Every time Ben 10's Big Bad Vilgax does something that hints he might not be a Complete Monster after all, he very quickly proves he's exactly as evil as he was when he was introduced.
  • In Ben 10: Alien Force, Vilgax conquered his homeworld (renaming it and his entire race after himself) and presents himself as a Benevolent Dictator who at least cares for his own people. In Ben 10: Omniverse he's revealed to just be a Villain with Good Publicity as he then erases those same people from existence just to kill Ben with them.
  • In the Omniverse episode "Vilgax Must Croak", Ben and his allies must protect Vilgax from Attea and her bounty hunters as they transfer him to a new prison for the sake of Vilgaxia. During the battle, Attea shoots at Ben, only for Vilgax to jump between them (Complete with slow-mo and Big "NO!"). But by Taking the Bullet, Vilgax's manacles were damaged, allowing him to knock Ben out and escape.
• BoJack Horseman:
  • Joseph Sugarman, the maternal grandfather of the titular character, at first seems like a very pleasant and charming 1950s dad, but is gradually shown to be an unempathetic sociopath who abuses his wife and daughter, all with Dissonant Serenity. Every time it appears there's light in his darkness, he does yet another terrible thing almost immediately after.
  • Beatrice Horseman, the abusive mother of the titular character, emotionally abused him for years, and whenever it's suggested that she's about to have a caring moment, it instead just turns out to be yet another hostile, petty comment to him about how he shouldn't have been born.
• A Buzz Lightyear of Star Command episode featured Buzz Lightyear and his Evil Counterpart Warp Darkmatter being kidnapped by aliens who wanted to study good and evil. During their escape attempt, Warp seemingly leaves Buzz behind, but then returns to rescue Buzz, saying that he just couldn't leave without him. Literally; he doesn't know how to fly Buzz's spaceship ("I can't drive a stick."); hence, he couldn't leave without Buzz's help. However, Buzz doesn't buy it.
• Whilst some episodes of Courage the Cowardly Dog either imply he is bitter due to a traumatic childhood and/or does have redeeming qualities deep down, whenever Eustace Bagge gets an opportunity to show he isn't all-jerk, expect him to botch it. A great example is in the episode "The Curse of Shirley", where Eustace is cursed with a Personal Raincloud that won't leave unless he does something generous. Despite multiple opportunities to do so, Eustace consistent refuses to do anything generous. The worst being when he encounters a man named Floyd being attacked by some unseen monster that is trying to drag him into the sewer; Floyd uses the last of his strength to give Eustace a love letter to his fiancée and ask him to pass on his dying apologies for missing their wedding and a final declaration of love, and he then gets dragged into the sewer. Not only does Eustace not try to help Floyd escape his apparent demise, he throws the letter away as junk. This being Eustace, Laser-Guided Karma ensues several times throughout the episode and more personally much later in "Curtain of Cruelty", where Floyd returns as the Villain of the Week.
• In The Cuphead Show! Ludwig is introduced as Mugman's piano teacher and a pompous prick who can't even get his students' names right. But he does seem to be a strict but sincere tutor who wants his pupils to succeed. All of that goes right out the window when he ditches Mugman in favour of Cuphead's raw natural talent without missing a beat. And then it's revealed he only took him under his wing so he could pass Cuphead's song off as his own.
• Danny Phantom: Vlad Masters/Plasmius, as demonstrated in "Masters of All Time." Even without the accident that gave him his powers and overall contempt for Jack for being married to Maddie, Vlad still grew up to become the same controlling and domineering sociopath seen in the present timeline. Even still being rich, married to Maddie, and having Jack as a disfigured outcast didn't make him a better person, showing his malevolent traits are a core part of his character.
• Family Guy:
  • It seemed Connie and the rest of her friends would warm up to Meg after she did them some favors and treated them nicely despite them pulling a mean prank. However, they then just decide to pull another mean prank on her.
  • At the end of "Tiegs for Two", it appears Brian and Glenn Quagmire, who had previously announced his hatred for and nearly beat the former to death finally set aside their differences when the latter accepts the former's apology and offers a ride home... only to drive off and back up to run him over.
• Futurama:
  • Zapp Brannigan qualifies:
    • He exposes himself as one in the very first episode in which he appears: after he breaks down to Leela and admits he's just an idiot who had no idea what he's doing, he uses her sympathy to get her to have sex with him, and gloats about it every time he encounters her afterward. Leela ultimately concludes that while there is a side to Zapp that doesn't disgust her, his normal personality is so repellent that she just doesn't care.
    • In "A Flight to Remember", as the Starship Titanic is set to crash, Zapp declares that the captain must go down with the ship. Kif tells Zapp that that's surprisingly noble of him, only for Zapp to clarify that it's actually noble of Kif, because Zapp is promoting him to captain and abandoning ship.
    • In Season 7, he hooks up with Leela's mother. We become increasingly certain that he cares about her. And then it turns out that he was ultimately attracted to her ability to speak alien languages fluently, and wanted to use this to his advantage in negotiations with non-English-speaking aliens. Specifically, he wanted to use her skills to pass off a declaration of war to a non-English-speaking alien race as a peace treaty, giving him the justification to invade and bomb their homeworld to rubble. In the end, in episodes where he features heavily, we're waiting for the point at which it turns out he was being a manipulative jerk all along.
  • Bender has his moments Depending on the Writer. In "Xmas Story" all the others are surprised when Bender says he wants to volunteer at a liquor kitchen for homeless robots. It turns out he just wants to pose as a homeless robot to get free booze.
• Pete in Goof Troop. Sometimes he may seem almost nice, but it's ultimately overwhelmed by his selfishness. He doesn't even bother to cross his fingers before making a promise he plans to break. He rarely has any Pet the Dog moments that aren't subverted except when his family are in danger, and even then, he goes back to mistreating them and everyone else around him afterward.
• Hazbin Hotel: In "Curtain Call", Alastor only joins everyone else in saving the day after Rosie makes a deal to fix his staff, threatening to let everyone else die otherwise. This is despite Emily risking her own life to save his.
• Kaeloo: Kaeloo is this. Some of her worst moment makes her as bad, if not, worse than Mr Cat. She would at first express sympathy over Stumpy's misfortune, only to make fun of him. Overall, she brings the worst side of herself when she's bullying Stumpy.
  • Her only reason to protect Quack-Quack is to look like a hero and not out of genuine care.
  • There were times when she would blame her friends for getting beaten up by her despite the fact that she brought it up upon herself.
• Kick Buttowski: Kick finds out that Brad’s new girlfriend Kelly thinks he’s a gross, unhip loser and is only dating him for a week as a cheer squad initiation task. When some of the other cheerleaders suggest that she dump him in public after the allotted time period, Kelly says she can’t do that, and Kick takes it as a sign that she has a heart deep down...until she immediately follows that she can’t break up with Brad in public without dumping garbage on him.
• Donald Duck acts this way a couple of times in Mickey Mouse (2013).
  • In "Bronco Busted", he, Mickey, and Goofy needed money to fix their car, and get the idea to compete in a rodeo to get the necessary money, with Donald pretending to be a horse. A millionaire offers to give Mickey and Goofy money in exchange for Donald due to mistaking him for an actual horse. Mickey is about to correct the millionaire until Donald eagerly accepts his offer, but he did it more because of the millionaire's promise to treat the "horse" like a king. After happily giving the money to Mickey and Goofy on behalf of the millionaire, Donald's parting words to them at the end of the short are even "So long, suckers".
  • "Wonders of the Deep" has him comfort Mickey when he blames himself for Professor Ludwig Von Drake being shot into the sea, only to agree with him that it is his fault.
• Miraculous Ladybug:
  • Gabriel Agreste is both a neglectful parent and Control Freak who does everything he can get away with to isolate his son Adrien from other people, trapping him in constant lessons and modeling jobs. However, on a very rare occasion, he shows that he does care for his son and it's strongly implied that he's just being overprotective. Of course, since he is Hawk Moth, all of those "rare occasions" become incredibly suspect as he's the one who is endangering Paris. In the Bad Future of "Cat Blanc", his response to finding out that his son is Cat Noir is to turn Adrien into another pawn in his plan.
  • Chloé Bourgeois is a total Alpha Bitch and Spoiled Brat whose cruel behavior has caused multiple Akumazations throughout the series. In Season 2, her character is fleshed out a bit, showing her Freudian Excuse, and that, very rarely, she can do some good. She is even allowed to use a Miraculous once or twice to become Queen Bee. Unfortunately, in between those moments, she's still a relentless bitch. Season 3 has Chloé benched from heroics because her identity is public, and therefore her family is endangered. Rather than understand and accept, Chloé grows resentful of Ladybug, and when Hawk Moth offers her the Bee Miraculous permanently in exchange for the Ladybug and Black Cat Miraculous, she accepts without being Akumatized.
• In the episode "No Second Prances" of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Trixie makes friends with newly-redeemed antagonist Starlight Glimmer, owing to their shared background as former antagonists. While there seems to be some genuine friendship building Trixie lets slip towards the end of the episode that she wanted to make friends with Starlight mostly because Twilight Sparkle would get annoyed by it. Starlight doesn't take this information very well and is distraught. Ends up being subverted in that Trixie admits that there was a true sense of camaraderie that she felt and, being aware of how out of whack her priorities were when revisiting her original plan, has a Heel Realization.
• The Owl House: As Eda Clawthorne points out, Emperor Belos doesn't want to free her of her curse out of the kindness of his heart, he wants to free her of her curse so she'll be indebted to him. Then we learn even that wasn't true, and he attempts to have her petrified. In "Hollow Mind" it's revealed Hunter, the closest person he has to a Morality Pet, is an artificial creation called a grimwalker. Hunter, along with all his Golden Guard predecessors, were created by Belos and then killed and replaced whenever they went against him. Belos admits that any affection he showed Hunter was calculated manipulation to keep Hunter useful for as along as possible. When that usefulness comes to an end, Belos tries to kill and replace him too. The same episode also reveals that Belos' stated well-intentioned goals with regards to the Coven system and Day of Unity are actually steps to accomplish a planned genocide of witches and demons because Belos is in fact the human Philip Wittebane and considers all non-humans inherently evil.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Every time Shadow Weaver seems to be showing a moment of kindness, it's swiftly revealed that she's spinning a line of bullshit. As an example, in "Light Spinner", she seems to be reaching out to Catra, telling her former ward that she was only so hard on her because they were similar, and she wanted Catra to be strong; this is shown, within minutes, to be a complete copper-bottomed lie, told to trick Catra into bringing Shadow Weaver a key tool for her escape. It's also shown in the same episode that her long-past mentorship of Micah was at least in part an attempt to use his vast magical talent in service to her hunger for power.
• In The Simpsons, whenever Mr. Burns shows any sign of a softer side, he almost always ends up reverting to form by the end of the episode. Homer notes, "I guess some people never change. Or they quickly change and then quickly change back." However, ultimately subverted when he reforms for real — or at least for a longer period than usual — after the death of his old girlfriend just as they are about to get back together, she had left him years ago when he told her he'd never give up being selfish for anyone, even her.
• South Park:
  • Eric Cartman seems to always have an ulterior motive for any good actions, despite what he has led the audience or other characters to believe. In "Major Boobage", when he wants to save the town's cats from being taken away, it's so bizarrely and honestly charitable that it felt like a Meta Twist. Of course, Cartman does manage to rack up some jerk points when Kyle insinuates that Cartman is a hypocrite for wanting to keep cats hidden in his attic and yet sympathizing with the Nazis while they hunted down European Jews similarly hiding in attics — and Cartman, who knows full well what Kyle means, gives a completely disingenuous response.
  • Saddam Hussein in The Movie gets a whole musical number telling Satan that he can change, but it's all just a shallow lie to manipulate him.
  • Stephen and Linda Stotch have both treated Butters pretty shoddily. Then you see times when they love Butters. Unfortunately, these displays of affection never last, as Stephen's authoritarian nature tends to bounce back before the episode even ends.
  • Shelly Marsh spends her debut beating up her little brother while hiding it from her parents. Near the end of the episode, she sticks up for him when he nearly gets in trouble for what his clone did, only to beat him up moments later.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In the episode "F.U.N.", SpongeBob tries to befriend him thinking that if he had at least one friend, Sheldon Plankton wouldn't be so mean. Plankton goes along to try and get a Krabby Patty, but he appears to turn around and become friendlier. Then SpongeBob finds out about Plankton's plan and confronts him. Plankton tears up and confesses, adding that "then you showed me friendship, and I realized... that's all I ever really wanted."
    SpongeBob: Really?
    Plankton: No, not really! Being evil is too much fun!
  • In "What Ever Happened to SpongeBob?", Squidward Tentacles is the only member of the group who's happy that SpongeBob has run away from Bikini Bottom, and even fakes out missing him.
    Squidward: If I'd known that was the last time I'd ever see SpongeBob, I would have slammed the door in his face even harder!
• The Diviner in Star Trek: Prodigy hints that he's more than a simple Evil Overlord from time to time. He expresses affection (though highly muted) for Gwyn—and then he abandons her on a Death World in order to reclaim the Protostar. His desperation to get the ship back has something to do with saving his people. His people destroyed themselves when contact with the Federation split them into those who wanted to associate with other cultures and xenophobic isolationists... like the Diviner. He came back in time to save his people not by preventing contact, but by destroying the Federation first.
• Tangled: The Series:
  • At the end of Season 2, even after everything they've been through, Cassandra still betrays Rapunzel by taking the moonstone for herself.
  • Much like in the movie, Mother Gothel is this trope to a tee. At the beginning of Season 3, it's revealed that Cassandra is Gothel's biological daughter. Much like Rapunzel, Gothel was awful to Cassandra, treating her like a maid, and even abandoning her on the night she kidnapped baby Rapunzel. In the episode "A Tale of Two Sisters", Rapunzel and Cassandra find a room full of mirrors that all show memories of Gothel's past, most of them are of her admiring herself. Cassandra then finds one mirror (which was placed inside Rapunzel's bag by Zhan Tiri to cause an even bigger rift between the two former friends) which shows Gothel giving a young Cassandra a music box as a gift, telling her that the music represents her motherly love towards her. This makes Cassandra believe that her mother actually did care about her. But then came the episode "Once a Handmaiden..." where Cassandra finds a missing piece of the mirror (which was thrown away by Zhan Tiri) that shows what happened next. As soon as young Cassandra left, Gothel muttered to herself that she only gave Cassandra the music box to keep her occupied and out of her hair. And she even calls her own daughter a "lousy little pest."
• The Teen Titans Go! crossover with The Powerpuff Girls (2016), "TTG v. PPG", has Robin, Starfire, and Raven act very condescending to the Powerpuff Girls and dismissing them as "babies". After the Powerpuff Girls beat Mojo Jojo, the Titans appear to learn their lesson and compliment the girls on their victory, only to get back to insulting them when Blossom replies that they couldn't have defeated Mojo without the Titans' help. Even the Lemony Narrator is left pondering, "Seriously, what is wrong with those guys?"
• In The Spectacular Spider-Man, Norman Osborn spends the entire series portrayed as a Jerk with a Heart of Gold regarding his behavior towards his son Harry. In Season 1, he asks Spider-Man not to reveal that Harry was the (apparent) identity of the Green Goblin, as his enemies would seek retribution. The Grand Finale of Season 2 reveals that Norman was the real Green Goblin all along, and had stuffed Harry into the Goblin suit and gone as far as breaking his own son's leg to cover his tracks. Peter is furious.
• Titan Maximum: Palmer has shown himself to be this on two occasions where it appears that he shows his caring side only for his selfishness to show.
  • During his fight with Gibbs, he tells Gibbs that he cannot believe they were friends. Gibbs yells that they were never friends, but Palmer sadly says he was a true friend. Gibbs points out the time Palmer purposely stranded Gibbs in space because Palmer was trying to get to a date. Gibbs says that it took him two months to get home. He arrived on his birthday, which Palmer completely forgot. All Palmer says is "Wow, I said we were buddies, I never said we were married".
  • At his friend Spud's funeral, he at first talks about how Spud was a great wingman, but then brags about his sexual conquests, to the shock and disgust of Gibbs and Jodi. When Gibbs gives his eulogy, Palmer interrupts Gibbs to generally brag about how cool he is.
• There are a lot of characters who are this in Total Drama:
  • Chris, Chef, Duncan, Sugar, Amy, Jo, Lightning, Alejandro, and Heather but the worst of them all is Courtney. Unlike the others, Courtney doesn't seem to understand that she is a bad person (and even thinks that everyone likes her) and puts the prize money above those close to her. In All-Stars, while members of the Villainous Vultures (sans Gwen and Cameron) are proud of their status as villains and even admit that they are jackasses, Courtney protests when she was transferred to the team in "Saving Private Leechball", being oblivious that her actions throughout the episode are villainous (scheming to eliminate Zoey, pushing an injured Sam to move faster, and even using him as a human shield). What's more, she gave Gwen the cold shoulder for stealing Duncan from her when Gwen attempts to apologize. After making amends, the two promise to go to the finale together but Courtney reveals that she is going to eliminate Gwen to bring Scott with her so he can give her an easy win. Worst, she thinks that Gwen will acknowledge her actions. After Gwen discovered this, when given a chance for redemption (i.e. vote for herself), she is reluctant to do so, and she humiliates herself trying to win the challenge in hopes of avoiding the decision.
  • The 2023 reboot introduces several of these such as Julia, Ripper, MK, Nichelle, and Scary Girl but the biggest example is Chase as like Courtney he doesn't seem to understand that he is a bad person believing the girl who clearly despises him is interested in him for being a bad boyfriend, doesn't care his "prank" was flat out dangerous and shows no remorse even after it nearly kills her and innocent animals, constantly makes himself look worse with arrogant remarks about himself, blows his second chance with Emma by telling the truth about his apology not being about his prank, and his last episode makes it clear he was a worthless excuse for a boyfriend even before she broke up with him, with the pinnacle of examples being cutting down a tree to save her cat and crippling Emma's mother in the process.
• Voltron: Legendary Defender: Every time it looks like Prince Lotor is going to reveal a more noble side to his personality, he immediately does something despicable to crush the idea. He resolves his conflict with Throk peacefully and gives a rousing speech to the Galra soldiers about unity, then casually has Throk Reassigned to Antarctica out of spite. He treats his Amazon Brigade with kindness and respect, only to murder one of them without hesitation when he learns Haggar is using her as an unwitting spy. He later tries to pull a Heel–Face Turn, but only because he's driven away all his henchmen by acting like a selfish prick, and knows he can't fight Zarkon alone.