Evil Is Not a Toy - TV Tropes

"Powerful fools seek to control it, play with it. But it too is powerful. Too powerful for anyone to control."

• Alexander Afanasyev's "Little Master Misery": The rich brother believes he can ruin his brother Ivan by freeing the embodiment of Misery from his entrapment and goading him into latching onto Ivan again until he is left penniless. Nonetheless, Misery latches onto the rich brother, mistaking him for Ivan, and drinks his fortune up until the rich brother is left penniless.

• Priest uses this in the climax of its several-volume-long flashback; a corrupt order of priests have succeeded in opening the Domas Porada, the "can" (and it does rather resemble one) containing the fallen angel Temozerela, believing him to be their savior. Unfortunately, Temozerela isn't too fond of humans... he kills almost the entire order with a single breath (he breathes at them and their heads explode), mocks the leader a bit, and then kills him by making demon faces sprout out all over the leader's body and bite him to death.

• The song "A Dangerous Meeting" from Mercyful Fate's second album "Don't Break The Oath", contains this gem, delivered as only King Diamond can do: OOOOooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH, THEY SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, NOT TO PLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAY, WITH THE POWERS OF HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEELL!
• Regret Game is a rather nasty deconstruction of games about Lovecraftian summoning of monsters and demons Gone Horribly Wrong.

• The Ars Goetia includes instructions for making sure that conjured demons don't show up in Eldritch Abomination form, but as something more comprehensible...but given the angels described in the book of Ezekiel, this would apply whether or not they had/have a low opinion of humanity. However, there are four exceptions, besides the pomp-and-sycophantry-loving kings (Beleth, Belial, etc.), who get special instructions.
  • Phenex: Don't listen to his song; in fact, interrupt it as soon as possible (the text doesn't say why, but there's an implication that the conjuror risks becoming Phenex's errand boy...at best).
  • Valefor: Beware of his temptations to become a robber; he's trying to get you caught and executed.
  • Malphas: Yes, he accepts sacrifices happily, but that opens the gate for him to start deceiving you.
  • Andras: Follow the binding procedures to the letter, and ignore every temptation he sends at you to do otherwise. Otherwise? He becomes free to KILL you and every single one of your associates. (No surprise that Andras's powers are causing murder and sowing discord.)
• In The Bible Jesus said that anyone with sufficient faith in Him could cast out demons in the same manner, but He did caution against attempting this unless you were devout enough to earn the authority to do so. In the Acts of the Apostles the sons of a rabbi try to corner a possessed man and exorcise him in the name of Jesus and Saint Paul. The demon then gives the Pre-Asskicking One-Liner "Jesus I know, and Paul I know about, but who are you?" before beating them bloody and somehow naked.
• It is a customary rule in all magic-using religions that you do not conjure up something that is more powerful than you are. If you don't have the power to send it away again, things can get ugly very quickly. Another rule is that magic is held by the rules of karma — the more evil the curse is, the more likely the spell will backfire. This led religions to discourage the use of evil spells in the first place.

• Big Finish Doctor Who has this happened to the Meddling Monk. He forms an alliance with the Daleks, thinking they're partners and he can loot the worlds they conquer of their art and become the richest man in creation. He realises his mistake after his companion Tamsin is killed by the Daleks.

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The sourcebook "Elder Evils" features several evils sealed in cans. One of these, Pandorym, is so alien it might as well add another axis to the alignment diagrams. Plus it's angry. Good luck controlling that.
  • The Inevitable trying to release Pandorym isn't doing so for its own benefit, though. It just thinks Pandorym got cheated on a contract and is trying to redress that "wrong." The mages who summoned and sealed it in its can get bonus stupid points when you learn why they did so: to blackmail the gods into letting them keep their worshipers enslaved without interfering lest they unseal the can. Guess how the gods responded to that.
  • For that matter, trying to summon any being from the Lower Planes without casting spells to protect yourself and/or contain the creature in question is guaranteed to end badly. A reckless demon summoning will result in both the enemies and the party being killed, if not worse.
• Pathfinder has a similar system for summoning fiends and other Lower Planes beings, and carries the same risk. The fear-feeding sahkil are particularly adept at this, as they count as less powerful than they really are for the purposes of determining how hard they are to summon, but more powerful for determining how hard they are to contain and control.
• In any RPG based on the Cthulhu Mythos, one of the villains will be trying to unleash an Elder God not to end the world, but to harness its power. To date, not one of them has ever succeeded.
  • ...Except perhaps the Ashcroft Foundation from CthulhuTech, but given the inspiration for that particular plot point, we probably just don't know how badly that went yet.
  • GURPS Cthulhupunk specifically states that those who wish to use the powers of the Mythos for some specific, human-scale goal - getting rich, unseating a government, etc. - are, to put it bluntly, the stupidest kind of cultist: "The powers of the Mythos cannot be controlled with anywhere near this kind of precision."
• The backstory for Warlord villain Avinaar Esmerek looks like one of these, with the heroes finding an ancient temple, obviously recently disturbed, full of prophesies about the awful things that will happen if the being entombed there ever awakens. However, in the final room, he is found Killed Off for Real, with a message from the mysterious Avinaar explaining that he unsealed this evil just to have a worthy foe — and it was too weak, anyway. Cue panic.
• More than a few denizens of Warhammer 40,000 have made the stunningly catastrophic mistake of treating Chaos or something devised by the Necrons like this.
  • Many a Necron tomb world has been awoken thanks to the following easy-to-follow plan: Adeptus Mechanicus lands on a planet, attempts to worship the dormant Necrons as befitting creations of the Machine God, gets painfully annihilated to the last man. Congratulations, yet another Tomb World is active and looking to purge the galaxy of all life.
  • One of the main divides in the Imperial Inquisition are the Puritans and Radicals. Puritans stick to the tried-and-true methods of daemonhunting, like faith in the Emperor and lots of fire, while Radicals believe that Chaos can be used against itself and as such are willing to use daemonhosts and chaos-tainted weaponry. This of course leaves them open to daemonic possession and corruption themselves, not to mention less-radical Inquisitors hunting them down to put them out of everybody's misery. Although Inquisitors are usually well-informed about the dangers of Chaos, Radicals are often older Inquisitors, who grow ever more desperate to see results in their unwinnable war against Chaos.
  • A notable exception is Ax'Senaea the Thrice-Possessed, who was duped into casting a ritual where she would summon a Keeper of Secrets inside her body and then keep it imprisoned by sheer force of will. Bear in mind that Keepers of Secrets are Greater Daemons of the Chaos god(dess) Slaanesh powerful enough to lead world-wrecking armies and specializing in illusions and sweet-talking, so this is a plan stupid even by 40K standards. She went through with it and... actually worked. Not content with leeching a Greater Daemon dry, she did it again. Twice. On the fourth attempt, Slaanesh herself showed up and ascended her to immortality as a daemon princess, both as a reward and as a giant middle finger to hir defeated daemons.
• Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Whether it's Chaos, necromancy, or some other evil force, anyone treating evil as a fun plaything will end up suffering and/or enslaved to some evil being's will before the end.
• A website referenced a Vampire: The Masquerade game where evil cultists wanted to revive and enslave Caine, the first vampire, while the PCs were to behold the impending doom, their hands carefully tied. Due to a PC heroically tossing his shoe to one of the cultists, the ritual was screwed up: Caine was revived but not enslaved, and the rest of the world was safe(ish).
  • This is how one Gehenna scenario ends for the Followers of Set. The clan as a whole descends from an insanely powerful vampire they believe to be the god Set from Egyptian mythology, and worship him by tempting others into wickedness. Well, when he finally wakes from his millennia-long slumber, he can't believe his childer would stoop so low as to worship him and starts eating them like popcorn. In a different scenario, Set awakens, but can't get out of the Underworld, so he telepathically demands that his loyal followers join him there; by the next night, only a tiny handful of Setites are left.
  • The Baali are a bloodline traditionally in service to various cosmic horrors and demons, calling on them for power. The Black Hand: A Guide to the Tal'Mahe'Ra introduces a Baali faction out to stop the rest of their bloodline, along with any other infernalists they come across, before they do something idiotic in dealing with these forces and break the world.
  • This is also why the Tremere don't summon demons; they have the common sense to realize that any demon powerful enough to be worth the trouble is a demon too powerful to be controlled.
• In GURPS, summoning a demon is temptingly easy to do, even for an inexperienced mage. The probable reason is that demons want to be summoned — by people who can't control them.
• In Magic: The Gathering, demon-type creatures tend to be powerful for their cost but occasionally have drawbacks that can screw over their controller unless steps are taken to deal with them. Certain demons like the classic Lord of the Pit and Archdemon of Greed demand regular sacrifices from their summoners and attack them if they are denied. Bloodgift Demon and Griselbrand both have abilities that allow their summoners to trade life for knowledge, and players can easily render themselves vulnerable to an opponent's surprise attack. Abyssal Persecutor will decimate your opponent's forces but it also keeps him/her from losing and you from winning just to keep the slaughter going for a little longer. Rakdos the Defiler is so hard to control that he is just as dangerous to his summoner as he is to the opponent.
• The Dark Eye has the story of mage-emperor Fran-Horas who, in order to put down a particularly troublesome revolt against his rule, summoned the Archdemons themselves and unleashed them onto the battlefield. They proceeded to wipe out the rebels...then turned on Fran's own forces, plunging the realm into chaos. Fran-Horas himself ended up dragged to hell a few years later, having first had to witness the fall of his empire. And a couple of generations down the line his descendant, the empress Hela-Horas tried to do the same thing. Another century or two of the Dark Ages was only averted because the gods themselves decided that enough was enough and made a personal appearance to stop the summoning.
• As a core part of Mummy: The Curse, the Arisen pretty much invariably gather cults around themselves, even whilst lying dormant. More than once, a cult has tried to use its patron as a tool, aided by the fact that rising from the grave in an amnesiac state and being bound to fulfill whatever purpose they were called back for is an inherent part of the Curse. However, what these cultists fail to take into account is that the Arisen are amnesiac, not mindless, and they do not simply fall down dead again once their purpose is fulfilled; they get to stick around and do whatever they want for a good while first. And their cultists are quite expendable...
• In Leviathan: The Tempest, it is mentioned that it's possible for a cult to cast rituals drawing on a Leviathan's power against the Leviathan's will, and there are even rituals that can be used to actually control the Leviathan to a limited degree. However, quite aside from the fact that anyone participating in one of these rituals is pretty much guaranteed to come out the other end crazy (assuming they weren't crazy already), if the ritual is a failure the Leviathan knows exactly who tried to hijack its power and where to find them, and will usually head over to eat the impertinent mortals. For this reason, those cultists whose madness is not of the sort that prevents planning ahead will usually stick to Leviathans who are trapped in the Rift and cannot make their displeasure known in person.
• A lower-key example, but it still counts: in Sentinels of the Multiverse, RevoCorp acquired the recently-captured Plague Rat and tried to use him as a bloodhound to capture Setback. This worked about as well as you would expect trying to use a giant, berserker rat-human hybrid as a hunting hound would go - his deck is focused around causing as much damage as possible to everything in play other than himself, he'll automatically attack one of his handlers every turn if at all possible, and his Incapacitated side shows his handlers floating dead in the sewers, with his Restraining Bolt torn off next to a torn-open grate.

• In 8-Bit Theater, Black Mage tries to control unstoppable forces of evil whenever possible, usually causing a double-subversion or whatever might be hilarious. He takes control of an accidentally summoned Eldritch Abomination—pretty successfully since it's almost as sociopathic as he is—until one of his "friends" accidentally kills it. He tries to become the ruler of Hell, and he does, but then someone brings him back to life. Played with most destructively in the end: Sarda absorbs Black Mage's super-evilness, which seems to work fine until he explodes and turns into Chaos. And Black Mage immediately tries to control him.
• Angel Moxie, Tristan helps release Vashi on the promise that when Vashi's boss Yzin takes over the world Tris can rule France. Vashi lied. Tris got mad and punched Vashi so hard she landed in China, before joining the good guys.
• Girl Genius. Zola releases and tries to help The Other. One Gilligan Cut later and she's hog-tied and an unwilling test subject for another fine display of Mad Science.
• A Modest Destiny: The villain Gilbert raises Deo-Deo from the dead, in exchange for immortality. However...
• Vaarsuvius in The Order of the Stick makes a Deal with the Devil and temporarily gains huge amounts of power. They do manage to get in a couple hits against evil but in their arrogance quickly loses all of that power, with the whole incident leaving the villains merely delayed instead of defeated like they wanted. Upon being DePowered back to their usual self, Vaarsuvius berates themself for acting so recklessly, knowing that they now have to deal with putting their soul in debt, jeopardizing their alignment, and making several powerful entities really, really angry. Plus coming back to bite the party in new and interesting ways with the death of the Draketooth clan as well as gods alone know how many other innocents across the Western Continent. Oops.
  • And on top of it all, their mate filed for divorce.
  • Xykon also believes (and this is the whole plan) that he will be able to control the Snarl. Instead, he'll just unleash a god-destroying monstrosity that has no idea of control at all. Redcloak knows this full well, and has other plans of his own.
  • To say nothing of Redcloak recruiting Xykon to help with his plan to give the Dark One control of a gate and then turning Xykon into a lich when the plan went awry, making Xykon far more powerful and far more evil than before, to the point that he overshadowed Redcloak.
• In Sluggy Freelance, more than a few Too Dumb to Live people have tried to profit by summoning the Destroyer Deity, K'Z'K.
  • In the "K'Z'K" arc, Gwynn summons K'Z'K to wreak vengeance on Riff for cheating on her. Unfortunately for Gwynn, K'Z'K goes about this by possessing her, stealing her soul, and warping her body into some sort of monster. Oh, and it turns out that, once K'Z'K fulfills his contract, he's free to destroy the world.
  • A corrupt god summoned K'Z'K, willing to destroy the current world in order to overthrow Khronus, the King of the Gods. K'Z'K cared nothing for his plans and put him through a Humiliation Conga instead.
  • There is an entire Apocalypse Cult dedicated to K'Z'K, filled with Too Dumb to Live mortals willing to destroy the world in return for power. Needless to say, they rarely benefit from it, usually ending up as Cannon Fodder for their leaders' plans, and it is unlikely the whimsical, treacherous, and sadistic K'Z'K would spare them from his extinction event either. Their leader, a Godhood Seeker, ends up suffering a Karmic Death when K'Z'K beats her to a bloody pulp.
• In Cucumber Quest, the summoned Nightmare Knight reminds Cordelia that he's not her servant.
• Sonic the Comic – Online!: In issue 266, Dexter Bagstille captures Sonic, planning to harness Super Sonic to end the war with Robotnik once and for all, using a special Chaos Containment Collar to keep him under control. It initially seems to work... but when the Omni-Viewer and Team Chaotix arrive on the scene, Super immediately attacks Omni and drains his power before going on a rampage, all while mocking Dexter for thinking his plan would work. Once Super is dealt with two issues later, Dexter is put on trial and convicted for his stupidity. Sonic even lampshades how stupid Dexter is to think his plan will work, pointing out that everyone who has tried to control Super Sonic has failed.
• Klonoa: Dream Crusaders: Downplayed. Tenebrae Hue steals the power of Noctis Sol to summon nightmare creatures. Noctis Sol attempts to warn Hue that stealing Sol's power will unleash a far greater evil, Claire the Ancient, but Hue doesn't listen and goes through with the process anyway, only to be easily overpowered by Claire. It's less a case of "villain summons a threat he knows to be dangerous and is then surprised when said threat betrays him" and more "villain summons threats and gets a much bigger threat that he didn't ask for."
• In Third Voice, a powerful Wasteland Warlord seeks a certain artifact that would allow him to summon an entity he calls "god in the crater" then use it as a weapon to conquer more lands. He is the very first character to be squashed by the "god" rampaging.

• In Hitherby Dragons:

  "This is the work of the Fisher-Price Ultimate line," says the talking learn-the-alphabet game.
  The sky swirls and there is an impression of death and sorrow.
  "In their laboratories, they built a child's toy prototype for ultimate evil — a toddler's first ultimate evil, as it were. The final product would have had safeties, seals, restrictions."
  Susan sees the direction of this speech.
  "But not," she says, "the prototype?"

• In The Gamer's Alliance, a greedy mage uses an ancient spell in the Second Age to release the imprisoned demon lord Yurius in order to use him for his bid for power over the kingdom. Yurius immediately kills him for his troubles.
• SCP Foundation: Incident 668-682, where a disgruntled agent (subsequently referred to as "the Victim") tries to smuggle a weapon to Omnicidal Maniac SCP-682.
• In Prolecto, it's subverted big time. Sonya, knowing Azazel was not a toy, took appropriate precautions, and through the majority of the book controls Azazel perfectly.
• In Twig, Reverend Mauer attempts to provoke his enemies into overreacting by creating primordial life (life which can rapidly modify itself) and then publicizing the resulting atrocities. Unfortunately, the reason people react overwhelmingly to primordials is that they grow and mutate uncontrollably, and even as it dies the primordial recreates itself as a new lifeform that takes over the plot of the series.
• Defied by OP in the Elfslayer Chronicles. The DM tosses the Eye of Blight, a sentient magical artifact, in his way, and he promptly buries it and has nothing more to do with it for the rest of the campaign. He's smart enough to know that a sentient evil artifact called the Eye of Blight is something that cannot be good news for anyone, especially the wielder.
• In Ruby Quest, the Metal Glen tries to use a mysterious substance found (along with multiple creepy artifacts like a dummy that rotates on its own so it's always staring at you) in a room buried under the ocean as a cure-all. It did not turn out well. The substance (heavily implied to be the flesh of an Eldritch Abomination) corrupted all who took it, twisting it into the horrific place that it is at the beginning of the quest.
• In the very first Acquisitions Incorporated podcast, Jerry comments the goblin trying to summon Orcus will likely be the first to die.
• RWBY:
  • In an attempt to cut the costs of hiring Huntsmen to protect his farm, Bartleby tried to lock two Apathy in the sewers so their will-suppressing power would force everyone to stay calm and avoid the bad feelings that attract Grimm. He doesn't realise that, when he seals up the underground waterways he's trapped the Apathy in, the rest of the pack has already followed their missing members. Instead of two manageable Grimm, he locks the farmstead up with hordes of them, dooming the lives of everyone who lives there.
  • A long time ago, Salem felt forced into manipulating the Brother Gods; she almost succeeds in fooling the God of Darkness until caught by the God of Light. Her punishment is unending life until she learns the value of life and death. When Ozma dies and the God of Light refuses to resurrect him, she manipulates the God of Darkness by playing on his desire for humans to worship him as they do his brother. Thrilled, Dark instantly restores her lover to life, but rescinds that life when Light tells him what Salem did. Salem is barred from reuniting with Ozma in the afterlife, thus beginning her long slide into evil.

• Part of the shared backstory of Tribe Twelve, Dark Harvest, and Everyman HYBRID is that the Nazis, and later American scientists working with ex-Nazi scientists, attempted to recreate the ancient rite of Gorr'Rylaehotep (a.k.a., Slenderman).
• In No Evil Charles can largely control the Black Tezcatlipoca, as it's somehow chosen him as its' wielder, but he can't awaken those it puts into comas. Amaroq uses this to his advantage by sitting on him, and pointing out he's not strong enough to lift him off, in one episode. And then in "Black, White, and Red All Over" he breaks open the mirror piece of the Black Tezcatlipoca, which was sealing the far more aggressive Red Tezcatlipoca, oops.