You Are What You Hate (original) (raw)

Appointing a blind man as their leader might not have been the Klan's best moment.

"If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us."

This is the implication that a character who dislikes a particular thing is secretly a practitioner of that thing.

This especially comes into play when ethnicity or homosexuality is involved. Such a character is likely to believe in negative stereotypes about his own group (no matter how irrational), and hate himself for it, or live by those stereotypes so they become self-fulfilling prophecies. If Fantastic Racism is in play, such as with Differently Powered Individuals, the person may try to suppress the trait that makes them part of the hated group or use their power as a weapon against them.

In older works, this sometimes comes up with racist characters who are exposed as being light-skinned African-Americans who are "passing". Depending on the time frame of the media, the result may be either to show that the character should love himself or, in very old media from before 1940 or so, to show that the character is a sneaky liar who wasn't ethical enough to accept his "natural" place in the order of things.

This sort of implication is "non-falsifiable": If even denial is taken as proof, there's no way to prove innocence. Characters who don't actually fall under this trope, but are accused of it by other characters, may get increasingly angry (or despondent) about no one believing them.

This trope comes in several flavors.

• The hater genuinely does not know he is a member of the group he hates.
• The hater has clear evidence that he is a member of the hated group but is in denial. He refuses to identify with them and often comes up with convoluted explanations as to why he isn't actually a member. Will often invoke the No True Scotsman fallacy.
• The hater privately accepts that he is a member of the hated group but hides it from others.
• The hater hates all members of the group, including or especially themselves.

Despite how bizarre it sounds, very much Truth in Television. A study conducted determined that people who were very anti-homosexual were more likely to show signs of arousal when exposed to gay porn. And it's a principle that can be applied to a lot of things, not just homosexuality. As a general rule, the more people make a public show of being anti-thing, the more likely they are to be practicing that thing in secret, since if they were really as anti-thing as they claim, they wouldn't need to shout it from the rooftops.

When the character is openly a member of the group he despises, then that's a Boomerang Bigot. It is possible for the two to overlap. A bigot's membership in the hated group might be secret to most people but known to a few. If he continues to sincerely express hatred towards the group, even when in a situation where his secret will not be exposed, then he might show shades of both this trope and Boomerang Bigot.

Often a cause of Unfortunate Implications. See also Hypocritical Humor, Psychological Projection, He Who Fights Monsters, Karmic Transformation, Cultural Cringe, I Do Not Like Green Eggs and Ham, and The Horseshoe Effect. Contrast Pretend Prejudice (in which a person pretends to hate a group but secretly likes or tolerates them), Hunter of His Own Kind (which usually involves Half Human Hybrids) and Color Me Black (where a bigot is forcibly turned into a member of the group they hate, usually by supernatural means). Armoured Closet Gay is one common Sub-Trope. If the hater doesn't realize that they're a member of the group they hate, they might just be a Tomato in the Mirror. See also Stop Being Stereotypical in which a person doesn't hate his group, but is embarrassed by the behavior of some members.

noreallife

Examples:

• Live-Action TV

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Anime & Manga

• Much of the plot of Osamu Tezuka's World War II saga Adolf revolves around the largely discredited notion that Adolf Hitler's grandfather was a Jew.
• In one chapter of Ai Kora, Maeda attracts the attention of Sajima, a Sadist Teacher who seems to have it out for him because of his "parts love". Turns out Sajima is a parts fetishist himself, but because of this, he was once in a student-teacher love affair that ended in tragedy, and he doesn't want something like that happening to Maeda.
• Eren Yeager in Attack on Titan. He doesn't particularly mind, though, so long as it lets him kill Titans more effectively. Most of the would-be Titan Shifters on the mainland call the Wall's inhabitants 'Violent Devils', despite also being ticking time bombs who are persecuted to hell by their own country. They're completely unaware that their situations are the same; a caste of slaves who are killed by their oppressors for leaving the nest or trying to make things better for everyone.
• Minako Aino in Codename: Sailor V openly dislikes cops, but as Sailor V she acts exactly like a Japanese cop, and, at the end of the manga, she actually joins the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, implying she's still a cop for the entire run of Sailor Moon, while The '90s Sailor Moon anime has her being a Super Cop in London for a while. She still dislikes the average cop.
• In Cross Ange, after declaring her intent on solving the Norma "problem", Ange is devastated when she discovers that she is one. She changes her tune over the next several episodes, and when she faces execution and public jeering when lured back via Wounded Gazelle Gambit from her sister, she's made a complete 180 and declares mana users to be the real "savages".
• Doubly invoked in Date A Live. Origami hates spirits and vows to kill them all because it was a spirit that killed her parents. This spurs her to use dangerous equipment from DEM to go after them, despite knowing that they're no longer considered a threat after Shido seals them. After being outclassed by them, she is encouraged to seek even greater power and becomes a spirit as a result. This disgusts her when she realizes what she's become, but ultimately confirms that it will not change her agenda and confirms that she'll kill herself when she's done with the spirits. She locates Kurumi with the intention of using her power to go back in time to kill the spirit that killed her parents. However when she does, she finds out that the spirit who killed them was her future self all along, which makes her Inverse when she finds out.
• Light/Kira of Death Note. When he describes his plan to kill off all the criminals and evil people in the world, Ryuk calls him on it:
  Ryuk: But if you did that, you'd be the only bad person left.
• Dragon Ball GT: Baby is a parasitic lifeform created from the cells of the Tsufurian king and is programmed with hatred towards the space-conquering Saiyans, the alien race that wiped out the peaceful Tsufurians after having immigrated to their home planet Plant (later renamed Vegeta). Once Baby reaches planet Earth where the last Saiyans are residing, he makes it a goal to steal Prince Vegeta's body, which he accomplishes step by step by stealing the bodies of the half-Saiyans. On Earth, Baby enslaves the entire population (minus Mister Satan and Mister Boo) with mind-controlling eggs while the GT trio are still on space (one them being already infected by his egg), and he continues evolving through mutating Vegeta's body with Saiyan energy and the Power Of Hate, later culminating into becoming a Golden Oozaru after being hit by a ray of Blutz Waves; the Oozaru is the "true face of the Saiyans". He also makes it his supreme goal of ruling over the universe by conquering other planets. In essence, Baby has become a Saiyan in body and mind, the very race he hates so much.
• Used in a very unusual way in Dragon Ball Super. Goku Black is a version of Zamasu who used the Super Dragon Balls to trade bodies with Goku before killing him. This is despite Goku being everything Zamasu hates about mortals like him hanging out with gods like he's their equal, fighting them in battle, and being immature as well as being extremely powerful. It was his entire meeting with Goku that sent him on his Start of Darkness. Yet, not only did he steal the body of the mortal he hates the most, but he takes many of his character traits like his need to fight, grow stronger, and be challenged. This gets lampshaded in the Final Battle, where Vegetto points out to the Merged Zamasu that even if he wipes out all life, Goku will live on forever as part of his body; Zamasu responds that he's fine with this, since Goku will serve as an eternal symbol of the gods' failures and the mortals' arrogance.
• Fruits Basket: Despite hating Abusive Mom Ren's guts, Akito is really the same as her: a Psychopathic Womanchild who is obsessed with proving that only she deserves to be loved by the Sohma men and gets insanely jealous over other women who "steal" their attention. The only reason Akito doesn't end up a solitary crazy lady ignored or outright despised by everyone around her is because of Tohru reaching out to her and convincing her to change her ways.
• Future Robot Daltanious: Kloppen calls clones "the most abominable things in all of space". Now, take a gander as to why he has such a strong physical resemblance to Prince Harlin...
• The main characters of the anime Genshiken are a bunch of otaku all fitting a certain subset of otaku life. The character Chika Ogiue introduced in the second season represents the self-loathing otaku, and she is very open about this despite being a prominent member of the Genshiken club. Kanji himself started off as this trope being a closet otaku before coming to terms with it.
• One of the more interesting elements lost in the adaptation of GoLion to the series Voltron is that Prince Sincline is not only the son of a human woman whom his father later disposed of, but that this woman was a citizen of Planet Altea, where his worst enemy lives. His reaction: kill his own grandmother Honerva.
• South Italy (also known as Italy Romano) of Hetalia: Axis Powers isn't fond of Germans in general, but he especially hates the personification of Germany itself. When Germany points out that Romano also has Germanic blood, it angers him enough to get him to charge Germany...and then slip on a banana peel, Face Plant, and skin his arm.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Dio Brando initially despised his pathetic father during his early youth and sought to cut all ties to ensure he never inherit his traits. But as the stress over his failing schemes against Jonathan begins piling up, it turns him into an alcoholic like his hated father. Dio would permanently discard his humanity by becoming a vampire to fully disown all of his weaknesses.
• Humorous example in Monster Musume: Zombina dislikes films with fast-moving, intelligent zombies and prefers the Romero-styled ones... despite being a zombie herself, a member of a special SWAT-like squad and one of the most active and boisterous characters in the entire series.
• In Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, the Big Bad Atlantean-supremacist Gargoyle didn't know he actually was a human that was adopted by Atlanteans.
• Neji of Naruto repeatedly put down Naruto and Hinata for trying to escape their "fate" to be weak. During their fight, Naruto pointed out that, despite everything he said, Neji was still struggling against his own fate as a member of the Branch Family.
• Fujimoto in Ponyo hates humanity even though he is very much aware that he is a (former?) human being himself. He also at first opposes Ponyo's attraction to Sosuke, even though that situation is very much akin to that of her parents (Granmammare and Fujimoto) when they first met.
• In Samurai Usagi (not to be confused with Usagi Yojimbo) a group of samurai-hating/murdering ronin all come from samurai families so they know first-hand how horrible samurai can be. To their consternation, they're matched with the Usagi Dojo, who really clash with how they imagine samurai to be.
• Soul Eater:
  • Having spent the series' early arcs rejecting any connection between himself, his father, and bad guys like Asura and Eibon, Death the Kid does not react well to the revelation that he and they are the same; Eldritch/Humanoid Abominations, even more so when he learns that Asura is his older brother, since he is also a fragment of Shinigami.
  • Death the Kid despises anything that is even the slightest bit asymmetrical, yet he himself is glaringly asymmetrical. This is lampshaded to him, but it doesn't stop him to continuing to act in the most asymmetriphobic way possible, despite a brief Heroic BSoD over it.
• Provides a series of major twists in Tokyo Ghoul. The Washuu Clan, famous Ghoul Hunters that founded and have led the CCG for more than a century... are themselves ghouls. Their oppression of their own kind seems to be motivated by their desire to become human. Likewise, Kishou Arima and his proteges from the Sunlit Garden are flawed Half-Human Hybrids with ghoul parentage. While Arima turns out to have been faking his disdain for his own kind, others like Hairu Ihei seem to have genuinely enjoyed killing ghouls.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: Seto Kaiba loathes his adoptive/stepfather and yet, because of the nightmarish training he underwent, he actually became the man who ruined his childhood. While he's not as bad as him, his methods and actions are rather questionable.

Comic Books

• The "homophobes are all secretly gay" idea shows up in a few comics, including Preacher and The Authority.
• In DC Comics, government agent Cameron Chase has a dislike and distrust (and occasional hatred) of super-beings (both heroes and villains alike) due to her father's murder. (He was a minor superhero, and his career as one resulted in his daughter witnessing his incredibly gory murder at the hands of a villain named Dr. Trap.) Unfortunately for Chase, she fits the bill herself, having a psychic ability to dampen the abilities of other "metahumans", which she apparently triggers subconsciously whenever she is threatened.
• Done intentionally in the Astro City arc "The Dark Age". Although Royal and Charles Williams didn't care for superheroes and supervillains, seeing them as pretty much the same, by the mid-'80s they have almost become a vigilante team of their own due to their unrelenting pursuit of the man who killed their parents.
• In Empowered, Mindfuck (yes, this is her actual superhero name) takes a peek into (ex-)lover Spooky's memories and instantly grasps that her public persona has been subconsciously patterned after the same vain blond bimbos she was so traumatized by. Both physically (sans actual blond hair) and personality. The bimbos even sold their souls for "supernatural hotness" (sans superpowers) just like Spooky did, and for the exact same reasons. Spooky discovered this when she tried to use her powers to take revenge — her patron demon didn't allow it because he is forbidden from interfering with other demons' clients.
• In the EC Comics title "Shock SuspenStories", there was a story called "Hate!". An all-American everyman who leads a mob to kill his Jewish neighbors by burning their house down finds out that he was adopted and that his real parents were Jewish. He then is victimized by his Jew-hating former friends.
• _Infinite Crisis_-era Maxwell Lord was prone to making speeches about how metahumans were the cause of all society's ills, and claiming that non-powered heroes like Blue Beetle should be on his side, as fellow normal humans. When Beetle pointed out that Max was currently using his metahuman powers, Max simply shrugged this off as beside the point. He knew who he meant by metahuman, and it wasn't himself.
• In Irredeemable, The Survivor (briefly) helps defeat The Plutonian out of vengeance for killing his twin brother, and soon takes the spot of the world's most powerful hero. The power and reputation quickly corrupt him though, and he soon becomes just as petty and vindictive as the Plutonian was before he became evil. This includes feeling entitled to having Kaidan, who had picked his brother over him, and considering murdering his other brother so he could keep his top spot once The Plutonian comes back.
• In the Judge Dredd story "The Neon Knights", Dredd unmasks the leader of the eponymous robot-hating "Klan", revealing him to be...A CYBORG! "I thought his voice sounded synthetic; like all bigots, he HATED HIMSELF and transferred that hatred to the thing he most resembled...Robots!" is Dredd's explanation.
• Xander Payne from the Mega Man (Archie Comics) comic is leader of the anti-robot group Emerald-Spears but is actually part robot himself. His brother had Xander's eye surgically replaced with a cybernetic implant after Elec Man fried it during Dr. Wily's first world domination attempt.
• The titular character of Marshal Law is a "hero hunter" who positively despises superheroes with every fiber of his being. This is despite the fact that he wears a personalized outfit with a mask, operates under a colorful pseudonym, upholds the public order, and has superpowers. Quite a number of times, other characters either compare him to a typical superhero or just outright call him one, much to his utter displeasure.
• Marvels: Phil Sheldon hates the Nazis with a vengeance like any American, not least of all because he was a war correspondent in World War II and personally witnessed the horrors they committed. Despite this fact, when mutants begin appearing, Phil is initially caught up in the anti-mutant fervor and hates them like many others… until he meets a young mutant girl his daughter has befriended hiding in his house during an anti-mutant race riot, and sees that the fear in her eyes is exactly like that of the concentration camp prisoners he saw in the war. The experience shakes him badly.
• In Thor: God of Thunder, the God Butcher, Gorr, lived his life believing gods did not exist, because he and his people suffered through so much tragedy, particularly those who deeply believed in the gods, that he thought there was just no way anyone with that level of power would allow this stuff to happen... Then two gods in a grudge match crash land next to him, and he realizes that gods aren't helping people because they're too busy fighting each other, so he kills the remaining god with the other's power. He then dedicated himself to killing all gods across all of time, so that everyone would have to learn to cherish what time they had, and would turn to each other for help. He does this by basically empowering himself into a god, and waging war on various pantheons. A god he is torturing asks him if he is so powerful as to be able to do these things, who is more godly than he is? He...does not react well.
• New X-Men: Academy X: Kimura grew up with a neglectful mother and abusive father and was bullied at school, which made her life miserable. Eventually, Kimura grew up to be the same time of bully her tormentors were, destroying lives, abusing, and making people miserable. Emma Frost, who read her mind, is completely disgusted with her, and tells her that she has grown up to be the same type of bully she dealt with and that she knows the pain she causes her victims. But she does not care because she genuinely likes causing pain to other people, and that’s why she’s a bully, even though she knows the pain her victims are going through. Emma Frost did not hesitate to erase her memories of her grandmother, the only person who was kind to her, causing her a lifetime of pain and making her the victim again.
• Mocked to hell and back in Rat-Man, where Brakko's mother in law is openly racist and hates him for being black while being black herself (hence how the author gets away with her constant use of the N-word). Considering the series, she's likely too stupid to realize she's black.
• Red Hulk is implied to be someone who really hates the Hulk. He turns out to be General Ross.
• Star Wars (Marvel 1977): Valance hates droids and cyborgs with a seething passion, but is secretly a cyborg himself. He hides his condition by covering his cybernetic parts with false skin, and in his first appearance, he destroyed the hospital where he was rebuilt to keep anyone from learning the truth.
• In Ultimate Spider-Man the biggest mutantphobic person turns out to be a mutant.
• In the Ultimate Universe Magneto and most, if not all, mutants are actually human beings, who have been genetically altered by an airborne variation of the super-soldier serum.
• In a comic so full of bigotry as X-Men there are bound to be examples:
  • Graydon Creed, the founder of the anti-mutant Friends of Humanity in X-Men, is not himself a mutant — but his parents were Mystique and Sabretooth. However, in a twist that Marvel Comics themselves once pointed out, a mutant is a being that differs markedly from their genetic parents. Thus, by not having powers in any way, Graydon Creed is a mutant.
  • Larry Trask, son of Sentinel-maker Bolivar Trask. He very nearly succeeded in having his giant robots wipe out all (then-known) mutants, but when his dad's friend Judge Chalmers ripped the power-suppressing amulet off of him, surprise surprise, Larry's a mutant too.
  • In God Loves, Man Kills, Anne — The Dragon of the Purifiers, a fanatical religious terrorist organisation who go around executing every mutant that they find, due to their belief that they are agents of Satan, was most devoted and loyal to the leader of this group — Reverend William Stryker, even killing children under his command without batting an eye when they turn out to be mutants. At some point late into the story arc to her horror, she discovers that she is a mutant herself. Stryker soon kills her after this discovery.
  • Sentinels can technically be considered mutants, according to Sebastian Shaw. He once outfitted a series of them with a Logic Bomb built in, in the event that he could use it to destroy them if they turned rogue, as Sentinels often do. The logic being that Sentinels were derived from the blueprints of the original Mark-Is, and since then, they have evolved and grown stronger, thus they are Mutants. Since they are Mutants, they must be destroyed, as per their prime directive. Sadly, it doesn't work out as Shawn plans, as Loki fuses three of them into the deadly Tri-Sentinel, his magic overriding Shaw's command; only confuses them long enough for Spider-Man to use his recently gained Captain Universe powers to take them out.
  • A surprisingly large number of anti-mutant bigots from the X-Men's Rogues Gallery are cyborgs — including Pierce, Akab, Cameron Hodge, Bastion and the Phalanx. So while they're not mutants, they're not exactly normal humans, either. If you are a truly determined soldier in the war against mutanthood, you cannot not be afraid to let Cybernetics Eat Your Soul.
  • The villain Magneto is also an example. He hates Nazis for what they did to him and his family, but as a result became a mutant-supremacist, hating all humans and just becoming a different kind of bigot. (A major case of Depending on the Writer. He's dated humans, and he's gone way out of his way to protect them… but, yes, he's also tried to wipe them out. He's conflicted.)
  • In Ultimate X-Men (2024), Rev William Stryker Jr is as much a mutant hater as his 616 counterpart, due to his abusive father (based on General Stryker from the movies), and said abusive childhood has left him in utter denial that he's a mutant himself.

Fan Works

Crossovers

• Action Pack: The half-human Kira despises humanity, though the few individuals he cares about are also human.
• Battle Fantasia Project: Minako absolutely hates cops, but became one herself... mostly to "keep an eye on the beasts in the force".
• Compulsion (Lead Zeppelin): One Interlude chapter focuses on the Empire 88 gang, a group of proud neo-Nazis, from the perspective of one of their members... the Irish Marcus Fahy.
• Fantasy of Utter Ridiculousness: Evidence is scattered throughout the Extra Stage that Patchouli is more like Coop than she thinks. Among other things she has some familiarity with video games and associated terminology thanks to her dreams, she eventually gives in to the urge to request a pizza-wrapped ham from the Mansion's kitchen, and her idea of getting out of an escort mission is to throw Reimu at the escortee. All this is despite the fact that she developed a hefty loathing for Coop, his lifestyle and stupidity, and Megas by the time they get brought up.
• Star Wars vs. Warhammer 40K: The Karkosan Untouchables are mutant Imperial Guardsmen who, according to the author, hate other mutants more than most Imperials. This is due to their brutal training which involves creating an immense amount of self-loathing, but upon becoming an Untouchable they believe they are then separate from other mutants, though they still hate themselves and wish to die.
• In A Subtle Knife, Edge fears that this will prove to be true, and that he is or will become like Jack Slash.
• In Uchibi Sasuke, Sasuke fears that he's become a pervert after Naruto's Harem Jutsu causes him to suffer a minor nosebleed. He responds by attempting seppuku.
• The Vigilante Boss and His Failed Retirement Plan: Having been severely bullied in the past, Futaba can't stand anyone like that. She winds up involved in giving Bakugou a taste of his own medicine.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

• Still on My String: Kai, a member of the Equalists who target and repress benders, turns out to have airbending abilities himself.
• there is a fire in me: Jet's hatred towards the Fire Nation grew to homicidal proportions before he came to Ba Sing Se. Then he learns he has Fire ancestry and is actually a firebender — cue a monumental Freak Out from which he spends the whole story recovering.

Danny Phantom

• Danny Phantom: Stranded: Star Strong has a very distant, complicated relationship with her mother Stella and an outright hatred for her stepsister Colette prior to the fic series and during it. Both Stella and Colette are spoiled; selfish women don't care how their actions hurt others as long as they get their way, and Star resented both of them deeply. However, before her character development. Star was no better as their influence made her insecure enough to join the A-Listers. A group of selfish kids who pick on others, which turned Star into the selfish, shallow, two-dimensional popular girl, that was shown in the series. Thankfully, Star changed due to her relationship with Danny. In "Stuck," she acknowledges that and admits to Sam that Danny saved her from a life of being a shallow girl who put too much value on looks, money, clothes, and status, much like her mother and stepsister.

Dragon Ball

• What If Gine Went With Goku to Earth?:
  • Gine points out to Raditz that by continuing to follow Freeza's philosophy and insisting that power is the only thing that matters, he's being no different from the despot he desires. Ultimately, Raditz agrees that she's right.
  • Vegeta flips this around on Gine when he provokes Gine by insulting Bardock. Once she lashes out, he declares that no matter how much she tries to deny it in favor of peace and kindness, she can never fully escape her Saiyan pride and warrior spirit.

DuckTales (2017)

• Ducktales Magic AU: Scrooge has always despised magic, and is shocked to learn from Goldie that he himself possesses a passive type of magic known as being Gold-Touched.

Inside Out

• In a comedic version of this, we have Intercom when Riley's Disgust finds out she's shaped similar to Broccoli, Riley's (and by extension, her) least favorite vegetable.
  Disgust: WHY WAS I CURSED TO LOOK LIKE MY LEAST FAVORITE THING IN THE UNIVERSE!!???

Kung Fu Panda 2

• The Vow shows that no matter what Lord Shen did, he was rejected by almost everyone as an abomination due to his paleness, and it played a part in his eventual Face–Heel Turn. His former fiancée Lianne tells him that he has become what he was for so long accused of being during one of her failed attempts to reach out to him.
  Lianne: You used to be a good man, you would have followed your father's footsteps: you would have been a great ruler of this city. The only thing that ever brought you down was the prejudice of others. All the petty words and insults the nobles ever threw at you... they called you a monster, though you hated it, you sought to prove them wrong. Even then you rose above that to be more. Shen, why do you squander this? You could have had the world at your feet!
  Shen: [chuckles cruelly] And so I shall...
  Lianne: Then I was wrong. You have truly become the monster you always hated!
  • After Shen destroys his family's home just to kill Po, Lianne tells him that he's becoming just as extreme as her father, whom he hates with a passion.

Miraculous Ladybug

• Throughout LadyBugOut, Alya is outraged at any suggestion that she's like Chloe. Chloe herself suggests as much when Alya resorts to personal attacks to try and defend her positing a photo without context for attention, and Ladybug later draws a direct parallel: if Chloe isn't qualified to bear the Bee due to behaving badly as a civilian, then why should Alya be trusted with the Fox despite personally betraying Ladybug?
  • At one point, Alya perfectly sums up one of her greatest issues... while accusing Marinette of being someone who "won't apologize and can't even see what she did." This only convinces Marinette to break off their relationship for good.

My Hero Academia

• Conversations with a Cryptid: All for One particularly despises Abusive Parents like Endeavor and Bakugou Mitsuki. This doesn't stop him from grooming Shiragaki into his personal tool, or constantly invading his own son's privacy, disregarding what he wants and keeping him isolated and helpless.
• When you're a hero and Transitioning.:
  • Before she realized her own identity, Katsuki bullied and drove a trans student out of her school. This contributes to her fears about coming out herself.
  • The Character Descriptions reveals that Monoma is actually a deeply repressed and closest trans woman, and that this is why they harass and target the other trans students attending U.A.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

• In the Pony POV Series, Nightmare Eclipse loathes Discord and seeks to punish him for his crimes. However, her methods of doing so ultimately not only make her worse than he is, but causing him to have a Heel Realization and her forcing him still doing the things she's punishing him just so she can keep punishing him, effectively meaning everything she hates him for is now her doing. Rota Fortuna, the Alicorn of Fate, lampshades this by giving her a Breaking Lecture during the Nightmare's defeat.
  Rota Fortuna: You condemn Discord for the murder and sin he's done onto others, yet you use those same ponies to die and suffer for your satisfaction. He only continued to make the ponies suffer because you allowed and then forced him to do so. The very sins you claim to punish him for are now your own. You embarrass yourself!!

Punch-Out!!

• In Ma Fille, Aran Ryan was bullied a lot as a child, and ended up growing up into a bully himself. He gets called on this hard when he picks a fight with Katrina after concussing her father, and she kicks his ass hard.

RWBY

• In Along Came a Spider, Jaune's conversation with White Fang member Tifa causes her to realize that several White Fang are just as racist against other Faunus as the humans they fight. What helps cement it is a conversation she hears in passing of two Faunus insisting a woman was a slut because she was a rabbit Faunus.
• In the one-shot Hate, the faunus-hating Cardin is secretly a rabbit faunus himself (with a tail that he hides). His parents are human but Cardin's mother had rabbit faunus in her lineage, leading to a faunus child.

The Smurfs

• The Psyche Master in Empath: The Luckiest Smurf is a Smurf who hates his own blue-skinned race and creates a light-skinned race of people called the Psyches who are taught to hate Smurfs. Of course, none of the Psyches know what the Psyche Master really is.

Touhou Project

• Rika of The Tale of Rumia hates Youkai with a blinding passion — and at the end of the arc she's introduced in, it's revealed that over the years, she herself became a Youkai. She never really stops being in denial about it, although she privately turns herself into a robot so that she won't have to live with the shame.

Undertale

• Dogs of Future Past has this as an element in the ultimate confrontation with Dr. Gaster. The good doctor loathes 'cheaters' who think they can bend the rules to suit their own purposes, whether for good or ill — because he himself tried to do the same, and ended up condemning himself and several innocent test subjects to a hell outside existence, and doesn't believe that he deserves to be saved.
  River Person/The first test subject: A person hates most in others what they hate most in themselves.

Worm

• Confrontation (ack1308): Sophia's vigilante career has been violent and ruthless, and since she's black, she especially hates the neo-Nazi Empire 88. However, in her personal life and relationships, she has a brutal philosophy of dividing people into predators and prey, with no sympathy for prey; if you don't fight back, you're not worth saving. And then she teaches that philosophy to Emma, getting her on-side with bullying Taylor by persuading her that Taylor is prey, that Emma can prove her strength by pushing Taylor down. When Taylor points out that this attitude of scapegoating and oppression makes her similar to the Nazis, she's both angered by the accusation and upset by realising how much truth is in it.
  Sophia: You were there. Emma needed to compare herself, to be able to prove to herself that she was getting stronger.
  Taylor: ... So how long have you been in the Empire Eighty-Eight?

Films — Animation

• The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Judge Frollo professes to be a devout Christian who longs to purge the world of sin, yet he's the most corrupt person in the whole movie. He also hates the Romani people, yet he develops an unhealthy obsession over a Romani woman. His hypocrisy is lampshaded in the opening song, and countless people even call him out on it. He also uses Psychological Projection to find faults in others and blame them for his misery, but refuses to acknowledge his own faults to the end due to his self-righteous pride.
• In Inside Out, Disgust's (and thus Riley's) dislike of broccoli is a running gag throughout the film. Disgust has been stated to have been designed based on broccoli. (This connection is lost in the Japanese dub, where every mention and appearance of broccoli in the film is replaced with green bell peppers.)
• In Turning Red, Tyler expresses disdain for fans of 4*Town but is secretly a fan himself and fears revealing it.

Films — Live-Action

• In American Beauty, the homophobic neighbor turns out to be a closeted homosexual.
• Subtly hinted at for comedy with Nigel Powers in Austin Powers in Goldmember: "There are only two things I can't stand in this world! People who are intolerant of other people's cultures... and the Dutch!"
• The film The Believer is about a young Jewish man who despite growing as in a religious lifestyle, later becomes extremely antisemitic and joins the American Nazi Party, hiding his true identity until it’s later exposed in the press, after which he commits suicide.
• Chink is a movie about Eddy Tsai, a self-hating Asian who becomes a serial killer targeting other Asians. He changes his name to "Richards" and falsely claims to have been adopted by white parents.
• In Die Hard with a Vengeance, the character of Zeus is a black man with serious problems with white people, most especially white racists. Eventually McClane calls him out on the fact that he's acting like a racist himself.
• Gretel in Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is revealed to be a witch by inheritance. This leads to no Character Development whatsoever.
• In The Human Condition, Kaji openly states his moral disgust for deserters and POW escapees. He becomes both by the end of the film.
• In I, Robot, Detective Spooner (Will Smith) displays an intense dislike towards humanoid robots... despite being a cyborg. Although, he does have a tragic reason for that one.
• Kingsman: The Secret Service: Arthur is an elitist prick who has it in for Eggsy the Working-Class Hero throughout the movie. He later turns out to be in league with the Big Bad and tries to poison Eggsy, but a simple sleight of hand trick leaves him the one choking to death on laced brandy. For his final dying expletives he speaks in a very coarse East End accent, implying that he started out in the lower classes and put on snobby airs to distance himself from his origins as he worked his way up the organisation.
• Milk subtly suggests that Dan White may have been a closeted gay man himself, adding another dimension to his crimes.
• Brian from Monty Python's Life of Brian hates Romans only for his mother to reveal that he is half-Roman. He hates them because they have invaded his homeland, not because they are Romans, though.
• Long before The Chappelle Show and its iconic black white supremacist, a much less comedic version of this idea was used in the 1963 film Shock Corridor, which featured a black KKK member in an insane asylum. In case you missed that one, suffice to say that anti-black rhetoric sounds even more terrifying when it's being delivered by a Scary Black Man.
• Surrogates: The Prophet, a man leading a group against the eponymous surrogates, is himself a surrogate, controlled by the inventions' creator at that.
• Lampshaded in This Is England: one of the far-right extremist characters, Combo, is a racist played by a mixed-race actor... hence his Meaningful Name.
• Thor (2011) spends much of its arc following the self-destruction of Loki, setting him up for his role as the villain of The Avengers (2012). His racism against Frost Giants clearly has deep roots but was never a major part of his life until it turned out he was one. Along with being a "Well Done, Son" Guy who seems honestly to be The Un-Favourite and regularly suffer All of the Other Reindeer, and with knowing he's actually responsible for Thor's exile and the fact that they're currently at war, and combined with unexpectedly being temporary king, this violent undermining of his entire identity causes him to go completely insane.
• In Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, Chad hates hillbillies because his mother was raped by a hillbilly Serial Killer who also murdered his father. The serial killer was actually Chad's real father, the proof being an old newspaper article with a photo of the killer, who looks exactly like Chad. Chad, already murderously insane by that point, has a total breakdown when he learns the truth.
• Jay of The View Askewniverse often makes homophobic remarks, but it's been hinted that he's secretly gay or at least bi.
• In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Judge Doom turns out to be a Toon in a human mask. Possibly justified in that he was motivated by greed, not bigotry, although he makes several anti-Toon statements prior to The Reveal as well (claiming, for example, that Toons are naturally lawless and deserve the most brutal punishments imaginable). It's probable that he's saying those things not because he believes other toons are like that, but because he knows that he is like that. Another possible interpretation is that Doom, being an evil Toon, simply has it out against other Toons, true to stereotype. After all, his master plan involves wiping out Toontown.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • Erik/Magneto hates Nazis due to being a survivor of the Holocaust but ultimately embraces racism against non-mutants. This is highlighted in X-Men: First Class.
  • Enforced in X-Men, where Magneto's crew mutates Senator Kelly, the US government's biggest backer of mutant suppression. It’s implied that he might have come to regret his bigotry but we don't really get too good a gauge of how he feels about it since he dies from the forced mutation right afterwards.

Jokes

• If racists are becoming a minority nowadays, and racists hate minorities...
• Arachnophobes are latent spiders.

Literature

• Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony has Leon Abbot, who has an intense hatred of warlocks for relying on magic over brute strength, despite the fact that he uses magic power he stole from a warlock to brainwash his kinsmen into loyal minions.
• The Black Witch Chronicles: The Gardnerian Mages despise everyone who isn't Gardnerian, especially Kelts and the Fae. It turns out they are Kelt-Dryad Fae hybrids.
• The Camp Half-Blood Series: Dionysus in Percy Jackson and the Olympians and The Heroes of Olympus hates demigods because his wife, Ariadne, was abandoned by the demigod Theseus. When Percy and Jason are fighting the Giants — who can only be beaten by a god and a demigod working together — it comes out that Dionysus (who is currently going by Bacchus) was the demigod who originally helped defeat them in ancient times. Of course, he's since become a god in his own right and one of the twelve Olympians to boot, so perhaps, in his case, you hate what you were before you got better.
• Chrestomanci: In Witch Week, an alternate Earth on which witches are known, feared, and persecuted turns out to also be a world on which nearly every human is secretly a witch.
• In Deryni Rising, the first book of Katherine Kurtz's Deryni series, Queen Jehana is a loud and determined opponent of all things Deryni. Later on, Morgan describes this very trope when confronting her to obtain her peaceful cooperation during her son Kelson's coronation. It turns out that she is, indeed, a full-blooded member of the magically gifted Deryni race. Thanks to Internalized Categorism, she becomes a Boomerang Bigot and spends several years in penance for the sins of being Deryni.
• In Kate Chopin's short story "Desiree's Baby", the slave-owner Armand rejects his wife Desiree and their newborn son due to the son's obvious African heritage. He takes this to be proof that Desiree is also of mixed heritage, and she eventually gets fed up and goes back home to her parents with her son in tow. While throwing out Desiree's things, Armand eventually comes across letters from his deceased mother that reveal that she was one of his father's former slaves.
• Different Seasons: In Apt Pupil, Todd is repulsed by one of his girlfriends, thinking that she is Jewish (due to the influence Dussander has had on him). He himself is 1/8 Jewish.
  • Dussander himself claims he and Todd have something in common; in that Dussander's mother was a Jew — it is unclear whether he was serious or joking.
• Discworld: The dwarven conspirator's motivation in The Fifth Elephant. Dwarf women in Ankh-Morpork are increasingly able to admit and show their true gender. As an Uberwald dwarf, Dee cannot, and is forced to pass as male by society. So she plots with werewolves to undermine a symbol of that society.
• Dragons of Requiem has King Raem Seran from the Dawn of Dragons trilogy. He's obsessed with exterminating the Vir Requis from the world because he's ashamed of being one himself, believing that all Vir Requis are "cursed".
• Dune:
  • Shortly after having his new home destroyed, his father killed, and being forced on the run with his mother by the Harkonnen family, Paul points out to his mother that she is Baron Harkonnen's daughter, making them part of the very noble family that they despise.
  • Essentially directly stated in one of the epigraphical quotations at the beginning of a chapter:
    "What do you despise? By this are you truly known."
    from the Manual of Muad'dib by the Princess Irulan
• In "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn", the title character goes insane and sets himself on fire upon realizing that one of his distant ancestors was an ape goddess.
• Forest Kingdom: In the Hawk & Fisher spinoff series' Book 1, Lord Roderik Hightower spent years obsessively going out hunting werewolves. He only ever found one, but it was enough — the werewolf bit him and turned him into the very thing he despised.
• Harry Potter:
  • Even though his father was a Muggle, Lord Voldemort, the Big Bad, believes in the supremacy of pure-blooded wizards and hates those with Muggle blood. Word of God states that Voldemort's own half-blood nature, coupled with his obsession with wizard blood purity, is based on perceptions of Hitler.
  • Severus Snape is an example through Moral Myopia and hypocrisy. He has detested James Potter since boyhood (James very much returned the hate). While part of Snape's hate for James comes from envy (Snape grew up in an abusive home, James in a loving one, etc.), Snape very frequently calls James out for his arrogance and behavior. However, Snape is at least as arrogant as an ambitious young wizard who wants everyone to see how clever and powerful he is. Snape joins a gang that becomes the Death Eaters — a group that commits worse crimes than the Marauders; while Snape may not do anything himself, he certainly pardons his friends' escapades while being raving pissed if he is targeted by James and or Sirius' tomfoolery. A lot of what Snape hates in James is within himself, and, unlike James, his hatred never leaves. Bonus points for him joining the Pureblood-supremacist Death Eaters, despite being a half-blood himself (Muggle father, witch mother).
  • While it is not apparent in the books she appears in Dolores Umbridge, who despises half-bloods and Muggles, was confirmed to have a muggle mother and a Squib brother by Rowling on Pottermore.
• In Hear the Wind Sing, the Rat despises the rich, despite coming from a wealthy family.
• The Lunar Chronicles: Cinder expresses hate toward the Lunars, a race/species of people who live on the moon and have powers. It turns out that Cinder isn't just a Lunar, she's their princess.
• Oddly Enough: "Am I Blue?" has two characters, one extremely homophobic politician and a bully who beat up the protagonist for being gay, who are both revealed to be gay themselves.
• Colin is the only character from Out of Position who despises Dev for being homosexual, whereas everyone else on the Firebirds team has lightened up to him. Uncovered reveals that Colin is a closet homosexual who has sex with Argonne and still refuses to accept that he's gay, or that he's cheating on his wife.
• In Relativity, one of the things Michael Bruce hates the most about Tony Toronto is that Tony is a terrible womanizer. Michael, however, is pretty much the same, spending most of the first series dating two women simultaneously and seeing a few others on the side.
• While it's probably more a case of him being easily led than an actual prejudice on his part, Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers reveals that, as a child, Rimmer was taken by one of his brothers to throw stones through a hologram rights march while chanting "Dirty Deadies!" Millennia later, he is resurrected as a hologram.
• Averted in Robots and Empire. In the beginning, Dr. Mandamus tries to obtain evidence from Gladia that he is not the descendant of Elijah Baley, claiming Amadiro suspects him of being one, and that prevents him from making a career. While given enough evidence, he claims it won't be enough for Amadiro, yet still seems to leave triumphant. Daneel figures out the reason — there was enough evidence to convince Mandamus, so now he can proceed with his plans to destroy Earth without being hindered by the trope.
• From Second Apocalypse: "Seek ye the true reflecting pool? Look to the enemy you despise, not the friend you love."
• In "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", the protagonist finds out that one of his ancestors is a Deep One, a fish-like monster. He eventually goes underwater to live with the other Deep Ones.
• Star Wars Legends: Some speculate that rabidly xenophobic half-human Grand Admiral Danetta Pitta was based in characterizations of Heinrich Himmler's Psycho for Hire Dragon Reinhard Heydrich possessing Jewish ancestry.
• Sword of Truth: Tobias Brogan, who not only hates magic and its users but leads the Blood of the Fold, a group intent on killing them all, himself has the gift. It's a secret his mother and sister kept hidden from him all of his life. The protagonist Richard Rahl is clearly able to recognize Brogan has the gift, confusing Brogan greatly during a discussion on defeating insidious evil, and telling him "Be careful the shadow you chase is not the one you cast." Brogan explicitly does not understand what Richard is hinting at. After he finds out, it drives him mad.
• There is a light-skinned black female character in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God who is contemptuous of dark-skinned black people. She complains that the dark-skinned blacks are ignorant buffoons who "cut de monkey for white folks," causing light-skinned blacks to get unfairly blamed for these antics. When she gets called out for these remarks by the book's protagonist since she is black herself, the woman retorts with something along the lines of "I ain't got no saucer lips!"
• Hinted at, though never explicitly stated, for one character in Those Who Walk in Darkness. Soledad joined MTac as a means of revenge on the super-villain Bloodlust, who destroyed her hometown. It's mentioned offhandedly that Bloodlust's "power" was his skill at inventing things, which he mostly used to design weapons. Soledad herself designs Abnormal Ammo, including but not limited to phosphorus bullets, poisoned bullets, explosive bullets, and homing bullets, all clearly beyond the skill of any other normal person in the setting.

Music

• Pink Floyd's The Wall has the main character become the very thing his father had died fighting against, as noted in the later songs "In The Flesh", "Run Like Hell", and "Waiting For The Worms"...at least within his own mind. This is made even more noticeable in the movie version.
• Titledropped in "Brush the Dust Away" by in Flames, "We think we're in control then we become the things we hate"
• The video for "Sugar, We're Going Down" by Fall Out Boy, is about a teenage boy with antlers, who starts dating a girl whose dad despises the fact that she's dating a boy with antlers. In the end, the dad gets hit by a truck while trying to shoot the boy, and as Antler Boy rushes over to help, it's revealed the dad has deer hooves.

Professional Wrestling

• During a segment on WWE Raw, CM Punk taunted John Cena with the fact that he (and by extension, Cena's hometown of Boston, of which Raw was taking place in that night...) was no longer the underdog by consistently being the "top dog" in the WWE, stating that he was no longer the Boston Red Sox, but rather the New York Yankees. Naturally, Cena didn't take too kindly to the comparison and promptly decked Punk after his comments. This got turned around on Punk years later in All Elite Wrestling after both Eddie Kingston and MJF accused him of being a dynasty like Cena instead of the renegade the fans fell in love with all those years ago. _Un_like Cena, Punk was annoyed and irritated by their words but didn't get angry at them, nor did he deny them, because they were correct. As one of the most popular wrestlers in WWE history and one of the biggest names in all of professional wrestling, he is a dynasty, and he acts like it too.
• It's often remarked by fans that Randy Orton also embodies this. Orton started off his career as "The Legend Killer" attacking and then defeating several in-ring veterans and legends, portraying the archetypal cocky, young hotshot, full of arrogance and disrespect. These days, Orton himself is a legend and a shoo-in for the WWE Hall of Fame when he eventually retires — albeit, he's a legend his younger self would've gone after if he lacked any self-preservation.

Stand-Up Comedy

• Played for Laughs when Ron White uses this logic against his homophobic Cousin Ray.
  Ray: Man, this world would be so much better if there weren't so many queers.
  Ron: You know what, the next time you have a thought...let it go. Besides, we're all gay, it's just a question of to what extent.
  Ray: That's bullshit, man! I ain't gay at all!
  Ron: Yeah, you are, and I can prove it.
  Ray: All right, prove it!
  Ron: All right, you like porn?
  Ray: Yeah, I love porn. You know that.
  Ron: Do you only watch scenes with two women naked?
  Ray: No, I watch a man and woman making love.
  Ron: Do you want the man to have a little-bitty half-flaccid penis?
  Ray: No, I like big, hard, throbbing co— (Beat, with a look of realization) I did not know that about myself.

Tabletop Games

• In After the Bomb, Emperor Daniel Christian, leader of the violently anti-mutant Empire of Humanity, is secretly a mutant himself. Since he looks human, as opposed to the Funny Animal mutants the empire wages war against, it's not as big of a deal, though his rhetoric combined with his burning hatred is still questionable.
• Chronicles of Darkness:
  • Second Sight explicitly states that possessors of the two anti-psychic merits listed are latent psychics who have mental blocks preventing them from accessing their powers and that this in turn makes them virulently skeptical.
  • Banishers in Mage: The Awakening are either this or Boomerang Bigots: their flawed Awakenings give them an instinctive hatred for magic, but they might not understand it or know that they themselves are mages. One group firmly believes that they are Alien Abduction victims who gained superpowers from the experimentation, and whether they identify another mage as a fellow victim or as an enemy alien infiltrator depends entirely on whether they think the mage is on their side.
• A campaign in Marvel Super Heroes had a mutant villain wanting to eradicate all mutants, founding an American NASI party, and of course being mutant himself.
• Paranoia:
  • Every player character is a "Troubleshooter" whose job is to hunt down various types of traitors, including unregistered mutants. Due to unacknowledged malfunctions in the cloning vats, everyone in the setting is a mutant. Bonus irony if they're also a member of the "Anti-Mutant" secret society, the members of which are completely unaware that there's not a single genetically pure human among them.
  • Friend Computer vehemently hates Communism, and considers Communists to be the single greatest threat to Alpha Complex. Indeed, all other threats, like mutants or other secret societies, are considered tools, pawns, or fronts for Communists. This despite the fact that the actual Communists are only around because of the Computer's crackdown, and have little to no knowledge of actual Communist ideology). In most editions of the game, Alpha Complex under the Computer's rule is practically a Communist dictatorship.
• In the Ravenloft setting, Malocchio Aderre seized political control of Invidia and initiated a pogrom against the Vistani. Malocchio's mother, whom he ousted from power, is part Vistani herself. Of course, she's no better; While most Darklords leave the Vistani alone, Invidia is one of the few realms where simply associating with them are liable to get a visitor killed.
• While his official stat-line disproved this, it is rumoured in-universe that Emperor Karl Prosek in Rifts is secretly a magician.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Though the Warp is considered (Not without reason) an evil, corrupting force that must never be played with, or even acknowledged, the Imperium still makes heavy use of sanctioned psykers, who must wield the energies of the Warp to defend Humanity from, among other things, the creatures of the Warp. Unsanctioned psykers are exterminated, often by burning.
  • Psykers and navigators are also needed for FTL travel and communication. The last time FTL travel went down caused the downfall of human civilization straight from golden to dark age during Age of Strife. And that was when the only major opponent of humanity were Orks.
  • The Emperor is a psyker. Some members of Ecclesiarchy actually acknowledge that and look upon the psyker without disdain, while others would burn you for saying that.
  • The Adeptus Astartes (Better known as Space Marines) are Pro-Human Transhuman defenders of humanity in the extremely racist/speciest Imperium. Uriel Ventris views this as a noble sacrifice for a cause far greater than himself. Horus Lupercal viewed it as a proof that once the Great Crusade is over, he will be disposed of and forgotten.
  • Both Mortarion and Conrad Kurze became what they hated most. Mortarion led his homeworld in a rebellion against alien tyrants dwelling in the poisoned mists, then ended up ruling a carbon copy of it in the Eye of Terror with his own Space Marines as the tyrants. As for Kurze, he started out preying on the tyrants and killers of Nostromo, only to become a much worse monster than any he fought — which is probably part of the reason he accepted his own assassination.
• Naturalized dryads from The Witcher: Game of Imagination will fight humanity to the death... while being brainwashed human girls and young women.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: The leader of the Barbarian Tribe at Freeway 42's Underground City considers humans sinful for leaving them in the dust beneath the ground while he, and the rest of the tribe members were formally human before they were transformed by the Mechanika Virus.
• Baldur's Gate:
  • Balthazar from Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal is a Bhaalspawn who plots to exterminate all Bhaalspawn (though he at least plans on taking this to its logical conclusion once the others are wiped out.)
  • In Baldur's Gate III, this ends up being a recurring theme within the party and even more so for an evil-aligned one.
    * Shadowheart is a cleric for the God of Evil Shar, and as a result of being a brainwashed Tyke Bomb initially refuses to believe that Shar's every bit the monster she accused her Good Twin Selune of being and then some. She accuses Selune of betraying her family, but not only did Shar try to kill her sister and spend the past century torturing her niece, she also tries to manipulate Shadowheart into becoming a Self-Made Orphan. Shadowheart also regards Selunites as being naive and brainwashed, only to find out that her Religion Is Wrong and she was a Selunite herself before her kidnapping.
    * Folk Hero warlock Wyll was manipulated by his demonic patron Mizora into trying to kill Karlach for working for the archdevil Zariel, conveniently forgetting that Mizora actively does so and by extension, so does he. The Player Character can even lampshade the hypocrisy and Kick the Dog by pointing out he's everything he accused Karlach of being.
    * The Smart Guy Gale was abandoned by his goddess Mystra, and while he still worships her he was slightly embittered, becoming significantly more critical of the gods and their treatment of mortals. If convinced to claim the Artifact of Doom for himself, he becomes a Deity of Human Origin and just like the Jerkass Gods he previously resented.
    * Astarion resented his vampire master Cazador for being a sadistic bully, but if allowed to usurp his Deal with the Devil Astarion ultimately fails to escape The Chain of Harm and becomes just like him.
    * A minor example is La Résistance leader Wulbren Bongle, who hated Evil Overlord Gortash for turning the city into a Police State but had similar views to him. Both were Social Darwinists, Gortash being the Misery Builds Character type while Wulbren was using it as Jerk Justifications. As a result, he sought to oppress the very same people Gortash enslaved.
• Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: Kokichi hates murderers and calls out Kaede for playing into Monokuma's hands by trying to murder someone. In chapter 4, he manipulates the Super Gullible Gonta into murdering Miu, playing the killing game just like Kaede did- but without her excuse of trying to kill the Mastermind. It's heavily implied that he allows himself to be killed in the next chapter because of how guilty he felt about becoming a murderer himself.
• Sergeant Avitus of Dawn of War plays this trope to a T in the route where he winds up being the traitor. A sneering, scornful, insanely violent man who constantly derides anything he perceives as a sign of weakness and is always looking for an excuse to destroy the enemy... who is eventually revealed to be utterly disgusted by the never-ending senseless slaughter of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, and channels his anger and fatalism into the battlefield. His Rage Against the Heavens moment is thoroughly laced with Self-Deprecation.
• Adell from Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories, the last human who hasn't become a demon, hates real demons. Turns out he only looks human.
• King Morgott of Elden Ring ruthlessly upholds the Golden Order and oppresses those who fall outside it, like Misbegotten, Albinaurics, and Omens. It ultimately turns Morgott himself is secretly an Omen who despises his Omen features, and his boss title is even Morgott, The Omen King.
• Fallout:
  • Chris Haversam in Fallout: New Vegas is a human who believes himself to be a ghoul because of his hideous disfigurement: ordinary male pattern baldness. Any attempt by human or ghoul to convince him that he is obviously human will just be met with accusations of trying to trick him. And yes, he derisively refers to humans as "smoothskins" just like other ghouls. Ironically, him leaving his previous job as Vault 34's reactor technician after "becoming a ghoul" doomed the rest of the vault population to actually becoming ghouls, since the reactor suffered a leak and there was no technician to fix it.
  • Paladin Danse in Fallout 4 subscribes to the Brotherhood of Steel's ideology of exterminating Super Mutants, ghouls and synths for the benefit of mankind, not realizing that he himself is a synth. When the truth is discovered, he asks you to put him down, insisting that he be an example rather than an exception, but if you convince Maxson to spare his life, Danse will be exiled and pronounced dead to everyone else, whereupon he learns to make peace with his identity.
• This trope is given something of a work-out in Fate/stay night, especially in the "Unlimited Blade Works" route: Archer is quite vocally disapproving of the idealism and stubbornness that seems to plague most of his 'allies' (especially Shirou), and yet it is repeatedly pointed out by several characters and scenes that he is, in many ways, just as bad when it comes to suffering from Chronic Hero Syndrome. Just to make things weirder, this is a LITERAL example in regards to Shirou, considering that they are the same person.
• King Zephiel, the Big Bad of Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, is a Misanthrope Supreme who believes that the "madness" of humanity causes suffering, and the only solution is to bring back the dragons, which humans sealed away in the ancient war known as the Scouring. Roy, The Hero of the game, counters that since Zephiel started a war that caused countless deaths, he's no better.
• Kratos from God of War. He doesn't like any of the gods he used to work with, and nearly hates them all vehemently, not without a valid reason. Once he finds out he's the son of Zeus himself, he doesn't take it well. He's calmed down a bit in the Norse saga, but that just means his self-loathing is more internalized and involves less stabbing of people; part of the reason he's still such a jerk is because he genuinely doesn't believe that any god, himself included, can possibly be benevolent, and acts accordingly. It's also one of the biggest factors in his strained relationship with Atreus, because he hates the godhood Atreus inherited from him, and Atreus senses his father's resentment without understanding the context. Mimir calls him out on this the first time he meets, but it still takes a while for Kratos to work up the courage to confess to Atreus because he hates his own divinity that much.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Grand Theft Auto IV gives us Bryce Dawkins, Deputy Mayor of Liberty City, notorious for his vitriolic homophobic rants (and advocacy of family values) to appease his right-wing base... all the while having an affair with Bernie Crane, a famously Camp Gay fitness trainer and alter-ego of Florian Cravic, Niko Bellic's former comrade. Once their affair is leaked (as a postgame radio news program indicates), blowing the closet open for the whole city to see, Dawkins apparently decides to enter rehab until the pressure has dissipated.
  • In Grand Theft Auto V, on the way to the Paleto Bay bank to scope it out, Michael De Santa deduces that his partner Trevor Philips is a hipster due to the way he dresses and his lifestyle. Trevor repeatedly states that he hates hipsters, and Michael retorts by saying that self-hatred is a common hipster affliction.
• In Hatoful Boyfriend, Sakuya, the proud heir of a pure-blood fantail noble family, treats every non-pureblood bird like trash, including even his half-brother Yuuya who he calls a "half-breed mongrel". However, he learns on the Bad Boys Love route that he's actually not the true heir of the Le Bel family and is Yuuya's full brother, which means that he's the very same "mongrel" that he constantly scorned Yuuya for being.
• Bertrand from inFAMOUS 2 considers Conduits to be demons and ultimately wants them to be exterminated, but is secretly a Conduit himself, and practically lept at the chance to become one. Although Cole points out that he most likely is jealous of the fact that whilst others became shiny supermen, he got to be a big bug. So maybe instead of "you are what you hate," he falls more under "you hate that others like you possess awesome powers yet yours suck."
• Done in a rather literal sense in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, as one of the focal points of the story is Master Xehanort manipulating Terra enough to make the boy immensely hate him, thus giving in to the darkness within his heart, which in turn would make Terra a suitable host for Xehanort's heart.
• During NieR: Automata, 9S — an Android — is shown having complete disregard for Machines. He calls them mindless things, incapable of emotions and any evidence showing otherwise, he concludes that they're mimicking human behavior. One of the reveals that led to his Sanity Slippage is him finding out Machines and Androids were built using the same foundation, and that Androids were made to be the more disposable of the two.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Gold and Silver: Silver considers Team Rocket a weak nuisance. It's revealed in an event in HeartGold and SoulSilver that he's the son of Giovanni, a mafia don who lost his organization to a 10-year-old boy.
  • In Pokémon Platinum's Distortion World, Cyrus's Straw Nihilist attitude gives way to a screaming tantrum, revealing that he's an uncontrollable Mood-Swinger who hates his own passions most of all.
• Master Atris from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords is an arrogant, self-righteous Jedi with a raging hatred of the Sith that borders on fanaticism, viewing even the slightest hint of The Dark Side as proof that someone is irredeemably evil and must be destroyed. Naturally, having such an insane and zealous attitude towards life and the Force has caused Atris herself to unwittingly fall to the Dark Side and effectively become a Sith Lord in all but title. She refuses to admit this in a way that borders on delusion, having the audacity to call herself the last true Jedi even after causing the Order's near-destruction by using them as bait to lure out the Sith.
• Adrian from X-Men: Destiny is a Purifier-in-training and despises mutants. Turns out he is one, though he had no way of knowing until the events of the game.

Web Comics

• In Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures, Dan does not take it lightly when he is told he is an Incubus and spends some time in denial about it.
• Kevin & Kell: Throughout 2017 the Dewclaw family were being harassed by N.O.P.E., an anti-Mixed Species hate group. Lindesfarne, who suffered the brunt of the harassment due to the birth of her Mixed Species baby, had enough and tricked the N.O.P.E. members to spit on her car, which allows her to perform DNA tests. The result is that none of the members were pure-blooded as they thought to be. This has two effects: one member performs a Heel–Face Turn and turns in the members who committed felonies, and the info revealed ensures no one in the group will trust each other ever again, leaving them decimated.
• Rodney R Rodney: Most of the people who think Rodney is a crazy stalker don't really display the best respect for boundaries themselves. This includes sneaking uninvited onto his property to take pictures (and breaking one of his flower pots in the process), and literally stalking him to steal his hair. It Makes Sense in Context. The level of paranoia they display also makes them look worlds more unstable than Rodney actually is.
• Scandinavia and the World: Turns out the homophobic (by Nordic standards) Faroe Islands likes yaoi.
• Natani of TwoKinds is a complicated case. He was introduced as an extreme misogynist Kedrian assassin. We find out later that He's biologically female. The complication comes with the later revelation that Natani was injured on a mission and needed to have pieces of his brother's soul spliced into his to save him. This process partially overwrote Natani's personality with her brother's, including his attitudes towards females. Since we've seen very little of Natani's pre-splice personality, we don't know how much of his misogyny and self-loathing is his own and how much is his brother's influence. Nor do we know if Natani was trans previous to the spice.

Web Original

• Neurotically Yours: Germaine hates how women are treated as nothing but sexual objects by men and are pressured to dress up in more provocative clothing yet has no problem using her own sexuality to manipulate men or allowing herself to become a slut while still complaining about how men are pigs.

Western Animation

• Alfred J. Kwak: Dolf is a crow supremacist with a lot of Hitler parallels, and he's secretly half-blackbird, presumably a reference to how Hitler may have had Jewish ancestry.
• An episode of The Amazing World of Gumball has Gumball (who is a cat himself) being attacked by a kitten, after which he explains that's why he's not "a cat person".
• In an episode of American Dad!, Francine is Mistaken for Racist when she kicks Steve's new black love interest out of the house. When her kids confront her she reveals it's actually a dislike of left-handed people who she calls "the devil's minions". The kids dig into it and their grandmother tells them it's because Francine herself was left-handed as a young child, but the orphanage they adopted her from was run by nuns who beat her for it repeatedly (using the exact phrase she parroted), forcing her to become right-handed. In a slight subversion, she's so used to using her right hand, she's actually quite dangerous using her left hand in the present.
• In the episode "Plumber's Helpers" in Ben 10: Alien Force, Helen Wheels and Manny Armstrong attempt to kill any alien/human hybrid they find, believing all of them to be completely evil, despite being part alien themselves.
• Sporting an upbringing beneath an abusive father and a self-hating mother, Uncle Ruckus from The Boondocks is the darkest guy in the series, and yet he hates black people with a passion. He does his best to distance himself from being black, holding onto whatever European heritages he believes he has (though a genetic test in one episode reveals he's 102% African, with a 2% margin of error) and claims to have a skin condition called "re-vitiligo", the "opposite of what Michael Jackson had", which supposedly causes him to get darker.
• Family Guy:
  • Peter Griffin starts hating on illegal immigrants only to discover he, himself, was one, or at least the writers' idea of what defined being an illegal immigrant. And since he has convinced the brewery to fire illegal immigrants, he was Hoist by His Own Petard. Though unsure if this is a clear example since he had no idea he was one until he talked with his mother to get his birth certificate.
  • Brian is a liberal dog who disapproves of racism but instinctively barks at black men due to his upbringing (his father was a police dog).
• In an episode of Futurama where Bender and Amy had a robosexual relationship, Bender at one point was sent to a retreat where Preacherbot urged sinners to wrestle with human mannequins in order to symbolically beat out their sinful impulses. Naturally, this entailed the robots making out with the mannequins. Preacherbot was clearly aroused. Professor Farnsworth also opposed robosexual marriage because a robot stole his girlfriend. He later discovered he was repressing the fact that she was also a robot.
• Despite pissing off Jackass Genie Puck when he's actually trying to be nice to her, Demona of Gargoyles has her wish granted so she doesn't turn to stone during the day. To her horror, she is able to walk in daylight because, in a cruel twist, she turns into the one thing she despises above all else: a human. She makes use of this ability/curse to blend in with the humans during the day, and changes back into her true form at night.
• In Justice League, General Eiling deeply despises superheroes and metahumans. When his organisation Cadmus was disbanded, he decided to use a superhuman serum and turn himself into "The General" to fight the Justice League, facing the League's non-metahuman members. The public calls him out on his actions and Eiling personally hangs a lampshade on his actions and says the trope name almost word for word, though he claims he is still in the right.
• King of the Hill has an interesting case: Hank Hill, proud Texan that he is, is initially horrified to find out he was actually born in *gasp* NEW YORK! Not just New York, but the women's restroom of Yankee Stadium. "NEW YORK CITY?!?!"
• The Legend of Korra has this with Big Bad Amon wanting to get rid of all Benders while secretly being a waterbender.
• In My Life as a Teenage Robot, Jenny defeats a huge mecha dogmatically seeking to eliminate all weapons by pointing out that it, itself, is a weapon.
• In the Muppet Babies (2018) episode "Monster Next Door" Kermit, Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo, Animal, and Summer call Sweetums a monster who is mean as he has scraggly fur, lumpy bumpy noses, and hairy feet. Sweetums then calls them out by saying the traits they used to label him a monster they have themselves. Animal has scraggly fur, Gonzo has a big, giant nose, and Fozzie has hairy feet. Kermit and company learn from their error and apologize to Sweetums and become friends with him.
• The Owl House: Belos depises all witches due to his upbringing in the 17th century, viewing them as nothing but evilness to be purged, yet be harboring magic to destroy them, he has also become a witch in the process.
• The ReBoot episode "Number 7" is, among other things, about Enzo realizing that he is becoming just like Megabyte.
• In Recess, Spinelli despises "The Ashleys" (a group of Alpha Bitch-esque girls all named Ashley) yet becomes very defensive when it's pointed out that her own first name is Ashley since she despises the thought of being lumped in with them. As Spinelli puts it, she doesn't hate her first name (she's named after a relative who was a war hero), she just didn't want to be associated with the rest of the Ashleys since they all have the same name. Spinelli's fears later turned out to be justified when playground law dictated she had to join their group because of her first name. Thankfully her friends got her out when they convinced most of the other kids to pretend their names were now Ashley and swarm the Ashleys' clubhouse.
• Rocko's Modern Life: Ed Bighead both hates circus clowns and secretly wishes to be one, a situation that many children only realized years later was a giant, glowing metaphor for sexual fetishes.
• In Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, the greeter at the medieval fair professes nothing but contempt at the pirates who attend on the outside, but in private secretly wishes to be one.
• When Springfield tried to pass a law deporting all immigrants in The Simpsons, Moe was one of its most vocal supporters. He viciously blames them for everything that ever happened in town, including bear attacks, and rants about things that piss him off about them like not learning the local language. He was later spotted nervously taking the citizenship exam wearing a very thin disguise.
• Played with on South Park:
  • Cartman hates "Gingers" (People with red hair, freckles, and pale skin) and insists they have no souls. As revenge Stan, Kenny, and Kyle draw freckles on him and dye his hair red in the middle of the night. He then hangs out with the gingers and whips them into a genocidal frenzy against everyone else. At a massive rally, they're about to kill everyone who isn't a ginger (starting with the "Daywalker", Kyle) only to have Stan, Kyle, and Kenny reveal Cartman's not a real ginger. Then he just goes back to ripping on gingers (though while also calming down the riot he just started). And then in "201" it turns out Cartman's father was also Scott Tenorman's father, making Cartman half-ginger after all. It's also worth noting that Cartman is anti-Semitic due to Jewish stereotypes he perceives as true such as Jews being frugal and carrying gold. This is ironic considering Cartman had no issues taking advantage of Walmart deals and ultimately isn't at all above doing absolutely anything for money, from scamming people to eating kilos of gold to smuggle it out of an attraction. He converts to Judaism after a prank seriously backfires and Kyle reluctantly goes to save him.
  • Mr. Garrison is homophobic in the early seasons, and is in denial about his sexuality throughout Seasons 1-3 until he admits to himself that he is gay in the fourth season. When his sex change results in his then-lover Mister Slave breaking up with him, he goes back to being hateful to homosexual men, and when it turns out Mister Slave is going to marry Big Gay Al, Garrison becomes an angry opponent of gay marriage. Then there's a mini-arc where Mrs. Garrison thinks it's "wrong" to be with another woman, but enjoys it and claims to then be a lesbian... And then there's a reverse sex change and Garrison becomes a man again, and almost immediately uses a homosexual slur. There's a quote from one of the creators that goes something along the lines of, "Garrison just hates whatever he happens to be."
• In Spider-Man Unlimited, the High Evolutionary despises mankind, considering them the dregs of society in comparison to his race of Mutanimals, despite the fact that he himself is a human. Surprisingly, nobody brings this up, even Spider-Man who is known for calling out his enemies.
• Steven Universe: The Gem Empire is meant to embody perfection as decreed by the Great Diamond Authority, and for this reason gems who are deemed "off color" are ruthlessly oppressed. It turns out that White Diamond, head of the Diamond Authority, is herself an off color, though to her credit she seemed to be legitimately unaware of this and lightens up considerably once she realizes her imperfection.