Sometimes, an adaptation or a new continuity of an existing franchise keeps a character, and it keeps them on the same end of the moral scale instead of applying Adaptational Heroism or Adaptational Villainy. But wait. It's changed the reasons why they're doing evil or good.
Maybe the entire Evil Plan is changed – Evulz isn't robbing banks anymore, now he's hunting The Chosen One so he can rule the world. Or maybe it's only the reasons why he's committing evil and what he hopes to get out of it that are different while the methodology itself is the same – Evulz isn't robbing banks because he's trying to become the richest in the city anymore, now he's robbing banks to pay off his father's debts.
Likewise, maybe Bob is up against completely different obstacles on the Hero's Journey to the point where his end goals, though altruistic, are no longer the same. Maybe, instead of being a soldier at war, Bob is now The Drifter. Or maybe Bob still holds the same job and cause, but he has a more personal, self-serving motivation for doing his positive deeds or vice versa — maybe, instead of doing good because he lost his mother, Bob is trying to save his girlfriend's life or win her father's approval.
If the goal change is popular enough, it might become Ret-Canon going forward with newer adaptations.
Note: Although the character can be an Adaptational Jerkass or Adaptational Nice Guy, their basic moral alignment must remain unchanged from the source material to also qualify for this trope, otherwise their goal change is just Adaptational Heroism or Adaptational Villainy. No Real Life Examples, Please! — historical domain characters are not used, except for in adaptations of a previous fictional work which re-adapts the first one's take on the historical domain character.
A Sub-Trope of Adaptation Deviation.
This can occur as the direct result of an Adaptational Backstory Change or Adaptation Personality Change, although those aren't a necessity. Can also be caused by or otherwise related to an Adaptational Angst Upgrade, Adaptational Angst Downgrade, Adaptational Nationality, Adaptation Origin Connection, Adaptational Job Change, Adaptational Jerkass, or Adaptational Nice Guy. It might be used to invoke or invert Adaptational Sympathy in the case of villains.
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Villains
Anime & Manga
- Black Cat: In the manga, Mason Ordrosso is a member of Chronos and is apparently a sincere believer in the group's mission of using covert activity and assassinations to preserve world stability. In the anime, it turns out that he had always planned on betraying Chronos and wants to use Eve to reshape the world according to his liking.
- Final Fantasy: Unlimited: Chaos. In Final Fantasy, Chaos a.k.a. Garland was motivated by preserving his immortality through a Stable Time Loop and pettily killing the heroes for causing his first defeat. In Unlimited, Chaos a.k.a. Earl Tyrant is a Demiurge Archetype that wants to combine the multiverse into a single dystopia he can rule over.
- Fullmetal Alchemist (2003): Shou Tucker still painfully transmutes his daughter Nina and her dog into a chimera. But unlike his manga and Brotherhood counterparts, he didn't do it in a vain attempt to keep his State Alchemist job. Rather, he admits he fully expected to fall out of favor no matter what he did, so he thought he might as well create the chimera For Science! When he resurfaces later in the series, it turns out that he's been conducting more experiments with chimeras and human transmutation to try to bring Nina back in a twisted attempt at atonement.
- Godzilla: The Planet Eater: Compared to his live-action movie portrayals below, Ghidorah in this iteration is a more instinctual-seeming being from a physics-warping alternate dimension, who consumes entire planets when he's summoned into the observable universe by the Exif.
- The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords (2004): Shadow Link. In the original game, Shadow Link terrorized Hyrule only because he was a manifestation of Ganon's thoughts. In the manga, besides being completely sentient, Shadow Link's only reason for working for Vaati and later Ganon is so he can later usurp both of them and take Hyrule for himself.
- My-Otome: In the original My-HiME, Nagi is revealed to be The Dragon to the Obsidian Prince, his goal being to present the various HiME with challenges to help them train to use their powers, before setting them at each other's throats to claim the title of the Obsidian Prince's bride. In this Spiritual Successor series, however, Nagi is now the Big Bad himself, a scheming and bored nihilist who seeks to wipe out the human race altogether.
- Panyo Panyo Di Gi Charat: Piyoko's goal is usually to kidnap Dejiko to get ransom money from it. In this adaptation, she is instead working under the Deji-Devil to make Planet Di Gi Charat a miserable place.
- Sailor Moon: Due to the nature of both the original anime and the manga it was adapting, many of the characters had different reasons for their actions:
- The Queen Beryl of the manga was driven by her unrequitted love for Prince Endmiyon and turned evil by Queen Metallia. The anime version held no such love for Endmyion and was seemingly just naturally evil.
- The Wiseman/Death Phantom of the manga was once a human being who was banished to the planet Nemesis for using his darkness powers to cause chaos and convinced those who were sent there to rebel. In the anime, he just wanted to spread darkness across the Earth.
- King Endymion is an ally to the present day Sailors and Mamoru, but his actions are completely different — in the manga, he makes Mamoru stronger by teaching him the Tuxedo La Smoking Bomber attack; in the anime, he puts him through a Secret Test of Character that he interprets the wrong way.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: In the manga, Gozaburo Kaiba is little more than a greedy corporate executive who got beat out by his adopted son Seto for head of Kaiba Corp. In the anime, he's an Omnicidal Maniac who planned to use his company's resources to launch nuclear missiles across the globe, killing 97% or all life on the planet while he rules over the survivors from the Virtual World.
Comic Books
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): In the original show, King Sombra was simply a power-hungry madman who sought to expand his rule across Equestria and enslave its population. In the comics, King Sombra is actually a The Antichrist for the Umbrum, a race of shadowmonsters so terrible even the ruthlessly-despotic Chrysalis fears them. His enslavement of the Crystal Empire's denizens was done in service of freeing them, and he doesn't seem to have aspirations of expanding his rule until Celestia and Luna try to stop his evil and he retaliates. What's more, Sombra truly doesn't want to free the Umbrum but feels that he has no choice but to follow the path laid out for him.
- Optimus Prime: The Fallen a.k.a. Megatronus, instead of being the former overseer of entropy who became too happy with his job and turned to Unicron with a plan to set the latter loose onto the universe; is a vicious historic conqueror who unified prehistoric Cybertron by force and later tried to usurp his fellow Primes, but was himself an unwitting pawn to a time-traveling Shockwave the entire time.
- Sonic the Comic: Whereas Chaos in the Sonic Adventure version was only lashing out at the world due to the Knuckles Tribe killing the Chao it protected, Chaos in this version is a genocidal monster that needs to be put down for good.
Fan Works
- Abraxas (MonsterVerse):
- The fic's expansion on Ghidorah's backstory and characterization reverts them to their original pre-MonsterVerse roots in their first Showa outing as a serial planet destroyer whose sole goal is sadistically killing all life they encounter across the cosmos. Reshaping the planets they attack in their own image with global storms is simply a means to that end — this actually fits with an alternative character interpretation that's briefly suggested in the Godzilla: King of the Monsters official licensed novelization.
- Abraxas: The Clash of Silver: The canon version of Mechagodzilla was possessed by Ghidorah's remnant consciousness (and was implied even then to be an Almighty Idiot in the official novelization), and it appeared to desire to resume Ghidorah's age-old enmity with Godzilla, while the novelization suggests it would afterwards go on to resume Ghidorah's goals of controlling the other Titans and ravaging the world. In this fic's version, Mechagodzilla is instead possessed by a fully sentient consciousness derived from a pair of Ghidorah's Zmeyevich children, who aim to hasten Ghidorah's resurrection via regrowing Ghidorah's body and to lay waste to the surface world.
- Coeur Al'Aran: (RWBY):
- RWBY canon wrote Salem as a Hidden Agenda Villain for some time before Volume 8 of the show provided a possible agenda in the form of Salem desiring to end her immortal life by summoning the Brother Gods to destroy Remnant and her. Coeur fics written after Volume 8 tend to dismiss that explanation and instead continue to portray Salem's goals after destroying the kingdoms to be rebuilding human civilization in her own malignant, despotic image with the handful of survivors.
- A couple of Coeur's works have portrayed Ozpin becoming a ruthless antagonist, and whilst it almost always goes back to his immortal burden from canon being deconstructed to show the morality-eroding effects that such would have, Ozpin's nastier plans and end-goals differ. In White Sheep and Null, Ozpin sincerely wants to save the world at large from Salem using amoral extremes, and when he's offered the chance to finally be relieved of his immortality, he happily accepts. In Relic of the Future, Ozpin for almost the entirety of the story appears to be the same as the former two portrayals, but then he reveals in his final scene that his personality has been so warped by thousands of years that he's trying to preserve his own life for longer by destroying Remnant's only chance of permanently defeating Salem because he feels entitled to a better reward than going back to obliviousness in the afterlife.
- The Unseen Hunt: Cinder Fall. Whereas her canon counterpart is a megalomaniac in Salem's service who covets absorbing the Maidens' magics for herself and serves Salem's goals of collecting the Relics and destroying the kingdoms to those ends, this version of Cinder is an extradimensional Elder Grimm who wants to breach the veil between Earth and the Grimm world so that she and her mate Leviathan can establish a territory for themselves on Earth, flooding Vale and a good chunk of the U.S. coastline in the process and making what humans survive the apocalypse their playthings.
- White Sheep: Whereas RWBY canon portrays the Creatures of Grimm as soulless entities which exist solely to attack and kill any and all human life they detect, in White Sheep, that's actually a humanity-wide misconception among the hunters and the kingdoms at large. In truth, the majority of Grimm are fairly sentient depending on the species, and in their natural state they don't really care much for harming humans – they're only homicidally aggressive when their instincts are overwhelmed by exposure to copious amounts of negative emotion, or when defending their territories. The only reason why the Grimm are universally aggressive to the point of hindering humanity's habitation of Remnant outside the kingdoms is that Salem's influence has been driving the Grimm to serve her war against civilization for millennia.
- In Dragon Ball Z, Dr Gero wants revenge on Goku because he wiped out the Red Ribbon army. Dragon Ball Z Abridged keeps this intact, but it adds the extra detail that his son Gevo was one of the soldiers stationed at Red Ribbon HQ and was killed when Goku fired a Kamehameha into the barracks he was living in.
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: Lord Voldemort, ultimately. He still wants to kill Harry, but more to derail a prophecy that Harry will destroy the world (which Voldemort can't rule if there's nothing left and nobody alive to keep him occupied) than because he believes there is any chance of Harry toppling him; what with how this version of Voldemort sent one of his Horcruxes into space to ensure he can't ever be killed.
- I Ain't a Doll, This Ain't a Dollhouse: Dio Brando's goals in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure have evolved from wanting to steal the Joestar fortune, to taking over the world after becoming a vampire in Phantom Blood, to creating a "heaven" on Earth where everyone knew their future, the latter taken up by his Dragon Ascendant Enrico Pucci in Stone Ocean; and conquering the original timeline in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of Heaven. In the fic, his primary goal is to make his former fiancé Johanna Joestar his wife, to the extent of the Big Bad DIO Over Heaven changing history to keep Johanna from learning Hamon and make it easier to capture her.
- I Rewrote RWBY Volume 8: The canon Volume 8 tried to rationalize Hazel's allegiance to Salem and him turning his revenge on Ozpin instead of her as being the result of Salem breaking Hazel's will by showing him the futility of trying to kill her, before convincing Hazel that she'll create a new world order without huntsmen and huntresses (the very profession which Hazel's sister died serving in). This rewrite does away with the canon explanation – instead, Hazel serves Salem and puts up with all her crimes because she (falsely) promised him that she'd use the Relic of Creation to resurrect his sister, and Hazel is shocked and horrified when seeing Salem's genocidal actions against Atlas forces him to confront the evil of the cause he's signed his life away to.
- Property Of: In this fic, the Decepticons agreed to a centuries-long ceasefire with the Autobots in the name of restoring Cybertron before their war could destroy it. However, this is purely in the name of Pragmatic Villainy, as the 'Cons figured out that, if they pretended like they were at peace with the Autobots, then they could get away with far more immoral activities because the 'Bots would be too afraid of restarting the war. This is how the Decepticons were able to start the Human Pet trade and manage to hide that humans were sentient, or that the 'Cons were basically tearing Earth apart to find Megatron and the AllSpark.
- Purple Days (A Song of Ice and Fire): In the books, the White Walkers/Others' motives behind their Zombie Apocalypse and spreading Endless Winter remain mysterious as of this writing, and in the TV series, their motives are stated in the final season to be because their transhuman leader wants to erase all traces of humanity's world and bring an endless night. In this fic, the White Walkers are the artificial vessels of the Red Comet, which is actually an Eldritch Abomination that uses the Walkers to create a Glacial Apocalypse and wipe out all near-sentient life on the planet every time a sufficiently sapient species arises.
- Rainbooms and Royalty: Sombra's motivation in the show is just conquest and enslavement. Here, he wants to become an Alicorn.
- To Serve In Hell (My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic): Tirek in the show is power-hungry and motivated by a need for his father's approval. Here, he is possessed by a Horror Hunger that drives him to eat magic. The more he eats, the hungrier he gets.
- In Sword Art Online Abridged, Kayaba still traps everyone in his virtual reality game Sword Art Online with the warning that they will die for real if they run out of health. But instead of doing it to nurture any kind of god complex, this version of Kayaba was an overworked and sleep-deprived programmer who mistakenly put in the death-inducing code. Unfortunately for everyone in the game, Kayaba was just the sort of Dirty Coward who would make such a tremendous lapse of judgement as holding everyone hostage instead of just turning off the servers when he realized people were dying.
Film – Animated
- Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie: In the books, Professor Poopypants became sick of everyone making fun of his awkward name forced everyone to change their names as a part of his scheme to Take Over the World and later attempted to destroy the galaxy in his final appearance; whereas in this movie, Professor Poopypants plans to rid the world of laughter, though that's also because he's tired of people laughing at his name.
- Ladybug & Cat Noir: The Movie: Whereas the Miraculous Ladybug incarnation of Hawk Moth seeks to steal the Miraculous of Destruction and Creation in order to cure his terminally-ill wife Emilie, in the movie version, Emilie is long dead and Hawk Moth seeks the jewels in order to bring her back to life.
- Lightyear: Zurg is very different from his usual depictions as an archetypal Evil Overlord and would-be Galactic Conqueror. This movie's version of Zurg is an alternate future version of Buzz from a timeline where Buzz never gave up on his mission to get the stranded Space Rangers home. Although somewhat anti-villainous and at first presenting himself amicably, Zurg-Buzz's mind and sanity have been completely consumed by his mission – even if it means changing the past in such a way that it will erase the stranded Space Rangers' living descendants, setting Zurg up as the Big Bad.
- Van Helsing: The London Assignment: Whereas the original version of Mr. Hyde had no plans or aims beyond indulging short-term violent impulses in everyday life without his good half's fear of consequences, this version of Hyde is co-operating with his Dr. Jekyll half in a long-term, calculated plot to steal the life force from murdered prostitutes and use them to keep Queen Victoria young and brainwashed as their eternal bride.
Film – Live-Action
- Sieben Zwerge Der Wald Ist Nicht Genug: Rumpelstiltskin. Originally just wanting the baby for unspecified reasons in the original fairy tale, in this version he wants to have the baby so he can eat it.
- Aladdin (2019): In the original Aladdin, Jafar wanted to obtain the lamp and usurp the Sultan with it purely for the sake of having more power than he already did. In this live-action remake, while Jafar is still after power, his main goal is trying to get Agrabah to declare war on their neighbouring kingdom of Shirabad (where Jasmine's late mother was from), just to take revenge on them for imprisoning him for five years when he was an impoverished thief growing up. It gets to the point that, when Jafar becomes a genie thanks to his third wish (though unintentionally this time), the first thing he attempts to do with his phenomenal cosmic powers is not to take over the cosmos like he did in the original, but to try destroying Shirabad instead.
- The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008): In the original movie, Klaatu and Gort are a Benevolent Alien Invasion who come to Earth to extend humanity an offer to join an inter-galactic coalition in peace due to mankind's technological advances, or face destruction due to the potential threat mankind poses to other worlds. In the remake, Klaatu is instead on Earth to decide whether or not humanity should be euthanized to preserve their planet's biodiversity, which the coalition he represents values far more than any single civilization due to the rarity of complex life in the universe, with the military's "performance" against a hostile Gort making it abundantly clear that the aliens don't view humanity as a threat to themselves.
- Dracula adaptations:
- In Bram Stoker's Dracula and many other Dracula adaptations, the titular Count pursues Mina Harker neé Murray because he's in love with her. In the original book, Dracula is a monster who may not even have the capacity to love, and the reason he bites Mina is to create a psychic link to spy on the heroes.
- Van Helsing: Dracula in this version has no intention of moving to London so that he can sate his bloodlust on a new populace after tiring of his homeland – instead, this version of Dracula seeks to bring his and his brides' thousands upon thousands of vampiric stillbirths to life at the expense of all humanity.
- Fright Night (2011): Whereas the original movie's version of Jerry the vampire only intended to kill as many people as he needed to feed on to survive, specifically targeting those whom society would not miss, and only went after the heroes in order to protect himself; the remake's Jerry is much more greedy, bloodthirsty and indiscriminate. He's not out solely for food, but also to rebuild his species' ranks by turning dozens of his victims into a new vampire tribe, and it's implied he would've ultimately wiped out the entire neighborhood via killing or turning everyone who wasn't already in the process of moving out.
- Godzilla: King Ghidorah, the mass destructive and often alien three-headed dragon. His original debut portrays him as a Planet Destroyer who single-handedly wipes every planet he descends on clean of all life seemingly under his own power; before later Showa movie appearances and the post-reboot Heisei continuity portrayed him as the Bioweapon Beast or Psycho for Hire to much more human-like villains. In the MonsterVerse, King Ghidorah is a cosmic invasive species whose mere presence on Earth causes massive storms and harms the ecosphere, and he seeks to take control of the other kaiju on Earth and to cause global chaos and mass destruction, ostensibly so he can xenoform the planet in his own image.
- Goldfinger: In the book, Goldfinger plans to steal the gold in Fort Knox. As this would be implausible due to the weight, the film changes Goldfinger's goals to detonating a dirty bomb inside the vault, making the gold radioactive and therefore useless, making his own gold more valuable.
- Halloween:
- In the original movie and the Halloween (2018) timeline, the voiceless serial killer Michael Myers' motives for committing his sadistic murders around the titular holiday ever since he murdered his sister at the age of six are enigmatic and random, and he doesn't have any explicit interest in Laurie Strode specifically – Word of God on the original movie implies Michael's motives for killing his sister were sexual, and Dr. Loomis and other characters conclude that Michael's mentality is purely and simply evil incarnate. In Halloween II and both the sequel timelines that spawned from it, Michael remains fixated on hunting Laurie and her descendants because Laurie is his long-lost other sister – The Curse of Michael Myers at the end of the first of the II timelines also states that Michael is afflicted by a supernatural curse which compels him to murder.
- In the Rob Zombie Continuity Reboot, Michael was driven by a highly abusive and dysfunctional home life to murder his abusive sister and become the masked serial killer he is in later years, and he remains obsessed with hunting down and killing Laurie, who is again his long-lost other sister here. The sequel in this continuity also implies that there's a supernatural element to Michael's homicidal pursuit of Laurie, as both of them hallucinate their long-dead mother as a malevolent entity urging Michael onward.
- The Lord of the Rings: In the books, Saruman sells out to Sauron with the intent of claiming the One Ring for himself and usurping Sauron at the end of the war – in this adaptation, Saruman shows no signs of intending to betray Sauron, and he hints that he's truly given up on defeating Sauron.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- In most of the previous iterations, Thanos' campaign to cause universe-wide death and destruction is motivated by trying (in vain) to appease Lady Death – but in the MCU, Thanos specifically wants to genocide precisely 50% of all life across the universe, in a delusional attempt to curb resource-depleting overpopulation like that which he blames his own people's destruction on, as explained in Avengers: Infinity War. Although once a time-traveling younger Thanos in Endgame finds out that all his work will be reversed in the future by the "ungrateful" surviving half resurrecting everyone, he, in a petty rage, resolves to instead annihilate the entire physical universe and make a new, "grateful" universe in his own image.
- Subverted by Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron. His original comic book portrayal wanted to kill all humans and replace them with machines. This version, though very much intending to inflict a global extinction event, is initially doing so because he wants to force humanity to evolve in extreme conditions for the sake of its own long-term safety, engineering a Colony Drop with a levitating city as the impactor to that end. After Ultron loses the Vision and the Maximoff twins desert him in horror, however, he seems to give up on humanity entirely and decides to just wipe the Earth clean until his metal bodies are the only thing left alive, coming more in-line with his comic book portrayal's goals.
- Scooby-Doo: Monsters Unleashed: In the movie's backstory, Mystery Inc. still solved a Pterodactyl Ghost case, but the motives of the culprit behind the mask and the location terrorized are completely different from The Scooby-Doo Show. In the original version, Johnny was donning the Pterodactyl Ghost disguise to cover up a music-pirating operation in remote canyons. In the movie version, Dr. Jonathan Jacobo was using the disguise in the city to commit bank robberies so he could fund his early experiments to create real monsters.
- Shin Ultraman: In the original series, alien Mefilas simply sought to conquer the Earth by attempting to get a child's permission to do so. In this film, Mefilas's general goal of world domination with humanity's consent is expanded upon, with his true mission being to use the human race as test subjects to create an entire race of kaiju that he could trade for his personal profit.
- Spider-Man 2: The general explanation in the comics for why Dr. Otto Octavius became the evil Dr. Octopus is that brain damage from the lab accident that fused Otto's four mechanical tentacles to his central nervous system, which might or might not have actually been his brain mutating, altering his personality. In this version, Octavius turns evil less as a direct result of brain damage, and more due to the now-unfiltered artificial intelligence in his tentacles taking advantage of his Despair Event Horizon, after he lost everything including his wife during the accident; compelling him to re-enact the original experiment which caused his transformation per the tentacles' programming. This version of Doc Ock is solely interested in bank robbery as a means to re-find the resources needed to restore his experiment.
- Transformers Film Series:
- The Decepticons' original portrayal in the original G1 cartoon held control over the Transformer home planet Cybertron, and they were primarily motivated by harvesting and amassing new energy sources for themselves and their empire regardless of who got hurt. This version changed the Decepticons' motives so that Cybertron was dead and abandoned in the backstory, and the Cons sought to rebuild their broken and homeless race on their terms — either by forcibly colonizing Earth, or by reviving Cybertron, or both depending on the movie. The Transformers Aligned Universe also used this new backstory and motive change.
- The new reboot continuity established by Bumblebee, though drawing on the original movie series' continuity a good deal, reverted the Decepticons' backstory and motives to be more in line with their G1 iteration, except that they're interested in Earth less for resources and more because they seek to annihilate any trace of the Autobots that have fled their homeworld.
- Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen: The Bayverse version of the Fallen has no apparent relation to Unicron nor displays any intentions of sacrificing Cybertronians to loose him onto the universe. Instead, this version seeks nothing less than to use a Star Harvester to destroy Earth's sun, killing all life on the planet out of pure hatred and to spite his brothers for thwarting the prehistoric first attempt, with acquiring a vast Energon supply from the destroyed sun to repopulate the Decepticons being an added bonus.
Literature
- Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire – The Official Movie Novelization: The Skar King's motivations for trying to defeat Godzilla and Kong, invade the Earth's surface and use Shimo to spread a new biosphere-decimating Ice Age are even nastier in this version than in the movie version. Whereas the movie makes the Skar King out to be The Caligula and a despotic warlord who ultimately wants to control and enslave everything, the novelization instead portrays him as an Omnicidal Maniac who seeks to extinguish all life out of spite and vindictiveness, deceiving his lieutenants and slaves that they will get to rule the surface world with him when he has no intention of upholding that promise.
- Transformers: Exiles: In the backstory, the Fallen a.k.a. Megatronus Prime has no relation to Unicron. He pressured a reluctant Solus Prime to build the Requiem Blaster for him and was over-attached to its immense power, which unnerved and horrified half of the other original Primes.
- The vast majority of War of the Worlds adaptations make it clear that the hostile invading Martians/aliens want to kill all humans, whereas the source material implied the invaders would've actually been content with a Vichy Earth at the end. Another variation in the invaders' plans which disappears and reappears between adaptations is whether or not they're using alien red weed to xenoform Earth like they were in the source material.
Live-Action TV
- Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024): Although he displayed no such plans in the original cartoon, Zhao in the live-action series plans on supplanting Ozai as the Fire Lord after his siege on the North.
- Power Rangers often adapts Super Sentai characters, but usually with some changes to their goals and motivations:
- In Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, Bandora sold her soul to Great Satan to get revenge for her son's death, in the present day, many of her plans revolve around her hatred of children. In Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Rita Repulsa didn't have any other goals beyond world domination and defeating the Power Rangers.
- In Ninja Sentai Kakuranger, Young Noble Junior/Gashadokuro had the main goals of building an army of Yokai and freeing his father, Daimaou. His Power Rangers equivalent, Rito Revolto, largely served Rita and Lord Zedd in accomplishing their plans.
- In Samurai Sentai Shinkenger, Akumaro Sujigarano's end goal was to split the world in half in order to open a gate to Hell (which is separate from the Sanzu River). Serrator, his Power Rangers Samurai equivalent, instead wanted to merge the Earth and Netherworld together so he could rule them both.
- The Sandman (2022): John Dee believes that humans are fundamentally selfish and deceptive, and seeks to reshape the world by using the power of the Ruby to eliminate deceit and force everyone into Brutal Honesty. In the source material, John Dee had no coherent ideology and just wanted the power of the Ruby so he could mess with other people for his own amusement.
Theatre
- The Audrey Jr. in 1960's The Little Shop of Horrors simply wants to survive, albeit it does so by hypnotizing and eating people. The Audrey II in the musical and its subsequent 1986 film adaptation wants to do all that and also breed and take over the entire world. This is part of an Adaptational Species Change since Audrey Jr. was the result of an experiment gone wrong while Audrey II is actually an alien.
Video Games
- GoldenEye (2010): In the original film and the 1997 videogame, Trevelyan is a Lienz Cossack whose parents were betrayed by the British Government and handed over to the Russians, and wants revenge for his parents' deaths. In this videogame remake, his motives have become a disillusionment with global capitalism and the British government's role in it following their poor handling of the 2007 financial crisis.
- Kingdom Hearts: Maleficent and the Disney Villains (Jafar, Ursula, Captain Hook, Oogie Boogie and Hades) are based on their animated incarnations, but in the games' canon, they have a goal different from all of their movie portrayals: they command the Heartless to search for the Keyhole of their respective worlds in a bid to control the Universe, while also antagonising their respective nemeses.
- Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon: In the original games, Lusamine just wanted to get the Ultra Beasts to herself for their power and rarity. In these games, however, Lusamine wants them so that she can see her missing husband again.
- Spider-Man (Insomniac):
- Spider-Man (PS4):
- Whereas the comic book version of Mr. Negative was a malevolent personality driven by profit, power and revenge on Spider-Man, this version is apologetically using crime as a means to get revenge on Norman Osborn for the latter's role in the deaths of his parents, and he has no interest in spiting Spider-Man.
- Most comic-book versions of the Rhino, after getting permanently fused into their rhino suit, have no intention of changing that — this version works with the Sinister Six because he wants to be un-fused from his suit for his services.
- The general explanation in the comics is brain damage from the lab accident which fused Otto Octavius' four mechanical tentacles to his central nervous system, which might or might not have actually been his brain mutating, altered his personality to cause his turn to evil. In this version, Dr. Octavius turns to crime out of a desire for revenge on his former business partner turned bitter rival Norman Osborn, for ruining his and many others' lives and for being far more successful than Otto despite the latter's lifetime of more altruistic work. The game makes a point that Otto's rage is being exacerbated by the mechanical tentacles' interface scrambling his brain and causing potentially permanent alterations, but ultimately, it's only bringing out Otto's worst impulses rather than forcing him to be someone he truly isn't. The tentacles themselves aren't fused to Otto's spine in this version, and instead of building them as lab apparatus as in most previous versions, Otto developed them as a means to bypass a neuro-degenerative disease that threatens to render his entire organic body immobile – as a result, Otto is highly possessive of the tentacles and terrified of losing them.
- Spider-Man: Miles Morales: Whereas the comic book version of Simon Krieger had a rivalry with Stark Industries and was hell-bent on taking them over using criminal means, this game's Simon Krieger instead seeks to sell his Nuform energy to run Harlem at all costs, not caring about and suppressing the evidence that Nuform has deadly side-effects on human life.
- Marvel's Spider-Man 2: Most iterations of Venom that act villainously have personal villainous goals, specifically antagonizing Spider-Man/Peter Parker and his loved ones and ruining his life out of revenge for him rejecting the Venom Symbiote. This version of Venom,, being a Composite Character with the comic books' Knull, seeks to assimilate the entire Earth and all life on it, and after Parker rejects it, it still wants to rejoin with him and repeatedly tries to convince him We Can Rule Together instead of seeking to spite him.
- Spider-Man (PS4):
- Transformers Forged To Fight: The Fallen betrayed his fellow Primes in the ancient past out of a lust for power rather than omnicidal mania, and his plan in this iteration is to merge his spark with that of the dormant Necrotitan in an effort to claim the latter's power for himself.
Web Animation
- Transformers: Prime Wars Trilogy: The Fallen, a comparatively more tragic character than most of his other incarnations, has no intention of freeing Unicron nor destroying the universe at large. Instead, he seeks to reunite with his slain lover Solus Prime at any cost after he accidentally murdered her long ago. Whilst he orchestrates many disasters from behind the scenes, manipulates other Transformers into becoming his acolytes, and shares his original incarnation's penchant for seeking to sacrifice other Transformers, this version of the Fallen does so not to set Unicron loose on the universe, but to resurrect Solus, trying to use his old Requiem Blaster to drain a genocidally-high number of Transformers' sparks to that end.
Web Original
- In the TFWiki.net Ask Vector Prime series, one post states that the Fallen betrayed the other original Primes out of jealousy and sought to take Prima's Star Saber for himself, compared to how the original comic version is stated to have acted out of love for chaos and sought to free Unicron.
Western Animation
- Batman: The Animated Series: Mr. Freeze was originally portrayed in the Batman media throughout the mid-20th century as nothing more than a money-grubbing crook despite his condition and cryogenic weapons. The Animated Series instead portrayed Mr. Freeze as a Tragic Villain who turned to crime as a means to initially avenge, then save, his terminally-ill wife who's being kept alive in cryostasis. The new take on Mr. Freeze was so well-received and so iconic that it permanently became the most common motivation for subsequent Mr. Freeze adaptations moving forward.
- Castlevania (2017): Whereas the video-game version of Carmilla was constantly portrayed as a slavishly devoted servant of Dracula, the TV version of Carmilla is very much the Starscream to him, seeking to underplay and usurp him; partly out of contempt for his insanity, mostly out of insatiable lust of power, and partly because he's a man which she cannot abide calling her equal or superior.
- The Spectacular Spider-Man: The showrunners intentionally redesigned several villains in Spider-Man's rogues gallery to set the show apart from some of its predecessors. For example, in the original comics, Eddie Brock was another employee at the Bugle who was jealous of Peter Parker for always getting better stories/photos (and always through honest means, unlike Brock). The symbiote feeds off of this jealousy and uses it to control Eddie as Venom. Here, Eddie Brock and Peter Parker start off the series as close friends, even referring to each other as "bro". Eddie is still jealous of Peter, but here it's due to Peter having had a much happier childhood than Eddie, who also lost his parents at a young age and spent his childhood as an Unadoptable Orphan before aging out of the foster system. Over the course of the series, this jealousy turns to hatred for Peter and Spider-Man. The symbiote targets his hatred and feeds off of it, turning Eddie into the series' incarnation of Venom.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012): In the original cartoon, Oroku Saki, a.k.a. the Shredder, had the goal of completely wiping out the Hamato clan, specifically its leader (and his nemesis) Hamato Yoshi, a.k.a. Master Splinter. In this incarnation, not only does the Shredder hate Hamato Yoshi far worse than in any previous adaptation, but his reasons for wanting Splinter dead are somewhat understandable: the Shredder blames him for the death of Tang Shen (despite the fact that she died via Heroic Sacrifice trying to protect Yoshi from him), and he wants to destroy Splinter along with everyone and everything he loves in revenge.
- Transformers:
- Transformers: Animated:
- Animated portrays the Decepticon faction neither as Cybertron's despotic current rulers nor as extremists seeking to resurrect a dead Cybertron, but as exiles from an Autobot-controlled and functional Cybertron who've been wandering outer space for eons, and their prime goal under Megatron is to wrest control of Cybertron from the Autobots by force.
- Most incarnations of the Decepticon Soundwave are Megatron's loyal right-hand, devoted to the Decepticon cause. The Animated version is instead a Transformer created from a manmade toy who hasn't had anything to do with the Decepticon cause since his debut, instead focused on creating an A.I. uprising against humanity amongst manmade technology in both his appearances.
- Dirt Boss's original incarnation in Transformers: Cybertron sought to win races, whereas his incarnation in this series aims to build a Constructicon power base in Detroit by stealing the city's oil supplies so he can hold the monopoly on them.
- The Transformers: Prime incarnation of Unicron, although still a planet-shattering Omnicidal Maniac who embodies elemental chaos, lacks the physical Horror Hunger of other incarnations which drives them to literally eat planets. Instead, Unicron at first seeks to break free of his imprisonment as Earth's core, dismissing the planet's native life who'll be eradicated as collateral of the Earth-Shattering Kaboom as parasites, and he seeks to renew his cosmic battle with his twin Primus and then plunge the universe into an Age of Chaos.
- Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015): Megatronus has a distinct plan from the Fallen's other incarnations. Vindictive over his ancient downfall, he manipulates Steeljaw and his Decepticon pack on Earth into freeing him from the alternate dimension where he's trapped, so that he can spitefully obliterate both Earth and Cybertron via summoning the AllSpark from Cybertron's core and combining it with remnants of Unicron's Anti-Spark from Earth's core.
- Transformers: Animated:
- What If…? (2021): In the backstory of "What If... Ultron Won?"; Ultron,, instead of devastating the Earth by levitating Sokovia into the upper atmosphere and engineering a Colony Drop, does so by ripping the nuclear codes out of a data center and launching every nuke on Earth. The opening also seems to hint that this version of Ultron decided from the get-go to exterminate all of humanity completely, instead of initially wanting to force-evolve us in a post-mass extinction environment, and he wanted to wipe out all life as a means to achieve absolute peace.
- Young Justice (2010): Whereas the comic Ma'alefa'ak is a raging psychopath who committed genocide against the Martians out of a petty sense of ostracism and carries a murderous grudge against his own brother, this version of Ma'alefa'ak is a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist member of the severely-downtrodden White Martian caste who became a hateful revolutionary.
Heroes
Anime & Manga
- My-Otome:
- In Hime, Natsuki Kuga's objective was to learn who at District One had ordered her mother's death and why. In Otome, as Natsuki Kruger, she is the administrator of the Otome school of Garderobe and seeks to keep foolish leaders from using Otome carelessly in battle as they are supposed to be weapons of last resort.
- In Hime, Nao Yuuki was a morally ambivalent character whose goal was to punish the perverts in the nearby town and turned against the other HiME when she was framed for attacking Sister Yukariko. In Otome, Nao is a morally ambivalent character who only joined the Otome to, as she put it, find a rich husband. However, despite being under Duke Nagi's kingdom and authority, she sides with the other Otome to put a stop to his schemes.
- Hime's Mai Tokiha served as a surrogate mother to her sickly brother Takumi and to Mikoto — her goals, aside from protecting them and preventing the HiME Festival, are to choose between Reito or Yuuichi, pass her subjects, and earn enough money for Takumi's badly needed transplant. Otome's Mai Tokiha was an Otome who was taking a walk to mull over whether to become the Otome to a powerful nation or to accept a marriage proposal — instead, she fell into a dimensional gap where she was captured by Mikoto and made to cook for her. She long ago gave up trying to escape and her only goals seem to be to cook for Mikoto and to help her fellow Otome in a time of war.
- Panyo Panyo Di Gi Charat: Dejiko's goal in most incarnations is to become a famous idol with loads of fans. However, due to her nicer portrayal in this adaptation, she is instead trying to make everyone happy.
Fan Works
- Coeur Al'Aran:
- The Unseen Hunt: Due to the Contextual Reassignment AU; Ozpin isn't an immortal locked in a forever war against Salem for the fate of Remnant after he agreed to the God of Light's request that he be resurrected to prepare humanity for the Gods' judgment, nor is he a headmaster who takes on huntsman and huntress students that apply to his school. Instead, Ozpin is a mortal man who is seeking to defend the Earth against interdimensional Grimm incursions, and hopefully eventually find a way to permanently cut the Grimm world off from Earth in the long term; in the meantime, Ozpin runs a safe refuge for people like him who incidentally awaken, disguised as a bar.
- White Sheep: Jaune, who in this AU is Salem's son, still runs away and forges his way into Beacon's student body, but instead of solely intending to become a huntsman, this version of Jaune also seeks to create a truce between the human race and the Grimm from within humanity, even if he initially isn't sure how. His Beacon teammates Weiss, Ruby, and Pyrrha, and their sister team consisting of Yang, Ren, Nora, and Blake, eventually come to share this goal once his true nature comes out after the attack on Beacon, as do several elder huntsmen and huntresses including Professor Oobleck after the world finds out the truth about both Jaune and his family.
- The Morrigan (Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury):
- Nika Nanaura in the show is an ingenue and idealist who wants to unite Earth and Space through peaceful collaboration to the benefit of all. In this fic, Nika Took a Level in Cynic, and now she believes her original goal is impossible as long as the brutally oppressive Benerit Group and Space Assembly League exist. As she tells Miorine, her goal is no longer to get a seat at the table: she wants to flip the whole thing.
- In the show, Felsi Rollo doesn't have any real awareness of the oppression of Earth, and she's a bully with a heart of gold and a dedicated mobile suit pilot and she wants to protect her housemates at Jeturk House. In the fic, Felsi has taken some time to read up on political theory and is a Rich Kid Turned Social Activist who despises Jeturk and everything they represent, but moreso is the one who takes the initiative in defecting to the Earthian freedom fighters the first chance she gets while her actually Earthian girlfriend is still hesitant.
Film – Animated
- "Beauty and the Beast (1991)'': The original fairy tale had the Beast's curse broken when Beauty agreed to marry him after confessing her love. The Disney adaptation adds the stipulation that the Beast has to learn to love another for the curse to be broken, which he does with Belle as part of his character arc.
Film – Live-Action
- Halloween (2018): Laurie Strode in this movie's sequel timeline shares her Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later timeline counterpart's motherhood and perpetual fear of being hunted by Michael again, but unlike H20 Laurie who has led an ordinary life hoping for the best after the first movie, this version of Laurie channeled her fear of Michael returning into becoming a Crazy-Prepared, hyper-survivalist Action Girl for decades, and she trained her daughter in the same until child protective services took her away.
- I Am Legend: Robert Neville, unlike his book counterpart who was only interested in staying alive and killing as many vampires as possible After the End, in this version is a military scientist who is desperate to cure the infected population, and it's clear that hope for finding a cure is pretty much the only thing keeping him going.
- The Lost World: Jurassic Park: Ian Malcolm and his expedition set out to Isla Sorna to rescue his girlfriend Sarah Harding, unlike in the original book where it was to rescue Richard Levine, a former colleague of Malcolm's who he doesn't appear to be quite as close to. Furthermore, the movie heroes' additional objective of sabotaging the InGen team's efforts to plunder the island's dinosaur population for a new park — which is the main motivator of most of Malcolm's teammates — was absent from the book.
- MonsterVerse: Ishirō Serizawa in Godzilla (2014) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) differs from the original Dr. Daisuke Serizawa in Godzilla (1954), in that Daisuke built a new bomb to destroy Godzilla in order to save humanity; whereas Ishirō is a naturalist who advocates for keeping Godzilla alive due to the latter's Adaptational Heroism, ultimately detonating a bomb to heal Godzilla.
- Sleepy Hollow (1999): In this version, protagonist Ichabod Crane is in the titular town because he's a New York constable investigating the murders caused by the Headless Horseman, he refuses to let discovering irrefutable proof of the horseman's supernature deter him after a brief episode of shock, and getting to court Katrina Van Tassel as he genuinely bonds with her is simply an added bonus goal-wise. In the source material, wooing Katrina is Ichabod's main goal, it's mainly motivated by him wanting to procure her family's wealth, and the Horseman has nothing to do with Ichabod's reasons for coming to Sleepy Hollow.
- The Time Machine (2002): In the source book and its previous movie adaptation, the protagonist was motivated by scientific curiosity to build his time machine and travel through the distant future. In this version, he expressly builds the machine so he can go back in time and prevent his fiancé's death, and when he discovers the hard way that her death is inevitable in every alternate timeline, he travels into the future in the hopes of finding an explanation in future generations' science for why he can't save her. This version of the protagonist also ultimately decides against returning to his native time in favor of starting a new life among the future Eloi, which is the opposite of what his earlier iterations did at the end.
- Transformers Film Series:
- Analogously to the Decepticons, the Autobots' goals outside of defending humans have shifted from reclaiming a Decepticon-occupied Cybertron from their sworn enemies as in the G1 continuity to restoring life to a destroyed Cybertron (in the first movie) to setting up a new home for themselves on Earth, and this motive change was also used in the Transformers Aligned Universe.
- Transformers: Rise of the Beasts: The original Beast Wars iteration of the Maximals come to prehistoric Earth because they're pursuing Predacon Megatron's ship which has a stolen artifact onboard, and their main goal during the series from there on (aside from protecting the planet from destruction) is to get back home to Cybertron. In this version, the Maximals have come to Earth fleeing from Unicron after the latter destroyed their previous home planet, and their goal throughout the movie is keeping the Transwarp Key out of evil hands so that it can't be used to summon Unicron to Earth, before settling on Earth long-term at the series' end.
- Van Helsing: The title character. Whereas his original portrayal in Dracula was specifically a vampire hunter who had no higher goals than to rid the world of Dracula and his curse and to save as many infected victims as possible, this version of Van Helsing is a hunter of multiple monsters working for a secret society, in part because he seeks to reverse his Laser-Guided Amnesia and discover who he really is, and he has to juggle ridding the world of Dracula and his vampires with saving a cursed family from eternal damnation before their last member dies.
Live-Action TV
- Goosebumps (1995): The Haunted Mask II: Due to the soccer kids being written out, Steve's motivation is rewritten to being that he wants a special night of scares and thrills, as he's worried that he'll be too old for Halloween and pranks next year. This makes the plot akin to the original once the Old Man Mask starts to take effect.
Western Animation
- Strawberry Shortcake: Downplayed Trope. The title character’s first three incarnations were all portrayed as being content with just making new friends, baking, and having fun. While Strawberry does still retain these aspects in Strawberry Shortcake: Berry in the Big City, she is given the additional goal of becoming a famous and successful baker.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003): In the original Mirage comics, Casey Jones became a vigilante after watching too many TV shows where vigilantes (and the crime-fighting lives they led) were glorified. In this series, his father's shop was burned down by Hun and the Purple Dragons when Casey was a boy. His father had refused to pay the gang protection money, and Hun killed him when he continued to refuse. Casey swore revenge on the gang, and as an adult, he spends his nights going after every gang member he can find. His friendship with the Turtles (especially Raphael) helps him to curb his temper more and become a vigilante for the greater good rather than personal vengeance.
Other (Morally Gray, Neutral, etc.)
Anime & Manga
- My-Otome: In the original My-HiME, Nao Yuuki was a morally ambivalent character whose goal was to punish the perverts in the nearby town, and she turned against the other HiME when she was framed for attacking Sister Yukariko. In Otome, Nao is a morally ambivalent character who only joined the Otome to, as she put it, find a rich husband; but despite being under Duke Nagi's kingdom and authority, she sides with the other Otome to put a stop to his schemes.