For me, it would be GLaDOS.
Portal 2 spoiler
She deleted the one remaining human part of herself because it was just too much to deal with. She releases you at the end of Portal 2 as a path of least resistance measure because “killing you is hard.”
What about you, what is your favorite media villain?
Sand dan Glokta from the First Law series of gritty fantasy novels by Joe Abercrombie.
He is a crippled, razor-tongued former war hero turned inquisitor: physically ruined by torture but mentally sharp, cynical, and ruthlessly pragmatic.
Sneaky, invasive advertising.
Shigaraki Tomura, Boku no Hero Academia.
For starters, he’s this regular emo kid (about 19-20), except he’s got like a dozen disembodied hands grasping him from his torso and arms to his head and face.
The reason for the hands is pretty bizarre. Spoilers for the second half of season 5:
Tap for spoiler
He killed his whole family, including his sister, parents, and grandparents, and was adopted by the world’s greatest villain, who preserved the hands and attached them to him to remind him where he came from.
Oh, his super power? “Decay.” Anything he lays all five fingers on turns to ash. It’s as awesome and terrible as it sounds. What’s worse? Final season spoilers:
Tap for spoiler
Decay wasn’t originally his power. The greatest villain can steal and give out powers. He actually took Shigaraki’s original power and replaced it with Decay. He set him up for failure and then adopted him to turn him into a monster.
The author, Horikoshi Kohei, is a huge Star Wars nerd. If Shigaraki Tomura sounds like “anime Darth Vader,” that’s intentional. Except when “anime Luke Skywalker” tried to turn him back to good, final season spoilers:
Tap for spoiler
It doesn’t work. Shigaraki tells Midoriya he’s too far gone and gives him a message to tell his best friend, another, minor, villain he played League of Legends with — I’m not kidding, they drop that name — and Midoriya delivers the message. Which is basically that right up to the end, he wanted to destroy everything. The message has the intended effect of showing the younger man that he was wrong.
And the kicker? Minor season 5 spoiler:
Tap for spoiler
Shigaraki Tomura wasn’t even his name. Shigaraki was the family name of the villain who adopted him. His birth name was Shimura Tenko — he was also the grandson of Midoriya’s mentor’s mentor.
Note that all names use the Japanese naming convention of giving the family name before the given name (e.g. “Lincoln Abraham”), and the show is known outside of Japan as My Hero Academia.
Edit: I also like GLaDOS. YSK she’s also in Cyberpunk 2077, if only in spirit. Ellen McLain reprises her role and reuses some lines while voicing a psychotic robotaxi. I assume, with permission from Valve (who probably loved the cameo).
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Donald Trump?
/j
Is that the guy from The Apprentice?
he was in home alone.
the swarm from stanisław lems “invincible” (not the invincible show, this is a completly unrelated sci fi novel) (also the swarm is not really a villian its more like defending its territory
Brother Justin in Carnivàle
I wish they would have gotten one more season. I loved that show so much.
Great character, great show!
probably Junko Enoshima because she’s so unmatchedly fucking bonkers batshit kookoo bananas unhinged
insanebut keeps it together just well enough to cause an apocalypse by shitposting really hard
Handsome Jack.
Best hero to villain in a game yet. Plus dude had charisma for days so even though he was a clear cut asshole you couldn’t help but love his antics.
Butt Stallion is an amazing throwaway joke, just so much thought put into even the stupid stuff.
Final Fantasy XIV has some good ones. The most signature would be Emet Selch, from Shadowbringers. The big challenge on his part was that the “Ascians” were seen as these cringey, Kingdom Hearts-style grimdark villains for a long time, and Shadowbringers had the challenge of turning them into complex characters.
His voice actor, René Zagger, isn’t even known for much more than that role and he plays it very well - achieving both jesting Kafka-esque mocking and jesting, as well as earnest, righteously-driven rage.
Another one, I’ll only refer to as The Mastermind, from Ace Attorney Investigations 2. The whole game structures its 5 cases towards that pinpoint much better than you’d realize, while still telling a great story up until then. The Mastermind themselves acts in a somewhat melodramatic way before you identify them, but has some appreciable complexities to them that add to the character journey Edgeworth is getting in that game.
Tied between Handsome Jack and Javert. Both misunderstood in their own ways.
Genuinely the scariest movie villain
sega killer
The washroom beating was brutal.
Andrew Scott as Moriarty he was so fun
Gul Dukat was the better villain in my eyes. At least he was way more interesting than Kai Winn.
i like weyoun he sorta trolls siskos but is a serious vorta.
My vote as well.
He constantly finds the piece of humanity within whoever hes talking to and then tries to manipulate it.
Its hard to top Gul Dukat.
They’re both excellent at being different kinds of evil.
Winn is prideful and ambitious above all else. She sides with good and evil both at different times in service to her own goals. She deludes herself into believing anything that pursuit of personal power is also what serves Bajor.
Winn commits evil in service to her ambitions.
Dukat has the same vices, but with added elements of narcissism and wrath. He briefly tries being good, and almost reaches it when he finds genuine love for and from his daughter, but when his actions lead to her death he lashes out at the universe and becomes entirely consumed by wrath and megalomania.
Dukat’s ambition in the end is to commit evil.
The great thing about Dukat is that he frequently finds his own humanity. You keep thinking that this time he’ll do the right thing and start his path to redemption, but he never does. He always chooses to do the wrong thing even though there’s clearly good in him and you’re always disappointed and even surprised when it happens. He’s like the anti-Zuko.
It’s been ages I saw a ytp and I never was quite the fan, but this right there is a fucking masterpiece.
I was about to just check it and ended up watching the whole thing.
“Attention bajoran workers! My wife left me” had me wheezing.
Sexcellent
The Quark “Nice Cock” poster almost made me ruin my monitor with water.
I think the counter to that is that:
Tap for spoiler
they completely dropped the ball with her toward the end of the show. She went from, I think, a great allegory for a religious radical right wing capitalizing off her people’s suffering but in a way she could genuinely warp her beliefs into thinking was for the greater good…
… to, I mean, come on… Having her go totally crazed with power and disavowing the Prophets wasn’t the problem; it’s that it was stupid, egregiously paced, totally unearned MacGuffin power without grounded stakes that only served to make an already-rushed resolution to the show feel even more rushed.
The Goat. Simply evil.
No, the guy she was boning was.
rip Nurse rachette.
