Best "Villains in Name Only"?

[Spectrre]

the origial joker. closest any acter ever got was mark hamill. when he was the joker it was like he was taking instructions from bob cane (the guy who made batman) himself. he did it the way the joker should have been. not a gangster like jack not a dark monster scarecrow might have made up. just a smiling murderer who likes to see the world burn.

I don't think you have a firm grasp on what the idea of this thread is. The Joker is pretty much the opposite of what the OP wanted us to bring up. He is pure chaotic evil. As you said, he just wants to watch the world burn. That's pretty far removed from "Villain in name only"

 

[Not Matt]

Hi, would like to apologize for actually posting this, me and my younger cousin did that "from now on you are my assistant and have to do everything I say" thing that I am pretty sure everyone have done with a younger family member once, and he just was reading out the latest forums on the escapeist cause I said I wanted to check out what was happening here. All he told me was "hey, how about this one. Who is the best villain?" naturally I assumed that that was the actual question. So I told him to write down everything I said and post it. Logged back in now and saw that a few of you had directed my little dictator post (sounded better in my head)

the origial joker. closest any acter ever got was mark hamill. when he was the joker it was like he was taking instructions from bob cane (the guy who made batman) himself. he did it the way the joker should have been. not a gangster like jack not a dark monster scarecrow might have made up. just a smiling murderer who likes to see the world burn.

But ashes to ashes dust to dust I have some apologising to do. Sorry about not making sure what the question before I posted it.i feel really dumb now but the most adult thing to do is to make up for my f@?? up.


A real villain by name is EVERY government agent in any children's movie. The are portrayed as monsters but really. The are just doing what is best for the masses. The aren't trying to be badguys they are just doing their just....... That we actually asked them to do

 

[Thunderous Cacophony]

Stannis Baratheon from the Song of Ice and Fire.

Stannis isn't a bad guy, he's just Lawful Good/Neutral. He views order as the most important thing, he despises the chaos of war which is causing such hardship to the people, and he even forbids his men from looting, raping, and doing the other things that the rest of the would-be kings are doing. Even Melisandre isn't that bad; she's just a religious extremist who, while she has killed a few people, seems to actually be trying to help (by putting Azor Ahai reborn on the throne) so he can save the world from the Others.

Jamie Lannister for sure. Yes he is an arrogant arsehole, and he is a Lannister which is a pretty nasty family overall. Yet all the things he does is largely either out of duty or what he believes to be justice. He isn't nice when he does it, and he certainly does some bad things, but he is not as bad as he originally seems.

These would be good answers, but I really don't consider either of them villains either. Jaime really wasn't a villain since Catelyn Stark released him from imprisonment in Riverrun, and to me after that surpassed Tyrion to become the true "good" character among the Lannisters. And I agree with the above posters that Stannis was never meant to be a villain. In fact, as far as I've gotten in the series (later on in book 4), I'm pulling for Stannis to "win" and take the Iron Throne.

The REAL "villain" of the series is obviously Cersei, though. There is absolutely nothing likable about Cersei.

Cersei is so unlikeable that if anyone I'm talking to about the series says that she's one of their favorite characters (in a non "love-to-hate" fashion), I'll assume that they're trying to be irritating on purpose.

Seriously, talk about a character with no redeeming qualities.

It's like Legion said, though: From their own perspective, nobody appears to be villains. Stannis was presented as a potential dictator, unbending and unwavering, but with the broader context you can see that he is just the sort of man you need in times like this. Jamie was a child-murdering monster, but you can understand (if not accept) his devotion to his family to any extreme, and his desire to be a good knight (by his own definition).

Compatriot Block: I'm kinda playing devil's advocate here, but I can see the appeal of Cersei: She's a woman in a man's world, who is willing to do anything and everything to protect her family. I have to admit, I admire the fact that she was able to still love Joffery, despite his absolute shitheaderry; I don't think I could do that if I was his father. She is definitely flawed, and probably the biggest human villain, but I can understand rooting for her and her schemes against the Tyrells and their schemes.

 

[bl4ckh4wk64]

Saren from Mass Effect

granted, he is somehow disturbing (Anderson's story), but let's be honest - he was probably indoctrinated already and besides, his reasoning while with Sovereign? He thought he was going to save trillions of lives. Tragic character in my opinion. And dat voice.

He wasn't indoctrinated until after Anderson's story, he had a massive hatred of humans because his brother was killed during the First Contact War. He merely wanted complete efficiency in his missions, not caring about the loss of life unless it was Turian life. Even then, if it was Turians who were known to do business with humanity, he saw them as traitors and spared them no mercy. After the events of Mass Effect: Revelation, he went looking for Sovereign because he thought it was a way to control the Geth and wipe out humanity. Saren was a hard bastard who I feel absolutely no sympathy for.

 

[WanderingFool]

Who do you think are the best examples of "Villains in Name Only"? As in, the antagonistic opposite of an antihero - perhaps, an anti-villain?

I think one of the best examples is Magneto from X-Men, a tragic Jewish Holocaust survivor who just didn't want anything like that to happen against the mutant population, largely oppressed by the rest of humanity.

As MovieBob's Magneto Was Right implied, if the X-Men universe existed in real-life, I personally think I would side with Magneto's Brotherhood of Mutants. Idealism doesn't suit me.

I think it argueable, as while he does have such an experience, he is basically taking it out on the whole of humanity (to be percise, the non-mutant half). Though I think its only the movies and the one cartoon series where he actually only focuses on killing all of the non-mutants.

Xanatos from Gargoyles. A rare cartoon antagonist who isn't blinded by petty revenge.

Oh, Xanatos is a villian, its just impossible to hate him.

 

[Leemaster777]

I'm about to post some huge stonking spoilers for The World Ends With You, so brace yourselves:

Spoiler

I think a good example of a "villain in name only" is the Conductor TWEWY. As we find out at the end of the game, he was only doing what he was doing in order to save Shibuya, if he had done nothing, Shibuya would have been destroyed. He had even (literally) bet his own life that he could succeed.

 

[Treblaine]

Edgar Ross in Red Dead Redemption.

Guy did the player a favour, legitimised your violent tendencies by turning you from a murderous outlaw to a bounty hunter. Yet Marston pines incessantly about this, saying his wife has been "kidnapped" he seems to not understand the concept of lawful arrest... amazingly hypocritically HE EXECUTES ARRESTS THROUGHOUT THE GAME! He shoots people in the kneecap, lassos them, ties them up and carries them away to a jail, or just back to a store owner the culprit robbed from. How is that not what happened to his outlaw wife?

Ross was a complete fail villain, they tried so hard but the best anti-establishment siel can't help but change he is doing Marson a favour.

And really, when the game's ending act turned into the fail-mode of a shitty farmville simulator, who here wasn't damn-Skippy when the army turned up for a fight.

Why the HELL did Marston even settle down to be a farmer when his skill and passion is for bounty hunting, he should have started a father-and-son bounty hunting operation with his wife as his publicist and occasional sniper backup.

And then younger Jack Marston murdering the old retired Ross. Why?

I thought when I went to confront Ross I'd be given the choice to forgive him, but no, not choice in the ending. Straight to Duel mode. I thought I could shoot the gun out of his hand like EVERY OTHER GUN DUEL IN THE GAME, but no. The game thought I'd only ever want to kill Ross. Heck no. Ross was a fucking legend and deserved his retirement and he did John Marston a favour putting his out of the misery of farmville.

 

[MrPeanut]

The Hellgast
atleast in the back story they got cartoonishly evil at some point in the games.

Not so much evil as fighting against injustice.

the ISA scum basically robbed their original homeworld and threw them out to the deserts to die.

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

Magneto is tragic, yes, but he was consumed by anger to do evil for what, in his mind, is a just cause. That makes him interesting, and a deeper character, that doesn't mean he is a villain in name only.

Now, a better example is literally every single character in My Immortal who name isn't Ebony. Yes, I have read almost two chapters of that piece of trash. Anyway, just about every single character is either a "goff," or a "perp," and what defines your morality isn't that your a crazed, sex obsessed douchebag (which the main character is) but which of those groups you fall under. Good people are "geffs," bad people are pretenders. What makes a person actually a "gonth" isn't really explained or defined in any clear way. Of course, that only scratches the surface of what is wrong from the fanfiction of Hell.

 

[getoffmycloud]

Edgar Ross in Red Dead Redemption.

Guy did the player a favour, legitimised your violent tendencies by turning you from a murderous outlaw to a bounty hunter. Yet Marston pines incessantly about this, saying his wife has been "kidnapped" he seems to not understand the concept of lawful arrest... amazingly hypocritically HE EXECUTES ARRESTS THROUGHOUT THE GAME! He shoots people in the kneecap, lassos them, ties them up and carries them away to a jail, or just back to a store owner the culprit robbed from. How is that not what happened to his outlaw wife?

Ross was a complete fail villain, they tried so hard but the best anti-establishment siel can't help but change he is doing Marson a favour.

And really, when the game's ending act turned into the fail-mode of a shitty farmville simulator, who here wasn't damn-Skippy when the army turned up for a fight.

Why the HELL did Marston even settle down to be a farmer when his skill and passion is for bounty hunting, he should have started a father-and-son bounty hunting operation with his wife as his publicist and occasional sniper backup.

And then younger Jack Marston murdering the old retired Ross. Why?

I thought when I went to confront Ross I'd be given the choice to forgive him, but no, not choice in the ending. Straight to Duel mode. I thought I could shoot the gun out of his hand like EVERY OTHER GUN DUEL IN THE GAME, but no. The game thought I'd only ever want to kill Ross. Heck no. Ross was a fucking legend and deserved his retirement and he did John Marston a favour putting his out of the misery of farmville.

The reason why John complained and why he had a farm is because he didn't want Jack to grow up as a bandit and having to kill people and what Edgar Ross did was ruin that and turned Jack into the bandit his father never wanted him to be that is point of that ending.

Edgar Ross really was an evil man he didn't just go to that farm to kill John he went there to kill the whole family and why didn't he just do it when John killed Dutch instead of waiting for the family to be reunited and start there new lives and then taking that away from them that was pretty horrible.

And then there is always this quote which sums up what he did.
?As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.?
? Christopher Dawson

 

[Ingjald]

Klaus Wulfenbach from Girl Genius.

He may be a no-nonsense, iron-fisted dictator of most of Europa, and surround himself with some rather nasty (albeit useful) characters, he doesn't exactly relish his positon, and sees it as something he has to do because he is the only one who can, and the alternative is an infected battle of more or less insane minor power figures that raged before he took power by force. Really, the only reason he's an antagonist in the comic is because our main heroine is the long lost descendant of the most powerful and gleefully sadistic sparks (mad scientists), whom he also believes is The Other, a mind-uploaded Femme Fatale Evil Genius, which she is, but not really. It's a bit complicated. Oh, and Klaus' son is her main love interest, and has run off to help her.
As another character summed up his modus operandi: "If someone can't handle an unpleasant truth? Lie to them. If someone won't listen to reason? Make them. If people don't choose to live peaceably?Don't give them a choice. If you don't like the rules?change the game."

 

[Vigormortis]

Dr. Evil
Beelzebub
Antagony
Doctor Strangelove
Cyberdemon
Nihilanth
Gollum
HAL 9000
Terminator
Headless Horseman
Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Sweeney Todd
Lex Luthor
Bane
The Perversion
The Parallax
The Blight
Hans Gruber

To name a very small few.

 

[MrPeanut]

Pretty much all of the Sith.

Emotions are bad according to Mr Lucas.

But spending time as a Sith makes you become a genocidal power hungry maniac.

That's bad, right?

 

[SajuukKhar]

Dr. Wallace Breen from Half-Life 2.

After humanity had effectively been destroyed after the Combine beat all the worlds armies in 7 hours, Breen surrendered humanity in order to allow us to survive, even if it meant we had to become slaves in the process, and fought against the "good guys", because he saw them as a threat to what little security he was able to attain for the human race.

The Ani-Spirals from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

After finding out that continued evolution would lead to the eventually destruction of the universe by a super-massive black hole, the Anti-Spirls launched a genocidal war against almost all living things so that the universe could survive.

the fought the heroes because they say them as idiots, blind to how their own existence would eventually destroy not only them, but the entire universe.

 

[thespyisdead]

Logan from Fable 3 comes to mind! If i had to be a tyrant to save the land that i ruled over, then why the fuck not... also Yahtzee pointed out the flaw of him not telling anyone about the great evil, and i agree! why not tell everyone, that he need money for the army to fend off a great evil!

 

[Squilookle]

The villain from Watchmen. I won't spoil who, but suffice to say I don't see them as a villain at all.

 

[Stalydan]

Jason Todd as the Red Hood, mainly for his first appearance as him.

He's killing drug dealers and crime lords and taking their territory so he can take over the crime world. There's more reasons to it than I'm about to say but my favourite he gives to Batman is along the lines of "Crime isn't going away so I'm taking control of it". He does give the dealers rules like "No dealing to children".

For that storyline, he's most definitely an antagonist to Batman but he's far from being an actual villain.

 

[BarbaricGoose]

Umm... is there even a contest? Catman.

Catman.

Cat. Man. Catman.