Johan Liebert, from the anime Monster. Spoiler-tagged for those interested in catching the series, because honestly, the less you know about it before watching it, the better.
As a child, he was placed in a corrupt orphanage in Germany during the Cold War. The place certainly messed him up in the head, but he managed to start a war within it by spreading rumors and making the other children paranoid. He indirectly caused hundreds of children to violently kill each other and their caretakers, and he sat back and watched.
By all means, this is not the extent of his insanity. Later in the series, it gets to the point where even the toughest of characters are almost paralyzed with fear at the mere mention of his name.
Yeah, I thought about starting this thread once, but got bogged down in how to measure evil.
I was inspired by Mrs. Lovett of Sweeney Todd, who (aside from making meat pies out of long pig) watched the destruction of the Todd family from the sidelines with never a thought for anything but how it could be turned to her advantage.
I’m going with Aaron from Titus Andronicus. Straight from the horse’s mouth, as he was about to be hanged from a tree:
For being such a godawful bastard, Aaron was spared the noose; rather than grant him such a quick, simple death, he is later buried neck-deep in the ground and allowed to starve. Upon hearing this punishment, he replies, “If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul.”
I saw “It” when I was 6 and was so traumatized i didn’t use the bathroom at all for 3 days. I didn’t poop for 5. I don’t think i bathed for more than a week.
Morgoth set about deliberately stealing, marring, or destroying everything made by anyone else, just because it wasn’t his. This included leveling mountains, or turning plains into canyons, or filling in canyons just because he wanted to and because someone not him made them. He warped and marred people and other living things, destroying or hording people as much as inanimate objects such as the Silmarils. He would have destroyed the Silmarils if he weren’t so obsessed with them. He was so bent on wrecking everything made by anyone else that he lost all hope of being able to make anything himself, ever again.
And it all started because he was pissed that he couldn’t form anything that wasn’t fundamentally made by Iluvatar himself.
Actual Hitler was already un-nice, but fictional Hitler ? Fuggedaboudit. Assuming all fictions to be equally valid, the guy was an evil magician, a Chtulhian medium/priest, a millenia old lich, was in cahoots with an evil alien race bent on galaxy-wide genocide, was busy making zeerust super soldiers and 19[del]20[/del]40s style death rays, and was a cannibal to boot. All that’s of course on top of killing all the Jews (and a clown). His paintings sucked, too.
On the positive side, his Xbox Live account was banned and he got reincarnated as a bonsaï tree. On the negative side, he got cloned multiple times, his brain is still alive in a jar somewhere, and his severed, jackbooted feet are villains in their own rights.
(And if you caught all those references, kudos ya big geek.)
Uriah Heep. I’ve seen more actual evil performed by those of his ilk than all other forms of evil combined. If you want real, true life evil, him. Or maybe his Mother, who purposfully trained him that way. . .
How has nobody mentioned Sylar from Heros? That guy is just one big bucket of crazy/evil. I think the bad guy (can’t remember his name) out of No country for old men comes in the running too. That guy was just…shudder…yeah.
Who was the villian from Titus Andronicus?
He didn’t have any pretense of evil for a pragmatic reason, he just loved being evil. When you’re last words are about your only regret is not pulling ENOUGH shit . . . well that’s pretty screwed with a capital F.
had Sansa whipped just turned my stomach. I was so happy when that little bastard bought it.
I nominate Kai Winn from Deep Space Nine, speaking of evil characters played by Louise Fletcher. (Guess she just has an evil face.) The thing about her is that she wasn’t some crazy, over-the-top, bloodthirsty fiend. You can look around and see plenty of political and religious figures just like her. The false piety. fear-mongering, hypocrisy, and for-the-greater-good attitude are frighteningly familiar. Not to mention her complete lack of self-awareness. Despite the fact that her actions showed that she would stop at nothing to gain power, she believed to the end that she was acting for the good of her planet and her religion.
You’ve pretty much described a bratty toddler. Bratty toddler’s are not evil, they are immature. Melkor comes off as immature that he is not always the center of attention. But on a bigger scale.
Sauron, on the other hand is bent on dominating and subjecting the wills of all living things to his own. And he does it on a Morgothian scale and is very nearly successful. Plus he also wants to bring back Morgoth, or at least worship him.
Part of it is that Tolkien humanizes Morgoth in the Silmarillion by giving him so many lines of dialogue and makes him a tragic figure of immaturity. Sauron, by contrast, is even in the Silmarillion a figure of mystery. Few lines of dialogue (if any) and flitting in form between werewolf, vampire, (sometimes cat see Teveldio) and Annatar. Always someone to project evil onto.
but wasn’t the road to evil sauron built on good intentions? he only craves power because he originally wanted to establish order? he’s basically a mythical hitler minus the genocide.
