And if we’re going to talk comic book characters (somebody mentioned The Joker upthread) I’ll have to go with Darkseid. I hate to admit it, but when I saw the JLU in which Batman tried to stop Superman from offing the Lord of Apokalips, my first thought was “What the hell is wrong with you? If ANYBODY is worth dying to off, this is the guy.”
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Batman is pathologically insane, and in some sense of the word, he’s a villain. He allows people like the Joker to live despite knowing that, by doing so, he’s condemning scores of innocents to death. His personal morals are more important than innocent lives to him.
I parsed it as both villains who needed to be killed in the course of the story, and have managed it and villains who needed to be killed when we were experiencing the story, and still need it.
Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin, of course) comes to mind, but he has to be surpassed by Max Cady as played by Robert Mitchum in the 1962 Cape Fear. He manages to be pleasant and friendly and scary as hell.
[QUOTE=Scissorjack]
Naw, he was quite a nuanced character: he was a nasty brutal bastard, but he needed to be to keep the likes of scum like English Bob out of his town. He was probably a bad man, but he was aware of his badness and why he needed to be bad: he wasn’t wholly unsympathetic. Besides, he was building a house - it was a leaky, ill-wrought house, but he was trying, in his own shoddy way, to create something of lasting worth: it was a metaphor, you see. Hats off to Gene Hackman.
John Herod also gets a pass for gunning down that cocky little shit Leonardo DiCaprio.
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Personally, I thought his treatment of English Bob added to his villiany. But I’ll agree, hats off to Hackman.
Malak Al Rahim from Wanted: Dead or Alive, played by Gene Simmons. When Rutger Hauer’s character decides to forgo the bonus for bringing him in alive, I and all my friends cheered.
[QUOTE=RikWriter]
Batman is pathologically insane, and in some sense of the word, he’s a villain. He allows people like the Joker to live despite knowing that, by doing so, he’s condemning scores of innocents to death. His personal morals are more important than innocent lives to him.
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In this aspect, Batman should be looked at like a police officer. The police can’t execute a criminal, they can only use lethal force when they absolutely have to in order to save the lives of themselves or others. The difference between Batman and the police is that Batman is willing and able to find non-lethal alternatives where the police would be justified in shooting the perpetrator. I’ve never read a story in which Batman was unavaoidably forced to kill or let an innocent die (plenty of occasions when he saved the innocent while the villain apparently perished due to his own actions, and didn’t seem too choke dup about it), then again, failing to outsmart such a trap would itself be out of character for Batman.
Or is Commissioner Gordon also insane? He’s had plenty of chances to kill the Joker, and didn’t do so. In fact, right after the Joker shot and sexually humiliated his daughter, he made Batman promise to bring him in by the book.
[QUOTE=D_Odds]
Personally, I thought his treatment of English Bob added to his villiany.
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Well, I think he wanted to set an example for other hired guns who might have been thinking of collecting the bounty. And English Bob was a nasty bastard, who had the misfortune to run into a bigger bastard.
Oh, and while we’re on Westerns, Michael Biehn’s Johnny Ringo from Tombstonebadly needed his killing. Another hat off to Mr Biehn, too: he usually plays softly spoken but kindly tough-guy heroes, but he made Ringito completely abominable.
Gaius f*cking Baltar for Battlestar Galactica. Along with whatever portion of the writers’ brains polluted an otherwise entertaining series with such an awful character.
I’ve been keeping up with this thread, and there are many bastards mentioned herein who badly needed killing.
But I’ll have to vote for the OP’s Dwight Yoakum character. Mr. brown was watching a DVD of Sling Blade last night, coincidentally, and I had forgotten how utterly hateful that character was. My very fingers itched to personally murder him from the first frame in which he appeared. Hopefully DY isn’t a bit like that in real life! He was suspiciously convincing.
Although I was sort of rooting for Shishio of Rurouni Kenshin to win, I was also secretly hoping that Kenshin would, just once, make exception to off this madman.
But no, Watsuki chickened out and had Shishio
die by spontaneous combustion. :mad:
Although, maybe he’s like a metaphor for Japan or something…
Also, Knives from Trigun needed to die, and Vash needed a beating with a Clue Bat.
[QUOTE=RikWriter]
Batman is pathologically insane, and in some sense of the word, he’s a villain. He allows people like the Joker to live despite knowing that, by doing so, he’s condemning scores of innocents to death. His personal morals are more important than innocent lives to him.
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Well … I can’t entirely agree. Batman’s a jerk (at least as currently written) but he’s right not to kill the Joker himself, if only because I’ve always taken it as part of his unspoken agreement with Gordon is that he is not to become an executioner. Bruce believes – hell, I think Gordon believes – that he wouldn’t come back from it, the way that Superman did with difficulty and Wonder Woman did with ease.
[QUOTE=Menocchio]
In this aspect, Batman should be looked at like a police officer. The police can’t execute a criminal, they can only use lethal force when they absolutely have to in order to save the lives of themselves or others. The difference between Batman and the police is that Batman is willing and able to find non-lethal alternatives where the police would be justified in shooting the perpetrator. I’ve never read a story in which Batman was unavaoidably forced to kill or let an innocent die (plenty of occasions when he saved the innocent while the villain apparently perished due to his own actions, and didn’t seem too choke dup about it), then again, failing to outsmart such a trap would itself be out of character for Batman.
Or is Commissioner Gordon also insane? He’s had plenty of chances to kill the Joker, and didn’t do so. In fact, right after the Joker shot and sexually humiliated his daughter, he made Batman promise to bring him in by the book.
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Well, to be brutally honest, it’s simply childish and unrealistic writing by a succession of DC writers which has gotten worse with time. But, treating them like real people for the nonce, yes, Gordon would be insanely stupid as well. It’s one thing to trust the judicial system to handle criminals, it’s entirely another to trust it when the SAME FUCKING CRIMINAL has broken out of jail somewhere over a hundred times to kill again. Batman and Gordon have both made themselves executioners: executioners by proxy of all the innocent people the Joker has and will kill.
[QUOTE=Scarlett67]
Interesting . . . I parsed “who . . . needed killin’” in the thread title as meaning those who had actually been killed. Tomayto, tomahto. Carry on.
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The past tense completley passed me by! But then, on second thought, you could interpret this as villians who needed killin’ once you’ve read the book and thought it over…
Anyway, need or needed-Umbridge, Voldemort, and Olaf all need it. And if their tale is done and they are not dead, they needed killin’ in the tale!
