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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
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?
Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg. He's a monster.
Silco from Arcane.
I often struggle with media villains, finding them unrealistic or unconvincing, but Silco is just so well-rounded and well-written, he elevates the quality of every other character he interacts with. In a series full of near- and actually-superpowered people, this weak, middle-aged man is the most terrifying and influential of them all.
spoiler
His absence from season two is one of the reasons why it flops compared to season one; Ambessa and Viktor are good characters, but weak villains.
One of my favorites as an adult, and one that scared the living shit outta me as a kid. Jude Doom from who framed Roger Rabbit.
hard not to love DIO. He's evil and he loves it
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.
Good choice
probably Junko Enoshima because she's so unmatchedly fucking bonkers batshit kookoo bananas unhinged insane but keeps it together just well enough to cause an apocalypse by shitposting really hard
Frank Horrigan, that's who. U.S. Secret Service.
Look the number of times I've heard his voice lines has resulted in them being burned into my mind.
Your favourite media villain
Easy answer: Rupert Murdoch
Australia's most embarrassing export
Followed by Ken Hamm
And Nicole Kidman is awful, she's friends with Murdoch
Sneaky, invasive advertising.
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.
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).
It has to be this way.
Time to watch that Videogame Dunkey explainer again
Genuinely the scariest movie villain
The washroom beating was brutal.
sega killer
I've always been fond of Magneto. He's a dick about it, but I see where he's coming from.
Here are the test results: You're a horrible person. That's what it says. A horrible person. We weren't even testing for that.
Andrew Scott as Moriarty he was so fun
I'm going to pick a slightly more obscure one: Kane from Command & Conquer.
Obscure? I think every gamer in my age group (Xennials) knows the leader of NOD.
Catherine Foundling, the Protagonist of A Practical Guide to Evil.
But I don't know if this counts. Catherine has only the best intentions and many Heros are kinda Dicks in PGtE. She definitely causes a lot of (what she considers) necessary suffering to end unnecessary suffering. And in-universe she undeniably is a Villain, but as the villain protagonist it's hard to argue that she's on the same page as villain antagonists.
An old one, but the Emperor from Gladiator. His death is among the most satisfying in movie history. Absolutely amazing performance by Joaquin Phoenix.
Biff Tannen, because we should have seen the signs.
OP asked for media villain, not real life…
