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Your Favorite Villain

Might be a little cocky here, but I will have to choose a villain from my own novels, King Seagraul. He begins in the early series as a revolutionary and a visionary, a living ideal of "change the system" and dies as a tyrant and war criminal corrupted by his own system. He bares the flaws of the kind of man whose ideas become violently radicalized, who becomes so obsessed with power that the base of his character is forever changed. I think a villain who transitions from heroism into villainy is always the strongest.

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MatthewRBishop.com
The history of our world is yet to be written
 

shwabadi

Minstrel
I think it'll have to be Tolkien's Sauron or Morgoth.
Just the idea of some dark lord, basically the embodiment of evil, makes me think they'd be the ultimate villain.
 

WooHooMan

Auror
King Haggard from the Last Unicorn is my favorite fantasy literature villain. There are so many dark lords, evil gods, powerful sorcerers, psychotic killers and sinister masterminds in fantasy that it's really interesting to see a villain whose terribleness comes from how completely pathetic he is. He's actually pretty tragic, even kind of sympathetic.
 

Bruce McKnight

Troubadour
I am a huge fan of Darth Maul - total b@d@$s!

(Too bad the movie as a whole was a turdfest)

The best part about his character was how he was slowly revealed throughout the movie. First scene with him, you just get a glimpse. Later, he's fighting with a light saber, but just for a second, then the jedi flee. He only gets a few teaser scenes. Then, at the very end, he draws his hood back and you see the tattoos and horns. Cool. Then he whips out his light-saber... double-sided! Sweet! Then he goes off on crazy, acrobatic, double-jedi attack that makes every other light-saber fight so far seem like toddler waving a pacifier. Then he gets sliced in half and thrown down a reactor shaft! Done in by hubris! Greek tragedy! Awesome!

I know there's more to his story, but as far as that movie was concerned, he was slowly built up to an amazing climax then swiftly ended. I thought it was fantastic.

Of course, the clowns in marketing had to waste the brilliance of the character introduction by starting every commercial by showing him, hood down, engaging his double-light saber, but that shouldn't take away from his general awesomeness.
 

WooHooMan

Auror
The interesting thing about Darth Maul is that he isn't badass but it's accepted that he is badass. It's pretty bizarre. Darth Maul's character amounts to a cool design and some awesome fight choreography but, as Bruce McKnight pointed out, there was a gradual reveal of what little information we get about his character and that made it seem like there was more to him than a cool design and awesome fight.
He's a good example of a "less is more" villain. Him and Boba Fett.
 

OGone

Troubadour
2643793-carnage_h509.jpg


From Wiki:
Cletus Kasady is a psychopath and a homicidal sadist. Kasady is a deeply disturbed individual with a dark past: as a child, he killed his grandmother by pushing her down a flight of stairs, tried to murder his mother by tossing a television into her bathtub, and tortured and killed his mother's dog. After the latter, his mother then tried to kill Cletus, and was apparently beaten to the brink of death by Kasady's father, who received no defense from Kasady during his trial. As an orphan, Kasady was sent to the St. Estes Home for Boys, where his antisocial behavior made him the target of abuse from both the other orphans and the staff. Kasady gained revenge by murdering the disciplinarian administrator, pushing a girl (who laughed at him for asking her to date him) in front of a moving bus, and burning down the orphanage. It was during his brutal years at St. Estes that Kasady acquired his philosophy that life was essentially meaningless and futile, that "laws are only words", and came to see the spreading of chaos through random, unpatterned bloodshed as "the ultimate freedom."

Pretty evil guy bonded with an even more evil alien. Carnage is the ultimate "do bad things just 'cause" villain. Joker eat your heart out.
 
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Mindfire

Istar
2643793-carnage_h509.jpg


From Wiki:


Pretty evil guy bonded with an even more evil alien. Carnage is the ultimate "do bad things just 'cause" villain. Joker eat your heart out.

Carnage was partially inspired by the Joker, apparently. And on the evilness scale, I'd say Joker scores slightly higher.
 

Mindfire

Istar
2643793-carnage_h509.jpg


From Wiki:


Pretty evil guy bonded with an even more evil alien. Carnage is the ultimate "do bad things just 'cause" villain. Joker eat your heart out.

Carnage was partially inspired by the Joker, apparently. And on the evilness scale, I'd say Joker scores slightly higher. Apparently the two of them met each other and worked together for a little while in a Marvel/DC crossover.
 
It takes a special brand of '90s to decide that Venom's brain-eating vigilante shtick isn't extreme enough. (This was the same decade that tried to replace Scarecrow with a guy who terrifies people before eating their hearts.) Still, the man does have appeal in a sense, and it's no surprise he's still being written about while other '90s characters have vanished into the mists of time.
 

Kn'Trac

Minstrel
I've always have a weakness for Count Stradh von Zarovich or Firran Zal'Honan (Azalin) from the Ravenloft series of novels. Their lives are so tragic, that you can't help but feel a kind of sympathy for them, even though they are ruthless monsters and would kill with little more than a second thought.
 

Eagle

Scribe
I have to add Jareth to this.

Labyrinth-David-Bowie_400.jpg

<3

I love Garoth Ursuul from Brent Week's 'Shadow's Edge'. He has to be one of the most evil, sadistic, and horrific characters I've ever come across in fiction, but manages to be hilariously funny at the same time. The slight parody of 'Empire Strikes Back' is golden.
 

Mythopoet

Auror
Baron Harkonnen from Dune has always been one of my favorites. One of his lines that I love to quote: "Have you any idea how displeased I'd be?"

I love Muska from Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky as well. Partly because he's Miyazaki's only real villain, partly because Mark Hamill does some fantastic voice acting for him (a really first class maniacal laugh) and partly because of his line: "A superior being such as myself has only one option: Burn them!"

Once upon a time I would have said Darth Vader, but the prequels ruined him for me.
 
In Star Wars, my favorite villain would have to be one of the few that wasn't ruined by the movies... The sinister Aurra Sing.
A Jedi killing assassin, she looks as bad ass as she is.

You see her one time in episode one, overlooking the pod races.
 
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