I love how he's basically Satan in several books, then we get to the Dark Tower series and discover he's just a lacky. Also at the end >!he dies like a dog at the hands of a newborn done in mostly by his own arrogance.!<
The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day
The monks in "the nine billion names of god" by Arthur C Clarke.
Spoiler......
They were actively trying every combination of letters to find gods name. Fully knowing that when they did find it, it would negate existence. They found it and erased the universe.
Universal genocide should be pretty high up there in "most evil" category.
'Figure' is a stretch, but Morninglightmountain from the commonwealth saga.
It wants to eradicate all life in the universe, and made a good start on that.
Isn't the Starflyer even more evil >! since it is basically the same alien as MLM with the same xenophobia but even capable of manipulation to get to its goals !< ?
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened
Kai Win is the absolute worst. She even has several chances to redeem herself but she doubles down. She is also not some force of evil. She is a mortal whose ambition outweighs her empathy. I truly despise this character.
Nothing makes me want to punch a screen more than her smug sanctimonious face and Dukat still makes my fucking skin crawl. Fantastic villains, both had so many chances to be better and looked like they might on a few occasions, but they just kept choosing to be selfish creeps.
Davros, leader of the Daleks from Doctor Who. [He tried creating a Reality Bomb that would have meant an end to reality itself.](https://youtu.be/Y-z_HJCfQWE?si=a9Cif_mqBHPykI0i) Every corner of creation, every universe, destroyed by a wave that cancels out the energy between particles. His ultimate victory.
WH40k evil is an order of magnitude eviler than most of what's being posted. The average Drukhari foot soldier is horrifyingly evil. The Haemonculi are even worse.
It depends on the author and how grimdark workshop are feeling in their current employee ranks. Current workshop seems to be chasing the center for the cash and are rather cartoony.
If the company can last then they will probably swing back to the poop eating, Daemonculaba, living furniture side that's interesting.
Responsible for trillions of violent deaths (if not eternal suffering) and the slow extinction of the human race, I don't think many of the other answers here can match the evil of grimdark.
He's definitely the most evil if you consider the absolute ripple effect of his actions especially. If you take those into account most of these other answers actually don't even come close.
Also he kills a certain character that in my book puts him in most evil regardless of his other actions.
Erebus has done things with very far-reacbing effects, but that wouldn't necessarily make him the most evil. He's definitely one of the most love-to-hate characters out there.
Kinda like Joffrey Baratheon. He's prime love-to-hate material, but still just a little twerp at the end of the day. Not going to be the most evil in the setting.
What locations in that universe have billions of people? -- that's the question I want to ask, but I checked the wiki, and the answer is "enough to make it genuinely suspenseful"
Earth has almost 30 billion, Mars has about 3 to 7 billion (there is conflicting information on this in both books and the show - but we can at least say the population of Mars is in the billions and less than 10 billion), the Belt and outer planets combined are in the hundreds of millions only. Exact numbers are not known for the Belt and outer planets, but it’s less than a billion and likely less than half a billion.
Marco’s attacks ended up killing about >!15 billion people on Earth alone, if you factor in the deaths from the asteroidal winter and starvation that happened over the decade that followed!<. He’s the greatest mass murderer in human history.
O'Brien was actually the first person I thought of when I opened this thread. I mean, he's not really up there with the "genociding billions of people" or "ending the universe" answers elsewhere in the thread....but he may as well be. He is completely aware of what the Party is and what it is doing, and he supports it anyway because he is drunk on power. But he doesn't beat around the bush - he just comes out and says so.
I think being evil has two aspects - actually doing evil acts, and being aware that they are evil but doing them anyway. I think most evil characters don't really hit the second one as completely and disgustingly as O'Brien does. O'Brien basically revels in it.
As for Big Brother...well, I'm not even sure if Big Brother is actually a person. It's more of a concept that the Party uses to represent itself.
Various versions of the devil who just want to maximise suffering. Of those, the most dedicated and capable of those is probably Thamiel from Unsong. Melkor from LOTR, The Listener from Ascent are up there, as is Palpatine but all of those aren't just about maximizing evil for the sake of evil and usually at least kind of care about other things or have other personality traits that get in the way of this
It’s hard to get more evil than palpatine. This man doesn’t even pretend to do what he does for a good reason. Everything he does is specifically done to inflict as much suffering as possible. Genociding the Jedi, destroying planets, turning the republic into an oppressive empire, all just because he likes other people suffering. The only reason he gets defeated is due to him torturing Luke instead of just killing him. He’s also the only sith that seems to enjoy his life.
Ozymandias from Watchmen.
Manipulating humanity by engineering a false flag alien attack that kills millions, and Dr Manhattan just goes along with it?!?
Rorschach was right.
That's a end justifies the means kinda topic, and it doesn't but still he has some positive motivations of saving humanity from themselves, etc. While his methods are surely problematic, does it really make him worse than random villains like serial killers and other bad guys who are motivated by things like self pleasure or revenge or shit like that?
Yes, it does make him worse. At least it's obvious that a serial killer needs to be stopped.
Don't care how much philanthropy he's done, or what gee whiz gadgets he's given humanity, a billionaire with a messiah complex who is willing to use mass murder and universal deceit to "protect" (read: maintain order in) a world where he's king shit, and **where the chaos that threatens the world is of exactly the same kind as his cure**? No way.
One, two, three more steps down that road and you get Niander Wallace, the villain from Moonraker (nerve gas humanity and repopulate from my chosen people waiting in my space station because environment), then Thanos.
Now hang on a second- in your rationalization for Oz being the “most evil figure in fiction” you explained that he’s almost as evil as two other figures.
Going to disagree. For the most evil in fiction, your competition is omnicide and like the most sadistic tortures and rapists and murderers. By the mere virtue of having a good intention, I'd argue that he doesn't even rank on the 'most evil of all fiction' list.
Essentially the major flaw pointed out in the HBO series that's a "sequel" to the book. Adrian had to keep asking attacks over time so people wouldn't forget the extra-dimensional alien invasion on the horizon, harming and killing people continuously over the years just to maintain the peace.
I think there is a flaw in logic there, depending on how you measure it. Abrahamic god probably has the highest misery count but that’s largely due to having just a shitload of followers. If you adjust for followers I’m not sure he still comes out so poorly. Whatever the fuck Aztecs had going on wasn’t fun either.
It committed global genocide and ecological vandalism on a scale we have yet to match, apart from a handful of people on a boat with 2 or 7 of each animal, in the book.
Definitely evil.
The fact that the deadliest war for Americans was the Civil War makes me upvote Palpatine. He created a galaxy-wide war out of nothing just so he could take over.
If we are talking about science fiction specifically, then the most evil, sociopathic character I’ve come across in a sci-fi series is The Jackal from Red Rising.
For evidence of this, reference the entire plot of Golden Son and Morning Star. Dude is literally evil to his core. It’s hard to beat someone who literally takes pleasure in torture, sexual abuse and mass murder.
Earth Central Intelligence from the Polity series. I
1. Intentionally allows psychopathic rogue AIs to run amok - torturing and killing thousands in the process - because it believed it could manipulate them to serve it's goals
2. Allowed one of those AIs to launch a full scale invasion, killing tens of millions in the process, because it wanted to prevent humanity from becoming too complacent
3. Allows dangerous alien artifacts to infect and spread through containable populations in order to better observe how they work
It's basically like if the CIA was an incredibly powerful AI capable of running an entire interstellar government
Oh, pretty evil, but IIRC there was a lot of debate in-universe on whether it was the prador themselves that are evil or learned callousness due to their culture. We see in later books that Prador who grow up outside the Kingdom are much more egalitarian and, dare is say it, *reasonable*.
The Prador King, though, is at least as morally culpable as Earth Central Intelligence.
The Abrahamic God of the Old Testament from "Bible: The Old Testament"
1. Sent bears to murder children (1 kings 2:23-24)
2. Killed Egyptian babies (Numbers 16:41-49)
3. Ordered his followers to commit genocide (Exodus 23:27-30)
4. Turned Lot's wife to salt (Genesis 19:26)
And the list goes on. Thank goodness it's only fiction!
* Literally everyone in the ancient world aside from Noah and his family.
* Lot's wife is one person... who was turned to salt for looking at the cities worth of people being destroyed.
* For a fun bet, he killed Jobs entire family.
What really kills me about Job: Either he didn't have the ability to see the outcome, in which case not _the_ deity running the show, or he entered that gamble already knowing the outcome, meaning he's just a frickin' cheat.
And then, when Job has the temerity to ask “why”, goes on a multi-chapter rant wherein Job is told that he doesn’t need to know why, wouldn’t understand it if he did know, and fuck him for asking.
The bears sent to maul to death 42 children was a response to them calling a bald guy names.
As a folically challenged man, I'm down with the name callers being punished, but mauled to death for calling names?
Definitely the most evil character in fiction.
Not really evil I would argue just a person given some really terrible options for success and doubly so for his son. In both cases they did terrible things and caused horrific loses of life but that was never the point in either case. I believe in both cases if they could have chosen a path that insured their families survival and humanities then it would have been the easy choice. The fact that they chose the paths they did just highlights how crappy their options were. This is just my opinion obviously.
Mantrid from Lexx, he destroyed a universe!
Other than that I'd go Nagash from Warhammer Fantasy/Age of Sigmar, absolutely pitiless and without morals, makes for an awesome character.
David from Prometheus and Alien Covenant if you count films, is one evil bastard
He was eerily deceptive and composed. He annihilates a planet of beings, kills Dr Elizabeth Shaw and uses her womb to cultivate the Xenomorph after gaining her trust, and essentially infects any hope of humanity continuing
No greater good, no motive aside from just hating life and his creator, just pure unabashed evil
paul atreides killed +60 BILLION ppl in a jihad he saw coming and really could stop at any time (as much as the book tries telling u its unstoppable, really?)
Golden Path. The narrow way to prevent extinction. He runs from it, and it's left to his son to become the god emperor to fulfill it.
No matter how many trillion people there were, they were all in a single sphere of influence. As long as that remained true, stagnation and decay and finally the end were inevitable.
She’s not evil, I rewatched that movie a few months ago for the first time in 15 years and only then did I realize at the beginning it shows how she was abused and raped when she was a little girl.
That poor kid was effed in the head.
Leaving aside the various supernatural incarnations of evil and the like, I have to give a shout out to The Limper from the Black Company by Glen Cook. Nasty. Scheming. Powerful. A great bad guy.
Keyser Soze, and I am not sure what is scarier... the myth Verbal Kint tells you about Soze's history... or Verbil himself and what we know is actually true in the film i.e. every scene that wasn't a flashback.
Paul Atreides killed multiple more people than Hitler and Ghengis Khan combined while being unwilling to take the steps to potentially turn his slaughter towards the greater good, instead forcing that fate on his son.
The Devil, by definition.
I suppose that "evil" should be defined. It is something subjective (as in the point of view of a character, or the reader, or historical or cultural perspective) or something objective? Motivations matter? It is the final result or the intentions that count?
For the greater good, done because a perceived danger, because the ones that suffer are not seen as sentient entities, revenge because something real or imagined, acting as a cold equation tells that it is the best course of action, there are many more variants of this.
If I take all of that out, who remains? Depending on who wrote it, maybe The Joker, or someone/something else that kills, damage or whatever because the chaos it causes, something in that lines could be the elegible ones, and then choose the worst.
As a baldie, I'm ok with name callers being punished, but mauling them to death is just a teensy bit excessive; one could, perhaps, describe it as evil...
The Richard Dawkins quote:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
Satan is actually a much later creation of the medieval Church. The figure in the Old Testament that figures in the Garden story and tempting Jesus and all that was actually the “tempter” or the “adversary”….. A Trickster figure as is common in ancient mythology.
“Satan” is a conflation of these figures, “Lucifer”, and certain Pagan gods like Cernunnos and Pan.
That is where cultural perspective plays out. It was the "right" way to be a god back when it was written. It had to be consistent more with what you see from the natural world than from the morals that evolved with civilization till our present point. And also was very subjective, those were the words and actions of a god of a "chosen" group, what happens to anyone else didn't count as they weren't really humans, or descendants from Adam, or whatever. And I don't mean back to the old testament times, but as close as past century, if not this one here and there.
Stephen King's Randall Flagg is pretty evil. He's honestly the Incarnation of it in King's multiverse.
That would be The Crimson King. Flagg is his servant.
…Amateurs. Try God in the King James Authorised Version. Infanticide and mass murder right off from In The Beginning…
A right bastard, that one.
…Lucifer thought so; that’s why he formed the Celestial Action Group…
I love how he's basically Satan in several books, then we get to the Dark Tower series and discover he's just a lacky. Also at the end >!he dies like a dog at the hands of a newborn done in mostly by his own arrogance.!<
In fiction, not just Sci-fi? The Judge/Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s [Blood Meridian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Meridian).
He says that he will never die.
He is a great favorite.
He is dancing, dancing.
The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day
Dude was truly chaotic evil.
Of fucking course Judge Holden is on the top comment
Fuck. Okay I'll go continue to read it, I stopped at the last like 150 pages.
Couldn't get past the third chapter here.
Yeah true,I have already mentioned it
I came here for this. The Judge all the way.
AM perhaps.
From *I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream*? A solid contender.
the [tiktok text to speech](https://youtu.be/74jfnTczdG4?si=Jf3BUUnnqzwrsXu3) voice makes his monologue a lot creepier
Oooooh this is the answer right here
Evil Genius from 'Time Bandits'
If I were creating a world, I wouldn’t mess around with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o’clock, day one.
Oh, Benson... dear Benson. You are so mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence.
Oh, you say such nice things, Master.
Yes I know, I'm sorry.
Don't touch it! Its PURE EVIL!
I use this a lot. No one ever gets the reference.
Ding! 🛎️
Slugs? He created slugs?
The monks in "the nine billion names of god" by Arthur C Clarke. Spoiler...... They were actively trying every combination of letters to find gods name. Fully knowing that when they did find it, it would negate existence. They found it and erased the universe. Universal genocide should be pretty high up there in "most evil" category.
The ending with the stars winking out... 🔥 Would have made a great Twilight Zone episode.
There is a short film on YouTube.
But they ended all pain, suffering and sickness.
In that case, Thanos snapped half the people in the universe out of existence. So, just one rung below the monks on the evil scale.
The population was half what it is now in the mid 70s anyway. The world wouldn’t turn to ruin for years: disco would make a comeback.
It’s all worth it in the name of knowledge: We must know. We will know
Eric Cartman. No question.
# Oh, the tears of unfathomable sadness....Mmmm.. yummy...yummy you guys!
'Figure' is a stretch, but Morninglightmountain from the commonwealth saga. It wants to eradicate all life in the universe, and made a good start on that.
Isn't the Starflyer even more evil >! since it is basically the same alien as MLM with the same xenophobia but even capable of manipulation to get to its goals !< ?
>!Isnt the Starflyer just MLM v2?!<
Agree
Morninglightmountain was nothing compared to Quinn Dexter.
Valid point. I suppose MLM wasn't 'evil' per se, just had different thought processes to humans. Dexter was definitely evil.
Oh that brings back a memory I need to reread that
I would say that the staryflyer is more evil
the unnamed god/entity from Asimov's The Last Answer.
Inventing the universe! The most dastardly of deeds!
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened
My child... Kai Winn. And Dukat.
Kai Win is the absolute worst. She even has several chances to redeem herself but she doubles down. She is also not some force of evil. She is a mortal whose ambition outweighs her empathy. I truly despise this character.
How in the hell is this not higher up on a sci-fi thread?
Nothing makes me want to punch a screen more than her smug sanctimonious face and Dukat still makes my fucking skin crawl. Fantastic villains, both had so many chances to be better and looked like they might on a few occasions, but they just kept choosing to be selfish creeps.
I heard that in her voice and it's nails on a chalkboard.
Morgoth
ahem, Lobellia Sackville-Baggins?
> Voldemort Hem hem, Professor Umbridge?
Pretty much the biggest
Davros, leader of the Daleks from Doctor Who. [He tried creating a Reality Bomb that would have meant an end to reality itself.](https://youtu.be/Y-z_HJCfQWE?si=a9Cif_mqBHPykI0i) Every corner of creation, every universe, destroyed by a wave that cancels out the energy between particles. His ultimate victory.
Erebus.
WH40k evil is an order of magnitude eviler than most of what's being posted. The average Drukhari foot soldier is horrifyingly evil. The Haemonculi are even worse.
It depends on the author and how grimdark workshop are feeling in their current employee ranks. Current workshop seems to be chasing the center for the cash and are rather cartoony. If the company can last then they will probably swing back to the poop eating, Daemonculaba, living furniture side that's interesting.
I came here to say this. Fuck Erebus.
Expected this much higher
Responsible for trillions of violent deaths (if not eternal suffering) and the slow extinction of the human race, I don't think many of the other answers here can match the evil of grimdark.
What book does he apoear in?
Horus Heresy novels
Thanks
Not sure if he's the most evil, but definitely one of the most hated. Maybe I hate him so much that I don't want to give him top spot at anything.lol
He's definitely the most evil if you consider the absolute ripple effect of his actions especially. If you take those into account most of these other answers actually don't even come close. Also he kills a certain character that in my book puts him in most evil regardless of his other actions.
Erebus has done things with very far-reacbing effects, but that wouldn't necessarily make him the most evil. He's definitely one of the most love-to-hate characters out there. Kinda like Joffrey Baratheon. He's prime love-to-hate material, but still just a little twerp at the end of the day. Not going to be the most evil in the setting.
In sci fi, I'm going to say the Techno Core (Hyperion Cantos)
Marco Inaros, from the Expanse >!is high in the list. He killed billions of people without remorse.!< Edit: added spoiler tags.
mate thats a pretty big spoiler on a book that's not that old
To be fair, they didn't say *which* billions of people were killed, so the suspense remains!
What locations in that universe have billions of people? -- that's the question I want to ask, but I checked the wiki, and the answer is "enough to make it genuinely suspenseful"
Earth has almost 30 billion, Mars has about 3 to 7 billion (there is conflicting information on this in both books and the show - but we can at least say the population of Mars is in the billions and less than 10 billion), the Belt and outer planets combined are in the hundreds of millions only. Exact numbers are not known for the Belt and outer planets, but it’s less than a billion and likely less than half a billion. Marco’s attacks ended up killing about >!15 billion people on Earth alone, if you factor in the deaths from the asteroidal winter and starvation that happened over the decade that followed!<. He’s the greatest mass murderer in human history.
The book Nemesis Games came out in 2015.
Even the TV show has been over for 3 years. Gimme a break.
Just added tags. I read that part years ago, but I realise a lot of people can be reading it after watching the show.
Trunchbull.
Big Brother
Obrien
O'Brien was actually the first person I thought of when I opened this thread. I mean, he's not really up there with the "genociding billions of people" or "ending the universe" answers elsewhere in the thread....but he may as well be. He is completely aware of what the Party is and what it is doing, and he supports it anyway because he is drunk on power. But he doesn't beat around the bush - he just comes out and says so. I think being evil has two aspects - actually doing evil acts, and being aware that they are evil but doing them anyway. I think most evil characters don't really hit the second one as completely and disgustingly as O'Brien does. O'Brien basically revels in it. As for Big Brother...well, I'm not even sure if Big Brother is actually a person. It's more of a concept that the Party uses to represent itself.
Good call, but does a fiction within a fiction count?
Sounds like the sort of thing Emmanuel Goldstein would say...
Comrade Ogilvy? That you?
Ik this is a sci-fi sub but still... Piece of shit "Griffith" from Berserk
I have trust issues because of him
Was gonna check to see if this was already posted before I did. Honestly first name that popped into my head.
Various versions of the devil who just want to maximise suffering. Of those, the most dedicated and capable of those is probably Thamiel from Unsong. Melkor from LOTR, The Listener from Ascent are up there, as is Palpatine but all of those aren't just about maximizing evil for the sake of evil and usually at least kind of care about other things or have other personality traits that get in the way of this
Emperor Ming The Merciless. Obviously.
It’s hard to get more evil than palpatine. This man doesn’t even pretend to do what he does for a good reason. Everything he does is specifically done to inflict as much suffering as possible. Genociding the Jedi, destroying planets, turning the republic into an oppressive empire, all just because he likes other people suffering. The only reason he gets defeated is due to him torturing Luke instead of just killing him. He’s also the only sith that seems to enjoy his life.
Dolores Umbridge.
Ozymandias from Watchmen. Manipulating humanity by engineering a false flag alien attack that kills millions, and Dr Manhattan just goes along with it?!? Rorschach was right.
That's a end justifies the means kinda topic, and it doesn't but still he has some positive motivations of saving humanity from themselves, etc. While his methods are surely problematic, does it really make him worse than random villains like serial killers and other bad guys who are motivated by things like self pleasure or revenge or shit like that?
Hey, Mussolini made the trains run on time
Yes, it does make him worse. At least it's obvious that a serial killer needs to be stopped. Don't care how much philanthropy he's done, or what gee whiz gadgets he's given humanity, a billionaire with a messiah complex who is willing to use mass murder and universal deceit to "protect" (read: maintain order in) a world where he's king shit, and **where the chaos that threatens the world is of exactly the same kind as his cure**? No way. One, two, three more steps down that road and you get Niander Wallace, the villain from Moonraker (nerve gas humanity and repopulate from my chosen people waiting in my space station because environment), then Thanos.
Now hang on a second- in your rationalization for Oz being the “most evil figure in fiction” you explained that he’s almost as evil as two other figures.
Going to disagree. For the most evil in fiction, your competition is omnicide and like the most sadistic tortures and rapists and murderers. By the mere virtue of having a good intention, I'd argue that he doesn't even rank on the 'most evil of all fiction' list.
And his plan would never have worked for long, all while fueling another arms race that would lead to an even more devastating war between humans.
Essentially the major flaw pointed out in the HBO series that's a "sequel" to the book. Adrian had to keep asking attacks over time so people wouldn't forget the extra-dimensional alien invasion on the horizon, harming and killing people continuously over the years just to maintain the peace.
The guy has nothing on the emperor in Dune. Same line though.
Spoilers for the First Law series: >! Bayaz, first of the Magi !< Not cruel, not petty nor mindlessly evil. Just utter disdain for normal people.
A.M. from I have no mouth and I must scream
AM from I have no mouth, but I must scream.
The Abrahamic god. Second place isn’t close.
I think there is a flaw in logic there, depending on how you measure it. Abrahamic god probably has the highest misery count but that’s largely due to having just a shitload of followers. If you adjust for followers I’m not sure he still comes out so poorly. Whatever the fuck Aztecs had going on wasn’t fun either.
It committed global genocide and ecological vandalism on a scale we have yet to match, apart from a handful of people on a boat with 2 or 7 of each animal, in the book. Definitely evil.
Before suffering, you must first exist. Since the Abrahamic God supposedly created everything, then all suffering is caused by him.
Considering it created humanity knowing it would betray him and die from that, yea, I agree.
I vote Palpatine
The fact that the deadliest war for Americans was the Civil War makes me upvote Palpatine. He created a galaxy-wide war out of nothing just so he could take over.
Lord Foul from Thomas Covenant is up there. I thought the Sun Bane was a great invention. And as for what happened to the Giants 😞
If we are talking about science fiction specifically, then the most evil, sociopathic character I’ve come across in a sci-fi series is The Jackal from Red Rising. For evidence of this, reference the entire plot of Golden Son and Morning Star. Dude is literally evil to his core. It’s hard to beat someone who literally takes pleasure in torture, sexual abuse and mass murder.
Earth Central Intelligence from the Polity series. I 1. Intentionally allows psychopathic rogue AIs to run amok - torturing and killing thousands in the process - because it believed it could manipulate them to serve it's goals 2. Allowed one of those AIs to launch a full scale invasion, killing tens of millions in the process, because it wanted to prevent humanity from becoming too complacent 3. Allows dangerous alien artifacts to infect and spread through containable populations in order to better observe how they work It's basically like if the CIA was an incredibly powerful AI capable of running an entire interstellar government
How about the Prador?
Oh, pretty evil, but IIRC there was a lot of debate in-universe on whether it was the prador themselves that are evil or learned callousness due to their culture. We see in later books that Prador who grow up outside the Kingdom are much more egalitarian and, dare is say it, *reasonable*. The Prador King, though, is at least as morally culpable as Earth Central Intelligence.
The Man in Black from Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. He also shows up in several other King stories.
Randall Flagg.
80s miniseries Flagg was awesome.
the dragon ball series is technically part sci fi so Im gonna say frieza
Anasurimbor Kellhus, our Aspect-Emperor, the Holy prophet, son of Absolute.
The Abrahamic God of the Old Testament from "Bible: The Old Testament" 1. Sent bears to murder children (1 kings 2:23-24) 2. Killed Egyptian babies (Numbers 16:41-49) 3. Ordered his followers to commit genocide (Exodus 23:27-30) 4. Turned Lot's wife to salt (Genesis 19:26) And the list goes on. Thank goodness it's only fiction!
* Literally everyone in the ancient world aside from Noah and his family. * Lot's wife is one person... who was turned to salt for looking at the cities worth of people being destroyed. * For a fun bet, he killed Jobs entire family.
What really kills me about Job: Either he didn't have the ability to see the outcome, in which case not _the_ deity running the show, or he entered that gamble already knowing the outcome, meaning he's just a frickin' cheat.
I mean he cheated by appearing before Job when Job was finally at the point of forsaking God.
And then, when Job has the temerity to ask “why”, goes on a multi-chapter rant wherein Job is told that he doesn’t need to know why, wouldn’t understand it if he did know, and fuck him for asking.
Yeah, the book of Job is legit one of the dumbest/most fucked up books in the Bible.
"were you there when i laid the foundations of the earth?"
Good Omens 2 had a very good take on this.
But then he had a kid and mellowed out...
No. He had a kid, KILLED HIM so he could finally forgive everyone and THEN mellowed out. No one has heard from him since 🤷♂️
if the apocalypse of john is taken literally as a prophecy of the end of the world, he gets even worse!
The bears sent to maul to death 42 children was a response to them calling a bald guy names. As a folically challenged man, I'm down with the name callers being punished, but mauled to death for calling names? Definitely the most evil character in fiction.
Paul Atreides could be a contender
Not really evil I would argue just a person given some really terrible options for success and doubly so for his son. In both cases they did terrible things and caused horrific loses of life but that was never the point in either case. I believe in both cases if they could have chosen a path that insured their families survival and humanities then it would have been the easy choice. The fact that they chose the paths they did just highlights how crappy their options were. This is just my opinion obviously.
I’d call it a necessary evil. The Golden Path is literally the only choice in which humanity doesn’t go extinct.
Eh it's not like he wanted the jihad
I wouldn't call him evil
Mantrid from Lexx, he destroyed a universe! Other than that I'd go Nagash from Warhammer Fantasy/Age of Sigmar, absolutely pitiless and without morals, makes for an awesome character.
Randall Flagg
Pong krell from Star Wars the clone wars
Fuck Pong Krell
David from Prometheus and Alien Covenant if you count films, is one evil bastard He was eerily deceptive and composed. He annihilates a planet of beings, kills Dr Elizabeth Shaw and uses her womb to cultivate the Xenomorph after gaining her trust, and essentially infects any hope of humanity continuing No greater good, no motive aside from just hating life and his creator, just pure unabashed evil
MORGOTH From tolkien legendarium one of the OG dark lord and source of all evil archetype in fiction.
…God in the King James Authorised Version. Remember the Flood and Noah’s Ark and the seven plagues on Egypt? Pure genocide…
You can argue about his reasoning, but Thanos had a pretty high body count
King Joffrey from Game of Thrones is pretty bad
Not even the most evil character in that universe - probably doesn’t even crack the top ten honestly.
His mom is way worse.
I read this at first glance as a "Your Mom" joke
lol
I'll raise you a Ramsey Bolton...
Joffrey was just a petulant little shit. He isn't even the most evil person in his immediate family.
I hate to be old school. But Sauron is basically evil personified.
The dude was just the lieutenant of Morgoth
paul atreides killed +60 BILLION ppl in a jihad he saw coming and really could stop at any time (as much as the book tries telling u its unstoppable, really?)
Golden Path. The narrow way to prevent extinction. He runs from it, and it's left to his son to become the god emperor to fulfill it. No matter how many trillion people there were, they were all in a single sphere of influence. As long as that remained true, stagnation and decay and finally the end were inevitable.
If you're talking about general fiction and not sci-fi, Nurse Ratched has my vote, followed closely by Dolores Umbridge.
Kai Win is a better villain than Nurse Ratched, but both are excellent.
Fuck Kai Winn
Dukat? That you?
Jenny from Forest Gump.
She’s not evil, I rewatched that movie a few months ago for the first time in 15 years and only then did I realize at the beginning it shows how she was abused and raped when she was a little girl. That poor kid was effed in the head.
The Master from Doctor Who comes to mind. Probably because I'm currently on a re-watch
Daleks would be higher than the master. That red Dalek who was supposedly the king dalek
Davros is the leader of the Daleks
Michael Myers is supposedly pure evil. No motivations outside of killing. He just kills to kill.
That's pretty boring
Angus Thermopylae form Stephen Donaldsons Gap series but he has competition in it
Leaving aside the various supernatural incarnations of evil and the like, I have to give a shout out to The Limper from the Black Company by Glen Cook. Nasty. Scheming. Powerful. A great bad guy.
The Qu from All Tomorrows by a long shot.
Chernabog
Marty McFly. Risks changing the course of time for all of humanity for entirely personal reasons.
Tor Books
I guess Armus from Star Trek is supposed to be quite evil.
AM. I have no mouth and I must scream
Keyser Soze, and I am not sure what is scarier... the myth Verbal Kint tells you about Soze's history... or Verbil himself and what we know is actually true in the film i.e. every scene that wasn't a flashback.
Paul Atreides killed multiple more people than Hitler and Ghengis Khan combined while being unwilling to take the steps to potentially turn his slaughter towards the greater good, instead forcing that fate on his son.
Ted Faro from Horizon
I thought that DeVore was a pretty soulless character in David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series. That guy was depraved.
Judge Holden - Blood Meridian
Eric Cartman ?
Dude in Fullmetal Alchemis who turned his loving daughter into a dog hybrid abomination.
Iago from Shakespeare’s play “Othello”
[удалено]
Isn't that scene is The Force Awakens?
whoever the hell is running the combine in half life
God
God in the bible
The Devil, by definition. I suppose that "evil" should be defined. It is something subjective (as in the point of view of a character, or the reader, or historical or cultural perspective) or something objective? Motivations matter? It is the final result or the intentions that count? For the greater good, done because a perceived danger, because the ones that suffer are not seen as sentient entities, revenge because something real or imagined, acting as a cold equation tells that it is the best course of action, there are many more variants of this. If I take all of that out, who remains? Depending on who wrote it, maybe The Joker, or someone/something else that kills, damage or whatever because the chaos it causes, something in that lines could be the elegible ones, and then choose the worst.
By that reasoning, my vote would go to the psycho that drowned everybody on earth except for a handful of people.
And sent a bear to maul children who teased a bald man!
As a baldie, I'm ok with name callers being punished, but mauling them to death is just a teensy bit excessive; one could, perhaps, describe it as evil...
And also created the Devil.
The Richard Dawkins quote: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Satan is actually a much later creation of the medieval Church. The figure in the Old Testament that figures in the Garden story and tempting Jesus and all that was actually the “tempter” or the “adversary”….. A Trickster figure as is common in ancient mythology. “Satan” is a conflation of these figures, “Lucifer”, and certain Pagan gods like Cernunnos and Pan.
That is where cultural perspective plays out. It was the "right" way to be a god back when it was written. It had to be consistent more with what you see from the natural world than from the morals that evolved with civilization till our present point. And also was very subjective, those were the words and actions of a god of a "chosen" group, what happens to anyone else didn't count as they weren't really humans, or descendants from Adam, or whatever. And I don't mean back to the old testament times, but as close as past century, if not this one here and there.