The Rogue's Gallery

I am an individual that finds villains in fiction to be one of the most important parts of a story, second to the actual storyline. A bad villain can break a brilliant story, and a good villain can turn a mediocre story into something special. Nine times out of ten the entire story is the hero reacting to everything the villain does. But I digress.

This is a place to give that special recognition to the darkest villains, the ones with complex pasts and illusive morality, the villains that got chills down your spines, the ones that killed off your favorite characters, the great darkness for the hero to overcome. All villains from all works of fiction are welcome.

Personally, my favorite villain is Shougo Makishima. I am not sure if I will ever find a villain more fascinating and complex then him.



A down to earth villain, testing those around him, and turning regular people in to savage killers like him. Simply an amazing villain. He is from Psycho-Pass by the way.

I reeeeally love The Beast from Over the Garden Wall. Picture under spoilers because his identity is a bit of a minor reveal!

Spoiler:

Has that whole "something in the woods is evil" vibe - which was terrifying to me - and in the very end it's a great reveal when you learn what he really is. Plus he sings. Really turned me on to singing villains!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZUH_ZGI1U8

I particularly enjoy vaas from far cry 3. It's a shame he isn't around more.
He's such an interesting villain because he's dynamic and no matter what he always seems one step ahead of the main protag.

Gul Dukat from Deep Space 9. Oversaw the military occupation and bloody enslavement of a planet, completely unrepentant after the fact. He was a total bastard, albeit a charismatic one who showed his own sort of love for his half-Bajoran daughter - only to completely mentally snap when (spoilers for a ten year old show)his lieutenant shot her in the chest right in front of him(/spoilers). One psychotic episode later, he comes back with a demon cult to do what he's pretty sure he should have done in the first place.


Everyone standing behind him is a hallucination, but this is one of the best looks we ever get into his head.

Not the biggest Mass Effect fan, and I think a fair amount of it is due to the kickass voice acting, but damn if I don't love the Illusive Man. Chilling, pragmatic, and an example of racism done well. I like TIM.

Looked up Psycho-Pass. My knowledge of cyberpunk has more holes in it than I thought, I'm afraid.

A ruthless philosophy, scrupulously followed? I can see the appeal of that. 'Justice system completely ignores him' is frustrating, but not without allegorical value.
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In KotOR II, my fourth and last charrie was hewing to Kreia's philosophy, which is about judicious application of one's strength. And finding strength in adversity. And encouraging others to find this strength. Or just imposing it on them.

The Disciple, a gender-gated companion of all things, posited that maybe civilians could be weak without being unworthy of happy lives. ICly, I should've argued that people in positions of power have a responsibility to be strong, therefore pragmatic, therefore ruthless. (Actually, he can be persuaded of this. If you game the influence system, anyways. Lie to him, edit the savegame, whichever.)

But in this case, the specific form of weakness was 'reliance on others'. Being social creatures, this tends to be quite inescapable for us. So that was an argument I lost. Clever of him, though, to equate 'others, i.e. putrefying bureacracy' with 'others, i.e. war comrades'. Dislikable. He's not a villain, though.

Anyways, my favorite villain is a fatalistic, minimally psychotic DS Jedi Exile. Which is a little biased! So let's say it's Kreia, too. But I already gushed about Sith Mom to Shade back on the Sporum.

Gosh there's a lot of words there. I should more rigorously verify whether conflict between the principles associated with an individual's various identities are indeed the primary cause of changes in their outlook.

dialog transcript:

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Oh, hm. Over the Garden Wall has nothing to do with Over the Hedge. Much less marketing, for one thing. That's injust.

On the one hand, I resent that in 'cinematic' games, the illusion of choice is reduced to nearly its furthest extent. (Particularly in character interactions, as most RPGs fare just as poorly at varying the mainplot.) On the other, given a sufficiently large budget, even the odd fail state can be lavishly rendered (e.g. letting Vaas shoot down your helicopter, as I see from the related videos).

Dang. DS9 handled colonialism well, from what I see here.
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Funny, I think I hated the Illusive Man the whole time for daring to make such a blithe self-insertion. "So hey, I've resurrected you. Remember that ship your government gave you? Here's a better one, with a highly illegal AI, no less.

Also, for making the same dang mistake as Saren. To the point of tuning out whatever he said. Despite all his benefactor-ness. I mean, Shep wouldn't have died at all if Cerberus hadn't been retconned into a catch-all plot device.

TIM sorta has a mix of Dukat's racism and Kreia's Ganesh-like 'adds and subtracts obstacles' qualities to him. Am still dubious as to whether he has any benevolence, though. Might have to listen and see.

JazzTap wrote:

Looked up Psycho-Pass. My knowledge of cyberpunk has more holes in it than I thought, I'm afraid.

A ruthless philosophy, scrupulously followed? I can see the appeal of that. 'Justice system completely ignores him' is frustrating, but not without allegorical value.

One of the reasons I found him so unique, is it is a spin on the dystopian fiction. The heroes are the ones trying to protect the unjust system, from the villain who wants to end it.

In a society where the computer network Sibyl tells you this person is a criminal, or a good civilian, and you no longer judge anyone based on what you think, but blindly follow what a computer tells you. Killing someone in the street because it told you they were a criminal.

And he finds that he cannot be judged by the all powerful Sibyl system. So, he decides, the only person that can judge him, is someone that can become a killer of their own free will. And that is what he does throughout the series, is creating killers, testing them. In a sense, almost seeing if they can judge him as it is. But ultimately he wants to destroy Sibyl, the root of all evil in his eyes.

I highly recommend the series actually, very good. The second series isn't as good, but still alright.


And yeah, I have noticed Vaas is extremely popular as a villain. I mean really popular. I haven't played the game myself, but I can tell everyone loves him.

Vaas has a lot of personality, his voice actor is very good. It's kind of hard to describe, but his voice actor doesn't hold back. Like I can imagine him doing more than just reading the lines with voice fluctuations. It's like he's in the recording studio flailing his body around as well.
it's dynamic.

Yeah, he probably gets into it to make it all the more authentic and real.

Master of ImpZ wrote:

One of the reasons I found him so unique, is it is a spin on the dystopian fiction. The heroes are the ones trying to protect the unjust system, from the villain who wants to end it.

In a society where the computer network Sibyl tells you this person is a criminal, or a good civilian, and you no longer judge anyone based on what you think, but blindly follow what a computer tells you. Killing someone in the street because it told you they were a criminal.

It's not even that it's a computer. At least that way, it has a prayer of making an informed and reasoned decision every time. The problem is that it has an agenda, isn't it? But suppose anyways that its intentions were good from a point of view that isn't unduly psychotic.

It's still difficult - impossible, on account of troublemakers?, - to maximize utility over a group of people without defining an outgroup of 'non-people'. Notably criminals. Or in this case, people with criminal potential according to a decent metric with some notable flaws.

But flawless metrics regarding any sufficiently complex system are nonexistent. Therefore, we must attenuate our judgement. Allow for error. How? Being discussed here is merely the worst that might happen when we don't.

Master of ImpZ wrote:

And he finds that he cannot be judged by the all powerful Sibyl system. So, he decides, the only person that can judge him, is someone that can become a killer of their own free will. And that is what he does throughout the series, is creating killers, testing them. In a sense, almost seeing if they can judge him as it is. But ultimately he wants to destroy Sibyl, the root of all evil in his eyes.

Seems as if he wants a death sentence, to go with such a narrow choice of judges. It does, however, serve as a good point of argument against Sibyl - to show that people can change. A pity if he does not succeed.

Master of ImpZ wrote:

I highly recommend the series actually, very good. The second series isn't as good, but still alright.

I shall mark it pending. It seems the second series tries to address the matter of judging a social group's morality, which is again inherently difficult. Does it produce any answers beyond that?
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edit: Also, it turns out someone's compiled Kreia's story arc into an hour-some vid, if anyone's curious.

JazzTap wrote:

Dang. DS9 handled colonialism well, from what I see here.

You could have re-aired the show starting with the pilot in 2002 and it still would have been topical and edgy. It shows a lot about colonial/imperialism and terrorism from both sides. First officer on the station was a former terrorist in a resistance cell, even. And you've got people from the occupying force who are on all corners of the moral spectrum, at least in their own heads. Dukat, who was trying to play the "not as big of a jerk as I could have been, so I really did you a favor" card, to several others who were utterly unrepentant and would have been happy to complete a genocide.

JazzTap wrote:

It's not even that it's a computer. At least that way, it has a prayer of making an informed and reasoned decision every time. The problem is that it has an agenda, isn't it? But suppose anyways that its intentions were good from a point of view that isn't unduly psychotic.

It's still difficult - impossible, on account of troublemakers?, - to maximize utility over a group of people without defining an outgroup of 'non-people'. Notably criminals. Or in this case, people with criminal potential according to a decent metric with some notable flaws.

But flawless metrics regarding any sufficiently complex system are nonexistent. Therefore, we must attenuate our judgement. Allow for error. How? Being discussed here is merely the worst that might happen when we don't.

The Sibyl system does have a dark secret, but it is a major major spoiler. What I can say is, it is the closest anyone has gotten to a perfect system. It doesn't arbitrarily assign numbers to people. When it judges an individual, it judges based on their past, education scores, past and present stress levels and moods, personality, etc.

As Makishima is in the act of torturing and killing someone, Sibyl still judges him as sane and good. In fact, it judges him as Pure White, a saint who could not hurt a fly. Makishima claims his own internal biological processes must be telling him that everything he is doing is good and right, and Sibyl picks up those same processes, so thus, cannot judge him. I always read into it as he was a sociopath with no empathy. Since he cannot even feel the slightest guilt, remorse, or stress to killing, Sibyl cannot judge him accurately.

It is also explained a perfect judge cannot exist. The moment Sibyl was put into operation, anomalies were discovered, which again is a bit of spoilers so letting it sit there. One of the characters, Shinya, the secondary character in all of this, mulls over the idea of a perfect utopia, that Sibyl supposedly introduced, but goes on saying the idea of a perfect society is impossible. It is impossible to make everyone happy, so you just make the largest number of people happy, and call that perfection. People begin to slowly realize the Sibyl system is not perfect, and it can never be perfect.

But on the flipside, the Sibyl system is constantly evolving, to become ever more perfect, to judge more accurately. Which goes into the season 2 thing, with its self evolution.

JazzTap wrote:

Seems as if he wants a death sentence, to go with such a narrow choice of judges. It does, however, serve as a good point of argument against Sibyl - to show that people can change. A pity if he does not succeed.

You will definitely want to see how that goes.

JazzTap wrote:

I shall mark it pending. It seems the second series tries to address the matter of judging a social group's morality, which is again inherently difficult. Does it produce any answers beyond that?

Due to some plot reasons, it becomes evident Sibyl must be able to judge multiple people in a group, for a combined crime coefficient number. A character in it is also much like Makishima, he wants to know what color he is. Color being assigned on your psychological profile. Such as the Pure White reference. But the character also begins to wonder.

If Sibyl is the ultimate judge, and MUST judge everyone in society, and it must judge everyone by the same merits, and same protocol, can Sibyl judge itself? And if it can judge itself, does it, would it? What would be the outcome of Sibyl judging itself.

Its all interesting. I can say that much, the outcome of it all.