Evil Is Petty / Literature

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• Another Note: Beyond Birthday murders at least three innocent people, but he has nothing against any of them, nor does he even know them. To him, they are just collateral damage against the real target of his anger: L, who he's trying to "call out" for allegedly not caring about the kids who were being groomed as his successors, including BB's friend A, who committed suicide due to the pressures of living up to L, and BB himself, who was Always Second Best. In other words, the entirety of the LABB Murders was a "Notice me, Senpai!" gambit.
• Blood Meridian: For all of Judge Holden's grand designs about becoming the suzerain of the world and how he would like to create a dog-eat-dog world, he is not above doing smaller-scale acts of evil, such as falsely accusing a priest he had never met before of various crimes to start a mob against him, or buying two puppies from a boy only to immediately throw them into the water in front of his face, just to spread even more misery than he already has.
• The Butcher Boy: You honestly can’t get any pettier than trying to ruin your neighbor's life simple cause he has a happier family than you.
• The Cask of Amontillado: Montresor murders Fortunato in an extremely cruel manner for merely offending him (and quite possibly not even intentionally at that).
• The Chaos Cycle: Velizar's plan to murder his brother came from the fact that his brother Sendoa had possibly found a friend after meeting a girl once. After Sendoa kills Velizar as a result, Velizar's undying hatred and sense of self importance means he corrupts his own reincarnations to constantly mess with his brother Sendoa's reincarnations. So deep is that hatred of his brother that eventually the combined malice of countless reincarnations who he corrupted allows Velizar to become the demon Abaddon.
• A Chorus of Dragons: A footnote by Thurvishar suggests that Gadrith murdered his academy roommate and bound his soul in order to take his spot as the highest-scoring student in their class.
• Codex Alera: Kord is a brutal slaver solely because he enjoys feeling powerful over other people (especially women) and blatantly ignores a threat to his own life and power base because he wants to break a woman who had previously shown him up. High Lord Kalarus commits large-scale atrocities (like when he creates a Brainwashed and Crazy slave army by attacking their minds from the start of childhood and later plans to unleash a volcano on his own city when his coup attempt gets beaten back,) but also collars a female hostage (who is taller than him and had previously faced him down,) to the floor with a chain that allows her to move around but is slightly too short for her to stand at her full height. Invidia in the last two books has submitted herself to the Vord in exchange for the poison in her blood being suppressed, fully aware that she's dooming the rest of Alera and is only prolonging her own life until she outlives her usefulness, but she does it anyway because she's too much of a Dirty Coward to let herself be killed by the poison, which she only got hit with because she lost the treacherous games of intrigue she started.
• Deathstalker: Finn Durandal overthrew his friend Douglas Campbell and usurped the throne, turning a golden age into a reign of terror. He gave fanatical human purists control of the military while slaughtering alien ambassadors; he arranged for former colleagues to be possessed by esper terrorists as their playthings and his personal hitmen; he destroyed the hereditary Campbell homestead and razed the Deathstalker homeworld after slaughtering the family. And he did all of this because Douglas decided to give his other friend, Lewis Deathstalker, the ceremonial role of King's Champion.
• Early in Death Star, a block on Coruscant dedicated to businesses like bakeries and cantinas is burned down in what some characters assume is a case of Insurance Fraud. However, given all the Imperial agents seen prior to this and the fact that one approaches a bereft cantina owner with a job offer as she sifts through the wreckage of the bar she worked so hard to afford, it looks more like an Imperial op. Meaning that someone in The Empire decided the in-progress Death Star would need people running leisure services for its off-duty crew and decided that it was better to put people out of their livelihoods and offer this alternative than to post job listings.
• Discworld:
  • In the first novel, The Colour of Magic, Death has a very different personality than in later books and does things like kill flies because he's annoyed. He also takes one of a cat's nine lives purely out of spite, despite being a Kindhearted Cat Lover in later books.
  • In Lords and Ladies, just before setting out to fight Margrat, the Elf Queen takes on the appearance of an idealized version of her, evidently how Magrat wishes she looked (and how her would-be husband has always seen her), just to be extra petty. Granny Weatherwax, no stranger to acts of petty spite herself, takes note.
  • Monstrous Regiment: Strappi, in the manner of the pathetic little bully. His job was supposed to be investigating accounting irregularities around Jackrum. Instead, he decides to bully a bunch of new recruits, and when told he's getting sent to the front line deserts... but not before destroying Maladict's coffee machine, stealing everyone's stuff, and pointing a bunch of enemy troops their way.
• Gorgoz from Divine Misfortune had vowed to destroy Lucky and everything he holds dear, a vow he's been obsessively working to fulfill. Why? Because he stole his girlfriend. He doesn't even remember what her name was, nor does he actually seem all that wounded over it. He's just going to all the trouble because he takes pleasure in inconveniencing a nemesis.
• Dortmunder: In What's the Worst That Could Happen?, Max Fairbanks catches Dortmunder burgling his beach house. Fairbanks hands Dortmunder over to the cops, which Dortmunder regards as a fair cop as he was caught fair and square. But then Fairbanks claims that Dortmunder's ring is actually his and takes it off him. This act of petty vengeance means It's Personal for Dortmunder and kicks off the plot.
• Dragon, Dragon has a dragon that goes out of his way to be a total prick to a nearby kingdom by doing the following: frighten maidens, stopped up chimneys, broke store windows, turned back clocks, caused dogs to bark endlessly, tipped over fences, robbed graves, putting frogs in the drinking water, tore out the final chapters of every book, put firecrackers in everyone's cigars, stole the clappers from the church bells, sprung all the bear traps, swapped everyone's house numbers so neighbors would be sleeping in strangers' beds, and change the directions of the road so people would go the wrong way.
• The Dresden Files:
  • In Summer Knight, Dresden makes a deal with Mab. She might not hurt him in retaliation, to influence him, to force his hand or for pleasure. Mab is a queen of fairies, of Unseelie Court and Lawful Evil through and through, bound only by the letter of the rules and the deals made with mortals. So she stabs Dresden's hand with a letter opener, just to show him he is not as clever as he thinks he is. She did it out of petty spite, which is not on the list of things Harry thought he needed to protect himself from. Evil Is Petty indeed.
  • In White Night, Dresden is forced to ask crime lord Gentleman Johnny Marcone for a favor. Marcone makes him say please. Then pretty please. Then pretty please with a cherry on top.
  • Ghost Story reveals that, after Dresden's apartment was burned down and Dresden himself seemingly killed during the events of Changes, Marcone purchased the property and used it as the site for his new castle. This ultimately backfires on him though, as in Battle Ground Dresden is able to use the fact that it's his former home to wrest the property — and by extension, the castle — away from Marcone.
  • This is ultimately what derails Nicodemus' plan in Skin Game. Nicodemus has just destroyed Fidelacchius, the Sword of Faith, and has Harry and Karrin at his mercy. Just as he's planning to kill them, Michael appears and offers to give himself up to Nicodemus in exchange for their lives. Nicodemus has no practical reason to agree to this — Michael is crippled and retired, and no longer a serious threat, while Harry is one of his biggest enemies. However, Michael was formerly a huge pain in Nicodemus' ass during his time as a Knight of the Cross, and he just can't stand the fact that he got to Earn His Happy Ending. So he agrees, with the intent of killing Michael and then killing Harry the next time an opportunity presents itself. Not only does he fail to actually kill Michael, due to Uriel's intervention, but his sparing Harry leads to both him being humiliated and losing most of his followers, and Fidelacchius reconstituting itself in the hands of a new Knight of the Cross.
• In the Erevis Cale trilogy of Forgotten Realms novels, the ultimate plan of the Big Bad Vhostym the Sojourner, in pursuit of which he commits such atrocities as destroying whole cities, slaughtering thousands and torturing to death dozens of angels? To create the "Crown of Fire", an artificially started and prolonged solar eclipse^note which creates a cataclysmic "Rain of Fire" as a by-product that kills thousands and triggers a food crisis that leads to a civil war a year later, incidentally, so he can walk upon a beach like a normal being one time before he dies. In case this doesn't sound petty enough, one should be aware that not only is Vhostym an incredibly powerful (Archmage-level) Wizard/Psion, meaning he has a wide variety of far less evil methods of doing this (including body-snatching others to experience the world through their senses and shapechanging into non-albino forms so he isn't burnt/blinded by the sun), and he actually muses on and dismisses them to himself, he's also lived for millennia and so has had dozens of opportunities to do during natural solar eclipses. Cale himself calls Vhostym on this at the trilogy's end; Vhostym simply retorts that it "wouldn't be as satisfying" to do things that way, and besides, he is strong enough to do it his way, so he will do things his way. Oh, and this is all because he saw a previous "Crown of Fire" as a boy and just wanted to relive a childhood memory.
• Skewered in Good Omens. Crowley's M.O. is perpetuating petty evil. Other demons will spend all their time trying to corrupt a politician or cause a priest to lose his faith. Crowley sets up telemarketing networks and causes traffic jams. Other demons accomplish one great act of evil. Crowley accomplishes a hundred thousand petty acts of evil, thus, in the aggregate, causing more evil than the other demons. Not that the other demons see it his way...
  • From the authors' 'Crowley's New Year's Resolutions, 2006' post:
  Resolution #1: I must accept that Super-Gluing valuable coins to the sidewalk and then watching events from a nearby café is not proper demonic activity.
• Most of the damned in The Great Divorce aren't murderers or criminals, but just normal people who happen to be selfish bastards. They include a pretentious poet, a conspiracy theorist, an ungrateful businessman, and My Beloved Smother.
• Harry Potter:
  • In Order of the Phoenix while the Big Bad and his minions are busy torturing, murdering, and attempting world domination, Dolores Umbridge is slowly usurping power at Hogwarts, making students in detention write lines with a pen that carves whatever they write into their hand, discriminating against non-humans and Muggle-borns, and just being an arrogant and irritating Jerkass in general. While the Death Eaters use Unforgivable Curses left and right, Umbridge merely threatens people with them. The fact that she isn't as over-the-top evil as the REAL villains ironically makes her even more fun to hate than they are.
    • Umbridge also delights in Screw the Rules, I Make Them! Umbridge suspects that Harry has information on Sirius Black (who is actually completely innocent), so she decides to use the highly illegal Cruciatus Curse on Harry to make him tell her. Hermione calls her out on this, but Umbridge brushes this off with a "What Cornelius [the Minister of Magic] doesn't know won't hurt him."
  • Draco Malfoy is a fairly petty villain as well — his misdeeds are mostly limited to insulting others, using his family connections and money to get whatever he wants, cheating at Quidditch, and abusing his power as a prefect. That is, until Book 6, when he gets in way over his head and learns the hard way that Evil Is Not a Toy. 6 years is a pretty long time to hate Harry to the point where he mainly targeted him and his friends for bullying because Harry rejected his "offer of friendship".
  • Before Voldemort became a genocidal Evil Overlord, his evil acts were at first limited to things like petty theft and bullying. He then moved on to unleashing Slytherin's monster and framing Hagrid for the ensuing deaths, and things only went downhill from there. And he cursed the Defense Against the Dark Arts position at Hogwarts so no one can hold the job for more than one school year after Dumbledore wouldn't hire him, even though he was only visiting as an excuse to hide another Horcrux and probably knew Dumbledore would turn him down anyway. In the final book, he also murders an entire family just because the person he was looking for no longer lived there. Culminates with Voldemort telling everyone that an apparently dead Harry was killed trying to cowardly flee Hogwarts to save his own neck when Harry did the exact opposite (deliberately going to his apparent death to save everyone in the castle), with Harry noting that Voldemort was relishing in the lie he was telling.
  • Invoked in-universe with Snape. Harry and Ron are convinced that Snape is evil because...he's mean to Harry (and to a lesser extent, Gryffindors in general) all the time. It's not until Book 6 (out of 7) that he actually does something outright evil. Of course, it later turns out he did it for altruistic reasons, completely subverting this trope. Snape is extremely petty, but he's not evil.
• Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest: Many of the Lost God's worshippers do so out of the idea that he will grant their hearts desires as payment for their devotions, ranging from protecting the animals, to doing something about "the Man", to smiting people who use their reserved parking space. Being a god, he has no actual intention of following through on such promises since he thinks Humans Are Insects.
• Honor Harrington: If you see anyone's early inner monologue include the phrase "that bitch" or a variant thereof in reference to Lady Harrington, rest assured they're the villain and will probably die in some bloody fashion before you reach the back page.
• Jaine Austen Mysteries: Scotty Parker from Death of a Neighborhood Scrooge was not only a blackmailing cheapskate, he was also a jerk who cut power to his neighbor's Christmas decorations, and told a bunch of little kids Santa Claus was in the hospital from a stroke.
• James Bond:
  • Hugo Drax, the Big Bad of the novel Moonraker, screws himself over with his trope. The entire reason M brings James Bond into contact with Drax in the first place is that...Sir Hugo Drax cheats at cards.
  • Goldfinger: The title character is not just a criminal mastermind, he cheats at cards and golf.
  • As in the films, 007's Arch-Enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld is quite a brutal Bad Boss towards his minions. Also, when his Evil Plan in On Her Majesty's Secret Service is foiled, he even manages to spite Bond by killing his wife Tracy on their wedding day.
• In John Dies at the End, the Big Bad, Korrok, is an Eldritch Abomination who talks like a stereotypical Xbox Live kid.
• C. S. Lewis:
  • Played for horror in Perelandra with Satan. Inhabiting a human body, he attempts to re-create the fall of mankind with the newborn humanoids on Perelandra/Venus. He's forbidden to harm Ransom, the protagonist, unless Ransom attacks first, so while the Eve equivalent is sleeping, he spends his time doing such petty things as killing small animals and tearing up the turf, even resorting to childishly tormenting Ransom ("Ransom!" "What?" "Nothing." ... "Ransom!"). Ransom is quite disturbed by this, finding it more troubling than he would a clever, charismatic Satan (he can be very charismatic, but only when he's trying to convince the Queen to sin). He comes to realize that Satan considers all virtues, including cleverness, taste, and the capacity to feel shame, to be a means to an end and discards them when they do not serve his purposes. He is pure evil and cares for nothing but making things worse for everyone else.
  • Lewis' logic of the pettiness of evil is further explained in The Screwtape Letters. It's complex, but the reasoning is actually fairly sound; when you need a steady influx of sinners, it's in their best interest to keep a good flow of slightly evil folks that are afflicted by petty vices coming down. Sure, they're not as enjoyable as spectacular sinners of legend, but it makes sure Hell isn't starved of souls when such are in short supply.
• A Little Princess:
  • Miss Minchin started resenting Sara after the latter accidentally embarrassed the former in front of the class for something that was Miss Minchin's own fault. So once Sara lost her fortune, Miss Minchin wasted no time on mistreating the young girl.
  • Other characters, such as the cook, who treat Sara coldly really don't have any motivation other than that they envy Sara's wealth.
• In Marked, Aphrodite's various crimes, which convince Zoey she has to be "taken down" for, include having oral sex with her boyfriend in the hallway (granted the boyfriend clearly was trying to get her away from him, but the fact that she was trying to have non-consensual sex was glossed over in favor of the fact that having oral sex at all is skanky and degrading), generally being self-centered and catty, tricking Zoey into drinking wine with Fledgling blood in it via lying by omission, and not showing concern after having seizure-like visions of disasters.
• Les Misérables has an important scene that's omitted from the musical: Shortly after Valjean's run-in with the bishop, he encounters a boy walking down the road. The boy drops a coin, and Valjean almost reflexively covers it up with his foot. Realizing that he's sunk to the level of stealing from a kid, right after having been forgiven by the bishop for stealing from the church, prompts his Heel–Face Turn.
• Agent Franks of Monster Hunter International is an extremely violent Well-Intentioned Extremist with no compassion whatsoever at the best of times. In the fifth book, we learn that he's also a fallen angel. Shortly after we learn this, we see him park a car across two spaces, both of which are reserved for other people. When his passenger points this out, he angles the car further so it blocks a handicapped space as well.
• The first Big Bad in Murderess, Bridget is this. Having been overpowered by the protagonist Lu, she tries to get back at her by tripping her and spreading rumours. Lu, on the other hand, isn't so different and gleefully tortures her back.
• Please Don't Tell My Parents I've Got Henchmen: Why does Charles reveal his powers at the football game? Because he can't stand playing without them. While a lot of super kids would agree that hiding your powers is annoying, doing it to win a football game is just eye-roll-worthy.
• In the Rainbow Magic series, some of Jack Frost's schemes are very petty, such as ruining all desserts or taking over the world of fashion. In fact, the entire series started because he wasn't invited to the Midsummer Ball, and despite being welcome to stay after he showed up anyway, he insisted on removing all the colour from Fairyland and banishing the Rainbow Fairies to the human world.
• Redwall: Thoroughly spoiled Emperor Ublaz from The Pearls of Lutra slaughters entire tribes and puts in ridiculous amounts of effort to get hold of a pink pearl crown, expressing no interest whatsoever in the other plunder taken from the raid or in anything else he could gain from it.
• Rod Allbright Alien Adventures: This trope is why "cruelty" is considered the worst crime you can commit in galactic society. Most other crimes can have some sort of mitigating factor, but if you're cruel to someone, it's because you want to be and that's it. The galaxy's most wanted criminal, BKR, spent several years disguised as a human schoolboy on Earth while hunting an old enemy. How did he pass the time? As The Bully.
• In Shaman Blues, the villain is willing to reveal her massive reserves of Black Magic (having which is a heavy crime), torture ghosts, and cause thousands in collateral damage just to get back at a man who revealed her to be a Phony Psychic.
• Dolly from Small World (Tabitha King novel). She has Roger murder an elderly woman in a terrible way (death by minimizer isn't pretty) solely to steal the woman's priceless antique necklace, then minimizes the necklace because it's so distinctive she can't even wear it herself. She then goes on to minimize her own grandchildren (while knowing that the process is irreversible and that it causes major physical and psychological trauma) in order to blackmail their mother into restoring the ruined Doll's White House.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • With Royal Brats Joffrey Baratheon and Viserys Targaryen around, it's a little hard to say who the pettiest of them all in this series is: both manage to take their excesses to extremes while having very little of practical substance at the heart of their Evil. Plenty of bonkers between, them, too. Joffrey just got more power with which to get over-the-top, wastefully petty; yet, it's more than clear Viserys would have been just as much of a puppy-crossbowing mistake on the Iron Throne had he got it.
  • Joffrey's mother Cersei does definitely have her moments of petty douchebaggery (usually aimed at Tyrion or servants), thereby amply showing where her son gets it from... even if she's not as reliably proficient with the sheer mind-numbingly stupid emptiness that her little boy is. She actually needs alcohol to eventually get there; he doesn't.
  • Lord Walder Frey might beat everybody hands down simply due to living up to the trope well into his 90s while infecting the rest of his family with the bug on top of that. He's a major (and very irritating) Troll with a Small Name, Big Ego problem which pushes him into some truly petty, short-term actions. Few Freys are escaping the consequences: poor things.
  • Even for a Chessmaster and Magnificent Bastard par excellence, Lord Tywin isn't above the odd, spiteful low blow just to put Tyrion down.
  • Arguably, another Xanatos Speed Chess player does this, too: Littlefinger isn't above mixing a little pettiness and puppy-kicking into his (usually) complex schemes here and there when he feels like it. He takes care of little, forgotten trifles in some of the most horribly strung-out ways when other, quicker and cleaner options would work... isn't that right, Jayne Poole, Ser Dontos Hollard, and Marillion?
  • Jaime Lannister reveals his motive for killing Aerys II Targaryen, aka "The Mad King", was because Aerys, having realised a rebel victory was a dangerous possibility after several defeats suffered by his loyalists, started burying caches of wildfire under the streets of King's Landing, intending to ignite them if his enemies stormed the capital and take the entire city with him rather than suffer defeat on his enemies' terms (Jaime also speculates Aerys, in his lunacy, believed he would not die but be reincarnated by the inferno as a dragon, reborn with the power to destroy his enemies. When Jaime's father Tywin pulled a Cavalry Betrayal on Aerys when a rebel victory became a Foregone Conclusion, Jaime realised Aerys intended to set off the wildfire, so killed the Mad King and his collaborators before they could carry out their plan.
  Aerys II Targaryen: The traitors want my city, but I'll give them naught but ashes. Let Robert be king over charred bones and cooked meat. Let him be the king of ashes.
• In Dale Brown's Starfire, the Russian president orders Patrick McLanahan's tomb robbed and desecrated, not for any military or political advantage, but just because he wanted to use the urn as a paperweight and literally piss on the medals.
• In Star Wars Sith tend to be prone to this (and Stupid Evil) as their power comes from negative emotion, so killing people for minor slights is not only accepted but encouraged. The Sith Lord Lumiya takes the cake, however; after getting heavily wounded by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars (Marvel 1977) which she deliberately set him up to do, she returned in Legacy of the Force seeking revenge on him for her injuries and his destruction of The Empire. She orchestrated a second Galactic Civil War and became an Evil Mentor to Luke's nephew Jacen, all simply to spite Luke.
• In The Stepford Wives, the members of the Men's Association plot to murder their wives and replace them with submissive robotic duplicates because they dislike the idea that women should have lives outside of tending to their husbands' wishes.
• The Stormlight Archive: Odium/Rayse, aside from his grander plans, also goes out of his way to be an insanely petty and vindictive dickhead who takes everything way too personally. When he notices Dalinar taking solace from his copy of The Way Of Kings, he burns the book out of pure spite. His Everstorm is shown going out of its way to destroy as much as possible, even specifically targeting Talenel's temple for delaying Desolations so much, and it's implied that his hatred for humanity is mostly him being pissy over the fact that humans chose to follow Honor and Cultivation instead of him. What else do you expect from somebody who's powered by a Shard of pure divine hatred?
• In The Sum of All Fears, Elizabeth Elliot tries to sabotage Ryan's career and marriage because he took offense to her bad manners in Clear and Present Danger. This takes up considerably more of the story than the ostensible main plot (the terrorists with the nuclear warhead) and mainly serves to explain why Ryan can't get the President to listen to him when the bomb goes off. The film version cuts Elliot out of the script and creates a different (and much more sensible) reason for the President to distrust Ryan, which improves it considerably.
• Timeline-191: Jake Featherston seeks to annihilate the Confederate States of America's black population because he feels that they screwed him out of promotion to second lieutenant.
• Togetherly Long: The evil Galactic Conqueror and Big Bad Emperor Von Mal never wears his seatbelt, hates exercise, will eat dried fruit that he doesn't even like just so someone else can't have it, and many more things such as this too.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Silmarillion: Despite once being the greatest of the Valar, Morgoth becomes incredibly petty, focusing more and more on ruining the lives of Elves and Men and ruling over them as a tyrant. On the other end of the scale, he raises the Misty Mountain range just to inconvenience a rival Vala on his hunting trips. During the creation of the world, he was known to try to do the exact opposite of what the Vala were attempting (turn mountains into valleys, valleys into mountains, turn seas into deserts, etc.), seemingly not caring what the world looked like, as long as it wasn't exactly what they wanted.
  • The Children of Húrin: Morgoth curses Húrin's entire bloodline to be Cosmic Playthings only because Húrin defies him.
  • The Fall of Gondolin: When Tuor and Voronwë reach the source of the Ivrin, they discover that Morgoth's minion Glaurung has uprooted and burned the trees, broken the marges of the stone basin, and turned the beautiful pool into a swamp of foul stagnant water and frozen, poisonous mud. Since there was no strategic reason whatsoever to defile the fountain, and given Glaurung and his master's modus operandi and mindset, it is a reasonable assumption that the Dragon's motives amount to: "It is beautiful, therefore I hate it".
  • The Lord of the Rings:
    • This is the root reason behind Sauron's fall: a great, proud creature would have eventually used the lost Ring to try to conquer Middle Earth, only to be found and Out-Gambitted by Sauron in order for it to return to him. But after the Ring escapes from human Isildur (who it betrayed at the first available chance), it's only found and used by hobbits, rather than creatures with power and sweeping dreams of grandeur to corrupt. The Ring, in short, gets to serve mischief rather than capital-E evil: Déagol only wants to possess a beautiful thing... and, is promptly murdered before he can do something with it. Sméagol uses the Ring to torment his relatives and decides to hide for millennia in the heart of a mountain, only using it to survive day by day. Bilbo uses the Ring to mainly to escape from his obnoxious relatives and neighbors or play what amounts to pranks. Frodo mostly wants adventure and uses it only to try to survive the process (usually by hiding), only falling at the last minute to fully claim it... exactly when the ring cannot help him. Sam's possible dreams of conquest are so nebulous (an army of enslaved gardeners?) that even he finds the Ring's attempts to find something to work with utterly ridiculous, and just laughs. Sauron never got the chance to reclaim his ring with those completely small-time losers, even though it was really trying very hard to get back to him. The only big-timers it bumped into were either on to it, too big to properly mess with in a short space of time, or genuinely liked/pitied the hobbits too much to really want to harm them.
    • Gandalf notes that Sauron would turn all hobbits into slaves if he could because, despite the fact that they wouldn't even be good slaves, he'd rather they be enslaved and miserable than free and happy. His forces are also known to cut down trees and leave them there to die (as opposed to using the wood as a fuel source), seemingly just to spite living and beautiful things. There's also the fact that he steals black horses from Rohan when he could easily get them from his own slaves. While this could be explained as Rohan breeds the best horses, and denying his enemy even one horse to ride is a smart move, it also seems like he's stealing from them because they refused to give him horses willingly.
    • With his dreams of becoming a proper Evil Overlord dashed, Saruman settles for taking over the Shire with some outlaw Men, purely to make the hobbits' lives miserable for a few months until they rise up and take him down again. He can't even wreak much in the way of genuine ruin beyond a handful of deaths; they quickly repair the damage to their country (admittedly with the help of some magic of Galadriel) and get back to business as usual.
• Trapped on Draconica: Zarracka's undying hatred for Daniar is based on her younger sister forcing her to play 'goblin queen' when they were children. Subverted. Their mother died giving birth to Daniar so Zarracka blames her for it. Double Subverted. She hates Daniar because their mother favored Zarracka herself and so Daniar stole the limelight away from her. There is little she won't do to make her sister suffer.
• Many of the Forsaken are like this in The Wheel of Time, devoting as much time to payback for slights real or perceived as they do to world domination, and even then are too selfish to work together well. Moridin, the head Forsaken, really finds the rest of them rather tiresome (being a more philosophical kind of bad guy) and is in general much more courteous to his Arch-Enemy Rand than he is to his own allies as a result. The Forsaken Demandred is something of a deconstruction; he was driven to evil almost entirely by his envy of Lews Therin Telamon, but it's made plain just how much he has let jealousy and hate to eat up his life and he's ultimately played more for fear and tragedy than scorn.

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