Evil Is Petty / Western Animation

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• On Adventure Time, Gunther is apparently the most evil being that Hunson Abadeer, the so-called Lord of Evil, has ever met. When he gains the power to take over Ooo in "Reign of Gunthers", all he does is force its citizens to provide him with an endless stream of glass objects for him to break. (Though his evil credentials are helped by his willingness to destroy sapient glass.)
• Roger Smith of American Dad! is a self-proclaimed sociopath and as such takes this trope to its most extreme, victimizing or destroying others either for some minor slight or sheer curiosity or boredom. He once convinced Steve he was adopted for stealing his cookie, for example, going so far as to burn all of Steve's baby pictures, and another point tried to blow up the Earth because Stan insulted him (which itself was provoked by Roger being his usual apathetic self). He also once hunted down and killed five teenagers one by one, slasher-style, for not paying him the $20 tip he earned by driving them to the prom on a limo (collateral damage was extensive, including bringing down a passenger jet), and he casually mentioned at some point nearing the end of his rampage that the week before he killed six over $19. There is some slight justification as his species are in fact Made of Evil, and if they don't let out their "bitchiness" on a frequent basis it takes the form of poisonous bile that kills them. Since he has little to no problem with this behavior, however, it still counts.
• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, almost every villain has been a small, petty, spiteful person to some extent or another. However, most of them are made no less of a threat and, in fact, are more dangerous because of it.
  • Fire Lord Ozai is a twisted psychopath who tried to set half the world on fire and mutilated his son for speaking out of turn and is jealous of his brother.
  • Princess Azula's primary motivations are getting approval from Daddy and destroying her brother because he was Mummy's favorite. On the other side of things, apart from trying to murder children, she also spends a vacation literally kicking over little kids' sandcastles.
  • Zhao has a personal rivalry with a teenager and a 12-year-old that has driven him to hire assassins at least once.
  • Sequel Series The Legend of Korra:
    • Book 2 has Unalaq as one of the Big Bads, and while their ultimate plan is impressively large-scale, he takes time out from it to personally screw with his older brother simply because he hates him. Also counts as holding the Villain Ball. This ultimately becomes his undoing as Korra eventually finds out his true motives sooner and ends up unraveling his plans.
    • Kuvira, the Big Bad of Book 4. Much like Unalaq, she has large-scale goals and ambitions, but she has a habit of doing petty and unnecessary things to people she's already screwed over often just to prove she can such as forcing the Governor of Yi to pledge his loyalty to her after she forced him to sign an unfair contract reducing him to a mere figurehead or using her authority to get Prince Wu booted out of the Presidential Suite and then smugly telling him that she always gets what she wants. Unlike Unalaq, however, she's crafty enough to only do so when she knows she can get away with it.
• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • The Joker qualifies, at least for a majority of his first season appearances. His plots amount to ruining Christmas for Batman and Gotham, ruining the mayor's son's birthday party, ruining a party in honor of Commissioner Gordon (he obsessively stalks an average guy and his family and then forcibly recruits him into the plot, all because the guy cussed at him while driving, too), attempting to patent something that legally cannot be patented, and then gassing the guy at the patent office who told him so. Which is part of what makes the character so scary — he doesn't differentiate between grandiloquent evil and petty evil. It's all equally relevant.
  • In "Cold Comfort", Mr. Freeze spends the entire episode kicking dogs simply because it would make them miserable, thinking they would share the pain he feels from his wife leaving him and his body having deteriorated entirely except for his head.
• In The Batman, Oswald Cobblepot (aka the Penguin) is a rude overbearing jerk in addition to being a villain. In his introductory scene (party-crashing a charity fund-raiser), he high-handedly orders Alfred around (addressing him as "Jeeves") and gets himself slapped while hitting on a woman. On his way out he makes his donation by way of throwing a wad of cash into a fireplace forcing Alfred to stomp it out. When Alfred unwraps it, it turns out to be just a bunch of $1 bills.
• The Highbreed of Ben 10: Alien Force consider themselves the Master Race and want to wipe out all other species in the universe. The thing is, they aren't doing this simply because they think they're superior and everyone who isn't them needs to die (like some people). No, that's somehow not petty enough. They're doing this because their efforts to maintain the purity of their gene pool has left them all sterile due to inbreeding, and they can't stand the thought of any other species outliving them.
• In Castlevania a lot of the villains are like this, with ironically Dracula being the exception.
  • The Bishop who instigates the series by burning Lisa at the stake had purely petty reasons for going after a Lisa in the first place. She was an intelligent woman and healer with wonderful inventions, the Bishop deemed her as a female trying to rise above her station and condemns her as a witch. When one of his minions compliments Lisa’s medical equipment and surreptitiously suggests during her execution the church make use of it, the Bishop snaps at him.
  • Godbrand can’t go a few hours without drinking blood and whines like a baby while the villain team is forming plans. His turn against Dracula is purely motivated by his own hunger as Dracula intends to kill every human in the world — something that glutton like Godbrand freaks out over, because god forbid he have to drink to cattle or anything else other than a human for a change.
  • Carmilla is easily the biggest case of this. She promotes herself as the Only Sane Woman and The Chessmaster but everything she does is motivated by simple spite and envy as she wants to be as powerful and feared as Dracula and claims in her Motive Rant that fellow vampires rejected and refused to help her simply because she was a woman and she’ll make them pay dearly for that slight. The fact that in said rant Carmilla literally pulls curtains down like a toddler in a rage and screams that she’ll “have everything” only cements this. Then there’s her fight with Isaac where she can’t stand the thought of losing to him and attempts a Taking You with Me and beforehand even starts another speech which she changes mid-sentence to a simple “Fuck you” when Isaac charges at her.
  • The show’s version of Death is a petty and spiteful skeleton bastard who indulges in insults and name calling towards his enemies like a schoolyard bully. Just see his declaration towards Trevor for being a human being daring to oppose him: “I’m going to eat your soul, shit it out and use it to smother your fucking girlfriend to death”.
• Codename: Kids Next Door:
  • The birthday parties of The Delightful Children From Down The Lane involve kidnapping all the kids from the city so they can be Forced to Watch as the Delightful Children eat an incredibly delicious birthday cake in front of everybody.
  • A one-shot villain by the name of The Dodgeball Wizard. This is a man in his later years. His goal? To prove adults are better than children at dodgeball, a task he has spent the past 64 years of his life trying to prove by essentially smacking the tar out of kids with dodgeballs, going so far as to drop a giant dodgeball on a city block. Even by the standards of this show, that is exceptionally narrow-minded.
• The Red Guy from Cow and Chicken and I Am Weasel. He is supposed to be The Satan, yet he has nothing better to do than mess with the main characters.
• Detentionaire: In one episode, The Serpent breaks into Lee's house to further his own mysterious agenda...but also takes the time to dunk Lee's toothbrush in the toilet.
• In an episode of Dinosaucers, the Big Bad, Genghis Rex, decides to grab a phone book and prank call people because he is bored.
• Extreme Dinosaurs: The Reckless Raptors want to cause global warming simply because they think the Earth presently is too cold.
• Futurama: Dr. Farnsworth's rivalry with his Sitcom Archnemesis Wernstrom began when Farnsworth gave Wernstrom's paper an A- for bad penmanship. Wernstrom swore revenge against Farnsworth and has dedicated his life to one-upping him as a result. Though Wernstrom isn't exactly evil; he's just a massive Jerkass, to the point he won the Nobel Prize and had it rescinded immediately after because he was just that obnoxious.
• The Devil in God, the Devil and Bob. In his introductory scene, he pops a kid's balloon, kicks an old lady's cane out from under her, and keys a car.
• Harley Quinn: Many of the supervillains, as befitting the comedic tone of the series. The Joker is a domineering egotist who constantly puts down people around him just to feel superior to them, The Queen of Fables horribly mistreats her minions (like making omelettes out of Humpty Dumpty), Bane kills people over getting quiz answers wrong or people misnaming him, and Lex Luthor refuses to validate parking.
• In the Hercules/Aladdin animated crossover, Hades is constantly berating Jafar for how petty his plans and schemes are, such as giving up on conquest for control over the world and the throne of the gods just for petty revenge against a single mortal who tricked him.
  • Hades himself is a lesser example; though his plans aren't petty at all, he's very easily angered and often inflicts harm on his minions for insignificant reasons.
• On Histeria!, J.P. Morgan is shown stealing candy from a child, then giving her a balloon in exchange, then popping the balloon as he cackles at his own evilness.
• On Invader Zim, Zim tends to fall into this a lot. Once, in an interview, Jhonen Vasquez commented that Zim wasn't really stupid; he just had a horrible sense of priorities — he took the episode "Megadoomer" as an example, where Zim gets a Humongous Mecha and immediately decides that "beating up Dib" is its best possible use (to the exclusion of taking any time to devise a practical power source for it).
• Lucius Heinous VII on Jimmy Two-Shoes prides himself on spreading misery, so even when he's not running Misery Inc. and abusing his employees, he's still finding ways to make people around him miserable (including his own son).
• Aku, the main antagonist of Samurai Jack, cannot resist committing unnecessarily cruel and petty acts to people he's already screwed over, often to prove he can or just for a sick kick at their expense. He ends up taking it to Stupid Evil levels as he always backstabs anyone he makes a deal with, just to laugh at their misfortune.
• Johnny Bravo has this with the demon Derek in the episode "Johnny's Inferno". His idea of evil amounts to petty and rather childish things, such as disobeying a "keep off the grass" sign, going into the ten-items-or-less line at the grocery store with eleven items and then paying in Canadian pennies, tampering with a "You Must Be This Tall to Ride" sign at an amusement park, and then turning off the city reservoir's filter system simply to give the water supply "a nasty, metally taste."
• Invoked in Justice League Unlimited by the Flash, who is inhabiting Lex Luthor's body at the time and trying to avoid discovery, as per the page quote above. Of course, this humorous pettiness goes unquestioned, because it's supported by Luthor's actual example in the previous season. His entire presidential campaign in the second season had nothing to do with his real Evil Plan uploading his mind into an Amazo android. Luthor ran for President just to, in his own words, "tick Superman off", and he's quite successful at doing so. He even based a side plan around this, via Briar Patching Amanda Waller and Project Cadmus, attempting to provoke the heroes to rash behavior so the world will lose faith in them.
• Kaeloo: In addition to doing regular villainy things, Mr. Cat also stoops to low levels to do petty things just for the sake of it, such as traumatizing Quack Quack and scamming Stumpy because he wanted to steal from Stumpy the grand sum of... four cents.
• Kim Possible: Several of the villains, but special mention goes to Gemeni, who created an evil organization simply because his sister signed on with Global Justice, and the two of them had never gotten along.
• Kung Fu Dino Posse: When no one came to his birthday party, Skor swore to conquer the world so he could force everyone to come to his parties.
• The main villain of Little Elvis Jones and the Truckstoppers, W.C. Moore, spends a surprising amount of time inflicting a minor form of Electric Torture on his chief underling and swindling kids at games of marbles using his remote-controlled Unobtainium super-marble.
• Masters of the Universe: Revelation: Skeletor finally accomplishes his goal in life, to obtain all of the Power of Castle Greyskull, and with it the capacity to bend reality on a whim, and all he wants to do with it is kill He-Man. That is literally it. And not even through some fancy way a Reality Warper would use (see Emperor Joker as an example — rather appropriate with this Skeletor being portrayed by Mark Hamill), but rather just get a really shiny new sword to drive through He-Man's gut. It is this lack of drive that is one of the big stressors to Evil-Lyn's Rage Breaking Point, and her subsequent decision to destroy all of reality.
• Miraculous Ladybug:
  • Often invoked by Hawk Moth; in his civilian identity, he'll set up a lot of petty annoyances like firing someone for a stupid reason. This increases the person's negative emotions, allowing Hawk Moth to akumatize them into a supervillain. His pragmatic reasons aside, he pretty clearly enjoys his meaningless acts of evil more than he should.
  • Audrey Bourgeois, Chloe's mother, is the queen of the fashion world who always demands everything to be perfect and tries to fire anyone who doesn't immediately give her everything she wants (including people who don't even work for her). In her debut episode, Gabriel Agreste reserves her a seat in the second row rather than the first. This pisses her off so much that she gets akumatized. Even her husband and daughter are shocked to discover she's that petty.
  • The apple did not fell far from the tree (although how much Audrey is exactly to blame for Chloé's attitude is an exercise that the heroes are no longer going to even bother to try). To supply just one example: "Penalteam", she willingly accepts being Akumatized by Shadow Moth and terrorize her class… because she hates football, she loathes playing with the rest of Bustier's class, and they saw through her crappy excuses to not play and insisted she play with them (obviously they expected it to become a Friendship Moment. They were wrong).
  • Lila Rossi is willing to throw her lot in with known domestic terrorist Hawk Moth to get revenge on Ladybug for... calling her a liar in front of the boy she liked. After she'd stolen his book. Even though she actually is a compulsive liar, she still blames Ladybug for humiliating her. Her pettiness isn't limited to Ladybug, though; come Season 3, she's antagonizing Marinette (who is Ladybug, but Lila doesn't know that) for no reason aside from Marinette being the only member of the class willing to call her out on her Blatant Lies (it probably doesn't help that Marinette's ALSO interested in Adrien).
  • Félix Fathom, Adrien's cousin, is in on his mother's mission to steal back Gabriel and Emilie's wedding rings. However, posing as Adrien to send all of the latter's friends an insulting video message does not in any way relate to his goal. Later, he tries to get Hawk Moth to help him steal back the rings (despite the fact that Hawk Moth is secretly Gabriel, and would not help him anyway). In the end, his reaction to Adrien forgiving him is to steal Gabriel's ring anyway.
  • By extension, Félix's mother Amelie also counts, as stealing the rings was her idea, and she gives Gabriel some thinly-veiled insults over him still wearing his ring, even though her own husband has recently died.
• Fizz from Mr. Magoo (2019) often tries to eliminate Magoo for constantly foiling his schemes, despite being fully aware that Magoo is blind and doing it completely by accident.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Discord has godlike powers and is overall one of the most powerful characters in the show, meaning he could momentarily get rid of all his opponents if he wanted to. He prefers to play games with them instead, either For the Evulz or because it amuses him. After his Heel–Face Turn he sometimes tries on the role of the Trickster Mentor and still engages in needlessly cruel acts, like making Twilight fight a giant worm or befriending Mane 5 just to make her feel jealous and paranoid.
  • In "A Canterlot Wedding", a fake Princess Cadance is mostly cold towards everyone, insists on being addressed formally, and is demanding and critical about everything that will be part of the wedding, including refusing to let the groom wear something that belonged to his favorite uncle because she just doesn't like it — even though it's actually Queen Chrysalis the shapeshifting impostor who only cares about it all as emphasizing her triumph for some reason, who is supposed to be masquerading as a pony whose normal behavior is the exact opposite. Most characters put this down to stress, but it's a big part of why Twilight Sparkle comes to suspect her of "being evil". Makes it a case of the Villain Ball, really, which ball she continues to carry in the next stage of the plot.
  • While Starlight Glimmer, in her evil days, didn't exactly waste time on petty dog-kicking and preferred to go big (after all, her ultimate goal was to make everypony equal), the very reason that had turned her into a Well-Intentioned Extremist was simply losing a childhood friend, Sunburst, after he got his cutie mark before she did. Plus, though her main motivation to travel back in time was to make sure her enemies never meet each other and form a friendship, she also did it because she simply wanted to take Twilight's friends away as Twilight did to her.
  • In "Rarity Investigates!", Wind Rider framed Rainbow Dash for a crime just because he didn't want her to potentially break his speed record.
• OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes: Boxmore and his minions. Their efforts in trying (and failing) to destroy the plaza has made them enduring characters.
• Oscar's Orchestra: Thaddeus Vent became a dictator and banned all music because he was humiliated during a recital when he was six years old. He was being a selfish, lazy spoiled child.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • This trope appears to be Heinz Doofenshmirtz's general operating guide. Almost all of his schemes revolve around him taking incredible Disproportionate Retribution against whatever minor issue happens to be bugging him at the moment. This, like everything else in the show, is often lampshaded by Doof himself;
    • Played with in "Oil on Candace", after Dr. Doofenshmirtz fails one of his schemes while trying to impress his old teacher, she tells him that you can also be evil in little ways, but then complains that he can't even do that right.
    • Lampshaded in the episode "Tree to Get Ready", where Dr. Doofensmirtz is planning to have trained pigeons crap on his "goody-two-shoes brother" Roger and admits the plan is "a truly petty act, brought on by my own mindless jealousy!"
    • There's also "Perry Lays an Egg" where Doofenshmirtz's latest scheme involved learning how to speak whale just so he could insult the one who stole away one of his ex-girlfriends. He had to chase Perry the Platypus down and demand Perry thwart his "evil" scheme.
    • In "Hail Doofania!", after his brother got elected Mayor, he created a metropolis he called "Doofania", complete with its own original anthem, which included the line, "It's founded on spite!"
    • He also steals his neighbor's magazines from the mail, even though they're in Spanish. "You know, evil never rests." (He also speaks Spanish himself in a few episodes...)
    • One episode also saw Doofenshmirtz try to find out where Perry lives so he could...ring his doorbell and run away.
  • The evil organization LOVEMUFFIN, denied Dr. Diminutive a chance to run for leader because he's too short. They cite this trope as why they're able to get away with it.
  • There's also Candace Flynn's entire motivation. She's not constantly attempting to tell on Phineas and Ferb because she's worried the boys will get hurt or because she thinks what they're doing is dangerous. Her entire motivation is literally just to get them in trouble and be seen as "in charge."
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
  • Him is a huge example of this. If his powers alone in conjunction with his One-Winged Angel seen in "Speed Demon" are any indication, he could probably beat the girls handily if he really wanted to. However, for better or worse, he's more interested in inconveniencing them and just generally being a dick. Some of his plots have included sending the girls on a wild goose chase and giving them free candy so they get cavities.
  • Marianne Smith from "Just Desserts" is a slight example of this, as she rallies her family together in that episode to destroy the Utoniums for getting her husband arrested and ruining her dinner, on top of it all, in "Supper Villain". The Girls just brush off this as being ridiculous and give them the usual villain beating.
  • In "Pee Pee G's", the Girls have been waking up every morning to find their bed wet, but they can't tell which of them did it. It turns out to be none other than Mojo Jojo who had been sneaking in and soaking their bed at night. When the Girls finally catch him in the act, they accuse him of doing this to destabilize their teamwork and facilitate his schemes; in response, he admits it was nothing but a prank; he did it because he doesn't like them.
• ReBoot: While Megabyte has more grand ambitions, like turning Mainframe into Megaframe and trying to infect the Super Computer, he dips into this when he returns in Season 4 as a Trojan Horse virus; he disguises himself as Bob, convinces everyone that he's the original Bob and the other one is a fake, and almost manages to marry Dot just to screw with everyone in Mainframe. When he's exposed, Bob demands to know why he did it. Megabyte's response?
  Megabyte: It amused me.
• Villain Protagonist Rick Sanchez of Rick and Morty is prone to this, being a hedonistic Insufferable Genius who constantly needs to flaunt his superiority over others and overreact to minor slights.
  • In "Morty's Mind Blowers" we find out Rick removes the most traumatic of Morty's experiences on their many adventures to keep him from going insane, and then stores them in memory vials. However, not only does Rick remove Morty's traumatic experiences and horrifying mistakes but he also removes his own embarrassing moments from Morty's memories just to make himself look better, including incredibly minor incidents like losing a game of checkers, thinking the phrase "taken for granted" was "taken for granite", and hitting a tree on a ski trip.
  • While Rick is always extremely petty, he takes it to the next level in "The Vat of Acid Episode" episode. Rick builds a remote control device that he lets Morty believe will allow him to "reset" to a "save point" as desired (or if he dies) via real-life Save Scumming but really teleports Morty to an alternate timeline by killing the Morty in that timeline and replacing him, just to get back at Morty for making fun of Rick's plan of faking their deaths in a fake vat of acid at the beginning of the episode. Even more specifically, when the FBI and several other disgruntled parties show up in a mob in front of the house when Rick merges the timelines, Rick makes sure that the only way Morty can get out of it is by using the same "faking your death in a fake vat of acid" trick that they used at the beginning of the episode, as payback for Morty being so unimpressed with the ploy. He even forces Morty to say that the vat is good, and makes him kiss it, before jumping in.
  • Rick's Evil Doppelgänger Rick Prime was exponentially worse. When our Rick turned down his gift of interdimensional travel technology, he takes it as an insult and dedicates his life to ruining Rick's by killing his wife across time.
• She-Ra: Princess of Power: While the case can be made it's his job to report failures his teammates would really rather keep from Hordak, Imp derives way too much pleasure from the resultant punishments for it not to also be fun to him.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Who Shot Mr. Burns? Part One", Mr. Burns blocks out the sun from the town, forcing everyone to use his power all the time. His desire to steal candy from a baby afterward is a sign that he's crossed the line. And a plot point, believe it or not. But Burns' pettiest moment was in "Raging Abe Simpson and His Grumbling Grandson in "The Curse of the Flying Hellfish"", where he was willing to kill Grampa Simpson, his commanding officer over paintings they hid away during the war. Yeah, priceless paintings, but he is plenty rich. He then tries to kill Bart for insulting him after he took away the paintings at gunpoint.
    • The episode "And Maggie Makes Three" showcases that Burns has a special door in his office for those coming back begging to get their jobs back: it is labeled "Supplicants" and it's a tiny tunnel that forces people to literally come crawling to him, covered in dirt and spider-webs. And if Burns gives them their job back, he then has it as company policy to install a plaque saying "DON'T FORGET, YOU'RE HERE FOREVER" to break what's left of their spirit.
    • Burns' Historical Rap Sheet includes him ordering the assassination of Amelia Earhart — Burns felt "that woman was getting too big for her britches".
  • Homer Simpson's Hair-Trigger Temper and penchant for Disproportionate Retribution get him into this as well. He does it even when it is to his detriment to do so, such as when he chased another motorist down the freeway for miles and threatened to club him with a baseball bat when he caught up to him — causing the family to miss their vacation flight to Hawaii — just because the other guy cut him off while changing lanes. Yes, the cutting-off was completely unjustified and itself a Jerkass move, but Homer!
  • In "All's Fair In Oven War", Marge enters a baking contest and all of the other contestants try to blatantly sabotage her food (with one of them even destroying her meal, forcing her to start all over again and almost getting disqualified for running out of time). Why do they do this? because they found her entry, the dessert dogs, a threat to their own entries. Talk about petty losers... and Marge eventually gets back at them by sabotaging their meals when nobody's looking.
  • Many of Sideshow Bob's plots have him attempting murder and engaging in terrorist acts to satisfy his grudges, but when he manages to rig an election and become mayor of Springfield in "Sideshow Bob Roberts", he just uses his power to make life as difficult for the Simpsons as possible, directing a new highway construction straight through their house and getting Bart's school to bump him down from fourth grade to kindergarten (which Bart actually enjoys).
  • In "Brother From Another Series", Bob's brother, Cecil, proves willing to flood Springfield simply because Bob got a job as Krusty's sidekick, a job he hadn't actually wanted and outright hated, instead of Cecil. And he plans to frame Bob in the process.
• Many of the villains in Skylanders Academy are described as being very threatening, but they do just as many petty acts of villainy as they do serious crimes.
  • In the first episode, after Kaos has frozen every Skylander and Master Eon, he decides that the next thing he and his butler Glumshanks is gonna do is go cover their library in toilet paper.
  • After Spyro has gotten the light inside him eaten by Strykore, he is turned over to the dark side under Dark Spyro, and the very first thing he says is that he has the urge to take up two parking spaces at once.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • Robotnik commits petty crimes in his spare time when he's not trying to take over Mobius. For example, one of the ways he uses his new superpowers in "Super Robotnik" is to steal candy from 4,822 babies.
    • Even more damning is Robotnik's Start of Darkness — he tried to kill a guy with a robotic snake because the girl Robotnik was in love with loved the guy instead! And when he started his conquest of Mobius, he was the first guy he locked up!
  • While it's more subtle, Robotnik's Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) counterpart has blatant shades of this, too. He takes a lot of pleasure in the fact his industries are polluting and destroying the planet, and rather actively belittles his minions (usually Snively) or gloats over his roboticized slaves.
  • Sonic Boom: Given the Denser and Wackier tone, most of Dr. Eggman's schemes are pretty small-time, simply amounting to just messing with Sonic and his friends or some other outlandish reason. Examples include:
    • In "Buster", he creates a fireman robot at the beginning of the episode to attack the village and has the robot do things like putting a baby walrus in a burning house or putting a kitten in a tree.
    • In "My Fair Sticksy", he uses a ballot bot to stuff the ballot box with votes for him so he would win an award. When he doesn't win regardless of his cheating, he decides to have his Bee Bots attack the gala.
    • In "Fortress of Squalitude", he hires and later kidnaps Amy... to force her to redecorate his lair so he'd be on the cover of a magazine that features evil lairs.
    • "Three Minutes or Less" has Eggman realizing that Sonic is working at Meh Burger and comes up with a plan to make Sonic late in hopes of Eggman getting the meal for free.
• Eric Cartman from South Park is this trope personified. Cartman has shown that his ruthless intellect could propel him to the top as a Corrupt Corporate Executive, but he frequently sabotages his own efforts when they don't cause suffering to his designated targets. When not causing mass murder, inciting riots, trying to start another Holocaust, giving Kyle AIDS, engaging in piracy, or manipulating Cthulhu to do his bidding, etc., he will do things like toilet papering a teacher's house or giving Butters a Dirty Sanchez in his sleep. His Moral Event Horizon was murdering Scott Tenorman's parents and sticking their corpses in Scott's stew, simply to get back at Scott for cheating him out of $16.12 and to literally lick Scott's tears off his face.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • Mr. Krabs comes off like this in part due to his Money Fetish, he is willing to go to extreme lengths to get or save as much as a single penny. He will rip a man's arm off for one, sell his fry cook's soul for less than a dollar, and in "Plankton's Regular," he becomes obsessed with taking away Plankton's first (and only) customer simply because he "just can't afford" letting Plankton have any business, legitimate or otherwise, despite this meaning he wouldn't have to worry about the safety of the Krabby Patty formula anymore.
  • In "Naughty Nautical Neighbors", Squidward Tentacles becomes antagonistic simply for being annoyed by the duo's antics behind his house, even though they otherwise weren't bothering Squidward at the time.
  • In "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy V", when Barnacle Boy briefly pulled a Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal and joined up with Man Ray and the Dirty Bubble, the acts that they're shown performing on the news include blowing up a building, abducting a bank, and ringing an old man's doorbell and running off before he can answer.
  • In "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy VI: The Motion Picture", Kelp-Thing, another of the duo's villains, commits the act of parking in a certain lot at a time when doing so isn't permitted. He ends up getting towed immediately.
• Star Wars Rebels: Agent Kallus has a few moments of this.
  • In "Spark of Rebellion", after the Ghost has escaped, he irately kicks a stormtrooper off the support pillar they were both clinging to after the trooper asked him if Kanan was the first Jedi he'd ever seen.
  • In "The Honourable Ones", after losing a rematch to Zeb at the beginning, he expresses his anger by questioning how Zeb could've beaten him if he'd lost back in their first fight.
• Steven Universe has Yellow Diamond, who in her first official appearance reveals herself to be arrogant and petty despite one of her underlings, Peridot, describing her as highly logical. She makes it clear she wants to destroy the Earth in spite because of the rebellion despite Peridot pointing out it's more useful keeping it alive, then after Peridot insults her she attempts to kill her by detonating her communicator immediately after she cuts off communication. Though with the revelation that Rose Quartz apparently shattered Pink Diamond during the rebellion, Yellow Diamond's motivation is more justified, albeit still pretty petty.
• Superman: The Animated Series: Darkseid leaves Earth after Superman gets a Heroic Second Wind and Orion arrives with reinforcements from New Genesis. Just as he's leaving, Darkseid decides to get one last dig in at Superman and vaporizes Dan Turpin, for no other reason than the fact Turpin (a Muggle for all means and purposes) dared stand against Darkseid. More than anything this is the event that seems to have put Superman on the course to make sure Darkseid never gets up should they meet again. When Superman confronts him again in the Grand Finale and gives Darkseid an And This Is for... punch, Darkseid has no idea who Turpin was but comments that if Superman was so broken up about the murder of a single human, he would have made sure to kill more.
  • Later on in Justice League, Darkseid vaporizes his right-hand man Desaad for mildly sassing him. Given that he's the Anthropomorphic Personification of tyranny itself, this was more Desaad being Too Dumb to Live.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012): The Shredder had created a fully functional and prosperous Ninja Clan for years, but the moment he finds out that Hamato Yoshi is in New York, he packs his bags and devotes most of his efforts to having better men just to destroy Yoshi. Literally everything he does is because he's pissed that Tang Shen chose Yoshi/Splinter over him, and almost every loss he ever has in the series is due to prolonging the feud just so he can twist the knife further.
  • It's especially bad when you compare him to previous iterations of the Shredder. While the likes of the '87 Shredder, 2003 Shredder, and the '90s Live-Action Shredder all had a hatred for Splinter and were willing to wipe out the Hamato Clan, they also had ambitions of conquest and forging an empire. All this Shredder cares about is his revenge. Even when Karai brings the Kraang to his attention and insists that there is a bigger picture to consider, Shredder completely ignores the fact that there are alien invaders in New York because he deemed it irrelevant to his vengeance... until it's revealed that they have a common enemy in the Turtles, upon which he's perfectly willing to help the Kraang.
• ThunderCats (1985): The four Ancient Spirits of Evil aren't above trolling their bound servant Mumm-Ra. In "Hair of the Dog" this includes infusing the Thundercat ally Snarf with their powers. The result is a super being called Snarf-ra who proceeds to hand Mumm-ra his mummified ass.
• Total Drama: When Mal isn't manipulating the entire island, causing eliminations, and harming his other personalities, he's usually breaking the other contestants' things. Special mention goes to the fact that the whole time the season is going on, he's literally destroying the alters' dreams so they're forced to have nothing but nightmares.
  • Max from Pahkitew Island, to the point that it's really all he ever does in terms of "evil". Averted with Scarlett, who's usually polite and amicable to the other contestants despite being allied with Max, a supposed "villain".
• The villains of Totally Spies! tend to be a pretty petty bunch. Candy Sweet from "The Black Widows" was turned down by the Honeybees cheerleading squad as a kid, so she kidnaps them and builds an army of robots that uses the Honeybees' moves to infiltrate an international cheerleading contest and slaughter the competition (quite literally) in the finals. Dr. Bittersweet from "Passion Patties" was kicked out of the Happy Girls for eating the cookies she was supposed to sell, so she tries to discredit them with super-addictive, super-fattening cookies. The titular Big Bad of "Evil Ice Cream Man Much?" would prefer to turn the entirety of Los Angeles into a frozen wasteland rather than expand his ice cream line with flavors that modern teens like. And so on.
• The version of Starscream in Transformers: Cyberverse is petty even by Starscream standards. One of his chronologically earliest acts of douchiness is to attempt to sabotage a big sporting match for no reason other than boredom.
  • Soundblaster, however, is a whole new world of pettiness. He destroyed many planets and committed brutal torture against many people, and why was he driven to such grievous villainy? Soundwave beat him in what's basically a karaoke competition.
• In Transformers: Prime, during the "Operation: Bumblebee" two-parter, Starscream doesn't just help MECH exploit Bumblebee's T-cog, he goes out of his way to insult Bumblebee for being unable to transform. Watching him wake up without his T-cog at the end is very karmic.
  Starscream: Time to jet, because I can!
• Black Hat from Villainous (Cartoon Network) is effectively Morgoth in this regard, being evil in all ways imaginable. The Orientation videos have him destroy planets and make mentions of killing countless heroes, but he also torments 5.0.5. just because he can, and accepts spoiling the ending of Doctor Flugg's favorite show as payment from the villain doing the spoiling. It cannot be understated just how cruel and petty he can be.
• Young Justice (2010): In the Phantoms season, Ocean Master gets so fed up of losing that he gets his hands on the Light's dossiers on the families of Justice League members and attempts their extermination to make the League suffer. The other members of the Light, who are pretty monstrous themselves, reveal that they have some degree of standards by explaining that they made the plan to annihilate the families of the Justice League, but that plan is strictly a Godzilla Threshold measure because they know the moment they try, the Justice League will go to full war footing and stop at nothing to bring them down. As a result of this, the Light kills Ocean Master.

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