Magnificent Bastard - Television Tropes & Idioms

Gendo Ikari Though Your Mileage May Vary on exactly how magnificent he is.
- Also Kaworu Nagisa to an extent. He's an angel that masquerades as an Eva pilot so he can pretty much annihilate everyone. He's under the control of someone else but also acts on his own. He also kills baby animals...then tries convincing Shinji it was the right thing to do because the cat would suffer otherwise. It was better to kill it. He appears to fail. But THEN Shinji ends up killing him when he thoroughly mind rapes Shinji using the same logic. Paraphrasing: "If you hated me then you should kill me. But if you like me then you'd want me to live but if I live I'll kill everybody else. Also I don't want to hurt anybody kinda so if you kill me you'd be showing mercy to me and thus you couldn't really hate me though if you kill me that must mean you hate me because why else would you kill me?"Leaving this troper incredibly confused.
  - Well, only in the manga does he kill the cat
  - The description above is pretty much specific to the manga, where Kaworu is, while not truly evil, a much more unsettling and sinister presence than in the anime, even though his actions in the anime follow the same basic formula and hurt Shinji just as badly in the end.
Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion is full of these, with titular character Lelouch being one of the best examples. He turns a weak regional rebellion into a massive world war against his father, all while under the guise of a fabulously theatrical masked persona. His older brother Schneizel lacks the theatrics, but more than makes up for it in sheer competence, managing to wipe out all the progress that Lelouch made in over forty episodes in less than four minutes.
- Considering both Charles and Marianne, it's In The Blood, after all.
- Even when Schneizel separates Lelouch from the Black Knights he manages to go and take over THE OTHER HALF of the world as from the half he captured last time He then goes on to finish taking over the rest of the world. His Magnificent Bastardness REALLY shines through, however, when you realize that taking over the world was really just part of a bigger plan to create a peaceful world for his precious sister Nunnally.
Bleach's Sosuke Aizen. The man had the entire governing body of the Soul Society slaughtered and replaced by him and his henchman without anyone noticing, then manipulated everyone with ease in a great, long-running Xanatos Roulette to steal the Hogyoku trapped in Rukia's soul, take over the Hollow world, create a new army of soul-eating supersoldiers, and then take over... pretty much everything else. He had backup plan upon backup plan, faked his own death, nearly stabbed to death his fiercely-loyal lieutenant (who remained fiercely loyal afterwards), and plans to obliterate Ichigo's hometown to fuel his ambitions. And oh yeah, when he turns evil he can slick his hair back sans gel or styling mousse. How do we know that his hairstyle isn't just another one of Kyoka Suigetsu's illusions? Sit down and think about THAT.
- And he just elevated himself to Dangerously Genre Savvy at the start of the most recent arc. You know how the heroes gather together to storm the enemy's citadel, battle with some Mooks, survive against impossible odds with lots of Big Damn Heroes moments then finally reach the Big Bad, defeat him and rescue the princess? Aizen bet upon this happening. He kidnapped Orihime because the main characters would come for her, and from what he'd seen, so would half of Soul Society, because Ichigo's The Messiah. He then gets the hell out of Dodge, takes the bulk of his forces with him, and destroys the way back. So now all the captains and vice captains who came for the aforementioned Big Damn Heroes moments are sealed in Hueco Mundo, along with Ichigo himself, and his Nakama. This is not a good thing for the defense of Ichigo's hometown...until we find that Head Captain Yamamoto is also Genre Savvy and has everybody else waiting for them, trapping them in a fire prison. Aizen isn't fazed by this in the slightest, and calmly states that he will eventually escape. Currently he's still just standing there with Ichimaru and Tosen doing nothing, and is still managing to be rather awesome.
Crocodile from One Piece. This guy manipulated an entire kingdom into a civil war between the king and his people while still presenting himself as a hero to the country. His entire slogan for his plan was, "The love for this kingdom will destroy it." He also added even more insult to the heroes about telling them about a bomb that would blow up the town square that was nearly impossible to stop because he had a backup in case his lackeys failed to set off the bomb. His plan was nearly flawless and would had succeeded if it was not for certain events.
- In a side-story that took place after his defeat, Crocodile took over his jail block and, when given a perfect chance to escape, chose to light up a cigar and stay put. He would later agree to an Enemy Mine to break out of The Alcatraz that is Impel Down solely for the chance to kill an old enemy (who, incidentally, everyone else wanted to help save).
Griffith in Berserk Abridged. He puts the Magnificent in Magnificent Bastard. Not content with merely burning all his political enemies alive, he then taunts the queen repeatedly about how he's going to nail her daughter. Then has Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" play as they burn alive (Despite it not existing yet...go figure). Then, to top it all off, at the end of the episode he does a SONG about nailing the Queen's daughter, to the tune of Ring of Fire.
- Plus there's the fact he gets all the best lines:\\
- "Hey everybody! I own a human life!" "Kill Bill No Jutsu!" "Oh for god's sake Corkus, what is it with you and murdering people?" "He thinks he's PEOPLE!"
- He calls Guts this when confronting the latter for leaving.
Proxy One in Ergo Proxy, who is even referenced to be "the winner at the end of the world" (with good reason). Not only is he the master manipulator of nearly everything that happens in the course of the series, but he wins.
Akio from Revolutionary Girl Utena. He seduces almost the entire cast, including his sister Anthy, Utena, Juri (supposedly a lesbian), Shiori (Juri's love interest), Ruka (Juri's other love interest), Miki, Miki's sister (at the same time as Miki, no less), Touga, Saionji, and others. The only characters he doesn't appear to sleep with are Nanami and Wakaba - and there's debate over that. He also: rigs the entire series of duels; creates a false timeline; convinces his own sister to stab Utena; and runs a private school in his spare time. And he gets away with all of that.
- Uh, Akio never seduced Juri.
Medusa the Witch in Soul Eater. Manipulates her daughter (?) into becoming a Dark Magical Girl...but subverts the usual Heel Face Turn so that "she" would be The Mole instead. Blackmails other witches into working for her by planting parts of her body in them that explode whenever she wills it. Matches the best Technician and Death Scythe in Shibusen in battle, resurrects the Cosmic Horror, gives The Corruption to the main heroine/hero duo, comes Back From The Dead by stealing the body of a small child, drives the best tech crazy, frames him for murder, drives out a good witch who wanted to defect, and convinces Shibusen to let her lead them in an assault against her Rival Older Sister.
- Then she proves herself to be an Uber Magnificent Bastard when she reveals that she had lied about Arachnaphobia kidnapping Chrona, gets Maka to defeat Arachne, then steals Arachne's body exactly as planned.
Light Yagami of Death Note employs Memory Gambits, Batman Gambits and Xanatos Roulettes left, right and centre while eating potato chips and wielding his pen like a sword to Ominous Latin Chanting.
Madara Uchiha in Naruto, notable for orchestrating almost every major event in the series mythos, even bending the show's resident Spotlight Stealer to his whim. All this under a veil of Obfuscating Stupidity.
Friend in 20th Century Boys is not only responsible for the deaths of thousands but he also manages to blame everything on the protagonists, while he goes on to be regarded as Japan's saviour and later President of the World. Oh, and his plan for world domination was inspired by a game the protagonists used to play when they were in sixth grade And the best part? He manages to pull off the latter half of his plan (becoming President of the World, that is) while stone cold dead. No, he doesn't fake it, or come back; he's dead and he still takes over the world. He's just that prepared.
Johan Liebert - the Monster. He pulls a several-years long Xanatos Roulette and outwits several governmental conspiracies, manipulates everyone he encounters as they were puppets on a string and then disposes of them without a second thought, subverts every Pet The Dog moment he's given in chilling ways, and never loses that Dissonant Serenity permanently affixed to his face. The problem is, the straight treatment the series gives his activities also makes him freaking scary to behold.
The most impressive and villainous character in Ashita No Nadja? A 13-year-old girl. Yes, a teen Bitch In Sheeps Clothing and Nadja's Forgotten Childhood Friend named Rosemary, who steals the spotlight brilliantly by kicking puppies so well and hard that even the local Smug Snake, who thought the kid would be an easy-to-manipulate puppet at first, in the end utterly fears her.
- And for all that, all that she got is a slap in her face and willingly leaving the mansion. Karma Houdini, indeed.
Xellos for The Slayers fits this bill quite nicely.
Manning from Orguss 02 is a perfect example of the trope. Perfect quote, when he's on a plane with two others that's under attack by an enemy Giant Robot:
Manning: "When I give you the signal I want you to push that button. That's not so hard."
Lean: "That's the hatch release. If I open the hatch, then what?"
Manning: "I'll escape in the Decimator."
Lean: "You mean the only person who's going to get out of this alive is you?"
Manning: <Shrugs> "Beats everyone dying, doesn't it?"
Takamura Mamoru of Hajime No Ippo. Arrogant, loudmouthed and mean, he never stops humiliating his fellow boxers or rubbing the defeat in their face. And yet, everyone in the gym looks up to him, especially Aoki, Kimura and Ippo, because he is the one who got all of them into boxing and also because he's a really good boxer. He rarely winds up hatching any of his ridiculous schemes, preferring brawn to brains except when it really counts - but come on, look at that charming smile◊.
Hiruma Youichi, Deimon Devilbats quarterback in Eyeshield 21. How did he get his players? Blackmail, manipulation, or the ultimate fallback, guns. Lots of guns. What does he do with his players? Gives them all nicknames that start with "Fucking," and puts them through Training from Hell including running up Tokyo Tower and pushing a truck from Texas to Las Vegas. What does he do to his opponents? All out psychological warfare, showing his hand, taunting unmercifully and cackling madly (even through a freshly broken arm if he has to.) He keeps innumerable calculations going on in his head and strategizes on the fly, willing (and eager) to go for the insanest of insane trick plays. He's a complete terror, but he has the absolute loyalty of his players (even the ones he recruited at gunpoint) who are willing to push themselves to insane heights right along with him (although they would be happier if he left his guns at home).
TREIZE. KHUSHRENADA.. How did he make the Earth Federation fall into OZ's clutches? Freely give the location of the Federation council's meeting to the Gundam pilots. And it ended with the pilot killing the leader who was ready to start peace talks, stripping the pilots from colony support, and making them have a (rather) minor mental breakdown. Considering the goal of the ''real'' Operation Meteor, it is possible that his goal is to strip all the bad guys (the Obstructive Bureaucrate Federation guy, the Romefeller Foundation who had their hand in financing the war, and the war-toting colonist) from their power in one go. And that's just one battle.
- The fact the killing shot came from Heero Yuy, who'd been renamed after an assassinated peacemaker, qualifies as the defining sick irony for the entirety of Gundam Wing. Thanks, Treize!
- He also had rose petals in his bath tub, and knows how to enjoy fine wine.
A rare example of both a female and a nice Magnificent Bastard: Mabel the fortune teller in the Kirby Anime getting everyone to follow her and recreate a Moses story in Episode 62. Kirby was the only one that knew it was a fake, and that was because he was using his Tornado ability to part the sea!
Kunzite in Sailor Moon. After over a season of Monsters Of The Week, most of the Shitennou repeatedly showing themselves to be complete idiots, and Usagi continuing to win and even gain ground against the Dark Kingdom, it was a breath of fresh air to see Beryl's Dragon set clever traps, catch the entire team and almost finish them off (and only fail because of a senshi he didn't know about), tear through Usagi's obvious Out Gambitted like it was made of wet paper, and finally go down fighting against Sailor Moon instead of getting the You Have Failed Me treatment. Even if he's not as awesome as some of the examples on this page, the series could have used more like him.
- He's even cooler and more badass (though less evil) in the manga.
Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's, the most recent Yu-Gi-Oh! anime, brings us Rex Goodwin; a very different villain given the genre. For all of the first season, he operates behinds behind the scenes, manipulating the Five Signers in order to force them to reveal themselves. For example, in order to get Yusei Fudo to participate in his tournament, he kidnaps his friends and threatens him with their deaths. Yeah. And the kicker; it's revealed that his reasons for this were inherently noble, and he has received no comeuppance for his actions. And throughout all of this, he has maintained a calm, friendly demeanor.
- And then it's revealed that he used both the good guys and the bad guys for not so noble purposes, which makes him even more magnificent and even more of a bastard!
The Count from Gankutsuou- holy shit. Perhaps even more so than he was in the original story.
Jean-Luc LeBlanc, Nietzsche Wannabe and Evilutionary Biologist, of Divergence Eve.
Yomi and Mukuro from Yu Yu Hakusho. Also, in an heroic example, Kurama.

Close Anime and Manga

Lex Luthor, of The DCU. Since the eighties, he's been well entrenched in Magnificent Bastardry. The Diniverse version is especially Magnificent, almost becoming the President as a distraction from his true plan... Though, unknown to him, he had help with that part.
Adrian Veidt of Watchmen. Got quite a brain on him, he has.
Vril Dox II from L.E.G.I.O.N. (a modern-day "prequel" series to the Legion Of Super Heroes), a slick Insufferable Genius, orchestrates the total disruption of two planetary governments in pursuit of justice in just the first six issues. He's so cold, he practically tamed Lobo.
Doctor Doom is a perfect example in the Marvel Universe. When you can take on a god without flinching...
The Kingpin, also part of the Marvel Universe, until the "Born Again" storyline.
Thanos of Titan, another example from the Marvel Universe, and arguably the quintessential one, at least for the company's cosmic landscape. A premier mover and shaker in many important storylines (if not the main focus altogether), he has a knack for successfully manipulating both sides of the fence (sometimes both at once) time and time again, despite his true nature being common knowledge to everyone.
General Wade Eiling from Captain Atom. First, he framed Nathaniel Adam for drug smuggling, mutiny, and murder, when in fact Eiling had been secretly running the conspiracy responsible for those crimes. Then he talked Adam into participating as a guinea pig in the Silver Shield Project, which led to Adam's apparent death. Then Eiling married Angela Adam, Adam's "widow." Then, when Adam rematerialized eighteen years later, now possessing superpowers, Eiling was able to talk him into masquerading as a superhero to spy on the Justice League as part of the Captain Atom project, by telling him that this would give him the opportunity to clear his name, and even reconnect with his children, who of course thought of Eiling as their father. Even after Adam did prove his innocence, he never uncovered Eiling's involvement in the frame-up, and continued working for Eiling. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. What makes this especially impressive is that Adam is very smart, and is no slouch at political intrigue.
- Since Eiling was created by Cary Bates and Greg Weisman, who also created Gargoyles and David Xanatos, this is probably not surprising. Eiling capped off his Bastardry by transferring his mind into an immortal, nigh-indestructible body in a later JLA story. Sadly, ever since then he's written almost exclusively as a dumb brute and little else. This is Character Development, albeit an unpleasant sort, as the one flaw in his plan was overlooking that the body had a tiny brain.
Tao of WildCATs and Sleeper. Genetically engineered tactical supergenius turned nearly unstoppable crime lord, Tao wins fights just by opening his mouth - by the time he's done with you, you'll probably have signed up with him. (Failing that, you'll be mindwiped, in a coma, or have been shot by your own allies - going up against this guy just doesn't pay.)
Groucho Marx plays this role of Lord Julius in Cerebus. Incidentally, Dave Sim writes and draws a perfect Groucho.
Edwin Alva in the series Hardware. He catches a case of Redemption Equals Death, unfortunately.
Spider-Man villain Roderick Kingsley, the orginal Hobgoblin, managed to trick Spider-Man and the general public into believing the Hobgoblin was deceased Daily Bugle reporter Ned Leeds for a good 10 years real time before being caught, blackmailed the Green Goblin into breaking him out of prison, and is currently living in luxury in the Caribbean. Not bad for a guy who was originally a fashion designer.
Bomb Queen, the Stripperiffic Villain Protagonist of her self-titled Image Comics book. The iron-fisted dictator of New Port City has, in no particular order: wiped out the rest of her original villain team; turned New Port City into a place where nothing is illegal in designed "Crime Zones"; stolen a government supercomputer, the powers of the demon lord Desarak and her clone Bomb Teen (the latter of which was "born" from her supercomputer); kept New Port City's mayor under her control with sex and verbal assaults, casually killing anyone standing near him when she blasts a hole through his office wall (repeatedly to the point of being a Running Gag); orchestrated terror attacks on the cities of other Image superheroes; repeatedly foiled the plots of the Government Conspiracy (which created her) to have her killed; and indirectly killed an innocent girl roped into her co-worker's attempt to interview Bomb Queen for their website. She is still a Villain With Good Publicity within her city, if only because her constituents are Complete Monsters who moved to New Port City in order to indulge in their vilest sins. Outside her city, she has absolutely no protection under US law; she manages to avoid justly-deserved punishments every time.
Lucifer is nearly the most Magnificient of all Bastards. Like a true Magnificient Bastard he isn't above putting himself on the line of fire, and can make and discard a hundred plans in a moment. He handily gets the better of just about everything in the universe, but barely manages to compete in the same league as God.
Gary Jackson. It was recently revealed that he faked his own death, entered the Witness Protection Program to escape the Mob, and is currently buying up his old company.

Close Comic Books

Keyser Söze from The Usual Suspects.
One word: KKHHAAANNNN!!!!, Star Treks best example of the Magnificent Bastard, though not the last.
Senator / Chancellor / Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars. Sith-ness notwithstanding, he managed to shape the entire galaxy in his image, had manipulated every major event for the past two decades or so, and had kept everyone assured of his respectability and trustworthiness while doing so. As he declared himself ruler-for-life (and was applauded by the Senate for doing so) he could justifiably claim to have earned it. And his start to political prominence was over a seemingly minor trade dispute. Which he started.
- The Force Unleashed plot takes things even further with the reveal that the Emperor deliberately manipulated his apprentice's apprentice into founding the Rebel Alliance, though he didn't intend the united rebel leaders to survive after exposing themselves. The irony is that this means Palpatine was the driving force behind both sides of the conflict in the second major galactic war just as he was with the first. Xanatos backfire doesn't begin to describe it.
Tony Wendice in Dial M for Murder. After discovering his wife Margot is cheating on him, he creates a complex plan to kill her while arranging a perfect alibi for himself and mentally punishing the man who cuckolded him at the same time. When Margot proves more resilient than he expected and kills the man he blackmailed into doing the deed, he only needs a few minutes to come up with a new plan to make it appear that she committed the act in cold blood. Even when his scheme is in danger of being exposed, he is quickly able to come up with a new way to turn the situation to his advantage. And finally when against all odds his whole plot is exposed, he turns out to be one of the all time great Graceful Losers, pouring wine for everyone who had a hand in finding him out (except a cop who he notes is still on duty).
The Joker from The Dark Knight is an unorthodox example of this trope. There's just something about the supreme competence and control he exhibits throughout the entire film that can one forget (almost) that he's a Complete Monster. Joker Crosses The Line Twice. Hell, he dances a jig up and down the line.
- When you manage to convince a man that it's not your fault you killed his wife-to-be, but the fault of those who were working to save both of them, and that it wasn't anything personal because you were just trying to teach Gotham a lesson in chaos; all while WEARING A NURSE'S OUTFIT, you're a Magnificent Bastard. The best example, however is when he goes through his elaborate plot to kill Dent, gets locked up in jail, but manages to have a bomb in the stomach of another prisoner, which he sets off. Of course, he had to be a part of all this to make it work.
  Want to see a magic trick? I'm going to make this pencil disappear! *WHAM* Ta-Daaaa! IT'S GONE!"
- The Book Of The Film gives the backstory of the crime boss known as the Chechen, who rose from being a penniless orphan in Chechnya to being a big fish in Gotham through the drug market and some luck.
Leslie Vernon, from Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. He's an aspiring spree killer (in the vein of Jason Vorhees and Freddy Krueger, as the movie is a big deconstructor fleet of slasher films) who is chosen to be the subject of a documentary that the main character, Taylor Gentry, is making. She eventually becomes great friends with Leslie, who turns out to be quite charismatic. Then, she is surprised when he does go through with the killings, his chosen victims trapped in a mansion that he pretreated to be lethal. She decides to help, but when she goes into the mansion, she realizes Leslie's real plan: she and her crew were also intended to be his victims, and they're playing right into his hands. Finally, she is the last victim left, and manages to kill him in exactly the way he said the final girl would. Unfortunately, he planned this the whole time, taking the preparations required to fake his own death...
- And he even tells her how and by which means he is going fake his own death!
Kuwabatake Sanjuro from Yojimbo. Not only does he play two rival gangs like fiddles, causing them both to collapse with little suspicion drawn to himself, he's able to turn his capture, which he didn't plan to his advantage.
Harry Lime from The Third Man. "Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax—the only way you can save money nowadays." And he's played by Orson Welles.
Bill "The Butcher" Cutting from Gangs Of New York has the hero at his mercy at one point in the movie, but instead of killing him decides to build him into a Worthy Opponent so they can have a Battle Royale With Cheese because having everyone living in terror of him is boring. Well, not quite. He lets the hero live because he considers him Not Worth Killing, who views being left alive by the Butcher as shameful. Which, in fact, may add to this magnificence. It helps that he's played with gusto by Daniel Day Lewis.
Hans Gruber from Die Hard holds a building hostage in order to trick the FBI into helping him steal huge sums of cash from it. That alone qualifies him. But when he's played with deliciously slimy charisma by Alan Rickman, well, Magnificent Bastardry ensues.
Ms. White from The Inside Man. She's apparently made a career (or at least a lucrative hobby) of pulling strings and doing favors for the rich and powerful, so she can demand return favors in her own time. Early in the film, after she extracts a demand from the Mayor, all he can say to her is, "You are a magnificent cunt."
- Dalton Russell would also classify. He takes a bank hostage and creates a foolproof plan to achieve his objective (hint: it's not robbing the bank) while escaping by literally walking out of the front door. Keith Frazier's entry into the plot doesn't even faze him. Russell merely modifies his existing plan and turns Frazier into an unknowing accomplice.
Little Bill Daggett of Unforgiven. Play by his rules while in town, particularly by handing over your means of defending yourself, and he's smiling, affable, and friendly; charming, really. Cross him, however, and he'll first put you in a position where you can't fight back and then beat you within an inch of your life or kill you outright for sheer fun. He even has a speech mid-way through detailing that what makes him formidable isn't speed or skill so much as his willingness to stand his ground and count on his manipulation of the odds where other people would piss themselves with fear.
Norman Stansfield in Leon The Professional is a corrupt DEA agent who casually shoots up an apartment, tells the owner he stopped right in front of him because Beethoven gets boring after his overtures, and even convices the cops that it was self defense, despite a single person in the apartment having a gun. He's also played by Gary Oldman.
Jackie Brown, who manipulates almost every character in the film against one another, while she steals millions of dollars and is granted freedom from prosecution, with only her lover the wiser.
Repo The Genetic Opera has Rotti Largo who planted poison in Nathan Wallace's home lab, thus killing the woman they both loved. Then he convinced Nathan that Marni's death was all his (Nathan's) fault and made him work as a Repo Man for Gene Co. And that's not much considering some of the other stuff he gets away with (and tries to get away with) in the movie. In a deleted scene he managed to get Shilo to extract zydrate from her mother's corpse.
Evil, as portrayed by David Warner, in Time Bandits, particularly during the final fight scene.
The entire premise of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is a competition between two con men to see which one is more of a Magnificent Bastard than the other. They both lose to an unknown third player.
The Prestige features two magicians trying to beat each other with Magnificent Bastardry.
And the titular character of The Illusionist is about one whose target of animosity isn't even a Chessmaster. He wins. With honors.
Dr. Frank N Furter from the Rocky Horror Picture Show is this at times. He's able to manipulate two people whom he's barely met (IE: Brad & Janet) into sleeping with him, tricks said people into eating the very remains of someone he killed out of pure spite (Meatloaf, anyone?), and FINALLY brainwashes not only Brad and Janet, but also his groupie Columbia and his own creation Rocky into performing a floorshow with him. All the while, for the most part, maintaining a very charismatic appeal to him.
Mr. Potter of Its A Wonderful Life: "I'm an old man, and most people hate me. But I don't like them either, so that makes it all even." He manages to nearly take over an entire town (and would have if it weren't for that meddling George Bailey). Seems to own absolutely everything in Bedford Falls (including the banks) beside the Building and Loan. In his office, there is an oil painting of himself on the wall and a bust of Napoleon (presumably his two favorite people.) The chair where visitors sit is deliberately tiny so he can lord over them, and on his desk is a paperweight shaped like a skull.
Captain Louie Renault from Casablanca, in a mostly harmless way. Unless you're an attractive young lady who needs a favor.
Rameses II from Cecil B De Mille's 1956 version of The Ten Commandments. Every motion, every expression, every word as portrayed by Yul Brynner epitomized Magnificent Bastard in epic form: magnificent, brilliant, clever, confident, charismatic, sexy, audacious and wrong. With a ginormous amount of Large Ham, he was a God and knew it. It took Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea to let him know who was really running things.

Close Film

Lord Vetinari, Patrician and supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork from Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, is described as being such a Magnificent Bastard, he makes Machiavelli look like an amateur. He plots against everyone, plays people against each other, and he manipulates people into doing exactly what he wants, and always gets away with it. Interestingly enough, he is almost a subversion in that we meet him when he is already quite-contentedly in power, and his Magnificent Bastardry is dedicated entirely to the mundane bureaucratic affairs of quietly running his city, leading a quite Spartan existence himself and almost always acting as a side-character to the main action, never protagonist or antagonist.
- Going Postal however has Reacher Gilt, who fits this trope to a T; the protagonist even describes him as the greatest conman he's ever met. He secretly has people killed in order to run the clacks into the ground and profit as it's built back up. And he gets away with it because he's so bald-faced about it, as well as amazingly charming, that no-one believes he's serious.
Sauron, though much of his magnificent bastardy takes place before Lord of the Rings - see this essay. Sauron is a cunning manipulator who has plans going all over Middle Earth. When force fails he can sweet-talk and when sweet-talk fails he has force and when that fails he has schemes within schemes within schemes. He can manipulate even his enemies into serving his goals. He engineered the Fall of Númenor through manipulation of the Númenoreans' desire for immortality and he was the one that was responsible for many of the Foul Things that inhabit Middle Earth. The Orcs were Morgoth's idea but he carried out the plan. And the Nazgûl were his own idea. And so on. Basically, he was a Magnificent Bastard all the way till the fall of Númenor. Afterwards, he became the archetypal Evil Overlord.
- He might have kept a few of his Magnificent Bastard traits even then. After all, he corrupted both Saruman and Denethor simply by preying on their base desires and fears in a plot to cripple the defense of Minas Tirith before the battle even began. It would have worked, too, had Gandalf (a Chess Master in his own right) not intervened.
- Think on this: He somehow arranged for the only way to destroy his Ring of Power to be to bring it right to his doorstep. If he'd actually been paying attention, rather than plotting the downfall of the entire free world (and very nearly succeeding), he would have been restored to his previous self and been nigh-unstoppable.
Lord Petyr Baelish of A Song Of Ice And Fire, also known as "Littlefinger." Even though his title has little standing, Lord Petyr is nonetheless one of the most powerful men in Westeros. He was so adept at finance that he managed to gain a seat as the Master of Coin on the king's council, and has replaced many officials with servants who are loyal to him. He was responsible for the assassination of the King's Hand, Jon Arryn. He easily duped Eddard Stark into believing he was an ally and was ultimately responsible for his execution. He murdered the only woman who seems to have loved him, Lysa Arryn, after we learn the entire civil war was set in motion at Littlefinger's behest (not that he likely planned for it to be so big, but still. And to demonstrate he tolerates no bastards of the less-magnificent variety, he took a hand in Prince Joffrey's assassination, facilitating Margaery's marriage to a sane king at House Tyrell's request. Even Tyrion Lannister, one of hte smartest characters in the series, doubts whether he is a match for Littlefinger. His only weakness is a love he once held for Eddard's wife Catelyn Stark, which seems to have transferred to an affection for her daughter Sansa, whom he's apparently "training" to follow on his manipulative steps.
- And let's not forget that, by the end of the fourth book, he is the Regent Lord of the Vale, is Lord of Harrenhal/the Lannister's duly chosen new Lord of the Trident, and has set in motion events through marrying off his protegé Sansa to Robert Arryn's heir to put himself in a position of power with the North as well.
- Many other characters, who mostly pale when compared to Littlefinger, including the Prince of Dorne who's been keeping plans to marry his children into the Targaryens to exact vengeance for his sister's death.
The villain of L.A. Confidential: Captain Dudley Smith. The audience knows from the prologue he's evil, but you don't realize exactly how evil until Exley, White, and Vincennes unravel how everything from Patchett's hooker ring to the Nite Owl killings to Mickey Cohen's mobsters, to the smut books, to even Preston Exley, Ray Dieterling, and the Loren Atherton case is connected to him. Either he's got the best luck in the world, or he's put together one of the biggest XanatosGambits ever.
- In this editor's opinion he's the only one on this list who can match Johan in terms of ruthlessness and efficiency. The man is really freaking terrifying.
In David Eddings' Belgariad and Malloreon, Prince Kheldar (a.k.a. Silk) is THE Magnificent Bastard. Silk spends the entire series conning, stealing, cheating, and tricking various people, all to the advantage of him and his friends.
The Lies Of Locke Lamora, tons of them. The most notable of course include the Gray King, and the protagonist Anti Villain Locke Lamora himself, leader of the fittingly named "Gentlemen Bastards".
- Capa Vencarlo Barsarvi of the first book deserves an honorable mention, despite the fact he is ultimately defeated by an even greater Magnificent Bastard, namely the Grey King. Barsavi was just a professor of Rhetoric for gods sake, moves to Camorr and in a few short years he had eliminated all the rival Capas, resulting in a total monopoly on the city's criminal enterprises with several thousand men and over a hundred gangs at his disposal. Not only that but through a shrewd alliance with the Duke's spymaster he promises not to go after the nobility and in exchange punishments are relaxed for his men and he physically rules several of the less desirable parts of the city. He kept this up for 20 years. Not a bad run.
- Speaking of the Duke's spymaster, the Spider aka Dona Vorchenza deserves a mention as well, for using a pair of Locke's marks against him to manipulate him into being captured.
- In the sequel, Red Seas Under Red Skies: The owner of the high class gambling ring Sinspire at first seems to be the classic 'early story mark' in his ego and position as decadent nobility, serving to lead Locke Lamora into the main plot. He shows quite nicely how this isn't the case as the end of book however, when as part of the Downer Ending he totally outsmarts even Locke. He had already worked out that they were trying to screw him over and what they were after, allowing them to do his dirty work to earn his 'trust' while replacing the target paintings with fakes.
Bastard Operator From Hell. Over the course of hundreds of short stories, he has almost exclusively come out on top with all of his complex gambits, quickly turning every event in his favor. He can walk into a convention with no preparation and manipulate total strangers into giving him their money. He had a Wonderful Life sequence and instead of coming to a realization of how bad he is, the only thing he gets out of it was the password to a competitor's computer system. This is the man that could take over the world if he only cared about more than just making more money by doing less work.
Gentleman Johnnie Marcone from Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files series. He's constantly putting himself in a position where it's absolutely necessary for people who hate him to cooperate with him, whether because he's the lesser of several evils or simply the only option. He has single-handedly brought all of Chicago's organized crime under his direct control and even managed to be the first normal human to sign on to the magical equivalent of the Geneva Convention known as the Unseelie Accords. The protagonist of the series says it all in his quote "Say what you want about Marcone, but he's got balls that drag the ground when he walks."
- Another Dresden Files example: Lara Raith, who single-handedly engineers the crippling of the White King (her own father) just so she can assert herself as the power behind the throne, and then procceds to manipulate her step-brother, the series' protagonist, into massacring her enemies in the white court for her, callously sacrificing dozens of innocent women in the process.
Troy Phelan from John Grisham's novel The Testament. A rich businessman with over 11 billion dollars in assets as well as three ex-wives and six children he hates with a passion, he cooks up an ingenious plan to totally screw them when he dies. He first fools his heirs into thinking he signed a will that divided the money equally among them. Then, while they're not looking, he signs the real will. In it, he gives his entire fortune to an illegitimate daughter. He only gives enough money to his heirs to cover all of their debts up to the date of his death, orders his lawyer to keep the will from being publicly read for a month, and then commits suicide. The lawyer then realizes that thinking they're going to inherit a fortune, all of Phelan's heirs will go on a spending spree for the next month and incur even greater debts. Suffice to say, when the will was finally read, everybody realized how much of a Magnificent Bastard Troy Phelan really was. The icing on this cake? Shortly before committing suicide, he manipulates his family into getting a team of doctors to declare him mentally competent, knowing that they'll try to backpedal furiously when the real will is read.
Dracula in the eponymous novel by Bram Stoker; a soulless, eerily polite Manipulative Bastard whose nocturnal predations turn Victorian morality on its head, transforming demure and innocent young maidens into voluptuous, demonic temptresses right under the noses of their impotent menfolk, all while remaining mockingly out of reach. He plots and nearly executes a Xanatos Gambit conquest of England that is only derailed due to a Contrived Coincidence involving his first victim in England's connections. His massive effect on pop culture, almost singlehandedly inventing the modern image of the suave, aristocratic vampire, is largely derived from the personality created in Stoker's original novel - repulsively evil yet undeniably magnetic.
- This carries over into film; Bela Lugosi's portrayal may seem hammy and silly now, but it put the thrilling fear of vampire seduction into 1930's audiences, and Christopher Lee did the same in the 1970s. Subsequent film adaptions have, of course, been hit-or-miss, sometimes Spikeifying or Flanderizing Dracula to the point of parody or unrecognisability. Nonetheless, the spirit of the original retains all the charm and unrepentent evil of an undiluted Bastard.
- Castlevania's edition is a classic Bastard on several occasions, especially in Lament of Innocence.
Forgotten Realms, having more underground intrigues than open epic quests, has its share.
- Jarlaxle Baenre (brother of Quenthel and Gromph, no less), founder and leader of the mercenary band Bregan D'aerthe, which he left in the hands of a deputy (he found drow who will not try to depose him but powerful and resourceful enough to keep control) to become a wandering adventurer. Living in a society where the precise cut of hair corresponds to identity, he shaves his head to show he's not in the system. Other drow of Menzoberranzan try to master the controlled chaos that is the City of the Spider Queen. Jarlaxle tries to add chaos, because he thrives in it. Though for many years he was Neutral Evil, in the latest edition campaign setting he's Chaotic Neutral, which is probably more accurate: he's not malevolent but a mercenary acting for fun and profit...or just for the hell of it.
- Road of the Patriarch pretty much amplifies his Magnificent Bastardry to truely epic levels, where he ends up manipulating the entire Kingdom of Bloodstone and its paladin king, Gareth Dragonsbane, the Citadel of Assassins, two ancient dragons, the remnants of the lich-king Zenghyi's artifical magical constructs, Artemis Entreri, and his own drow mercenary band that he is no longer in direct control of to his own benefit and for the hilarity of it all, and he does it with such flair and ease that it looks like child's play. Truly, Jarlaxle is one of the greatest Magnificent Bastards in all of fiction.
- Elaith "The Serpent" Craulnober appears in Forgotten Realms books of Elaine Cunningham and Ed Greenwood. Stylish, fearless, merciless and almost shameless crimelord of explosive temper. As multiclass Anti Hero/Anti Villain, usually intervenes when something offends him. Or when things can get worse — wrecks attempt to establish a guild of thiefs and assassins in his city "because it's not in his best interests" or saves hero as an "enemy of my enemy" and to keep Status Quo — he prospers, why rock the boat?
- Lauzoril, extremely charismatic Zulkir of Enchantment. Became leader of Imperialist party despite demonstratively breaking Red Wizards' tradition. Then dodged Villain Decay despite being defeated in military campaigns. When tired of wars, proved he was very Affably Evil — jumped into dangerous adventure to save complete stranger just because his daughter happened to show compassion to poor guy during scrying lesson. And then made sort of separate peace with Witch Queen — it looks like "he chose to do right thing", only he managed to do it after long underground war on her Harpers agents, up to and including assassination attempt on her sister, while she's the most dangerous wizard in his world and didn't only wrecked plans of Red Wizards, but has a habit of killing them at sight — not typical Friendly Enemy. Then they met and... parted as friends.
Raistlin Majere from Dragonlance is definitely an example of this. His cunning plan? Go back in time, study under the most powerful dark wizard ever (also Magnificent in his own right), then kill him and steal the rest of his secrets, organize an army and attack one fortress in order to get close to another which contains a gate to the Abyss, manipulate a cleric of good into ~~falling in love with him~~ helping him open it, lure out the supreme goddess of darkness, kill her, and take her place. The only thing more insane is how close he came to succeeding. This is made more interesting by how many times Raistlin came close to failing; sure, he's a supreme Bastard, master manipulator, and ends up the series' most powerful dark wizard, but let's not forget that he started with absolutely nothing, and gambled everything with every step - this is a man so physically frail he coughs blood after casting even the most basic spells, and constantly wrestling with his own amorality, bitterness, and the shreds of actual love he felt for his brother and even Crysania. All of this only combines to make him more Magnificent; no wonder he's a Draco In Leather Pants to many fans of the books.
Nyarlathotep from HP Lovecraft's writings: Not only is he a Cosmic Horror, he's the only one of Lovecraft's pantheon that seems to take real interest in actions of humans, which is not a very good thing for humanity. Prime examples include his appearance in "Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath", where he gives a three-page-long speech about how he was never trying to kill the protagonist (his minions just misunderstood him) and, in fact, needs him to go get the Dreamland's gods back to their rightful place in Kadath. He then proceeds to give the protagonist a flying creature that would take him to the Sunset City where the gods now dwell and explicitly warns him from flying too high with it. However it turns out that the protagonist has no control over the beast and it is taking him to the court of the great daemon sultan Azathoth (the biggest Cosmic Horror there is). He barely escapes with his life.
- In "The Shadow from the Steeple", which was written by Robert Bloch in response to a story written by HPL in response to a story written by Bloch, he posesses a medical doctor and turns him into *gasp* a nuclear physicist. He then helps mankind develop nuclear power (and bombs) from behind the scenes. Seems rather nice of him until you realise he only does it so we would have a weapon powerful enough to wipe ourselves from the face of the Earth. In a war he no doubt starts.
Lord Gro from from The Worm Ouroboros is a rare example of a tragic Magnificent Bastard. A charismatic, delightfully sophisticated serial traitor with balls of solid rock who affects every trait of glorious bastardry, his tragic flaw is an oddly chivalrous sense of fair play that compels him to always be on the losing side - and so every time he manages to turn the tide with his cunning (that's several times in the book) he has to switch sides. His consistent magnificence makes him easily the most popular character in the book.
Hannibal Lecter, before Badass Decay set in. (Or didn't; there's a reason why Hannibal and Hannibal Rising are commonly considered Dis Continuity.)
Randall Flagg/Walter o'Dim/Walter Padick from The Dark Tower. In the very first book, he brings a man back to life in full view of a woman who has always wondered what happens after death. He then leaves her a message telling her that if she says "19" to the previously-dead man, he will tell her the secrets of death, adding repeatedly that it will drive her insane to know. He then cheerfully reminds her of the password several more times. She goes for it.
- Made all the more evil and brilliant by the fact he signs the note that will steal her sanity with a smiley face and "Have a nice day". Then he adds: "P.S. Did I mention the number is NINETEEN?"
- First appeared in The Stand, where most of his badassery originally comes into play.
Rupert of Hentzau from The Prisoner Of Zenda and its sequel is a textbook—nay, an entire course in Magnificent Bastard -ness. Starting out as The Dragon for the book's villain, Rupert is a womanising, treacherous, amoral, totally fearless young man who will kidnap your king, try to stab you in a public place, seduce or rape any young, pretty woman (not drawing a line at the future Queen or his own master's mistress), and do it all with the utmost good-natured charm, despite having caused his mother to die of grief. Also, the following line:
...the man Johann, whom I was compelled to...send back to Zenda, where, by the way, Rupert Hentzau had him soundly flogged for daring to smirch the morals of Zenda by staying out all night in the pursuits of love.
- You could easily argue that Rupert is several sandwiches short of a picnic, If You Know What I Mean.
Steerpike from the Gormenghast trilogy.
Mr. Wednesday from American Gods. Early on in the story, the protagonist's wife died in a car accident she inadvertently caused by distracting the driver, which was later revealed to have been arranged by Mr. Wednesday so he could hire the protagonist for a dangerous job. This may seem impressive until you realize the thirty-something protagonist was born to be an integral part of Mr. Wednesday's Xanatos Roulette.
- And that's without before we even get to his master plan in which he intends to screw over every other god in America (except, possibly, his partner) to replenish his power. And you kind of want him to get away with it.
Marshal Roke Alva from Vera Kamsha's Chronicles of Eterna is a possible subversion of this trope. In the first pages of the first book, characters speak of him as of your garden-variety Magnificent Bastard. When Roke himself enters the action, he turns to be a lovable, good-hearted Magnificent Bastard. By the way, he's a favourite of the Russian Estrogen Brigade.
There are several in The Wayfarer Redemption. For starters WolfStar, who pretty much rigs destiny in favor of Axis. And in the second trilogy, it comes to light that the Star Dance itself is responsible for setting the playing millennia ago, with a stop on Earth that this troper found to be unnecessary Nightmare Fuel...
Edmond Dantès, also known as The Count Of Monte Cristo. It's hard to summarize his schemes, but from psychologically destabilizing his enemies, to ruining their finances by messing with the telegraph system, to his inhuman penchant for disguises that allow him to control the flow of information about his character, and the way he draws the admiration of all who meet him... There isn't a single run-on sentence long enough to encapsulate his magnificence. As for bastardry, he does manipulate a greedy wife into poisoning almost every single member of her family, including one Shoot The Dog moment outside the count's immediate control where she poisons her nine-year-old son.
Satan/Woland in The Master and Margarita. See also Noble Demon and Affably Evil.
Rebecca of Daphne duMaurier's Rebecca. She manipulates her husband into keeping quiet about some sort of trouble she's gotten into by promising to bring life into Manderley, his childhood home. She keeps him under her control with this promise for years and years while she goes off and has sex with several "friends in London", including her own cousin. In the meantime, the two of them keep up the charade that they are the perfect happy couple, and Rebecca makes fanatic friends of all the servants and townspeople, particularly Mrs. Danvers, who loved her because of her manipulativeness. When she discovers that she has a fatal cancer, she makes her husband believe that she is pregnant with another man's child, causing him to lose control, shoot her dead, and sink her body in her boat. And then, even after she's dead, she still manipulates the second Mrs. de Winter into thinking (more than she already did) that she is worthless and her husband doesn't love her, by way of mementos, Mrs. Danvers, and a string of misunderstandings.
Honor Harrington has the Mesa Alignment. It's implicated that they not only started the current war between Manticore and Haven, but that they caused the revolution in Haven. 'The first one 200 years ago.' All part of the plan feeding their true plans. Not only that, but the Audubon Ballroom, a terrorist organization that kills Mesan leaders, is completely compromised and only kills deadweight in the cover organizations that don't know the Alignment exists, despite being nominal heads of Mesa.
Milo Minderbinder from Catch-22. Although a mere mess officer, he has connections all over the world and is - among other titles - mayor of an Italian city and imam of a Middle-Eastern country. Due to mastery of international import and export (including goods from Germany) and blatant pinching of various army supplies (he even leaves stylish notes!) he makes himself ludicrously rich, and becomes gradually even more of a capitalist wonder by turning his eye to private contracting with both the Allies and Axis. At the end of the novel he pulls off the amazing feat of bombing the regiment's own airfield for the Germans but easily avoids getting court-martialed due to his seemingly-unlimited funds. His only mistake is buying too much cotton from Egypt, but he takes care of that by convincing General Cathcart that the troops should be fine eating his excess cotton, provided they cover the cotton in chocolate sauce first.
- He buys eggs at 7 cents apiece to sell them at 5 cents apiece. For a profit.
Lawrence John Wargrave, aka U. N. Owen from And Then There Were None, full stop.
In Brandon Sanderson's first Mistborn book, he gives us a nice inversion with his main character Kelsier being a heroic, well-intentioned Magnificent Bastard.
- Also, in his earlier stand-alone novel Elantris, the three main characters are each Magnificent Bastards: Hrathen scheming to convert the nobility of the nation of Arelon to his religion in order to avoid a holy crusade, Sarene working against him and foiling his plans as best she could, and Raoden using his princely skills to wrest control of the title city from three vicious gangs and rebuilding civilization there from scratch.
- Do Raoden and Sarene really count, though? They're both magnificent, but neither of them is particularly bastardly. Hrathen, though, definitely fits.
Stephen Norton in Curtain. Manipulated many people who were not murderers into murdering.
Toranaga in Shogun is a skilled Chessmaster throughout the book, but the reveal in the final chapter of the insanely elaborate Kansas City Shuffle he's been playing through the entire second half, ending with his brutal To the Pain revenge on his nemesis Ishido, puts him firmly in this category. And he's based on a real guy! "It wasn't an Act of God. It was an Act of Toranaga."
Grand Admiral Thrawn of the Star Wars expanded universe novels counts. He can deduce the mindset of enemies merely by observing their art, achitecture, and actions and adjust his tactics accordingly. His strategic skills were so great that he managed to keep pressure on the New Republic with only a relatively small fraction of the now-fractured Empire and managed to lock down Coruscant for the duration of his siege. His greatest act of magnificent bastardry, however, was in the prequel novel Outbound Flight wherein—as a young Commander of a very small Chiss task force—he managed to set up a Xanatos Gambit of epic proportions by predicting the actions of a human prisoner, his superiors, an agent of Darth Sidious and his Trade Federation comrades, a group of nomadic alien radiers, and a colony ship full of Jedi (the titular Outbound Flight) in such a manner that everything he wanted to deal with all convened in one area while those that he didn't were out of the way. He then counted on the Jedi on Outbound Flight to use the Force to disable the gunnery crews on the nomadic raider's fleet (which he wanted to destroy earlier, but couldn't under Chiss Rules Of Engagement) while he used captured Trade Federation droids to destory most of the now disabled fleet, his own ships then swooped in and disabled the weaponry of Outbound Flight.
- At times this can veer perilously close to Villain Sue levels... it's revealed he's able to produce clones so rapidly by knowing more about how the Force works than the Jedi did during the Clone Wars.
  - That whole thing about clones and growing rates thereof appears to have been declared Canon Discontinuity, seeing as how nobody has ever acknowledged it since.
Marquise Isabella de Merteuil...just Marquise Isabella de Merteuil.
Space Vulture from Space Vulture.
Glenin Feiran of the Exiles trilogy by Melanie Rawn. Cunning, beautiful (and aware of it), she once remarks that the main difference between her and her major rival is that when she becomes the most powerful woman in the world, she'll look the part. She wants to control the world and order it to her vision, part of which involves using her sisters as breeders and later having his son sleep with his cousin for the magical offspring they'll produce. She also permanently maims her sister and shows no remorse. She's very popular with the fanbase for her intelligence.
Special Agent Woolrich from John Connoly's Every Dead Thing - who is also an example of a Complete Monster.
Saint Dane from The Pendragon Adventure series. Most of the time he disguises as two different people. One he allows Bobby to know about to taunt him, and the other is somebody who isn't revealed until around the end of the book. Usually the second disguise is what he is using to manipulate everybody to their doom, with the exception of The Rivers of Zadaa where he convinces the Rokador to flood everything as himself and The Quillan Games where he reveals his new secret weapon Nevva Winter. To top things off, as of Raven Rise, he's arguably winning, having destroyed all the barriers of Halla. The fact he also is capable of holding his own in actual combat, is more or less unkillable was responsible for the deaths of Press, Alder, Patrick, and Kasha (though they all got better makes it no surprise that a good portion of the fanbase wants him to win in the last book.
Romance Of The Three Kingdoms' Zhuge Liang, single-handedly responsible for half the Crowning Moments of Awesome in the novel. Just ask poor Zhou Yu.
The King, in James Clavell's King Rat.
In Enemy Mine by Barry Longyear, Drac skilled in Talma (peculiar teachings of philosophy and logic) who apply it to political needs tend to achieve this effect. Like having a proper prisoner of war accidentally blinded, taught Talma and nearly adopted by one's clan as a way to stop the war. There's also the whole species whose survival model starts with "when running from a predator, run to another, make them fight over their prey, then slip away while they're busy". And when they started to mess with the big politics, they managed to confuse even Dracs into following their plans.
Achilles in the Shadow series of sequels to Enders Game. Sabotaging India's war in Indochina to allow China to sweep in and conquer both India Proper and its new conquests, and then playing both the Chinese and Peter Wiggin like a violin until Bean stops him makes him the epitome of a Magnificent Bastard. And all before his thirtieth (hell, maybe even his twentieth) birthday.
The titular Harry Lavender in The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender by Marele Day is an exceptional version of one of these in the crime fiction genre, with an iron grip on Sydney's crime world and the city itself. Through the extracts of the in-universe titular book, we gain insight into the type of character Harry is, a manipulative, cunning and brilliant man who is cold, yet still has an ego. In the story itself, he pulls off what would normally be The Perfect Crime, killing Mark Bannister by altering his pacemaker through a program and more or less causing him to have a heart attack by reading his own death. And then he engineers a cat-and-mouse game with the protaganist, Claudia, eventually resulting in a Crowning Moment Of Awesome which can be summed up with the words "To My Valentine". And that occurs when the man isn't even around. The only thing that screws his plan up in the end? There are some things that you just can't prepare for. Even then? He slips into a coma JUST before Claudia has the oppertunity to expose him, avoiding punishment and preventing her from gaining that satisfaction of taking him down while he still lives, and his memoirs would end up being published posthumously, just as he intended. "They will remember me", indeed.
John Scalzi's protagonist from the Old Mans War ~~trilogy~~ series is just a lovable roguish character up until the third book where he leads a fleet of former enemy ships to Earth to circumvent the tyrannical extra-solar human government who had been keeping Earth in the dark about anything beyond Pluto. By doing so, he managed to prevent the extermination of the human race, free the Earth from the amoral splinter government and bring humanity into an interstellar alliance. He does all of it while navigating the judicial bureaucracy of a government that wants him to hang, framing himself as a war hero in the interplanetary politics, leading an entire planet and negotiating peace. At the same time, his daughter assists his plan in her own story which might qualify her as well.
Although mentioned below in detail, in the Real Life section, Cardinal Richelieu in Eric Flint's 1632 series gets even more chances to demonstrate his magnificant bastardy, thanks to getting a preview of the flow of history thanks to uptimer history books, as discussed in 1633.
Though he's not as magnificent as some examples on this list, and his plans do fail about half the time (though considering the sheer amount of schemes he has going at once, that's still a large number of successes) one has to give props to Nom Anor. Merely the fact that he can survive as a Dirty Coward in a culture of Proud Warrior Race Guy Scary Dogmatic Alien Knight Templars is quite a feat- and when his superiors finally do get tired of him, his response is to assume a fake identity and launch a rebellion that nearly brings their government to its knees. Plus, his knowledge of how "infidels" think and continuous work as a political destablizer was responsible for most of the victories the Yuuzhan Vong won against the New Republic period.

Close Literature

Ted Roark from Chuck. Played by Real Life Magnificent Bastard Chevy Chase.
Doctor Who is littered with examples:
- The Master, in many of his incarnations, in Doctor Who. For instance:
  - In the Delgado era, he was a suave foil for the Doctor, constantly trying to take over the world, using untrustworthy allies.
  - In the Ainley era, he created a city for the sole purpose of trapping the Doctor, managed to foment a civil war among people who were convalescing, and nearly derailed the signing of the Magna Carta, among other schemes. Not to mention the time he held the entire universe for ransom.
  - In the Simm era, he ran for and was elected Prime Minister. He took over the Earth, decimated the population with six billion robot beachballs Of Doom, tormented the main protagonists while dancing around his Cool Ship to Scissor Sisters, and was generally bastardly. And magnificent. This was undone in the end.
- Davros in the episode "Revelation of the Daleks". After escaping from a maximum security prison, he adopts an alias and becomes a hero to the galaxy by alleviating famine. How does he do it? He uses the bodies sent to a planet-sized cemetery complex as the main ingredient for an "artificial" foodstuff. When the Doctor asks if he's actually told the general public about this Davros says no, because "That would have created what I believe is termed 'consumer resistance'." Oh, and while he's doing all this he's using other bodies from the complex to create (yet another) new race of Daleks.
  - Come to that, he was pretty bastardly in "Genesis of the Daleks" as well. When the Doctor convinced the Kaled government to investigate his research programs, he simply gave the Thals, his own people's arch-enemies, the information they needed to annihilate the Kaleds. Then he sent the Daleks to wipe out the Thals. Meanwhile, he carries out a purge of any surviving Kaleds whose conscience might hinder future development of the Daleks.
- Ramón Salamander in The Enemy of the World. A public benefactor for his own ends, he was consolidating power by engineering tectonic disasters. He did so by herding some people into a giant fallout shelter under the pretext of avoiding a war, and telling them the survivors were so warped it would be a mercy to kill them. Also, his supposed arch-nemesis was actually The Dragon (and The Starscream). When his plans went aft a-gley, he used his resemblance to the Doctor to get into the TARDIS (His cover did not last, of course).
- Li H'sen Chang from The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Onstage, he was a star illusionist and the most popular act (albeit with some unfortunate facets to his act). Offstage, however, he was The Dragon for a fifty-first century mass murderer, very skilled in hypnosis, and quite possibly Jack The Ripper.
- Cessair of Diplos, from The Stones of Blood. She absconded with part of a Cosmic Keystone and three silicon-based creatures, which she used as attack "dogs". With the ship hauling her to prison stuck in hyperspace by Earth, she passed herself off as a deity among the locals. For ages they fed her Ogri (with animal blood once human sacrifice was abolished), and she bought up the land her shrine was on, through the ages. Oh, and she may have been an agent of the Black Guardian.
- The Dalek Emperor in Parting of the Ways. After manipulating the human race for centuries, he grew an army of Daleks by transmatting and harvesting the losers of many game shows of doom.
  - What about the Dalek Emperor from the Dalekmania years? Establishing a council of Smug Snakes to procure the materials necessary to destroy the Earth, and then manipulating the Doctor himself, making him isolate the "Human Factor" so that the Daleks could isolate the "Dalek Factor".
- The ~~Brickyard~~ ~~Knacker's Yard~~ Valeyard from Trial of a Time Lord. Of course, any bastard siphoned off of the Doctor while the latter was regenerating would HAVE to be magnificent, and the Valeyard almost succeeds in getting the Doctor executed, all the while plotting to wipe out the High Council. In the ensuing Thirty Xanatos Pileup, his plan literally blows up in his face, but he survived and become Keeper of the Matrix. And even the Master was afraid of him.
- Taren Capel from The Robots of Death overcame more than a million subroutines per robot when making them forget the First Law Of Robotics and turn on the humans, while impersonating a man assigned to a Sandminer.
Star Trek has entertained us with many a Magnificent Bastard. This troper's favorite, the villainous Q. Omnipotent, yet petty; cruel but not vicious; causing devastation yet helpful at times, you really couldn't help but love the bastard(s).
- This troper thinks the most Magnificent Bastard is Gul Dukat. Even going so far as to turn himself into a Bajoran in order to corrupt their entire religion. And always expects people to be grateful to him.
  - Gul Dukat was far too often a victim of his own ego and hubris. Garak, on the other hand...
- Seska from Voyager was a Cardassian spy surgically altered to look Bajoran. After she was busted, she wormed her way into power in a rabidly misogynist society and got them to steal Voyager. Some time after the ship was retaken and she was killed, it was discovered that she had edited a tactical training scenario to trap the author — Tuvok — in it and hunt him down and kill him — after toying with him for a while.
Lionel Luthor from Smallville is the Trope Namer.
Azazel of Supernatural is no slouch on the bastardry, but with the revelations of the end of season 4, Fridge Brilliance kicks in, and he becomes the magnificent bastard we know and loathe. For starters, we find out that his master plan, previously hinted at, was to release Lucifer himself, and for kicks, exclusively torment one family. he starts by arranging the release of Lucifer's firstborn, Lilith, who is the LAST of the 66 (of 600+) seals necessary to free Lucifer. He then tricks various parents into signing away their unborn children's futures as incubators for demon blood, specifically so that they can kill said firstborn. The master stroke here being picking a favorite future mother, killing the parents of Mother Mary brutally, possessing the dead father, killing her future husband for the first of TWO times, THEN having her sign away her child's future, with a deal of bringing back John, the future husband. This "bargain" was of course done for the sole purpose of creating the child he'd doomed. The deal was sealed with a kiss, again, between Mary and her dead father that Azazel was wearing. Of course, leaving right afterwards, no doubt making her carry the body away. This takes place a few decades before the series begins. During the course of the show, on the other hand, he has a couple of pet projects: plotting to get his hands on a gun that kills everything, attempting to kill the entire remaining Winchester family, choosing an heir to herald the armies of hell, and attempting to literally open the gates of Hell. He succeeds in ALL OF THEM. The kicker is, his greatest victories, as well our knowledge of ANY of his true plan, only come after he dies, with the knowledge that he's basically already succeeded in everything he set his mind to. MAGNIFICENT. Oh, and he succeeded in getting my first ever post on TV Tropes to be about him.
Jack from Tru Calling. His Bastardry comes from his mission: to keep the protagonist from saving the lives of the dead people who ask her to do so. His Magnificence comes in the way that he does it. Where Tru tends towards attacking the problem at its source, Jack thinks sideways, poisoning people against Tru before she even shows up. He also tends towards taunting her with little notes and snide commentary. He managed to infiltrate her inner circle with a mole, thus allowing himself to garner all manner of info on her without her knowledge. By the end of the series, he literally has 3 people connected to Tru and her gang that they are entirely unaware of. Imagine the Bolivian Army Ending when the good guys don't even know the army is there.
Ebony in The Tribe. For most of the show's run, she was manipulating half the other characters into turning against each other while she managed to be elected City Leader.
Heroes has several of these. In season one there's HRG, smooth and calculating enough to trick even his MIB employers, although his eventual Heel Face Turn puts an end to his Bastardry. Later, we get introduced to another, Mr. Linderman, the Affably Evil mastermind behind everything. Season 2 brings us a new Magnificent Bastard in the form of the new Big Bad, Adam Monroe. Magnificent and manipulative to boot, Adam recruits resident Idiot Hero Peter Petrelli to be his unwitting dupe, attaining a level of villainous charisma unmatched by any villain in the series since.
- Even after HRG Heel Face Turn he's capable of being a Magnificent Bastard when he threatens his former teacher's family in order to get the information he wants to help keep his family safe
  - Due to the fact that HRG's methods in achieving his aims have not changed at all, despite the fact that he changed sides, this troper would argue he never took a true Heel Face Turn, but counts as just a straight example of this trope.
- Let's not forget everyone's favourite Manipulative Bastard and self-described shark politician, Nathan Petrelli - at least in Season 1 before Character Derailment and Face Heel Revolving Door / Face Heel Whiplash set in.
- Two Words: Angela. Petrelli. Heroes' resident Queen Magnificent Bitch.
- At times it seems like everyone in the Petrelli family except Peter is a Magnificent Bastard - take, for example, Arthur Petrelli. "Come, now, give your father a hug." ... Makes you wonder where Ma and Pa Petrelli went wrong with their youngest one.
Livia in the BBC adaptation of Robert Graves' I Claudius. She spent years brilliantly and subtly manipulating everyone in the highest level of the Roman Empire, just to get her son Tiberius chosen as Emperor. And that's just a part of what she did.
Benjamin Linus from Lost ascended to this status during Seasons Three and Four.
Catherine Packard Martell in Twin Peaks. It's not just everyone who can fake their own death in a mill fire, come back to town in drag to foil the plans of everyone looking to profit off the land, and then plot with their Not Quite Dead brother to seek revenge on his treacherous wife.
Alfred Bester on Babylon 5 combines ruthless scheming with an infuriating charisma that drives the heroes crazy even as they are forced to respect his skill. Speaking of Babylon 5: Londo Mollari.
- Londo's not so magnificent a bastard. He tried to Resuscitate The Dog during his Start Of Darkness, and Garibaldi (his only friend on the station) even "feels sorry for him" for getting stuck in a position where he has no choice but to be a bastard. Nobody feels sorry for a Magnificent Bastard!
  - Babylon 5's characters tend to evolve with such complexity that nobody knows just who is going to be the bastard at any given time. Londo careened between comic relief, Magnificent Bastard, and Tragic Villain countless times throughout the series.
Damages featured a brutal winners-takes-all war fought between the magnificent bastard Arthur Frobisher and the magnificent bitch Patricia "Patty" Hewes.
- Continued into Season 2 with Patty vs. David Pell and Walter Kendrick's energy-manipulation scheme.
Francis Urquhart in House Of Cards. He plots, schemes, manipulates and backstabs his way up the political chain in the hopes of becoming Prime Minister; remaining above suspicion among all of his colleagues. He does it with class, skill and style, all the while giving conspiratorial No Fourth Wall asides to the audiences, explaining his thoughts on his opponents and next steps. He commits terrible deeds, but the audience has to forgive him, because his charm and panache are too overwhelming for him to be hated.
Richard Cross in Murder One. A fabulously rich developer with a love of fine wine and Renaissance art, who has a marvellous public image through his various donations to charities. He also helps out South American drug lords just for the hell of it, and after one of these affiliations goes very, very wrong he spends the entire first season wildly improvising to keep himself and his associates in the clear, all while appearing completely unruffled and dangling his involvement in the faces of the show's heroes. It also doesn't hurt that he's played by the indescribably charismatic Stanley Tucci.
Holtz from Angel falls under this, mostly for his sheer efficiency. Jasmine spent millenia with godlike power manipulating events to come to earth, lasted less than a week, and died at the hands of her most loyal servant. Wolfram and Hart spent five seasons with nigh-limitless resources trying to corrupt Angel and all they accomplished in the end was letting him know who to kill. Meanwhile Holtz, had no powers whatsoever, was out of his own time and had no allies but those he created for himself. And in half a season he managed to convince one of Angel's closest friends to kidnap Angel's son, then escaped into a hell dimension with him, raising him to be Angel's worst enemy. Then his assisted suicide actually made things worse between them.
Angel: You took my son!
Holtz: I kept your son alive. You murdered mine.
Spike was sometimes seen as this before his infamous (and highly arguable) "Spikeification." However, he has a large strike against his cred in his admitted tendency to "get bored" and rush into things without thinking, something a full fledged Magnificent Bastard does not do. That being said, whenever he does take the time to plan things out, he can hang with the best of them (most notably in episodes like "The Yoko Factor").
The Devil in Reaper not only arranges for Sam to get an apartment next to a pair of rebel demons whose plan to destroy him would actually have worked, and manipulates Sam into infiltrating the rebellion with a new (doomed) plan to kill him, he also signs Sam's lease with his name and sends him clues as to what is going on that Sam, Sock and Ben can only work out moments after it is too late to do anything about it. Then repeats this plan with the few survivors of the rebellion, and is still witty, charming and diabolically affable. Ray Wise's portrayal is just so good that fans now think he may actually be The Devil.
- How about another Devil. The Devil from Brimstone. Also happens to be another Magnificent Bastard played by Jon Glover.
Ryan O'Reilly from Oz controls the prison's drug trade, has all this rivals killed by other people, starts gang wars between the ethnic clans and is one of the few characters to survive the show's entire run, and never has anyone other than his mentally retarded brother for muscle. As he replies when one character asks him how he became a leader of the prison riot despite his lack of a gang: "I'm like the Lord of the Fucking Dance. I've got moves."
The title of Super Sentai's only Magnificent Bastard goes to Dr. Mikoto Nakadai of Bakuryu Sentai Abaranger, an Insufferable Genius who takes on the mantle of AbareKiller, the Evil Counterpart of the Abaranger. Within five seconds of his introduction, he captures the Monster Of The Week and turns the poor thing into his personal maid, complete with apron. He sets up a series of Deadly Games for the heroes just to amuse himself and demonstrate that Humans Are Bastards to the Wide Eyed Idealist heroes. He seizes control of three of their (sentient) zords via More Than Mind Control. He decides to take over the villains' headquarters and install himself as their new leader just for kicks. Oh, did I mention that the Super Prototype Transformation Trinket he uses will eventually blow up with the force of a nuclear warhead and that not only is he fully aware of this, he doesn't mind one bit?
- Naturally, Deviot of Power Rangers Lost Galaxy takes this trope to a t. He sets up the rangers to kill the Big Bad himself, and tries to kill his daughter, without her noticing...for a while.
Scorpius of Farscape fame spent the entire run of the series, plus the Made For DVD Movie holding allegiance only to himself, and doing his darnedest to manipulate every side in his favour... and more or less succeeding by series end. And he accomplished his goals with such intelligence and charm, even his apparent Freudian Excuse is transformed into a rational explanation.
Roman Grant in Big Love: the patriarch of a polygamist compound who stole the title of Prophet from the hero's grandfather. He's also an extremely cunning businessman, who manages to one-up the hero, Bill, thoughout the first season - in one case, just when Bill appears to have blackmailed him into giving up his financial interest in Bill's business, by threatening to destroy a guitar he particularly likes, he makes a deal with Bill that appears to give Bill everything he wants - a third outlet of Bill's "Home Depot" style store. Except then he gets the government to declare the land Bill has already bought an historical site. Despite being a thorough swine, he also believes deeply in the importance of family and calls to commiserate for Bill when Bill's family is exposed as polygamists. Of course, he exposed them...
Sheriff Lucas Buck of American Gothic fulfills this trope again and again throughout the series. Among the worst (or best, depending on your point of view) offenses would be his Mind Rape of Dr. Crower, beginning with forcing him to relive his past tragedies (his alcoholism, its destruction of his career, and the terrible accident which cost him the life of his wife and daughter), which nearly makes him fall Off The Wagon again. This then continues on to the convoluted Xanatos Roulette wherein he convinces Dr. Crower via a woman who claims to be his mother that he is the Devil Incarnate. Armed with this Cassandra Truth, Matt morphs into a Stalker With A Crush (only without the crush, unless you take it to mean wanting to crush Buck to death), so that in the end he gets dragged away, having gone off the deep end, and is last seen locked away in an insane asylum. Talk about a Downer Ending...but so ingeniously pulled off.
- Honorable mention also goes to the number Buck pulls on the orderly in "Eye of the Beholder", Carter in "Damned If You Don't", and the talk show host in "Resurrector" he forces to kill his wife...or at least, he thinks he does.
Avon, of Blake's 7, is a rare example of a Magnificent Bastard protagonist.
Joey Heric from The Practice gleefully eludes justice for one blatant murder after another with his expert manipulation of the legal system, confounding both the district attorney's office and his own defense firm with theatrics, misdirection, and at times even the truth. His ability to shed reasonable doubt into just about everything he does is so uncanny, he can even imply responsibility for crimes he's legitimately not involved in and still have people conviced he might have something to do with it.
T-Bag from Prison Break. This guy has built his house behind the Moral Event Horizon.. Or so you'd think. He sexually abuses prison mates. He raped children and killed them. He's racist. And yet, you still somehow find him awesome. Maybe you can stand him because he more than once got what he deserved. (One hand hacked away, for example). Maybe it's because no matter how often he gets beaten, he always rises from the ashes and continues his magnificent plans.
Edmund Blackadder, the third incarnation and the episode involving the French Revolution, especially.
The Marquis de Carabas from Neverwhere is the king of Magnificent Bastards. He makes his living by trading favours, and will call them in whenever he likes, however he likes, whether the debtor likes it or not.
Al Swearengen from Deadwood slowly earns this title over the course of the second season when it becomes clear he's trying to bring order to the horrible frontier town in order to protect his dominance. Sure he orders hits on little girls, kills innocent people and generally does horrible things to everyone. Compared to Hearst and his cronies, Swearengen is practically a populist man of the people.
Parodied with Bill from News Radio had a tendency to see conspiracies in coincidences and accuse Dave of being a Magnificent Bastard, once even uttering the page quote (with Rommel replaced with Dave). This said, the true Magnificent Bastard of the show is Jimmy James.
Julian Sark from Alias is a perfect example.
One Word: Cardassians. Magnificent Bastardry is their hat.
Commander Cain, commanding officer of the battlestar Pegasus in the original Battlestar Galactica, certainly qualifies. He was based on Patton, after all. His counterpart in the re-imagined series, Admiral Cain, is more of a General Ripper.
- Starbuck calls Apollo this in the new series after he flies through a conveyor system to fly under a Cylon base's defences and blow it to bits. More a congratulatory term for pulling off something insane brilliantly, but still.
- Brother "John" Cavil.
Gaius Baltar of the new Battlestar Galactica has demonstrated an amazing ability to weasel, connive, and adapt every adverse situation to his own personal advatage. Even when he has been called out on his manipulations and lies and has grudgingly admitted to it, he has been able to show his opponents how it is to their advantage to grant his wishes, just this one more time.
Jack Donaghy from 30 Rock ultimately personifies this trope, being a motivated, cutthroat corporate head who usually finds incredible ways to benefit both himself and his favorite underlings, usually while sounding totally ridiculous (see Season 2's scene in which he imitates Redd Foxx in order to aid a black movie star under his employ in coping with his family issues.... and actually manages to make it work). DY-NO-MIIITE!
Jake gets called this in an episode of {{Jake 2.0}}. He's really not one, but given the geekitude of the writers and the military setting of the episode, the use of the term is probably intentional.
The System Lord Ba'al from Stargate SG-1. What, you DARE mock him??
- The Wraith "Todd" on Stargate Atlantis
Parodied humorously in That70s Show when Fez literally calls Hyde a magnificent bastard. Which leads to the response "Sorry buddy. By the way it's pronounced 'bas-TARD'."
- Hyde actually does fill this role around Fez and Kelso throughout the series.
King Silas in Kings. As one fan put it, "Never try to outsmart Ian Mc Shane. He is smarter than you."
- So much so that we root for him even though the Bible itself tells us he's doomed.
Hilary Briss in The League Of Gentlemen.
"Somebody's got to stay in control."
Adelle De Witt has ascended to Magnificent Bastardry in the last couple episodes of Dollhouse The woman took a bullet and proceeded to watch her former right hand man be lobotomized then carried on a conversation as cool as ice cream!
Ashton Kutcher could be the very definition of this trope as the host of Punk'd.
Colonel Montoya, the Big Bad of the cheesy TV show Queen of Swords. Possibly as a result of being played by one of two decent actors on the entire show, and being one of two intelligent characters.
The season two finale of Gossip Girl manages to turn its title character into one while still keeping her The Unseen. First everyone gets a text during graduation of Gossip Girl's own judgements about their personality flaws. When some of them team up to try to discover her identity, she retaliates by printing all of the most hurtful information she's held back on. Finally Serena tries to bluff her into a private meeting at a coffee shop, saying she knows her identity, but instead Gossip Girl arranges for the whole class to go to the coffee shop, then sends them another text saying that they're all looking at Gossip Girl right now, as the only reason she can do so much is that people keep sending her information. She goes on that they're not rid of her yet, and she'll still be keeping tabs on them all in college.
Holly Day from Slings And Arrows. Neither as evil nor as magnificent as many on this list, she still earns her place by managing to display exactly how batshit insane corporatization and commodity culture are, and how they can seem perfectly reasonable and good from the inside. And for taking a bright and sunny disposition far beyond Affably Evil. And for just being so over-the-top as to gush about her plans for the New Burbage Festival in the middle of her sex scene with her Bastard Understudy.
Mark Antony in Rome, at least up until he comes up against Octavian. His effortless domination of a mighty empire is made all the more awesome by the fact that he seems to manage it without ever engaging higher brain functions (if he can't have sex with it or extract money from it, he kills it. And an empire trembles).
Charlie Harper thinks Raffi is one of these, due to his successful musical career.
"You magnificent sunnuvabitch. How do you do it?"
Brian Kinney from Queer As Folk personifies this trope perfectly. He treats people as disposable commodities, but never has a shortage of new people lining up to be abused. To a lesser extent, his protege Justin tries to live up to this trope as well.

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From Norse mythology; Loki. Not even counting his cosmic Face Heel Turn after the death of Baldur, in itself a grandiose act of Bastardry, his consistent use of clever, cunning plots and charismatic trickery combined with Thor's brute strength in the stories of their journeys together make him one of the most entertaining characters of Scandanavian myth, even when he's being a total prick. One example has him turn into a female horse to distract an ice giants horse. He ends up giving birth to one of the great horses
- Also, Odin, in his Trickster guise as the one-eyed Wanderer, performs some glorious Bastardry, but outside of that his defining Bastard act is encouraging humanity to continue slaughtering itself in pointless wars so that his Valkyries can gather the souls of enough valiant warriors to bolster Odin's armies in Ragnarok.
Satan, the Devil, in just about every portrayal since Milton (and Marlowe, and Goethe...) has shifted from the nasty but easily-duped Trickster of early medieval times to a charming, smooth-talking soul dealer and patron saint of Magnificent Bastards. The appeal of this version has led to it becoming increasingly popular to portray the Devil as tragic, misunderstood, sympathetic or even an out-and-out AntiHero. Despite this, he's rarely given Woobie traits and usually remains unrepentant literally until Doomsday, dodging Badass Decay and making him truly Magnificent. Some fans of this interpretation take it so far as believing it's God who's the real bastard, and sometimes a Magnificent one in His own right.
- The Beast will purge the human race of everyone not irredeemably evil.

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WWE Chairman Vince McMahon, both in the ring and in Real Life. Through a succession of ballsy, everything-or-nothing moves in the 1980's, he turned North America's entire Professional Wrestling scene into his own personal fiefdom. He now uses his firm grasp on the industry to make people he likes into stars — and ruin the careers of those he doesn't. He even managed to turn real-life fan hatred of him due to the Montreal Screwjob into legitimate Heel heat, simply by coming out on screen and being himself. Only more so. So many in the industry hate him while also wishing they were him, and wrestling fans constantly express their disgust with him, even as they eagerly fill his bank account every time the WWE comes to their town.
Ric Flair was probably wrestling's prototypical Magnificent Bastard. "Limousine riding, jet-flying, kiss-stealing, wheeling, dealing son of a gun" that he was, he always had four aces up the sleeves of his impeccable suits and gaudy ring robes, and a couple of them in his boots too for when things got really desperate. As a heel, he also delighted in constantly reminding the other wrestlers, and everybody watching, that they'd never, ever be like him, no matter how much they wished otherwise. Wooooooooooooooooooooo!
Edge, in his "Ultimate Opportunist" Gimmick, has established himself as a dangerous threat to any world champion, and a cunning adversary for any respective challenger, with his ruthless exploitation of any circumstance he deems favorable. As such, even after the most embarassing of defeats, he almost always bounces back.

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Asmodeus, ruler of Nessus, Ninth Layer of Baator in Dungeons And Dragons. He is one of the oldest living things in the multiverse, controlling all of the Nine Hells and standing over every other devil. The gods fear him. He once instigated the Reckoning, an Enemy Civil War, just to root out the more dangerous of his foes... only to promptly step forward and force all of Baator to submit once it stopped being useful to him. His only reaction to Mephistopheles threatening to take his throne was an amused silence.
- Don't forget that with the update to 4th Edition his status went from merely a powerful archdevil that required a full team of high level epic characters to fight into a full god.
Cleon Zhunastu founder of the Third Imperium in Traveller. He actually did better then Palpitine because his Empire lasted for more then a thousand years. He manipulated dozens of powerful men and thousands of planets into forming the Third Imperium.
Hanse Davion from BattleTech. While he reshaped military thinking within his life, he will probably best be remembered for his acts of Magnificent Bastardry. The first being where he ordered the court martial, exile and stripping of name from the son of his Intelligence Secretary - and best friend - as a part of an elaborate ruse to plant him into another state's intelligence network. So successful was this gambit that in the subsequent war (Which Hanse started at his own wedding) he captured more worlds in two years of fighting then his predecessors had in the last two hundred, all but crippling the state and driving its leader to insanity. Why did he do it? As an act of revenge against said leader who had tried to kill Hanse and replace him with a doppleganger.
- While on the subject of BattleTech, let us not forget Ulric Kerensky. Even when introduced as 'merely' the Khan of Clan Wolf, he already comes across as this; once voted into the position of ilKhan and forced to lead an invasion he's essentially opposed to, he manages to ever-so-subtly sabotage it without ever committing an outright act of treason (most notably by playing on the vanity of the other leaders and letting them get hoist by their own petards when they're too full of themselves to ask for advice or instructions), ultimately culminating in a fifteen-year truce — and then, when later challenged over it, sets into motion a plan to cripple the Clan pushing the hardest to resume the invasion while making sure part of his own Clan survives to keep defending the Inner Sphere in the future, even though it will cost his own life among others. Throughout it all and even posthumously he's never depicted as being anything less than completely in control and on top of events.
- Also Sun-Tzu Liao. He turned his crippled state (Courtesy of Hanse Davion above) around in the space of a few years, abused his elected position as the new First Lord of the reborn Star League to allow his nation to leagally annex a breakaway state, reclaimed more then half the territory his grandfather lost under the pretense of "Peacekeeping" operations and forged a three-way alliance amongst other dissafected nations. There's (circumstantial) evidence that he even nuked his own capitol to serve as a propaganda piece to provoke hatred of his enemies. In the end he fakes his own death to acend to the level of godhood in the eyes of his people. In many way,s he acts like Hanse Davion, which is no surprise, as he's Hanse's genetic son.
Tzeentch of Warhammer 40 K is a literal god of scheming who lays plans that take millennia to pay off. Whilst we're in the same universe, the Alpha Legion are, most terrifyingly, an entire army of Magnificent Bastards, even before the Horus Heresy (with the exception of Bale and Carron, but we don't talk about them).
- Then there are the Thousand Sons Legion, whose meticulous planning runs for centuries, every detail mapped out, completely flawless, until the Space Wolves show up, kick their teeth in, then laugh at all the effort Tzeentch put into those plans. The Space Wolves, a whole army of Spanners In The Works, they keep the Thousand Sons from ever becoming 'proper' Magnificent Bastards.
- The entire Eldar race is a race of Magnificent Bastards. How else do you think they've survived this long?
  - Plot Armour?
- Then there's the Alpha Legion, who's whole Hat is this.
Khazrak the One-eye, a beastmen leader from Warhammer Fantasy. A ruthlessly efficient beastmen who uses simple yet effective ambushing tactics. He has a rather one-sided Friendly Enemy relationship with the count of Middelland and really believes in an eye for an eye. Even though the count sends knights, soldiers and mercenaries his way, and has put a price of a whopping 10 000 gold pieces on his head, Khazrak keeps one-upping everyone he meets (and even if he somehow gets caught, he will escape and exact revenge on whoever caught him). The fact that he's from a race that's not too good when it comes to smarts is just icing on the cake.
Legend of the Five Rings has the Scorpion Clan, which basically trains every single member from birth to try to live up to this trope, with a frightening degree of success. However while the Scorpion Clan might specialize in it (and get the most attention for it), just about every major organization in the setting has a good half-dozen or so examples that qualify. Of course, there's also the Kolat, who tend to be as magnificently bastardy as the Scorpion Clan but for entirely different reasons. That is, until the Scorpion Clan found the Kolat's secret hideout and, in a suprisingly unsubtle but extremely effective maneuver, sent in a crack team of killers to wipe out as many Kolat as possible and stole the Kolat's magic scrying device that they needed to remain the super-secret all-knowing conspiracy, thus giving the Scorpion Clan a monopoly on Magnificient Bastardry within the Empire.
- Incredibly, the overwhelming majority of Scorpions avoid slipping into Smug Snake or Chaotic Stupid territory, despite effectively having a giant banner reading "We are untrustworthy and will compulsively backstab any and all who deal with us in any way whatsoever" as their clan emblem.

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Iago from Shakespeare's Othello is a super Magnificent Bastard. Sure, he's kind of the bad guy, but he has been argued as having a "motiveless malignity". Indeed, the reasons he gives for manipulating everybody just aren't big enough for justification - in the end, it probably has to do with the fact that he finds it fun to control everyone and have them believe his every lie. Iago is such a witty and amazing evil genius he's practically the main character. Eponymous good-guy Othello has no chance against his sneaky intellect. Just to complete his magnificence, he manages to be one of the only Shakespeare villains who doesn't get killed at the end, though it is heavily implied he'll be tortured. To make it even more magnificent, he goes through almost the entire play with the nickname "honest Iago."
Shakespeare's Magnificent Bastard par excellence is Richard III. Born with a slew of Red Right Hands and a truly twisted intellect, he takes to villainy, manipulation, and Xanatos Gambits like a fish to water. He also possesses an unparalleled wit and charisma, managing to seduce the wife of a man he murdered over the man's corpse. He talks to the audience more than almost any other Shakespeare character, letting them in on his plans, and sharing his triumphs in wonderfully gloating asides. He's a vile and utterly self-centered man, but it's just about impossible not to admire how damn good he is at it. How much the real Richard III lived up to the "bastard" half of the equation is a matter of much controversy in historical circles.
The three witches in Macbeth persuade a great hero to murder his king and become a bloody tyrant, all without even explicitly encouraging murder until he is steeped in it already.
- Two female examples in one play: Lady Macbeth.
Aaron The Moor from Titus Andronicus really needs a mention as well. Rarely can yo look up a mention of him on this site without having the words magnificentbastard trail behind.
King Lear's Edmund. A bastard in every sense of the word, Edmund is an evil manipulator of the Iago variety, but he's also way cooler than his legitimate half brother Edgar, who, while not (particularly) stupid, is a total stiff. Edmund lies, forges, betrays, and seduces his way to the top, but part of you still can't help liking him. Especially since he actually says in a speech, "Stand up for bastards!" No apologies.
Harry Roat from Wait Until Dark, right from the very first scene when he traps Talman and Carlino into his plot.
Caldwell B. Cladwell, Corrupt Corporate Executive and Big Bad of Urinetown, most definitely qualifies. His bastardry is even more delicious when in the end it is revealed that as cruel as his methods were, they actually caused less harm to the people than when the heroes take over and make water consumption unlimited, resulting in an apocalyptic drought.

Close Theatre

Krelian is pretty much the God of Magnificent Bastards.
- His partner Miang is even better, and far cooler. Krelian mostly works behind the scenes, experimenting on nanotechnology and plotting to rebuild God. Miang, meanwhile, goes straight into the thick of things, even when the protagonists are ultimately mostly bit players in her scheme. When she deliberately built Oedipal issues into Ramsus, solely for the sake of building him into a weapon for killing Emperor Cain, and then alternately treats him like trash and makes sweet love to him to ensure he fulfills his purpose, and succeeds in every aspect of her plan, it's hard not to be left open-mouthed in wonder.
Arkham of Devil May Cry 3 plays all the sides against eachother, in order to open the gate to hell.
Spider of the Mega Man X: Command Mission RPG is in reality manipulating X and company from even before they meet him in order to obtain the latest series Macguffin, under the guise of his Commander Redips identity, a high-ranking maverick hunter. Sure, the name reversal's obvious in hindsight, but it's sufficiently stealthy and well-executed that most of the people that this troper's discussed it with missed it on the first go-round.
Alex of the Golden Sun series manages to manipulate 4 different groups of characters throughout the games, all to achieve a power higher than Alchemy. It doesn't quite work out, but there was a big enough cliffhanger at the end of the second one to imply it could've.
Ocelot of the Metal Gear series casually plays every side against every other possible side, all while twirling his prized revolvers. Almost everything that happens in the series can be somehow traced back to him, and when it can't, it's usually because it happened before he was born. Reached Aizen level in Metal Gear Solid 4.
- And, in a more Meta example, Hideo Kojima himself. Admit it.
Killzone's Scolar Visari, who creates public support through his sheer force of will, who singlehandedly rebuilds the Helghast (a word he invented, by the way) state into a highly disciplined military state with him as an absolute leader, and who then invades the neighboring human colony of Vekta. Oh yes, and he has some of the greatest speeches in video game history.
Jade Empire has Master Li, who pulls off an astounding Xanatos Gambit that seems too complex to be possible. Then, if you play through the game again, you can see how carefully he planned everything and manipulated everyone, making even the crazy complex scheme believable (of course, he had twenty years to do so, and they don't call him "The Glorious Strategist" for nothing).
- It also has a character with the regal title of "The Magnificent Bastard" from the game's England analogue. Though he doesn't really fit the trope, being voiced by John Cleese certainly qualifies him for the magnificent part.
Frank Fontaine of Bio Shock started off as just a small-time smuggler in Rapture, but after the discovery of ADAM, he set the wheels in motion to take over all of Rapture. He charms the lower class and corners the market for ADAM giving him a massive army of both poor citizens and ADAM-addicted splicers. Then Fontaine faked his own death, reappeared under an assumed name and led his followers in a massive civil war that left Rapture in ruins. The game's protagonist, Jack, is revealed to be a Laser Guided Tyke Bomb created by Fontaine in order to kill Rapture's founder. Who is also programmed to die on command when the job is done so he can't come back and kill the man that created him.
- Depending on your point of view, Andrew Ryan himself is a Magnificent Bastard.
Albert Wesker, proof that one can be an ur-Chessmaster and a physically godlike Bad Ass at the same time. Plus, there's, ya'know, the fact that he's never actually lost at his Xanatos Gambits.
- And then Ozwell Spencer goes and pulls the title out from under him in RE5 when he reveals that Wesker was essentially manufactured to be precisely the Magnificent Bastard he is, and was carrying out Spencer's own Xanatos Gambit the entire time.
Delita Hyral from Final Fantasy Tactics. In a game full of competing Chessmasters and Magnificent Bastards, he finishes the story standing on top of the Thirty Xanatos Pileup, out-manoeuvring everyone else to become a king by marrying the Damsel In Distress and using the protagonist- his lifelong friend- to do most of the hard work.
- Let's not forget that Delita became King through marriage to a princess who was not actually a princess. In a world where blood trumps everything, a pair of commoners became the absolute rulers of the realm, through divine right.
Starcraft had Kerrigan. While a major character of the original game, she doesn't show her true magnificence until Brood War, an expansion pack nearly as long as the original Starcraft campaign. The entire length of Brood War is Kerrigan playing the Protoss and two competing Terran factions against one another in order to spread the Zerg to even more worlds and ensure herself as their queen. She pulls it off magnificently, betraying, murdering, or both every named character, and setting up a massive Downer Ending.
- While she belongs here, do remember that she left Raynor and Zeratul alive, not to mention the whole Duran-saga. Seems like she may have dug a grave for herself, although Starcraft 2 will tell.
  - Duran (or at least the unknown powers that stand behind him) is also hinted to be a Magnificent Bastard - or at least a Chessmaster.
Command and Conquer has Kane, the granddaddy of them all. Unshakeable, unflappable, and utterly in control the entire time (well most of the time anyway), for all the games, and also quite affably evil, Kane betrays his second in command, manipulates GDI to get what he wants, (multiple times), is a veteran and master of Xanatos Roulette, and in the latest installment, starts the Third Tiberium War just to get GDI to fire a Ion Cannon strike on Temple Prime, detonate a liquid Tiberium bomb, and call the Scrin to Earth. All so that he can hijack the Scrin gateway and leave Earth.
- It gets even more awesome in Kane's Wrath. not only does Kane manipulate the fractured Brotherhood into reunifying in the wake of Firestorm, he also engineers the rise of Redmond Boyle, who he wants to be in charge of GDI so he can manipulate him into using the Ion Cannon on Temple Prime. And he does all this while constructing LEGION, the ultimate strategic AI to interface with the Tacitus and bring him and Nod one step closer to ascension. And this is while fighting off the most well-armed and elite forces of both GDI and the Scrin.
Strangely enough, a droid plays the role of Magnificent Bastard in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II. The first HK-50 droid you meet orchestrates the systematic murder of every single person aboard the Peragus II mining station (save for the imprisoned Atton Rand) and lockdown of the same facility, as well as several events preceding your arrival there, and administers a sedative meant to keep you unconscious until it can deliver you to the Exchange for the bounty on your head. Its plan works so smoothly, in fact, that even after waking up you have no means of escape until T3-M4 intervenes.
- Really, though, the true crown of Magnificent Bastardry should go to none other than Kreia. You can't get to the end of the game without simply being awed at how completely and absolutely she used and manipulated the Exile, with the implication that the Exile was fully aware the entire time that he/she was being manipulated but unable to do anything about it. Not to mention how she utterly and compeltely crushes Mandalore, Atton, and Hanharr psychologically.
  - This troper believes that Kreias success in KOTOR II had less to do with any Magnificient Bastardry on her part, but was entirely due to the Exile holding the Idiot Ball throughout the game. Seriously. I was looking for a way to get rid of the manipulative old bitch all the time. Being forced to watch the Exile swallow all the crap she kept feeding him made me cringe constantly.
- Of course, the game won't just let you kill her and be done with it because you can't kill your own party members. In her case, I tried.
  - You can't kill her because the force bond between the two of you is so strong that it would kill you as well...or so you're informed. Why she nevertheless dies quite cleanly and without problems for you at the end is never explained, likely due to the rushed production, but we at least know why even a light-sided Exile might have been hesitant to kill her beforehand.
M. Bison (Vega in Japanese) in the Street Fighter saga pretty much fits the bill, mind controlling multiple heroes, making them fight each other, having clones of himself to activate once he dies, and arranging the whole friggin' Street Fighter tournament just so he could make all those who want his head to beat each other up for him. Of course, he meets his end in the hands of Akuma, but it's not like death would slow him down. He's such a Magnificent Bastard that he manages to retain his awesomeness in, of all things, the Street Fighter movie.
The Gravemind from Halo can arguably be considered one hell of a Magnificent Bastard for the way it manipulates everyone around it, combining complicated Xanatos Roulettes with skin-crawling psychological warfare. Most striking is the way it ended the war with the Forerunners by truning the AI created to destroy it into its greatest ally using nothing but logic. Even when defeated, its only response is that its destruction is nothing but a temporary setback.
Master Albert from the Mega Man ZX games is one hell of a Magnificent Bastard. He fits the criteria like a glove, manipulating the entire cast of the two games for centuries. Even during his defeat, he doesn't throw any tantrum or scream/evil laugh at his defeat, he merely acknowledges his defeat and delivers one of the finest lines even spoken in the series.
- Mind you, there's another person who could was potentially even more of a Magnificent Bastard than Albert - Master Thomas. In the hidden ending, he reveals that he simply helped the heroes (Simply by making the defeat of Albert an official mission) for the sake of making Albert kick the bucket so Thomas could start his own scheme to reset the world, and even recruited the four rival Mega Men. It's possible that he planned Albert's demise from the beginning, thus manipulating the entire heroic cast into doing exactly what he planned. Which would make this one a Xanatos Roulette that even Light Yagami would quite possibly be jealous of, considering both of them enacted over a span of 200 years. This is an would be an example of a Xanatos Roulette being designed to destroy another. That is truly magnificent.
There's a whole bunch of Magnificent Bastards in Super Robot Wars over the years, but the biggest was, without a doubt, Commander Laker of the Far East Brigade, a character who never actually fights. Between being the planner of the campaign against Aeidoneous Island -which crippled the DC movement-, helping plan the defence of Geneva from the DC's remnants, and the L5 campaign, he certainly is a competent leader. The icing comes on the cake, however, is the fact that before the DC War began, he gave the Kurogane -arguably the strongest of the 3 Space-Noah vessels- to Elzam Braunstein, a supporter of the DC movement who promptly used it battle against Laker's own subordinates. Of course... come Elzam and company's Heel Face Turn, the Kurogane gets one too and serves as the heroes' "shadow", stepping in and helping when things look hopeless, and getting supplies from Laker and the Far East all the while.
- Aside from that, there's also Ingram Prisken, who on top of infiltrating the EFA way back before the events of the game even starts, helps put together the best team of mecha pilots in the world, trains the SRX team, and then makes a Face Heel Turn for the purpose of motivating the team into becoming strong enough to not only defeat him in his transformed stolen and extremely powerful mecha, but also to become strong enough to defeat Levi Tolar in her Judecca. The defeat of Judecca deeming their race a dangerous enough threat to wake the Adjudicator to destroy them, and thus the team suitably motivated to become powerful enough to defeat that, and fulfill the biggest Xanatos Roulette of the game..
The Phoenix Wright franchise is full of them. Manfred von Karma and Kristoph Gavin are quite worthy of this status for playing magnificent long-term Xanatos Gambits to ruin other people's lives. Matt Engarde also deserves a special mention for being able to pull a brandy sifter out of nowhere during his Reveal. Whilst in police custody, no less! Sure, all the villains in this series get their comeuppance, but some of them were just better at getting their evil ways before their eventual Villainous Breakdown.
- Dahlia Hawthorne from Trials & Tribulations almost qualifies, but sadly all of her schemes end in failure, a fact that is actually used as the coup de grâce against her.
- Luke Atmey. Dear God, where to start? He manages to set himself up as an Ace Detective while at the same keeping afloat and benefiting from the thief he's hunting. He then falsely gets himself indicted for being the thief to keep from being convicted for his real crime of murdering a CEO. Then the only reason he's even caught is a slip of the tongue and this is after successfully having four of the five crimes he was on trial for has been proven to have not been his doing.
Axel was this in Kingdom Hearts:Chain Of Memories, where he played both sides of an Organization conspiracy and backstabbed many of his allies in order to benefit himself.
Etna from Disgaea takes Enigmatic Minion to glorious new heights. By the time she's through out-Xanatos Gambiting a Big Bad who was blackmailing her, he's literally on his knees weeping and pleading for his life. What's more, she does a masterful job of ~~annoying~~ motivating Laharl to become a competent Overlord while hiding her true nature and motives from everyone. (The player included if you don't find her secret diary.)
Kain is what happens when you mix this with Heroic Sociopath.
In A Tale In The Desert, one of the more prominent developers, Apophis, created a character named "Setna". Setna was played as your stereotypical newbie, creating a camp from the time he started, played as a casual player overall... with one difference. First a breed of flax seed that caused Bad Things to happen was released, with him as the primary vector...and then several skills which provided a character with personally beneficial, but socially detrimental, alterations were released through him. His own Crowning Moment Of Awesome was persuading one of the elected representatives of the community to feel sorry for him, and defend him right up until the end of that Telling.
Ghaleon from Lunar is a Well Intentioned Extremist and an Anti Villain. But his Genre Savvy humor, his sheer skill at using the party's altruism for his own purposes and his sheer joy in playing out the villain part for the protagonists definitely qualify him for this trope. Of course, that's before his Heel Face Turn in the sequel.
City Of Heroes has its share. Take Requiem for example.
Requiem: I cannot say that you will have gained my respect, but I will acknowledge that you fought well. Drink deeply of your success. Bask in the adulation of your peers. Savor this victory. Know that you have saved your world and this moment from the shadow of history. But you have only saved it for now. Do not think that you have saved the world for your future. Know that you have saved this world for my coming Dominion.
- But the undisputed king of them all is Nemesis. Looks like a goofy Steam Punk villain, but is somehow responsible for nearly every development in the game world for the past hundred years (and even more so if you believe the Epileptic Trees).
Jade Curtiss in Tales of the Abyss. Openly mocking everyone from royalty to the game's antagonist to even his own teammates, Jade's sarcasm is easily the best part of the game.
Maximilian of Valkyria Chronicles. That he's voiced by and has a similar back story to Lelouch Lamperouge are small indications of this fact before he even shows it.
The World Ends With You has Yoshiya "Joshua" Kiryu. Certainly he fits with intelligence, dubious morality and punch-in-the-face obnoxiousness ("Good going, Neku.") What makes him a magnificent, manipulative bastard though is The entire ending, and every single Secret Report. He is the ultimate Composer god-thing, with the power to resurrect people, steal memories, and generally screw with everyone's heads while hitting stuff with game breaking power and having, among other things, clairvoyance. Even the Higher Planes, the great heavenly powers that rule over everything, can't predict this guy, and his powers of manipulation are so great that even after revealing that he murdered the protagonist and manipulated him in to possibly destroying his entire home town, and even with all the trouble he's caused Neku doesn't shoot him. So he follows that up by shooting Neku, and he still manages to get out of that with the guy's trust in the end, and with making everything alright. Actually, he managed to plan things out so that just about everybody came out of it for the better, except of course for the guy he was competing against in the first place. A god damned asshole-which is why we love him.
- Even with all that, Mr. Hanekoma tops Joshua as a Magnificent Bastard. Mr. Hanekoma not only motivates Neku to become a better person through his inspirational speeches but also plans to destroy Joshua at the same time by teaching taboo technique to Sho Minamimoto. That way, he ensures that either Neku becomes a better person and manages to change Joshua's mind about destroying Shibuya (since Joshua's reasoning for destroying Shibuya was that people did not change) or Sho Minamimoto usurps Joshua's place and ends Joshua's plan to destroy Shibuya. What makes this even more magnificent is that Mr. Hanekoma manages to pull this off without directly interfering with anything (Joshua had to briefly team up with Neku and take down Sho in order to make his plan work) and not even the Higher Plane is able to fully comprehend what he did. The fact that the Higher Planes mark Mr. Hanekoma as "the Fallen Angel" just draws even further comparison to Satan, who nowadays is shown as manipulative but charismatic and charming.
World Of Warcraft honorable mention: Drakuru. An ice troll who is friendly enough to talk to you and actually genuinely appears to like you. He came out of nowhere, was trapped in a cage as a lowbie mob and without leaving his cage or really telling you much of anything except he had a cool idea and wants to learn some stuff manipulates you into taking down the entire Drakkari empire. By the time you get to Zul'Drak, the trolls inside are almost all dead or killing and eating their own gods in a desperate attempt to stave off the Scourge. Yes, you just took out the strongest remaining non undead native faction to Northrend. Oh, and they're also undead now and didn't really get much chance to fight back. Of course, Arthas had to pick up his villain ball and kill him in a totally pointless YouHaveFailedMe moment. Sigh. He was one of the best characters introduced in this expansion and now he's gone.
- Given the shadiness of some of the things he asks you to do, he can't hold a candle to Loken. Just about every stage of your unwitting complicity in his plan involves you doing nice things for people- rescuing an enslaved innocent, repairing relations between a bereaved demigod and his former friends- and half the time he didn't even have to tell you to do it. Then the last Watcher remaining at large and uncorrupted is captured by Yogg-Saron as you look on, helpless to do anything to stop it and knowing that you made it possible. Pity he then forgot the Evil Overlord List prohibition against "laughing at him then leaving him to his own devices".
Ash Crimson of The King Of Fighters has been manipulating every single one of his teammates since day one. He chooses his teammates based on the best ways to manipulate them. Oh, and did we mention that he's managed to steal Chizuru Kagura's and Iori Yagami's powers. Yes, you heard me: a gender-bending Scrappy kicked the ass of one of the most popular characters in King Of Fighters. To add to the humilation, Iori got his ass kicked while in Riot of the Blood mode, which makes him stronger. Proof that Ash is Obfuscating Stupidity. One can only wonder how he's going to take Kyo's powers...
The makers of Earthbound deserve this for the extensive lengths of thwarting pirates they went through. If you use a copied cartridge, you first of all have to deal with an increased rate of creature spawns. Then at several points in the game you will experience a crash. Now if you manage to get to the final boss, the real brilliant evil move is revealed when after beating the first form, the game crashes during the form transition, forcing a restart. Upon restarting, you find that ALL of your saved games have been DELETED!
Albert Silverberg of Suikoden III constructs the entire plot of the game single-handedly and then casually derails it, confident that he's proven his genius and increased his reputation as a strategist.
Caellach the Tiger Eye from Fire Emblem 8. By far one of the most Affably Evil antagonists in the whole game (even with his two huge Kick The Dog moments), as well as very hard to kill.
- Limstella from Fire Emblem 7, King Zephiel from Fire Emblem 6 and both Alvis and Manfroy from Fire Emblem 4 also qualify.
The Spy of Team Fortress 2. This video says it all.
Why does Carmen Sandiego steal all those landmarks? Because she friggin' can, that's why.
Mario series: No Dimentio? This guy manages to nearly bring about The End Of The World As We Know It without ever really needing to lift a finger, and even kills Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Bowser in a fantastic subversion of No Sneak Attacks that comes out of nowhere, and is only really hurt by the fact that they got better. Granted, that was part of the plan, and things were set up to still go through even if he himself was defeated.
Kotomine in Fate Stay Night. Only really prominent in Heaven's Feel route where you know perfectly well he's a bad guy and even Shirou knows. Lancer dies, the Grail changes hosts, Zouken Matou is involved, Gilgamesh gets eaten and dozens of other cards are going against him and he still makes it to the final fight after beating Zouken and True Assassin at the same time. His Xanatos Speed Chess skills and utter truthfulness throughout the game even make his mullet forgivable.
Sandro from the Heroes of Might and Magic series. He manages to fool Gem and Crag Hack into getting him some of the most powerful artifacts in the world.
Ovan from ./hack/G.U.. Not only is he the real Tri-Edge, he P Ked Shino, is responsible for the infection of AIDA, gave Sakaki the AIDA cores required to turn himself and others into coma-inducing P Kers and has been minipulating Haseo, along with the Twilight Brigage and the members of G.U., since the very beginning with the purpose of defeating and killing himself just so he can cleanse the system of the virus and free his little sister from his arm along with bringing everyone back from their comas.
- Combine that with his final statement at the end of the second game.

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Thief of 8-bit Theater. In a team full of bastards, Thief is the magnificent one. He has total control over the team and all its assets, (and those of anyone he meets) due to his extremely convoluted and loophole-laden contracts. He is capable of stealing anything from anyone that isn't bolted down or on fire (and has broken that distinction at least once), and once stole The Lich's soul out of its gem with nothing but logic (and can cause aneurysms with the same method). And to cap it all off, he stole his own class change from the future. Case in point: Black Mage's response to Thief's Super Ultra Fine Print.
Sluggy Freelance actually uses the phrase here.
- Not to mention Bun-Bun, especially during the Holiday Wars arc — "Well-a-ho-ho-freakin'-ho. Are we in for a year of great holiday fun or what???" Too bad his shadow was such a Xanatos Sucker....
Aldran of anti-HEROES. There's many examples, but this comic can be taken as proof all on its own.
Lampshaded in Ansem Retort, where Zexion rates Xanatos Gambits on a scale of 1-5 Michael Corleones.
The character Ki, from Harkovast. He enjoys lengthy, cynical inner monologues. For example, his philosophy on heroism is an interesting one!
Dominic Deegan has several: The Infernomancer, his demonic patron Karnak, and, at least some of the time, Celesto Morgan and Jacob Deegan (the latter two sometimes act more like Worthy Opponents, too honorable for true Bastardry). Helixa might be considered one, too, and Dominic himself has certain tendencies in that direction, being at times insufferably smug about his abilities, and given to manipulating events to suit his interests (see especially the Snowsong story arc).

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Depending on who you ask Danya, Big Bad of Survival Of The Fittest, is either a Magnificent Bastard, a Complete Monster, or merely a Smug Snake.
- This remains to be seen, as recently, there's been a string of events that Danya hasn't forseen and he seems to be quickly losing it with every unexpected event.
If you play Mitadake High and are a charismatic Kira, as opposed to a n00b or someone lucky enough to run into the Eyes and get their help early, you will be one of these. It's basically a victory requirement.
Jobe of the Whateley Academy. Genetic engineer, bio-devisor, actually proud of his reputation as, quote, a "vile bastard," and ready to avenge any slight with vicious alacrity with one of his trademark gruesome viral concoctions. He is one of the most loathed students at the academy. However he has an absolute ironclad code of honor, never taking any vendetta one centimeter further than he deems necessary—- and holding "self determination and free will" as absolutely sacred. When the school's most benign pacifist is viciously attacked with a mutagenic virus and he is framed for it, he uses his sinister skills to help the Whateley staff capture the perpetrators. His feral cunning, and his absolutely ruthless vengeance against the perpetrator when caught for violating his sacred code and using his reputation to do it, is truly a story-length Crowning Moment Of Awesome.
- Note, however, that Jobe is still in training, as he finds himself suffering a bit of a Humiliation Conga, which includes being turned into his own perfect woman through the embarassing method of getting confused which vial holds the antidote, and which vial holds his prototype experimental serum. He also made the mistake of trying to deal with a demon...who hated his guts. This leads Sara Waite/Kellith into the type, as she effortlessly manipulates Jobe into swearing eternal vengence upon her. SO THAT SHE CAN DEFEAT HIM AT EACH TURN AND LEVEL-UP! (She, in fact, devours his mutant monsters and takes their powers into herself.) Sara also succeeded early on at killing everyone who could manipulate her, has her own pack of people soul-bound to her, makes sure to treat them kindly and care for them, has her own cult, and is a member of the good guys. Note also that Sara has managed to become a blood-sister of an ancient elven queen, who is in fact the person who defeated Sara's race the LAST time. Also, she screws destiny by killing her own future self...
  - Sara Waite is perhaps the ultimate Magnificent Bastard in the series, as she's managed to spin every event to her own purposes. Jobe's particular attempts at revenge are primarily beneficial to her because she's Lavos-esque: she can absorb and adapt to the DNA of any biological threat, and she has a massive amount of information at her very fingertips. (Or in them.)
- Another In-Training character, however, is Ayla Goodkind. Being one of the few members of Team Kimba without New Powers as the Plot Demands, she has to rely on her own wits to handle the fact that half the school wants to kill her. She's a known TG, she's a hermaphrodite, and her parents like to kill mutants for fun. She was within inches of finding the people who attacked her, and threatening to utterly ruin their familes forever, until she discovered she couldn't actually do that. Instaed, she pointed out that she COULD do that, but instead... "IF you stop bugging me, I'll BAIL YOUR FAMILIES OUT DEBT! With lots of biographical information. Also, she purposely goes to great lengths to build contacts, and makes sure to overpay her servants just a little, so that they actually like her. She goes to great lengths to subvert most of the cliches of Rich Bitch. She knows how to use money well.
- Her training pays off in Ayla 5, where she manages to smoothly handle a thirty Xanatos Pile-up, with the definition of a Xanatos Gambit. She had won before the game even started.
The eponymous Bastard Operator From Hell, scourge of users, the Boss, the HR droids and the beancounters. Complete with his Bastard Understudy, The Pimply Faced Youth.
In Decades Of Darkness, *US president Hugh Griffin, and of course *Otto von Bismarck (who's a bit different from his Real Life coutnerpart, but no less magnificent)! *Russian Emperor Alexander II (not even the same man) also deserves a mention.
British Ambassador: Why have you declared war on Great Britain?!
Alexander: Because every Great Game must end in checkmate.
The Chaos Timeline has several of them:
- Maffeo Servitore, of Florence, who's not coincidentally an Expy of Machiavelli.
- Alfred Kleiber, chancellor of German Atlantis (=America), who manages to unite the three Germanies (in Europe, North and South Atlantis) into one great superpower.
- And the New Roman emperors, who make Italy into another superpower owning lands on four continents.
Michael-Lan of The Salvation War, who is able to manipulate an entire interdimensional war to position himself in control of Heaven, and his ambitions might not even stop there.

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David Xanatos from Gargoyles is usually one step ahead of the Gargoyles, and everyone else. He frequently got away with actions that would send a normal man to jail for the rest of his life, and was a member of the Illuminati's guild. Of course, since Xanatos was such a smooth talker, he would make you believe he was your friend all while positioning the knife in your back.
- There's a reason it's called a Xanatos Gambit / Xanatos Roulette
  - Ironically enough, his ~~FIRST~~ second LINE in the show is "Magnificent!"
Megabyte from ReBoot. The baritone voice of Tony Jay certainly helps, but this is one of the few villains that has never suffered from any sort of Villain Decay, and is actually considered more dangerous as the series progressed. His most magnificent moment (besides the guitar duel) is when he took advantage of the web invasion and subsequent Enemy Mine situation to strand Bob, Mainframe's champion, into the web. While Daemon is more powerful and dangerous, Megabyte's return in season 4 evoked much more fear from the main cast. What makes this so Magnificent is how his dispatching of Bob is so un-magnificent. He shoves him and presses a button. Dead easy. It also helps that he wins.
- This troper was scared shitless by Mega Byte watching Re Boot as a child. Not only was his voice and appearance scary as hell, he didn't screw around. He goes straight for the killing blow and the final phase of the plan. There is nothing fancy, nothing flashy - only the most efficient method. (Well, save for a quick moment of relish before he strikes - usually to slowly extend those claws) Several times he came very, very close to succeeding.
  - Megabyte's bastardy in the first few seasons was completely overshadowed by what he got up to in the fourth season. At this point, he has decided to forego his pursuit of power in favor of personal revenge, which he does in truly epic fashion. He uses his newfound Voluntary Shapeshifting to return to Mainframe in the guise of the original (Season One/Two) Bob, and comes within literal seconds of marrying Dot just to mess with everyone's heads.
  - Bob: "But why, Megabyte?" Megabyte: "It amused me."
Cartman from South Park attempts this a lot but usually fails. He does succeed in a Crowning Moment Of Awesome in the episode "Scott Tenorman Must Die" where he tricks the titular Scott Tenorman into getting his parents to trespass on a farm which he thinks contains a pony trained by Cartman to bite off his penis after Cartman let Stan and Kyle in on his plan to trick Scott into getting his dick bit off by said pony thinking it can give him a blowjob. The farmer was told by Cartman that someone would be breaking onto his farm to kill the pony which makes the farmer shoot the parents dead. Cartman THEN sets up a Chili Cook-Off and sets up Scott Tenorman as a judge where he'll eat what he thinks is Chef's chili, but is actually a chili made from Tenorman's own parents, and to top it all off, once the reveal has been made, Tenorman's favourite band, Radiohead, tricked by Cartman into thinking that Scott was about to die of cancer, show up and chide him for being a 'crybaby'. Rightfully, Stan and Kyle agree never to piss Cartman off again.
Female Example: Princess Azula from Avatar The Last Airbender. She's a sociopathic firebending prodigy, but she does it with such style and planning that you can't help but admire her (but hopefully not too much). She manipulates everyone around her, including her own brother, and her plans in the second season require her to out-maneuver another Chessmaster, Long Feng, which she does, effortlessly. Her Crowning Moment Of Awesome was nearly killing Aang with a lightning blast in the middle of his Transformation Sequence in a Dangerously Genre Savvy moment in the second season finale.
Another female example: Nerissa from W.I.T.C.H. Can also be considered a Manipulative Bastard, as can Prince Phobos. Cedric too, especially in the original comic series.
The megalomaniacal Dogbert from Dilbert whose "religious belief" is "that everyone exists for the sole purpose of entertaining me." Though a multi-billionaire and former ruler of the world, he often works as a business consultant simply for the fun of conning people and stirring up trouble. On one episode, he sets up a carnival booth where you "knock a street urchin off a beam with a baseball and win a toy." In another, he convinces Congress to abandon all holidays in favor of National Dogbert Day for the sole purpose of being annoying. (The same reason he invented Secretary's Day.)
Megatron of Beast Wars: He's a user and abuser of his followers, a gloating sadist who enumerates the ways he's beaten his enemies as he's standing over them in his moment of triumph, a master manipulator who is only served by his underlings' treachery... and yet he carries off scheme after scheme with audacity, panache, and an almost vaudevillian flair. Nor does he work in small potatoes; his schemes include two bids to rewrite history as well as consuming his namesake's soul to add to his own personal power. Magnificent. Bastard. Yesss
Tombstone in The Spectacular Spider Man, in one swift move, floors Spider Man, antagonizes him by telling him how he is fighting a losing battle, uses it as an attempt to get Spider Man to do what he wants and finally makes Spider Man look bad in the eyes of the cops. All in around five minutes.
- Dr. Octopus as "The Master Planner" has also obtained this status. He operates his plan, for the most part, from a mental ward, has Gwen Stacy kidnapped and then has her father betray the law in exchange for her safety, damn well nearly takes over the world in the end...all while managing to casually sit back and drink coffee out of a mug labled "EVIL GENIUS".
- Norman Osborne is up there, playing both sides throughout season 1—getting paid to make supervillains to fight Spider-Man, and then getting paid to come up with the systems to contain themk. In season 2 this continues, plus in "Accomplices" he carries out a beautiful Xanatos Gambit wherein he gets the competition to demolish each other fighting over what is, ultimately, a worthless chip—earning himself half a billion dollars with literally no risk or effort. Oh yeah, and he was the Green Goblin all along, willing to break his son's leg to fool Spidey.
Danny Phantom has an intriguing one: Vlad Masters/Plasmius. He wants to marry Danny's mom, adopt Danny and kill Jack, not exactly in that order. A lot of his lesser plans work, but the main ones probably would if he had better control of his emotions and kept his priorities straight. The fact that he spills the beans on minor plans to Danny to try to show him how to pull it off makes his subsequent Character Derailment after Made For TV Movie "The Ultimate Enemy" (which shows him repentant in a horrible future) even more tragic. Being bonked by a meteor while in space is not the way to go.
- For a more straightforward example, there's "Reign Storm" where Vlad's biggest plan then succeeded in spades, manipulating nearly everyone to get what he wants by end.
Chris from Total Drama Island. Ye gods, not only does the man fill his reality show with sadistic challenges, but he even traps the contestants into a second season after the winner is chosen! That he's so damn cheerful while he's being so cruel makes him all the more magnificent.
Darkseid from the Superman The Animated Series and Justice League. Even though Superman usually won the day, he took every defeat (and victory) with the same steely expression. In "Apokolips Now" Darkseid told Superman clearly that every victory would come with a price. Even when Darkseid was beaten on his own planet, Superman threw his body to his slaves on Apokolips and said they could do whatever they wanted to with him. The slaves began to pick up their cherished leader and take care of him. While being carried off, Darkseid gave Superman a parting line:
"I am many things, Kal-El, but here...I am God."
- Lex Luthor from the same series tends to shift between Magnificent Bastard and Smug Snake constantly, usually depending on his current plan. He was clearly in the Magnificent Bastard zone when he beats the crap out of The Question and tells him his Luthor-For-President campaign was a load of crap:
  "President? Do you have any idea how much power I'd have to give up to be president? That's right, conspiracy buff, I spent seventy-five million dollars on a fake presidential campaign just to tick Superman off."

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Broken Saints has a truly magnificent one in its Big Bad, Lear Dunham.

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Not, ironically enough, Erwin Rommel. Yes, him. The Trope Namer. General Rommel was admired by Patton for being a tricky, devious commander with flair and skill, which may sound close to the trope, but that was his generalship, not his personality. Given his unambiguously heroic actions, including concealing the Judaism of Allied prisoners of war from his superiors, it's clear that we don't cheer for Erwin because he may have been a bastard but he did it with flair, we cheer because he wasn't actually a bastard at all, but a pretty swell guy. He was, in fact, the very model of the Worthy Opponent.
Hollywood example: Robert Evans. The former pretty-boy acting sensation became Head of Production for Paramount Pictures, turning the failing studio from the ninth largest to the most successful in the world, all while marrying seven times and living a life of frantic hedonism. Even after being convicted of attempting to buy cocaine and being tangentially linked to the murder of one of his films' investors, Evans was able to return to producing. Evans himself narrates the story in the popular documentary The Kid Stays In the Picture, based on his autobiography. Comedian Patton Oswalt describes the audiobook version as sounding like "The Devil dictating his memoirs."
Alcibiades, as depicted in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. Within the course of the war he switches sides five times, boffs the Spartan king's wife and Socrates, and sweeps the Olympic games. He was such a magnificent bastard that even after he betrayed them the Athenians chose to give him command of the army when it looked like they were losing the war and needed someone truly brilliant to lead the troops.
Otto von Bismarck. Did he use his mastery of he diplomatic art to engineer an elaborate Xanatosian policy that would, over decades, bring Germany to a position of first unity and then European dominance? ''Or'' did he evade every threat, ride out every crisis, and seize every opportunity before retiring and successfully cultivating a myth that he had been a master of schemery? He was too much of a Magnificent Bastard for us to be sure either way, but either way, he was a Magnificent Bastard.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. Qualifying for Manipulative Bastard for most of his career and a notorious Wild Card, Talleyrand managed to work himself into the favour of four separate governments of France, Royalist and Revolutionary, both before and after the chaos of the Revolution, always by foreseeing their ascent and positioning himself in order to support the next ruler - befriending and later aiding Napoleon's ascent, opposing the punishment of Prussia at Tilsit and befriending the Russian Czar at Erfurt, disassociating himself from Louis XVIII before the July Revolution). He hit true magnificence with the Congress of Vienna, however. Intended by the victorious allies as a means to suppress France and reshape Europe, he took on a role as champion of the smaller, "unimportant" nations, befriended the Spanish ambassador in order to force himself into the decision-making process (and later dropped Spain when their ambassador became a burden). He successfully split the Coalition between France-Austria-Britain and Russia-Prussia after the Saxon crisis, and despite the devastating losses France had taken in the war, secured France's original borders with the addition of several minor enclaves and borderlands (like Papal Avignon).
Catherine II, the Great. In 1744 she was selected by the empress Elisabeth of Russia, to be the wife of her heir Peter. She came only from a minor German state and therefore needed to make sure to please the empress and the Russian people. To do so, she took the name Catherine, learned Russian and converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. She also read a lot and made contacts with people abroad and at the Russian court. Her marriage was unhappy and after the death of Elisabeth, she made sure to contrast her behavior with that of Peter, for example at Elisabeth's funeral, where she mourned while he behaved disrespectfully. He was simple, but favored Prussia. This made many Russians angry, as they had just been in a war with Prussia. Like Elisabeth before her, she used the army to stage a coup. Soon she was proclaimed empress of the Russians. Peter was disposed and later murdered by Catherine's lover. She choose capable advisors and during her reign large portions of land were added to Russia after war with Turkey. She was a great proponent of the ideals of the enlightenment. Because many Russians were afraid to be vaccinated against smallpox, she was the first person in Russia to receive vaccination. She also had many lovers, but always managed to hold onto the throne, despite being not even Russian-born. (Admittedly, the same was true for Peter, who didn't even bother to learn Russian, other than Catherine.)
A sadly obscure but nonetheless magnificent example: King Clovis, the first king to unite all the Franks, as related by Gregory of Tours. He was, amongst other things, a master of the Batman Gambit, making his various relatives and other enemies kill one another for his favour and then punishing the others as well. The definitive example came towards the end of his life, when he bribed the army of Ragnachar (a rival chieftain and a relative) to capture said Ragnachar and Ragnachar's brother, then killed Ragnachar for dishonouring the family by allowing himself to be captured, then killed the brother for allowing his brother to be captured; and when the people he bribed complained of being given fool's gold, he told them that they were lucky he didn't kill them for treason as law demanded it, and they promptly dropped their claims and begged for mercy. "When they [the king and his brother] were dead Clovis received all their kingdom and treasures. And having killed many other kings and his nearest relatives, of whom he was jealous lest they take the kingdom from him, he extended his rule over all the Gauls. However he gathered his people together at one time, it is said, and spoke of the kinsmen whom he had himself destroyed. "Woe to me, who have remained as a stranger among foreigners, and have none of my kinsmen to give me aid if adversity comes." But he said this not because of grief at their death but by way of a ruse, if perchance he should be able to find some one still to kill."
Hernan Cortes: sent to Mexico by the spanish government to "establish trade with the natives" in order to get rid of him, he decided instead to conquer one of the largest empires on earth. Horribly outnumbered and underequipped (there is some debate about how underequipped you can be when you have guns and the enemy has rocks: the answer, when they have thousands more rocks than you, all very, very sharp, is pretty damn underequipped), he convinced his men to go along with his scheme, manipulated Aztec politics and religion to his advantage turning smaller states against the larger empire, and "convinced" the Spanish army sent to arrest him to become his reinforcments. He retired as the governer of Spain's largest and wealthiest provinces.
Cosimo de' Medici: Second head of the infamous Medici banking family, he exercised massive power over Florence during a considerable portion of the 15th century. In 1433 his chief rival Albizzi essentially set him up and tried to execute him, but due to his massive popularity (even Albizzi's allies in the ruling council refused to sign on), it doesn't work. The Venetians, nobles, the head of the Florentine mercenary army, and even the Vatican under Pope Eugenius IV intervene to prevent him from being executed, due to Medici's position as head of an immensely powerful bank. Albizzi backs down and Medici is exiled for ten years. He's back in a year after flaunting his weath in Florentine ally/rival Venice, doubling the profits of the Venice branch of his bank, making friends, and saving the Pope's ass. He immediately exiles Albizzi and essentially runs Florence until his death thirty years later.
How does getting yourself off for two counts of burglary and then sueing the state for libel grab you?
- The man is suing the state for lost wages and property damage, not libel. After all, libel is printing slanderous claims about someone, which the state did not do.
Yolande of Aragon. After the battle of Agincourt was won by the English in 1415, there were few people in France still supporting prince Charles' claim to the throne. Yolande of Aragon gave him refuge at the lands of which she was regent. His mother queen Isabeau ordered him to come back at court. Yolande's response: "We have not nurtured and cherished this one for you to make him die like his brothers or to go mad like his father, or to become English like you. I keep him for my own. Come and take him away, if you dare." She then let Charles marry her daughter and surrounded him with councillors of her choosing. The duke of Brittany was persuaded by her to support Charles. She was one of the supporters of Joan of Arc, some things pointing that she played a bigger role in her rise than was known openly. Soon Charles could be crowned and parts of France were regained. Advisors she disliked, she had removed and she had an extensive network of spies at all the courts of important nobles. Her actions kept the hopes of the French party alive and allowed Charles VII to regain his kingdom.
Oliver Cromwell: Love him or loathe him, he rose from obscurity to Head of State in a dozen years and even his enemies bitterly commented on his magnificent bastardy. In fact they make him seem more magnificent than his praisers as they emphasize what they see as a ruthless Machiavellian facet of his personality. The bastardness is a contentious issue (unless you're Irish) on just how much of one he was but Magnificent? Definitely.
Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Even his enemies generally admit that he was magnificent, and even his supporters generally admit that he was a bastard.
- Ditto for his protege Jean Chretien.
Oda Nobunaga(1534-1582). An utterly brilliant general who started out in the tiny province of Owari, then conquered his way through a third of the daimyo. Known for innovating the musket reloading technique that the British army would use to devastating effect Two Centuries Later. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobunaga_Oda. (I'll thank someone to continue this and find a better source.)
Ever read Acts of Gord? He may not be a head of state, but that's one game shop owner you don't want to screw around with.
Anne Boleyn. Not part of the high nobility in England, Anne was nevertheless made a lady-in-waiting to the French queen Claude. At her return to the English court her French mannerisms, charm and wit attracted a lot of attention. King Henry VIII became infatuated with her, but she refused to become his mistress. The king then started a process to divorce his wife, so he could marry Anne. The church refused Henry an annulment of his marriage and encouraged by Anne, he broke with the catholic faith, installing himself instead as head of the English church. She also had a hand in the destruction of Cardinal Wolsey, who had been Henry's chief advisor. Many English people disliked all this change and in response she had the clothes of her servants embroidered with: 'Let them grumble, that is how it is going to be." Henry married her and she held a magnificent court, while at the same time pressing forward the ideals of the reformation. She argued a lot with Henry, at one point telling her brother that Henry was impotent. The cause for her downfall however was not this, but the fact that she didn't have a son. She was put on trial for crimes that she did not commit, at which she showed great courage in her defense. Still, she was executed in 1536. Her only child was Elizabeth, who would become queen in her own right and is another Magnificent Bitch.
Napoleon Bonaparte. Today he is mistakenly characterized as being short, was born in Corsica and was often not considered a true French. He lived in a family of low social class whose only connection to the nobility was with minor lords. Despite this, he married his way into nobility, became a general of the revolutionary army, led a Coup de'tat and set himself up as dictator. He was a brilliant orator and politician, and so he kept the people's favor even while taking away any presence they had in his parliament; undermining the initial goal of the French Revolution. Later, when being crowned emperor he took the crown from the pope and placed it upon himself which was more or less a Take That to God. He then went on to conquering most of continental Europe, and those he didn't outright control was forced into an alliance. Not even the humiliating defeat in Russia which lead to his downfall stopped him. After being exiled, he snuck back into Paris and, with the help of the people that were still loyal to him, kept control of Paris for an entire 100 days. Other than that, if the quote "I found the Crown of France on the floor, and I picked it up with my sword" isn't grounds for being considered a Magnificent Bastard, I don't know what is.
- Technically Napoleon didn't lead the coup. He let another French politician (who had also been Napoleon's mentor and the former lover of his mistress Josephine) do all the work of organising the coup and preparing the new government system which would be set in place, while he prepared his army for the new order in a manner which would leave him the most powerful man in France. When the coup came about, Napoleon hijacked control of it, demonstrating the absolute loyalty the army held to him and how the new order couldn't survive without it, and left his former mentor with no choice but to acquiesce to Napoleon's control. In summary, Napoleon launched a coup within a coup. Any modern dictator wishes they could be that magnificent.
- This troper owns an edition of Machiavelli's The Prince with Napoleon's footnotes. The sheer Magnificent Bastard-ness of them outshine Machiavelli's text.
Diego Portales Palazuelos, Chilean statesman of the 19th century. He never was the Chilean President, even when he could have been due to his talent, but he always was the Man Behind The Man.
Randall Monroe.
How has no-one mentioned Machiavelli yet?!
- Well, he spent years in an Italian prison and never actually conquered anything himself... and if he was really that good he would never have published in the first place. Because, after all, by this time //everyone// has... "read his book!"
Vladimir Putin surely must qualify for this by now. His invasion of Georgia while the rest of the world was watching the 2008 Olympic Opening Ceremony was pure mangificence.
- There's practically a whole genre of TRUE stories of him effectively trolling George W. Bush. This one in particular stands out: At one of Putin’s informal meetings with Bush, Putin showed the US president his Labrador and said, “Bigger, tougher, stronger, faster, meaner than Barney” (Bush’s dog). If that isn't a Crowning Momentof Awesome, I don't know what is.
- Add the dispatching of a political enemy with radioactive tea.
  - This one isn't, mainly because such a plot would be more complicated than with normal poisons without any advantages. And for the same reasons isn't very believable, even if some magazine published it straight-faced when it was fashionable.
Despite his treatment by Dumas, Cardinal Richelieu qualifies. Starting as minor nobility, he managed to not only acquire influence under Marie de Medici, who was ruling in the name of her son Louis XIII, he managed to return to politics after a period of exile, arrange peace between mother and son, and rise to become Louis's Prime minister. And then he pulled France through a couple wars and coups. He pretty much transformed the French monarchy from a relatively weak throne constantly threatened by the nobility to the absolute rule associated with Louis XIV and later.
- A man does not get something named the Day of the Dupes on his resume without qualifying for this trope.
Joe Peacock was discriminated against by the staff at the Walmart where he worked. Then they faked inventory lists to get him fired. The manager was in on it. Peacock still had the keys to the store.
Gnaeus Pompey Magnus deserves some recognition for magnificent bastardry. An excellent example comes early in his career, when upon being ordered to return to Rome alone he claimed that his soldiers insisted on coming too, and showed up outside the city with six legions, then demanded and got a triumph (which he wasn't eligable for). Even when the dictator of that time and fellow Magnificent Bastard, L. Cornelius. Sulla, rebuffed Pompey for this, he reportedly turned around and reminded Sulla that he was in a position to take over the city, and since Sulla was in the midst of murdering his entire political opposition, he would not be missed. Pompey went on to bastard his way into four consulships, three triumphs, finishing off Spartacus, wiping out piracy in the mediterranean and finally to make the fatal mistake of taking on Gaius Julius Caesar.
King Gustav Vasa of Sweden qualifies: Starts out as an imprisoned hostage, escapes, manages to gather the support of the peasantry of Dalarna, gets many of the local opposition to defect. Gets proclaimed regent and then king, systematically betrays and removes just about every one of his earlier allies to increase his own power. (Including ruthlessly crushing rebellions by his former allies) radically strengthens the Swedish monarchy, initiates the Reformation in Sweden, at one point manages to push his decisions through by threatening to abdicate. (in an awesome speech, too) manages to get his debts annulled by fighting the German city of Lübeck. Dies as the wealthiest man in Europe.
Queen Olimpias, You may already be tangentially aware of the existence of Alexander's mother thanks to the frighteningly boner-inducing depiction of Olympias by Angelina Jolie. Never has an audience been given so much reason to forgive an Oedipus Complex than the movie Alexander. Beautiful, powerful and heavily involved in a snake-worshiping cult of Dionysus, Olympias is regularly depicted as sleeping with snakes. Hell, Olympias was the Angelina Jolie of 4th century B.C. When the now-king Alexander was gone (read: the entire time he was king), Olympias wielded great influence and power, often contradicting the efforts of the guy who was supposed to do that, the regent Antipater. Antipater's many official complaints on the matter went unnoticed by Alexander, who was happy to let his mother do as she wished. Hell, between wanting to fuck her and being scared to death of her, who wouldn't?
Yelu Chucai Nicknamed "Long Beard" by Genghis for his... long beard, Yelu was a tempering voice during Mongol rule. For instance, Genghis saw nothing in China but a place that lacked pasturing for his horses and had said that "It would be better to exterminate the Chinese and let the grass grow." Yelu, himself a foreigner, appealed to Genghis's self-interest to save many Chinese cities. Given that Genghis had just three motivations—pasture for ponies, women for raping and gold for pillaging—and given that two of those would be most easily attained by utterly destroying every Chinese city he came upon, Yelu's job wasn't easy. But he convinced Genghis that a whole lot more gold could be had from China by merely taxing them.
Grigori Rasputin, After some moderate success nursing Alexei back to health, Rasputin took the opportunity to ingratiate himself with the royal family, becoming spiritual adviser to the Tsar's wife. Given his humble origins and the foreign roots of Alexandra, this bond quickly aroused the distrust of the Russian elite, who circulated rumors that the two were having a romantic affair. and made this prophecy "I feel that I shall leave life before January 1 [check] ...If I am murdered by boyars, nobles, [check] ...Brothers will kill brothers, and they will kill each other and hate each other, and for twenty-five years there will be no nobles in the country. [check, check, check] ...If it was your [Tsar Nicholas'] relations who have wrought my death, then...none of your children or relations, will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people. [Jesus Christ, check]"

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