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"I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and the blackest eyes... the Devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil." — Dr. Loomis, Halloween
This is it. The end of the line for evil and evil tropes. Simply, there is nothing worse than being this. Trying to put a value to how horrible the qualifications to be a Complete Monster are is like trying to assign Bill Gates a credit score: it becomes a moot point. This is not the villain who is designed to be comic, or tragic, or even so awesome you can't help but root for him. This is the villain who is so repulsive and completely irredeemable, that the only satisfying end for him is a death just as horrible as he is... or hopefully worse.
Complete Monsters typically appear in Darker And Edgier works and those on the very cynical side of the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Vs Cynicism. In Lighter And Fluffier works, it's incredibly hard to depict a character bad enough to invoke this trope without breaking the mood. On the other hand, as a work slides into Black And Grey Morality, it gets harder to be so evil that you become the focus of the audience's hatred. Thus, only the most exceptional of villains can qualify - only the worst of the worst belong on this page. Far from every Serial Killer, Psycho For Hire, Ax Crazy, or Omnicidal Maniac is bad enough to be a Complete Monster. While most Complete Monster villains are Obviously Evil, not everyone who is Obviously Evil is a Complete Monster.
- The character must do truly horrendous acts, and the story makes no attempt to gloss these over or present them in a positive light. Acts concealed behind a Villainy Discretion Shot don't count. In other words, the Complete Monster usually starts at the Moral Event Horizon and keeps on running. He must also have a direct, active role, and the Evil Overlord doesn't count if he only sends out waves of minions to do horrible atrocities - he must perform these himself or force someone else to do it while he looks on. It's the character that's supposed to scare and disgust you, not his Mooks.
- A Freudian Excuse is either not present, or inadequate to excuse his behavior.
- The character must show no regret or remorse for his actions, however terrible. It's better if he obviously enjoys it, but complete emotionlessness or lack of caring will suffice. For this guy, Its All About Me is not just a choice; it's the core of his existence.
- The character must evoke fear and/or hatred from the other characters in the story. If there are other villains around, they are afraid of him/dislike him too — Even Evil Has Standards, after all. If this character is not the Big Bad, there's likely to be an Eviler Than Thou subplot.
- The character should affect the tone of the work. His scenes are the darkest, scariest, and most serious. He can push a work into Darker And Edgier territory simply by his presence, and if it's already dark, he makes it a candidate for High Octane Nightmare Fuel. This type of villain will almost never appear in a comedic work unless it is a Black Comedy of the nastiest sort.
- Defeating the character should be a major element of the story, if not the main plot — especially if his opponents are motivated by revenge or hatred for him. When it happens, it's usually someone's Crowning Moment Of Awesome. If the villain wins, it's game over for the good guys, and even if he's defeated, he often leaves one heck of a mess behind.
- Most importantly, the character must have no chance of redemption without being considered a Karma Houdini. The only way the story could come to anything resembling a happy ending is if he dies or is otherwise removed. A Heel Face Turn is out of the question, and nobody would believe it if it happened. There can be no Redemption Equals Death for this character, and no Fate Worse Than Death is too extreme.
Remember, it takes something truly, truly special to be a Complete Monster. Far from every villain qualifies, especially if they turn out to mean well. No Real Life examples, please.
Tread carefully through the examples. It probably goes without saying, but due to the nature of the trope, there are huge spoilers that may or may not be marked. And also, some of the deeds listed here are quite disturbing, even though they're all fictional.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Johan Liebert, the eponymous character of Monster, pictured above. You may appreciate his abilities as a Magnificent Bastard, and you may consider his scenes the best in the series, but the extremes that he goes to (such as teaching youth to play chicken on ledges, or sending a boy looking for his mother in a red light district, or killing people who took him in and cared for him) completely negate any sympathy that his could elicit in the audience.
- However, he is also a thorough deconstruction of the trope, as one of the major goals of the series is to examine whether any human at all, regardless of everything horrifying that he's ever done, is irredeemably and irrevocably evil. This is also illustrated with Franz Bonaparta, the man responsible directly and indirectly for what Johan had become.
- Friend of Twentieth Century Boys. You know you're not dealing with anyone friendly when Kick The Dog is merged with Shoot The Dog.
- Apos from Mnemosyne ranks up there with Johan in sheer wickedness and depravity (being a fellow blond bishounen doesn't help either). Listing all of his sickening acts would probably fill up the page and then some. Most memorable would be his games of "torture chess" with dismembered immortal women, or when he brutally rapes Mimi purely out of boredom. It's especially horrible when you find out his motive for everything he does: he likes the taste of his victim's suffering.
- Osamu Tezuka's manga MW features the single most hateful and sociopathic character Tezuka ever created: Michio Yuki. Blackmailer, bisexual rapist and murderer. In one chapter, he robs from the very bank he works from, pins the whole thing on the daughter of the bank president by impersonating her, and then kills him by making him lose his grip on a precipice by throwing lit matches into his mouth. FUN! His crowning achievement will be to steal a classified military neurotoxin and slaughter as many people as he can with it. And does he get away with it? No, but he still manages to fake his own death and get away clean. To see the man who created Astro-Boy come up with someone this messed-up rattles the eyeteeth more than a tad.
- Blade of the Immortal brings us the truly despicable Shira. He's first seen (deep breath) murdering a prostitute (who had just been introduced as a Hooker With A Heart Of Gold who was just in the business to pay for her mother's medicine) supposedly because she didn't have the information she wanted. Then, the morning after he joins up with heroes Manji and Rin, he gives Rin a motivational speech over breakfast, and then reveals that they've been eating the stray dog she had befriended the night before. After that, he and Rin are attacked by a pair of assassins, who Shira kills, but not before savagely, gleefully torturing one with his saw-edged sword. He then turns to the unarmed woman who had led them into the trap and tortured her as well when Rin turns on him. Would've ended badly if Manji hadn't shown up and cut his hand off. He runs off and isn't seen for a while... until he comes back for revenge against Manji, having turned his arm stump into a weapon by carving the flesh off the end and sharpening the bones. He battles Manji's companion Magatsu, the friend of the aforementioned sweet little prostitute, and reveals to him that the reason he killed her wasn't because of information, it was because he liked cutting up women while he has sex with them, because it made their muscles seize up... all of them. He finally gets his other hand cut off and falls down a waterfall... but the brutalities still keep coming as Shira is revealed to be still alive (now missing both hands and an eye, which he claims to have replaced with a weapon) having been salvaged by his employers. His employer then asks if he's chosen a new set of hands yet, and we see a dead hooker and savaged-looking young boy in Shira's cell. With dialogue implying that he raped both of them all night long, Shira says the boy will be his hands. He hasn't been seen since (not in the American releases, anyway) but one wonders how he's going to top himself.
- He gets exactly what he deserves as Manji and the boyfriend of the first prostitute he killed slice off all his limbs and impale him...and to top it off, he's eaten by wolves...and the kicker? Thanks to the immortality he's received, he's alive. And fully aware while he's being ripped apart.
- Blade of the Immortal has a few of these...there's Anotsu Kagehisa's grandfather whose response to a girl rescuing his grandson was to string her up from a tree, bleeding and beaten, to be devoured by packs of wild dogs. There's Hyakurin's husband, who sliced his own 8 year old son in half because the boy was too weak to swing a sword. Not to mention he killed his own infant daughter because she was a girl. Interestingly, Araya Kawakami is a subversion of sorts: he's a former complete monster desperately trying to bury the past so his son never knows what he really is...but he's willing to murder anyone who gets in the way of that. He does manage, despite everything, to retain a measure of sympathy, despite his horrific crimes.
- Dio Brando from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, particularly in Part III. He has no compunctions forcing people to do his bidding, and even if they do that, it's no guarantee of survival (think the rich man who drives him around in Part III). His shadow also looms large over all antagonists that follow him, with all of them being connected to him in some way, and is directly responsible for the events of Part VI, where all the main characters die. Oh, and he used his time stopping stand to force someone to eat a dead cat and stab someone else in the face - and he did this just because he could.
- Dio also makes a habit of recruiting other Complete Monsters as minions: Jack The Ripper, Tarkus, Gray Fly, Devo the Cursed, J. Geil, Steely Dan, Alessi, Terence D'Arby, Vanilla Ice (what, you thought "Bizarre" was in the title just for show?)...
- Norose Genichi, the Big Bad of Chaos;Head is a sneering, arrogant, sadistic bastard with a god complex who specializes in Mind Rape, especially of young girls. What he did to Sena's family (and most especially the amusement he felt about it) was so far over the Moral Event Horizon that it begs belief and that was one of the first things that the audience knew about him!
- Szayel Aporro Granz from Bleach. As a Mad Scientist for the Arrancar, Szayel likes nothing more than pulling the organs out of people via voodoo dolls and then smashing them. He also horrifically mutated his own followers just because it amused him. His opposite number in the Soul Reapers, Mayuri Kurotsuchi, arguably counts as well, though he's really more of a Dead Baby Comedy protagonist who you can occasionally root for in cases of Eviler Than Thou, especially when he goes up against Szayel.
- Mayuri himself is dangerously close to this, alongside Heroic Sociopath. Pretty much his only redeeming qualities are his loyalty to Soul Society and how he pwns and kills Szayel. However, his loyalty seems only out of the fact that they let him continue his experiments as long as he remains their other Psycho For Hire besides Kenpachi, and so far has no interest in outright doing a Face Heel Turn to Aizen's side.
- One of Ichigo's earlier enemies, the hollow called Shrieker, is shown to have been a Complete Monster even before he turned into a Hollow. A serial killer who stabbed a young mother to death and got off on it, his greatest regret is being killed before being able to do the same to her child, Yuichi Shibata. After he became a Hollow, he sealed the child into the body of a parakeet and lied to him, saying that if he could escape from him for three months, he'd revive his mom. Of course, he got his come-uppance when he was killed by Ichigo and sent to Hell.
- Being the only Hollow in the ENTIRE SERIES to get that treatment.
- Frieza has earned the moniker for being the most evil in Dragon Ball Z. Not only being a racist, he was responsible for the extermination of the Saiyans (who kind of brought it upon themselves) since he feared he was going to be overthrown by a Super Saiyan. Second, during his invasion of Namek, he killed many civilians including Dende's caretakers and brother even after he got the Dragon Ball. Not only that, he slaughtered several warriors and tortured both Nail and Vegeta to near death, and even had Vegeta crying and begging Goku to stop Frieza — who Frieza then shot through the heart. He then blew up Dende too when he learned the boy could heal people. And he finally killed Kuririn and threatened Goku's son, which led to Goku becoming the very thing that he feared most.
- And all of it was done willingly. He wasn't born to be a monster (like Cell or Majin Buu), nor was he insane (like Broly and some of the other movie villains) he was just an asshole who reveled in his power.
- The archenemies of Guts in Berserk are Complete Monsters who perform horrible deeds for their own amusement, and it's not exactly helped by the fact that every demon was once a human who sacrificed something or someone dear to them to the Godhand, the primary Big Bads of the series in general, to become that way.
- Bishop Mozgus reveals himself to be a sadistic monster during the Conviction arc. When starving refugees try to steal from him, he spares only a young mother and her child. He then sentences her, in a High Octane Nightmare Fuel scene, to horrendous torture in order to "expiate her sins".
- Ganishka, the Emperor of Kushan, however, establishes himself as a Complete Monster even among other Complete Monsters, and that's no mean feat given Berserk's World Half Empty and horrific villains in general. Mass executions, ethnic cleansing, using conquered populations as human shields or cannon fodder for his armies, attempting to rape the captive Charlotte, suspending women over a pool filled with hungry crocodiles, dropping thousands of pregnant women into cauldrons with stitched-together Apostles to turn the unborn babies into half-human demons that rip apart their mothers upon birth... this guy isn't beyond the Moral Event Horizon, he's the black hole causing it, and not even the fact that he's doing it all to "transcend the Apostles" and rebel against the Big Bad Godhand is enough to make him sympathetic.
- And then you find out about his background, where his mother tried to poison him so his younger brother would become the heir, making him insanely paranoid (both the mother and the brother did not survive, of course) to the point where his own son tries to kill him because he was so afraid his father would see him as a threat. Yeah. We're talking Royally Screwed Up here.
- And you could possibly count Griffith as well because of the way he crosses the Moral Event Horizon during the Eclipse, but most seem to consider him a Magnificent Bastard.
- King Hamdo of Now And Then Here And There is a raging and unpredictable tyrant who uses child soldiers as cannon fodder (this can also be considered Truth In Television, since this is how many tribal warlords act). Hamdo evokes the smallest drop of sympathy because he is obviously insane and in great pain... and then he kills his cat in a temper tantrum and sexually assaults a little girl. His second-in-command warns him that one of his tactical moves will directly result in the bloody deaths of thousands of children, and his response is, more or less, "So?"
- The various Gundam series have a habit of trying to show war in various shades of gray, and as a result most villains (if they can even be called that) are tempered with sympathetic human qualities. However, there are still exceptions to the rule...
- In the first Mobile Suit Gundam series, there's Prince Gihren Zabi, eldest son of the Zabi family. He takes being compared to Adolf Hitler as a compliment and later blasted his own father and General Reville into oblivion just so they wouldn't reach an armistice. Uhm...
- Yazan Gable from Zeta Gundam is a thuggish Psycho For Hire whose whole reason for joining the Titans is so he can satisfy his bloodlust by killing members of the AEUG and their supporters. He has no interest in rules of warfare and murders just because he is good at it. He also has a disturbing warcry of "I'M GONNA VIOLATE YOU!!"
- For that matter, Titans leader Bosque Ohm is just as horrible. He beat the shit out of Captain Bright for opposing to his orders, had Camille Vidan's mother Hilda put in a capsule in outer space without a spacesuit just to retrieve the Gundams stolen by the AEUG (this leading to her horrendous and heartwrenching death), ordered at least two massive colony gassings, etc. Heck, ex Cool Big Sis Reccoa Londo may have defected to the Titans for a really stupid reason, but even she was more than happy to blast Bosque away as soon as she could.
- Another one is actually Camille's Disappeared Dad, Franklin Vidan, who cares for nothing but his reputation and his mistress Marguerite, hits his estranged wife when she points that out, shows no regret whatsoever when Hilda gets Stuffed Into The Fridge much to Camille's ire, and later attempts to kill Camille himself in battle, despite Camille trying to reason with him. It's pretty much a relief when Char shoots him down.
- Katejina Loos from Victory Gundam is the undisputed queen of evil in
the UC-verse all Gundam universes. She's a young girl extremely embittered over the destruction of her town at the hands of the evil Zanscare Empire, who blames the League Militaire for all that happened, and ends up defecting to Zanscare and aiding them in their genocidal plans, never once feeling a twinge of regret or hesitation over killing her former friends. Such is her monstrosity, even going as far as to try to murder her old friend Usso while he's trying to save her, that she eventually gets a Fate Worse Than Death, surviving as a blind and mentally crippled beggar woman. Yoshiyuki Tomino has said that he chose this ending for her because death would have been the easy way out for her - and when that's coming from "Kill Em All Tomino", you know that means she was one nasty piece of work.
- Karozo "Iron Mask" Ronah from Gundam F 91, who wanted to eradicate most of humanity using his dreadful Bugs, all according to his twisted concept of aristocracy. The manga shows in sickening detail how brutally and efficiently his creations did their work. And previous to his final fight with Seabook Arno in The Movie, Iron Mask uses his moble suit's hands to grab his own daughter Cecily and throw her out in space when she questions him. Luckily, her spacesuit saves her life.
- Dekim Barton from Gundam Wing Endless Waltz, who spent almost two decades setting up a plan to Take Over The World by pulling a Colony Drop, then sending five Super Prototype Gundams to wipe out any remaining resistance. And when that fell through, he revised the plan, this time using soldiers manipulated into thinking they were fighting for their slain leader's ideals, when in fact they're just following Dekim's plot. And on top of that, there's the strong implication that Mariemaia, the figurehead leader of the rebellion and Dekim's granddaughter isn't really his granddaughter OR Treize Khushrenada's daughter, but rather some random girl Dekim effectively brainwashed. And after she's shot, he boasts that he can easily make another one. And all this because he thought Earth needed to be punished for the assassination of the colonies' leader. Just damn.
- Muruta Azrael from Gundam SEED, leader of the terrorist organization Blue Cosmos, who wanted to kill all Coordinators by any means necessary and took unholy delight in their wholesale slaughter. The sheer hatefulness of his plan is only reinforced by the Freudian Excuse he uses to justify himself.
- Lord Djibril from Gundam SEED Destiny, Azrael's successor, with none of his intelligence or charisma, who had his minions perform horrible experiments on children, personally killed thousands of innocents with a Wave Motion Gun and was responsible for turning Mwu La Flaga into Neo Roanoke.
- And perhaps the reigning champion in Gundam villainy (despite his fanbase), Ali Al-Saachez from Gundam 00, a self-admitted Psycho For Hire and Blood Knight who loves war and wants it to never end, manipulated Setsuna into killing his own parents, killed Saji's Hot Scoop Intrepid Reporter sister for the fun of it (In fact, many fans suspect he did more than just killing her) after revealing to her just how evil he is and generally only exists to make the world a much, much worse place. Burning down an entire country is all in a day's work for this beast. It also says a lot about his character that he actually finds empathy disgusting.
- The Unknown Man from Elfen Lied.
- "I got to play rough with her...when she still had a lower body.
- For those unfamiliar with the story: The Unknown man was hunting for a Diclonius (girls with powerful psychic powers). The only thing that can sense a Diclonius is another Diclonius - so he made a radar system out of a still-living Diclonius girl. To make it portable, he cut her in half at the chest. To stop the Diclonius he's hunting from being able to detect the girl, he keeps her hovering in a state of near-death. To stop her from using her psychic powers to attack him, he put a device in her that tortures her constantly so she's in too much pain to focus. And since he thought it was a shame to do all this to such a cute girl, he raped her repeatedly so her pretty body wouldn't go to waste.
- And if that wasn't enough, he sexually assaults Mayu, who is barely into her teens and had already been sexually abused by her stepfather.
- If Hougen from Ginga Densetsu Weed is not the most evil and malicious dog ever, in any media, he is surely the strong contender for this place. He introduces himself to the legendary heroes of Ohu by taking a shit and telling them that if they eat it, he'll let them go. He then paralyzes the heroes by threatening to kill a young female, Reika, if they dare to fight back. He has the heroes beaten almost to death as a result. In addition, Hougen frequently laughs at pain and desperate acts of heroism, and defiles the corpses of those he's defeated (in one snowy scene, he sits on a recently dead dog to keep warm, and jeers at the fallen's companion that he'll sit on him next when he dies). Hougen is not above using his lackeys as expendable shields (sending dozens of them to their deaths against opponents whom he can beat himself, and so on), and when he has temper tantrums, he brutally kills whoever happens to be standing around. Even finding out that Hougen and his brother were trapped by their human owner for so long that they had to resort to cannibalizing the dogs trapped with them does nothing to evoke sympathy for his cruelty. The only smidgen of honor Hougen shows throughout the whole series involves a pact he and his brother made, that if Genba dies, he wanted it to be by Hougen's fangs. When Genba suffers a head wound that drives him psychotic, Hougen murders him. Then promptly turns on the dogs who were with his brother, tears out their throats, and hurls them from the top of Gajou.
- In the manga, Hougen is also a serial rapist, who demands from his underlings to round up females for him. He forced Nero (GB's pack leader and a minor villain) to kill the abandoned puppies right in front of GB (he was about to look after them but he brought them at the wrong time) just to prove that the puppies weren't Nero's - and that Nero, therefore, did not hide a female from him. This, by the way, did not save Nero's hide in the end as later (chronologically), after Nero encountered the leaders of Ohu, was swiftly cowed into submission by them and tried to justify his cowardice to Hougen by saying that they threatened to bite off his legs and piss on his face, Hougen immediately made an example out of him, by doing exactly that.
- Elder Toguro from Yu Yu Hakusho. Three words: "Genkai puppet show".
- Or what he did to Makihara aka Gourmet, after taking over his body. AAAAAARGH!!!
- Narutaru, given its overall tone, presents quite a few of its villains as this - especially the minor baddies. These include Aki Honda, the most sadistic Libby that could only have come from Mohiro Kitoh's warped imagination; she bullies one of the protagonists by forcing her to eat worms, then raping her with a glass test tube and threatening to kick her in the belly while it's inside her. Then there's a gang of city thugs later in the manga, whose brutal rape and murder of Norio is extremely over-the-top - they even nail the victim's head to a doll's body once they're done. And considering that the major baddies are pretty terrible to begin with... well, you get the picture.
- Tomoe Marguerite from Mai-Otome started out merely as a manipulative bully who was in love with Shizuru, but after joining the Schwarz, she refused a Last Second Chance to rejoin the Alliance and threatened to kill them all because she enjoyed making people suffer, and that the lives of everyone but Shizuru were meaningless to her. That she later says she does so because she "always get[s] what [she] want[s]" pretty much cemented her "heartless bastard" status in the eyes of a lot of fans.
- The creator of Basilisk really loves creating these. The Yagyu Ninja Scrolls brings us a full cast of complete monsters in Akinari Kato and his Seven Spears. Kato? Is a tyrannical daimyo who has women kidnapped and raped and will frequently kill or maim them in fits of rage. When he's done? He gives them to the Spears who rape and torture them to death. At the series start, the Spears drag the captive men of the Hori clan to their wives, mothers and daughters... and proceed to butcher the women horribly until they're stopped, leading to the series Roaring Rampage Of Revenge. Throughout the series, they commit many more atrocities. One can only cheer when series resident hero and badass Jubei Yagyu Turns Akinari into a eunuch with a well aimed sword slash in a Crowning Moment Of Awesome.
- Mad Scientist Precia Testarossa from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. Her very first scene involves a horrific example of child abuse towards her Dark Magical Girl daughter Fate, or better said, the girl who is a clone of her true daughter, Alicia, whose death sapped away the sanity she once had. She only gets worse from there. In fact, a decent part of the fandom hopes that she survived her fall just so that the heroes can kill her in a suitably epic manner.
- By the way, the spoilered Freudian Excuse was revealed by having her crush what little self-worth her nine-year old daughter had and laughing at her despair. That's right, instead of using the Freudian Excuse to make her sympathetic, the writers used it as a way to get the viewers to hate her more.
- There is also Quattro from StrikerS, who is such a cruel Smug Snake — much worse than the actual main villain of the season — that you cannot help but hate the guts out of her and stand up and cheer when she finally gets the living crap blasted out of her in a Crowning Moment Of Awesome by Nanoha herself.
- Then there's Jail Scaglietti, Quattro's boss and a Mad Scientist far surpassing Precia, who doesn't make any pretenses to having a motive and proved himself to be utterly, disgustingly evil even before he used a five-year-old to power an Artifact Of Doom and forced her to attack her mother. Again, his WTF-pwnage was most wonderful to see.
- At least he had a few Pet The Dog moments. Precia, however, had none.
- Jail Scaglietti came over as pretty much just a troll, since he had no motives what so ever. Still not as shockingly evil as Precia.
- Pretty much any of the Big Bads from One Piece, with the Celestial Dragons taking the cake.
- Doctor Hogback, despite not being a Big Bad, deserves special mention for how gleefully he passes the Moral Event Horizon by ordering the zombie of the woman he "loved" to lick the floor, while saying how she's better now that she's totally under his control and how he really only liked her appearance anyway.
- Shiryu of the Rain, former Head Jailer of Impel Down, also deserves a mention. In his backstory he would brutally kill scores of prisoners for his own amusement, justifying his actions by saying they were just prisoners. Magellan was revolted by these actions and had Shiryu imprisoned and put on death row (may double as a Crowning Moment Of Awesome for Magellan). Shiryu takes it to a new level when Magellan frees him to deal with the Blackbeard pirates. Shiryu instead kills his fellow guards and lets the Blackbeard pirates through. He also kills the guards in the surveillance and communications room to cut off ties to the outside. It becomes pretty clear that Shiryu is nothing but a sadistic Ax Crazy murderer.
- The reason why Blackbeard is there? He wants Shiryu to join up with him, and Shiryu thinks it's a great idea.
- Dante, the Big Bad of the Full Metal Alchemist anime, who creates and maintains a military dictatorship and has her minions, the Homunculi, go around stirring up conflicts and encouraging people to engage in forbidden alchemy and human sacrifice — all for one goal, to create the magic stone that will allow her to keep on living forever.
- However, she's is nothing compared to her own Dragon Pride, who plows right through the Moral Event Horizon at the end of the anime when he remorselessly strangles his Morality Pet, his son Selim, to death for bringing in his equivalent of kryptonite (having no idea what it really was) during his final battle.
- But the reigning champion of all is Envy in the manga, who loves to turning into his enemies' dearest just to mess with their minds, and openly admits enjoying seeing humans suffering. No wonder Mustang goes batshit against him.
- Father from the manga and second anime wiped out the nation of Xerxes just so he could absorb half the souls and gain a body.
- Central Command who think of nothing about having the rest of Amestris killed just so they can get immortal bodies.
- Kimblee is quite a monster who has no regard for the lives of his allies and even less for those of his enemies. He's even more of a psychopath in the manga, where he confesses that he sided with the homunculi to see how the conflict would end. Ed questions him as to how someone like him could have become a State Alchemist, and he admits to being good at passing himself off as normal, largely because he already knows how at odds with society he is.
- Shou Tucker certainly qualifies as well. His experiments in human transmutation use his own daughter and wife as test subjects.
- "The Man In White" spends most of his screentime crossing the Moral Event Horizon. He's responsible for experimenting on people to make human-based homunculi; except for the one who became Wrath/King Bradley, all of the subjects died or were rendered mindless and used as Elite Mook, and later slits Riza's throat in an attempt to force Roy Mustang to open the gate. He does so without any remorse or regard for human life, and it's thus very satisfying to see him being impaled from behind by Pride while he boasts about Wrath's skill as one of his creations.
- Luciano Bradley, Psycho For Hire and Knight of Ten from Code Geass. Bradley is even known to be a Complete Monster in the eyes of most of the other characters in the show. Fearless Action Girl Kallen is visibly frightened the moment she finds out she is in the same room with him; the fact that he implies that he plans on raping and torturing her does not help alleviate that fear. He also kills his own men without a care (whether needed or not), and loves to kill people slowly using his mecha's energy drill while asking them whats the most importent thing for them. It's taken to the point where neither of his KOR allies Suzaku (whom he almost killed for the hell of it, and whose deceased girlfriend he insulted) and Gino (whom he called a rich boy whose family name is the only reason for his position) seem to care at all when Kallen kills him in battle (whereas she and Gino even exchange some semi-friendly banter).
- If Moon Phase's Count Kinkle hadn't already earned this title from brutally torturing and/or mind-raping nearly every named protagonist/bystander he ever met (Seigi manages to get off with just being tricked into fighting his allies), he would have got it from his role in Elfriede's backstory. The "hate" in I Hate You Vampire Dad almost seems like an understatement.
- Most of the villains from Rurouni Kenshin, including psycho serial killer Jin-e, drug-dealing scumbag crimelord Kanryu, militaristic bully Raijuta, and Darwinist madman Shishio (who is actually played as a Magnificent Bastard until Kenshin's gang makes an assault on his stronghold). And let's not even talk about Enishi's group... (Curiously, Enishi himself is slightly less of a Complete Monster and more of deeply and horribly fucked up, though still remaining without almost any chance of redemption until almost the end.)
- God knows how many villains in Fist Of The North Star, though a good number of them do have redeeming moments of sorrow to make up for it. Arguably the most heartless of them has to be Jagi, who, as his most villainous act, chained a cinderblock to a kid's leg and left him in the middle of the desert. For no reason. Just like Kenshiro said, hell is too good for him.
- Masaru "Kodama" Kodaka, the second child to pilot Zearth in Bokurano, loves the rush of fighting the enemy in an urban district, gleefully justifies the reckless killing of bystanders by claiming that "it was their fate" and that a million deaths are outweighed by saving the whole world, and wants to destroy even more to provide business opportunities for his father, a Magnificent Bastard who is the only one he looks up to. Doesn't feel quite so happy after he accidentally crushes daddy too. And then there's Dung Beetle in the anime, the 'cute mascot' who is utterly unsympathetic toward the doomed kids and even takes a perverse joy from seeing their misery - that's not to say he's a saint in the manga, but at least there he eventually gets some Character Development and mellows out a bit after his sister Yoko is shot dead.
- In the manga, the most evil character has got to be Mr. Hatagai. What he does to his student and lover Chizuru "Chizu" Honda is completely and utterly horrible, so it's no wonder the girl goes Yandere once he breaks her. He's considerably toned down in the anime, though, but still above Jerk Ass level.
- In manga he's so sick, that Kirie, the biggest Stoic in both manga and anime was trying to stab him after one talk.
- Yonemi Kamon, the teacher from the from the manga adaptation of Battle Royale. Hobbies: watching students kill each other, killing students, joking about said students' deaths, raping orphanage directors, etc. Consider: when the teacher is killed in the movie and novel, it's because the main character shoots him. In the manga, they shove sharpened pencils into his nostrils and slam his head against a desk. He earned it.
- Saki Yurikawa from Reiko the Zombie Shop certainly qualifies. A psychopath who hunts little girls for the purpose of replacing her little sister Midori, who's been stuck in a coma for the last decade (a coma Saki herself put her in). When first met Saki has killed twenty-nine of these girls with a knife, and over the course of the first volume gleefully continues her killing spree, adding a male school friend, several more young girls, an investigative reporter, her cameraman, two police officers, a nurse and heroine Reiko Himezono to her list. The incident with the reporter is especially brutal, as Saki had called her from her house, threatening to kill her daughter if she didn't show up in ten minutes. The reporter fulfilled her part of the deal; Saki didn't. Her comeuppance is both brutal and richly deserved.
- Mori Kouran from Flame Of Recca has many traits of a Complete Monster (complete with the ugly looks too). He already had wealth and power, but he continues to crave for more, and would never stop at achieving so, by using deceit, manipulation, murder, and especially yanking on other people's emotions, and it's implied that he's been like this since he is a child. To that end, he sought immortality, just so he can be satiated forever. You'll see how much of a monster he is in what he has done to Kurei: forcing him to be loyal with him by taking his stepmother hostage, and plants a bomb on her just in case he rebels (and he later does anyway, when Kurei has becomes useless to him ("Everything you care for... I WILL TAKE IT AWAY!" probably sums it up just fine. Though to be fair, thanks to Kurei's Battle Butler, his mother is safe), and worst of all, adopts his possible lover Kurenai and sends her to live with him and just when he is about to get defrosted, Kouran retaliates by blowing her up, revealing that he planted the same bomb he used on his mother. When he gained his godlike powers, the next thing he does is hiring maids to serve him food but the 'food' is actually the maid, and when Kurei's clone Renge, his 'daughter', finally begs for help, he responds by killing her and absorbing her, revealing that she is born to be that way. If you have any love for this depraved bastard who thinks nothing but himself and wants nothing but enjoyment for himself for eternity... you have no soul. Oh, and he's a rapist too.
- From the same series, we also get Mokuren. He's a sadistic Axe Crazy Serial Killer who loves see his (mostly female) victims' fear and pain before killing them, and is never given any reason for his actions save For The Evulz. He gleefuly tortures the protagonists and uses some of them to put the others into Sadistic Choice situations, and comes back from defeat more than any other villain simply because of his all-consuming hate for Recca and his friends. He starts out a craven Dirty Coward, but gradually takes several levels in badass, and his desire to destroy Recca overrides everything else to the point that nothing is too extreme if it gives him even the slightest advantage, making him even more despicable and terrifying. His sole somewhat humanizing moment towards the series' end - when it's revealed he's begun a relationship with a female villain who herself was shown to be quite complete monster-ish - is brutally subverted when he betrays and mortally wounds her because he finds it more convenient, giving her an Alas Poor Villain death. When he finally dies trying to take Recca with him, it is noted by the narrator how utterly morally bankrupt he was, and completely devoid of compassion.
- All euphorics who appear as minor villains in Speed Grapher qualify. These euphorics, who received superpowers based on their fetishes, use their powers to murder for kicks and giggles. Only three euphorics in the entire anime can be considered stable and two of them are major antagonists. Strange case where major antagonists come off more sympathetic than minor antagonists.
- Yoshiyuki Tomino gives us another despicable villain in Zambot 3, in the form of Killer The Butcher, the Dragon to Big Bad Gaizock. During the series' run, this guy commits any sort of horrible action, the mildest of which is mass murder of innocent civilians with the excuse that Humans Are Bastards. If, by the end of the series, you still don't think this guy deserves a quick, brutal death, just wait until he implants mini-bombs inside unknowing human prisoners, just to release them, let them go back to their families... and only then blow them up. Alive. Even children. And all the while, he admires his work, is proud of the bloodshed and even jokes about the horrible deaths of his victims, treating his killing sprees as a funny game. If that does not spell Complete Monster, I don't know what does.
- Several of the murder victims in Detective Conan were killed because they crapped on their killers or their friends/families in the past, BIG TIME. Listing them all is obviously a suicidal mission, but a special mention goes for the eccentric horror novelist who gets to marry a beautiful local girl with a particularly sadistic Scarpia Ultimatum and ruins the life of his ghost writer by causing his Ill Girl sister's death and telling him that the girl still lives to force him keep working for him.
- Chaka from Black Lagoon, is possibly the biggest Jerk Ass in the entire series with little to no excuse for his needlessly sadistic and often idiotic behavior. Even Heroic Sociopaths such as Revy and Ginji are disgusted by this asshole's actions, and his abuse of Yukio at the bowling alley in particular is enough to bring out Rock's absolute worst language and drive him to violence. He gets a well-deserved comeuppance at the hands of Ginji, who uses his shirasaya blade to slice up Chaka's gun — and then cut off his hands. Followed by forced drowning.
- Arguably Luuza Luft from Aura Battler Dunbine, an Evil Matriarch of the worst kind who plots against her own husband (who, despite being the Big Bad, comes across as more sympathetic than her) to have the power all to herself and her lover Bishott (and it is doubtful she has any loyalty to him as well). She will do absolutely anything to get what she wants, including murdering her own daughter in cold blood, which she threatens to do in an early episode and actually does prior to the bloody finale. Her Karmic Death at the hands of Rimru's heartbroken boyfriend is both brutal and highly satisfying.
- The Director (her real name is Keiko Yamazaki but that's never used) of hospital Center #102 from Junko Mizuno's Pure Trance. She loves stealing from, abusing and even killing her employees, usually from her incredibly lurid
drug den sex dungeon bedroom.
- Baki The Grappler's Yujiro Hanma, definitely. He beat the everloving crap of his own son, titular Baki Hanma, so that Baki's entire body, except face, is covered in scars, killed Baki's mother, and then beat up Baki's friends and allies just to show he could. Yujiro has enough of Charles Atlas Superpower to be effectively untouchable by police and authorities, and uses his ability to do whatever suits his fancy without repercussions to put relentless psychological pressure on his son (including, but not limited to, threatening to kill his girlfriend, if Baki fails his expectations, and to subject Baki's possible children to the same abuse he had piled on Baki), just to create an opponent worthy of himself. Baki puts himself through Training From Hell and series of incredibly brutal martial arts tournaments just to become able to protect himself and his loved ones from Yujiro. The worst part is that Yujiro hasn't got his comeuppance yet - after about 600+ chapters - although this is somewhat understandable, as his defeat probably would end the series.
- Akechi Mitsuhide in the anime adaptation of Sengoku Basara. He gleefully leaps over the Moral Event Horizon in episode 5. It's not when he goads Nagamasa into fighting Masamune. It's not even when he diverts a squad of riflemen from supporting Ieyasu (screwing over Ieyasu too in the process) to fire on Masamune, with Nagamasa right in the middle. No, it's when he brings Oichi to the site (on the pretense of letting her warn Nagamasa), and then picks the very moment she tries to warn Nagamasa to order the riflemen to fire. It then becomes blatantly obvious that Mitsuhide wanted to kill Nagamasa all along and that he wanted to break Oichi in the process as well, and that he likely did all this for kicks. And this is before the infamous Honnouji event where he betrayed and killed Oda Nobunaga, here probably not because he's way too evil. But probably for kicks too, just like in the games.
- The "blood-bending" Deadmen can be pretty sadistic (see Minatsuki: "Your despair turns me on!") but the anti-Deadman-weapon-wielding Undertakers are worse because while some of the Deadmen were criminals, all of the undertakers are sadistic murderers (even the eight-year-old Cloud Cuckoo Lander). As an example, two vicious serial killers (one of whom enjoyed killing women and sewing their scalps into a coat that he wore "inside-out") are easily dealt with in order to highlight how difficult the real Undertakers are.
- Toujou from Bio Meat. He will do anything to make sure the reputation of BM stays good, including forcing an American army colonel to command his soldiers to kill an entire building filled with innocent people, just because there might be a chance that they would tell others about a minor BM outbreak. He doesn't even change his tune in the third arc, when 90% of Japan's population has been killed by his own creation. He also likes to rub the death of Shingo's mother in his face, something for which he was responsible.
- Handsome, charming Muraki from Yami No Matsuei. As of the start of the series he's already spent several years systematically kidnapping, dismembering, and vivisecting small children, raping adolescents and infecting them with slow, agonizing fatal diseases, and seemingly murdering pretty much every grown woman he comes across, whether to use them in scientific experiments, to attract the attention of the Shinigami, or just for lulz. All of this murder, torture, and rape is really only the means he uses to the end of fashioning a good old Mind Rape, whether it's mentally torturing a girl madly in love with him into developing split personalities, mind-controlling suicidally depressed pop stars into becoming blood-drinking monsters, or stalking and harassing one of the Shinigami with so much misdirected guilt that he finally manages to drive him into a catatonic state, in which state he fully intended to vivisect the Shinigami and use his Shinigami powers to bring his older brother back to life, so that he could kill him more slowly and painfully.
- Admiral Haruki Kusakabe from Martian Successor Nadesico establishes himself as a very detestable person near the end of the TV series, by framing Tsukumo Shiratori for treason and having his former best friend Genichiro "mercy-kill" him, all in order to prolong the war between Earth and Jupiter, and have a chance to seize Mars' forgotten technology. He is finally discovered and forced into exile, but plotting revenge... and what marks his real entrance into Complete Monster territory is the fact that, in the three years between the series and The Movie, he had Akito and Yurika captured and experimented on to replicate the Boson Jumping effect. The experiments permanently hooked Yurika up to a machine, in a catatonic state, and completely destroyed Akito's senses, leaving him an empty, tragic shell of the innocent boy he was. He's also a Karma Houdini, so it's even more infuriating... and it makes it even more cathartic when you get to kill him off in some Super Robot Wars episodes. Preferably with Akito and Gai's Double Gekigan Flare...
- Yukino from Yakitate Japan may not have quite as much killing and mayhem under her belt as some of the other people on the page, but the manga's pretty clear that it's only because she doesn't have the opportunity. She literally only takes joy in the suffering of others, as exhibited in the chapter where she has Kawachi's bread dough sabotaged, forcing him to try to get it to rise by kneading it so long that he passed out... she was working so hard to restrain so much laughter that she almost soiled herself. Which seems fairly mild compared to the sheer paroxysms of glee she worked herself into by torturing her illegitimate little sister with the desecration of said sister's mother's remains. She's lied, cheated, and killed all so that she can have 100% of her father's company instead of just 90%.
- Wiseman/Death Phantom, the Big Bad and Eldritch Abomination of the R season of Sailor Moon, is definitely this. He corrupted and manipulated the rebellious Black Moon Clan of Nemesis into become villains and used them to turn the peaceful utopian Earth of the future into a barren desolated wasteland, Mind Raped a vulnerable little girl into becoming his servant and tries to have her kill her future parents and friends, turned one of his pawns into a monster and knowingly sends her to her death, sadistically blasted to death another minion in front of that minion's older brother for having outlived his usefulness and attempting to screw up his master plan, and planned on destroying the universe for the sheer hell of it.
- Magic Knight Rayearth is a show notorious for giving all of its characters a sympathetic, or at least understandable, motive for what they do. Nobody is a Complete Monster here. Except one: the Big Bad of the second season, Lady Debonair, an Eldritch Abomination born from the collective fears of Cephiro's people who wants (just like the above-mentioned Wiseman) to destroy the world for no understandable reason, cannot be reasoned with, and will use any despicable trick in the book to get her way. Even reading this does not convey how horrible she is, but when she abandons her own "daughter" Nova to her fate after she fails in defeating the Magic Knights... well, that's when it truly sinks what kind of monster we're dealing with. Not to mention, she was the one who killed the very popular Anti Villain Eagle Vision for no reason at all.
- Professor Akihiro Kurata in Digimon Savers is the most despicable human villain to ever appear in the Digimon franchise. While Ken and Oikawa from Digimon Adventure 02 were under Mind Control in a significant way, and Yamaki from Digimon Tamers was a Well Intentioned Extremist, Kurata's only goal is to Take Over The World and sadistically destroy all Digimon because of a petty grudge. Creating the Gizumon, mechanical monstrosities that make other Digimon Deader Than Dead by stopping them from reincarnating like usual, and experimenting in creating half-Digimon hybrids were only the start. Creating a weapon of mass destruction to kill thousands of Digimon in one shot, forcing the Teen Genius on the heroes' side to a Face Heel Turn by threatening to kill his Ill Girl little sister, trying to replicate his experiments on said Ill Girl, and finally awakening a mighty Demon Lord and merging with it to destroy all of his enemies... well, that should give you an idea of how loathsome this guy is.
- He is not just the most despicable human villain to ever appear in the Digimon franchise. He is the most despicable VILLAIN to ever appear in the franchise. Period.
- Gemma, the Big Bad of Ninja Scroll. The other Eight Devils of Kimon are all nasty pieces of work, but he surpasses them all with his callous disregard for anyone, lover, friend or foe, just so he can feed his bottomless greed.
- In Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni, the orphanage leader from Miyo Takano's past was quite a despicable bastard. He kept children in line by fear, whipping the disobedient ones while others could hear them. Then there's the scene where one boy accidentally spills his ink, so the leader forces the boy to eat it. It's his treatment that helped turn Takano into a delusional psycho herself.
- The people working at the orphanage are just as worse, if not worse. In the manga(and probably sound novels), which was excluded from the anime probably due to censorship or not having enough time, they're shown to kill and abuse the children in horrifying ways.
- Miyo Takano herself is no saint; in fact, FAR from it. She deliberately exaggerated the dangers of a virus as an excuse to murder an innocent girl and order the mass-extermination of her fellow villagers. Why? To feel like a god. Even if her plans get foiled in two arcs, one thing that remains consistent was that she murdered said girl's parents in the back story.
- Teppei Hojo, Satoko's uncle, is in all timelines a vile and disgusting human being. He abuses his niece, physically and emotionally, and to top it off, he's also a swindler, and he and his girlfriend Rina's latest intended victim is Rena's father. He earns his Karmic Death in two arcs, and is busted by child services in another, which would be nice if they weren't also the arcs the infamous Hinamizawa disaster occurs.
- Divine of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's fits this trope better than any human character in the whole franchise. He manipulates a teenage girl into joining his group, claiming that is a gathering place for Psychic Duelists that have been shunned by society. In truth he is just trying to rebel against those that have discriminated his kind, and seems to enjoy dancing along the Moral Event Horizon. He electrocutes a boy to death, tortures an even younger child in somewhat of a Shout Out to GX, kills the cutie just because she accidentally stumbled across his secret library, and even tries to drown the protagonist and the resident Office Lady.
- Keith White in Project ARMS. He is willingly the head of a research group that uses humans (usually children) as test subjects for painful, unethical, and often deadly experiments. When Alice asks if she and the children could just see the outside world for a second, he hits her. He then has all of the children shot which leads to Alice being shot and merged with an alien lifeform, something which he shows absolutely no sorrow or regret over. When a colleague denounces the experiments as unethical, Keith laughs at him. Then, he later creates multiple child clones of himself and implants them with nanotechnology, causing most to turn into monsters and die painfully. Even later, he shows up taking over Keith Black's body and is is thrilled at the thought of Alice launching a nuclear missile and driving the Jabberwock to blow up America with anti-matter. When Keith Violet tries to talk him out of it, he tosses her off of a building. Top that all off with him kidnapping Katsumi possessed by Alice to get her to be taken over by the ARMS Bandersnatch and freeze the entire world. He kills Keith Blue, his son, with absolutely no remorse.
- Naraku from Inuyasha. Despite the gigantic laundry list of horrible crimes he's committed, they're downplayed by certain sections of the fanbase because of his "nice looks".
- Beatrice from Umineko No Naku Koro Ni is very rapidly ascending the ranks of this. One of the things she did to a defeated opponent was to tie her to a chair and force-feed her the cooked up remains of her relatives, ending with the living, severed head of her daughter as desert.
- She later turns out to be a subversion of this trope, actually.
- Oh trust me, Beatrice isn't exactly a Complete Monster, because she has her Pet The Dog moments. In fact, she likes Maria to the point where Maria is a Morality Pet of sorts to Beatrice. And then later, she's considered an imaginary friend to Natsuhi. Some of the other witches, however, are about as evil as you can get:
- Eva/Eva-Beatrice in Arc 3: Starting with torturing Rosa via killing her over and over again, she decides being as cruel as possible is fun and spends the rest of the arc killing everyone else off while also subjecting them to this fate. She's eventually the only survivor (though her status on whether she actually killed anyone besides Battler is debatable). Then after that Eva makes the only other remaining Ushiromiya's life a living hell just because she won't accept her as her mother, going as far as siccing ANOTHER evil aunt on her, one who wants to make her suffer because she's the daughter of her much-hated sister. And then she encourages said evil aunt to tear apart the last remaining symbols of Maria's innocence in front of her. And after things happen, she shows up to shove a bullet into her brain. Keep in mind, EVA IS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD AT THIS POINT DUE TO HEART FAILURE..
- Lambdadelta: Well first, she's the one who enabled Miyo Takano to get as far as she did back in Higurashi, if the backstory is to be believed. And of course, she now provides the same service for Beatrice, only more directly. And at the end of Arc 3, she very scarily reminds Beatrice of her place. She's determined to keep the game in a TIE, thus screwing over the Ushiromiyas as well. And at the end of Arc 4, she shackles Beato up so she can no longer escape or run away like she did with Maria. Now, the only way Beato can lose is if Battler wins and disproves her existance.
- Bernkastel is the worse among them, though. Starting at the end of arc 4, she ends up with quite a laundry list of horrendous acts. Conspiring with Lambda so that Beatrice is their own personal plaything is the least of these. In arc 4 alone, she sets Ange up to have her life screwed over by Eva, and finds the result amusing. And for all her trouble how does she get rewarded? By being RIPPED APART and presumably left that way. Bern and Lambda even JOKE about it. To top it off, Bern's regret is that she lost a big advantage.
- And of course, she ramps this up in Arc 5. She invokes Decoy Protagonist and Hijacked By Ganon when Battler refuses to play along, and pulls out an actual Expy of Rika to serve as the new Protagonist. A Bitch In Sheeps Clothing who immediately points the finger at Natsuhi, who currently is not having a good day. Which gets WORSE now that being implicated for the murders brings Eva's wrath down on her. She also leads Battler to the Gold Room, which makes him the next successor, adding fuel to the fire regarding his family's stake in the murders. And manages to successfully disprove Beatrice, with Battler unable to help since he's too busy being IMPALED. Then Lambda makes Battler the Golden Sorcerer, effectively cementing him in the role of the 'villian'. And you know what the best moment of this is? Battler and Beatrice's furniture give Erika and her minions the beatdown they deserve. Naturally, Bern revels in this until the point where Erika gets her ass kicked. She even has a smug 'Oh, did I piss you off?' look on her face at times.
- In a slightly different example, Yokoya from Liar Game definitely fits. He doesn't directly kill or hurt anyone, but while everyone else is in the Liar Game to win money to pay back their huge debts, Yokoya has plenty of money, and only plays the game to manipulate people for his own amusement. He couln't care less whether or not people end up with millions of dollars in debt, and will probably be traded as slaves to pay it back. He also used money, fear and distrust to take control over his high school as a teenager. As a matter of fact, this quote pretty much says it all:
"...Some of his actions were dispicable... Suicide when only half way to his goal! He could not be a true dicator... At the end of the day, he's still a failure... I will not become a failure like Hitler. Nothing will stop me from becoming a true dictator. In life... And, of course, in the Liar Game..."
- Szilard and Fermet of Baccano. The first will do anything to gain knowledge, and wants to give people immortality just so that he can absorb them and gain their knowledge and memories. The other, upon gaining regenerative immortality, killed a similarly immortal child repeatedly in incredibly painful ways for an unknown number of years. His excuse for doing this is that they need to learn the limits of their immortality, and he's testing to see if there's a level of damage they can't recover from. That's his excuse, while real reason is simply sadism.
- There are perhaps three Complete Monsters in Naruto:
- Orochimaru: Despite having a somewhat sympathetic original goal (living long enough to see his parents reincarnated), became absolutely unsympathetic for his experiments on 60 infants that resulted in 59 of them dying (only Yamato/Tenzo survived), as well as his...interest in little boys and power, and the way he transmits his soul from body to body, and being the reason for Hashirama's, Tobirama's, and Hiruzen's Fate Worse Than Death.
- Hidan: An Axcrazy Blood Knight whose entire religion thrives on blood and violence, his backstory said he got bored of Hotsprings village's peace and went on a killing spree for the lulz.
- Kakuzu: To keep himself immortal has to rip the hearts out of people to replace his wearing out kind with the Grudge Edge Fear technique, and only cares for money.
- The Big Bad of D.Gray-Man, the Millenium Earl, may at first seem too cheerful and cartoony to be scary. This impression, however, is very quickly corrected as we learn more about him. It's becoming increasingly obvious that he's basically Satan and that there are very good reasons he's the only person in existance that Allen hates.
- Tenzen Yakushiji from Basilisk is the Big Bad of the series, a Complete Monster of a ninja who plays both sides of the conflict between his Iga clan and the Kouga clan for his own sadistic benefit, and whose most heinous moments, especially in regards to Kagerou Kouga and Princess Oboro, make him very much hated. He finally gets his comeuppance when Oboro finally regains her sight and uses her nullifying powers to make Tenzen's Head A Splode.
- Episode 7 of the new season of Darker Than Black has a new Contractor character, Ilya, who is certainly an example of this. Prior to getting his powers, Ilya was a Serial Killer of women. As he himself notes, becoming a superpowered sociopath actually improved his behavior as while before, he was Ax Crazy, now he can kill calmly and painlessly. While not stated outright, Ilya's Remuneration seems to be doodling pictures of murdered women, and he seems to do this of any female character he happens to see.
Comic Books
- Batman has quite a few of these characters in his Rogues Gallery.
- Some depictions of The Joker fall into Complete Monster territory. Like all comic book characters, this depends on the writer (and to some extent the actor in adaptations, with Heath Ledger's take the cruelest of the lot). The Joker tends to bounce around between Harmless Villain, Complete Monster, and Magnificent Bastard like a pinball. He epitomizes the trope Laughably Evil.
- What's so effective about the presentation is how he can go from one end of the spectrum to the other without batting an eye. The Joker crippled Batgirl purely by accident: it didn't matter to him who he shot. He tortures her and humiliates her, all while her father is forced to watch. Later, he tells Batman an old joke. To him, there's no difference.
- I think it's fair to say that the Joker personifies this trope: hell, it's even been stated that when the other DC villains want to scare each other, "they sit around telling Joker stories". When you have a villain so evil he provides Nightmare Fuel for the OTHER VILLAINS, you know you have a Complete Monster.
- It's important not to forget, however, that this entry starts with "some depictions of the The Joker fall into Complete Monster territory". Some of them occasionally show a (slightly) softer side to him or make him somewhat sympathetic- even the classic example of his sadism quoted above was from The Killing Joke, the story which gave him a one hell of a tragic backstory and ended with him almost sadly admitting to Batman that he's incurably insane. And he's often seen as an incredibly awesome character, monster though he be. There's a REASON he's Batman's number 1 rogue.
- Black Mask qualifies, too. His hobby is Cold Blooded Torture.
- The Red Skull, arch-enemy of Captain America and former second-in-command to Hitler in the Marvel Universe. He's so evil that even fellow supervillains like Dr. Doom and Magneto despise him. Though given that Magneto's family were Jewish (and all but him dies in the Holocaust) and Doom's family were
gypsies Romany, it's not surprising that they would dislike the Skull.
- Just to point out the Skull isn't a Nazi any more. It's not that he's got anything against Nazis either. He just thinks he's superior to them. Yes, he's even more arrogant that a group of people so narcissistic they called themselves the "Master Race". And the scary thing is he's only become even MORE evil since renouncing the Nazi cause, not less. The guy didn't just go past the Moral Event Horizon — he IS the Moral Event Horizon. Even sadistic mind rapist Dr. Faustus is disgusted by him.
- However another minion of the Red Skull, Arnim Zola, seems like a complete monster in his own right. He was a Swiss scientist who choose to work for the Nazis to get funds and "test subjects" for his genetics research. Now that's pretty bad, but It Got Worse. He put his mind into a genetically altered body that allowed him to survive into modern times. So now he does things like make Hitler clones and kidnap orphans in order to turn said orphans into genetically altered monsters. Oh also he revived the Red Skull after he died, by transferring his mind into the body of a Captain America clone, ensuring the Skull's evil would contiue.
- WITCH has Will's estranged father who left Will and her mother, Susan, after becoming an evil gambling addicting person. He returns to Will's life briefly to blackmail her mother into giving him a lot of money or he will take Will away from her. Luckily, he's a much more sympathetic person in the animated series.
- Preacher has Marie L'Angell and her henchmen Jody and TC, quite possibly the three most evil and twisted creatures to walk (well, roll) the series (and for a veritable monster island like Preacher, that's saying a lot). To say that the most satisfying thing about the All in The Family Story Arc is seeing these vermin get their well-deserved Karmic Deaths would be a gross Understatement.
- To be specific, Marie L'Angell is the terrifying grandmother of protagonist Jesse Custer. She is takes "controlling" to a new level and views her own family as tools rather than people. Her usual punishment of her grandson Jesse was locking him into an airtight coffin with an air hose, and letting him wallow in his own shit and piss for a week. Then she attempted to kill her daughter Christina for trying to stop it. But the worst of Marie's cruelties is her obsession with "hardening" Jesse by destroying all his non-family ties, including his puppy dog, his girlfriend and and his childhood friend. And his own father.
- Jody and TC are just as bad. Jody is the incredibly cruel Cynical Mentor to the young Jesse, teaching him "lessons" that range from breaking his arm, to crucifying his puppy dog, to shooting Jesse's father in front of him. TC, on the other hand, is a serial rapist and Corrupt Hick who will have sex with anything in his path. He slashed Billy-Bob's throat when the kid caught him raping a chicken (which was darkly comical but became sickening).
- Dr. Destiny in the pages of Sandman where he goes from being just a rather-creepy-but-nothing-really-special supervillain to pure High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
- His Justice League (animated series) appearance seems to take a page off of this.
- Swamp Thing has Anton Arcane who seduces his own niece while possessing her husband's body and then condemns her to Hell.
- Cassandra Nova, who kicks off her first appearance by murdering sixteen million mutants, entirely for the purpose of inflicting pain on Professor X. And then there's her Mind Rape of Kitty Pryde...
- Dr Psycho... oh god, Dr Psycho. He's a rapist, a misogynist, a sadist and a mass murderer. He quite literally has no redeeming features and his only real motive in life is to make as many people suffer as possible. And it's implied he's been like this since he was a child, suggesting he really is just pure evil by nature.
- Spider-Man's archenemy Norman Osborn, the original Green Goblin, became one of these the moment he tossed Gwen Stacy off a bridge (well, Your Mileage May Vary depending on your opinion of Gwen...)
- He definitely reached this point by the time of his Post Clone Saga resurrection though. Spent years torturing Peter, designed a DNA bomb to kill everyone on Earth and, oh yes, he most recently ordered a commercial ariliner full of innocent people shot down... just so he could get at ONE woman. Said woman being a harmless pacifist who has never done a thing to him.
- Carnage, who was never really sane to begin with. As a child he killed his grandmother and pet dog, tortured his mother, killed the head master of his orphanage with a lead pipe and then burned the orphanage down; he became even more insane and murderous after being possessed by the symbiote, and he has no qualms about who he kills... even people he once trusted, including his own henchmen and childhood friends.
- Tomoe Ame's cousin Noriko is known as The Blood Princess. She's had homicidal tendencies since childhood, enjoys humiliating her defeated opponents (especially if her opponent is Tomoe), and uses beheading as a morale booster. She's revealed as Tomoe's half-sister and her considerable rage stems from being rejected by both her stepfather (who she poisoned for being "weak-willed") and Tomoe's father, her biological father (who she stabbed in the back after telling her he would never accept her as his daughter out of respect for their families, and probably because he also suspected her Complete Monstrosity). Naturally, Noriko reveals this information while beating Tomoe up. She later gets a Karmic Death... probably.
- Sin City's violent and hard Anti Heroes are rooted for mainly because the villains they fight tend to be Complete Monsters.
- Kevin is a young cannibal Serial Killer who acts as a hitman for Cardinal Roark when he's not murdering and eating prostitutes — and even worse is that he eats them piece by piece, keeping the women alive as long as possible. What he does to Marv's parole officer Lucille can be summed up in only four words: "He made me watch!!!". However, he gets one of the most gruesome, over-the-top, and yet poetic punishment imaginable from the Heroic Sociopath Marv.
- Roark Junior is the son of a US Senator with the appearance of a handsome young playboy. In reality, he is a sadistic pedophile with a penchant for raping and murdering pre-teen girls. These horrible crimes are covered up by his corrupt Senator father (brother of the aforementionned Cardinal, natch), which means that no one on the police force is willing to take him down until John Hartigan saves his latest victim, Nancy Callahan, and goes through years of prison for it because of the vengeful Senator dad. Near the end, it's revealed that Roark Junior is impotent unless he hears the little girls scream in pain, and that there were hundreds of victims.
- One of the marks of the Iron Age of comics is the increasing spread of cannibalism as a routine feature of supervillains. Ditto for rape.
- Pretty much everyone The Authority fights that isn't a Strawman Political is a Complete Monster.
- Like Kaizen Gamora who destroyed Moscow and was trying to do the same with London and San Francisco because he was bored..
- Kid Miracleman, as reenvisioned by Alan Moore and John Totleben, is both so powerful and so psychotic that his alter ego, the young and innocent Johnny Bates, resists uttering his transformation word. When Johnny finally does so to stop the boys in his group home from raping him, Kid Miracleman tears apart his assailants and momentarily considers sparing the one nurse who'd been kind to him. Then he reconsiders lest people say he's "going soft," and punches off half of her head. And that's just the beginning: he then rampages through London, creating possibly the most visceral Scenery Gorn in history by massacring tens of thousands and desecrating their corpses by draping their flayed skins from clothes lines, creating a chessboard with breasts as pieces, and making a rain of severed hands and feet.
- Ultimate Magneto. In contrast to his noble, at times even heroic mainstream counterpart, he's a coldly calculating genocidal sociopath who has twice attempted to wipe mankind from the face of the earth. He also verbally and physically abused his children (ordering Wolverine to kill his son at one point and later kneecapping him).
- Although to give him his due, the Ultimate Universe is even harsher to mutants than the mainstream one. Ultimate Deadpool and Ultimate Mojo are also completely monstrous: Deadpool gave a speech on TV about how the X-men (who he repeatedly described as "babies") didn't choose to be mutants and were just born that way, before dismissing them and all mutants as animals who deserved to die horribly, while Mojo's plan was to force Professor X to watch them being hunted down and slaughtered by Deadpool and the Reavers for a reality TV show before lobotomising him live on air! (Fortunately they hadn't planned for Spider Man's invention and Xavier took an unspecified revenge on Mojo instead). The Ultimate Universe is generally a lot Darker And Edgier than the classic Marvel universe and Complete Monsters are almost commonplace.
- Willy Pete, from Empowered, was a man once, and is now a fire elemental. But he still has a man's appetites, and satisfies them with rape and killing, which, in his case, are one and the same, thanks to his constantly superheated body.
- And, as we later learn, through cannibalism. Because all normal food is incinerated on contact with him, he resorts to eating superheroes/villains. The worst part is that he doesn't even need to eat, he just does it because he likes the taste.
- Oh, and he still manages to top himself at the end of volume five. Instant death of ten supers, followed by throwing as much fire as he could through the portal they came through without even knowing what was on the other end, thereby forcing Emp and Mindfuck into a Sadistic Choice from hell? As if the bastard wasn't already bad enough...
- Might as well throw in Mindfuck's older brother who used his powers to force her to cut out her tongue and gouge out her eyes with a rusty pair of scissors and would have made her go after other body parts if Mindfuck hadn't been restrained... Oh yeah, and for extra creepiness, he thought he was helping her by forcing her to use her psychic powers instead of being able to see or speak.
- It is also possible that he's at least partially responsible for Willy Pete's existence: when Mindfuck briefly scanned the latter's mind, she discovered that it was actually a "jumble of neurological hacks and persona fragments"; an "artificial personality". Guess who among the previously mentioned supervillains has a set of psychic powers that explicitly allows doing things like this to others' minds, and is evil enough to actually create such a monster.
- Fables reimagines Hansel as a Holier Than Thou Jerk Ass who tortures and kills women for implied sexual gratification (starting with the witch that tried to eat them), up to and including his own sister. Cue the resident Action Girl...
- Junior in Secret Six. Despite having a Freudian Excuse (it's heavily implied that her father, Ragdoll Sr., molested her as a child), the things that she does don't just cross lines — they come all the way around and cross them again... and again... and again. She's a rapist who's raped men and women alike, she tortures people to death (including a priest), she enjoys using such torture implements as bricks and scissors to murder people, and oh yes, before she kills people, she forces them to choose whether they die or their family dies. If they choose to die, she kills them. But if they say they want their friends and family to die, she tape-records them saying it, butchers them anyway and leaves the body for the friends and family to find, along with a recording of the victim begging her to kill their family instead of them. Complete Monster is an understatement really. She makes the Joker look like a loving and kindly individual.
- While on the subject, Ragdoll Sr. was quite the monster in his own right. He started off as a Golden Age Flash villain with the power to be unusually flexible. In the 1990s Starman series, he was re-imagined as a Manson-esque cult leader who masterminded a killing spree and forced the Golden Age Starman, Green Lantern and Flash to kill him. He came back and started up another cult (who he got bored with and blew up) and eventually got what he deserved in an Injustice Society heist storyline. Oh, and as mentioned before, he molested his daughter (and beat his sons, and hell he probably molested them too).
- It's implied in the dialogue that Ragdoll Sr. only went for girls so the second Ragdoll and his as yet unseen brother were probably safe from that. Though their childhood was still a thing of horror. And oh yes, when Ragdoll Sr. met his now adult son he tried to violently murder him. He's a hell of a guy.
- Pretty much how much of The Punisher's antagonists were written, particularly under Garth Ennis:
- Nicky Cavella is no ordinary mafioso, but murdered his family (including his aunt, although she was molesting him), chopped up and fed a Triad boss's son to him, killed a cop he'd taken hostage, and started the "Up Is Down and Black Is White" arc by digging up and urinating on the skeletons of the Punisher's wife and children, then deliberately sent the video to him. While it succeeded as intended in throwing off the Punisher's self-preservation instinct, former associate Rawlins pointed out that there was no way that mere gangsters could actually take advantage of this. He met his end following a botched attempt to finish the job himself after losing Teresa (sister of a henchman from the first arc), Rawlins, and his entire gang to the Punisher (who'd killed so many of Nicky's men that he couldn't threaten those who wanted out) and O'Brien.
- Rawlins dumped a crewman (killed) and his wife O'Brien overboard to be raped by the Taliban so that his helicopter would be able to stay airborne with him and the drug shipment, activates a terrorist group to hijack an airliner and fly it at the Kremlin as a diversion for another operation, and when he murders Zakharov's right hand man (who seemed along with Zakharov to recognize the snivelling Jerkass underneath the Smug Snake exterior) he taunts the dying bodyguard by vowing to rape his son to death. This doesn't work against the Punisher soon after O'Brien's death, and Rawlins meets a well-deserved end in a Kabul airport restroom.
- There's no way Zakharov doesn't qualify for this trope. When he was having civilians massacred during his stint as a Soviet general in Afghanistan, a woman begged him to spare her baby. His response? He took it and threw it off a cliff. Any claims of his moral superiority to the mercenary scumbag Rawlins dies a horrible death after learning this.
- Which is a bit of a twist since the "Mother Russia" arc (the first story he appears in) sets him up as a Magnificent Bastard. Fridge Brilliance sets in when his quote "He is no more likely to kill millions than me" (referring to the Punisher) takes a whole new meaning when we learn of his Moral Event Horizon.
- There needs to be a nod to the Bulats, father and son Tiberiu and Cristu and their associate Vera. Tiberiu and Cristu were part of an Eastern European militia responsible for ethnic cleansing, slaughtering entire villages until Cristu got the idea to take young women captive. They forced them into sexual slavery and went to the United States to export the business. Tiberiu is a trigger-happy madman who'll kill anyone at the slightest provocation while Cristu and Vera are calculating business types who routinely have the girls raped. What Frank does to these three? Some of the most brutal acts he's ever committed. And it's never been more satisfying.
- The Marvel Universe seems to have a lot of Complete Monsters:
- Bullseye, a Psycho For Hire enemy of Daredevil who not only kills people for pay, but also just for kicks;
- Mister Hyde, a sadistic bully and enemy of The Mighty Thor, Daredevil and The Incredible Hulk who systematically crippled the Avengers' butler Jarvis by breaking him apart one bone at a time;
- The Shadow King, who mentally enslaves his victims and then degrades them by making their bodies do horrible things, when he isn't hatching some diabolical plot that the X-Men have to stop;
- Psyko, an enemy of Sleepwalker who cut out the hearts of at least fourteen women as a Serial Killer before becoming fused with an otherworldly demon who gained the power to viciously Mind Rape his victims and make them Brainwashed And Crazy;
- Purple Man, an old Daredevil villain with the power of Mind Control who was revamped by Brian Michael Bendis into a rapist/serial killer who would force people in restaurants to stop breathing because the noise in said restaurant was bothering him.
- And let's not forget what he did to Jessica Jones and Swordsman...
- Scarecrow (not to be confused with Batman's enemy) the villain who fights Ghost Rider on a regular basis also fits. He is a psychopathic child killer who once murdered a mother and her baby with a pitchfork. But that's not even the worst thing he has ever done. Later on, he tried to make a building out of people by sticking them all together (some were dead and some were alive). When Ghost Rider saw this, he broke every bone in Scarecrow's body and the audience rejoiced.
- Dr. Zander Rice, one of the lead scientists of Weapon X's X-23 project. He has X-23 kept in a padded room except during training sessions or assassination missions, almost kills her with radiation poisoning to trigger her healing factor at the age of seven, and surgically removes her natural claws one at a time, coats them with adamantium, then reimplants them (all of this without anesthesia) at the same age. He develops a pheromone "trigger" that activates her berserker rage and uses it to get X-23 to kill her martial arts instructor, and leaves her behind on a mission to be killed after he murders the other members of the team so he can claim they were taking fire and had to retreat. After X-23 shows back up alive, Rice then manipulates the head of the X-23 project, who had raised Rice after his father's death, into granting Rice control of the project, at which point Rice then sends X-23 to kill the man, his wife and son - even though Rice knows the boy is his son, from an affair between Rice and the wife before her marriage (X-23 leaves the child alive). Upon taking over the project, he begins the development of embryos X-24 through X-50, which he intends to sell to the highest bidders, and then taints the one remaining person X-23 cares about, the project scientist who was her surrogate mother, with the trigger pheromone, which causes X-23 to fatally injure the woman - just as she was about to take X-23 and disappear after destroying the project complex. Rice's reasoning for all of this? His father, who worked on the original (Wolverine) Weapon X project was killed by Wolverine when he escaped, and Rice held X-23, who is Logan's genetic double, responsible for Wolverine's killing of his father. Somehow, X-23 kicking the shit out of him and his dying doesn't quite balance the scales...
- Karima has her moments too.
- The Plutonian in Irredeemable, after his Face Heel Turn, seems to be determined to be the biggest one of these he can be. The essential purpose of the book is to ask the question of "what would happen if Superman suddenly turned evil'? Given how the first thing we see him do is murdering a mother and her baby, and that's not even the first thing he's done to cross the Moral Event Horizon, the answer seems to be 'he'd fit in this trope pretty nicely, actually'.
- Dr. Arthur Light was retconned into a complete monster in the Identity Crisis crossover. He was Hand Waved from a goofy Harmless Villain, into a serial rapist who violently raped the completely innocent Sue Dibny, just because he was a petty asshole who wanted to torment the heroes by brutalizing their loved ones.
- Dominga Salvador (aka the Senora) from Anita Blake. In order to stop the rampage of a zombie killer, Anita tries to enlist the aid of this powerful voodoo priestess, but discovers she has been taking souls and forcing them back into their dead bodies to stop the process of rotting, but at the cost of leaving the souls painfully aware of their situation in an And I Must Scream scenario. To prove her theory, she explains to Anita how she returned the soul to a zombie, then took it out to leave it to rot, then put it back into the body to see if it will stop decay. Not only does she use these zombies to make money in the prostitution ring, under the excuse that she has legal possession of the bodies from families who paid to see them suffer, but plans to sell her knowledge to the highest bidder. "Amoral, cold-hearted bitch" doesn't even begin to describe this woman.
- The Duke of Lorraine from Rex Mundi. At first Lorraine seems a decent guy, if a bit harsh with his dead wife, his daughter hating him and trying to win the affections of heroine Genevieve. He soon reveals himself as a vicious monster who masterminds a murderous secret society for the purpose of seizing power in France and launching a bloody crusade to conquer all he can, expelling or just murdering Muslims, massacring anyone who stands in his way and launching bloody pogroms of 'unfit' minorities. (Nazi allegories very much in effect). Lorraine crosses the Moral Event Horizon from the massacres he orders, then by ruthlessly shooting the PREGNANT Genevieve when she reveals the child she's carrying is hero Julien Sauniere's.
- Tujiro of the Grendel comics is a mass-murdering Japanese Vampire/Kabuki Actor involved in human traffiking and a recurring villain for the Grendels. Arguably the Grendels, particularly Hunter Rose can qualify for this status.
- Felix Faust. Let's just say he puts the "Evil" back into Evil Sorcerer. Selling his own infant son's soul in a bid for power, killing little girls in another bid for power, defiling the remains of a hero to manipulate a widower into helping him to escape imprisonment, raping the widower's resurrected wife...he's done all of that and probably worse. Even Neron was disgusted by this guy.
- Tao from Wildstorm Universe. This guy was one of the few who predicted The End Of The World As We Know It, and what did he do? He brainwashed the two most powerful beings on Earth, and turned them into his sex-slaves just to make sure they would not try to push Reset Button. And that's not even the worst thing he ever did.
- The Four from Planetary. They slayed a whole alternate dimension to make it their armory. And their leader is ReedRichards mixed with Doctor Mengele.
- Eddie Blake a.k.a. The Comedian from Watchmen might qualify, even though his job was to take down Complete Monsters and other villains. Among his acts of evil include the beating and attempted rape of Silk Spectre I, and killing a pregnant woman who was carrying his child! He's dead before the comic even begins, and he's killed not out of revenge, but because he knew about Adrian Veidt's plans and Veidt was afraid he'd talk. Despite this, he's widely hated by just about everybody else in the comic, and the only one who seems to care at all that he's dead is Rorschach.
- Baron Wolfgang Von Strucker, the leader of HYDRA. As if being the leader of the most evil terrorist organization in the Marvel Universe wasn't bad enough, he recently confirmed his Complete Monster status when he heard that his new ally Norman Osborne had recently killed Strucker's son. Strucker simply said that now he owed Osborne another favor. Oh, and he's also a Nazi.
- Major Force, the Evil Counterpart of Captain Atom. The guy responsible for one of the most infamous Women In Refrigerators incidents in comics (the Trope Namer in fact). He murdered Kyle Rayner's girlfriend and stuffed her body in a refrigerator for Kyle to find. His idea of a joke? Pretending to do the same thing with Kyle's mother by putting what looked like her severed head in an oven. He's pretty much the worst possible person to choose for a military experiment that turns humans into powerful immortal Energy Beings. Then again, the guy who nominated him for the experiment, General Wade Eiling, was a pretty big bastard too, though a magnificent one.
- The Crucible from Knights Of The Old Republic is composed of these guys. Bar'injar, who takes a sort of perverse pride in the Crucible's High Octane Nightmare Fuel training methods, Chantique, who mindrapes Zayne, forces him to kill thereby tarnishing his goodboy innocence, strangles a guy, and shows a disturbing lust for violence. It's also implied that all of the atrocities she commits are simply designed to get revenge on Jarael, and Snout, who is a self confessed killer. The tragic thing about Snout is that he isn't motivated by sadism; he's just so broken and hopeless that he's pretty much resigned himself to the role the Crucible created for him; he doesn't want to be a killer, he just sees no other way out.
- Then there's Demagol, the Mandalorian genetecist who practically doubles as a torturer, to the point where the Mandalorians - a society which has no qualms about fighting wars for the sake of glory or killing for money - basically use his name as a stand-in for 'complete monster'.
- The Garth Ennis miniseries Crossed, from Avatar Press, mixes Zombie Apocalypse with this trope. A plague turns infected humans into unrestrained monsters determined to act out their darkest desires while retaining all their knowledge and intellect. In one scene a group of infected rape half their captives before imprisoning them in a shipping crate, knowing that watching the results of the infection and the captives turning on each other will be more entertaining.
- Sabretooth, the Evil Counterpart and former Arch Enemy of Wolverine. He may be the only person in the 616 Marvel Universe who enjoys killing people more than Bullseye. In one issue of Deadpool he had killed a bunch of people for fun. Bad enough. Then it was revealed that he had kept a little girl in a closet that he was saving for later. Even the possibility that his homicidal nature might be part of his mutation doesn't excuse his actions. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Sabretooth embodies everything ordinary humans hate and fear about mutants. Thankfully, he receives a very Karmic Death. First, he gets Mind Raped by Romulus and made into his bitch. It's so bad that Sabretooth ends up begging Wolverine to kill him. Wolverine gladly does so, beheading him with a magical katana that negates his Healing Factor, killing him for good.
Fan Fic
- Alexia from The Return who uses Mind Rape as a recruitment tool, turning unwilling humans into her compliant, loving, daughter Succubi and then gleefully abuses, discards and uses them as Cannon Fodder, after all it doesn't matter is they die she can always make more.
- A deviantArt Fan-Sequel/canon-break to Captain N, The New Captain N, turns Ganon into one of these as soon as he is released from the realm of the dead. The first thing he does upon getting out? Crush a 6-year-old Bowser Jr.'s skull. And laugh about it. While Bowser watches.
- Max (upon seeing Ganon destroy the great fox: Why did you do that!!?? They weren't even in range to attack you!!
- Ganon: Eh, I was bored.
Film
- Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit who kills Toons for sadism.
- Jonathan Doe from Se7en is the epitome of this trope and possibly the most twisted and disturbing Serial Killer in cinematic history. The reasons for his actions defy all understanding, his torture/rape/murders are completely horrifying (and the last one is inexcusable from any standpoint). Because it would be unimaginable to actually show these crimes onscreen, only the gruesome aftermath is seen.
- Oddly, the graphic novel based on the movie, told mostly from Jonathan Doe's point of view, reveals him to have sympathetic traits despite being a monster. Definitely worth reading for fans of the movie.
- He chose the obese man and the prostitute only because they disgusted him. Two of Jonathan Does's murders stand out as especially horrible - one was strapping a man to his bed for a year, keeping him conscious and (barely) alive through the ordeal, until he has deteriorated into something less than human. And I Must Scream doesn't begin to describe it. The other one was forcing a man (who went insane from the trauma) to put on a strap-on dildo with an attached knife blade, and gore a prostitute with it raping her to death.
- Normally, it would be gratuitous to put Serial Killer villains from horror movies on this page, but John Doe's torture-killing spree is so shockingly horrible that he earns a place. All his actions are later contrasted against his kind face and Dissonant Serenity.
- The Scorpio Killer from Dirty Harry, with his nerve-screeching laugh, smug, cowardly demeanor (I have the right to a lawyer!) and his sick sense of fun. His worst act is when he kidnaps a 14-year-old girl, hides her in a well with limited oxygen supply and sends the police a message that if ransom money doesn't drop in time, the girl will die. Scorpio then proceeds to tell Harry Callahan that he changed his mind and is going to let the girl die anyway. When the girl is found, she's dead (and it's strongly implied Scorpio repeatedly raped her). Later Scorpio captures a schoolbus full of children, planning to kill them all. Callahan, already disgusted with Scorpio getting away with his crimes, decides to take justice in his own hands.
- Warden Norton in The Shawshank Redemption, especially after he has Tommy murdered and he gives Andy Dufresne a month in sensory deprivation. After he breaks the news about Tommy and threatens to demolish Andy's beloved library, he sentences the starving and half-mad Andy to isolation for another month just to think about it.
- Amon Goeth of Schindlers List is the classic example of a Complete Monster. Unlike the others on this page, the dead-eyed concentration camp commander has sympathetic moments, a sort of Morality Pet in his heroic friend Oskar Schindler, and comes off as a deeply troubled human being who doesn't cross the Moral Event Horizon until about halfway through the movie. Schindler describes him fondly as "a wonderful crook, who loves money, wine and the ladies", but we are shown a different side to Amon - and the scariest thing about him is how completely irrational and unpredictable his cruelty is. The most infamous moment is either when he sends away trainloads of Jewish children to be gassed (while laughing at the crying parents), or when he goes out on his villa balcony at morning with a sniper rifle, and starts shooting random Jews only for sport.
- The really creepy bit comes if you do some research about Amon Goeth and realise the film actually downplayed what a sadistic monster he was by a whole lot. In real life, he had a fondness for horrific torture and making sick children eat their own diarrhea before shooting them. He invented several tortures of his own in his pastime. Under his villa were several torture chambers, whipping benches and chute-like dungeons so tight that the immobile prisoners could only stand in their own piss and shit. One of the survivors later said "When you looked at Amon Goeth, you saw death".
- Steven Spielberg had many of the living Schindlerjuden ("Schindler's Jews") on hand as consultants for historical accuracy. When Helen Hirsch (Goeth's maid) was on set, she accidentally ran into Ralphe Fiennes in full SS uniform. She was shaking uncontrollably from fear, on the verge of a total hysterical breakdown.
- Made even stranger in a documentary where Goeth's daughter is confronted by how much of a monster he was when Schindler's List came out.
- In that documentary, Inheritance, she meets up with a Holocaust survivor who was Goeth's enslaved maid in the camp, for them both to try and come to terms with what her father was. The trailer alone is heart-wrenching.
- Anton Chigurh of No Country For Old Men certainly fits this trope. He strangled an innocent man to death with cuffs, murdered an old guy for his car, shot both his employers in cold blood because he wanted the money they were chasing after, shot a crying, surrendering man who was hiding in a shower and, in what was his most senselessly cruel act, murdered the dead protagonist's teenage wife only to fulfill a pointless promise to him. Even knowing Anton Chigurh puts you in mortal danger, and the worst thing about him is how he subjects his victims to a bizarre form of Mind Rape and actually convinces them to accept their death. It's easy to see why his partner-in-crime Carson Wells compares him to the Bubonic Plague.
- Brett from Eden Lake is possibly the most evil teenager ever put to screen. A sadistic chav (British young white-trash), he is the ringleader of a teen gang. Brett crosses the Moral Event Horizon when he forces all his "friends", even the youngest ones, to take turns slashing the male protagonist with knives. While he films the whole thing on his mobile to incriminate them. But his worst deed is later when his gang burn the male protagonist on a stake and Brett forces a little Indian boy to light the fire. Then Brett "rewards" the boy by drenching him in gasoline as well and burning him to death for fun. And worst of all, he's a Karma Houdini.
- Brett's father isn't any better and is implied he's the reason Brett is what he is. Other adults in the town are also hinted to be pretty monstrous.
- William Tavington from The Patriot likes to shoot little boys and set churches filled with innocent people on fire. The audience can only cheer when the hero kills him.
What part of Braveheart upgraded Longshanks? It was a downgrade, in the film he murdered a few lords in a barn. In real life he personally butchered an entire city of 20,000 people.
Literature
- Patrick Bateman from American Psycho is possibly a protagonist example. He appears to be a shallow, vain and amoral yuppie. He is actually a sadistic psychopath who enjoys murder, rape and torture. One of the scariest things about him is that he is fully aware of his own madness, but just goes on anyway. Stabbing a homeless man and his dog to death? Skinning a poor girl alive? Killing a child only to see what it feels like? Check, check and check. He may not qualify however, since most murders may take place only in his own mind and he is clearly insane.
- A Song Of Ice And Fire has complex main villains with very understandable reasons, but there are a few repulsive minor villains who are this trope. What gives the series its Black And Gray Morality is that even monsters have their uses, which those in power know all too well. When they are those in power, then those without it have reason to not rise up.
- Ramsay Bolton. Probably the worst one in the series. He is an extremely sadistic young man who enjoys skinning his victims alive for fun. To be specific, he plays a game where he strips the skin off their fingers and lets the exposed flesh fester until the victims bite off their own fingers to relieve the excruciating pain. He also has a penchant for raping girls, killing them, and forcing his mentally-retarded servant to rape the corpses. Infuriatingly, he is a Karma Houdini of the worst kind.
- Considering the fates of characters from A Song Of Ice And Fire listed below, karma probably just waits for an appropriate moment.
- Ser Gregor Clegane. A terrifying giant of a knight, Gregor is a monster fueled by migraine headaches that keep him in a constant state of anger. He is a sexual sadist who takes a sick pleasure in slaughter, torture and especially in rape. Inventing gruesome tortures of his own, Gregor has an extremely black sense of humor. His Moral Event Horizon was burning his little brother Sandor's face in a brazier just because the latter played with Gregor's discarded toy. Another shocking (and fateful) act was when he smashed apart a baby's head against a wall, then raping the mother with his hands still covered in her baby's brains.
- Amory Lorch is Gregor's partner-in-crime and almost as horrible. He murdered Princess Elia's children along with Gregor. To be specific, Lorch stabbed a crying three-year old girl fifty times because she kicked him. Notable for being a Fat Bastard, an incompetent Smug Snake, and getting fed to a bear, although considering how people like above-Gregor use their (much more terrible) abilities, that's probably for the best.
- When it comes to Complete Monsters, teenage King Joffrey Baratheon distinguishes himself even among other Complete Monsters. When he ordered protagonist Eddard Stark's execution For The Evulz, it earned him the readers' eternal hatred. His cruel and prolonged abuse of Eddard's young daughter Sansa, his fiancée, was infuriating as well, and when there was a city-wide hunger, he killed starving people with his crossbow for sport. Not only that but it's implied that he sexually abused his two siblings (Tommen and Myrcella, both of them under ten years old) as well. There is something about the sadistic teenage brat that makes him so much more despicable than the other villains in the series.
- In Murder on the Ballarat Train there is a gang that supplies young orphans to brothels. The worst one is the man who rapes the kids to help break them, considering it all part of his compensation for leaving his previous legitimate job.
- In Murder in the Dark, the sociopathic killer-for-hire (and Self Made Orphan, as it turns out) who trades under the name "the Joker" (no, not that one). A sociopathic Master Of Disguise who sent a coral snake to warn someone to stay away from the scene of his next job, then locked a little girl into a disused outbuilding to die slowly of starvation.
- In Queen of the Flowers, Rose Weston's grandfather, who makes pre-reformation Scrooge look like the Ghost of Christmas Present. Scrooge at least paid his employees' wages, if not generously — Weston was always late in paying wages and prone not to pay at all when servants quit, and topped it off with bad food and terrible working and living conditions, both for the staff and his own family. Not to mention selling his twelve-year-old granddaughter to a partner in an insider trading scam, then conspiring to have her discredited or killed when she became unstable (he doesn't seem to have cared which happened).
- Mike Carey's Felix Castor series includes a number of demon villains (notably Asmodeus and Moloch) who could easily qualify, but more frightening are the human villains, notably Satanist Church founder Anton Fanke and human-trafficking pimp Lukas Damjohn, who deliberately and voluntarily head in this direction every chance they get. While we don't get much background on either, and so aren't in the best position to judge their culpability, they do actively, knowingly, voluntarily and not least happily inflict a level of damage on others that appears to bear no particular relation to anything they themselves may have been through. (And Damjohn, in a psychic flashback by the main character touching him, appears to have positively welcomed his first chance to make others suffer, ultimately gratuitously, in his early childhood, so that he himself could get ahead, during the Balkan conflicts.)
- Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar from Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. As we read more and more scenes with them, we realize just how despicable and terrifying these two truly are. And to put that in perspective, in their first scene, Vandemar eats a rat. Alive. This is minor. One notable example among many is the cold-blooded murder of Door's entire family, especially that of the mother in front of her young daughter before (presumably) disposing of her as well.
- Darken Rahl from Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series buries a kid up to his neck in sand, starves him, kills him by pouring molten lead down his throat and then turns him into a hellbeast mount to ride into the underworld. And that's only the first thing we see him do, since Wizard's First Rule is a Doorstopper, and part of a long series of same.
- And, to top it all off, his chief henchman is a prolific rapist and murderer of young boys; it was only at Rahl's insistence that the boy in the above example was brought to him undefiled.
- In fact, most of the villains appearing in that series qualify. And so, at least according to the Hatedom, do Richard and Kahlan themselves, who are supposed to be the heroes.
- Rasheed from Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. Nasty, violent-tempered, smug, and thoroughly heartless, he spends the entire book ruining the lives of the protagonists in a myriad of ways, such as marrying a 15-year-old and promptly raping her, tricking a 14-year-old into marrying him immediately after her entire family is killed by paying a man to tell her her surviving love interest is dead, beating the tar out of his wives on a daily basis, completely neglecting his daughter in favor of his son, forcing one of his wives to eat pebbles because he thought her rice was undercooked, shoving a gun into the mouth of one of his wives, and finally trying to strangle her to death. What little sympathy the author tries to create for him by letting us know his first son died is quickly dashed away when it's implied that his own drunken neglect probably caused it.
- And when his wives try to run away, he tells the younger that if she ever tries it again, he will kill his other wife (her only friend) and her daughter in front of her. And she knows he's not joking, because he's just put them all in sensory deprivation rooms in the blistering heat with no water for three days.
- Could we mention Assef from Hosseini's other novel, The Kite Runner, as well? I mean, he rapes Amir's servant, Hassan, because he wouldn't give him a fucking kite, then goes on to be a member of the Taliban, where he takes small children from orphanages to become sex slaves, and on top of all that, he actually admires Adolf Hitler! Yeah, this little psychopath crosses the Moral Event Horizon by the first time we meet him.
- Darth Bane in Drew Karpyshyn's Darth Bane Trilogy. When dying of poison, he forces a healer to medicate him by threatening to drop the man's young daughter into a pot of boiling water. Later, he manipulates Kaan, the leader of the Brotherhood of Darkness, into using an inherently suicidal Force technique that kills the entire group (plus the vast majority of the Jedi Order), leaving Bane the sole remaining Sith Lord. This is aside from his tendency to kill at the drop of a hat. His apprentice Darth Zannah, however, manages to actually get creepier than her master's evil, destroying a romantic rival's mind with her powers, leaving the woman basically alive but irrecoverably insane in a coma. Oh, and the tiny fragment left of her conscious mind is still somewhere in there, trapped with all her nightmares until her body dies. And showing that she's learned her lessons well, when at a later time Zannah has to go back to that healer to save Bane's life, once he's done so she ends up betraying and murdering him, then driving her cousin insane and leaving him to be slaughtered by the Jedi as "proof" that the last Sith Lord has died.
- Judge Holden from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is a perfect example. He is probably the worst Complete Monster on this whole page. A complete list of all his horrendous atrocities - especially his crimes against children - would fill up several pages, but the scariest thing about him is his intelligence. The other mercenaries are barbaric killers, but the intellectual Judge is so terrifying because he has an inner peace. He understands what is happening and knows how wrong it is, but he still is the driving force behind the gang's destruction of everything in their path.
- Another chilling thing is how he sees tiny things that the reader wouldn't notice. The Kid went along with the rest of the group in their brutality, but the Judge noticed that "in a corner of your soul, you alone had some clemency for the heathens". So he decided to destroy him.
- Glanton is a close second, being the psychopathic leader of a gang of scalphunting mercenaries. The scene where Glanton shoots an old woman in the head only because she stood there, is really disturbing. He later leads the rape and slaughter of countless innocents, saying: "If we don't kill every last nigger here, we deserve to get whipped and sent home."
- Cormac McCarthy uses this one a lot: guess who penned the original novel No Country For Old Men?
- Carcer from the Discworld novel Night Watch is definitely one of these. I can see your house from up here....
- Jonathan Teatime. Oh dear god... never mind the fact he's a Self Made Orphan, what's terrifying is that he honestly doesn't understand his sadistic behavior is WRONG. He sees no difference between having a friendly chat with a man and stabbing him to death. Even hardened criminals who've earned their reputation on murder are horrified by him. If he is sent to kill someone, he will mercilessly slaughter them, their family, and their pets. Oh, and his name is pronounced "Te-ah-tim-eh". And don't you ever forget it!
- Although contrary to all his other actions, he only gets mildly annoyed when people mispronounce his name.
- Wolfgang Von Uberwald from The Fifth Elephant is pretty despicable. Before the book starts, he murders his little sister Elsa, because she isn't a full werewolf, and as such is "impure". Oh, and his favourite game is hunting humans through a forest, and giving them the illusion that they've escaped before ripping them to shreds. He doesn't give a damn about all the political power he and his family can gain through the civil unrest, he just likes being a sadistic bastard. Then he messed with Vimes...
- Lorenzo the Kind, the last king of Ankh-Morpork. We learn little details of him, apart from that "he was very...fond of children" and having "devices for ..." in his dungeons.
Murdered executed put down like a rabid dog by Old Stoneface, ancestor of Commander Vimes. Though we do learn these 'details' several centuries after the fact from the fanatically anti-monarchist Sam Vimes (who would't lie but who definitely has a partisan approach to history).
- Going back to Night Watch, Captain Swing (chief of the Unmentionables) and his (unnamed) Torture Technician.
- Who, of course, hired Carcer.
- Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter is a domineering and abusive matron figure who forces misbehaving students to cut up their own skin. She goes from annoying to so repulsive that many readers despise her far more than the series' Big Bad.
- And The Film Of The Book turned it up to eleven with the magnificent performance of actress Imelda Staunton. She played such a despicable character so believably that she gave the viewers urges to leap through the screen and punch her to make her stop giggling.
- Though what may be the most disturbing thing about the character is how believable she is. Voldemort is completely ridiculous. Umbridge is someone you might encounter when dealing with a bureaucracy. She's the Queen of Nightmare Fuel because you can see yourself being oppressed by her.
- We also find her in the last book, sweetly threatening to destroy the souls of people who resist arrest for the crime of being Muggle-born. There's something about the casual evil of the woman that makes her more repulsive than even Voldemort.
- It says alot about you when you are more hated than the Big Bad who is basically HITLER with a snake fetish.
- But let's not let Voldemort off the hook here. He is a total sociopath who started a genocidal war against Muggle-borns, voluntarily split his own soul into a "lucky seven" parts using the murders he committed, and a perfect example of a Complete Monster. He's just such an archetypal villain that he's harder to hate with the passion fans reserve for Umbridge.
- And he gets even worse in the later books, as his magical transformations and soul-mutilations have taken a toll on his mind, driving him pretty much completely Ax Crazy.
- How about Fenrir Greyback? It's one thing for a werewolf to go helplessly violent in wolf form; it's another to bite people in human form just for the pleasure of ruining their lives. He is responsible for Lupin being a werewolf, and doesn't get a real comeuppance, either (well, aside from being killed in the end). Not to mention that his obsession with biting children has disturbingly pedophilic overtones and he's heavily implied to engage in full-blown cannibalism too.
- Bellatrix Lestrange, a psychotic female Death Eater who seems to be motivated primarily by her desire to inflict as much pain on as many people as possible - except Voldemort, on whom she has an obsessive crush. Bellatrix' insanity makes her an unfettered case of The Fundamentalist, and while Voldemort is a coldly unfeeling mass murderer, Bellatrix is gleeful cruelty incarnate. She has a special fondness for torturing people with the Cruciatus curse, sometimes to the point of driving them insane from the pain. Actually, the depictions of her passion at points would almost produce some empathy for her. But that emotion is so horribly misguided that it only emphasizes her monstrosity.
- Take any villain, any villain from anything written by the Marquis de Sade and you've got yourself a Complete Monster on an epically horrific scale. It's not just them, either. When it comes to the likes of the Marquis de Sade, the complete monsters often aren't the villains. Hardly surprising for a man whose name gave rise to the word 'sadism'.
- Bob Ewell from To Kill A Mockingbird. Search long and hard for a redeeming quality: you'll find absolutely none.
- Jake Featherston and Jefferson Pinkard in Harry Turtledove's Timeline 191 series, being Alternate History Expys of Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann. They are responsible for exterminating America's black population. Making it all the more unnerving is that both are fairly sympathetic characters when first introduced, and their evolution into those roles comes as quite a nasty shock.
- The Emergents from Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky are led by one Tomas Nau. As part of their defeat of the rival Qeng Ho, Nau rapes and murders their fleet commander in front of her daughter. He then has her mind-wiped and charms her into falling for him. Every so often, because the mind-wipe is imperfect, Qiwi remembers what happened and tries to kill Nau. He then has her scrubbed and starts the process again. This continues for decades.
- Francis Begbie from Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting kicked his pregnant girlfriend in the groin repeatedly when she questions him, and shows no regret. The chapter "The Glass" depicts Begbie casually throwing his pint glass off a balcony and splitting open a woman's head, only so he can start a bar brawl.
- The book deconstructs this. Renton: "Begbie wisnae the main hard cunt in those days, jist one contender. He wis a lot mair easy-going before he began believing his own - and it must be said, our - propaganda aboot him being a total psychopath".
- Johnny Wulgaru, alias Johnny Dark, alias John Dread, alias John More Dread, from Tad Williams' Otherland series. His Freudian Excuse explains why he is a sociopathic Serial Killer, but not in a way that would provide him with any sympathy whatsoever. He even manages to pull an Eviler Than Thou on his employer, Corrupt Corporate Executive Felix Jongleur, at which point he launches into an orgy of virtual destruction that might have led to Omnicidal Maniac territory if he hadn't been stopped. At the end of the series, his Convenient Coma strikes the other characters as a Karma Houdini. (They're wrong.)
- Sunlight Gardener in The Talisman. Brainwashing children is probably the least despicable thing he does.
- The Warrior Cats series has had no fewer than three complete monsters thus far: Brokenstar, Tigerstar, and Scourge. It says something about the other two when the series' Big Bad can arguably be described as the tamest example of the three. Scourge is probably the worst, being a mass-murderer who wears the teeth of his victims as trophies and reinforces his claws with sharpened dog's teeth, and leads a massive gang of stray cats calling themselves BloodClan, who as a group also have a reputation for extreme violence.
- Scourge is especially noted as a Complete Monster when he uses his reinforced claws to hurt Tigerstar, the original Big Bad, so terribly that he dies thrashing and gurgling in agony nine times in a row, all the while watching as if the moment was as mundane as grooming his fur.
- The Markhagir from Kushiel's Avatar fits this trope chillingly well. He practices sexual torture, mutilation, degradation of all kinds, and is just overall a master at tormenting people psychologically as well as physically. Has an entire priesthood to back him up, too. The author makes it clear, though, that while he may have supernatural evil on his side, the Markhagir is the product of human atrocity.
- Two examples from The Lonely Winds
 : the Crown of Thorns and Terek Domar. The Crown is a vicious bitch of a vampire who seems to enjoy being sadistic and playing mind games with the heroes for the hell of it. Terek Domar is a dragon that has done things like casually kill several dozen mentally ill people, then laugh raucously afterward.
- Pryrates in Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series fills this role admirably. His very first appearance to the protagonist has him crush a puppy to death beneath his boot, and it only gets worse from there. He engineers wars and betrayals, gleefully tortures innocents, and literally sells his king's soul for power. Even the Big Bad is painted as sympathetic to a certain extent, but not Pryrates.
- Falcone from the Warchild Series is a perfect example. In the books' setting, piracy is already a pretty explicitly evil tactic — preying on innocent merchant ships just trying to get from point A to point B. But Falcone takes it to another level by slaughtering everyone on the ships he boards, then blowing the ships to pieces to ensure no survivors... oh, except for the children he captures to then sell as slaves. Except for the ones he keeps for himself and abuses in every way your mind can possibly think up. Even after his death, he manages to be a complete monster in flashbacks. And this is in a series where everyone is a little edgy.
- Gretchen Lowell, the Big Bad of Chelsea Cain's Archie Sheridan series. She's quite fond of making her victims swallow Drano.
- Martin Vanger in the Swedish Millennium trilogy. Martin is the likeable CEO of a family corporation, but troubled since his sister vanished long ago. He is a nice guy and even saves the protagonist's life in the movie. But in the end, Martin reveals his true colors: he is a serial killer who has been torturing, raping, and murdering hundreds of women since he was a teenager. His chilling explanation is: "This is every man's innermost dream. I take what I want."
- Dostoyevsky's Devils (AKA Demons or The Posessed) has one or two monsters. The first one is Pyotr Verkhovensky. His ambition is to become the Evil Overlord of a utopia of slavery, and wants his circle of revolutionaries to join him. Shigalyov, written as the antithesis of Christian values, is horrified by Pyotr's hijacking of his political philosophy. Pyotr is also rather an Omnicidal Maniac who decides to incite rioting in his town, defaces an icon (which gets him chewed out by murderous ex-con Fedka), and humiliates the old writer Karamzinov at a party. He always plays himself as a simple, curious fool, able to worm his way into people's trust. But probably his most Magnificent Bastard moment, and the one that made him stand out, is his twisting of Calling The Old Man Out. His father, Stepan Trofimovich, is a tutor for the rich Varvara Stavrogina and also carries a little torch for her, having written and hidden some love letters. So Pyotr reads the love letters in front of his father and Varvara, making it seem as if Stepan only sought a job with her to marry her and have her money, which gets Stepan fired and kicked out of the house. At the end of the book, after the dust settles and several characters are dead, we find out what happens to Pyotr. He just leaves. Karma Houdini perfected. Good lord what a monster. And the second monster? Stavrogin, according to a deleted chapter where he confesses to raping an 11-year-old girl, who then committed suicide, upon which Stavrogin was surprised to have felt no emotion at all. Ugh.
- David Weber does Even Evil Has Standards very well, with honorable enemies who put Honor Before Reason and really aren't that bad. Then, you get the Masadans, who raped several dozen female prisoners to death and enjoyed it, as well as Honor's jailors later in the series, who strip searched her every day in front of male guards after burning out the prosthetic nerves in her face. None of those, however, even came close to Saint-Just, who calmly detonated a nuke in the middle of a large city to destroy his opposition, made all the worse by the fact that he seemed a Magnificent Bastard at first and degenerated from there. Fortunately, Weber also does the Karmic Death exceedingly well.
Thomas Theisman: I think we've had quite enough of those kind of trials. Goodbye, Citizen Chairman.
- Lijah Cuu from the Gaunts Ghosts series at first simply established himself as a scary, Ax Crazy soldier with a mean streak a few light-years across. However, it isn't until The Guns of Tanith that his true nature is revealed, when he rapes and kills a civilian woman and then kills Bragg for reporting him. Then, in Sabbat Martyr, he kills Colm Corbec while trying to kill Saint Sabbat.
- Granted, he was under the influence of Pater Sin's psykers when he tried to assassinate Sabbat, but that needed something to latch on to, like an already-present desire for some Murder-Death-Kill.
- And who can forget Straight Silver, where he almost beats Larkin (who is a relatively old man) to death for defending an innocent old lady, and later on when Cuu finally attempts to revenge-kill Larkin while he was defenceless and in the middle of a seizure, he ends up murdering Sehra Muril, a fellow Ghost who catches him red-handed. This just reinforces the fact that Cuu is an absolute Fething Bastard.
- Saren in the novel Mass Effect: Revelation, the prequel to the video game, is a pure amoral monster - his character is actually softened in Mass Effect.
- Rosie's husband Norman in Stephen King's Rose Madder. Setting aside for a moment the fact that he's been beating and sexually abusing Rosie for fourteen years, including causing her to miscarry, and that when she escapes, he determines to hunt her down and torture her to death, and that he tortures and occasionally rapes and murders the people who lead him to her, and that he has murdered before, he is also a racist, sexist, homophobic creep who thinks all feminists are lesbians and despises one of his victims as soon as he finds out he's Jewish. His feelings about women are summed up in the fact that when he is in disguise and has to come up with the name of a woman who's protected him, he uses the first and last names of his two favourite porn actresses. When he finally meets his admittedly gruesome fate, there is no chance that the reader feels any sympathy for him.
- More recent Stephen King example - Selectman Jim Rennie from Under The Dome.
- Dilaf in Brandon Sanderson's Elantris. He's introduced as Hrathen's slightly loony sidekick, but it gradually becomes apparent that the guy is much more clever- and much more evil- than he appears. By the end of the book he's revealed to be a superpowered warrior monk (and The Dragon to the theocratic emperor ruling half the continent), who thinks nothing of sacrificing his own men so that he acquires the power to teleport somewhere he could have walked in fifteen minutes. It turns out he blames the Elantrians for the death of his wife, but he loses any sympathy when we find out his plan- to commit the genocide of everyone in the kingdoms of Arelon and Teod, just because any of them might become and Elantrian someday. When Hrathen finally decides he's had enough and strangles Dilaf, it's truly a moment for the audience to cheer.
- Lord Foul from The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant is the Complete Monster (almost literally, as he's the Anthropomorphic Personification of hatred on a cosmic scale). He has to destroy the mortal world in order to free himself from it, but it's heavily implied by the fact that he was imprisoned for corrupting it in the first place that he'd do so anyway out of sheer sadism.
- Valentine Day in the highly obscure The Book That Is Not Written easily makes the grade. An assassin who never actually spends any of the money he's paid to kill but rather takes the job because he knows his employers will cover up his actions, leaving him free to kill again and again. The worst part is that, while his employers The Last Gate are pretty horrendous, they're doing what they do out of misguided hope for a better world. Valentine isn't driven by love, hate, revenge, or anything human. Protagonist Eduardo sums it up best:
He doesn't feel. Not pain, not emotion, not the barest stirrings of empathy. The eyes are the window to the soul, they say, and having looked into his, I can state he doesn't have one. His desire to kill cannot even be called a desire. It is simply the only thing he does. It is as natural to him as breathing.
- And to make it worse, at book's end, given a choice between forcing the main character's loved one to die in a fire and saving himself and therefore giving her the opportunity to escape, he chooses to remain and burn to death with her. He finds an agonizing end more bearable than the thought of letting someone live.
- Dr. Victor Helios, aka Frankenstein (Yes, that one), in the Dean Koontz' Frankenstein trilogy. Plans to knock off humanity and replace them with a New Race of his design, emotionally stunted and beholden only to him. He specifically patterns his plans after Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. He regularly abuses and kills off his creations when they displease him (or just For The Evulz), and denigrates everything most people consider part and parcel of being human. Also counts as Light Is Not Good, given that his alias is the Greek word for the sun. The "monster", by contrast, is a being struggling for humanity despite the darkness of his origins.
- He's made his own wife, genetically tailoring her to his 'standards', including allowing her (unique among his creations) to feel shame so that, when he sexually abuses her, he can have the full satisfaction of dominating her in every way possible. All of Victor's creations have a remarkable rate of recovery and are nigh immortal, which mean that he can slap his wife around, breaking her bones and bruising and cutting her, and she'll be fully recovered in a few hours, in time to be socially presentable at a dinner party. Oh, and saying 'her' here is a bit misleading: each time the wife proves "flawed" in some way (the fourth one's major flaws were reading books and slurping her soup), Victor kills her off and builds a new one, "improving" on the model.
- There's a scene in the second book where we see Victor going into the back room of a Chinese restaurant in order to sample a particular delicacy: live day-old mice, which are dipped into a vat of boiling oil and eaten. It is stated that he resorts to such barbaric extremes in taste largely because he is bored.
- Nefarian Serpine, from the Skulduggery Pleasant series of books. Geez, where do I begin with this guy? He was The Dragon of an evil wizard who started a war to revive Eldritch Abominations, and he killed the protagonist's family then tortured him to death. However, after the guy somehow manages to come back to life and leads his side of the war to victory, Serpine double crosses his old buddies by becoming The Mole and selling everyone out to get his own ass out of the fire. This, just so many years later he can get his hands on a super-powerful Mac Guffin to start everything from scratch and kill everyone who even looks at him funny. It doesn't help that he only uses said Mac Guffin on real powerful people because it kills them very fast and painlessly, while he prefers to kill everyone else in the most slow and painful way possible.
- Several characters from The Dresden Files. These include Nicodemus, a 2000 year old psychotic who tortures people because he gets more powerful for every person he tortures. And his long-term goal is jump-starting the apocalypse. Really, all the Denarians count, but Nick stands out.
- Don't forget the vampires of the Red Court. They eat babies and innocent children, and kidnap attractive women to unwillingly put into mind-controlled prostitution.
- What really makes Nick horrible is how polite he is about everything. His wife Tessa is Chaotic Evil and Ax Crazy, but her bloodbaths are nowhere near as scary as his quiet, well thought-out atrocities.
- The Duke of Ch'in in Bridge Of Birds. He's introduced as a tyrant who only cares about money and power. Seems like your standard villain characterization, but wait, there's more. The protagonists find out that the Duke tricked three gullible handmaidens into giving the feathers of the Princess of Birds' crown to him (thus rendering her unable to meet her lover in Heaven) and then murdered them so that they couldn't ask for them back, so that he could become immortal. But wait, there's more! The Duke then drowned an entire city just to be able to hide his Soul Jar there. But wait, there's more! The three aforementioned handmaidens? The Duke cursed them to guard his Soul Jar, essentially binding them to protect their murderer's heart for eternity. At this point, readers will be heartily agreeing with Ten Ox's declaration that the Duke "must have the coldest heart in the world!" (If he even has a heart, that is...)
- O'Brien from Nineteen Eighty Four. A deranged, sadistic Torture Technician who provides one of the most terrifying Mind Rape sequences in all time, unflinchingly.
- His superior, Big Brother, is presumably one as well, assuming he actually exists. Even if he doesn't, he's still the avatar of what's basically the Complete Monster of political systems. For that matter, we can really throw in all high-ranked members of the Party responsible for its existance.
- Simon Legree is a sociopath and a sadist. He is brutal to his slaves, makes no bones about the fact that he works them to death — it's cheaper, he says, but it's clear he'd do it For The Evulz anyway — and he endeavors to drag them across the Despair Event Horizon, too. Not only does he fail to break Tom, but Tom revives good and hope in some of the other slaves on Legree's plantation.
- Spoilers ahoy! After his reappearance, Steve Leonard in The Saga Of Darren Shan. Between seducing the hero's sister in order to get her pregnant and use his son as a bargaining chip against Darren, and snapping the neck of Evra's son, he's an all-round unrepentant scumbag, and loves every moment of it.
- The Domination of the Draka is an entire nation of these. How bad is it? Well, in the first book, Marching Through Georgia (as in the country in the Caucus Mountains), the average person WILL be rooting for the Nazis, the lesser of two evils (for example, the Nazis didn't enslave hundreds of millions of people or execute dissidents by impalement). What's worse they end up conquering the entire world.
- Count Olaf from A Series Of Unfortunate Events. The things he does to everyone that crosses him or simply would be more convenient dead - for the sake of snatching a fortune from innocent children, one of which he's got a clear Scarpia Ultimatum on - make him one of the creepiest villains in young adult fiction.
- Baron Ryoval from the Vorkosigan Saga is such a Complete Monster that even other Jacksonians find him repulsive. He has his own father murdered, takes over the family business, then wipes out the rest of the family — by assassination in the case of the men, by mutilation and sale into sexual slavery in the case of the women and younger boys. And all that's before what he does to Mark ...
- CS Lewis portrays the Devil this way in Perelandra. He's a totally horrible creature who possesses all the intellect and suave charisma of Milton/Marlowe/Goethe's version, but by nature would rather torture small animals to the brink of death (the expression of sheer sadism on his face while he does this is so chilling that the main character faints the first time he sees it) than actually use them. Like some incarnations of the Joker, he seems to find damning entire species and acting like an annoying five-year-old to be equally amusing. Add in the fact that he is a non-human intelligence doing his best impression of the man whose corpse he's possessing (and falling headlong into the Uncanny Valley as a result), and he's one nightmarishly disturbing villain, and a massive deconstruction of Magnificent Bastard Satan.
- Child slave-dealer Genshed in Shardik, who specifically deals in unwanted and deformed children so he can gain a greater profit and use more barbaric methods. Instead of grown-up overseers, he grooms the cruelest of the boys to be his overseers, replacing them only when they kill or damage too many of the slaves (or learn too much). He prides himself on being able to drive children mad without even touching them, though he isn't above physical abuse - chains through the ears, knife blades under the nails or across the eyes, a device called a "flytrap" that keeps the mouth open. He castrates the boys, and it's implied the children in his possession (mostly young ones, under fourteen) are sold as sex slaves of one kind or another. When he learns one boy will be used for begging, he cuts off the boy's hands to make him more valuable, then charges the new owner for the job. The only regret he ever shows is at the loss of a profit. Though he only appears in person for a few chapters, when he gets his face torn off by the title bear, it feels entirely appropriate.
- Virgil Byrnes, the father of the title character in Chris Crutcher's "Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes". He held Sarah Byrnes's face against a burning wood stove when she was three, forced her to tell people she was burned when she pulled a pot of boiling spaghetti on herself, tied her up and wouldn't let her eat, according to Sarah Byrnes, and, in what could arguably be called his Moral Event Horizon, stabs and nearly kills Moby out of pure spite. There is no explanation or justification for anything he does; he's just batshit crazy; even his own kid says so.
Live Action TV
- Any Crime And Punishment or Mystery show show will have at least a few of these, unless they make a point of avoiding them. Among the shows that have been seen to use the trope: Law And Order, Law And Order SVU, Law And Order Criminal Intent, Matlock, NYPD Blue, CSI, CSI Miami, CSI New York, Magnum PI, Homicide Life On The Street, Shark, Veronica Mars, Bones, TheCloser, and the list just goes on and on and on.
- In particular, Criminal Minds is a big offender. Either the serial killer is a great example of this trope, or he's absolutely bonkers.
- Let's be fair. It's a show about serial killers. By definition, the people they chase have to be either a complete monster or completely crazy. Any middle ground—and it's been done occasionally—is a fine, fine line.
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A few several villains in The Shield. But two of them earn a "special" place in the viewes' hearts.
- Armadillo Quintero, the most sickening villain on the show. A young Mexican drug lord, Armadillo is a calm and easy-going guy who likes to stay at home with a book. And a child to rape. After crossing the border, he united two rival Latino gangs under his own command by "necklacking" their leaders with car tires, then drenching them in petrol and burning them alive. But his Moral Event Horizon comes after this - a man he murdered had a cute twelve-year old sister who refused to keep quiet like her family told her. Instead, the little girl went by herself to the police and testified against Armadillo. Later the cops took in Armadillo for questioning, and when he sat alone in the cell for six hours, he found the girl's lost comb and began laughing eerily to himself. He is released for lack of proof, and the same night, the little girl is nowhere to be found. When she finally comes walking home in a daze, Armadillo has raped her and tattooed a dove on her cheek (his calling card; he'd already been mentioned as doing this to a gang member's girlfriend).
- And let's not forget how Armadillo ordered his own brother's murder in jail.
- Antwon Mitchell. Short list? He is a huge drug kingpin who's trying to replace crack cocaine with heroin; he then murders a teenage girl with two police officers' weapons (implicating them in the killing); and finally tries to arrange Vic Mackey's murder, all while doing a convincing job of pretending to be a hardworking, respectable citizen.
- Anubis from Stargate SG 1. He used to be a system lord before he was banished by the other Goa'uld, who considered his actions distasteful even by their evil standards. And if that doesn't convince you, his ultimate plan before he finally got taken out was to wipe out all life in the galaxy - all of it, mind you - so he could use the Ancient knowledge he retained to entirely recreate an entire galaxy's worth of races that would worship him as God.
- This trope is the sole reason why the Daleks of Doctor Who are pure High Octane Nightmare Fuel despite being squawking giant pepper pots. Ruthless, pitiless, inhuman in every sense, they exist for nothing aside from the complete extermination of every other organism in the universe, entire species and planets enslaved to provide "raw materials", if not simply immolated. Oh, and they always survive. Granted, most of their reputation is Secondhand Storytelling, but their actual appearances somehow make them worse. "EX-TER-MIN-ATE!"
- Think that's bad? In the novel "Prisoner of the Daleks" we learn why the Dalek guns are able to blow up whole buildings yet leave the human body intact. When targetting a human or otherwise organic victim they dial the power of the gun down to the level it will take to kill them...then dial it down a little more, so the victims death takes longer. We're told the nervous system "Burns up from the outside in" causing a slow, agonising death. Proof, as if it were needed, that the Daleks truly are the sickest creatures to appear on television. They don't just kill because of their xenophobia, they do it because they enjoy it.
- Their creator Davros, meanwhile, exceeds even the Daleks in evil not so much by his actions, but simply due to being a single man who can equal an entire species of monsters. His list of atrocities includes but is not limited to genocide against his own people, feeding an entire galaxy the remains of their dead, and "THE DESTRUCTION! OF REALITY! ITSELF!".
- The really horrifying thing? Turning the galaxy into unknowing cannibals was actually a KINDLY action on Davros's part as he was trying to start anew with a new species of Daleks (which he made out of the frozen bodies of the intellectually worthy). Put simply when the guy tries to do good he's even WORSE than when he's actively seeking out evil goals.
- Davros is at least quite clearly insane. His henchman Nyder, in Genesis of the Daleks appears to be completely sane and rational, and more or less emotionless... and will do anything for Davros, including betraying the scientists he works with, arranging for them to have brain surgery to shut down their emotions, and helping Davros destroy his own people. One wonders if Nyder didn't have some of that 'brain surgery that shuts down their emotions' done to him.
- In Genesis of the Daleks, the Doctor asks Davros what he would do if had a virus capable of destroying all life. Davros is clearly delighted with the idea and says he would release the virus, because he loves the idea of holding that kind of power over life and death.
- Sometimes the Master has veered into this trope, from being a Magnificent Bastard or Card Carrying Villain, to fiendish malevolence and sadism.
- The 456 from Torchwood: Children of Earth, while being Starfish Aliens, are very definitely examples of this trope. After taking control of all the world's children in order to communicate, it turns out that they are intergalactic drug dealers who use human children in some nasty symbiotic way in order to get high and are bargaining to take 10% of the world's children to use as drugs or else they Kill All Humans. This is a protection racket, and they would almost certainly have been back for more later. One child is seen hooked up to one of them and it's shown that he's been a human reefer for over 30 years. It's really twisted and nasty, although it could be argued that a few of the human characters should qualify as well.
- PM Green. Calmly allows 10% of the world's children to be sold as NARCOTICS. Orders the man who's been most loyal to him to give up his own children, just to make the cover story he's created realistic - which leads Frobisher to shoot his family and himself to spare them the horror. And after all the horror and pain, Green's first thought is "How do I blame the Americans for this?". The knowledge that he's certainly going to be put in prison, if not "Disappeared" by UNIT or executed for treason is highly comforting. Granted, there's the whole Punch Clock Villain ensemble that's going to avoid the punishment meted out to the more visible Green.
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Angelus is probably the Most Triumphant Example of this trope in the Buffyverse, particularly so when contrasted with every other vampire in both series. By way of examples, Spike and Drusilla had a genuinely loving relationship, Spike looked up to Angel as a friend and mentor, Darla was devoted to the Master and loved Angel (even though it's implied she knew he was incapable of loving her back), Wishverse Willow and Xander seemed to truly care for one another (notice how overjoyed evil Willow is when she finds Xander alive after seeing evil Xander killed), and the Master was rather fond of Darla (and in the Wishverse, Xander and Willow) and mourned her death. In contrast, Angelus was utterly devoid of all human feeling (to the point that a demon sent to burn humanity from the Earth was incapable of harming him) and considered Mind Rape to be an art form. One can also see a strongly abusive streak to his relationships with Darla and Drusilla, who in turn practically worship him for such cruelties inflicted on them as much as anyone else. It puts things into perspective when the Master (an ancient and demonic vampire head of an order which worships Eldritch Abominations and seeks to bring about the end of the world) refers to Angelus as "the most vicious animal I have ever known".
- Warren Mears, who when introduced in season 5 seems to be just a pathetic loser-geek stereotype, but in season six he slowly slides from that into a super-villain wannabe, into an "accidental" murderer who finds out that he likes killing women because it's the only time he feels like he has any power over them. His getting skinned alive is cathartic.
- He came back in Season 8, now skinless but alive thanks to Amy. And he's become even WORSE, calmly nuking a castle full of hundreds of Slayers, seemingly for kicks.
- Considering he only appeared in a single episode, the vampire Zachary Kralik did a remarkably good job as appearing as one of these. At this point in the show vampires in general were seen as being a fairly low-level threat, but Kralik managed, partially through a quasi-Diabolus Ex Machina and partially through his own utter hideousness, to be thoroughly terrifying and completely monstrous. It's impressive that even when given a Start Of Darkness story involving the abuse he suffered from his mother, the viewer still cannot like him in the slightest.
- Apart from Angelus, Angel also features an episode in which Angel and his gang trying to exorcise a demon from a young boy that had been causing the child to start fires and attempt to murder his own sister... the twist comes when after being ejected from the boy, the demon reveals that it was trapped inside the child's body, that the boy was so twisted, cruel, and malevolent that the otherworldly monster was actually afraid of him. Angel barely manages to get to the boy's home to stop him from succeeding in burning his sister alive.
- Another, later episode of Angel had Charles Gunn heading back to his old hangout to meet up with his old gang of vampire hunters, who have since become indiscriminate demon-slaughterers, dominated by a new guy. This new guy is a racist killer who, when it is revealed that he did something really bad to a girl he knew, deflects accusations by accusing Gunn of letting his own sister die due to incestuous urges, just to get the gang back on his side. The guy gets bitten in half at the end but we don't get to watch him scream.
- Oz has many, the worst being Vernon Schillinger (the leader of the Nazi gang and a sadistic rapist, who makes his son kill an 8 year old), Simon Adebisi (a drug dealer and rapist, he injected a man with AIDS, decapitated an unarmed policeman, and killed a man by feeding him ground glass for a month) and Malcolm Coyle (a gang member who raped a dying woman and stabbed her baby "for fun"). Spoilered for the weak-stomached.
- In Deadwood, Francis Wolcott and George Hearst were the Complete Monsters who squared off with Magnificent Bastard Al Swearingen. Wolcott was a sexual sadist who enjoyed murdering prostitutes and Hearst, well, let's just say his lack of ethics and decency made Swearingen look like a moral paragon. The series ends with Hearst winning the conflict big time, riding out of town with everything he wanted and with Swearingen forced to go beyond the Moral Event Horizon by killing an innocent prostitute to save Trixie from Hearst's retribution. I wanted to set things on fire after that bit.
- Knox from Heroes was getting there. Victimized an entire bank full of people just so he can get revenge on one person, kills a small child in an episode that takes place in the future and feels no remorse, and tries to force Hiro into killing his best friend Ando simply because Ando has no powers and is presumably useless. He just gets worse as time goes on, aiding Arthur Petrelli in his nonsensical murder of Adam Monroe and later killing Scott, a promising new character played by Chad Faust.
- If Knox was 'getting there', then Arthur Petrelli went all the way and came back with the T-shirt. He makes his introduction to the series by pointlessly and cruelly offing the one of the most sympathetic villains of the show, Adam Monroe, and goes on to commit some of the most heinous acts seen yet in Heroes, including mind-wiping Hiro into thinking he is ten years old, trying to kill his own sons, and repeatedly mind-wiped his wife Angela.
- Most recently, Emil Danko (a.k.a. the Hunter) of Volume Four is getting this treatment. He describes the people with abilities as "animals" and guns down Daphne in cold blood. Daphne doesn't die immediately. But Danko, having gained control of the program, has Daphne removed from the medical facility and refuses to provide her with medical treatment, causing her wound to become septic. Matt manages to escape with Daphne and bring her to a hospital, but the doctors are unable to save her life.
- And now it looks like he'll be teaming up with Sylar.
- That's not going to end well. To quote Noah: "Just how stupid are you?"
- Bounty Hunter Jubal Early of the Firefly episode "Objects in Space" started off as a Boba Fett style badass, but lost all our sympathy about the time that he tied up and threatened to rape Kaylee. And then River reveals to us during her Hannibal Lecture to him that he once tortured a neighbor's dog to death, revealing him to be a Psycho For Hire sadist who lives for power, control and pain.
- Adelai Niska definitely qualifies as well. This is a guy who tortures his wife's nephew to gain the fear and respect of prospective mercenaries he is hiring. And if you cross him, he gets even worse — he'll torture you to death, and then, through the miracle of modern technology, bring you back to life just so he can pick up where he left off with you.
- The Reavers are a race of animalistic humanoids whose entire mode of contact with those outside their race is nonstop rape and cannibalism.
- The Movie Serenity has a very notable subversion: The Operative commits truly monstrous acts, fully acknowledges how monstrous they are, and mourns their consequences, having only committed them because he thought they were in the interest of the greater good. He even admits that a monster like him has no place in the perfect world he is working to create—this very knowledge prevents him from being a true monster, and once he realizes he was very wrong, he severs ties with the Alliance, and disappears into oblivion.
- Parodied on an episode of Reno 911!: The cops appear to be overreacting (as usual) to their prisoner, a normal-looking young boy in a little-league uniform. They leave Lt. Dangle to watch the boy, whom he gently admonishes and sends away. The cops return and yell at Dangle for letting the kid who raped his little sister to death escape.
- Some of the villains from the BBC's Spooks are just a big void of warm and fuzzy feelings. Interestingly, the two very worst monsters in the series are complete opposites; one is the white supremacist who murders one of the main cast by shoving her head into a deep fat frier and the other is the Muslim cleric who turns ten year old boys into suicide bombers. Next to these two, a lot of the other villains in the series can come across as kind of cartoonish.
- Wayne Callison of Shark probably qualifies, what with the whole torturing women to death, hiding their bodies underneath his younger brother's (whom he goaded into raping a girl at the tender age of 15) deck. He then threatens Stark's daughter during questioning just to enrage the guy to the point of attacking him, then tries to get him thrown off the case for it. When that doesn't work, he drives his one escaped victim to suicide and uses a loophole from that to become a temporary Karma Houdini. And that was just in his first episode.
- Rook from Kamen Rider Kiva, who spends pretty much all of his free time making up "games" for himself that generally go along the lines of, "Let's see if I can kill X amount of people wearing Y in Z amount of time." He has a lot of free time.
- Desperate Housewives - By the end of season 3, Orson's mother Gloria has really come across as this. Seriously, here's a woman so insanely determined that her son will marry Alma, a woman he doesn't love, that she's not only completely willing to murder any other woman who gets close to him, but also quite ready to frame other, innocent people of the crimes and emotionally blackmail her vulneurable son into becoming an accomplice in the murder of a woman he loved. She continues her mad efforts to force her son back into this miserable marriage for so long, even after Alma herself has told him to give it up, that you have to wonder just who the hell shes trying to please. And this is all before you find out that she infiltrated Brees house and gained her trust solely for the sake of polishing her off too. And thats before you find out that, when Orson was a teenager, she murdered her husband, set it up to look like a suicide, and allowed the young Orson to blame himself for this. In the end, the viewer can only cheer when she ends up with locked-in syndrome and Orson takes the opportunity to taunt her.
- Prison Break: Wyatt Mathewson, the season four Dragon who murdered Alex Mahone's innocent wife and son.
- And Christina Scofield. What a bitch. The General doesn't really fit because he also presents some Magnificent Bastard tendencies and is definitely likeable as a villain.
- In Primeval Helen Cutter wants to wipe out the whole of humanity before it even began and along the way she'll screw with the cast's lives and minds just for the hell of it. She even wipes out her ex-husband's new love interest from the timeline for no reason other than her being a Jerk Ass at one point.
- Howard Epps from Bones. We don't know exactly how many women he murdered but we know of 6. Add to the fact that he manipulated Bones and her Nakama into stopping his execution and then escaping prison by setting a fire and killing a fire-fighter, dressing in the man's uniform and walking out only to continue his twisted little mind games with Bones. He then shows up in her apartment, trying to kill her, and jumps from the balcony killing himself by letting go of Booth's hand.
- Bester. He got a sympathetic backstory and lots of people still want to crush his head with a rock. Manipulative Bastardry. Planned genocide. And the worst part is that he did it all with a smug little smile on his face.
- He also brainwashed a main character, making him turn against everyone he cared about. And after he had completed Bester's mission, Bester revealed everything he had done and how it furthered his goals in painstaking detail. And that smug little smile never left his face...
- Brother Cavil in the recent Battlestar Galactica. Made worse by the fact that he was introduced as an Affably Evil, Deadpan Snarker type. That was before we find out that he's the mastermind behind the human genocide, as well as a majority of the other bad things on the show. All because he was unhappy with the body he was made in.
- Lost has Psycho For Hire Martin Keamy, and Anthony Cooper, the con man who ruined the lives of two survivors (Sawyer, due to taking all the money of his parents and leading them to death; and his own son John Locke, making him lose a kidney, his girlfriend and the ability to walk).
- Two episodes of Without A Trace had Emil Dornvald, a mercenary working for an African dictator. The missing person of the week is in love with a rebel opposing said dictator and knew where he and his friends were holed up. So Dornvald cold-bloodedly murders the pregnant teenager she's been mentoring and is very fond of, sends her a picture on the girl's phone, and offers to stop killing her loved ones if she just tells him where the men are.
- Brainiac from Smallville. Has no emotions, and is fond of skewering people through the head and draining the info from their brains. Despite being nearly equal to Clark Kent in power, he prefers to perform complex Xanatos Gambits to make others do his dirty work for him. Including infecting Mrs. Kent with a deadly disease just to trick Clark into releasing General Zod from the Phantom Zone. In the Wonderful Life episode, without a Clark Kent to stop him, he triggers a nuclear holocaust, saying the world is now perfect for Zod, Zod's consort Supergirl, and himself to rule.
- Owen, Annie's fiance from Being Human. When confronted by the ghost of the woman he killed, his reaction is basically "Why are you bothering me?" Until he starts screwing with her... He gets his in the end.
- That mad psychiatrist from the Mission Impossible episode Mindbend, who works for The Syndicate and Mind Rapes petty crooks, brainwashing them into single-use hit men who kill themselves once they have killed their target.
- Pretty much any villain from Walker Texas Ranger. Yeah, that show does not believe in subtlety. Honorable mentions go to the son of a Corrupt Corporate Executive who drowns his own wheelchair-bound father with a Psychotic Smirk on his face to take over his company and doesn't give a damn that his activities are destroying the native's homeland; and the President, along with his killer for hire who is capable of murdering an innocent child without even feeling anything.
Tabletop Games
- Chaos followers and Dark Eldar of Warhammer 40000 are entire factions of Complete Monsters. Chaos Space Marines' goal is essentially destroying/corrupting everything they see for their Eldritch Abomination Gods, while Dark Eldar build their entire culture around rape, slaughter and torture and going Beyond The Impossible with it. The Imperium occasionally has a few people that veer towards this.
- A note on Chaos Marines: the ones described above are the standard members of the faction, with the age and experience of a Marine directly proportional to how despicably horrible they are, especially if they are one of the many possessed by a daemon, or a bigger daemon, or a really, really big daemon. The absolute worst are the Daemon Primarchs, surviving leaders of the nine Traitor Legions that ten thousand years ago ascended to daemonhood and have since been ruling over their own Daemon World (essentially hell spread over an entire planet, which incidentally haunt the dreams of psykers across the galaxy), commanding their devoted followers in campaigns of destruction and death all for the glory of Chaos.
- The Dark Eldar are made even worse because their very lives depend on torturing others, otherwise one of the aforementioned Eldritch Abomination Gods will suck the soul out of them. Thus, there are no un-monstrous Dark Eldar.
- One can play as the Dark Eldar in the Dawn Of War expansion Soulstorm. Their builder unit is a slave they have "grown tired" of torturing which repeatedly screams "No, not the whip!", the buildings to increase their Arbitrary Headcount Limit are slave chambers that can be upgraded to periodically kill one of them, tossing the corpse outside, their basic infantry unit is armed with a gas that gives the enemy mind-raping hallucinations (don't even get me started on the more powerful abilities like those of the Haemonculus), and one of their resources is harvested souls. Hilarity, inevitably, does not ensue.
- "Bring me another plaything. This one seems to have broken."
- The Mad Scientist Fabius Bile also stands out amongst Chaos Space Marines, due to creating an even stronger and crazier version of them, and reducing entire worlds to shambling mutants. Made worse by the fact that he doesn't even have the excuse of being a slave of the gods as the others are - he's purely mercenary, despite millenia of chaos corruption. Not to mention he has a lab coat made of human skin.
- Iron Warriors aren't slaves to any gods. They're just bitter Jerkasses.
- Lucius the Eternal, champion of Slaanesh, who took pleasure in tricking a loyalist Marine into killing other loyalists in Fulgrim.
- Kharn the Betrayer, a brutal, ruthless, unstoppable killing machine even by Chaos standards, the most feared member of the the World Eaters legion even among his "allies", champion of Khorne and inventor of the Chaos Space Marine's iconic battle cry of "KILL! MAIM! BURN!" (hopefully in the order). As his name indicates, he cares not from whom the blood flows, only that it does.
- Abaddon stands out - of the 13 Black Crusades, he launched about 5 of them, and almost every one of them achieved their purpose - that is, causing as much death and destruction as is physically (and psychically) possible across thousands of star systems. Seriously, this guy spends hundreds of years of hard and dangerous work gathering together the Chaos Legions into a single body for no other purpose than to kill.
- Remiare the assassin in Mechanicum, who burns out an Adept's memory centres simply because she enjoys making people suffer.
- Stone of Deadlands is an example of this trope. He is one of the Harrowed, revenants who came Back From The Dead with a demon using their body as a time-share. Most Harrowed must engage in a constant battle of wills with their demon. Stone has no such conflict, because his demon is afraid of him.
- The list can be made longer; Darius Hellstromme, Ezekiah Grimme, and Raven all qualify. Darius Hellstromme may be the creepiest of the bunch, since he is still at least nominally human... but actually Hellstromme is not a Complete Monster. He proved this with a good old Heel Face Turn in The Unity
- Desus, a canonical NPC from the Dreams Of The First Age supplement for Exalted. Hailed by everyone as Creation's greatest wandering martial arts hero, as well as perhaps the most loving and devoted husband among the Solar Deliberative. In reality: the event hailed as his greatest victory of legend was actually him sucker-punching an innocent being while negotiating with them under a parley flag; his wife suffered less psychological trauma from being alone in the heart of pure maddening chaos for three thousand years than she did from their marriage; part of his good reputation is his researching a custom magical effect that forces every single person who sees him or hears him talk to rationalize all of his actions as being for the best of intentions, no matter what they actually are; he is stated to be the worst kind of sadistic serial killing rapist, but since his victims for that particular fetish are anonymous mortals they're never missed and he's never suspected; he is one of the five seniormost members of the single most corrupt political cabal in the later First Age.
- Let's not forget the part where his wife Lilith had been so psychologically broken, both by normal and magical brainwashing tactics, that her single deepest core motivation/primal impulse is "Please Desus", that he beats her routinely (causing her to miscarry at least once, which says something when you're a demigoddess whose big theme is survival and toughness), that part of her mental conditioning is to be forced to rationalize reasons why it's her fault for every single cruelty he lays on her, and that anyone attempting to explain any of the above to her will trigger post-hypnotic imperatives in her mind forcing her to kill that person and then blank her memory of the entire incident. The several millenia she spent hiding in the depths of the Wyld, the uttermost depth of purely insane chaos? Was how Lilith regained (some of) her sanity in the millenia after her husband finally died. That's how horrific it was, that the Deep Wyld would be a comparative rest cure.
- Basically, imagine Angelus, as mentioned above. With the power of a god and 500 extra IQ points. And being right-hand-man to the ruler of the world. And having the entire planet fooled into thinking he's the equivalent of Captain America. And who has had several thousand years in which to have gotten very, very bored... and no epic goals or master plans to occupy himself with, just an epically jaded sadist looking for a good time.
- Let's not forget the fact that he believes his own hype. All of it. The things he did to Lilith? He genuinely loves her, and it's not like she can't take the abuse, and she never asked him to stop. After all, only a handful of beings in the whole world can resist the above-mentioned compulsion to interpret all of his actions as virtuous for any length of time and see how screwed up he is, and all of them are corrupt or uncaring so they can't be bothered to tell him about this. So, naturally, after being told that he can do no wrong for a few hundred years, Desus himself started to believe this. He is the poster child for why the Usurpation was worth it. Of course, anyone who researches a technique that compels all around him to rationalize away and forgive him his every sin as a permanent, always-on effect instead of a weapon to be used against specific bad guys is starting out from a vastly dubious position, so he may very well have been a case of "You can't fall off the floor".
- The Ebon Dragon, a canonical NPC from Exalted. The Ebon Dragon is a Primordial, one of the in-game entities that created the game's setting. While other Primordials presumably introduced things like rainbows, hugs and teddy bears into Creation, one of the Ebon Dragon's major contributions was the concept of treachery. Why? Because he's a Dick. Given his cosmic significance, it's quite accurate to say instead that he is THE Dick, who will sell out anybody and everybody at any moment for personal gain (or sheer amusement). Among his lesser nasty accomplishments is the Phylactery Womb, which houses the Exaltation Shards of the Infernal Exalted when they're not inhabiting humans. The Phylactery Womb, by the way, is a young girl who has been repeatedly violated in every possible sense of the word; at this point she's a bloated demonic monstrosity with occasional flashes of lucidity. At least Desus has the Great Curse as an excuse; the Ebon Dragon is just thoroughly foul, evil and rotten through and through, almost by definition completely, irredeemably evil.
- Just to clarify: The Primordials were largely described as being pretty nasty already, the Ebon Dragon just likes to go that extra mile.
- The BoVD also introduces The Dread Emperor, who lives up to his grandiose name. His armour has four children chained to it at all times, and striking him transfers the damage to the children.
- And, of course, there are the demons, devils, and yugoloths, who are literally made from evil... and, well, it shows. And the mind flayers, who start their lives as humanoid aberrations by eating an entire human nervous system and steadily get worse. And the aboleths. And...
- ...and Mind Flayers again. Let's take a closer look at them, shall we? They are mostly humanoid shaped creatures with tentacles coming out of their heads. These tentacles are for eating your brains. If you meet a mind flayer and you're not a superheroic adventurer (or you don't have a good will save), the best you can hope for is to have your brains eaten immediately... otherwise, you go back to the slave pens, which are as nice as they sound. The mind flayers have special magical emotion-emitting devices there that replicate the effects of soul-crushing, suicidal depression turned up to eleven. If you're unlucky, instead of being freed by heroes or eaten, you will instead have an alien tadpole implanted in your skull. This tadpole will devour and replace your nervous system over the course of a few days. Mind Flayers have been revealed to only be able to feel certain emotions on the normal spectrum - pretty much all being negative, the closest to a positive emotion they can feel is something like sadistic joy. Mind Flayers are led by Elder Brains, which are huge brains that live inside vats. The closest Mind Flayers have to the idea of an afterlife is their belief that when they die, their brains will be absorbed by the Elder Brain and they will join its consciousness for eternity. In actuality, the Elder Brain simply eats the brains, destroying the 'donor' forever. In their spare time, Elder Brains also like to eat baby mind flayers.
- And we can't forget that mind flayers experiment with tadpole implantation in their spare time. Their biggest success: urophions, a mind flayer version of a roper (a form of living stalagmite). Despite their form, urophions are no different mentally from any other mind flayer... yet are banished to defending paths, desperately lonely as mind flayers go, and with their only reward being the chance to meld with the elder brain upon death (which, as we've already seen, isn't much of a reward).
- The Book of Exalted Deeds had a mind flayer do a Heel Face Turn, but that's kind of an isolated case.
- Going back to the 1st edition, one has to mention the two most famous of the original Mystara villains: Baron Ludwig "the Black Eagle" Von Hendriks, a mad tyrant who cruelly oppresses his people and takes pleasure in the Cold Blooded Torture of his prisoners (to the point where he doesn't even care if the victim is guilty or not, only that he/she screams as much as possible); and his right-hand-man, the aptly-named Bargle the Infamous, a sadistic wizard whose criminal record encompasses the murders of his mentor (all in order to steal his magic books and gain more power) and of Aleena, a female cleric who was the complete inversion of this trope.
- Most of the sorcerers of Geoffrey McKinney's pulp fantasy-inspired Carcosa, a recent supplement for the 1974 edition of D&D, are Complete Monsters to the core. Many of the ninety-six rituals available to sorcerers require them to carry out the often graphic murder and/or torture of human sacrifices, ranging in age from newborn to aged, with four of the rituals in question involving sexual assault, the most infamous one involving an eleven-year-old girl being raped eleven times before being strangled to death with her own hair. The only rituals that do not require a sorcerer to do horrific things to people are the banishment rituals, which are reserved for player sorcerers. Not surprisingly, McKinney offers two versions of the Carcosa setting — the original version for mature audiences and the "Expurgated Edition" which removes the explicit violence and sexual content and is more in line with standard D&D fare.
- Considered an ideal by the Rapine Storm in Cthulhutech. It's worth noting that the Storm contains numerous actual Lovecraftian monsters in their ranks, and they aren't as bad as the human members.
- This is generally what happens when your Karma Meter hits zero in the new World Of Darkness.
Theater
Video Games
- Kefka Palazzo: Monster Clown, Psycho For Hire, Manipulative Bastard of Final Fantasy VI is one of gamings most famous Complete Monsters. While there is some dialogue from him that can be considered darkly funny (in the American localizations, Woolseyism can make Kefka Evilly Affable at times to many people, more so in the SNES version than in the GBA version), his actions are portrayed in an horrific and many times, tragic light. The poisoning of Doma and the impact it had on the charcter of Cyan was a major example of this. He embodies despair, hatred, and death and believes that life is meaningless, finding destruction fun because "precious lives" are lost... and commits his atrocities laughing.
- Kefka's atrocities: testing Terra's deadly magical abilities on his own soliders, burning Figaro Castle (and ordering his soliders to kill everyone), poisoning Doma Castle's water supply which leads to mass death of innocents as well as his own troops (and tricking his fellow general and foil, Leo, in the process), brutalizing weakened Espers in the Magitek Facility, murders General Leo and the Espers during a truce (and gleefully killing more that come to avenge them), tries to make Celes The Atoner kill her friends (which in a Crowning Momentof Awesome, stabs Kefka instead), ruins the world and remakes it in his image. He then rules over a dying broken world full of suffering, killing anyone or any city that rebels against him with the light of Judgement, and then deciding to destroy everything in a "monument to non-existence". He also orphans the children of Mobliz by murdering their parents with the Light, leaving the kids to die. Luckily for them, Terra (The Messiah) arrives.
- Professor Hojo, the Mad Scientist from Final Fantasy VII. No words can describe just what a sick, twisted psychopath this guy truly is.
- While I'm unsure of Before Crisis, I do know that every bad thing in the rest of the series(FFVII, AC/C, Crisis Core, Do C) that happens is a result of Hojo's experimentation, either directly or indirectly.
- Final Fantasy XII features Judge Bergan, who decides, on a whim, to slaughter half the population of Mt. Bur-Omisace including the Gran Kiltias, who was the in-game equivalant to the pope, the Occuria, who decide that because of the actions of Vayne, Dr. Cid, and Venat, the entire Empire should be obliterated off the face of Ivalice, and Ba'Gamnan who killed possibly dozens of hunters trying to lure out Balthier, and he only killed them because they weren't Balthier!. These guys are sick individuals.
- Final Fantasy XIII seems to have revealed one in Jihl Nabaat. She turned Sazh's six year old son into a crystal and is later seen taunting him about it in an interrogation scene.
- Suikoden II features Luca Blight who, as opposed to the ambiguous nature of the game's other villains, is possibly the most evil and sadistic character in the entire franchise (including Yuber). Any scene where he is not killing puppies, he is kicking your ass. And he is an enormously Large Ham.
- For reference, one of the first scenes we see him in, he is burning a defenseless village to the ground and slaughtering innocents. When one woman begs for her life, he tells her to act like a pig. She does then asks if she can go. "I DON'T SPARE SWINE!", and then kills her. Then we get to the final confrontation, as he is covered in an entire battalion's worth of arrows, and being attacked by the 18 best soldiers of your army (3 parties of 6 characters) he continues to spout about how incredible and evil he is. "I slaughtered men by the hundreds, but it tooks THOUSANDS to kill me! I AM THE VERY FACE OF EVIL!!!"
- He also sacrifices the entire population of the city of Muse to the Beast Rune while Jowy watches in complete horror, as does the party outside the city. He is so evil that Jowy and other Highlanders betray him to the player's army which sets up the ambush and his death in the forest.
- Childkiller: after the mercenary fortress falls to Luca early in the game, Luca is found running Pohl, a teenage boy, through with his sword. He then terrifyingly turns his attention on a very young girl named Pilika and in a Break The Cutie moment, attempts to run her through as well. Luckily he was prevented from doing so but Pilika becomes a Cute Mute after the incident.
- Neclord, from both Suikoden I and Suikoden II qualifies. He likes to abduct women as well as slaughtering the city of North Window out of boredom. Viktor, being from that city, battles him twice in finally ends him in Tinto with Sierra and Kahn's help.
- Pious the Lich, of Eternal Darkness. While he is The Dragon to an ancinet evil god (you can choose from three), he is the main antagonist. When you first see him, he is a playable character, a Roman legionaire who stumbled on an ancient temple in Persia. In the end, he is corrupted by one of three artifacts and serves that god. It is not known when he crosses the Moral Event Horizon, but he is clearly over it for the rest of the game, committing horrific acts gleefully, including throwing hundreds of innocent people into a tower of corpses during Roberto Bianci's scenario (him included). He kills other characters you play as as well. In the final battle, Alyx as well as all the spirits of those killed trying to stop Pious do battle. Alyx kills Pious for good with his own staff if you win. But if you lose, you see a special scene of Pious gloating over a dead Alyx.
- The Combine from Half Life 2 certainly qualify. They ceaselessly, thoughtlessly, and efficiently subjugate entire races for their own purposes, and seem to have no motive other than complete and utter domination. Furthermore, they also seek to weaponize certain other members of alien species to allow for further conquering. And the fact that they created the Stalkers, well, there's just no other apt description for them.
- Vladimir Makarov in Modern Warfare 2 walks right past the Moral Event Horizon in one of the first missions (and takes the player with him) when he and his crew cold-heartedly slaughter an entire airport terminal full of civilians. He then follows this by shooting the player in the head so that the crime can be placed on the CIA, thus inciting the international community against the Americans.
- Many Nazi soliders, including Colonel Kamm, in Velvet Assassin. This is probably the most brutal portrayal of the Nazis in a video game, and coming from a German developement studio, this is notable. The events of the clearing of the Warsaw Ghetto of Jews after the unsuccessful uprising is portrayed as well as the brutal Gestapo prisons. The innkeeper and his wife and child are hung in a mission and in the final level, a church with villagers locked inside is set on fire. Violette fails to reach them in time.
- One solider calls burning bodies in a ditch an "art".
- Cumore, Ragou and Alexei of Tales Of Vesperia definitely fall into this trope. Their monstrosity helps to justify Yuri's vigilante actions.
- Jay's abusive surrogate father Solon from Tales Of Legendia.
- Remiel,
Josef Mengele Kvar, and Rodyle from Tales Of Symphonia add to the list of the Tales Series's Complete Monsters. And don't forget Vharley either.
- Tohma from Tales Of Rebirth also count. A sadistic Gajuma/beastman with extreme hate for the other race for no good reasons than 'racist superiority thought' may not be calling it, but the main kicker is how he sadistically and gleefully manipulated the life of Hilda Rhambling. The amount of him kicking her is really depraved.
- While nowhere near as bad as Ragou and Cumore, Grand Maestro Mohs from Tales Of The Abyss is still pretty vile.
- Anyone who's played Cave Story can tell you exactly why the Doctor was "like a demon." The Mengele-style Psycho Serum experiments using the local race of Ridiculously Cute Critters? Just the tip of the iceberg.
- Westin Phipps of City Of Heroes, whose missions, rather than being the standard Supervillainy jobs are all meant to merely cause even greater suffering amongst the poor, to destroy the hopes of the downtrodden and to basically make people with already crappy lives even worse.
- Phipps deliberately poses as a charity worker helping the poor of Grandville, in order to find out what minor hopes they have so that Arachnos (and the player, if you have Phipps as a contact) may more effectively crush them.
- If you're rooting for Dahlia Hawthorne by the end of Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations, there's something seriously, seriously, seriously, seriously, seriously wrong with you.
- And in Apollo Justice, Kristoph Gavin, who among other things tried to kill an agoraphobic 12-year-old to cover up another crime. The fact that he managed to completely ruin Pheonix's career should make him a Magnificent Bastard. Somehow, it doesn't.
- Izuka, from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn is pretty much Fire Emblem's version of Josef Mengele. He transformed hundreds of Laguz into Feral Ones, crazed Laguz forced into their beast forms, and he considers it all in the name of science. In the second game, he tries to transform one of the Laguz on his side into a Feral One; luckily, you're able to prevent him from doing this. And that's before you learn that he chose Pelleas to be king of Daein so that the senators could force him into a blood contract. This forces Pelleas to either do as the senators say, or watch as his kingdom dies. He also used the Feral One-creating elixir to turn Elincia's uncle Renning into the insane Bertram (showing that it also works on Beorc, albeit differently than with Laguz). Fortunately, the Heron Laguz are able to cure him. It is immensely satisfying when you finally get to kill the slimeball.
- Also from Radiant Dawn, we have Lekain, who will do anything to move up on the social ladder. ANYTHING. Even directly cause the genocide of the most peaceful race on the planet by blaming them for the assassination of his country's empress. And did we mention he was the one who actually killed her?
- Don't forget Ashnard. He's not called the "Mad King" for nothing. This guy became king of Daein by getting his father to sign a blood pact, and then invoking it, killing everyone else who was in his way to the throne, not to mention countless other innocent people. He then proceeded to kill his own father, therefore becoming king. After finding out about the dark god or rather, Yune, who really isn't evil sealed in Lehran's Medallion, he decides to release it for the lulz. This requires a war that spans the whole continent, so he decides to begin by invading the next country over. He also, after finding out that his own son was unable to transform into a dragon like the child's mother used to be able to, decides to hold him captive to get ahold of the the kid's uncle, the oldest son of the king of Goldoa. He then proceeds to warp Rajaion's body and turn him into something resembling a wyvern, and then use him as a mount. He laughs at everything. He wasn't even aware of the existence of Jill's father, who was a pretty high-ranking Daein general. He doesn't care at all about anyone except for himself, and he'll do anything, ANYTHING, to get power. His ideal world, the one that he wishes to create, is one where the only thing that matters is power. And did I mention that this is the guy that the aforementioned Izuka used to work for? He may not be quite as loathsome as some of the others on this page, but I think he still qualifies as a Complete Monster.
- Previously in Blazing Sword, there's Sonia. Manipulating a small group of Robin-Hood-like warriors to the dark side and abusing button-cute Nino are evil acts. But mercilously slaughtering the leader of said band after laughing at him for believing she truely loved him, trying to get one of her underlings to kill Nino after another empty promise of love and affection, and right before her final attempt to kill her revealing that she mudered Nino's entire family and just kept her around pretending to be her mother all her life are acts that any gamer with a scrap of heart tissue railed as unforgivable.
- And previously again in Genealogy of Holy War, we have Queen Hilda, the power hungry queen of Freege. As you gather information from villages to villages, you learn that she wholeheartedly supports the movement of sacrificing kids to an evil god and she did it For The Evulz. Later on it is revealed that she is very much responsible for the death of one of the first generation characters, Tiltyu, by abusing her and her daughter Tinny (who is a 2nd generation character), again For The Evulz (other 'traitor' reasons for her is just side things) to the point that she was reduced into a shell of her former cheery personality and died with it. And Hilda takes extreme pride on it, gloats it in front of her children.
- The Protagonist in Soul Nomad And The World Eaters becomes this should he agree to side with Gig in the beginning of the game, going in a warpath across the world with the help of some evil characters (or characters who end up turning evil/psychotic because of you), including the leader of a child slavery gang who even begins to get sick of you. Even Omnicidal Maniac Gig shows disturbance towards you. Another example would be Hawthorne, who is revealed to be a serial rapist/murderer who buys girls off of Black Market dealer Lobo (who's a nasty individual himself) to rape and kill when they reach seventeen.
- To expand: the "worst" ending of the Demon Path results in the main character literally killing his way through everything in two worlds, leaving nothing alive but himself and Gig. He then proceeds to devour Gig and gain god-level powers, at which point the gods of the two worlds he has just finished exterminating show up and demand that he stop destroying everything. He proceeds to beat them both and blast both worlds into nothingness. His last words before joining two worlds in their total annihilation? "It doesn't matter. It was fun."
- A majority of the villains can count in the normal path some of which end up joining you in the Demon Path. They range from Dark Messiah Kanan, ruthlessly selfish Lobo, Mad Scientist World Eater Thuris and Levin/Raksha, who stands on the edge of this and Magnificent Bastard.
- The scientist named Yuna from Breath Of Fire IV, although until you complete the dungeon of his lab, he comes off as little more than a self-righteous, smarmy little git. Once you see that he's taken Nina's sister, and made her into some sort of genetically modified horror, things become a little clearer. It's when he tells you all about the 'wonderful gift' he's given her, looking for some kind of praise, that you realise how irredeemably evil the guy actually is.
- And to add insult upon injury, he's a Karma Houdini, since you don't get to splatter that bastard's innards all over the place, and he is even there in the ending smugly claiming he will do it all over again.
- Father Habaruku of the second game, founder of the church, which steals the souls of its believers in order to power up the Big Bad. His favorite method for winning followers seems to be replacing respected members of various communities with literal demons that disguise themselves as those people... Paranoia Fuel, much?
- Not to mention his sermons... in which he publicly executes nonbelievers. Brutally.
- Then there's one of his subordinates, Aruhamel/Aruhameru. He has the ability to erase memories. And has full control over this ability... which he uses to cause people to forget anything "inconvenient". Like, for example, the fact that the town hero exists. Poor guy...
- While Bosche of Dragon Quarter is quite the dick (What with the whole stabbing in the knee and then in the neck when you refuse to turn over a little girl to be executed), his father Vexacion is revealed in subsequent playthroughs to be the real monster of the family. a flashback shows Bosche as a little kid, no older than eight, being given a sword and forced into battle against a monster so big that it could crush him beneath its heel without even noticing. Bosche, terrified out of his mind, begs his father for help. Vexacion just stands off to the side and tells his son to live up to his 1/64 D-ratio. We then skip to after the fight, where we see Bosche with half his body covered in blood and a crazed, not-all-there look on his face. Talk about your Freudian Excuses, huh? For Bosche I mean, not the rat-bastard father who thought that was a good training method.
- Rugal Bernstein from King Of Fighters is quite probably the most evil villain SNK has ever come up with. In contrast with Geese Howard (a Badass Magnificent Bastard with a tragic backstory), Wolfgang Krauser (a Noble Demon with a strong sense of honor), the Knight Templar Orochi clan, or even NESTS (who at least have Take Over The World as a motive)... Rugal does evil for the sake of being evil. We're talking about a man who killed God-knows-how-many martial artists just to bathe their bodies in liquid bronze and make them into decorative statues for his yacht. And that's not even going into Heidern's backstory, where we find out that Rugal slaughtered all 50 soldiers in the guy's squad before killing his wife and daughter, who he had previously kidnapped, just for the fun of it, and topping it off with gouging out Heidern's left eye and leaving him to live in despair. When Rugal was finally consumed and killed by the Orochi power he had gotten from Goenitz, it was probably a joyous day for all fighting game players everywhere.
- Flying Fox, The Dragon of King Bohan from Heavenly Sword, outdoes Bohan himself in terms of sheer nastiness. Sick, twisted and utterly sadistic, this guy was responsible for driving poor Kai crazy. And then he breaks her more when he reveals that he stuffed and mounted her murdered mother as a display piece.
- At least he gets his. "Bullseye, asshole!"
- Fate Stay Night has two:
- Shinji Matou quickly establishes himself as a Jerkass by his treatment of Shirou (who is, by all accounts, his only friend). It only gets worse from there, from his abuse of his younger sister Sakura and horrible mistreatment of his Servant Spirit (apparently including rape), to his greatly over-inflated ego alternating with his complete cowardice, to his Attempted Rape on a tied-up and helpless Rin. Oh, and his willingness to kill an entire school to make his servant stronger. Heaven's Feel gives him a Freudian Excuse (a massive inferiority complex due to various things), which explains but doesn't excuse the revelation that he's been raping Sakura for years. His painful demise at Berserker's hands in Fate and Sakura's in HF come as welcome relief (though the latter immediately led to Sakura's Freak Out...).
- Notably, he can be redeemed once, but only after suffering a memorable Humiliation Conga and a karmic Fate Worse Than Death. Being made into the near-literal heart of hell finally seemed to scare him straight, but not after he ordered the death of Ilya and gloated about it only because he had Gilgamesh on his side laughing in apparent triumph as Gilgamesh rips Ilya's heart out.
- Still, seeing as he gets that heart planted in him later, it's a magnificent karmic bitchslap.
- Zouken Matou. Not only is he indirectly responsible for a lot of what Shinji does to Sakura, he's also responsible for Sakura's literally tortuous Training From Hell designed either to break her completely or drive her violently insane (eventually, the latter happens), and for turning poor Sakura into a holy grail. This in addition to the way he keeps himself alive and his general callousness towards human life, all with the eventual goal of becoming immortal.
- Lord Galcian from Skies Of Arcadia. His Dragon is a little more sympathetic, even though he goes completely nuts by the end of the game, but the Big Bad himself crosses the horizon really, really hard for such an optimistic game.
- Just to elaborate? This is a man who, when he gets control of an ancient superweapon, decides to demonstrate its power to the world by using it on his own country. It's the most powerful nation, after all... if he can destroy it so easily, the others will fall in line, right?
- Caulder from Advance Wars: Days of Ruin appeared to be just an amoral scientist, interested in seeing all his crazy prototypes finally see some field testing. But as the story continues his "scientific curiosity" as he puts it is slowly revealed to be genocidal sadism. It gets to the point where when he tries to Hannibal Lecture the hero about how Humans Are Bastards the hero throws it in his face saying that it doesn't matter if he's right, that he's a monster who needs to be destroyed. He even reveals that he literally isn't human, but a clone of an amoral scientist that fought back and killed his creator and the OTHER clones of said amoral scientist. "Do you know what it's like to watch yourself die? It's FASCINATING!"
- One of his most notable acts: inventing the virus known as The Creeper. This virus is unique, in that it makes flowers bloom on your body. By "bloom," I mean they grow underneath your skin and burst through it, covering your body with roots, stems, and flowers. You can feel it growing in you. And it is very, very painful. Caulder succeeded in turning flowers into Nightmare Fuel. But wait! The original virus wasn't good enough for him, as it only infected the young. So he upgrades it! Now it can kill everyone, and even faster and more painful than before. The photo they show you of one of the victims of this new strain of Creeper? High Octane Nightmare Fuel, nothing but.
- However, Caulder's insane sadism led to one scene that had at least a few players cheer for him: Giving that massive Jerkass mayor a creatively ironic (and even karmic) death. The mayor sells out the heroes for a vaccine to the Creeper virus that Caulder promised him. Turns out it was poison. Nighty-night, Mr. Mayor.
Caulder (grinning): Hello? Can you hear me? Mr. Mayor? ... Fascinating.
- Hanne Lichthammer, the psychic Nazi commander from Clive Barker's Jericho. Her sadomasochistic, psychotic behaviour in the game is fairly tame in comparison to what is revealed in her unlockable character bio: she delights in torturing people - and not just physically, either. She enjoys using her powerful psychic powers to expose her victims' innermost fears and memories, and in the process breaking their minds and driving them insane. Her bio includes just a couple of the results of such mental torture: it caused mothers to devour their own children and other victims to dissect themselves, amongst countless other atrocities.
- AM from both the short story and the point and click game I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison. A sentient master-computer, he's already wiped out most of the human race before the story even begins, keeping five people alive for 109 years for him to torture physically and psychologically until the end of time. To save time, here's the most horrible of his tortures: trapping Ellen in a virtual reality simulation of the elevator where, years earlier, she was tortured and raped by a psychopath disguised as a repairman- with a simulation of the 'repairman'...
- Plus, he's also the Trope Namer for one of the most horrifying tropes ever.
- The game also features a repentant Complete Monster as one of the survivors: Nimdok, a Nazi scientist responsible for the death and torture of thousands. Did we also mention that he's actually Jewish?
- Gongora, the Big Bad of Lost Odyssey, is identifiable as a Smug Snake even before it's clear that he's the villain, but as the game's backstory is revealed it becomes clear that he crossed the Moral Event Horizon before the game had even begun. Since several of the main characters of the game are immortal and unkillable, he had to get creative in getting them out of his way... which he did by sealing away their memories, leaving them completely amnesiac and unaware of their origins, which all of them agree is something like being a walking corpse. Of course, for him to be able to do it in the first place, they had to go through something traumatic enough that they wouldn't want to remember... so he abducted Kaim and Sarah's daughter and left them believing she was dead, forced Seth to kill her best friend to save her son, and set giant monsters loose in Ming's kingdom to slaughter her subjects until she agreed to block off her own memories to save them. As a result, Kaim and Seth both end up working for him, Ming becomes a figurehead in the country she's ruled for a thousand years, and Sarah goes insane for several decades.
- And as if that weren't bad enough, near the end of the game after the other immortals have overcome all of that, he magically controls Jansen and forces him to attack his friends and love interest, apparently just to be a Jerkass.
- Meet Porky Minch. In Earthbound, he's at best kind of a jerk, and at worst a real jerk who's even playing Giygas for his own desire for power, and incredibly petty desire to mess with Ness. Come Mother 3 though, his evilness is turned right past eleven and up to fifteen, as he turns a rather simple, peaceful island into a needlessly materialistic society (his view of utopia), tears apart lead character Lucas' family, and then proceeds to enlist the help of the Masked Man (A.K.A. Lucas' twin brother Claus, almost killed by one of Porky's own creations and brainwashed to serve Porky) to summon the Dragon (not that one) to completely destroy the world. Even reading all of this doesn't convey the message of how truly sickening this guy is.
- And his reasoning for killing all these innocents, corrupting the island's nature, and almost destroying all of existence... he was bored.
- Porky is one of the most confusing villains ever. He's essentially a 12-year-old kid in a 10,000 year old body who got picked on by everyone back at home. In spite of literally being king of the world, he wants to destroy everything because he thinks no one likes him. He can no longer die, and he's sick of everyone, so his motivation for destroying the planet is so he can be the only one left in it (a wish he eventually gets, in a twisted way). But in the end, you can also see that he's essentially a little kid who was robbed of his childhood, and the two things he misses most are his neglectful and abusive parents and Ness, a boy he made a sport out of screwing with. I should mention that everything he did to Ness he essentially thought was the same as "playing a game with him". The reason I say he's a confusing character, really, is that while I can't think of him as anything less than a complete monster, there's still sympathetic elements to him... he's absolutely horrible, but you can understand why he has become a monster.
- For anyone who has watched an episode of South Park, Porky becomes a much less confusing Complete Monster. Just imagine him speaking with Cartman's voice.
- Super Robot Wars, especially the OG series, are ripe with Complete Monster too:
- First we have Aguilla Setme, master of memory alteration who continues to tamper on the School Children's memories without much care of their welfare. Just look at how she crosses the Moral Event Horizon oh so many times to break Latooni. To make matters worse, she gleefully reveals that Aya and Mai are not Kenzo's true daughters as they believed, they just had their memories altered, and when Ryusei calls her out for it, her response is that to them, human life has no value, they're just her research subjects.
- Then we have Archibald Grims, a Psycho For Hire without a cause, whose objective is only to enjoy more bloodshed, especially if it's from the innocents. He also gleefully forces Elzam to make a Sadistic Choice whether it's to sacrifice his wife, or commit mass murder on many people. His comeuppance from the Branstein brothers becomes very satisfactory.
- Archibald also has a predecessor in form of Lubikka Hakinnen from SRW Gaiden. He doesn't even start out decent and the first thing we know about him chronologically is that he massacred Tytti's family right in front of her and swore to make her suffer and ENJOY doing it. He almost became a Karma Houdini as he almost became a Herald of Elemental Lord, until Tytti reported his Complete Monster-ness, which caused him to flee and became Shutedonia's resident Psycho For Hire, doing jobs for its handsome pay and thrill on making people suffer. To hammer it down, then he killed Tytti's lover Ricardo RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER, all while having the crazed look of a would-be rapist.
- Asakim Dowin from SRW Z also counts, whereas he puts Setsuko's life into true hell just so she could awaken her power and kill him. What does he do? He kills her two friends in front of him, then beats her up in front of one of their corpses. Then he impersonates one of her friends... only to shoot her from the back. Then he brought Alternate Universe versions of her two friends and pit them off together. Unfortunately, Asakim is a Magnificent Bastard that he mostly acts as a Complete Monster to Setsuko. In front of Rand, he tends to be less of a monster.
- The Player Character of Armored Core For Answer on Ending C. On that particular route, the Player Character destroys 5 of the Cradles, which are flying cities with 20,000,000 people each. Yes, 20 MILLION. (Do the math, that's 100 Million innocent people dead right there.) Yes, if you take that route, you get your karmic punishment in the form of facing That One Boss times four, but if your do things the Koijima way, even that final mission becomes stupidly easy. It is implied that after that, the player character went on to destroy all of the Cradles.
After that, the blood of the innocent rained down from the Cradles, all at the hands of a single Lynx, one who would go on to become the greatest monster in all of humankind.
- Adachi from Persona 4 is revealed to be one of these, enacting the murders just for the fun of it. Of course, there are some hints of Magnificent Bastard hidden under there, according to some of the fanbase.
- The first murder was a complete accident. He was trying to rape the victim. The second murder was for the fun of it, as well as convincing Namatame to do the rest of the kidnappings.
- He also does appears to show remorse for his actions when he learns that Dojima still considers him his partner, so he's not a complete monster. Doesn't make his actions any less repulsive.
- Rhapthorne from Dragon Quest VIII is one of the most repulsive villains in the series, going as far as to order the murder of an unborn child. Let's just say his death was way too nice for what he did.
- Bishop Ladja from Dragon Quest V counts as well. If you don't hate him after he murders Pankraz and enslaves you and Harry, you'll DEFINITELY hate him when he turns you and your wife to stone, but leaving them self-aware so they can "see the world end."
- Trauma Center's first Big Bad, Erick Von Reitenau aka Adam, is the hypocritical Nietzsche Wannabe leader of a terrorist organization who believes medicine is a product of the devil and mankind deserves to be destroyed for rejecting the "gift" of death. In order to do so, he has created artificial parasites called GUILT, all of which are highly contagious and capable of killing their victims in horrible ways all while claiming biblical justification by equating GUILT with the Seven Plagues of Revelation and himself with the "devouring angel" Abbadon (yup, the one with the locusts), all the while boasting to Derek that he alone will watch as Derek and friends burn in Hell. Despicable, yes, but when Derek and Angie join the raid on Delphi's floating headquarters, they discover something that makes him truly irredeemable - in order to cultivate his biological weapon, Adam has kept seven children (dubbed "Sinners" to go with his deranged ideology) in a nightmarish near-death state as culture grounds for the GUILT. Makes it even worse when you think such a horrible fate could have befallen Angie as well...
- And, in the sequel, Adam's grandson Heinrich is an even worse person than his already despicable grandfather ever was. When you find out that he has used his own son and daughter as GUILT living incubators, you'll probably wish you could just save Karl and Christine's lives, and leave Heinrich to die in pain and alone when he contracts his own artificial disease.
- Dr. Suchong from BioShock, the Mad Scientist responsible for bioengineering Jack, the player character. A thoroughly nasty gent who is caught on tape ordering Jack to snap a poor puppy's neck. However, Suchong suffers an appropriately unpleasant Karmic Death after he grabs an Idiot Ball: in a moment of exasperation, he slaps a Little Sister and promptly gets drilled to death by an angry Big Daddy.
- Similar to Nimdok of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, Bridgette Tenenbaum was formerly this, with her scientific career starting in the Nazi Camps (and like Nimdok, she is of Jewish descent) and is responsible for the Little Sisters. The latter eventually drove her to guilt and made her The Atoner.
- Miranda Jahana, the Big Bad of Variable Geo, is a Corrupt Corporate Executive who wants to create the perfect fighter by any means necessary. To that end, she forced her own daughter Reimi to undergo Training From Hell, abandoning her without a second thought when she lost to Yuka, and created Gattaca Babies through genetical manipulation, only to cruelly kill them off when they didn't fare any better than Reimi. Also driving poor Yuka to an Heroic BSOD through her hideous actions. And let's not forget how she manipulated Satomi in the OVA series, offering her a Deal With The Devil in exchange for a cure for her ill brother, and tried to take over her body. Worst of all, the reason why she wants to create the ultimate fighter is never revealed, so it looks like she's only doing all of this For The Evulz. That she is also an SNK Boss only rubs salt into the wound, but she finally gets her just desserts when she gets defeated by Yuka and Tamao, cast out of the Jahana group by her husband and daughter, and finally blown up by a Spirit Bomb from all the main heroines' ki put together.
- Hector from the Dept Heaven series. In order to fulfill his scheme of becoming the true creator, this already god-like being is responsible for almost every calamity that happen in the series. His most heinous crimes include torturing Nessiah and Marietta into insanity, using people as test subjects for divine weapons, and sacrificing his own servant and Ein's girlfriend to awake the spirit of destruction. And did we mention that the final phase in his plan involves slaughtering the entire population of one world?
- Even the Harvest Moon series has a Complete Monster in the form of Gelwein, the antagonist of Rune Factory Frontier. A scientist banished from the Imperial Research Center in Norad for his theories on using Runes for powering weapons of mass destruction, Gelwein attempts to continue his research by draining the Life Energy from a sentient floating island, condemning the island's sentience to a slow, torturous death in the process. When told that the floating island could, if completely drained of its energy, fall out of the sky and crush an entire town's worth of innocent people underneath it, he smugly says that it's not his problem.
- In the Zone Of The Enders series, Nohman Ridley, the leader of the extremist Martian faction called BAHRAM. He causes countless destruction in the name of freeing Mars and has no qualm about sending his minions to death in order to achieve his goals. Then, it is later revealed that not only does Nohman not care about Mars' independence at all but also wants to wipe out the entire solar system with the Aumaan.
- On the Earth's side, we have Zephyr, the Mad Scientist. Willing to do anything to gain recognition for his research on Metatron, he uses children in lethal experiments to develop the mindflow system, which subdues the will of a pilot to enhance the performance of orbital frame. This system works better with children, making them ideal for soldiers. Only two of the children, Pharsti and Vale, he used for his experiment manage to survive and run away, setting the plot of Fist of Mars in motion.
- In Tsukihime this falls to either Nero Chaos or Makihasa Tohno. The first one's Establishing Character Moment is killing and eating over 100 people because he can without even paying the slightest attention to doing so. No sympathetic aspects are ever attached to him and his entire reason for living is simply living long enough to see what kind of horrible monster he'll end up becoming. The second one raped a girl for years starting at the age of nine or ten, tops. Plus murdered the entire Nanaya clan except Shiki for no apparent pressing reason. Some other bad stuff concerning his treatment of Shiki, SHIKI and Akiha as well. Oh, and finally, the fact that he randomly murdered the family pets occasionally and nobody appears to find this a strange event for him in retrospect is a pretty clear indication that he was not a model citizen before dying at the start of the game.
- Religious zealot and manipulative narcissist Dahlia Gillespie from the first Silent Hill game. She tortures her seven-year-old daughter for years and impregnates her with an Eldritch Abomination and then burns her alive because she thinks it'll get her brownie points with God. Worse, Wish House indicates Alessa isn't the only child she's tortured to see her dream come true, only the one who suffered the most.
- Redship Rory, a pirate from Tachyon: The Fringe, at first seems to have a certain manic charm about him. Then you meet him, and upon recognizing you he remarks "some of my boys have a problem with guys who destroy hospitals for profit. Hospitals should be destroyed for fun!" and... Well... A charming voice actor only goes so far.
- Luther Stickwell (a.k.a. "The Creeper") from The Suffering: Ties That Bind. Pimp, serial killer, paedophile, homophobe, murderous ghost... honestly, what can you say about a character that bonded three prostitutes to his stomach and turned them into Combat Tentacles? And of course, there was that one line: "Remember, blood's the best lubricant!"
- Copperfield the Slavehunter: besides his obsessive hunting of runaway slaves and their innocent ancestors, it's revealed that his hounds are starved before a hunt so that runaways will be horribly mauled or eaten alive when found.
- Back in the first game, the toxic ghost of executioner Hermes Haight was by far the most sadistic of characters in the game, especially when he reveals that his own gas is visible just so that his victims can see death inching towards their nostrils. Oh, and there was that grotesque spell of obsession he had with his own victims while he was alive, which apparently descended to the level of having sex with their corpses.
- Kartikeya of Wild ARMs 5. Although he initially appears to be an average Psycho For Hire, it's revealed later via flasbacks that he shot Greg's 5-year-old son and his wife for trying to protect Greg for no real reason other than it was a fun way to play with his new ARM. His reason for attacking Greg and then letting him live after murdering his family? Again, just for the fun of it.
- Dr. Weil from Mega Man Zero has the dubious honor of being the biggest Complete Monster in the entire Mega Man mythos. Not even Wily, Sigma or even Regal can match him in sheer malevolence, insanity and depravity.
- Here's the lowdown in case you have to ask why he's here instead of any of those three. First, between the Maverick Wars and the Arcadia Wars, there was an incident known as the Elf Wars, triggered by Dr. Weil corrupting the Mother Elf - a sentient superprogram made to eradicate Wily's Maverick/Zero Virus - and made her into the Dark Elf, and used her, along with smaller copies known as Baby Elves and a reprogrammed Zero's body, now christened Omega, to elevate him to a position of absolute power in a campaign of mass terror. Why? Because he, for no good reasons, thinks that humans are superior than Reploids. By the time the Elf Wars ended, 60% of all humans and 90% of all Reploids alive before the war were wiped out, the Dark Elf had been entombed with either a massive cipher device or X's body, and Weil was given an undying mechanical body before being jettisoned off into space so he could watch the world prosper without him. This is just the beginning and take note that HE STARTED EVERYTHING.
- One hundred years later, he drops down with Omega back online, and has managed to construct a replica of X - unlike the Continuity Snarl of the first game, this one is clearly a copy - and wormed his way into supreme power that way, going so far as to have the Four Guardians dismissed. Then he drops a high-yield bomb in a human settlement with Omega, Crea and Prea on board just to get his hands on the Dark Elf again! When Zero comes along to disable Copy X, he kills himself in a One Winged Angel attempt, thus putting Weil at the top of the food chain as he planned all along. The Resistance later avoids a mass brainwashing attempt by Weil using the Dark Elf's power, though at X's ultimate expense, long enough for Zero to shut down Omega and purify the Dark Elf completely.
- Even with Omega dead, Weil still rules Neo Arcadia, and his iron- and spike-fisted rule is so brutal that humans are risking going into the wastes of the outside world just to get away from him. Why does he do that? He thinks both humans and Reploids must pay for the crimes they did against him, even if it's blatantly obvious that he is the one at fault! A caravan of such refugees, led by Neige, finds Area Zero - the site of the Eurasia colony crash - and begins setting that up as their "home away from home", only for Weil to send troops along to start to interfere with the region's recovery as a diversion while he gets Ragnarok up and running. When Craft heel-faces, blows up Neo Arcadia and then wrecks Ragnarok's cannon controls, Weil tries to drop it on Area Zero as a last resort to kill the whole region, if not the whole planet. Zero manages to stop this completely, though unlike in the X series, this really was his last hurrah.
- Though this last entry may go into Wild Mass Guessing territory, it is backed by some rather disturbing evidence. By the actions of all Maverick parties after the end of the Arcadia Wars, there is a very strong possibility that the real Big Bad isn't Serpent, Master Albert, or even Master Thomas, but Dr. Weil himself, still alive inside Biometal Model W. Akin to the Jenova Reunion, Albert's plot to become the ultimate Mega Man involved gathering all the pieces of Model W to construct a new weapon with which to cleanse the world as its new god. It is likely he lost his soul to Model W during his initial research in the same way Serpent lost his due to his own use of it. Indeed, the plots of Serpent and Albert in the ZX games, as well as Thomas' coming plot, all parallel Weil's in some fashion.
- At the end of the day though... it comes down to this; although he ultimately failed and they won... Weil killed both X and Zero in a way. And he does all that because he thinks if anyone doesn't follow him, they deserve to die. Compare with Wily who just wants to Take Over The World and stops there (Weil takes over the world... and make the people suffer even more!), Sigma who at first doing it for the Reploids (Weil exhibits a very severe case of Its All About Me). If that's not a reason by itself for a character to a complete monster I don't know what is.
- The Fallout series has many, many evil people, but Dr. Stanislaus Braun really takes the cake. He is found inside a virtual reality simulation, having been the sole administrator for 200 years. What has he been doing all this time? Why, torturing and killing the other in the simulation over and over again of course! He specifically mentions that doing so is only fun because they are real people, and not computer simulations.
- The people behind The Vault Experiment were definitely monsters. Trapping unwitting people desperate to escape from war in enclosed environs deliberately designed with horrible flaws just to gather social data? One of which was the above mentioned virtual simulation run by a Complete Monster? A Deathclaw would be preferable to these sick bastards.
- Hell, Deathclaws aren't even that horrible at times.
- The third game gives us Roy Phillips, who seems to be a personification of everything that makes Ghouls disliked turned Up To Eleven, and Alleister Tenpenny, an unashamedly callous bigot who wants to blow up a city full of innocent people for sport.
- Giorgios Geld from the Downloadable Content of Valkyria Chronicles, a game otherwise known for giving all of its antagonists at least a few redeeming qualities. This guy is a ruthless war criminal who likes using civilians as shields to get away from the line of fire, and torturing prisoners to death just for fun. The game's backstory reveals that one of his victims was Frederick, Captain Varrot's lover during the First European War, and the usually calm and collected Eleanor goes out of her way and risks her whole carreer to get her revenge on him. Only a well-timed call-out from Largo keeps her from killing Geld in cold blood... though this doesn't save the rat bastard's life, as Emperor Maximillian, in a prime example of Even Evil Has Standards, has Geld court-marshalled and executed for his atrocities.
- The Xenosaga series gives us Dr. Dmitri Yuriev. A man who created an entire army of clones of his own child and then sent them off to battle a diety, knowing that doing so would likely cause a reaction that would incinerate an entire planet, children, innocents, and combatents alike. He was already planning to use this genocide as political leverage to increase his own power. He held back one of those clones, though not out of mercy. No, he planned to use that one to assassinate any of the boys he grew up with as brothers who might survive and then take over his body in order to continue living forever. And lets not forget that once he finally took over the body of said clone, he used that appearance to get close to a very sweet girl who trusted that clone implicitly, and then shot her in the stomach. And then went on to murder an entire starship's crew, civilians and all.
- Pigma Dengar from Star Fox is a (literal) swine, a former member of the original Star Fox, alongside protagonist Fox's father James McCloud and Peppy Hare in his young days, betrayed his comrades and unit resulting in the death of James... just for profit. After this he becomes a member of mercenary for hire group (and Star Fox rival) Star Wolf, under contract by Andross to destroy the new Star Fox team. As the player fights them, Pigma shows no sign of remorse whatsoever for doing what he did and even revels in the idea of killing the second generation as well as finshing what he started with Peppy... all while getting a big fat check. After Star Fox 64 and Venom's fall, apparently this guy is so bad that even Star Wolf, who run on their own code of mercenary honor, find him disgusting and expel him. Pigma goes on to possibly sell out his entire species and star system to the hive like Aparoids in Star Fox Assault, only to be taken over himself. Although his physical form ceases to exist after Assault, his spirit lives on to continually torment Star Fox and anyone involved in it. He's a total, snout-nosed monster in every sense of the word and no one likes him.
- He also spouts the most disturbing line in the entire series. "Daddy screamed reeeaaal good before he DIED!".
- Pigma is also a Large Ham (pun intended) and is a good example of how a character can be occasionally amusing yet still remain a Complete Monster.
- Colonel Volgin from Metal Gear Solid 3 is a sadist who, within minutes of appearing, fires a Davy Crocket nuke at his countrymen just to give it "a test drive," knowing full well that he won't be blamed for it, even when one of his subordinates is clinging to his arm, begging him not to. Then come the one of the most vicious Cold Blooded Torture scenes in video games. Note that it's damn clear he didn't care if the torturee lives or dies before getting the proper information, as long as he gets his kicks.
- The Mad Bomber Fatman from MGS2 can certainly qualify. He joined Dead Cell's operation simply to outdo his teacher and only gets worse as time goes on.
- Curtis Blackburn from Killer7. His first appearance is a cutscene in which he kills a prostitute in his car before walking into an office and killing every person in it for no apparent reason. Then you find out he killed one of the player characters and controls the female half of the black market for orphans (who're used for organ harvesting). Next, Curtis gets revenge on his partner (who controlled the male half) for cutting into his orphans... by raping and killing his wife in front of their son, killing his children, and showing him his daughter's severed head before killing him. And that's before you find out what he does to the girls he steals. This game is messed up.
- Pretty much the only characters in Prototype who aren't Complete Monsters are the USMC mooks, Alex's sister Dana, and Doctor Ragland. When the viral mutant who wreaks havok across New York and eats people is the closest thing to a "hero" we have (he very, very slowly develops something resembling a conscience), you know you're dealing with a world of Black And Grey Morality, at best.
- One of the worst Monsters in this game is the real Alex Mercer. Not only does he brag about making a deadly virus 10x deadlier, when asked how he felt about his work and the human test subjects involved, he replied, "I wasn't being paid to feel". Even worse, when he was cornered by Blackwatch agents at Penn Station, he decided to unleash the Blacklight Virus on Manhattan in a truly callous act of Taking You With Me, even though he knew his own sister was in the city at the time. The man-eating virus itself is arguably less repulsive. It's almost a shame that he's already dead so you can't kill him yourself.
- It really puts things in perspective when that man-eating virus itself is disgusted at what the real Alex Mercer did.
- If Cyrus from {{Pokémon}} Diamond/Pearl/Platinum isn't a Complete Monster on top of being Lawful Batshit, then he's certainly the villain who has come the closest to qualifying in the main series. In the spinoffs, however, you can put Cipher on the list easy. Yes, a whole organization whose upper management consists of nigh-Complete Monsters does exist in the Pokeverse. The list starts at Shadow Pokemon and goes for quite a while.
- Even after his defeat by the player's hand, Cyrus remains unrepentant, stating that he's still continuing his plans, only making sure you can't find him.
- Bob Page from Deus Ex, anyone? Among other things, he invents a nano-robot to simulate a viruant infection and uses it to painfully kill as many people as possible, murders his non-Dragon mooks if they fail him (or if they don't, for that matter), uses nukes - when possible - to deal with his foes when his troops don't work, and generally tries to cause as much death, destruction and chaos as he possibly can in his bid for godhood. "Let it spill over into the schools and churches, let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end, they'll beg us to save them."
- Jon Irenicus. Shadows of Amn starts with his torturing the Player Character, and continues with a tour of his dungeon where you find out that he has killed two of your party members from the previous game and cut one of them apart while making your innocent little sister watch, and keeps people floating in jars in perpetual pain and madness, and stuff like that. One reviewer at Amazon.com gave the game an extremely negative review after only playing this part and quitting in disgust, saying that Irenicus "defines evil". And Irenicus does all this with complete indifference. He doesn't enjoy, justify or regret it. He just has no regard for the suffering of others whatsoever. Even his Freudian Excuse is something he only got after already trying to leap the Moral Event Horizon (although those initial crimes seem tame to the player compared to his others, as we don't get to see what would actually happen if he killed the Tree of Life). His former people and most of the playable characters also think of him very much in Complete Monster terms. The fact that he is made to appear as an unbeatable, irresistible inevitability that your character is helpless against only adds to the desire to finally destroy him.
- From Halo 3: ODST's audio-files, we have Police Commissioner Kinsler. Over the course of the story told in the various audio-packets you find throughout the city, he tries to capture and rape Sadie multiple times, has the city Superintendent shut down, hindering rescue work and thus likely resulting in hundreds of unnecessary deaths, casually orders the execution of Dr. Endesha (Sadie's father), has his troops open fire on a tightly-packed group of civilians who were trying to get to safety in his train car, and other things I can't remember at the moment. The last of those acts gets him killed, when Vergil opens the train doors, allowing the angry mob to rush in and literally tear him apart.
- Ah Kratos. If you're on a Redemption Quest, why do you persist in being a murderous dick to everyone you meet? His only apparent redeeming quality is his love for his wife and children, and for many this comes off a little weak given that he slaughtered them in a beserker rage, one that only came about because his constant conquest led him to make a Deal With The Devil to keep conquering. From the impression of cutscenes in the first game it seems he only started to care about them after they were dead. He then fixated on killing Ares, the only possible candidate other than himself that he could blame for his actions.
- Palie Franchetti's portrayal in The Darkness. Sneds Jackie on a suicide mission to kill a business rival because Jackie starts questioning the way he does business. Jackie finds the guy already dead, a video of Paulie explaining why Jackie has to die, and a bomb set to go off when he arrives. When Jackie survives, Paulie blows up the orphanage where Jackie grew up with a bazooka, and murders Jackie's girlfriend Jenny in front of him.
- The Darkness itself counts, since it MAKES you watch him kill Jenny by restraining you during the scene, after which it has itself a good laugh.
- Probably has to be this much of an asshole for the game's protaganist, an anti hero/noble demon mafia hitman in a symbiotic relationship with an actual demon, to gain any sympathy.
- Hey, why hasn't anyone mentioned Old King from Armored Core 4A? He ruthlessly kills MILLIONS of people via Colony Drop. It doesn't GET more evil than that. Oh, and the kicker? He gets YOU, the PLAYER to do it.
- Most of the villains in the Sly Cooper series are this, which is why Sly's family steals from them, but they really seem to get worse as the series goes on. Clockwerk hated the Coopers SO MUCH that he literally lived off it, turning himself into a cyborg and bringing a Five Bad Band to brutally murder Sly's parents as a child. Neyla at first just seemed to be a case of Dating Catwoman, but then she betrays you, frames her partner, abuses police forces, joins the bad guys, kills her boss, fuses with Clockwerk's shell to become immortal off the drug-induced hatred of France, and cripples Bentley. And Dr. M not only kills his henchmen, but comes pretty close to doing the same to you, your love interest, your friends and team members...
- Karras in Thief 2 - Let's see... the guy is abducting the homeless people and turning them into mindless automatons, in a bid to commit mass murder by using the servants to eradicate all organic life in The City.
- Most villains from the Warcraft games are well intentioned extremists, fallen heroes or corrupted in some way. The exception is Gul'dan, a power-hungry orc who voluntarily corrupted his people into a bloodthirsty horde which he secretly controls, planned the draenei genocide and brought the orcs into Azeroth so they could trigger two wars. He also created Garona as a "breeding experiment" between an orc soldier and a female draenei prisonner, after what she was magically aged, tortured and mind controled into becoming his personnal assassin. Finally, he betrayed the Horde to follow his own goals, which caused the defeat of the orcs. That he died like a bitch trying to make a Badass Boast when he was bleeding to death is the more satisfying.
- Despite his lack of redeeming qualities Gul'dan arguably avoids this due to being cool and inventing fanfavorites like the Death Knights and mass produced Ogre Magi.
Other
- Robert Evanko. That is all. Possibly his brother John and John's wife as well.
- Music example: The eponymous character of The Decemberists "The Rake's Song" relates how he murders his three children after their mother dies in childbirth because he wants a new life, including beating his son to death and burning the body for daring to fight back, and concludes by saying that he doesn't regret it at all.
Web Comics
- Goblins: Life Through Their Eyes boasts two truly vile antagonists: racist, power-grabbing sadist Dellyn Goblinslayer; and the dwarven paladin Kore, one of the most brutal and racist Knight Templars imaginable (including killing an innocent child). At least, people refer to Kore as a paladin, despite him violating everything a paladin's oath stands for and never actually using any paladin powers on-screen.
- Jack gives us Drip Tiberius Rat, the sin of Lust, one of if not the vilest webcomic villains ever, whose lowest point was raping a small child to get revenge on the title character (said child being one of Jack's only friends). The real kicker? It was Drip's son. And he knew it, too.
- Considering that he's almost a word-for-word expy of Violator... yeah, no surprise. Original does it far better, and far cooler, though. He's also a little bit of a self-insert if you've seen Dave's old galleries.
- The rest of the Sins, excluding Sloth, get pretty close. Sure, Jack was a mass murderer who quickly climbed the ranks to successfully driving the entire human species to extinction over a Dead Little Sister, but at least he's somewhat sympathetic compared to most of Hell's denizens. Sloth we just don't see do much.
- Silver, Big Bad of The Law of Purple, masterminded the plot to murder his entire extended family (which happened to be Caligula's Royal Family) in order to erase the stain of his cousin Blue's birth from the bloodline. He's since begun work on "purifying" Caligula as a whole using similar methods.
- Gloog from A Game of Fools. Even the Big Bad is pretty horrified by his alternate plans for the Alien Invasion. Not to mention his treatment of poor, poor Neeg.
- Trace Legacy from Two Kinds used to be this before he got amnesia. This page should be proof enough.
- Advisor Toh in Blade Of Toshubi enjoys torturing & breaking women.
- There's also Major Kohi, who is by far the most sadistic Feline soldier we've seen so far.
- 8-Bit Theater is what happens when not only are the Complete Monsters main characters (except for Fighter), but have the entire thing played for laughs.
- Interesting example from Mind Mistress. First, we have pedophile and murderer Les Kidman who fits this trope perfectly. Then we find out that Lolerei's grandfather (who appears only in retrospections) hired him as a part of Xanatos Gambit in which he was supposed to kill her. Why? Because Lolerei is mentally chalenged and her grandfather considered it disgrace to familly name.
- Smiling Man in Lightbringer was just Slasher Smile guy with Forthe Evulz elements. But in The Crossoverlord he easily proved he is worth a place on this list. Twice. At last.
Web Original
- The Whateley Universe has three particularly stand-out examples:
- Emil Hammond, a modern-day Josef Mengele who likes to perform horrific experiments on kidnapped mutant children — and believes himself justified because, to him, they're not even human.
- Deathlist, a psychopathic, Nigh Invulnerable cyborg who gets off on widespread carnage and considers the world to owe him a debt of pain. The most horrific thing he's done so far was to kidnap a mutant superheroine, jam a power-neutralizing device into her skull, then hack off her arms and legs and give her to his troops as a sex toy. Then, when she died after more than a month of torture and rape, he impaled her corpse on a pole with a message to one of her former team-mates carved into her chest. Not even his Freudian Excuse (namely, that his parents tried to kill him by crushing him in a garbage compactor) nets him any sympathy after that.
- The really horrifying part: That message to a former teammate? It was a thank you note, for allowing him to do that. Moral Event Horizon for said "hero" right there.
- Hekate, a wizardess supervillain-in-training, whose rap sheet includes using a spell to enslave two of her classmates for a year, during which they were repeatedly raped and otherwise abused, as well as the fact that the athamé she used in the spell was empowered by the ritual sacrifice of two young children. Not only that, but during a magical battle with Fey (after trying and failing to ensnare her in the same enslavement spell mentioned earlier), she summons a trio of iron elementals using the promise of dozens of future sacrifices. To top all that off, she used her athamé to stab Jade in the heart beforehand, just to torment Fey.
- Four: Overclock, who plans to trap super-regenerator in a holographic sim, drive her insane, cause her to accidentally kill someone and maybe blow up her friends too, all so she'll end up in the prison known as ARC Red Complex until she dies... which, since she's a super-regenerator, might be forever. Why? She ate up all of his favorite cereal one morning, before he got any.
- There are a few in Broken Saints: Mars, Lieutenants Charles and Bravado, and Benjamin Palmer.
- In Survival Of The Fittest, Cody Jenson starts out as simply a perverted, arrogant asshole. Then he gets hit with a tire iron, and his mind breaks down. Then he kills Adam Dodd's girlfriend, brutally rapes her friend, then kills her too. And those are just his first two kills. Adam Dodd gets his revenge and Cody gets his comeuppance at the end of Version 1, when he kills Cody with a katana and carves the word "Rapist" into his stomach.
- In Book III of Tasakeru, a wolf named Ares is introduced as being one of these: a completely unrepentant rapist. He gets worse. The title of Book III is Soulsnatcher, to give you an idea of how much worse...
- Imperium Nova doesn't have many of these, but Patrice Rey Barte of Gemini managed to earn the title by orchestrating an orbital bombardment of the planet Dnoces 13 that can killed over a billion people because he was bored.
- Dorf Quest has a shining example in the form of Garrelf Swiftrip. A jackass to the core who only looks out for number 1, he is strangely beloved by the players. It probably has a lot to do with him being one of the good guys... kind of.
Western Animation
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