Fallacy of the Talking Killer. The villain wants to kill the hero. He has him cornered at gunpoint. All he has to do is pull the trigger. But he always talks first. He explains the hero's mistakes to him. Jeers. Laughs. And gives the hero time to think his way out of the situation, or be rescued by his buddy. Cf. most James Bond movies.
"I am Kira." Just so he could see the look on Naomi Misora's face moments before his Artifact of Doom kicked in.
Light also gloats evilly at the end of the penultimate episode. While it wouldn't have changed the outcome had he not done so, it was pretty reckless of him, and he only did it as a matter of pride to show how confident he was that he had successfully tied up all remaining loose ends.
The look on his face when L dies.
And then in the manga Light gloats one last time when he thinks Ryuk is writing his enemies names down.It backfires badly.
Averted hilariously in episode 5 of the first season of Birdy the Mighty: Decode, in which Birdy punches Kinzel's mecha, the Amubis 777 (yes, like Anubis) in the middle of his explanation of why it is so awesome and will own her (to which he responds, "You oughta listen until I'm finished!").
While the manga and anime adaption of Chrono Crusade disagree on quite a few things, there's one thing on which they agree: Aionloves to gloat.
When Tomoe confronts Arika in Mai-Otome after acquiring her new battle suit, she wastes no time bragging about her involvement in Miya's disappearance, Erstin's leg injury, and Arika's costume damage right before she and three of her companions attack. However, she was only supposed to capture Mashiro and get back to base as quickly as possible to avoid drawing attention.
In both the anime and manga versions of Bleach, the 9th Espada, Aaroniero Arruruerie, fights Rukia, breaks her sword, and skewers her with his trident. He pulls her closer so that he can gloat effectively. This is when Rukia pulls out her third Shikai which reforms her sword through Aaroniero's head instantly killing him. Sure, Rukia's sword reforming and her subsequent rescuing are major Deus Ex Machinas, but in Bleach, we lost count long ago anyway.
And that's not even going into Sousuke Aizen, who just loves to listen to himself talk, going by the fact that he has on a few occasions taken the time to fill the good guys in on every little detail regarding exactly how bad he's screwed them over.
To be fair to his villainous willpower, he will wait years for the opportunity for these gloatings. His Un Clarking monologue was stored up over well over a hundred years of playing the nice guy. Of course, he did get to let it out sometimes, so long as he was sure whoever it was was about to die. Letting Urahara and Shinji and company get away alive had better bite him hard in future.
In the recent Fullbring arc, Giriko breaks into this when Drunk with Power...which gets him killed by Kenpachi.
Mahou Sensei Negima! has Chao doing this to Negi's friends after sending them a week into the future when she'd already won the battle by sticking a note gloating about her victory on the side of Eva's resort.
Evangeline is also fond of evil gloating, especially when she isn't doing anything evil. She probably wants to remind everyone she most definitely has not gone soft.
The villains in One Piece love this trope. Somewhat subverted in that their gloating usually doesn't bring about their fall, Luffy's endless willpower does.
[A] Keep an eye on them to make certain they don't do stupid shit or have a game plan if they do?
[B] Sit there and go into full-on gloating as your shark's teeth pop back out?
or [C] have your summoned pets knock the last remnants of air out of them just to be sure?
If you picked B, congratulations, Ark! You just won an ass-kicking from Sapphire, who used those teeth to cut open the glass and drain all the water while you were gloating! Enjoy your dirt nap, sucker!
Pretty much everybody does this in the Liar Game, after they believed to have successfully tricked their opponents, particularly if it was the protagonists Nao and Akiyama. However, usually once they do this, they better be prepared to have a Hannibal Lecture or to be Out Gambitted seconds later in a humilating defeat.
Frankly, this is a pretty common behavior of the homunculi, due to their massive arrogance. Greed and Lust both did Explaining Your Power to the Enemy (the latter because she didn't plan to leave them alive anyway), Wrath often monologues about humans being weak, and Pride is a Smug Snake because of his habit of threatening people and bragging about his superiority.
Unlike most examples of Explaining Your Power to the Enemy, they didn't really say anything that could make the good guys pick up on a weakness. They had to figure that stuff out on their own.
In the first season of Zero no Tsukaima, Cromwell, the villain behind it all, starts to gloat about how he'll never be defeated as long as he has the ring. Before he can finish the sentence, Guiche sneaks up behind him and hits him on the head with a big stick. "So, who is this guy?"
Despite being a very intelligent and shrewd man, Kabuto Yakushi from Naruto has a terrible habit of gloating before fallen enemies when he thinks (and usually does) he has the upper hand in a battle.
A good example is when he fought Tsunade in order to "convince" her to heal Orochimaru's soulless arms. He began kicking her while she was in her hemophobia-trauma-shock and taunting her for "bringing shame to the name of Sannin. Which Orochimaru has brought glory and power to!" (or something along those lines).
He also seems to do this whenever he and Naruto manage to meet up in battle. Since Naruto has a short fuse on anything involving Sasuke, it's not even a challenge to get him riled up by Kabuto's taunts.
In Hellsing, Zorin Blitz really likes doing this. However, it proves to be her undoing when she calls Pip Bernadotte an 'insect' and mocks him and the Wild Geese, while a blind and mutilated Seras is crying over his body. Understandably, Seras doesn't take it very well. To the extent that she paints the walls with Zorin's head.
Comic Books
Watchmen plays this straight, but with a nod to the oft-fatal habit of monologuing, but adds the already infamous twist to the end. When confronted by Rorschach and Night Owl, Ozymandias coolly explains his master plan to them. The heroes expect to be able to stop him yet, but he bluntly tells them his plan is already complete.
In the pages of Grant Morrison's JLA, the Key rants (basically to no one, since only his nonsentient robots are around to hear him) for about a page about how brilliant he's made himself through the use of brain-altering chemicals, and how it's allowed him to finally beat the JLA. It ends with this immortal aside:
The Key: Oh, and make a note of an interesting side effect of my expanding consciousness. I can't stop talking to myself.
In All Fall Down, AIQ Squared lays out his entire scheme to the confused and outraged IQ Squared.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: a vengeful man catches up with Tuco ("the ugly" of the title) while Tuco is taking a bath. The pursuer starts ranting about tracking his quarry for weeks, and Tuco shoots him dead with the gun he has hidden under the soap-foam: "When you have to shoot.... shoot, don't talk!"
The Untouchables: Eliot Ness has chased Al Capone's hitman Frank Nitti to a rooftop.
Ness: I'm going to see you burn, you son of a bitch, because you killed my friend!
Nitti: He died like a pig.
Ness: What did you say?
Nitti: I said your friend died screaming like a stuck Irish pig. Now you think about that when I beat the rap. [starts to walk away when Ness grabs him and pushes him off the roof]]
Magua:Before you die, know that I will put under the knife your children, so your seed are wiped out from the earth forever.
In The Princess Bride Count Rugen, (the Six Fingered Man) briefly has Inigo at his mercy after hitting Inigo with a throwing dagger.
Rugen: You must be that little Spanish brat I taught a lesson to all those years ago. You've been chasing me your whole life only to fail now? I think that's the worst thing I've ever heard. *beat* How marvelous.
In GoldenEye, following an intense fist fight, Trevelyan is armed, James Bond is at gunpoint... and he stops to breathe and then say "You know, James? I was always better" before shooting - and he misses, as Bond kicks a trapdoor and goes down a staircase. (James Rolfe used this as an example for Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him? on his "10 Worst Clichés" list.)
In Space Balls, Stephen Toblowsky's character gloats over the captured heroes. Unfortunately for him, it turns out they captured their stunt doubles.
Discussed in The Incredibles by Frozone and Mr. Incredible when recounting stories of their glory days:
Frozone: One more shot from his death ray, and I'm toast. Eventually, I manage to find cover, and what does he do?
Mr. Incredible: (laughing) He starts monologuing?
Frozone:He starts monologuing! He keeps going on about how inferior I am! How inevitable my defeat is! How the World! Will soon! Be his!
Mr. Incredible: Yammerin'!
Frozone: Yammering! I mean, the guy has me on a platter and he won't shut up!
In Matilda, the main villain gloats, just before the title character gets her final revenge: "In this classroom, in this school, I AM GOD!"
Live Action TV
Done successfully by Londo Mollari in the Babylon 5 episode "The Rock Cried Out No Hiding Place" He explains to Lord Refa, via recording, his entire Xanatos Gambit for no reason other than to grind Refa's face into his failure and imminent demise. Of course Refa is then horribly murdered by a mob of angry Narns and framed posthumously for treason, fulfilling the rant and the gambit both.
Ethan Rayne from Buffy the Vampire Slayer likes doing this. And its the only thing The First Evil ever really did, being intangible. Angelus was good at it too.
It's never a good idea to do this in the Buffyverse, however, as it tends to signal a villain's defeat, usually because speechifying leaves them open to attack or buys the hero time to recoil. Villains like Rayne are aware of this, but can't seem to help themselves: "I really got to learn to just do the damage and get out of town. It's the stay-and-gloat that gets me every time."
The First could pull this off because of the whole incorporeal thing. Though It was also an expert in Mind Rape
iCarly:Missy does this, allowing Carly to overhear and finally figured out that Missy was trying to get rid of Sam.
In the 6th season premiere of Stargate SG-1, Anubis does this when he finds a way to overload the Earth stargate.
McKay: Hello, Anubis? Your agent called, you're playing it wayover the top."
And the Goa'uld wonder why the Tau'ri refuse to take them seriously.
In the first season finale of Supernatural, the Yellow Eyed Demon does this. Dean lampshades it with "Just kill us, 'cuz I just can't take the monologuing." This just fuels the Demon's Hannibal Lecture. It should be noted that Demons are practically the only type of evil the brothers face who pull this one. Occasionally some other malevolent beastie will indulge but every single demon does it when most creatures just get right to the killing, or at least attempted killing, of the brothers.
In the episode of The Big Bang Theory entitled "The Vengeance Formulation," Sheldon makes foam fall on Kripke from the ceiling tiles in his office to get back at him. The plan goes horribly wrong when the president of the university and the board of directors are drenched with the foam too. Then, to make matters even worse, a pre-recorded video comes on to Kripke's monitor. It contains Sheldon gloating about the "classic prank" that Kripke has just fallen prey to. He also gives congratulations to Leonard and Raj for helping him with his plan.
Inverted in The West Wing when Secret Service agent Donovan is so busy gloating about how stupid a crook was to try to rob a store when the Secret Service was in town, that he doesn't notice the store clerk's very obvious eye rolling, trying to indicate that the guy he's caught has a partner.
Subverted at the end of the Doctor Who episode "Utopia", when Professor Yana transforms into the Master and begins to run away with the TARDIS. He says "Now, then, Doctor! Oooh, new voice. Hello, hellooo, helllloooo! Anyway... why don't we sit down and have a nice little chat where I can tell you all my plans and you can work out a way to stop me, I don't think!" Then he zooms back into the past leaving the Doctor, Martha Jones and Captain Jack at The End of the World as We Know It End of the Universe.
The Tad Williams book The War Of The Flowers features Lord Hellebore explaining to his rivals their imminent destruction through a Magitek television. Lampshaded when the Remover complains about him wasting valuable resources to send them the message for no reason other than to gloat.
Williams also pulls this in Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn in the part of Evil Sorcerer Pryrates, who spends half of the climactic chapter gleefully explaining his plans to the now-helpless protagonists so everyone involved will know exactly how thoroughly they failed to stop him. For bonus style points, he works some of it into the summoning ritual for the Storm King — and true to the trope, said villain promptly cuts off the gloating by demonstrating that Evil Is Not a Toy.
At the climax of Darkness Visible, the traitor who Lewis and Marsh have been chasing for weeks gives a Hannibal Lecture gloating over the destruction of London.
In Discworld this is a common feature of villains. Commander Vimes considers that an evil man always likes their enemy to know they've been beaten, thus giving them a chance to turn the tables, while a good man will kill you with hardly a word.
Cats and witches also prefer an enemy who knows they're beaten. A key difference is that cats and witches know the dangers of monologuing, so they instead just make sure their opponent is so good and beat that there's no question.
Coraline gets out of the Other Mother's clutches by fake-guessing that her parents are hidden behind the door that leads out of the world, causing the beldam to open it so that she can gloat about Coraline being wrong.
In the Thursday Next novel The Eyre Affair, Big Bad Acheron Hades launches into a gloating soliloquy right when he has Thursday cornered. In the time it takes him to gloat, Thursday is able to figure out his one weakness (silver) and shoot him dead with a silver bullet.
In The Goose Girl, by Shannon Hale, Selia gloats for a few PAGES about how she's a better princess, how Falada died, and so on, and how no one will believe poor Ani.
she should have double checked behind the tapestries, though.
Harry Potter villains just love this trope. Voldemort himself is easily the biggest offender, though nearly every major villainous character monologues at least once in the series.
Finally inverted with Harry himself monologuing Voldemort at the very end. Of course Harry is in the lucky position of finally holding all the cards - to the point where it doesn't even matter that he tells Voldemort exactly how his shiny new weapon works.
In "A Witch Shall Be Born", Salome opens the story with explaining her plot and her powers to her sister the queen and gloating over her.
Harry Dresdenfrequently notes the tendency of villains to do this, and thinks that it must be part of his training. He usually uses the opportunity to seize the initiative in combat, but sometimes is tempted to do the same himself, usually to his cost.
In Ghost Story, a villain actually uses this to their advantage -When she continually gloats about the situation in the middle of a fight with Dresden, he just thinks she's being stupid and attacks. He realizes a bit too late she was actually trying to trick him into Cast From Hit Pointing himself to death.
Radio
Satan likes his Evil Gloating in Old Harrys Game. Several episodes have him place a bet with the Professor about how horrible humanity is, with the stakes simply being that if Satan's proved right, he gets to gloat about it.
Tabletop Games
Infernal. Exalted. They can reduce their Torment meters by doing something their Yozi patrons like. As it happens, She Who Lives In Her Name enjoys an impressive feat of Evil Gloating, meaning that a Green Sun Prince who wants to pursue his own agendas without losing control may well have to rant like a B-movie supervillain.
In Wolfenstein, Blazkowicz comes across a Nazi officer standing in front of a Veil portal. His gloating is interrupted when he is rather violently Killed Mid-Sentence by a giant, mutated abomination that telefrags him.
Imbeciles...You would knowingly shackle your heart with a chain of memories born of lies? You would be one who has a heart, yet cast aside your heart's freedom? You turn from the truth because your heart is weak—You will never defeat me!
In Mass Effect, it turns out that even the machine gods aren't immune to evil gloating. Sovereign tells you that there's nothing you can do to stop him and the other Reapers from wiping out all sentient life in the galaxy. It also claims that you're just a tiny insect compared to it and that you have no way of understanding its nature, and yet there it is delivering its evil speech.
Kane does this to the player midway through the GDI campaign of Command and Conquer, completely unaware probably aware that GDI is Faking the Dead.
Kane also gives a good one to Mike McNeil after breaking through the Hammerfest defenses in Tiberian Sun and stealing the sonic crystals, leaving behind a broadcast in which he glibly informs him that the sonic tank "will make an excellent addition to my collection", and that he is sorry to hear that McNeil's brother died a slow and painful death in the raid.
Subverted in Ratchet and Clank 3 where Ratchet throws a wrench at the big bad as soon as he opens his mouth to gloat.
Strictly speaking, he throws his wrench at the remote control for his uber weapon just about to target Veldin. Nefarious just stood in the way.
SHODAN does this a lot in the System Shock series. In both games she taunts the player that she is superior to you in every way because as an AI construct, SHODAN has access to more human information and more control over machinery that any human on Earth could ever even conceive. She also explains how being an organic life form makes you inferior and in the second game, she says that the only thing she likes about you are the cybernetic implants she gave you. She especially does this as you traverse the levels trying to find her, but when you show up for your showdowns with SHODAN her taunting amounts to nothing more than mere Boss Banter.
In one of the last stages of Jedi Outcast Fyyar goes off on a monologue, while Kyle casually finishes the objective he was performing before he was interrupted.
Several World of Warcraft raid bosses do this, especially if you start wiping. Kael'thas and Malygos have raised it to an art form.
And after he succesfully does the above... He proceeds to gloat enough to allow Tirion Fordring to summon Heroic Willpower and ruin all his plans in one strike.
Keal'thas also does this in the Frozen Throne Campaign, where he tells Arthas exactly what his and Illidan's plans are, though in that case he is far less of a villain. It does, though, help cause the plan to fail in a similar manner as other villains. Once Arthas knows the plan, he takes a faster route to the Lich King, and arrives in time to organize the forces and fight back.
In the last quarter of Resident Evil 5, Wesker's speeches are pretty much nothing but this, intermixed with his truly epic Villainous Breakdown.
Wesker truly is the epitome of this. He's got it so bad, it's to the point where he literally has a gun pointed straight at Chris' head, and had a perfect opportunity to just off him right there. Except... he ends up just gloating and trying to convince Chris exactly how wonderful of a God he will be.
In the third Ace Attorney game, Dahlia Hawthorne lays bare the sheer contempt she feels about the Fey clan and Phoenix; she's dead, having been channeled by a medium, so she believes she's beyond punishmment. Boy, is she wrong.
As the resident Evil Genius in, well, Evil Genius, you can naturally do this while your enemies are being tortured. Be warned that super agents can escape as you gloat over their misfortune.
Pretty much everythingNEXUS says in Warzone 2100 is some sort of gloating.
NEXUS: "You have five minutes, Commander, and then it's frying time! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
In Jak 3 Veger taunts Jak right after Damas dies, taking exceptional glee in telling Jak that he was his father and that he died without knowing.
Web Original
Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog has both Captain Hammer's gloating to the Doctor that he is going to sleep with the girl of his dreams, and later on, Horrible's awesomely gloating counter in the form of "Slipping."
Also subverted earlier, as Dr. Horrible tries to get his gloat on but gets sidetracked by his romantic problems:
All right. The wait is over. This, my friends, is my freeze ray, which, with the addition of the Wonderflonium I obtained at my famously successful heist last week... I say successful in that I achieved my objective. It was less successful in that I inadvertently introduced my arch-nemesis to the girl of my dreams, and now he's taking her out on dates, and they're probably going to...French kiss or something. She called him sweet? How is he sweet? [long pause] Right, freeze ray!
Another suspension-of-disbelief moment in lonelygirl15, when Edward Salinas broadcasts a video straight to TAAG's IP address for this purpose.
Pretty much every villain from the web fiction serial Dimension Heroes displays this trait to some degree.
Webcomics
In The Order of the Stick, after Elan defeats Lord Kubota and is about to bring him to trial, Kubota proceeds to gloat that he will never be charged, and that he will get off scot-free due to being an apparently Magnificent Bastard. Vaarsuvius disagrees.
Subverted earlier with Elan's Evil Twin Nale: after Elan catches him with Haley in a compromising position, Nale proceeds to gloat at Elan's stupidity at not seeing that Haley is evil and has been selling out the Order of the Stick. The catch is that none of it is true, and Nale is gloating about something that never happened, but since Haley is afflicted with aphasia at the moment, she can't defend herself against the evidence at first.
Nale even lampshades it earlier. He did gloat out all his plan. Only he did it securely alone, to the mirror, in order to get the urge out of his system.
Girl Genius takes a stellar use of this trope when Lucrezia Mongfish, in Agatha's body, turns Klaus Wulfenbach into one of her slaves and gloats about a wonderful Heterodyne-Wulfenbach alliance to come. Klaus even says, "Heard you gloat too many times." However, the self-congratulater is undone by her own pride. Watch it here.
One of the previous Heterodynes was apparently plagued by the habit of gloating prematurely or decided to leave some advice to future generations and inscribed onto the stairs a list of things that must be taken care of before it's safe to gloat.
In thisNodwick strip, a captive explains that he knows the entire plan because the villain has gloated about it. Over and over and over and over and. . . .
For some reason, in the chapter bROKEN, Bun-bun goes curiously Genre Blind and does this to Oasis after trapping her, even though he's not even the villain in that situation. Of course, right then something new is revealed that makes it backfire.
In S.S.D.D future Norman once went into a full explanation of how the "heroes" were all acting according to plan, so he could distract Tessa until he had his gun pointed straight at her head.
Frans: Did I hear one of you ask how this glory can be real? I remember... when you stormed my mansion, and you alone cut through my army of ninjas... And I kept hearing... "He's just one man! He's just one man!" I didn't realize it until then, but that was how I defeated all of your peoples in the 80's. I was just one man. And now I am just one man again! And I'm killing you! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Boondocks character Colnel H Stinkmeaner is quite possibly the king of this trope. Every single word he says is evil gloating. At one point he even dies goes to hell and basically gloats that he is more evil than the Satan to which Satan readily admits
Lampshaded twice in The Incredibles. First, when Mr. Incredible and Frozone are reminiscing about past superhero-ing:
Frozone: So I'm in deep trouble. I mean, one more jolt of this death ray, and I'm an epitaph. I somehow manage to find cover, and what does Baron Von Ruthless do?
Mr. Incredible:(chuckling) He starts monologuing.
Frozone:: He starts monologuing! He goes into this prepared speech about how feeble I am compared to him, how inevitable my defeat is, how the world will soon be HIS!! Yadda yadda yadda.
Mr. Incredible: Yammering...
Frozone: Yammering! I mean, he's got me on a platter and he won't shut up!
Later, when Syndrome and Mr. Incredible first meet:
Syndrome:...How do you think I got rich? I invented weapons. And now I've made a weapon that only I can defeat, and once I unleash it I'll-
Even good guys gone bad suffer from this. In an episode of Beast Wars where Rhinox is turned into a Predacon and nearly takes over, this is what trips him up:
Megatron: Even now, Rhinox, you're teaching me a valuable lesson...
Rhinox: Yeah? What's that?
Megatron: Sometimes Predacons gloat too much! * ZAP*
Kyle Rayner: "Wait! Don't you want to talk first? You know, banter back and forth to show me your innate superiority?" Sinestro: "No."
When Starscream of Transformers Animated wanted to destroy Megatron by using his clones as bomb decoys, he just had to gloat instead of detonating the damn things, giving Megatron and crew time to get clear and let the Autobots save the city. In fact, in this series Starscream is addicted to evil gloating, spending time bragging instead of offing the people he wants to off, like Megatron.
This is averted with Megatron (the only TF canon where it is averted, come to think of it), who stands over Optimus and gloats that he's going to finally destroy the person who left him as a head for fifty years before turning right around and blasting the slag out of Starscream, the guy who actually did it.
Trust me, this guy takes his evil gloating really seriously. He got pissed off when Bumblebee interrupts him. "YOU...INTERRUPTED...MY...SPEEEEEEEEEECH!"
At the end of The Lion King, when Simba, still blaming himself for his father's death, is dangling from the edge of a cliff, Scar can't resist doing some Evil Gloating and says "I killed Mufasa." Big mistake.
At the end of ReBoot Megabyte gives a short speech to the entire city after taking over again. He even lampshades the expectation of evil speeches from the Big Bad.
In Spider-Man: The Animated Series, Episode "Venom Returns", Cletus Cassidy gloats briefly about how everyone is going to die in 30 seconds due to a bomb he strapped to his belly, only Spidey takes advantage of this by taking the bomb off his stomach by force (and surprise) and throwing it at the sky, saving everyone.
In The Simpsons, Mr. Burns is known for doing this, (Springfield's organized crime community is relatively less prone to it) but an especially sickening example is in Who Shot Mr. Burns part 1. At the town hall meeting about Burns' plan to block out the sun, Bart is telling the people at the meeting about how his dog was crippled by Burns' oil drilling operation; Bart shows the town the dog's cast and everything, and Burns walks in at this exact moment and says "oh, those wheels are squeaking a bit; perhaps I could sell him a little oil!"
Subverted when Homer ends up owner of the power plant:
Homer: Mr. Burns reign of terror is over! And today begins my reign of terr...
