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...
Gundam 0080 stands out among Gundam series as the one with the most Grey and Gray Morality, and yet it does have one Complete Monster, ColonelKilling, the high-ranking Gihren loyalist who took part in Operation Rubicon. The name itself should be a dead giveaway, but just for the lowdown: this bastard deliberately sabotaged Operation Rubicon, causing the death of the whole Cyclops Team (only Ensign Newbie Bernard Wiseman survived, and only because he got lucky). And he did that just to give his superiors an excuse to destroy the colony with nuclear weapons. He's also a firm believer in We Have Reserves and Klingon Promotion, and when his commander overrides the order of destroying Side 6, he shoots him dead and usurps control of the operation from him. Luckily, the attack fails thanks to a timely intervention of the Earth Federation forces, but all the suffering the protagonists of this mini-series go through can ultimately be traced back to him.
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 the rules of warfare, murders solely because he is good at it, and has the disturbing warcry of "I'M GONNA VIOLATE YOU!!" Worse yet, he's a Karma Houdini who makes his escape at the end of the series, despite having killed three main characters, arranged the death of his superior officer (for the heinous crime of not letting him fight a pointless battle), and earned the enmity of every named character in the show. It's worth noting that he was likely the inspiration for Ali Al-Saachez and Decil Galette, two of the worst characters on this list, and does all of this while being a Badass Normal in a show full of Newtypes.
For that matter, Titan's second-in-command, Bask Ohm, is just as horrible. He beat the shit out of Captain Bright for opposing to his orders, had Kamille 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 heart-wrenching 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 Bask away as soon as she could. He's got a Freudian Excuse of the Being Tortured Makes You Evil type, but it obviously doesn't come close to justifying his brutality.
While we're on the subject, the Titans were a haven for such individuals. Top researcher Namikar Corner is more restrained than Bask, but her cruel manipulations of a highly unstable Dark Action Girl put her beyond the Moral Event Horizon.
Katejina Loos from Victory Gundam is the undisputed queen of evil in the UC-verseallGundam 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 Uso 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.
She develops a massive, massive ego, thinking she's the most beautiful woman in the universe and thus perfectly justified in whatever it is she does. She starts off by tricking Uso into a trap, thus letting chronocle into the victory gundam (keep in mind that she had been saved by Uso and that she had noticed that he had a crush on her). When that fails, she tells the kids that she was trying to infiltrate the Zanscare empire, and then she manages to look like she had been kidnapped. She returns later on, after receiving military training, and the first thing she does is to try to kill Uso (knowing that it was him that was piloting) in order to prove her superiority, endangering the colony where she had trained in the process. After a few skirmishes (which resulted in numerous deaths) and an atmospheric reentry, she is rescued by Zanscare supporters, who, upon an attack on their underwater city, are persuaded into following her into the Angel Halo. As they make their escape, she doesn't even try to let other people go with them, condemning hundreds of civilians to death. After a while, she reappears worse than before; she nearly kills shakti (a pre-teen girl she knew was nothing but kind), and only spared her at Chronocle's insistence, whom Shakti had accidentally shot at. Because she knew that she was outclassed, when Uso tried to rescue shakti, she set up a trap (the infamous bikini babe assault team) by lying to her underlings about needing to be naked and giving them easy to use weapons that would do nothing to a mobile suit's armor. Why? Because she wanted to force (the 13 year old) Uso to kill humans rather than mobile suits, thus inducing a Heroic BSOD. Fortunately(?), Uso had gotten through a lot worse, so he's not distracted enough for her to sneak a beam saber attack. After this, he finally decides to kill her, but, in tears over (wrongly) believing her to have been brainwashed, gives her enough time to escape. She then goes even more insane, believing that Uso had rejected her (?!?), and eventually goes into a murderous rampage when Shakti tries to influence her into being peaceful (which makes her ''sick''). She starts killing the "psychickers" (note that some had been taken there by her) in order to make Shakti feel all their deaths (and we're talking about hundreds of them being blown up and/or slowly suffocating, some of whom were children), as well as two members of the Shrike team (one of whom thought that she had been trying to defect), and decides to call Chronocle into a final confrontation with Uso in order for the winner to earn her love. She then kills off the remaining members of the Shrike Team and Odelo (a 14 year old) because they were helping Uso. After Chronocle dies, she has a chance to shoot Uso's Gundam, but instead gets out of her suit and proclaims that she was free from Chronocle's influence. She then hugs the confused 13 year old in order to stab him and throws him to his death, of which he only recovers thanks to another save from his Haro. As you can see from the sheer length of the above, her title as Most Evil Gundam Villainess is well deserved.
While Gundam ZZ's Glemmy Toto was nevera nice person, at least in the anime, he gets enough characterization and is funny and quirky enough to neatly avoid this trope. In the manga's Alternate Continuity, though, his evilness is cranked Up to Eleven. He doesn't even start out sympathetic and is immediately shown to be coldly manipulating Puru and treating her as nothing more than a weapon to be used against his enemies (complete with a Nightmare Fuel worthy description of the poor girl's brainwashing). When Puru does her Heel Face Turn, Glemmy tries to kill her himself. And during the desert arc, Glemmy orders his men to destroy a defenceless village just to draw out Judau and his friends (which leads to Puru's death at the hands of her Evil Twin, Puru-2). It is immensely satisfying when, during the final battle, Judau takes a page out of Kamille's book and disables Glemmy's Queen Mantha with his Newtype powers, before ramming a HUGE beam saber up Glemmy's cockpit. He's eventually revealed to be a clone of Gihren Zabi, Gundam's original CM, which goes a long way towards explaining how he turned out.
Carozzo "Iron Mask" Ronah from Gundam F91, 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 used his mobile suit's hands to grab his own daughter, Cecily, and throw her out in space when she questioned him. Luckily, her spacesuit saved her life.
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. He's also misogynistic, childish, smug, arrogant, condescending, and enthusiastically psychotic. He believes entirely that his subordinates are expendable and would willingly sacrifice thousands and even millions of them just to see all the Coordinators burn. He's also a Sore Loser and a raging hypocrite who uses drugs and brainwashing to turn children into TykebombSuper Soldiers, while claiming that genegeneering is a sin (it's heavily implied that this is a case of Driven By Envy). The sheer hatefulness of his plan is only reinforced by the Freudian Excuse he uses to justify himself (he was bullied by Coordinators when he was a kid. Yeah,that's about it), and his eventual Villainous Breakdown is a source of Nightmare Fuel. He manages to make the series' actual Big Bad (a ranting Omnicidal Maniac) look downright sympathetic in comparison, and he's so utterly vile that he causes hardline Sergeant Rock Natarle Badgerrule to pull a Heel Face Turn.
Lord Djibril from Gundam SEED Destiny, Azrael's successor, with none of his intelligenceor 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 Mu La Flaga into Neo Roanoke. Essentially what happens when you give someone with the personality of a low-functioning sociopath and jumped-up school bully access to unlimited resources and technology. He's a combination of impotent rage and cowardice, but with the money and influence to make him horrifying instead of merely pathetic.
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 ScoopIntrepid 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.
And lest we forget, Ali has an understudy, who, strangely enough, is the protagonist of the manga side story 00F. At one point, it is implied that Fon Spaak was so Ax Crazy that even Ali couldn't handle him and he ended up being booted out of the KPSA. He then gets shuffled around to other terrorist groups who all end up dropping him because the guy is just too damn crazy. This culminates in one of his plans being to execute a Colony Drop of his own. Ironically, Ax Crazy Fon ends up working for Celestial Being as one of their "Slave Meisters", but loves it anyway since it means he gets a chance to fight inside a Gundam.
Ali Al-Saachez's boss and the show's Big Bad, Ribbons Almark. In the first season, he didn't seem so bad, particularly in comparasion to Ali. Then came the second season...To sum up his character: he's an Innovator who shut everyone but the Innovators allied to him from VEDA, the super computer Tieria relied on. Responsible for the death of Aeolia Schenberg and leader of the genocidal A-Laws in the second season. He views himself as a God as well.
That's putting it mildly. Here's a list of his atrocities. To start off, he manipulated Alejandro Corner to do his bidding by pretending that he cared for the man and, once he served his purpose, allowed him to die (and mocked him right beforehand). He created the Trinity siblings simply so that he could use them as an excuse to give the world GN Drives and then sent Ali Al-Saachez to kill them (his own children of sorts) when he was done with them. He created the A-LAWS in the second season, so all of their atrocitites can be traced to him, sends Ali to burn Azadistan down, and later uses a Kill Sat to blow a major Middle Eastern city off the map. And then there's what he does to IllDark Action Girl Louise Halevy, a mentally and physically unstable orphaned rich girl who he has finacially support A-LAWS with the promise that she would get her revenge against the Gundam who killed her family (which he delivered on, but that doesn't make him any better - especially since the pilot of said Gundam was the Sole Survivor of the Trinity siblings, another Dark Action Girl...who could be considered as his daughter). He intended to make her the world's first true Innovator (and partially succeeds) so that he could have a measure of control over one. When his Manchurian Agent, an Innovator girl named Anew Returner, was about to defect after she fell for Lyle "Lockon Stratos" Dylandy, he re-brainwashed her and forced her to attack Lyle, so Setsuna had to Shoot the Dog. And that's just naming a few. Perhaps the only good thing he does in the entire series is saving the life of Child Soldier Soran Ibrahiem, aka Setsuna F Seiei, when he was young. And that was only due to little!Setsuna's sheer awe at seeing Ribbons' Gundam stroking Ribbons' ego, as opposed to kindness. Only Ali is more of a monster than Ribbons is.
And the only reason Ali comes off as more evil, despite Ribbons' actions throughout the series being far more heinous in comparison, is because Ribbons appears to be trying to be something of a benevolent person, whereas Ali is For the Evulz in human form.
Arthur Goodman of A-LAWS is also quite the monster, but he's not as Ax Crazy as Ali nor can he hold a candle to Ribbons' A God Am I motivations. He is responsible for most of the A-LAWS' more brutal tactics throughout season 2, such as the firing of the Kill Sat mentioned above and then using it to destroy an orbital elevator (or rather severely damages it) just to get a group of individuals who opposed A-LAWS, killing almost everyone on it (some 60,000 civilians, mind you).
Here are the specifics of his atrocities: as a high-ranking pilot for Eden and Vagan (also known as the Unknown Enemy), he uses his position to spearhead genocidal attacks on space colonies that stand in his path. It is heavily implied that one of the victims of his attacks included Yurin's family's space colony, leaving her as an orphan with nowhere to go. But he doesn't just use his power to kill those who belong to the Earth-Race. In episode 5, he gundam-jacks the AGE-1 (no thanks to him being a Deliberately Cute Child) to test the Gundam's capabilities. By testing the Gundam's capabilities, he means brutally killing his own comrades just to keep his piloting skills fresh. And then, in episode 12, he forces Alzack Birmings to give up Yurin. Once getting his dirty hands on Yurin, he forces her to fight for Vagan. And by forcing her to fight for Vagan, Desil means imprisoning Yurin inside a pink mobile suit (complete with chains) and taking control of her mobile suit, leaving her helpless as Desil vastly damages the Gundam. And then, when Yurin takes the hit for Flit and dies, the monstrous brat utterly shatters the Moral Event Horizon by gloating that Yurin was a mere plaything. Despite all of this, however, Flit allows Desil to live.Having grown up during the timeskip,◊ he's now a power hungry, sadistic madman. He doesn't take the news of his brother Zeheart's promotion to commander of the Earth Occupation Forces well and makes an offhand threat about revealing the true reason why Zeheart failed to destroy the Gundam. As the Second Generation progressed, his obsession over his brother's position causes his already-low sanity to slip even further, eventually encouraging the Magicians Eight to sortie without their commander's permission. Using their anger over the death of two of their colleagues to engage an isolated Diva, he completely exposes the Magicians Eight and brings forth a humiliating defeat that results in the group losing more of their members, which causes Zeheart to completely lose trust in Desil's actions. This all climaxes in Episode 26, when he goes after and attacks Asemu and Woolf and gets help from two Magicians Eight pilots too. By getting help, Desil means mentally forcing his two wingmen's mobile suits to hold up Asemu and leaving them at the mercy of Woolf. As Asemu is dazed from the explosion, Desil closes in, forcing Woolf to push Asemu out of the way and receive the fatal blow. By that time, Zeheart and the last two Magicians Eight pilots decide they had enough of Desil and leeave his Ax CrazyBlood Knight brother at the mercy of an enraged Asemu. Unlike his father, Asemu wastes no time in promptly putting Desil down by completely obliterating every last trace of the sick bastard's mobile suit. One could only imagine what other sickening acts Desil might have done if he wasn't burning in Hell after episode 26, but judging by the sheer amount of the text above, one thing is crystal clear. Katejina might be Gundam's queen of evil, but Desil is indisputably Gundam'sking of all things horrifying.
What makes him really stand out is that, with the exception of Katejina, he manages to surpass all the other villains in this entire page even after his series is close to its halfway point. Managing to do that when your series isn't even over yet is pretty jarring (even if he's now dead).
Major Nomoa Long from Gundam X. A former scientist for the Space Revolutionary Army, he was dumped on Earth by his superiors following the devastating aftermath of the war and began plotting revenge against them. While this is at least understandable, the extremes he goes to in his pursuit of vengeance are downright depraved - his plan was to use the Fort Severn laboratories to create a strong enough Artificial Newtype (and we know how thoseunfortunate peopleare created and how unstable they usually end up becoming) in order to power up the Patulia, a nightmarish Mobile Armor that is literally Powered by a Forsaken Child: this horror needed a Newtype (who ended up being Artificial Newtype Carris Nautilus) to be used as its power source, and it would slowly and painfully erase the victim's mind, turning him or her into nothing more than one of the Patulia's own components. Does Nomoa care about any of this? No, he just wants the Patulia to destroy all those who have wronged him somehow, and he will sacrifice anyone to achieve that.
Dr. Berg, a Mad Scientist suffering from a terminal case of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder who is willing to betray and murder in order to complete his research and create the most powerful Gundams ever, as he takes pride and joy in inventing newer and newer ways for humans to kill each other. He has no regard at all for human lives and only considers people as guinea pigs for him to toy with. It is also revealed later on that he arranged for the death of Dr. Burnett and his wife, the parents of series protagonists Odin and Odel, in order to divert fundings from their research to his own weapon manufacturing...and the reveal sends Odel, who is normally quite The Stoic, into an Unstoppable Rage and drives him to kill Berg. Unfortunately, the mad doc initiates a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum and activates his Grand Shirio's doomsday program to destroy the colonies and drop itself on Earth to pollute it with its nuclear engines. Odin barely manages to avert disaster.
Krats Silvy is at first just a member of the Quirky Miniboss Squad OZ Prize and doesn't seem to have much going for him. However, he reveals his true colors when Valdor Farkill (see below) takes over the organization: he's an opportunistic bastard who fights for the strongest side and readily betrays his friends as soon as something better comes along, even going as far as to try to kill his former friend, Hot BloodedNoble Demon Roche Nattono (who survives the attempt and has an Heel Face Turnout of sheer disgust). Krats' Karmic Death, brought on by the abuse of his Gundam Prometheus' Super ModeDeadly Upgrade, is a cold, miserable, and undignified one...and he still has no chance of earning any sympathy from the readers.
Finally, Big Bad Valdor Farkill, the Black General of Death, so nicknamed for his skill in battle and for the enthusiasm he puts forth in slaughtering entire companies of enemy soldiers. He estabilishes himself soon after his introduction by coldly disposing of Broom Brooks - the third member of the Quirky Miniboss Squad - just because he had outlived his usefulness, and then by blowing up several shuttles filled with civilian refugees just because. And he gets progressively worse, to the point that, by the time he betrays and kills his loyal henchwomen, Tyke Bomb sisters Solys and Luna, he has already estabilished himself as the most despicable villain in the After Colony era. He's also an extreme megalomaniac who believes it is his destiny to fight and kill Well-Intentioned ExtremistAnti-Villain Treize Kushrenada, for no better reason than a desire to be forever remembered in history books. His final fate is most appropriate: he suffers a Villainous Breakdown when Roche breaks the news that Treize has fallen in battle, which robs Valdor of the glorious fate he envisioned for himself, exposes him as the pathetic Smug Snake he really was...and ends with Odin making Valdor Half the Man He Used to Be.
