Not So Harmless Villain / Literature

• 2666: Popescu is introduced as a Romanian intellectual touring Dracula's castle with General Entrescu. Several years later, he shows again, tying up loose ends from the war by killing a former comrade.
• In Counselors and Kings Dhamari is introduced as a middle-aged wizard of unremarkable talents and unassuming nature significant only because he was once married to one protagonist's mother. He's actually one of the trilogy's main villains who's been helping half of the Big Bad Duumvirate with her schemes ever since they were apprentices together, and while he's no more magically talented than he looks and is too petty to be a true Chessmaster, he's got more than his fair share of low cunning and Chronic Backstabbing Disorder.
• In the Doctor Who New Adventures, the Monk, who was quite comical in his two TV series appearances, reinvented himself as the horrifyingly-effective Big Bad of a major story arc.
• Earth's Children: In The Clan of the Cave Bear, Broud starts out as a Spoiled Brat who bullies Ayla and shows little respect for others, but is mostly just a whiny jerk. Then he snaps when Ayla, who is only a child still, expresses reluctance at waiting on him hand and foot and beats her to the point of unconsciousness. It only escalates from there.
• In the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Alien Bodies, by Lawrence Miles, a Dalek spaceship arrives as a new villain faction, terrifying everyone. Then it turns out that the ship was hijacked and all the Daleks killed by a group of Krotons, who previously appeared in one Troughton-era TV story and were remembered in fandom as among the show's all-time most laughable rubbish monsters. It is then revealed for the rest of the novel just how much they Took a Level in Badass.
• Enemies & Allies: Scott Thomson and Larry Buccheim (the respective heads of marketing and propulsion technology at Wayne Enterprises) may seem like a pair of bottom feeders without much to contribute to either Bruce or the man they are betraying him to, but both of them are surprisingly good at drawing up engineering specs to pass on to Lex Luthor for some of his key villainous endeavors.
• Harry Potter:
  • Pettigrew/Wormtail. All accounts of his past portray him as a simpering incompetent little coward who hid in the shadow of more powerful friends. While this is mostly true, he's far from harmless. When he's revealed to be the one who really betrayed the Potters it's also shown that he killed about a dozen people with a single spell to cover his escape. He also managed to overpower a Ministry official (admittedly a somewhat scatterbrained one) that happened to know information that Voldemort could use. Then he killed Cedric on Voldemort's orders, with a wand that wasn't his. He may be the least competent of Voldemort's Death Eaters, but he's still a Death Eater to the core. And EVERYONE seems to forget he became an Animagus at 15; sure he had a ton of help, but isn't that a slight hint he might be more powerful than expected?
  • Draco Malfoy. For the first five books, he's just a whiny, snarky, envious bully, and even then he's of little threat to the main heroes, other than through his father's connections. But in book 6 he's tasked with assassinating Dumbledore. This doesn't make him more powerful, but sheer desperation turns him into a loose cannon and drives him to ever greater extremes, and he doesn't care if innocent people get hurt in his attempts. He ends up very nearly killing two people (Katie Bell and Ron Weasley) AND sneaking a gang of Death Eaters into the allegedly impenetrable Hogwarts.
  • Gilderoy Lockhart at first seems like nothing more than a pompous Small Name, Big Ego, but later reveals himself to be a dangerous villain in his own right because his Crippling Overspecialization just happens to be Laser-Guided Amnesia.
• Honor Harrington presents us with Mesa, a small, horribly corrupt star nation run by a coalition of Mega Corps, being responsible for a wide variety of atrocities in the name of the bottom line. Despite the fact that they are effectively untouchable due to being wrapped in a tangled web of backroom political deals and blackmail of various powerful officials across the galaxy, they are considered largely a minor sideshow given the fact that the People's Republic of Haven and the Star Kingdom of Manticore are fighting the largest interstellar war in the history of mankind. And then the Mesans launch their surprise attack on the Manticoran and Grayson homeworlds, smashing industrial infrastructure and causing millions of deaths, all with no warning.
• I Did NOT Give That Spider Superhuman Intelligence!: Mammon is a posturing suck-up and fool, but he will gleefully kidnap innocent women and children and sell them to a sadistic Mad Scientist or sacrifice them himself.
• Shere Khan in The Jungle Book, more noticeable than the Disney film. He has a lame leg and is considered something of a narcissistic fool. He is still a great hulking tiger and actually shows something of a manipulative streak towards the wolves.
• Everybody mocks Kallor as a bullying braggart in the Malazan Book of the Fallen. Right up until he joins forces with the Crippled God and performs an epic backstab on Caladan Brood's forces. Then in Toll the Hounds he approaches near Hero Killer status.
• Les Misérables: Thénardier is introduced as a petty thief and conman and a neglectful parent, set to be forgotten after he fails to squeeze more money out of Valjean after the latter gains Cosette's custody. Later in the novel, he comes back as a dangerous gang leader in Paris who manages to kidnap and threaten Valjean, breaks out of prison, attempts to break into Valjean's house with his gang, and demands payment from Valjean to let him leave the sewer and save Marius's life... while also knowing that he'll end up running into Javert, who's lying in wait outside.
• At the very end of the second book in Mistborn: The Original Trilogy, the heroes discover how to Mind Control the monstrous koloss, and from then on they use hordes of dominated koloss as shock troops in conquering various rebel factions. Until, at one particularly crucial moment, the series' Big Bad steals back all the koloss, and blocks the Flaw by which the heroes had been controlling them. All of a sudden, the heroes are faced with an army of supernaturally strong and tough enemies, every one of which they have to kill.
• Mogworld:
  • Barry starts off as an insecure, short-tempered buffoon who is rightfully regarded as a joke. And he is, until Simon turns him into an insane Dark Messiah and Physical God.
  • Simon seems like merely an incompetent Jerkass and a classic case of Small Name, Big Ego, but nothing more. Once he discovers the NPCs are sentient, he quickly goes Jumping Off the Slippery Slope and decides to become their god. He's still a moron, but his craven desire for power and narcissism leads to him causing horrific amounts of damage.
• The Pillars of the Earth: Yeah, see that idiotic, envious kid named William Hamleigh? Got made a fool of, butt of a lot of marriage jokes, and he lusts after a girl he'll never... Oh shit did he just rape Aliena! It all goes downhill from there, too...
• A Practical Guide to Evil has a few examples:
  • Kairos Theodosian, Tyrant of Helike. At first, he just looks like some kind of insane Royal Brat in the mold of a Joffrey Baratheon — dangerous to hang around, but ultimately a self-destructive footnote in the making. It takes him less than a chapter to show how he actually earned his Name. And, he keeps his foot on the accelerator. His being a cackling font of ostentatiously Classic Evil is quite deliberately hiding a metric tonne of meta-awareness under all that ham. For starters, he's actively using his appearance of being "just another nutso Tyrant" to hide the extent of what he's capable of not just from the Calamities, but the Wandering Bard, as well. Every hard-core, very nasty trick he's pulled has been a shell game used to attain goals beyond the obvious ones, yet others have been slow to realize this thanks to the show he makes of juggling the obvious villain balls.
  • Almorava of Smyrna, The Wandering Bard. An Ashuran hero who joins The Lone Swordsman's party before the rebellion begins in southern Callow. Ridiculously dressed, constantly throwing back enough alcohol to kill a herd of livestock and a less-than-competent musician and singer, she first appears to be little more than comic relief. The jury's still out on how much of her silliness is an act, but there's certainly more to Almorava of Smyrna than meets the eye. She has the Genre Savvy that is the hallmark of her profession, with an understanding of the workings of fate surpassing even the Black Knight. She has a tendency to appear (literally) whenever anything particularly plot-relevant is going on; no matter how much violence is directed her way she always manages to escape just in time; she seems to know intimate details of events she should be far too young to have witnessed and if nothing else, her liver must be superhuman. She is also apparently scary enough to bully the Forever King. At the conclusion of Book 2 Almorava of Smyrna dies (apparently of alcohol poisoning) and the name passes on to a new host named Aoede of Nicae, revealing that The Wandering Bard is actually some kind of body-hopping immortal entity that has lived since long before elves arrived on Calernia. The precise nature of this entity is still mysterious but she seems to always exist as a storytelling-based Name and although she switches bodies and identities she retains all of her former memories. The reason for her existence? In Book 4 it is revealed she is the rival of the Dead King and has been thwarting his plans for millennia.
  • Akua Sahelian, The Heiress (later gains the Name of The Diabolist). Despite being a bit of a Smug Snake and tending towards Bond Villain Stupidity, she's just powerful and clever enough to become a massive threat later in the story, she whisks away an entire city, uses a magical plague to kill every last inhabitant to raise a massive army of undead and summons thousands of devils in a bid to conquer Praes and return her homeland to its long tradition of old-fashioned villainy.
• Nicky Testa from Pronto is probably one of the few times that this actually turns out well for the protagonists. Nicky is an incompetent, very stupid gangster who spends the entire novel being bullied by his bosses and co-workers. After growing increasingly bitter, Nicky snaps and kills the gang's leader in cold blood so he can take over. Since he never really cared about the gang's vendetta against the heroes and everyone who did is dead, Nicky calls off the hit and promises to leave them alone so long as they let him run the gang in peace.
• In some Rainbow Magic books the goblins can be this, like when they successfully prevented Kirsty from getting Sophie's sapphire.
• Safehold: Vicar Allayn Maigwair is repeatedly remarked as the least intelligent among the antagonists known as the Group of Four. His actions, such as wasting time and resources building ships that had been outclassed by the protagonists and a certain uselessness in political matters, confirm this. Yet, it is his idea to engage in subterfuge intended to make the Empire of Charis think they were sending their newly built fleet to one location when they had a separate target. Even with their near-omnipotent spying capabilities, this trick catches the Charisian leadership entirely flat-footed. Later, in the sixth book Midst Toil and Tribulation when given a hand in commanding army forces, as opposed to naval ones, he proves to be a very competent military leader and launches one of Safehold's most successful army campaigns ever.
• Sandokan:
  • At first baronet William Rosenthal seems to be just an obnoxious and racist young noble who planned to make a career in the Royal Navy thanks to his nobility and hated lord Guillonk's guest (actually Sandokan, found near dead and healed by Guillonk and family after a bad run-in with a British cruiser) because he wasn't English. He's in fact obnoxious and a little racist even for the European norm of the time, but he's the captain of the cruiser that had nearly killed Sandokan, and that didn't actually hate him until he realized where he had already seen him. There's even a good chance he had been the one who actually wounded Sandokan in that battle...
  • Sindhia, the Rajah of Assam and Surama's cousin who sold her to the Thuggee. He's initially presented as an idiot and a borderline madman, depending on his adviser Teotokris for actual rule. Yet he easily disposed of his predecessor by duping him into not killing him immediately and giving him a gun, and upon breaking out of the asylum he had been sent after being deposed he practically dethroned Yanez by stealing him most of his popular support and building an army under his nose, only losing due Sandokan showing up with a Plague Master. Also, comparing the approximate date of his accession to the Assam throne with Real Life events, he actually extended his dominion, somehow taking back the whole Assam from the British East India Company (who had come to conquer the whole Assam and restored the previous dinasty in Upper Assam only).
• Skulduggery Pleasant: Vaurien Scapegrace is introduced in the second book and quite clearly intended as a comic relief character, proclaiming to make murder into an art form despite never having successfully killed anyone, showing little skill with fighting and no apparent magic. Scapegrace never manages to become a major villain, and in the fourth book he actually gets killed by his own boss....who then reanimates him, turning him into a zombie. Vaurien maintains his status as a comic relief character, but nevertheless manages to kill dozens of mortals, creating a small zombie horde and temporarily providing a serious threat to the heroes.
• Son of the Mob: Tommy may seem like a dumb thug who will sometimes sacrifice time he could spend on criminal pursuits to do stuff with his brother, but he tends to manipulate Vince for some cynical moneymaking scheme whenever that happens. Also, Vince doubts that, boss's son or not, Tommy could have been given such a high-ranking job in the mob without proving his dedication by murdering someone.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: This series takes a positive delight in showing how gods-damned dangerous "harmless" can turn out to be.
  • Walder Frey is introduced as a greedy and opportunistic lord whose loyalty is fickle and will always place his own concerns over others. Ultimately he shows that crossing him can provoke him into some shockingly savage behavior.
  • Joffrey is presented as a spoiled brat of a prince who is nonetheless held in check by his father. However, once he assumes the throne, he reveals that he's much more depraved and sadistic than he at first appeared, and has the means to exercise his darkest impulses.
  • Reek is introduced as the disgusting, sycophantic lackey of the monstrous (and late) Ramsay Snow. After Theon pulls him from a cell, he becomes Theon's lackey during the would-be prince's occupation of Winterfell. As the ill-advised campaign begins to inevitably fall apart, Reek eventually reveals that he's actually Ramsay Snow himself, the bastard son of Lord Roose Bolton, and he has designs on conquering the North for himself.
  • Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish is introduced as a court Wild Card, a cynical, opportunistic sneak who only supports Eddard Stark due to being childhood friends with Ned's wife Catelyn. As the book series goes on it's revealed that Baelish is a Manipulative Bastard who's an expert in Xanatos Speed Chess, and has been running a Long Game where he used his position as Master of Coin and confidante of Lysa Arryn to manufacture much of the Seven Kingdoms' current financial and political troubles. Even people who know what an unpleasant character he is beneath his façade tend to underestimate him because his house is two generations away from being peasants and his 'lands' practically exist only on paper.
  • The Ironborn, while under the incompetent King Balon Greyjoy during the first phase of the War of the Five Kings, are viewed by all of the other factions as nuisances and indirect threats at worst. Around the time the war begins to slow down, Euron Greyjoy orchestrates the murder of his older brother and manages to successful get himself elected king. When hostilities start up again, the competent and monstrously evil Euron (likely also aided by dark magic) turns the Ironborn into a genuinely horrifying threat, ready to directly challenge the other great and spent powers of Westeros in open conflict as opposed to the more small-time raiding they had done previously.
• The Star Trek Expanded Universe novel Kahless does this with the legendary Klingon tyrant Molor. Indeed, at the beginning of the story, Molor is a powerful and imposing warlord carving out an empire on Qo'noS with Kahless as his loyal lieutenant. Then Kahless is forced to do the honorable thing and kills Molor's son in a duel for insubordination. After that, Kahless, Morath, and a few others are forced to flee. Eventually, Kahless (with Morath's help) forges La Résistance and storms Molor's capital city. Kahless and Morath confront Molor in his throne room... only to see a feeble man made of skin and bones, suffering from the same plague as many of his subjects. Seeing this helpless guy, Kahless drops his guard, only for Molor to throw a dagger at him. Morath throws himself in front of the dagger, while Kahless beheads the tyrant. Interestingly, this means that Kahless II is, in fact, the clone of Morath and not Kahless.
• In the last Star Wars New Jedi Order novel The Unifying Force, the true Big Bad of the series is revealed. It's not the Recurring Boss Nom Anor, nor is it Evil Overlord Shimrra. It's Onimi, the weak-looking and disfigured court jester. The events that disfigured him also made him the only Force user among the Yuuzhan Vong, giving Onimi the ability to rule from behind Shimrra through Mind Control. In the Final Battle, Onimi also reveals the ability to produce deadly toxins, giving Jacen Solo a run for his money.
• The central premise of The Supervillainy Saga by C.T. Phipps is that Villain Protagonist Gary Karkofsky AKA Merciless: The Supervillain without MercyTM acts like a fool and a parody of a supervillain in a universe that plays comic book tropes straight. He's ALSO a habitual killer and has a wide variety of powers like fire, ice, intangibility, and durability that he uses to tear through most opponents. As such, he manages to kill numerous more powerful villains and some heroes well above his weight class.
• In Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War, the Lady Land Azania and its female soldiers are on the receiving end of even more than the usual amount of sarcasm and condescension from the avowedly anti-feminist hero, John Rumford, who does not believe that women can fight. This verdict then at first appears justified, when their inexperienced air force underperforms despite superior technology. However, on the ground, the Azanians actually prove to be Rumford's most dangerous enemies throughout the story, and the only ones who manage to outmaneuver his unit in the field.
• The Witchlands: Corlant is a smarmy jerk who loves throwing his weight around; Iseult considers him a nuisance, and Aeduan often fantasizes about squashing him like a bug. In Truthwitch he nearly kills Iseult with a cursed arrow, and in Bloodwitch his cursed arrows halt Aeduan's Healing Factor and temporarily drain him of his magic.
• Skitter from Worm is considered a pretty minor concern to the heroes at first. Creepy and dangerous in the wrong circumstances, sure, but ultimately not a major player. A few months later and they're discussing her like this:
  Miss Militia: Skitter’s a known criminal mastermind, with an emphasis on the latter. She’s a capable strategist and a battlefield tactician. As far as we were aware, she [is] one of the more powerful villains in North America, judging by her control over this city.
• In The Zombie Knight, Parson Miles. While everyone knows how powerful he is most think he is a buffoon more concerned with ice cream than strategy. Even his seemingly massive failures have long-term repercussions that seem to be exactly what he wanted them to be.

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