- Played with in Childhood's End where the overlords, Aliens who arrive to govern Earth, make much ado about not showing themselves to Humanity until it is 'ready' because they would and do indeed appear obviously evil. The ultimate analysis of significance of their appearance at the end of the book is somewhat ambiguous.
- The Vitalizer in "Clockpunk and the Vitalizer" is described as wearing all black save for a gray mask with menacing-looking features. Along with his condescending, destructive behavior, there's really no ambiguity.
- Invoked in The Death Gate Cycle. Sinistrad is an Evil Sorcerer who is tall and gaunt, with pale skin, no hair, and a fondness for black robes (the latter, admittedly, because that's what a wizard of his stature wears regardless of their morality). He knows the odds are pretty stacked against anyone mistaking him for a good guy, so he goes the other way and deliberately plays to the stereotype, complete with changing his name to "Sinistrad" in the first place, all so most people end up assuming that this walking cliché can't be for real and he can't possibly be as bad as he makes out. He's worse.
- Other characters from The Death Gate Cycle also fall into this category easily. Lord Xar, ruler of the Nexus; Dynast Kleitus, ruler of the Necropolis in Abarrach; and Sang-Drax, the main serpent who practically oozes evil (and revels in it) whenever he shows up on the page.
- Discworld: Played with in Carpe Jugulum. The old Count von Magpyr Looks Like Orlok and acts like a Card-Carrying Villain, but is not a main villain; in fact he actually helps the witches against his descendants, new-style vampires who don't play fair. The witches credit him with being a Worthy Opponent in his day and his obvious evilness being the reason he was allowed to keep coming back to life; if vampires all started ditching their weaknesses they would be so overpowered people wouldn't put up with them and would find a way to make them Deader than Dead.
- Dante's The Divine Comedy: In Inferno, the Malebranche is a group of pitch-black demons with bat's wings and names that all mean "evil." They gnash their teeth, curse, and eagerly prepare their pitchforks to stab people with, a get-up that telegraphs so much malice that even the Hypocrites lower in Hell know not to trust them. Unfortunately, pagans like Virgil never got the memo about demons being evil and so he trusts the Malebranche until they're hunting him down.
- Dragonrealm: Dragon King Ice is emaciated, almost undead-like in his appearance. His burning gaze reeks of malevolent intentions.
- The Harkonnen in Dune are sodomites, love wanton slaughter, their leader is an obese glutton who cannot move without technological aids, their homeworld is a cesspool of pollution and so on. Also, Baron Harkonnen forces his heir to kill his own slaves as punishment after he intrigues against him.
- Lampshaded in Eliezer Yudkowsky's short story "Failed Utopia #4-2." It's said that the AI "might as well have been wearing a sign saying 'VILLAIN'." It's implied that this is because the AI was programmed to be honest.
- If The Grand Ellipse is any indication, Those Wacky Nazis have created a new version of this trope. The villainous empire of Grewzia is full of tall blond guys, everyone from it is habitually punctual, and its national language consists mostly of hard consonants. This society is not an expy of the Nazis, and beyond appearances has almost nothing in common with them — this stuff's just our cue that they're bad, bad people.
- Harry Potter:
- Voldemort. Red, snake-like eyes, bleach-white skin, and clawed fingernails. This is justified, as the method of his immortality mutates him gradually and made him this way. Then there's his lackey, Wormtail, who follows Animal Stereotypes (specifically, rats). Out of the original generation of wizards, who was it that became a traitor? Yep, the one who turns into a rat. Also justified in that Animagi take the form of the animal which best embodies their personality.
- Subverted, however, with Snape, who spends the whole series wearing black, being mean to the heroes and in general acting like a typical villain. He turns out to be a good guy acting as a Double Reverse Quadruple Agent. He still doesn't like the protagonists much and his motives aren't really covered until the end of the series.
- On the other hand, the Carrows with their twisted faces, squat and ugly bodies and constant wheezing (and they Crucio anything that moves) makes their alignment painfully obvious.
- Sirius Black is a subversion. When we first hear about him, he's described as looking Obviously Evil with a skull-like face, yellow teeth, and matted black hair. He's played by Gary Oldman in the movies. Then we get to The Reveal where we find out he was actually a good guy all along. After this happens, his description in the books becomes more favorable. For the films, they stop making Oldman up to look scary at this point. It's attributed to him recovering from his time in Azkaban, but the result is the same.
- Dolores Umbridge. The way she dresses screams Most Definitely Not a Villain, her name is a pun on insulting and resentment, she openly speaks out against somebody that saved Hogwarts four times and was prophesized to do it several more times, and uses medieval disciplinary methods. How the Ministry of Magic hasn't caught on to this is a mystery.
- In The Hunger Games, the dictatorial politician President Snow is described as having snake-like eyes and the smell of roses and blood.
- Since most of the villains in The Kingdom Keepers series are Disney villains, it's natural this trope is in effect. Special mention goes to the new character Jez, who has pale skin, black hair, and her name is short for Jezebel. To Finn's credit, he does begin to suspect her...until it’s revealed that she was actually Brainwashed and Crazy rather than evil. She’s actually quite nice. Oh, and her real name is actually Jessica.
- Knaves on Waves has Captain Carnage, a giant, crimson-skinned Super-Soldier who sails on a ship covered in corpses.
- Looming Gaia: Overlord Morgause of the Unseelie Court dresses in black and red, dramatically shouts everything she says, practices cannibalism, drinks elf blood, and is amused by death and carnage. Literally everything about her screams "evil", so it's no surprise that she also steals souls from her subjects to extend her life, abused her divine ex-husband and killed him multiple times, raises zombies to fight or have orgies for her entertainment, and keeps endangered sprights imprisoned and tries to force them to breed.
- New Jedi Order: It takes Jacen Solo about one conversation with Viqi Shesh that doesn't even last five minutes to peg her as being utterly untrustworthy, even comparing her to pre-Clone Wars Palpatine. He then passes this thought along to his mother, and it only takes her a moment's consideration to figure that Shesh is in fact super-suspicious.
- Path Of The Ranger has the Dark Rangers a subversive splinter cell of the King's Rangers. The name says it all. The King's Rangers aren't presented as perfect or wholly good, but with a name like "Dark Rangers", there's no question that these are not going to be a better alternative. And that's before they start their whole sale assassinations of anyone who might foil their planned regicide.
- Many villains of the Redwall series. Let's see... An ugly rat with a heavy whip-like tail, scars, a cape made of bat wings and clasped with a mole skull, a war helmet decorated in blackbird feathers and stag beetle mandibles, and an eyepatch: Check. A dark-cloaked rat-weasel creature with dead black eyes, dark fur, and snake-like movement: Check. A gray fox that wears a wolf skull as a helmet and a wolf pelt as a cape, with long iron claws on his arms: Check. A cult of black-robed rats led by a purple-robed rat who wields a mouse-skull scepter and serves a gruesomely deformed polecat who rules a slave-driven underground kingdom: Check. A ferret that wears terrifying warpaint, a necklace of teeth and claws, stains his fangs red, wears a blood-stained cape, and has a six-clawed paw sheathed in a heavy gauntlet: Check. The list goes on.
- Safehold: In the immortal words of the Earl of Coris describing the Big Bad of the first nine books, Villainous Glutton Vicar Zhaspahr Clyntahn:"There ought to be a law that villains shouldn't be allowed to look like stereotypical villains."
- Subverted by Galadriel Higgins from The Scholomance. She practically stinks of malia, leading most of the students to assume that she's a rather incompetent maleficer who can't hide her true nature. In actuality, she is easily the most powerful mage in the school, with a natural affinity for apocalypse-scale destructive magic and malia draining that she absolutely refuses to use.
- Zahhak in The Shahnameh is an oppressive ruler with brain-eating snakes coming out of his shoulders. He only got the brain-eating snakes after he took over, since it was a result of the deal with Ahriman that let him take over. Presumably he was a little less obviously evil beforehand, though since he was an Evil Vizier you never know.
- Shannara
- All of the main villains from the original trilogy are like this — their names alone are tip-offs. The first book's Warlock Lord is an undead tyrant in a Black Cloak who rules over the Skull Kingdom; the second book's Demons are, well, Demons and are presented as a ravening, hateful horde of Always Chaotic Evil monsters; the third book's Mord Wraiths are basically an entire organization of mini-Warlock Lords, down to sharing his fashion sense.
- Subverted in the Sequel Series The Heritage of Shannara. The first few Shadowen the protagonists run into are horrible monsters, leading to the impression that all Shadowen are like that. Except it doesn't work that way. The obviously evil Shadowen are actually the weakest ones, who lacked sufficient control of their magic to stop it from mutating them. The most powerful Shadowen — like Rimmer Dall — can pass themselves off as ordinary humans almost flawlessly, until they choose to reveal themselves.
- The Silmarillion has some interesting examples. Morgoth and Sauron were both shape-shifters, and could take any form they chose. Sauron would in fact take on pleasing forms. Morgoth however (once he finally did become a God of Evil) decided he liked having an obviously evil form, and used it so much he got stuck in it. After Sauron destroyed Númenor, he was punished by being rendered unable to take a pleasing form ever again, so he took an obviously evil form by default. This trope is justified in Tolkien's Middle Earth, where evil has a really noticeable corrupting influence on everything it touches. This is why many of the villains in the Middle Earth stories tend to be so obvious.
- A Song of Ice and Fire:
- The Boltons have a flayed man as their sigil, their House colours are basically shades of red (for blood or exposed muscle) and pink (skin and other assorted bodily fluids), they live in a place called the Dreadfort and were once known as the Red Kings back in the days before the North unified (guess why). One looks a lot like Vlad the Impaler with some photoshop and moisturiser, another like Gilles de Rais on acid. On top of that, they display the family trait of having the creepiest pale, barely blue-grey eyes imaginable. They also happen to wear armor that has screaming faces and exposed muscles styled onto it. Yeah; nice guys.
- Rorge and Biter. Where to start... One looks like the noseless, string-haired, homeless junkie out of your worst nightmares. The other like a huge, pale, pock-marked, teeth-filed-to-points Fester Adams, with none of the charm or intelligence you'd hope for. Both engage in Rape, Pillage, and Burn as well as I'm a Humanitarian — in the open.
- Averted, however, with the Lannisters. Tyrion Lannister is by far the most ethical one (at least at the start of the series) but is hideously deformed, in contrast to his brother and sister, who are evil but very attractive.
- Euron Greyjoy seems to enjoy invoking this trope. He looks like a stereotypical pirate, complete with an eyepatch, his sigil is essentially the eye of Sauron with added Creepy Crows, and sails a ship with a blood-red hull crewed by deformed mutes and sorcerers. In sample chapters for The Winds of Winter he ups the ante with a crown made of shark teeth and a suit of red and black armor.
- Trapped on Draconica: Evil Overlord Gothon wears armor that makes him look like a demon.
- We know James of Twilight must be evil, because he's the only one of the vampires who is described as having a nondescript face, rather than being unbelievably beautiful. Also, he and his companions are dirty and dressed in worn clothing, rather than wearing designer labels all the time like the good vampires.
- The Necromancer of the Whateley Universe. Nobody has a name like that unless he's Obviously Evil. Then he goes for the evil cloak over the hideous armor that's part cybernetics and part chitinous inhuman organics, plus the obligatory skull facemask. And he has a team that based on monsters: Lycanthros (a super werewolf type), Vamp (a girl with vampiric powers), the Arch-Fiend, Nightgaunt, and Lady Darke. It goes without saying that he is not petting any puppies. Oh, and he's a Nazi.
- Who Goes There?. Blair is not impressed when Connant insists the alien they've found frozen in the ice, with its red glaring eyes and monstrous appearance, "grew up on evil, adolesced slowly roasting alive the local equivalent of kittens, and amused itself through maturity on new and ingenious torture." Blair accuses him of instinctively hating something that looks different. Once it wakes however, the Thing proceeds to try and Kill and Replace everyone.
- Both subverted and played straight in The Zombie Knight with characters like Gohvis, an eight foot tall black scaled lizard, with a reputation for destroying cities by punching holes in volcanoes, turns out to be a Librarian. Or Koh, the Man Eater, who likes small children, and looks like a cigar smoking dog.
