The Caligula / Western Animation

• Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog: During Dr. Robotnik's frequent (frequent like Once per Episode) conquests and efforts to expand the outskirts of his one-man (and multi-robotic) nation to include just a small nearby community, the first thing that he usually does as the self-appointed ruler of his new slaves is to order them to build a giant statue of him. If this is any indication about his priorities his mission in the world is to give people more... of him.
• Adventure Time:
  • Xergiok is a sadistic, cruel, jerkass leader who delights in spanking his subjects and intimidating them.
  • Lemongrab is a bit of a more sympathetic example — he isn't evil, but he certainly is inexperienced (at being a ruler, and at being alive) and has anger issues, which eventually leads to everyone in the candy kingdom being sent to the dungeon.
  • Ice King skirts around this as his status as crazy ruler of the ice kingdom started being undercut by his transition to Tragic Villain.
  • King of Ooo, after he usurped the Candy Kingdom throne from Princess Bubblegum, was this in spades. He always blamed his shortcomings on other people, made the Banana Guards wear wigs resembling his hair, have Finn and Jake wear clunky, weird-looking armor, and was willing to send his subjects to their deaths in battle against the Cloud Monster.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Already unstable following the Heel Face Turns of Mai and Ty Lee at the Boiling Rock, Princess Azula falls quickly into paranoia and fits of rage after Ozai promotes her to Fire Lord, banishing servants and guardsmen from the country in droves and hallucinating about her Missing Mom, Princess Ursa. It doesn't help that Ozai made himself the Phoenix King when he crowned Azula, effectively making her position as Fire Lord meaningless. So while she would rule the Fire Nation, Ozai would rule the world.
  • The Earth Queen from The Legend of Korra undoes all the good things her father from the previous series has done for Ba Sing Se. The stuff she does include overtaking her people so that they live in squalor while she lives in luxury and raising an airbending army by imprisoning them. When she becomes one of the only people in either series to explicitly be murdered, nobody, in-universe or out, mourn her.
• Princess Boo-Boo from Freaktown is the bratty, bossy ruler of Sweetlandia who wants to make Freaktown as cutesy and saccharine as the rest of her domain.
• Nero appears in an episode of Garfield and Friends, where Garfield tells the story of the cat who invented lasagna. In the story, Nero is depicted as a Villainous Glutton who imprisons (or in some cases, executes) bad chefs. When the cat's owner (the cat and the owner being Expys of Garfield and Jon) is thrown in prison, the cat appeals to the Emperor's appetite, claiming Jon is an excellent chef (even though he isn't) which persuades the Emperor to give him a chance. The cat's idea is that cats and emperors are very much alike, lazy, greedy people who like to be waited on, so he figured the Emperor would like what he likes, and directs his owner to make what is eventually called lasagna. It works; the Emperor loves it and pardons the man.
• From Gravity Falls there's Quentin Trembley, the unknown 8 1/2 President of the United States. Elected by a landslide (as in the other candidates were literally buried by one), he proceeded to ban pants, declare war on pancakes, and appoint babies to the Supreme Court. He was eventually deposed, replaced by William Henry Harrison, and all evidence of his term stricken from the national record. He ended up founding Gravity Falls, being deposed again and finally encasing himself in peanut brittle, in an attempt to live forever — which, amazingly enough, worked.
• That episode of I Am Weasel where the titular character and Cloud Cuckoolander I.R. Baboon have their brains switched. The now deranged "I.R. Weasel" uses I.M. Weasel's influence to mess up the world (thinking that he's making it better). The now level-headed "I.M. Baboon" convinced him, however, to go on forced retirement before he could do more damage.
• The Almighty Tallest of Invader Zim have tendencies as such, being perfectly happy to put their subjects under such events as Probing Day, where they make Invaders do ridiculous things to entertain them or else suffer a pummeling (pushing some buttons that lead to said Invaders getting beat up by their own technology). The entire principle of destroying a planet to build a parking garage or food court also says something about them. They also tried to kill their best invader just for being short^note and ugly. They order everyone to retreat from battle just because of their snacks being lost, and once even punished someone by shooting them out of the airlock. Security threw out the wrong person by accident. Their response? Apathy.
  Tallest Purple: That was the wrong guy, but... it's okay. I think everyone gets the point.
  • This winds up doing them in in Enter the Florpus since they could have easily escaped the unfathomable chaos that is the titular space anomaly by turning away from it.
  Tallest Red: [whiny] But we're going straight...
• Lucius Heinous VII on Jimmy Two-Shoes. Although technically a Corrupt Corporate Executive who owns Miseryville, he dedicates his rule to making sure everyone is miserable. His various deeds include having a barbershop blown up for giving him a bad horn manicure, mounting his high school teacher's head on a wall for mocking his horns, ordering for one of the world's three suns to be destroyed, and stealing all the city's water to fill a private swimming pool. That's not even getting to the deeds of his family (His father, Lucius Heinous VI, once had the entire town flooded just to get back into the mood).
• The title character of King Rollo is a benign, downplayed example. He never does anything malicious — in fact, he never does anything at all besides play with his toys and move from place to place in a silly manner. The show's very young target audience doesn't need to concern itself with the effect Rollo's reign has on his kingdom, but older viewers are free to infer what they will.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • A tame example occurs in the episode "Hearth's Warming Eve". Pinkie Pie's character in the pageant about the foundation of Equestria is Chancellor Puddinghead, leader of the earth pony tribe and clearly a few apples short of a bushel. She was apparently an elected official, but it's a bit of a mystery why anyone would vote for her; it's possible that the various hardships brought about by the extended winter drove the earth ponies to desperation, as hinted at by the quote below.
    Puddinghead: I was elected because I know how to think outside the box, which means — [shoves head up a nearby chimney] — I can think inside the chimney! [beat] Can you think inside a chimney?
  • A less tame example is Discord, a former Evil Overlord who ruled Equestria a long ago in a reign of chaos and suffering. He's what happens when a crazy psycho with Reality Warper abilities and a twisted sense of humor is in charge.
  • In her second appearance in "Magic Duel", the Great and Powerful Trixie becomes this thanks to an Artifact of Doom, turning Ponyville into an empire without Celestia (who at the time was performing royal duties in a far-off location) there to stop her. It is also making her more insane by the moment, to the point she spends half the episode being pulled around in a chariot without wheels because she doesn't trust wheels.
• Oh No! It's An Alien Invasion: Emperor Brainlius III, ruler of the Brainlings, is an obese, idiotic manchild who spends most of his time playing in his bathtub rather than actually ruling, leaving the invasion entirely in the hands of his Dragon-in-Chief Briiian.
• The Czar of Balzac from the Rocko's Modern Life episode "The Emperor's New Joe" was obsessed with making his tiny nation trendy, no matter how ridiculous this made his citizens.
• Nero himself appeared on Peabody and Sherman's segment of Rocky and Bullwinkle, but this was a subversion, where he was portrayed as Not Evil, Just Misunderstood. In this reality, it was actually Nero's music teacher who started the fire.
• Aku from Samurai Jack, as expected from a sadistic, Ax-Crazy Psychopathic Man Child demon Made of Evil. Not only commits carnage and genocide on a regular basis, but he is also more than willing to welcome a lot of criminals and gangsters in his Bad Future, a surprisingly disturbing dystopia.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Catra's rank in the Horde seems to be inversely proportional with her sanity and ability to be at all reasonable. By Season 4, she's an equal partner of Hordak himself... and has also developed a nasty habit of lashing out and verbally abusing people for disagreeing with her, forcing her underlings to work three shifts back-to-back without a chance to sleep, keeping everyone in the dark about her plans, and making some very damaging decisions in her effort to finally outdo Adora, up to and including nearly ending the world, and exiling Entrapta — Hordak's almost-girlfriend — to Beast Island when she tries to interfere. This all blows up in her face by the end of the season; thanks to her actions, many of her soldiers have lost all confidence in her, she causes at least five people to defect from the Horde, two of whom were her most useful allies, and Hordak finds out what she did to Entrapta and goes ballistic.
• The SpongeBob SquarePants special "Whatever Happened to SpongeBob?" has an amnesiac SpongeBob finding himself in a city under the tyranny of a greaser gang who outlawed bubbles just because they have the potential to cause harm. In the end, they turn out to have been Properly Paranoid when the city (somehow) collapses into chaos only a few hours after SpongeBob's bubble laws were put into practice.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Star's alleged great-times-ten grandmother Queen Solaria is recorded in history as being a wonderful All-Loving Hero. In reality, she was a total lunatic whose hatred of monsters reached psychotic levels. She created an army of horrific mutants to aid in her crusades and tried to create a spell called "Annihilation", which would've killed every single monster in existence. Fortunately, she died before she could complete it, and her daughter Eclipsa was sane enough to make sure it stayed incomplete.
• Transformers:
  • Galvatron from Transformers: Generation 1. Spending the time between the movie and season three in a lava pit turned him from the Megatron-but-competent of the movie to... uh... the way we all remember him being. He blasted more of his own troops in his rages than Autobots in battle, and at one point, some other Decepticons told his right-hand bot Cyclonus that if something didn't change, they were going to deal with both of them. Too bad no Decepticon civil war ever materialized.
  • Straxus from the comics is even worse. His Animated counterpart, however, is played for laughs on a fan-run formspring page.
• Urban Vermin has Ken, a Card-Carrying Villain and all-around Jerkass who made himself a tinpot dictator so he could hoard all the garbage in The Block for himself, with his skirmishes with his brother being as much childish sibling rivalry as they are a struggle with La Résistance.

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