The Sociopath / Marvel Cinematic Universe

For the numerous amount of villains that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has provided, there were bound to be a few sociopaths included in the ranks.

Film Examples

• Johann Schmidt, aka Red Skull, from Captain America: The First Avenger. Superficially charming and friendly, but literally all he cares about is himself and power. Even the Nazi cause is meaningless to him; the Nazis were merely a means to an end and once he reveals as much, he cheerfully tells his “bosses” that their capital is one of the first places he’ll be blowing up for his Evil Plan. This backfires against him horribly in Avengers: Infinity War. After the events of The First Avenger, he was teleported to Vormir and given knowledge on how to get the Soul Stone... but it’s useless to him because you have to sacrifice the person you love most to get the stone. Schmidt never loved anybody except himself, so he’s left stuck on Vormir for eternity, unable to complete his life’s work or leave.
• Obadiah Stane from the first Iron Man movie is a walking, talking checklist of dark triad traits. He treats people around him like chess pieces on a board and plays both sides in the US government's fight against the Ten Rings terrorist sect while showing that he's perfectly willing to betray them both. He manipulates Stark Industries' board of directors into cutting Tony out of his company and later rips his (figurative) heart out and leaves him to die while never dropping his chilling Nice Guy facade. During his final fight with Tony, he shows no care for the destruction he causes and is even willing to murder innocent civilians, children included, just to get an edge over him.
• Iron Man 3: Aldrich Killian, who starts a cell of superpowered suicide bombers because Tony Stark didn't meet with him nearly two decades beforehand.
• Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): Ronan the Accuser is a low-functioning sociopath who views killing families as forgettable, bathes in Xandarian blood regularly, and will Kick the Dog just because. Back in the day, he was more calm and rational about it, but he still had no qualms about bombing the hell out of innocent people in the name of Kree imperialism, even if Kree soldiers were caught in the crossfire.
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Ego, who wishes to assimilate all life into himself because he was dissatisfied with his first encounters with other life. When he fell in love with Meredith Quill, he gave her brain cancer in order to keep his head clear. She was not the only mortal woman he slept with, as he needed a child for his scheme. Most of his children are dead because they were useless to him without powers, and he tries to use Star-Lord as a battery when he defies him.
• Thor: Ragnarok: Hela Odinsdottir, who assisted her father on his initial path of conquest, but betrays him the second he decides to stop. After escaping her imprisonment, she immediately continues with her scheme of multiversal domination, not caring how many have to die.
• Captain Marvel (2019): The Supreme Intelligence is a charismatic AI who manipulates Captain Marvel into assisting in its attempt at completely wiping out the Skrulls largely out of disgust for them.
• Thanos is a cross between this and Moral Sociopathy. He's a ruthless galactic conquering abusive parent with a god complex whose modus operandi is to invade other planets one by one and kill half the population in order to prevent an overpopulation crisis, and he absolutely cannot comprehend why anyone would oppose him. He also has an impulsive streak, best seen when the 2014 version of him sees how "ungrateful" the universe is after he succeeds his life mission, and decides to completely restart the universe despite seeing the physical and emotional toll his original goal had on his future self.
• Spider-Man: Far From Home: Quentin Beck, the face of Mysterio is a petty, egotistical, and manipulative snake who has been killing hundreds of people around the world and then pretending to defeat the creatures responsible in a bid to be perceived as a hero. His only act of kindness is during his Evil Gloating as he praises the individual designers and technicians helping him to pull this off, but it's clear he's going to claim all the glory for himself. He briefly voices distress about the fact that a group of high schoolers have information that could unravel his scheme, but then immediately pins the blame on one of his underlings and goes after them anyway. His last act was to frame Spider-Man for his death and all the crimes leading up to it, and he also publicly exposes Spidey's true face and name, seeing to it that sixteen-year-old Peter Parker's life is ruined while he is remembered as a hero.
• Black Widow (2021): The leader of the Red Room, General Dreykov, treats all the Widows like tools to be discarded if the don't live up to his standards or cease to be useful. He outright compares girls to being a natural resource. He manipulates people through brainwashing from mundane methods to outright mind control and lacks empathy for anyone but himself. He orders Alexi, his long time friend and collaborator, to be thrown in prison for reasons only known to Dreykov himself. Even his daughter is eventually used as a tool and turned into Taskmaster. Despite seeming to care, he allows her to die when the Red Room is falling.
• Spider-Man: No Way Home: The Green Goblin persona within Norman Osborn's head is a sadistic, murderous bastard with a god complex. He looks down on people who has morality compulsions, seeing them as too weak to deserve power, and relishes on making people suffer or become just as bad as he is. He can fake Norman's nice personality, and manipulates Electro into rebelling by preying on his desire to be special. He also takes delight in making Peter suffer for his morality, killing Aunt May just to set him "free" and take his vengeance upon his murderer, betraying everything that Spider-Man stood for.
• Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania finally introduces Kang the Conqueror (the Exile variant), and the man certainly lives up to his name. He is callous and cruel, treats Darren Cross/M.O.D.O.K. harshly, considers himself a higher being compared to everyone else, hides his sadistic nature beneath a veneer of charm and elegance, manipulates everyone around him for his own benefit, and never displays a shred of remorse for anything he's done and will continue to do if left unchecked. His torture of Cassie in front of Scott, his Hand Wave of every planet he's destroyed and how many lives he's taken when confronted by Janet, and his ruthless retaliation against the Quantum Rebels solidify just how little life means to him.
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: The High Evolutionary can act charming and patient, but underneath this façade, he is a ruthless, controlling, power-hungry despot and sees every living thing as nothing more than an experiment for him to study and discard as he sees fit. He has no true empathy for anyone besides himself and he doesn't truly care for the civilizations he builds; he just wants to make everything his idea of perfect.

TV Examples

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
  • The Clairvoyant (aka John Garret) has several signs of sociopathy. He's extremely charismatic even to those who know his true nature, and is incredibly selfish in his attempts to gain power. He is willing to kill countless lives just to save himself. He plays up his accomplishments while cutting everyone down to bolster his own superiority. His former allies never suspected anything of him as he lied about his true affiliations.
  • Grant Ward ultimately subverts this. He is a Consummate Liar who doesn't even blink while casually betraying, torturing or killing people, but he is capable of feeling empathy and even love. Ward is aware of his heinous actions and the fact he is hurting people. He even feels guilt for doing them, but as his brother points out, he justifies his actions by blaming his victims, so he can stay blameless in his own mind. Daisy deduced that his problem isn't that he doesn't feel anything, he feels too much.
  • Dr. Daniel Whitehall is a truly disturbing example. He's a Mad Doctor who experiments on people in the most painful of ways, and continues using them even after it is apparent that they don't work mostly For the Evulz. He can be Faux Affably Evil and tends to remain calm even as he is getting arrested. He believes that "discovery requires experimentation" to an absolutely ruthless degree. He shows no empathy for the unfortunate victims of his experiments.
• Cloak & Dagger (2018): D'Spayre (real name Andre Deschaine) ticks off all the boxes. He only cares about his own pain and is willing to cause others pain just so he can dull his migraines. He manipulates and lies to women to trick them into sex slavery so he can feed off that despair. He poses as a friendly counselor of a support group, but this is all to find more victims. He also thinks that helping 90% of the people who come to his support group makes up for the other 10% that he condemns to a life of suffering. And his grandiose sense of self-worth shows itself when he "realizes" that he could use his powers to attain godhood.
• What If…? (2021): With Wanda and Pietro absent, presumably dead, Infinity Ultron is now an unfeeling machine of mass destruction with a pathological need to kill more life to satisfy his programming. He cares not for the countless lives lost in his genocidal crusade, only seeing their extinction as the "peace" he wanted. And when finished wiping out all life in the universe, he suffers an existential crisis about what to do next... until he discovers the Multiverse with an infinite amount of sapient life and chaos for him to wipe out.

Netflix Examples

• Daredevil (2015):
  • The series has its take on Bullseye, Benjamin "Dex" Poindexter. Although a supposedly upstanding FBI agent, if something of a Cowboy Cop, he's quickly established to feel no regret or remorse for the people he kills on the job and goes out of his way to kill additional targets just for kicks. He's able to fool just about anybody with his superficially friendly behavior, is manipulative enough to con a police-trained psychologist, and can't take an ounce of criticism for his actions. Although he can form connections with a few people, it's mostly to give himself a "north star" to follow for guidance, since he's otherwise unable to understand morality on his own.
  • Wilson Fisk himself, aka Kingpin, has become this by Season 3. After being imprisoned, Fisk became callous, ruthless, Machiavellian, remorseless, cold, and sociopathic. Having given up on his old ambitions, he became concerned solely with attaining money and power, getting revenge upon the people who had wronged him, and being reunited with Vanessa. While he originally showed some reluctance and remorse about killing civilians like Elena Cardenas, this changed after his release from prison, as he displayed a willingness to order the murders of innocent people without a second thought if it would even slightly further his plans. In short, his capacity for empathy has drained away, feels no remorse for any of his murders, and manipulates people like pawns, eventually proving that, by the end of the day, there's no place for emotions in his ambitions. Even before he became progressively sociopathic and his actions went more in the direction of Moral Sociopathy, he was already quite violent and homicidal, as exemplified when he destroys the head of one of his own subordinates... just because he embarrassed him.
• Jessica Jones (2015):
  • Kilgrave (aka Kevin Thompson), the Big Bad of Season 1, is an evil mind-controller that exemplifies many symptoms of sociopathy. He treats people like rags to be used up discarded at his leisure and only cares about his momentary whims regardless of how it may affect his victims. He's extremely petty and will make people mutilate or kill themselves just for annoying him. He uses self-justification to make himself look like he's doing nothing wrong and even tries to blame his past of experimentation on his behavior, something that is called out several times. He claims to love Jessica, but he has to remind himself to call her a person after calling her a "thing." And the real reason he wants her back is that he can't actually control her anymore. Even when he's not using his mind control, he manipulates people through mundane methods such as using the people around Jessica as leverage to force her to do what he wants and convincing Hogarth to release him from his prison. And despite being a Serial Rapist and Serial Killer by definition, he refuses to see himself as such since he doesn't psychically make anyone do anything (even though people have no choice but to do what he tell them).
  • Gregory Sallinger, the Big Bad of Season 3, is a Serial Killer who targets those he considers to be mediocrities as a means of making himself feel self-important.
• The Punisher (2017):
  • Billy Russo plays with this. He claims to have truly cared for Frank and his family, but in the end was willing to keep his mouth shut on the fact that Rawlins planned to assassinate them all. There's also the fact that killing a man's as easy to him as breathing, and that he was willing to smuggle heroin from Afghanistan into the USA by way of stuffing the drugs into the bodies of those who were KIA. The tell-tale signs are when he plays Madani's grief like a fiddle and accidentally outs himself by not quite gauging the emotions and information right, all for adding a bit of of "I know and you don't" risk. And, truly not grocking why admitting to his deliberate inaction would never, ever work as an explanation for Frank.
    • Ben Barnes more or less describes him as one in an interview, noting that even if Russo does have a fondness or admiration for someone or something, at the end of the day he doesn't really understand how relationships or love "work" because he values himself above all else, and thus he'll throw anyone under the bus at the first opportunity to either save himself or acquire power.
  • His boss Bill Rawlins, aka Agent Orange, plays this much straighter to a disturbing degree. He's a sadistic Glory Hound who considers himself to be the most important person in the Cerberus operation. Even when people try to explain pragmatic and altruistic motives for doing things, he is genuinely puzzled by the idea of doing anything that wouldn't have a direct benefit to himself.
  • Dr. Krista Dumont displays that she's well matched for Russo in this regard. She's attracted to him because of his criminal ties and actively encourages his sociopathic behavior without displaying much issue with it.

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