Villain Critique Thread (Because Its About Damn Time!)

I changed the top of the comment to reflect on that.

In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.

I'll just repost mine here so it doesn't get swallowed. Changing my previous post to reflect the commentary.

First, the commentary Mickey Donahue from KSPAM: I don't think you run the risk of making people sympathize. Plenty villains can have sympathetic backstory, but while it can explain them, it doesn't excuse them.Especially as it sounds that Mickey is evil despite the abuse and not because of it. Subverting that sort of sob story is always interesting.

As for Sero's: He sounds pretty bad. My first question is how he maintains a grip on power exactly? Does he conceal his worst actions from the populace or are they simply too cowed?

Here's a villain from one of my main stories. The setting is an All Myths Are True area, with both an active heaven and hell that are in a state of civil war, with most other pantheons existing, and earth being the playground for most supernatural forces.

Name: Malachor Archayus (pronounced "Mala-core Ar-kai-yuss"

Age: 16 at the start, later centuries, and then untold millennia old

Personality: Disarmingly polite and reserved. However, spending too much time with him reveals that he's a very...empty person.Malachor has an inability to feel much for others, save for enjoying their suffering. In addition to this, he tends to have a cold sense of humor and enjoyment for the pain of others.

Abilities: As one of the most powerful demons, Malachor's an accomplished sorcerer and has an incredible charisma when commanding his followers, many of whom worship him from afar. With so many years to hone his fighting skills, he's an impossibly talented hand-to-hand and weapon using fighter. His favorite ability, though is his ability to cause intense anguish in others, physical or emotional by crushing them with all their innate fears, traumas, etc.

Weaknesses: Malachor is nigh-on incapable of not harming those around him after a period of time, which leaves him with kind of a dearth of talent. His isolation of most of those around him, coupled with his inability to assume positive traits of others lead to him being vulnerable.

Goals: Malachor has one goal: to die permanently. Besides that, in the short term, he prefers to rule his circle of Hell while endlessly experimenting to create one person capable of destroying him.

Role In The Story: Malachor is the motivational nemesis of one of the main characters who functions as an Anti-Hero, as well as the son of the ultimate Big Bad. He later allies with the heroes for his own interests.

Background: Malachor was born into a once-powerful demon household whose glory had long faded. Hailed as the new dawn for House Archayus, Malachor was trained by the House's greatest champion, Zayel Archayus, who was secretly his father (and his mother's brother). When he reached young-adulthood, Zayel had trained him to perfection, while Malachor slowly realized something was...'off' about his father. Zayel, however, encouraged his feelings towards Malachor's elder half-sister, and eventually swayed the two into becoming lovers. Then Zayel allowed to discover he was nothing more than a front for House Archayus and his grand destiny was nothing more than a lie.

When devastated, Zayel wove a complex spell that had taken root over Malachor's entire life. As Malachor's lover tried to comfort him, Zayel magically caused him to mishear her words as hatred and scorn, increasing his son's rage until he snapped and murdered her on the spot. With the spell complete, Malachor was 'frozen' in that emotional and spiritual state: empty and pained, unable to ever feel joy or much of anything save in causing the suffering and death of others. When he brokenly asked 'why', Zayel responded "You are my son. You are my ally. You are my masterpiece, and you are my revenge against this House. But never forget, my son. You are also my toy.

Malachor and Zayel became a feared duo with Malachor's power ever increasing. Then the two wiped out the ruling body of the Archayus household, including Malachor's mother. Zayel promised that as long as Malachor served his goals, then as soon as Zayel achieved his own goals, he would grant Malachor the final death he wanted after he placed a final geass on him to be incapable of suicide or picking a fight that amounted to suicide.

Malachor became a feared, ruthless monster, torturing and killing as he would, but he made sure to target those with great potential for power, taking everything from them and destroying their lives in the secret hope one would grow to surpass him and kill him. Unable to be anything but a monster, he eventually lost sight of having been anything else. Malachor would eventually surpass and turn on his father, who laid a final curse before Malachor locked him in a single, eternal moment of agony and set about to ruling alone, sowing chaos and destruction in hopes of satisfying the emptiness inside himself and creating his destroyer. Even after his death, he found no true release as Zayel's final curse was endless reincarnation, always remembering what he truly was and with a soul too scarred and pained to ever be in peace.

Relevant Tropes

• Abusive Parents: they don't come more abusive than Zayel
• Bad Boss: Sometimes. He keeps most of his men at arm's length specifically to avoid this.
• Becoming the Mask: Such a long time at playing at being an utter monster, with only being able to enjoy the pain of others has made him a monster.
• Blonde Guys Are Evil: Platinum blonde.
• Brother–Sister Incest: his first relationship was with his maternal half-sister when they were both in young adulthood.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: His specialty.
• Death Seeker
• Depraved Bisexual: While bisexual, his most 'humanizing' relationship is with his male lover who he genuinely cares for and is one of the few things he truly feels almost at peace around.
• Despair Event Horizon: When he realized he would never have the peace he wanted thanks to the reincarnation cycle.
• Driven to Suicide: Oh, he'd like to be...
• Earn Your Happy Ending: His final fate? His dead lover merges his soul with Malachor's own, so his pure love heals the corruption in Malacor's soul, allowing him to be reborn with the memories and pain of his final life not resurfacing.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: He does genuinely care for several people, even if he's terrible at showing it.
• Even Evil Has Standards: He has some sense of honor still, and always gives his attempted destroyers a sporting chance. He will also never, ever lie and always keeps his word.
• Heel–Face Turn: He does ally with the heroes against a revived Zayel, if only out of hatred for his father.
• Pet the Dog: Has a few instances that can be interpreted this way. He's able to do a good deed here and there even when he gains nothing.
• Tragic Monster: He was once an idealistic boy who wanted to fight for his house and family, manipulated into becoming a monster worse than any other.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: After being shattered, losing everything and being used by his father as a weapon and being incapable of feeling anything but for the suffering of others, Malachor gave himself to darkness entirely.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: He sure as hell doesn't.
• Worthy Opponent: He eventually considers his destroyer this. Malachor admits that because his enemy has risen through the pain Malachor gave, Malachor has fallen in love with him. "But my love earns no special treatment. It only makes me want to see you suffer more. I am sorry for that....but all you get from me is more pain."

Carrington presents himself as a Bad Ass who's willing to take on the Exarchs (warlords who formed the government in his homeland). Generally speaking, the people slowly turned on him once they realized he's worse.

Your Malachor guy reminds me slightly of Ryofu from Ikki Tousen, at least with the Depraved Bisexual part. He seems like a Jerkass Woobie, though more on the Jerkass than the Woobie.

In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.

I admit I'm not clear if he would fully qualify for 'depraved bisexual' as his bisexuality is just an aspect to him that's portrayed as normally.

He is, however, responsible for a lot of bad things. I'm unsure how to put the accent on that syllable. It's a balance to keep him sympathetic despite...genuinely awful things he does and multiple lives ruined/ended. It's a point that he eventually just forgot himself in the dark persona he created and it became who he was. Anything you think that could be improved or anything else?

Good to know the people see through Carrington eventually. What's his final fate there?

Malachor doesn't seem like a real villainous person, going by his tropes, role in the story, and how his story ends. His father, though, looks to be much more interesting as an antagonist. There's not much I can say about Malachor except that he's a decent enough character, even if I don't see others having a strong sense of loyalty to him, and ouch on the Worthy Opponent entry. I do think he might be more Bi The Way than a Depraved Bisexual; he's not supposed to be bi because he's evil, right?

---

Name: Dr. Sara Salazar

Age: 38

Personality: Sara is a very cold, sociopathic woman who has control issues and an obsession with the dead. She despises being held accountable for her actions and resents authority figures. Rather fond of human experimentation, but only on corpses; the idea of experimenting on the living disgusts her.

Abilities: A skilled physician (a neurosurgeon, specifically), decent chemist, and a crack shot, who can be counted on to remain calm and professional no matter what. She is also capable of re-animating the dead, regardless of species, and manipulating up to a dozen corpses at a time.

Weaknesses: She's a sociopath with no regard for anyone except herself which doesn't endear her to her allies, and has a chronic case of backstabbing against those who she feels outclass her, leading to no-one trusting her. And unlike veritably every other officer of the Renascence, she can't hold her own in a fight nor does she have superhuman durability. Death terrifies her.

Role in the story: The Medic for the villains/ secondary Evil Genius

Goals: To find a cure for the uniquely Transhuman disease that's been released into the Renascence. Not for any philanthropic reasons, just because it's a challenge.

Motivation: She had nothing better to do and they're going to give her more bodies.

Backstory: Sara was raised by her two loving parents in Buffalo, NY. Neither of them were Transhumans and they had no idea that their daughter was, until she was five, when the family dog, Smokey, was hit by a car. Sara didn't quite understand why her pet wasn't moving, so she made him get back up and come to her when she called him. Her parents were suitably horrified and tried to tell her why Smokey wouldn't listen to her, but upon realizing that their explanations weren't sinking in, just begged her to keep him out of sight because the neighbors wouldn't understand. Sara did, right up until he rotted. They made sure to never buy her another pet bigger than a fish.

Sara grew up and came to understand the idea of death, though peoples' grief over it continued to confuse her. With her ability to handle death while feigning sympathy, her still disturbed parents suggested a career as a coroner, wanting to keep her as far away from normal people as possible but not loose on the streets. She liked the idea, but changed from forensics to neurology. When asked why, she said that she: "found brains to be fascinating things."

Sara did well in medical school and, oddly enough, made a few friends. She found that she liked musicals, which she and her classmates saw in their free time. Unfortunately, that all changed when she was doing work on her first human cadaver. When she looked into it, something in her snapped. She became sullen and cold, speaking in monosyllabic terms and obsessing over the dead. Her friends were gone soon after. She began to sneak off to morgues, doing something with the corpses, but was never caught. Any sense of empathy she once appeared to have was completely absent. In her personal life anyway; she remained a decent if bizarrely driven student in the eyes of her professors. It wasn't until after her residency, where she was mentored by a Transhuman doctor with Healing Hands, that her superiors found out that something was wrong with her, i.e. when she was caught staring into a dying patient's eyes and taking notes rather than trying to save them. By that point, it was too late. A nurse was the one to catch her and for that she shot him (non fatality), three security guards (all fatality), and then just walked out of the building.

Sara took up being a back-alley doctor, where she gained a modest supply of corpses to work with. For her genuine skill with those who gave her something she wanted in return, she became an on-and-off doctor for wealthy Transhumans criminals, including the Renascence where she re-connected with her former mentor. When he caught the virus infecting them, Sara was called in as his replacement. She accepted, if only to prove that she was better than him.

Relevant tropes:

• Above Good and Evil: She doesn't think in 'good or bad' so much as 'me or not-me'.

• Alliterative Name: The only one out of the entire cast.

• Back-Alley Doctor: For about two years. She liked it better than working at a hospital.

• Bastard Understudy: To her mentor, Dr. Peter Smith, the first time around. She planned to learn all she could from him, then poison him via the hospital cafeteria, hoping his death would simply be counted among the dozens of others. She would then take his prestige, if not his position, as his sole protégé. Fortunately, she was forced to go on the run before she could enact her plan.

• Combat Medic: Sara is the de-facto CMO of the Renascence and the Renascence's officers' personal doctor, which often drags her into combat zones. As long as it ends in bodies, she doesn't really care.

• Creepy Monotone: She never raises her voice, ever. Not when she's operating without anesthetic, nor when letting a person die in front of her in the name of her own morbid research. Not even when she's had the "battle specs" that are affixed to her head ripped out by an angry Wren Summers, does she do anything more than calmly request to be dismissed as the blood drips down her face.

• The Dreaded: Among her allies, she certainly is. For any non-officer, getting sent to her is more of a punishment than a relief, even if she doesn't do anything to them. The officers who aren't Wren aren't too thrilled either.

• Feels No Pain: She could feel it at one time, but by the time she joined the Renascence she had a preternatural resistance to any kind of injury. It's unknown where the ability came from.

• Firing One-Handed: She taught herself to shoot that way so that she could do two things at once. Her battle specs have a targeting system in them that lets her do just that.

• Evil Counterpart: To Isabella Tachibana. Both are former students of a prestigious doctor whom they eventually turned against, rarely get involved in combat, are close friends of Big Bad, have mind-control powers, and switched allegiances after reading a person's mind. But while Isabella makes up for her previous actions by saving lives, Sara makes her own corpses to study.

• Go Mad from the Revelation: Did she ever. It made her worse than she'd ever have been, even as a sociopath.

• Girl With A Gun: One of three people in the cast to use a firearm as their primary weapon, a handgun more specifically.

• It's All About Me: People are dying by the dozen? Don't care. Could upstage her mentor/boss (again!) while having access to all those cadavers? She can start right away.

• Killed Off for Real: She's shot by the heroes' Friendly Sniper while trying to patch up an officer during the Battle of Manhattan.

• Lack of Empathy: She never understood what it was like to feel for another person, but she would smile and nod or frown or cry at the appropriate times. After, she didn't even see the point in that.

• Mad Doctor: YES. The only reason she became a doctor was to get her hands on brains to see what made humans tick.

• Master Poisoner: Sara becomes one for Wren, killing off her enemies within the Renascence with only a slight trace. Which is never found because Sara's the doctor, would you like to question her?

• The Medic: And God help her patients.

• Must Have Coffee: She's called into the lab at all manner of ridiculous hours (Shelley has no real concept of the normal flow of time), so she gets pretty dependent on the stuff. The poor techs usually end up getting shot at if it doesn't reach her the second she steps through the door.

• Necromancer: She rarely uses it, because controlling a body is not the same as being able to fight with said body. If she does, it's to terrify the other side by sending their dead friends and/or fellow soldiers stumbling back towards them, bringing a cocktail of diseases.

• Night of the Living Mooks: Whenever she does join the Renascence in a fight.

• Nightmare Fetishist: Sara has a fascination with the dead, preferably fresh corpses.

• Not a Morning Person

• Not Using the "Z" Word: Averted. Everyone refers to her mooks as zombies, though Sara thinks the terminology is "questionable."

• Nothing Is Scarier: As one point, Sara does tell Bertram (the only other member of the Renascence to experience death firsthand) that when she linked up with a dying man's mind: "There's nothing but a void. An absence of everything." The idea of dying is the only thing that can make her openly express any sort of fear.

• One-Way Visor: Her battle specs are one. The lower-ranking officers/soldiers have a running bet as to what exactly is under them ('nothing' has a huge pot).

• Sanity Slippage: From a rather harmless non-empathetic to an ice-cold sociopath. More and more contact with the human mind drove her further and further into insanity.

• The Sociopath: She was a high-functioning one before she touched a dead human mind. Not so much afterwards, where her lack of concern for anyone became prevalent.

• Soft-Spoken Sadist: She quietly told the man she watched die what she was seeing through his eyes as if she was reading from the phonebook.

• Squick: Inspires much of this in-story, especially to her parents.

• The Starscream: She really doesn't like being trapped answering to her mentor a second time: "'Don't inject her with that, Sara. Testing first, Sara. At least pretend you care, Sara. We're trying to save them, Sara.' Wren, he goes on and on and on." So when he gets sick, she arranges for him to miss his injections of the cure, leaving her in charge and totally unimpeded.
  • She sets her sights on being the Big Bad for a moment, but getting beat half to death changes her mind. The pain doesn't do anything, but Wren proving she can beat Sara without trying gets the point across.

• The Stoic: She has emotions, but they don't translate into human ones. Her stoicism stems mainly from apathy to living things, such as asking for a towel to wipe the blood and grey matter off of her visor with mild annoyance rather than being shocked that a person's head blew up without warning.

• Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: Sara really should have stayed away from the human bodies. What she saw in there broke her, twisting the good qualities she had into a monster.

• Triage Tyrant: A doctor example. Annoying her, then coming into Medical without a priority stamp from a higher-up is just about a death sentence.

• Unknown Rival: She's one to Shelley. Shelley remains blissfully oblivious to the fact that should she exceed Sara in their research, Sara will kill her.

• Villainous Friendship: With Wren, in their own twisted way. Sure, Wren knocked her delirious the time she tried to kill Wren and Sara's still a sociopath, but otherwise they're the closest thing the other has to a functional relationship.

• Visor Does Something Unusual: It lets her monitor a person's heart-rate, blood pressure, temperature, etc, as well as being a targeting system. It's repurposed from military "battle specs" she pulled off of a soldier's corpse.

• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: She can control the dead, but the toll it takes on her mind really isn't worth it.

• Would Hurt a Child: Dead children have been among her zombies and they haven't always been dead before she finds them.

• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: To her mentor before he dies:
  • "You were useful once."
  • "Sara..."
  • "But you're not anymore."

edited 12th Sep '14 11:53:30 PM by UmLovely

RISE

Well, several points on that: Malachor makes himself a villain to others with the whole killing everything they care about so they have nothing but revenge on him left. You're right, though, Bi The Way is probably way better as a trope. His depravity and bisexuality have nothing to do with one another (I try very, very hard to leave that as a redeeming quality). As far as loyalty goes, his fanatic followers are demons themselves who view strength and cruelty as the ultimate perfection. I'll do a writeup on his father soon.

For Sara, it's interesting to see a villain like this who can't hold her own in a fight. I also find her backstory...oddly tragic in a sense, in that she seems utterly incapable of feeling emotions and nobody seems to have made anything of an effort to reach out to her. That seems a rather disturbing portrayal of a sociopath all told. Is it even possible Sara would ever be satisfied with answers if she found them?

Sara's one hell of a character. Really. I especially like that as a Mad Doctor villain, she really does sound, well, medical. In fact, I think this is my favorite portrayal of a necromancer yet (at least I think that's what you're going for; a modern day necromancer.) I've always liked the idea that necromancy(the fantasy, zombie-raising sort, not divination) is closely linked with medical practice, and a good necromancer should be a good healer/doctor as well. That she's a female villain that seems void of any sort of sexy or fanservice whatsoever is just bonus.

Here's a villain opposing people like Pierr and Iris, in a fantasy, as of now nameless story concerning the invasion of a small kingdom called Ayregard.

Name: Wyconia Weyhart Palamecea, Commander of the Knights of the Rivers Legion, Vinlan Imperia

Age: 44

Personality: People say the commander and her late love Torio Palamecea, formerly a legion commander as well, are like night and day. Torio was a bold man, his rashness and recklessness unchanging from his first day as a squire, while the fair lady of Weyhart has always been the calmer one, so to speak. Indeed, she's the more ruthless one, too. That she earned her own title as the commander of one of the most fearsome legions under the Imperia should speak volume of how adept she is at warfare and politics. Her calmness at times borders disconnection from the world, but the lady of Weyhart never lets her mind wander off too far from reality, always keeping watch over herself and the people she both serve and command. In that regard, she's a maternal figure to the Knights, too, though in a very reserved, tough-motherly-love-ish manner. Above all, however, Wyconia demands that everything's under her control, and will go the deep end to ensure that. Widely respected as she is feared, the lady embodies nearly everything that is Vinlan Imperia: strength, confidence, efficiency, cunning, cruelty, Wyconia has it all.

Abilities: Wyconia is an adept tactitian. On the strategic level she may not seem prodigal, but those who have served with her know that the woman is a master of adaptation. No matter the situation, Wyconia can and will pull through. Of lesser importance is her skills with spellrifles. Her favored weapon, Maldea's Crux, a specially customized rifle inscribed with special sigils and capable of firing powerful ammunitions, compliments well with her sharp aim.

Weakness: For a legion commander and formerly a legionaire herself, Wyconia is rather physically weak. This is probably the issue of age, as after giving birth to her only son the woman has been gradually growing weaker and weaker. The treatments, magical or alchemical, help keep her in shape to some extent, but Wyconia can't fight nature, and certainly can't fight the way she used to as a young legionaire. Long session of direct combat drain her out quickly, and up close she can be easily overwhelmed.

Goal: Completing her mission, which is to capture or kill members the group led by Ayregard's former First of the King's Witch, before things escalate out of control.

Motivation: Wyconia wishes she had nothing to do with the occupation of Ayregard at all. She's much more concerned about her son getting married soon, and only wishes to complete her assignment as soon as possible so that she can leave this "kingdom of imbeciles and bird-eating heathens", and return to the capital before the marriage.

Backstory: Wyconia Weyhart was a fair lady from house Weyhart, a highly-esteemed family of Vinlan Imperia administrates, and in her youth was plagued by all sorts of courtiers. In the end, she accepted the hand of Torio Palamecea, a man of an equally well regarded family of legionaires. Her path diverged somewhat from most from of her family in that Wyconia has always been more interested in warfare than she is in civil works. Despite her family and husband's objections, Wyconia enlisted, a decision that eventually resulted in her becoming recognized as a skilled soldier of the Imperia Legion. Her time as a junior officer in the Knights of the Rivers Legion, the Imperia's mobile task force usually assigned with missions requiring great precision and skills, although short, was proof enough that Wyconia had a certain level of tactical sense in her. Over the years, she climbed the ranks quickly, leading to her eventually being given command of the Knights of the Rivers themselves. Discounting Torio's death, which for a period left her distraught, Wyconia has been operating as an effective commander whose career looks to be heading towards a pleasant end, and her only son, Marco Toria, an aspiring junior administrate officer, has shown a lot of promise as well. Unfortunately, all good things came to an abrupt end when, while anticipating Marco's marriage with a woman of another administrate's family, the Imperia's invasion on the Kingdom of Ayregard resulted in Ayregard's quick surrender. Initially a sound development, things took turn for the worse as the Imperia force moved in to occupy the kingdom, which resulted in the birth of New Ayregard Formation, a rebel group bent on driving out the Imperia. This new player demanded full attention, and the Imperia, faced with a foe more formidable than it originally anticipated, had no choice but to deploy the Knights of the Rivers, a development Wyconia most certainly loathed. But as the Knights arrived at the ruined kingdom, Wyconia found that the real threat wasn't in these rebels, but rather in a handful of extremely dangerous individuals, one among them Iris, First of the King's Witch, and Captain Ishra Lunel, formerly an Ayregard Battalion soldier renowned and feared for her prowess, and now captain of the famed Ironhand Cadre, all working to destroy the Imperia's legions within the Kingdom's boundary. Her task was then changed to capturing or eliminating these individuals, to ensure that the Imperia would not lose its new territory. The longer she fought on, however, the more she came to realize that this might well be the most difficult campaign she ever had to fight in, and that, unlike every battle in the past, she might not leave this one alive.

Tropes

Abnormal Ammo: The Maldea's Crux fires things ranging from metal rounds that pierce right through armor to balls of flame that explode spectacularly on impact. Less ordinary things it can shoot include shots that null all sound in the area momentarily, or shots that realign according to their targets' current positions.

Action Mom: Not an extreme one, but Wyconia is rather combat ready for a woman with an adult son. And yes, threatening to harm her son in any way will lead to her unleashing the sort of rage not even the Imperator of Vinlan would be immune to.

Break the Haughty: What was gradually happening to her during the series of events that transpired after her arrival at the occupied Kingdom. From seeing a large chunk of Imperia forces, mostly soldiers of other more expendable legions, getting exterminated by Iris and Wightfinger, to losing the best of her men in ambushes. When she came to Ayregard, Wyconia viewed the remnants of the ruined Kingdom as beneath her, as she did the other legions. Near the conclusion of these events, she realized that the Ayregard people, if only a handful among them, were stronger than she thought, that she might have overestimated herself all along, and that, as mighty as she was as regarded within the Imperia, she might find a the end of her life and everything she spent her entire life building here.

Cold Sniper

Control Freak: She's this to her son and late husband, but when it comes to running the Legion Wyconia subverts the trope. While a very strict and highly confident commander, she does care about what her subordinates think, adapting her strategy according to her men's insight if it best suits the situation. She'd rather be alive and win than be in complete control and dead, anyway.

Lady of War: With a rifle in hand, she's a force to be reckoned with.

My Beloved Smother: While Marco certainly loves his mother, and she him, Wyconia really can be a bit too much to bear at times, with how strict, no-nonsense she can get. The lady's control freak tendency even scared her husband Torio, himself a feared warrior.

Not So Different: In-universe, many characters from both sides noted the similarity in how Wyconia and Pierr operate. Both are practical and ruthless, skilled in utilizing whatever means available to them to destroy their enemies. Both are determined to achieve their goals, which, in a way, are completely selfish (Wyconia doesn't want to operate in the occupied Ayregard because her son's getting married; Pierr wants to find his brother.) Lastly, both are exceptional with similar weapons. On the philosophical level, however, the two are nothing alike, with the commander being way more materialistic and worldly. Wyconia herself initially found the idea that a lowly soldier-turned-forester is even comparable to her a ridiculous notion, but of course later came to respect Pierr professionally.

Punch-Clock Villain: Wyconia's devotion to her work as a legionaire is less about loyalty and more about the desire to be wealthy and respected. While she holds some disdain for the people of Ayregard, that's less because the Kingdom is the Imperia's enemy and more because she finds them and their traditions disgusting. Wyconia wishes she had nothing to do with the people of Ayregard at all, in fact. As soon as her marks are dead, the Knights can and will retreat, and she'll just go back to the capital without a care.

Reasonable Authority Figure

Stiff Upper Lip/The Stoic: Her trait. Despite everything, Wyconia's reaction to most any misfortune, from trivial to serious, is a subtle sigh. "The Seraphs are a bit angry today, do you think?"

Worthy Opponent: Her sentiment when it comes to Pierr. The forester and his companions many times outwitted her. Even in clashes between them and the Knights, the Knights seemed to fare much worse than they ever did against any other opponent. While the lady hates him deeply, she can't help but admire the young man's skills.

edited 15th Sep '14 10:00:51 PM by arreimil

On the foundation of glass a dream is built. And, like glass, it shatters.

@ Um Lovely: I'm pretty shocked by my reaction to this character. Usually whenever the trope Above Good and Evil appears, I always see it as the sign that the man/woman/creature it describes is either just a bad case of Blue-and-Orange Morality or just extremely evil and arrogant. However you did an excellent job of presenting it; Dr. Salazar can't really be described as "evil" or at least not in my opinion. She is an accurate and chilling description of an actual sociopath, not overtly malicious, just without the chains of a conscience and thus willing to do whatever it takes to make her whims a reality. I actually feel a little sorry for her, partially because it seems that she would have remained mostly harmless—just cold and uncaring for morality—if she hadn't peered into whatever lies beyond death and been driven mad by it.

@ arremil: I actually like Wyconia—she doesn't really seem like a villain at all. I kept combing through her information, trying to find some atrocity or evil deed that would brand her one, but all in all, it seems that she's just a person fighting on the other side of the main protagonist. And that's fine; it humanizes the bad guys, showing that they are just people like the protagonists, fighting for what they believe in—or in this case, she is a soldier and has a responsibility to her country and the men under her command. Good job. I actually found myself hoping that she doesn't die, especially not at the hands of that madwoman Iris.

edited 15th Sep '14 7:44:02 PM by Swordofknowledge

"Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake." —Edgar Wallace

Sara sounds interesting, though I'm actually more interested in the group that she belongs to. Have you done a write-up on Wren yet? Wyconia, as the poster above me noted, doesn't actually sound evil. Does she ever Kick the Dog, or is she meant to be a straight up Anti-Villain? In which case, how bad are her bosses?

---

The character I'd originally posted here has been redone to deal with the critique.

edited 16th Sep '14 4:08:35 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

@Lightysnake: I'm glad Malachor's relationship with his (male) lover is one of his redeeming qualities; it's a form of romance rarely seen as a positive point, especially with villains. Sara's story is a bit tragic in it's own way and she has the answer she's looking for, to the question: "What happens to us when we die?". She's just in denial.

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@arreimil: Thank you. She is a modern-day necromancer, with a sci-fi twist. I really can't imagine Sara being a fanservice type at all. I'm going to have to go with and , Wyconia doesn't seem villainous. But that only makes me like her more. She's a person, not evil or cruel, and I kind of hope she gets through everything intact.

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@Ambar Sonof Deshar: I've done a write-up on Wren, but she's changed since then, so I'll be putting her new one up soon.

Cale is difficult, I think, to critique. The problem with him isn't his skills, goals, weaknesses, or motivation; those are all good. The backstory is kind of cringe-inducing, though. So on one hand, he's a dangerous villain who poses a serious threat (e.g. flaying people alive!) during his run on the show, but on the other, Kissing Cousins and the Deep South. I'm torn. Maybe take out the Kissing Cousins; not because of the incest, villains do that a lot in fiction, but I feel like if that was gone, he'd be a character with some stereotypical parts instead of a character that looks like a pure stereotype.

RISE

Thanks. The real problem with Cale is that he's only ever been in my head as "The Threat". I knew he was a psycho for hire, I knew he was incredibly ambitious, and I knew he'd just made his way north. I knew his role in the story, and I knew his personality. What I didn't know until I sat down to write this out, was what his backstory should be. I had the who and the what, in short, but not the why. Once I'd written it down and read it I had the same problems with it that you did in fact, but I couldn't come up with a better backstory, that adequately explained why he was what he was.

Then again, I've probably just given into my need to give everybody a backstory. Cale isn't really a character who needs a lot of depth to his past after all, so maybe my original notion—that he was a former Dixie Mafia hitman, up from Missouri and looking to make a name for himself—doesn't actually need an explanation? Going to do a repost taking that into account.

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This is a repost on Cale. For those who didn't read my original write up, which I've taken down, he's a villain from Gangland, the same show that Svetlana "Lana" Rossokovsky hailed from.

Name: Cale Brownlow

Age: Late twenties

Personality: Cale's an absolutely vicious social climber, whose personal values reflect the backwoods Mississippi hamlet he grew up in, and the Dixie Mafia goons he used to work for. He's casually racist, more than a little misogynistic, and above all else, ambitious. He's devoid of conscience, and firmly convinced that Murder Is the Best Solution, an attitude that puts him at odds with many of the cities other criminals; his violent temper and penchant for torture only makes it worse. As far as his appearance goes, Cale's blond, sports a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, and always wears a bomber jacket, a Confederate flag baseball hat, and a belt that holds several of his best knives.

Abilities: Cale is the most physically dangerous character in the show, bar none. He's fast, agile, and far, far stronger than his thin frame and unprepossessing looks would suggest. Forbidden to own a gun after a series of arrests, Cale is the best knife fighter anyone is ever likely to meet, and in the Season 1 finale, manages to kill a SWAT team member with only his blades. He's got a good eye for the main chance, and is a very capable judge of character and who is likely to become a threat—there's a reason why he's the only criminal in Season 2 to keep an eye on Lana's growing organization.

Weaknesses: Cale's an opportunist, not a long-term planner. He lives in the here and now, and often doesn't consider the future consequences of his actions. His fondness for bloodshed bothers other gangsters, including his Medici family employers, and he doesn't hide his ambitions well. Perhaps most damaging of all, Cale's prone to vendettas, and often drags anybody who works with him into it.

Goals: Cale wants to go down in the history books as the next Al Capone. He's got dreams of being a big-time gangster, known and feared over a vast area. How exactly he's going to do that, he doesn't know, but in the meantime he works for whoever pays the most.

Motivation: Cale remembers being poor and looked down upon. His family were pariahs in their hometown, and he's damned if he'll ever end up like that. To that end, he wants to be rich, he wants to be powerful, and above all else, he wants to be feared.

Role in story: Cale is the leader of the Dixie Boys, a dozen-strong band of shotgun-toting, truck-driving criminal mercenaries up from Mississippi. Recruited from the worst of the Dixie Mafia's hitmen, the Boys are highly skilled, and totally loyal to Cale, acting as a force multiplier for any gang that hires them. In Season 1 they are retained by Alexander Rossokovsky, only to turn on him when they receive a better offer from the Medici crime family (it's Cale and his Boys who raid Alexander's headquarters at the same time that the police arrive to arrest the Russian mobster). In Season 2, Cale is out to put Svetlana Rossokovsky in the ground, despite orders from Nick Medici to avoid doing so, a conflict of interest that ultimately results in him betraying Medici to The Cartel, aiming to start another Mob War and then pick up the pieces afterwards. He's also the subject of a massive police investigation after he killed a SWAT officer in the Season 1 finale; with Lana, Mitchell Michaels, and the Medici all gunning for him, he doesn't outlast Season 2.

Backstory: Cale doesn't give a lot of information on his past. We know that his family has a criminal track record that goes back decades in Mississippi. We know that he left home at fourteen, stealing his uncle's truck and a shotgun in the hopes of making it big somewhere else. We know that he made his way through Biloxi, Jackson, and Gulfport, working first as a drug runner and then a hitter for the Dixie Mafia. We know that after a couple of arrests he lost the right to own a gun and had to bail out of the state, and that when he did, he brought a band of his fellow Dixie Mafia bagmen (the aforementioned Dixie Boys) with him. He's been moving north ever since, trying to find a place where they can set up shop, leaving a trail of wreckage behind him. That's about all we know, however, and Cale's not telling the rest.

Relevant Tropes: Ambition Is Evil, Badass, Blond Guys Are Evil, Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, Dragon-in-Chief (to the Medici and then The Cartel), Flaying Alive, Four Eyes, Zero Soul, The Heavy (in Season 2), Hired Guns, Knife Nut, Opportunistic Bastard, Professional Killer, Psycho for Hire, Stalker without a Crush (to Lana in Season 2, trying to prove to the Medici that she'll be a threat), Wearing a Flag on Your Head.

edited 16th Sep '14 4:17:59 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

While I normally like attractive female characters, I like how Sara Salazar isn't attractive - either physically or personally - because her male counterparts are often themselves unattractive. It's a nice touch. Her getting killed so unceremoniously by a Friendly Sniper is a bit... anticlimactic, though. Granted, since she can't feel pain, it kinda does make sense.

Wychonia is very much a Punch-Clock Villain, which I like. She's a good example of how an antagonist is not always a villain. Keep that up.

With Malachor Archayus, I feel that you can't quite decide if he's meant to be sympathetic/tragic/pitiable or not. If he goes through a Becoming the Mask storyline, then he probably shouldn't have an Alas, Poor Villain final fate unless it's meant to play up what he could have been.

Cale sounds like a Conflict Killer, what with his being an Opportunistic Bastard. He sounds like the type that would piss off just about everyone.

---

Most of the stuff Carrington does has yet to be written down, but it is the role I'm gonna implement for him. At the very end, Carrington boasts about how he's "smarter, stronger" than his warlord enemies. Several people in a nearby crowd then ask "Then why are you better?" His smile drops. "If you are smarter, stronger than these warlords, then how does that make you better?"

Offended, Carrington proceeds to massacre the crowd, but with a catch - he was already heavily crippled by a fight. Soon, his body was unable to handle the strain of utilizing his Guardian Entity, and he dies from a power overdose as the remaining citizens refused to fight back or acknowledge him. I like writing him as a flamboyant Glory Hound, though, so while I wanna have this as his final fate, I might wanna have him survive a bit longer. Bit of a crossroads here for me.

edited 20th Sep '14 2:13:34 AM by Serocco

In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.

Cale's not a Conflict Killer per se, but he certainly does take the spotlight away from his employers, especially since the Medici aren't really looking for a war, and The Cartel doesn't have that much muscle without him. And of course his obsession with Lana, and the fact that he knifed one of Mitchell's SWAT officers pretty much guarantees that he'll have the focus of both protagonists firmly on him.

Hmm. So, an opportunistic murderer? Is there anything he specifically wants? It sounds fairly organic, so that's pretty good.

Oh, boy. I sure hope this guy stands up to the rest of these awesome villains here.

I mean seriously, WOW!!!

Name: Gary Sunlans

Age: About 250

Personality: A Manipulative Bastard that enjoys screwing everyone over to the umpteenth degree just to have fun. He suffers HARD from Contractual Genre Savviness, but doesn't care in the slightest. He always puts ALL his energy in his actions. Think an evil hipster with red bull. Also he's an archangel.

Abilities: His main weapon is Mind Control, which he abuses to the max. This makes the victims have a blue tattoo-like thing on their left wrists, which needs to be cut off to free them. The only other relevant thing I should mention is that, since he's in a different dimension, he spams magical (read: completely unrealistic) black holes to bring scientists to his place to take control of. Not much else can be said, since he mainly abuses these. He is technically magical, but really hates it.

Weaknesses: Hurting the few people close to him. He claims he has exterminated emotion from his mind (magic = emotion, science = logic), but it is clearly not the case. That and just slicing off your left arm (and not dying). Also his programming is wretched. ...In retrospect, he DOES have a lot of weaknesses.

Goals: Take Over the World so everyone can worship him and give him attention. Cliché and he knows it.

Motivation: After being ostracized from the Magangel Corp. (Essentially the guys who make Magic A Is Magic A), Gary realized he liked attention but hated people. He is also now against magic. Solution? Supervillian! ...Okay, it's a bit more complex than that, but it'll be described in the backstory.

Role in the story: A hurdle the heroes must overcome. He thinks he's the main Big Bad with which he heroes must fight, but...no. There are quite a few Bigger Bad(s).

Backstory: After being accepted into Magangel due to his excellent achievements in science (which is mistaken for magic), Gary is shunned away due to his particular personality (if you were a nerd and/or geek in school, think of the guys who bullied you). Unfortunately, he doesn't take this well at all, so he steals a portal to another dimension, uses one of his devices to create a black hole and runs. He then uses the portal to cross-dimension Mind Control an alien (essentially the circumstances of Indiana Jones 4, but less advanced), who begins Mind Controlling and killing everyone, who then kills an angel of death, prompting the angel's kind-of girlfriend...uh...yeah, it's pretty long. This is all before the book starts, FYI. If you want, I can post the rest.

Relevant Tropes: (May or may not post some later)

Any questions?

edited 21st Sep '14 2:49:35 PM by Dimentiosome

Also HOLY FaCKING SHeT!!!!!!!

Dimentiosome: It's etiquette in the thread to comment on previous example/s before bringing up your own. That said, can you elaborate on the archangel part? It sounds like Gary also suffers from a bit of an...inferiroity complex, which isn't bad. And delusions of grandeur.

Sero: The point of said storyline is his becoming a monster to create his own destroyer. While his actions are far from sympathetic, I feel it's possible to make the motivations and the backstory behind them to be. Particularly when you're left with someone who almost can't help but be evil, who utterly loathes himself and the inability to feel almost anything except in evil deeds and wanting only revenge and death for it. It's a difficult balance to keep sympathy with a character. I'm not quite sure why you say that he shouldn't receiving of any sympathy when you consider the backstory.

Ambar: Cale sounds...well, he sounds like a thug with delusions of grandeur. How high does his influence reach at his best, and how does he avoid being put in the ground long before?

Cale's essentially a modern criminal take on a medieval mercenary captain—he moves from town to town, finding what work he can, backed by a dozen strong band of very dedicated, very loyal killers, most with rapsheets as long or longer than his. While a large organization like the Rossokovsky's or the Medici could get rid of Cale and his boys, it'd be an ugly, bloody process that nobody really wants to go through. Throw in the fact that he's always on somebody's payroll—first Alexandr Rossokovsky, then Nick Medici, then Antonio Salazar's—and taking a run at him becomes an even worse proposition.

What ultimately does get Cale killed is when, after selling out Alexandr to Nick Medici, and then selling out Nick Medici to Salazar, Salazar decides that Cale can't be trusted, cancels the contract, and withdraws his protection. That leaves Cale and the Dixie Boys exposed to all their enemies, with Mitchell Michaels and the anti-gang task force, Svetlana Rossokovsky, and Nick Medici's son Luciano, all looking to end him. I'm not actually sure yet who is going to get him, but regardless, with that many people gunning for him, Cale can't last long.

When you put it that way, Snake, that does make a good case for him being sympathetic. It's a pretty distinct way of going about it.

---

Here are more of my Eclipse villains. Remember Eighinn Stossuhl, the crazy Large Ham from earlier? He is one of the Freiherren - the "free lords" who command the paramilitary Anti-Magic corps known as Skuurnur. Including Stossuhl, there are six Freiherren at the start of the story (it later extends to twelve). The one I'll talk about is Eraldo Supryor.

• Appearance: An enormous Monstrous Humanoid who stands at a menacing 8'2, Eraldo Supryor is one of the more bizarre-looking characters in Eclipse. His legs split apart at the calves, producing two feet on either leg. Each foot carried three talons at the front and one more from the back. He had a squid-shaped hounskull that was spiked at the top. Dozens of circular holes were made around the nose and mouth areas of the snout-like visor. Slim, rectangular sockets were made for the eyes.
• Personality: Eraldo is a somewhat flamboyant creature, who often curls his tentacle-shaped fingers whenever he's excited or interested. However, he becomes much colder and more intolerant whenever he's working; do not ever interrupt him as he works. Despite his somewhat fruity demeanor when out of work, Supryor is an amoral, ruthless, morbidly curious, and borderline obsessive Mad Scientist and Mad Doctor. Everything he does is in the name of his own curiosity first, along with science a distant second. A quirk of his is to drape his tentacle-fingers over someone's shoulders as a way to "persuade" them to see his point of view. Supryor is very much a perfectionist; if you do not aim for the very best, you do not deserve your worth as a scientist or doctor. He constantly upgrades and reworks as a way to achieve the perfection that he craves whenever he works. In his own words, "If something is perfect, then there is no further room for improvement - because the goal had been reached and the flaws have been removed. If one does not seek perfection, you are fraudulent and defeatist."
• Abilities: He is the strongest Freiherr, as well as the most powerful Culliver due to his Nigh-Invulnerability and ability to temporarily remove someone's powers by repressing their Battle Aura.
• Goal: Constructing the greatest Culliver in history - namely himself - and dissecting everyone who intrigues him out of morbid curiosity.
• Role: He is the creator of the Cullivers, who were designed as a deterrent against Aura Users. He allowed hundreds of thousands of Cullivers were persecute Aura Users with damn-near impunity, with entire governments and nations falling apart due to his work. Now the go-to Mad Scientist and Mad Doctor for Skuurnur, he is one of the smartest and most powerful, along with one of the most horrific of the Freiherren.
• Backstory: As a young man, Eraldo was enthralled by the idea of evolution. As an aspiring scientist, he sought about learning more about Aura - seeing it as the next step towards "a more perfect Mankind." He took it upon himself to experiment on Aura - first by learning the abilities, strengths, weaknesses, and side effects (among others) inherent to an Aura User. Before long, he began conducting human experimentation from his family-owned science, research, and medical company - first with himself. He thus became the first Culliver, and began turning more and more regular humans into Cullivers with no regard over the consequences of such an act. His success in converting and upgrading Cullivers led to Eighinn Stossuhl, the founder of Skuurnur, to recruit him into Skuurnur. Since then, Eraldo has performed unethical human experimentation on not just Aura Users, but practically anyone who catches his eye.

edited 22nd Sep '14 5:59:50 AM by Serocco

In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.

Eraldo is a pretty cool character; he reminds me of Syazal Apporro Granz from Bleach; both of them have the same Mad Scientist vibes and are fairly tentacle-ish in appearance. They even have the same spiel about perfection, though Granz's seemed more along the line of arrogance towards his own power than a general philosophy. I think what I like about him the most is his total disregard for the rights of others—it's a fairly common personality trait for Mad Scientist types, but it never gets old for me. How dare someone just capture and experiment on other people without their consent? It really is the mark of a villain and I applaud it. I read your page about Eclipse to get a better understanding of the world and characters, but I do have one question: I can't tell if Eraldo's monstrous appearance is natural for his race, or if it is the result of years of self-experimentation?

"Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake." —Edgar Wallace

I wanted to keep that ambiguous. Eraldo being a Monstrous Humanoid has a sort of mystique to it.

For what it's worth, the rest of Skuurnur isn't that humanoid either. Yuehni Siggueir, the diplomat, has a gaping maw on his stomach and shoulder spikes that turn into wires.

In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.

Ah, I see. So they're basically a race of rather ambiguously human monsters with aura-suppression powers? Your design for them reminds of me Masashi Kishimoto's original design for Akatsuki.

Now, for another Clockwalkers character. I honestly wasn't sure what she qualified as, but she was closest to being a villain, so here we go. In many ways she is the "primordial" villain of the piece, since her actions shape the entire setting.

• Name: The Empress of Sinestel, Los Rengard

• Appearence: Los was moderately young woman of average height and slender build. She often dressed in a long white and crimson robe with long flowing sleeves, and gold bangles encircled her arms. Her white hair swept almost to the ground and on her head rested a black crown with three horn-like protrusions, each with a sapphire embedded in the center. Los's snow-white complexion and matching hair was unique among Sinstel's people, giving credence to the belief that she was a deity's vessel.

• Age: 18 to 34 throughout the three flashback chapters.

• Personality: Los embraced the myth that her family was descended from Zalakshi and viewed her immense magical powers as proof that she was the mortal incarnation of the Goddess herself. This arrogance extended to her civilization as well. Los viewed humans as inherently superior to all Zalakshi's other creations, but condemned other human nations as uncivilized savages, dismissing their cultures and achievements as meaningless. She sought to bring all human territories under Sinestel's "enlightened" rule, through a series of wars and political maneuvers. As she believed herself to be a goddess in mortal form, Los looked down on everyone she encountered and was utterly incapable of giving value to the life of anyone other than herself. Though she interacted with her subjects, soldiers, and advisers, she kept them all at arm's length and had no one whom she was truly close to. Los felt nothing but disdain for the nonhuman races and saw them as little more than pests to be cleared out to make room for human territory.

• Abilities: Los could easily consume amounts of Mana that would be fatal for anyone else. She could also siphon the Mana of anyone around her through physical contact, permanently stripping them of their magical abilities if she chose. This allowed her to single-handedly cast spells that would require multiple mages. Los was able to create large blasts of Pure Energy capable of destroying entire cities and could make torrential rains, devastating earthquakes and send lightning down on chosen targets.

• Weaknesses: Los's powers all required immense amounts of Mana, thus she could never venture far from Sinestel's Ley Line, which provided its inhabitants with human-attuned Mana. Los could not master healing magic, her powers were purely destructive in nature. Los was particularly susceptible to treachery simply because she couldn't imagine anyone daring to betray or deceive a goddess.

• Goals:
  • Force all of humanity to unite under Sinestel's rule.

  • Invade the lands of the nonhuman races and gradually exterminate them to further expand her empire across the planet.

• Motivation: Her family were worshiped as gods by the populace of Sinestel and she was the subject of unquestioned devotion since birth. Her immense magical powers and unique appearance made her believe that she was Zalakshi in a mortal body, strengthening the idea that she alone had the right to decide the fate of the world's people.

Backstory:

Los Rengard was born 7,034 years before Clockwalkers. Her pale skin and colorless hair astounded the imperial court, some believing that the child's aberrant appearance indicated some handicap or defect, while others saw it as a sign of even greater divinity. Los grew to adulthood surrounded by luxury and unquestioned adoration, attended by servants and priests. The passive extravagance of Los’s life was interrupted when a diplomat from a nearby human kingdom paid tribute to her. Los noticed that the man was astounded not only by her but by all that he saw around him. It was through this encounter that she discovered that not all humans used magic or even cared about its practice. As magic was Zalakshi’s gift to humans, Los was shocked and felt a personal anger. When she ascended the throne as Empress, Los waged a series of wars and political campaigns, pulling kingdom after kingdom into the Sinestel Empire’s control.

Meanwhile Los continued to experiment and dabble with different fields of magic, trying to increase her personal power along with her political authority over the world. During a foray into summoning magic, Los succeeded in bringing down a being from the Overworld. Using her blood mingled with several slave sacrifices and the flame of a torch, she bound a small organism of living flame into a large mirror on her private chambers and named it the Denizen of the Mirror. The creature was at first pleasant and childlike, but Los discouraged any attempt at friendliness and demand it obey her. When she discovered that it possessed knowledge of magic never before seen in the mortal world, she exploited that to her advantage. When the Denizen begged to be allowed to see the outside world, Los mocked it and once again reminded it that she had brought it into the world and that it lived to serve her.

Years later Sinstel’s exploration of a new-found continent resulted in disaster when the settlers and their guards were destroyed by a powerful nonhuman race known as the nuriel. They violently repelled all attempts to force them out of their forested homeland and went as far as to insult Los directly. Enraged with the nuriel’s resistance, Los demanded of the Denizen a way to annihilate their race while sparing the land for the human colonists. The Denizen persuaded the Empress to gather all her royal mages and together cast the spell it provided.

However it became immediately apparent that the Denizen had deceived Sinestel. The spell summoned hundreds of flaming stones from the sky which struck all over Rica, killing millions of people. The deaths disrupted the flow of Mana in the world and the Ley Lines weakened in power. Everyone on Rica lost their magic in an instant, including Los. As her city and its people fell apart around her, Los was horrified to see that the Denizen had constructed a physical body from the Mana leaking out of the corpses of the dead and molded it in the image of a steward who had been kind to it. Dumbfounded and broken at the loss of her powers and the destruction, she was helpless to stop the Denizen from simply snapping her neck.

• Relevant Tropes

• Abusive Parents: In a strange way. The Denizen of the Mirror regards Los as its creator because she brought it into being from the Overworld's chaotic energy through her blood and magic. However Los immediately brushed aside any attempt at paternal love or even basic friendliness and made it clear the Denizen was her servant, created for her whims and needs only. She constantly badgered it for its dictionary-like information on magic and the races of the world and mocked its pleas to see the outside world—even though she was capable of granting it mobility and the power to survive outside its mirror prison.

• Abusive Precursors/ Neglectful Precursors: Before her reign, Sinestel was a nation of scholars who studied the aspects of magic and its impact on the world and people. While they did use it as a means of attack and defense, this was a mostly unexplored area. Los made the weaponization of magic a top priority for her wars and soon many magical weapons were created, their inventors vying for the Empress's attention. When the Rain came and Sinestel fell into ruin, many of these scattered weapons lay hidden across the remains of their territory and caused occasional disasters when discovered by ignorant modern people.

• The Assimilator: Los's ultimate goal was absorb all established human nations into the Sinestel Empire, then mop up the small nomadic or independent human tribes and then conquer and destroy the nonhuman races and use their land to expand all across Rica. Los gutted the cultures of the nations she conquered by destroying bastions of their history such as temples, monuments and libraries and executing keepers of such traditions to facilitate the merging.
  • Notable in that she thought she was doing the human race a favor by uniting them all under her idea of the pinnacle of civilization. Her savage punishments and attacks against any resistance was punishment for what she saw as spiteful resistance to a better future.

• A God Am I: Los's immense magical powers and extraordinary appearance gave rise to rumors that she was the goddess herself returned in mortal form to rule over her chosen kingdom. She eventually all but banned conventional Zalakshi worship in Sinestel and had temples built where the people could pray to her. When her forces were victorious over other nations, she would have monuments and temples to her glory built at the sites of such conquests, often using slave labor obtained from the losing army.

• Antagonist Abilities: Inverted. One of the reasons a Sinestel could not defeat the nuriel was because their bodies absorbed Mana. Because magic was simply Mana re-purposed to the whim of the caster spells did no damage to them at all. Even Los's dreaded destructive magic would have been ineffective. For a nation of mages it was a frustrating scenario and terrifying to the Empire's Magic Knights that found themselves battling a seemingly unbeatable foe.

• Apocalypse How: A combination of Class 2 and 3. It is unknown how many flaming stones were summoned by Los’s spell, but they landed all over the planet, causing horrific destruction and altering the landscape. Entire nations perished as millions of people either died on impact or from their injuries or starved to death in the century and a half of winter that followed. The impact on Rica weakened and damaged the Ley Lines so using magic to heal the wounded and sick or hunt or defend was no longer an option. Then things got worse when the leaking Mana from the dead could no longer be reabsorbed into the weakened Ley Lines and became a destructive Fog of Doom that engulfed most of the planet, causing a secondary apocalypse that killed even more people and led to the formation of three small kingdoms founded on ragged patches of Sinestel’s remaining land.

• Area of Effect: Though powerful, Los's spells could only function within a limited area, usually a space of 345 square miles from wherever she was standing. This is the reason that the Denizen of the Mirror had to create its own country and form a seven thousand year old Ancient Conspiracy—it was not free even after gaining a physical body, since Los's magic, including the spell that kept it tied to the physical world, only worked within the grand capital’s borders.

• Badass: Los's powers were both solely focused on destruction and the most powerful magic in living memory. She could manipulate the weather, cause horrible earthquakes or simply annihilate large groups of enemy forces with blasts of Pure Energy. It came to the point that all the Sinestel military had to do was threaten to call their Empress to the battlefield, and it would be enough for the other side to surrender for fear of losing not only their territory but their lives and those of their loved ones. In fact what kept Sinestel from simply using this again and again was the need for her powers to be recharged by the Ley Line and that she had to be convinced that it was worth her time to solve the army's battle.

• Badass Longrobe: A long white and crimson robe with flowing sleeves that brushed the ground when she walked.

• Battle Aura: When she had consumed large amounts of Mana, it would emanate from her body and semi-solidify in the air around her in a constantly moving shroud as she focused on casting a spell.

• Back for the Dead: Not really her, but after Azelas/The Denizen completes its ritual to absorb the nuriel into its body to create an artificial soul for itself it remodels its human-shaped cocoon to resemble Los even down to the clothes she wore, presumably as a mocking “screw you” to its former master. This is the final form Azelas takes before being destroyed by the protagonists.

• Be Careful What You Wish For: Los wanted to change the course of Rica's history by creating a single unified human civilization that stretched across the planet. By following the treacherous Denizen's advice she brought about the apocalypse twice, once directly and once as a much later aftereffect of the casualties her spell had caused. The human survivors fleeing from the Fog of Doom created by the secondary effect then formed the Kingdom Of Ylati, which at the time of Clockwalkers is the only known human land in existence. For extra irony, it is housed within Sinestel's territory and its capital city Kes'trina was constructed over the ruins of Sinestel's grand capital.

• Berserk Button: Two, though both of them tie into the same issue. Because humans were the best at using magic, Sinestel believed it to be Zalakshi's special gift to humankind. Humans either undervaluing or outright maligning magic was a personal insult to Zalakshi—and therefore to Los. Her second was having her divinity called into question by anyone, and when the nuriel vehemently denied not only her godhood but her family's divine lineage, she resolved to destroy every last one of them rather than chase them from their forests.

• Broken Tears: She sheds these uncontrollably while wandering through the halls of the palace after she cast the spell that destroyed the world, crying from a mixture of shock, horror and confusion at how she could have caused such devastation and how she a goddess couldn't have foreseen the coming events.

• The Caligula: Averted. Though she was an arrogant, self-absorbed narcissist, Los was a stable ruler. Despite the countless lives lost during her campaigns and turning her formerly respected nation into an imperialist juggernaut, she ushered in an age of prosperity and created jobs and forums for those inclined towards creating and theorizing on harmful magic, something such people never would have had during peacetime.

• Classic Villain: Los has very little backstory in comparison to many of Clockwalkers villains and functions mostly as a part of the Big Bad's Backstory. She is almost the personification of Pride and the Lack of Empathy that comes with it.

• Combo Platter Powers: Limited weather manipulation, creating earthquakes by sending Mana into tectonic plates, energy blasts and siphoning Mana from others.

• Colony Drop: The Denizen of the Mirror provided the enraged Empress with a spell that would destroy the nuriel by “raining death from the sky”. It pleased her and appealed to Los’s delusions of godhood and inflicting divine punishment on those who had dared to resist and blatantly insult her. Following the Denizen’s instructions, she gathered all her royal mages at the top of the palace’s highest tower and said the spell while they channeled all their Mana into the Empress. To their horror instead of merely striking their opposition dead it called down flaming stones of varying sizes from the sky, causing them to strike at random intervals all over the planet.

• Disproportionate Retribution: For the heinous crime of refusing to give up the homeland that had been granted to them by Zalakshi herself, and for questioning the idea that a member of a race they had never seen before was their goddess in mortal form, Los decided to wipe out the nuriel race entirely both in vengeance and as a way of proving her divinity. This fit of bad temper, arrogance and gullibility destroyed most of the world and caused the surviving races to teeter on the brink of extinction.

• Divine Parentage: The Rengard Imperial Family claimed descent from an affair between Zalakshi and Ashav, the first man she created, and that this divine origin gave them the right to rule.

• The End of the World as We Know It: She caused it, albeit unwittingly. At the time of Clockwalkers only humans, the elves, nuriel, dwarves and dragons have survived what is now called “The Rain” by modern scholars, and these survivors live in prosperous but conspicuously small kingdoms surrounded on all sides by the Miasma. At least one other civilization is revealed to exist, but its nature is entirely unknown.

• Energy Absorption: Los could drain Mana from other magic-users with simple physical contact and a thought. It varied in severity to merely draining away some of the target’s power to rendering them unable to cast any more spells without recharging at the Ley Line—and other times she did it so violently that her victim was left unable to ever cast magic again, something considered a Fate Worse than Death in magic-heavy Sinestel. Los did this latter action very rarely and saved it only for those who she felt had committed unforgivable crimes using their magic and no longer had a right to it. As she was the only person capable of doing such a thing, she handed down this sentence personally. It was thought of as a perfect substitute for execution, since those who permanently lost their powers almost inevitably committed suicide anyway.

• Evil Albino: Los’s physical features such as her pale skin, colorless hair and coral-colored eyes mark her as an albino…though she wasn’t evil per se, just casually cruel and narcissistic. Her albinism was a shocking sight amidst the normally Dark Skinned Redhead citizens of Sinestel.

• Familiar: The Denizen of the Mirror was this to Los; she gave it a clear consciousness and mind as well as creating a somewhat organized form for it out of frenzied raw Mana using her blood, which meant her magic was all that kept it from becoming one with the energy that it had once been a part of. It was obliged to answer her every question on magic or the races of the world so that she could better understand how to harness the powers of magic, or conquer.

• Fatal Flaw: Los’s entire downfall was the result of her Pride. Had she simply given the Denizen of the Mirror more freedom and approached it with a kinder demeanor, she wouldn’t have made an enemy in the form of a creature far more knowledgeable about magic and the world itself than she would ever be. Furthermore, her need to punish anyone she felt had slighted her led her to go after the nuriel and leave an opening for the Denizen to manipulate her. Finally, Los never even imagined that she could or would be taken advantage of, simply because she didn't think anyone would dare to commit such blasphemy.

• Femme Fatalons: Her nails were described as “rose red daggers, five inches long”. It was a common practice in Sinestel for men and women of the upper class to let their nails grow extremely long.

• Irony: Los's arrogance and tendency to look down on almost everyone around her led to her defeat through trickery. The Denizen of the Mirror, the one responsible for her humiliation and death, eventually took on almost all the traits of its master. Though it didn't think of itself as a god, it considered itself higher than any other life-form on Rica and looked down on humans as tools and pets after years of controlling Ylati through its Inner Circle minions. And just like Los, it was brought down by the very same life-forms it had considered beneath it, due to letting its guard down out of a solid belief that nothing could stop it.

• Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: All of the monuments, edifices and temples Los had constructed in both her name and the name of Sinestel are either crumbling ruins or horribly destorted by the Miasma's reality-breaking powers. Even if they were intact, nothing sentient lives in the Miasma-infested lands where most of them lie. Worse, no one even knows who Sinestel and or Los even were anymore, except for the Big Bad. Even the dwarves, who shared the continent with Sinestel's grand capital only know of it as a human city that existed before Ylati; it's name and specifics have been lost to their history.

edited 3rd Oct '14 8:42:19 PM by Swordofknowledge

"Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake." —Edgar Wallace

Los reminds me of Yhwach. An imperial monarch who assimilates shit. Unlike Yhwach, it seems Los is meant to be a Generic Doomsday Villain or a Predecessor Villain of sorts.

---

Here is another villain from Eclipse. This is Beyniph Osciteck, another Freiherr from Skuurnur.

• Appearance: Two curved spikes were on the sides of his head, with one curved spike at the top of his forehead. His upper mouth guard was shaped like the letter Y, covering Osciteck's cheekbones and producing large, ovular eye sockets. The lower version of the mouth guard was V-shaped, with a spike at the bottom as six slim slots were positioned diagonally on the mouth area. A black abyss emanated from the eye sockets and exposed sides of the neck. A metallic collar was adorned on his shoulders, upturned and serrated at the edges. Square-shaped plates were overlapping one another on each of his fingers; cylindrical plates were on the back of his palms. His forearms protruded triangular blades, the tips facing his triceps. Osciteck's legs were split open, with silver wings at the sides and three black rods trailing down to his feet.
• Personality: He is a liberal practitioner of Pragmatic Villainy; even his public appearance as a hardliner is based solely on his belief that taking such a hard line against major enemies of the world would provide better credibility to Skuurnur. When he sees Stossuhl enact a Public Execution, Osciteck immediately decides to dump the Insane Admiral upon realizing that Skuurnur's legitimacy is likelier to cease with every passing minute Stossuhl draws breath. An incredibly analytical strategist, Osciteck is Skuurnur's chief strategist and intelligence director, but he sometimes dips into Complexity Addiction, and he often needs a colleague to snap him out of trying to over-think things. He's something of a smooth talker, with a laid-back and easy-going demeanor towards most things, although he tends to lay back and watch fights so he could discern the fighters' strengths and weaknesses.
• Abilities: As a Culliver, Osciteck can repel/regress Aura-imbued superpowers. He channels this, most of all, through his legs. Once the small wings on his legs detach, his legs turn into scissor blades that he flails around in a deranged amalgamation between a break dancer and a Kick Chick.
• Goal: Orchestrating, planning, and overseeing a successful war effort against Aura Users. Think the Major from Hellsing, except his goal is to both wage and win war rather than simply wage it.
• Role: Osciteck serves as the de facto leader for Skuurnur, as he attempts to restructure the corps and reestablish its credibility post-Stossuhl.
• Backstory: As a young man, Osciteck was fascinated by war. In the same vein as people dissected Ancient Rome or Ancient Greece and their warrior cultures, Osciteck did the same. The logistics, effects, environmental advantages/disadvantages, geopolitical chess games, strategies, mid-battle tactics, battle formations, and philosophies of war all fascinated him as a kid. Due to that, he knows the best and worst strategies of any particular battle, and he has turned into an incredibly analytical intelligence director (he's even Skuurnur's top strategist by default). He joined Skuurnur because he was ecstatic at the idea of waging war with Aura Users - not because he's a Blood Knight, but because that meant he could brainstorm exactly how to fight such a war. It's like a Promoted Fanboy being hired to direct his favorite movie series.

edited 3rd Oct '14 11:05:54 PM by Serocco

In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.

I am seeing a Greco-Roman fanboy villain, which often results in interesting characteristics. The fact this doesn't result in a Blood Knight but in more of a war organizer is an interesting direction. I'll have to see more...

• Name: Mieruka Kyonori

• Age: 30

• Personality: Mieruka is an antagonist only in the fact that she still feels she has to, as a loyal young woman basically told to be a Yamato Nadeshiko, she needs to obey her father. And her father...is Wolfang Richler. As a result, she is highly intrusive in the lives of her children, dictating who dates who, and depending heavily on ancestry charts and even star alignments to determine what is best. She reacts to people going outside her authority with extreme violence, her Character Establishing Moment is her maintaining her "saintly" Yamato Nadeshiko demeanor as she beats seven shades of tar out of her eldest son for kissing a girl she did not approve, even going as far as Why Did You Make Me Hit You?. She isn't abusive or manipulative because she enjoys it - she does what she does because Wolfang told her to do it. As she puts it "Our patriarch, Matsuno-sama, has dictated that family bloodline purity and magical lineage be preserved. I am afraid, my dear son, that I cannot allow you to do as you please. Please do not make me hit you again." She basically worships the ground Wolfang walks on, and is willing to do anything for him. She even took what looked like a Deadly Upgrade simply because he needed a test subject. When it made her...less than human...she didn't even mind it. However, she doesn't prohibit her children from expressing dislike or even detest for the course Wolfang's set. She was told to make things happen a certain way, she wasn't told she or any of her children had to enjoy it. As the polar opposite of a super protective parent, Mieruka takes Shipper on Deck to positively horrifying levels. And she's also inherited her father's manipulative abilities, as mentioned previously - you probably won't even know your ideas aren't your own by the time she's done. Most often, though, people describe her as "looking cheerful, but having eyes so dead they belong in a cadaver."

• Abilities: She inherited a massive supply of Mana from Wolfang, and a number of absolutely broke abilities. She can stop someone from casting spells or using Mana with her Prehensile Hair. She can generate a Susano'o-like structure around herself made entirely of bone, and if these summoned bones crack, they release a deadly toxin. She can teleport, much like dear old dad. She can manipulate water vapor, letting her turn air "black" and make it a deadly weapon. She can also control fibres, imbuing them with her Mana to cause any number of distinct magical effects. Yes, she can kill you with your clothes. She also possesses the Shadow Hand and Green Garden abilities her children Matsuji and Tomoe have, but at a vastly higher level. There are also indications she has a Gravity Master spell core, and her Wings can "obliterate" living matter.

• Weaknesses: Due to her lack of food intake, she falls right into Squishy Wizard, if she was in better health, she'd be a Lightning Bruiser, but as it is she rests just between that and Fragile Speedster. As a result, at the present, she requires her cousin's defensive abilities to be a serious threat. Hence why she gets so panicky when he betrays her.

• Goals: She wants to ensure Wolfang's plans go off without a hitch. And that means ensuring people marry "who they're supposed to". She shows very little reservation when the goal expands to include murdering her teenage nephew and causing a very damaging Magical Incident.

• Motivation: Her father basically drilled it into her head she has no choice but to do as he says. He was the only one who was around for her, and only he really paid her much attention. She was utterly despised at school for the crime of...being prettier than most of the popular girls.

• Role in the story: Evil Matriarch

• Backstory: I should start by explaining the family tree. She was born to Wolfang Richler, using his Matsuno Kyonori name, and Meerin Tsuruji, who was the niece of a man who also counted Wolfang as his father. Meerin's father was also Wolfang. Due to how he raised her, she not only sees nothing wrong with it, but sees absolutely everyone else as sickos for not partaking in this disgusting Magical Lineage social experiment. Mieruka eventually learned how to use her magic, and used it to not only kill the school bullies, but make it look like they killed themselves because "I don't want to burden my household with an unsightly murder trial." While in a different way, its often suggested she's just as ruthless as her father.

• Relevant Tropes:
• Absurdly Youthful Mother: Ayumu is seventeen. She's thirty. She has a vicious, callous, and sociopathic monster for a father, who cares more for his magical bloodlines than his actual family. Do the math. Wolfang, you're a disgusting freak of nature. And then its revealed that, compounding the creepiness, he watched her give birth the entire time, and whispered in her ear, "If its not a boy, I'm going to snap your neck."
• Abusive Parents: Neglects Kouji and Teisuke, abuses Ayumu viciously both emotionally and physically, Matsuji and Tomoe get the emotional end of this...yeah, its clear where she gets it from.
  • She was also abused and neglected by Wolfang, mostly in an emotional manner, as he did not want to physically abuse her. He also threatened her, took advantage of Deliberate Values Dissonance, and brainwashed her.
• Action Mom: She will kick ass if her children prove unable to hold up. Just ask poor Matthew.
• Adult Fear: Poor Shuuji, finding out his adoptive sister had been sent away to live with this situation. He's fought malignant servants of Queen Anathema, he's fought a New World Order composed of Mafioso types, but this is the first time we see Shuuji really come undone.
• Affably Evil: her composure only rarely breaks - otherwise, she sounds and acts like the ideal Yamato Nadeshiko. Though given the deconstruction of the concept present, her endlessly polite tone makes her extremely creepy.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: There are no words for some of her relations to some members of her family. One of her children could be her uncle-in-law due to the arranged marriage she set up. This, viewers, is the true face of Wolfang's Magical Lineage experiment.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: To the outside world, she looks like a cheerful, devoted mother with a handsome husband and numerous kids with good grades and prowess in athletics. Inside? She's one of the most messed up villains, has been forced into her malevolence, and is dissonantly serene when dispensing pain.
• Blood Knight: "Oh, I am so sorry if that looked disturbing...I cannot help but feel excited that you have lasted ten minutes." Considering how she was brought up, and who brought her up, its pretty clear why she finds combat entertaining. She even admits later she "takes what enjoyment she can find", and "its dirty, feeling such excitement."
• Curb-Stomp Battle: She stomps all over poor Matthew, almost fighting like a Huckebein. Granted, he had no idea what she was at the time, nor her weaknesses. The next fight, together with Shuuji, proves to her she's not so invincible after all.
• Daddy's Little Villain: A grown up example - even in her youth, it is insinuated she did Wolfang's disgusting bidding. Including carving out the heart of a guy who had a crush on her.
• Dark Action Girl: Even though she acts like a Yamato Nadeshiko, she's really this - powerful, vicious and nasty, she's an extremely hard hitting female villain.
• Deconstruction: Her character is a deconstruction of many old traditionalist Japanese ideologies, and in particular the idea of a Yamato Nadeshiko in the modern day, and even further, deconstructs both the sexist assumption that women should stay in the kitchen as well as more common ideas like "don't poke your nose into other peoples' business", because the business that's going on is extremely disturbing...yet a lot of people outright ignore what they've seen and say its none of their business.
• Dissonant Serenity: She always talks extremely politely and in classical Japanese politeness - when wishing her kids well at school, when discussing romance, when stating how she intends to kill "the cute foreigner boy" in "as painful a manner as I can think up"...wait. Yeesh.
  • She doesn't even change expression when beating Ayumu for freeing Matthew from her death trap, and finishes by saying, "You know I love you, dear."
• Enigmatic Minion: Hers is her cousin Shinjiro. More sympathetic than most, given he's genuinely unsure if he really wants to stick to Wolfang's plan or if he sees a better one in mind. the first blow against Wolfang and Mieruka's plans comes when Shinji decides to betray them.
• Evil Matriarch
• Evilutionary Biologist: A stern eugenicist, she believes that "lesser family lines" can rot and die for all she cares. Her family line is what is important, ethics be damned.
• Flechette Storm: Even more lethally than just her wings, she can fire instant death feather missiles at people.
• Freak Out: She has one when her children stand with Shuuji rather than continue fighting for her. It hints to her that kids don't always have to stay on the side of their parents, and maybe she made a drastic, horrifying mistake all these years.
• Freudian Excuse: Hers is her horrific time she spent growing up under Wolfang's malignant wing, which included what amounts to More than Mind Control, her horrifically painful birth of Ayumu that blatantly did a lot of damage, emotional abuse, as well as the fact he absolutely refused to help her with the bullies driving her further and further into depression.
  • She, however, also ends up the Freudian Excuse of Teisuke. Tei is basically a Jerkass who has really warped ideas about women, and is extremely misogynistic. His misogynism is a cover for a deepseated fear of women, due to his mother burning his hand when he was five for not playing with boy's toys, and she neglects him utterly, viewing Tei as a failure and a "disgusting egotist who thinks people's plans don't include him".
• Guinea Pig Family: She was used as a guinea pig for Wolfang's magical experiments, as were her other relatives, and she continues the trend, even when she'd really rather not.
• Heel Realization: After seeing a caring, normal family pull themselves out of Pure Magical Storm Nyctomedes, she realizes she's been wrong the whole time, and that she's been abusing her children, keeping them in line with fear and manipulation, and was so tied up in loyalty, she saw nothing wrong with any of it. Sadly, she decides she's too far gone, hopes the foster care system can be good for once, and pointedly asks Shuuji when he wins to "kill me, in any way you prefer."
• Heteronormative Crusader: Simply because Wolfang never told her it was okay for any of her children to harbor affection for the same sex. She is personally against this one, but Wolfang simply tells her to go through with it anyway.
• Humanoid Abomination: Like father, like daughter.
• Ignored Epiphany: Played with; at first it looks like the case, but she reveals she did realize what she was doing was wrong, but ultimately couldn't see any way to go out other than fighting for Wolfang's disturbed cause. She even tells Ayumu, who most resembles Wolfang himself, and who has a personality like Wolfang did before he even went evil, to "not...follow in my footsteps. Be independent of the clan".
• Incest Is Relative: See Big, Screwed-Up Family. She sees absolutely nothing wrong with it, and is actually offended when her children decide they'd rather not, ah, keep it in the family.
• Instant Armor: Her bone armor technique. It comes filled with a deadly poison. Of course she's immune to it...
• In the Blood: Played with; her children don't really act evil, outside of what she forced them into. She herself is unwillingly a participant in Wolfang's schemes, but goes along anyway because "it is what a good girl does."
• Kissing Cousins: Averted - she creeps Cousin Shinjiro right the fuck out.
• Love Makes You Crazy And Evil
• Manipulative Bastard: Manipulates passive-aggressively, and using her position as the matron to get her children to form factions and not work together.
• Mind Screw: She has a flashback that starts off showing how she met her husband, and then Wolfang arrives riding a giant flying caterpillar. And then it turns into a clip show, anime style, involving descriptions that invoke images of deranged animation, someone murmuring ...never...wa...nted...this... and descriptions of the sounds made by a mouth eating very course food.
  • And then we cut to Ayumu just looking at her, and she tells him, "Go wake your siblings up, its time for school."
• My Beloved Smother: To creepy levels - she demands that she have a lot of control over her children, but she does it in such a passive-aggressive way, and not in always the most overt ways.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Her smiles come across as automatic, a conditioned response, and her eyes are dead. She encourages disturbing behavior in her children. And generally contributes to a frightening atmosphere in the Kyonori House.
• No-Sell: She No-Sell's Matthew's barrage of sword attacks when she had her cousin's defensive ability readied. When he betrays her, it leads to this ability vanishing, resulting in Oh, Crap!.
• Pet the Dog: Her relationship with Doctor Lyle. She seems to view him like a close friend, and the two form an interesting dynamic in their interactions, and she tolerates speech from him that she wouldn't from anyone else. Its later confirmed he's the person she actually loves.
• Sanity Slippage: After her cousin's betrayal, she really suffers from this, murmuring at times that she never asked for any of this, and why does he have to make her do this alone.
• Shipper on Deck: In a really nasty way - she pairs her eldest son with his aunt, for example, just because she calculates the baby would have "very nice magical genes".
• Shout-Out: Her entrance into the Arashino Church is met by loud German music played by her father, Wolfang. Perhaps a shout out to a certain evil anime mom...
• Squishy Wizard: Magically overwhelmingly powerful, befitting a daughter of a Physical God. Physically, she has to use her powers to keep up with faster foes, and cannot fight physically very well outside of defensive measures. Really fast foes are her worst match up.
• Surprise Incest: She had a particularly horrifying psychotic breakdown when she discovered the truth about the guy Wolfang let not only date her, but marry her. As she puts it; "We're all horrible people...the world is a sad, cruel place full of depraved people. Best, then, to sit at the top of the heap..."
• Teleport Spam: One of her many abilities.
• Touch of Death: Her wings have the ability to destroy living things at skin contact. However, if the living thing is not touched directly on the skin, this has no effect at all.
• Undying Loyalty: An exercise in Deliberate Values Dissonance; when she has problems with The Plan, she blames herself for possibly harming Wolfang's chances, rather than blaming Wolfang for being absolutely freaking insane. She doesn't like doing what she does, but feels she has no choice but to be loyal to death to Wolfang and his unending plans.
• The Unfavorite: While she abuses Ayumu the worst, she considers him her favorite due to his resemblance to his grandfather. She despises Teisuke and Matsuji for being "weaklings" for merely being born with two magic types.
• Villainous Breakdown: She has a number of them, most spectacularly right before the final battle, when everything basically comes to naught.
• Villainous Incest: Pervs on her cousin, married a guy related to her in so many ways its not funny, and mandates this life style for her children.
• Why Couldn't You Be Different?: Ayumu is more like a friendly, Nice Guy who'd prefer to love the cute childhood best friend...she was instructed to make him more like Wolfang himself. She actually asks why he couldn't be like his grandfather, and he states that "people choose who they are, nobody can make you be what they want." She doesn't even abuse him after that - the implication wrecked her the rest of the day.
• Why Did You Make Me Hit You?: And magic blast you, and kill that girl with an evil insta-kill feather, and...
• Wicked Stepmother: To Shuuji, through really circuitous and strange ways.
• Winged Humanoid: Like Wolfang, she can create wings...though these have some nasty effects.
• Yamato Nadeshiko: What if one of these devoted herself, mind, body and soul to a guy like Wolfang Richler? This also serves to inspect and deconstruct elements of the character.
• Yandere: She is utterly desperate for her eldest son Ayumu to love her...so she abuses him until leaving her would be even scarier than staying, makes sure leaving would financially end him, basically she does everything she can to ensure he's never leaving that house. A rare mother - son example with no icky elements - though her ships for him more than fulfil that end of it.
• You're Insane!: Shuuji shouts this at her. By that point, she didn't necessarily disagree.

edited 16th Oct '14 9:15:04 PM by NickTheSwing

Sign on for this After The End Fantasy RP.

Well, this is my first time posting here. Let me just say, very cool thread. Now on to the villains...

Re Malachor: I really do love this character. I've always had a fondness for the tragedy surrounding tortured souls so damaged that they become monsters. There's just so much potential for really emotional and heart-breaking scenes with them. I'm also happy that, despite being a villain, he does gain some measure of peace and happiness in the end.

Re Dr. Sara Salazar: It's odd, while she sounds so creepy, I do feel some pity for her. It's definitely a unique portrayal as a sociopath. Instead of just acting like sociopaths can be written off as pure evil, it would be interesting to explore the "human" side of them, the tragedy of their inability to connect with others. It's disturbing but it's not their fault for being born that way.

Re Wyconia: Like others have mentioned, I'm not getting an "evil" vibe off of this character. They're just someone on the opposite side of a war. Not that I oppose this because it makes the conflict more interesting when people on both sides of a war are portrayed as... well, you know, people.

Re Cale Brownlow: Sounds like a good Love to Hate kind of villain. Every series needs a good, ol' fashion psycho now and then for the viewers to root against. Based on what you've mentioned about him, it sounds like the audience will be yearning for his death in no time. Good work!

Re Gary Sunlans: Wow. That definitely sounds like an interesting story. I'd also like to know a bit more about this archangel thing.

Re Eraldo: A Monstrous Humanoid who's also a Mad Scientist? He sounds like he could be a pretty enjoyable character.

Re Los Rengard: Not gonna lie, your character sounds a similar to a villain in a work I'm working on currently. So obviously I consider you a person of impeccable taste! I always love someone who's ego is so massive they consider themselves above literally every other living being, mainly because it makes all the sweeter when their delusions come crashing down.

Re Osciteck: This is another interesting take on a character type. It's rare to see a villain committed to waging war because of the intellectual challenge it poses him. Also, he definitely has a very interesting character design. Does make me wonder more about what exactly he and his comrades are.

Re Kiyonori: Again, there are so many interesting character ideas on this thread. A villainous Yamato Nadeshiko, don't believe I've ever heard of one before. The way she abuses her children is chilling, especially the idea that she feels a compulsion to do so "for their own good."

Well, here's my own baddie. Back in high school I had an idea for an action animated series, drawing a lot of inspiration off of shows like Avatar, Gargoyles, and the DC Animated Universe, with their whole focus on Character Development, moving stories and Myth Arcs. I never really managed to get a good title for it so I tentatively just called it Golem.

Just a basic run down of the plot: Centuries ago in an ancient kingdom, a golem, named Arthur, was constructed to act as the bodyguard to Princess Rose while their kingdom was at war with a rival empire. Unfortunately, when the war progressed to the palace’s doorsteps, something happened that made Arthur deactivate. He awakens centuries later, in a country that is entirely sealed within a great magic dome (eat your heart out Stephen King). The person who awoke him is a descendant of the old Princess’s bloodline, a delinquent/powerful sorceress named Lily. With no one else to turn to in this new time period, Arthur pledges his loyalty to Lily, and, after a harrowing two-part episode eventually, Lily decides to use her powers to fight criminal and supernatural threats with Arthur’s help, all while uncovering the mystery behind the great dome that locks their country away.

Name: Elias Maxus

Age: 754

Appearance: Seven-feet-tall and broad-shouldered, he’s a mountain of muscle wrapped up in a fancy dark blue suit. He’s completely bald and has a short, golden beard. His eyes are green but they’re usually obscured behind the shine off his glasses. He has a hawkish nose and sharp cheekbones. Ideally voiced by Clancy Brown. This requires no explanation why.

Personality: A capable planner and manipulator, Maxus is a cold and ruthless man. He’s completely unfettered, willing to sacrifice anything to achieve his goals, however, he’s also a firm believer in Pragmatic Villainy, believing there’s no point to dirtying his hands if there’s no profit in it. He also has a pathological need to be in complete control of everything, his arrogance making it so that he believes he’s the only one who knows what’s best for the world. He has a very With Us or Against Us personality, even if someone has similar goals to himself, if they won’t follow his orders, he views them as Wild Cards and possible threats that need to be eliminated. Despite all of the atrocities he commits, he still views himself as a hero that needs to save the world.

Abilities: He has super strength, has exemplary fighting abilities, and is a powerful magic user. He also possesses an amulet which not only grants him immortality, but also acts as a sort of “sponge” for damage, absorbing it into itself.

Weaknesses: After absorbing too much damage, the amulet’s protection can wear out at which point it needs to be recharged. This is when Maxus is at his most vulnerable and able to be killed. Also, while normally composed, if certain buttons are pushed his anger can seize complete control of him, turning him into an unthinking berserker.

Goals: To defeat the Elder Shadow and lead the devastated world in rebuilding itself as a glorious utopia.

Motivation: A combination of pride, megalomania, paranoia at having his kingdom taken away, and a genuine desire to save the world and undo past mistakes.

Backstory: Born Elias Corrallan, Elias was the younger brother of King Duncan Corrallan and the uncle of Princess Rose Corrallan. Serving as their kingdom’s general, Elias’s kingdom was endangered when a rival nation declared war. Mired in a hopeless struggle, Elias’s forces steadily lose ground until eventually the palace itself was under attack, the king was slain, and all hope seemed lost. However, the palace held a dark secret. Locked away, deep beneath the palace, a creature known only as the Elder Shadow, remained imprisoned. A creature of unspeakable horror, it once waged war against mankind until it was defeated by the Corrallan sorcerers of old. In desperation, Elias made a deal with the creature, spare his kingdom, defeat his enemies, and grant him the power to protect his kingdom forever, and in exchange Elias would free it from its confinement. The Elder Shadow agreed, but on one condition. It demanded someone of the Corrallan bloodline to serve as its host. Elias obliged. Defeating Arthur, he sacrificed his own niece to the Elder Shadow. The Elder Shadow made good on its part of the bargain. It completely destroyed the invading army, then constructed a massive magical dome around the entire country as a showing of “good faith.” Having hoped that his two enemies would destroy each other, Elias watched in horror as the world was steadily corrupted and destroyed by the Elder Shadow. Fearing that the Elder Shadow will return and try to destroy his country someday, Elias has spent the past several centuries trying to find a way to destroy the Elder Shadow once and for all.

Role in the Story: Serving as the Big Bad for the first two seasons, Maxus runs the domed country the story takes place in. Backing various Corrupt Corporate Executives, Sleazy Politicians and powerful mobsters, Maxus’s true agenda would remain a mystery for most of the first season. Acting through his Number Two Cassandra, Maxus abducts and experiments on magical creatures, in addition to experimenting with forbidden magics in order to find ways to weaponize them. Maxus also takes an interest in Arthur, planning on capturing him in order to discovering the secrets of his creation. All of these plots are experiments Maxus is conducting to find the best way to combat the Elder Shadow, whether it be building up an army, or sucking the magic out of innocent creatures so he can empower himself. While the heroes, Lily and Arthur, primarily deal with thwarting Cassandra, as well as Maxus’s son, Jack, who often acts as an enforcer for Maxus’s allies more mundane crimes, they aren’t even aware of Maxus’s existence until the first season finale, after which, stopping him becomes their number one priority. Numerous developments occur throughout season two, Maxus gains a new Dragon in the form of a Robotic Psychopath, Jack makes a Heel–Face Turn upon discovering his father’s experiments, and Lily and Arthur discover what Maxus’s true goals really are. Though they clash a few times, due to Maxus’s amulet protecting him, Lily and Arthur aren’t able to defeat him until Lily’s father, Detective Malcolm, makes a Heroic Sacrifice to deplete the amulet’s power. When Maxus plans on recharging his amulet by sucking the life out of a large number of magical creatures, Lily, Arthur and a recently-aligned Jack head off to stop him once and for all. After a fight between the four, Maxus is badly wounded, is betrayed by his newest Dragon, his amulet is destroyed, and he ends up blown to high heaven when his base blows up from a magical overload. Killed Off for Real, his place as Big Bad for the third season would be replaced by former Bigger Bad, the Elder Shadow, though Maxus himself would make one final appearance in season three. When Arthur is temporarily killed, he winds up in limbo, where Maxus has been feeding off souls in an attempt to build up enough power to break into the world of the living and continue his crusade. Instead, he’s defeated again by Arthur as well as the ghost of Malcolm, and ends up sucked into oblivion, ending his threat permanently.

Tropes:

• A Day in the Limelight: The backstory of the world would be explored from his point-of-view in a two part special that details the fall of his kingdom, Arthur’s amnesia, what happened to Princess Rose, and the release of the Elder Shadow.
• Abusive Parents: He’s emotionally abusive to his son, Jack, manipulates him at every turn, and frequently uses him as a tool due to Jack’s lycanthropy. This eventually reaches Arch Nemesis Dad standards when Jack makes his Heel–Face Turn.
• Badass Baritone: Ideally he would be voiced by Clancy Brown so this would kind of be a given.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: He’s almost never seen outside of a dark blue suit.
• Big Bad: He would serve as this for the first two seasons. In the first season he’s behind many plots the heroes thwart but he would be personally acting in the shadows. One of his Co-Dragons, Cassandra, would be the one following his orders and acting as The Heavy. When the heroes finally become aware of his existence in the first season finale, he would begin to handle things personally in the second season.
• The Chessmaster: He’s always got plans within plans.
• Control Freak: More than anything this is his defining trait. He manipulates everyone and prides himself with the knowledge that everyone in the country is working towards his ends whether they know it or not. Furthermore, while his desire to save the world is ostensibly sympathetic, he believes he’s the only one capable of doing so. Anyone who won’t conform to his orders or who stands in his way, he’ll crush mercilessly, regardless of whether or not these same people would want to save the world just as much as he does.
• Deadpan Snarker: He has his moments.
  • Guard: What do you want us to do with [the unconscious Lily] boss?
  • Maxus: Killing her would be nice.
• Deal with the Devil: Revealed in the backstory episode that when his kingdom was in danger of falling to their enemies, he made a deal with the Elder Shadow. He released it to ravage his enemies in exchange for gaining the power and ability to “protect” his kingdom forever.
• Determinator: He won’t let anything get in the way of his goals. Probably best exemplified in the third season following his death. In a two-episode special where Arthur is killed, he has to combat Maxus’s ghost, who’s lingering in limbo, feeding on other lost souls just so he can gather enough power to rise from the dead and continue his fight with the Elder Shadow.
• Dragged Off to Hell: In his third season appearance as a spirit, he ends up being sucked into oblivion.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In an effort to destroy Lily and Arthur, he unleashes an old super-powered enemy of Lily’s. When it’s quickly revealed that his new minion is an Ax-Crazy lunatic who enjoys attempted mass murder For the Evulz, he quickly expresses his disgust at such pointless cruelty.
• The Evil Prince: Surprisingly averted. He’s clearly jealous of his brother being ruler but he never tried to kill him and take the throne for himself. Instead he acted as the loyal general he was expected to be. It was only after his brother had died and their kingdom was in imminent danger of collapsing did he eliminate the remaining successor standing in his way and seize power for himself.
• Fatal Flaw: Pride. His ego is so great that he can’t possibly imagine anyone else being capable of defeating the Elder Shadow. For this reason, even if someone else wants to destroy the Elder Shadow, he won’t let them live unless they become completely subservient to him. In his mind, since he obviously knows best, he can’t risk Wild Cards out there endangering his plans.
• Genius Bruiser: In addition to being an excellent plotter, manipulator and highly educated person, he is an absolutely massive man, over seven-feet-tall and a mountain of muscle.
• He Who Fights Monsters: While he wasn’t exactly the nicest person before, by the present day he’s one of the most vile people around.
• Hero Killer: Very much so. In contrast to his Co-Dragons, Cassandra, and his son, Jack, Maxus is obscenely powerful in both physical and magical prowess. In their first fight with him, he owns them both utterly, with the two barely managing to survive. Whenever Maxus shows up personally, Arthur and Lily either barely manage to lay a scratch on him, or their primary strategy is simply to escape. Eventually he becomes this literally when his fight with Lily’s father, Mal, results in Mal making a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: For season one he seems like just a power hungry megalomaniac but there are times when a deeper motive is hinted at. The second season reveals he is a power hungry megalomaniac, but he’s also trying to save the world from a greater evil.
• I Did What I Had to Do: How he justifies releasing the Elder Shadow to save his kingdom, and how he now justifies the atrocities he commits to stop the Elder Shadow.
• I Own This Town: He essentially runs the entire country whether the people living in it know it or not.
• Killed Off for Real: In the second season finale, he’s betrayed by his newest Dragon, defeated by the heroes, and blown up in an explosion due to a magical overload at his hideout. He later becomes Deader than Dead when his spirit is sucked into oblivion.
• Knight of Cerebus: Whenever he shows up things are meant to get really serious really fast. Even when he’s defeated, it’s never in a comical fashion as it sometimes is for Jack or Cassandra, it’s always treated as a significant accomplishment.
• My God, What Have I Done?: He assumed his kingdom’s rival nation and the Elder Shadow would destroy each other in their battle. Instead, the Elder Shadow ended up wiping out the other nation before moving on to the rest of the world. The only place unaffected by the Elder Shadow’s corruption is his old kingdom, sealed away in a massive dome. When Maxus realize he unwittingly doomed the entire world, he decided to undo his mistakes… through any means possible.
• No Nonsense Villain: In stark contrast to Cassandra, who’s in love with Evil Gloating and Bond Villain Stupidity, Maxus does not mess around. No exposition, no death traps, with every attack he goes straight for the kill.
• Offing the Offspring: When Jack discovers the full extent of his father’s criminal enterprises, he finally makes his Heel–Face Turn. At this point, Maxus has no problem whatsoever trying to kill his child whenever he gets in his way.
• Pragmatic Villainy: While he funds many illegal enterprises, this is primarily to keep the Corrupt Corporate Executives and various criminal elements under his control. In general, all of his truly heinous crimes are committed with a specific goal in mind. If there’s no profit or no advantage to it, there’s no point in doing it.
• Really 700 Years Old: Over 700 years old, actually, being alive and kicking when his kingdom was at it’s peak.
• The Unfettered: He won’t let anything stop him destroying the Elder Shadow, he’ll sacrifice anyone or anything, even his own son. Even death won’t stop him from trying to fulfill his goals.
• Villainous Breakdown: Goes into a truly epic one after he’s betrayed by his newest Dragon and is left to his death. He spends his final few moments ranting about how the world will burn without him before he’s blown to smithereens.
• We Can Rule Together: Makes the offer to Lily and Arthur, though it’s less “rule together” than it is “be my pawns.” Naturally when they refuse, he handles it poorly.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: In a way where the trope is meant to humanize him but not make him sympathetic, if that makes sense. He wants to save the world from the Elder Shadow, but he also wants to rule it afterwards, believing he’s the only one capable of restoring it to it’s former glory. Furthermore, the lines he crosses to “save” the world are incredibly monstrous.
• With Us or Against Us: Applies to everyone, even his own child.
• Would Hurt a Child: Kind of goes without saying considering the protagonists are children. Well, technically Arthur is centuries old but he has the mind of a sixteen-year-old.

edited 25th Oct '14 4:33:58 PM by OccasionalExister

Wow, that is...an amazing story to say the least. It reminds me of Clockwalkers in some ways—-sealed away Kingdom with a ravaged world just outside its borders, manipulative villain and a golem-like creature for a main character. However you takes these tropes and make them exquisitely unique.

Elias strikes me as terrifying and perfect for his role as the Man Behind the Man Big Bad. He has just enough atrocities to his name to make it clear to the audience that he is nothing short of a monster—added to by the fact that he caused the whole mess to begin with—but he also is shown to have benevolent goals for his people and that isn't something to be ignored. Even the whole Elder Shadow mess started out of a desire to protect his people, and it plays to the sympathy of the audience—or at least me.—to contrast the Elias then and the one now and know how far he has fallen. His determination is something to behold though, since he tries to overcome death after he is killed. I love how you subverted his Like A Badass Out Of Hell attempt.

I'm interested to see that he has a son, though not surprised that the son is his right hand man. It reminds me of Prince Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender particularly the Heel–Face Turn part.

edited 29th Oct '14 3:59:21 PM by Swordofknowledge

"Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake." —Edgar Wallace

This is a re-post of a Clockwalkers villain I submitted earlier. I pretty much just expanded this and added some tropes that I thought fitted her, since I didn't do a particularly good job last time.

• Name: "Gweyna"

• Age: She implies that she is around a thousand years old, making her far older than any known elf in Rica.

• Appearence: Like all elves Gweyna is thin and willowy with pointed ears, maroon almond-shaped eyes and a brownish green complexion. However unlike other elves her skin is deeply wrinkled and shrunken and her hair is pure white. Gweyna is always clad in a crimson dress with a multitude of curved yellow markings across the chest, upper back and sleeves and a silver belt that circles her waist.

• Personality: Gweyna is exceedingly shrewd and cunning. Like the members of the Inner Circle, she is fiercely loyal to Azelas' plan to sacrifice the nuriel race and absorb their Life Energy, and carries out its orders without regard for those impacted by her actions. She is well aware that Azelas’s promise of godhood for all humanity is a lie, and that the ritual is solely an attempt for it to gain a soul. She takes great pride in this understanding of Azelas’ true goals and looks down upon her fellow collaborators and ordinary humans alike with thinly veiled disdain. Because Azelas showed her the truth, Gweyna trusts that it thinks of her as a partner rather than a pawn—and that it will share a fraction of the energy from the sacrificed nuriel with her, allowing her to revitalize her aged body and prolong her life indefinitely. Gweyna dislikes children immensely; viewing them as simple-minded and feeble wastes of space, and due to her immense age sees everyone except Azelas and the ancient dragons as a child. Though she looks down on humans, she utterly despises elves. This loathing for her own kind is something she embraces with a bitter passion and takes great pleasure in the sufferings of other elves and will target them over others in a situation with multiple opponents.

• Abilities: Gweyna is one of the few on Rica still able to use magic. She can heal wounds by repeating the words of a spell and concentrating on the individual she is curing. Gweyna is also skilled at psychological analysis; she was able to pinpoint potential candidates for prince and princess out of a host of children by estimating which ones would survive having their minds "hollowed out" by Azelas and new compliant personalities implanted. Gweyna can exercise mass Mind Control over others, and combined with a firm grasp of tactical skills and combat, she is able to put together a deadly and coordinated team of living puppets under the right circumstances. She is also well-versed in ritual magic, enough that she could carry out the preparation rites for the nuriel sacrifice without hesitation or difficulty even while under attack. Like all pure-blooded elves, Gweyna has the ability to go without food for days at a time as long as she has sunlight to photosynthesize.

• Weaknesses: Gweyna's healing magic requires intense concentration on her subject. Gweyna's Mind Control powers are only usable on those whose brains are damaged in some way, such as the children whose minds were destroyed by Azelas' tampering. Finally, Gweyna is elderly, even for an elf. She tires easily and is unable to really physically fight, at some points expressing worry over whether she will live to see the plan realized.

• Goals: Reduce the entire nuriel race to raw Life Energy so that she can absorb some of it in order to keep herself young, healthy and alive for all eternity.

• Motivation: Fear of death.

• Role In The Story: The Dragon to Azelas since she is a major player in the Ancient Government Conspiracy and an overseer of sorts.

• Backstory: Gweyna's past is mostly unknown. What is known is that she arrived in Ylati over a thousand years before Clockwalkers and quickly established herself within the Inner Circle's ranks, though she held herself aloof from the Heads of the Four Noble Families that composed its main members. Instead Gweyna received the special attention of Azelas itself, and was soon granted the job of overseeing all operations and actions relating to the plan. She quickly took charge of the "recruitment and training program" for young king and queen candidates, making the process far more efficient. During the war with the dwarves to push them out of Ylati's network of underground tunnels, she appeared to magically heal the then-commander of the Exterior Guard and swore the man to secrecy. Either during or just after the war, she threatened the dragon Tevrae's mate with death, forcing him to consume Mana and become the fortieth undead dragon under the Inner Circle's control.

Relevant Tropes

• Faux Affably Evil: Gweyna is a soft-spoken and incredibly polite conversationalist. She is particularly good at talking to children and often assured the abducted children used as "candidates" that they would be fine and calmed their fears. However has very little emotion towards other except disdain and views them as beneath her. She also explains the creation of her miniature army with the patience of a kindly teacher and takes sick pleasure out of Niccolo's horror at their backstory—and how close he came to being one of them.
  • Her exchange with the captured young dragons Tevrae and his mate Bertelg has her calmly offering them a Sadistic Choice—-Tevrae becomes an undead monster eternally in agony and under the Inner Circle's control in exchange for Bertelg's life. When it looks like Tevrae is going to listen to Bertelg pleas not to sacrifice himself for her sake, she drops her polite act and has her impaled through her soft underside and takes on a Creepy Monotone as she offers to use her healing magic to fix the fatal injury if he accepts the terms.

• Age Without Youth: Gweyna has lived over a thousand years when the average life span of an elf is three centuries at most. It is unknown exactly what methods she or Azelas employed to keep herself alive this long, but it certainly didn't stop the march of time and she is withered and frail from the wear and tear of centuries. It is also heavily implied that this unknown method isn't true immortality and she will die of old age sooner or later—most likely sooner, hence her desperation and glee that the ritual will be performed soon.

• Aloof Ally: To the Inner Circle, and she's not afraid to let others know it.
  • Ernesto (pulls crossbow): "Which means you're on the Inner Circle's side?"
  • Gweyna: "Their side? Oh, child...I'm on his side, if we have to use simple terms. But feel free to call me your enemy, because I have no intention of letting you disrupt all our efforts."

• Ambiguously Elven: Gweyna is over a thousand years old, she is wrinkled and aged beyond what any elf should look like, to the point of deformity, and she registers the same malevolent "aura" as the Big Bad to the elves' extrasensory perception. It is implied that the reason for her longevity and appearance is that Azelas...did something to her in exchange for her help.

• Antagonist Abilities: Her power to mentally coordinate her team of Empties makes it extremely difficult for anyone to get close to her, and since most of the party that encouners her during the Final Battle has contact weapons, she is able to stand in plain sight and casually continue her work while they fight off her minions. The only one slightly exempt from this is—ironically—Vanthi, an elven archer. However even his arrows prove useless once Gweyna realizes she is being targeted. See Human Shield.

• Asshole Victim: Gweyna is eventually taken out by Queen Araceli de Massimo, moments after insulting her even after Araceli had just intervened and saved her life.

• Bad Boss: She is in charge of the children whose minds were destroyed in the attempts to create a Royal Pair. Gweyna refers to them disparagingly as "empties" due to their mental state (or lack-thereof) and uses them as little more than puppets to fight for her. At one point she nonchalantly slits one's throat in order to begin preparing Azelas's Magic Mirror for the sacrificial ritual. She is also quite vocal on Araceli's status as "damaged goods" due to the hollowing and reconstruction process being only partially successful on her, and continues to refer to her as defective even after Araceli saved her life.

• Badass: Gweyna is a frail, elderly elf without any physical skill, yet she shows no fear at all when confronted by Drasil Jinette, Ernesto Rossini, and Prince Niccolo. In fact, her only reaction to them invading the chamber where Azelas's Mirror is contained is to simply curse the laxness of the Inner Circle for allowing it and send a small army of "Empties" at them while continuing her work.

• Blood Magic: In order to prepare Azelas's Mirror—and therefore Azelas itself—to receive the mass of Life Energy from the ritual, Gweyna calmly slashes the throat of one of her Empties to provide the human blood essence it will need to be accepted by the Human Aligned Ley Lines.

• The Dragon: To Azelas. While everyone involved in the plot knows Azelas helped found Ylati by gathering the human survivors of the Rain, Gweyna is the only one aware that it caused the Rain in the first place, and that it regards the land and its inhabitants as a "farm" of sorts, for its plan to achieve a soul and couldn't care less about conferring "godhood" upon humankind. She views herself as a partner in a joint venture with Azelas rather than expendable puppets like the Inner Circle. However there are hints that she isn't as well informed she she likes to think—she uses male pronouns to describe Azelas, such as "him" and "that man" when Azelas is really a genderless Eldritch Abomination piloting a construct in the shape of a young man.
  • Co-Dragons: With Araceli, though the queen is little more than a brainwashed tool in Gweyna's eyes and her functions are rather basic such as keeping the Kingdom peaceful and free of any rebellion so that things may proceed as planned.

• Dirty Coward: Gweyna makes no excuses about it. She blatantly admits that she refuses to get into a real fight with Drasil and the others because she might get hurt or killed; instead it's just easier to send her Elite Mooks to do the job while she focuses on things "more suited to someone her age".

• Early-Bird Cameo/ Chekhov's Gunman: During a glimpse of the Ylatain Exterior Guard's battle with dwarves in the during the war, Gweyna offered magical healing to a very important commander, reminding him that the visit and his method of getting back on his feet is to remain top secret. She only becomes important later on.
  • If she is the protagonist from the tale of the maiden banished from the elven forests, then she appeared even earlier than that.

• Elite Mooks: The children—now young adults—gathered by the Four Noble Families who failed to become the next prince and princess and whose minds were destroyed. They are simply breathing shells who act only according to Gweyna's mental commands and guard Azelas's Mirror in underground ruins of Sinestel with their lives.

• Evil Genius: Gweyna was able to learn the lost art of magic, she can analyze people so that she can—for the most part—tell who will or will not adapt well to Mind Rape, and able to make a complex battle-plan by observing her opponents and the environment while simultaneously concentrating on controlling the bodies of over twenty people, including their individual attacks. Oh and this last action was done while performing a complex magical ritual that she had only one chance to get right.

• Evil Old Folks

• Flunky Boss: A non-video game example (though the story was inspired greatly by RPG games). Drasil, Ernesto, Prince Niccolo, and Vanthi's battle with her consists of trying to get past her minions and stop her from completing the spell on Azelas's Mirror Shard to prepare it for the "main event".

• For the Evulz: There is literally no reason for her to give verbal orders to her minions, since they are bodies in a vegetative state, controlled only by her will and magic. She just does it because it freaks out her enemies.

• Freudian Excuse: Only applies if she is the maiden from the elven fable, and there is strong evidence to suggest that she and its protagonist are one and the same. Her husband fell sick and after trying every natural remedy for him that she could, he died. Driven by the horror that someone could simply cease to be, she scoured the forested lands of Atnar for a way to prolong her life indefinitely and share this gift with all her kind. However when she was found out, she was brought before the authorities and thrown out of the forest for her crime—something considered a Fate Worse than Death for most elves.

• Good Powers, Bad People: She is proficient enough with healing magic that she can simply concentrate on a person and will their wounds away while uttering the right words. However she is a selfish individual who would help an evil Eldritch Abomination, manipulate humanity, and destroy an entire race in the hope that doing so might let her live forever.
  • She is essentially a child psychologist, yet uses that knowledge on how to analyze and assist the mental states of children to target those who she knows will adapt well to being Brainwashed to serve the conspiracy's purposes.

• Human Shield: During the fight, Vanthi spies an opening and aims an arrow at Gweyna, accurately surmising that if she is killed then the Empties will stop attacking. However Gweyna notices and has one of them leap in front of her, taking the arrow in the chest.

• Immortality Immorality: Apart from the methods she supports now, the elves of Atnar revere the natural cycle of nature and the world—that all things are born, live out their days and then expire to give rise to a new generation. Something that does not die or uses unnatural means to extend its life beyond the set limits of its species is abhorrent to them. Her forays into the concept of eternal life branded her a heretic among her people.

• Immortality Seeker: If Gweyna is the protagonist from the fable, then the loss of her husband pushed her to find a method of protecting the elves from death. After being punished with banishment for her desires—since the elves revere the cycle of life and death—she became even more driven and will do anything to obtain immortality for herself.

• Irony: She is captured by Vanthi, an elf working with La Résistance, using a rabbit snare of all things, one of the most basic tricks elves teach their children. Of course she doesn't stay this way for long, thanks to Araceli's timely rescue...

• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: After Araceli saves her, Gweyna thanks her and comments that even damaged goods can be useful sometimes—for which a tired, severely injured and mentally frayed Araceli simply runs her though the chest with her sword.

• It's All About Me: She is well aware that the ritual won't kill the nuriel, it will instead sentence them to unceasing torment within Azelas---and hopefully her---when they are reduced to energy and bound. However the horror and cruelty of it doesn't even begin to phase her, as long as she can get immortality out of it.

• The Medic: For her team of Empties; part of what makes them so difficult to take down was that she would heal them every so often, complicating and worsening the battle.

• Misanthrope Supreme: Gweyna may disparage humans, but she absolutely hates elves; she believes them to be a dogmatic and stupid race that would be better off wiped from Rica entirely.

• No Name Given: Despite introducing herself as "Gweyna", it is very likely that this isn't even her real name at all. She visibly hesitates about using it during her first appearance in the story as if deciding on what name to use, and during her conversations with Azelas, it never refers to her by that—or any—name.

• Obviously Evil: Unlike the Inner Circle members who are uniformly Villains With Good Publicity, Gweyna is unquestionably a bad guy—which is one of the reasons she stays off to the side and coordinates things from the shadows.

• Plant Person: The elves are distinctly plant-like in physiology; they have a brownish green complexion, their blood is amber and thick like tree-sap and they photosynthesize sunlight in place of food, allowing them to go for days without physical nourishment. Gweyna, being an elf, has all of these traits. Her wrinkled state is at one point compared to a plant that has been dead for years.

• Psychotic Smirk: When she's not wearing a straight-up Slasher Smile that is.

• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: She gives one—albeit out of earshot—about the Inner Circle while her minions are fighting off the heroes and she muses to herself:
  • Gweyna: "All we asked was that they keep this country stable until the ritual could be prepared. Stability, not even peace but just keeping the amount of resistance to a minimum. And they couldn't even do that correctly. Oh well...that's what happens when your only source of help are the descendants of barbarian refugees. I suppose they were the only ones he had available at the time, but the whole breeding stock was tainted from the beginning."

edited 1st Nov '14 4:19:40 PM by Swordofknowledge

"Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake." —Edgar Wallace