Card Carrying Villain / Literature

• O'Brien, the villain (of many) in 1984, gives a Breaking Lecture to Winston, where he extols the virtues of a world of fear, torment, and treachery. Big Brother and the Inner Party are all about Dystopia Justifies the Means.
• Alcatraz Series: Parodied with the Honorable Guild of Evil Warlords who rejected a name change that was suggested after numerous charitable events because they just purchased business cards with the organization’s name on them.
• Alien Hunters: Lord Skrum is a burly, red-skinned alien who wears all black and takes much delight in torturing and murdering innocent people and causing senseless carnage.
• Armageddon Force: Dr. Edgar Malbarn describes himself as "sick, deranged, sadistic, and insane", and loves every second of it. He also admits that he Loves the Sound of Screaming.
• Artemis of Artemis Fowl is a half-example. He freely admits he's a devious, manipulative kidnapper and plays to that expectation. However, it's implied that he's making himself out to be evil in order to bury his own guilt on the kidnapping scheme. It's one of the last money-making options available to him, his father's missing (presumed dead by everyone but him) in northern Russia, his mother's teetering on the edge of insanity, and he's only twelve, so he's gotta do what he's gotta do.
• Zig-zagged in the Babylon 5 Expanded Universe trilogy The Passing of the Techno-Mages with Galen, whose original high ideals for the Technomage order are shattered when he finds out that Technomages are products of Shadow technology. As such, he starts to believe himself to be inherently evil, incapable of good. Turning into a Person of Mass Destruction doesn't help. He later changes his mind.
  • On the other hand, several other Technomages definitely fit the trope. Razeel willingly chooses to serve the Shadows for an unknown reason. Circe's motivation for betrayal is pure desire for power.
• Bleach: Can't Fear Your Own World: Tokinada believes that, as the world of the Soul Society was built on a sin, he can be as evil as possible with no moral compromise. He literally says that he was tired of pretending to be anything but evil, and resolves from then on to behave in as evil a manner as possible.
• Various characters in Andrew Vachss' Burke books, including the Anti Villain Protagonist himself, identify themselves as "thieves". How evil these characters are actually varies from person to person.
• Lieutenant Colonel Korn from Catch-22 takes positive delight in describing how odious and reprehensible his plans are.
  Colonel Korn (to Yossarian): I really do admire you a bit. You're an intelligent person of great moral character who has taken a very courageous stand. I'm an intelligent person with no moral character at all, so I'm in an ideal position to appreciate it.
• When you're almost the Creator's Evil Twin and your most common name is Lord Foul the Despiser, it's pretty safe to assume that you aren't an Anti-Villain. Word of God elaborates further- Foul doesn't really see himself as evil, since he feels that he is so far above all other living things that their moral standards don't apply to him. However, he is deeply flattered when other people call him evil.
• Alex DeLarge of A Clockwork Orange happily rapes, murders, and beats as he pleases. Why? Because, as he freely admits, he just prefers to be evil.
• A rare case of this trope being played both seriously and non-Narmfully is the Hunter of C.S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy. Living in a world where the human mind can unconsciously shape reality, he has made an absolute monster of himself in a bid to deliberately invoke the trope of the invulnerable evil overlord.
  • Beyond that, he's getting his immortality through a pact with an entity that's the unholy lovechild of Satan and Cthulhu - if he ever stopped being knowingly and extremely evil, it would withdraw its end of the bargain, killing him.
• Author Drew Karpyshyn plays this painfully straight with his interpretation of the Sith in his Darth Bane series of Star Wars spinoffs. Every Sith always intends to stab every single one of the rest of them in the back, and knows it—and knows that the others know it, too, and that they know that they know. They don't just casually accept this, they consider it bad not to do this, since that would mean that the offender is not truly devoted to The Dark Side.
• Invoked by Sinistrad of The Death Gate Cycle as a form of Obfuscating Stupidity. He is legitimately evil and power hungry, but played up the "stereotypically evil villain" role (including the very act of changing his name to "Sinistrad" in the first place) so that his fellow wizards would dismiss him as a harmless eccentric (coupled with marrying an idealistic young wizardess who was infatuated with him in order to make it seem like he really wasn't so bad under his sinister exterior). This directly lead to the other wizards deciding he was no threat, allowing him to blackmail his way to their leader before the majority caught on to what was happening.
• Discworld:
  • Subverted with Lord Vetinari, who cheerfully classifies himself as one of "the bad people", but is actually a force for good, or at least stability. A sort of Card Carrying Anti-Villain.
    Greenyham: You can't do that!
    Vetinari: Can I not? I'm a tyrant. It's what we do.
  • Lady Felmet, in Wyrd Sisters. Granny Weatherwax tries to Mind Rape her by "showing her her True Self" - and it doesn't work, because she's already well aware she's a villain, and she's proud of it.
    Lady Felmet: Well, old woman, I've seen exactly what I am, do you understand, and I'm proud of it! I'd do it all again, only hotter and longer! I enjoyed it, and I did it because I wanted to!
  • Somewhat subverted with Dr. Hix (né Hicks), head of UU's Department of Post-Mortem Communication. Because necromancy is a so-called evil curriculum, he wears the skull ring and forces himself (if apologetically) to take an Evil stance on things, simply because it goes with his job description. Mostly this involves minor evil actions such as making tasteless comments or giving people tickets to his community theater group. However, it also involves a level of Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work by performing morally questionable yet necessary actions (like curing possession by smacking the victim quite hard in the head) and enforcing the University's monopoly on evil magic by tracking unofficial evil wizards into their caves and serving a cease and desist with fireballs.
  • Done something with by Abrim, The Grand Vizier in Sourcery. He points out that the evil things he does are expected of him. But he doesn't apologize for doing them, like Dr. Hix, or do them for the greater good, like Vetinari. Probably closest to lampshaded.
  • The Last Hero gives us Evil Harry Dread, a Dark Lord from Cohen the Barbarian's age, who, like Cohen, has become disgruntled with how the world's become. When he tips off the gods on Cohen's quest to deliver fire in the form of a high-explosive, he justifies it by saying, "Well, I AM Evil." He seems to treat being Evil like a career, doing things that are expected of villains, and at the same time purposely making the usual mistakes- stupid guards, easily escapable jails, uniforms that can be used to go undercover with- and feels deeply hurt when today's do-gooders BLOCK OFF his escape tunnel to subvert Exit Villain, Stage Left.
  • The Thieves Guild, who are required to carry cards. Vetinari gave the Guild a license to thieve provided that they keep track of unlicensed thieves and steal only the allowed amount. Nowadays it's not uncommon to find your missing property replaced with a receipt.
  • In the fourth Science of Discworld book, Vetinari gets strongarmed into pressing the Big Red Button to turn on the wizards' newest ill-advised invention, even though he suspects it's a very bad idea. But he reassures himself on the basis that, apparently, it would at least be a pretty evil thing to do:
    If indeed it's me who blows up the known world, then it might just be good for my image anyway.
  • The Old Count from Carpe Jugulum makes it very clear that he's a monster. However, unlike his descendants, he's a Fair-Play Villain who gladly grabs the Villain Ball and does Convenient Weakness Placement as a form of Pragmatic Villainy. As he puts it, if he can be dispatched by someone with a lot of guts and a little luck, no one will feel the need to render him Deader than Dead.
• The original Dragonlance villains dress in black armor with horns, practice slavery and human sacrifice, and are generally about as evil as they could be if they tried. However, the main point making them an example is that they knowingly and self-admittedly serve an evil god.
• The Elemental Trilogy: The Bane, if this brief exchange is any indication.
  Iolanthe: Your real name is Pyrrhos Plouton, you nasty old man.
  The Bane: About to be an even nastier, even older man, thanks to you.
• Emberverse: In Dies the Fire by S. M. Stirling. The Big Bad who's turned Portland into a feudal dictatorship uses the Eye of Sauron on his flag. One of the protagonists comments how stupid this is, as it would make more sense to use the Stars & Stripes to give himself legitimacy. When his colleague points out that "Hey, it's cool to be bad!", he responds "What's the point of letting people know you're evil enough to backstab them at the first suitable opportunity?"
• The Enormous Crocodile: The titular crocodile happily gloats about how he plans to gobble up human children for lunch, both internally and out loud for the other animals in the jungle to hear. Unsurprisingly, this backfires when the animals foil his plans by warning his potential victims, culminating in Trunky the elephant throwing him into the sun to his death.
• The Fountainhead: Ellsworth Toohey puts on a front of being a kind humanitarian, but is secretly one of these. He privately delivers a Motive Rant to Peter Keating in which he gloats about how he and those like him will create a world of slaves where true joy will be unknown and great achievements will be impossible.
• Frankenstein: While most later versions of Frankenstein's Monster would tend to be portrayed as Non Malicious Monsters, the original is closer to this trope. He repeatedly compares himself to Satan, and at one point quotes the "evil, be thou my good" speech from Paradise Lost almost verbatim. And due to his unique predicament, he is actually a much more sympathetic example than usually for this kind of mindset, since he originally wanted to be good to people and make friends with them, but the repeated rejection and hostility that he faces from nearly every single person that he encounters including his Father leads him to conclude that all people are evil and thus he shall be evil to them in turn and be more like them.
• The poster-boy for Yellow Peril, Fu Manchu, started out as one of these ("They die like flies! And I am the God of Destruction!"), before turning into something closer to a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
• Goblins in the Castle: Subverted; Herky would like people to believe he's one, since he keeps insisting that "Herky bad!", but his actions prove that he's really a nice guy at heart.
• According to The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, someone aware of their own evil is easier to save from damnation than a Knight Templar or Well-Intentioned Extremist. If you know you're evil, you can be converted to good. If you think you're good, it's harder.
• Harry Potter:
  • The main antagonists call themselves "Death Eaters" with Voldemort proclaiming himself to be the "Dark Lord". While they believe they are doing the right thing, some of them also openly and proudly gloat about all the morally reprehensible things they have done throughout their lives and while the Dark Lord downplays it by rejecting morality, and the concepts of good and evil he still chooses to be feared by everyone and treated as a boogeyman, in essence embracing the negative feelings that he inspires in all who know him.
  • Godelot, a historical personage and author of Magick Most Evile, reveled in his villainy (although a passage quoted in Half-Blood Prince indicates that even he would not dare go into the field of Horcruxes).
• In A Harvest of War we have the Thyll cousins:
  • Rhona Thyll is a self-described terrorist, though in more words than that.
  • Guinevere Thyll, after raging when she's called a criminal, acquiesces without a second thought when that is ammended to "evil".
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz is well aware of his species' reputation for unpleasantness, and wants people to know that it's well-deserved.
  Jeltz: No, well you're completely wrong. I just write poetry to throw my mean callous heartless exterior into sharp relief. I'm going to throw you off the ship anyway.
• In Immortals After Dark, this is frequently seen. There's even a Queen of Evil whose primary power is to control anybody or anything evil. Two major characters are concerned by this because they are perfectly aware that they're evil.
• In the Incarnations of Immortality series, Satan seems to be the Corrupter. And, he is very good at his job — to evoke the latent evil in souls. Interestingly, in For Love of Evil, we find he is a good man and according to Archangel Gabriel he is one of the most effective Incarnations because he has not become Drunk with Power.
  • In the same book, Satan himself says he was impressed with Zane, but protocol required him to depart in an angry huff.
• In the Year 2050: America's Religious Civil War: President Osama bin Muhammad is very much this. In the very first chapter, when meeting departing President Jackson two hours before his inauguration, he feels the need to gloat about all the ways he's going to destroy America and all the infidels he will kill.
• In Death: some of the bad guys reach this level in the series. Casto from Immortal In Death admits that he is a selfish man. Reanna Otts in Rapture In Death cheerfully describes herself as a sociopath and completely agrees with that diagnosis!
• Set in The Kane Chronicles is officially known as a God of Evil, so he has no qualms about being a villain.
  Set: You figure that out all by yourself? The god of evil is evil?
• The Nome King from L. Frank Baum's Land of Oz stories is a sadistic old bastich who enjoys being angry because it makes everyone around him miserable.
• Marquis de Sade's characters are usually libertines who openly extol cruelty, destruction and despotism for achieving the former two, although they don't think it's evil, but good (or that both of them are illusions).
• One gets the impression that Pryrates, Evil Sorcerer and The Dragon to the Big Bad of Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, has a list of villain tropes in his pocket and is working his way through it as the story goes on. Kick the Dog, check. Torture Cellar, check. Sell your king's soul for power, check. All we need is the Evil Gloating...oh, there he goes.
• Don John in William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing comes right out and says it. He's pissed that he can't rule because he's a bastard son, and will therefore do anything so long as it causes his brother grief: "I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in / his grace, and it better fits my blood to be / disdained of all than to fashion a carriage to rob / love from any: in this, though I cannot be said to / be a flattering honest man, it must not be denied / but I am a plain-dealing villain." Played quite straight by Keanu Reeves in the 1993 film, the character has no purpose but to foil the good guys.
• Satan in Paradise Lost revels in his own villainy, making no attempt to hide his contempt for God and his creations.
  Satan: Evil, be thou my good.
• A Practical Guide to Evil is set in a world where many Heroic Fantasy tropes are enforced by the universe's laws, including Black-and-White Morality—virtually everyone on the side of Evil technically counts. Subverted, however, in that it's more of a job description; many villains (including the protagonists) simply have more relevant goals than just paying dues to Below. It's justified in that leaning into this trope can significantly affect the power a villain can command (and the dues Below is willing to pay back when you die), though leaning in too hard tends to result in the story offing you.
  • The Dread Empire of Praes is an entire empire whose story is being ruled from the Tower by a Dread Emperor/Empress that tries to conquer the neighboring Kingdom of Callow through various harebrained Evil Plans that often involve flying fortresses. They occasionally occupy Callow successfully, but always get chased out. It is noted by one character that the Praesi Highborn treat betrayal as sacred. Many Dread Emperors, as demonstrated from the start-of-chapter Epigraphs, were particularly notable versions of the trope:
    • Dread Emperor Traitorous, the undisputed master of Double Reverse Quadruple Agent shenanigans for their own sake.
    • Dread Empress Triumphant ^note (may she never return), who is notable for having been the only one to actually conquer all of Calernia successfully. Her gains lasted at most a decade, however—and she pulled down the Tower on herself rather than see her final comeuppance at the hands of the First Crusade.
    • Dread Emperor Tenebrous, who went insane and turned himself into a Giant Spider lurking deep beneath the sewers of Ater.
    • The current Dread Empress Malicia downplays the trope, being a savvy master of Realpolitik who has spent her incredibly long rule consolidating power and trusting her Black Knight to handle the conquest and occupation of Callow. She's still absolutely aware of what she is, however.
  • Akua Sahelian is a Praesi Highborn who starts the story as The Heiress, who sees Black and Malicia as trying to smother the story of Praes and wants to restore it to a story of one villain ruling everything. Her means to get that are to become the most magnificent villainess since Triumphant by turning an entire city into a flying fortress with a Superweapon, rising for one moment above all Creation in glory even if she does fail in the end. After her post-demise character development sees her temporarily reject the trope, she ultimately becomes this once more as the Calamity to check the Intercessor's Providence.
  • Kairos Theodosian, Tyrant of Helike, is the present story's straightest and most genre-savvy example. Kairos is a consummate villain and backstabber with a habit of starting plans half on a whim and half to exploit the first step of the plan always working, complete with an army of gargoyle Mooks he uses in various petty ways. He revels in tricks and obvious bad faith and loves when they're reciprocated by his opponents. Justified: he knows by prophecy that his days are numbered, and his Wish aspect lets him burn that short lifespan further to get what he or others want. Leaning into villainy and embracing that his time in the story is limited lets him enjoy every moment of it, then matter enough to slay the Age of Wonders.
• In the Rainbow Magic series, Jack Frost is this. He causes trouble just because he can, and loves seeing bad things happen to others.
• Some of Redwall's villains clearly revel in this trope. Vilu Daskar, upon being praised by his crew for inventive sadism, modestly says "Oh, I do my best to be the worst." The trope gets even more obvious in Triss, when the villainous pirate crew does three song and dance numbers dedicated to their own gruesome behaviour. The irony here being that Grubbage, one of the singers of the second song ("'Tis nice to be a villain/wot all honest creatures fears/and terrorise the beasts for miles around"), does a Heel–Face Turn in a sadly very brief skimmed-over epilogue.
  • Before the siege of Redwall Cluny the Scourge spent his early life more than earning his nickname by spreading terror and death in all of the lands that he travelled. Not one who likes empty words he does plenty of things that justify this reputation such as sending a minion of his to his death and treating him as a personal messenger between himself and the devil.
• Gary Karkofsky is an odd example in The Supervillainy Saga since most supervillains are rich glamorous criminals. What makes him odd is that other supervillains resent being called such and consider their labeling as such childish. Gary, by contrast, thinks its awesome.
• Kurt Barlow from 'Salem's Lot. He moves deliberately into a house with an evil reputation and proceeds to turn the town into vampires because he wishes to spread the curse of undeath as well as destroy as many lives as possible.
• Count Olaf from A Series of Unfortunate Events. Is pretty proud of the fact that he sets fires and kidnaps children for their fortune.
• The Screwtape Letters: Screwtape and Wormwood know full well that they're evil and are unashamed of it. This seems to be the norm for demons.
• Most of the vampires of the Dread Empire of Shadow in The Shadowspawn are not merely Always Chaotic Evil, but self-aware about it. Adrienne and Michiko set the tune in their first scene together, casually discussing torture, murder and genocide over lunch in among the other girl-talk. All with a playful wink.
  "Aren't we awful?"
• In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter comes close to describing himself as evil:
  "You can't reduce me to a set of influences. You've given up good and evil for behaviorism...nothing is ever anybody's fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I'm evil? Am I evil, Officer Starling?"
  "I think you've been destructive. For me it's the same thing."
  "Evil's just destructive? Then storms are evil, if it's that simple."
• House Bolton in A Song of Ice and Fire. Their house arms features a flayed man due to their history of flaying their prisoners alive. They wear pink and red capes because ages ago they used to wear the skins before submitting to House Stark. Their castle is called the Dreadfort. Lord Roose Bolton and his heir Ramsay commit numerous atrocities and eventually betray their liege lords in a massacre that shocks the continent.
  • Interestingly, Ramsay and Roose are Deconstructions of this. Ramsay is so savage and brutal that everyone else in the North is wary of him, and is waiting for an opportunity to kill him as soon as possible. Roose, meanwhile, tries avoiding this status because he knows that gaining this reputation is an excellent way to end up dead. The backlash from the Red Wedding and Ramsay's various atrocities will probably do just that.
• Dr. Impossible in Soon I Will Be Invincible is a Mad Scientist and he absolutely loves being the villain. Sure, he admits that it's a lonely life with no opportunity for a secret identity, but by God he's going to keep trying to take over the world and kill his arch-nemesis CoreFire. His plans often include deaths of millions or even billions, even though he personally doesn't actually kill anyone.
• In Stage-Land, for the Villain, doing evil is a reward in itself (since he gets no other profits from his villainy, really), and he proudly admits it.
• Khan is more than willing to, as he puts it, slit the worlds throat in Star Trek: The Eugenics Wars by destroying the ozone layer above whatever nation defies him. His only regret is that he has to be secretive about it.
• Acheron Hades of the Thursday Next series wrote the book Degeneracy for pleasure and profit and extols the wonder of doing evil for its own sake. He also complains that profit "dilutes the taste of wickedness".
• Unsong:
  • Thamiel and his demon servants.
  You should know that if one were to compare a single water droplet of this cloud to all the oceans of the world, the oceans above that are seen by Man and the greater oceans below in the wellsprings of the earth – that as miniscule are the torments you suffer now to the torments of Hell that are prepared for you and everyone you love. And that even if you escape those torments, as some do, you have friends, and you have a family, and even those who seem most virtuous have secret sins, and so the probability that neither you nor any of those you care about end up in my dominions is impossibly fleeting, a ghost of a ghost of a chance. And that I will be given dominion over the Earth, and that it will be no different, and everything beautiful and lovely and innocent will become no different from what you feel now, only it will last forever.
  • Zig-zagged with The Other King. He's made a point of living his life as sinfully as possible and takes pride in making his kingdom a horrible place to live, but it turns out he's also a Knight Templar. The reason he causes so much suffering to people on Earth is that once he dies, he plans to remake Hell and save all the people there from infinitely worse suffering.
  • Also, Dick Cheney, apparently. One day when he sat for Sunday services at St. John’s Church, the pastor read from the Gospel of Matthew -“Who among you, if a child asks for bread, would give him a stone?”. Cheney stood up immediately and raised his hand.
  Americans were sick of all the virtues and ready for a straightforward, no-nonsense villain. Cheney and all the other servants of the Shrouded Constitution were only too happy to provide.
• Every villain of a Wilbur Smith novel. They're so obviously evil that it's as if they all came from the same dog-kicking litter.
• The Astronomer from the Wild Cards universe could have been created as an exercise to write a character as utterly evil as possible. He seeks to rule the world. He revels in murder, rape, corruption and both psychological and physical torture. He has no value system, no passions, no vision, no motivation other than his personal power and pleasure, and he never tries to explain or justify his acts in any way. His previous life is a blank book, and the reader never has any occasion to understand what made him what he is. He is so cold, ruthless, calculating and devoid of any sense of humour that we can't even merely categorize him as "crazy". He has no respect for neither his allies not his enemies, and will readily use, abuse and kill even his own allies. And to people he knows, he will casually admit all of the above, including sacrificing his own allies, while both scaring and manipulating them in such a way that they go on serving him while knowing they have every chance of being betrayed.

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