Eviler Than Thou / Literature

• In The Elric Saga, Stormbringer compares himself to Elric immediately after killing and devouring Elric's soul. "Farewell, friend. I was a thousand times more evil than thou!" Despite Elric being an anti-hero, having destroyed his homeland and most everyone in it, partnering with entities of chaos, conveniently falling "in love" with every major female character in The Multiverse and generally being an amoral prick should constitute him evil enough for comparison. Stormbringer is eviler than Elric though — Stormbringer is a demon forged into the shape of a sword, and has often been a corrupting influence on Elric. This line could also be read as something of a subversion. Taking responsibility for the actions throughout Elric's life that had left him racked with guilt, rather then claiming superiority.
• Makuta gives at least two of these in BIONICLE
  • The first came in Time Trap to the Shadowed One when the latter seals the former in protodermis, says he'll "deal with him later", and turns to leave.
    Makuta: Dark Hunter. If you believe that you can "deal with me", then you know nothing of Makuta! (shatters bonds, advances) You have challenged me. Wounded me. Imprisoned me. Dared to place your petty ambitions above my wishes. You sought to make time your ally, Shadowed One— now let it be your death! (hurls Shadowed One against time-creature Voporak, the former begins to rapidly age)
  • The second was given to Karzahni in story serial Dreams of Destruction after the ancient tyrant decided to Mind Rape him. Makuta responded by not just bouncing back, but mind-raping Karzahni so hard back he broke his mind.
    Makuta: You...made a...mistake, Karzahni. You see, I don’t get nightmares... (backhands Karzahni and sends him to the ground) I give them. Your shadow plays are impressive, tyrant – but never forget who is the true master of shadows. (proceeds with the Mind Rape)
• Harry Potter:
  • The early books contrast the all-consuming evil of Voldemort with the petty, selfish bullying of Draco Malfoy. In later books the misguided and corrupt Ministry of Magic, personified especially by Dolores Umbridge, takes over as secondary villain.
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows contrasts the 1940s-era Dark Wizard Gellert Grindelwald (a Knight Templar who believed Wizards should oppress Muggles for the Muggles' "own good") with the series's perennial antagonist Lord Voldemort (a deranged terrorist who thinks Muggles should just be killed). At the end, it's a guy who thought he was doing the right thing (who felt remorse later in life and spent his entire prison sentence wondering if he was right or not), versus someone who's just in it for power and the Evulz. Three guesses who wins.
  • However, when the two meet, Grindelwald is an old, powerless man who has been in prison for almost sixty years, pondering whether he was doing the right thing. Grindelwald in his prime could conceivably have been a match for Voldemort in terms of power and wickedness. And Grindelwald refuses to give Voldemort the information he wants, and laughs at him despite knowing that Voldemort would kill him. Given that he was entirely at Voldemort's non-existent mercy, that's pretty impressive.
• In Tigana, two wizards from different foreign lands have each conquered nearly half of the land where the story is set. One is simply a sadistic bully. The other has more redeeming qualities, but causes his subjects even more misery by crushing a province to avenge his son's death there. Not merely crushing; he seeks to obliterate all memory that it has ever existed, and renamed it after its most hated rival.
• Animorphs had Visser Three and Visser One. Visser One was in charge, but Visser Three did the micromanagement and was who the heroes dealt with most often. Nevertheless, on more than one occasion, they had to stop Visser Three from getting promoted, because his tactics would have been worse. And they were. In the arc leading up to Visser One's death and Visser Three's promotion, especially in Visser, Esplin (Visser Three) proves himself to be far and away eviler than Edriss (Visser One). Stupider, but definitely eviler.
• The protagonist of For Love of Evil twice has to battle other villains for the job of being Satan. Oddly enough, he wins, at least in part, because he isn't as evil as they are — he has friends who are willing to help him, while his rivals don't.
• Recurring theme in the Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher. In the first book, Kord is contrasted with Well-Intentioned Extremist Fidelias. It is even explicitly spelled out in one dialogue, where someone concludes that the latter is more dangerous than the former.
  • In later books, we see contrast between High Lord Aquitainus and High Lord Kalarus, and ultimately between all of the human(oid) villains and the Vord.
• Mordeth in The Wheel of Time series compared to the Dark One.
• In Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files, Harry has several possible Big Bads who want the pleasure of either killing him or having him join them: Cold blooded fallen angels, Well-Intentioned Extremist / Lawful Stupid other wizards, devious vampires, and secret societies. Thus far the fallen angels are probably in the lead, but given that the Black Council has barely acted overtly at this point it seems the likely favorite. Especially as it's been implied that there may be some Denarians in the Black Council.
  • In the backstory, there's Heinrich Kemmler, a necromancer from the time of the World Wars (and a serious appreciation for Putting on the Reich). While he is extremely super mega-dead in the present, basically everyone who knows about him thinks he's a real monster. Even beings who normally don't bother with morality like Bob the Skull and Queen Mab flatly call him a monster.
• While William Walker and Doctor Alice Hong from S. M. Stirling's Island in the Sea of Time trilogy are not exactly rivals they do have a conversation about this. Walker argues that while Hong tortures people in an extraordinarily sadistic fashion compared to the normal methods of killing he employs, he is far more evil than she is because of the sheer volume of people he kills. While Hong and her priestesses have tortured hundreds of people to death Walker's armies have slaughtered tens of thousands of people in his campaigns of conquest. Hong concedes that Walker is right. What's most amusing is that this instance of "Eviler than Thou" is actually Walker giving Hong a peptalk. She is feeling a little down what with being a horrible monster who castrates people without anesthetics and gets off on it. He gives her a speech about how he is ten thousand times worse than her and feels nothing because he is an Übermensch, and that she should be too. She feels a little better after this hilariously twisted exchange.
• Marching Through Georgia, the first installment of Stirling's Drakaverse series, has the sadistic, slaveholding Draka face off against Nazi Germany, whom the Draka see both as a strategic threat and as barbarians for murdering people in concentration camps rather than putting them to good use. The book gives many readers the uneasy feeling of wanting the Nazis to win once the Draka philosophy is outlined.
• Friday the 13th: Hell Lake contrasts two serial killers, one based on Richard Ramirez and the other based on Ted Bundy.
• In The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds, Panoply's only hope is to defeat an evil super intelligent AI is to enlist another super intelligent AI who is merely bad, insane and bent on vengeance ..maybe.
• In Peter F. Hamilton's The Reality Dysfunction, the souls of the dead are returning to possess the living, but they need permission to take control of a live person's body. No problem; they use their reality-warping powers to torture and terrorize the victim until the living soul goes catatonic and lets the dead soul in. Then one of them tries this with Quinn Dexter, who happens to be a Satanic cultist, a psychotic serial killer, and possibly the most evil person in the galaxy. Dexter has no trouble terrorizing his own possessor into submission, which leaves him in control of both his own body and his possessor's supernatural powers. The former possessor can only watch helplessly as Dexter becomes a malevolent demigod bent on enslaving humanity and turning the galaxy into a literal Hell.
• In Outlander Leander Signe and Lieran are rival villains. While Lieran is content to keep the counterfeiting ring as it is and staying under the radar of the law, Signe intends to expand her mother's crime ring and gain access to better weapons and vehicles.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, Littlefinger ultimately pulls this on House Lannister when he plots with House Tyrell to kill the Lannisters' Puppet King, Joffrey Baratheon. Stretching even further, they were one of his many Unwitting Pawns in starting the War of the Five Kings.
  • Theon Greyjoy, meet Ramsay Snow. Have fun.
  • None of the Greyjoys are good people by real world or most of Westerosi standards. Even Asha, the most moral of them, is at best an Anti-Hero. They all end up looking like pure angels when Euron Greyjoy makes his debut. Euron manages to be monsterously evil by real world, Westerosi and Ironborn standards, and is the only family member universally despised by all of the others.
• In Nineteen Eighty-Four, a character representing the Party disparages other dictatorships for not having realized the true For the Evulz logic of power and thus being hypocrites.
  We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
• In the Gods of Mars, Phaidor thinks that she and her fellow Holy Therns rule Barsoom, because their fake religion has tricked almost all of the Red and Green Martians into making a suicidal pilgrimage. She is disabused of this notion when the Firstborn show up; it turns out that the real objective of the Holy Therns' religion is to make them fat and complacent so that the Firstborn can carry them off to be enslaved and/or eaten.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Tales of the Bounty Hunters: The IG-88 that took the bounty on the Millennium Falcon follows Boba Fett to Cloud City, planning to snatch the bounty out from under him. Instead, Fett ambushes the droid and destroys it, hence why there's a dead IG-88 in the scene where Chewie and the Ugnaughts are fighting over C-3PO's limbs. Two of the other droids try to avenge their fallen brother between films, but Fett destroys those, too. The last tries to do this to Palpatine by copying itself over the Death Star computer with the intention of wiping out both sides in the battle of Endor; other than messing with elevator timing nobody ever even noticed.
  • The Yevetha from Black Fleet Crisis and the Yuuzhan Vong from New Jedi Order have a number of similarities, both being Scary Dogmatic Aliens with pain obsessions and a taste for genocide. About midway through the NJO series, a group of planets the Yevetha had previously targeted worry that they're preparing to try again (with good reason) and make a Deal with the Devil: they surrender to the Yuuzhan Vong without a fight, in exchange for the Vong glassing the Yevetha homeworld and wiping out the entire species. No great loss.
• Judge Holden in Blood Meridian confronts and eventually murders the kid, a multiple murderer who's at least complicit in the mass slaughter the gang takes part in, for holding some "clemency" in his heart.
• Bazil Broketail: The Masters of Padmasa are the main villains for most of the series, being in charge of an evil empire which constantly threatens the homeland of our main heroes. However, when Dominator takes the scene in book six, they are instantly eclipsed by him on threat level scale. In the final book, they are basically reduced to his Unwitting Pawns.
• Bruce Coville's Book of... Magic: Malefestra is a bigger threat than Dark Anne in Wizard's Boy, and he shows it by killing her pet the Grangli.
• The first "A" of Pretty Little Liars is Hanna's supposed best friend, Mona Vanderwaal, who wants revenge on the Liars for the Jenna Thing, which physically scarred her and blinded her then-friend Jenna. Mona's a blackmailer and attempts to kill Hanna and Spencer at different times, but doesn't try to kill or seriously hurt anybody else besides the Liars, and by the time she dies at the end of the fourth book, hasn't killed anyone at all. She's then replaced by the second A, the real Alison DiLaurentis, who is not only far more malicious and vindictive—wanting revenge on the girls for much more petty reasons and already having killed someone (her twin, Courtney, who was the "Ali" the Liars knew) by the time they took over the role of A—but also has no problem with killing anybody else whom they feel knows too much about them, and by the end of the series, has accumulated a body count of at least six other people, plus having attempted to kill two more (not counting the Liars).
• In PartnerShip, five Royal Brats fresh from graduation take a two-week trip to reach their inglorious new assignments. They spend much of them jockeying for status. Blaize is the Token Good Teammate but vulnerable to peer pressure. Fassa is an Anti-Villain who seduces and abandons older men for gain thanks to horrific childhood trauma. Darnell is already a sleazy, murderous Corrupt Corporate Executive. Alpha was denied her medical license for kidnapping people and exposing them to a horrifying form of acid called Ganglicide so she could study forms of treatment. Then there's Polyon, who soon becomes their leader as all of them learn to fear him and do as he says.

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