Fairest of Them All

Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who is the fairest one of all?

Every villain does what they do for a reason. The Card-Carrying Villain wants to be evil and cool. The Diabolical Mastermind wants money... more money, most likely. The Stalker with a Crush "wants" The Hero. The Evil Overlord wants to Take Over the World (Of Course!).

The Vain Sorceress? She wants to be beautiful.

But she doesn't stop at wanting herself to be beautiful. She has to be more beautiful than any other woman in the kingdom, on the planet, or in the universe. How can she achieve this? By taking out the competition. There are two ways to do this:

1. Supernatural Means: Essentially suck the beauty or youth out of every woman and girl within your scope. The side effects for the victims can range from simply becoming unattractive to aging rapidly to inhuman mutation.
2. Traditional Means: Good old-fashioned murder. Recommended if you only consider one person as a threat to your beauty.

A Sub-Trope of Driven by Envy, this plot is Older Than Feudalism. Long before the days of The Brothers Grimm's jealous Wicked Stepmothers, Classical goddesses had a habit of getting very jealous if a mortal was considered more beautiful than them. Psyche, for one, became a target of Aphrodite, the Greek Goddess of Love and Beauty herself, but, as usual, was saved by The Power of Love.

There's also the Stage Mom variation, in which a woman wants her daughters to be more beautiful than some other girl, usually her stepdaughter.

Very rarely will you find this situation Gender Flipped, but the occasional Sissy Villain does have this motivation.

May actually entail So Beautiful, It's a Curse for the person who is deemed a threat. She seldom whines about it, though; perhaps because she is too busy trying to stay alive.

The Blood Bath is often a method a character may use to attain this.

A modern and mundane equivalent may involve cosmetic surgery. If Frozen Face ensues, the character will get no sympathy; then, since she has her looks, she doesn't want any.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• In Digimon Frontier, the villainess Ranamon is considered the Digital World's most beautiful inhabitant, but she gets murderously jealous of Izumi and Izumi's Spirit Evolutions, seeing them as threats to her title. In one scene, the villain Mercurymon deliberately says he thinks Izumi is more beautiful, knowing it would rile Ranamon up and make her fight harder.
• Theanime Adaptation of Snow White Shirayuki Hime no Densetsu (The Legend of Princess Snow White) has the wicked stepmother trying a Grand Theft Me instead. And it's not her first time.
• In Sailor Moon Queen Nehelenia became obsessed with staying young and beautiful forever, and when she saw in her mirror her old and ugly future self, she decided to steal dreams from people, turning them into living dead, and she intended to implement it everywhere.

Ballads

• In the Child Ballad Young Beichan, when the porter declares that the heroine is more beautiful than any woman he's seen, the bride's mother in some variants is in a snit because he didn't except her, not the bride.

Comics

• In Zenescope's Grimm Fairy Tales, one story focuses on a cheerleader's step-mother who is told a darker, more violent version of Snow White. It turns out that the step-mother has been poisoning her daughter because she's jealous of both her beauty and her fame on the school's cheerleading squad (back in her youth, the step-mother was the best cheerleader).
• Doctor Doom is a rare male example of this trope (Type 2), although it's only one aspect of the many-layered Green-Eyed Monster that drives his hatred for Reed Richards.
• In The Mighty Thor, Amora The Enchantress is considered the World's Most Beautiful Woman, but she often gets jealous of female superheroes and the girlfriends of male ones, seeing them as threats.
• In a Richie Rich comic book story, Reggie Van Dough asks his Magic Mirror who's the richest kid of all, and the mirror answers Richie Rich while trying to guess where to place Reggie in the ranking of rich kids. Reggie didn't like this, as this magic mirror was the creation of a Dr. Nimblebrain who was under his employ, and apparently the scientist found out that the mirror was programmed to be too honest with its reply.

Fairy Tales

• Snow White's Wicked Stepmother, of course. Modus operandi: Hitman; when that didn't work, strangulation; when that didn't work, poisoned comb; and last but not least, poisoned apple. In the Grimms' first edition, she was a wicked mother instead.
• In "The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh", the stepmother, out of jealousy at her beauty, turns her stepdaughter into a dragon; she is disenchanted by her brother.
• In “Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree", the mother, Silver Tree, feigns illness and pretends to need to eat her daughter's heart and liver to get well; then she tries, twice, to poison her.
• In "The Twelve Wild Ducks", the stepmother is jealous of her stepson's bride's beauty and tries to have her killed.
• In "Kate Crackernuts", the stepmother has her stepdaughter's head turned into a sheep's head, because she was more beautiful than her own daughter. Unique in that the titular character is said stepmother's daughter and she, in no way, agrees with her mother.
• Cinderella's Wicked Stepmother was determined to prove her daughters were the Fairest Of Them All.
• A Gender Flip occurs in the Armenian folktale "Ara the Handsome", which is about a king of Armenia who is the most handsome man in the land, and the Queen of Assyria goes to war with Armenia just to have him, after he declines to marry her because he was already married.

Films — Animated

• Shrek parodies this with Lord Faarquad asking a Magic Mirror, "Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, is this not the most perfect kingdom of them all?"

Films — Live-Action

• In the Beethoven Was an Alien Spy fantasy The Brothers Grimm, the Big Bad responsible for the disappearances of village girls by various means is a Vain Sorceress who cast a spell on herself hundreds of years ago to live forever when plague ravaged her kingdom — not realizing that the spell couldn't prevent her from aging and rotting. She needs the girls so she can enact a complex ritual involving an eclipse, a mixture of blood samples from each, etc. to steal their beauty and restore her own. Her first words once she's lovely again are "Who is the fairest of them all now?" The poor, "sleeping" beauties are saved first by her defeat and second by True Love's Kiss.
• Subverted in Snow White: A Tale of Terror. Claudia isn't so much wanting to be fairest in the land as to be more beautiful than Lilli for two reasons: first, because she can surpass the shadow of Frederich's first wife, second, because her beauty is all she has left as a wife after a stillbirth leaves her barren.

Legends & Mythology

• In the The Judgement of Paris, Eris (goddess of strife) throws a golden apple with 'For the Fairest' on it into a wedding party. After years of fighting (as in, the son of the bride and groom has grown up into the world's greatest fighter), Zeus finally picks a very handsome mortal to act as the judge between the three finalists - Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. Long story short, the Trojan War happened.
• Psyche was so beautiful that people started worshiping her instead of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty herself, who naturally became extremely jealous. She sent her son, the god of love, to make her fall in love with a horrible person or creature. Instead, her son fell in love with Psyche. Oops.
• Countess Elizabeth Báthory reputedly bathed in the blood of young women to regain her beauty.

Literature

• Dorian Gray wished he would remain young and beautiful forever while his new portrait aged instead. Be Careful What You Wish For...
• There's a short story by Matthew Hughes in which a man wishes to be the richest, most intelligent, and most attractive person around and the being granting the wish responds by making everyone else poorer, stupider, and uglier.
• An interesting variant in Gail Carson Levine's Fairest, with voice being the desirable quality.
• In C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, it's implied that some of the misfortune in the story is caused by the goddess Ungit being jealous of the princess Istra's beauty. It's a retelling of the story of Cupid And Psyche from Greek Mythology example.
• Famously parodied in The Princess Bride, where there is apparently a list of the world's most beautiful women, and it is revised every year. Much of the narration about Buttercup's adolescence is about her progress up the list's rankings.
• Played with in the "Snow White" adaptation White as Snow. Arpazia is more interested in her lost youth, which she believes her daughter Coira represents. But she does want to be beautiful, i.e. find the girlhood that was stolen from her.
• A Song of Ice and Fire. In "A Feast of Crows" the Queen Regent Cersei Lannister, up till that point famed for her beauty, is starting to show the signs of middle age and becomes obsessed with bringing down the future Queen Margaery, because of a prophecy Cersei heard as a youth that she would be overthrown by a younger and more beautiful queen.
• In Lucy Daniel Raby's Nickolai of the North, the Wicked Witch Magda is pretty obsessed with power too, but her chief priority is her matchless beauty which can be maintained only by sucking out childhood from children and turning them into obedient marionettes with no feelings.
• In The Twelve Kingdoms, the former Queen of Kei banished all the other women from her kingdom so that she would be the most beautiful and there would be no chance of Keiki paying more attention to them than to her. Those that would not or could not leave were executed.

Live-Action TV

• Done twice on Are You Afraid of the Dark?: First, by a witch who ran a beauty salon and had to kill 3 of her young female employees every so often in a ritual to keep herself young and beautiful. The second woman just stole girls' faces and enslaved them.
• Denshi Sentai Denziman: The Big Bad, Queen Hedrian, ruler of the Vader Clan, travels around space with her minions ruining planets because she wants to be the only beautiful thing in the universe. All the monsters she creates are ugly, asymmetrical beasts. She even has a servant with the ability to transform into a mirror for her to ask "Whose the fairest?" to. In one episode she sends out a tooth monster to ruin the teeth of children for having nicer teeth than her.
• Used by Friday the 13th: The Series, in which a cursed mirror could steal a person's beauty, killing them in an accident shortly thereafter.
• Kolchak: The Night Stalker: In "The Youth Killer", Helen of Troy's motivation is to remain forever young and beautiful. She achieves this by sacrificing beautiful young women to Hecate in in exchange for eternal youth and beauty.
• Averted in Once Upon a Time of all places. Despite the rivalry between Regina (the Evil Queen) and Snow White being one of the main plot points, this trope is never cited as a reason for it (aside from a mention by Snow in the first episode that's then ignored by the rest of the series). Regina actually wants Snow dead because she holds her responsible for the death of her true love, and subsequent loss of happiness. There's never even any indication that Snow is supposed to be more beautiful than Regina, personal preferences aside anyway.
• Power Rangers Lost Galaxy: Trakeena had a monster go around stealing girls' beauty and putting it in a jar in the form of gold dust, which left their skin covered in purple and yellow squares.
• Smallville: A girl who was ugly until she got plastic surgery, and then her mother — like Cinderella's WS — went around attacking girls at her high school who were naturally good-looking.
• Partly gender-flipped in an episode of Tales from the Crypt, in which a man stole women's beauty by taking molds of their faces, to transfer to his dead and decaying wife.

Music Videos

• The video for the Foster the People's "Best Friend" involves a model who steals the beauty of other models by literally devouring them.

Professional Wrestling

• "Exotic" Adrian Street would not tolerate the existence of any men in professional wrestling who were prettier than he was. Fortunately for most of his opponents, Street had an inflated belief in how pretty he really was.
• Texas based valet Venus decided she wanted to become a wrestler and set out on a journey to wrestle in every part of the country. Along the way Venus decided she should be the only pretty person in wrestling, teaming up with men to help her beat up other women and attacking the faces of her opponents, although she made an exception when she found Serena Deeb, who aided Venus as her R.A.T.S. Tag Team partner.

Tabletop Games

• GURPS 4th Edition Magic supplement has a spell called "Steal Beauty".
• The Fairest from Changeling: The Lost — come on, it's right there in the name — aren't all like this. However, the special attentions visited on them by the Gentry have left them more prone to losing touch with reality in the face of a crisis, and a sidebar in one book hints that some Fairest stoop to rather desperate measures once age starts to catch up with them...
• One villainess from an early Ravenloft module became one because she became insanely jealous of a fellow priestess who was slightly more beautiful (Cha 18) than she (Cha 17). Apparently being more beautiful than 98% of humanity just wasn't enough for her, so long as someone even better-looking existed.

Video Games

• Banjo-Kazooie: Gruntilda the witch sought to be the most beautiful person in the world, and created a "beauty extractor" to that end. She then set off to kidnap the fairest maiden in the land—who turned out to be the hero's little sister, Tooty: a cross between Goldilocks and a bear. And when you get a game over, she succeeds.
• One of the possible quests in Darkstone features Mika the witch, who placed a curse on a nearby village. If any of the women in the village ever became more beautiful than Mika, she would be turned to stone. Although Mika was very beautiful in her youth, by the time of the game she's about a million years old, so all of the women are stone. The player character must locate the Mirror of Lies, which will convince her that she's still beautiful; once she believes that, she'll undo the curse.
• Hidden City's Mistress of the Manor is a renown beauty with many suitors who dislikes having competitors, and repeatedly threatens to turn her maid Juliette into a frog likely out of jealousy of her beauty. In the Christmas Crime case, she volunteers to help the heroes defeat the Snow Queen not out of altruism, but because she doesn't want the gorgeous Snow Queen to rival her.
• Living Legends: Frozen Beauty: The evil Queen not only wants to become the fairest in the land, she also wants to become the fairest for all eternity.
• A male example is done in Mega Man (Classic), but with strength instead of beauty: Bass, Mega Man's rival, thinks he's stronger than everyone else, is completely stuck-up, and is jealous of Mega Man's strength and wants to eliminate him. Sooner or later, this will be done.
• One of the bosses in Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening is the Baroness, a noblewoman who was originally beloved by the peasants she ruled... until she began demanding they sacrifice their children in order for her to sustain a magic spell that would keep her eternally young and beautiful.
• Street Fighter has a male example in Vega, a Spanish ninja whose defining trait is narcissism and admiration of beauty, especially his own, to the point that he goes berserk if any damage is done to his face and tries to murder those he deems ugly. He retains these traits in the Street Fighter live-action movie, Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, and Street Fighter II V.
• In Castle of Illusion, the witch Mizrabel is envious of Minnie Mouse’s beauty and popularity. She kidnaps Minnie so that she can try and rob her of it, leaving her boyfriend Mickey Mouse to go rescue her.
• Super Gem Fighter has this as Dark Stalkers's Morrigan's motivation. Morrigan wants to be the fairest of them all and Chun Li is in her way. After taking out Chun Li, she's still unhappy as she finds her "little sister" Lilith to be constantly flocked by men.
• Twisted Wonderland: Vil Schoenheit is directly based on the Evil Queen from Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as such he works tirelessly to achieve worldwide popularity and is very bitter that he is often Always Second Best. This trope is also the name of his unique magic, which allows him to enchant any object to curse any person or thing touching it.

Web Comics

• Head Trip "explored" possible complications with such magic.

Western Animation

• Animaniacs: Snow White was no better than her Wicked Stepmother. She had the dwarves abduct Dot for being the cutest of the all. In the end, after Snow is defeated, Dot had the Magic Mirror covered so it'd be no longer able to have anyone Driven by Envy.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: "Did Ozai scar his son so he wouldn't be a threat to his good looks? No one can be sure what goes on in the twisted mind of the Firelord."
  • It didn't work.
• Spectra from Danny Phantom. In her first episode, she feeds off children's misery so that she'll remain looking youthful. Her second appearance is similar to the Totally Spies example below, except she used the parts for a body for herself.
• One of the most memorable of The Real Ghostbusters episodes "Janine, You've Changed" introduced a creature that feeds on vanity — she grants your wish to be more and more beautiful but slowly drains your humanity in the process until you become one of them. Janine accepted its deal to make her "perfect" and was almost fully transformed before Egon pulled her back with The Power of Love.
• In The Smurfs (1981) episode "Beauty Is Only Smurf Deep", Periwinkle the pixie is so vain and beautiful that when her magic mirror shows Vanity Smurf to be just as handsome, she gets so jealous that she goes as far as to give her competition a lethal mud bath... but fortunately for her, Vanity is such an understanding soul when it comes to the burdens that she bears (of being perfect in a world of imperfection) that she allows the Smurfs to save Vanity without putting up a fight.
• Sofia the First: When Sofia arrived at the castle, Prince James told Princess Amber she'd no longer be the fairest of them all.
• Totally Spies!: The girls uncover a modeling agency that steals the most beautiful parts of other girls to make their models perfect, including Clover's legs, Sam's teeth, and Alex's hair.
• In the ‘’Looney Tunes’’ short ‘Broom-Stick Bunny,’’ Witch Hazel inverts this: she fears becoming beautiful, and feels threatened when an uglier witch (actually Bugs in a mask) appears at her door one Halloween.

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