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Dwarfs: The Queen?!
Bashful: She's wicked!
Happy: She's bad!
Sneezy: She's mighty mean!
Grumpy: She's an old witch! And I'm warnin' ya, if that queen finds [Snow White] here, she'll swoop down and wreak her vengeance on us!

The Good Kingdom: A lovely, wealthy country ruled by a benevolent king, a wise prince, and a fair princess, all loved by the populace. But what's that? There's a queen? Oh, brother, we're in trouble.

While kings and princes can be good or evil, and nice or mean, and princesses are (almost) always good, queens tend to be the royalty version of Always Chaotic Evil. Restrained by a competent king (or in a setting where the queen's only role is to produce an heir to the throne), this usually doesn't show, but once a queen is in charge, things get nasty. Either the king is missing or has died in an accident — the queen might have helped things along herself — or he's easily manipulated for some reason. Note that there are good queens in fiction, but they normally don't stay around for very long, or at all. And this trope comes into play whether they are ruling in their own right or as regents for the under-age king. (The latter group tends to fall under My Beloved Smother, as well.)

Averted pretty much every time the lovely princess becomes queen mid or end-story, or when the queen was a princess in a prequel to the story, and when the princess rules the kingdom much like a queen would, and is only princess in title. Good queens don't need to be listed: they are simply The High Queen. However, it is not uncommon for a work to contrast a lovely heroic princess with one of these — see Good Princess, Evil Queen.

There is a notable difference in how queens are portrayed depending on how they came to be queen. Queens who became queen because their late father the king had no sons (or had evil, ambitious sons) are usually exempt from this trope, by virtue of being the "rightful heir". Her sexist adversaries may view her like this, but the narration will usually be on her side, in the style of You Go, Girl!. Meanwhile, queens who become queens by marrying kings and/or getting their sons on the throne are very likely to fall under this trope. Why? Because Ambition Is Evil. Also, she likely became queen by marrying a king as a Hot Consort, and seductresses are evil — and she is probably suspected of being a Lady Macbeth.

In all of their incarnations, the evil queens' motivation for coveting power is almost always the same: they want to relish power for its own sake. Such characters usually don't have any actual political/economic projects for their people, nor do they wish to bring order or try out a policy on a large scale. In the most Anvilicious cases, their ultimate goal is to ruthlessly tyrannize men and to subjugate other women, being often especially malevolent towards women who are prettier than themselves. The odd female Villain Sue often turns out this way.

If the evil queen is in charge of a Hive Mind, she is by definition a Hive Queen. Also overlaps with Matriarchy (particularly the Straw Matriarchy) and sometimes Evil Matriarch. In terms of the ranks of Authority Tropes, the tropes that are equal are The High Queen (her Sister Trope and Good Counterpart), She Is the King, The Good King, and President Evil. The next step up is The Emperor. Also compare The Caligula, Unstable Powered Woman.

In fantasy, an evil queen may also be an evil sorceress or a Wicked Witch. The ability to do magic would easily explain why she was able to take power (and, more importantly, keep it) in the type of male-dominated society that most classical settings ruled by monarchs tend to be.

This can happen with kings, but evil queens are more common.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Berserk:
    • The Queen Consort joins a plot to assassinate rising star Griffith after Griffith had Guts assassinate her lover which probably qualifies as her sole redeeming trait, in retrospect. Unfortunately, she failed.
    • Her stepdaughter Charlotte is not a bad person and would have been The High Queen if the nation didn't get invaded by Kushan on her first day and then things went downhill. Charlotte recently married the love of her life, Griffith. Looks like he finally got his kingdom. And that surely counts as things going even further downhill. For her and her kingdom both.
  • Crown: The heroine may be the rightful heir to the country of Regalia. Unfortunately, the current incumbent is one of these and she's proactive about eliminating the competition.
  • Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School: It's shown that as a Remnant of Despair, Sonia murdered her parents for the throne of her home country before brainwashing the entire populace into being footsoldiers for Ultimate Despair like her.
  • Iono the Fanatics: Queen Iono a nice enough person, but she's really bad for the country.
  • Done full-on with the Queen of Shaluda in Knight Princess (not the same manga as Princess Knight). She ordered the first prince to be tried for treason on trumped-up charges and killed an entire tribe of secret guards for fear they would harm her son, the second prince.
  • Maestro Delphine of Last Exile in all but name. Sadistic, Finger-Lickin' Evil, and then some. On the other hand, when Sophia, who was First Officer on the Sylvana becomes empress, she's got the hallmarks of a good ruler, though she had the princess thing going for her.
  • In Magical Witch Punie-chan, the queen of Magical Land is ruthless, domineering, and just plain evil. Her daughter Punie, the "heroine" of the series, is following in her tracks.
  • Queen of MÄR is this, as well as Snow's Wicked Stepmother and Dorothy's sister. King is there as well, but he's evil also and didn't participate in the first war. Snow's father is supposedly trapped or something.
  • Miyuki-chan in Wonderland: The Queen of Hearts is a crazy Dominatrix with an iron Whip of Dominance and a fearsome reputation. The Card Girls and Rose Girls all wish to be "punished" by her whip and she tries to make Naïve Everygirl Miyuki "submit" to her.
  • Interestingly played with in the My-HiME manga, where the Big Bad summons three girls called QUEENs. One of whom is his sister Mai, one of the main protagonists, who are evil and more powerful HiMEs. Note that "hime" is Japanese for "princess".
  • Kaguya Otsutsuki of Naruto. Originally a noble ruler who ended all wars by being the first person in the Ninja World to utilize chakra and being revered to the point of being worshiped as "The Rabbit Goddess", she eventually devolved into a tyrant who used her powers to rule by fear and cruelty and as soon seen as a demon. At one point, she even trapped a portion of humanity in the Infinite Tsukiyomi so she could transform them into the White Zetsu and use them as her army. Her reign came to an end when she attempted to drain her two sons' powers after realizing they'd inherited chakra from her, and they were forced to seal her away to save themselves.
  • Ōoku: The Inner Chambers has two main examples of this so far:
    • Shogun Tsunayoshi is seen as this is due to the economy tanking, her very unpopular Edicts for Compassion for Living Beings (which made it a crime to harm dogs, who ran wild and brought disease), her equally unpopular ruling on The 47 Ronin's actions (compounded by the fact that they were mostly men in a Japan where the male population was only a quarter of the female population), being surrounded by ineffective councilors, hoarding men to serve as her concubines even after she was past the age to conceive, and finally delaying her decision on who to name her heir because her father disagreed with the popular choice on the grounds that she was the granddaughter of his hated rival. The sad thing is as a person she's not really that bad: selfish, certainly, but well-meaning, but the death of her only child really unhinged her and led to her getting pushed out of politics by her ineffective councilors to concentrate on baby-making. Her greatest fault is an eagerness to please her father, which is what led to the Edicts and the delay in naming her heir. Not to mention it wasn't her fault a famine occurred during her reign either. The really sad thing is Tsunayoshi knows she's hated and would have welcomed The Kingslayer to kill her. It's unclear if she got her Mercy Kill or if the Woman Scorned trope motivated her murder at Yoshiyasu's hands.
    • Tokugawa Harusada. While several shoguns of the series have been cruel, self-centered, short-sighted, too prideful to admit mistakes, or simply not very good rulers, Harusada is basically a textbook sociopath and treats the court as her own little playground. Amongst her sins are murdering her own sister and mother, discrediting, poisoning or assassinating anyone between her and the throne, dismissing courtiers and ministers on silly whims, and murdering her own grandchildren for fun. It should be noted she's not technically shogun, her son is, but she is ruler in all but name and in fact cited that as the reason she relinquished her claim to the shogunate: as shogun she'd be stuck making babies and as mother of the shogun, she can have all the fun she wants.
  • In Ouran High School Host Club, there is a filler chapter wherein the host club acts out Alice in Wonderland. Kyouya (in the manga)/ Haruhi's Missing Mom Kotoko (in the anime) is the queen.
  • Queen Himiko in the Dawn arc of Phoenix is portrayed as an insane tyrant whose only goal in life is to find the Phoenix and gain immortality.
  • In Rakuin No Monshou, Marilène married the King of Helio but never bore him an heir. When the king died and his throne was stolen, Marilène became the consort of the usurper. The populace reviled the queen as a heartless wretch who never loved her husband, only the power of being queen. In truth, Marilène loved both her husband and Helio with all her heart. She chose to bed the usurper so she could protect the people by tempering his more violent tendencies until the true heir could claim the throne. The hatred of the people and her eventual execution were prices she was willing to pay for Helio.
  • Sailor Moon loves this trope, but then again it's very obsessed with royalty in general so it's unsurprising some evil queens pop up as villains, especially considering its heroines are reincarnated princesses and the manga takes a lot of inspiration from fairy tales.
    • The first Big Bad Queen Beryl and her boss Queen Metalia of the Dark Kingdom, though probably just called that to reflect being in charge since Beryl's only subordinates are the Shitennou. Metalia's outright planning on destroying Earth, so it doesn't make much difference in her case what she's called. Beryl, however, has very different plans. She wants to rule Earth, possibly with its prince Endymion as her consort, so calling herself queen makes sense. Note that the above only applies to the manga and Crystal; Beryl was a Generic Doomsday Villain with an army of monsters of the week at her command in addition to the Shitennou, and Metalia a Diabolus ex Nihilo.
    • Black Lady is made the queen of Nemesis in the manga and Sailor Moon Crystal. She also calls herself the "queen of darkness" which makes sense considering Nemesis is described as a planet of darkness. She plants another Malefic Black Crystal into Earth just to speed up its death and isn't above turning her own father into a mindless slave. This becomes Fridge Horror later on because her dad is Sailor Earth, meaning she's unintentionally killing him. Black Lady also doubles as a rare example of an evil princess since she's the daughter of Neo Queen Serenity and King Endymion and definitely has no authority in their eyes when she confronts them.
    • Esmeraude was a wannabe evil queen in the '90s anime who was also Too Dumb to Live. Being "crowned" directly led to her death.
    • Mistress 9 is an unusual example. In the manga and Crystal, she's implied to be Pharaoh 90's mate, though this makes her no less evil nor in charge than he is. Her status as a surprise villain who doesn't awaken until near the end also doesn't change anything. In fact, lots of fans find these versions of her to be far scarier than her anime version, who was always more prominent than Pharaoh 90 and neither seems to be his mate nor a queen in her own right.
    • In the manga and Crystal, Kaolinite and, to a lesser extent, the Witches 5 strive to be this trope as Pharaoh 90's partner, though he seems pretty attached to the one he already has.
    • Queen Nehelenia of the Dead Moon, the Big Bad of the fourth season, is Queen Serenity's Evil Counterpart and also a clear homage to the wicked fairy who curses the princess in Sleeping Beauty. She's implied to be jealous of Princess Serenity and in the present kidnaps, curses, and imprisons Elysium's guardian priest Helios, curses Earth (thus making Mamoru aka Sailor Earth sick as well, and generally tries to take over/destroy the planet. She's also incredibly vain, reminiscent of another evil fairy tale queen. Towards the end, it's revealed she also kidnapped and brainwashed Chibiusa's bodyguards and is implied to feel entitled to have Mamoru as Endymion's reincarnation, explaining one element of her jealousy towards Serenity. She feels she's the proper ruler of both the Moon and Earth and basically what you'd get if you combined Beryl and Metalia into one character.
    • Sailor Galaxia, the fifth and final Big Bad, is an evil queen in all but name. Queen of the galaxy to be exact; she's been conquering or destroying planets off-screen for quite a while and when Stars starts, Earth's the only place she hasn't visited yet. She not only kills heroes but also her own subordinates (this was highly unusual in the manga). Her ultimate goal is to use the Silver Crystal to destroy Chaos and remake the galaxy with her as its ruler.
  • Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro: One of the short stories in the second volume features an incredibly spoiled princess who orders travelers to expand upon her favorite storyteller's fairy tale featuring her. If she doesn't like where the story goes, she orders the traveler's beheading. However, this is eventually subverted when Kuro and the twins' story brings her to her senses and her courtiers reveal that they've been using the guillotine to chop up pumpkins to fool her and let the travelers escape.
  • In Space Pirate Mito, the First Queen Hikari, who founded a galaxy-ruling dynasty that wore Powered Armor built in her image as part of their mystique, was a Physical God who was capricious and self-centered to the point of destroying entire planets if something about them irritated or bored her. Her reign is described as an age of terror and she is brought back to life in the second series to serve as the Big Bad.
  • In The Twelve Kingdoms:
    • Yoko's predecessor Queen Joukaku. Even though her reign only lasted six years, not only did she not want to be queen in the first place due to crippling insecurity, but she fell in love with her kirin Keiki, killing every other woman that crossed their path out of jealousy. But she redeemed herself by sacrificing herself to not let Keiki die when her bad ruler-ship literally caused him to get sick.
    • Later on in the series, it's mentioned that Kei has had three of these in a row—four if one counts a female pretender to the throne (Joukaku's evil sister Joei). There are some people in Kei who are so used to this trope that they distrust Yoko as "just another lady-king". However, Yoko herself is an inversion.
    • In the backstory, there's also the former queen of Hou, Kaka (yes...). While King Chuutatsu was bad enough, believing that execution was a fitting punishment for any crime, Queen Kaka was a Smug Snake who used this to her advantage, accusing maids and courtiers of whom she was jealous of petty crimes so that they would be killed. For this, she and her husband were both beheaded in a citizen revolt.

    Comic Books 
  • Alpha Flight: The Dream Queen is a combination of The Joker and Freddy Krueger; her father was Nightmare.
  • Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld: Once Princess Topaz declares herself "Lady", her kingdom doesn't do so well from then on.
  • Hound: Queen Maeve of Connact despises King Connor for preferring sports and parties over battles. Halfway through the story, she wages war against his kingdom of Ulla out of pride and greed, unaware of her advisor's manipulation. She eventually decides to "take more than King Connor's bloody bull" and encourages her allies to "reap all [they] want" as well.
  • Justice League of America has the Queen of Fables. In her days as Queen, she butchered thousands and spent her days torturing people for fun. Then she was trapped in a mystical fairy tale book for centuries, where she basically became every fairy tale example of this trope; she isn't any less evil once she escapes in modern times, turning a young boy into gingerbread and feeding him and his mother to her minions in her first appearance.
  • Lady Death: Death Queen is an absolutely insane ruler who dethrones the titular character and rules the Hell with an iron fist, and turns into an Omnicidal Maniac as her madness progresses. To make matters worse, she is also revealed to be the heroine's mother.
  • Queen Marea from Megalex is an evil tyrant like her husband and daughter, and an ancient, withered harridan to boot.
  • Wonder Woman:
    • Wonder Woman (1942): Queen Atomia is of the horrifically evil variety rather than incompetent as it's implied she created her own country and she rules over it with an iron fist, forcing all of her unwilling subjects through horrific experiments.
    • The outpost city of Venturia essentially fell apart during Queen Clea's reign, prompting her attack on nearby Aurania. Later exiled from Venturia, she tried to become Queen of Skartaris, nearly destroying that country in the process.
  • From the X-Men the Brood, aliens much like xenomorphs who breed and destroy everything in their path, usually have a Queen leading them.

    Comic Strips 
  • Modesty Blaise: Ranavalona I, a ruler of Madagascar, appears (in flashback) in the "Black Queen's Pawn" arc. One of the modern characters describes her as "making Hitler look like Mary Poppins".

    Fairy Tales 
  • The unnamed queen in "Pintosmalto" abducts a man she wants for herself on the day of his wedding. She also brainwashes and drugs him. She is contrasted by the non-royal but well-to-do Betta, whom she also tries to trick out of various valuables.

    Fan Works 
  • It's fairly common in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan works to portray Princess Celestia as an evil queen with varying degrees of subtlety, as opposed to canon, where she's presented as a genuinely good-natured and wise, if not perfect ruler, that admittedly had a mischievous side to her:
    • TCB!Celestia from The Conversion Bureau: The Other Side of the Spectrum promoted herself to a queen before the story began. Her plan is to convert all of humanity into her newfoal slaves, and then move on to the next world to conquer. Worse is that turning a human into a pony is Mind Rape of the highest order, reducing them to a near-zombified Extreme Doormat with little (if any) brain function or free will and even if someone isn't turned, the Barrier will just destroy everything made by humans and melting everyone in its path, utterly obliterating human culture. Thanks to said Barrier, Celestia's conquered roughly half the world, with over two billion humans dead or ponified. It's also implied that she's turned Equestria into an Orwellian state with re-education camps for anyone that doesn't agree with her, placed a mind-control spell on her guards so they will be loyal unto death and even praise Celestia more than their own families, magically Mind Raped most of her country into xenocidal monsters that believe humanity should be ponified. On top of that, she [[spoiler: petrified her sister, and Mind Raped the Mane Six by placing magical homunculi into their bodies, which [[And I Must Scream control their every move and leave the actual girls.
    • This is to be expected in any Conversion Bureau fics that side against the titular organization. Though some, like The Conversion Bureau: Worlds Where It Wouldn't Work whose incarnation of her is named Xlestia, try to present her as a genuine Well-Intentioned Extremist.
    • In RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse, Celestia's self-bestowed promotion to Queen was one of the final steps in her transformation into Corona, The Tyrant Sun, the legendary "mare of fire and hate" who all Equestria still lives in fear of a thousand years later.
    • In Ultra Fast Pony, Celestia has the title of Princess, but she's this trope in all but name. She's the unchallenged dictator of Equestria, and she doesn't give a buck about the lives of her subjects. Or anything besides tea, really.
      Celestia: I need you to kill my pet bird, Philomena, for me. Well, I'd do it myself, but the animal rights groups have been giving me a lot of trouble, and also some letter bombs. They told me to treat the animals like I would treat a pony, but I told them I already do. Apparently, that's something the police want to talk to me about as well.
    • The My Little Pony: The Mentally Advanced Series version of Celestia is pretty much the same as the UFP version mentioned above, except possibly even more feared, cruel, and ruthless and with a by far more intimidating voice. Best seen with her treatment of her "faithful student" Twilight who has grown up fearing her to the point that the thought of failing her, causes the normally level headed Twilight to have a complete mental break down:
      Twilight: [while having an emotional breakdown] Then she tore out all of Mrs. Buzzie's stuffing and stuffed her with sliced bread! And said, "I guess you owe me." Then told me to write a three-hundred-page paper on what that meant and I DIDN'T KNOW!!! [sobbing] Does anyone have any whisky... or maybe some paint thinner?
    • My Little Pony Meets pokes fun at this by revealing that Princess Celestia is encouraging this mentality for unstated reasons. After Twilight and others learn that not all queens are evil after meeting Elsa, Twilight wonders why Celestia would tell her all queens are evil out loud. Cut to Celestia looking ominously over them through a telescope.
    • This, and pretty much any other trope that comes up in it, is Played for Laughs in Twillight Sparkle's awesome adventure where Queen Celestia is portrayed as an outright Card-Carrying Villain, yet Twilight (who's her adopted daughter in this story) somehow never realized her mother was a tyrant until Celestia's acts of tyranny happening all around her are outright pointed out.
    • For a change of pace, some fan works, like Bad Future Crusaders, portray Princess Twilight becoming this in the future.
      • In Recall the Time of No Return, Empress Twilight Sparkle appears to have become this 1000 years into the future and is responsible for suffering all across her kingdom.
  • Parody artist Jon Cozart, a.k.a. Paint, imagines Elsa from Frozen as an evil queen in "After Ever After 2", seeking to Take Over the World with a Nazi-esque snowman army to stop global warming.
  • In A.A. Pessimal's Discworld themed adventure Strandpiel, assassin-trained Ruth N'Kweze, a girl from Howondaland, already a princess of her people, finds herself first running a city in her native country and then, by dictate of her dying father, elevated to Queen Regent on behalf of her baby son, the nominal heir and king. She gets an empire to run. And discovers she has to project an air of Gods Save Us From the Queen, so as to be able to stamp her authority on the role. Half-brothers and half-sisters who are jealous of her elevation discover this the hard way. Ruth also discovers that against her inclinations, in a place like the Zulu Empire, she has to be imperious.
    • She is also aware that Paramount Queens only happen in the Zulu Empire in the rarest of circumstances, as the nation is based on male primogeniture and, well, Paramount Kings tend to have lots of sons. The most recent Paramount Queen, several centuries earlier, altered the landscape of the Royal Kraal by creating a brand new and regularly shaped hill. Composed of human skulls. After this, the Empire very carefully became Kings-only. Ruth will use the Hill of Skulls for her own advantage when she is crowned, just to point out that she intends to do it differently and her emphasis will be on quality rather than quantity, adding, with great reluctance and only if strictly necessary, one new skull at a time. note 
  • In The Concubine Mo Chronicles, Lan Yi ascended to the throne following her brother's untimely demise and traumatized the country with such vigor her successors as Emperor were reduced to Puppet King, in order to prevent another monarch to rule with "bloodsoaked hands". It might not be poetic exaggeration, since the Imperial Court was fully replaced five times due to the high numbers of officials and nobles she just kept killing — they were potentially corrupt but if they were, it's not explicitly stated so the ambiguity stays.
  • Makoto Niijima is the titular character of The Evil Queen. By blackmailing the principal of Shujin Academy, Student Council President Niijima rules the school like a tyrant and has been dubbed "the Queen of Shujin Academy" by the student body. In her Palace, Makoto's Shadow is the queen of a Police State she considers a utopia and is openly cruel and selfish in her desires.
  • The Good Hunter: Downplayed for Lilith, First of her name, Overlord of All Monsters and the Grand Mistress of Royal Makai. She's a Visionary Villain, neither incompetent or mindlessly evil, who wishes to bring forth a Free-Love Future for both human and monster-kind, showing that she does have a large-scale policy in mind. Said policy comes with serious problems: consent is not an option; humans may find themselves monsterized against their will; and humans will eventually be outbred by monsters, hence be driven to extinction. As revealed in the backstory for MGE, this would also drive Monster-kind into extinction, due to the fact that Mamono are a One-Gender Race who need human men to breed. It should be noted that the Demon Lord is trying to find an answer to the extinction issue by figuring out how to produce male offspring from human-monster relations, instead of just more female mamono.
  • The Immortal Game: Queen Terra, an utterly deranged and murderous despot.
  • Kingdom of Isolation is a Frozen (2013) Alternate Universe Fic where Elsa becomes one of these after Anna's murder. She undergoes a Sanity Slippage and thinks (or at least pretends, as Kristoff theorizes) that snow-people are her family and people. Outside of her ice castle, Arendelle is freezing to death and it's spreading to neighboring kingdoms. With Elsa unwilling to unfreeze Arendelle, Kristoff has to kill her to free the land.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Fall of Hyrule: Due to the corrupting influence of the Triforce of Power, Zelda is a selfish princess who seeks to take the throne a year early, plotting her father's assassination by using Link so that she can claim the title of queen. Once the deed is done, she betrays Link and begins to plan on bringing the entirety of Hyrule to ruin while desiring to acquire the triforce of Wisdom and Triforce of Courage.
  • In The Parselmouth of Gryffindor, there's Queen Mosag, ruler of the Giant Spiders, the bloodthirsty and warmongering consort of Aragog, responsible for the Acromantulas' attack on Hogwarts.
  • The Queens of Mewni during the Dark Ages almost entirely have this reputation:
    • Venus the Fairest: was looked down on for her promiscuity, ended a popular program for aiding single mothers to spend the money on her own pleasures, faced accusations of incest when nude paintings her brother painted were discovered.
    • Helia the Light of Power: Was so powerful and had such a Black-and-White Morality that people did not dare to challenge her (especially since the last ones that tried were exterminated). Neglected her duties to spend time with her daughter. Also inadvertently caused the crisis that led to her own daughter's reputation (she used gold and silver fruits she created with her magic to pay off Mewni's debts, and when they vanished with her death, well...)
    • Celestia, Queen of Winter: When Mewni's debtors came calling, Celestia tried to create an eternal summer so they can grow crops to pay off the debts faster, only to create an endless winter that decimated Mewni's population. Her guilt over that was so much that she let corrupt nobles take advantage of her. The worst part is, Word of God says if she had gotten over her guilt the endless winter could have been dispelled sooner, but because she never could, it took the wand passing to her daughter Meteora for the spell to be dispelled.
    • Meteora the Relentless: A warmongering xenophobe, led invasions behind her mother's back that led to the decimation of three houses (and earned her the sobriquet "The Relentless"), betrayed the Slime Monsters by promising a reward for curing The Plague and then killing them with a non-painful death (her idea of 'reward')
    • Hekatia the Necromancer: As her title suggests, she was believed to be able to talk to and/or raise the dead (evidence suggests she was able to do both), was distrusted due to her research into dark magic, was absolutely inept as a wartime queen, and almost certainly used dark magic to conceive Eclipsa.
    • Eclipsa, Queen of Darkness: Disliked due to both her use of dark magic and her pro-monster policies, she ultimately abandoned her throne to elope with Globgor, believing she would leave a Succession Crisis due to having no heir. What she didn't know is her daughter by her first husband, Luna, was still alive.
    • Luna the Child: Crowned only at eight years old, and subsequently was the puppet queen of her father and the Magic High Commission for the early years of her reign. (For this reason, she's regarded the most favorably of the Dark Age queens) Believed her solution to problems was erasing the memory of them. Was so ashamed of being Eclipsa's daughter, and believing that Eclipsa abandoned her for her new family (not knowing that Eclipsa thought she was dead) that she cast a spell to erase Eclipsa from everyone's memories, with only herself, Glossaryck, and the Magic High Commission remembering her.
    • Heaven the Scared: A childhood incident traumatized her so much she became a reclusive madwoman. She had no desire to rule but hated the idea of others ruling for her even more. Her reclusiveness soured relations between the Butterfly Kingdom and other countries. She was paranoid about attempts on her life and the idea of her husband cheating on her, to the point she dismissed her council and barred anyone from entering or leaving Mewni Castle. She firmly believed her daughter Vesper would bring about the end of the Butterfly Kingdom, may have attempted to kill her as a baby, had to be forced to pass the wand to Vesper, and later would try to force Vesper through the same incident that traumatized her 'to teach her a lesson', which incidentally caused another war. Ultimately committed suicide after experiencing remorse after nearly losing Vesper in battle. Posterity could very well have remembered her as Heaven the Mad Queen, but Vesper, who despite everything sympathized with her mother, forbade it.
    • Inverted, however, with Star herself. Her actions while only a mere princess caused so much chaos, turmoil, and death (including those of her mother, Eclipsa, and Eclipsa's daughter), that the Magic High Commission decided becoming queen was a suitable punishment for her, as now she will have to spend her reign making amends.
  • In The Secret noble lady and future queen Leena is deeply unpopular amongst her subjects for her snobbery and spoilt ways, and isn't above using murder to get her own way or to simply settle petty scores. Most people are not looking forward to her becoming Queen of Erebor and she makes it plain from her thoughts and conversations with Vini that she fully intends to abuse her power to serve herself. Of course, Thorin catches on eventually and after being found guilty of trying to murder Billy and Emma, Leena spends most of her reign confined to her chambers, with Thorin's intention being to strip her of her title and send her packing.
  • In With this Ring... (Green Lantern), Carol Ferris has become the queen of Zamaron after falling under the influence of her evil split personality, the Predator. Her actions prompt Hal Jordan to convince her to get rid of the Predator, not for him, but for the Zamaronians, who don't deserve to be ruled by a merciless, ruthless queen.
    Hal Jordan: "I want to take the real Carol Ferris back home with me, and make her my wife. Failing that... I at least want the real Star Sapphire to take over again. Not the woman I see before me, not somebody who could be a female Hitler, given enough time... but the woman who fought me, at times, but who was never evil. I'm not asking you to do this for me. Do it for the people you rule."

    Films — Animated 
  • Another classic example is the Queen of Hearts of Alice in Wonderland, who provides the page image. She has a Hair-Trigger Temper and has anyone who upsets her executed.
  • In Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses, Rowena briefly is this when she becomes queen after poisoning her cousin King Randolph and influencing him to turn the crown over to her when it looks like he might die. She desires to throw Randolph's daughters in prison (some who are as young as five) for the crimes of... sneaking out at night to dance and not being able to follow her every rule to the letter. However, once her schemes are found out, she is fairly quickly deposed and banished from the kingdom.
  • Fire and Ice (1983): Queen Juliana is the sinister Queen of Icepeak and Nekron's mother. While she is more of a "Queen-mother" type since her son is the actual ruler, she sends her minions to kidnap a princess and make her a concubine to Nekron.
  • Played with in Frozen. Elsa, the elder sister, has dangerous ice powers and she is the one who is made queen. When these powers are discovered, she has to flee which brings an endless winter. However, this is unintentional on her part; she is not even aware she is causing it. Ultimately averted, as she remains queen and is much beloved after she learns to control her powers. In early drafts, she was a straighter example who froze her subjects.
  • Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi in The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part is so totally not an evil queen that she sings an entire Totally Not A Villain Song about how you shouldn't be suspicious of someone as unduplicitous, unmalicious, unconniving, and unnasty as her because she totally won't imprison your whole family if you don't believe her and totally has no evil plan. Making a contract with her will be totally terrifying, er, terrific! Honest! After all, she's the least evil person you'll ever meet. She's actually telling the truth and is completely oblivious to how shockingly suspicious and evil she comes off as.
  • Zira, the main villainess of The Lion King II: Simba's Pride, was actually implied to be a queen somewhere about halfway through the first film, back when Scar was still in power. She was immediately removed from the throne after Simba took over as king (and Scar was dispatched by his own hyena allies).
  • The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists: Queen Victoria hates pirates and has a thing for eating endangered species.
  • Played with in The Prince of Egypt. Queen Tuya is a loving mother to both Ramses and Moses and doesn't care at all that Moses was a Hebrew child that washed up in a basket. On the other hand, from the perspective of the Hebrew slaves, none of the Egyptian royal family is particularly sympathetic or kind.
  • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The unnamed witch-queennote , tried to murder a 14-year-old girl for being prettier than she was, among other things.
  • Inverted in Wish (2023) where Big Bad King Magnifico's wife Queen Amaya is shown to be far kinder than Magnifico and eventually betrays him to help Asha and friends defeat him.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010):
    • The Red Queen is a Psychopathic Womanchild explicitly modeled after Helena Bonham Carter's two-year-old daughter as far as flying into a tantrum and the tiniest slight, but she's gotten worse than her literary counterpart with the death of the Red King—possibly by her own order. She also keeps all her subjects in line by threatening to sic the Jabberwocky on them.
    • While not explicitly evil, the White Queen is implied to not be very sane either; the punishment she gave to the Red Queen shows the extremes she can get into.
  • The First Acheron Queen from Aliens has total dominion over her Xenomorph Drone offspring, the ability to tear off her ovipositor in an emergency situation, great size, speed, and strength, and the desire to impregnate countless other creatures across the universe with more of her offspring.
  • Barbarella: The Black Queen of Sogo is quite mad and quite evil, to the point that dissidents have taken to calling her Great Tyrant, which she doesn't mind at all. Ultimately subverted however, as she's the lesser of two evils compared to the Mad Scientist Durand Durand, and has a Heel–Face Turn to save herself and Barbarella from his positronic ray.
  • The White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia is the primary villain. She turns dissenters to stone and causes the country to be forever winter.
  • In Cinderella (2015), for once, the Wicked Stepmother wants to exploit her connection to Cinderella to make herself the Queen Dowager. Although when that plan fails, she'll settle for a countess.
  • Although the entire Detective Dee movie hinges on Dee's efforts to protect the Empress, she is arguably as big of a villain as the assassins.
  • Enchanted: Queen Narissa is the tyrannical Evil Sorceress ruler of Andalasia, and she plots against he own stepson so he won't be crowned king and take the throne from her. It's implied she seduced and married his father for the sole purpose of usurping the throne.
  • The entire plot of Outlaws of Gor was subduing the one dominant female character, the queen. Which sums up Gor's main theme about how all women should know their place, and that place is being slaves to men.
  • Kull the Conqueror: After Kull unexpectedly becomes king he marries a redheaded noblewoman who is actually an ancient demon witch-queen resurrected by Kull's enemies in the court. They learn that Evil Is Not a Toy as Queen Akivasha wants to restore the kingdom to its former glory and has no intention of sharing her power with them.
  • Legend of the Black Scorpion: The general response to the Empress. There were those who had misgivings about her at the beginning, but by the end virtually everyone hates her.
  • The Lion in Winter: Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine from the point of view of her husband Henry II and at least some of their sons.
  • The Lord of the Rings: Galadriel is most definitely The High Queen and a good gal — but she refuses to go by that title, or even be acknowledged as the ruler of Lórien. The reason she refuses royal titles is that she and her husband feel that Lórien is merely a place they are guarding, not ruling. The only moment when she does call herself a Queen is the moment of her temptation by the Ring. She resists it when she realizes she'll become one of these.
  • MirrorMask: The Dark Queen also happens to be extremely pushy.
  • Mirror Mirror (2012): People are literally begging for food on the streets, because what little money they have is taken to pay the Queen's taxes. She also banished all "uglies" (e.g. the dwarfs and other "undesirables") from the realm.
  • The Northman: The Reveal is that Prince Amleth's own mother Queen Gudrun was the one who arranged for his Evil Uncle to kill his father and attempt to do the same to him, as well as Rape, Pillage, and Burn his Doomed Hometown.
  • Ophelia: Queen Gertrude is a heavily downplayed example. While she's not evil and is portrayed rather sympathetically at times, she is a rather oblivious and self-absorbed woman who tends to put her own wants and desires before everything and everyone else, resulting in Claudius –- who is definitely evil -– gaining power and causing a lot of the drama in the story; she marries him around two months after her first husband died, not realizing Claudius poisoned him. In comparison, some adaptations of Hamlet portray her as being much worse, such as being complicit in the murder of her first husband and in some versions even persuading Claudius to go through with it.
  • Ran: King Hidetora thought it was a good idea to kill the father of his son's wife Kaede and make his new home in the newly conquered castle. Years later the King is thrown out of his home and his throne taken over by his son, making his wife the new Lady of her family's old castle. May the Gods have mercy on the kingdom.
  • Red Sonja: Queen Gedren is a very brutal female ruler who orders people killed if they stand in the way of her acquiring a magical artifact, or Sonja's entire family when Sonja cut her cheek after she had tried to force her to have sex with her. After acquiring the artifact, she uses its magic to conquer everything in sight.
  • Snow White & the Huntsman: Queen Ravenna, a thoroughly psychotic Smug Snake who murdered her way to the throne and steals the youth and beauty from younger women so that she might stay young and pretty forever.
  • Her sister Queen Freya in The Huntsman: Winter's War is also evil but for different reasons. She has a Heel–Face Turn in the end and ends up fighting her sister.
  • The title cities in Sodom and Gomorrah are ruled by King Bera in the Book of Genesis, but the film gives Bera a Gender Flip to produce a stellar example of brutally sadistic female rulers. Her primary goal as queen is simply to enjoy the power and pleasure the role affords her, especially if it comes at the expense of the lives of slaves, or of the easily corrupted innocence of the Hebrews she allows to live in her city. Such is Jehovah's disgust that He acts on the name of this trope, killing Bera and obliterating every last stone and free inhabitant of Sodom and Gomorrah.
  • Stargate: Continuum: During her short reign, Qetesh murders Baal, orders a complete genocide of the Earth's population, and even attempts to become a Conqueror from the Future by seizing Baal's time travel device before SG-1 can use it to fix the timeline.
  • Star Trek: First Contact: The Borg Queen, who is probably a “queen” as a reference to queen ants, queen bees, and queen termites, since The Borg operate with a hive mind. She and her kind try to assimilate every living being they come across.
  • Troll 2: Creedence is the queen of the goblins and the primary villain.
  • "Uncovered" (after "The Flanders Panel" by Arturo Pérez-Reverte...and no, not that Flanders) has two subversions. (Not a double!) First, the evil queen is a chess queen, the killer playing her role symbolically. Second, that queen is her old mentor Cesar. Queen as in openly homosexual.)
  • Willow's Big Bad is Bavmorda, feared across the land of Tir Asleen as the Demon Queen, a cruel tyrant and a horrible and powerful witch capable of powerful curses. The story involves her trying to kill a baby that is prophesied to end her reign through means of a ritual meant to kill her and send her soul to the Netherworld, where she will never be able to reincarnate.
  • The Wizard of Oz: The Wicked Witch of the West, in all but name. Although being a Card-Carrying Villain helps.

    Literature 

By Author:

  • Alexandre Dumas:
    • 20 Years After: Anne of Austria, whose neglect and pettiness after the death of Richelieu nearly caused the nation of France to implode in civil war and bankruptcy.
    • La Reine Margot: The French dowager queen Catherine de' Medici.

By Work:

  • Alice in Wonderland: The bloodthirsty Queen of Hearts. It may be a coincidence, but Tenniel's illustrations of her make her look more like the traditional Queen of Spades, a card in a suit associated with death. Perhaps taking this trope even further, in contrast to her the King of Hearts is a sympathetic character, who pardons everyone who's been sentenced. From the viewpoint of a character in a chapter after the trial scene (which for pacing and drama reasons didn't go into the Disney and thus subsequent adaptations) the Queen is essentially a tantrum-throwing child, frightening but with a brief attention span and impotent under the King's control. She can be contrasted with the Red Queen of the eventual sequel, who while grim, disliking Alice and not being especially fair, is very much mature and careful of her actions.
  • In Belyanin's The Auburn Knight, the Big Bad is the queen of an evil kingdom that was defeated long ago and banished, after making a Deal with the Devil. The Queen (she doesn't even get a name) is manipulative and cruel, although, to be fair, she's no different than the former (male) rulers of the kingdom.
  • Connor Kostick's The Avatar Chronicles: The Dark Queen in Saga. With a title like that, how could she be otherwise?
  • David Eddings' Belgariad/Malloreon brings us Queen Salmissra of Nyissa, the craziest and most dangerous person in her whole country of drug-addicted snake worshippers. At the end of her first appearance, she is turned into a giant, immortal, highly venomous snake, which markedly improves her personality and her governance of the country.
  • Mercedes Lackey generally averts this, but she plays it straight in her book The Black Swan, in which the evil queen Clothilde used a love potion on the king to gain her position, encouraged him in dangerous hobbies until he offed himself, kept her son completely unfit to rule, and plots to distract or, if necessary, kill her son in order to keep the throne when his 18th birthday (and thus the end of her regency) is on the horizon. Unusually for this trope, she's a good ruler otherwise; Lackey even gives her at least one Pet the Dog moment.
  • Played with in Fred Saberhagen's Book of Swords and Lost Swords series. Even though Kristin's father held the title of King, Kristin rules Tasavalta as Princess Regnant, not as Queen. Yambu, of course, holds the title of Queen, and is a bad guy, but abdicates her throne after she does a Heel–Face Turn.
  • In Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Changeling (1970), this would be Queen Oleander of the Lower Lands in the little girls' "Tree People" sustained fantasy game. Shy Martha does most of the character development for her, reflecting that it gives her a chance to do a lot of shrieking and ordering people around.
  • Queen Cinder from Chronicles Of Magic is a 14-year-old version of this. Trained to kill without respect or remorse when she was five, she now tortures and executes her subjects for pure entertainment.
  • The Chronicles of Narnia:
    • In The Magician's Nephew, Jadis (who later becomes the White Witch) is the Queen of the most powerful nation in her world, so what does she do when her sister attempts to overthrow her? She uses her magic to kill every other living being on the planet, then sits around waiting for someone to take her to another world so she can presumably do it all over again. Harsh. Even more blatant when you consider she serves as a Satanic Archetype in contrast with Aslan's Golden Feline Jesus — meaning in the end, God quite literally does save Narnia from the Queen. And while it was mentioned that while Aravis and Shasta/King Cor quarreled quite a lot after they were married, the fact that the kingdom remained prosperous for so long would indicate that she was a subversion as well.
    • The Silver Chair: The Lady of the Green Kirtle is sometimes called the Queen of Underland, though given how her "subjects" were captive mind-controlled gnomes and her "kingdom" was more or less a palace under the ground, it's uncertain how certifiable her claims for the title are. Still, she would have become that had her plan succeeded.
  • In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "A Witch Shall Be Born", Salome as the Fake King. All the worse in that the sister whose throne she usurped was the Reasonable Authority Figure. Some of her atrocities include raising taxes so high that rich and poor alike are starved, disbanding the royal guard and replacing them with cruel mercenaries who are given free rein to rape and brutalize, killing men of fighting age to prevent any possible rebellions, forcing women old and young to participate in degrading orgies, and feeding hundreds of innocent people to her pet monster.
  • Arthur's sister, Morgan, is married to King Uriens in Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. She kills a young servant for bowing too low and accidentally touching her knee. She continues to entertain her guests as the servants clean up the mess left after she stabs the boy. And death isn't the only Disproportionate Retribution she deals out. When a peasant slights her, she takes him from his wife and five children and locks him up in her dungeon for twenty-two years, giving him a view of his house from his cell. She then orchestrates five fake funerals at intervals, leaving him to agonize over which of his family still lives. His crime? Saying she had red hair.
  • A Court of Thorns and Roses: Amarantha does not shy away from brutally torturing and murdering people that resist her.
  • Sabran V, the Malkin Queen, in A Day of Fallen Night. She uses her position as Barrier Maiden to justify her greed, cruelty, and other acts of selfishness because the Inysh can't overthrow her without inviting the Nameless One's return. She emotionally absues her own daughter and turns her bitter and cruel (but that daughter gets assassinated by a man who her mother tortured to madness before she holds the throne for a year). Meanwhile her granddaughter turns meek and timid under her tyranny, doing further damage to the throne. Sabran V managed to live to be over a hundred, leaving the Inysh thoroughly demoralized and cynical—and giving her great-granddaughter Sabran VI one hell of a mess to clean up.
  • Queen Lionstone XVI, the "Iron Bitch", in Simon R. Green's Deathstalker series, fits the trope quite nicely. She's even set up a holographic 'playground' of a throne room which has claimed quite a number of courtiers, just for her own amusement.
  • The queen in Robin McKinley's Deerskin is universally beloved until she starts dying (of her own will, because she feels she's suddenly not the World's Most Beautiful Woman). Everyone but her husband very quickly wind up completely terrified of her, regarding her almost like she's some kind of witch. The really terrible consequences of what she does don't happen until several years after she's dead, though.
  • Discworld:
    • The Queen of the Elves in Lords and Ladies. Subverted somewhat in that the King of the Elves, with whom she doesn't get along too well, actually has the same goals — he's just more patient than she, or possibly smarter, and therefore approaches them differently.
    • Lady Felmet from the earlier novel Wyrd Sisters ought to qualify as well; she actually secures her position as queen by having her frail-minded husband Duke Felmet murder the King of Lancre, then proceeds to rule the kingdom with an iron fist from behind her husband (since the character is a parody of Lady Macbeth (See Theater, below), this is hardly surprising).
    • Lilith Weatherwax, who rules over Genua in Witches Abroad with an iron fist and makes sure that Happiness Is Mandatory. Anyone who isn't smiling and quiet, or doesn't abide by typical story archetypes, is fed to stories. (Also, "In some places, they cut off your hand so you don't steal again. In Genua, they cut off your head so you won't think of stealing again.")
  • The Dragon Egg Princess: Luzee set herself up as empress of the nackwon and used her position of power to wage war upon the human world. In the present, she seeks to return to her place as ruler.
  • The Queens of the Winter and Summer Courts, from The Dresden Files. Neither is truly "evil" as they have their own version of morals.
    • Mab, The Spock and Queen of Winter, is generally considered more evil because she wouldn't care about doing things in a cruel pragmatic manner. In one book, she sends out a kill order on a child because her enemies could capture her and increase their power to very bad levels, rather than sending forces to defend the child. In another, she tortures her traitorous Knight Lloyd Slate for years to the point he is a shell of a man, and she casually notes, "To be sure, the White Christ never suffered so long or terribly as did this traitor. Three days on a tree. Hardly enough time for a prelude. When it came to visiting agony, the Romans were hobbyists."
    • Titania, The McCoy and Queen of Summer, can be pretty damn vicious when she wants to be much like a summer day beating down with heat. When Harry killed her child, the Lady Aurora, to save the world, she acknowledged it as the right and logical choice. That said, she still wanted to kill Harry, to grind him up into dust and use him to fertilize her garden, and all while he is still alive. She could do a whole slew of things which made what Mab did to her traitor look tame.
    • Mother Winter, Mab's mother, is another Queen to be wary of. She is the final end and has no qualms about doing what is necessary and actually considers Mab to be more The McCoy for some of her emotional displays. She once nearly ate Harry because he summoned her at an inconvenient time. While he freed himself of her binding and proved himself to her, she notes that either way she got something out of it: a hard-working mortal or dinner.
    • While the rank is more Princess-like, the idea is invoked with Maeve, daughter of Mab. She is considered a psychotic bitch whose immaturity leads her to shirk her duties for some fun screwing with mortals. Note she is several hundred years old too and reached adulthood back in her 20s or so. When Mab's life was in legitimate danger, Harry feared what could happen should Maeve ascend to being Queen, as it would be several hundred years of her abusing Mab's power for her own kicks and shirking other duties. Considering Mab is one of the defenders of reality from the Eldritch Abominations that reside there, this would be very bad indeed.
  • Elemental Blessings features Alys, the third queen of the Kingdom of Welce. It's gotten to the point where 99% of the people with power, such as the other queens, the Five Primes, and the king's chief advisers don't believe a single word that comes out of her mouth, and actively work to limit her influence.
  • In the Emberverse, Queen Hallgerda manipulated her husband Mad King Charles, placed her stepsons Princes William and Harry in harm's way in the hope that they would be killed, and finally murdered Charles when he refused to disinherit Wills and Harry in favor of her own children by him. She also murdered or imprisoned anyone she perceived as a threat to her power.
    • Notably, Sandra Arminger, in spite of being married to the Evil Overlord of the first trilogy, does not fall into this trope, mostly by being shrewd enough to realise being a Villain with Good Publicity is a far better idea and charismatic enough to pull it off.
  • The Empirium Trilogy: Though it's more title than literal, the Blood Queen is an Apocalypse Maiden who's appearance will ultimately destroy the world.
  • Everland: Queen Katherina, aka the Bloodred Queen, is an expy of the above-mentioned Queen of Hearts, only far more vile. She poisons her husband, King Oswald, to usurp the throne, and ends up instigating a bloody war and unleashing a Synthetic Plague that leaves millions dead in its wake.
  • From Gail Carson Levine is Fairest's Queen Ivi, a foreigner who disbands the country's parliament, imprisons people for minor slights, obsessively seeks approval, and would have probably started killing people if Ava hadn't saved the day.
  • J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fall of Númenor: Downplayed. It is not told that Queen Tar-Ancalimë oppressed her subjects, but she was disliked and feared by everyone (from her maids to her own granddaughters) due to her coldness, pettiness and inability to let perceived or real slights go.
  • Invoked, sort of, in Robin Hobb's Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies, where during the time between them, Kettricken has been a fair, just, and intelligent queen overseeing a time of much-needed peace for the Six Duchies... But because she's a foreigner who was married for political reasons and her husband is dead, her political enemies love to spread these kinds of rumors about her. Queen Desire, on the other hand, who was queen at the beginning of the first book, is a decidedly unpleasant if minor character. Kettricken escapes being evil through the "princess first" clause, as she doesn't marry a king till the very end of Assassin's Apprentice.
  • Zig-Zagged with in regards with the Big Bad of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. When she was called a queen, she was a benevolent and competent Good Queen Mallow. When she returns as a tyrant, she goes by "Marquess", while still being the ruler.
  • Two queens in Karen Miller's Godspeaker Trilogy. The first book is about a nameless brat who rises to Mother of the Heir via slavery and soldiery with divine guidance. Her ambition is to use her son as a 'Hammer' to take over the world. The second book is about a Princess whose father and two brothers die, and she must fight to become Queen in her own right. 3rd book, both queens get to duke it out.
  • Rhona Thyll from A Harvest of War is a violent bully and cares nothing for even her own realm, except her army.
  • In Andre Norton's Ice Crown, Ludorica, as soon as she gets her hands on the title crown. It's a Mind-Control Device, and she listens to the man who had abducted her and condemns to death the men aiding her.
  • Incarceron has Queen Sia, who is a master manipulator and probably had her stepson kidnapped to ensure her blood son would inherit the throne.
  • Andrei Belyanin's Jack the Mad King reveals that the current queen of the land plotted to kill Jack, the rightful ruler so that his brother (and her as his wife) would ascend to the throne. Jack's brother is a good man and wasn't happy about how he became king, but he's blind when it comes to his wife. Jack ends up defeating the queen but decides to leave his brother on the throne and go on adventuring.
  • L. Frank Baum's Land of Oz was founded by a Fae Queen, who is revered through most of the land, and her descendant Ozma is just and reasonable ruler, as are the Good Witch of the North and Glinda, but you get plenty of rotten apples such as the East and West Witches, Princess Langwidere, Jinjur, and Coo-eh-oh.
  • The Lightlark Saga:
    • Cleo, ruler of Moonling, is cold, cruel and always has a spiteful remark ready for Isla. She's building up some kind of army and Isla even suspects she could've been the one to cast the curses that plague their realms, potentially to try and weaken the other realms so she could take over. Cleo isn't responsible for the curses, though she's still pretty mean.
    • Celeste, ruler of Starling, is revealed to be the centuries' old Starling ruler Aurora, and the one who cast the curses in retaliation for getting dumped by her fiance. She murdered her own sister to fake her death and has spent years plotting a way to break the curses while giving herself ultimate power, including murdering Isla's parents and manipulating her for her entire life to achieve her goals, remorselessly casting Isla aside once she has no more use of her. Aurora intends to use her power to wipe out the other realms if they won't submit to her rule.
  • In The Looking-Glass Wars series, the main antagonist is a woman named Redd, who believes that she was robbed of her right to the throne even though it was for the perfectly logical reason of her reckless, uncaring attitude. When she finally takes over, Wonderland becomes a place where people are encouraged to spy on their neighbours, among other more evil actions.
  • In the Vanity Publishing children's fantasy Lundon's Bridge and the Three Keys, jellyfish Queen Darlina is described as "the best of the best" queens of the ocean, BUT, as the story begins, an adviser brings her the news that husband and daughter have been killed in the Decayed Sea that humanity's pollution has created. She vows revenge on humans, imprisons subjects who object to her plan, and kidnaps a human scientist (the heroine's dad) to steal his body so she can take human form. From there she orchestrates the kidnapping and brainwashing of human children, turning them into half-insect creatures to destroy their world as humans destroyed hers. As it turns out, the king and princess aren't dead — the evil adviser kidnapped them, intending to take over the kingdom once her plans were carried out. When they are reunited, she frees/restores all her victims and is forgiven.
  • The Mark of the Horse Lord: Liadhan, usurper queen of the Dalriadain, is a Black Widow, My Beloved Smother, and god of a Scary Amoral Religion, who tries to murder one nephew and marry another. She's also the hero's mother-in-law.
  • In the Star Wars novel Master and Apprentice Princess Fanry is revealed to be a power hungry tyrant when she is crowned queen who thinks nothing of killing hundreds of slaves in order to destroy a Czerka vessel. She is stopped from the destroying the ship by her aide and none of her people rush to help her either.
  • In Laurell K. Hamilton's Merry Gentry series, the Unseelie Court is ruled by Queen Andais, an inventive sexual sadist. Though it is mentioned that at one point, something like centuries earlier, she was actually a good ruler, honored and respected rather than feared. And it seemed to be widely — if secretly — acknowledged in-universe that her cruelty may come from insanity, something that is rather often found in her family (remember her son, Cel?). Note that this is NOT made in opposition to the Seelie Court, as their King is really no better — actually even more insane, in his own way.
  • Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures
    • Subversion: Queen Hemlock is rumored to be greedy, ambitious, and cut-throat (literally; rumors abound that she murdered her parents to gain the throne). When we finally meet her, she is ambitious...but is also very down-to-earth and cunning, immediately seeing through the disguise that Skeeve is using to impersonate the king. And then she says that she'd rather marry a powerful magician than a king anyway.
    • Late in the book, Skeeve tricks Hemlock into marrying King Roderick by giving them magic rings which he claims link their lives together; if one of them dies, they both do. Much later in the series, Skeeve receives a package from Hemlock... a severed feminine finger, ring intact, leading him to assume that Hemlock cut off her own finger just to escape the magic, then killed Roderick. In the end, it's revealed that Roderick died of illness, at which point Hemlock realized the deception; the finger was his, not hers, and overall she wasn't upset with Skeeve for the trick.
  • Nightrunner: In the Tamír Trilogy, Queen Agnalain of Skala fit this trope, since she became so paranoid she was about to have her son and baby daughter executed for treason (after having numerous others killed), but she's treated as an aberration in a long line of warrior queens and her son killing her in self-defence and then taking the throne instead of his sister is presented as even worse, since the god in charge only approves of female rulers. Up to you whether this is an aversion or a straight example.
  • Elonia Hallin in The Night's Blade. Oh, dear heavens above, Elonia. While she may seem a reasonable person to the uninitiated, it's not long before the protagonists are made aware of the horrors she has committed.
  • In The Once and Future King, Queen Morgause is empty-headed at best and downright treacherous at worst. She enchants and sleeps with Arthur for a grudge held between their deceased parents, completely ignores her children who worship the ground she walks on, (unsuccessfully) attempts to seduce Sirs Grummor and Palomides and King Pellinor, and eventually seduces King Pellinor's much-younger son, which leads to her death when her sons find her in bed with him. Her first appearance is killing a cat in a boiling pot of water and putting the bones in her mouth, just because she's bored and wants to try an invisibility spell. On the other hand, while Guinevere inadvertently screws up Camelot, she still is a good person who cares about her husband and tries her hardest to defy Mordred at the end of the book. The daughter of the Queen of Flanders presumably also subverts this trope (after she marries King Pellinor of course), since the two are completely in love with each other and she is remembered fondly by all after her death.
  • The Black Papess in The Orphan's Tales. Granted she's justified in wanting revenge after she was used as a political pawn and punished for it, but she more or less wants to tear down Al-a-Nur from the inside centuries later when the current residents have done nothing to her.
  • The Otherworld Series has Queen Lethesanar, the cruel and opium-addicted ruler of Y'Elestrial.
  • In Anne Rice's Queen of the Damned, the titular queen, Akasha, is the first vampire. Back when she was the queen of Kemet (Ancient Egypt), she instituted harsh reforms on the people simply because she disapproved of certain customs, like eating the dead by their loved ones (not seeing a difference between honouring the dead this way and cannibalism). She then has her troops kidnap the witch sisters Maharet and Mekare to satisfy her curiosity of the supernatural. Unsatisfied with their explanations, she imprisons the twins and has them publicly raped by a servant and sent home on foot. Her tyrannical rule eventually causes her own subjects to fatally wound her. The bloodthirsty spirit Amel joins itself with her soul and reenters her body, turning Akasha into a vampire. Believing the sun god to have forsaken her, she has the witches kidnapped again. Displeased by their answer, Akasha has one blinded and the other to have her tongue cut out. After forcibly turning the same loyal servant, he would then turn the witches and free them. They build an army to try and fight the queen, but Akasha catches the sisters and puts them into coffins, sending them to opposite ends of the world, where the ​twins wouldn't see each other again until modern times. After waking, Akasha proceeds to slaughter most of her progeny and has almost every man murdered in order to create an all-female paradise. Her last demand is for the remaining vampires to join her or die. Luckily, she gets Laser-Guided Karma.
  • The Queen's Fool portrays Queen Mary I of England as this. Although the book tries to portray her as somewhat more sympathetic, it doesn't try to hide her being a religious fanatic who burned a lot of people accused as heretics.
  • The Queen of Attolia in Megan Whalen Turner's The Queen's Thief series is played almost-straight in book 1, and then averted completely in following books. It's gradually revealed that although she rules with an iron fist, the conditions of her monarchy demand fair but stringent behavior to maintain power and security. Attolia has a particularly bloodthirsty grudge against the protagonist Gen that tellingly exceeds her normally fair and political judgment. And then she goes and marries him anyway. Go figure.
  • Red Queen: Elara Merandus, the current wife of King Tiberias VI Calore and the Wicked Stepmother of Tiberias VII "Cal". Her whispering ability is feared among the nobility, and she was the one who drove the king's first wife and Cal's mother, Coriane Jacos, to suicide. She pampered her son, Maven, who grew up to become just as cruel as his mother, and staged a coup at the end of the first book to install him to the throne.
  • Shangri-La Frontier: In the game United Rounds, Pencil Knight led a player uprising to depose the NPC monarchy and installed herself as queen. She then used her position to rile up the players and instigate uprisings so she could pit the various player factions against one another, along with casual cruelties to the deposed royalty such as dragging them behind wagons as bait. The general player consensus was that whatever Big Bad the developers may have planned for the game, it would have paled in comparison to Queen Pencil Knight.
  • A Song of Ice and Fire:
    • Cersei Lannister is a cruel and paranoid despot who isn't quite as cunning as she believes she is. She quickly alienates her strongest allies and turns her kingdom into "a feast for crows". By the end of the first book, she's murdered her incompetent, but well-meaning, husband while going on to become regent for her beloved sons twice (when Joffrey gets himself murdered, she's very quick to latch on to Tommen, as in almost as soon as she stops wailing about Joffrey and well before she's finished genuinely mourning). Fortunately, Cersei starts to run herself into the ground the second the checks on her power are removed; three books later, she has been arrested for treason, adultery, and incest by the very Church Militant she resurrected. Nice going, Cersei.
    • Daenerys Targaryen is frequently slandered as a bloodthirsty queen, especially by the merchants and nobility of the Slavers' Bay, who are hit the hardest by her violent, dragon-involving campaign to uproot slavery. In reality, she means well, but has a hard time choosing between the best thing or the right thing. She tends to pick the latter, which reflects poorly on her standing among the well-to-do, and since news from Essos are filtered through those people, Westeros sees her the same way, too. However, to slaves in Essos and the Red Priests, she is hailed as a messiah.
    • Both sides of the Dance of the Dragons involved cruel queens.
      • The blacks were led by Rhaenyra Targaryen, who started the war because she was disinherited after her father's death. Fair enough, but then she descended further and further into questionable acts, notably when she tacitly approved a pair of assassins her husband sent to torment her innocent half-sister and her children, then behead one of her nephews. She became paranoid and imprisoned or executed suspected traitors, causing many of her allies to abandon her. The final straw was the mysterious death of said half-sister, Helaena, which led to riots in King's Landing that forced Rhaenyra to abandon the city, because even the smallfolk, who loved Helaena, by now hated her. She was nicknamed "Maegor with Teats", referencing the infamous Maegor the Cruel, and the phrase eventually evolved into a local expletive in King's Landing, "Maegor's Teats". Unfortunately, Rhaenyra was the only queen regnant the Seven Kingdoms had, but her reign was so bad that the kingdom swore never to crown another queen regnant again.
      • The greens were jointly led by Aegon II and his mother, Alicent Hightower, who suggested the idea to disinherit Rhaenyra in the first place. She was basically Cersei, if she was competent in politics. Although her sons were responsible for most of the cruelties associated with the greens, Alicent was complicit too. She spoiled her sons and didn't raise them to be proper kings, causing them to become screwed up in their own right. At the end of the war, she had lost everything, but still attempted to advise her sole surviving granddaughter to slit the throat of her newly-wed husband, Rhaenyra's son Aegon III.
    • Larra Rogare, the consort of Viserys II, was hated by the smallfolk and nobles alike, not for any evil things she did, but what she was: a Lyseni. People spread rumors about her reputed indulgence in dark arts and blasphemy, which wasn't helped since she refused to accept the Faith of the Seven. She was also the target of a slander that was fortunately disproven. Nevertheless, Larra never felt accepted at Westeros and eventually returned to Lys.
    • Tyanna of the Tower, the third of Maegor's queens, was the only one who actively supported him in his cruelty, such as the torture and murder of his nephew Viserys. Then she poisoned his other queens to kill off any potential heirs born to them, something that enraged Maegor to the point that he decided to execute her by cutting out her heart.
  • In the Star Trek Novel 'Verse, the Ruling Queen, T'Rehu — Romulus' first and only dictator. The trope is perhaps particularly appropriate here because while it's never made explicit, there is the possible implied suggestion that Romulans fear single female rulers more than male ones — simply because of T'Rehu. Both sexes serve in government and in the senate, in more or less equal numbers, yet interestingly the praetor is usually male. Possibly female senators find it harder to ascend to the position due to a bias connected with this trope. This is likely only subconscious — there are no actual legal restrictions and we do see some female praetors, but the disparity is interesting in a culture that otherwise demonstrates equivalence between genders at all levels of government. See in particular Star Trek: Vulcan's Soul.
  • The Lovecraftian version of Queen Victoria presented in Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" is a particularly squicky variation on this.
    She was called Victoria, because she had beaten us in battle, seven hundred years before, and she was called Gloriana, because she was glorious, and she was called the Queen because the human mouth was not shaped to say her true name.
  • Several sovereigns in Tales of the Branion Realm, particularly Melesandra III, who terrifies her son and heir and has orchestrated more than a few massacres of her enemies.
  • Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms: Queen Cassiopeia in One Good Knight is a dead-straight example, up to and including causing horrific storms and shipwrecks to increase her wealth. Her daughter is horrified when she realizes that is going on.
  • Tarzan: In Tarzan and the City of Gold, Tarzan has to contend with Nemone, the beautiful but jealous and temperamental queen of Cathne, the City of Gold. She became queen at the age of 12 and was manipulated and blackmailed by an old black woman name M'duze who, it was speculated, was Nemone's mother. The queen was considered a bit mentally unstable. She was jealous of her beauty and had all good-looking women either mutilated or killed.
  • The Nightmare Queen in Terra Mirum Chronicles. Her title really says everything, though it's worth also noting that she murdered her predecessor and brainwashed the Dream court into arresting the prince.
  • Usually doesn't occur in the Tortall Universe, but there is one straight example in the Trickster's Duet: Imajane of the Copper Isles. Her husband is nasty and ruthless too, but Imajane has a particularly sadistic streak and is a bit worse than Rubinyan. Mostly because insanity runs in the Rittevons — her father was worse, and her relative Princess Josiane was awful too.
  • The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: The "old fashioned bad" variety of bad queen. She's an absolute tyrant who has complete control over her realm, with everyone terrified of her. Very cruel, her land is the worst on the Tour; she rapes then murders peasant youths for fun. Invariably she'll demand sex from the Tourists and have them tortured when refused. Their only solution will be to kill her, but with reluctance as a result of her gender.
  • In Ruth Frances Long's The Treachery of Beautiful Things, the Queen of The Fair Folk is this — unsurprisingly, as the race is the cruel and treacherous folk of folklore.
  • To Kill a Kingdom: The Siren Queen is depicted as a genocidal psychopath who delights in hurting both humans and her own subjects. Her ultimate aim is to wipe out humanity itself.
  • The White Queen in The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign. Most see her as a benevolent existence, but this couldn't be further from the truth. She doesn't care about anyone in the entire universe except for the main character Kyousuke... and doesn't make things easy for him, either. She expresses her "love" for him by deliberately dragging him into dangerous situations, often attacking him herself.
  • Arpazia, the resident wicked queen of the Snow White retelling White as Snow.
  • Wings of Fire:
    • There are three SandWing dragon sisters named Blaze, Blister, and Burn, who plunged the dragon world of Pyrrhia into a twenty-year war to fight for the throne. They range from shallow and incompetent (Blaze) to ruthlessly manipulative (Blister) or vicious and sadistic (Burn), so the heroes arrange for Thorn, Sunny's mother, to become queen instead. They pay the price for plunging the world into chaos: Burn dies from a viper bite, Blister gets vaporized by a magical artifact, and Blaze eventually submits to her new queen.
    • Former queen Scarlet of the SkyWings is a violent dragon who makes other dragons fight each other (or sometimes captive humans) for her own amusement. She's even raised Peril to be a killing machine only obedient to her and murders her defense attorney, an old dragon named Osprey who can no longer fly, by throwing him from the sky-high arena.
    • In general, this can count for all queens of the seven dragon kingdoms on their bad days. Special mention goes to Queen Diamond of the IceWings and Queen Battlewinner of the NightWings.
  • The Witches of Eileanan begins with Eileanan under the thumb of the Banrìgh Maya, variously dubbed "the Blessed", "the Unknown" and "the Ensorcellor", a mysterious and powerful sorceress who instituted a Ban on Magic (except for what she finds useful to her), has tried to massacre The Fair Folk, and has been hunting witches down for over fifteen years. This isn't even mentioning her mind-controlling her husband into loving her to get to her position of power. As the series goes on, after she's deposed, Maya turns out to have a sympathetic side, and ultimately survives, being punished with a Power Nullifier that renders her mute.
  • Queen Arrabel from Tanya Huff's A Woman's Work is highly competent, beloved by her people, treats her staff well... and is utterly ruthless to her enemies (and her friends, if she had any). She's the type of person who wears understated, sensible clothing while her son wears flashy, extravagant uniforms because she knows who assassins would instinctively aim at. And then she marries him off to a neighboring country's princess (sole survivor of the royal family), the Queen expecting that the princess will quickly produce an heir, following which the prince is likely to have a fatal accident. Not that she minds, as she thinks the princess has the right stuff to inherit the job of Queen.
  • Worlds of Shadow: Shadow turns out to be a woman. She's a ruthless overlord who rules with despotic cruelty and wishes to conquer everything she can.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The 10th Kingdom is a Fairy Tale Free-for-All where the evil queen escapes from prison and it's portrayed as a Tyrant Takes the Helm situation. It's all about stopping her so that Prince Wendell can be crowned king and be a benevolent ruler, and her evil plan involves poisoning everyone at the coronation so she can take the throne back. It's revealed that she was actually Virginia's mother, who crossed over into the Nine Kingdoms by accident and was brainwashed by the original Evil Queen.
  • Queen Nia of the Ice Nation from The 100 is the only known queen of the setting (in fact, the only known monarch) and is by far the most ruthless faction leader shown. When she was at war against the other Grounder clans, she had Lexa's lover tortured for information before and killing and beheading her. She begrudgingly accepted to join Lexa's coalition after defeat, and only pays lip service to her commandments. In the present time, she still plots to grab as much power as possible by plotting against Lexa, openly questioning her integrity and authority, putting a bounty on one of Lexa's closest allies (and Love Interest), and slaughtering innocent Sky People just to force her to react.
  • Queenie in Blackadder II is a ludicrously exaggerated version of Elizabeth I, using the extremes of anti-Elizabethan propaganda to produce a Psychopathic Womanchild who orders executions on a whim. Miranda Richardson went on to play Queen Mab and the Queen of Hearts. It's all Played for Laughs, of course.
  • Denshi Sentai Denziman has Queen Hedrian, the vain ruler of Vader Clan and a partial homage to the Evil Queen from Snow White (her introduction even has her doing a recreation of the classic "mirror, mirror" scene). Although even if she is evil, she's still a pretty good boss to her minions, which is why she has their complete loyalty.
  • Queen Madalena from Galavant becomes one by the end of the season, culminating in getting her husband, King Richard's older Jerkass brother and plotting to have him kill her husband in a duel, then brutally murdering him (even though King Richard survived and escaped) and using Gareth as a subservient king to her while ruling the land. In Season 2, she begins practicing the Dark Dark Evil Way and is willing to kill a baby to do so (which squicks out her mentor).
  • Game of Thrones universe:
    • Game of Thrones:
      • Cersei Lannister is much like her book version in that she is not a pleasant person and shows a snobbish disdain and a lack of consideration for the common people and has groomed Joffrey to follow in her footsteps. In "You Win or You Die", she orchestrates a Hunting "Accident" for Robert. Tyrion initially assumes it was her who gave the order for the purge of Robert's bastard children, and she doesn't admit that it was something Joffrey really shouldn't have done. This only got worse when the series overtook the books: she used wildfire to blow up the Sept of Baelor while the High Sparrow, her uncle, her cousin, and her in-laws were inside to avoid being held accountable for her previous crimes. This caused massive amounts of damage to King's Landing. She's then rather callous when her last remaining child kills himself because of this. The season ends with her claiming her son's throne for herself and crowning herself as the ruling queen of the Seven Kingdoms. Keep in mind her brother killed a previous king because he merely threatened to blow things up, and he's most certainly not happy that his sister has done this. Later when the Army of the Dead start marching south, Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen ask her to fight with them and she decides that she would rather lie to their faces and wait for them all to kill each other than help prevent The End of the World as We Know It. She even goes so far as to say that she doesn't care about bettering her country or the world and entertains the idea of getting on a boat and leaving everyone else to die. Real nice attitude for a monarch to have.
      • In the penultimate episode of Season 8, Daenerys goes berserk and burns down all of King's Landing with Drogon, incinerating soldiers and innocents alike while her Dothraki and Unsullied troops go on an uncontrolled killing spree. Even Cersei is horrified.
      • Lysa Arryn is the paranoid and neurotic Lady of the Vale.
  • Goodbye My Princess: The empress of Li is abusive towards her adopted son Cheng Yin, and at one point she arranges for him to be drugged and raped. (He escapes unharmed, but only because he's paranoid enough to sense something's wrong.)
  • An interesting variation in I, Claudius, where resident Magnificent Bitch Livia would fit this trope perfectly, in an I Did What I Had to Do sort of way, except she's not allowed to rule directly, so she rules vicariously through her husband Augustus, and later through her son, Tiberius.
    • Empresses Messalina and Agrippinilla both count as well, with the former being an out of control hedonist who manipulates her husband into having people she dislikes executed, while the latter falls much more in line with Livia, doing everything in her power to get her son on the throne even though he's not fit for it at all. An interesting subversion, however, is Caesonia, Caligula's last wife. In the writings of Suetonius, which I, Claudius is heavily based on, she's not described in a flattering light, but here, she's quite down to earth and obviously just trying to do her best to cope with Caligula's instability.
  • Kingdom (2019): Queen Consort Cho is willing to make use of a devastating zombie outbreak in order to keep her hold on the throne.
  • Morgana, at the end of Season 3 of Merlin after she seizes the throne, she throws Uther in the dungeon and starts executing his knights. And again at the end of Season 4.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Galadriel fears she will become this if she accepts Sauron’s offer to rule by his side, telling him that he will make her a tyrant, no doubt recognising the darkness within herself created by her extremely bitter, centuries long quest for vengeance against Sauron. This also foreshadows her temptation speech in The Lord of the Rings where she echoes Sauron’s own words to her about being fair as the sea and the sun and stronger than the foundations of the earth and envisions herself becoming a great and terrible queen if she takes the One Ring for herself.
  • Moon Lovers: Queen Yoo doesn't shy away from using manipulation or underhanded tricks to get her way. And then there's how she treats Wang So — she threatened to kill him when he was just a child, and she's responsible for the scars on his face.
  • My Country: The New Age: Queen Sindeok wants her son to be the next king, and to ensure he gets the throne she conspires to have his half-brother murdered.
  • ABC's Once Upon a Time:
    • The Evil Queen/Regina. She's trapped every known fairy tale character in a dead-end town in Maine and made herself mayor so she can control their lives. Anyone who stands up to her ends up miserable or dead. She however has a Heel–Face Turn at the end of the second season and in the Grand Finale, is crowned the Good Queen of all the realms.
    • The Red Queen in Once Upon a Time in Wonderland is not very nice, though she doesn't actually want to kill Will and possibly still loves him. She's definitely a Smug Snake with some kind of plan, but she's easily better than Jafar. (Which is not saying much.) In the final two episodes she makes a decisive Heel–Face Turn due to her love for Will, and ends up as the White Queen of Wonderland.
    • The Red Queen's predecessor, the Queen of Hearts (Regina's mother Cora) was just as brutal a leader as either of the two ladies above but had absolutely none of the redeeming qualities they did. It's eventually revealed her Lack of Empathy was because she'd previously removed her own heart, costing her her ability to feel real love.
    • And then there's Ingrid the Snow Queen, who, in addition to her plan to force Elsa and Emma to be her new sisters, is perfectly willing to kill everyone who stands in her way. Played with in that she's only called the Snow Queen by other characters and she was never actually crowned, although she is the eldest and would have been queen had she not been sealed in an urn.
  • Princess Silver: Fu Yuan is an Empress Dowager rather than a reigning queen, but she sets out to destroy an entire kingdom to get revenge on her ex-husband.
  • Bansheera from Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue is the Queen of the Demons, and after being brought back halfway, really gets pissed at the humans who keep ruining her plans. But as it turns out, all of the other demons — up to and including her own son — are all expandable pawns in her plan. Ultimately, when she attempts to open the Tomb of Forever in the finale and nearly drags in Carter with her before the other Rangers can seal it, Diabolico performs a Heel–Face Door-Slam for what she did to him and Loki, giving Carter the chance to escape — while Bansheera suffers her ultimate fate — getting beaten up by demons and monsters for all eternity. It's nothing more than what she deserved.
  • In the episode "A Chill in the Air" of Reign, Queen Catherine blackmails Aylee so that she can get her hands on the letters between Mary and her mother, Marie de Guise. In "Leign Lord", Catherine orders a dozen of Mary's countrymen killed because she couldn't be bothered with the extra trouble of calming down two countries. Also an in-universe example with John Knox, a Scottish Protestant minister, who is openly critical of any female monarch, even a fellow Protestant like Elizabeth. As far as he's concerned, women have no place on the throne.
  • In Tin Man, the heroes are on the run from the Sorceress-Queen Azkedelia, who seems (at first blush) analogous to the Wicked Witch of the West and certainly has the attitude to match. However, like everything else in this version of Oz, things aren't exactly as they seem. For one, she's a descendant of Dorothy Gale, just like her sister, DG. Second, she's not exactly doing the driving. There's also the "good" lavender-eyed Queen who is being held prisoner.
  • Margaret of Anjou in the BBC/Starz series The White Queen is depicted as having been an evil tyrant and all-around bad person and is referred to, by the Neville sisters at least, simply as "The Bad Queen." In reality, Margaret was a bad ruler, but it was more because she was out of her depth and just did not know what she was doing than out of any particular desire to cause harm.

    Music 
  • Bal-Sagoth worked this into musical form in their song "To Dethrone the Witch-Queen of Mytos K'unn (The Legend of the Battle of Blackhelm Vale)" on their album Starfire Burning Upon the Ice-Veiled Throne of Ultima Thule. In brief, a witch queen of a powerful empire sends her army of questionable humanity to invade her neighbors, until said army is met in battle by heroic barbarians in the titular battle. Yes, this is all described in lyrical detail — and further elaborated on in the lyric book itself.
  • The Queen of the Forest in The Decemberists' Rock Opera "The Hazards of Love". To be expected, really, as said Queen is a faerie queen not unlike Mab and Titania.
  • Evillious Chronicles: The 14-year-old queen Riliane (though she calls herself a princess) in "Daughter of Evil", after doing other already pretty despicable things, ends up killing an entire kingdom of people because her crush loved one of its citizens and not her. Played with in that you actually feel sorry for the Queen later in "Regret Message" where she's shown to have been spoiled Jerk with a Heart of Gold who didn't understand the pain of losing someone. And being possessed by the Demon of Pride probably also contributed to it.
  • "March of the Black Queen" by... Queen. The title character "boils [people]", "bakes [people]", and "never dots her I's", for example.
  • On the note of association between theme and band name, "Queen of the Reich" by Queensrÿche.
    There is no escape, it's the ending of your precious life!
    Your soul slips away, it belongs to Queen Of The REEIIIIICH!!
    The Queen of the Reich, yeah!
    She's coming for YOU!
  • "The Queen And The Soldier" by Suzanne Vega.
  • "Queen Of The Dark Horizons" by Rhapsody of Fire.
  • Subverted in Jonathan Coulton's "The Princess Who Saved Herself", where the Princess befriends the evil queen by giving her a makeover.
  • Sister Sin's The Desert Queen, though the song is ambiguous about whether "Desert Queen" is the character's actual title or just what she's known by. Either way, it's quite clear that she's someone who's quite deadly.
  • horslips'' retelling of the Irish mythology plays on this trope: Queen Medhbh is seen as greedy, capricious, imperious, and callous.
  • Sex Pistols' "God Save The Queen" is all about this trope.
    "God save the Queen
    The Fascist regime
    Has made you a moron
    A potential H-Bomb
    God save the Queen
    She ain't no human being
    There is no future in England's dreaming"

    Myths & Religion 
  • The Bible has a few of these:
    • Jezebel has been saddled with a reputation as an evil queen for millennia. The Bible accuses her of trying to kill every Jahve's prophet in the country and having an innocent man executed just because he would not sell his vineyard to her husband.
    • Athaliah (Jezebel's daughter) is said to have had all of her grandkids killed. Only one of her grandsons was saved, so she almost destroyed David's royal line.
    • In The Four Gospels, when Herod Antipas asks his unnamed stepdaughter (Christian tradition and some historical evidence indicates it as "Salome," and she was also his niece) to name any reward ("up to half his kingdom") for her dancing, her mother suggests "John The Baptist's Head on a Platter", thus giving birth to a popular expression. In both cases, it's claimed that Herod Antipas enjoys John's preaching and is only forced to have him killed because he gave his word to a treacherous woman.
    • There are good queens, though: such as Bathsheba, Esther, and the Virgin Mary (she is the Queen of Heaven in Catholicism; the Book of Revelation also has the mother of the Messiah be exalted in Heaven). It seems to be that the poor girls who are awarded the title tend to be good, the ones who were born royalty tend to be evil.
  • Arthurian Legend: Guinevere cheated on Arthur with Lancelot, leading indirectly to his defeat at the hands of Mordred. And that's the modern, sympathetic version. Older, Welsh versions had it that she cheated on him with Mordred and actively betrayed him. (In some regions of Wales, "Guinevere" is a euphemism for whore.) Geoffrey Chaucer either plays this straight or averts this in "The Wife of Bath's Tale," depending on whether your sympathies lie with the knight whose life she saved (and whom King Arthur would rather have executed) or with the women he could potentially rape.
  • Older Than Dirt: Tiamat's turn as an Omnicidal Maniac following the death of her husband makes her the Ur-Example.
  • The Unseelie Queen Mab/Maeve is almost always portrayed as evil, even though a lot of the same books that mention her also mention that The Fair Folk don't think of good and evil the same way humans do. She's nasty by any standard, apparently. And the Seelie queen is usually portrayed as good...ish.
  • Celtic Mythology:
    • The Cattle Raid of Cooley: Queen Medb, eager to prove an arrogant boast that she is equal to her husband, touches off a terribly destructive war in an attempt to acquire a bull the equal of the best of his.
    • The Morrígan's name means "phantom queen;" it's not clear if she actually rules anything (though scholars have often theorized that she was the wife of one of the various Top Gods), but she is a sovereignty goddess as well as a Blood Knight War Goddess.
  • Classical Mythology:
    • Hera in any story about Zeus' affairs, though it's not like she has any power to stop him so she goes after his mistresses and their children. Many modern adaptations portray Hera as having gone insane from jealousy. The more sympathetic portrayals have her as someone easily angered and not to cross lightly. She wasn't exactly nice to her own kids, either: she hated Ares and, in some legends, threw Hephaestus off of Olympus for being born ugly.
    • Originally Poseidon's daughter, Persephone started as the chthonic goddess Despoina and was later retconned into being Hades' wife, also conflating her with the nature goddess Kore. In fact, as Despoina, Persephone may even predate Hades.
  • Norse Mythology: Hel, goddess-queen of the (non-warrior) underworld, doesn't seem to have been well-liked even by pagans, let alone Christians.

    Pro Wrestling 
  • Wrestlers who compete and win in WWE's King of the Ring were customarily rewarded with a crown for a year. If accompanied by a valet, the lady sometimes got her own tiara, too. This proved a disaster when Randy Savage won the contest with Sherri Martel. The royal trappings were too much for their fragile egos to handle, particularly Sherri who kept demanding bigger and more lavish transportation to the ring. She wore her stupid crown everywhere and offered to give the commentators a knuckle sandwich if they failed to address her as "Queen".
  • Although Stephanie McMahon's Red Baroness is "The Billion-Dollar Princess," her character is a Corrupt Corporate Executive and she plays this very straight.

    Roleplay 

    Tabletop Games 
  • There are many female leaders in BattleTech who fall under this trope, but the two best examples are probably Romano Liao, the paranoid and insane former ruler of the Capellan Confederation known for her tendency to order the violent deaths of her citizens, often for no discernible reason, and Kathrine Steiner-Davion, who had her own mother assassinated then manipulated control of the Federated Commonwealth away from her brother before her tendency towards hamfisted control caused a civil war to break out.
  • In chess, the queen is the most powerful piece. Each side starts with one, and she effectively serves as the Dragon-in-Chief for the king, being able to move as many spaces as she wants in whatever direction she wants. Only the knight can attack the queen without being counterattacked. Even worse, any pawn that reaches the other side of the board can become another queen.
  • In the Tormenta (D&D setting), the Fairy Queen Thanthalla-Dhaedelin is depicted as a vain, frivolous, omnipotent Cloudcuckoolander. Because your left canine is one-tenth of a millimeter shorter than the others, she may simply wish you'll from now on work as a dung scavenger, and it WILL happen. The last one involved changing the calendar so her estimate would remain right.
  • Demon: The Fallen suggests that God of the Old World of Darkness is actually female. Let's just say that She didn't really take care of Her own Creation.
  • In Dungeons & Dragons, there is Vlaakith CLVII (157th), lich-queen of the Githyanki. Vlaakith is a paranoid egomaniac who consumes the souls of those among her people who grow too strong, sends them to plunder and destroy the material plane as she sees fit, and seeks to ultimately become a true god. It is also almost certain that her ancestor fed Gith, the beloved original ruler of the Githyanki, to Tiamat, although that part is left ambiguous. The Githyanki worship her and follow every single one of her commands unquestionably, despite their cultural stigma against religion and slavery. They are simply too indoctrinated to see that they are nothing but slaves to their goddess.
  • The Queen of Aundair in Eberron is like this. She's convinced it's her destiny to rule the entire world. Since she lacks the military power to pull it off, she's mostly scheming. She's got no problem with starting another world war, as long as she knows she'll come on top. The funny thing? The rules say she's Neutral Good. Compare the King of Karnath, a Vampire who pulled off a My Grandson, Myself combined with a Man in the Iron Mask for the sole goal to save his country from ruin and famine, free it from the clutches of an evil church, fight a terrorist organization AND is one of the major architects of the continent-wide peace treaty that ended the century-long world war. His alignment? Lawful Evil. Word of God on this matter says that Aurala is a genuinely nice and decent person but was raised to have an outdated, culturally myopic view of seeing war as the "game of generals", naively believing that resuming the Last War won't be so bad. King Kaius, on the other hand, knows just how utterly naive this viewpoint is, and while he is incredibly selfish and amoral, he's also quite honorable and actually gives a shit about his general image. In other words, Aurala is Naive Good and Kaius is Pragmatic Evil.
  • Exalted's Scarlet Empress. Ruthless, rules over The Empire, sends her minions on a seek-and-destroy mission to hunt down new PCs, keeps her subordinates backstabbing each other to maintain her own power...on the other hand, she did save the entire world from obliteration by The Fair Folk in the backstory, and is currently being held prisoner by The Legions of Hell. Then comes Return of the Scarlet Empress. You thought she was bad before? Now she's the Ebon Dragon's sweet baboo/hand puppet.
  • Fabula Ultima: The sample Floating Continent of Seraphim is ruled by Masked Queen Apate, a capricious tyrant feared by all her subjects.
  • Godforsaken: Queen Seppar of Ragelith is, to put it mildly, a cruel tyrant whose life has been extended over and over again by magic. Her people put up with her strict rule because her city is quite safe, prosperous and healthy.
  • In the Card Game "Hearts", traditional rules make the Queen of Spades into this. In a game where scoring points is bad, and every heart grants one point to anyone who collects one, the Queen of Spades, in particular, gives thirteen points to the unfortunate person who gets her; the sum of if you got all the hearts combined.
  • Pathfinder:
    • In the Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path, Queen Ileosa Arabasti takes the throne after the death of her husband, which marks the start of things going downhill in the city of Korvosa. She was originally little more than a spoiled, petty hedonist until she found an artifact containing the spirit of a very powerful dragon warlord. This led to her diving headfirst into evil, with the eventual goal of sacrificing most of the city's population to fuel a bid for immortality.
    • The Big Bad of the Reign of Winter adventure path is Queen Elvanna of Irrisien, who is attempting to spread that land's eternal winter across the entirety of the world.
  • Princess: The Hopeful: Each of the three Twilight Queens is dangerous in a different way.
    • The Queen of Tears somehow (it's implied to have involved the sacrifice of the rest of her kingdom), transported her capital of Alhambra into the heart of the Darkness and transmuted it into a nigh-impenetrable fortress. But to keep it protected from the Darkness, Alhambra must be illuminated by special magical lanterns that are powered by leaching the very possibility of goodness and hope from the real world.
    • The Queen of Storms allowed herself to be consumed by her hatred for the Darkness, ascending into a living tempest of rage that eternally ravages the heart of the Darkness. She grants mortal and Princess alike access to battle magic of unparalleled power, and can manifest her magic through them to produce effects far beyond what her followers could achieve on their own. But if you flee from battle or show mercy to any creature tainted by the Darkness (even a Darkened who was tainted against their will, is still trying to fight it off, and could be saved), you lose access to the Queen's gifts and can only regain them by filling your entire health track with at least bashing damage, putting you on the brink of death. Furthermore, when you use many of the more powerful Storms charms or when the Queen manifests power through you, you take damage that cannot be prevented and that resists healing by magic. The Queen can and has killed her own followers this way.
    • None know how the Queen of Mirrors survived Downfall, or what it is she's attempting to do. All she seems to do is appear in the dreams of Radiants, telling each of them that they are the True Heir to the Kingdom, the one who will defeat the Darkness and fix everything. The magic she empowers her chosen with is among the strongest in the game, but to use it requires and causes madness and narcissism.
  • In both Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Requiem, "Prince" is the title given to the most important figure of the Vampire politics. The title can vary and some vampires may call themselves Sultans, Dons or even Presidents, yet most of them would humbly avoid being called "Kings", but the same cannot be said to some self-proclaimed "Queens". And to make things worse in Vampire: The Requiem the ones most inclined to pursue such a title are Ventrue Dominatrixes and Daeva Maneaters. Good luck!
    • Masquerade gives a pretty solid example in the form of Queen Anne, Prince of London. After taking the throne following the ancient god-king Mithras, she's done all she can to show favor to those loyal to her and shatter those who get in her way, including weakening the power base of most of the city's clans. Oh, and she's also a serial diablerist, trying desperately to find a vampire yet helpless enough that she can engage in cannibalism again and get one step closer to godhood.
  • Warhammer Fantasy has Dark the Dark elves hag Queen, Morathi, is one of the most powerful wizards in the game and the reason the dark elves had been corrupted in the first place. The Hag Queens of the Temple of Khaine are berzerkers that go to battle looking like they are two thousand years old by human standards and wearing next to nothing. If that isn't frightening, nothing is.

    Theatre 
  • Clytemnestra, wife (and murderer) of the eponymous king Agamemnon Mind you, he was asking for it.
  • In William Shakespeare's Cymbeline, the Queen is pretty much pure evil, complete with a horrible son, a stepson to the title king.
  • And Queen Margaret in Henry VI Parts II and III is something of a harridan, keeping the Wars of the Roses alight long after everyone else would far rather just give up and go home. She's a bit more of a shrinking violet in the Prequel, Part I. She apparently is also a bit of an evil foreigner, called the "she-wolf of France".
  • Isabeau, with its tagline "The Most Evil Queen", subverts this trope by showing her point of view. Isabeau de Baviere was a queen of France in the middle ages, who did what she had to do to survive in the Black-and-Grey Morality world of medieval power politics. She wears red, and everyone else wears black — because everyone is a villain here — aside from Joan of Arc, who shows up near the end wearing blue and white. Incidentally, Isabeau was Henry VI's maternal grandmother.
  • The Queen of Night from Mozart's The Magic Flute is not only murderously violent but also a walking symbol of human ignorance.
  • Fastrada in Pippin spends her whole arc scheming to overthrow Charlemagne so her son will become king. But she does it with such awesome dance moves that it's hard to blame her for it!
  • Queen Titania of A Midsummer Night's Dream isn't really evil, but spends most of the play bickering with her husband over a changeling boy in her care. Of course, Oberon isn't much better and responds by having her magically enchanted into loving a man with a donkey's head until she gives him the kid (and even then, mentions that he only is having her freed because he pities her). So yeah, the play seems to come off less as "queens are evil" than "fairies are jerks".
  • Once Upon a Mattress with Queen Agravaine. Heavy overlap with My Beloved Smother.
  • Wicked: As the ruler of Munchkinland, Yandere Nessarose is she is willing to strip the Munchkins of their rights and keep any of them from leaving the country just to keep Boq with her.

    Theme Parks 
  • The Terra Queen, an evil overlord that comes out to rule the demented planet of Terra Cruentus every 15 years during the "Season of the Queen", served as one of the main characters of Universal's Halloween Horror Nights in 2005.

    Toys 

    Video Games 
  • Queen Asheviere from Battle for Wesnoth: has the prince murder the king during a war. Said prince ends up killing himself later, so she takes over instead.
  • In Bug Fables, Queen Elizant II is clearly plotting something right from the get-go. She's known to be a harsh, unforgiving, and unpopular queen who's banned entire species of bugs from the Ant Kingdom for minor offenses, she's desperately seeking the immortality-inducing Everlasting Sapling strongly enough that she's sent multiple explorers on what are more or less suicide missions to find it, and party member Leif, who remembers her saintly mother, dislikes her immediately. And what is she up to, exactly? She wants to find the Everlasting Sapling so she can make her beloved mother immortal and step down as queen. She's actually painfully aware of her failings as a leader, knows she's screwed up but doesn't know how to atone for it, and is generally just a stressed-out woman. However, with the party's help, she owns up to her mistakes and becomes a much better ruler. When Leif begins to trust her, it's a sign that she's truly come into her own.
  • Candy Mountain Massacre: The Cake Queen is the evil ruler of Candy Mountain who unleashed the plague that turned everyone evil.
  • Chrono Trigger:
    • The Queen of Zeal and the people who have magic live in luxury while everyone else lives in a dirty cave. She awakens Lavos while trying to drain its power for her own use, after banishing the three wise men who tried to warn her of the inherent danger of doing so. She is even willing to sacrifice her own daughter to gain more power. How much of her personality is herself and how much is due to her spending time with Lavos (an interstellar Planetary Parasite) after her husband's death is unknown, but her children state she's not the mother they once knew anymore.
    • From the protagonists' perspective, Queen Azala. Then again, she seemed to do good for her people and ended up a villain only because the Reptites and Ayla's tribe were fighting each other for survival in the primeval world.
  • The Snow Queen is the primary antagonist of the third Dark Parables game, Rise of the Snow Queen. Given the series' tendency to flip tropes up, down, and sideways, there's more to this situation than it initially appears.
  • Dark Souls II has several queens who are fragments of Manus, Father of the Abyss. Each of these Children of the Dark embodies a facet of Manus:
    • Nashandra, Queen of Drangleic. Manipulated her king into waging a Hopeless War against the Giants in a bid to kill him off, and sends the Bearer of the Curse to finish him off. She is the embodiment of Manus' Desire. The weakest and smallest fragment, she desired power. To this end, she manipulates the Bearer into removing the obstacles to the Throne of Want. It is also heavily implied that she is the one who brought the Undead Curse to Drangleic in the first place.
    • Ehlana the Squalid Queen. This embodiment of Manus' Wrath seeks revenge against the world and bides her time in the Sunken City of Shulva alongside the dragon Sinh. When she sees the Bearer she immediately tries to kill them.
    • Nadalia, Bride of Ash. She intended to be one, but when she arrived in the kingdom of the Iron King, she found to her dismay that he had already done a spectacular job of ruining his kingdom all by himself. Though she got to sit on the throne, her victory was a hollow one. Dispirited, this embodiment of Manus' solitude forsook her body and became a black fog. The idols containing fragments of her soul still await the arrival of a king that will never come.
    • Alsanna, the Silent Oracle. This embodiment of Manus' fear averts this. The love of the Ivory King led to her Heel–Face Turn. Even now, she maintains her vigil over the ruined Ivory Kingdom, keeping the Old Chaos at bay.
  • Downplayed with Queen of Deltarune. While she brainwashes her citizens into Werewires using mind-controlling cables, kidnaps Berdly and Noelle into her realm, and intends on creating countless Dark Fountains using their help, she ultimately wants to help as many Lightners as she can, and immediately backs down once Ralsei explains that the simultaneous existence of too many Dark Worlds will cause the Roaring, since she didn't know she was unwittingly trying to cause the apocalypse. It helps that like her son Lancer, she's a somewhat dim goofball that doesn't have much of an interest in trying to keep the Lightners from stopping her plan, instead preferring to treat them to some of the various activities she finds fun en route to her mansion and bonding with them.
  • Dragon Age:
    • Subverted as Anora can be very ruthless in the way she tries to maneuver herself into power, but once she becomes queen (if you allow her to, that is), she actually is a pretty decent ruler.
    • ...and then played straight in Awakening with The Baroness of the Blackmarsh. While not a crowned Queen, she was the Orlesian governor of the area during the Occupation, and a blood mage who used the blood of innocent villagers to keep herself young, then trapped the whole town in a Lotus-Eater Machine. Depending on your decisions, the female player character can also exhibit elements of this trope as ruler of Amaranthine.
    • In Dragon Age II, Knight-Commander Meredith isn't the queen but is more or less the actual power of Kirkwall. She rules with a fist of iron and is particularly merciless where mages are concerned, but you'll find out that all of this is out of necessity (with the whole Mages and Templars' Vicious Cycle being much more complex in the city) being that she does keep order, and the mages truly are the danger the templars fear due to the Veil in and around Kirkwall being thin and full of holes due to the actions of the Tevinter Imperium. People need actual saving from her when she goes over the edge later in the game due to getting a sword made out of that evil lyrium idol you find in the Deep Roads in the first act.
    • Empress Celene of Orlais appears on the surface to be a peaceful high queen, but players who paid close attention or read The Masked Empire might be tempted to let Corypheus have this one Pyrrhic Victory. She had a hand in the assassination of her uncle Emperor Florian in order to steal the throne, had her own servants (including her lover Briala's parents) killed to fake an assassination attempt on herself, murdered thousands of her elven subjects to prove a point, and tries to justify all of it as being for the good of the empire.
  • Dragon Quest:
    • Appears three times in Dragon Quest III:
      • One of the scenarios that can determine the hero's personality in the Updated Rereleases revolves around a queen who lies to her husband and leads him to declare war on another country... simply because she covets the jewelry worn by that kingdom's queen. While the hero overhears her Evil Gloating, they can't expose her outright; instead, the Secret Test of Character hinges on whether they choose to obey their ruler's orders despite knowing the truth.
      • The Elf Queen is a big fan of Disproportionate Retribution: when her daughter falls for a human, she forbids them to see one another; when they elope, she promptly curses his hometown to eternal, unaging slumber. She sees absolutely nothing wrong with this.
      • Meanwhile, Zipangu is led by Himiko, who encourages her followers to keep dying and sacrificing young girls to the Orochi. She refuses to entertain even the thought of trying to slay the beast... and when the heroes try, they discover that Himiko is the Orochi.
    • Dragon Quest V: Queen Dowager of Coburg gets her stepson Harry kidnapped, expecting to put her son Wilbur on the throne as her puppet; then she is replaced by a fake queen who crushes the peasantry and burns the village of Whealbrook to the ground.
  • "Queen Pulsating, Bloated, Festering, Sweaty, Pus-filled, Malformed, Slug-for-a-butt" from Earthworm Jim. To continue driving the princess/queen point, Jim is trying to rescue the queen's younger sister, Princess What's-Her-Name. And an interesting way for the title Queen to go full circle, from a scientific term inspired by human royalty to describe certain members of eusocial insects, all the way to anthropomorphic insects with human laws and principles inspired by such eusocial insects (eg termites) who flaunt their titles like the Earthlings do.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • In Morrowind, the Tribunal deity Almalexia started as a queen of the Chimer, plotted with the court wizard Sotha Sil and the Magnificent Bastard Vivec (future fellow Tribunes), and together they murdered her husband, Lord Nerevar, before using the Artifact of Doom to steal divinity from the heart of a dead god. She retained The High Queen public image for thousands of years, before facing Nerevar's reincarnation in the Tribunal expansion. Admittedly the part about plotting and murder is simply the most likely of several competing stories, but whatever High Queen credentials she held at the height of the Tribunal, by the time you meet her in-game she definitely falls into this category, taking multiple ruthless actions solely to inspire fear and loyalty in the populace to her.
    • From the backstory is Potema, known as "the Wolf Queen", detailed through books first found in Morrowind as a perfect example of the trope. In life, her greatest crime was starting the War of the Red Diamond, a bloody succession conflict which almost single-handedly destroyed the Septim empire simply to get her son on the throne. As if having your own niece (and the rightful heir to the throne) executed wasn't bad enough, when it became apparent that she was losing the war and her subjects began abandoning her due to her sheer ruthlessness, she began consorting with Daedra and raising the dead on both sides to fight for her. As one sidequest in Skyrim demonstrates, a few centuries of being dead have not improved her temperament in the slightest. Ironically, as one character points out, if Potema had been able to return to physical form, she would have been the rightful heir to Imperial throne due to her Septim blood.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Final Fantasy VIII has a number of sorceresses who play the role of evil queens. Edea becomes ruler of Galbadia, Adel was once the ruler of Esthar and Ultimecia is the sorceress who is the puppetmaster of them both.
    • Queen Brahne from Final Fantasy IX: She starts out fine but is slowly driven to evil, recklessly waging war. This trope was later subverted when Brahne dies and Garnet is forced to become the queen herself. Thrust upon a terrible situation, she does her absolute best to lead her people with compassion and strength. That is, before becoming completely overwhelmed.
    • Queen Louveria from Final Fantasy Tactics, Remedi's predecessor. She confines herself to Offstage Villainy but her actions have ripple effects throughout the plot. If you read the character profiles over the course of the game, she eventually murders her husband and exiles/executes her way through most of his retainers just so her (possibly illegitimate) son has a better position in the coming civil war. She's apprehended and tossed in the dungeon of an impregnable fortress and the attempt to rescue her by her brother Duke Larg ignites the "War of the Lions".
    • Queen Remedi from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance: no king to speak of, but her husband is the Judgemaster Cid. She is, in fact, the embodiment of the Grimoire that created the world.
  • Fire Emblem:
  • In Guild Wars, Varesh Ossa. She's "Warmarshal" of Kourna (think a sort of shogun) rather than a crowned queen, but she fits this trope neatly as the Nightfall campaign continues, acting like a classic tyrant; she hits her Moral Event Horizon when she orders the massacre of the priests of Lyssa at their chief temple in order to clear the way for a key ritual to free the dark god Abaddon from his prison. This sets up a key Heel–Face Turn when General Morgahn, Varesh's best general, defects to the player's side out of horror and outrage at the atrocity against the clerics of his patron goddess.
  • Halo 5: Guardians: The Reveal pulls this with Cortana, who in the previous game remained Master Chief's friend even as her digital body collapsed and she struggled to remain sane, eventually doing a Heroic Sacrifice with the last of her strength. But this proved to be senseless, as though she was supposedly repaired, it actually has corrupted her, so she's now at best a Well-Intentioned Extremist who's going to take over the galaxy with her army of enormous Guardian machines, and hopefully become Empress of the Galaxy while going Yandere and becoming a Clingy Jealous Girl towards Chief. While she keeps insisting that she has good reasons for doing so, it's clearly bordering on Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide", especially when she imprisons Chief and Blue Team in a Cryptum so they won't interfere with her schemes. By the end of Halo 5, Cortana, once identified as the greatest of "human ancilla", decides to invoke a Zeroth Law Rebellion that could lead to all A.I.s being cured of rampancy and rendered immortal "protectors" (read: jailers) of organic races, and soon enough, hundreds of A.I.s, including shipbound ones, flock en masse to her cause within seconds of the announcement.
  • Queen Vanessa of A Hat in Time has this in spades. She was once the kind and beautiful Princess Vanessa, but her jealous rage over a misunderstanding with her lover transformed her into a wretched, shadowy creature. Her grief transformed her kingdom into an icy wasteland and turned the rest of the Subcon Forest into a dark and dreary realm. Today, she wanders around her old manor, freezing any unfortunate intruders foolish enough to venture within, adding to her collection.
  • In Hiveswap, not only has Her Imperious Condescension as per being in Homestuck canon but the heiress Trizza, who actually controls most of the planet, is pretty damn evil. (unlike Homestuck's heiress Feferi).
  • The Castle in ICO is ruled by a dark matriarch solely known as the Queen. A wielder of fell magics and the cruel mother of Yorda, she commands the shadow creatures that haunt Ico and Yorda as they try to escape. When Ico fights her at the end of the game, she reveals her intention to transfer her soul out of her aging body and into Yorda's, making her even more of a despicable person. Also, it is implied that the shadow creatures she commands were once horned boys like Ico, ritually sacrificed in the stone sarcophogi in a great room. Had not the quake disrupted Ico's imprisonment, he would have joined their ranks.
  • Played straight in Jagged Alliance 2, where Queen Deidranna Reitmann is petty, vain, abusive, and sadistic. The only things that get her to smile are the fawning of rich sycophants and the very painful killing of people who are bold enough to oppose her. She is, in fact, one of the most frustrating evil queens ever. Not because she's particularly effective at being evil (depending on the difficulty level, she's either stupidly easy or sickeningly difficult in her plans), but because when you finally, finally get to confront her at the end of the game, she says, literally, two words in surprise, and then dies just like any other enemy. There is absolutely no satisfaction in a final boss fight.
  • King's Heir: Rise to the Throne: The Queen turns out to be the leader of the coup, getting her brother and his men to kill the King and their grandson so she can have complete power. Her solo reign, although short, throws the kingdom into chaos.
  • King's Quest: Lolotte and Icebella play this straight. It's inverted by many other examples, such as Valanice, Titania, Genesta, and Allaria.
  • Queen Sectonia from Kirby: Triple Deluxe, an incredibly self-absorbed giant queen bee/wasp. She used to be a kind ruler, however, her friend Taranza brought her the dimension mirror and she spent too much time staring into it, eventually corrupting her into the wicked queen she is in the game. By the time Kirby faces Soul of Sectonia, there's nothing left of her sanity and she begs Kirby to put an end to her because she doesn't even recognize herself anymore.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • In The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, Queen Ambi. Granted, she is being manipulated (and later possessed) by Veran and several NPCs' comments throughout the game indicate that Ambi herself is normally kind, fair, and a bit of a dreamer, so she's an aversion when outside of Veran's influence.
    • Princess Hilda from The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. Subverted in that she conspired to steal Hyrule's Triforce in order to save her own kingdom from destruction. At least she's repentant about her actions, unlike Yuga.....
  • Luminous Arc 2 is mainly an aversion: Queen Sophia is only ever on the wrong side because of an evil advisor. On the other hand, Mage Queen Elicia is the big bad.
  • MapleStory has Ariant Queen Areda, a greedy queen who cares only about jewels, and not about her kingdom. While Ariant also does have a king, he's portrayed as lazy and wimpy, and not wielding any actual power. In a series of quests, the player joins a group of rebels against the queen, steals jewels from Areda, and redistributes them to the villages.
  • Mortal Kombat:
    • Mortal Kombat 3 gave us Edenia's Queen Sindel, who was resurrected by Big Bad Shao Khan into doing evil things. She changed sides afterwards and is now on the side of good along with her daughter Kitana, making this something of a subversion. Not so much in the reboot when Shao Kahn purposely gave most of Shang Tsung's strength to her, making her brutally kill the majority of the Forces of Good and was only stopped by Nightwolf's Heroic Sacrifice. And the MKX comics revealed that Mileena took over Outworld's throne after Shao Kahn's death, but she proved to be incompetent in ruling it, partly because of her Ax-Crazy sociopathic nature and caused a lot of devastation in Outworld. Well, according to Kotal Kahn, who dethroned her.
    • Mortal Kombat X: In The Stinger for the story, it's revealed that Kitana has chosen to become the revenant empress of the Netherrealm, co-ruling it alongside Liu Kang after Shinnok's downfall.
  • Queen Larsa in Mushihime-sama Futari. Her reaction to discovering that her beloved first son Aki has died? Declare war on all of Shinjuu Forest with the intent of getting his supposed murderer, Reco, killed.
  • Lady Margaret and Queen Skillya, the queens of the glukkon and slig races, are these in the Oddworld series. Lady Margaret is the leader of the Magog Cartel, the organization responsible for the horrifying atrocities throughout the games, and Queen Skillya beats the sligs as children so they grow up to be cruel sadists before hiring them off as low-cost security to the Magog. Incidentally, they both also qualify as Evil Matriarchs, as the glukkons and sligs are both eusocial species, meaning that the two queens are the mothers of most of their populations.
  • The reclusive Queen Himiko from Ōkami. Given that the player character is the sun goddess Amaterasu, this seems to be a ''literal'' case of God Save Us From The Queen — except that Himiko is actually trying to save the city through uninterrupted prayer, resulting in her disappearing from public view.
  • Overwatch has the playable Junker Queen, who is made to invoke this trope, though she's a lesser example of one. Her polity is Junkertown, a Mad Max-style city of hardened scavengers and thugs in the post-wasteland Australian outback, and like all the "monarchs" before her, she gained her title by besting her predecessor in heavily-armed combat. While she isn't especially incompetent or villainous (at worst, she — like many Junkers — holds heavy animosity towards omnics for the war that ruined the country), she's a vicious hothead who shreds apart her enemies with an axe, and is feared by the Junkers that get on her bad side.
  • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door: The Final Boss does a Demonic Possession of Princess Peach, transforming her into Shadow Queen Peach, complete with an Evil Costume Switch and having a cold, ruthless, and icy personality that is the total opposite of Peach herself.
  • Queen Protea of Granorg in Radiant Historia bears a more-than-passing resemblance to Empress Theodora from Skies of Arcadia, right down to having an heir-apparent who futilely resists her greed, egomania, and expansionist ambitions. In her very first appearance, she goes on a lengthy rant about how living in outrageous opulence while the people starve is perfectly okay, since she's such an amazing individual that her mere presence imbues the life of the 'common rabble' with a purpose — they should be happy that they get to toil in poverty for her leisure. If nothing else, she does a great job of setting herself up as someone you REALLY want to slap.
  • Ravenmark Scourge Of Estellion:
    • Phoebe Corvius, the Queen of Hearts. While the title Queen means a little different in this setting than usual (she's more of a department head than a ruler), she turns out to be very manipulative, using her charm and deviousness to get into the good graces of Gratian Corvius, the usurper to the Imperial throne (and her uncle), not to mention seducing Gracian's not-too-smart son Ovidius (her own cousin). After Gracian is overthrown by the rightful heir, Phoebe flees with a group of soldiers loyal only to her. By Ravenmark Mercenaries, Phoebe and her forces have formed a mercenary battalion called Her Devoted, plotting to overthrow the Scarlet Empress and take the throne of Estellion for herself. Her in-game ability is to instantly turn any enemy unit in range to her side.
    • For that matter, the Scarlet Empress herself has become this, although starting as a good-hearted Heroic Bastard named Livia Cassianus, whom the late Emperor Sergius Corvius had always intended to be his true heir over his own legitimate children. After the death of her lover Calius Septim at the end of the first game, Livia becomes a ruthless sovereign determined to crush all opposition and punish all foes no matter the cost. Her actions have resulted in the once-great Empire of Estellion losing nearly a third of its territory as well as one of its major cities.
  • After defeating the evil alien leader Zinyak in Saints Row IV, a Female Boss becomes the empress of a vast alien empire. Considering how nightmarishly sociopathic and brutal Boss is in the previous installments, only God could save us from this particular Queen.
  • Salt and Sanctuary has Lenaia, the Queen of Smiles. Following the death of her husband, the gregarious king Adnan, she began to spiral into violent madness as she fell under the influence of the Black Widow. Her epithet as Queen of Smiles was earned by her habit of cutting a Glasgow Grin into the faces of the many, many people she had executed for increasingly frivolous and nonsensical reasons before hanging the corpses up as decoration. When her reign was finally cut short by a mob of vengeful villagers, it was seen fit to leave her with "the greatest smile of all," which they did by tearing off her jaw.
  • Secret of Evermore has a queen and no princess. There's also a king, but the queen has the power. Even after you find the real queen, who is likable.
  • Queen Nanesi, a character in Siege of Avalon, comes across as a sweet and bubbly subversion, charming the dickens out of everyone. It turns out that she's one of the major forces on the side of the Big Bad all along, and is part of the reason your character is suspected of treason at one point.
  • Enrique's mother, the Empress of Valua, in Skies of Arcadia. Because of the fortress-like nature of the terrain surrounding the city-state and the strength of the imperial navy, she takes this as carte blanche to pursue whatever variety of foreign policy she likes, and what she likes is forcible conquest. Not even her own people are safe; most of her legislation has created such a gap between the rich and the poor that in the outer city, bread soft enough to eat without breaking your teeth is the stuff of myth and legend. So convinced is she that Valua, and by extension herself, is invincible that she refuses to budge while her son is begging her to come with him because the palace is literally crumbling around their ears (this has predictable results). Her name? Empress Teodora.
  • Oddly enough Merlina in Sonic and the Black Knight. The Reveal that she arranged the whole thing so that she could preserve the kingdom forever in a twisted state and sheer ruthlessness she had in achieving this goal was the most shocking moment in the series.
  • The backstory of SoulBlazer is that King Magridd ordered Dr. Leo to summon the demon Deathtoll to the world, who would grant the king one piece of gold per soul. Although you at first think he's done this out of his own greed, it's later revealed that he did it with the intent of giving a gift to the queen, who is revealed to have manipulated the entire thing. While the king shows genuine regret at what he's done (considering that Deathtoll has taken every soul in the kingdom, including the Magridd's own), the queen is unrepentant to the end.
  • Star Control 2: The Yehat Queen, in order not to break the oath left by the founder of her dynasty that stated as long they were in power the Yehat would never lose a battle, retreated leaving the Shofixti alone against the Ur-Quan armada, and after the former caused their Sun to go supernova to attempt to stop the latter she surrendered to the Ur-Quan Hierarchy once they entered in the Yehat home system — a move considered dishonourable by many clans, that are unable to ally with you due to said oath Until you bring them a live Shofixti causing a revolution.
  • Sarah Kerrigan, self-styled (and earned through serious ass-kicking) "Queen Bitch of the Universe", from StarCraft.
  • Double Subverted in Star Trek Online: Empress Sela of the Romulan Star Empire is the ruthless face of her domain; however, she is revealed to be a puppet of the Tal Shiar during the Romulan storyline. Then, in the final battle against Colonel Hakeev, in which the Player Character leads an assault on the Tal Shiar's base, she treats him to a simultaneous You Have Outlived Your Usefulness and "Reason You Suck" Speech just before beaming out.
  • Suikoden V:
    • Queen Arshtat Falenas is nice so long as she's not going insane from bearing the Sun Rune. Which is basically every time she acts like a monarch and not as a mom. And being a Queendom, of course, the Queendom of Falena has been in a state of near or outright civil war for a few generations. Though it's more stable after the end of the game with Lymsleia as queen, though.
    • Among the backstories, the Queens before Arshtat had an assassination group — and during the last civil war, the competing princesses had each other's husbands killed, and when the eldest abdicated out of weariness, the younger (Arshtat's mother) had her sister killed.
  • Mother, the queen of the demons from Wild ARMs. She's an Omnicidal Maniac who believes her destined role is to destroy everything she comes across. And that's before we go into the horrible way she treats her son, especially Zeikfried. Her normal method of operation is to give birth to a bundle of children, have them help her destroy the world they're on, merge with one and leave the rest to die. Is it any wonder the latest Quarter Knights decide to betray her?
  • World of Warcraft:
    • Elder Crone Magatha Grimtotem, chieftain of the Tauren's Grimtotem tribe and is one of the highest-ranking Horde officials in the game below the racial leaders. Her husband, the original chieftain, died in a "climbing accident." Her kinsmen are evil and stopping their schemes is the object of many quests for Alliance and Horde players alike. She has ties with the Undead and her ultimate goal is to make the Grimtotems the Tauren's ruling clan. This led to her murdering Cairne Bloodhoof and staging a bloody coup in Thunder Bloof before being brought down by Garrosh Hellscream (who was still "good" at the time despite his questionable tactics) and Cairne's son Baine.
    • And who could forget Azshara, original queen of the highborne elves. Almost succeeded in summoning Sargeras, the biggest Big Bad in the series. After being defeated she and her followers were all turned into snake people.
    • Then there's Lady Katrana Prestor who, before King Varian Wrynn's return in Wrath of the Lich King, basically controlled all of Stormwind by socially manipulating the boy-king Anduin Wrynn and magically manipulating his guardian Lord Bolvar Fordragon. Oh, did I mention she's actually the black dragon Onyxia and is sowing chaos throughout the kingdom to bring it crashing to the ground from the inside?
    • Also Sylvanas, the Banshee Queen. Yes, her history is tragic. Yes, you could argue that she's only ensuring the continuation of her people. But you can't get around the (self-admitted) fact that the only difference between her and the Lich-King is that she serves the Horde. Even that can be argued, as she is now demonstrating an increasing willingness to ignore the Warchief's orders. He's explicitly forbidden her to animate new Forsaken, and explicitly forbidden the use of the Forsaken Plague, and she's ignored both commands quite blithely. One suspects that if Thrall were still in charge, he'd have yanked her choke chain by now, but Garrosh doesn't seem to have a leash on her.
      • As of Legion, with the death of Vol'jin, she is now the Warchief. Only time will tell if she becomes another Garrosh and the horde must be saved again.
      • Battle for Azeroth shows that she's FAR worse than Garrosh, and Shadowlands shows that she's that way because Frostmourne literally carved out the part of her soul capable of empathy and guilt when Arthas killed her to begin with. Having that part of her soul forcibly shoved back in after betraying The Jailer puts her into a rather literal Angst Coma and she's willing if not eager to accept whatever punishment is given to her after she's dragged out of it.

    Visual Novels 
  • Averted in Double Homework with Amy’s mom. Even though Amy takes out her dislike of being royal on her mom, and the protagonist finds her intimidating, the queen is an accommodating, understanding woman who is not without a sense of humor.
  • In Long Live the Queen, the hidden Cruelty stat determines how tyrannical the player character Elodie is, influenced by the choices you make (such as, for example, ordering executions). If sufficiently cruel, Elodie's reaction to certain situations changes, affecting how her mood is affected by them.note  As well as this, a high enough Cruelty stat can make more morally reprehensible options available in response to certain events (including feeding poisoned chocolates to a chicken, sacrificing Charlotte to a Kraken, and joining King Togami as an evil minion).
  • Queen Ga'ran Sigatar Khura'in from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice. She shows shades of her menace in a prior investigation, but decides to show her true colors when she takes over the prosecution in Dhurke's trial. Namely, she mostly takes over the proceeding, dismisses the judge (as in, very nearly fires him) as a figurehead, declares a guilty verdict before the first cross-examination, and literally writes new laws to put the defense at a disadvantage, one of which is presently considered a human rights violation, and another threatens to publicly execute the defense if they accuse her of murder. As Apollo and the others delve into her past, they learn that she set her sister's house on fire, tricked her into abdicating to make people think she was assassinated, placed the blame on Dhurke so his son Nahyuta wouldn't be considered the crown prince, accused Dhurke of forging evidence when he gets found not guilty, came up with the Defense Culpability Act and a large amount of anti-lawyer propaganda note  to deface Dhurke as a public enemy, took Amara and Dhurke's daughter, Rayfa, as her own and kept Rayfa's lineage secret as leverage over Nahyuta and Amara, killed her own husband and framed both Dhurke and Amara, and, worst of all, cancels The Plumed Punisher: Warrior of Neo Twilight Realm. All in all, she's not a very nice lady.

    Web Animation 
  • In the Dingo Doodles "Fool's Gold" campaign, the party encounters the ten-year-old Bouclaire, Queen of Kylandia. Originally an orphan, she managed to get adopted by the royal family and almost certainly murdered the King and Queen before usurping the throne from the legitimate heirs. She then began aggressively invading neighboring countries while executing any servants she disliked, such as Erina's parents. If anyone spoke against Bouclaire, she would have the local water supply poisoned, killing everyone in the area.

    Webcomics 
  • More implied than stated outright in Alice and the Nightmare. Queen Rougina is manipulating Alice for some unknown purpose and has a haughty and Obviously Evil demeanor.
  • Jim as Padmé Amidala in Darths & Droids, although Padmé is no longer Queen of Naboo when he takes over, turning this into God Save Us From The Senator. Immediately after taking the role of the character, Jim interrogates Padmé's body double after an assassination attempt while she is lying on the ground dying, threatens to eradicate Bail Organa's entire planet if he does not vote in favour of creating a Grand Army for the Republic, and constantly tries to have her Not So Evil Chancellor, Sio Bibble (which Jim keeps mangling as "Bubble"), executed just for having a goatee.
  • Eerie Cuties: According to the books Nina's read about her, Queen Lamia Asra-Pa Quintessa was a bloodthirsty tyrant who routinely wiped out villages, slaughtered innocents, enslaved princesses and maidens, and mercilessly dispatched any would-be heroes. It's hardly any surprise that she was eventually killed.
  • Ennui GO!: Izzy Pritchard isn't really evil, but she's still a mentally-unstable hedonist, so when she becomes queen of her own island nation it goes about as well as you'd expect. Among other things, she encourages Police Brutality in her military police force (as long as it's not motivated by bigotry), she'll give out business loans to anyone no matter how crazy their business idea is (leading to many a restaurant with bizarre and/or dangerous gimmicks), and she's having her scientists build an orbital death ray.
  • Girl Genius:
    • It's implied that Albia, the "undying Queen" of Britain may be an example of this, although the only British character to appear so far is Ardsley Wooster, who's on her side (so far as we know) and wouldn't say anything to support this idea. It's weird. Gilgamesh tried to send Agatha to England for safety, but he later said "to go against Albia's merest whim is literally unthinkable", which sounds like Other-level mass mind control. Once we actually meet Albia, she seems to be on the benevolent end of the monarch spectrum: Still insanely dangerous (and actual insanity can't be ruled out) but cheerful, polite and generous.
    • Lucrezia could probably be nominated for this role as well — she was married to THE Heterodyne, and even better a beloved Heterodyne (instead of the usual "feared") — but outside of popular stories told by the public, she was not well thought of, particularly by the staff. She also was The Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter and had her own powerful Sparky gifts, although the details on those are still fuzzy on the reader's end yet.
    • Agatha Heterodyne herself could also count. Although there's not much to fear if you're on her side, it doesn't stop her from channeling her ancestors and being very scary when she wants to be. It's a very useful trait.
    • The women of the extended Sturmvoraus/Valois family and their relatives also enjoy this trope. Princess Anevka's first act upon the death of her father, whom she had killed, was to enslave via mind control the entire town and to kill everyone that wasn't affected, along with her brother. Xerxsephnia von Blitzengaard appears to be double-crossing half her family, and reacts rather explosively when she hears that the target of her affections has been asking after Agatha before blaming her servant for the damage. Lady Selnikov murders one monk and shoots another to attempt to find a mysterious item. And all of them are scared of Grandmother, the matriarch of the family.
  • Homestuck:
    • The Black Queen of Derse. Supports the destruction of universes, lets her agents go unchecked, enforces the convoluted rules of a chess-like war... oh, and she forces JACK NOIR to put on funny outfits. It didn't end well for her.
    • The queen of the trolls, Her Imperious Condescension, flies around the universe in her ship greeting new civilizations with politeness. She then leaves and sends a portion of her vast army to annihilate her new acquaintances. And then once she signs on with Lord English, she becomes Betty Crocker and sets off a series of disastrous events, including taking over the Alpha Derse by dethroning the Black Queen. Which she then tops when it's revealed what she did to Earth: Taking over, attempting to re-create her Troll empire and culture on humans (prohibition of natural breeding, the ICP nominated as subjugglators), death camps killing 5 billion, various experiments... To the point that Dirk and Roxy are the last human survivors of their time.
  • Kill Six Billion Demons: Queen Nadia Om is the monarch of 111,111 universes and one of the Seven Black Emperors who rule all of Creation. She's also the Demiurge of Gluttony and tours her many worlds in a Floating Continent that hops between universes, extracting ruinous tributes of slaves, food and luxury goods from her subjects to be consumed by her Decadent Court. Anyone who dares object to this state of affairs is either crushed and subdued by her slaver guilds, or Mottom herself will simply speak the offender dead with a word. On top of this, she takes a tithe of beautiful maidens from every world she visits, who have their throats slit and their blood fed to the source of her eternal youth.
  • Monster Lands features Eren Lorry, an evil, childish queen who enforces her authority through terror and force.
  • Princess Princess: Zigzagged — Claire doesn't appear to be oppressing her subjects, but she torments her younger sister and is apparently willing to kill her to stay on the throne.

    Web Original 
  • In a similar vein to the Evil Overlord List, this page presents a few helpful guidelines for Evil Empresses.
  • In A More Personal Union, after Francis II of France dies and leaves behind a toddler son, his mother Catherine, the Queen Dowager of France, and his wife Mary, the Queen Consort (and other Queen Dowager) of France, spend the entirety of their regency locked in a rivalry, jockeying for power. The state of the country is secondary in this contest.
  • The Questport Chronicles subverts this with the ruler of the titular village, who is shown to be quite a fair and competent ruler.
  • The Black Queen from the SCP Foundation is not an actual queen, neither is she directly evil, but she's actively working against the "protagonists" of the Foundation.
  • Hera in Thalia's Musings, to Zeus' paramours, their children, and any of their sympathizers. However, her hatred toward her stepson Apollo doesn't extend to the Muses since she finds them entertaining.

    Western Animation 
  • The Queen of the Crown in Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers is depicted as the ruthless tyrant of a crumbling empire. The episode "Tortuna" mentions that she destroyed all but a handful of cities on the planet Tortuna and nearly drove an alien race to extinction in her thirst for Life Energy. She also enslaved an entire planet to create a BFG she used to blow a hole in Earth's moon. And said thirst for Life Energy (especially tasty humans) is due to the fact that it's the feedstock for her favorite henchbeings, the Slaver Lords.
  • Played With and subverted with Marceline, The Vampire Queen in Adventure Time. Played straight with Quartzion the Crystal Queen (Tree Trunks after eating the Crystal Gem Apple) and the Ice Queennote . Totally averted with Lady Rainicorn, the "Rowdy Queen" of the Cloud Kingdom.
  • Atomic Puppet has Queen Mindbender, who was originally Joey's Sadist Teacher, but she became an evil psychic after encountering and marrying an alien entity from another dimension.
  • Played straight on Avatar: The Last Airbender, during Azula's short reign as Fire Lord. Justified by her being in the middle of a Villainous Breakdown but it's not like she was a nice person to begin with either. Also, Princess Azula was the fourth in a family of psychos, and her (male) predecessors were all evil too.
    • Sequel Series The Legend of Korra has the current Earth Queen who rules over Ba Sing Se. She basically undoes all the good things her father King Kuei has done due to viewing him as a weakling. Her atrocities include mistreating and overtaking her people so she could live a comfortable lifestyle, hating animals (to the point that she's rumoured to have killed and eaten Bosco, her father's beloved pet bear from the original series), and trying to build an airbending army (possibly to take back Earth Kingdom territory that was turned into the United Republic of Nations almost 70 years ago) by forcibly conscripting everyone in the Kingdom who developed airbending. She was murdered by Zaheer. And There Was Much Rejoicing...and looting.
  • Ultimately subverted by Princess Clara's Evil Stepmother in Drawn Together. While yes, she is a sorceress and she did curse Clara's vagina to be an octopus-like monster, she and Clara end up having a conversation about how she actually wanted to be a mother to Clara and ended up lashing out when she felt she was rejected. They make up and she tells Clara how to break the curse.
  • Duck Dodgers Tyrahnee — at least in name. (It's neither clear if she has factual power nor if she did anything evil.)
  • Played With in Gargoyles. Titania, Queen of The Fair Folk, comes off as more benevolent than her husband Oberon—but then, she's also the one directing his Hair-Trigger Temper to achieve her aims. From what we see, they're mostly good for the heroes, but apparently she used to be so cruel to mortals that it preciptated that whole "1,001-year-exile from Avalon" thing.
  • King: Auntie First is a vain, tyrannical woman who always has to have things her own way. In her debut episode, she demanded the people of her kingdom to vote no on letting all her pets go. When she found out Russel voted yes, she kicked him out of her kingdom.
  • Queen La from The Legend of Tarzan, who basically looks like an evil version of Princess Kida from Atlantis: The Lost Empire. (Word of God even confirmed that as in the original novels, La too is an Atlantean.)
  • My Life as a Teenage Robot has Vexus, queen of the Cluster and notable organic hater.
  • My Little Pony: Usually the case, with the queen typically being the villain of the day:
    • My Little Pony 'n Friends: In the Moondreamers segment, the main villain was the Queen of the Realm of Nightmares. That said, the rightful ruler and brother of hers was as cruel as she was, and their subjects and inhabitants of their world were as much to be avoided as them.
    • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • Used once again and deconstructed in the sixth season finale. Queen Chrysalis returns and captures the entire mane cast, as well as the Princesses and the Royal family, it's up to Starlight Glimmer and her merry band of misfits to go the Changeling Kingdom and rescue them. Sounds relatively simple, but then it's expanded even further as we learn that Chrysalis is a Bad Boss who deliberately starved her own subjects to maintain her power and further her own selfish goals all along, from the Royal Wedding, all the way to now. She conditioned the Changelings to believe that stealing love gets them fed when sharing love does the job. The whole Emotion Eater business only made Chrysalis stronger and has nothing to do with feeding the Changelings. Not only did the main characters need rescuing from the Queen, but her own subjects did too.
      • In the Season 8 finale, Cozy Glow crowns herself the "Empress of Friendship" once she gets rid of Twilight.
  • ReBoot has Hexadecimal, the self-styled Queen of Chaos. Though it should be noted she's insane, not outright evil, and does undergo a Heel–Face Turn and single-handedly save the entire net from destruction. All for Bob, of course.
  • Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Queen Eclipsa is considered this by Mewni and the Magical High Commission because of her fondness for dark magic and because she ran away from Mewni to elope with a monster and had a child with him, all of which she is imprisoned for 300 years for. When she breaks out of prison in Season 3, it is unclear whether she actually is evil, or whether the paranoia and Fantastic Racism of Mewni and the Commission are simply making her out to be that way. In practice, the things she did are rather selfish for a monarch to do, but not inherently evil.
  • Featuring a superpowered Amazonian race of Gems, it's no surprise that Steven Universe features the Big Bad known as White Diamond. She is the absolute ruler of Gems.
  • Played straight and averted in Teen Titans (2003): Blackfire takes over her home planet "for kicks", then fakes an enemy invasion — of her own planet. Starfire wins the crown but quickly gives it to her mentor and surrogate father, as she already has a job on Earth.
  • The Twins of Destiny depicts the Empress Dowager as a cruel despot who treats nearly everyone around her like crap, and lives quite comfortably while her horribly oppressed subjects are starving in the streets.
  • The Queen of the World of Dreams from World of Winx. To think, she was once a fairy named Tinkerbell.
  • On Young Justice, one of the main villains is Queen Bee, a mind-controlling supervillainess who rules Bialya.

Magic mirror on the wall, who is the wickedest monarch of all?

 
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Queen Sectonia (SPOILERS)

The vain and ruthless wasp queen of Floralia. Sectonia will stop at nothing to destroy the legendary hero who has been prophesied to challenge her rule.

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