Wants to Be Hated

You've got to love to be hated, find the good in being bad!
Oh, the crowd is full of gentlemen, but they've paid to see the cad!
Yes, it's a hoot, a kick, a gas, when you're the villain of the show!
And once you wear black, you never go back! It's a high to be loathed!

— Mr. Burns, The Simpsons, "Gorgeous Grandpa"

Some people want everyone to love them. Some people want nothing to do with anyone. And then, some people seem to want to be the bane of everyone's existence. The type of person who wants to be hated. They enjoy all the hatred that people throw towards them. Any insult is guaranteed to backfire. And in extreme cases, they may view compliments as insults. This character is often Hated by All (not that they mind). And if they accidentally do something heroic and are praised for it, they will not be happy.

Common to many Trolls whose only purpose is to inspire hatred in others, as well as many Card-Carrying Jerkasses and Villains, but it can also come from sympathetic characters who have faced some trauma. This character can be a Hate Sink if successful, but can easily become an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain if their plans to gain notoriety are less than successful. The extreme endpoint to this is Fame Through Infamy.

Note that Professional Wrestling examples are barred from this trope, as heels always try to invoke this trope. We don't need examples of every time a heel tried to get the people hate them, as that's basically the very reason they have that role in the first place.

Related to Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad, Zero-Approval Gambit (where incurring derision has a greater purpose than just the sake of doing so), and Enemies Equals Greatness (since this belief may lead to this trope if misguided). For those who feed on hatred literally, see Emotion Eater (though this does not exclude them from being this trope if they enjoy inspiring hatred). Compare/contrast Death Seeker. Contrast Heroic Self-Deprecation, where a character thinks they deserve to be hated in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Hunter × Hunter: Pariston Hill, a member of the Hunter's Association and one of the twelve Zodiacs, is noted as being one of the most despised Hunters in the organization despite his competence in the job. As Paristan reveals to Ging, during the plans to travel to the Dark Continent, he is aware of how much people hate him and actively tries to cultivate it. The reason being that, unlike most people in the world, who derive joy from experiencing love and being loved in return, Paristan only gains joy when as many people hate him as possible.
• Kill la Kill: Nui Harime is a particularly vile Troll who revels in causing misery to everyone around her. The more infuriated her victim is, the more gleeful Nui becomes, as she holds the belief that "hate and love are two sides of the same coin". Ragyo Kiryuin - the woman who created and raised Nui, and as such almost certainly the one to blame for her twisted worldview - lampshades this, even quoting the line from Macbeth.
• One-Punch Man:
  • Garou hates heroes and wants to be seen as a villain and a monster, but he doesn't get along with monsters that well either. It's eventually revealed that his real goal is to unite the world in fear of him. And even that is half-assed - in the end, Garou wants to be a hero, but refuses to admit it because he's convinced himself heroes are inherently bad people. He's taken the path he has because Evil Is Easy, but evil isn't making him happy. When Saitama calls him on his backwards worldview, Garou has no answers and surrenders.
  • Saitama himself invokes this after defeating the Deep Sea King. In order to convince the people watching that the other heroes efforts weren't worthless, he pretends that the only reason he was able to win was because the other heroes wore the Deep Sea King down first, and he just delivered the finishing blow and intended to steal all of the credit.
• Sailor Moon: Queen Nehelenia brainwashes Mamoru, subjects the Senshi to And I Must Scream fates and kills Usagi's Kid from the Future all to try and get her to hate her. It doesn't work.
• Squid Girl: A variation. Since Nagisa is the only one who thinks Squid Girl might be a threat, Squid Girl is overjoyed that someone's finally taking her seriously. As such, she wants to mess with Nagisa as much as possible so that the latter will fear her.

Comic Strips

• Popeye: In one strip, the Sea Hag shows up at Popeye's house, planning on moving in. He insults her and tells her to Get Out!, but she's very flattered. Granny says that's not the way to anger the Sea Hag, and she showers the Sea Hag with compliments, which offends her. The Sea Hag promptly storms out in a huff, saying she doesn't stay where she's wanted.

Film — Animation

• The LEGO Batman Movie: The Joker spends most of the movie trying to get Batman to acknowledge him as his greatest enemy while the latter still thinks of Superman as his greatest enemy at the moment.

Literature

• The Folk of the Air: Due to a lonely childhood combined with being a member of the royal household, Cardan learns that lashing out and behaving badly gets him attention, even if it's negative. By the time we see him as an adult, he's fully embraced his reputation as the bad seed of the Greenbriar family, including taking credit for murders he didn't actually commit. When he and Jude wind up dealing with their Belligerent Sexual Tension, her saying that she hates him is what turns him on.
• Dune: The Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is grotesquely obese to the point that wearing an anti-gravity harness is required for him to move. A descendant with access to his personality and experiences, due to a form of inherited memory, claims that the Baron deliberately cultivated obesity because he "enjoyed offending" onlookers.
• Temeraire: Tharkay is the mixed-race son of a British nobleman and a Nepalese woman, and his heritage makes him a target of suspicion and prejudice from other Englishmen. As a sort of coping mechanism, he deliberately cultivates distrust with the people he travels with, behaving suspiciously and making veiled insults, because he prefers being disliked for concrete reasons than being looked down on for no reason at all.

Live-Action TV

• Scrubs: In "My Big Move", Dr. Kelso gives the Janitor a new robin's egg blue uniform. The new uniform makes people less terrified and antagonistic towards the Janitor and more friendly towards him which he finds uncomfortable (due to a subconscious trigger, as the light blue color makes people feel more positive towards him than the dark green he used to wear). In the end, the Janitor decides he'd rather be hated and feared and goes back to his original uniform. However, the episode's ending shows him wearing the blue uniform around his animal friends.

Video Games

• BlazBlue: Yuuki Terumi, the Big Bad of the series, is a sort of ghost. As such he is tied to the Schroedinger principle whenever he's not possessing a host body, like Hazama, meaning he needs to be "observed" in order to exist. And the easiest way he has found to make people observe him is to make them obsess over their hatred of him. In other words, he is effectively sustained in this world by the hatred people feel for him. Unfortunately, Terumi is very, very good at instilling this hatred in others due to all of the evil things that he does since he also enjoys being a depraved monster.
• Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls: Jataro Kemuri looks like this. From his trauma due to his mother saying that he was so ugly and forcing him to wear a mask to hide his hideousness, his worldview became warped to the point that he only wants people to hate him.
• Elden Ring: The Dung Eater considers his life's purpose to be cursing the Golden Order via murder and defilement of corpses, even considering himself an Omen despite being a normal human. He welcomes hatred and disgust as part of his Devil Complex.
• Persona 5 Royal: Mementos target Heiji Ono wants attention so badly that he's willing to make himself a nuisance to everyone around him to get it. The Phantom Thieves change his heart and he stops his behavior.
• Touhou Project has the main antagonist of Double Dealing Character, Seija Kijin. As an Amanojaku, a yokai so synonymous with contrariness that Japan uses the word to refer to any Commander Contrarian, her worldview is entirely reversed: She, by nature, likes what others hate, so she creates chaos because others prefer peace, and she is at her happiest when everyone rejects her because that means she's being properly contrary. People liking her and being happy because of her actions depresses her.

Web Original

• The Nostalgia Critic: In the I'll Be Home for Christmas review, an annoying guy named D-Bag, a self-proclaimed parody of 1990s films starring "student A-holes," brags to Critic about doing awful things (such as bullying a nerd and burning down a little boy's house) because he thinks it's "cool to be hated." He eventually arrives at Critic's house and begs for Critic to hate him, but Critic refuses because it's "too easy" to hate a guy like him and it takes much more effort to be kind to people and relate to them. It's then revealed that D-Bag is so awful because he's the Devil's nephew.
• SMG4 has Waluigi. One of the biggest arcs on the channel was his attack. After being shunned and neglected by everyone his entire life, he decided to take over the world, using his newly discovered "rejection powers." As the name suggests, his powers strengthened with the more people who hated him. Because of this, the start of the arc, before he began his takeover, revolved around him causing essentially mass terrorism. One of the last episodes before his attack was a direct attack against Mario, the last person who liked him, that involved kidnapping and torturing his Mario's brother Luigi.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: Magic Man is a detestable trickster who curses people with his magic just to hear people say he's a jerk.
• Chaotic: Krystella and Klay are obnoxious, mean-spirited, hostile jerks to everyone they meet, and in return, everyone hates their guts, which the two are perfectly fine with. They've openly stated that they like being unpopular.
• The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack: In one episode, Flapjack tries hard to make at least one enemy in the Stormy Harbors because he learns from Captain Knuckles that every great adventurer has this. However, all his attempts to make people hate him cause something that makes him look likable instead. After Knuckles gets beaten near the end of the episode, he tells Flapjack that he hates him, which delights the boy.
• Phineas and Ferb: This is one of the big reasons why Dr. Doofenshmirtz is a Mad Scientist, to the point that in a couple of episodes where Perry the Platypus has quit hounding his footsteps because he's fed up with this assignment or been replaced by another agent, the doctor actually acts like a jilted lover and begs Perry to return.
• The Powerpuff Girls: Mojo Jojo is a Card-Carrying Villain who proudly proclaims that he is evil and wants everyone to acknowledge him as such. When he ends up saving the city from an alien invader, the townspeople (and even the narrator) hail him as a hero, which makes him extremely angry.
• The Simpsons: In the episode "Gorgeous Grandpa", Mr. Burns explains to Abe Simpson that being hated is very fun because everyone loves a villain. Of course, Abe also got to experience the the drawback of this kind of thinking, namely that people now despised him outside the wrestling ring as well thanks to Kayfabe, because Abe's original career was back in the 1950's when pro wrestling was portrayed as real, and the audience thought he really was the same jackass in real life.

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