"The serum did not fail. It did exactly what it was designed to do. It enhances what is already within. It is Herr Schmidt who has failed at being human."
"He doesn't have any redeeming qualities. He's a proper villain you know, proper with a capital P. He's going after something terrifying, he makes you very uncomfortable, and you're waiting for him to get his comeuppance. And those [qualities] are very fun to play without any apology or any craving for sympathy from the audience's side."
Given its source material, it should come as no surprise that among the numerous characters inhabiting the Marvel Cinematic Universe (including tie-in comics) are several vile villains.
- Non-canon material can be found here (novelizations, junior novels and other literature) and here (related video games).
- Examples from other films can be found here.
All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
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Films
Multiple Films
- Captain America films:
- The First Avenger & The Winter Soldier: Dr. Arnim Zola debuts as a cowardly scientist who joins the Nazis so they'll fund his work. Gleefully making war machines as part of HYDRA, Zola delights in the disastrous results of Dr. Abraham Erskine's Super-Soldier experiment in anticipation of Johann Schmidt turning to his scientific expertise instead, all while mocking his rival over the prospect of his family being executed for his failure. When Schmidt lets Zola in on his plot to Take Over the World, the scientist enslaves and experiments on prisoners of war to build the super weapons necessary for the scheme before betraying his boss to the Allies when it's made clear failure is inevitable. Having become a true believer in totalitarianism, Zola joins the newly-formed S.H.I.E.L.D. and goes about reforming HYDRA within its ranks, all the while masterminding global conflicts to make the people desperate for security. To do this, he abducts and brainwashes people into being "Winter Soldier" assassins, keeping them in stasis and torturously memory wiping them between missions. All of this culminates in a plot to launch Project Insight, which will trap the world in an eternal surveillance state and give HYDRA the ability to slaughter any dissidents, with it being explicitly stated that this will lead to tens of millions of deaths.
- The Winter Soldier & Civil War: Brock Rumlow is a S.H.I.E.L.D. operative who is really a member of HYDRA. As a STRIKE commander, Rumlow happily killed HYDRA's enemies for years. When Captain America exposes HYDRA's infiltration of S.H.I.E.L.D., Rumlow personally activates Project Insight, a trio of Helicarriers designed to kill millions of people who may threaten HYDRA's power, before killing several S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in the chaos. Barely surviving the battle and becoming severely disfigured, Rumlow abandoned his loyalties to HYDRA and became the Arms Dealer Crossbones, killing rival dealers and attacking several police stations. He then attacks the Institute for Infectious Diseases in Lagos, killing everyone inside and stealing a dangerous bioweapon. When stopped by Captain America, Rumlow sets off a suicide bomb, hoping to kill Cap and the numerous people nearby as revenge for his disfigurement.
- Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) & Captain Marvel (2019): Ronan the Accuser is a genocidal Kree terrorist and renegade wholly devoted to the destruction of the planet Xandar out of xenophobic zealotry and slighted family pride over the deaths of his forebears. Once in charge of the Accusers, Ronan would lead them in bombing planets suspected of harboring Skrulls, at one point trying to do the same to Earth. Disgusted by his people signing a peace treaty, Ronan enacts massacres throughout the galaxy and confronts a captive member of Xandar's Nova Corps, crushing the helpless man's skull with his Universal Weapon. As a henchman of the Mad Titan Thanos, Ronan seeks to gather an item for Thanos so that he will destroy Xandar for him. Under Thanos, Ronan has committed multiple murders, including the deaths of Drax the Destroyer's wife and daughter. Ronan later pursues the motley band of Guardians to the space prison the Kyln, and orders a full massacre of every prisoner to Leave No Witnesses. When he realizes the power of the Infinity Stone he has been sent to retrieve, Ronan double-crosses Thanos and vows to kill him after he's finished with Xandar. Assaulting the planet, he even orders his own men to become suicide bombers by flying their ships into Xandar, injuring and killing numerous civilians, before killing over 80,000 members of the Nova Corps in one fell swoop. After mocking Drax about finally remembering murdering his family, he declares Xandar "guilty" by his psychopathic philosophy and attempts to purge it of all life.
Individual Films
- Captain America: The First Avenger: Johann Schmidt, aka the Red Skull, is a profound narcissist who believes himself a god no longer bound by humanity's rules. The head of HYDRA, a Nazi military organization, Schmidt—as revealed in the tie-in comic First Vengeance—orchestrated the Night of Long Knives to butcher his political opposition before turning the group into his own personal cult. Schmidt is introduced killing the guardian of the Tesseract and ordering the entire village where it was hidden wiped out, before betraying the Nazi party in order to pursue his own goals and murdering three officers sent to check on his research. Schmidt uses the Tesseract to make fantastic new weapons for HYDRA, and has POWs torturously experimented on in order to replicate Dr. Abraham Erskine's Super Serum—which Schmidt originally forced Erskine to create by threatening his family, never informing him that they had already died in a concentration camp. Despite their fanatical devotion to Schmidt, he continually shows no concern for the welfare of his men, having them chomp cyanide pills when captured, executing one merely for surviving an attack, and activating the self-destruct sequence at another HYDRA base when Allied forces overrun it, not caring that hundreds of his troops will be killed in the blast. Schmidt's ultimate plan is to use his new weapons to wipe out half the planet, bombing nearly every major city—including his own capital—just so he can rule over what's left.
- Iron Man 3: Dr. Aldrich Killian is the CEO of A.I.M. and the creator of the Extremis compound. To perfect the compound, Killian preys on wounded combat veterans to experiment on, leading to several violently exploding. To cover up these failures, Killian turns these veterans into unwitting suicide bombers in public places, then blames the attacks and resulting deaths on the Ten Rings and an actor pretending to be the Mandarin. Desiring the War Machine armor, Killian's forces—as detailed in the film's Prelude comic—lure Rhodey to Hong Kong, where they almost release a virus and detonate a nuclear reactor in the city; Killian later secures the armor by capturing Rhodey and torturing him until the suit releases him. Along the way, Killian also murders his comrade Dr. Maya Hansen and forcibly injects Pepper Potts with Extremis, risking her detonation. Killian's master plan is to publicly assassinate President Ellis so the corrupt Vice President Rodriguez can take control, at which point Killian can propagate an endless War on Terror for limitless profits, all because Tony Stark rejected his partnership offer back in 1999.
- Thor films:
- The Dark World: Malekith the Accursed is the leader of the Dark Elves who intends to plunge the universe into eternal darkness. Millennia ago, Malekith waged war with Asgard to acquire the Aether, yet when he found he was losing the battle, Malekith disabled all of his soldiers' ships, crushing his enemies yet killing all of his own soldiers just so he could escape. Blaming Asgard for this, Malekith resurfaces in the present day to continue his hunt for the Aether. After Kursing his loyal follower Algrim without hesitation, Malekith tracks the Aether to Asgard, having Thor's mother Frigga killed when she hides its location from him. After removing the Aether from Jane Foster and taking it for himself, Malekith then leads an assault on London, using the Aether to begin reverting the universe to a state of complete darkness forever.
- Ragnarok: Hela, Goddess of Death and Thor's monstrous elder sister, helped Odin conquer the empire of Asgard, but when he tired of war and finally sought peace, she was sealed away when her bloodlust and cruelty grew too great. After murdering his guards, Hela was finally subdued and sealed but massacred the Valkyries until only one remained when they sought to prevent her escape. Upon returning to Asgard, Hela slaughters all its soldiers when they resist her and tries to claim the sword of Heimdall to open the gate to the other Realms. When Heimdall saves the population of Asgard, Hela attempts to have her undead soldiers slaughter all of Asgard's people while forcing Thor to watch them die—after she had blinded him in one eye. She even killed her own right-hand man, Skurge, when he takes a stand to defend Asgard's civilians. Monstrous, sadistic and insatiable, Hela seeks to open the gate to all other Realms so she can conquer everything and continue her work of drowning them in blood and tears.
- Doctor Strange (2016): Dormammu, lord of the Dark Dimension, is an "ego run amok" who seeks to assimilate all life in the multiverse and make them an eternally tortured extension of himself. Dormammu is the one who manipulated Kaecilius and his Zealots into evil, preying on Kaecilius's desire for eternal life so Kaecilius will destroy the Sanctums keeping him at bay from Earth. Dormammu only relents from torturing Dr. Strange to death for all of eternity at the realization Strange would trap him in an endless time loop, and leaves after dragging his Zealot followers into the "eternal life" he had promised them.
- Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy:
- Vol. 2: Ego, Peter "Star-Lord" Quill's father, is an immortal Celestial, who once traveled the universe seeking companionship, but found that other life utterly disappointed him and lost any interest in them. Ego instead decided upon a plan of assimilating all creation into himself in what he termed "The Expansion". Lacking the power to do so on his own, he sired countless children—including Mantis, whom he treated as no better than a pet—hoping they would inherit his Celestial powers, killing them out of disappointment when they didn't. Traveling to Earth, Ego met Meredith Quill, whom he developed genuine feelings for. Unwilling to deviate from The Expansion, Ego gave her the brain tumor that killed her to ensure nothing held him back from his self-appointed purpose. After learning Peter might carry the Celestial gene, Ego tracked him down, playing the good father to him before revealing the true purpose of The Expansion, revealing his true nature when he believed Peter wouldn't care. When Peter turns on Ego, Ego enslaves him to his own power to use Peter as a battery for the next thousand years before kicking off The Expansion to consume every living thing in the universe, while spitefully destroying Peter's Walkman which was a gift from Meredith and his last link to his mother. When Peter attempts to stop Ego, Ego without care also tries to murder Peter's friends.
- Vol. 3: The High Evolutionary, the universe's most consummate Evilutionary Biologist, has tortured, vivisected, and incinerated countless sapient beings in his never-ending quest to create the so-called "perfect" society. In his earlier days, the High Evolutionary experimented upon animals he uplifted into intelligence; among them was a young Rocket Raccoon, who endured torture that even the hardened Nebula says is worse than what Thanos inflicted upon her. After Rocket corrected the High Evolutionary on a slight mathematical error, the High Evolutionary began brooding over the idea that one of his creations upstaged him. Over this, the High Evolutionary allowed Rocket to stage a breakout with his friends in "Batch 89"—only to murder Lylla, the love of Rocket's life, in front of him, even cruelly mimicking Rocket's hysterical sobbing to his face. After this, the High Evolutionary goes from uplifting and destroying entire civilizations as a matter of course; when a planet of billions known as Counter-Earth fails to satisfy his expectations, he annihilates it and everyone on it, and earlier threatens to destroy his servant Ayesha's entire civilization should she fail him. Throughout the rest of the movie, the High Evolutionary blows up his own minions; commands the slaughter of Knowhere; and nearly allows his entire spaceship and thousands of sapient beings on it—including a laboratory full of hundreds of children he's bred to be his next attempt at a "perfect race"—to be destroyed in his insane obsession with killing the Guardians. The High Evolutionary's utopian rhetoric is peeled down as the ravings of an egomaniac by the end: a man who doesn't want to make things perfect, but "just hates things the way they are".
- Captain Marvel (2019): The Supreme Intelligence is an entity comprised of the greatest minds in Kree society uploaded into a single sapient being, where it is the absolute authority of the Kree Empire. The Supreme Intelligence has the single-minded goal to expand the rule of the Kree Empire as far and wide as possible, doing so by invading and oppressing countless planets. Due to the Skrulls resisting, the Supreme Intelligence had their homeworld of Skrullos destroyed and then hunted the Skrull survivors down to near-extinction. When Mar-Vell defected and assisted the Skrulls, the Supreme Intelligence ordered for Mar-Vell and her Light-Speed Engine to be captured. When Carol Danvers instead absorbs the engine's energy, the Supreme Intelligence crafts her into a Living Weapon dubbed "Vers", erasing her memories and fabricating a story that the Skrulls killed her family, before drafting her into the Starforce to war against the Skrulls. When Carol learns the truth, the Supreme Intelligence sees her as a threat and attempts to Mind Rape Carol into submission while authorizing a mass bombardment of Earth in a bid to wipe out the Skrulls.
- Spider-Man: Far From Home: Quentin Beck, aka Mysterio, is the true master of the Elementals, orchestrating their attacks around the world to paint himself as a hero. Fired by Tony Stark years ago for being unstable, Beck concocts a scheme to both spite Stark and bring himself the attention he has always craved, entailing the destruction of a variety of villages and cities worldwide via the Elementals, then arriving on the scene as Mysterio to save the day, hoping to be a better hero than Iron Man ever was. Upon befriending and manipulating the young Spider-Man into handing over the E.D.I.T.H. glasses, Beck mind rapes and tries to kill him, threatening to execute his entire staff for a failure immediately beforehand as well. Beck plans to "stop" an Avengers-level threat by using his illusions to destroy London, causing maximum casualties to gain more coverage, and schemes to murder Spider-Man's entire class of high school friends to eliminate potential witnesses to his true nature before basking in the glory as Mysterio. An attention-craving lunatic defined by his petty, treacherous nature, even trying to appeal to Spider-Man's sympathy only to stab him in the back once beaten, Beck gets the last laugh as he frames Spider-Man as a villain and exposes the teenager's identity to the world as a final move to secure his claim to fame.
- Black Widow (2021): General Dreykov is the man who runs the Red Room. Having abducted or purchased numerous girls, including Natasha—whose mother Dreykov murdered for trying to find her daughter—and Yelena, Dreykov subjects them to nightmarish training to become "Widows", assassins whom he can use; only one in twenty girls survives the horrific training. Dreykov later turns his own injured daughter into a brainwashed assassin after she was scarred and intends to use his Widows to enact enough chaos and death across the world that he might control things from the shadows, viewing each of the Widows he's taken as nothing more than the recycling of a "useless resource" in the girls he corrupts and destroys.
Television
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Examples
- Season 1: John Garrett, seemingly a jovial S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, is truthfully the Clairvoyant, the mastermind behind the Centipede Project. Tasked with creating an army for HYDRA, Garrett brainwashes and experiments on superpowered individuals to create assassins and super-serums, while implanting his many soldiers and unwilling operatives with bombs to execute them for failure or disobedience. Two notable victims forced into committing massacres include Akela Amador and Mike Peterson, with the latter's son abducted for extra leverage once he's mutilated into a cybernetic Deathlok. Despite his cheery demeanor, the Clairvoyant has no loyalty or empathy, as demonstrated when he tortures Coulson and fatally wounds Skye to learn the truth behind T.A.H.I.T.I.; frames and murders a paralyzed man; guns down several groups of agents and frees countless supervillains during the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D.; and grooms Grant Ward into his murderous, undyingly loyal spy, while nearly killing him to further his plans before ordering him to kill his friends, Fitz and Simmons, to prove he's not weak. Upon extending his own life, Garrett plans to create thousands of Centipede soldiers enslaved with explosives—supported by a vast network of "employees" whose loved ones are held hostage to ensure their loyalty—to facilitate world domination.
- Season 2: Dr. Werner Reinhardt, aka Daniel Whitehall, is one of the heads of HYDRA and a true believer in Johann Schmidt's cause of eliminating The Evils of Free Will. Whitehall has performed horrific human experiments since World War II, testing how quickly people died after touching the Obelisk. In the 1980's, Reinhardt brutally tortured and eviscerated Skye's mother, Jiaying, via surgery to obtain her powers of lasting youth. With his newfound longevity, Whitehall mentored future generations of HYDRA sleeper agents, artificially inseminating one girl for the "Destroyer of Worlds" super soldier project. In the present, Whitehall brags about mastering the art of keeping victims conscious while performing gruesome and invasive surgeries without anesthesia; brainwashes people, including loyal S.H.I.E.L.D agents, into becoming his slaves; frames S.H.I.E.L.D. for killing sprees he himself organized; and ordered the Bus shot down, despite Ward promising mercy, after forcing its passengers to surrender Skye. Whitehall's goal is to use the Obelisk and the city it leads to in order to create a Weapon of Mass Destruction, which he will use to kill millions, if not billions of people. In his final appearance, Whitehall plans to torture Skye to death and force her father to watch.
- Season 5: Sinara is the quiet yet ruthless Dragon to Kasius in his horrific dictatorship over the remnants of humanity in 2091, aiding him in farming Inhuman slaves to be sold off or forced into Gladiator Games. Kasius' chief troubleshooter, enforcer and executioner, Sinara hunts rebellious elements—particularly the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents prophesied to save humanity from the Kree's wrath—and murders whomever displeases Kasius with stoic sadism, bashing in skulls or impaling her victims. Sinara handles the regime's bloodshed with the express purpose of enabling the cowardly, ineffectual Kasius to focus on his schemes to gain power and keep humanity oppressed using the persistent threat of extinction, with Sinara personally overseeing his "Renewal" rituals wherein human slaves are periodically forced to kill one another to breed terror and submission. Though seen by Kasius as his loyal lover who saved his life years ago, Sinara cares most for his viciousness and ambitions to raise them both to greater glory; Kasius' submissiveness to his hated brother drives her to almost join the latter in disgust of his weakness, with only the bloody act of fratricide restoring her respect, and she later disobeys his orders by trying to kill Quake to sate her bloodlust.
- Season 6: Pachakutiq is the Greater-Scope Villain behind both Izel's galactic rampage and Sarge's vicious crusade to stop her. A hate-filled demon from another dimension, Pachakutiq sought to escape his realm to spread terror and suffering with his people, instructing Izel to use the Monoliths to summon him a physical form. However, when Izel failed, Pachakutiq suspected her of stealing his glory and possessed a clone of Coulson to vengefully pursue her, inadvertently scrambling his memories. Pachakutiq's resulting amnesiac identity, Sarge, is influenced by the demon into hunting Izel throughout the centuries by using whatever monstrous means necessary, murdering his followers when they're inconvenient and nearly killing hundreds of thousands with an atom bomb as collateral damage. Izel, meanwhile, continues his plan to assemble an army of hosts ripe for possession, unleashing her Shrike to devastate entire planets and reduce billions of beings to hollow shells. An entity synonymous with "the death of everything", Pachakutiq revels in the carnage of his actions upon retaking control of Sarge's body, promising the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents that he will handpick spirits to ravage their souls for eternity as he prepares to unleash his fellow demons upon the galaxy.
- Season 7: Sibyl, the Chronicom Predictor, leads the Hunters in their invasion of Earth's past. Forming an alliance with HYDRA, Sibyl fast-tracks Project Insight to kill thousands of potential enemies, while having her Hunters kill and steal the faces of both loyal S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and Mack's parents. Sibyl survives an explosion that destroys her Hunters and, after manipulating and murdering a lonely programmer who helps her return, provides knowledge of the future to Nathaniel Malick. With her help, Malick recruits killers destined to die because of S.H.I.E.L.D. and assaults the Inhuman sanctuary of Afterlife, subjecting the inhabitants to agonizing power-stealing processes. Sibyl later makes contact with the Chronicom fleet and orders them to obliterate every S.H.I.E.L.D. base on the planet, intent on repeating the process upon being transported back to the primary timeline, and threatens to enslave Coulson out of annoyance with his constant interference. While rationalizing her invasion as an effort to save her species from extinction, this is little more than Sibyl's coldly logical belief that Chronicoms are superior and more deserving of survival over humanity, as she proves fully willing to dominate and destroy her own people should it suit her needs.
Netflix Series
Examples
- Daredevil (2015): Nobu Yoshioka is a high-ranking and ruthless member of the Hand, directly overseeing their operations in New York under the guise of being a Yakuza underboss. Buying out land, Nobu seeks to excavate Hell's Kitchen in search for the skeleton of a dragon. Nobu and the Hand's leaders intend to harvest its immortality granting properties, leaving New York to be destroyed in the process. Nobu becomes a partner of Wilson Fisk's syndicate, pushing Fisk into having an elderly tenant murdered for her property. After Fisk's downfall, Nobu takes proxy control of the Roxxon Corporation, seeking out a new Black Sky—a human weapon groomed to serve the Hand. To this end, Nobu abducts and tortures an employee's teenage son, Daniel, and several other teenagers to drain their blood. Nobu subjects them to chemical brainwashing when rescued, with Daniel killing his father, before Nobu finishes them off. Realizing Elektra is a Black Sky, Nobu intends to push her to her "destiny", and for Daredevil's interference, Nobu has twenty people Daredevil had previously saved taken hostage, intending to execute them to draw him out.
- Jessica Jones (2015):
- Season 1: Kevin "Kilgrave" Thompson is an amoral, mind-controlling sociopath responsible for the ruination and deaths of countless lives. After gaining his powers due to his parents' painful, though well-intentioned, experiments on him, Kilgrave turned them into his slaves and grew up getting everything he wanted, notably raping women, ordering those who annoyed him to maim or kill themselves, and tormenting children, simply because he felt like it. Kilgrave becomes obsessed with heroine Jessica Jones when she breaks free of his control after he forced her to kill an innocent, and begins ruining her life by addicting her neighbors to drugs and having them kill themselves in her house, ordering one of her clients to murder her own parents in front of Jessica, and tries to manipulate her into becoming his slave again by holding people hostage by the dozen. Though seemingly caring for his parents, Kilgrave reveals his true colors as he forces his mother to stab herself to death and has his father taken apart limb by limb until he is dead. When seemingly beaten, Kilgrave orders dozens of innocents to kill each other just to distract Jessica, and uses his final act to proclaim his intent to make Jessica's sister Trish his new slave to be raped and tortured at his leisure. A petty, childish bully who wanted everyone to be his playthings while never admitting true guilt to anything he did, Kilgrave is one of the most despicable villains the MCU has to offer.
- Season 3: Gregory Sallinger is a man defined by envy and spite towards anyone he feels has more than him. A vicious sociopath from a young age who hated his "talentless hack" of a brother, Sallinger murdered a child and taunted his parents with photos. Growing up, Sallinger fixated on those he felt were mediocrities, torturing and murdering seven people while mocking them with the moment of their despair. Later torturing Jessica and her lover Erik with intent to murder them, Sallinger kidnaps Dorothy, Trish's mother and Jessica's adoptive mother, and tortures her to death. A devious sadist out to hurt others to embiggen himself, Sallinger shows the darkest side of humanity.
- The Punisher (2017):
- Season 1: William J. "Bill" Rawlins III, aka Agent Orange, is a sadistic CIA agent who was the mastermind of Operation Cerberus in Afghanistan, sending special forces to torture and kill targets while apathetic to any lives lost through incompetent planning. In reality, Rawlins used it to his own benefit, and when an honest Afghan officer named Zubair learned the truth, Rawlins framed, abducted, tortured, and murdered him while continuing to enrich himself via heroin smuggling. Upon receiving accolades and a potential promotion to Deputy CIA Director, Rawlins sought to close loose ends by having the remaining Cerberus squad members murdered, and is responsible for orchestrating the mass shootout between several underworld gangs that killed Frank Castle's family. When he learns that David "Micro" Lieberman, who knew of Zubair's murder, had faked his death, Rawlins kidnaps and tries to murder Micro's wife and children along with him. Upon capturing Castle, Rawlins, his career in tatters, attempts to brutally torture him to death, ranting that Castle, and even Rawlins's own subordinate, Russo, are just "grunts" who exist to serve men like him. A sadist with a god complex, Rawlins stops at nothing to always come out on top and destroy those he can.
- "Scar Tissue": Arthur Walsh was the caretaker at the Ray of Hope children's home decades ago, where he took advantage of his position to sexually abuse the boys under his care. When the young Billy Russo resisted, Walsh broke his arm. Walsh's actions went on for years before one of his victims reported him, but when an amnesiac Billy visits him decades later, Walsh only says it was unfair that he lost his pension and went to prison, mocking Billy's dead mother and both his mental and physical scars, accepting no responsibility for his actions or how his abuse helped turn Billy into a killer. Though a retired man by the start of the series and only appearing in a single episode, Walsh stands out as a frighteningly realistic child molester in the MCU.
Young Adult Series
Examples
- Cloak & Dagger (2018) season 2: D'Spayre, real name Andre Deschaine, was once an aspiring jazz musician who received powers from the Roxxon oil rig explosion, which allowed him to remove his headache pain by feeding off the despair of others. To cultivate this despair, he manipulates a nurse named Avandalia "Lia" Dewan into abandoning her life for him, and together they cultivate a sexual slavery ring under the guise of a community support group for abuse victims, using the group to find more victims. Once Ty and Tandy destroy the ring, D'Spayre feeds off Avandalia one more time, and abandons her barely-living body on the side of the road. After visiting the voodoo priestess Chantelle, who he later murders, D'Spayre uses his powers to rise to godhood, abducting people from across New Orleans to his Pocket Dimension so he can feed off their despair forever. While on the surface a helpful community support worker, D'Spayre is truly a sociopathic monster who inflicts unimaginable horrors on anyone who isn't himself in order to fuel his own power.
- Runaways (2017) season 3: Morgan le Fay is an ancient witch banished to the Darkforce Dimension, a realm of madness and torture that well supplements her own power-hungry cruelty. Once an enemy of the Minoru family who sought to manipulate Tina into stealing the Staff of One to further her dark machinations, Morgan reemerges in the present to bring Tina's daughter Nico to her side, escaping her prison and subjecting countless denizens of the Darkforce to death or insanity in the process of enacting her horrific will. Taking over the PRIDE's resources, Morgan converts millions into her mindless slaves in a ritual to merge Earth with the Darkforce Dimension, intent on trapping humanity in endless nightmares as she reshapes the world to her pleasure. Along the way, Morgan delights in all manner of petty sadism, such as spitefully murdering Tina's husband; attempting to sacrifice Molly Hernandez by blasting her with lightning; torturing Alex Wilder for months until he kills a visage of his own mother; and killing Gertrude Yorkes in one Bad Future, thoroughly proving herself beneath all her justifications as a megalomaniacal, proudly soulless bully.
Examples
- "What If... Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?": The Red Skull faced by Captain Carter is just as evil as his Sacred Timeline counterpart. In this timeline, the Skull seeks global domination not by means of the Tesseract, but by a dimensional portal through which he intends to summon an Eldritch Abomination, risking the annihilation of the entire planet just so he can stand on top and willing to see everything burn should he fail. Along the way, Red Skull indulges in familiar cruelties like gunning down old men and murdering his own allies, thoroughly proving that he has no loyalty to even the Reich.
- "What If... Ultron Won?" & "What If... The Watcher Broke His Oath?": Infinity Ultron is a much viler variant of Ultron who successfully managed to upload himself into Vision's body. Deciding "peace" means the eradication of all life, Ultron wipes out all of humanity with a nuclear apocalypse. Ultron then kills Thanos, loots the Infinity Stones from his body, and uses their reality-warping power to systematically annihilate all other life in the universe. After finishing that goal, Ultron recognizes the existence of the Multiverse itself and, armed with the Infinity Stones, attempts to completely purge every single universe of life.
- "What If... Nebula Joined the Nova Corps?":
- Nova Prime, unlike her Sacred Timeline counterpart's goal of protecting her people, only has the goal of maintaining power. Disillusioned with the state of Xandar, Nova Prime makes a bargain with Ronan the Accuser to allow him to invade and ravage the planet, so long as she keeps her authority. Setting Nebula on a mission under the guise of saving Xandar, Nova Prime has Yon-Rogg betray her and leave her to die—also having Garthan Saal brutalize her when she reappears. Nova Prime then has Saal wipe out Nova Corp soldiers not in on the scheme to allow them to grant Ronan the means to breach Xandar, fully enabling the bloodbath that would ensue.
- Yon-Rogg is Nova Prime's partner in the conspiracy to surrender Xandar to Ronan. Recruited by Nebula to help her retrieve the source code for the planet's shield generator, Yon-Rogg betrays her to painfully rip the code from her head before abandoning her to die—first to an explosion, then to the brutality of Nova Prime's corrupt cronies. Yon-Rogg proceeds to hand the codes off to Nova Prime so they can lower Xandar's shields, removing all opposition to Ronan's genocidal invasion.
- "What If... Peter Quill Attacked Earth's Mightiest Heroes?": The version of Ego the Living Planet faced by Celestial Star-Lord is as vile as his Sacred Timeline counterpart. Ego is a powerful Celestial who seeks to initiate an event called the Expansion, whereupon Ego plants cosmic seeds on every planet in the universe and assimilates it into himself at the cost of wiping out all life. Ego is also a hideously Abusive Parent to his son Peter "Star-Lord" Quill and forces him to activate the seeds and use them to wipe out countless inhabited worlds like Asgard. Arriving on Earth in search of Peter, Ego intends to activate its cosmic seed to wipe out Earth. He eventually reveals to Peter that he killed Peter's mother for being too "mortal" and tries to kill Peter himself when Peter rejects him.
Tie-in Material
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Prelude
digital comic), by Peter David: Baker is a terrorist leader who wants to use the Zodiac bioweapon for destructive purposes. Breaking into the Willis Building in Chicago, Baker kills a security guard and takes a position at the top of the building, planning to wait until thousands of people are inside before unleashing the Zodiac and killing them all, and possibly more across Chicago. Baker uses the Zodiac as a shield when Captain America attacks, and leaves his henchmen to be caught to enable his own escape, saying that he'll find another target to use the Zodiac on soon enough.
