More Hateable Minor Villains in Visual Novels.
- CLANNAD, both the Visual Novel and the Anime Adaptation, usually is in a setting where there is No Antagonist, thus it's a daily life series. Every character seems to always have more sympathetic qualities. However, the closest they can have for this trope is the whole soccer team, a team very full of Jerk Jocks, that while Youhei Sunohara was being a jerk that they kicked him out, they were no better, with implications that they did enjoy making Sunohara's time in the club miserable, and when his sister Mei begged for them to put him back to the club to re-ignite his passion in life, they instead chose to torment not only Mei but also Tomoya (and in the anime, also Nagisa, who tags along) for nothing but laughs with false promises that if they put up with it, they will let Youhei back. Of course, they refused to make good of the promise, to the point that when Youhei, usually the Butt-Monkey of the whole series, struck back at them for bullying his sister. It is saying something that in the same series, there's a group of Biker Gang/Yakuza... and they have a lot more moral standards (and a sympathetic story arc) than the club.
- Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: Despite Tsumugi Shirogane's status as the Big Bad and Monokuma's status as The Heavy, she isn't as despised as she is merely considered forgettable due to having an extremely bland personality and her actual evil acts mostly being Offscreen Villainy, and Monokuma is Laughably Evil enough to amuse the audience. Then there's Korekiyo Shinguji, who was revealed as an incestuous Serial Killer who killed nearly 100 people to let his dead sister have friends in the afterlife and murders two students for that reason. Despite his implied sympathetic backstory of being abused by his sister and most of his bad deeds also being Offscreen Villainy, nobody, not even the more amoral participants or Monokuma himself, finds his motivations justifiable enough to make up for all the harm he has done.
- In the original The House in Fata Morgana, most villains are shown to have once been good people before being Driven to Villainy, even the Big Bad herself, The Witch, but these nobles were not:
- Antonin Bollinger is the abusive father to Michel Bollinger. Raising his intersex child as a daughter, he declares him cursed when Michel comes out as a trans male, and has him locked up. Allowing Aimee Joubert to torture him, Antonin also repeatedly rapes Giselle, a servant of his, and carves the word HARLOT into her crotch. Eventually ordering Michel executed and sending Michel's own beloved brother Didier to do the job, Antonin shows no love or concern for anything but his own reputation.
- Aimee Joubert is the one mainly responsible for Michel's trauma. The fiancee of Georges Bollinger who created on him with his brother Didider, Aimee shows disgust towards homosexuality when the female-presenting Michel kisses her. When Michel is locked up, Aimee gleefully tortures him, depriving him of food and water, ritually humiliating him, and taking great pleasure in all of his pain. Later, she slowly poisons Georges to death to gain all his property. When she reappears in the backstage interviews, she smugly gloats about how she went on to live a life of comfort and security and faced no justice for her crimes.
- Amadee is the leader of a local village who initially befriends Giselle. When she is falsely accused of stealing from the village, Amadee refuses to listen to her, subjecting her to Cold-Blooded Torture instead, and it is later implied that he was the one who framed her. When Michel is set to be executed, Amadee takes his corpse and humiliates him in front of the whole village, calling him a demon. Like Aimee, Amadee is never shown having paid for his crimes.
- In his appearance in the original game, Lord Jean-François Barnier is the one responsible for driving Morgana and Jacopo into villainy. A tyrant who torments everyone around him for fun, he buys Morgana and organizes the blood sabbaths where he and other nobles drink her blood. His torment of Morgana is a major part of what drove her to become a Wicked Witch.
- Mystic Messenger's main antagonists, the Mint Eye cult led by The Savior/Rika/Mina and Unknown, are creepy and legitimately dangerous, but all the members are mentally ill and treated with some sympathy- even the Savior and Unknown have a Freudian Excuse. Two of the routes have Arc Villains who are much easier to hate:
- Echo Girl's only purpose is to serve as an antagonist in Zen's route while Unknown and The Savior are doing their own thing. She is a famous celebrity who tries to pressure Zen, a co-actor in an upcoming production, into sex, then makes a False Rape Accusation as revenge for being turned down, nearly destroying his reputation and career. She has no redeeming qualities, and the only good thing she's ever done for Zen was to convince the director not to drop Zen from his project when he injures his ankle, albeit for ulterior motives.
- Glam Choi and Sarah from Jumin's route are a pair of greedy Gold Diggers who seek to marry Chairman Han and his son Jumin, respectively, solely for their immense fortune. The two have no redeeming qualities, with Sarah trying to force Jumin into a marriage he doesn't want and antagonizing the heroine for being close to him, and like Echo Girl, they serve no real purpose other than to cause trouble in a route where Mint Eye doesn't play as much of a role.
- Nasuverse:
- Fate/stay night features a great number of villains, but nearly all have some sympathetic quality, even Kirei and Gilgamesh (or at least something that makes them undeniably cool villains), or even the terrifying, no-nonsense and coldhearted Zouken Matou. Then there is Shinji Matou, Sakura Matou's abusive brother, Zouken's grandson, who is unpleasant on a personal level. A smug braggart, Shinji also mistreats his own servant, Rider, and cares nothing for her well-being, and he desires to force Rin Tohsaka to bow to him and satisfy his lust towards her. In the Heaven's Feel route, he's also revealed to be a rapist who primarily targets his sister, already a very sympathetic characternote . Arrogant and sexist, Shinji Matou lacks the interesting qualities of his rivals, instead being a pathetic loser who always gets outwitted. It says something that, in nearly two decades of vile villains in the Nasuverse, this one high school kid still manages to be the most near-unanimously hated character. It's even lampshaded in Carnival Phantasm where Sakura outright says that his only positive quality is making everyone around him look good.
- The 2014 Fate/stay night [Unlimited Blade Works] TV adaptation gives an expanded character to Caster's summoner and first Master, who in the VN is supposed to have been a boring coward, but is nameless and never appears onscreen. Atrum Galliasta is Adaptational Villainy personified, with zero redeeming qualities and even less sympathetic than Shinji, if that's possible. He sacrifices orphans/kidnapped children for mana and doesn't like that Caster can gather much more mana without killing anyone because it shows that she's a better mage than him—and possibly because her method doesn't involve killing anyone—he hits and insults his far more powerful Servant and uses poorly-thought-out methods to enforce her obedience, and he's a Straw Misogynist on top of everything else, keeping a literal harem and using only girls for his mana sacrifices. He's present mainly to make Caster look like a saint.
- Fate/Apocrypha: The Red Faction are full of varying characters with their own motivations that can be noble, including the leader Shirou Kotomine/Amakusa Shiro. The Black Faction is a mixed bag as it has a lot of selfish and underhanded character mixed with good people. And worse, the patriarch, Darnic Prestone Yggdmillenia, was part of the Nazi and has been consuming souls of children, but he exhibits style, being genuinely nice to the good members of his family and generally being more of a team player, focusing his efforts to make sure his family gets the Holy Grail. On the other hand, one of its member, Celenike Icecolle Yggdmillenia, stands out as an extremely horrible one note evil bitch who is completely evil, one of the vilest beings to ever grace the Nasuverse. She only does her magic research to torture people because she gets off it, she gains the service of the virtuous Astolfo for the purpose of breaking his morality and drive him to despair by violating his Paladin code for her own pleasure, she murders people on a whim and goes into horrific details in how she wants Sieg to be offed because he got the attention of Astolfo more, going so far to waste all her Command Spells only for specific ways to kill and torture Sieg done by Astolfo, meaning that she didn't share Darnic's team spirit, she's only in to satisfy her own lust. It's little wonder that her sudden end by Mordred decapitating her from behind was met with joy and the remaining family proceeded to forget that she ever existed, with no one ever mentioning her again.
- Fate/Grand Order:
- Christopher Columbus, known as the Rider of the Resistance that debuted in the Agartha Singularity (whereas the main mastermind/antagonist of the Singularity is the thanatophobic, yet quite sympathetic, Scheherazade). Unlike other Servants, Columbus instead got an overblown Historical Villain Upgrade, having the negative rumors and traits about him flanderized: He's a two-faced self-serving bastard that masks his own dark, selfish desires with positive traits such as being an inspiring Determinator, while also holding high values that usually disgusts normal people (for example: Slavery should be promoted because it's much more profitable, even if the age of slavery has been long gone). While he is summonable, the game and narrative makes no excuse that Columbus is an utter bastard you're supposed to dislike. Being portrayed as an old man instead of having a Gender Flip like other Servants might help push this trope further too, and while he doesn't promote slavery as often, he still does everything in the name of profit thus most of his actions tend to leer into another unsavory role of a Con Man.
- From the same game, when it comes to non-Servant, there's also the Demon God Pillar Flauros, though you know him more as Professor Lev Lainur. What differentiates him from other Demon God Pillars are that he begins the game by gruesomely killing Olga Marie Animusphere to non-existence, all while taunting how pitiful she is, and he spent the rest of his time being a supreme Smug Snake, always babbling about how doomed you, the players, are in the face of him and the other Demon God Pillars; and makes unpleasant Slasher Smile too while he's at it. And when eventually his master, Goetia, developed his own character and other Demon Pillars gain their own quirks, Flauros basically stays in square one forever, still the same Smug Snake as ever. This results fans cheering when Altera butts into the Septem Singularity to kill him, and it's considered one of the few good things of the Singularity when it's considered problematic. And additionally, in the Salomon Singularity, after the fans were done farming with Barbatos, they went straight to obliterate Flauros with full intent of making him pay for the gruesome murder of Olga Marie and for being a smug ass to the end.
- The Caster of Limbo (a.k.a. Ashiya Douman) revels in being a Smug Snake supreme, making the lives of everyone in the Shimousa Sub-Singularity miserable and takes extra delight in the suffering of Katou Danzou as his 'puppet'. Even his fellow Swordsman of Carnage, Saber Empireo/Yagyu Munenori, doesn't have high opinions on him and killed him when he tried to enact his revenge on Musashi, but he lived and revealed that all his servitude was an act, his true loyalty was to the Alien God and the whole thing was just a prelude he prepared for the Lostbelts. He then gleefully made some peaceful Lostbelts into hell on Earth (the Yuga-Kurukeshtra, especially) and gives a MUCH more revelling towards the sufferings he caused, and in his last stand at Lostbelt 5.5: Heian-Kyo, it turns out that he does all those for the sole reason of surpassing his eternal rival Abe no Seimei and satiating his pride, which Seimei used to the heroes' advantage by not appearing in physical form, allowing him to be beaten for good. After being summonable, he might have claimed himself to be free from the Alien God's link, but all of those petty and despicable actions are still on his own volition.
- Princess Evangile has Shinya Okonogi, the father of protagonist Masaya Okonogi. Despite Masaya taking care of him for years after him and his mother got divorced by doing part-time jobs and earning money for both of them, Shinya makes no hesitation in selling out his own son to the Yakuza during the prologue. In most routes, he's a Karma Houdini, never seen again by Masaya despite the latter winning the lottery ticket Shinya himself had asked Masaya to buy. In Chiho's route, however, he's part of the Big Bad Ensemble alongside the Headmistress. And here, he proves to be even scummier than the former (who at least has a code of loyalty, when it's revealed he stabbed his ex-wife for refusing to give him money, kidnapped Chiho, and even drugged his own son into handing over his lottery ticket winnings, threatening to kill him and Chiho if they refuse.
- Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair: Hiro Shiratake may not be the killer, but he is much more of a scumbag than said killer, Momoko Mori (a Sympathetic Murderer). After Momoko became popular, Hiro set out to make her his trophy girlfriend, ditching Runa Hikari when he realized she wasn't rich. He later tried to charm Momoko's best friend, Kamen Eiga, while he was dating Momoko, and caused Momoko to think her best friend was sleeping with her boyfriend, setting off Momoko's murderous revenge plot. Hiro is ultimately killed by Momoko, with nobody mourning his death, and Raiko Shinpuku agrees that even his bad childhood does nothing to excuse his actions.
- Spirit Hunter: Death Mark II: Since all of the spirits have sympathetic backstories, even the Departed, the humans who were responsible for their torment are all made to be unlikable Asshole Victims in their stead:
- Toshihiko Izumi only shows up a few times before being killed off by Hanako of the Toilet, but he is the one who turned her into a spirit in the first place because he was jealous that she got the part in the piano recital he wanted, and continued to torment her even after she gave the part to him. He ultimately drove her to suicide, and unlike his lackey Kyoko, who at least loves her boyfriend and has a somewhat sympathetic send-off as the Pool Spirit, Izumi demonstrates no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
- Megumi Manabe ruined Rei Kashima's relationship with Sousuke Hirose, their art teacher, by framing him for sexual harassment out of petty jealousy that Kashima was closer to him than she was. This ultimately drove both of them to suicide, which Megumi shows no remorse for. While her two lackeys, Erika and Miho/Student S, at least visit her grave and show some genuine desire to repent, Megumi's only concern when Kashima starts haunting her is to save her own skin.
- Student K, real name Mitsuru Kuromine, is the one responsible for Masaki Kiyohara becoming the spirit Mister Kokkuri. Back when he was a delinquent, he dealt the Fox Laccata mushrooms to his friends, and under the influence led them in beating Masaki's wife and daughter to death while hospitalizing him. He got away thanks to his dad being an officer and grew up to be a cop himself, still continuing his criminal activities and blackmailing a student into helping him. Though unseen, he's built up as a truly disgusting man and an example of how the law can fail people.
- Since the Departed are a sympathetic Big Bad for a change, the M Town priests serve as an object of hatred instead. They're the ones who turned the Mayamura sisters into the Departed by sacrificing them and their grooms in a horrific Human Sacrifice ritual that involved the brides slowly being killed by insects and mold, so they could be offered as brides to the village's gods. In their single scene, they smugly dismiss the pain of the brides they are causing, instead telling them how happy they should be with their sad fate. While their motives were to please the gods in hopes it would stop a famine, this motive is given no sympathy by the characters whatsoever.
- Super Danganronpa Another 2: Mikado Sannoji may be the Big Bad and a Bad Boss, but he demonstrates some rather admirable intelligence (such as successfully manging to Frame-Up somebody else for murder), does a few good deeds, and is sickened by the more hateable minor villain's actions. That minor villain turns out to be Kanade Otonokoji, who has killed at least 60 people, including her own parents, all so she can wear down her sister Hibiki's psyche and control her every move — displaying absolutely zero remorse for anything she had done.
- Tokyo Dark: Reina is ultimately a tragic figure with a Freudian Excuse; but these four men, two of whom warped her into a monster, are the embodiments of misogyny and arrogance:
- Goto is a fat, ugly, and perverted businessman whose hobby is pressuring teen girls into sexually servicing him in the sewer. When Detective Ayami Ito first encounters him, he hits on her; later he is discovered to have antagonized Akane to the point of making her cry. When Ayami returns to make him stop, he is seen with yet another girl whom is pleading with Ayami to save her. Ayami can choose to blackmail, threaten, or even kill him; taking the last option leads to the ending where Ayami is arrested.
- Detective Akira Taira is The Rival to Ayami and a haughty Jerkass. Constantly deriding Ayami at every opportunity and treating her as incompetent simply for being a woman, Taira is introduced mocking Ayami for failing her mission, an event which had traumatized her due to the death of her Love Interest. When she gets demoted as a result, he takes her spot, and repeatedly antagonizes her whenever he finds her, treating her like a criminal. In the Arrested ending, he gleefully arrests Ayami for killing Goto, gloating the whole time, while ignoring her protests that Goto deserved to die for victimizing innocent girls.
- Eiichi Higashi was the Human Trafficker who abused Reina and directly turned her into an evil spirit. As the head of the talent agency Omega, he would recruit girls to be his idols while pimping and sexually abusing them behind doors, with Reina, his adopted daughter, as his latest victim. He would put her through horrible abuse until she finally snapped and killed herself, then came for him as a spirit. Everyone who mentions Higashi describes him as a monster, and even Ayami feels that he fully deserved his fate.
- Tokimassa, real name Shinji Umezawa, was the deranged leader of the second Kamenkai cult. Despising humanity and modern society, he turned down-on-their-luck people into his followers, fleeing with them to Aokigahara. He world emotionally abuse a young Reina and eventually make her into the Mask Bearer by killing everyone in a mass Murder-Suicide, including her mom, traumatizing her.
