YMMV / A Practical Guide to Evil

• Complete Monster:
  • Dread Empress Triumphant^note May She Never Return, the evilest Tyrant to ever emerge from the Wasteland, was a prodigy Diabolist who climbed the Tower and cowed the High Seats into subservience through overwhelming might, with her hordes of devils and demons rechristening the Praesi Legions into the Legions of Terror. Within ten years Triumphant was able to conquer all of Calernia through dint of sheer bloody massacre, with notable crimes including the release of a Demon of Madness on Laure to exterminate the Alban dynasty completely; the slaughter of a fifth of the Gigantes in a battle that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives as collateral damage; the slaying of a Seraphim summoned to stop her, after which she butchered a hundred different tribes for their defiance; and the extermination of two random cities in her fury at being denied the Golden Bloom. Triumphant's reign was no better than her conquest, regularly involving children being forced to crucify their own parents, and her final act upon inevitably being overthrown was to bring down the Tower and unleash all her demonic contracts in an effort to take her killers with her. Having entertained wide-scale torture and murder with an eye towards expanding her rule across all of Creation, Triumphant inspired such fear and terror that countless future generations of Praesi pray she never finds a way to return from death.
  • Mighty Kurosiv, also known as "the Leech" and "the All-Knowing," was once a jaklavar noble of the Empire Ever Dark before he allowed Rumena and Sve Noc to kill the Twilight Sages, plunging their civilization into unending murder and horror in the hopes of taking over in the wars that would follow. Having learned how to come Back from the Dead and usurp portions of Night from its followers when they are slain, the Leech clashed with Rumena seven times over the centuries, intentionally throwing away the lives of thousands of warriors in every encounter to overwhelm Rumena's sigils and gorge itself on stolen Night. Continuing to use these horrid tactics when brought into the War on Keter, Kurosiv takes advantage of Sve Noc's weakness in the wake of Night being ruined to poach two shards of their Gloom, declaring itself the divine Loc Ynan and making an alliance with the Dead King. Telling its followers that they will be left in peace so long as the drow stay out of the war and allow the dead to scour Calernia of all other life, Kurosiv truthfully intends to sacrifice its entire race to finally ascend into the god it has always believed itself.
  • Book 6: The Wicked Enchanter used domination magics to murder, rob, and rape his way along the outskirts of the Brocelian Forest, with the tortures and rape he inflicted on one girl turning her into the Red Axe. On the advice of the Wandering Bard, the Enchanter joined the Truce and Terms for amnesty from his crimes, but not before taking his self-styled "court" to terrorize three more villages.
• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • Masego is prone to Brutal Honesty, he's extremely competent within his limited field of interest and uninterested in most things not related to it and he compulsively corrects, argues or clarifies small details. Catherine theorizes that some of his personality quirks may be from the effects of his Name, but a chapter that showed him before he came into his Name had him act in much the same way.
  • Even before he became the Squire (and then the Black Knight), his analytical, abstract and asocial approach to Evil differed widely from the norm. He's actually worried he'll go too far over the edge with it in time, as Black Knights have a habit of going too far into the deep end of madness.

• Foe Yay Shipping: Catherine openly ogles, flirts-with and/or fantasizes about many major characters, friend or foe. However special mention must go to Akua, and the current White Knight.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Catherine. She was probably bound to get this being the protagonist of an (ostensibly) YA novel but the fact that she's openly bisexual just doubles the available options. This is further aggravated by the fact that she has sexual tension and chemistry with almost everyone, friend or foe, With pretty much the sole exception of Black Knight, her mentor/father figure.
• Love to Hate:
  • Akua Sahelian, the Heiress, aka Diabolist. An unrepentant throwback to the Stupid Evil days of Praes, Akua is entitled, arrogant, and ends up sacrificing over 100000 innocent souls in Liesse to power a doomsday weapon, and all-around Manipulative Bastard to the point where it's debatable whether even she knows when she's actually being sincere.
  • The Bard as well, for many of the same reasons. She's (nominally) on the side of the angels though.
• Magnificent Bastard: Has its own page.
• Memetic Badass: General Abigail's status as an (admittedly Evil-aligned) Accidental Hero and Magnificent Bastard. All of the victories and strategic cunning that caused her to become Callow's first Callowan General since the Conquest are the result of her self-preservation instincts, desire to get a cushy retirement, and blind luck as her plans always seem to go wrong in just the right ways.
• Nightmare Fuel: It is mentioned in the Coup de Théatre Interlude that the Sky Breaker and his wife were bound at the top of a mountain, one cursed with endless hunger and the other with endless healing. Think about that for a moment.

---