Fictional "Villains" Who Did Nothing Wrong Thread

How does Illias rate?

Didn't play the game but wound up absorbing a lot of the plot from SB. From what I can tell, 90% of the monsters will attack and rape Luka on sight, and a significant chunk of them will then kill and eat him so team monstergirl isn't all that nice. The Harpy Happiness Village tries "coexistence" but it turns out that consists of the monsters abducting all the men and the human women just having to live with their men getting raped by harpies. Monstergirls can't have human children nor males and appear to outbreed humans due to their habit of abducting anything with an XY chromosome and leaving human women out. Humans appear to mostly be extinct everywhere the monsters hold sway, with besieged enclaves where Illias' protection allows for human cities. Yamatei village is an exception, where the Monstergirls have set themselves up as gods and require regular human sacrifice to themselves so... yeah.

The "heroic" monster lord Alice will straight up rape and murder Luka then consume his soul in the opening if he doesn't care for her enough. That's the monstergirl that's the forward-thinking coexistence fan.

AFAICT the misdeeds of Illias are:

Destroyed a village of coexistence in the past. If it was anything like Harpy Happiness Village and Yamatei Village I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
Created a prison for Heinrich, who betrayed her first.
Outmaneuvered several underlings who were trying to betray her but failed, in order to gain ultimate power and kill all the monstergirls.

Bear Ribs said:

I'll also note that Hook was bo'sun, hence a senior officer, under Blackbeard (Edward Teach died 1718).

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This is probably J.M. Barrie screwing it up out of character, because the boatswain is the seniormost rating on a ship, i.e. not a commissioned officer. Being a noble educated at one of the elite English universities, there is *no way* Hook would have been anything but a commissioned officer, and even if a pirate crew ignored that distinction, the bo'sun is most senior by experience, which screws up the timeline even more.

ShadowArxxy said:

This is probably J.M. Barrie screwing it up out of character, because the boatswain is the seniormost rating on a ship, i.e. not a commissioned officer. Being a noble educated at one of the elite English universities, there is *no way* Hook would have been anything but a commissioned officer, and even if a pirate crew ignored that distinction, the bo'sun is most senior by experience, which screws up the timeline even more.

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Far as I can tell, J.M. Barrie thought the Bo'sun was first officer on a ship. Smee certainly appears to be Hook's first officer.

Bear Ribs said:

Far as I can tell, J.M. Barrie thought the Bo'sun was first officer on a ship. Smee certainly appears to be Hook's first officer.

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To a degree; and this is something that seems to vary a lot between different versions of the Peter Pan stories. The original story does explicitly identify him as the bo'sun but his actual duties are inconsistently portrayed; the Disney version did make him the first mate.

DarthOne said:

After your previous example, I’ll be using this as Evidence #2 for Why Shonen And Most Anime Is Trash.

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. . . I wouldn't, because to anyone who is informed it makes you look like an idiot, as the Trails series is a series of JRPGs, and while it has an anime aesthetic for character designs and the like (which is a JRPG stable going back to the JRPGs that came out on the original NES), it's not an anime...

You're doing the equivalent of saying "most live action television and movies are trash" and then holding up as an example of that "Command and Conquer"...

S'task said:

. . . I wouldn't, because to anyone who is informed it makes you look like an idiot, as the Trails series is a series of JRPGs, and while it has an anime aesthetic for character designs and the like (which is a JRPG stable going back to the JRPGs that came out on the original NES), it's not an anime...

You're doing the equivalent of saying "most live action television and movies are trash" and then holding up as an example of that "Command and Conquer"...

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I stand corrected.

Ash's Boomstick said:

A lot of Super Villains could be rich if they sold their inventions instead. if anyone hasn't read it then maybe look for the fic 'The Shocker: Legit' which shows exactly what happens when a single member of a rogues gallery makes a decision and the huge amounts of ripple effects that choice makes.

Back to the thread though, it has been shown that some Villains are normal everyday people who get screwed by the system or someone manipulating the system (I'm looking at you Tony Stark) and have no choice but to turn to crime for that reason, its those kinds of characters who come closer to the 'did nothing wrong' type than most. I'll also point to Syndrome from The Invincibles, was he necessarily the bad guy everyone thought he was? He screwed up yes, but he wanted to make everyone super so that no-one would be unique, that could be an issue where people use that power for ill but then again it might stop a lot of society's problems as a whole.

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Syndrome killed off superheroes so that he could pretend to be one. He then launched a killer robot into a populated city so that he could, again, pretend to be a superhero, and that robot did not have adequate shackles on its intelligence to prevent it from killing bystanders. That's not just evil, that's depraved indifference to pain and suffering.

Hell, ignore his plan for the moment. Remember that moment in Syndrome's lair when Mr. Incredible took Mirage hostage? What was Syndrome's reaction? He dared Mr. Incredible to go through with it. It's not just that he was callous towards the health and well-being of his employees, that's standard supervillainery. No, in that moment, Syndrome was interested in his old idol once again. But Mr. Incredible couldn't go through with it. He's an old-school superhero.

I knew you couldn't do it, even when you've got nothing to lose. You're weak. And I've outgrown you.

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Yeah. Syndrome thinks that the willingness to kill isn't just a mark of strength, it's a badge of maturity. What happens when he gets his wish?

Back in the day, the superheroes were forced to retire because the collateral damage from saving the day was just too high. That was just everyday damage from superheroes who were genuinely trying to help out. How bad is the collateral damage going to be from a super who cares more about self-promotion than saving people? How is Syndrome going to react when the US Government tells him to please stop killing bystanders?

Syndrome explicitly wants to be a superhero for the fame, adoration, and proving that he really is stronger than the old superheroes. He wants respect, and when his body count and sloppy superheroing* turn the public against him, he's going to turn supervillain.

*Really, it's a nice touch in The Incredibles how Syndrome is really bad at fighting. He's a supervillain with powerful gadgets, but those gadgets don't translate into combat skill. He's always let his robot do the fighting, and he blindsided the supers who beat the bot the first time. That complete lack of experience meant that he fell for all the classic villain blunders, and he crumpled like a beer can the moment that his fight against the robot went off-script. The only fights he won are the ones that he could shut down with his zero-point energy gauntlets.

Quirel said:

He then launched a killer robot into a populated city so that he could, again, pretend to be a superhero, and that robot did not have adequate shackles on its intelligence to prevent it from killing bystanders. That's not just evil, that's depraved indifference to pain and suffering.

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In other words, more or less the same thing that Hank Pym did with Ultron, at least before all the retcons, ret-retcons and ret-ret-retcons they subsequently came up with to try to explain it away. . .

On the killer robot front, the Robot Masters in the Megaman series are generally fairly evil but the ones in Megaman 9 are convinced by Wiley to rebel because... they're nearing the end of their service life and will be scrapped once their license runs out. Given that they're able to reason out that it's better to rebel and maybe die than submit and certainly die, it's hard not to see them as intelligent beings who just don't want to be killed for getting too old.

Bassoe said:

Yeah, add MCU Vulture to this list. In a sensible world, he'd be enjoying his nobel prizes and six figure salary with the DOD's new XCOM branch for reverse-engineering scavenged alien gadgetry before the next invasion.

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Not really, in a sensible world he would have either been dead or locked up.


That? Yeah, Tony is 100% right about both what the government would think and of the issues with the Vulture. He very much wasn't a "did nothing wrong" or "in a sensible world he wouldn't be a villain".

Spartan303 said:

One could almost add Baron Zemo to that list as well. Almost.

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Zemo ran an Eastern European dictatorships elite kill team. Then went and decided that his family dying as collateral damage in an end of the world battle was justification for trying to destroy the planets best protection, in the process killing a ton of (at least relatively) innocent people directly.

I mean if you want an MCU villain who "did nothing wrong"...well Sutur maybe?

Ash's Boomstick said:

Nah Zemo's a prick through and through.

A technical villain who did nothing wrong, The Winter Soldier. He was a villain but didn't know he was, what he had done, who he was or anything else helpful, thats why I said 'Technical' as he did kill people, he did hurt others, did incredible amounts of damage and almost helped wipe out hundreds of millions of people. THEN he turned back when he realised what was happening and began to regain his identity.

Then Bucky Barnes made a return and regained his place as a hero.

There are others that have technically been villains but the person themself did not do anything wrong, because it wasn't truly them that did it. (Including Superman at one time).

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That was true until Civil War. Although really that was more Cap being the villian and getting his mentally compromised best friend to go along with his crimes.

Terran Federation from SST. Defending your country from a hostile alien hive mind will never be wrong. This goes double for movieverse, as in that universe the Arachnids' endgoal is to exterminate humanity as our individualism disgusts the hive mind.

Arlos said:

I guess the Enclave as a whole, if they weren’t evil stupid in the games. (Sigh)

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In FO3 ... I fail to see any real distinction between Autumn and Maxson from FO4, save that Autumn has a better chance of building something that actually lasts. I mean, in a comparison between him and Elder Lyons the latter is obviously the much better guy, but we know Lyons and his ideals don't last long after FO3 so that's kinda irrelevant.

FO2 Enclave are obviously led by bad guys and need to be stopped, and there doesn't seem to be a way to do so at least ingame without the civilian casualties that blowing up the oil rig entails. So if it comes down to the oil rig civilians vs. the entire population of Earth, the latter wins out.

Bassoe said:

Yeah, add MCU Vulture to this list. In a sensible world, he'd be enjoying his nobel prizes and six figure salary with the DOD's new XCOM branch for reverse-engineering scavenged alien gadgetry before the next invasion.

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Vulture *started out* justified -- he had a legitimate salvage and rebuild contract from the City of New York and Stark's people literally went out of their way to screw him over *and* rub his face in it out of sheer spite. But where he went from there was absolutely *not* justified.

Ash's Boomstick said:

I'll also point to Syndrome from The Invincibles, was he necessarily the bad guy everyone thought he was? He screwed up yes, but he wanted to make everyone super so that no-one would be unique, that could be an issue where people use that power for ill but then again it might stop a lot of society's problems as a whole.

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That's not what his plan was. His plan was to fake being a superhero with his robot and get all the fame and adoration he thought he'd been denied, and then when he's "old and has had his fun", then he'll sell his stuff. He just wanted the fame and, by leaving the playing field after he's done, tossed sure no one else can ever top him or take his place. He had no noble motives whatsoever.

Navarro said:

In FO3 ... I fail to see any real distinction between Autumn and Maxson from FO4, save that Autumn has a better chance of building something that actually lasts. I mean, in a comparison between him and Elder Lyons the latter is obviously the much better guy, but we know Lyons and his ideals don't last long after FO3 so that's kinda irrelevant.

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Autumn tries to force you tell him the codes for the purifier at gunpoint, and executes you if you turn them over, and that's his SOP given the same thing was done to seize the purifier and was attempted when the enclave moved to take over vault 101.

That's not how the brotherhood operates under Maxson, the closest they come is making a preemptive strike against the railroad, which is a atypical compared to thier other actions. Given they don't normally go around bombarding everything that might be a threat and given how railroad aligned NPCs talk about the brotherhood, it is at least plausible that such a preemptive strike was justified, an excuse that does not apply to the Enclave.


As for the relative longevity of thier societies, the brotherhood has an established track record of being able to interact with and mostly peacefully coexist alongside (or over) normal wastelanders. The enclave does not.

Battlegrinder said:

Autumn tries to force you tell him the codes for the purifier at gunpoint, and executes you if you turn them over, and that's his SOP given the same thing was done to seize the purifier and was attempted when the enclave moved to take over vault 101.

That's not how the brotherhood operates under Maxson, the closest they come is making a preemptive strike against the railroad, which is a atypical compared to thier other actions. Given they don't normally go around bombarding everything that might be a threat and given how railroad aligned NPCs talk about the brotherhood, it is at least plausible that such a preemptive strike was justified, an excuse that does not apply to the Enclave.


As for the relative longevity of thier societies, the brotherhood has an established track record of being able to interact with and mostly peacefully coexist alongside (or over) normal wastelanders. The enclave does not.

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He's right, Autumn in particular is an idiot, most of the rest of the Enclave in all of their incarnations seem to be woefully short sighted given their so called long term plans. Maxson's brotherhood tend to be arseholes but at the same time do tend to try to help the great good (but not at the cost of their primary mission) even though it seems that probably crippled all the good that the Lyons Pride and the Lone Wanderer did back in DC. Unless of course they helped to rebuild a decent settlement for a lot of the locals, given they pulled the nuclear reactor from Rivet City to power the Prydwen.

I've never been sold on the "the brotherhood stole rivet city's reactor" theory.

1. They never say "rivet city", they say "wrecked aircraft carrier", but will mention rivet city in other contexts. It's odd they would try and obfuscate the name in just this one comment.
2. The brotherhood, even the goody two shoes Lyons version, was never shy about thier more morally dubious actions. Their destruction of the pitt is referred to as The Scourge even by thier own personal, and while it's entirely likely that assault was merited, most people would give it a more PR friendly title.
3. Danse lived in rivet city, it's unlikely that he wouldn't at least comment on the brotherhood harming his hometown. He voices his issues with other aspects of the brotherhood, why keep quite about that one?

The issue is that the line says 'that aircraft carrier wreckage', now there is no other carrier in the area and the nearest ocean naval base is hundreds of miles away, even if they could find one they'd have to take it out and move it across a very large area of the continent, meaning that honestly it makes no sense that they would use anything else other than Rivet City. It also is pretty much what you are supposed to believe in game as well.

The Brotherhood under Lyons did a lot of bad on their way into DC, but after that they weren't nearly as much of a threat to people given that Lyons changed them enough for an entire faction to break away and set up shop further inland. The Pitt needed to be scourged, hell the fact they didn't wipe out everything was either a testament to the BoS' mercy or their blindness, its likely also still called 'The Scourge' as a memory of what they did, so no-one forgot just what they were capable of an what they can't allow themselves to do in the Capital Wasteland.

Remember that Danse's memories are fake and he wanted off that carrier, that's why he joined up with the BoS, he may well have not said anything because as far as he's concerned, it doesn't matter.

Ash's Boomstick said:

He's right, Autumn in particular is an idiot, most of the rest of the Enclave in all of their incarnations seem to be woefully short sighted given their so called long term plans. Maxson's brotherhood tend to be arseholes but at the same time do tend to try to help the great good (but not at the cost of their primary mission) even though it seems that probably crippled all the good that the Lyons Pride and the Lone Wanderer did back in DC. Unless of course they helped to rebuild a decent settlement for a lot of the locals, given they pulled the nuclear reactor from Rivet City to power the Prydwen.

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A. All FOverse factions are wantonly incompetent, some more than others, so the PC can stand out.
B. FO3's writing is emotionally compelling but falls apart under the slightest logical inspection in general.
C. The Enclave are the bad guys (and a direct reference to American conservatives, whom the writers dislike) so they're portrayed as especially incompetent (to be a bit more precise on that bit in parentheses, the message of FO2 boils down to "America delenda est, California uber alles" and the descriptions of the backstory Sino-American War are slanted so that a distinct minority of fans come off with the impression that the Maoist aggressors were the good guys in the conflict).

Unless of course they helped to rebuild a decent settlement for a lot of the locals, given they pulled the nuclear reactor from Rivet City to power the Prydwen.

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They didn't. Whatever semblance of order they managed to bring to DC ended the moment they left. Back to square one.

Ash's Boomstick said:

The issue is that the line says 'that aircraft carrier wreckage', now there is no other carrier in the area and the nearest ocean naval base is hundreds of miles away, even if they could find one they'd have to take it out and move it across a very large area of the continent, meaning that honestly it makes no sense that they would use anything else other than Rivet City. It also is pretty much what you are supposed to believe in game as well.

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There's no other carrier in DC, yes. Norfolk is practically next door, and could easily have salvageable carriers.

Nor would they have to lug the reactor all the way back to DC, the airship already had a reactor install and they could have simply flown it over to Norfolk and swapped reactors there. It's almost certain the reactor can be swapped out without requiring special facilities, because they wlyld have had to do that either way, hauling a reactor from rivet city to adams AFB woyld have been just as absurdly hard as hauling it from Norfolk to AFB.

Ash's Boomstick said:

The Pitt needed to be scourged, hell the fact they didn't wipe out everything was either a testament to the BoS' mercy or their blindness, its likely also still called 'The Scourge' as a memory of what they did, so no-one forgot just what they were capable of an what they can't allow themselves to do in the Capital Wasteland.

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You're reading a lot more into it things than the dialogue supports.

But the Brotherhood of Steel came down on the place with a righteous hammer. They called it "The Scourge."

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That doesn't really sound like the words of someone that thinks the scourge was something horrible that the brotherhood should never do again.

Ash's Boomstick said:

Remember that Danse's memories are fake and he wanted off that carrier, that's why he joined up with the BoS, he may well have not said anything because as far as he's concerned, it doesn't matter.

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Dance wanted more than his life on rivet city, but that doesn't mean he'd have no regard for the place either. The fact thst he is quite insistent that forcibly confiscating technology is not the brotherhood way also argues against the rivet city theft theory, it's not like he'd go around saying that when in fact the brotherhood is totally up for taking tech by force.

Him having fake memories isn't relevant, since regardless of thier status, they're consistent with reality. If Daniel had memories of events that didn't happen or people that didn't exist, that would have been noticed by his fellows.

@Battlegrinder @Navarro

Another thing to consider is that, and bear in mind it's been a while since I played Fallout 3, but when you first encounter Autumn, he has no reason to trust you more than any other (dubiously civilized) nobody in the wasteland. And even before you assault the Enclave-controlled Project Purity, you've been allied with enemies of his.