Not worst as in completely uncharismatically sadistic. Not worst as in an absolute hate sink. WORST as in horribly written, uninteresting, annoying, one note, has a annoying voice, completely moronic motives, or straight agonizing to sit through!
Elon Musk
(You didn’t say it had to be someone fictional. I mean, just look at him!)
Basically a real life cartoon villain from a shitty family Guy clone. LMFAO
I said this in another thread recently, but Ted Faro from the Horizon Zero Dawn series was so badly written. He was a one note guy, use technology to get profit at the expense of the planet, lying and dishonesty and being a douchey and thoroughly despised tech bro—
and then I realized, he’s incredibly well written. He’s fuckin’ Elon Musk but American. He’s Sam Altman. He’s all these fuckers, and they’re him.
Elon Musk would totally irradiate himself in a bunker to become an immortal monster. Hell, that’s literally what Peter Thiel goons his tiny dick to every goddamn night!
Ted Faro was a bad villain back in ‘18. In ‘26, he fits in.
They saw exactly what was happening. Artists aren’t stupid.
Most aren’t. Eventually I’ll hold the brain cell for a bit.
My partner holds sessions where everyone passes it around. If you’re in Seattle, you should join us.
Caillou
Satan. Loses his job over a difference of opinion and then suddenly becomes the complete antithesis, and raison d’être, of his boss. How convenient. He just screams “plot device” to me.
Anakin
I was a 1980s kid. Darth Vader was one of those peak villains one sees in childhood, the ultimate bad guy. He killed indiscriminately. He had space wizard magic to find you and read your mind and choke you remotely. He had the evil (red) version of the coolest weapon in the universe. He was so scary his own soldiers on the bad guy side were afraid of him. He tortured the princess. For some reason he was part robot, had a deep commanding voice, and even his breathing was scary. And to top it all off, it turned out he was the good guy’s father. Fathers are supposed to be safe, not scary!
I had many, many childhood nightmares about Darth Vader. I watched the movies an incalculable amount of times, I cheered when the good guys beat him, or at least escaped him with their skin intact.
Then I grew up, and the prequels happened. I don’t know if any retroactive backstory could have matched the feelings my childhood mind had generated so many years earlier, but I was at least curious about what they’d come up with to explain who Darth Vader had been and what made him that way… only to learn that apparently the ultimate scary badass was apparently just some dull and whiny guy who somehow was randomly lucky, smart, and magical, lived a really nice and comfortable life with lots of support and encouragement, but was just all “no I wanna be bad now because some easily-resolvable life stuff made me angry waaaah.”
So disappointing.
The calypso twins in Borderlands 3. The streamer schtick got old quickly, and the game just took control away from you whenever they showed up so they could act with impunity. They were just annoying and kind of whiny so the “sympathetic” backstory didn’t do anything for me. I remember the final boss being deeply unimpressive after all the build up, too.
Was going to post this. Seriously ruined the franchise.
The Riddler from The Batman is poorly written because he spends the first two acts establishing himself as a person trying to right the wrongs of Gotham and honestly did a really good job at it, then had to switch to trying to destroy the city in act 3 because they didn’t want the audience to get any ideas.
Eddie Brock in spider man 3 comes to mind.
It’s amazing how much they bastardized both Sam Raimi’s Spider Man movies and Venom in that movie.
suggestion: edit the question so it asks who is the worst-written villain. Unless you really want boring political rants.
Oh, I got a real fictional answer. Dominic Toretto. His crew started as simple thieves who stole DVD players. Dom had no problem with Brian getting iced by the Koreans to throw off the feds. He played all sides against themselves and showed real potential as the villain who got away. Stone cold sociopath who drives 2 nice cars.
Fast forward 20 years and he’s a super spy who has reluctantly saved the world three times while driving variations of those same 2 nice cars.
He’s become the anti-villain. Not a hero but someone who stops other villains. There’s also no real person anymore. Dom is just a guy who drives and has a one word catchphrase that’s so boring it’s a joke now. There is no more depth or nuance to him. And since he contractually can’t lose fights in his films there is no chance the other villains succeed.
Rose from Pokémon Sword and Shield. He wants to solve an energy crisis that won’t actually be an issue for like 1,000 years. Then when Leon asks him to delay his plans for literally one day he massively flips out and decides to kick off the apocalypse. And no, it doesn’t make any more sense in context.
That is some Gainax ending level type shit there.
The Hamburgler
Willy Wonka is definitely up there. Slave labour, child endangerment, unsafe working conditions the list goes on. The man is psychotic
Edit: I didn’t read the whole prompt.
Rupert Murdoch.Edit: I see the title has been edited and so Murdoch doesn’t count (and it was a stretch given the qualifiers in the post text anyway.)
I’m probably gonna get a lot of flak for this, but definitely team rocket of the mainline pokemon anime. They basically kept harassing a kid, who I was so glad they replaced in New Horizons, and had no life after gen 5. Gen 5 was their absolute peak, before they went from doing serious spy type work for their boss back to harassing an annoying kid.
After a few series, they get kinda boring because they become nothing more than another box to check off for episode production. Felt like they didn’t have anything cool left to do, outside the gen 8 episode where their alternate universe selves are using dialga and palkia fighting to turn everyone’s pokemon into eggs so they can steal them.
I have only seen maybe the first 20-30 episodes of New Horizons and I am so glad they have a new evil team taking the reins.
