I’m not just talking cruelty in terms of their goals, but also how they went about achieving their goals
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The Shapeshifters from Deep Space 9. They put a pox on an entire race for being disobedient.
I was gonna say that alien from TNG who wiped out an entire civilization because they killed his wife.
This is a very interesting thought: the Dowdy alien you mention has wiped out an entire race of 50 billion beings, but is aware of his crime and lives in self exile. He’s committed an atrocious crime in a rage fit.
On the other hand, the changelings committed a planned crime with intent to cause suffering.
I’m not sure who’s worse: the Dowd by magnitude of the crime, but the Changelings ruthlessly command their Dominion.
And he didn’t even like Eric all that much.
Which aliens got the po?
I dont remember the name of the episode, but Bashir took a leave of absence and hung out on this planet for, I’d guess, a year to work on a cure. He didn’t find a cure but managed (by accident) to make a vaccine that saved new-borns from getting infected.
The Endsinger is up there. FFXIV Endwalker spoilers follow.
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She was tasked with finding the meaning of life, but the vast indifference of the universe turned her into the incarnation of depression. She determined that life is pointless and invariably leads to suffering, and decided to end all life in the universe as a kindness. She made her nest at the edge of creation, where she gathered all of the souls of the dead to prevent their reincarnation and feed on their despair and suffering, to eventually grow powerful enough to accelerate entropy and bring about the heat death of the universe.
She was defeated by the power of friendship. And our best frenemy.
On second thought, Valens van Varro is worse. Fuck that guy.
She literally recreated civilizations from the souls of the dead at the height of their suffering to harvest their negativ effects on dynamis.
My guess is gonna be a Dr. Who or a Black Mirror villain that utilized deep psychological horror. Maybe one of the ones that made people into immortals or data-immortals with a near infinite amount of time combined with horrifying living conditions to break their victims.
Or Hades/other Greek gods and such.
Hades is far from being evil. He’s a loyal husband and impartial/ fair when dealing with the dead. He even did a solid for Orpheus that one time and all. Too bad homie didn’t follow Hades’ clear instructions.
Zeus on the other hand… Yeah…
Doctor Who (him/her)self has done so many messed up stuff in the name of his/her own moral compass.
But it was her mother who destroyed half the universe.
The reverse flash . Goes back in time to kill the flashs mom just because he hates the flash and to inflict as much emotional damage as possible.
The Fleshmancer in Sea of Stars is pretty terrible. He creates giant, potentially world destroying, monsters that feed on different types of despair, and so seek to create those emotions in as many people as possible. He committed one genocide against an entire race, and then trapped them in living death, unable to be seen, or leave his lab. He seems to have committed another genocide, just to make a birthday present for his friend. And this is all on just two planets, when he is acting in the same way across the entire multiverse
There was an old Captain America comic where the Red Skull had a glass floor in his dining room so he could look down on the torture chamber underneath.
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The worst part was, the C’tan which ended up being known as The Deceiver convinced them that they could make the Necrontyr immortal, fixing their cancer ridden short lives, and aid them in their war against the Old ones. This was accomplished by a process called bio-transference using the bio furnaces. As the Necrontyr either willingly or unwillingly lined up to burn up their bodes in the furnaces, the C’tan could be seen above the bio furnaces gorging on the souls of the Necrontyr burning.
Yeah, fuck those things.
Big Brother.
The paranoia of everyone being on the watch for everything forcing everyone to be even more paranoid
Delores Umbridge.
Naraku from Inuyasha.
Oh wait no.
God from The Bible.
I don’t remember all that much about Inuyasha but I remember while watching it thinking I had never hated a villain so much in any other thing I’d seen
I disagree… but you’re close… the ancients.
Not only do they see all the horror and suffering that Anubis and the goa’uld inflicted on the universe; the could have done anything… not even helping; rather they never even hindered Anubis
They didnt do shit until he halfway ascended and became a threat to them. And how did he halfway ascend? Oma fucking Desala meddled with the mortals, again. And when a mortal gave up everlasting life and power to un-fuck their mistake, they un-ascended him!
They really took a nosedive in the public relations there.
Oma did all those things. They did none of it. She was literally the only one who ever did anything. All they did was ignore Oma and Anubis and Daniel.
Now when Morgan LeFey was trying to help the gang with the Ori, they gave her a proverbial bitch-slapping.
Though, really, their non-interference was basically an application of the Star Trek Prime Directive. Basically the same kind of thing we recommend when dealing with nature, make as little impact as possible. Its only as cruel as nature itself is cruel.
There’s a huge difference with the Prime Directive - although I think it can be horrible too.
The Federation doesn’t go around leaving super advanced technology to be found and abused by primitives everywhere. When the Ancients ascended, they just left everything behind, for good or ill, and then refused to interfere when others found their old stuff and used it.
The Ancients meanwhile not only did that, but also abandoned friends and allies, like the Asgard. They could’ve fixed the Asgard genetic problem, and pre-ascension, they’d been allies, but despite that they were just ‘nah, fuck y’all, we’re out.’
The Crippled God from Mazalan Book of the Fallen. I should probably spoiler this. And trigger warning.
spoiler
The High King Kallor once ruled an empire. And he did so with a cold hard iron fist. Some Elder Gods decided that he was to be dethroned, and set off to confront the High King. Kallor had gotten wind of this before the confrontation and so had all his mages begin a ritual. One that would summon an alien force from beyond the known universe. They were successful and pulled an entity of such power that it destroyed Kallor’s entire empire. As the Gods approached the High Kings throne they found him there, emporer of only ash.
The power Kallor summoned was so alien and anthemic to the universe it needed to be destroyed. But they found it couldn’t be done. So instead they crippled and chained the power. This power came to be know as the Crippled God.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly the cruelty that the Crippled God did himself. See, the crippled god worked in the shadows from his tent on the beach. He lifted others up to enact his broken visions. Granted them slivers of his alien power, and whispered promises of power or revenge into their ears. One such figure was the Pannion Seer.
The Seer was a holy figure who led an massive army, the Pannion Domin, on a crusade against the world. This was a holy war and such his followers where blindly devoted. His most devoted where called Tenescowri. The Tenescowri where purposely starved. Given no rations, no water, no food. They had to subsist on what they were able to find. And what is the most common thing found after a battle? Dead bodies. The Tenescowri was an army of forced cannibalism.
It gets a bit darker. The most powerful of the Tenescowri where the Children of the Dead Seed. During battle the fervent women would take dying men, and force them to copulate. Filling their wombs with the seed of a dead man. These children would grow up to be unholy warriors.
I think it was said the Tenescowri were 100,000 strong led by Anaster the Fist Born of the Dead Seed.
The series is fantastic but it does get quite heavy in a lot of ways. Very heavy on the ways people and societies are shitty to each other, but the central theme of it really is compassion.
As Llamapacolypse said, it has it’s dark moments. What I wrote above is some of the darkest. It never goes into too much detail when it involves some of the more triggering things. Just a fade to black.
That said it’s such an intensely human series. So much love and compassion litered throughout the whole thing.
It’s also such a unique experience. Most fantasy books have huge massive reveals that shock and take you by surprise. Malazan has these things. But it also does it in reverse. You’ll read something and then a book or two later it changes context entirely, completely blowing your mind.
