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Which characters count as supervillains?


Nihlus

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I count a supervillain as someone who has a malign effect outside his own vicinity.  Joffrey, Gregor, and ramsay are all really nasty, but if you're not next to them, you are probably safe.

Euron is seriously bad news, as is Cersei. Together, they could potentially cause a great deal of damage.  Littlefinger also probably qualifies, depending on what he has done/will do. And I wouldn't be surprised if Varys is one as well.

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Super-Villains as in, has super-powers and is evil?

I find it odd nobody has yet mentioned:

  • The Faceless Men
  • Melisandre
  • Khal Drogo
  • Qyburn
  • Veramyr Six-Skins
  • The White Walkers

I'll keep giving the Three Eyed Crow the benefit of the doubt for now, but I'm 88% sure he's evil as fuck as well.

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6 minutes ago, Damon_Tor said:

Super-Villains as in, has super-powers and is evil?

I find it odd nobody has yet mentioned:

  • The Faceless Men
  • Melisandre
  • Khal Drogo
  • Qyburn
  • Veramyr Six-Skins
  • The White Walkers

I'll keep giving the Three Eyed Crow the benefit of the doubt for now, but I'm 88% sure he's evil as fuck as well.

Melisandre's not a villain, and what's supernatural about Drogo again?

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4 hours ago, Ivan33 said:

If the story is properly written there should be no villains or heroes so given that i don't consider anyone villain or hero.

Nah. I'm not having that. There's shades of grey in the story, and a lot good characters have done bad things with the best intentions or simply because they are flawed. There's even "bad" characters who I feel sympathy for, like Viserys or Theon, but characters like Gregor, Ramsay, Roose, etc, are unquestionably villains. There's no shades of grey there. Those guys are just evil.

 

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5 hours ago, Ivan33 said:

If the story is properly written there should be no villains or heroes so given that i don't consider anyone villain or hero.

I have to disagree. Tell me how you don't look at a character like Jon and see him as a hero? There is no ambiguity surrounding which side of the line he is standing on. Same with a character like Ramsey. There is nothing heroic about anything he has done; everything he has done has been villainous.

As @UnFit Finlay says, there are characters who stand closer to the line. Theon is one, certainly. He betrayed Robb Stark, who he had grown up alongside, but later reveals the guilt he harbours for it because to Theon, Robb was like a brother. Not to mention the fact Ramsey destroys him. Robert Baratheon was King and loved by many, but he was happy enough to let Gregor Clegane rape and murder Elia Martell and kill her and Rhaegar's children. In aGoT he tried to let hired hands kill a young Daenerys, but would we call him a villain? Definitely not.

But this topic is about supervillains, which go beyond the pale; they are meant to be villains that have some kind of supernatural power. I listed Roose Bolton in a previous comment. But others have listed the likes of Euron Greyjoy, Ser Robert Strong, the Others, Veramyr Six-skins etc, who all fit the bill, too.

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I have to go with Euron. He is pretty much the quintessential mustache twirling mad scientist who has a diabolical plan to cause wanton destruction and bring about untold misery and suffering. Also Littlefinger being the mastermind behind causing much of the chaos and strife we have right now comes in at second.

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I've seen Vicky G referred to as a supervillain at least three times on three different websites. It makes sense, thinking about it. He's got a distinct character design (big dude with viking axe, decoared armor, and squid helmet), a position of power, a cool-sounding alias (Iron Captain), an over the top manner, a bunch of bad deeds under his belt, and something supernatural about him. Namely the dragon horn and red priest that he's using, plus his weird blackened hand that apparently grants enhanced strength.

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  • 2 weeks later...

To me a supervillain has more going on than just being good at killing (Drogo, Victarion), or doing horrible things (Mel). There's a certain something about supervillains that can even inspire a fan following. They're more interesting than your average brute, more successful than your standard opportunist, and smarter than your average bear (no disrespect meant to House Mormont).

Euron is top supervillain here.

Littlefinger may have a low bodycount but his scheming is top notch. He's in this class, no question.

Gregor is awful, but he's mindless muscle. You need cunning to be a supervillain. 

Ramsay. I'm on the fence with this one. I'm not entirely sure he's all there mentally. He's got some cunning but it's of a low sort. To be fair I'm not sure Euron is sane but he seems to be intelligent enough or dastardly enough to make up for any defect in that regard.

Roose is definitely a supervillian. He may even be the best one because he's smart enough to keep it under wraps so well that few, if any, realize what he is. 

Walder Frey is a terrible person and a total opportunist, but I don't really see him as supervillain material. The Red Wedding was not that difficult to orchestrate and the only reason he pulled it off was because no one would ever have thought of him doing something so low. Again, not a master of cunning here. He's a villain, just not a super one.

Cersei aspires to be a supervillain. She's really not smart enough for it.

Joffrey was a little dirtbag but probably would have grown up and realized he was making things worse for himself by acting that way.

Tywin is a supervillain when it suits him, which may even be worse than being downright evil through and through. He can turn it off and back on again, which is sick. He deliberately chooses supervillainy. 

The Others we don't know enough about to classify as villains or not. They're not human so judging them by even medieval human morality is silly. Besides which this thread seems to be about individuals, not groups.

Varamyr might or might not be. It would help if we knew him better, but I don't want to know him better so I'll leave him in the middle ground, wishing he could get supervillain status. 

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1 hour ago, Lady Blizzardborn said:

Gregor is awful, but he's mindless muscle. You need cunning to be a supervillain. 

A lot of famous supervillains are just muscle. And Gregor is actually fairly clever. He's not a top-tier schemer but he's shown to be a competent field commander and warrior.

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10 hours ago, Nihlus said:

A lot of famous supervillains are just muscle. And Gregor is actually fairly clever. He's not a top-tier schemer but he's shown to be a competent field commander and warrior.

He's competent at being a field commander when the orders are to burn, rape, and pillage. Tywin never gave him anything to do that required much in the way of brains. Being a competent warrior doesn't necessarily require intelligence, though intelligence can certainly help. No one ever accused Gregor of being burdened with an overabundance of thoughts. Like Walder Frey, I count him a villain, but not a super one. Maybe halfway between regular villain and supervillain. He's a sub-supervillain. 

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 8/19/2017 at 9:23 PM, Lady Blizzardborn said:

Cersei aspires to be a supervillain. She's really not smart enough for it.

But Cersei has a nicely synchronistic set of superpowers, like any superhero or supervillain who was invented or repopularized in the late 1980s.

Her superhuman level of shortsightedness might not seem like something you'd call a superpower, and on its own, it wouldn't be. But then neither would Deadpool's cancer, or Wolverine's ability to push his bones out through his own skin—those would just be ways to die, if not combined with their healing factor. The same goes for just about every late-dark-age super, from Daredevil's blindness to Crazy Jane's multiple personality disorder.

And Cersei's super-shortsightedness is combined with a sort of anti-karma: Every time she does something ridiculously self-destructive, it harms other people even more than herself, sometimes even her intended targets. A normal person would have no use for this power, but combine the two, and she's the most dangerous supervillain on Westeros.

However, I can see the problem with Cersei as a Rob Liefeld-era character. It's one thing that she doesn't have gigantic hair, a waist smaller than even the toes on her size-0 feet, clothing that's both impossible to put on without teleportation and impossible to keep in place without telekinesis, or extra muscles in places people don't have muscles, not even on top of her other muscles. But she never seems to have even one random pouch or ammo case strapped to her body, which absolutely rules her out.

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