Hate Sink

This character is typically found in stories that don't contain a true "villain", and are meant as a target that the audience can channel their dislike toward. Examples include disaster stories where there literally is no villain behind it all, films where a system or even an idea are the "villains" so to speak, and certain action movies where the villains are just too cool to hate.

This character is not the main villain, and is usually not a true antagonist at all. They aren't causing the struggle that the heroes must overcome, though their actions always make the heroes' job more difficult. Their list of character traits usually includes selfishness, stubbornness, greed, holier-than-thou contempt, and a simply inexhaustible ability to make bad decisions. Basically, they exist to be hated. Every action they perform and every piece of dialogue they utter is designed to incite rage in the audience. They usually get their comeuppance in a very audience-satisfying scene.

This isn't the same as Jerkass or Designated Villain. The key here is in the story that the character comes from. The writers are giving you someone to hate simply because the story needs an anthropomorphic "villain", but the character is sort of an afterthought to the actual plot.

See also Villainy-Free Villain.

Film - Animation

 * In the 2002's movie Groove Squad, the villains can't be hated for several reasons: Dr. Nightingale is entertaining in his ambition of TOTAL! WORLD! DOMINATION!; Flower Power are a trio of evil hippies with cool powers, and the Giant Worm is a... well... giant worm. So the movie has one in the form of Star, Chrissy's bitchy rival at the squad. Every moment of her screentime is her complaining about how Chrissy's the cheerleader captain and not her, constantly trying to take her place in the squad and steal her Love Interest. And if that wasn't enough,

Film - Live Action

 * Titanic: Billy Zane's character, Cal. He disparages the Picasso paintings; verbally and physically abuses Rose; tries to have Jack killed; is exposed to care more about money than Rose; and finally cowardly escapes on a lifeboat using a small child. Although he survives, he is deprived of Rose in the end, loses his money through bad investments and ultimately puts a pistol in his mouth and that is the audiences' consolation.
 * Independence Day: The Secretary of Defense, Mr. Nimzicki (a.k.a. Foily McAntagonist). The aliens are inscrutable, have cool ships and bring the Monumental Damage and massive carnage that is the reason you bought the ticket. This guy knows about the aliens ahead of time but stays silent to give the President "plausible deniability." He continually pushes the use of nukes that are ineffective. He cockily celebrates victory too soon only to immediately be proven wrong. Finally he is the only person to disagree with the final plan that ends up working. His comeuppance is being fired by President Whitmore in person.
 * Aliens: Paul Reiser's company guy, Carter Burke. The aliens are already scary, so the filmmakers are hedging their bets by offering Burke as the weaselly company guy that only cares about money and fame. He knows about the aliens ahead of time and sends the colonists to investigate. He disagrees with nuking the site from orbit. He tries to impregnate Newt and Ripley with alien embryos with a plan to sabotage and kill the other heroes. Finally he cowardly retreats behind a door locking the other heroes out, where he is deliciously killed by an alien.
 * In the novel, he was to be found attached to a wall when Ridley went on her rescue mission to save Newt. Begging for death, she hands him a grenade instead.
 * Die Hard: The reporter. The German terrorists/bank robbers have awesome accents and their leader is the perfect villain to love: intelligent, Wicked Cultured, and compassionate to the hostages, but swift and deadly toward the authorities and driven by greed. So who do you hate? The annoying reporter that ends up exposing who Holly McClane really is by threatening the McClane housekeeper with deportation and terrorizes their kids all for the sake of a story. Possibly the greatest comeuppance example: he is punched by Holly McClane at the end.
 * The coke-snorting yuppie asswipe who constantly badly flirts with Holly exposes John's identity to the terrorists, problably hoping to finally get her in the sack. He ends up getting shot in the head by the terrorists.
 * To a somewhat lesser degree, the two Agent Johnsons (no relation). The are rather disrespectful to Powell and the other police, unknowingly play into the robbers hands by cutting the power, and are perfectly fine with allowing some of the hostages to die if it means getting the villains.
 * The same reporter gets zapped with a stun gun by the same Holly McClane in Die Hard 2 after revealing on international TV that the airport has been hijacked, thereby causing a panic that the authorities were desperately trying to avoid. William Atherton seems to have made a career playing jerks we love to hate. Speaking of which...
 * Ghostbusters: Walter Peck, probably the quintessential Obstructive Bureaucrat. You can't hate ghosts or Gozer. But this pencil pusher is pissed that someone has the audacity to be as cool as the ghost busters. So he shuts their containment system down causing the climax of the movie.
 * Twister: Cary Elwes plays the corporate-backed scientist Jonas. You can't rage at the tornadoes, right? They're a force of nature, and they inspire awe in the heroes and give them purpose. But this guy "sold-out" and got corporate funding, making him a puppet of The Man (and why would a scientist ever want funding?). His team travel in four sinisterly identical black SUVs compared to our Ragtag Bunch of Misfits' ragtag assortment of vehicles, he's a hack that doesn't know the true science and just copies the heroes or relies too much on the instruments rather than the clairvoyant way that Helen Hunt just stares at the storm and knows which way it will go. Ultimately, his whole team is sucked into the storm when he arrogantly ignores the heroes' warnings.
 * Sean Parker from The Social Network. In a story full of Gray and Gray Morality, he's the closest character portrayed as an outright villain due to what a Jerkass he is.
 * Harvey Baylor in the laughably awful Planet of the Dinosaurs. The protagonists have all crash-landed on a far flung planet inhabited by prehistoric creatures, with no way to contact Earth and little hope of being rescued. Harvey proceeds to whine indiscriminately about how he's the Vice President of Spaceways Incorporated (and therefore their boss) and he can get them all fired, complains about having to do so much walking with no clear endpoint, and repeatedly sexually harasses his secretary. You can't hate the dinosaurs because they're dinosaurs (and barely put in any appearances in the movie anyway), and you can't hate the planet because it's a planet. But BOY can you hate Harvey Baylor!
 * You can't hate the titular eldritch abominations from The Langoliers (especially since they're just a creepy noise closing in from over the horizon for most of the story), and there's no one to really blame for stranding the characters in the past. But there's Toomy. Hateful, spiteful, assholish, with Freudian excuses and issues stacked high, who annoys, irritates and backstabs. Yeah, you can hate Toomy. You can't not hate Toomy.
 * In a similar Stephen King example, in the live action production of The Mist, the monsters are terrifying but you can't completely hate them because they don't appear to be acting with true malice. They're just following their instincts to eat and reproduce. But boy, oh boy, can you ever hate Mrs. Carmody, the shrill, hateful Jesus freak who looks down her nose at anyone who isn't as "righteous" as she is and whipped the mob into a religious frenzy that almost resulted in the murder of the protagonist's young son.
 * Let's go for King story number 3: Percy Wetmore in The Green Mile. You can't hate the racism in the '30s that put John Coffey on Death Row; you can't hate the system for making sure he'll die in the electric chair; and you sure as hell can't hate Old Sparky itself. But you can definitely hate Percy, who uses the fact that he's the nephew of the governor's wife to duck authority at every turn...even after deliberately sabotaging the execution of a convict he particularly hates and having him literally fried alive.
 * Carl Anhauser from 2012...is a subversion of this, surprisingly. While he acts like a dick for much of the movie and occasionally lashes out at people, he's still trying to keep as many people alive as possible, and the movie never really paints him as a completely bad person.
 * Jurassic Park: Donald Gennaro, the lawyer. Specifically because of how different his character is in the book from the movie. In the book he is actually fairly competent and brave, not the useless, spineless one-dimensional character in the movie, illustrating the screenplay writers needed someone the audience to focus some hate on, because you can't hate the heroes or the dinosaurs right? He's the only person to not see any problem with cloning dinosaurs, shows his stupidity on the tour by asking if the live people are autoerotic (perhaps confusing the word animatronic?), and then abandons the children during the scene with the T-Rex. His comeuppance of getting eaten sitting on the toilet is masterful.
 * Ironically, the novel version of John Hammond fills the role very nicely; he's an arrogant, rich bastard used to getting his own way, whose refusal to listen to criticism ends up getting numerous people killed. His comeuppance is  In the movie he's upgraded to a nice old man whose only fault is naive overconfidence and sexism in survival situations.
 * Resident Evil Afterlife: Kim Koates plays the annoying Bennett, a movie producer trapped in an L.A. prison with a few other survivors. His character is the classic hatesink - utterly one dimensional and can be lifted right out of the story. He is rude, selfish, and disagrees with every other main character on decisions.
 * Unstoppable: You can't hate a runaway train, but you can hate Obstructive Bureaucrat Galvin. His comeuppance is that he loses his job afterwards.

Literature

 * In the Malazan Book of the Fallen novel Deadhouse Gates the Chain of Dogs (a massive host of refugees marching across the continent) is constantly being attacked by enemy armies, but our viewpoint character for these sections of the story never gets more than a few glimpses of the enemy leaders. Without a face or personality to put to them, it's hard to dislike the armies of the Apocalypse on a personal level. Instead we're invited to vent our loathing upon a group of whiny nobles within the Chain of Dogs, who protest the Canon Sue's actions at every turn, are openly cruel to their servants, and get a lot of their fellow refugees killed through incompetence.
 * Harry Potter gives us Dolores Umbridge. In a book in which the Big Bad Voldemort is laying low, she takes the stage as the main face of opposition, and is still the character most hated by many fans. While Voldemort was never seen as the slightest bit sympathetic, he is so cartoonishly evil that he's hard to take seriously on an adult level, and so singleminded (and subsequently flawed) in his purposes that he's more like a force of nature than a person. Umbridge, on the other hand, is a good demonstration of what you get when you take a bigoted, hypocritical shrew and give her authority, and is so plausibly cruel in the course of her travesties of justice that readers find their blood seething with her every word and deed. This goes to the point that J. K. Rowling herself had to state she was tossed into Azkaban for life for her crimes at the end of the final book.
 * Since there's no real villain in Flight 116 Is Down by Caroline B. Cooney, the audience gets to focus their hatred on Darienne, a selfish passenger who ends up being completely unharmed in the crash. Heidi and Patrick work hard to save the passengers of the crashed plane while Darienne stands around doing nothing but complaining and being useless, yet she tries to take credit for saving people at the end. Even Patrick loses his cool when Darienne gets too much to handle.

Live Action Television

 * Persons Unknown: We don't know who's behind the kidnappings of our main cast, but Bill Blackham, played by Sean O'Bryan, seems to be a repository for all the negative reactions one could have to being kidnapped and placed in a ghost town. Everything he does is selfish or irrational, especially his.
 * Netflix's hit series Orange Is The New Black is set in a women's prison, so it's filled with pretty horrible people, inmates and staff alike. However, they tend to have sympathetic (even pitiful) moments and being funny and entertaining in their hijinks. There's an exception to this rule in Season 3 with . Unlike anything else seen in the show, this is played completely seriously, made all the worse with . Any of his appearances darken an already dark show, and seals his status as the only truly irredeemable character in the series.

Theater

 * Inspector Javert is the main antagonist of Les Misérables, but while he does make life miserable for Valjean, Javert honestly believes that he's the good guy and he's just trying to do his job and arrest what he believes to be a dangerous criminal (and Valjean technically is); and when Javert realizes that Valjean is really a good person through and through, it turns his world upside down, . So who can the audience hate? The Thenardiers, the cowardly comic relief thieves who abuse Cosette, loot bodies during the Revolution, and try to attack Valjean's house, which leads to Cosette being sent away to protect her.

Video Games

 * In Pokémon Gold and Silver, the evil Team Rocket organization only turns up three times and hardly drive the plot, and end up hardly detestable as a result. However, the story features many encounters with your rude, thieving, Pokemon-abusing, borderline-sociopathic rival, who is much easier to hate. Until he finally undergoes Character Development, that is.
 * Your rival in Red/Blue might count. He's not evil in any sense, but hes a rude, annoying braggart, always one upping you and WILL make you want to beat his face in. He gets better at the end of the game, though.
 * In Pokémon Black and White, the conflict of the story is between the player and N. So there's, guaranteed to earn the player's hatred and disgust.
 * Final Fantasy X. As it's rather hard to develop much hatred for a giant, emotionless crustacean regardless of how many people it kills (and even harder to keep coming up with excuses to wind up in the ocean having boss fights with it), Seymour keeps popping up in the plot to provide a speaking villain for the party to fight on land instead of Sin. While he does have his own motivations and does get somewhat tied into the plot with Sin, his personal impact on the story itself is quite minimal overall aside from providing ever more complex boss fights
 * Volgin of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. His first action is blowing up his allies with a nuclear bomb, for the hell of it. However, despite being (relatively speaking) the Big Bad of the game, he's not the main antagonist - the game is much more interested in the relationship between Naked Snake and The Boss. Volgin simply serves as 1) A Homage and Affectionate Parody of James Bond villains; 2) a Foil to The Boss; and 3) a form of catharsis before The Reveal. Not to mention the fact that if it hadn't been for the stunt he pulled with the nuke, the entire series would probably had never happened.
 * Amateur Surgeon is a wacky medical comedy in which the patients are hilariously sympathetic criminals who can't be hated due to their hijinks, so we have the closest thing to a Big Bad of the first two games and Alan's arch-nemesis . He's a sociopathic Serial Killer whom his horrible misdeeds include: All of this for revenge and fun. Every one of his deeds are taken in a much more serious way compared to the others, and settles his status as an horrifyingly dark villain in an otherwise lighthearted game.
 * The Big Bad of the third game,, is even worse. At least shows impressive Chessmaster and Manipulative Bastard tendencies, so he can get some respect. , on the other hand, merely copycats his MO, and proves to be an stupid, incompetent bastard. As such, he's the only character to hate in the game.
 * Ace Attorney has a lot of horrible criminals, but these two are guaranteed to earn the player's hatred:
 * Trials and Tribulations has, Bitch in Sheep's Clothing extraordinaire. . And if that wasn't enough, , you can't help but cheer.
 * from Justice for All proves to be even worse.

Web Original

 * In Joss Whedon's supervillain musical Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, there's Captain Hammer, the Arch Enemy and Foil of the titular Villain Protagonist Dr. Horrible. He's a petty, bullying, womanizing and smug Jerkass who only engages in superheroics for the PR, completely uncaring for the safety of the citizens. He constantly bullies Dr. Horrible because, in his mind, all nerdy kids end up being supervillains. The final nail is him dating Penny to spite him, which leads to the doctor taking matters into his own hands. Seeing him being defeated and humiliated by Dr. Horrible is incredibly satisfying,
 * That said, Nathan Fillion's performance makes him entertaining despite his status as a Hate Sink.

Western Animation

 * Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy is situated in a grey set of characters, none of them being a saint but also not devoid of redeeming qualities. So the movie introduces the closest this series has to a Big Bad in the form of, who changes most things of the entire series in its short-timed presence. . What makes this character repulsive is The reason why it exists is