Designated Villain: Difference between revisions
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* [[They Plotted a Perfectly Good Waste|Done deliberately]] in ''Rosso Malpelo'', a novel written by Giovanni Verga. In fact, the child miner protagonist is portrayed by the narrator (who embodies the Sicilian mentality of the nineteenth century) as a malicious and bad bully...[[Values Dissonance|due to his red hair.]] However, it is made pretty clear that Malpelo is just a poor [[Jerkass Woobie]], brutalized by the cruel society where he lives, who sometimes even borders on a [[Jerk With a Heart of Gold]], especially when he interacts with his ill friend, Ranocchio. (And no, this is not a case of [[Villainy Free Villain]]: all the other characters, [[Wide Eyed Idealist|with the exception of his father and Ranocchio]], are far bigger jerks than him, if not outright evil).
* [[Michael Crichton|Michael Crichton's]] ''[[Timeline]]'' features a [[Jerkass]] corporate executive Robert Doniger whose quantum teleportation experiments kickstart the plot. He supports all possible safeguards for his technology, all accidents and disasters are caused by people refusing to follow his orders, and he does everything in his power to help the protagonists. As thanks for this, they murder him at the end by sending him back in time to die of the Black Plague. For being a jerk.
* Even if Claudia weren't a member of the Baby Sitters Club, the title of ''Claudia and Mean Janine'' tells us which sister we're supposed to be rooting for in The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry. However, Janine never does anything particularly "mean" in the book. Instead, she makes attempt after attempt to connect with her sister, while Claudia repeatedly shoots her down, internally snarking about Janine's activities, friends, and her clothes. Claudia's complaints that Janine isn't helping take care of their grandmother also ring hollow since (a) no one ever asks Janine to help, and (b) when Janine tried to volunteer to help, Claudia insisted she could take care of everything and there was no reason for anyone else to disrupt their lives.
* Most of the 'monsters' in mythology are never actually shown to do anything evil, and a lot of them are treated horribly anyway. Medusa and the children of Loki especially come to mind.
** Through only Jörmungandr was treated that way. Odin tried to drown him for... well being a snake. Hel was put in charge of Hel and given control over 9 realms. Sure, she was separated from her family and was not allowed to live among the other gods but she was given a important job. Fenrir was taken to Asgard and only chained up after he grew enormous and wreaked havoc.
** Likewise, depending on which versions of a fairy tale you read, the evil stepsister/rival to the heroine doesn't do anything evil in general, besides being pushed to replace the heroine by her mother. In some stories, the stepmother even forces her own daughter(s) to mutilate themselves, inflicting worse pain on them than the heroine goes through! And yet most of those tales end with the rival being humiliated or brutally murdered.
* Karen Traviss seems determined to do this to Dr. Catherine Halsey in her Halo novels Halo: Glasslands and Halo: The Thursday War (prequels to Halo 4), putting the blame for the SPARTAN-II program's shadier aspects squarely on Halsey's shoulders. Almost everyone suddenly starts seeing Halsey as a monster who shouldn't be allowed to live. The specific act that earns the hate is the flash-cloning of the kidnapped children in order to convince the parents that the kids aren't really missing. The clones fall ill and die a few months later. The head of ONI, Admiral Margaret Parangosky, personally blames Halsey for this. The kicker is, nothing happens in ONI without Parangosky's say-so, so there's no way she could not have known about the flash-cloning, especially since it hardly could have been accomplished by Halsey alone. Nobody seems to consider that making parents think their kids are dead may be more merciful than living with the constant fear of any parent whose child was kidnapped. Alternatively, the SPARTAN-III program (using orphans from glassed planets) is seen as the better alternative, as the orphans agreed to take part in it. However, the SPARTAN-III program is meant to produce a mix of Super Soldiers and Cannon Fodder. Besides, all those orphans are teenagers and, thus, cannot be mature enough to make the decision to agree. Another argument is that the SPARTAN-II program was started many years before the war with the Covenant, so there's no justification for it. However, the Insurgents who plagued UNSC for years did so using terrorist tactics, such as suicide-bombing (in Halo: Contact Harvest, Sergeant Johnson's entire squad is wiped out trying to stop an Insurgent woman, who ends up blowing up several city blocks with her bomb-purse). Basically, while Halsey's actions may be seen as deplorable, they can also be seen as justified and in no way placed on her shoulders alone. Worse, the author shows no sympathy for Halsey, even when it's revealed that she cries herself to sleep every night with the name of her dead daughter (Miranda Keyes) on her lips.
** Traviss just barely skirts the line on this with the Jedi and the Republic in her Star Wars Expanded Universe material. Granted, she does have a point about an army of cloned, 10-year-old cannon fodder being led by 13-year old commanders, with both Jedi and Clone Troopers trained as emotionally detached killers with no messy "attachments" from infancy, and a Republic that sees no problem with this being very dodgy with ethics at best and no better thsn what they're fighting at worst.
* In the Inheritance Cycle, for the first two books at least, King Galbatorix can come across as this. During his centuries-long reign, we never actually see or hear about him doing anything truly evil. The worst he does is imposes hard taxes on his people (acceptable as his Empire is in a state of war) and sends an army against the rebels attacking his reign. Despite this, every good person in the books seems to see him as a tyrant.
* Bishop Patricius in The Mists of Avalon. Granted, he was very lawful and by-the-book. And he was the head of Christianity, which was the new "invading" religion, as compared to the Druidism that the Lady of the Lake and the Merlin were the heads of. But did he really deserve such a horrendous portrayal?
* [[The Bible]] has numerous examples of misunderstood people whose actions make them out to be villains. Potiphar, for example, may have had Joseph jailed on trumped-up charges, but he's portrayed as a faithful husband to his not-so-faithful wife nonetheless, and he apparently wasn't thinking very clearly.
* Marietta Edgecomb and Cho Chang in [[Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix.]] While we can all agree that Marietta attempting to rat out Dumbledore's Army wasn't a wise move, we're supposed to believe that she deserved to be deformed for it. This is especially jarring since it was heavily implied that she did it out of fear that her mother would lose her job at the Ministry of Magic. Cho is this because she actually dared to speak against Hermione for setting up the Jynx. We're supposed to think that Harry's breakup with her was justified, but Cho had every right to call Hermione out for something a Death Eater would do.
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