Red Skull: Difference between revisions

* [[Back from the Dead]]

* [[Bad Boss]]: He frequently kills all but his most loyal or competent underlings--and sometimes even them--either [[You Have Failed Me...|for failure]] or for [[You Have Outlived Your Usefulness|outliving their usefulness]], but just as often [[For the Evulz]]. He once killed his ''accountant'', for pete's sake, because "she was a bad accountant". And he usually uses his "Dust of Death" poison, one of the most agonising and horrible weapons in his arsenal, when he feels like doing the deed.

* [[Badass Normal]]: Though he may be a thoroughly despicable human being, there is no doubt that the Red Skull is [[Badass]]. He is a highly skilled fighter capable of regularly holding his own against [[Captain America (comics)|Captain America]], one of the best martial artists in the world. He is an expert marksman and a brilliant and imaginative strategist, and like a true [[Magnificent Bastard]] is unafraid to put himself in harm's way or use himself as his own best chess piece to see his plans come to fruition. He is considered one of the deadliest threats to mankind in a world that has to put up with regular [[Alien Invasion|Alien Invasions]], [[Eldritch Abomination|Eldritch Abominations]], power-mad superhumans and all manner of catastrophes, and he consistently demonstrates why he has that reputation.

* [[Bastard Understudy]]: To Hitler.

* [[Dark Messiah]]: There's an Aryan brotherhood gang called "The Skulls" and they worship the Skull as the second coming. Oddly enough the gang and their leader are mainly Wolverine villains. You could also say Crossbones sees the Skull this way.

* [[Diabolical Mastermind]]

* [[The Dreaded]]: Just mentioning his name is a good way to end villain deals, and you'll have to look pretty damn hard if you want to find someone who would willingly work with him.

* [[Dystopia Justifies the Means]]: His ideal world varies between a violent [[Police State]] and a lawless, chaotic hellhole; in either case he believes that the strong could and should brutalise the weak, commits mass murder on a regular basis, and demands absolute power which he wants to use primarily to oppress and torture people, not simply power for its own sake. And he enjoys it, every minute of it.

*** Curiously, [[Doctor Doom]] has made similar claims. Maybe it's just an innate power of [[Marvel Comics]] archvillains?

* [[Hoist by His Own Petard]]: After coming [[Back from the Dead]] with the "perfect Aryan" face of his rival, Captain America, his first major scheme ended with him being disfigured with an actual "red skull" for a face after he inhaled his own "dust of death" while trying to kill Cap.

* [[Kick the Son of a Bitch]]: Magneto once kidnapped the Skull and locked him in an abandoned fallout shelter, telling him that death would be too good for him and that he wanted the Skull to wish that Magneto ''had'' killed him after the coming ordeal. The shelter was completely empty except for some jugs of water, which Magneto advised the Skull to conserve, and had no light source. So for weeks, the Skull was locked in a dark room with concrete walls, slowly starving to death. He raged, pounded on the walls, tried in vain to reach the exit high above him, sobbed, and eventually began hallucinating. By the time he was found by Crossbones, Mother Night, and Machinesmith, he was utterly broken and wished to die.

** He had an [[Ignored Epiphany]] moment here too. After being locked in that shelter for days, starving and alone in the dark, he finally resigned himself to his fate and for the first -- and only -- time in life, he felt remorse for his life of villainy and privately conceded that he deserved this fate. He was rescued shortly after, regained his will to live after seeing Captain America and remembering how much he hated him...and after telling Cap as much (Cap's reaction to this meeting is the page quote, incidentally), began ranting about how he would get revenge on Magneto for putting him in there (though, [[Always a Bigger Fish|tellingly]], he didn't put much effort into that particular scheme).

** It's actually rather complicated in publishing terms, since the first three versions were originally intended to be the same character, and only a series of [[Retcon]] stories have created the distinctions between them.

* [[Master of Disguise]]: The list of people he's successfully impersonated to run his schemes must be a yard long at this point. And that's not counting the times he's just [[Grand Theft Me|used other folks' bodies]].

* [[Offscreen Villain Dark Matter]]: [[Justified Trope|Justified]] as the Skull not only having access to hidden Nazi caches, but also frequently running organizations like HYDRA and various factions of AIM from whom he takes resources.

* [[Politically-Incorrect Villain]]: Aside from the fact that he's a (former) friggin' ''Nazi'', he's also pretty sexist, to the point of nearly killing his own daughter because she wasn't a ''boy'', though he's expressed a certain level of respect for certain supervillainesses like Madame Hydra, and Syn when she grew up. Doesn't make up for his treatment of Mother Night, though, which was outright and frequent physical abuse, and he loved every minute of it too.

* [[Stupid Jetpack Hitler]]: Turns out the Skull financed the research into a lot of sci-fi technology in the 1940s.

* [[Sympathy for the Devil]]: He claims that his violently abusive father genuinely loved his mother in the same way that Hitler genuinely loved the Jews, the way a victimiser needs victims, without whom there is only madness. He is dead serious and though he never directly links himself to either in the same way, it can be inferred. He relates to the bully more than the bullied, even when the bullying is on a genocidal scale.

* [[Torture Technician]]: His hobby, apparently. At least on one occasion he even had his own [[Torture Cellar]], which he said was for "recreation".

* [[Training from Hell]]: Claimed to have liked it, to hope and pray that Hitler would come up with something more intense and cruel than last, because pain and punishment and torment were his motivators.

* [[Unholy Matrimony]]: When he was with Mother Night. Though Skull was always abusive to her, even if she was completely loyal to him.

** He also tried briefly with Madame HYDRA/the Viper, but she turned out to be too crazy for ''him''.

* [[Unreliable Narrator]]: The Skull's own version of his life story includes the claim that he remembers every detail of his birth, knows in-depth what his parents were like despite never really meeting them (he claimed to "feel the hatred" of his father for him- yes, when he was just born) and some other stuff like being thirty years old when he committed his first murder and met Hitler, despite subsequent versions portraying him as a teenager, not to mention his claim of having completed his Red Skull training in weeks, whilst simultaneously being an uneducated failure at everything in life up to that point. Obviously a lot of these changes are [[Retcon]], but it actually makes sense that they are different because if you read between the lines, the Skull could be taken as just a [[Blatant Lies|blatant liar,]] trying to make himself sound more remarkable than he was.

* [[Villain Exit Stage Left]]: The Red Skull is really slippery when he is making his getaway, with escape routes carefully designed to discourage pursuit.