Topic on Talk:Evil Is Petty
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The thing to understand is that this trope isn't "Evil is a small thing" but "Evil likes being a dick when it isn't doing big EVUL things". When Evil is Petty, a Bond villain, in between his schemes, will take the time to steal candy from babies and make little kids drop their ice cream, just for giggles. He'll bring in a bolt cutter and "liberate" all the pens at the bank. He'll go out of his way to do an incredibly tiny dickish thing, because there's no dick move too small to inflate his ego. If he could find a way to diminish someone else's happiness just by breathing, he'd do it and revel in it.