The villain's journey is rare in popular culture--most characters are fully-formed tyrants with little to no story arc. However, a few particularly epic series take the time to develop complex villains, including Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Smallville, Babylon 5, Game of Thrones, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Increasingly, villains' origin stories have found new popularity through films like Wicked, Maleficent, and Despicable Me, alongside shows starring serial killers and Machiavellian schemers. This book examines the villain's decline and subsequent struggle toward redemption, asking why these characters are willing to cross moral lines that "good" characters are not. The first half follows characters like Loki, Jessica Jones and Killmonger through the villain's journey: an inverse or twisted version of scholar Joseph Cambell's hero's journey. The remainder of this book examines the many different villainous archetypes such as the trickster, the outcast, the tyrant, or the misunderstood hero in greater detail. Written for writers, creators, fans, and mythologists, this book offers a peek into the minds of some of fiction's greatest villains.

The American Villain: Encyclopedia of Bad Guys in Comics, Film, and Television seeks to provide one go-to reference for the study of the most popular and iconic villains in American popular culture. Since the 1980s, pop culture has focused on what makes a villain a villain. The Joker, Darth Vader, and Hannibal Lecter have all been placed under the microscope to get to the origins of their villainy. Additionally, such bad guys as Angelus from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Barnabas Collins from Dark Shadows have emphasized the desire for redemption—in even the darkest of villains. Various incarnations of Lucifer/Satan have even gone so far as to explore the very foundations of what we consider "evil." The American Villain: Encyclopedia of Bad Guys in Comics, Film, and Television seeks to collect all of those stories into one comprehensive volume. The volume opens with essays about villains in popular culture, followed by 100 A–Z entries on the most notorious bad guys in film, comics, and more. Sidebars highlight ancillary points of interest, such as authors, creators, and tropes that illuminate the motives of various villains. A glossary of key terms and a bibliography provide students with resources to continue their study of what makes the "baddest" among us so bad.

When a reader is reincarnated into a hardcore rated-R novel as Estella, the most precious child of the villainous Kartina family, she learns that the life of a cunning archer, deadly apothecary, and bomb maker isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. After all, this is a world of violent fiction, and there’s only one ending awaiting her family… death by male lead! Armed with the knowledge of the plot and her family’s regrettable demise, Estella decides to approach the story from an entirely new angle. She pretends to be a helpless and frail sister to her older siblings Kalen, Ada, and Alya—both to protect them from their miserable fates and change the course of the future for their marks. But with the male lead Rodrigo Erhart at the top of their hit list, she has her work cut out for her. Except is saving her family all there is to do? As Estella proves her worth to Rodrigo and gains his trust, are they also catching feelings? Only time will tell in The Obsessed Hero and the Villainous Family’s Daughter!

Alongside superheroes, supervillains, too, have become one of today’s most popular and globally recognizable figures. However, it is not merely their popularity that marks their significance. Supervillains are also central to superhero storytelling to the extent that the superhero genre cannot survive without supervillains. Bringing together different approaches and critical perspectives across disciplines, author Nao Tomabechi troubles overly hero-centered works in comics studies to reconsider the modern American myths of the superheroes. Considering the likes of Lex Luthor, the Joker, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Loki, Venom and more, Supervillians explores themes such as gender and sexuality, disability, and many forms of Otherness in relation to the notion of evil as it appears in the superhero genre. The book investigates how supervillains uphold and, at times, trouble dominant ideals expressed by the heroism of our superheroes.

Study of selected pirate novels of the 19th century which illustrates the relationship between varied images of pirates and the different political projects of the authors, and the use of pirates as emblems of the struggle of Spanish America to transform

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Münster (Englisches Seminar), language: English, abstract: Is there a difference between a tragic villain and a comic one? On the basis of the two Shaespearean villains Iago of the tragedy Othello and Don John, the villain of the comedy Much Ado about Nothing this term paper aims at scrutinizing the concept of the Elizabethan villain.