How "Evil" is Your Villain?

Oh, yeah, it's not always change for change's sake, but there have been things before that've made me scratch my head and say "Why?"

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So many characters...

Most of my villains aren't "evil." Thieves, "bad," sure, willfully doing things to get ahead, but not "Evil." At most, I have one character I can think of who would happily cross the line into "evil" if she could - she was created to be used for revenge, destroyed her creators in the COT, and would do whatever possible (as far as she knows) to hurt them as well as the one she was created as a double of (who she blames for her existence.)

Of course, the game itself doesn't really let us be "evil." Bad, sure. But generally "pawns." That's part of the problem with trying to act to any character's concept of "being evil."

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In no particular order:

Sorrow-Weave: Thinks she's the daughter of Ruladak, so she enjoys testing her strength against people. Probably my most stereotypically villainous character, she has no real limits short of destroying the world. Still, she doesn't beat people up for no good reason--she has a bit of a code of honor about it. If you put on the cape, you're accepting anything she might throw your way, but she has no interest in hurting the weak unless she has to, and gets annoyed at those who go out of their way to do so.

Jessica Reid: Brainwashes people, sells illegal substances, and pretty much murders indiscriminately. She's evil, but it's the small-minded 'hey, where's my money?!' evil, not the 'mwahaha, how I am invincible!' evil.

Silead the Lament: Has a completely screwed up nervous system, and she's sort of a reverse-empath, so she's usually in horrible, mind-numbing pain... unless she's around somebody who's unhappy or in pain, which is the only time she feels okay. Put simply, she isn't a nice person to be captured by. When you get down to it, though, she's just a lonely kid who's doing the best she can to cope with the fact that she was horribly screwed up when she was young, and she does her best to do good with her, er, abilities as an assassin.

Liora Kate: Is going to be invincible! Yaaaaaaaay! She just needs a few more parts to finish up, and that's why she had to steal everything from that store. And then throw a brick through the window. And then set it on fire. But she gave like ten thousand (stolen) dollars to some orphans yesterday, so it's totally okay, you guys.

My villains range from not evil at all to pretty damn evil.

On the 'not evil' side I have a completely neutral observer who was falsely accused of a crime in Paragon and went with Arachnos to the Rogue Isles just to see what might happen there.

Another character is a former hero who felt ignored and unappreciated and was injured by a careless hero who thought they could do the job better than he could. In despair and anger, he used his invisibility powers to steal money from a bank. He got caught and was sent to prison, ended up in the Rogue Isles. He would never kill an innocent person, but he's disillusioned enough at this point that he'll steal and intimidate for his owl survival. When GR comes out he's going to redeem himself and become a hero again.

On the 'pretty damn evil' side... I have an Arachnos Soldier who has absolutely no loyalty to anyone. He was the smallest and weakest of eleven children, never special, and anything he could do his siblings could do better. So he murdered them all so he could be the best. I'm still on the fence about whether he killed his parents or if he's keeping them somewhere so he can occasionally ask them who their best son is...

I have some other villains who would kill anyone for more power, but he's the only one who had such a specific example...

... and on the other hand, I have some characters who make no sense at all. My first level 50 villain is Professor Orange, a chemist who discovered several potent poisons, a way to chemically dull free will, and then something that made him go completely insane and decide everything in the world needed to be colored orange. I imagine the crime he most often commits is vandalism, sending his minions to go paint random cars, buildings, people, dogs, etc.

If by 'evil' you mean 'would enjoy bathing in the blood of Statesman/Superman/Captain America', then yes, they're all evil. They'd all kill your grandmother in cold blood if it advanced their cause or the cause of the collective. They'd all tell you to 'get over it' when you whined about it, holding ol' grandma's limp head in your arms.

The only line(s) they won't cross is harming dogs in any form. Cats they'll skewer/electrocute/burn alive/beat to death/suffocate, pigeons they'd feed Alka-Seltzer or Polident to, but dogs are sacred beasts. Dogs and one species of bird.

I've done Westin Phipps' arc twice now and I don't see the big deal. ONE shining example near the END of a villain's career doesn't make up for 40 levels of passive aggressive suck, in my view. I guess it just makes beating Recluse bloodless all the sweeter.