Designated Villain / Literature

• Ben Shapiro's novel True Allegiance features a president who's clearly meant to be an Expy of Barack Obama and which the audience is meant to loathe. His many crimes against the American people include: wanting to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, creating a jobs program to get more Americans into work, creating an extensive infrastructure bill, ordering a CIA extraction rather than an airstrike on Iranian soil based on a military hostage blinking out a message in Morse code in a terrorist video, expecting the governor of Texas to send the National Guard to New York to help after a terrorist attack more severe than 9/11, making a speech at the site of that attack during which he wears a windbreaker and cries a single tear, and continuing to believe that a majority of Muslims are, in fact, not terrorists. The particular irony of this characterization is that Shapiro frames this president as doing everything for his image and not remotely out of principle; less than a year after the book was published, Shapiro would be endorsing Donald Trump for president.
• Author Peter David, in his Star Trek: New Frontier novels, uses Jellico (now promoted to Admiral) as a recurring character. For most of the series, he remains a Designated Villain to the pseudo-Military Maverick main character, Captain Mackenzie Calhoun. Then, after a Time Skip, he's informed that Calhoun is missing and presumed dead. The reader is clearly supposed to expect Jellico to not be particularly upset by this...until it's revealed that some time during the Time Skip, the two had resolved their differences and were now close friends.
• Jill in The Girl Who Owned a City. Her arguments in favor of voting and collectivism seem rather reasonable, but are dismissed in favor of the objectivist main character.
• Before The Worm Ouroboros decided to ditch its framing device, the viewpoint character is guided around by a talking martlet, who identifies many of the main characters and pours a ton of adjectival condemnation on the villains. This is before they've done anything. Lessingham dryly concludes that "A fiery politician is my martlet", and resolves to make up his own mind on things. He and the martlet are never referred to again. As it turns out, the villains aren't much different from the heroes and certainly don't deserve titles like "the children of night everlasting". This is an odd example because the author seems to quite like them.
• Deliberately invoked in Typewriter in the Sky, L. Ron Hubbard's Deconstruction of swashbucklers. The protagonist of the story is the antagonist of the story-within-a-story, but does his best to subvert the author's wishes. Even the editor can't tell who's supposed to be the good guy, so he forces a bit of rewriting and, among other things, has the newly revisioned baddie attempt I Have You Now, My Pretty on the heroine.
• Javert, in Les Misérables. He's not a monster, he's not cruel, he doesn't kick puppies, he's just a cop trying to arrest a wanted fugitive. The fact that the fugitive is sympathetic doesn't make Javert evil. His All Crimes Are Equal Felony Misdemeanor attitude and refusal to give second chances does tip the scales towards the "evil" end, though.
• Deliberately invoked in The Ogre Downstairs. The ogre in question is the grumpy stepfather of three of the main characters. One of the first things he does is the book is buy two of the kids chemistry sets as presents, but the kids are determined to treat him as a bad guy. As the book progresses, he gets increasingly angry and punishes the kids for messing up the house, getting in trouble, making a lot of noise, and ruining a party he was throwing. By the end of the book, the children realise that the ogre was actually trying to be nice and that maybe he had a point about their misbehaving.
• The Twilight Saga:
  • The Volturi. We're told that they're a corrupt government with no respect for human life who want to take out the Cullens for selfish reasons (kidnapping Alice and Edward), but they're the only vampires that make any active attempt to control their species, follow their own laws, and keep vampires from senselessly slaughtering humans. Even though their primary motive is self-preservation, they still do more to protect both their own species and humans than the designated protagonists, the Cullens.
  • Laurent. He's reasonable and even warns the Cullens about James and his ability. In New Moon he's revealed to have been trying to be a 'vegetarian' but sometimes relapses; since Bella has a delicious scent and he's quite hungry, he can't help himself and plans to eat her, but is still planning to make it quick and painless. In fact, he considers it to be a Mercy Kill because it will pre-empt the much nastier death that Victoria would like to deliver. He's subsequently killed by the werewolves. The narrative paints him as evil, but other people-eating vampires (such as the dozens introduced in Breaking Dawn) are not treated as such, despite eating just as many people and mostly not even considering becoming vegetarians.
  • Leah. The characters and narrative treat her as a bitter, shrill harpy who gets in everyone's way. But Leah has had arguably one of the worst lives of the Pack, is fiercely loyal to her tribe/Jacob, and manages to get over the myriad of ways that life has screwed her to do her job as a shifter.
• Mr Rochester's wife, Bertha Mason, could be Jane Eyre's only real Designated Villain, because she is the main reason why Jane and Mr Rochester cannot be together. However, she was insane and her erratic behavior came from what spread in her family and Mr. Rochester locked her up for ten years in the third-story room with no one to see but a maid.
  • In Jean Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea, the hereditary madness of Bertha is deconstructed: Bertha went insane due to Rochester's mistreatment of her, including everything from obviously disliking her during the duration of their marriage to having sex with one of their servants. Bertha's mom, on the other hand, went insane after the servant of her new English husband abandoned her infant son during a fire started by the angry townsfolk. This led to the child dying of smoke inhalation. Their madness is not hereditary, but rather a result of the English men who came into their lives and messed everything up.
• Kayla in The House of Night makes a whopping two appearances and is promptly branded a man-stealing jealous bitch by Zoey as a result. Kayla's crime, really, is hooking up with Heath after Zoey tells her several times, in no uncertain terms, that she's broken up with him. In Betrayed, Zoey acts like Kayla was being horribly spiteful and irrational in going to the police after witnessing Zoey drinking Heath's blood, and then having Zoey threaten to do the same to her. To really hammer this point in, Zoey's friends (who never even met Kayla before) begin referring to her as "skank-bitch Kayla" after learning that she went to the police.
• In the Fairy Tale "The Wonderful Musician", the wolf, fox, and hare don't actually do anything to harm the protagonist until he tricks and humiliates them because he wanted a human companion, not an animal. Then they come after him.
  • What's worse, the only reason they approached him in the first place was that he compelled them to with his supernatural music, and could easily release them; he's only trapping them in various ways For the Evulz. The narrative makes it clear that he effectively brainwashes the woodsman and makes him give up his old job to be a companion. Yet when the "beasts" charge in for revenge, the same narrative says they have "some evil design". After the woodsman chases them off, the musician releases him from servitude, which is played off as a gesture of kindness and gratitude... even though he enslaved him in the first place.
• Macdonald Hall: The developer from Beware the Fish having his car get wrecked twice in a row is played as being humorously karmic l, given how he wants to buy the school and tear it down to make apartments, but the school is going bankrupt through factors outside of his influence, and Elmer points out that if the developer doesn't buy the school then it's likely that a sewage treatment plant will be constructed on the land instead (which would be even worse for the girls at Miss Scrimmage’s next door).
• In the Fairy Tale "The Mouse, The Cock and The Little Red Hen", the fox (whose gender changes depending on the version you are reading) is only looking for food for their children. The story ends with him/her drowing, because the three title characters (who, other than the hen, do little to engage the reader's sympathy or admiration) fill the sack they were in with stones.
• Done deliberately in Rosso Malpelo, a novel written by Giovanni Verga. The child miner protagonist is portrayed by the narrator (who embodies the Sicilian mentality of the nineteenth century) as a malicious and bad bully...due to his red hair but 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, with the exception of his father and Ranocchio, are far bigger jerks than him, if not outright evil).
• 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 Death. For being a jerk. This was addressed in The Film of the Book, where Doniger actively tried to hide the flaws in the system and strand the protagonists in the past by destroying the machine, which earned him a trip to the past and a sword in the face.
• 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.
• Karen Traviss seems determined to do this to Dr. Catherine Halsey in her Halo novels Glasslands, The Thursday War, and Mortal Dictata (prequels to Halo 4), putting the blame for the SPARTAN-II program's shadier aspects (primarily the kidnapping of six-year-old children) 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, with most dying 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 beforehand, especially since it hardly could have been accomplished by Halsey alone (indeed, previous sources implied that the flash-cloning was done with ONI's full approval). Nobody seems to consider that making parents think their kids are dead may be more merciful than living with the constant fear that their child was kidnapped (and additionally, Traviss even conveniently forgets that the flash-cloning was done precisely to stop people from asking further questions). 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 Insurrectionists who plagued UNSC for years did so using terrorist tactics far beyond anything we've seen so far in real life, like using suicide bombers armed with nukes (the Insurrectionist nuking of the Haven arcology, mentioned in Halsey's own journal, killed two million civilians and injured 8.3 million more). While Halsey's actions may be seen as deplorable, there were reasons why she took them, and it's fairly clear that the moral culpability rests on ONI as a whole (which, to its credit, Mortal Dictata does touch a tiny bit on). 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.
  • In addition, the SPARTAN-III program (using orphans from glassed planets) is presented as the better alternative, as the orphans agreed to take part in it. However, the SPARTAN-III program were meant to be Cannon Fodder Super Soldiers, most of whom end up dying in combat by the age of twelve. Since all those orphans were also recruited as children (many of them at ages even younger than the IIs), they're obviously not mature enough to make the decision to agree.
  • Much of the fandom's issue with Traviss's presentation isn't so much that she points out that the Spartan-II program was ethically dodgy at best (obviously), but that she even ignores prior canon to make Halsey look worse; for one thing, claiming that Halsey lied to the children about why they were taken, when prior sources showed that she specifically said that ONI should not lie to the children about the reasons behind their kidnapping.
• Traviss just barely skirts the line on this with the Jedi and the Republic in her Star Wars Legends 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 than what they're fighting at worst — but she also seems to present them as worse than the beloved Mandalorians, who do at bare minimum every single thing that the Jedi are accused of, and then some.
• 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?
• Danny Pickett in the Just Disgusting story, The Story of the Very Stupid Boy, and the Very Big Slug. The narrative constantly berates him for accidentally creating a giant mutant slug by feeding it dog food, and becoming unable to control it, leading to the world's destruction, just after he gets arrested for creating it. Justified, as this is a story Andy made up to make himself look good, to the point where he makes himself into a Marty Stu.
• Isengrim the Wolf from Reynard the Fox and many of the other animals like Bruin the Bear and Tybalt the Cat. They are treated as the villains for being against Reynard and wanting him brought to justice. Reynard is a Designated Hero who raped Isengrim's wife, blinded their children, killed the Cockeral's wife and most of their children, along with killing a hare and framing a ram leading to their execution. The version by Andre Norton simply makes Reynard himself the villain.
• The Chemical Garden Trilogy:
  • We're repeatedly told that Housemaster Vaughn is evil because he dissected Rose's body after she was killed by the virus to find a cure, but that's a fairly common medical practice, even today. It's not pleasant, but it's not evil.
  • How dare Cecily 1) do her best to adapt to a situation that to her doesn't seem at all horrible, considering she was practically raised for it, 2) attempt to make friends with her sister-wives, 3) criticize the staff when she quite reasonably expects them to do their jobs (particularly when she's pregnant and intensely frustrated from being kept in bed all the time), 4) try to monopolize Linden's attention when he's the only one who takes much notice of her anyway, and 5) make an honest mistake when she tries to keep Rhine from getting into trouble?! How dare she?! Later, she also gets yelled at for trying to stop a man from smoking near her while she's pregnant and holding a newborn.
• The Department of Homeland Security from Little Brother are depicted as tyrants trying to infringe on privacy. They started enforcing strict security measures after a major terrorist attack occurred in The Hero, Marcus's Doomed Hometown, and the only person they're outright said to be spying on is Marcus. However, Marcus has done nothing but make himself look suspicious, such as using his hacking skills to play hooky and refusing to hand over his phone to The Severe Haircut Woman on the principle of privacy, and yet acts like he's a victim. The only DHS member that acts legitimately villainous is the Severe Haircut Woman, enforcing strict security measures, detaining Marcus's friend Daryl, and waterboarding Marcus just For the Evulz.
• In-Universe in Worm. Skitter and the Undersiders probably do more good for Brockton Bay over the course of the story than any other faction, including the PRT. By the time they decide to publicly unmask Taylor, breaking the unwritten rules the public ain't havin' that shit anymore.
• Cardinal Richelieu of the 1632 series. While his measures are harsh and his rhetoric kind of terrifying to modern ears, he's also doing nothing more or less than trying to do his job and protect his nation to the best of his ability. His methods are in line with what's expected in the era, and he's perfectly nice and diplomatic in person. Eric Flint has gone on record that Richelieu is only the villain because he needed a smart and capable antagonist for the plot, and if there were anyone else Richelieu could have gotten a different role.
• Redwall runs into this trope on occasion. Due to the clear expectation that we’re supposed to see species like rats, ferrets, weasels, stoats, and foxes as Always Chaotic Evil, characters who are among those species tend to be treated as automatically evil regardless of their previous actions or their circumstances. On the one hand, the main antagonists of the books almost always do go above and beyond in proving their villainy with countless murders, looting and plundering, trying (and occasionally even briefly succeeding) to take over Redwall, using Bad Boss treatment on their own subordinates, etc. On the other hand, a group of Redwallers will occasionally encounter a stray group of rats that have no affiliation with the Big Bad, for example, and treat them like bad guys despite that stray group not having done anything to justify it. One egregious example was in the book “The Legend of Luke”, where Martin’s group encountered a stray group of rats on their journey and forced them all at sword-point to jump off a cliff, even though this group didn’t seem to have done anything wrong or even had any affiliation with any villains. Another example was in “The Outcast of Redwall”, when the Redwallers took in an orphaned baby ferret and named him “Veil” specifically BECAUSE it was an anagram of “evil”, and accordingly they fully expected him to grow up to be evil. Sure that baby did grow up to become evil, but most fans tend to interpret this as a result of the Redwallers treating him like a bad guy from birth and Veil internalizing this reputation as he grew up. It is worth noting that very occasionally there will be a member of an “evil species” who is proven to be good and actually treated as such Blaggut and Romsca being notable examples, but these instances are extremely rare.
• The Snow Queen: The Snow Queen herself in the original story, as Kai chooses to go with her to her kingdom rather than being kidnapped, and his problem is caused by the mirror shard put within him before he even met the Snow Queen, rather than being under the Queen's control.
• Parallel World Pharmacy: The pharmaceutists' guild. On the one side, you have the professional organization that represents tradespeople who serve the common folk because the Blue Blooded royal pharmaceutists refuse to sully their hands helping the commoners. On the other hand, you have Farma, the kid of a Fiction 500 archduke who won the Superpower Lottery and immediately moves in and starts putting guild pharmacists out of business, much like what Internet retailers have been doing to downtown shops for the last three decades. Naturally we're supposed to side with the trust fund brat who refused an offer to join the guild in favor of directly competing with them for customers.
• Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War: the neo-pagan Episcopalian bishop, Cloaca Devlin, whose burning at the stake by the Christian marines opens the book. She's given a chance to admit that she is not a Christian, abdicate her bishopric, or die, and she chooses the latter, with the resulting execution presented as a justified and righteous deed. While her strongly heretical theology surely gives her church the right to expel her (she does not believe in the Trinity or even God, while openly worshipping pagan goddesses) and she behaves generally obnoxiously throughout the courtroom negotiations and beyond, she does not really seem to have committed any real crime by real life, early 21st-century American legal standards; there are some hints that she was a fellow-traveler with the Azanians earlier in the story, but even then only an ideological supporter, not a spy or any such thing.
• A Study in Emerald: The murderous duo that the protagonists chase. The reader sympathises with their attempts to free humanity by killing the Old Ones. Unusually for this trope, the YMMV aspect is that some readers would debate if the murderous duo were designated as the villains of the piece, or if they were intended to be the heroes.

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