Egomaniac Hunter

"I use antlers in all of my decorating!"

"Hunting was his love. He made it a practice never to let a day go by without killing something. It didn't much matter what."

— The Princess Bride

This guy just loves to hunt. He doesn't do it for food, or because his prey is a danger to mankind, not even because It's Personal. He will hunt anything that tickles his fancy and he does it for the thrill and the glory and self-gratification. He is an adventurer and egomaniac.

He doesn't shoot ducks over a pond; his prey has to live far, far away in a most dangerous and uncomfortable location and be hard to find, impressive looking, and immensely powerful. Great cats, large sea creatures, elephants, and crocodiles as well as birds of prey come to mind. If the author is more fantastically inclined, he can let the Egomaniac Hunter go after dragons, dinosaurs ^note Non-avian ones, that is, phoenixes, unicorns, you name it.

Sometimes, the Egomaniac Hunter even goes after anthropomorphic animals, despite or even as a direct result of knowing that they are sapient. This is typically played off as Black Comedy, but may also be Played for Drama as a very uncomfortable yet chillingly logical conclusion to What Measure Is a Non-Human?.

This character isn't very likable in modern renditions. His (and it's almost always a man) usual traits include some of these: selfishness, recklessness, trigger-happiness, racism and arrogance. Older works show him in a more favorable light, but often, he's seen as decadent by them, too. Extra points for striking the Captain Morgan Pose over his fallen victim, having a gallery of rare trophies, endangering others in his hunts, gleefully shooting something that everyone knows is the last of its kind just so he can have it mounted and stuffed, or chasing sapient game.

He is usually European or American (perhaps with an occasional Awesome Aussie or Amoral Afrikaner thrown in for flavour), but he can have any real or fictional ethnicity.

He provides contrast to reasonable or anviliciously eco-sensitive heroes; he can bring danger to the group, die a funny death, or just be the hero's employer whom he brings along for the ride. This character type also commonly appears in Horror or Adventure films where the antagonist is some kind of huge, dangerous animal or monster.

Because Hunters Are Evil, he will sooner or later break the law to be able to continue with the killing and become an Evil Poacher, provided, of course, he isn't already one.

Subtrope of Classical Hunter and In Harm's Way.

For the heroic counterpart, see Great White Hunter. For an appropriate fantasy or sci-fi analogue, see Proud Hunter Race. If they are so successful as to wipe out an entire species, they may cross over into The Great Exterminator.

Despite the name and his personality, not to be confused with pro wrestler Triple H, who was previously known as Hunter Hearst Helmsley.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Wolf Guy - Wolfen Crest, Haguro becomes this after Inugami beats him up for the first time. His prey? Inugami.
• Garza in Zatch Bell! is a first notch hunter from Africa, and nearly uses his skills along with Baransha's spells to defeat Zatch and Kiyo, which would have been the main duo's first defeat.

Comic Books

• Green Arrow: Green Arrow's foe Big Game.
• One of a series of comics based on the Disneyland attraction The Haunted Mansion had an adventurer named Lord Dunswallop who enjoyed hunting and killing various monsters with his bare hands. Along with his biographer, he heads to the eponymous mansion to catch one of the barrel fisted "Gracy Ghasts" for his trophy collection. When asked by the biographer how he intends to strangle ghosts since they are incorporeal, Lord Dunswallop reveals that he has taken some poison and intends to return to his body later. In an And Then John Was a Zombie moment, after leaving his body and entering the grand hall, he is greeted by the ghosts with glee for they now have ghost #992, leaving the biographer unemployed and forced to drag Dunswallop's now dead body with him.
• The Colonel who appears in Lady Mechanika #0. His employer is not impressed when he kills the target rather than capturing it alive.
• The version of Priscilla Rich in The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016) is a hunter who loves killing and has her home covered in furs and taxidermy from her hunts. She's also fond of killing humans and gleefully allied herself with the Nazis.
• Legion of Super-Heroes: Otto Orion, a.k.a. the Hunter, captured the Legion and subjected them to a Hunting the Most Dangerous Game scenario in Adventure Comics #358. His son Adam later adopted his father's alias and M.O. and attempted to avenge his father, eventually becoming a member of the Legion of Supervillains.
• Marvel Universe: Cosmic Villain The Obliterator. An Elder of the Universe, he obtained immortality by being monomaniacally obsessed with one thing — in his case, killing. He is the last member of his own species, as he hunted them all down and killed them one by one (by his own admission, twenty billion of them). He has exterminated huge numbers of worlds in the five billion years of his existence — one living creature at a time.
• Robin (1993): Jaeger.
• Spider-Man: This is basically the driving motif of Kraven the Hunter. He's a legendary hunter of dangerous animals who decided to come to New York and hunt Spidey down to challenge himself. Able to hunt down and kill everything and anything up until he gets to Spider-Man; this sole failure is what ends up having him obsessively spend lifetimes hunting after Spidey as a result.
• Swamp Thing: Upper-Class Twit and uber-jackass Maximillian Ramhoff from Will Pfeiffer's brief run was one of these; he makes a habit of hunting the rarest creatures possible and making elaborate trophies just because. For instance, he not only kills the last California Condor, he eats it. He also killed the Yeti, has a stuffed thunder lizard, made a coat out of the skunk ape, and sets his sights on Swamp Thing as the plot moves forward.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Mirage): Minor antagonist Jack Marlin, from the original Mirage comic books, initially plays the trope completely straight. His animated counterpart, on the other hand, is simultaneously more nutters and more affable than most examples of the trope.

Comic Strips

• Modesty Blaise: In "The Killing Game", Modesty and Willie are abducted by the Big Bad Kromm, who runs an exclusive (and illegal) club for egomaniac hunters. And who has decided to step up to Hunting the Most Dangerous Game, and believes that Modesty and Willie would provide the perfect challenge.

Fan Works

• The Interceptor from The Lion King Adventures most certainly qualifies. His game, of course, is other lions, particularly cubs. Not that he doesn't enjoy a tasty mouse every now and then as well...
• The Hunter, naturally, in With Strings Attached. He walks in an aura of arrogant self-love and superiority. The four utterly detest him... at least until he has a Heel–Face Turn and undergoes Character Development.

Films — Animated

• Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, as seen in the page image, plays this character type completely straight. "I use antlers in all of my decorating!"
  • Apparently, one of the deer heads on his wall was meant to be a cameo of Bambi's mom, which led Disney fans to suggest that he was the hunter who shot her.
• Chill Out, Scooby-Doo!: Alphonse LaFleur is a boastful professional hunter obsessed with bagging the Abominable Snowman but suffers scores of Amusing Injuries in the process. He tricks Shaggy and Scooby into accompanying him to serve as "the bait no monster can refuse." That being said, most to all of his traps are non-lethal ones (indicating he plans to take the monster alive), and he abandons his hunt after believing that the Snowman may have saved his life.
• Victor Quatermaine from The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The fact that he is single-mindedly obsessed with shooting fluffy bunnies probably doesn't say much about his big game hunting skills.
• Grimmel the Grisly from How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World is an arrogant, cunning, tenacious, ruthlessly pragmatic, dragon-hating hunter who eliminated all the Night Fury dragons... except for one called Toothless. Described as a single-minded predator who loves getting under the skin of his prey and pulling their strings, Grimmel will do anything to finish the job, even if it means murdering fellow humans.
• Captain DuBois in Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted is supposed to be an Animal Control officer but in-practice is an insane animal-killing huntress whose goal is to kill Alex and mount his head on her wall, which includes an insane amount of animal heads (including housecats and dogs).
• Shaw from Open Season is this to twistedly insane levels. He's a paranoid, violent sociopath who shows no regard for any life other than his own and is thus a selfish, vain, evil, egotistical, pompous, and greedy man. This is proved by the sadistic and heartless way in which he's mounted many animals in the forest on his cabin wall and how he drove his truck recklessly to try and kill Elliot, nearly hitting several people along the way. He also shows no regard for the law: hunting in a national park (before the hunting season actually begins), and even going as far as attempting to fire his gun in a crowd. Shaw also has a bizarre love for his hunting gun called "Lorraine" and even seems to believe it to be sentient, talking to it and even offering it a blanket so it wouldn't be cold. To top his ego off, Shaw seems to develop the paranoid belief that animals are becoming as smart as humans and are plotting a rebellion to overthrow mankind and Take Over the World.
• Percival McLeach from The Rescuers Down Under is probably one of the most sadistic versions of this character type. Besides hunting down an endangered eagle just because he can, he regularly skins animals for fun.
• Clayton, the villain from Disney's Tarzan is an arrogant, rude and selfish hunter who acts like a guide to Professor Porter and his daughter Jane. His secret goal is to capture wild gorillas and sell them to zoos and circuses for profit, but he's also very eager to shoot Kerchak. BRIAN BLESSED puts on a very hammy performance for the role.
• Charles Muntz from Up used to be a Bold Explorer, but his failure to capture the giant bird of Paradise Falls drove him mad. As a Fallen Hero, he stayed at Paradise Falls and pursued the giant bird for, apparently, six decades.

Films — Live-Action

• Colonel Brock in the horror film Alligator.
• In The Beast Must Die, a rich hunter invites several people to his mansion for a weekend so he can determine which one of them is a werewolf and shoot it.
• Virginia in Confessions of a Psycho Cat who, on being denied permission to leave the country to go on big game safari in Africa, instead decides to start Hunting the Most Dangerous Game. From the little we see and hear, her brother Anderson seems nearly as bad, but at least restricts his hunting to actual animals.
• The Big Bad Morgan from Cry Wilderness, who is very proud of his achievements in big game hunting and later relishes in the fame he'll get for taking down Bigfoot.
• Crazed hunter extraordinaire Danton Vachs in Death Ring. Every year he holds a contest where people can purchase the right to hunt down and kill a human being.
• The Ghost and the Darkness, subverted. Both Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas play "Great White Hunters" that fit several of the stereotypes listed. Arrogant, glory-seeking adventurers that don't hunt for food. One's even world-famous for hunting. However, both are very sympathetic characters. Val Kilmer's character is surprisingly personable and warm, a family man who reaches out to all around him, high and low, and Michael Douglas' character, who is world-famous for his exploits, actually doesn't like hunting but does it as an escape from memories of the family he lost.
• In Into the Grizzly Maze, Douglass believes he is the best hunter in the woods, and the only one capable of hunting down and killing the rogue grizzly. He is especially contemptuous towards to anyone connected to conservation and environmentalism, like Beckett and Michelle.
• Trigger-Happy Van Pelt from Jumanji, who is hunting down Alan, has the obsession and personality of an Egomaniac Hunter.
• Jurassic Park:
  • Roland Tembo from The Lost World: Jurassic Park is portrayed as being this, but most of his actions really show he's more of a Great White Hunter. "Somewhere on this island is the greatest predator this world has ever known. The second greatest must hunt it down." Once the dinos escaped, he focuses on trying to keep people alive, even the idiots responsible for releasing the dinos and endangering everyone in the first place.
  • Ken Wheatley from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, is a straighter example, and acts as a Foil to Tembo. While Tembo is working for InGen in exchange for the opportunity to hunt the fearsome game to ever live, Wheatley is clearly only in it for the money and constantly reminds his employers about his bonus. And while Tembo makes sure his men are holding up and is extremely distraught when his long-time hunting partner is killed, Wheatley is shown to care more about his paycheck than his men. He also proves to be far more incompetent than Tembo and ends up brutally killed after entering the cage of a seemingly tranqed Indoraptor to pull out one of its teeth for his collection without actually checking to see if it was really tranqed.
• In The Lost World (1998), John Roxton is far more smug and trigger happy than he was in the source material, as well as exceptionally greedy.
• The villain from the John Leguizamo film The Pest.
• The titular stars of the Predator series are a culture based around this trope. The movies imply, and the Expanded Universe states, that their whole society revolves around each individual member striving to earn greater status by gathering trophies. It's a civilisation built on the prospect of going out into the universe in search of the most impressive and dangerous alien lifeforms that can be found, killing them, and coming back with their skins, bones, horns, tusks, fangs, claws, pelts, and anything else that can make an appropriate trophy, and their (centuries-long, it's implied) life is devoted to accumulating ever-greater bragging rights via this method. While they do have something of a code of honor, that code is devoted solely to ensuring that the sport is "fair" — never kill pregnant quarry (lest there be no new targets to hunt) — and they are less braggadocious than is usually associated with this trope, they otherwise match it perfectly. They even deliberately spread one of the most dangerous alien lifeforms in their universe, the Xenomorph, to other worlds, simply because it's one of their favorite hunting trophies.
  • The Predator reveals another motive besides pride. The Yautja harvest the genetic material of their quarry from the trophies they collect. They then use advanced genetic engineering technology to upgrade themselves with said genetic material. The humans discover this when analyzing the blood of a captive Yautja reveals human genetic material in it. The culmination of this genetic enhancement is the Ultimate Predator, a Yautja who dwarfs his classic counterpart. The Ultimate Predator is so tough and strong that he doesn't need armor or advanced weapons to tear apart the other armed and armored Yautja in less than a minute. At the end of the movie the Ultimate Predator takes Rory because his ability to figure out how to use Yautja technology and decipher their language (remember he's a child) means his genetic material is worth harvesting.
• In Sands of the Kalahari, Brian O'Brien is a big game hunter and the best survivalist of the group. Thinking his own chances will be improved by the absence of competition, he ruthlessly seeks to eliminate his fellow survivors, one by one, intending to leave only Grace Monckton alive, an "Eve" for his "Adam."
• In Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, Zed has dedicated himself to hunting, believing it to greatest accomplishment a man can achieve. Having hunted the most dangerous beasts the galaxy has to offer, he has now turned to Hunting the Most Dangerous Game.
• In The Suckers, Steve Vandemeer is a big-game hunter who has grown tired of stalking and killing animals, and so decides to start Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: humans.
• In Walkabout two white hunters on a jeep shoot a buffalo and leave it to rot, much to the grief of the Aborigine boy who watches it happen.
• The film director played by Clint Eastwood in White Hunter, Black Heart, who goes to Africa ostensibly to shoot a movie but is actually monomaniacally obsessed with shooting an elephant.
• In The Wolfman (2010) Sir John Talbot knows how to use his hunting weapons and is shown wearing various animal coats and showing off plenty stuffed animals in his manor, proving to be this trope. This passion of his eventually lead to his doom when during a hunting trip in India, he got bitten by a feral boy with lycanthropy.

Literature

• Another heroic (albeit mildly buffoonish) example is Ned Land from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He is portrayed as greedy and destructive, though, in contrast to the more scientific-minded Arronax. That might be because he's Canadian, though.
• Julian from The Chronicles of Amber combines this with being an Evil Prince.
• The Classic Singapore Horror Stories short, "The White Tiger of Kilimanjaro", has its two leads, a pair of retired policemen-turned-hunters, travelling to the Indonesian jungles to hunt a mystical white tiger (who supposedly has sacred powers) for sport, even gunning down several of the local wildlife for no reason other than for fun (at one point, shooting a pregnant baboon and blasting the baby on her shoulders — and congratulating each other for being a good shot). It bites them back hard when they encounter the sacred white tiger near the end.
• Herne the Hunter in The Dark is Rising is an odd case because he is, arguably, a good guy.
• Darksaber: Drom Guldi is a mine owner who goes on a very dangerous wampa hunt and even as the creatures gain the advantage over them and are prepared to kill the hunting party, he still displays some preoccupation with having failed to get the pelts of the ones he killed. That being said he does show some concern for the others while calmly acknowledging the near-certainty of his own demise at the hands of the creatures he came to hunt.
• Discworld: Mustrum Ridcully is quite heroic, but a fiend for hunting and fishing. According to Lords and Ladies, "Mustrum Ridcully did a lot for rare species. For one thing, he kept them rare."
• Lord Cockswain, the Steampunk adventurer who massacres the rare game of Venus in Doctor Grordbort's Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory. At the end of his illustrated journal, we see Cockswain's living room full of the mounted heads of his game, including his alien guide.
• The members of the ironically named "Endangered Dangerous Species Society" in the Doctor Who novel The Doctor Trap (including Lord Percy, a parody of the Great White Hunter). And Sebastiene, who invites them to Planet 1 to hunt the Doctor.
• A very common personality trait among The Draka. A short story set in the Drakaverse by Harry Turtledove has the Domination's army restricted from using nuclear weapons on an American holdout because its leader wants to keep the area as a nature reserve after the war.
• Dieter in Hunter's Moon. He is the CEO of a German company who forces his executive team to accompany him on a hunting expedition in the Alaskan wilderness. His stated goal is to bag a record antler rack, and Kate is disgusted when he only takes the head of the moose he kills, refusing to pack the meat out with him.
• Ian Fleming's James Bond short story "The Hildebrand Rarity" features one Milton Krest, a loathsome filthy rich 'Ugly American' who rounds up rare animals for scientific groups as a tax write-off on his massive yacht. He tends to collect his quarry by bribing local officials, throwing too much money to resist at owners, and in the case of the title fish, poisoning a section of lagoon, killing everything in the area.
• Illuminatus! sidequest: Smiling Jim Trepomena is out to get famous for killing the last American Eagle. He succeeds...partly. He doesn't get the credit.)
• Into the Drowning Deep: Jacques and Michi are some of the most infamous big-game hunters in the world, not least for having shot critically endangered species simply because they wanted to. They're literally aroused by killing things and are treated like Psychos For Hire by the rest of the characters, rightly so, as Jacques admits they've both murdered people who got in the way of their hunts.
• Life's Little Instruction Book looks down on men who think that this is how to show their manhood:
  289. Find some other way of proving your manhood than by shooting defenseless animals and birds.
• He's not seen actually hunting, but Juan Puneta in Mass otherwise fits this trope; The Narrator Pepe visits him in his fancy house with tiger-skins on his floor and an elephant rifle.
• General Zaroff from the short story (and later movie) "The Most Dangerous Game". Interestingly, the hero he tries to kill is a Great White Hunter.
• A gender-inverted example is Hunter from Neverwhere. However, other than her obsession with hunting rare and powerful monsters (and for this reason, she betrays the party in exchange for a spear with which to kill the Beast of London), she's an extremely professional and reticent fighter and bodyguard and doesn't showcase any of the other personality foibles that tend to go along with this trope.
• Prince Humperdink from The Princess Bride.
• Suruk The Slayer from Space Captain Smith and its sequels.
• Sherlock Holmes: Sebastian Moran, Moriarty's right-hand man, apparently does a lot of this on the side. His biography in Holmes's index includes 'Author of "Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas".'
• The Silmarillion gives a surprisingly early example of this trope being portrayed in a negative light — and not because the author disapproves of hunting either. Celegorm, son of Fëanor, fits this trope quite well. For starters, his name literally means "quick riser": a reference to his quick temper. He was the favorite of the Vala Oromë back in Valinor. While in his younger days he appeared to be a half-way decent character, by the time he appears in the story proper he's a selfish and power-hungry Jerkass. He is one of only two elves ever shown contemplating a forced marriage, and only doesn't go through with it because the girl escapes. While he isn't on the side of the Dark Lord, he manages to do almost as much damage to The Heroes as he: the Second Kinslaying, involving the invasion and sacking of Doriath, was his idea. Oh, yes, and despite being an excellent hunter he conspicuously doesn't bother trying to find and rescue his own brother from the Big Bad. Celegorm even has the gall to object when Maedhros abdicates in favor of the father of the guy who DID rescue him. He'll "hunt" almost anything: the Silmarils, Lúthien, his cousin's throne, his own dog even. Except that when there's an actual monster to hunt, Carcharoth the werewolf, Celegorm is nowhere to be seen. Tolkien started to write the start where Celegorm first appears in the 1920s, although he originally wrote it in verse and titled it "The Lay of Leithian". But Celegorm is one of the few characters who is completely unchanged between the first drafts and the final version: a notable fact given Tolkien's habit of rewriting his work.

Live-Action TV

• In Season 2 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy'' meets a werewolf hunter who fits this trope, except for selling the werewolf pelts. He runs away after she bends the barrel of his gun like a limp noodle.
• Captain Cook from the Doctor Who serial "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy" seems to qualify. We never actually see him hunting, but he bores everyone with his 'tales of glory' and had no problem with enslaving a sentient being he captured on one of his expeditions and using her for his own ends.
• The killer in the Father Brown episode "The Lair of the Libertines" is ultimately revealed to be this.
• Frontier Circus: Duke Felix Otway in "The Race". He travels the world trophy hunting. He also regards himself as a 'hunter of men', which is what sets the plot in motion.
• There is a General Zaroff parody ("Hans Hunter," played by Harold Gould) in the Get Smart episode "Island of the Darned".
• The Goodies. "Dodonuts" has Tim and Graeme as leaders of the Endangered Species Club who hunt down endangered species, including a dodo protected by conservationist Bill Oddie. Hilarity Ensues.
  • It's even funnier when you know that Bill Oddie is an enthusiastic ornithologist and conservation activist in real life.
• Michael Sutton from The Incredible Hulk (1977) episode "The Snare". He brings Banner to his private island in order to hunt an intelligent man...and becomes even more interested when he learns said man sometimes turns into a monster.
• Hank and Roy Spim from Monty Python's Flying Circus parody this trope in that they hunt little bugs like mosquitos... with assault rifles, machine guns, and bazookas.
• Neverwhere. See Literature above.
• The Night Gallery episode "Clean Kills and Other Trophies" centers around an aging, arrogant trophy hunter who bullies his soft-hearted son into participating in a deer hunt. This being Night Gallery, karma catches up to him by the end of the episode.
• Sir Malcolm Murray of Penny Dreadful starts out as the Great White Hunter but the further the audience learns of him it's apparent that he's a deconstruction of the character archetype and comes to resemble this trope more closely. He's butchered and raped his way across Africa. He's mentioned having lured predatory lions into ambushes with dead lambs in favor the more sporting action of stalking them down. And in his quest for glory left behind his son Peter to die to continue the journey. When his son's dying wish was to have a mountain named after him Malcolm instead upon discovery of the territory named it after himself.
• The Bill Brasky sketches from Saturday Night Live paint Brasky as one, possibly less "egomaniac" than just plain maniac. He's hunted down and killed all of The Banana Splits with a machete and killed Wolfman Jack with a trident. Interestingly the one time he's mentioned as having hunted a non-human creature, a deer, he merely captured it and then forced it to say his name by manipulating its lips with his hands.
• Star Trek: Voyager: The Hirogen are a species of Egomaniac Hunters. One of them threatens to remove Seven of Nine's intestines as a trophy, as "Unusual relics are prized. Yours will make me envied by men and pursued by women." Seven, who rivals the Hirogen in the big ego stakes, is unimpressed.

Music

• The Beatles satirize this character type in their song "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" from The White Album.
• Parodied by Tom Lehrer in Songs by Tom Lehrer with "The Hunting Song," in which all his prizes turn out to be game wardens and hunters (plus a cow).
• "Little bunny Foo-Foo, hopping through the forest, scooping up the field mice and bopping 'em on the head..."
• The video for CNR by "Weird Al" Yankovic features Charles Nelson Reilley charging head-long at a bull moose and killing it with a roundhouse kick to the face. The next shot is of his trophy room, which features a menagerie of animals he's killed with his bare hands.

Tabletop Games

• Bwana, a villain from one of the Champions supplements.
• Disney Villains Victorious: The Elite Global Huntsmans Club is made up of every hunter-type character in animated movies (Clayton, Gaston, Cruella de Vil, Charles Muntz...) who live on Muntz' zeppelin.
• Malar, god of the hunt in the Forgotten Realms, is a bloodthirsty brute who's the patron of evil lycanthropes and serial killers.
• The Planescape D&D setting had Adamok Ebon, a rare female example (who's also an assassin who works for the thrill instead of money) and a module featuring an arrogant young nobleman with no clue of how smart (and dangerous) Beastlands creatures are.
• Kosarro Khan, a Space Marine Captain from Warhammer 40,000, has this kind of tendency, as well as Hunting the Most Dangerous Game, attributed to him (and his chapter) in the backstory of the newer rulebooks.
• The Strange: Nimrod The Hunter is infamous across The Strange for having hunted no less than 9 species to exinction. He will often hunt humans and other sentients as much for pleasure as being paid for it.

Theatre

• Harold Ryan, the not-dead husband in Happy Birthday Wanda June, is a big game hunter with hundreds of kills. Hunting fills a void left from the end of World War II. According to Kurt Vonnegut, Ryan is based on the aspects that disturbed him about Ernest Hemingway

Video Games

• Mordecai from Borderlands is a cross between this trope and Blood Knight; his class is actually called "The Hunter".
  • Lady Aurelia from Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! is a wealthy heiress who travels the galaxy for dangerous game who came to Elpis on a hunting expedition. What separates her from her brother, Gentleman Adventurer Sir Alistair Hammerlock from Borderlands 2 is that she's a Rich Bitch who mainly does it to alleviate her boredom. Unsurprisingly, Sir Hammerlock and his sister do not get along.
  • We also have FL4K from Borderlands 3, who's a robotic version of this trope. They are obsessed with "The Hunt" and proving themselves as the biggest Alpha around.
• Dead Rising 2: Case Zero has Jed Wright, a psychopath who is happy that the Zombie Apocalypse happened because he can hunt zombies as much as he wants and take trophies without getting in trouble with the law. He also hunts humans who have been bitten, insisting that they are already zombies, and not caring if they take Zombrex to prevent themselves from turning.
• Duke Prosper in the Dragon Age II expansion "Mark of the Assassin". He hosts an annual wyvern hunt (both as a social function and to keep the population in check), has a tamed wyvern he rides into battle, and some impressive trophies. In a variation, his actual Evil Plan has little to do with the hunt and it's the PC who has to hunt and kill a wyvern to get close to him. His Boss Banter does include threats to make your party into trophies.
• In The Elder Scrolls series, Hircine is the Daedric Prince of the Hunt. He lives for the glory of the hunt and has no reason to do so beyond his own vanity. He prefers Hunting the Most Dangerous Game solely for the sport, including having his own pack of hunting dogs (read: werewolves). Somewhat unusually for the trope, he doesn't consider it a true hunt unless the prey has a sporting chance. Additionally, he has respect for those who do survive his hunts, or better yet, turn the tables on the hunter.
• The Force Unleashed: Ozzik Sturn, who appears as the commander of the Imperial forces on Kashyyyk. Sturn will hunt non-sapient game but particularly enjoys hunting intelligent beings. When he first appears, he's wearing a sash made from the fur of Wookiee slaves he hunted down and killed as though it were a badge of office. The main character also passes through his trophy room, which is filled with the skulls of various aliens from the Star Wars franchise. When you confront him, he mentions how he's grown tired of hunting Wookiees and relishes the opportunity to kill a Jedi.
• In Gems of War, the leader of the centaurs of Divinion Fields is like this. It extends to hunting Atlanta, the quest-giver for that area.
• Every Norn in Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 is this, as are most Charr.
• Rudy "Lynx" Roberts in the Jagged Alliance series. His character bio mentions his favourite hobby is "tracking down endangered species to finish them off".
• In The New Order Last Days Of Europe, Reichskommissar Siegfried Müller of Nazi-controlled Zentralafrika loves to hunt for the most exotic and rarest animals of Africa so much, he often disregards his duties as a ruler of country so he can shoot another elephant.
• Myron Van Buren in Poptropica. We won't go into too much depth about him, but let's just say he's a "special" category of Egomatic Hunter.
• Count Razoff from Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc.
• Sam & Max Hit the Road: Evil country music star Conroy Bumpus, who is out to capture the same Bigfoot the heroes of the game are trying to aid just so he can add it to his personal menagerie. His obsession is even lampshaded in his Villain Song "King of the Creatures":
  I trapped my first tiger before I could speak
  Killed me a bear when I was three
  And now with this Bigfoot and giraffe-necked freak
  I finally have a full menagerie!
• Jean Bison in Sly 2: Band of Thieves has some shades of this combined with him being a lumberjack. It is also subverted, as Sly notes that Jean's time as a Human Popsicle catapulted him into a time where these traits are considered bad.
• Hemet Nesingwary from World of Warcraft fits this trope to a tee. His son took over his original hunt when Hemet moved to Outland for bigger game to hunt, where he and his expedition proceeded to instruct players to slaughter an immense number of creatures in one of Outland's few pastoral wildernesses left. Then he left for Northrend, settled down in a primeval jungle (it makes sense when you get there) and cradle of life, and had the nerve to first demand assistance from a dead rhino spirit, then refuse to leave as it asked, saying "no dead rhino'll stop me from hunting wherever I want!"
  
  Amusingly, just as players tend to hate Hemet for his ridiculous egomania and his tedious quests (endless slaughter-fests for the most part), an organization of druids, D.E.H.T.A (Druids for the Ethical and Humane Treatment of Animals) has arisen with killing Nesingwary and his increasingly deranged followers as their sole goal. "Hemet Nesingwary" is a Significant Anagram: Ernest Hemingway.
  • On the other hand, D.E.H.T.A itself is a bunch of overaggressive tree-huggers who demand hunter ears as a currency and will literally jump you no matter what your relation with them if you killed an animal, even in self-defense. This includes an aggressive one they saw attack you.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic gives some detail on the Trandoshans, for whom hunting is their religion. They follow a goddess called the Scorekeeper who assigns points for impressive kills. Many of them (including Qyzen, the Consular's companion) have taken to hunting Wookiees, with obvious consequences for relations between the two races.

Webcomics

• Madame Outlaw: Thaddeus is a bad man, which is established when he shows Estelle hunting trophies he's collected while he internally monologues about viewing other people as prey.
• In this minus. comic, what initially appears to be a fairly normal hunter is told that the lion he recently shot "wanted to have a proper go at [him]" and is given a pair of boxing gloves. What does he do? He boxes the lion!
• Rak Wraithraiser from Tower of God, a giant bipedal alligator, used to be this until Bam and Khun conned him into their team. He entered a Tower hailed as being able to grant any wish if you reach the top, not to get a wish, but to fight the other strong people trying to get to the top.

Western Animation

• Nimrod, a recurring nemesis of the Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, looks like an extra from Cats and acts like a crazed game show host, but don't underestimate him. In his introductory episode ("The Power Within"), he traps the Rangers in a Hunting the Most Dangerous Game scenario—after removing their badges to prevent them from accessing their Applied Phlebotinum powers. We are also shown that Nimrod has done this several times before with other space travelers.
  
  Galaxy Rangers fandom has also referred to him as "a Thundercat on drugs". In a later episode, "Murder on the Andorian Express", he actually helps Doc and Niko take down a Crown assassin, explaining that his whole purpose for getting on the luxury liner in the first place was to hunt the assassin.
• Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog gave us Katella the Huntress, an utterly gorgeous and depraved woman who travels the galaxy kidnapping people and selling them as exotic species to zoos on other planets. She carries around a portable record player for her own background music and fell madly in love with Dr. Robotnik because of how evil he is. Unfortunately for him, Katella displays her affection by manhandling Robotnik every chance she gets and refuses to take no for an answer. Katella only backs off when Sonic invites Momma Robotnik to their shotgun wedding, and decides it's not worth having her as a mother-in-law.
• The Batman had a one-shot hunter in Killgore Steed (yet another Punny Name) who specializes in hunting endangered species (and the occasional human) in his killer island death maze. He got his karmic comeuppance when The Joker killed him with a pair of hyenas.
• The Stalker from Batman Beyond, an African hunter who could stalk and kill a cheetah with his bare hands, is a subversion. He and Batman also get into an Enemy Mine situation at one point.
• The Beatles are on an African holiday (episode "I'll Get You"), guided by Alan Watermain, great white hunter. At the conclusion, John and Paul scare Ringo and George with a lion costume, but Watermain mistakes it as real so he opens fire on them.
  Subjects (who had the costume): Excuse me, b'wana...must get back lion costume.
  Ringo: (holding teacup to his ear like a telephone receiver) I'm sorry...the lion is busy!
• Ben 10: Omniverse: Khyber the Hunter is one in a very Predator-like way. He apparently likes to hunt down various alien creatures and keeps trophies of them. He precisely goes after Ben because he considers him a "worthy prey".
• Skulker from Danny Phantom. Skulker can also be vengeful, as seen in his attitude towards Danny after Danny defeats him the first time. Even so, he acted this role with Danny and Valerie, leading to an Enemy Mine.
• Regis Stone in Dex Hamilton: Alien Entomologist. He tricks Dex into helping him track down the universe's largest insect and boasts that this won't be the first time he's wiped out an entire species.
• In an episode of the Dial M for Monkey shorts in Dexter's Laboratory, the titular hero Monkey fought an alien hunter named, appropriately enough, Huntor, who targeted the most dangerous game of all: heroes. Monkey defeated the heavily-armed hunter by relying on his jungle instincts rather than his superpowers, then ditches him on a planet inhabited by giant redneck aliens so he would feel what it's like to be hunted. Huntor would later have a cameo in Samurai Jack, still up to his old tricks.
• Flintheart Glomgold in DuckTales (1987).
• A brief cameo from such a character appears in the Futurama episode "Love and Rocket", when the soon-to-be-stuffed bears at the Romanticorp factory are chased by a safari-suit wearing, snarling elderly Englishman whose blunderbuss is carried by his malnourished Indian attendant.
• He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) has the episode "The Huntsman", where Prince Adam and Teela try to convince a famous hunter to leave the unicorn alone. He refuses and the heroes not only have to use force to stop him but convince the King to ban sport hunting for good measure.
• Mitch and Tiff in Season 2 of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous claim to be eco-tourists who have come to the abandoned Isla Nublar to photograph dinosaurs, but this is revealed to be a lie they told to the campers in order to earn their trust; they're actually big-game hunters who have come for the opportunity to add dinosaurs to their trophy collection.
• Looney Tunes:
  • One of the "Rabbit Seasons" trilogy had Bugs and Daffy reading out of recipe books to set Elmer on each other. Elmer explains that he's a vegetarian; he just hunts for the sport.
  • Also Wile.E.Coyote who has been famously declared a "fanatic" as far his game is concerned. He suffers from severe narcissism and Motive Decay and while he starts hunting because of his appetite, failure leads him to obsess over killing the elusive prey even if this makes it uneatable. It is no longer about food, it is about him winning.
  • It becomes even worse in Duck Dodgers where he started Hunting the Most Dangerous Game.
• The Looney Tunes Show: This is what Blacque Jacque Shellacque appears to be in "Ridiculous Journey". Ultimately he is revealed to have been attempting to return the pets to their owners, but this doesn't explain why he was attempting to hunt the Abominable Snowman at the start of the episode.
• An episode of Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series featured an Egomaniac Hunter who threw the concept of sportsmanship to the wind, by using increasingly powerful robotic weapons in the process of hunting the unarmed avian heroes through a jungle.
• Mitch from the Phineas and Ferb episode "The Chronicles of Meap", who captures the galaxy's rarest creatures for his personal collection.
• The Simpsons
  • Parodied with a hunter character who says "Time for lunch" and fires blindly into the air, killing a condor, then catches it between two slices of bread and eats it. With an intense look on his face. He's after a bear Homer is travelling with, and wants to stop it from reaching a wildlife sanctuary. He's VERY scornful about the very concept of one.
  • Rainier Wolfcastle is also one. He participated in a charity basketball game to help build a nature preserve where he can hunt "the most dangerous game of all", Man. He then goes off to hunt Lenny.
• Bwana Bob from The Super Globetrotters.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) has Marlin, a big game hunter who enters into the sewers to hunt Leatherhead and the Turtles, bringing with him all manners of traps and high tech weapons to hunt his prey. He's also surprisingly okay with his own demise, as long as he gets to take the Turtles and Leatherhead with him and goes down knowing he's hunted the greatest beasts alive.
• Safari Joe from Thunder Cats, complete with racism. He doesn't even see the Thundercats as sentient, despite them talking to him. He even has his own 'slave' -0 the robot Mule.
• The Transformers cartoon episode "Prime Target" featured Lord Chumley, who decided his hunting trophy collection would not be complete without the head of Optimus Prime. He is nuts: in the opening of the episode, he shoots down and mounts a Soviet fighter jet as if it were a downed game bird. In order to bait Prime, he captures almost a dozen other Autobots. He even captures a couple Decepticons in the process of wearing Prime down, and later sets them free in the hopes that they'll help him once things inevitably go south. The capture of the Soviet fighter jet was causing political trouble unseen since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Many a fan probably smiles each time they see the jerk dropped off for the Soviets tied to the nosecone of the same jet he stole.
• In Transformers: Prime, Airachnid hunts endangered species. And if they aren't already endangered, she makes them.

Real Life

• Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, could be seen as an Egomaniac Hunter. In his home on Long Island, every other piece of furniture is some part of an animal. Every wall has animal heads on it. He even stepped down from the presidency so he could go on an African safari. Subverted when you think of his status as a conservationist, and then played straight again when you realize that it was mostly so he didn't run out of animals to hunt. He was overall, a complicated man who even voiced a concern on the wanton destruction of wildlife and hoped that cameras would largely supplant rifles. It is worth noting that the more ethical tranquilizer rifle would not be invented until after his lifetime and that in his time, conservation meant that killing wildlife to put them on display in museums was the best way to preserve them and he himself was a strong believer in this Insane Troll Logic ideology.
• British writer Lord Dunsany — when some zebras escaped from a zoo, he hunted them in the middle of central London.
• Ted Nugent. Hunts really large bears in Michigan with a bow and arrow. Donates much of the meat from his hunting to Feed the Homeless.
• While most hunters at least try not to waste too much and sell any meat/hide that they don't want or can't use, there are some content with killing something, taking its head as a trophy and maybe a few pounds of meat, and leaving the rest of it to rot while they head merrily back home. Most hunters like medium-sized game (especially deer), which average a hundred pounds.
  • For this reason there are laws regarding hunting and legal obligations of the guide and hunter.
• Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria (whose assassination triggered WWI), according to The Other Wiki, had a love of trophy hunting far in excess of the norm of his time. His diaries kept track of some 300,000 trophy kills (which means that, strictly on average, he killed over 18 animals every single day of his life), 5,000 of which were deer.
• Numerous poachers fall into this trope, particularly those who hunt for fun and simply leave the carcasses of whatever they shoot and the ones who target endangered or protected species like rhinos, elephants, tigers, and other animals to harvest body parts that have high monetary values on the black market.
• Vladimir Putin, reputed as loving extreme sports like mountain climbing, outdoor survival, and martial arts, also loves hunting big game like huge bears in the cold, dark wilderness of Siberia.
• In the old Rhodesia, when the British colony declared its own unilateral independence and attempted to go it alone as a white-run apartheid state, the de facto number two in the administration was Peter Kenyon Fleming Voltelyn van der Byl. Coming from an Amoral Afrikaner family that was as near to royalty as you could get in Southern Africa, the autocratic P.K. van der Byl was an obsessive big-game hunter. A sociopath who got into a position of high power, there are well-founded stories that given the opportunity offered by an undeclared civil war and neighbouring black states offering safe haven to insurgents, he took advantage of his power to go out and hunt the biggest game of all. It is entirely possible that van der Byl hunted human beings for fun and personally executed captured black guerillas.

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