Evil Is Cool

Darth Vader Dual Wielding chainsaw lightsabers. If he got any more awesome, he'd explode.

"Why do the Decepticons always get the good shit?!"

— Robert Epps, Transformers: Dark of the Moon

There is a reason actors fight for the chance to play the bad guy. The lines are great, the costumes are awesome, the songs are spectacular, their schemes are brilliant, the villains often look much sexier than the heroes, they have their fair share of Cool Planes, Cool Cars and Cool Boats to flaunt, and they don't have to spend the whole shoot pretending they are nicer than anyone they've ever met. No, seriously; it's psychological!

Even the Evil Old Folks can be Cool Old Guys and Cool Old Ladies, if this trope kicks in.

Plus, there are all those wonderful toys!

Why is all that true? Why does the bad guy get all the cool stuff? The more interesting the bad guy, the more interesting the story. It really is that simple. You don't have a story unless you have a conflict. The bad guy in most cases is the conflict.

Plus, there are all those marvelous toys... Wait, we already said that.

Compare Good Is Boring. Contrast This Is Your Brain on Evil and Being Evil Sucks. See also Balance Between Good and Evil. Those wonderful... Ahhh, forget it. The reason Love to Hate exists. Dark Is Not Evil, Noble Demons, and some types of Anti Heroes are able to harness the coolness of evil without the actual evil. Compare the subtrope Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster! when criminals are consciously portrayed as cool by the work itself. Compare Draco in Leather Pants when the coolness of the evil (among other things) makes fans think the baddie should be a good guy. Compare also Fame Through Infamy when being infamous is seen as cool as being famous.

No relation to Evil Is Deathly Cold.

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Example subpages:

• Anime & Manga
• Comic Books
• Films — Animated
• Films — Live-Action
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Music
• Professional Wrestling
• Video Games
• Webcomics
• Web Original
• Western Animation

Other examples:

Advertising

• The Canadian Sleeman Breweries launched an ad campaign playing up the bootlegging activities of the company's founder John Sleeman. It also plays up George Sleeman, whose business was threatened by prohibitionists who'd managed to get anti-liquor laws passed in his hometown, after which he ran for mayor himself and repealed the prohibition laws.
• Jaguar's ad featuring Jag-driving Evil Brits, with the tagline "It's Good to Be Bad."

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): In this Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) fanfiction, it's Ghidorah again. Even after all of it except for San's severed head has been destroyed, it still exercises a Cthulhu-like Brown Note effect on every human who gets too close for too long without their guard up, and the further exploration of Ghidorah's Psychic Powers in flashbacks makes it more awesome.
• The Bikini Bottom Horror: The Tortured One is a colossal, starfish-derived Eldritch Abomination set on devouring everything in its sight and it takes nothing short of another Kaiju to fight it.
• Child of the Storm has Lucius Malfoy. The guy's as evil as they come, but he's also A Man of Wealth and Taste, an even bigger Magnificent Bastard than Nick Fury himself, he's pragmatic, ruthless and proves that, despite the fact that he actually needs his Classy Cane to walk after Nick Fury destroyed his knee the night after the attack on Godric's Hollow, he is personally very dangerous by killing Baron Von Strucker. And it's recently been revealed that he's been manipulating everyone, good guys and bad. At the start, he managed to weld together an impromptu alliance of some Death Eaters and HYDRA, along with Gravemoss. Now, he's the undisputed Master of HYDRA with vast financial resources after inheriting or being granted control over a significant number of Death Eaters accounts, much of which is being invested by the Goblins on the London Stock Exchange, and he has command of the Winter Soldier. He's evil, but he's got style.
  • The second book introduces us to Dracula, a Man of Wealth and Taste (well, vampire, technically), who's a Physical God and Wicked Cultured, displaying (usually) impeccable manners in addition to Physical God levels of physical and psychic abilities, and being incredibly skilled in psychic combat as well.
• Code Prime has, quite possibly, one of the most successful iterations of the Decepticons period. Not only do they succeed in overthrowing Britannia and establishing themselevs the new rulers of Earth at the end of R1, Megatron gives his Animated version a run for his money as an intelligent strategist that is able to rival Lelouch. Aside from that the roster also has various fan favorites such as Starscream, Shockwave, Soundwave, Knock Out, Bruticus, Dreadwing, and Sky-Byte among others.
• Fairy May Cry has Vergil, who spends his debut arc terrorizing Fairy Tail with such effiency and ease and delivering a Curb-Stomp Battle to many of their strongest members, that many fans find it awesome. What also helps is he gives them a chance to surrender several times, all while maintaining a code of honor. These traits do not lessen when he returns in the Devil Hand arc and later joins Sabertooth, remaining just as formidable as ever.
• Almost any villain in The Lion King Adventures would have to qualify. Hago, Scar, Death, Interceptor, Shocker, Nyoka, Virusi, and many more...
• The Rat from The Night Unfurls, for being the first demon, god, or whatever that resembles a malevolent entity ever introduced. His eccentric personality aside, fans adore him for being exclusively introduced in the remastered version of the fanfic, paving a potentially different direction for the plot of the remastered fanfic, distinct from the original.
• In The Official Fanfiction University Of Middle-earth, this gets deconstructed with the subject "Evil Is as Evil Does 101", taught by Sauron himself, to teach that Evil is more than calling yourself evil because it's cool and dark and edgy. Like causing a river of blood, at least.
• Queen of All Oni initially plays this straight, but the second half of the story averts it hard. At first, Jade is essentially the same character, with the addition that she's now a villain, and generally just succeeds where other villains failed just to prove that she can, without really acting truly "evil" (at one point she organizes a complex scheme to steal the Dog Talisman for no other reason than to make her dog immortal). But between the continued Shadowkhan corruption, and a Trauma Conga Line she slowly becomes worse and worse and starts crossing the Moral Event Horizon repeatedly, and becoming less and less sympathetic. Lampshaded by the author at one point:
  Eduard Kassel: I am sure many of you are disappointed, wanting a cool villain Jade. Well, you had her, more or less, for a while. This story has been about exploring Jade's fall to darkness, not celebrating it. And my explorations, in planning this story, lead me to evil not being a toy. And as you give yourself to darkness, bit by bit you lose yourself to it.
• Princess Jody's Legion of Doom-type organization "Injustice Unit Patrol Squad" in Super Milestone Wars.
• Inkopolis Chaos has Cyalux Clover for being a conniving and manipulative bastard all while being a Laughably Evil Large Ham. There are reasons why he is arguably the best loved villain in the trilogy.
• In The Fire of Futures Past, Bonnie (Experiment 149)'s response to being the villain of Nani's story is just the third word of this trope. She likes the idea of being the bad guy so much that she impatiently gets Nani to skip to the climax.
• Invoked in Kara of Rokyn. Wrestler Jara is a "heel" because she likes playing the villain and going wild on her adversaries, to her audience’s delight.
  Jasmine stood up, smiled, and preened herself for the crowd. There were boos, but, satisfyingly, a few cheers. Lots of guys like to see the heroines take a beating, she reflected, and that's what I'm here for.

Puppet Shows

• Uncle Deadly of The Muppets. He's a sinister-looking and eerie ghostly dragon Shakespearean actor. Being a Muppet, this trope is subverted for most of his appearances; in The Muppet Show he was only scaring the cast for fun and pretending to be evil, and in the 2011 movie he performs a Heel–Face Turn and has his Moment of Awesome right at that point.

Tabletop Games

• Chaos epitomizes this trope in Warhammer 40,000. Then again, so does the Imperium...
  • Also, Kharn the Betrayer. Seriously, what a great guy!
  • From the spinoff Dawn of War computer games: Eliphas the Inheritor is universally considered one of the top five characters, as is Gorgutz 'Ead 'Unter. Mainly because Eliphas is almost painfully badass with a dark charisma and Gorgutz is awesomely insane.
• Magic: The Gathering reintroduced the Phyrexians, who want to corrupt and assimilate the entire multiverse. Naturally, half the fan base takes their side. 51%, at last count, in fact.
  • They eventually took over the world they were invading, and there's a persistent myth that it was a popularity contest and that 51% "vote" was what doomed Mirrodin. (Actually, with set lead times, New Phyrexia was finished and printed before Scars of Mirrodin even came out, and plans for corrupting Mirrodin went back to the original block, but the "popularity contest" myth is engaging enough to hang on.)
  • Nicol Bolas definitely earned some fans due to having so much villainous charisma.
• Exalted: Infernals are widely considered to be way more awesome than Solars. The Solar charmset is generally viewed as kind of bland (the overriding theme is "I am really good at this" with a few paragraphs for each Charm describing what they are good at and how that is expressed), while Infernals do things like turning a glass of water into a tentacle or undergoing mitosis. Solars have an ascension path of "Solars with higher Essence", while Infernals can forge themselves into new Primordials. Abyssals, the other equivalent of Solars, on the other hand, are much less popular due to flaws in their Charmset and limited support for character paths other than "angsty penitent" or "kill the world and piss on the ashes".
  • The Ebon Dragon is seen as this as a portion of the fandom, even the point of his character is the opposite.
• For Iron Kingdoms players, much of the appeal of the evil factions is how cool their models look. In particular, Cryx's popularity was only partially due to their power level in Mk 2; a lot of the rest of it was the armies of cyborg zombies, sexy but sadistic satyr buccaneers, and malevolent ghosts, backed by scuttling, buglike black-iron warjacks and led by machine-liches.
• The Imperium in Strike Legion has this going for it by being an Expy of the Imperium of Man, but they go MANY extra miles, possessing armies that include Godzilla type monsters, MANY forms of super soldiers even deadlier than its Space Marines, and MonsterClowns that include lightsaber wielding Expys of The Joker.
• Two of the most popular of the Loads and Loads of Races in Dungeons & Dragons are the Drow and Tiefling.
  • Drow were the original "evil PC race" of choice, thanks to their combination of the inherent popularity of elves with more explicit and overt sexual overtones. They were one of the major reasons that the Forgotten Realms eventually overtook Greyhawk as the most popular default setting, and by 4th edition, were so popular that they were one of the "intrinsic races" deemed vital for presentation as part of the adaptation of the Realms to that edition. In 5th edition, whilst plagued by rising voices complaining they possessed Unfortunate Implications, they still remained one of the most popular playable races, and even made it into the core player's sourcebook, such is their popularity.
  • Tieflings were originally introduced as little more than half-orcs for the Planescape setting; people cursed with distant demon, devil or other evil planar creature ancestry, which resulted in them being perceived as inherently tainted and shunned. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, they became immensely popular^note the inherent customization options for the race, which appealed to both The Roleplayer and the Munchkin, and the multiple art pieces by the great Tony DeTerlizzi, probably didn't hurt. In 4th edition, they displaced the older half-orc as the "evil-touched" race of the first player's handbook, with designer commentary in a preview sourcebook openly stating that they were chosen due to their popularity, and their popularity stemmed from their status as "the bad boys/girls race". They likewise made it into the player's handbook for 5th edition, and if anything their popularity exploded in the late 2010s, where they developed something of an LGBT Fanbase.

Theater

• The Shakespearean characters every actor wants to play are his most notorious villains, Iago of Othello, and the eponymous Magnificent Bastard of Richard III. Similarly, every actress wants to be Lady Macbeth, his greatest villainess. The roguish buffoon Falstaff was so popular that Shakespeare gave him his own spin-off comedy in which he is the protagonist. (By royal command, no less - Queen Elizabeth turned out to be one of Falstaff's admirers.)
• Similarly, the really cool characters in opera are not the tenor good guys, but the jealous/mad/pervert baritones and the creepy basses who sing low notes of Doom. Who would ever prefer the nice, boring tenor Don Ottavio to the Magnificent Bastard Don Giovanni? Or, in Der Freischütz, prefer the utterly bland Max to the ribaldly malevolent Kaspar?
• And one of the greatest soprano roles in the entire repertoire is the evil Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, despite having only two solo arias — they're both complete show-stoppers, especially "Der Hölle Rache köcht in meinem Herzen" ("Hell's vengeance boils in my heart").
• Despite the fact that The Phantom of the Opera is an obsessive, controlling, homicidal, textbook 'bad boyfriend', he is inevitably the one the audience roots for. You'll have to scour through hundreds of Phantom/Christine Shipping Fan Fics to find one Raoul/Christine, and it's better than even money that actors would rather play the Phantom. Why? Raoul is a largely ineffective ponce; Erik drops chandeliers on people. Plus, in the case of the musical, he gets all of the cool songs and a stylish black cape.
• Cats has Macavity.
• Christopher Marlowe was good at writing this type of character; the best-known example is Mephistopheles in Doctor Faustus, but Tamburlaine of the play of the same name and Barabas of The Jew of Malta also qualify. Oh, and the evil ghost Machiavelli.
• Mr Doolittle of My Fair Lady is an amoral drunkard, but for all his faults, "With a little bit of luck" is so charming, we can't help but think this guy cool.
• The entire point of the Villains Tonight! stage show on the Disney Cruise Line, featuring Hades, Maleficent, Ursula, Jafar, Yzma, Captain Hook, Cruella DeVil, and Dr. Facilier all together in one show!
• In Pokémon Live!, Giovanni, Team Rocket, and even the Rocket Grunts completely steal the show with their catchy songs, villainous plots, stylish outfits and dancing, and getting as close as they ever come to outright winning.
• You can't possibly toss a ball into a room filled with Elisabeth fans without hitting someone who loves the show because of Death, whether it be All Girls Want Bad Boys or Love to Hate. He's snazzy in every version. Into Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous? There's Uwe Kröger and an entire fleet of Takarazuka actresses. Adore Hell-Bent for Leather? There's Mark Seibert and the rest of the new Deaths in the German/Austrian productions. Somewhere in between? Hello, Máté Kamarás. The show is very often marketed as a love story between Elisabeth and Death, and/or a triangle if you add Franz Joseph.
• István a Király: Given that it's a historical rock opera, István is the eventual winner. However, Koppány is a Walking Shirtless Scene with far better songs, three attractive nymphomaniac wives, and he is usually played by veteran rock singers with a powerful voices in contrast with the young tenors cast as István.

Web Animation

• Strong Bad was originally the antagonist in Homestar Runner, but he was loved by so many fans that he pretty much became the main character.
• Happy Tree Friends: Flippy, or more specifically his evil form Fliqpy. He has one of the highest body counts on the show, but fans love him anyways because of his creatively brutal kills and his conflict with Flippy's other, much nicer persona.
• Mecha Sonic from Super Mario Bros. Z is incredibly evil, yet incredibly badass. Every time he appears in the story, he hands someone's ass over to them (Yoshi's brutal defeat in episode 3 and the utter massacre that was episode 6 come to mind). The series is already 8 episodes long and the most heroes managed to do was temporarily inconvenience him.
• While calling him evil is a bit of a stretch, Strong Bad of Homestar Runner was originally intended to be a bumbling bad guy who always lost. He quickly became the most popular character on the website. His old introduction video actually said "you don't know it yet, but I'm the real reason you're here." From the first Strong Bad Email: "Do you use [your powers] for good, or for awesome?"
• Red vs. Blue:
  • After the Laughably Evil villains adequate for a comedy series, season 6, with its more serious and elaborate plot alongside the wacky antics, introduced the Meta, the most badass villain in the entire series, a hulking monstrosity who shoots or punches with no reservations and has the strength of twenty bears.
  • The Chorus Trilogy had Locus, a deeply voiced and intimidating Space Pirate with an Invisibility Cloak and who is never used for comedic purposes.
  • While all three villains of Red vs. Blue: Zero aimed for this, the one that succeeded was Phase, an Affably Evil Knife expert with a very flashy power, as that she teleports to wherever the knife is thrown.
• RWBY:
  • Roman Torchwick was a surprising example, given his apparent Non-Action Guy introduction. He proved himself to be quite the badass when he fended off both Blake and Sun at once and consistently gives his opponents a run for their money, all the while being stylish and snarky, and managing to look cool even while losing.
  • Cinder Fall's debut had her Playing with Fire and blocking bullets from Crescent Rose with her bare hands, then her subsequent battles showed off her materializing her bowsword out of volcanic glass and brutally curbstomping most of her opponents.
  • Raven Branwen is essentially RWBY's take on a Social Darwinist magical samurai Batman. Skewed morality aside, it is -at least- as cool as it sounds. Her decisive victory against Cinder truly cements how cool this woman is.
  • Adam Taurus is a skilled swordsman, and capable of injuring Yang and sending the heroes running. Whilst he suffered Badass Decay in Volumes 4 and 5, he got to show off his charisma and skill once more in his own character short.
  • Volume 7 cements Watts and Tyrian in this role, as they tear apart Atlas and Mantle with flair and enthusiasm.

noreallife

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Ooh, look, toys!

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