Sadist

"Before we begin I'd like to discuss the subject of screaming. By saying this — go right ahead."

— Black Mask, Batman

A sadist is someone who enjoys the suffering of others. While a sadist who has a good sense of morality and empathy will stick to playing a Cruel Player-Character God or doing some Casual Kink in a Safe, Sane, and Consensual way, sadism becomes outright Nightmare Fuel when combined with sociopathy. This is the kind of character that takes pleasure in inflicting Cold-Blooded Torture and psychological abuse. Whether it's physical or psychological, a sadist will take pleasure in making or seeing others suffer. Sometimes, a sadist has a Lack of Empathy that stops them from feeling any guilt from the suffering they cause. However, that is not a prerequisite: Some of these characters do indeed feel bad about their actions; they just enjoy it too much to stop.

Note that while real-life sadists are usually of the decent kind and psychiatry stopped perceiving sadism and masochism as mental disorders long ago, fictional sadists are usually of the truly despicable kind. After all, a sociopathic sadist is much easier to use for drama or for eroticized daydreaming. When the non-sociopathic kind of sadism is included in fiction, it tends to be either for a plot twist, some lighthearted fun, or maybe even tragedy.

The original Trope Namer is the author Marquis de Sade, who in his books used sexual sadism both for fetish fuel and for satirical ways of describing the hypocrisy and injustice rampant in pre-revolution France. Back when psychiatry viewed all sexual minorities (including homosexuality) as "mental disorders", regular BDSM was considered pathological under the diagnoses "Sexual Sadism" and "Sexual Masochism". For a little while long ago (in an appendix to DSM III, but not included in the later versions DSM IV or DSM V), psychiatry also had a concept of non-sexual sadism as a mental disorder of its own. Sadist characters may or may not fit any diagnosis, or in the case of sympathetic characters, be unfairly labeled with such a diagnosis.

Many sadist characters are not physically violent, and the ones who are usually come from a violent culture or background. Psychological and emotional sadism is much more common and, in some cases, much more sophisticated and harmful, being easier to disguise from either the victim or their loved ones. It's also, often, very mundane — the Mean Boss, The Bully, and the Domestic Abuser are all common types of sadists. Many target family members in particular, as they are "safe" targets they can control easily, or otherwise go after someone who is in their power (e.g., a Mean Boss with their employees, or a Sadist Teacher with their students) so that it becomes harder for them to resist. Others, including the nastier types of internet Troll, prefer to target strangers and may hide their behavior from those closest to them (at least, if they feel they will be judged for it), essentially leading a double life.

The difference between The Sociopath and the sadist is that the latter wants to hurt others; the former is defined by their utter indifference and lack of remorse, and typically cause harm only as a means to an end. A sadist is not necessarily devoid of guilt; rather, like the Narcissist, they just ignore or find excuses for it, frequently blaming their victim ("You're stupid"; "you're weak"; "Why Did You Make Me Hit You?", etc). That being said, the two disorders are highly co-morbid, meaning that there are plenty of sadistic sociopaths and sociopathic sadists both in fiction and in Real Life. When sadism meets narcissism, the results are equally ugly. Serial Killers and, indeed, many violent criminals and personalities, often have shades of all of the above. Many sadists won't see or even consider the idea that there is a problem with their behavior. However, sadism just gives you unusual appetites rather than removing your sense of morality — there are heroic sadists out there who either suppress their desires or find socially acceptable outlets for them.

The difference between this trope and a Blood Knight is that a sadist may not even enjoy fighting. They simply love the misfortune of others. Whereas a Blood Knight will enjoy fighting his opponent (and are likely to lose interest if their target is unable or unwilling to fight back), most sadists will be perfectly fine with torturing a helpless victim. Expect them to take extreme actions to make their victim suffer as much as possible. That said, there are plenty of characters who fit both bills. The Heroic Comedic Sociopath is usually this trope Played for Laughs. See also It Amused Me (which may or may not include torture), Soft-Spoken Sadist, and Unsexy Sadist. An easy, psychologically realistic option to explain a villain who does things For the Evulz — in fact, most characters who don't have some more abstract or alien reason for adhering to that trope will be sadists who let their appetites rule them. Frequently overlaps with Ax-Crazy, The Sociopath, Mad Doctor, Sadist Teacher, Depraved Dentist, Blood Knight, and Loves the Sound of Screaming. Compare and contrast with Combat Sadomasochist, who's just as happy with receiving pain as dishing it out. Dystopia Justifies the Means and To Create a Playground for Evil often involve sadistic delight in the misery of a whole setting.

A sadist is quite capable of delving into Stupid Evil if they take their joy for harming others over actually choosing the more intelligent decision. In fact, many villains have sadism as a Fatal Flaw, choosing to make their enemies suffer and drive them to despair instead of just shooting them and getting it over with.

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Examples:

• Comic Books

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Anime & Manga

• Esdeath from Akame ga Kill! is a Social Darwinist, works as The Dragon for The Empire, and enjoys hurting those weaker than herself, such as by stripping them nude and forcing them to lick her shoes while chained. Her name even derives from the Japanese word for "I am a sadist".
• Rio Miyaichi from Ana Satsujin clearly enjoys her killings and frequently uses her main character boyfriend as an unwilling pawn in luring in victims, often at the expense of his own health and safety.
• Basilisk: Tenzen Yakushiji really loves making his enemies feel pain. Among other things, he tricks Gyobu into striking at a child, forcing the boy's father to take a fatal blow solely so the child's pain rattles Gyobu enough for Tenzen to win, and later ties up Kagerou and tortures her by shooting needles into her bare torso purely For the Evulz.
• In Black Butler, Sebastian and Grell fit well into this trope.
  • Grell's favorite color is red, and she delights in painting the world red with blood. Her line of work as a reaper effectively involves her hacking up people with a chainsaw every night. With paperwork in between. She is also actually Jack the Ripper and took great pleasure in killing the women involved.
  • Sebastian has had plenty of moments where he gets one hell of a kick off of the suffering of his victims (particularly Grell) but he isn't sadistic 24/7. He can be somewhat caring when it comes to Ciel.
• Bleach:
  • The Hollow Shrieker enjoyed killing people brutally when he was alive, and as a Hollow he psychologically tortures the soul of a little boy for kicks.
  • Many of Mayuri Kurotsuchi's attacks are designed to inflict maximum pain even on a helpless opponent — such as his paralysis ability he uses on Ishida (which Mayuri notes does not numb the user from pain — which he demonstrates by stabbing the defenseless Ishida in the shoulder) or the painfully slow death he uses to finish off Szayelaporro. He is quite fond of taunting and bullying his enemies in battle too (as well as his allies). The manga goes further by detailing the nature of the experiments he performed on the captive Quincy — essentially, he tortured them all in horrifically cruel and senseless ways or forced them to kill each other in the most violent ways possible.
  • Gin Ichimaru cultivates this image very convincingly, due to the Slasher Smile that he keeps on his face whenever he causes someone pain, from mentally torturing Rukia to cutting Hiyori in half. He even points out that he toys with his "prey" like a snake.
  • Szayelaporro Granz greatly enjoys performing grotesque experiments on others, and goes out of his way to torture Ishida and Renji during his battle with them.
  • Cirucci Sanderwicci seems to enjoy inflicting pain. The whip should have been your first clue.
  • Sternritter Driscoll Berci greatly enjoys the carnage he causes and mocks and taunts his enemies when he thinks he has the upper hand, to his delight.
  • While he conceals it pretty well usually, Yhwach is an utterly ruthless and sadistic being who absolutely delights in the pain of others, freely slaughtering enemy and ally alike just to further his own goals, and even looks down upon mercy and compassion. His first appearance in the series shows him torturing Luders by blasting his arm off and mockingly permits him that he can rest on the floor, but says he will blast Luders' legs off as well because he doesn't need them to sit. He then kills both Luders and Ebern simply because he can. After he kills Yamamoto-Genryuusai, he gives a taunting speech to him about how "weak" he has gotten and obliterates Yamamoto-Genryuusai's corpse even though he was already dead. He also enjoys playing cruel mental games with his victims, as during his second battle with Ichigo, he could've used 'The Almighty' to immediately defeat Ichigo on the spot, but instead chose to drag the fight on, both to enjoy it, and to give Ichigo the hope that he could win. When he reveals his future manipulation power, he breaks Ichigo's new Bankai, thoroughly beats him down, severely injures Orihime with the tip of Tensa Zangetsu, and by the end starts indulging in hysterical evil laughter at the emotional pain of Ichigo.
• Maika from Blend-S is an inverted example of sadism, as she's almost too kind and gentle. However, genetics has gifted her with a certain cruel look whenever she concentrates and a certain natural ability that comes off as vicious. Due to this, she can only get employment in a Character Cosplay Café where she acts against type by pretending to be a sadist to the customers. This is all played for laughs.
• Candy♡Candy: Eliza Leagen admits that this is her main reason for always bullying Candy and making her life miserable — it's fun, and provides her with entertainment she usually doesn't get as she's bored with her rich life.
• Daimos: Raiza, the Baam-seijin's Torture Technician and seargant of the Baam military. Be it a child like Cindy or an old lady like Margarete, she will take pleasure in their suffering. Outside of that, she was always a cold Alpha Bitch to Erika, while being a suck-up to her brother Richter, who she has a crush on.
• Death Note: As he gets in the habit of killing, Light Yagami starts to really enjoy it and often smiles and laughs as he slaughters people by the score. He also appears to get off on being a Manipulative Bastard and can't resist the urge to gloat to his enemies that he's literally signed their death warrant, or take cruel pleasure in discarding and betraying his own allies, even girlfriends. Some of his kills are needlessly nasty as well (eg. said girlfriend was forced by the Death Note to set herself on fire), and on several occasions, he takes a moment to watch his victims die; for example, when he writes Naomi Misora's name in the Death Note, he reveals himself as Kira to her just because he wanted to see the look on her face before she died. And of course, like many sadists, he absolutely believes that his victims had it coming, and that he himself is blameless.
• Dragon Ball Z:
  • Once he took over the world, King Piccolo set all the criminals free and abolished all laws, just so that he could enjoy watching humanity tear itself apart. He then had a lottery where he would destroy one section of the world for the next 36 years, all so he could enjoy the terror on people's faces during their final moments.
  • Piccolo Jr. started out as this, taking more than a little joy in breaking Goku's legs and trying to saw off his arm. He grins in delight when he's about to make the killing blow against Goku and Raditz. His training with Gohan was also brutal and he did seem to enjoy the boy's pain at first. He slightly gets over it after he becomes "infected" with Goku's and then Gohan's goodness, a little more after he fuses with Nail, despite Nail's claims that the process would not alter Piccolo's personality, and more still after merging with Kami, although Picoolo still likes inflicting pain on those that anger him or hurt Gohan.
  • Nappa absolutely enjoys dominating his foes, as seen when he fought the Z-Fighters. In fact, he seems to have a sadistic joy with each act of destruction he performs, such as his grin when he blew up East City.
  • Vegeta, especially in the earlier seasons when he could be just as bad as Frieza, often killing people with a Psychotic Smirk on his face. He massacred an entire Namekian village with a huge grin on his face and laughed when it's revealed that they weren't wished back by Shenron because of the way the wish was worded. Before then, in his Great Ape form, he ruthlessly crushed every bone in Goku's body while laughing his head off. He does get over it once he settles down on Earth and tends to kill people for pragmatic reasons instead of joy.
  • Frieza enjoys slowly tearing apart his enemies and having them die in despair rather than outright killing them, as shown when he impales Krillin with his horns, shoots up Piccolo, brutally beat Vegeta to near death, and tears Goku apart with only half of his full power. When he is almost killed by the Spirit Bomb, he slowly picks off Goku's friends in front of him to rub in how helpless he is. This, however, backfires when Frieza's killing of Krillin and threatening of Gohan unleashes the very thing he most feared in Goku, a Super Saiyan.
  • Future Androids 17 and 18 definitely qualify. They spent decades slowly torturing the people of Earth with running them over with cars, shooting them while they're running with regular guns even though their modifications should be far more lethal, and promising to spare them only to kill them anyway. That's not even getting started on how they treated beating Gohan and Trunks to near-death like it is a game.
  • Cell is also this to even greater degrees. While Frieza is satisfied with the physical suffering of his victims, Cell prefers to add the psychological element to his cruelty, terrorizing and destroying any chance for hope his opponent has, before killing them. On top of that, Cell freely admits that the extent of his plan after winning the Cell Games is to hunt down every last human being on the planet one by one, and savor their fear and despair before he kills them. The Future Androids had reduced humanity in number, but were still leaving people alive. Android 16 takes one look at Cell and decides Cell must die for the good of the universe and Cell eventually does decided he'll go to other planets and rinse and repeat until everything's dead.
  • Gohan, of all people, becomes this when Cell's sadism triggers his Super Saiyan 2 transformation, deciding to torture Cell instead of just killing him. He drops this behavior, but only after his sadism results in the death of his father and the almost-destruction of the Earth thanks to Cell refusing to accept that he could ever be beaten and mocked like this.
  • Super Buu is on par in terms of sadism and is even worse than Frieza or Cell. He specializes in killing his victims in extremely gruesome ways — for example, killing a man by liquefying his own body, forcibly going down the guy's throat, and making him explode from the inside out. He also turns Chi-Chi into an egg and steps on her in front of her family and friends. Super Buu even adds psychological torture to his list, such as his fight with Gohan. Kid Buu, in turn, is both extremely sadistic and an outright Omnicidal Maniac — his only purpose in life is to kill until there is nothing left, and he loves violence, given how he brutally beats Vegeta and his good counterpart until they can't even move anymore. Interestingly, however, Kid Buu doesn't seem to take much (if any) pleasure in the pain of others, as he never really takes his time killing his enemies or watches their pain inactively. Even when he beats Vegeta and Fat Buu mercilessly, he isn't enjoying their pain so much as just the act of pummeling them both repeatedly.
  • Broly from the non serial movies. This may stem from his general insanity. As with others such as Frieza, Cell, Buu, etc., this leads to his downfall — though he is shown as clearly capable of killing the Z-warriors in one fell swoop, he chooses to torture them instead, granting them the time to pull off a miraculous comeback.
  • Zamasu of Dragon Ball Super shows this to various degrees, in all his incarnations. Goku Black murdered Goku himself and then his family purely for the sake of being cruel after stealing the former's body, and then he and Future Zamasu reveal this to Goku after impaling him with a Laser Blade just to rub salt in the wound. Also, the Present Zamasu who was killed by Beerus was positively delighted to discover the chaos Black and Future Zamasu had inflicted upon the future Earth, happy that his dream of a mortal-free universe was becoming a reality. Fusion Zamasu succeeds in killing all known life in the universe except for the remaining saiyans, Mai and the past kais for the purpose of laughing at them, instead expending his energy expanding into the past timeline, making Beerus wonder if he'll have to get involved.
• Fairy Tail:
  • Pre-Heel–Face Turn Jellal and Laxus took great pride in dominating others with their incredible powers. Though only Laxus balked at actually killing someone, while Jellal was too deep in his brainwashing to care, as shown when he tried to murder his former love interest, killed another childhood friend in the crossfire, and then laughed about it.
  • Zancrow loves torturing others for a cheap laugh, be it his opponents or his own men.
  • Everyone in the Tartarus Guild who isn't Silver, Torafuzar, or Mard Geer is a power-hungry monster that wants to slowly kill all humans in order to take pleasure in their rule over Earth. Special mention should go to Jackal, who loves presenting a Sadistic Choice to a helpless wizard, and Kyoka, who submitted Erza to Cold-Blooded Torture while enhancing her pain receptors. This last one actually provokes Mard Geer into torturing Kyoka, but not out of any decency; rather, he's disgusted by the fact that Kyoka could find any pleasure, and from it a twisted liking, out of a race so pathetic that they might as well be weeds on the roadside.
• Fist of the North Star features many villains who enjoy inflicting torment and cruelty on the innocent. As Kenshiro despises such villains, they are often subjected to just as cruel ends.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • In the manga, Envy delights in giving pain to others, taking every possible opportunity to Kick the Dog and gloat about the atrocities he commits to anyone who'll pay attention.
  • Similarly to Envy, Lust is notable for being the most sadistic of the Homunculi with some heavy implication of sadism being what she lusts for. She gleefully paralyzes Havoc with a twisted smile on her face and injures Mustang badly enough and leaves him to die. She will kill anyone, regardless if they’re a needed sacrifice or not, something even Envy won’t do.
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Envy is characterized in much the same way, hurting other people because of his daddy issues.
• Okita Sougo from Gintama loves to see everyone, allies or enemies, in distress, but especially Hijikata. He's pretty dependable when the time calls for it, though.
• Russia from Hetalia: Axis Powers almost always wears a smile despite being flat-out cruel.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders:
    • Devo is a Combat Sadomasochist who loves inflicting pain just as much as he loves receiving it.
    • J. Geil makes it very clear that he enjoys women screaming and inflicting guilt onto their loved ones.
    • Mannish Boy seems to get a lot of enjoyment out of torturing the Crusaders in the dream world.
    • It's made pretty clear from his Psychotic Smirk that Pet Shop relishes in his job as the guard falcon of DIO's mansion, enjoying inflicting fear on his prey before violently killing them.
  • Cioccolata from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind delights in the pain and suffering he brings to other people.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: JoJolion:
    • Ojiro Sasame would often pass the time by using his Stand to non-fatally drown any woman that came near him.
    • Tamaki Damo seems to get a lot of enjoyment out of interrogating people.
• Little Tyrant Doesnt Want To Meet With A Bad End: This Manhua has a sympathetic (and played for titillation) example in the form of Princess Noelle teasing the protagonist Roel, who puts up with it in part because his powers depend on quantified Relationship Values. Part of Noelle's affection for Roel stems from him accepting her for who she is.
  Roel: Now I regret that I encouraged you that day.
  Noelle: I can't control it. You look so cute when you feel perplexed, just like what you're doing now.
• Quattro from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS is a borderline sociopath who takes great pleasure in torturing Nanoha's 6-year-old adoptive daughter Vivio, an act for which Nanoha more than makes her pay.
• Maria no Danzai: Nozomu Okaya, out of all his friends, is the worst offender when it comes to sadism to the point where he makes most normal bullies look like saints. He goes out of his way to destroy his primary victim, Kiritaka's lunch, then force-feeds it to him when cockroaches begin to eat it, fully expecting his stomach to become infested with cockroach eggs. He later casually dismisses the possibility of Kiritaka breaking his legs and later becomes disappointed that Kiritaka went and got himself killed since that means Okaya can't make his life a living hell anymore. While the rest of Kiritaka's bullies also qualify, Kiritaka acknowledges that they are just fanatics following Okaya's lead.
• Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: Yazan Gable goes out of his way to put the "sociopath" in Sociopathic Soldier — in the final episodes, he laughs as he goes on a Hero Killer rampage.
• Monster: Johan Liebert clearly enjoys tormenting people. Some of his ways of inducing people to suicide are unnecessarily cruel as well.
• Naruto:
  • Suigetsu enjoys cutting off the limbs of his opponents before cutting off their heads.
  • Sakon in the Creepy Twins duo of the Sound Five also counts, since he always likes to prolong fights.
  • Hidan is the most obvious example. He intentionally strikes non-vital areas of his opponent so that he can make them die a "good death". Though he does feel the need to join a Religion of Evil before acting on his sadistic impulses, so at least he feels his sadism needs some "higher" purpose.
  • Orochimaru is a power-hungry psychopath, but he clearly likes making people suffer along the way. He also seems to enjoy making a mockery of other peoples' beliefs and values, for example by how much his horrific actions freak other people out, as well as manipulating others to fight and die for him; in addition, his stated reason for trying to start another global war was "peace is boring". He also once lost the use of arms because he dragged a fight out for too long — because he was trying to make his opponent, his mentor the Third Hokage, psychologically suffer before losing.
  • He once tells Kabuto, his underling, that he is even crueler than he is. Kabuto is a Mad Doctor who earned Oro's praise because he was able to keep their human experiments alive for longer, and later forces the zombies of various famous ninja to fight their friends and family as a form of psychological warfare.
  • Gaara the Sand ninja is introduced as a psychotic sadist — he believes that he must kill people to feed the chaos inside of himself, driven as he is by a combination of Demonic Possession, lifelong insomnia, and a horrifically traumatic childhood. He once killed three ninja in battle, and then tried to find more people to kill because it wasn't enough. He also kept his older brother and sister in line by threatening to kill them if they didn't do what he said. He got better though.
• One Piece: Almost all the primary villains have this, but some stand out more than others:
  • Kuro, captain of the Black Cat Pirates, who went into great detail about why he despised working under Kaya and says how he was looking forward to the day he kills her. This is despite treating Kuro like a friend and father figure for three years.
  • Arlong who laughs at Nami's misery after he breaks his promise to her. He then brags to his crew about he would keep Nami under his control for the rest of his life.
  • Crocodile goes out of his way to cause pain and misery to others for no particular reason other than to be cruel. He causes Vivi great emotional distress by causing a Civil War that nearly destroyed her country, sending sandstorms just to torture some old man in another town, creating Hope Spots just to drive home how helpless everyone is. It is strongly hinted that he does this because his own dream of becoming Pirate King was crushed by people like Whitebeard, so he wants everyone to be as miserable as him.
  • Rob Lucci enjoys making people bleed and licking their blood. He actually bites Luffy in his leopard form.
  • His boss, Spandam, is even worse. While Lucci has no problem making people who can fight back suffer, Spandam mercilessly beats and brutalizes Robin and Franky, both mentally and physically, when they couldn't fight back, disgusting even Lucci.
  • Doflamingo who enjoys torturing people in much the same way as Crocodile. After he forcibly takes over a country, he has people fight until they're maimed in gladiator battles and turn others into toys to serve as his slaves. He also delights using his powers to control people's bodies and make them attack their own loved ones and allies.
  • Diamante, Doflamingo's right-hand man, is an utterly inhuman dick who, like his boss, revels in both physical and mental torment. He drags out his battle with Rebecca far longer than he needs to, given the vast difference in power between them. He not only reveals to Rebecca that he was the one who killed her mother, Scarlet — he gloats about it, and never stops doing so once he brings it up. He pulls the same card against Rebecca's father Kyros, which only serves to make Diamante's defeat at his hands that much quicker.
  • Kid, one of the Supernova. He is known for his sadism. He crucified pirates for daring to try to leave the New World.
  • Law zigzags this trope. He is known for being overly cruel and does enjoy causing pain, but he does so for mostly pragmatic reasons. The only person he truly enjoys torturing is Doflamingo and his family, but that's purely for personal reasons.
  • Blackbeard enjoys telling Luffy in detail about how he defeated his brother and how he's on death row because he tried to protect him. He also mocks Whitebeard for his inability to save Ace. To really show how sadistic he is, he laughs like a maniac as he and his crew are shooting Whitebeard to death.
• Enter Vincent Nightray from PandoraHearts. If he isn't molesting his stuffed animals with scissors, he's stalking his hot older brother or kidnapping women.
• Redo of Healer:
  • Just one look at Keyaru's borderline comical Slasher Smile will tell the reader that he really loves unleashing the worst sexual violence possible against his revenge targets. Unlike most examples however, he's literally just as awful as all of the people he fought against.
  • As for Keyaru's targets, Princess Flare gets kicks out from subjecting Keyaru to horrific abuse, Blade delights at drugging, raping and killing women during late night and Princess Norn spreads death and destruction with a wide slasher smile on her face.
• Ross/Shion from Senyuu. treats the main character Alba sadistically every chance he gets. In episode one, after being asked to fight in the next battle, instead of attacking the enemy, he punches Alba in the back. In episode two, he even explicitly states that he likes seeing people suffer. He does it to other characters as well, but not as often.
• Sorcerer Hunters: Lady Velrose/Barbara Ouiblert is a sadistic Femme Fatale who immensely enjoys torturing Carrot.
• Ryouko Mendou from Urusei Yatsura is a rich and bored girl who found that causing trouble and watching people squirm was the best form of entertainment. She uses underhanded mischief and devilish practical jokes as a primary source of pleasure.
• Dark Marik from Yu-Gi-Oh! is a pretty clear case of what used to be Sadistic Personality Disorder. He's a psychological and physical sadist, who rigs up his duels so that they will cause the maximum amount of emotional and physical trauma to the victims, gloating about it the entire time. The Spirit of the Millenium Ring is of a similar mindset, though he's not near as blatant about it as Dark Marik is.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS: Towards the end of Aoi's and Spectre's duel in Episode #34, Spectre makes Aoi believe that she's about to win and is about to save him. However, it's only a façade, as Spectre's Sunbloom Doom makes him nowhere near losing. He even mocks her, calling her "a worthless woman who will never become a Blue Angel" and claiming that he was the Blue Angel who killed Aoi. He then tears up the copy of the ''Blue Angel'' book that he materialized and burns the shreds. The story means the world to Aoi and gave her comfort after her parents died about ten years before the start of the series; to see it be so carelessly destroyed, in addition to her being so cruelly manipulated and mocked just moments ago, destroys her. Given that the Tower of Hanoi absorbs those who lose duels and leaves their real bodies in a comatose state with no hope of waking up, Spectre essentially tortures her mentally before Player Killing her in cold blood.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): It's already clear in MonsterVerse canon that Ghidorah is a sadistic Omnicidal Maniac with For the Evulz and There Is No Kill Like Overkill tendencies, but this story goes more into showing how depraved Ghidorah (particularly the middle head Ichi/Eldest Brother) is capable of being when it wants to torment an individual without killing them, and also how Ghidorah became that way.
• All For Luz:
  • Despite finding the vestiges to be creepy, All For One describes their moans of pain in Luz's Mental World to be musical and wonderful to his ears. It's revealed that he lied to Luz about the Addictive Magic her Quirk is said to give her because he enjoys watching her brutally kill her camper friends' murderers and steal their Quirks in her rampage. He only holds off on tormenting Luz herself not out of any compassion but by out of Pragmatic Villainy to keep her trust in him.
  • Darlene seems to enjoy hearing Julia screaming in pain as she's stabbing the girl with her Wolverine Claws. Her voice described as being filled with nothing but pure bliss, almost as if she revelled in the act of killing people.
  • Governor Maxwell counts, too. Well, what else would you call a bastard that forces kids to kill each other?
  • While most of the Wittebane's militia unit are all assassins and Punch Clock Villains, Jonah is the only one confirmed to take sick pleasure in his kills, dragging out their suffering. His boss, Tyler, also counts.
  • Averted with Luz. She has never been one to enjoy killing someone, aside from the one time she was possessed by the All For One Quirk.
• Two fanfictions rewriting certain chapters of Fairy Tail depict Erza of all people as a sadist. One rewrites chapter 372 so that she tortures Kyouka, and another does that with chapter 321 so that she tortures Minerva. In both of them, Erza continuously taunts them and tells them that she enjoys hearing them scream in agony.
• Jimmy's Visit With Dr. Franklin: Ebon, A Gangbanger who would do anything to get his way and would enjoy every second of it.
• The "protagonists" of My Immortal are described as sadists and routinely torture their enemies (who admittedly try to rape them). An author's note claims that "sadiztz rok haz any1 seen shrak atak 3 lol". A notable instance misspells "sadistically" as "statistically".
• In True Potential, being one is a requirement for working on Torture & Interrogation. And you will become one after working there for some time if you're not one to begin with.
• In Vale's Underground, Cinder has this aspect of herself ramped up to the point that it's literally a sexual fetish for her. She genuinely gets aroused by torturing and fighting people as well as having Mercury talking about what they'll do to one of her rivals. One reason for her nickname being "Cinder"^note "Cinder Fall" isn't her real name in this fic is that one of her favorite ways of sending a message is burning people alive. Her mother reveals that she has always been a sadist, even in childhood. She used to capture rabbits and kill them in gruesome ways. And she didn't hesitate to brutally torture her father — an innocent man — to death.
• In Walk on the Moon, Rei Yamanaka develops shades of this after running into obstacles on her path to freedom. You can tell the general state of her mental health by how sadistic she is at any given time.
• Zuma's Fear has Damian Stone, a sociopath who loves torturing his victims before killing them.

Films — Animated

• A Bug's Life: Hopper is a ruthless tyrant who delights in the fear he instills in the ants and was fully prepared to publically execute their queen to keep them compliant. He even admits to his minions that they don't even need the food the ants provide, implying his actions are motivated purely by sadism.
• Hercules: While he is more of a calculating villain, Hades clearly takes a lot of savage delight in tormenting every victim of his schemes, either emotionally like Hercules or physically like his minions, to vent his frustration.
• In The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney), we have Judge Claude Frollo. He has a sadistic Slasher Smile on his face after he sets fire to the platform Esmeralda is on when he tries to burn her at the stake. Also note his glee in witnessing a prisoner being tortured in the Palace of Justice.
  Frollo: Ease up. Wait between lashes; otherwise, the old sting will dull him to the new.
• The Incredibles:
  • When he realizes Mr. Incredible knows the people on the plane approaching his island, Syndrome takes great pleasure in launching a missile attack while Bob watches helplessly.
    Syndrome: So you do know these people... Well, I'll just send them a little greeting.
  • Although it mostly acts like a ruthless, cold-blooded machine, the Omnidroids do have a couple moments which suggest this. Notably, the v8 slams Mr. Incredible to the ground upon grabbing him and then tries to rip him in half like a Christmas cracker, when the intelligent A.I. could've simply thrown him into the nearby lava pool (almost as if it's pissed by his efforts to destroy it). Likewise, the v9 cruelly tosses Mr. Incredible around as if toying with him, although this instance might actually be justified by Syndrome's control.
• Lord Business from The LEGO Movie is so sadistic, it's a wonder how they managed to put him in a kids' film. He kills a man in cold blood by decapitating him, he psychologically and physically tortures his lieutenant Good Cop Bad Cop to turn him into his puppet for his master plan, and he crushes Emmet's self-esteem brutally in the climax when Vitruvius claims the prophecy was made up just before he dies and forces him to watch the destruction of his home town before leaving him and the Master Builders to die in the Think Tank, which he sets to self-destruct. Oh, and let's not forget that after using Bad Cop for his own goals, he abandons him to the same fate.
• Osmosis Jones: Beyond being the microbial equivalent to a Planet Destroyer, the virus Thrax enjoys hurting other microbes way more than he needs to in the pursuit of his goals. He taunts the odd victim before killing them or taking them hostage (the moment where he taunts Ozzy that he's going to infect and kill Frank's daughter after killing Ozzy is particularly noteworthy), and he breaks Bruiser's arm just to make a statement whilst taking over Scabies' crew. Furthermore, when Thrax reaches the hypothalamus, he kills the two hapless brain cells at the gland in needlessly creative and vicious ways instead of using his (admittedly already gruesome) Finger Poke of Doom on them: throwing one cell against the hypothalamus to be violently vaporized, and as a background bonus stabbing the other cell to death with multiple syringes to the back.
• In Pinocchio, we have the evillest villain in the movie, the Coachman. He takes great pleasure in turning innocent children ("the stupid little boys") into donkeys, enjoying their pain with whipping them, and also selling them into slavery.
• In Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, we have The Wolf, later revealed to be The Grim Reaper himself in the flesh. The wolf himself admits with blood-chilling pleasure that he "loves the smell of fear" when he terrifies Puss by cutting his forehead. Whenever Puss runs away from him, the Wolf intentionally lets the cat get a head start, just for the sake of chasing him, and even gives away his presence a few times with his Sinister Whistling, just to let Puss know he's watching and is still on the hunt. After the reveal that the wolf is death itself, he slowly stalks a terrified Puss with a a sadistic Slasher Smile and an Evil Laugh. That said, it's also implied to be something he's doing just to Puss-in-Boots to punish the arrogant cat for his disregard of life and lack of respect for death. Sadism is also Death's Fatal Flaw, as giving Puss a chance to gain respect for what death really means allows Puss to overcome this fear; as soon as he notices this change, he can no longer bring himself to finish Puss off, but actively chastises himself for "playing with his food" and thus giving him the chance to change for the better.
• Pokémon 4Ever features the Iron-Masked Marauder. He succeeds in capturing Celebi with his Spider-Machine's claw, brutally electrocuting it. Then, he plans to use Celebi and attempts to usurp and kill his own boss Giovanni in order to take over Team Rocket and the entire world for himself.
• Rattlesnake Jake from Rango. He constantly terrorizes his victims. In his first appearance, Jake strangles Beans and licks her face, and strangles her again in another scene, looking like he's enjoying it way too much.
• Lotso Huggin-Bear from Toy Story 3 is so embittered that his owner lost and replaced him that he snapped, took over the Sunnyside daycare centre, and turned it into a toy prison where he rules with an iron fist. While his principal aim is to ensure that he and his cronies get to live the good life and have run of the place, he clearly takes pleasure in deceiving new toys and bullying those under his power and gets especially mean when the idea of owners actually loving their toys is brought up and nearly laughs as he leaves Woody and the others to burn to death, saying "Where's your kid now, Sheriff?". Even his underlings seem more than a little scared of him.
• In Wreck-It Ralph, we have Turbo, known as King Candy, as particularly shown when the Cy-Bugs go after Vanellope and he tries to force Ralph to watch.
  "I should thank you... but it'd be more fun to kill you!"

Films — Live-Action

• 13 Assassins: Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira, the shogun's half-brother, goes around raping and murdering as he pleases and decides to take the shogunate and plunge his country into civil war for no reason.
• 22 Bullets: Pascal Vassetto is a hitman who dispatches his targets in the most brutal ways possible, such as feeding them to dogs, and doesn't think twice about murdering a child.
• Alien Outlaw: The leader alien comes to Earth to murder and rape for fun and abandons his alien buddies at the slightest trouble.
• Axeman: The Axeman of Cutter's Creek stalks the woods to torture and kill random people. When his victims ask what he's doing, he dismisses the idea that he even has a reason.
• In the film version of Battle Royale, Kiriyama actually joined the Program to kill students he doesn't even know, and shoots at them with a smile.
• Bedeviled: Mr. Bedevil is a demon who's tormented man since the beginning of time and made an app to attack people with because he believes that technology has made them grow complacent.
• The Black Belly of the Tarantula: Mario learned he enjoys killing women after murdering his wife and decides to paralyze his future victims with tarantula hawk wasp venom to make their deaths slower.
• Black Butler: Shinpei Kujo is a Corrupt Corporate Executive who gleefully traffics women to be experimented on for Hanae's experiments and forces a room fulll of people to kill each other for the antidote for the hell of it. He believes that everybody tearing each other apart for power is the natural state of humanity.
• The Black Cobra: The bandit leader believes that true freedom is to cause chaos and hurt people for fun, but abandons his men to die when the heroes come for them.
• Blade (1998): Deacon Frost is an upstart vampire who believes that humans are cattle and that the vamp establishment is weak for not acknowledging this. His response to this issue is to sacrifice a bunch of his brethren to become a Blood God. He's also the one who turned Blade and his mother, and finds it hilarious when he sets his mother upon him.
• Blastfighter: Wally Hanson is a poacher who kills deer slowly because he finds it more amusing and is perfectly willing to go after humans to keep his business going.
• Bloody Mallory: Lady Valentine is an aristocratic vampire who gains a near-orgasmic pleasure from blood, and is perfectly willing to destroy the world for her own power while acting diabolically flirty in every scene she's in.
• The Book of Revelation: After he asks why they're doing this, one of Daniel's rapists says it's just for their pleasure.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Lothos is an ancient vampire whose favourite hobby is killing Slayers. He does try to seduce them to the dark side first, but his manipulations are transparent, and he usually gives up after the first try, immediately descending into misogyny. He also shows no care for his minions, mockingly playing the violin as his right-hand man dies.
• Bumblebee: Shatter is a seriously nasty piece of work. Her partner Dropkick is more into killing their foes and that's it, but Shatter, despite being more restrained, savors their victims' despair just before their end when it comes down to it.
  "You're a brave warrior. You deserve a better death. [chuckles evilly] Then again..."
• Cannibal Holocaust: Alan Yates and his crew go to various places to film sensationalist documentaries, and will gleefully torture, rape and people to get good shoots. In fact, Alan has to be reminded that the camera's rolling so he can hide his own crap-eating grin.
• Ciaran the Demon Hunter: The demon possessing Ciaran is a perverted fiend that spends its entire screen time beating people for no reason and trying to rape a woman for his own perverted ends.
• Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange tortures, rapes, and assaults innocent random people for his own amusement (or, as he said, "for a bit of the old ultra-violence").
• Cliffhanger, Delmar, a sadistic mercenary working for Qualen, is ready to kill Hal. But when he sees that Hal is ready to die, Delmar instead brutally beats and tortures him. He laughs and taunts him throughout, comparing it to a game of football, even narrating it like one.
• The Crow (1994): Top Dollar started the tradition of Devil's Night because he felt regular crime was boring, and decides to lead all of Detroit's criminals to burn the city to the ground For the Evulz
• In The Crow: City of Angels, crime lord Judah Earl admits point-blank to one of his goons he executes (because the guy objected that the bad quality of their drugs was cutting into their profits since it killed too many customers) that hurting people is his only enjoyment.
  Judah: Weren't you listening before, Basset? I said we all have our pleasures. Mine is the pain of others.
• Demolition Man: Simon Phoenix is a maniac who lives only for carnage and sees a future where world peace has been achieved as a way to kill people more easily.
• Demon Hunter (2005): Asmodeus, the Demon of Lust, is a Serial Rapist who wants to found a horde of half-demons so he can Take Over the World. Despite demon sex killing the vast majority of humans, Asmodeus keeps at it, even relishing in the thought of forcing himself on an innocent.
• The Demonologist: Abatu is a General of Hell who betrayed Lucifer with his brothers and has spent the ensuing millennia trying to destroy the world for giggles. He shows no care for his brothers beyond a shared love of destruction and doesn't even blink when his cultists die. Meanwhile, he enjoys violence, being borderline orgasmic when killing people.
• The Scorpio Killer from Dirty Harry is completely Ax-Crazy and very sadistic as well, his worst act being kidnapping and burying a teenage girl alive.
• Dog Soldiers: After the werewolves drag Terry off, instead of killing him right away, one of the werewolves slowly eats Terry while he's still alive inside the barn. When Joe finds them some time later, the werewolf clearly notices Joe — then it proceeds to slowly bite down on Terry's neck and through his spine, and throw the severed head at Joe for him to see. There's also the werewolf who simply lurked behind Joe and let Joe realize on his own what was behind him, as if toying with its prey.
• The Dungeonmaster: Mestema is an Evil Sorcerer who has spent the centuries kidnapping random people and holding their families hostage to make them fight him because he's bored.
• Nathan from Ex Machina programs his creations to desire freedom so that they'll suffer in captivity. It's visually implied that he enjoys their psychological pain, as evidenced by his smug and satisfied expression when one of his creations goes mad from isolation.
• Faust: Love of the Damned:
  • M is a powerful demon who's willing to torture, rape and murder anybody he has to to bring about the Apocalypse.
  • Claire, M's Dark Mistress, willingly goes along with her lover's apocalyptic scheme, slits a guy's throat during sex, and tries to overthrow him.
• Sergio Leone's villains Ramon and Esteban Rojo from A Fistful of Dollars, El Indio from For a Few Dollars More, Angel Eyes from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Frank from Once Upon a Time in the West, and Gunther Reza from Duck, You Sucker! all enjoy hurting other people; for Indio and Frank in particular, it is their whole raison d'etre.
• Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th is an Ambiguous Situation case. Despite being a Serial Killer on par with Freddy Kreuger below, it is implied (and in later films stated outright) that he is an extreme Knight Templar who kills those he views as immoral, committing his murders out of a twisted Psychopathic Manchild's sense of morality rather than any sadism. And yet, despite this Informed Attribute Jason often inflicts a Cruel and Unusual Death on his victims, killing them in elaborate ways or toying with them in ways that certainly suggest to viewers that he enjoys terrorizing them. Being a Silent Antagonist, we'll probably never know for sure exactly how sadistic Jason truly is, but he can certainly be interpreted as such.
• Funny Man: The Funny Man is a demon who spends his whole screen time brutally murdering people while cracking bad jokes.
• Ghidorah and Gigan from Godzilla seem to enjoy causing suffering, over and above the usual expectations of giant marauding kaiju. Gigan likes to get up close and personal, where he tries to slowly and painfully carve up his enemies with the buzzsaw built into his stomach, while most versions of Ghidorah like to take their time when killing other kaiju.
• Tommy De Vito from GoodFellas is constantly seen using sadistic violence to threaten others and shows no apparent mercy for his victims. He also seems to be very familiar with utilizing fear and humiliation, especially when he kills Spider.
• Goth (2003): Goth is a madwoman who believes that the true goth lifestyle is raping and murdering anybody she pleases. She spends the film trying to corrupt a couple into her lifestyle, succeeding with one of them.
• The Gravedancers: Kira is being haunted by the ghost of Judge William Langer, an honored man who was admired by the entire community and died peacefully. Upon his death, they found journals he wrote, which tell of his fetish with sadism and masochism. He would lock women up in cages and tie them with masks over their faces, and eventually kill them, after brutally raping them.
• Gremlins: Stripe and his reincarnation Mohawk surely love hurting others and killing even more than the other gremlins.
• Guinea Pig: Devil's Experiment: The three unnamed men abduct a random woman and gleefully torture her so they can test the limits of human pain.
• Halloween: Film critic Kim Newman put it best in the 25 Years of Terror documentary when he noted that for Michael scaring people is perhaps more important than killing them. He seems to enjoy ratcheting up his victims' fear before he kills them — most perfectly exemplified by stringing the bodies of Laurie's friends up for her to find in the first film. And that's not even getting into the increasingly elaborate and brutal ways he dispatched his victims as the series went on... There's also the way how he tilts his head after usually killing someone, as if he wants to admire his work from another angle.
• Hellbenders: Surtr is a mad god who exists entirely to destroy all existence. While seeking to do so, he toys with mortals, acting like those he possessed in order to torment their loved ones and poking at people's greatest insecurities, when he doesn't just brutally kill them.
• The Hobbit: The dragon Smaug's usual modus operandi with intruders is to burn first and enjoy it immensely, except with the case of Bilbo. After talking with Bilbo at length and nearly killing him, Smaug decides it'd be way more fun to let him live for a while longer and go kill innocent people just because Bilbo begs him not to and he knows it will make him suffer with guilt. The part where Smaug draws the line is when his sadism interferes with his greed; he would love to watch Thorin gain the Arkenstone and lose his mind to greed and corruption, but Smaug still wouldn't seriously consider giving up the gem to see it happen.
• Horrors of War: Captain Mitchell is a thuggish American soldier who's abrasive to his own men at the best of times and rapes civilians at the worst of times. He seems to genuinely believe that there are no innocents and anything he doe to people is deserved.
• Howl (2015): The Scar werewolf in particular seems to be having a lot of fun scaring and picking off the passengers one at a time.
• In My Country: Despite justifying this as defending his people, De Jager also says that he'd really enjoyed torturing people to Langston too.
• Xiao Tian-zhun from The Iron Buddha is a former muderer and rapist who's captured alive by a kung-fu master named Liu and is granted a second chance by the benevolent Liu. Big mistake — three years later, Xiao graduates his training, and proceeds to organize the massacre of his entire school, culminating in killing and raping Liu's daughters while Liu is Forced to Watch. Xiao deliberately kills his mentor and former benefactor in an excruciatingly painful manner, and then goes on a massacre across the martial world to satisfy his sadistic lust.
• In Island of Death, the murderous duo Christopher and Celia dispatch their victims with utter glee, to the point where they derive sexual pleasure from doing so.
• I Spit on Your Grave: Stanley enjoys the rape the most. The others even call him a sex maniac.
• It Waits: The Demon is explicitly a sadist, targeting the protagonist Danny and going out of its way to make her live Hell while brutally killing everyone around her for no reason other than it enjoys it.
  Professor Riverwind: It's like a cat. It likes to play with a damaged mouse but doesn't kill it. It enjoys the preamble of its kills. It actually gets a kick out of watching us suffer before we die.
• James Bond:
  • Red Grant of From Russia with Love. His SPECTRE file describes him as a homicidal paranoiac, which comes into view when cornering 007, where instead of just going with the fake murder/suicide, Grant plans to humiliate and torture Bond.
    "The first [bullet] won't kill you. Not the second. Not even the third. Not until you crawl over here and kiss my foot!"
  • Franz Sanchez from Licence to Kill takes immense pleasure in hurting others or killing those who displease him, usually in horrific ways.
    "See you in hell! [Evil Laugh] No; today is the first day of the rest of your life."
  • Xenia Onatopp from Goldeneye, whether it be crushing her victims to death during sex or gleefully machine-gunning a bunch of computer programmers.
  • Spectre: Whether by torturing 007 in an effort to weaken his morale or by kidnapping the Bond Girl just to rattle him, Franz Oberhauser/Ernst Stavro Blofeld does have a knack for sadism on his foster brother. While all versions of Blofeld were psychopaths in general, Franz Oberhauser is later revealed to be the darkest and most violent incarnation of SPECTRE's nefarious leader, yet he remains eerily calm and soft, trying to weaken 007's morale in any way possible. To twist the knife even further, he even sadistically rubs Bond's past failures in his face several times.
• Jurassic Park:
  • The Lost World: Jurassic Park: Dieter Stark has shades of this, randomly shocking a curious Compsognathus for no reason other than "it gives me the creeps".
  • In Jurassic World, the Indominus rex doesn't strictly kill for food, she hunts for sport. This is most chillingly brought to light upon discovering she left an entire herd of her suffering victims still alive to expire in an excruciating slowness.
  • In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the Indoraptor, is less sadistic and evil than the I. rex, but still fits here. He can be shown playing with his prey and while he does eat them unlike the Indominous, he still takes a bit before doing so.
• The Last House on the Left: Krug Stillo rapes and tortures women for fun and got his son addicted to drugs to maintain control over him.
• Orin Scrivello from Little Shop of Horrors. His Villain Song mentions that he loved to torture animals as a kid, so his mother encouraged him to get a job where he can cause people pain and suffering and get away with it — thus, he decided to become a dentist, often giving people root canals without anesthetic. He likes to beat up his chubby female assistant, and he abuses his girlfriend Audrey — he's also notably disappointed by a sadomasochist patient who loves pain.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: It's implied that Gorbag has witnessed Shelob preying on his comrades yet sports a wicked grin as he describes how she prefers to feed. Further evidenced when he decides to spitefully "bleed" Frodo after the skirmish at Cirith Ungol.
• Mars Attacks!: The Martians are incredibly sadistic; the novilization clarifies that their entire way of life revolves around attacking other planets and killing the populace to sate their sadism and hedonism.
• Masked Avengers: Lin Yung Chi started an assassins' guild despite not needing the money, and one time decided to have a woman raped by his men for no real reason.
• Mulan: Rise of a Warrior: Prince Mengdu is introduced killing prisoners for fun, starts a war to avoid punishment, and kills his own father to keep it going.
• Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street was a sadistic child killer before his death at the hands of the parents of Elm Street, and became even worse afterward, trapping his victims in horrible dreams that kill them for real.
• Night of the Templar: Lord Renault murders his commander in a Deal with the Devil for immortality, then proceeds to rape and murder anybody he pleases for ten lifetimes.
• The Open House: The unnamed killer spends his days sneaking into people's open houses to psychologically torture them until he gets bored and goes in for the kill. He's barely characterized but seems to be motivated by nothing but pure sadism.
• The Outlaw Josey Wales: "Redlegs" Terrill is a guerrilla who spends his days butchering people for fun. Despite working for the Union, anything he says endorsing their cause is obviously lip-service so that they'll sign his paychecks.
• The Retreat (2021): Gavin and James clearly enjoy harming their victims, from the happy expressions which they have while doing so or anticipating the acts.
• Satan's Little Helper: The Satan Man is a man in a costume who shows up and starts killing people, including a baby and an old woman, with no rhyme or reason behind it beyond a love of chaos.
• The Serpent and the Rainbow: Captain Dargent Peytraud runs Haiti's Secret Police with an iron fist, crushing all dissenters with gusto. His favourite things to do are torture people and fake their deaths with voodoo magic, burying them alive to steal their souls for his power. At times Peytraud pretends to be a Well-Intentioned Extremist that wants to keep Haiti strong in the face of Western imperialism, but he shows no hesitation in doing this to his fellow countrymen as well.
• The Seventh Curse: Sorcerer Aquala serves a Human Sacrifice god for power, condemns women to death for not marrying him, curses outsiders to a slow death when they intervene, and tortures hundreds of children to death to power a vampire beast to serve him.
• Elena in Shark Week. Her sadistic personality is established when she is shown displaying pleasure over Tiburon killing his first victim, as well as her wanting to watch Tiburon's live feed of his victims being tortured and subjected to his twisted demands.
• The Big Bad of Shotgun (1989) is a traditional sexual sadist who enjoys beating prostitutes.
• Sodom and Gomorrah: Queen Bera and the other Sodomites find high entertainment in watching slaves who revolted die by torture.
• Palpatine/Darth Sidious from Star Wars. This is best demonstrated with him using Force Lightning to torture both Mace Windu and Luke Skywalker when he could have just killed them.
• Tenebre: Peter Neal murdered a girl in his youth to vent his sexual frustrations and starts killing again when the new murders awaken his bloodthirst.
• Theresa & Allison: Vampires like Paisley enjoy torturing and raping humans before they feed on them.
• Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead: The Man With The Plan ordered that all of the criminals who'd messed up his job die painful, slow deaths. He also clearly enjoys toying with Jimmy later when he's at his mercy.
• Time After Time: Dr. John Leslie Stevenson, better known as Jack the Ripper, kills for fun and steals a time machine to keep killing throughout time with nobody to stop him.
• Tokyo Gore Police: The Chief of Police assassinated his predecessor so he could privatize the police force, has a Sex Slave with no arms or legs, and decides to send his men on a complete massacre when he's exposed.
• The Toxic Avenger: Bozo and his gang run children over with their cars for fun. One even masturbates to pictures of the bodies.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Judge Doom's enjoyment in doing evil to people is quite like a child having fun while playing with his toys. He orders first Smart Ass to let Eddie watching Roger and Jessica being Dipped and then to shoot him when he could have just had him killed right now. Again, during the final confrontation he starts the Dipmobile on in order to Dip Roger and Jessica with a deranged smile simply to hurt Eddie, he saws a chain to show Eddie how powerful he is and what is going to happen to him. Also, his plan to destroy Toontown appears to be more For the Evulz than for greed.
• Witchfinder General: Matthew Hopkins pretends to be a Puritan hunting witches but is really just torturing random women to death for money.
• Wonder Woman (2017): Dr. Poison and General Ludendorff revel in the suffering and panic of others. When they turn on the German high command and lock them in a room with Poison's corrosive gas they toss in a gas mask, which will do nothing against said gas, to laugh at the men desperately fighting over it to try to survive.
• Would You Rather: Both of the Lambricks see poor people not as people but as toys that they can destroy for their own entertainment and show absolutely zero remorse for the amount of suffering and death they cause.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • Deadpool (2016): Francis seems less interested in any scientific discoveries that his experiments have brought and more interested in the pain and suffering that they will bring.
  • Logan: Donald Pierce maniacally laughs while dragging one of the children's bodies into what looks like a crematorium, murders Gabriela in cold blood and then jokes about it, and tortures Caliban by exposing him to sunlight.

Literature

Examples by author:

• The Villain Protagonist libertines written by the Marquis de Sade were all about enjoying themselves, very frequently at other people's expense — and their treatment of others, particularly those they hated, was beyond cruel. There's a reason this guy is the inspiration for the word "sadism".

Examples by title:

• Wargrave of And Then There Were None admits in a document intended to be found after his death that he had always enjoyed causing pain, even as a child. Fortunately, he did also come equipped with a strong moral sense and chose a career that allowed for his sadistic tendencies to be indulged within this moral code.
• Visser Three from Animorphs is so fond of playing the Torture Technician (a job which he could easily pass off on others at his current rank) that his hobby is collecting exotic torture devices from across the universe. Unsurprisingly, his second-in-command Taylor shares his passion for torture, to the point where most of an entire book (The Illusion) is dedicated to her gleeful torture (both physical and mental) of a captive Tobias.
• Venandakatra from the Belisarius Series is also known as the Vile One (a name given to him by the psychotically evil Malwa regime), and fully lives up to it. Anyone who crosses him in even the slightest way ends up on the wrong end of a short stake, even minions who failed at impossible tasks. He also gets a kick out of beating up kids, among far worse things. Venandakatra is so gratuitously evil and pointlessly, self-sabotagingly cruel that the racist, fascist-lite Malwa regime that considers gang-rapes and mass murders of captured civilians standard military policy thinks he's beyond the pale.
• The Book of Lost Things: The huntress takes pleasure in killing things and is always looking for her next kill. She has grown bored of her usual prey and, by the time of the book, has developed a taste for children. She enjoys teasing her prey, making them believe they will survive, before cruelly ending their life.
• Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock is revolted by sex, but his feelings of petty anger are described as "sensual." He has indulged this sensuality as a school bully and as an unusually hands-on gang leader. In one scene, he idly pinches a girl's hand, she tells him he can keep at it if he likes that sort of thing, and he immediately lets go — her consent is a turn-off. He reminisces about
  ...all the good times he'd had in the old days with nails and splinters: the tricks he'd learnt later with a razor blade: what would be the fun if people didn't squeal?
• In A Brother's Price, Keifer Porter was this kind of person. Most of his abuse was emotional abuse of his adult wives, he threw tantrums, played them out against each other by making them jealous, and locked himself up in his room for days when things weren't done as he wanted it. Ren suspects that he hurt her on purpose when he first had penetrative sex with her. (She was a virgin and had nothing to compare him to). By far his worst offense was torturing teenage Trini, after giving her a Tap on the Head and tying her to his bed.
• The Burning Kingdoms: General Vikram recalls how Emperor Chandra made him recount all the details about the priests and the temple children from Hirana burning alive with obvious pleasure, which disturbed him greatly to do.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa: Joslyn was sold to a man named Captain Samwin as a girl, who tortured her along with his other slaves for pleasure, burning her genitals and breasts. He did even worse to others, killing some. She eventually killed him in his sleep before running away.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses: Amarantha is positively gleeful about physically and psychologically torturing people who oppose her.
• Date A Live: In Volume 15, an Inversed Tohka sits on top of Shido and tries to make him eat cake from the floor, spanking his butt when he starts to object.
• A Dearth of Choice: Although the Gargaren family puts on a friendly facade to the public, Katrina knows that they're very different behind closed doors. Such as the time the patriarch pushed her down the stairs, "not out of anger, spite, or anything like that. No, he just felt like it. It brought him happiness."
• Department 19 has two examples. Alexandru Rusmanov is a cruel brute who revels in death and pain, inflicting it on his own minions when they fail him — the narration describes Alexandru's Slasher Smile as a "smile of utter malice, of pure sadism". Dracula is even worse, thinking up nauseating tortures and using them any time he has any kind of excuse, and it's made clear that he greatly enjoys this.
• Doctrine of Labyrinths: Malkar Gennadion is physically, emotionally, and sexually sadistic, and he enjoys it to the hilt. His former protege Felix Harrowgate also has a taste for cruelty, although Felix tries to confine it to verbal sniping and consensual BDSM.
• Izaya from Durarara!! genuinely screws with people simply because he enjoys it and likes seeing their reactions — except for Shizuo. He hates Shizuo.
• Ender's Game:
  • As a child, Peter Wiggin flayed squirrels alive and subjected his brother to cruel games. His genius qualified him for Battle School, but he was rejected as too dangerous. As he grew up, his moral compass largely overcame his sadistic tendencies, and he used his intelligence for good.
  • Achilles de Flandres in Ender's Shadow is his inverse. He doesn't take pleasure in the method of death, favors efficiency over pain, doesn't even need to witness it, and only goes out of his way to kill someone if they have shamed him in some way, yet he is eviller than Peter.
• While never explicitly shown, it's believed by everyone that Saeko of Girls Kingdom is one. For example, her Seraph and indentured servant, Matsuri, is a nervous wreck especially when she's around (but still wants to work for her even after the debt is paid off), she has been confirmed to physically punish Matsuri, and there's a rumor that the S in her name stands for Sadist. Her presence is also intimidating enough that Misaki prefers to steer clear of her whenever possible.
• Drake Merwin from the Gone series is a vicious psychopath who serves both a sociopath and a God of Evil purely for the chance to hurt as many people as possible. There is rarely anything he does in the series that is not for the pleasure of harming another human being. His psychological profile at the Coates Academy even diagnosed him as a sadist. Diana drew a smiley face next to it.
• Harry Potter:
  • Lord Voldemort is probably the worst. He takes terrifying pleasure in terrorizing, manipulating, torturing and murdering other people.
  • Bellatrix Lestrange is motivated primarily by her desire to inflict as much pain on as many people as possible in the name of Voldemort's cause and has an aptitude for Cold-Blooded Torture.
  • Barty Crouch Jr. deeply shared her affinity for torture but was quite smart about dealing with it. Case in point, he managed to rub in the face of a student of his how he tortured his parents into a permanent vegetative state, without anyone none the wiser about his intent.
  • Lucius Malfoy is quite the example. He is extremely abusive to his house-elf Dobby, and in the fifth book, he is described as blushing in pleasure at the thought of hurting teenagers, some younger than his son. His sadism is a lot more covert... but that doesn't make him any less creepy.
  • Dolores Umbridge shows clear signs of being one in Order of the Phoenix when she uses a blood quill on two students and is willing and eager to use an unforgivable curse on Harry and Hermione to force them to answer her questions. This aspect of her nature is wholly confirmed in Deathly Hallows when she relishes her new power to hand muggle-borns over to the dementors.
  • Argus Filch muses about how punishments were much more severe back in the old days and outright says that he Loves the Sound of Screaming.
  • Harry finds himself disturbed by how much the goblin Griphook seems to enjoy other people's suffering and actively wishes that they'll have to hurt wizards in order to break into Gringotts.
• In Hurog, Ward's father is suspected to be a sadist who beat his children just for fun, though he certainly also had a nasty temper. There is also Bastilla, Kariarn's slave, who plainly "likes to hurt people".
• Kane Series: Mollyl from the story "The Cold Light" likes causing pain to people and the fact that he comes from famously degenerate island of Pellin does not help, either. He joins Lord Gaethaa (a.k.a. the Crusader) simply because it gives him a lot of possibilities to inflict pain. When Gaethaa's men rape Kane's lover Rehhaile and his second-in-command Alidore later checks on her, seeing bruises and welts on her body, he reflects that she isn't really badly messed up, compared to other women with whom Mollyl played.
• Ivarr Ragnarson of The Last Light of the Sun is a Serial Killer and Torture Technician whose dream in life is to successfully blood-eagle somebody while keeping them alive. Since blood-eagleing involves cutting open the victim's ribs and removing their lungs while they are still alive, this means all his victims are in for a long, drawn-out, and thoroughly agonizing death, which Ivarr enjoys every moment of.
• Duke d'Angouleme from the Malediction Trilogy is a very powerful troll and the main enemy of troll prince Tristan and his human wife Cecile. He uses pain and terror as a tool to intimidate his enemies, but he also thoroughly enjoys it. And then he gets to look after Tristan's younger brother Roland, very powerful but also raving mad and it goes from bad to worse.
• Horror writer Maurice Level has a short story called "A Maniac", which is about a man who gets thrills from watching violent accidents, and he frequents a show in which a cyclist does a death-defying stunt in the hopes that he crashes. Unlike other examples, the man is explicitly stated to be neither evil nor bloodthirsty, so he is essentially an otherwise normal man with a very strange fetish.
• George Mellis in the Sidney Sheldon novel Master of the Game is this of the sexual variety. His first scene is of him beating and sodomizing Eve Blackwell, who was perfectly eager to have sex with him before discovering his true nature — there are frequent descriptions of him going to bars and picking up women or men and leaving them broken and battered. He also mentions a realistic consequence to his needs — he doesn't like having sex with masochists. In fact, he does his best to avoid them, because they enjoy the pain he inflicts, which decreases his pleasure.
• Neverwhere has Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar, a pair of Humanoid Abomination killers for hire, who kill, destroy and torture down the centuries, and love their job. In the story, they crucify and horrifically torture the Marquis de Carabas to death using discarded medical instruments, and fantasise about doing the same to Richard and Door.
• The Obsidian Chronicles: Lord Dragon, on top of all his already established cruelty, likes to torture and murder people for fun.
• Pick a Nazarick NPC in Overlord (2012) and there's a high chance where they really get the kicks out of torturing and killing people and spreading death and chaos to any nation they touch. And those who don't treat killing swathes of people like squishing ants so they aren't any better.
• In The Pillars of the Earth: William is sexually impotent unless he is violently assaulting his victims - consent inhibits him. When he is given the order to cut Aliena's ears off in front of her defeated father and his retainers, he discovers the command sexually arouses him. William comes to understand this quality gradually in himself; while he is holding an enemy's feet in a fire to make him confess treason William discovers that torturing a man gives him the same feeling as raping a girl, but later, dissatisfied, he decides that torturing a man without killing him is like stripping a girl without raping her.
• Rifters Trilogy: Achilles Desjardins is a sadist in the sexual sense, implied to be the result of faulty neurology due to genetics or some other physiochemical factor. He's initially able to controls his urges with the help of the GuiltTrip Restraining Bolt, while also using virtual reality simulations to satisfy them whenever they occur. Once GuiltTrip is gone, taking his normal sense of guilt with it, his sadism becomes his primary motivation. He intends to prolong the βehemoth crisis for as long as possible, which will make his help so important that the authorities will look the other way when he becomes a Serial Killer. When someone suggests that he go back to torturing women in simulations rather than in reality, he replies:
  "It's not about the sights or the smells, okay? You can't hurt a hallucination. It's play-acting. What's the point of torturing something that can't even suffer?"
• Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption has Bogs Diamond, a sadistic prisoner who sexually assaults Andy on multiple occasions. Red makes the point that Bogs' sexuality has nothing to do his attacks; he's high enough on the prison hierarchy that he could have almost any partner he wanted without resorting to Prison Rape.
• This is considered the worst crime in the galaxy in Rod Allbright Alien Adventures, because there's no mitigating factors — if you're cruel to someone, it's only because you want to be. Naturally, the Big Bad of the series, BKR, is a perfect example. Causing pain is his greatest joy in life, to the point he willingly spent a long period disguised as a human teenager because it let him be The Bully. His plans are all based around causing as much suffering as possible to as many sapient beings as possible; he doesn't care at all if he gets caught in the crossfire as long as other people get hurt in the process. The ultimate of these plans is a bomb that will freeze the universe in time — he loves the idea that anyone who's suffering will be trapped in that suffering forever, while his enemies spend eternity in the moment of their worst failure, and he spends it in the moment of his greatest triumph.
• Roderick Whittle, a.k.a. Jack the Ripper, from Savage. His greatest joy is inflicting his trademark mutilations on still-living victims, prolonging their agony as long as possible. He killed his London victims before cutting them up, but this was only because their screaming would attract too much attention otherwise. Once he's in America, he takes his victims to an isolated cave where he doesn't have to worry about that.
• Shade's Children: The Overlords clearly enjoy watching the creatures they make kill each other for sport, and when harming free humans as well.
• All vampires in The Shadowspawn are clinical sadists, though they can vary between mildly creepy and murderously, psychopathically Ax-Crazy. However, most are the latter.
• Slayers: Hellmaster Phibrizzo is a manipulative sadist. He revels in his victims' suffering and despair, as evidenced when he kills all of Lina Inverse's friends one by one.
• The Crapsack World of A Song of Ice and Fire provides numerous examples, including:
  • The Blood Knight Gregor Clegane, who as a child held his younger brother Sandor's face in a fire for playing with his discarded toy, and who leads a band of Psychos for Hire in a campaign of Rape, Pillage, and Burn against the hapless peasantry.
  • Sadism runs in the blood of the Obviously Evil House Bolton, who have a history of flaying their enemies alive and continue to practice it in secret despite it being outlawed by their overlords. Ramsay Snow, after capturing Theon Greyjoy, engages in psychological and physical abuse. He flays Theon's fingers and toes and possibly castrates reducing him from a proud handsome man to a broken wreck, terrified of and submissive to Ramsay. Ramsay's behavior is atrocious enough that his father Roose berates him for it — not because he's appalled by what his son is doing, mind you, but because it's bad for PR.
  • Joffrey Baratheon takes delight in his absolute power over his subjects and particularly enjoys ordering executions, mutilations and forced duels to the death. While he is never hinted to actually have sex with or rape most of his victims — he may very well have died a virgin — Joffery gropes Sansa during her wedding to Tyrion Lannister and spontaneously kick-starts her undressing ceremony, indicating that he's a bit of a sexual sadist as well.
  • Joffrey is often compared to Aerys II, who did such lovely things as lighting people on fire and setting up Saw-like traps for the people who weren't on fire. At one point, one of his bodyguards reminisces that Aerys would get sexually aroused from seeing people burned alive, and one time clawed his own pregnant wife so fiercely while having sex with her that she had to be evacuated from the capital, covered in scratch marks.
  • Euron Greyjoy crosses this line with gusto and likes manipulating people before torturing them for that extra evil touch. What makes Euron especially stand out is that most of his worst acts of sadism are against his own family.
• In The Stormlight Archive, Shallan's brother Balat has a compulsion to hurt things, which he usually vents on small animals. Combined with the time he set the estate's servant quarters on fire, there's some indication that he's a psychopath. Unusually for the trope, he knows that something's wrong with him and takes great pains to avoid harming people, especially his loved ones; it's strongly implied that the setting's God of Evil is causing or exacerbating his urges.
• Sword Art Online:
  • Nobuyuki Sugou. Not only does he meddle with the Pain Absorber to torture Kirito, Sugou goes so far as to pin him down and sexually assault Asuna right in front of him, just to make him suffer psychologically. He even takes the time to look right at Kirito and smirk while doing so. He also seems to thrive on trying to be a Hope Crusher towards Asuna and is ecstatic when Asuna attempts to reassure Kirito, saying nothing Sugou does will really hurt her.
    Sugou: I was hoping you'd say that. But I wonder how long your pride's going to last. Thirty minutes? An hour? Why don't we see how long you can HANG ON TO IT?!
  • Gabriel Miller began studying the concept of mortality when he was a kid by killing childhood friend Alicia Klingerman. And as Vector, the dark god of Underworld, he tortured even more souls (artificial ones, but no less satisfying to him). His prime goal in Underworld though is hunting down Alice — who resembles Alicia — and torture her as well.
  • Vassago "PoH" Cassals. Born to a Japanese father, who sold him and his mother away, he created the Laughing Coffin guild just to see Japanese people kill each other. Vassago later brings in Chinese and Korean gamers into Underworld to fight the Japanese gamers who are rescuing his SAO-era archnemesis Kirito, just to revel in the sight of Asians beating each other up. But wait, there's more. Vassago proceeds to torture Kirito in front of his True Companions just to spite them, planning to cut off his limbs and force Kirito to watch him torture Asuna. And when Kirito recovers and soundly defeats him, Vassago vows that he will never stop coming after Kirito and Asuna until he finally manages to kill them in real life by cutting their throats and ripping their hearts out. This backfires on him epically; after hearing this, Kirito has had enough of him and subjects Vassago to a Fate Worse than Death by permanently trapping him in a tree and leaving him to rot in Underworld.
• That Hideous Strength: Miss Hardcastle a.k.a. the Fairy uses cigarette burns to interrogate a prisoner — then she gets so carried away with the torture that she neglects to get any actual information from the prisoner.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • Morgoth, the Big Bad of The Silmarillion, Beren and Lúthien, The Children of Húrin and The Fall of Gondolin' (as well as many stories of Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth and The History of Middle-earth''), has sadism rounding out of his many, many unpleasant qualities. While torturing captives can get him useful information, he often just does it for fun even when it has no practical purpose and takes great joy in his victims' agony. Something that can be traced to his real motivation behind everything, that he wants to completely nullify any life-form that he encounters as it is a reminder that it didn't originate from him and is and will always be beyond his control.
  • Sauron. Several thousand years of being thwarted and forced to run away from fights — and on The Fall of Númenor and other occassions, the physical death of his body — along with general decay of his powers, has left him extremely embittered and completely intolerant of anyone who defies his will. Case in point, his torture of Thorin's father in The Hobbit— he tried to get him on side with a We Can Rule Together bargain, but one refusal from the dwarf was enough for Sauron to flip and torture him for days on end out of spite. By the time of The Lord of the Rings he wants to dominate the world and destroy all opposition simply because that's all he's got left.
• The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: A number of bad guys will take pleasure in raping, torturing and murdering the people in their clutches.
• Warrior Cats has quite a few cats who relish in other's suffering:
  • One Eye has perhaps the most frightening sadistic streak; he loves to manipulate, dominate, and torture other cats just for the fun of it. In the one book he appears in, he imprisons and tortures Sparrow Fur (who is barely out of kithood!), marks several innocent cats as his servants by permenately scarring them with a circle-shaped slash, and has his followers brutally beat up Acorn Fur (focusing on inflicting head wounds in this case), and later Clear Sky, all with blood-chilling joy.
  • Darktail is almost as bad. When he holds four injured RiverClan warriors captive, he cruelly tortures them into swearing an oath of loyalty to him by starving them and leaving their wounds to fester. When the last cat, Reedwhisker, finally gives in, Darktail humiliates him by forcing him to say the oath again, louder. And even after they've given in, Darktail continues to starve them anyway for his own amusement. Later, Darktail murders Needletail as punishment for Violetpaw trying to drug him, but before doing so, he forces Needletail to either kill Violetpaw or be killed herself, expecting that she will choose to die but wanting to torture her and Violetpaw psychologically.
  • The Broken Code arc makes it apparent that Ashfur, once a noble warrior, has become one. He displays a certain degree of joy and satisfication in hurting and terrorizing other cats, such as turning the Clans against one another, torturing the ghosts he has enslaved, and forcing Rootspring and Snowtuft to fight each other.
• Most of the Forsaken of The Wheel of Time have cruel or spiteful streaks, particularly towards those who defy them, but Semirhage takes the cake. Also known as "the Lady of Pain", she was once a world-renowned healer who defected to the Shadow after the fact that she went out of her way to cause her patients pain came to light. She became the Dark One's favorite torturer, and even her fellow Forsaken — The Dreaded one and all — tend to be wary of her cruelty.
• The Witch of Knightcharm: Chosovi is shown to be this during the first Wizard Duel that we see. The fight is a Curb-Stomp Battle in which the experienced student Morgan brutally flattens the brash newcomer Julia, but no matter how horribly Julia is beaten, Chosovi continues to take a gleeful delight in the duel.
• A Wrinkle in Time: IT, the Brain in a Jar that rules over the world of Camazotz, refers to itself as "The Happiest Sadist".

Live-Action TV

• Arrow: Zigzagged with Oliver Queen. During season 5, the Big Bad Prometheus spends several days torturing Oliver, with the hopes that Oliver would reveal his "secret." Eventually, Oliver is so exhausted that he eventually cracks and claims that he only ever killed because he liked it and wanted to, seemingly confirming that he is a sadist. However, things get more complicated in the following episodes, as it's explored how Oliver only admitted to such under immense psychological pressure. Meaning he might not enjoy killing people, but was rather pressured into believing it.
• Buffyverse: Angelus absolutely thrives on causing pain to others, with virtually everything he does being geared towards destroying someone physically, mentally, and/or emotionally. He slowly drove Drusilla insane by slaughtering everyone she loved and turned her into a vampire so her torment would continue for eternity. At the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 2, when he's captured Giles in order to torture him for information, he freely admits that he hopes Giles won't give up the information he needs willingly because he doesn't want to be deprived of the opportunity to torture him.
• Toby Meres from Callan takes great pleasure out of 'interrogating' members of the Opposition, is the only assassin in The Section who volunteers to visit the interrogation department, and generally enjoys seeing even his co-workers in pain (emotional or physical) and is inclined to try to see how much he can get away with in regard to increasing it.
• Cursed (2020): Brother Salt shows a clear enjoyment of his work as a torturer.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Daleks seem to get a disturbing amount of pleasure from killing things, and they do it in the most horrible ways possible. In the New Series Adventures novel Prisoner of the Daleks, it is revealed that the Daleks adjust their Death Ray to the level required to kill their target... and then dial it down a notch to ensure that their victims die in excruciating agony.
  • In "Planet of the Ood", slave overseer Mr. Kess takes a disturbing pleasure in trying to kill the Doctor with the warehouse's robotic crane arm.
• Red Jack from Doom Patrol (2019). What else do you call a being that feeds on pain and suffering?
• Game of Thrones:
  • Gregor Clegane does not specifically love battle, just wanton slaughter — he gets just as many jollies from butchering civilians, raping women and murdering children. When he asks Cersei who he's going to kill in a Duel to the Death, she asks him if it matters. He merely shakes his head. Ser Gregor cares not from where the blood flows, only that it flows.
  • Even the established torture-happy monsters like Gregor Clegane, who had people killed via terrified rats gnawing through their chests for the hell of it, don't hold a candle to just how utterly sadistic and cruel Ramsay can be with those who fall into his hands. Myranda isn't too far behind Ramsay in this department.
  • Joffrey's only genuine source of joy seems to be hurting other people. He forgoes even sexual sadism in favor of more direct physical violence.
  • One of the darker personality traits that Arya Stark develops over time is that she actually seems to enjoy frightening and killing her enemies, smirking and mocking them when she cuts their throats or feeds them human-flavored pies and such. That being said, she doesn't enjoy inflicting pain and suffering on just anyone, only assholes whom she believes deserve it in retaliation for the suffering they themselves have inflicted. Still, not being indiscriminate in her sadism doesn't make her any less of a sadist. Liam Cunningham even points out in an interview that Arya’s cruelty isn't something that should be glorified, as many viewers do.
  • A number of the Sparrows have very enthusiastic smiles when relishing the opportunities to hurt people. Cersei of all people actually calls them out on this to Septa Unella's face, pointing out they clearly do all their evil acts to satisfy themselves rather than to appease their gods, just like her.
  • Ser Meryn Trant uses his position as Kingsguard to abuse his power and hurt weak children as opposed to saving them. It's actually part of his fetish to beat little girls.
• Many killers from Hannibal are sadists, but explicitly Hannibal Lecter himself when somebody tries to copy his crimes and both Will and the FBI realize the key difference between the two killers — the copycat didn't torture his victims to death. It's strongly implied in the novels that this is how Lecter kills but it is made crystal clear here. Beyond that, of course, is that he is the Trope Namer of Hannibal Lecture for a reason, and in his particularly twisted pathology seems to regard psychological torture, Criminal Mind Games, exercising and abusing power over others, and pitting people against each other as acts of love. He likens himself to God and thinks that he is Above Good and Evil, and believes that both he and God are cruel to those they love because that is simply their nature.
• Himmelsdalen: Raymond found that he enjoyed seeing Helena in distress before when he'd drowned her, begging for mercy. To relive the sight, he takes hostage Luck (a dog she's fond of) so that she'll beg for mercy once again.
• Justified:
  • Dickie Bennett, Big Bad Wannabe of Season 2, is a cowardly drug dealer who wants respect and will inflict as much pain as he can on anybody who doesn't give it to him. His Establishing Character Moment has him forcing a man to put his leg in a bear-trap because the man dared to grow weed without his permission. He later captures protagonist Raylan Givens, strings him up from a tree, and tries to beat him to death, gloating the entire time.
  • Robert Quarles, Big Bad of Season 3, is a Serial Killer and Serial Rapist of male prostitutes (as well as a Detroit gangster). He kidnaps boys off the street, tortures and molests them, and then kills them, all as part of a hideous ritual that he can't seem to stop doing. Most of it stems from the utterly horrifying abuse he suffered at the hands of his own father.
• Takeshi Asakura/Ouja from Kamen Rider Ryuki is completely psychopathic and extremely sadistic as well, his worst act being killing The Rider, including Jun Shibaura/Gai, Miyuki Tezuka/Raia, Shuichi Kitaoka/Zolda and Mitsuru Sano/Imperer, and also killing Miho Kirishima's sister.
• L.A.'s Finest: Wayland kidnapped and held Jen along with other women to torture them for his own pleasure.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is a show about sex crimes, and sadists show up from time to time. Whenever the Villain of the Week is a Serial Killer, there is a good chance of him being one. Interestingly, the victim from the Pilot was one.
• Many of the killers in Luther.
  • A notable yet ambiguous example is Villain Protagonist Alice Morgan, whom Luther diagnoses as a malignant narcissist, a particularly nasty condition that combines narcissistic, antisocial, and sadistic behaviour into one vicious package.
  • One of the most notable and atrocious examples is David Robey from the film. He revels in death and violence, hosting his own chatroom for sick individuals to watch him torture, rape, and kill his victims, while also taking delight in maliciously taunting his victims and opponents, even going so far as to wear a mask with a screen that displays the faces of his victims while tormenting their relatives.
• It's a family comedy, but Reese from Malcolm in the Middle has been shown to have no empathy and enjoy bullying others, especially his brothers. In one particular episode, he makes the neighborhood kids, whom he's bullied horribly for years, think that they're finally getting to beat him up, when in fact Reese had kidnapped a kid of about the same size as a stand-in.
• Charles Augustus Magnussen from the Sherlock episode "His Last Vow". Sherlock describes him as "a shark", as well as the worst person he had ever met, and says that he "picks on people who are different". He is a media baron who is secretly the "King of Blackmailers"; digging up dirt on people — usually people in positions of power or influence — seems to be his very raison d'etre. But he doesn't use this information just to gain advantages for himself or his newspapers; he uses it, along with his own position of power, to bully and humiliate people in extremely cruel and childish ways, such as forcefully licking a government minister (i.e., sexual assault) after threatening to paint her husband as a child molester (her husband had earlier committed suicide over this threat — he cheated on her with a 15-year-old girl, but he thought she was of legal age — so Magnussen going after the man's wife afterwards is beyond low), to pissing in Sherlock's fireplace, to having Watson thrown in a bonfire (claiming afterwards that he had a man there ready to save him if Sherlock didn't) and watching it on his television over and over and over again... all for no other reason than he can. He also admits at the end that he is willing to publicly humiliate and ruin people in his newspapers regardless of whether he can actually prove anything he says.
• The Society: Sam relates that Campbell once tortured a bird to death for fun, while Elle says he's inflicted pain on her for pleasure since their relationship began.
• Star Trek:
  • Gul Madred from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Chain of Command" holds Picard prisoner and tortures him with a remote-controlled device that induces excruciating pain. At one point, he admits that he no longer needs anything from Picard; he's just enjoying the process of breaking Picard's mind.
  • The main antagonist in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Duet" is the former commander of what's basically the Cardassian version of Auschwitz, and he pulls no punches about his enjoyment of the horrors he inflicted on Bajoran prisoners. It turns out he's actually a file clerk who worked for said commander, and far from being a cold-blooded sadist, he's setting himself up to take the fall because he feels that someone needs to be punished for the atrocities, but the fact remains that the commander in question was a real person who, it's implied, really did think that way. What's worse, the real commander died some years earlier and thus can't be brought to justice.
  • Narissa from Star Trek: Picard derives great pleasure from the suffering of others. In "Absolute Candor", she chuckles after molesting her brother Narek and then has an amused, open-mouthed smile after strangling him. She relishes the idea of torturing Soji for information and utters the words "pain and violence" with reverence. In "Nepenthe", a Psychotic Smirk forms on her lips and she hums in satisfaction after reducing Hugh to a blubbering pile of Broken Tears when she and her lackeys gun down several of his xB patients.
• Supernatural:
  • Protagonist Dean Winchester actually has some of this:
    • During his time in Hell, Dean's limits when being tortured are pushed beyond expectation, possibly due to his stubborn behavior. However, after thirty years, he finally succumbs to becoming the torturer and claims that he loves every second of tearing each of them apart, as he isn't the one getting tortured anymore.
    • Season 10 sums this up when he uses all of his past tragedies as a hunter who lost almost everything he's ever cared about and becomes an Ax-Crazy demon with a ruthless and sadistic attitude. Similarly to Sam when he literally had no soul, instead of becoming emotionless, Dean actually loves killing people and making them suffer as he gleefully stabs a man who is in a depressed state just for kicks. He also goes as far as trying to murder Sam and Cas — his brother and his best friend, respectively — while sadistically smiling and enjoying the psychological torment that he inflicts on the former to make him feel responsible for all of their past issues.
    • This isn't his first rodeo with sadism either, as he has shown shades of this in the earlier seasons. He has been shown to brutally torture people, demons, and even gruesomely kill innocent creatures that don't partake in any malicious behavior. This is explicitly shown when he coldly kills Sam's old friend, Amy, for being a kitsune, albeit a kitsune who only wanted to keep her son alive and healthy. However, Dean's Knight Templar ways prevent her from living and he murders her in front of her young son with no remorse. Thankfully, he has come a long way and has now gotten better, thanks to realizing the error of his old ways.
  • Demons generally tend to be this, taking a lot of pleasure in inflicting suffering on others.
  • After her Face–Heel Turn, Ava Wilson seems to take pleasure in watching Andy suffer and die.
  • The alternate Michael from Apocalypse World is a lot crueler than the main Michael, who took no joy in bringing about the Apocalypse. He notably tells Dean he's taking his time killing him because he's enjoying it, and that the moment when the soul finally leaves the body on death is "beautiful".
• Titans (2018): Doctor Light horrifically murders a surviving prison guard in a painful fashion, seemingly out of sheer sadism.

Music

• Many lyrics from Death Metal songs have a quite sadistic quality to them.
• Since Macabre sings about real life killers, it helps that some of the scum they sing about were actually diagnosed with this.
• In the Hip-Hop, several Gangsta Rap and Horrorcore songs (especially in the Horrorcore) tell stories of people quite sadistic.
• The Beatles song "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" is about Maxwell Edison, an Ax-Crazy kid (and pretty sadistic) that uses the title hammer to murder a girl, his teacher, and the judge who took his case, in front of a full courtroom.
• Doom Metal band Saint Vitus, The Sadist.
• The subject person in Adam and the Ants' "Whip in My Valise", whose activities include pulling the wings off flies, killing grandmothers, and good old punishment.
  Your sadistic suits my masochistic

Professional Wrestling

• "Exotic" Adrian Street boasts that he COULD kill a man, just that he wouldn't be able to do it very quickly.
• Dario Cueto and Catrina, the two competing jefes of the Lucha Underground Temple, are two different flavors of sadist. Cueto simply loves violence in almost all its forms. He gets queasy around the subjects of Child Abuse, Domestic Abuse, abuse of the kidnapped, basically of people who he feels wouldn't be able to fight back but giving an abuse victim an equal chance to inflict violence on the perpetrator is still fair game. He will gleefully coerce business partners, Tag Team partners, friends, and family into matches they may not want with little regard to physical safety or property damage, even if it is his own property. And if a person he doesn't find interesting, such as Mascarita Sagrada (VII) or Pimpinela Escarlata enters his temple he will do everything he can to ensure they are destroyed. To discourage them from coming back. He is generally regarded as a Drunk with Power asshole even by the show's most shameless blood knights. Catrina is much more personal, as she likes singling out individuals, be they enemies, subordinates or simply "interesting" and doing whatever she can to make their lives miserable, be it having them beaten into bloody messes or breaking up their relationships. She has the more common case of enjoying the power to hurt people when she can in whatever way she can. She did genuinely love Fenix however and felt bad about manipulating him, not that she ever let guilt stop her.

Roleplaying Games

• Dino Attack RPG: Only the vilest of wide cast of villains are Sadists, including Michelle Glados, Carolyne Provencal, Zed Provhezor, the Brickspider Bot v1.0, and the Darkitect, for they are the ones who actually enjoy watching the suffering of others.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons: Black dragons are Chaotic Evil monsters and the most openly sadistic of the chromatic dragons. They'll burn towns and villages with an Acid Attack, kill indiscriminately, and engage in tortures of other beings purley For the Evulz. Other dragons may kill hundreds of people in a fit of rage or see no particular reason not to hunt intelligent humanoids when they're hungry, but black dragons just like to hurt people and take pleasure in causing pain and suffering to those they consider weaker than them. And since dragons view themselves as a Superior Species, a black dragon's list of "things that are weaker than me" is a very long list.
• In Nomine: While this is a common trait among Demon Princes, most tend towards large-scale atrocities. Not so much Beleth, the Princess of Nightmares, who's the most personal torturer in Hell — she doesn't just want to make humans suffer, she wants to make each individual human suffer in the way that hurts them the most.
• Legend of the Five Rings: Hida Tsuneo was the Crab Clan Champion and Right Hand of the Emperor during the reign of Hantei XVI. He was also unquestionably brutal, was personally involved in killing or torturing the Emperor's political enemies and seemed to draw particular joy from hurting those who were physically weaker than himself. His defining moment probably came right before his death, when he was ordered by the Emperor to kill the Emperor's mother — and did so by crushing her head with his bare hands.
• Pathfinder: Chuuls take perverse enjoyment from other creatures' physical and emotional suffering. They strictly prefer to prey on sapient beings, eating them alive and taking time before each kill to insult and torment their victims and talk at some length about how they will enjoy devouring them.
• Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Kruleboyz, as their name suggests, are a subspecies/tribe of Orruks, who are much more prone to sadism than their cousins. Ironjawz just like breaking things, and Bonesplitterz are more interested in hunting giant beasts; both will simply kill you outright if you get in their way. Only the Kruleboyz will deliberately drag out a death. Even before battle starts, they enjoy using psychological warfare to terrify and torment their intended targets, often just because they're nearby.

Theatre

• Little Shop of Horrors: Orin Scrivello enjoyed torturing animals as a child. Naturally, he chose dentistry as his career. Hilarity Ensues when he ends up with a masochistic patient.
• Othello: Iago delights in ruining Othello's life.

Video Games

• The title character from Bayonetta is a rare heroic example. One of the gameplay mechanics is her literally throwing her enemies into spectral versions of medieval torture devices.
• Yuuki Terumi of BlazBlue loves mind raping others, and trolls them as they get defeated. And that's not even mentioning the great enjoyment he appears to take in physically hurting his opponents in battle, either. In fact, his entire playstyle revolves around inflicting as much pain to his opponents in the most brutal and humiliating ways possible. It's suggested by another character in-story that he gets off on ruining people's lives and Terumi doesn't deny it.
  Terumi: Make sure you do your part, and scream for me!
• Handsome Jack from Borderlands 2 is an extremely cruel person, and even when not being physically violent he still likes to say things to hurt people, such as making fun of Helena Pierce's scars and taunting Moxxi about how he burned her Underdome to the ground.
• Willow from Brawl Stars has a ton of malicious, suffering-loving voice lines, from telling her victims that they won't live to regret hurting her to claiming that she can smell suffering and admitting that she likes it.
• Darkstalkers:
  • Lord Raptor is an Ax-Crazy, mass-murdering zombie who thrives off the deaths of countless people.
  • BB Hood outright states that she will never give up killing until every last living creature on Earth is dead.
• In Dead by Daylight, the majority of the human Killers in the Entity's Realm either have tragic backstories for why they descended into murder, and/or were forced (sometimes via torture) to go along with the Entity's killing game after it abducted them. Quite a few of them, however, were already cruel, violent Serial Killers even before entering the fog and gladly embraced it when the Entity came for them, seeing it as a chance to continue torturing and murdering victims to their heart's content for eternity. This naturally includes a few licensed Guest Killers from franchises mentioned elsewhere on this page, like Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Albert Wesker, and Amanda Young; however, several original characters also fit the bill, primarily the Clown, the Doctor, the Trickster, the Knight, and Ghost Face^*who, while technically a licensed killer too, is an original character underneath the mask, rather than one of the Scream movie villains.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition: Downplayed but present for Sera, who can't seem to enjoy anything unless it's at someone else's expense. As a Red Jenny, she relishes humiliating, tormenting, and executing abusive nobles more than actually helping commoners, and her only idea of fun is being The Prankster or The Gadfly (when she's not being a Blood Knight). If romanced, she loves making your relationship public mostly because she relishes the irritation and discomfort it must cause other people. ("It's one thing for people to know, but shoving it right in their faces... Vivienne's face must have puckered pinky-tight!") In Trespasser, she proposes mostly to flip a big old middle finger at the world. "We showed them! We won!"
• Dragon Quest V: Ladja brutally beats children up, kills their parents as their kids are forced to watch helplessly, mocks his victims before burning them to ashes... and enjoys every minute of it.
• The Mad Scientist Relmyna Verenim in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion has a nigh-religious devotion to pain, though for all her musings on its purifying power, she only ever inflicts it on other people.
  "I became sheltered within a tapestry of tranquility, woven from the screams of the Breton's anguish..."
• Fallout 3: As the head of Vault-Tec, Stanislaus Braun turned what should have been safe havens to shelter from a nuclear apocalypse into brutal experiments mostly For the Evulz. This ran the gamut from forced mutations, intentional exposure to virulent diseases, intentional class conflict, exposure to mind-altering madness-inducing chemicals, and so on. When you find him in Vault 112, he has subjects trapped forever in a simulation just so that he can find more cruel ways to torment them for his own amusement. He instructs you to go and make a little boy cry, and his true sadism is revealed in that he is displeased with you for simply punching that kid but loves it if you break up his parents and make him believe that he'll be sent away to live in a miserable foster home.
• Ramsay Snow lives up to his gruesome characterization in Game of Thrones (Telltale) by purposely escalating a war between two feuding families so he could amuse himself by watching the two duke it out in a battle to the death. Either way, he's the only one to benefit, both for his sadistic appetite and business-wise.
• The Grand Theft Auto series is full of sadists, obviously being a Crapsack World:
  • Catalina loves to cause misfortune or suffering to others, including sexual, and this is evident when she tortures C.J. for sexual pleasure.
  • Heavily implied in protagonists like Tommy Vercetti (he always has to make a slaughter butchering their victims with chainsaws), Luis Lopez and Trevor Phillips.
• Half-Quake has the owners of the titular "institute", the self-proclaimed "Masters of Sadism", who take glee in having hapless chaps get slaughtered within their deviously designed Death Courses. Sadism in itself is a major theme of this Game Mod series, to the point of it being an Arc Word.
• AM from I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a supercomputer with amazing god-like powers who has held the last five living humans captive in his dungeon, keeping them alive for eternity while making them endure endless Cold-Blooded Torture to entertain the eons of endless time he has in his new rule over Earth. Approximately 90% of his dialogue is also Kick the Dog moments and he actually says that all he feels is hate.
• Erol of Jak and Daxter series is very cruel, heartless and sadistic. He hopes to have Keira's heart and eventually kill Jak.
• Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories introduces us to Larxene, a member of Organization XIII (and the only female member discounting Xion). She takes clear glee in kicking the dog on several occasions, going so far as to say outright that "more pain for you means more fun for me!" The manga adaptation even shows her reading one of the Marquis de Sade's books.
• General Shimada, the main villain of The Legend of Tian-ding, reveals his true nature as a bloodthirsty, heartless piece of work when he had an unarmed civilian he wounded beaten and stomped to death. Before ordering his minions to slaughter the whole village and having the captured resistance shot. He even displays his callousness over his own men in the finale, sending most of them to die in a booby-trapped mausoleum to retrieve a powerful MacGuffin capable of letting him Take Over the World and, prior to retrieving the item, kills all his remaining minions without batting an eye.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky has a few:
  • Scherazard from the Player Party uses a Whip of Dominance to go with her dominatrix-themed abilities, including one that whips allies to improve their performance in battle; her Limit Break is directly called "Sadist's Whip", in which she rapidly whips a target while Laughing Mad.
  • One of the villains in the second game is the Angel of Slaughter, armed with a Sinister Scythe, who practically salivates at the prospect of making the Player Party suffer. Her sadism is explained by the Freudian Excuse of her parents having sold her to a child trafficking ring, serving as her Cynicism Catalyst, before she was freed from said ring by the Big Bad's organization brutally killing her captors while she watched.
• The titular mask from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Everything it does, from threatening to drop the moon onto Termina to ruining the everyday lives of its people, is all because it finds the pain and misery it causes hilarious.
• Don Morello from Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven is introduced beating an innocent person who accidentally rammed into his car to death. The next cutscene he is in shows him torturing a dockworker who went on strike.
• Dr. Vile/Weil of Mega Man Zero is a huge sadist. He admits that during the Elf Wars he personally enjoyed the mass slaughter and devastation brought by his Dragon Omega, and in the present enjoys watching "pigs squeal". In Zero 4, he makes life in Neo Arcadia horrible and takes glee in the idea of destroying nature. While he does have a reason for this (mainly make humanity suffer for what they did to him), it's made all too clear from his attitude he's enjoying this. Combined with his narcissistic personality and desire for destruction, this makes Dr. Weil one of the darkest and most horrifying villains in Mega Man history.
• The Metal Gear Solid franchise provides us with two.
  • The first is Revolver Ocelot, who is outright referred to as one in the first game, and takes great joy in torturing Snake, and tortured Donald Anderson to death. If the player forfeits during the torture sequence, he promises to kill Meryl, for no other reason than to be cruel. Of course, some of this is also Characterization Marches On, as his motives are much more complex as the games go on.
  • But worse than him, by far is Colonel Volgin, from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Unlike Ocelot, who serves higher (if extremely convoluted) purposes, Volgin's sole motivation for anything he does is to cause other people as much pain and suffering as humanly possible, which is why there's no small reason why he's one of the only MGS villains to not get the Draco in Leather Pants treatment. Within minutes of being introduced, he nukes his own country just because he can, knowing full well it could spark a war, and during the game, he abuses EVA, both physically and sexually, he beats a suspected informant to death with his bare hands, beats Sokolov also to death, and tortures Snake/Big Boss as well, expressing enthusiastic enjoyment when he sees Snake losing bladder control due to the pain. He is also stated to be personally responsible for hundreds of murders, most of them again, by beating people to death with his bare hands. He's too much even for Ocelot, who begs him not to go through with firing nukes at his own people to no avail. Revolver Ocelot actually credits Volgin with introducing him to the joy of sadism, stating that witnessing one of his 'interrogations' made him realize that the true quality of a man is only revealed when he's in pain. Appropriately, many of his torture sessions are framed as endurance tests for the victims.
• In Mortal Kombat, the sorcerer Shang Tsung takes great pleasure in the suffering of his victims, and even has a massive torture chamber beneath his island for his own amusement.
• Harvey from Octopath Traveler II is easily one of the biggest in the entire series of Square Enix’s Octopath Traveler—and given how evil the villains who are portrayed as Hate Sinks tend to be, this is saying a lot. The entire battle, Harvey is only too gleeful to salt the wounds about mutating Rita, brainwashing Elena and rubbing it over and over in Osvald's face that he's done this purely to hurt Osvald. He also tortures one of Ochette's possible animal companions for a decade, with hints he may have gotten overly invested in the task.
• In Persona 5 Royal, after dropping his princely mask entirely in the final act of Royal, Akechi gleefully indulges in his most violent and psychopathic tendencies when fighting Shadows.
  Akechi: Working together means EXTRA PAIN for them!
• Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal features Courtney Gears, an Evil Diva who works for Dr. Nefarious, and sings peppy songs about hate and genocide. Her pre-boss cutscene has her claim that using the Biobliterator prototype that turns organic life forms into robots "doesn't hurt... much". Most of her Boss Banter spells sadism.
• SCP – Containment Breach: SCP-106, as usual, stalks the player and forces them to kneel before him.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Mephiles the Dark from Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) makes it his sole mission to cause pain to Elise throughout the entire course of the game, and even breaks out into a maniacal laughter after ending Sonic's life.
  • He's followed up on by Infinite from Sonic Forces, who loves using his immense power to hurt and belittle the heroes fighting against his and Eggman's domination of the world.
• StarCraft:
  • Kerrigan, the "Queen of Blades" and leader of the Zerg, loves playing mind games with the other factions and pitting them against each other, usually by feigning innocence to gain their trust. In StarCraft II, this attitude of hers returns, when she tries to weaken Zeratul's mind by making him believe the Protoss will be doomed to extinction no matter what he does, although it's eventually revealed that she doesn't actually believe any of this as she was actually under the influence of Amon the Fallen Xel'Naga.
  • Highlord Alarak adores combat and has no qualms about letting people around him die, nor violently torching or killing innocent individuals. He threatens to outright destroy the entirety of the capital of Korhal simply due to a single human faction attacking one of his outposts. He outright kills one of his own soldiers when he is low on health in order to avoid death, and actively heals from the deaths of his enemies. Furthermore, he literally has an ability called "Sadism" in Heroes of the Storm, which increases the damage dealt to enemy heroes by 100% (which can be decreased if certain abilities are chosen). It can also be increased by choosing the ability that causes it to increase every time an ally dies.
• From the Street Fighter series, we have Juri Han. She loves to have fun but unfortunately, her fun involves beating her opponents within an inch of their lives. It doesn't matter if they're a guy or girl as long as she gets to torture them. It gets to where she literally gets off on the pain she inflicts.
• Luca Blight from Suikoden II is a bloodthirsty sadist and a completely insane prince of Highland. He takes immense pleasure in telling the scared woman to act like a pig and kills her anyway when he burned down the Ryube village to the ground. As well he might, as he feeds the blood of Muse people to unleash the Beast Rune. Unlike the other sympathetic villains, he is considered to be the evillest, brutal and sadistic JRPG villains in this series.
• Tales of Berseria: Magilou has a Running Gag of excitedly punishing her Familiar The Chew Toy Bienfu. This becomes most explicit when Pirates get into a conversation about a Kraken with Naughty Tentacles and Phi gets involved: "Boy, there's no need to contain your curiosity. When pain turns to pleasure, you've truly become a man."
• Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World: Alice, a Cute and Psycho antagonist, is mentioned to be a sadist. She's also seen kicking around her subordinates and laughing at their pain.
• Yuuka Kazami from Touhou Project.
  • In her first appearance in Lotus Land Story, she playfully threatens to reduce you to a mist of atoms.
  • In her second appearance in Mystic Square, her motive for wrecking through Makai and beating people up is basically because she's bored and wants to play. She also utters her infamous "Genocide is just a game" line. Her tendency to add "<3" at the end of every sentence doesn't help.
  • In the Windows era, she reappears in Phantasmagoria of Flower View, in which she's supposedly has calmed down a lot. She still threatens everyone who met her or accepts other characters' accusations of being the culprit of the incident, even when she's really not, just so that she has a reason to beat them up. When Eiki Shiki confronts her about this, she says that it was just 'daily teasing'.
  • In fan works, she's often portrayed as downright Ax-Crazy.
• Ys:
  • After petrifying or killing his enemies, Dalles usually lets at least one of them live so he can savor their despair.
  • Ys IV: Mask of the Sun: The Dark Knight attacking Celceta straight up expresses delight at the thought of flaying the skin off of Adol's flesh before he could find Lillia.
  • Wanderers from Ys (pre-''Oath in Felghana versions): Galbalan took glee in slaughtering life across the land and found the idea of siblings dying together to be a nice image as shown by his attempt to kill Chester and Elena.

Visual Novels

• Fate/hollow ataraxia: Caren Hortensia, as Kirei's daughter, inherited his sadistic nature, though she usually limits herself to being a Troll to make people miserable.
• Fate/stay night:
  • Kirei Kotomine confesses that he is capable of feeling joy only in witnessing the suffering of others. His abuse is mostly psychological and he prefers to guide events so that others inflict suffering on themselves. At the same time, he still has a conscience and so knows taking pleasure in others' suffering is evil.
  • Gilgamesh qualifies for one as well, if his treatment of Artoria is anything to go by. Even in his more likable portrayal in Fate/EXTRA, he still says that he loves the sound of a heart breaking.
    Gilgamesh: That which appeals my heart the most is the sound of a heart breaking that, when you washed the beautiful (heart), drips an even more beautiful water. When you lick it, it tastes sweet.

Webcomics

• Adria and Quixoto from Charby the Vampirate. She kept Zerlocke chained and repeatedly gave him mortal wounds for a human lifetime — his preferred prey is human children, and he likes to mentally torment his prey and let them try to escape him before eating them.
• Goblins:
  • Mryorg the ogre, as the result of one too many journeys into hell, has been stripped of his ability to get satisfaction from anything except inflicting suffering on others.
  • Dellyn Goblin-Slayer enjoyed the Cold-Blooded Torture he inflicted on monsters, both the physical and the emotional. He also couldn't fully enjoy raping Kin unless he'd beaten her to near death at the same time.
• Jae of Magience enjoys other people's pain.
  Jae: Memories of your screams will be my lullaby for the next decade, at least.
• Unlike many of the other bullies in Weak Hero, Teddy torments the weak because he gets a kick out of it. Even as he's working his way to the good guy's side, he can't help but resist the urge to be nasty here and there.

Web Animation

• Mechakkara from Atop the Fourth Wall usually sports a sadistic grin on his face when he's harming Linkara.
• Dreamscape:
  • Ethan and Curien love to torture and torment their victims for their own twisted amusement.
  • In the Master of the Dammed's own words, he breaks the spirit of people before he breaks the spirit of people.
• RWBY:
  • Mercury Black enjoys hurting people and watching them suffer. He's entirely happy to taunt and terrify Ruby, and when he sees Ruby crying over Penny's destruction, he has an immensely cruel and satisfied grin. Later, when Vale is being overrun by Grimm after Cinder's plan comes to fruition, Mercury records the resulting chaos, all with a Slasher Smile on his face, in direct contrast to his partner Emerald, who somewhat regrets it.
  • Cinder Fall also seems to enjoy the pain of others. She describes watching the Grimm slaughtering Vale citizens as "wonderful", and when she stole the first half of Amber's power, she drew out the pain of Amber's last conscious moments with needless theatrics that gave Amber the chance to see what was going to happen to her and beg for life in horror. When she kills Pyrrha, she doesn't simply shoot her through the heart, her arrow also burns Pyrrha from the inside out — while Pyrrha is still alive. After Ruby disfigures her, she motivates herself to grow stronger by burning alive illusions of a begging Ruby that are created by Emerald. In Volume 5, her sadism becomes more pronounced as shown when fighting Jaune in "The More The Merrier", by taunting him over his failure to save Pyrrha and when he damages her mask, she impales Weiss with a flaming spear just to spite him. It's very likely that she picked up this behavior from her equally sadistic stepmother, who would often torture her with an electrical collar more for the sheer enjoyment of it than to punish her for doing something wrong.

Web Original

• Pretty Pink Ponytails in Angel of Death loves nothing more than a nice, long session of Cold-Blooded Torture in the form of a childish game in her special "playroom".
• Pretending to Be People features Francis Beans, a Torture Technician and all-around Jerkass, and Marvin Glass, her boss, who delights in breaking peoples' minds and condemning them to horrific deaths in Blood Sports.
• Gray Boy in Worm greatly enjoying using his time-looping powers to subject people to eternal torture.

Western Animation

• Amphibia: : Despite the Core's almost purely mechanical and data-based nature before possessing Marcy, the Mind Hive is still very much capable of feeling emotions, and there are many occasions when they take great pleasure in hurting others.
  • The elaborate illusions it crafts against Marcy and Olivia contain details that serve no purpose beyond mocking them for how badly they feel they've failed at protecting what matters most to them. Olivia's mother turns into a machine-newt hybrid monster belching factory smoke, whose lower half is comprised of polluted earth and strewn with Amphibian bones, symbolizing how the environmental devastation will kill not only the creatures of Amphibia but the people as well, something that clearly upsets her. The two-headed Anne/Sasha fusion that mocks Marcy for selfishly betraying them and claims her friends want nothing to do with her anymore has the St James emblem on their chest turn into a heart as they do so, symbolizing how much Marcy loves her friendship with the duo and how awful she feels for metaphorically breaking their hearts with her Dark Secret. And, while it's not necessary for its plans for Marcy, it has Andrias outline exactly what's about to happen to her before it begins the conversion process, and keeps itself hidden inside the room for the entirety of Olivia and Yunan's attempted rescue apparently out of amusement at their futile efforts, when it could have physically interfered at any point.
  • When Andrias suffers a Villainous Breakdown and throws a childish tantrum over failing to kill Anne again, Darcy mocks him for his 'unkingly' conduct, calling his reaction 'pathetic'. This is despite his emotional outburst being born from the same negative traits the Core itself explicitly encouraged in Andrias over the course of 1,000 years in order to make him a more compliant servant to it, essentially mocking him for not acting more mature when it itself encouraged his emotional immaturity as a means of controlling him. The fact that one of the Core's collective minds is Aldrich, Andrias' father and the one he explicitly seeks to impress through the Core, gives another cruel twist to it expressing contempt for him not acting like a proper king would.
  • When Darcy sees Andrias shooting a pained glance at the portrait of him, Leif, and Barrel together in his childhood, it snidely mocks him that it's not the only one that needs to let go of old memories, explicitly Gaslighting him for his still-painful regret over the implosion of his childhood friendships and how it's still distracting him from his duties as the Core's loyal servant. Darcy's smug grin explicitly shows it knows this hurts Andrias and that it takes amusement in his emotional turmoil, aware that he's too devoted to it now to do anything but loyally serve it, and finds twisted fun in how he's still hurting after all those years. When Andrias burns the portrait to help re-commit himself towards serving the Core, it adopts a smug Slasher Smile and briefly lets Aldrich's personality surface from the collective in order to tell Andrias how he's almost proud of him for doing so, explicitly withholding the approval for his actions that Andrias so craves from the Core even as he acts in line with its wishes.
  • While it admits that inhabiting Marcy's body caused the Core to start exhibiting some of her quirks and mannerisms, it's implied that it's also deliberately emulating Marcy at times to mock Andrias for his suppressed guilt over making her into the Core's vessel, at one point making it clear to him that Marcy's still around, but trapped inside her own mind because of what he did.
  • In "The Beginning of the End", when Darcy reveals themself before Anne and Sasha, they mock both the girls' failure to stop it as well as their claims that they're still friends with Marcy despite her stranding them in Amphibia, pointing out that from browsing Marcy's memories, it can tell they weren't the most supportive friends to her back on Earth, even though neither was actively malicious towards her, pointing out that they ignored or overlooked Marcy's needs and interests and treated her as 'the friend that was just there', which fuelled her poorly thought-out decision to use the Calamity Box. Having more or less already won at that point, it has no logical reason to taunt the girls with their past failings beyond its sadistic pleasure at their regret. It even specifically taunts Anne's intelligence, calling her 'dumber than a bag of rocks' because Anne previously admitted to Marcy her insecurities with being 'the dumb one' of their trio and it wanted to rub that in her face. It clearly relishes broadcasting the strike team's failure to disperse the resistance, and when they decide to kill Anne to retrieve the Calamity Gem energy powering her, they're clearly enjoying the chance to gut her with a laser knife. They even allow Anne the opportunity for Any Last Words? before they start cutting into her, clearly not intending to honour any pleas for mercy, doing it just to enjoy the moment more, and while Anne manages to successfully reason that they can't afford to kill her just yet, they're displeased that they've been forced to delay her demise and make it clear that they will finish the job later.
  Darcy: You only bought enough time to watch your planet fall. We look forward to dissecting you. Alive.
  • This ends up being a major component of its downfall in "All In", where it allows itself to be distracted by tormenting its victims, ultimately allowing Sasha to cut the cable on Darcy's helmet.
• Mrs. Robinson from The Amazing World of Gumball is a monstrous old lady who feeds on the suffering of others. Her most prominent episode The Wicked outright shows the audience and characters that she amuses herself by poisoning animals, framing others for her crimes, kicking people when they're down, fooling others into letting their guard down before harming them, robbing people, vandalizing property, assaulting children, carjacking, disturbing the peace, attempting murder on a daily basis, making life a living Hell for all those around her, and drinking the tears of young children she bullies. The moment she truly crosses the Moral Event Horizon is when she purposely allows Darwin to choke to death while smiling and waving goodbye as she shuts her door on him. Even her own Jerkass husband is terrified of her cruelty and goes into a monologue (with a Thousand-Yard Stare) about how she loves committing horrible acts For the Evulz. She has no reason to act so cruel, but she just loves to make everyone suffer out of pure joy.
• American Dad!: Stevearino (Steve's evil clone) sadistically tortures and kills cats for fun.
• G-rated, Jerk with a Heart of Gold example: Slappy Squirrel in Animaniacs. Wrong her, annoy her, otherwise get on her list... and she will enjoy every second of making you miserable. She stays sympathetic partially because she at least waits until she's provoked, partially because she does care for her nephew Skippy, and partially because it's a cartoon and even the most ridiculous injury is survivable. Best exemplified in "Frontier Slappy", dealing with someone attempting to cut down her tree.
• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • Several villains, with The Joker and the Scarecrow being the obvious examples, the latter especially since his crimes are almost entirely based around spreading terror and driving people insane with fear.
  • There is also the one-shot villain Lock-Up, a cruel and power-mad guard at Arkham who thinks that criminals deserve to be tortured and clearly enjoys doing it — and when stopped, expands his definition of "criminals" to those who got him fired or condemned his actions, as well as Gordon, the Mayor, and Batman, because he thinks they are too "soft" on criminals. He is so scary that the other Bat-rogues tried to escape Arkham solely to get away from him.
  • Pamela Isley, alias Poison Ivy: All her crimes imply Pamela enjoying the suffering of others. She is a Control Freak and while most of her crimes fall into Well-Intentioned Extremist territory, at the same time, she just enjoys taking revenge on behalf of Mother Nature. Like Lock-Up, she is a good example of a sadist who truly thinks that her victims had it coming.
• Tarantulas from Beast Wars takes a perverse amount of pleasure from inflicting pain and dominating others, physically and mentally. Some 'hobbies' we see him engage in include killing animals for fun, abusing Blackarachnia on nearly every level, and making a few attempts at cannibalism. It's heavily implied that he was a Serial Killer of some sort back on Cybertron.
• As a Sadist Show, The Fairly OddParents! has multiple in order to make their comeuppance at Timmy's hands that much more cathartic.
  • Vicky the Babysitter. Her main hobby: torturing, tormenting, and presumably trying to kill children For the Evulz, though she also tries to profit from this by hiring out her services to gullible people who think that she is good at her job. She also bullies her little sister and even her own parents.
  • Timmy's Arch-Nemesis is his Sadist Teacher Denzel Crocker, who gleefully hands out failing grades. On one occasion Timmy tricks him with a Look Behind You by pointing out a nonexistent "child in pain", upon which he pulls out a stool and popcorn.
    Mr. Crocker: Hey! There's no child in pain here! BUT THERE'S GOING TO BE!
  • Older episodes also had Timmy's Depraved Dentist Dr. Bender, a narcissist who took great delight in making his procedures unnecessarily painful.
• Family Guy:
  • Carter, although not showing a particularly murderous streak, is often gleefully sadistic (particularly towards Peter) and is shown to keep a Rancor in a pit below his house in "Peterotica". Worse, he torments orphans For the Evulz.
  • Even Brian Griffin has sadistic tendencies. He frequently kills and terrorizes squirrels for pure sadism, an act that even shocks Stewie.
• Lord Commander in Final Space. The worst thing he did, next to tearing off Gary's left arm for no reason, was having his soldiers kill their firstborn to prove their loyalty to him. He crosses the line when he kills Little Cato's father, Avocato, in Chapter 6, in a spiteful, last-ditch effort to murder his son.
• Bender from Futurama has his moments. He has no qualms when he has the opportunity to hurt someone and is very heavily implied to enjoy doing that.
• Hazbin Hotel: Alastor states openly that he is backing the hotel because he revels in watching people fail to better themselves. He also has a very deep smile as he obliterates Sir Pentious' blimp.
• Invader Zim: Zim is a completely Ax-Crazy Psycho for Hire, and also very sadistic.
• Miraculous Ladybug: To some degree, it's very clear in Hawk Moth tone of voice during episodes while monitoring the activity of the people he akumatizes and him taking obvious pleasure in watching his minions cause chaos around Paris that he actually seems to enjoy the destruction caused by the people he corrupts. He also doesn't seem to care about anyone affected by this and only about the end result.
• The Mr. Bogus episodes "Computer Intruder" and "Bad Luck Bogus" feature a huge and hideous Evil Knockoff of the eponymous character who delights in torturing Bogus.
• The worst habit of Lord Tirek from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. He has superior strength and intelligence, as he only prefers an opportunity to cause pain and suffering.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
  • Him enjoys torturing his victims psychologically.
  • One episode features the most evil one-shot villain, Dick Hardly. He attempts to kill the Powerpuff Girls to make even more knockoffs of them and forces Professor Utonium to stay with him and make more Chemical X.
• Ren Hoek from The Ren & Stimpy Show. There have been several episodes where it is implied that he loves to inflict physical and psychological pain on others and even himself.
• Samurai Jack:
  • As a God of Evil, the Big Bad Aku delights in causing pain and misery to as many people as possible. The whole Bad Future stems from him deciding To Create a Playground for Evil in Jack's absence.
  • The High Priestess takes sheer glee in abusing her daughters and shows zero remorse for it.
  • The Dominator really enjoys torturing his victims, both physically and mentally.
• Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons, who enjoys tormenting Bart in particular.
• South Park:
  • Eric Cartman is frequently shown to have a horrific sense of humor at the expense of others. He laughs at several of Kenny's deaths, delights in torturing Kyle relentlessly (and revels in the idea of actually killing him), and is revealed at one point to have bullied a classmate to the point of being Driven to Suicide. Probably one of the most sadistic moments in the entire series comes from the ending of "Scott Tenorman Must Die"... courtesy of Cartman, of course.
    Mr. Mackey: Well, what did you use to think was funny?
    Cartman: You know, all the usual stuff. Dirty jokes, funny movies, seeing someone die...
  • Saddam Hussein might be even more sadistic than Cartman. First off he takes sexual pleasure murdering and torturing innocent people (including Kenny), enjoys abusing his boyfriend Satan, and depraves kids from their adopted families For the Evulz.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Sheldon Plankton. Even in one episode where he is seen in a dream, he is destroying Bikini Bottom, even trying to crush Gary with sadistic glee. This is also evident in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie when he expresses great excitement and joy when Mr. Krabs will be executed.
• Steven Universe: In "Alone At Sea", Lapis Lazuli admits to enjoying taking out all her frustrations and anger on Jasper while holding her down. Unfortunately for her, Jasper was messed-up in the head enough to enjoy it.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
  • In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987), a mobster named Don Turtelli is presented as a sadist, who likes to interrogate people by tickling their feet with a feather (which is presented as Cold-Blooded Torture in the show), unlike other villains, who just put heroes in dangerous situations, especially since he clearly enjoys making his victims suffer. This is presented in one episode where Turtelli is torturing two kids; Rat King, who is a dangerous villain, was disgusted with Turtelli's method, saying "I can't stand to watch..."
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) features the evillest character, Dr. Victor Falco, later known as the Rat King. He takes massively cruel and sadistic delight at mind-controlling Splinter and forcing him to attack his sons, the Ninja Turtles.
• Total Drama has the host of the show, Chris McLean, who throws teenagers in the most perverse, screwed-up challenges ever just for kicks, ratings, and money. By the time of the fourth season, the original cast is so sick of him that they have sworn to never be on the show again in any capacity, barring contract requirements like having to participate in the fifth All-Stars season (with many explicitly stating that they hated Chris). DJ freaked when he was back in Camp Wawanakwa for a challenge in the fourth season, and he was the judge.
• Wander over Yonder: Lord Dominator loves causing hopelessness, panic, and especially destruction because it amuses her greatly. Her Villain Song, "I'm the Bad Guy", sums it up pretty nicely.
• Sledgehammer O'Possum from the What A Cartoon! Show cartoon "Out and About" inflicts all kinds of pain and suffering on a dog who did nothing to provoke him, and he often laughs at his misery.

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