Slimeball

"There's a misconception because many people think they're like amphibians, that are actually slimy. Now some of them do slimy things, they are not in fact slimy to the touch. Did you know that snakes possess a spinal cord? They're in the phylum cordata and all animals in that phylum have a spinal cord. Some of them don't possess a backbone, but that's a different story. Finally, did you know there are over 2,600 species of snake on Earth? Well on May 25th, there's gonna be one less. Because yours truly, Jim Nye the science guy, like the mighty boa constrictors of the Amazon, is going to eat Black Serpent alive."

— Fringe Pro Wrestling

The Slimeball is a character who has the most slippery, slimy personality imaginable. Usually motivated by petty personal gain, the Slimeball is always trying to manipulate events around him in his favor and the people around him into viewing him in a favorable light. A defining characteristic of the Slimeball is a lack of class or sophistication. While some Slimeballs erroneously believe the opposite is true, there is an equal number who accept their crass nature. Above all and whether he consciously knows it or not, all of the Slimeball's actions are ultimately taken out of self-interest.

The Slimeball can appear under the guise of friendliness and the desire to help others; however, depending on the story he can also be the Card-Carrying Villain with no attempt to conceal the fact. Sometimes the Slimeball is an Obstructive Bureaucrat or a Corrupt Corporate Executive introduced to harass the protagonists — his slimy nature will often be confirmed by some subtle attempt to manipulate the protagonists into doing what he wants them to. Only very rarely will he be above attempting Sexual Extortion against female protagonists if he happens to possess something they desperately need.

The Slimeball's motivations and actions are usually directed towards the goal of personal gain, often monetary or of a sexual nature. Though they are often a Smug Snake, not every Slimeball has such grandiose ambitions; some preferring to simply make quick easy money or to influence others to like and trust them. The Slimeball who only harbors petty ambitions is almost always a Small Name, Big Ego and a Dirty Coward. When dealing with just about any person in authority with the confidence and/or strength to back it up, he will default to being a Professional Butt-Kisser. When his ambitions are sexual, he is usually a Casanova Wannabe. In many romantic comedies, the romantic rival for the protagonist will usually end up being recognized as a Slimeball by the end of the film. The Slimeball may also be a Miles Gloriosus, using tall tales of alleged courage and adventure as an attempt to be charismatic. The most common reaction from a protagonist after dealing with the Slimeball is the intense desire to take a shower.

The average Slimeball is usually not competent enough to handle the reins of power on his own. Should he find himself in a position of real authority, he often becomes Drunk with Power and embraces the role of Corrupt Bureaucrat. Depending on his position, he will usually be a General Failure or Pointy-Haired Boss, but if a group of Slimeballs have banded together to share power, then they become a Decadent Court.

He is often attracted to sales as a career, for whatever reason, and may be found peddling used cars, Snake Oil, the Brooklyn Bridge, or other such wares. He can also be discovered working as a Crooked Contractor, Shady Real Estate Agent, politician, or lawyer.

May overlap with Hate Sink, a character designed to be hated, and Very Punchable Man, a guy people want to clobber.

Synonyms include but are not limited to: Scum(bag/bucket), Sleaze(bag/oid), Con Man, Hustler, The Barnum.

Because most female antagonists, in action films at least, are portrayed as either attractive or tough and aggressive, the instances of female Slimeballs are rare. Since attitudes change and the roles of women in stories become much more versatile and diverse, this also changes. Has nothing to do with villains who are literally made of slime; for them, see Muck Monster and Blob Monster.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Great Teacher Onizuka: Munakata, who talks his way into becoming Tomoko's Smooth-Talking Talent Agent and starts putting her in more risque situations, to her former (now assistant) manager Okinoshima's consternation.

Comic Books

• Action Comics #592-593 have Sleez, one of the New Gods and a Green and Mean Gonk who's so vile even Darkseid couldn't stand him and banished him. He uses his mind-control powers to rape Big Barda and try to make her film a porno with Superman, this being the final straw for Darkseid, who sics Barda's husband Mr. Miracle on him.
• Marvel Universe:
  • The Krask Brothers are a pair of greasy lawyers who typically work for extremely unpleasant people in the smuggest, sneeringest way possible. An introductory caption in Mighty Avengers (2013) even calls them slimeballs.
  • Henry Gyrich, the king of Obstructive Bureaucracy in the MU. Even when he's not being an officious asshat (which is not often), or even out-and-out evil, he's just generally rude, smug, and unpleasant, knowing he's got government connections that will allow him to avoid consequences for his behavior (or failing that, that he's dealing with heroes who, being heroes, won't do anything to him). Even All-Loving Hero Captain America openly dislikes him. S.W.O.R.D. (2020) has Abigail Brand describe him as "a weasel looking for an easy meal".

Fan Works

• Jeremy from Bart Simpson: Attorney at Law is one nasty piece of work. He manipulated Alex into seducing married men so he could blackmail them. He decides to extort Bart, but thinks it is safer to target Maggie, his younger sister, manipulating her into stealing $700,000 from Bart on the threat of revealing what Alex did on his behalf. When that plan falls apart, he tries forcing Alex into working for him again and nearly kills Bart. His fate, being beaten and sent to jail, is very satisfying.

Films — Live-Action

• Carter Burke from Aliens is slimy as it gets, feigning genuine care for Ellen Ripley and the marine company in their mission to exterminate the Xenomorphs that have attacked the LV-426 colony. His true colours show when they discover he planned to kill all the marines in cryo-sleep on the trip back and smuggle xenomorph larvae inside Ripley and Newt, all to make bank for the Weyland-Yutani bioweapons division. He's such a scumbag that Ripley concludes the Xenomorphs may still be the greater threat, but they're definitely the lesser evil.
• General Ross in Captain America: Civil War. Initially outwardly polite, it pretty quickly turns out that politeness is a very thin veneer hiding a bastard who, while never exactly openly rude or hostile, has a habit of finger-pointing and blame-shifting, quick to condemn the heroes for any mistake they make while refusing to take any accountability for his own.
• In one sense, the titular character of Citizen Kane is revealed to be something of a slimeball by his best friend after Kane's failed election campaign, who observes that "you just want to persuade people that you love 'em so much that they oughta love you back".
• Richard Gaddis in Criminal 2004 is self-admittedly one of these. He's a con artist motivated solely by greed. The film deconstructs this type of character by showing what a loathsome and pathetic human being he is.
• Die Hard has Harry Ellis, the coke-snorting yuppie asswipe who constantly badly flirts with Holly and exposes John's identity to the villains, probably hoping to finally get her in the sack. Sure, he later tries to defuse the whole hostage situation, but he's so bad at it that he ends up getting shot in the head by Hans for his trouble.
• Kill Bill has lots of guys like this, all minor characters, remarkably enough.
  • The worst is likely Buck, an orderly at the hospital where Beatrix was treated while in a coma, who not only raped her while comatose but pimped her out to others for profit. (Not surprisingly, he's one of the first ones to die when she wakes up.)
  • Budd's asshole boss at the strip club he's working at counts too. He's a pervert who harasses his employees, and hates Budd's hat.
• Jack Vincennes from L.A. Confidential starts out as a complete slimeball, arresting people set up by his equally slimy associate, the tabloid owner Sid Hutchens, so that he can look like a hero cop while Hutchens gets prime gossip material. Jack manages to wash the slime off and become a real cop when his shady operation backfires and gets a young man killed.
• Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in the 1962 adaptation of Lolita oozes slime from every pore.
• Grí­ma Wormtongue as portrayed by Brad Dourif in The Lord of the Rings. He's slimy to the core, subtly influencing King Théoden against his own kingdom. He also spends an excessive amount of time creeping on Eowyn. Even his appearance is disgustingly greasy.
• The school guidance counselor in Pump Up the Volume makes the enormous effort to convince students that he is looking out for their interests while really being the school principal's lackey, assisting her in expelling all the undesirables. The film's protagonist "Hard Harry" even describes him as "slime" on his pirate radio signal for so deeply betraying the students who came to him for help.
• The Anti-Hero of Strange Days is Lenny, the sleazy pusher of illegally recorded memories. He wears obnoxious suits, slicks his hair back, and is constantly hustling everyone to get an edge or a favor or out of trouble. Over the course of the film, however, he's revealed to have Hidden Depths.
• Daryl Van Horn in The Witches of Eastwick comes off this way to Alexandra when they first meet. He spouts off crass opinions and vulgar jokes at her over lunch, then invites her to his mansion and propositions her for sex on the spot. She gives him such a dressing down that it would annihilate the soul of any ordinary man. Unfortunately, Daryl is no ordinary man, and he's not even fazed.
  Alexandra: I think... no, I am positive... that you are the most unattractive man I have ever met in my entire life. You know, in the short time we've been together, you have demonstrated every loathsome characteristic of the male personality and even discovered a few new ones. You are physically repulsive, intellectually retarded, you're morally reprehensible, vulgar, insensitive, selfish, stupid, you have no taste, a lousy sense of humor, and you smell. You're not even interesting enough to make me sick.
  Daryl: Uhm, would you like to be on the top or the bottom?

Literature

• David Copperfield: Uriah Heep is a smarmy villain with sanctimonious "umble" mannerisms, inspiring loathing from most other characters. On their first meeting, David tries to be polite but is repulsed by Uriah's clammy handshake. It turns out his scheme is to use Gaslighting to manipulate Wickfield into giving him control of his fortune and letting him marry the innocent Agnes, which qualifies on so many levels. Uriah even manages to take any fun out of it when David finally clobbers him one, merely looking hurt and saying he was too generous of a man to hit back.
• Peter Pettigrew from Harry Potter is one. Being The Load to his friends at school, he only gravitated around them because they were "the biggest bully on the playground". His Animagus form is a rat. It is revealed that he betrayed the Potters to Voldemort out of fear. In an ironic twist, he once called Severus Snape this trope.
• A Song of Ice and Fire.
  • The members of House Frey live and breathe this trope. Even before the infamous Red Wedding, nobody else liked them. Walder Frey was a spoiled little brat since the age of four whom time has not improved one bit, and most of his family takes after him. Walder himself thinks the best way to rise in the ranks of Westerosi nobility is to backstab and kill other nobles who looked down their nose at him, while not even bothering to try to be noble of character which is what put his betters above him in the first place. The Freys all look the part too; Walder is a Villainous Glutton, wears clothes that appear to be weaved out of mildew, has permanently greasy hair and a weasel-like appearance that most of his family inherited.
  • Depending on who you ask in-world, Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish comes across as a mostly benign one of these: sure, he's a bit of a sleaze, but he is in the business of moneymaking, after all — and, whorehouses are a predictably profitable money-spinner, so it just stands to reason he has his fingers in those pies, too. Besides, what he is in the corrupt, he more than makes up for in the useful charm, right? He's not benign. At all. Just ask Jeyne Poole and Sansa Stark. Both girls find out about his bad side in heartbreaking ways.
• Sword Art Online has a perfect example in Nobuyuki Sugou, an insecure creep and sexual deviant who sleazes his way up the business ladder and over-compensates his inadequacies and insecurities with expensive suits and slicked back hair.

Live-Action TV

• Ashes to Ashes (2008): DCI Keats is an example of the Obstructive Bureaucrat version and is completely covered in slime throughout his tenure on the show, at least until the end when the gloves come off and he reveals his nature. None of this is surprising anyway, as it is all but stated directly that he's really Satan.
• Babylon 5:
  • One episode introduces us to the very rare female Slimeball in the form of the station's first political officer, Julie Musante. She even tries to seduce Sheridan to influence him.
  • Alfred Bester is the biggest Slimeball of the series, who tries to convince all of the protagonists that he's on their side, that they should welcome him with open arms, and that he loves working with them. It also happens that he is a Magnificent Bastard, committing a whole parade of unspeakable atrocities behind the scenes throughout the series.
• Deadwood:
  • You can practically see the trail of slime behind E.B. Farnum as he skulks around town, engaging one poorly thought-out scheme after another.
  • Likewise, Cy Tolliver appears to be coated in a sickly layer of slime.
• Hannibal: Dr. Chilton, a colleague of Doctor Lecter, is a smarmy creep who manipulated a patient into confessing to a series of unsolved murders so that he could boast that he had a famous murderer in his asylum. It backfires when both the real murderer and the patient figure it out and decide to make sure he won't do it again.
• Darren from season nine of How I Met Your Mother definitely counts. Charming, affable, friendly... and a total suck-up Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who wants to ruin your closest friendships. Why? Because he can.
• Ken Masters from Howards' Way fits this trope perfectly. He's a tacky, unsophisticated businessman running an empire of garages and chandleries, a Serial Homewrecker, manipulates anyone to his own personal gain and falls flat on his face when faced with any more threatening character in the show.
• Pop is one of the most depraved of The League of Gentlemen and can barely restrain himself from assaulting any nearby females including his son's love interest during dinner, whom he still misses no opportunity at sexually harassing. His gross and animalistic behaviour which includes growling and whispering in his target's ears can only be controlled by his desire for their money. That's why he settles for peeking under one of his tenants' covers in bed and later enjoying a dish of pasta while watching his tenants having sex through his secretly installed cameras.
• Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: In the 1950s storyline, Lieutenant Hatch is a smug bigot who oozes condescension, he quite crudely insults the female Japanese doctor Keiko to her face, and upon being granted control of Project Monarch by General Puckett, he actively tries to sabotage the organization and get it shut down with a negatively-biased and damning report to Puckett so that he can repurpose its funding toward his own Red Scare tactics. His attitude and behavior leads to the Monarch trio not telling him anything of value and ultimately leads to Shaw pulling out all stops to get him ousted.
• The Office (US) has the perpetually sleazy Robert California, played by James Spader. While he oscillates between being a Pointy-Haired Boss and Manipulative Bastard, he regards almost everything in terms of sex. Whenever he talks to his staff one-on-one, they usually go away with a vague feeling that they've somehow been sexually harassed regardless of the topic of discussion. He even tries to start a naked pool orgy at a party he hosts at his house, much to the extreme discomfort of the guests who all work for him.
  Robert California: There is only sex. Everything is sex. Do you understand that what I'm telling you is a universal truth?
• Revolution: "Sex and Drugs" introduces Drexel, a drug lord who might as well be coated in slime. He tries to act like he's such a good chum, but it becomes clear early on that the man has no class or sophistication to speak of. He has two goals: first, he wants to get rid of Bill O'Halloran, the patriarch of the Irish cop family, for burning the poppy fields he has to make heroin with; finally, he wants to get back at Miles Matheson for tarnishing his reputation when Miles betrayed Monroe. To obtain both goals, he decides to send Charlie Matheson to go kill off Bill, which will result in Charlie's death and hurt Miles. Both of these goals are clearly for personal gain. Fortunately, he fails at both objectives in the end.
• Stargate-verse:
  • Stargate SG-1: Robert Kinsey, the Senator who alternates between trying to shut down the Stargate program or seize control of it in his ambition to become President. He later briefly serves as Vice-President under President Hayes, who finally has enough of his antics and accepts his "resignation" after he attempts to flee during the Battle of Antarctica.
  • Stargate Atlantis: Dr. Peter Kavanagh is this to a T. When we first meet him, he accuses Dr. Weir of castrating him when she disagrees with his idea in front of his team. When Atlantis is under attack by the Wraith and everyone is recording personal greetings to send back home, he uses his video time to go on a whiney and petty rant criticizing her leadership.
• Star Trek: The Ferengi are a Planet of Hats of Slimeballs, always trying to suck up to anyone who they think they can profit from. It's always raining on their home planet Ferenginar, thus the planet itself is always muddy and wet — making it a literal giant ball of slime. In the expanded universe, the most popular soft drink on Ferenginar is Slug-o-Cola, a disgusting drink that looks and tastes like slime. The Ferengi are an entire race of Slimeballs who live on a giant Slimeball and even drink slime.

Professional Wrestling

• The reason "Stone Cold" Steve Austin labeled Christian a CLB. When The Rock left following a loss to Goldberg, Christian considered himself the successor, that he had to step up an be the next people's champ in his efforts to connect with "his peeps" he just came off like a creepy little bastard.
• Christopher Daniels in TNA following the breakup of Fortune. Self-gratification, envy, slander, blackmail, he basically ticked every box and drug Frankie Kazarian down with him. Most importantly, they opened their own Hall of Fame after TNA did and inducted Bobby Roode in protest of TNA's induction of Kurt Angle instead of themselves.

Roleplay

• Described as such in his bio, Devin from Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues is a budding politician whose manipulative tactics are employed by Daigo to soothe over any situations that Daigo doesn't want to deal with personally.

Theatre

• In Othello, Iago manages to be the Magnificent Bastard, playing off the other characters against each other for his own gain while pretending to be a close friend and counsel to all of them.

Video Games

• Stanley Poole from BioShock 2 is a transparent liar, shameless opportunist, and reprehensible coward with a grotesquely overinflated sense of self-worth, a ludicrously hedonistic lifestyle, and a habit of betraying everyone who gets too close to him.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 3 has Ronald Laren, who is trying to get into the pants of his painfully naive neighbor.
  • Likewise, Fallout: New Vegas features Benny, the leader of the Chairmen gang of New Vegas. He is the Smug Snake first and foremost, but what makes him truly slimy is that as a female protagonist, you can seduce and sleep with him towards the end of the first act, and this is after he shot and buried you at the beginning! Benny is so enthusiastic about getting laid that only once does he consider that you might be trying to get close to him to take revenge, and all it takes is your assurance to the contrary to persuade him otherwise.
• In Love & Pies, Esme describes Sebastian as a slimeball since she knew him as a bully and a creep in school. She says that he's still scummy to this day, and Amelia has every reason to suspect him of attacking her café because he acts unusually nice to her while abusing his daughter, Edwina, and running his company with an iron fist. Amelia is also shocked to find that Sebastian's in cahoots in her mother, Freya, while Esme thought they hated each other.
• NEO: The World Ends with You has Tanzo Kubo, who's smug, obnoxious, and condescending from the moment he's introduced, and Rindo and Fret become very uncomfortable around him when they first meet. In truth, he' much worse than his initial behavior implies, having been responsible for Shinjuku's destruction and planning to do the same to Shibuya.
• Nintendo Wars: The Mayor from Advance Wars: Days of Ruin/Dark Conflict is an Entitled Bastard who set himself up over a small village of apocalypse survivors in a position of authority solely so he could leech off of their supplies to sustain himself. He never does a damn thing to benefit anyone else, blaming absolutely everything that goes wrong on the soldiers who are the only reason his village survives at all. He eventually crosses into full-on Jerkass territory when he sells Isabelle out to Caulder in exchange for medicine... which he then uses himself instead of having it replicated. Thankfully, this is the end of his jackassery, as Caulder figured he'd do that and gave him poison instead.
• Junya Kaneshiro of Persona 5 is a greedy Fat Bastard mafioso who embodies the gaudy materialism of the Nouveau Riche and gleefully tries to blackmail both Niijima sisters into prostitution and sex slavery, saying it's all they're worth as women. Makoto aptly sums him up as a "money-grubbing asshole" and "filthy fly on dirty money".
• Dane Vogel, of Saints Row 2 is the quintessential Corrupt Corporate Executive variant. He allows, and encourages, the leader of the Saints to wipe out all the other gangs in Stillwater so his company Ultor can move in on their territory, and then sics the Saints on Ultor's own board of directors when they disapprove of his methods before trying to destroy the Saints themselves. When the main character brutally retaliates and confronts Vogel in his own headquarters, he tries to weasel his way out of trouble by claiming that it was the board's idea to go after the Saints and that he tried to stop them. The protagonist doesn't buy it, and an execution ensues.
• Captain Raems T. Quirk of Space Quest V: The Next Mutation begins as the standard figurative Slimeball before becoming a literal one due to a mutating virus.
• Pigma Dengar from Star Fox. Not only is he really sleazy and gross, he has absolutely no sense of loyalty (which eventually leads Star Wolf to kick him out).

Visual Novels

• Even when Dennis from Double Homework is trying to be friendly, he comes off creepy, especially when he’s talking to a girl.
  Johanna: I watch pimple popping videos, but Dennis is a pimple.
• Gaspen Payne from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies is an incompetent, crooked prosecutor who proudly calls himself "the Defendant Humiliator" because he enjoys seeing people squirm. He is very slimy and his "genteel-man" politeness is as fake as they come. At the end of the game, he gets fired by Chief Prosecutor Edgeworth for his misconduct. Gaspen then immigrates to the Kingdom of Khura'in, where he goes from this trope to an outright Hate Sink. Since defense attorneys in Khura'in receive the same sentence as guilty defendants, Gaspen tries to subject Phoenix Wright to the death penalty when he unwittingly defends a nine-year-old boy accused of murder.

Web Animation

• RWBY: Jacques Schnee is a smug Corrupt Corporate Executive whose only goal is to increase his profits and make himself look good, so he hosts charities events to try to boost his PR uses his own family as props and runs for a seat on the Atlas council to end an embargo that is hurting his profits. He can be superficially charming, buts it all an act to try get people to do what he wants.

Webcomics

• General Protection Fault: Trent Terrell is obnoxious, arrogant, not nearly as smart as he thinks and rather sexist. Virtually everyone who's known him for any amount of time ends up disliking him, and he's even repulsive enough to disgust an Amoral Attorney.
• Almost everything Daimyo Kubota from The Order of the Stick does to try to usurp Hinjo's position is just plain hateful, culminating in him ordering the assassination of a pair of former commoners who were promoted to nobility. The wife is pregnant. When the plan fails, he murders his own number two with poison just to give himself time to escape.
• Yongbae from Weak Hero is a smarmy, corrupt asshole who pretends to be jovial while delighting in threatening or scamming others into bending to his shady business practices. What's more, he's a Dirty Coward who calls in the local gang to help him out when Jake threatens him with even a little violence.

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