The Caligula / Anime & Manga

• Berserk:
  • The King of Midland, after making a Face–Heel Turn and losing his sanity. He diverts the entire resources of his country towards hunting down Griffith and the Band of the Hawk, even as the country descends into plague and famine, making it even more vulnerable to the Kushan invasion afterwards.
  • Emperor Ganishka, who is literally a demon and has an ego so big that he attempts to defy God. He has a nasty temper and is Ax-Crazy enough that his subordinates fear his wrath. This gets taken up to eleven when he reincarnates himself as an unholy monstrosity that makes the most horrifying Apostles look cute and towers over the city of Windham, becoming so drunk on power that he tramples his own soldiers like ants.
  • As the ruler of Falconia, Griffith makes for a very dangerous ruler, as his reign is based entirely on a personality cult dedicated to someone who in the past is more than willing to betray those closest to him and even subject them to a cruel and horrifying fate of torture, rape and death to perpetuate his own power, and has turned the already harsh world into a Hell on Earth and manipulates people into kowtowing to his will by forcing them to seek refuge inside one of the last remaining "safe" zones — his very own Egopolis—, just to advance his ego. Those who disagree or stand in the way won't live any longer.
• Daimos:
  • King Olban of Planet Baam. Ascending to the throne by assassinating King Leon, and pinning the blame on the innocent people of Planet Earth, who face the brunt of Prince Richter's scourge. While the true heirs of the throne are away at the war he manufactured, Olban terrorizes the planet by turning the cryostatisized Baam-seijin into mindless slaves and mass murdering those that protest. Once Richter finds out the truth, he swears revenge on Olban and successfully kills him, though in the process he loses his last ally, Raiza, realizing that he was in love with her all along. Feeling ashamed for all the lives he took in the war, Richter commits suicide.
  • Richter is this, to a degree. Unlike Olban, he is of legitimate blood, but while commanding the Undersea Castle, he is cruel to his underlings, ordering their executions if they dare suggest that the Earth-Baam isn't worth it and that peace is the better option. Richter's cruelty results in a lot of his fellow Baam-seijin turning against him, such as Margarete, Dr. Ourin and Gurney Halleck, and even his own sister, Erika. Once he finds out that Erika pursued an Interspecies Romance with Kazuya, a human, he becomes enraged and swears to kill him too.
• Light Yagami, a.k.a. Kira, of Death Note certainly qualifies in the latter part of the story as an unusually intelligent and competent example of this trope, as his reign is based strictly on his personal idea of justice, not to mention that his god complex consistently gets in the way of his judgment. Those who disagree or stand in the way have about forty seconds to live.
• Dragon Ball Z: Freeza is a violent tyrant who readily kills his own men when he's in a foul mood, but he's otherwise coldly logical and calculating. That is, until he falls off the deep end when he is defeated by Goku. When he's rebuilt into a cyborg, he rushes to Earth with his dad to get revenge and is killed by Future Trunks. When he's revived, instead of listening to his men who beg him to leave the Super Saiyan alone and rebuild his failing empire, he ignores them and devotes all his remaining resources to invading Earth. Although he lasts longer against Goku and Vegeta thanks to his four months of training, he's killed again in the end, and what is left of his empire also dies on Earth.
• EDENS ZERO: Although Shura is the adopted son of the Nero empires ruler, Poseidon Nero. Nero himself is so old that the Interstellar Union Army fears Shura's ascension to the throne far more than anything the Emperor can do, prioritizing Shura's elimination above all else in the Aoi War. For good reasons as he has demonstrated himself to be an unstable sociopath prone to acts of extreme violence and graphic executions over seemingly trivial details, as well as sadistic pleasure.
• Fruits Basket: While not actually royalty, Akito plays this role as head of the Sohma family (complete with an unhealthy dose of A God Am I). Akito gets better, unlike the standard Caligula.
• Clair Leonelli of Heat Guy J. This (more than the fact that he's only 19 years old) is the reason the other Mafia higher-ups are reluctant to let him assume the role of Vampire.
• In Hunter × Hunter the Fourth Prince of the Kakin Empire Prince Tserriednich Hui Guo Rou is seen to be potentially this should he succeed in his families succession war. Since he has been shown to be a total psychopath who seeks to remake the world in his own twisted image, the fear of him succeeding is not without warrant.
• Kingdom: King Tojo of Zhao, a man who spends his time being serviced by young boys, ignores the plight of his citizens, and hates his only competent general Riboku. He is so self-centered that he handicaps Riboku when Qin invades, fully willing to sacrifice half of Zhao while ensuring his safety — sure, in the long term this would lead to the ruin of Zhao, but he will be dead of old age by then, so he doesn't care.
• Kino's travels in Kino's Journey takes her to a country ruled by one such leader. Visitors are immediately imprisoned and enslaved, with their only chance for freedom being a life-or-death gladiatorial tournament that will also grant them the power to enact a new law if they win. When Kino does well enough in the tournament to be granted a personal audience with the king, he's revealed to be a schizophrenic lunatic.
• King Dedede of Kirby: Right Back at Ya! is this moreso than in the games. He has a castle which has his face all over the place, and yet the only thing he ever does is find ways to take advantage of the cappies, and orders monsters from the truly nightmarish evil corporation to make everyone miserable, or just to beat Kirby.
• Gihren Zabi of Mobile Suit Gundam is a rare high-functioning example who's less overtly crazy than many examples but makes up for it with his total Lack of Empathy and emotionless psychopathy. His only goal is to become autocratic ruler of the Earth Sphere and he'll pull out all stops to achieve it, to the degree where he frightens even the other members of his Big, Screwed-Up Family.. He has no problem with turning his father into a figurehead and then murdering him to seize power, framing his sister for trying to assassinate him, using Weapons of Mass Destruction to butcher civilian populations, or promoting a Social Darwinist agenda to further incentivize his soldiers to commit war crimes.
• Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ: Zig-zagged with Haman Karn, who projects the visage of a strong-minded leader to her followers and for the most part is able to keep it up in public, but in private it's clear she's dealing with a lot of issues.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack sees Char Aznable end up as this after failing to deal with the and becoming leader of Neo Zeon. He now believes dropping a massive asteroid on Earth and permanently irradiating the environment is what's best for humanity and the environment, and more-or-less instigates the entire conflict just as an excuse to settle things with Amuro Ray. Unfortunately, his followers worship him too much to see the depressed and PTSD-addled Gryps War veteran underneath their idealized image of him.
• Gjallarhorn of Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans is pretty much this but applied to The Federation. It's ruled by corrupt aristocrats who will eliminate anything in their path, no matter how insignificant. Corruption is rampant to the point that having anyone with a modicum of decency and morality is a rarity, and they even fully condone lesser rights for Martians and colonists so that they're easier to oppress. They even murder Tekkadan kids with glee in their attempts to kill one publicly-known young woman advocating for Martian rights. It gets worse to the point that season 2's Big Bad had to reform and restructure Gjallarhorn both out of necessity from all other ruling parties being killed and out of sheer efficiency's sake due to the ruthless chaos and suppression just making everything worse.
• In the backstory of Naruto, the Fourth Mizukage, Yagura, led the Hidden Mist Village during the years of the Bloody Mist, where half of each graduating class was required to murder the other half in cold blood, one of the village's most famous ninja lead a failed coup, an entire Cipher Division being cut down by their own bodyguard was considered proper procedure, and Kisame (the aforementioned bodyguard) even told Yagura to his face that the latter would have him eliminated at some point. Apparently, people thought highly of Yagura, which could be true, because either Madara Uchiha or Tobi/Obito was mind-controlling him the entire time. The fact that Yagura was being controlled by the Akatsuki leader has become public knowledge in the Mist Village, as numerous characters have blamed Akatsuki for the Bloody Mist years.
• King Hamdo of Now and Then, Here and There is a petty, raging tyrant who expends his armies of enslaved Child Soldiers at will. His first scenes involve strangling his cat when it upsets him, and then having the child protagonist tortured for hours and hours on end. After securing his rule over every single town across the world; he insists that there are still other towns with people in them that are sucking up air without his permission, and immediately relays an order to mobilize their forces into eradicating everyone.
• The World Government of One Piece appears to fall into this, although not the Marines protecting it. The World Government itself is incredibly corrupt and brutal, being major patrons of the mostly pirate-run slave trade and using the Marines for acts of mass butchery to silence those who found out their dirty secrets or could threaten them. The "nobility" of this world is even worse, as the former rulers of Goa and Sorbet Kingdoms cheerfully attempted to slaughter the lower classes to make things look neater for a World Noble's visit or pay less taxes, respectively and claim it's the poor people's fault for being too stupid to be born nobles. The World Nobles are so batshit insane that they wear air bubbles to prevent themselves from breathing the same air as commoners and regularly murder anyone they encounter over the very pettiest gripes. The only reason the World Nobles aren't killed at sight is because they could summon an Admiral.
  • Villains who actually work for them is a case-by-case basis. For example, most of the antagonists in the Impel Down arc are just as Ax-Crazy and sadistic as any noble, with the notable exception of Magellan, the Big Bad of the arc; he was the closest anyone in the prison came to an Anti-Villain and a Reasonable Authority Figure, despite being loyal to his employers.
  • Spandam is certainly this to the CP9 and everyone at Enies Lobby. Despite being weaker than Coby when Luffy first met him, he somehow got to be the leader of a major Marines stronghold and treats everyone, subordinate and pirate alike, like they were gum on the bottom of his shoe in addition to reveling in his power to make the Buster Call, even after accidentally making it. What really sealed it, though, was telling everyone over the loudspeaker his plan to leave them all to be destroyed by the Buster Call while he hightailed it to a safe distance.
  • Were he to achieve his goal of taking over Fishman Island, Hody Jones would easily be this - his immediate plans would be to slaughter anyone on the island who wants to live in peace with humans, followed by going to a council of kings with the intended purpose of murdering them all.
  • Eneru/Enel from the Skypiea Arc could fit this as well. No regard for others, carelessly strikes down anyone with a dissenting opinion, an A God Am I complex, goes even more batshit insane when someone he can't instantly beat beats his ass? Yup. He's as bad as any World Noble ever was.
  • A childlike queen who just wants to create a nation where all races of the world can live in peace, accompanied by cheerful sentient objects. How could this go wrong? By having said queen, Charlotte Linlin AKA Big Mom, be a giant-sized psychopath who switches between a somewhat reasonable schemer, an oversized brat with the power of two armies (her pirate army and herself being a One-Man Army) and an uncontrollable berserker who murders everything that gets in her way. She has everyone who lives in her kingdom pay pieces of their SOULS (effectively reducing their lifespan) so she can put them into inanimate objects and bring them to life as her homies, threatens people by saying she'll chop off a loved one's head and send it to them in a box, holds extravagant tea parties where she plans to kill certain guests and have everybody dance on their corpses and eat cake. And to top it all off, she's one of the worst mothers in anime, frequently berating, beating, and occasionally killing her 85 children. God Save Us from the Queen! indeed.
  • Kurozumi Orochi is the shogun of Wano and is a self-centered psychopath. He holds massive parties and gorges himself while the rest of the country starves, kills anyone who offends him and allows the Beast Pirates free reign of the Wano, which has turned parts of the country into polluted wastelands due to the weapons factories they built. What makes it worse is that Orochi is completely aware of what he’s doing and his devastation of Wano is intentional. He wants revenge on the people of Wano for ruthlessly hunting down his entire clan for the crimes of his grandfather, turning their Sins of the Father policy back on them by slowly grinding the entire country into oblivion. That doesn’t stop him from enjoying every second of it though.
• Queen Himiko from the Dawn arc of Phoenix, who then dooms her kingdom by exiling her Brother when he finally tells her enough is enough.
• Princess Malty S. Melromarc from The Rising of the Shield Hero is a class-case example of a Caligula. A Chronic Backstabbing Disorder so fierce that even Starscream himself would blush at? Check. A Compulsive Liar so bad that her own mother had her branded with a Slave Crest as a Lie Detector that shocks her into confessing the truth? Check. A Yandere that has an "Entitled to Have You" complex so fierce that she would secretly sell other female party members into slavery and lie that they simply had left? Check. A Cain that would take any opportunity to try and kill her own younger sister? BIG FAT CHECK. The only reason why she was able to get away with this for so long throughout the series was because of the fact that she was a Daddy's Girl that only put on a front of innocence when around her father The King.
• Kano from Texhnolyze, the Big Bad. While very intelligent, charismatic and eloquent, he's a deranged solipsist who believes that he's the only real person in a world that exists inside his mind. A possible explanation for this may be the fact that he's the result of generations of selective inbreeding, designed to create the perfect ruler.
• The Valerian sovereign in Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-. According to a letter of distress, he starts indiscriminately murdering people and having their corpses dumped in the Sinners' Valley in his "fits of insanity." Then, after he believes that everyone else in Valeria is dead, he jumps in himself and commits suicide in front of Yuui. The Valerian people chalk his insanity up to the curse of the twins.
• Voltes V has Emperor Zambajil. He is a Narcissist who's biggest fear is that one day, someone will usurp the throne from him, just like he did with Prince Gohl, the true heir to the throne. Out of spite, Zambajil has Gohl's son, Heinel, exiled from the palace and sets him up to die when he comes of age to rival him for the throne. Zambajil is also cruel to his citizens, only allowing a set amount of Boazanians to live in prosperity (under the condition that they have horns and are of Blue Blood) while the rest are Forced Into Slavery. He freely puts people to death if members of his court insist so and when the chips are down against him, instead of fighting for the planet, Zambajil flees like the Dirty Coward he is.^note Or, should we say, tries to flee since moments later, he meets a Karmic Death at the hands of the very Prince he tried to kill

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