Captain Nemo Copy

Sometimes being a submarine pirate runs in the family.

The Captain Nemo Copy is a character archetype started by Captain Nemo of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a misanthropic scientific genius who created the means to leave civilization behind.

Jules Verne being a classic science fiction writer and a huge influence on Steampunk (despite Nemo's technology being electrically powered), Nemo became one of his most famous and influential characters and authors in that genre are particularly aware of him. With Verne's original novel out of copyright, the name of Captain Nemo can be used freely by writers, though they may take some liberties with the character.

Typical traits:

• They are The Captain of their own unique vessel. Said vessel is created by advanced knowledge or technology reserved for them alone, which they use to oppose their enemies.
• Oftentimes they lead a group of pirates, or they're just labeled pirates, be it beneath the ocean, in space, or the air.
• Being Wicked Cultured, as the intelligence which allowed them to create their vessel is applied to a wide range of subjects, often including being a Mad or Omnidisciplinary Scientist.
• Extreme misanthropy often resulting from grief, such as due to loss of loved ones or their homeland. These characters rarely interact with people outside of their intensely loyal crew. Their independence can put them in Übermensch territory.
• Possessing a Rebellious Spirit and is independent of any government or other organization, often working against at least one in a quest for Revenge, sometimes as head of an N.G.O. Superpower.
• A Mysterious Past, and questions about how the character obtained their power and what motivates their hatred becomes the cores of their involvement in the story.
• Sometimes, in addition to hating civilization, they are a Misanthrope Supreme actively plotting to destroy it and/or create their own.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Space Pirate Captain Harlock, who travels the universe fighting totalitarian regimes with his ship, the Arcadia, though he claims not to fight for the sake of anyone else.
• In Code:Realize, a brilliant, eccentric scientist named Nemo appears, and is the creator of an advanced airship named the Nautilus.
• In Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, due to being a very loose adaptation of Leagues, the traits of the original Nemo were split between two characters.
  • Captain Nemo appears as captain of an even more implausibly advanced Nautilus, in this case battling the Neo-Atlanteans and their attempts to dominate humanity. This version is such a deviation from Verne's work, being a Human Alien and father of the protagonist, that he's effectively a new character built off the original concept, regardless of the name.
  • The misanthropic aspects of Nemo went into Gargoyle, the Big Bad, who hates humans and aims to use his own advanced naval technology to Take Over the World.
• Alex Rowe, the infamous captain of the Silvana and its Sky Pirates in Last Exile, a brooding man seeking revenge against the Guild. He used to serve Anatoray but broke away from it for unknown reasons, serving no nation.
• Misato Katsuragi becomes this in the second half of the Rebuild of Evangelion tetralogy, primarily due to the films have various Production Throwbacks to the above Nadia: Secret of Blue Water. Misato mirrors shots of the Nadia version of Captain Nemo, her outfit even resembling his having become the leader of WILLE, an organization formed from former NERV personnel to counter their former employers after it was discovered NERV intended to start more Impacts. Now The Captain of the Wunder, a partly bio-mechanical aerial battleship powered by a captured Eva, and has introductory scenes paralleling the New Nautilus. Due to her guilt over inadvertently encouraging Shinji to cause Third Impact and having lost Kaji, Misato's become much more cynical and distant, and the final film revealing she has an estranged teenage child.

Comic Books

• Infinity, Inc. villain Carcharo sees himself as a sort of modern Captain Nemo, living by his own rule and well-educated.
• Three generations of Captain Nemo's descendants become a Generation Xerox of him in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
  • First, his daughter Janni Dakkar reluctantly took his title and command of the Nautilus when he died.
  • Janni's daughter Hira married the Sky Pirate Armand (son of Robur) and similarly plagued the skies in the Martian-heat ray equipped airship/submersible The Terror.
  • Finally, there's their son Jack Dakkar, commander of a nuclear-powered Nautilus waging war against modern governments.
  • Another League was established in The '40s and modelled after the original group. Nemo's counterpart was Professor James Gray from "The Iron Fish" comic strip from The Beano. His main similarity to Nemo is that he also built a submarine.
  • A rival french League called Les Hommes Mystérieux had Robur the Conqueror as a rival to Nemo.
• Captain Barracuda in the Marvel Universe is a pirate who used advanced submarine-type ships armed with high tech weaponry. He has fought the Sub-Mariner, The Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Moon Knight and Iron Man.

Film — Animation

• Captain Nathaniel Flint from Treasure Planet is a Space Pirate whose smaller craft can appear suddenly, raid large merchant starships, then vanish without a trace. Though, in a method twist, Flint's spacecraft isn't all that special; Flint uses Treasure Planet itself as a planet-sized portal generator to teleport to and from his victims. With this instantaneous and far-reaching mechanism, Flint has amassed "the loot of a thousand worlds."

Film — Live-Action

• The Black Hole contained many homages to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, so it's to be expected that Dr. Hans Reinhardt, commander of the Cygnus, would be a brilliant (but mad) scientist bent on taking his ship into the eponymous black hole using his unusual anti-gravity technology.
• Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean is a supernatural version, a heartbroken man who frequently plays an Ominous Pipe Organ as Nemo did, is forever cut off from dry land, loves the ocean above all, and his ship, the Flying Dutchman, functions as a submersible. His power over the seas is absolute, until the East India Trading Company took control of him by obtaining his heart, which he'd cut out after the woman he loved didn't return his feelings.
• Karl Stromberg, the villain of The Spy Who Loved Me, wishes to start a world war and restart human civilization in the ocean. He has a noted love of the ocean and little respect for human life, and executes his plans from an enormous supertanker, the Liparus.

Literature

• The Trope Namer is Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Captain of the Nautilus, the most advanced submarine craft of its time, he and his crew spend most of their time exploring the ocean and periodically sinking ships, primarily those of the British Empire, which he hates passionately. Imperialism led to him renouncing humanity, refusing to ever return to civilization or even set foot on dry land again once the Nautilus was completed. With easy access to sunken treasure, he is one of the richest men in the world, and funds revolutions against oppressive governments. In The Mysterious Island it is revealed that his name was Prince Dakkar, son of the Raja of Bundlekhand, educated across Europe in the sciences in the belief it would make him a more modern leader when his time came. However, he lost his family and land in First Indian War of Independence, and exiled himself to the ocean. He is also notable for being extremely cultured, possessing an extensive knowledge of multiple scientific fields, speaks several languages, and is a master at playing his Ominous Pipe Organ.
• Atlas Shrugged has the character Ragnar Danneskjold, a philosopher turned pirate who rebels against a society of "looters" by robbing from the undeserving poor to give to the deserving rich (yes, this is in the right order; it's Ayn Rand).
• In Clockwork Century novel Clementine, former slave turned air pirate Captain Croggon Beauregard Hainey travels the skies of a steampunk Civil-War era America in the Free Crow, racking up crimes and stealing a variety of military equipment.
• In The Grimnoir Chronicles, a Sky Pirate named Robert "Pirate Bob" Southunder uses the last piece of the superweapon Geo-Tel to attack ships of The Empire from his blimp, the UBF Traveler. He and his crew, the Marauders, are dedicated to destroying as many ships as they can and will continue to do so until they are all dead.
• The Grisha Trilogy introduces the privateer Sturmhond in the second book. The books are set in a Russian Fantasy Counterpart Culture and with a crew of outcasts, the charismatic Sturhond raids the ships of its enemies but professes to be Only in It for the Money. With the help of his crew, Sturmhond has invented new technology to aid his endeavors- specifically a small Cool Air Ship armed with advanced guns. Midway through the book, it's revealed that Sturmhond is actually the royal price Nicolai and the privateer guise is his unconventional method of serving his country.
• The title character of the 1892 novel Hartmann the Anarchist is a genius engineer an creator of The Attila, an airship built from an unknown metal stated to be nearly weightless. He praises his vessel as being powerful enough to topple tyrannical governments, and intends to attack London with the help of the socialist protagonist Mr. Stanley, who fills a role observing Hartmann similar to Professor Arronax in Verne's novel.
• Marko Ramius of The Hunt for Red October was a Lithuanian whose family suffered during its annexation by the Soviet Union, his parents branded enemies of the state and his wife avoidably dying from cancer as a result of unpunished incompetence, both driven by the Soviet system. He became a submarine captain with decades of experience, and eventually came to command the Red October, a ship with an experimental "caterpillar drive" propulsion system, and turned against the USSR by stealing the submarine to turn over to the United States.
• Hagbard Celine (real name Howard Crane) of Illuminatus!, the genius anarchist who opposes The Illuminati with his golden submarine, the Leif Ericson.
• Robur of Robur the Conqueror, also written by Jules Verne, possesses a unique (at the time) heavier-than-air craft called the Albatross with which he travels the skies, flaunting his superior technology, and eventually uses it to exact revenge on the people who tried to destroy his work.
• In the multimedia project Star Wars: The High Republic, the Nihil are led by Marchion Ro, the Eye of Nihil, who poses a serious threat to the Republic due to his access to supposedly impossible hyperspace routes, provided by Mari San Tekka letting him attack indiscriminately. Like Nemo, Ro's past is a mystery, though it's implied he's out for revenge against the Jedi. Fitting with the high-tech pirate theme, he wears what resembles a finned diving helmet.
• The Time Wars novel The Nautilus Sanction features Drakov, a mad captain from the future, stealing the titular ship, armed with nuclear weapons in this version, to start a world war.

Live-Action TV

• "The Shark Affair", a first-season episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., featured Robert Culp as Captain Shark, who has a ship he is filling with experts in a variety of occupations. His intent is to have a colony able to restart civilization after the nuclear holocaust destroys it. His intentions may be honorable, but he is kidnapping people to join his colony, and using violent means to keep them in line. The fear of nuclear war is justified, as this was 1964.
• M.I. High: In "The Octopus", pirates have been raiding numerous trade ships, stealing components to make a nuclear warhead. Their leader is The Octopus, and he has plans to blow up Antarctica and flood the world to protect the world's marine life from humans. And to drive the Nemo connection home, The Octopus' state-of-the-art submarine is named the Naughty Lass.
• Captain Annorax of the Star Trek: Voyager two-parter "Year of Hell". A temporal scientist whose technology advanced the Krenim Imperium, he uses his ship, known only as the "Krenim Weapon Ship", to erase his enemies from the timeline, and is unrivaled in his understanding of time. He was driven on his quest by the loss of his home, including his wife, and keeps trying to alter history to restore it. His name is a play on "Aronnax", the protagonist of Leagues, and Tom Paris even refers to him as "Captain Nemo" once.

Tabletop Games

• The Mercenary faction of Pirates Constructible Strategy Game not only has Captain Nemo himself as the unofficial faction leader, but he is joined by a whole fleet of Submarine Pirates who learned to build their craft from him, and now ply the seas either serving their own goals or those that will take them on as Hired Guns.
• Pirate Queen Alanda "The Banshee" Ryle from Scum and Villainy is a Space Pirate captaining a capital spaceship capable of traveling between star systems without a jump gate — the only other ship known to be capable of that is the personal vessel of the Galactic Hegemon. Banshee also has a massive bone to pick with the Hegemony itself, with her crew exclusively targeting Hegemonic military targets and supply routes.

Video Games

• EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce: Captain Nemon, the FishMan deepnoid who rescues the heroes when their ship goes down at sea. He and his loyal crew pilot a remarkable submarine, and Nimon himself hails from a people who have cut ties with the surface world due to their destructiveness, though Nimon himself actually desires peaceful relations with humans in opposition to his people and his inspiration. His name is even a very subtle nod to Captain Nemo.
• In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Captain Ulrik Svensgaard, head of the ocean-based Nautilus Pirates, opposes other governments in favor of creating his own anarchic society on Planet.
• The player characters of We Need to go Deeper, being crew of an anachronistic submarine, can fit the mold. Certain choices of clothing, weapons, and submarine can emphasize the similarity, particularly the Espadon with its ramming prow resembling the film version of the Nautilus. To drive the homage home, the remains of Captain Nemo himself can be found in the final biome within the wreckage of the Nautilus.

Web Comics

• Girl Genius has two:
  • First, we have Sanaa, queen of a group of Submarine Pirates in a mechanical narwhal (the creature the Nautilus was mistaken for) and benefactor of Venetian revolutionaries, among other crimes. However, she's retired from that life and working at Castle Heterodyne when we see her, and not heavily involved in the plot.
  • The second is Baron Klaus Wulfenbach, a Well-Intentioned Extremist Übermensch who created Castle Wulfenbach, an airship the size of a small city, after his family lands were destroyed. He used the ship to become a powerful Sky Pirate, and rather unusually, he's taken control much of Europa rather than a rebel working against an oppressive regime, since much of the continent was in anarchy before he took over and thus no-one was around to oppose him.

Western Animation

• Parodied in The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius episode "The Evil Beneath", where dance-obsessed genius Dr. Sydney Orville Moist, based at the bottom of the ocean, plots revenge against humanity.
• The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog episode, "The Little Merhog" has Captain John Paul Memo, who wished to destroy the undersea kingdom of Mertopia, so that he could build condominiums and extort money from the Fish and Merhogs. In the past, he went to school with Dr. Robotnik, and the two have a rivalry with each other. In fact, Memo was willing to fire on Robotnik when he thought he was trying to move in on his territory.
• Batman: The Animated Series: Grant Walker, the Corrupt Corporate Executive who builds the Oceania theme park in isolation in the middle of the ocean, is revealed to be a monstrous megalomaniac who wants to freeze the rest of the world over so that he can restart civilization on his terms with his own little "perfect society" in Oceania.
• Captain Finn of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers is another parody of Nemo, being a sapient anchovy who discovered a submarine that looks like the film version of the Nautilus, and wants to use it to take revenge on humanity for eating fish.
• Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures includes a character named Captain Havel, a rogue submarine captain whose ship was mistaken for a sea monster attacking whaling ships.
• Josie and the Pussycats are captured by Captain Nemo and taken aboard his submarine. The captain claims that his great-grandfather helmed a sub exactly like his. The mad captain is using a huge drill bit on the ship's prow to puncture the hulls of merchant ships, sinking them, then looting them safely underwater. The vessel even includes a pipe organ on the bridge.
• Parodied in one episode of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!: Bowser refers to himself as "Koopa Nemo", using the submarine "Koopilus" to terrorize a seaside town by making them think it's a monster, as the Nautilus was originally mistaken for.

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