A To Z 2024 - Villains! - X Is for eXtras

 In all the, the years I’ve been doing the A to Z Challenge, I’ve only had one occasion when I got a real X word - during my Greek Mythology posts. That’s because there are X words in Greek. The X post was about the immortal horses of Achilles, Xanthus and Balius. 

Every other year I’ve cheated with “Extras” which gave me the chance to slip in things I didn’t do last time, as there are only so many I can use in each post. This year will be the same.

So, just a few…

M is for Medraut and Minotaur

Medraut, or Mordred, is the incestuously born son of King Arthur. In Malory his mother is Arthur’s sister Morgause, the Queen of Orkney, wife of King Lot. His half brothers are Gawain, Gareth, Gaheris and Agravaine. Morgause sleeps with her brother, who doesn’t know they are related. Medraut ends up fighting his father and they kill each other in battle. He is responsible for wiping out the Round Table fellowship. 

He is in pretty much all of the Arthurian legends and retellings, because he has to be, but there are plenty of novels in which he is not really a villain, it just works out badly. For example,  Mary Stewart, author of the Merlin series, said that she had read an account which just said that Arthur and Medraut had died in a battle, not that they had been fighting on different sides. She would have liked to go with that but she had already established that they would be on opposite sides. But her Medraut was basically okay and tried unsuccessfully to prevent the prophecy from being fulfilled. For the most part, though, he is the baddie, as in the film Excalibur, in which the role was played by Robert Addie, who went on to play another villain, Guy of Gisburne, in Robin Of Sherwood. Before going off to fight his father, this Medraut kills his mother(played by a very young Helen Mirren). 

By the way, even Guy of Gisburne had a couple of novels in which he was the goodie and Robin Hood was the villain! 

The Minotaur is a creature from Greek mythology, son of Cretan Queen Pasiphae, who was also the mother of Ariadne who helped Theseus in the Labyrinth. King Minos had kept a white bull sent him by Poseidon for sacrifice, so by way of godly vengeance Pasiphae was made to lust after the bull. She had the craftsman Daedalus build her a cow she could hide in and… Anyway, the result was a bull-headed man, which Minos sent to live in the Labyrinth designed also by Daedalus, and fed with teenagers taken as tribute, until the hero Theseus killed it.

In Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, Minotaur was simply the title of the heir to the throne of  Crete, like the Prince of Wales, and his father was a Hittite bull dancer.  Theseus killed him anyway, while he was about to be crowned; he was the villain of that book. The Labyrinth was the name of the palace, not a place under it, so he didn’t have to hide there. 

C is for Carcer

Carcer is the villain of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel, The Night Watch. Usually the Discworld books are hilarious. This one is more serious than the others though it has some humour in it. 

Sam Vimes, hero of the City Watch novels in the Discworld series, time travels while chasing Carcer, who is a serial killer, who just kills for the pleasure of it. They both end up in their city, Ankh Morpork, thirty years before the time in which the series is set. Ankh Morpork was not at that time the likable place it became. The City Watch was not nice. There is corruption. There is killing. Carcer fits right in. Vimes, who remembers a mentor, a John Keel, who had arrived in the city to join the Watch, only he doesn’t, because the first thing Carcer does is murder him, so Vimes has to become John Keel and mentor his younger self. And deal with Carcer. And get involved with a rebellion… 

Fortunately he has the assistance of the History Monks, who specialise in time travel. But he has three days to do what needs to be done and get history back where it needs to be. 

Carcer gets his comeuppance. 

T is For Mr Teatime

Mr Teatime is another Discworld villain, in the novel Hogfather. The Hogfather is the Discworld  version of Santa Claus. Mr Teatime, a member of the Assassins Guild, is commissioned to kill him. His method involves ensuring he doesn’t exist, by removing belief in him. He is utterly insane and worries even the head of the Assassins Guild, Lord Downey. 

Fortunately for the future of the world, he is beaten by Susan Sto Helit, the granddaughter of Death, who in this world is a likeable skeleton, and taking over the Hogfather’s round, in a desperate attempt to keep belief going until Susan can fix it. 

Susan, a governess, fights the monsters under her charges’ beds with a poker. A poker that only kills monsters, so right through Death and into Teatime. 

See you on Monday for Y! 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! - W Is For Wanda, Wicked Witch of the West And Lily Weatherwax

 W is for Wanda, Wicked Witch of the West and Lily Weatherwax. Enjoy! 

This post is about the MCU Wanda, not the comics Wanda, as I have not read the comics she is in.

Wanda Maximoff, the Red Witch, is a strange character to write as a villain. She has a sad background as she and her twin brother Pietro were left orphaned during a war in the Eastern European country of Sokovia. She starts by working for villain organisation Hydra and for the evil Ultron, created by genius Tony Stark to protect the Earth, but not working quite as he intended. 

However, for some time, she is with the Avengers, the good guys. She falls in love with Vision, a sentient android whose body was created by Ultron for itself, but who ended up with the mind of Jarvis, Tony’s AI. 

She loses him during the war against Thanos, who rips the Mind Stone out of his forehead, killing him. This is when she starts to become a villain. Wanting a normal life, she re-creates him and settles in a small town called Westview. The only problem is that she takes over the entire town with her magic, turning it into a sitcom haven. As a child, she and her late brother used to love the TV sitcoms their father brought home, set in the decades starting in the 1950s. So this is the life she chooses - and forces the townsfolk to live it with her. 

She has two children, getting pregnant and giving birth in a day. The children, Billy and Tommy, shoot up soon after. 

She is forced to give up her hold on the town, after her magic duel with witch Agatha Harkness. To let the town go, she has to farewell her husband and children. In the last scene of WandaVision, we see her studying an evil book called the Darkhold.

The next time we see her is in the second Dr Strange film, Dr Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness. Steven Strange goes to her for help, assuming she is still a good guy. But, obsessed with finding her children in another universe, she is after his companion, teenager America Chavez, who has the ability to travel between universes, to kill the girl and help herself to America’s powers. 

This is a Wanda who is more powerful than Dr Strange. She arrives at the sorcerers’ settlement of Kamar-Taj, where America Chavez is being protected, and kills many of them. Her plans involve finding her children, killing her alternative version and replacing her. Oh, dear…

Then she wipes out an entire group of powerful people, the Illuminati. 

When she finds an r alternative universe with her children in it, the boys are horrified at what she is doing and run for their real mother.

It eventually occurs to her, after she has spilled a lot of blood, that this isn’t going to work. She destroys the Darkhold and disappears under a lot of rubble. This being the MCU, it’s entirely possible that she is not dead. 

While we might sympathise with her reasons, she has murdered a lot of people in her obsession.

W is also for the Wicked Witch of the West, from The Wizard Of Oz. A truly nasty character in the novel and the 1939 film, though I haven’t seen the musical Wicked! which tells it from her viewpoint. 

There are four witches in Oz. The witches of the North and South are good. The witches of the East and West are evil. Dorothy’s house falls on the Witch of the East, who has not been popular with her Munchkin subjects, so they celebrate her death.

The Witch of the West has enslaved her subjects, the Winkies. She has her Flying Monkeys attack Dorothy and her companions and enslaves Dorothy. She wants Dorothy’s magic shoes(silver in the novel, ruby in the film), but can’t get them off her feet, so she has to steal them. Dorothy, furious, splashes her with a bucket of bath water and it turns out that water dissolves her, so that’s the end of her. Nobody mourns her. 

W is also for Lily Weatherwax, the villain of Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad. She is the sister of Granny(Esmerelda) Weatherwax, one of Terry Pratchett’s beloved three witches. Esmerelda hates her sister because, when Lily became bad, she had to be the good one. When Lily takes over the town of Genua(basically the Discworld New Orleans), after killing its ruler, she decides to make it a literal fairytale town. On their way to Genua, the witches encounter some fairytale characters she has been messing with. In Genua, you can be arrested for being a cobbler who doesn’t tell stories to children or an innkeeper who isn’t fat and red faced. 

Lily has turned a frog into a prince and is planning to marry him to the girl whose father she murdered to take the throne, who has been forced to take the role of Cinderella. So the witches’ mission is to make sure Cinderella doesn’t marry the Prince…

See you tomorrow for the letter X! 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! - V Is For Voldemort

 

Voldemort, known to his followers as the Dark Lord, is the main villain of the Harry Potter series. The people of the wizarding community call him “You know who”. In the last book, he has made sure to find anyone who uses his name.

We can think of him as the Hitler of the wizarding world. His followers are called Death Eaters, tattooed with the Dark Mark that will let them know when he wants them.

Voldemort was born Tom Riddle, a member of a family that is descended from Salazar Slytherin,  one of the founders of the wizarding school, Hogwarts, the one who believed those not born to pure Wizarding families shouldn’t be allowed to study magic, but they are poverty-stricken and when we see them in a flashback, they are basically the poor, unpleasant Ewells from To Kill A Mockingbird. Merope, Tom’s mother, falls in love with the local squire’s son and wins him using a love potion. When the effects run out, he leaves her to give birth and die in an orphanage, where Tom is brought up.

It would be easy to feel some sympathy for this orphan, due to his sad background, but when Professor Dumbledore comes to the orphanage to invite him to Hogwarts, he is uncomfortable to realise that this child has already done some very nasty things to his fellow orphans. Still, he accepts him for the school, though, as Voldemort says later, he never trusts him, unlike the other staff, who think Tom is lovely. They consider him a hardworking student who has made the best of his life. But Tom uses this to get the gentle Hagrid, then a third year student, accused of opening the Chamber of Secrets, where a basilisk lives. The problem for Hagrid is that he loves animals any animals, including even giant spiders. He has his wand taken and snapped, though he later gets a job as groundskeeper.

Tom leaves a diary with the voice of his sixteen year old self. Later, his Death Eater follower Lucius Malfoy, father of Harry’s enemy Draco Malfoy, slips it into the cauldron of Ron Weasley’s younger sister, Ginny, getting her nearly killed.

When Voldemort has unsuccessfully tried to kill Harry Potter as a baby, his spell rebounds on him, leaving him alive, but without a body. He is brought back properly in the fourth novel, Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, when his minion Peter Pettigrew manages to get Harry within reach. 

Later, when the Death Eaters(read Nazis) have taken over the wizarding world, he makes sure Muggleborn, ie not pureblood wizards, are arrested and tried. 

Eventually he is killed in a final duel with Harry. There are some mixups over the Elder Wand, which is supposed to make its user invincible. He had killed double agent Severus Snape because he assumed Snape had been the “master of the wand.” He hadn’t. 

A couple of things: Voldemort had created “Horcruxes” to keep himself safe, killing people to insert a bit of his soul into different objects - a bit like Koschei the Undying(See my post about Koschei). 

He had tried unsuccessfully to get a job teaching Defence Against The Dark Arts at Hogwarts, so created a spell that ensured nobody else ever got the job for more than a year. An interesting explanation for why every novel had a different teacher of that subject! 

Also interestingly, the author seems to have at least a small amount of sympathy for him, describing him and Harry as the two orphans for whom Hogwarts was home. 

Tomorrow, W Is For Wanda Maximoff! 

A To Z 2024 - Villains! - U Is For Utgard-Loki

 

Utgard-Loki. Public Domain

Today’s visit will be to Norse mythology, in the Eddas. Utgard-Loki is not the Loki we know and love. He is the king of a group of giants living in a castle in Jotunheim, the land of the giants. 

Really, he isn’t particularly evil, just cheeky. But he does humiliate Thor, Loki and Thor’s servant, a young boy called Thjalfi. 

Travelling through Jotunheim, our heroes encounter a giant who introduces himself as Skrymir. They take shelter for the night in what turns out to be Skrymir’s glove. He snores loudly all night. When Thor tries to shut him up with his hammer Mjolnir, the giant murmurs in his sleep that an acorn must have fallen off the tree. Skrymir is Utgard-Loki. 

They journey on to the castle, where they are made welcome, but are expected to show what they can do to be allowed to stay.

 Thjalfi, an excellent runner, races with a young giant, Hugi, and loses.

 Loki, who is very good at eating, challenges a giant called Loge to an eating race. He manages to eat an entire meal at amazing speed, but the man competing with him gets through the meal and the plate in the same time.

Then it’s Thor’s turn. Utgard-Loki sneers at him. Thor challenges the giants to a drinking competition, which he loses despite three huge gulps from the drinking horn. Utgard-Loki suggests, laughing, that he try lifting the castle cat, but he is only able to lift a paw, which must be humiliating for someone who is proud of his strength. 

Finally, Utgard-Loki suggests that he will go easy on Thor  by having him wrestle Utgard-Loki’s old nurse, Elli. But the old lady is a lot tougher than she looks. Thor can’t beat her. 

The party is only too glad to leave next morning after their humiliation. Utgard-Loki walks with them.

He tells them that they did a lot better than they realised. Instead of destroying Skrymir, Thor created some valleys with his hammer blows.

Hugi is Thought, and nobody can outrun thought, not even young Thjalfi.

Loki was challenged by Fire, so of course it ate the dish! 

Thor was trying to drink the sea. He couldn’t finish it, but he did create tides.

The cat was the Midgard Serpent. Even lifting its paw was impressive.

The old woman he wrestled was Old Age, which nobody can defeat. 

Utgard-Loki is extremely disturbed by how well they did and lets them know that they are not welcome to return! At this point, Thor swings his hammer at the giant, but he disappears, as does his castle.

Utgard-Loki appears in one of Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase novels, very annoyed at how many people get him mixed up with the better-known Loki. That Loki, by the way, really is a villain in the Magnus Chase trilogy, not the MCU anti-hero-to-hero, or the likeable rogue of the later comics. 

See you tomorrow for V is for Voldemort! 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! - T Is For Thanos

 Thanos is a major MCU villain. I haven’t read the comics, so will stick to the films. He is a part of the Infinity Saga, in which the Avengers have to fight him.

Unlike other villains, he is not interested in ruling the universe - in fact, once he has done his dreadful deed, he retires to a farm. 

He is a villain who thinks he is the good guy. Okay, most villains think they have the right to do what they are doing, but he really thinks he is helping! Never mind that nobody asked him to help in this way, or wants him to.

Thanos is on a quest for the six Infinity Stones. Once he gets them, he can put them on a gauntlet and snap half of the universe out of existence. His argument is that there are not enough resources for everyone, so why not get rid of half and then the rest can have enough. He has minions, of course, and an army, plus two adopted daughters, Gamora and Nebula, from worlds he has already cut down. He has encouraged them to fight each other and has punished Nebula savagely for every fight she lost. 

 In quest of one stone on Earth, he sends an invasion fleet to New York, led by Loki. Another stone, the Soul Stone, is on Vormir, guarded by Red Skull(see R Is For Red Skull). When Red Skull tells him the only way he can get the stone is to sacrifice what he loves most, he shoves Gamora off a cliff. Who wants that kind of love? 

He finally gets them all and snaps his fingers. The result is devastating, of course. Among the people turned to dust are Peter Parker - Spider-Man - and Dr Strange. Both return after the Avengers’ Time Heist in the next movie, when they collect the Infinity Stones from the past - Thanos has destroyed them. Dr Strange returns to find, to his annoyance, that he has been replaced as Sorcerer Supreme. 

Of course, Thanos gets a taste of his own medicine…

He appears in an episode of the animated series What If…? In that episode, Wakandan Prince T’Challa(hero of Black Panther) is accidentally carried off, as a child, by the Ravagers instead of Peter Quill(Guardians Of The Galaxy). T’Challa takes over the band of misfits and becomes a sort of space Robin Hood, much admired. Thanos is one of his band. T’Challa has talked him out of carrying out his genocidal plans, though he still thinks it’s a good idea. Nebula is whole, and they have a good relationship.

So, even a villain can reform, right?