Top Tier Media Villains

⚠️ SPOILERS AHEAD ⚠️

Enrico Pucci

Coriolanus Snow

Negan Smith

This is a website about my favourite villains from my favourite series. Enjoy! (And like I said above, watch out for spoilers)

Enrico Pucci

Series Rundown

JoJo’s bizarre adventure is an anime series that’s based off a manga of the same name, and it was created by Hirohiko Araki in 1987 with the anime series following years later in 2012.

The anime follows a family line, with each new part following a descendant of the original “JoJo” in part 1, Jonathan Joestar. Each JoJo is forced to take on villains, usually accompanied by a group of their friends who help them out on their journey.

JoJo also has it's own unique power system.

In part 1-2 the JoJo's are seen using hamon, which is a form of martial art that uses breathing to produce energy.

Part 3 and onwards, all the characters in JoJo switch to using these beings called "Stands". The official description of what a stand is as follows, “a visual manifestation of a person’s life energy and fighting spirit”. Along with being a physical embodiment, they all have some form of ability, and fun fact, stands are primarily named after music related things such as bands, singers and albums! I find that super cool.

Introduction

Enrico Pucci is the main villain of the sixth part (or season) in JoJo’s bizarre adventure. He’s a priest who had an extremely close relationship with one of the previous and most well known JoJo villains Dio Brando, and follows Dio’s philosophy and plans closely even after his death in part 3.

Pucci’s stand is White Snake, it has the ability to take discs that contain a person’s soul and stand from them. This doesn’t innately kill them, but it does put them into a death-like state that they can’t exit unless they get their discs returned. This can lead to their death without outside intervention.

Characters

I’m going to be talking about a few characters other than Pucci, and they are as followed:

Jotaro Kujo, he killed Dio in part 3 with his stand Star Platinum: The World (an upgraded version of his original stand Star Platinum) which has the ability to stop time for a few seconds, and since then has been generally known to be one of the stronger JoJo’s that can find his way out of almost anything. He’s a marine biologist, and has been tackling his family's reemerging bad luck with encountering villains ever since he was a teenager. Despite his stoic and rough personality he is extremely loyal to the people he loves, and will go extremely far to try and help them.

Dio, the main overarching antagonist of JoJo. Despite dying in part 3 his influence remains over the 6 parts of the show, with characters relating to him popping up everywhere. He initially was the adoptive brother of Johnathan Joestar, Jotaro Kujo’s great-great grandfather, before he took over Johnathan’s body after his death in part 1. He would go on to create a massive group of followers that had almost a cult-like affection for him, and this would lead Jotaro and his gang of friends known as the Stardust Crusaders to take him down for good.

Jolyne Cujoh, she’s Jotaro’s daughter and the main character of part 6. She has a stand named Stone Free, which allows her to essentially unravel her own body into string. Her and Jotaro’s relationship is very strained, as Jotaro spent a lot of time away from home trying to keep Jolyne safe from their family’s issues.

Motive

Pucci’s motive was to fulfil his and Dio’s wish and “obtain heaven” through a universe reset. He wants to create a world where people know their fate from the start and can prepare themselves for whatever’s coming. On a personal level, it’s possible that Pucci’s operating off of not wanting people to feel regret as he has, as he made mistakes in his past that lead to his own sister's death. It’s possible that he wants to make it so that wouldn’t even be able to happen. It’s basically his attempt at making humanity happy, even though it would be robbing people of the unpredictability of life.

Pucci's impact

Pucci, in my opinion, is one of the smartest and most intimidating villains in JoJo.

During one of his first interactions with the main characters, he outsmarts Jotaro. While Jotaro and Jolyne are distracted fighting somebody else, Pucci’s stand comes in and uses Jotaro’s moment of weakness while he defends his daughter to steal his discs from him, thus putting him in that death-like state.

He instantly wipes Jotaro off of the board, something that Dio tried and failed countless times to do using his followers and eventually himself.

Jolyne spends almost the entire part trying to save her dad by retrieving his discs, which she eventually manages to, and Jotaro is able to be part of the parts final battle.

As Pucci gains power during the final battle, Jotaro and one of Jolyne’s friends Anasui come up with a plan to protect the team and defeat Pucci. Anasui will sacrifice himself while Jotaro lands the final blow with his time stop when Pucci gets close. They put the plan in action, Jotaro going into the timestop after Anasui’s sacrifice. Jotaro realizes that Pucci had used Jolyne’s summoned stand’s hand to attack Anasui, and then notices dozens of knives that Pucci had thrown at her before the timestop. This will kill her once the timestop ends. Jotaro is forced to choose between defeating Pucci or once again saving his daughter.

Jotaro’s family is his weakness, and Pucci knows that.

Jotaro saves Jolyne, and Pucci lands the final blow on him. Killing him.

Pucci’s impact comes from his extreme intelligence. He was able to outsmart one of the most powerful characters in the series twice, and I think out of all the villains he came the closest to reaching his goal. A universe reset did happen, but it wasn’t the version that he wanted. It was just a world wiped clean, with new Joestars that were free from their curse of constantly being bombarded by evil. His backstory also adds heavily to his character, but it involves topics that I wasn’t very comfortable discussing in detail in a school project.

Coriolanus Snow

Series Rundown

The Hunger Games is a series about a dystopian future where America is split up into 12 districts and an overruling Capitol, otherwise known as Panem.

As punishment for a rebellion that happened 74 years before the events of the series the Capitol holds an annual gameshow where families in the districts are forced to send their children between the ages of 12 and 18 into a reaping where two of them will be randomly selected and forced into an arena where they fight to the death until there’s only one remaining.

The series is known for its strong political themes, especially statements on usage of media to control an audience, and how we can become so disconnected from the truth that we can’t see what’s actually happening. One of the best examples of this happening in the series is the Games itself, Capitol citizens willingly and excitedly watch as children slaughter each other.

There’s tons of others, but this is one that really stands out to me.

Introduction

Coriolanus Snow is the President of Panem in the series “The Hunger Games”, he’s the main antagonist of the series and is known for his white roses and his knack for poisoning people he doesn’t like. Snow is a very two faced character, on one hand he acts very charming, when in actuality he is a manipulative power seeking man.

A few characters that I’ll be talking about alongside Snow include:

Katniss Everdeen, the main character of the series, a victor of the 74th hunger games and the person who helps start the rebellion. Snow met her officially after Katniss won her first games, where he proceeded to threaten to kill the people she loved if she didn’t put out the flames of the rebellion that had started when she had attempted to save herself and her district partner Peeta in the games.

Peeta Mellark, Katniss’s love interest and district partner, and also the second victor of the 74th hunger games. A baker known for his extreme kindness, he’s a constant ray of sunshine throughout the series. Despite his sweet personality, he has an insane ability to sway an audience. This becomes very useful when so much in the hunger games relies on audiences and propaganda.

Motive

Snow’s ultimate motive is to remain in power over Panem and the districts, and he will do anything to keep it.

As seen in Snow’s prequel novel, he was always an ambitious and manipulative person, but his evil was heavily influenced by his mentor Dr. Gaul. She believed that the Capitol should have absolute rule over everything and all of the districts, and they would use the Hunger Games as a distraction against any potential district rebellion. He carries her teachings with him for the rest of his life.

Snow's impact

Snow’s impact mostly lies in his character, he was such a two-faced person and that was really interesting to see. One of the most prevalent scenes showing this was one of Snow and Katniss’s first interactions. He’s waiting for her when she gets home, and he proceeds to tell her that the districts are uprising and that he’s counting on her to settle things down during her and Peeta’s victory tour through the districts. Or he’ll kill everyone she loves.

Katniss’s mom walks in with a plate of cookies, and his tone shifts instantly. He becomes very pleasant and accepts the cookies while cracking small jokes.

There’s two completely different sides to him. There’s a dark, ugly side that condones killing children and will do anything for his own gain, and there’s a manipulative charming side that he uses as a mask for the uglier parts.

This is even shown in his character design. He’s known for smelling like highly perfumed roses with a lingering scent of blood behind it. Just like his personality, it’s an attempt to use something pleasant to cover up what he truly is.

Negan Smith

Series Rundown

The Walking Dead is a television series that’s based off of a comic of the same name. Although the story is nowhere near the same as the comics so it might as well be it’s own thing.

The series follows Rick Grimes and his attempt to navigate the apocolypse with a group of survivors. Him and his group go through different eras throughout the series, with people being lost all around, but they still always find a way to stick together and maintain insane levels of trust.

Rick Grimes’ first goal in the series was to find his family, and he did find them, and then he created a much bigger one.

Introduction

Negan is the leader of a group named "The Saviors", he is the overarching villain of season 7 and 8 and is known for his barbed wire bat that he calls Lucille. He runs his group with 8 leutinents, the most notable one being Simon. The people underneath him looked to him like a god, always showing him the utmost respect and trusting him to protect them.

The characters I will be including other then Negan include:

Rick (The leader of Alexandria and the main character of The Walking Dead)

Daryl (One of Rick's closest friends, known for his loyalty and devotion to Rick and his friends)

Glenn (A fan favourite. He's the moral compass of the group and generally gets along with everyone.)

Abraham (Extremely strong man with a temper. He's one of the biggest fighters in the group. Although everybody in this list is)

Side note: There will be a small section on Simon at the end because he was also an amazing villain who greatly impacted the characters in the show, albeit not as much as Negan did.

Motive

Negan had a fairly concrete philosophy, and despite the show messing it up sometimes it always remained pretty consistent. People are a resource.

The Saviors relied heavily on communities outputting resources for them. The Sanctuary (The Savior’s main base), despite being very militarized and well protected, was a horrible place to cultivate crops and maintain livestock. We find this out after The Savior war when all the crops are constantly dying while they try to produce for themselves. So, because of this, they would take over other communities and force them to produce the things they needed. For example, the community Hilltop focused mainly on farming, so The Savior’s got fresh produce from them. This repeated with other known and unknown communities in their general area.

Because of the nature of how The Savior’s survived, Negan believed that mindless killing was not productive. How can people provide for The Saviors if they’re dead? Instead of razing half a community in an effort to make them surrender, he chose to do this instead: when his group finds a new group, they kill one as an example, and leave the rest to work for them. He used fear instead of force, and in general, it worked very well. We’ll come back to this soon.

Negan's impact

In my opinion, Negan had the biggest impact on both the characters and the audience in The Walking Dead.

By season 6, Rick’s group was extremely confident, riding the high of their brutality in season 5. After wiping out a group of Saviors, including one who had told Rick that he was Negan, they thought the fight was over.

They were wrong.

The famous scene known as “The lineup” happens. The Saviors trap the group and force them to kneel before Negan, who reveals that his group all take on his identity, and so he was in fact not dead and was the real deal. He kills one of Rick’s strongest group members, Abraham, as his example, then Glenn, who was a fan favourite and the one of the most stable members of Rick’s group as punishment after Daryl, Rick's best friend and right hand man, lashes out.

This moment completely breaks Rick. For the first time in the series he’s completely hopeless. To his group's frustration he remains like this up until the Savior war hits. I will never fault him for this though, Rick felt responsible for the people who died and was terrified of it happening again.

That’s what makes Negan so impactful. He shattered Rick’s group's sense of security in a swift, brutal sweep. No villain had ever done that before him.