I want to get a symposium going on bad characters. A word on what I mean:

For a start, I'm looking for fictional characters, NOT characters we wish were fictional. A ?bad? character is the primary opponent of the protagonist. So yes, I?m looking for your most memorable antagonists. Maybe book, movie, or television. And let?s throw in games, which I?m pretty ignorant on. I don?t care if it?s high literature or low. Name your favorite bad gal or guy and tell a bit about her or him and ?why? and whether it made the book worth reading or the show worth watching.

One of my faves:

From the TV show ?Wild Wild West? (the original starring Robert Conrad and Ross Martin), Dr. Miguelito Loveless, played by the great Michael Dunn. The character had boundless drive and imagination, was decades ahead of his time technologically, and an abiding hatred for the series hero. He invariably escaped at the end of an episode, and could be counted on to reappear. Especially interesting, was that although he was a ?little person?, this did not figure as a plot point, other than that James West could usually peal away one or two of the lovelies who accompanied the evil Doctor (maybe a source of his abiding hatred). Although he was a bad guy out of my youth, I was especially intrigued to learn many years later that there was a brilliant 19th Century scientist named Charles Proteus Steinmetz, who suffered from dwarfism and other deformities which gave him a diminutive stature and nonsymmetrical structure. I wondered if some well-read writer had used him as inspiration, but apparently the Loveless character was NOT a derivative of Steinmetz, but it captures the imagination in retrospect.