Top 5 Wednesday: Favorite Bookish Villains

Top 5 Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Sam @ Thoughts on Tomes and created by Lainey @ Ginger Reads Lainey. You can check out the group’s Goodreads page for this month’s topics!

This week’s topic is our favorite villains, because who doesn’t love a good villain every now and then? Also I’ll throw in here that Sam specifically asked us to try and NOT include any villains from Harry Potter which is understandable because I think we could all rapid fire name off 5 great Harry Potter villains, am I right?

So with HP off the table it forced me to think a little harder about my favorite book villains and so I mostly have a list of morally gray “villains” who aren’t necessarily 100% evil but are still the bad guys. If there’s one thing I love it’s a complex antagonist that makes me sympathize with them a teeny tiny bit.

***** Spoilers for “Gone Girl” below! You have been warned!*****

 

5.) Amy Dunne – “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn

So don’t take this as me actually liking Amy herself so much as appreciating how diabolical and purely evil she is. I think as much as we all hate Amy we can agree that she is a good villain with loads of complexity and smarts.

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4.) Cheshire – “Alice” by Christina Henry

(No he isn’t a cat in this book but I wanted to have a picture…)

While Cheshire isn’t exactly a villain in this book he isn’t a good guy either, he’s sort of in a gray area which is still good enough for me to consider him kind of, sort of a villain. He has a twisted sense of humor and ways of helping along his own agenda, he’s a very interesting and complex character.

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3.) Talis – “The Scorpion Rules” Erin Bow

So Talis is probably one of the most hilarious villains ever and I couldn’t help but love him. He’s the AI that took over the world to ensure we all have peace by keeping children hostage, etc etc. He’s a pretty complex character that has his reasons but as I said he’s a favorite of mine due to his hilarity alone.

(I picture him as Chris Pine in Star Trek above)

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2.) AIDAN – “Illuminae” by Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman

Once again this is a kind of gray area, while AIDAN isn’t inherently good he isn’t all bad either…he’s an AI that kind of went a little crazy and did bad things but also had his reasoning behind it. IT’S COMPLICATED, OKAY? Read the book! Either way he’s definitely one of my favorite “villains” because his narrative was so interesting and he developed a lot throughout the progression of the story.

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1.) Victor Vale – “Vicious” by V.E. Schwab

Now I will say this Victor Vale isn’t technically the villain of this story but he also kind of is…..it’s very complicated to explain if you haven’t read “Vicious”. The characters here are very much in one huge gray area, Victor plays the part of a super-powered villain but he isn’t a bad guy and he doesn’t have deranged illusions about it either.

Definitely my all time favorite “villain” and sorry to those of you who haven’t read this book yet because it’s really hard to explain what exactly Victor is! You all that have read this probably get where I’m coming from though.

Have you read any of these books? Did you love their villains too?

Who are some of your favorite (non Harry Potter) villains?

How about some of your favorite gray/ morally ambiguous characters?

Let me know in the comments and feel free to link up your T5W as well!