Most Evil Fictional Character: Frieza vs. Johan Liebert

Board 8

Board 8 » Most Evil Fictional Character: Frieza vs. Johan Liebert
Welcome to the 2023 edition of Most Evil Fictional Character, a single-elimination tournament to determine the most evil fictional character of all time!

Here's the bracket:

https://www.bracketmaker.com/tmenu.cfm?tid=477621&tclass=

And here's the discussion topic:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/80568652

And here are the rules:

-First and foremost, YOU MUST BOLD YOUR VOTE FOR IT TO COUNT . The reason for this is that these topics encourage a lot of discussion and debate, and it helps me to distinguish a vote from simple discussion if all votes are bolded. So, I state again, ALL VOTES MUST BE BOLDED FOR THEM TO COUNT . I reserve the right to be lenient in early topics if people just aren't getting it, but for the most part, IF YOUR VOTE ISN'T BOLDED, IT WON'T COUNT.

-You must vote for which of the two characters you honestly believe to be the more evil of the two. You can determine this via any method you like, use your own morals and judgement, read all the arguments made to determine your choice, or however you choose to make your pick, but you must only vote for the one you truly believe is the most evil. This isn't a death battle, or a popularity contest. You're voting ONLY for the most evil character out of the two choices presented.

-While on that subject, remember that because this isn't a death battle or a fighting tournament, do your absolute best to consider the two characters as if their power levels were equal (either the weaker character brought up to the level of the strongest, or vice versa, or both if you want to consider both possibilities). Therefore, just because, for example, one of the characters blew up a planet and the other one merely kicked a puppy, doesn't necessarily mean the planet killer is more evil than the puppy kicker. Consider the characters as if they have the exact same capabilities and what they might do in that scenario.

-You can make any arguments, debates, etc. you want in this topic. Discussion is STRONGLY encouraged, a fun debate about which of the two characters is most evil is exactly what these topics are for. No insults or flaming, keep things civil even if you disagree. Also, no vote rallying, if you want to encourage people to vote for your character you need to at least make some semblance of an argument as to why, even if it's just "Character X did (dastardly thing), I can't believe no one's voting for them!"

-Voting will continue for 24 hours. If there's a tie, there will be a new 24 hour topic. This will continue indefinitely until winner is determined.

- YOU MUST BOLD YOUR VOTE FOR IT TO COUNT.

-

The following write-ups will contain untagged SPOILERS for Dragonball Z/Super and Monster.

FRIEZA

Frieza is a major antagonist in the Dragonball anime and manga.

After inheriting Cold's imperialist army and rising to power as the emperor of Universe 7 at a young age, Frieza quickly established himself as a ruthless tyrant, feared across the universe for his unparalleled cruelty and power. After one of the races he subjugated, the Saiyans, attempted to revolt against him, the tyrant retaliated by laughing maniacally with delight as he prepared a Supernova to annihilate their home planet of Vegeta. The attack consumed Bardock and some of his men as it buried itself deep beneath the planet's surface resulting in a massive explosion, eradicating nearly every Saiyan. Frieza tends to handle most situations with a systematic approach. He commonly utilizes dark humor, making twisted jokes and tasteless mockery of his foes before killing them. Frieza is fully aware of his reputation for brutality and makes no effort to deny it, but instead revels in it as evidenced by his introduction to the Namekians. Likewise, he has shown great anger at the idea of his cruel deeds being undone, such as the revival of all his previous victims from the Dragon Balls. Frieza can be best summed up as an intelligent, composed (for the most part), yet extraordinarily sadistic and completely heartless sociopath. He has absolutely no qualms with slaughtering his own forces, no matter how loyal to him, simply for being in his way, as seen from when he destroyed Planet Vegeta despite most of his men being within the trajectory, as well as his reason in the Japanese version for executing a soldier before deciding to personally deal with Future Trunks. In addition, when executing Tagoma by shooting him out into space, he also made no attempt at activating the secondary window to save his forces from being sucked into the vacuum of space. He also reacts violently to criticism or if his plans either fail or if his pride is abashed. At his core, Frieza relishes glory, power, agony, dominance, control, and destruction, as shown in his enjoyment of making his enemies suffer before he kills them. He is one of the most sadistic and megalomaniacal beings in the known universes, without any sympathetic or redeeming traits. When Kikono states that the Frieza Force are criminals, Frieza retorts by saying that they merely overtake planets to sell them to those who need a new planet, viewing the interactions as transactional and demonstrating how he makes excuses for his malicious crimes and feels no responsibility for his actions.

vs.

JOHAN LIEBERT

Johan Liebert is the primary antagonist of the anime and manga Monster .

Johan Liebert is a ruthless, emotionless, and psychopathic serial killer whose life was saved by Kenzo Tenma as a child. He is also the older twin of his sister Nina Fortner. Johan has stated that his one true goal is to be the last one alive when the world endsbut upon rediscovering a children's book that appeared to play a major role in his past, he instead set his mind on committing the "perfect suicide", i.e. dying without leaving behind any evidence of his existence (with the possible exception of Dr. Tenma's memories of him, in order to destroy Tenma's faith in humanity). His wanton cruelty and depthless malice do not appear to be humanized by traits or drives such as hatred, vengeance, lust, a point to prove, or even sadism; being fully aware of his nature and devoid of any need to justify himself, his actions are about as reasonless, emotionless, and nihilistic as he isthus possibly rendering his evil as literally pure and undiluted as can be, given his lack of any discernible gain from it or even a consistent identity. It is perhaps for this reason that he earns such condemnations as monster , devil , vampire , alien and for which Schuwald claims to have seen Hell itself in his eyes. The clear psychopathic tendencies he exhibits as a childalong with the hellish fate he inflicts upon the child-experimenting orphanage Kinderheim 511, even prior to most of his past traumasclearly prove that he is far from a victim of circumstance, given the premeditated and calculated murders of his foster families; a former director of said orphanage, Hartmann, admits himself that not even such an inhumane place could have crafted a "masterpiece" like Johan. His most consistent belief is that all life is insignificant, equal only in death. He possesses an equal capacity for psychological torture and can persuade nearly anybody to kill either others or themselves; whenever possible, however, Johan will subject his victims to the worst possible suffering and loss rather than killing them himself, which often drives them to suicide anyhowsuch as when he forces Helmut Wolf to watch his wife, children, and many friends and acquaintances all die one after the other, reducing him to a broken and paranoid wretch, despite he and Anna having been saved by Wolf from a near-death experience. Johan has expressed a similar lack of gratitude to Dr. Tenma, who had also saved his life, by poisoning his boss and coworkers, thereby framing Tenma for the murders due to his severe demotion prior to this.
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Frieza
Johan Liebert
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Congrats to azuarc on being really good at predicting stuff
Frieza's such a weirdly potent combination for this. Because you have this guy who is so actively against the idea of "good" that his personalized Hell is being cocooned in constant positivity and love. Keeping in mind that another cartoonishly evil character (Dabura) was turned into an overly romantic good guy with, like, less than a week of similar exposure, Frieza survived at least a decade of this with his hate only growing stronger. And THEN there's the genocides and the racism and the torture and wanting to raze cultures to the ground so he can wish to be a little bit taller. But it's all entirely self-serving; Frieza isn't so much evil for evil's sake as he is evil for his own sake, which incidentally loves doing evil.

Meanwhile Johan is significantly more personal in the amount of spite he's willing to give to break one person due to an act of kindness. He's motivated by ideology to do horrible things in a completely calculated manner for the sake of fulfilling that. However, due to that, the actual torture that he inflicts on people is a lot lesser than other characters in this tournament, as everything is tied into a more nihilistic ideology. It is less him extracting personal joy from pain and more believing that pain is the natural end state of humanity... with the exception of Tenma who gets to feel years upon years of futility in a self-destructive quest to stop it.

So it's getting me to the weird point of asking if it's more evil to indulge in being evil and committing to it for your personal joy, or if the simple state of being a creature of evil willing to ignore everything that relates you to your fellow living creatures to inflict it is worse.

Have to think about it, because I don't think a vote of "Frieza, unless you're Kenzo Tenma specifically, in which case Johan" would count for much!
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Frieza
All the stars in the sky are waiting for you.
Johan Liebert
I've decided to put my fears behind me. I'm not going back.
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Johan
I just decided to change this sig.
Blaaaaaaargh azuarc
Yeah this is a tough one.

Johan, if he scales properly given Frieza's power, seems like the winner here. However given a lack of an apparent driving force that would make him want to go galactic, we need to know well of his philosophy, because otherwise I think Frieza wins due to having examples where he enacts planetwide genocides and such whereas it is unclear Johan necessarily would want to. He definitely seems intelligent enough to devise a way to cause widespread suffering with more power and that point it comes down to drive and likelihood.

His write-up to me could go either way and I don't know enough about Monster. The big thing that makes me lean Frieza is

instead set his mind on committing the "perfect suicide", i.e. dying without leaving behind any evidence of his existence (with the possible exception of Dr. Tenma's memories of him, in order to destroy Tenma's faith in humanity)

With Frieza's power this seems like an achievable goal without necessarily even eradicating one entire planet, and when enacted, that's the end of his evil. Still evil to be sure but has a ceiling.
No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!
Johan
dilateDChemist
Last minute changes killed my bracket - still would've got destroyed by azuarc
Frieza

I feel like, if I had both of them in a room and they were trying to one-up each other on "the most evil thing you could do to a person", Frieza would continue to escalate infinitely for his own satisfaction while, at some point, Johan would feel that a maximum level of human suffering was achieved and would want to move onto something else.

It really is just a debate of a force wanting to be pure evil versus something that is invariably a force of it. I think that the scale that Frieza operates on simply allows him to think of more ways to be pointlessly cruel, whereas Johan in the same circumstance would inevitably settle on a "perfect" solution.
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Frieza
Johan
Bells, bells, bells!
Johan Liebert
Call from demon - with dark power to tempt your mind, very proud of the power. Destroy the firing shot!
Frieza seems right to me
No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!
Frieza
It's Reyn Time.
Frieza
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Frieza
Congrats to 2020 GotD Guru champ azuarc!
Frieza
E come vivo? Vivo!
Frieza
Give 'em hell Ukraine.
frieza arguments have convinced me
Johan
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Leaning Johan
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"There comes a time in every man's or woman's life where they have to make **** up to cover their ass." - Hazama
Close match
frieza

his turning into a gaffe character will give the edge to a potential couple of others against him in the future but i still think frieza is the more evil character overall in this matchup
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Board 8 » Most Evil Fictional Character: Frieza vs. Johan Liebert