7a Baddest Discworld Bad Guys
They sneer, they stab, they laugh maniacally… and sometimes they stare through you as if you’re worthless. Terry Pratchett is great at many things, but crafting horrifying villains is one of his superpowers. While he has certainly introduced many memorable female villains to the Disc — the Duchess of Lancre, Lily Weatherwax and the Queen of the Faeries for example — and many iconic antagonists that are entirely (or mostly) ungendered such as the Auditors, the Gonne, and the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions, there is something deeply and deliciously sinister about his male villains. What do many of them have in common? Competence, ruthlessness and a talent for admin.
Rub your hands together in glee, it’s time for an octagonal listicle!
1. Mister Teatime
SOME PEOPLE WILL DO ANYTHING FOR THE FASCINATION OF DOING IT, said Death. OR FOR FAME. OR BECAUSE THEY SHOULDN’T. (Hogfather)
He kidnaps and tortures the Tooth Fairy in order to kill the Hogfather. Need I say more?
Oh, there’s more.
Pratchett has a genius for creating the physically unsettling villain, often conveyed through the reactions of a point of view character. In the case of Mister Teatime (pronounced Teh-a-tim-eh), he’s an attractive young man, all fair curls and a charming smile… but deeply disturbing eyes, one replaced by glass and the other off-white with a sharp, narrow pupil.
It’s laid out at length that assassins in Ankh-Morpork are not necessarily evil in themselves, merely doing a job… and yet Teatime is one of the more dramatic exceptions to that rule, a man who takes a cruel joy in developing and wielding his deadly skills.
It’s no surprise that such a man would be eager to take on a professional challenge like killing the Hogfather, but it’s more telling that his colleagues are eager to get rid of him, because his inherent creepiness and love of murder are giving the rest of the assassins a bad name.
Susan, meanwhile, knows exactly what Mister Teatime is: he might have started out as an enthusiastic murderer with a side of extraordinary hubris, but by the end of Hogfather he has transformed himself into a storybook monster deserving of the governess’s weapon of choice: a cast-iron poker.
2. Dios
Teppic realised that the high priest was, indeed, truly mad. It was the rare kind of madness caused by being yourself for so long that habits of sanity have etched themselves into the brain. (Pyramids)
In the Discworld, true power-hungry evil tends to go hand-in-hand with a willingness to do a lot of admin. This is never more true than for Dios, High Priest of the Djel, who has absorbed all the ruling power of its Royal Family simply by outliving them all and managing each new king with frightening efficiency. For seven thousand years, one day at a time. He actually (kind of) means well, but that does not make him any less terrifying, especially when he makes it very clear that he values concepts like “the kingdom” or “big pyramids” above the wellbeing of all actual humans, living or dead.
Dios’ punishment, ultimately, is to do it all over again without learning from his mistakes… and it’s hard to be sure whether this is a punishment for him, or for the kingdom.
3. Edward d’Eath
It was said later that he came under bad influences at this stage. But the secret of the history of Edward d’Eath was that he came under no outside influences at all, unless you count all those dead kings. He just came under the influence of himself. (Men at Arms)
The true villainy of Edward d’Eath is spelled out in the opening scenes of Men in Arms — it’s not his intention to overthrow the Patrician that makes him so very evil, it’s the meticulous nature with which he plans a cold-blooded crime, from no motivation other than thinking he knows better than anyone else about how Ankh-Morpork should be ruled.
The book is full of nasty people — one of the subplots follows Sam Vimes as he starts socialising with the posher end of society and discovers to his horror how confident they are in their opinions that everyone else in the city is worth less than they are — but Edward’s aristocratic nastiness goes above and beyond.
Ultimately, he doesn’t get to go through with his crimes, as his plot is taken over by someone even more sinister, and for equally selfish reasons. But Edward deserves a place on this list for the sheer casualness with which he approaches concepts such as murder, treason and the torture of servants.
4. Vorbis
It takes a long time for people like Vorbis to die. They leave echoes in history. (Small Gods)
Yet another admin-themed Discworld villain, Vorbis represents the kind of evil that appears on the surface to be perfectly reasonable, because it’s calm and efficient. He doesn’t start out in a particularly senior position in the hierarchy of the Church of Om, and in the early pages of Small Gods, his villainy is drip-fed to the reader rather than explored through his actions.
And yet, every time Vorbis appears, somehow he carries with him such an intense aura of cruelty that it feels like the reader should be screaming “HE’S BEHIND YOU” at Brutha.
By the time Vorbis reveals his terrifying villainy (the reveals keep coming, like the endless handkerchief trick, every time you think Vorbis has reached a pinnacle of wickedness, he whips off another layer) it’s not especially surprising, because we know he was bad from the start.
Vorbis is evil at a personal level, absolutely. He’s also evil at an institutional level. He is the definition of the wrong hands one does not want power to fall into — and when he’s around, everyone else gets that little bit more sinister too.
The worst thing about Vorbis isn’t that he’s evil, but that he makes good people do evil. He turns people into things like himself. You can’t help it. You catch it off him. (Small Gods)
One of the themes of Small Gods is that everyone (except Brutha of the superhuman compassion) is basically terrible, especially the gods themselves — Om, one of our protagonists, has been at best a neglectful god, at worst a thoroughly selfish and destructive one, and is only humbled because of his circumstances, rather than through personal growth, until very late in the story.
Vorbis, meanwhile, brings out the worst in every character we meet, regardless of what ‘side’ they are on. Even when the book is pointing out everyone else’s flaws, Vorbis reigns supreme.
HE WAS A MURDERER, said Death. AND A CREATOR OF MURDERERS. A TORTURER. WITHOUT PASSION. CRUEL. CALLOUS. COMPASSIONLESS.
“Yes. I know. He’s Vorbis,” said Brutha. (Small Gods)
5. Carcer
He smiled all the time, in a cheerful chirpy sort of way, and he acted like the kind of rascal who made a dodgy living selling gold watches that go green after a week. And he appeared to be convinced, utterly convinced, that he never did anything really wrong. He’d stand there amid the carnage, blood on his hands and stolen jewellery in his pocket, and with an expression of injured innocence declare, ‘Me? What did I do?’ (Night Watch)
Sam Vimes represents competent crime-solving in the Discworld, and so it’s hardly surprising that he gets to collar plenty of great and terrible villains along the way. Of all his nemeses, none chills the bone quite like Carcer, the “stone-cold killer. With brains.”
Carcer has all the classic nastiness of a basic crook with no moral centre, but like all the best villains it’s his own sense of self-importance that makes him truly dangerous — he’s the hero of his own story, and he thinks he’s in the right.
This would be bad enough without a supernatural advantage, but a touch of accidental time travel puts Carcer on the path of being able to do serious damage to Ankh-Morpork’s past as well as its future … and when basic villainy isn’t enough, he becomes the most dangerous thing of all: a bent copper rising through the ranks, with the potential to destroy everything Vimes loves.
We’ve seen Vimes desperate before, and beaten-down, and even quite thoroughly broken. But Night Watch is the first time we really see him afraid, and it’s Carcer who inspires that fear.
What makes Carcer dangerous? He doesn’t think rules apply to him.
6. Reacher Gilt
No one was sorry for anything because no living creature had done anything wrong; bad things had happened by spontaneous generation in some weird, chilly, geometrical otherworld, and ‘were to be regretted’ (another bastard phrase that’d sell itself to any weasel in a tight corner). (Going Postal)
Reacher Gilt: such a classic bad guy that the actor who played him on TV literally described him as “dastardly.” While several classic Discworld villains emerge from privilege, administration or pure criminal/homicidal impulse, Gilt is a corporate bad guy with a mastery of weasel words. We’ve seen the danger of profiteering in the Discworld before, such as CMOT Dibber’s phase as a maniacal kinema executive in Moving Pictures, but Reacher Gilt takes it to a whole new level.
Gilt is the embodiment of the kind of empire-building, world-swallowing, spin-doctoring billionaire CEO toxic capitalism that honestly is even more of a social issue now than it was twenty years ago, when Going Postal was originally published. (Just because corporate greed is at stratospheric levels in 2024 doesn’t mean no one was thinking about it in 2004 — case in point, Terry Pratchett.)
When Reacher Gilt enters a room, no one doubts that the swaggering, piratical figure before them is a villain, but it’s the creeping effect on people’s lives where Gilt really shows his sinister side: the Clacks workers who are so stretched thin they can barely function at the end of a work day, the mysterious and convenient corpses that have been stacking up in the corners, even the slow and torturous sabotage (one might say, attempted homicide) of the Post Office itself…
Then there’s the personal effect: the crushing of young innovators and dreamers, the murder of loved ones, the theft and piracy of beloved family businesses, transforming them into single soulless corporations that don’t actually function nearly as well any more…
All in the name of profit.
What’s perhaps most interesting about Reacher Gilt’s villainy is that he’s not the most important villain in the book — our hero, Moist Von Lipwig, spends most of Going Postal coming to realise the consequences of his own past crimes, processing the guilt, and attempting to atone — Gilt exists, therefore, as the other kind of villain, the one Moist can comfort himself that he is not. The kind of villain who does not accept any form of culpability at all, not even when it might save his life.
A great villain reflects the hero in some way, the two of them existing in a duality of Good vs Evil… or in the cast of Moist and Gilt, Redeemable vs Irredeemable Crook.
7. Count De Magpyr
The Count was clearly a fair-minded man. Anyone who didn't think so deserved to die. (Carpe Jugulum)
As we see from the recurring Discworld motif of ‘villains who are excellent at admin,’ one of the worst things a bad guy can be is efficient.
Malice is bad enough, but malice combined with competence? Devastating.
In Cape Jugulum, the Lancre Witches are faced with Count De Magpyr, who has exchanged the romanticism of past vampire tradition for a more “modern” corporate model.
The town of Escrow, near Don’tgonearthecastle, is the model of the Count’s bureaucratic approach to bloodsucking, and it’s terrifying: not only because the vampires have rendered themselves immune to their traditional weaknesses, but because the townspeople have been convinced that letting the vampires control them is for their own good.
Under the rule of the creepily reasonable Count De Magpyr, vampires have been rebranded as benevolent. The humans under his thrall have accepted a life of dull grey servitude in exchange for not being randomly terrorised. It’s not… a wonderful exchange.
“People as things, that’s where it starts.” Granny Weatherwax.
7a. Vetinari
Vetinari is not a bad guy.
(But we’re pretty sure he’s not a good person.)
No one actually likes him being the tyrannical ruler of Ankh-Morpork, but from the highest ranked aristocracy to the lowest-born street rats, it is generally agreed by all but the most selfish (eg. Edward d’Eath in Men at Arms) that literally anyone else in the same position would be worse.
(The question, of course, is whether anyone else will ever have that opportunity.)
Vetinari makes the city function, he thwarts chaos, and he is right nine times out of ten.
(You’ll never hear about the tenth time.)
Vetinari embodies many of the elements that are generally found in Discworld villainy: he’s good at admin, he has an unsettling physical appearance, he antagonises and thwarts many of our heroes (including/especially Sam Vimes, a man literally put on the Disc in case any tyrants need to be resisted or overthrown), he wears a lot of black, he is deeply confident in his own irreplaceability, and he sends a chill down the spine of most people who are ushered into his presence.
Vetinari kills with impunity, he relishes his own power, and he was once played by actor Charles Dance.
He’s the baddest bad guy of them all.
And yet.
Just as Ankh-Morpork the city accepted the competent, efficient and disturbing rule of the Patrician, we the reader accept him as a comforting presence. We relish his ability to creep out our heroes, while knowing deep down that his are not the bad hands power falls into, but the good hands in which it can be trusted.
Not that he’s good.
If we even know what ‘good’ means.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Ethical Quandary of Havelock Vetinari is that the books keep questioning whether or not he should be in power. It’s established that monarchy is always bad even when some kings are good individuals (as Vimes explains in Men at Arms, the entire system around the king also has to be good in order for the system to remain uncorrupted)… meanwhile there’s nothing democratic or fair about how the Patrician seized power, and continues to hold it. He might as well be a monarch himself, though he is careful not to wear a crown.
His competence keeps revolutionaries at bay.
His efficiency means that good people like Sam Vimes are willing to make sacrifices to keep him in power.
His openness to change and development allows for criminals like Moist Von Lipwig to become good citizens, and criminals like Reacher Gilt to be thoroughly disappeared.
He’s good at his job.
(Don’t forget, being good at your job is a strong sign of villainy.)
We the readers never got to learn what happened to Ankh-Morpork after Vetinari’s rule ended. Honestly, I’m not sure anyone wanted to know what happened next. It’s comforting to have him there, watching the wheels spin.
Perhaps this means we’re all part of the problem.
Tansy Rayner Roberts is a Doctor of Classics, a Doctor Who podcaster, and an author of many science fiction and fantasy books, as well as the essay collection Pratchett’s Women. You can find her at tansyrr.com.