Complete Monster/Sonic the Hedgehog



""I can taste your terror, child. All that anxiety and doubt... It's delicious. Give in to your fear. Flee screaming and I'll let you live." —Infinite taunting the Avatar in Sonic Forces."

Just like Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog has also ran into his fair share of especially twisted nasties from time to time.

Video Games

 * Shadow the Hedgehog's Black Doom counts. Doom's invasion actions such as sending his army to kill millions of innocents, destroying an entire city and everyone in it, including most of his own army, with the Eclipse Cannon, and spreads a toxic gas that paralyzes Sonic and friends to make them easier targets seem too similar to terrorism tactics for comfort. His plan is also especially gruesome: have his armies get strong by devouring every sentient being on the planet and terraform it to better suit his kind. Having visited the Earth for thousands of years, he made contact with the late Gerald Robotnik 50 years prior to the series, agreeing to a bargain where Black Doom’s cells were used to create the Ultimate Lifeform, the future Shadow the Hedgehog, who would then deliver the Chaos Emeralds so that the Black Arms can use Chaos Control to arrive on Earth and supposedly bring prosperity to humanity, only for Gerald to soon realized that he was lied to when he discovered what Black Doom's actual intentions were. While he does pet Shadow, this is more because he needs Shadow on his side than genuine affection. And it's also heavily implied that the Black Arms are being mind-controlled, if not just near-mindless anyway. Meaning that any Pet the Dog moment with them (and, by extension, everything he does) is purely self-serving. He constantly preaches about the evils of humanity and how they don’t deserve to be free, acting as if they would be better served as a food source for the Black Arms, but he undermines even this when he shows no regret in killing his own Mooks or throwing away his own “son” when they outlive their usefulness. And unlike most villians in this series, he doesn't even have a dry sense of humor. Something even Mephiles, who's basically the DEVIL, has.
 * Erazor Djinn from Sonic and The Secret Rings is a malevolent genie with aspirations of godhood and world domination. Having been forced to grant the wishes of 1000 people as punishment for his crimes prior to the game, Erazor harbored a hatred for the creator of the Arabian Nights and sought to escape the storybook world. To that end, Erazor began to destroy and absorb the pages of the book, thus all life within them, to grow in power. When Shahra brings Sonic into the storybook to stop him, Erazor uses his Flame of Judgment curse to force Sonic into finding the Seven World Rings for him before the flame kills Sonic. He also commits other attrocites such as attempting to assassinate King Shahryar, summoning the Ifrit demon to burn the remaining pages of the book, and condemning King Solomon to life as an undead skeleton. When Sonic confronts Erazor at his palace, Erazor reveals his intention was to sacrifice Sonic to gain control of the Seven World Rings and reshape the world in his image. His attempt to kill Sonic is thwarted when Shahra takes the hit for Sonic. Erazor is unmoved by her sacrifice, calling her weak. A smug, self-absorbed sociopath with the cruelty to match his ego, Erazor's transformation into Alf-Wayla-Wa-Layla only reflected the evil within his heart, an evil that reveals him to be one of the vilest villains to ever grace the Sonic franchise.
 * Mephiles the Dark of Soinc 2006 wanted to try and essentially eliminate Time itself, as well as the fact that he killed Sonic the Hedgehog for little reason than to make Elise cry so he could merge with Iblis and thus destroy time itself. Although Sonic got better, it's still quite the Moral Event Horizon. Its also implied that he was part of the reason why Shadow ended up sealed away by humanity as well as an unwilling Omega carrying out the deed (he had some resemblance to Shadow thanks to absorbing his shadow, so its not unreasonable that he would have done deeds that the populace will blame Shadow with), and he manipulated Silver into attempting to kill Sonic with the implied intention of destroying the past. If that's not enough, he also enjoyed the carnage he inflicted. He ranks among the most evil characters in the entire franchise not only because of his motives simply being to wreck and destroy anything and everything he can for no reason other than For the Evulz at best (even Black Doom at least desired to rule over the Galaxy), but also at how frighteningly close he came to succeeding in his goal to destroy everything, heavily damaging the time-space continuum.
 * Ix of Sonic Chronicles also qualifies. We're talking about a guy who rules his people with an iron fist and developed unstoppable weapons and robotic warriors in a bid for global conquest - and he would have gotten away with it had the Argus Event not occured (said event shunted his entire civilization into a parallel dimension whose flow of time isn't parallel with ours and is also a Tailor-Made Prison to other races of similar renown). However long his people have resided in the Twilight Cage wasn't long enough for him to repent, it seems, as once the Nocturnus have developed interdimensional warp devices, he's at it again, and his response to Procurator Shade questioning his motives is to blow her off Angel Island, which gives her suitable enough motivation to change sides. The guy is known to execute dissenters on a whim to boot - Shade, in one conversation, states that she is siding with Sonic and company with the full expectation that Ix will do everything in his power to have her killed. Now tell me the guy isn't a Complete Monster.
 * Infinite of Sonic Forces is the high commander in the Eggman Empire and the primary reason behind the flawless conquest of Earth. Because of his position and power, Infinite took full part in the iron-fisted domination of 99.9% of the world, gleefully eliminating opposition, heroic or civilian, directly or by proxy through his illusions of Shadow, Chaos, Zavok, and Metal Sonic. He makes his introduction beating Sonic into unconsciousness for him to be imprisoned for six months. In the interlude, Infinite murders the Avatar's helpless friends, only sparing the Avatar so Infinite could relish their fear. He's put Omega out of commission from an early point to the finale; tried to kill Silver thanks to his love for ending heroes and instilling despair; and repeatedly tried to kill Sonic after his escape, only to not go through with it when Sonic is deemed not worth the effort. When the Resistance tried a full-scale assault on Metropolis, Infinite uses the Phantom Ruby to reduce them to even greater shambles. Later, he and Eggman try to trap Sonic in "null space", a void of eternal nothingness, to live out the rest of his days. At the climax, Infinite conjures a virtual sun to drop and burn everyone to death. A raving lunatic of a sadist, Infinite envisioned omnicidal designs even as a lowly thief and stands out for the reasons behind his sadism and hatred for weakness.
 * Eggman Nega would certainly qualify; he was destroying the natural balance of the world and doesn't care that either side would be destroyed. He's basically what happens when Eggman cuts the crap and gets down to business. The fact that Nega is his descendant doesn't help; he's willing to essentially destroy everything via paradox. The one time he teamed up with the normal Eggman (who he was ultimately using to further his own goals and planned to do away with), even Eggman was horrified by how evil this guy was.

Comics

 * Dr. Ivo Robotnik from the Archie Sonic series, formerly Julian Kintobor of House Ivo, delights in causing suffering, is fiercely obsessed with power, despises organic life and wishes to wipe it out so that robotics can take it's place, and is willing to deprive creatures of their free will to make them work in his factories. Don't mistake his occasional brief team-ups with the heroes for acts of redemption; he just cooperates with them when he thinks it will be to his own benefit. And his humorous personality doesn't detract from his atrocities either. During the Great War, he intended to test weapons he'd developed for the government on his own people and fled to the Mobians side when he was to be punished for his actions. While acting as Warlord for King Acorn, he secretly captured a peaceful village of Mobian monkeys and utilized them in an early attempt to create mechanical slaves by surgically implanting cybernetics, and of that entire village only one survived the process. Afterwards, he sabotaged the Roboticizer co-developed by Charles Hedgehog just as it was to be used on his wounded brother Jules, making him think he'd turned his own brother into a mindless drone. When Jules' wife discovered the truth, Julian had Jules toss her into the Roboticizer and transformed into a Robian as well, orphaning Sonic and crushing Charles' spirit to the point of retiring from being a Science Minister to running a chili dog stand. He then did similarly to Tails' father Amadeus on the day of his birth, making it seem as though Amadeus could care less for his newborn son and subsequently shattering his wife's heart, throughout which Julian maintained a straight face. Following his betrayal of King Acorn and the takeover of Mobius, Julian made himself into a cyborg and gave himself the name of Dr. Ivo Robotnik. His rise to power saw much natural wildlife and habitats destroyed in order for his pollution factories to be built, including the city of Mobotropolis getting transformed into Robotropolis, and countless families were broken and millions enslaved, with Charles Hedgehog being one such victim after Robotnik seized him at his chili dog stand. Over the course of a decade, Robotnik would wreak havoc upon planet Mobius, destroying the ecology and even pushing more than a few Mobian breeds to the brink of extinction. And just prior to his death, he displayed a deeply disturbing relish at the thought of murdering one of his own kind and was positively gleeful when he got the chance to use his latest and greatest weapon on a fellow overlander.
 * And then there is his alternate reality counterpart and eventual successor, Robo Robotnik, AKA Dr. Eggman, who hailed from a Mobius where he eventually conquered and destroyed everything, wiped out the Freedom Fighters, roboticized himself and then decided to head to Mobius Prime to replace his deceased doppelganger and re-live the thrill of conquering Mobius out of sheer boredom, and so he's pretty much the reigning king of evil on Mobius. Though he's gone through several bouts of Villain Decay, when he comes back, he comes back BIG! His evil is, if anything, even more faux affable than his predecessor, which, if anyting, makes him even more of a Complete Monster. One of the most unnerving of his many, many atrocious acts is the creation of the Egg Grapes: like his old powering of robots with animals, but on a bigger scale. These things sucked the life force from Mobians to power his city. He basically re-eradicated the Echidna race with these things alone. Ten seconds in the process was enough to render Charmy Bee a semi-coherent loon. One of his (now deceased) minions actually asked Eggman if there wasn't some more efficient energy source he could use. He agreed there probably was, but "Where was the fun in that?" Before that, he pretended to be a savior to a displaced group of his race - including his own brother- when he was letting them get fatally poisoned by radiation with the intent of robotosizing them later. He was especially gleeful about doing this to his aforementioned brother. And all the stuff written about his predecessor above? He did almost all of that, too, in his home dimension, and he only ever goes further and further over the Moral Event Horizon from there.
 * Dr Finitevus was once a fellow scientist of a race of prosperous Echidnas, until a freak accident changed his looks and intelligence. Despite his new-found genius, he was declared mentally unstable and was to be put down. He escaped and later sold out his home to Dr. Robotnik. Everyone who had once lived there died later. Furthermore, this guy manipulated four whole sides in a war (Dingoes, Echidnas, and two Dark Legion factions) into providing the fuel for the fire of his master plan, which is basically him deciding the world is hopelessly corrupt and he wants to purify it...in fire. He, to this end, manipulated Dimitri, a head in a jar, into providing secrets and information, and then manipulated Knux into becoming Knuxerjak and starting a battle with his former friends after the whole corruption from power thing. Finitevus' expression at the scene where Knux becomes Enerjak shows he is not only mad, but completely delighted, even as his betrayed allies watch on and denounce him.
 * And he still has the balls to say he's a Well-Intentioned Extremist. Any other Well-Intentioned Extremist would beat him down for degrading their trope. (Although fellow Complete Monsters self-proclaiming themselves as Well-Intentioned Extremists such as Anti-Spiral and Master Xehanort would probably go out for a pub crawl with him.)
 * Dark Enerjak is also from the Archie Sonic series and is the tyrannical ruler of another dimension. He is actually a version of Knuckles the Echidna whose Chaos Powers went out of control, also fueled by a desire to make the world a better place. While he started out noble, he gradually went more and more insane as time went on, before he considered everyone an enemy. Among his atrocities are: the sinking of an entire continent, likely causing countless deaths; the destruction of several enemy cities, such as Station Square, as punishment for their defiance; and the capture of his strongest opponents and ripping their soul out - victims including Sonic, Shadow, Tails, Amy, Sally, and just about all the villains, including the previously-mentioned Eggman and Finitevus. As if to re-affirm his evil, you get a full shot of many of his more prominent victims after he demonstrates the process on his newest captive. He turns the souls into robotic slaves known as "Prelates" with his power. His soulmate was one of his victims, and he made sure not to use her soul to form a Prelate until the final battle...he summoned her to fight their daughter, much to said daughter's disbelief. He also announced how it would be "unfortunate" to suck his daughter's soul out too, showing he's far gone. Upon getting his power taken away, he pretends to be sane again, hoping his daughter will give it back. Fortunately, she's wise to his true nature and promptly shatters the very sword that makes it possible to transfer such great power between individuals.
 * Another is General Kage Von Stryker, the leader of the Eggman-backed Dingo Regime. After ousting his father from power, Kage led his people in conquering Angel Island, imprisoning the Echidnas in what were clearly concentration camps, which led to countless deaths. The one good thing to come of Knuckles becoming Enerjak (not to be confused with Dark Enerjak above) was that he atomized this bastard and wiped his city off the map. And that's not all, as he personally tortured Knuckles's father for the location of the Master Emerald, tried to wipe out the last echidna village on two separate occasions, and during the second attack, he boasted that he had crushed more Echidnas under his boot than he could even remember. While like Helmut, Kage also bore a deep hatred for the echidnas, unlike his father, Kage just wanted to flat out Kill 'Em All.
 * Minor villain Hunter's entire deal was hunting down certain specimens of Mobian, as his name suggests. He debuted trying to do just this to Knuckles. This would make him a standard nasty piece of work, but then Hunter revealed that not only did he hunt down Mobians, but he'd also claim their severed heads as trophies. Working with Eggman, Hunter became a gleeful participant in the genocide of the Echidna and other Angel Island inhabitants, capturing droves of poor souls to be sent to the Egg Grape Chambers to perish in a slow, horrible fashion by having the very life drained from them. This put Hunter beyond the pale, establishing him as truly an honorless, irredeemable scumbag.
 * Dr. Ivo Robotnik from (British) Sonic the Comic has signs of being this, possibly being even WORSE than his Archie comics counterpart! He manages to take over all of Mobius (while Archie's version only took one city at first and was seen slowly expanding) over just a single year (because Sonic was trapped in another dimension), implicitly commiting atrocities similar to his Archie counterparts or even worse (at many points, you can see him eating meat, and as all animals on Mobius are humanlike...), and instead of teaming up with the heroes to help stop a greater threat and protect his rule, he decides to lure Chaos (who's also a Complete Monster here, see below) to them so that they can all finally die for thwarting his plans for so long, even though it also means his own death. Not to mention trying to destroy the entirety of Mobius simply because he was tired of losing to Sonic (though having his entire empire destroyed may have had something to do with it). This version of Robotnik is also less of a control freak than his other incarnations, enjoying spreading needless destruction, loving chaos, fear and uncertainty, and inflicting cruelty on others purely For the Evulz. He also actually had people executed on a regular basis, usually for committing the most insignificant of misdeeds. One citizen even stated that "the crime for ANYTHING around here is death!". Again, humor does not mitigate or excuse any of his atrocities and if anything, he only gets less and less humorous and more and more deranged as the comic progresses.
 * Dr. Zachary, Knuckles's Arch Enemy and this comic's equivalent to Dr. Finitevus, is introduced as a seemingly harmless old man and one of the last of the Echidnas. Zachary tricked Knuckles into leading him into the Emerald Chamber, whereupon he shattered the Master Emerald and used the Chaos Emeralds to empower a reprogrammed machine of his. Zachary gleefully allowed the inhabited floating island to fall onto Mobius as a "monument to his genius", intending to butcher the population of the planet Mobius for his own amusement before seeking revenge on Knuckles's people. In his second appearance, rebuilt as a cyborg, Zachary leads Robotnik to the location of the floating island's villagers so Robotnik could use them as components in a biological computer, which would consequentially kill them, a process which Zachary happily watched over. Possessed of a vindictive streak matched by few, Zachary manages to outshine most of the comic's other antagonists despite his relatively minor running as a villain
 * In Sonic The Comic Online, Zachary once again proves himself among the comic's nastiest. Zachary begins his new streak of evil by attempting to enslave Super Sonic to utilize his powers to wreak havoc across Mobius. Quickly cheated of that, Zachary builds up an alliance of like-minded psychopaths he calls the Syndicate and quickly builds a new plot to destroy Mobius utilizing the Chaos Emeralds. Snatching some of Sonic's DNA by capturing his young companion Tails and nearly drowning him, Zachary awakens the dormant Shadow the Hedgehog and uses his powers to draw the Chaos Emeralds out of the Special Zone, consequentially creating a massive chain reaction of Chaos Energy that obliterates the Special Zone and the billions of lives within. Brushing off the death of the Special Zone as a mere side effect of his plans, Zachary attempts to use a device he calls the Chaos Siphon to agitate the Chaos Energy on Mobius to the point where it causes an explosion potent enough to destroy the planet. Eventually foiled and captured by Knuckles, Zachary contents himself with sadistically mocking Knuckles about his failure to protect the Special Zone, and upon breaking out, forces Knuckles into a Sadistic Choice to either allow his friend Tikal to die or let the Floating Island collapse. A total sociopath as always who is utterly remorseless over the billions of lives lost to his machinations, Zachary proves he's no less of a monster here than he was in the original comic.
 * Emperor Metallix is the supreme leader of the Brotherhood of Metallix and one of the comic's most significant early villains. Going rogue from his intended purpose as one of Robotnik's drones, Emperor Metallix begins a crusade to wipe out all life from Mobius and replace it all with machinery. To this end, Metallix forcibly duplicates the Omni-viewer, callously ordering his double agent Nack the Weasel killed when he sells out the Chaotix before trying to terminate the Chaotix themselves. Metallix later drives a crusade to roboticize the Miracle Planet — enlisting Grimer's unwilling help and later threatening to kill Grimer before Sonic's eyes — and, succeeding at that, alters history so that Robotnik never comes into being and Emperor Metallix leads a successful assault on Mobius that leads to the death of most of the planet's organic life and the few survivors relegated underground. The Emperor Metallix has no compunction brutally killing whatever stands in the way to it and its own victory, and even Dr. Robotnik rightfully fears and dreads what the Emperor Metallix is capable of.
 * Fleetway also has Megatox. A sociopathic sludge monster made entirely out of Mega Mack, Megatox delights in trying to drown poor Sonic in the toxic sludge that compromises his body, an incredibly slow and painful way to die. He also wants to pollute all of Mobius one day, killing almost all life on the planet. His excuse? Simply because he can! He's a truly horrendous mix of Mr. Sinister and Hedorah.
 * Chaos in Sonic the Comic. Unlike his SEGA counterpart, he's shown as an utterly merciless monster with no sympathetic past, having once been a nasty Drakon Prosecutor before becoming the monster he is today. In his current state, Chaos has a "fear aura" that allows him to avoid attack, and exploits it to psychologically torture Sonic and co. He then fatally punches Johnny Lightfoot. Johnny didn't sacrifice himself or anything; Chaos straight-up MURDERED the poor bunny. He also tries to devour Sonic, resulting in his mutation. Eventually, he becomes Perfect Chaos and likely caused thousands of deaths. Karma kicks him in the balls when Sonic de-mutates him and throws him into the sea. Even his fellow Drakons think he's a lost cause. In the online continuation, it's said he tortured poor sweet Tikal for 8000 years! She was tortured for so long and so painfully that the sole reason she's not bonkers is because of Laser-Guided Amnesia.
 * The Evil One from the Nameless Zone arc, as he mutated a hapless old man into a hideous monster named Trogg, made him try to mutate all his buddies in the council, and then tries to brutally murder Tails! Word of God even called him "The Devil himself."
 * Vichama in Sonic The Comic Online starts as an enigmatic flunky of Zachary enlisted in the Syndicate before revealing himself as something far worse. Vichama is in actuality the sadistic God of Death, an immortal entity who gained access to the physical plane through a deal with Pochacamac, using his new presence on Mobius to indiscriminately slaughter millions of echidnas. Trapping the souls of all of his murdered victims within his dark temple before he was banished, Vichama is brought back by Zachary and at first eagerly helps the doctor in his plot to destroy Mobius, helping to obliterate the Special Zone by proxy. Once Zachary's plot is foiled, Vichama leaves the doctor to die before rising his temple again and causing mass death through Mobius, assuming his true form as the God of Death. Casually incinerating Knuckles when he's confronted on his plot, Vichama announces his intent to bring the "gift of death" to everything that lives within the universe through all the enslaved souls in his thrall. Cloaking his murderous nature with a posh demeanor, Vichama is motivated by nothing less than a desire to spread mass death for its own sake and proves to be an utter bastard of a god who more than lives up to his title as the God of Death.

Animation

 * Sonic Sat AM: Dr. Julian Robotnik, unlike the Affably Evil, Laughably Evil versions of him you'd see in other Sonic cartoons, (or the games themselves) is much less pleasant. A ruthless, ambitious backstabber with a series of treacherous moves to his count in the name of self-interest, Robotnik's first betrayal was his sealing of the evil wizard Ixis Naugus in the Void. Later becoming known to the King of Mobius, Robotnik became instrumental in the King's own military victories before deciding to take over Mobius himself. Staging a coup d'état and overthrowing the King from Mobotropolis, Robotnik stole the technologies of the Roboticizer from Charles Hedgehog, and used it to forcefully convert almost all of Mobius into a polluted dystopia, with him as supreme ruler from the newly named Robotropolis. Reducing most of Mobius's inhabitants to his robotic slaves through a horrific roboticization and mental enslavement process, Robotnik made fierce enemies with Charles's nephew Sonic and the rest of the Freedom Fighters. Robotnik would demonstrate his psychopathic nature again and again, attempting to kill, torture, or otherwise roboticize the Freedom Fighters, happily willing to jeopardize the ecosystem in doing so. Robotnik also coldly abuses his own minions, his diminutive, weak-willed nephew Snively among them, and condemns them all to die for the sake of his own life in the finale. An emotion-deficient fear-monger with nary a comedic quirk to his name, Robotnik proved one of the most vicious incarnations of Robotnik seen in the franchise.
 * Note also that the implications of said robotic slavery are much more serious in SatAM than they are in other Sonic cartoons and in the games. Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic X portray Robotnik's henchrobots as feeling either genuinely loyal to him or at least inclined to try to help, while the games leave it a bit more ambiguous, but seem to treat it lightly, and almost all of the Undergroud ones are nonsentient; in this version, at least some of Robotnik's henchrobots are quite aware of what's happening to them, and morally objecting to that which their robot bodies are forcing them to do. There are episodes in which some robots are carrying on secret conversations with their loved ones, from before roboticization, only to double over in apparent pain before proceeding to attack said loved ones because of the control Robotnik has over them through said robotic slavery.
 * For comparison purposes, the worst thing the Robotnik from Sonic Underground did was tricking Manic with a robot made like a baby hedgehog in the hopes that he'd get attached to it -- and reveal where Sanctuary, a place of refuge for children and infants was. So he could destroy it and roboticize the inhabitants. Despicable, to be sure, but just not on the level of the SatAM version.