Who is your favorite Blizzard villain?

Blizzard Entertainment has a long history of creating games highly personalized protagonists, heroes that we can relate to and root for. But a protagonist is only as good as the challenges they face, and for most major storylines the challenge is a clearly defined antagonist.

If you’ve spent any amount of time in nerd spaces you have probably encountered a standard alignment chart. It normally has two axis, lawful to chaotic, and good to evil, with neutral in the middle. While not entirely accurate to life, it does highlight that there are different types of evil and that sometimes the inflexibility of following rules can in itself be evil. A good fictional villain has a believable and reasonable motivation for why they’re doing what they’re doing. Villains are rarely just doing evil for the sake of being bad, nor are their acts usually truly random. A villain almost never sees themselves as the bad guy — instead, they’re trying to achieve a goal and they don’t see another way of achieving it.

If you want an excellent example of this look at Ozymandias from the Watchmen graphic novels and movie. He causes millions of people to be killed because he thinks that overpopulation and the resulting climate impacts are the biggest threat to human life. He doesn’t view himself to be a villain, but as humanity’s savior. An example from Blizzard cannon has Sylvannas taking the same position, causing millions to die so that many millions more can live.

My current favorite Blizzard villain would be Lilith; from the Book of Cain we can see she had a dysfunctional and abusive upbringing (with the Lord of Hate being her father, could it really have been otherwise?), before finding herself in a relationship with the angel Inarius which could be considered in its own way abusive, as she sought to save her children and Inarius sought to destroy them. She’s not good, but is she truly evil — and did she ever stand a chance to be anything but what she was?

Who is your favorite Blizzard villain? In their shoes, would you have acted any differently? Would you have found another way out? Who is someone that we call a hero now, but looking back, maybe that label is not justified?