A villain is a stock character, whether based on a historical narrative or one of literary fiction. Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines such a character as "a cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel; or a character in a play, novel, or the like, who constitutes an important evil agency in the plot". The antonym of a villain is a hero.
The Wicked Witch of the West from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is an example of a literary villain.
Louhi, the wicked queen and mistress of Pohjola, is a villain of the Finnish epic poetry Kalevala. Rya of Louhi stealing the sun and the moon, Joseph Alanen, c. 1909.
Frankenstein's monster, an example of a sympathetic villain
Evil, by one definition, is being bad and acting out morally incorrect behavior; or it is the condition of causing unnecessary pain and suffering, thus containing a net negative on the world.
Sendan Kendatsuba, one of the eight guardians of Buddhist law, banishing evil in one of the five paintings of Extermination of Evil
The devil, in opposition to the will of God, represents evil and tempts Christ, the personification of the character and will of God. Ary Scheffer, 1854.
Extermination of Evil, The God of Heavenly Punishment, from the Chinese tradition of yin and yang. Late Heian period (12th-century Japan).
Martin Luther believed that occasional minor evil could have a positive effect.
