Evil Gloating

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Fallacy of the Talking Killer. The villain wants to kill the hero. He has him cornered at gunpoint. All he has to do is pull the trigger. But he always talks first. He explains the hero's mistakes to him. Jeers. Laughs. And gives the hero time to think his way out of the situation, or be rescued by his buddies. Cf. most James Bond movies. —Roger Ebert's Movie Glossary entry.

When you have to shoot, shoot - don't talk. —Tuco summarises The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Gloating. Monologuing. It's what villains do. Maybe they "set up us the bomb" and are calling to rub it in and take credit, perhaps he's just snatched the MacGuffin from the hero's very hands and insist on staying just out of reach to taunt. Maybe the villain finally has the hero at his mercy and just has to taunt him one last time before shooting him.

Or perhaps this is the place where they finally have a chance to get all the reasons they despise the hero personally off their chest. Any mistakes the hero makes are also fair game for villainous gloating. At any rate, while this is a villainous staple on par with a hero and In the Name of the Moon, it's still one of the things the Evil Overlord List strenuously warns against, as any villain caught gloating is sure to be either killed or foiled. In their defense, it's really fun and gives you that warm evil feeling in the black pit of your soul when you utterly grind your opponent's face into the dirt. Unfortunately, most villains fail to grind hard enough. But how could anyone appreciate the brilliance of your scheme unless you explained it to them?

Another way this could easily backfire is that it goes hand-in-hand with Engineered Public Confession. A Genre Savvy hero can use it as an easy way to reveal the Chessmaster or Manipulative Bastard to the world and bring their plan crumbling around them.

This goes hand in hand with Evil Plan, where it's practically required to give the hero and viewer exposition of just what the heck is happening. Expect the villain to let out an Evil Laugh and start to Trash Talk about how the hero(es) are powerless to stop his Evil Plan. It can greatly surprise them when the hero interrupts with Get It Over With.

Heroes tend to not gloat, which is why villains facing a Sword Over Head will usually either be allowed to live or killed without (much) fanfare: Compare After-Action Villain Analysis.

If they've just finished owning The Hero, this is sure to become "The Reason You Suck" Speech, but don't worry, a Thwarted Coup De Grace is coming up. May overlap with Trash Talk. See also Villain Ball and Did You Actually Believe?? Has some similarities to the Motive Rant. A particularly sadistic version of this is the Post-Rape Taunt, where a rapist taunts someone by lying about how his victim "loved it."

Index Of Monologuing-Related Tropes You'll Read Soon Enough

• A Fate Worse Than Death
• And Your Little Dog, Too
• As Long as There Is Evil
• Did You Actually Believe?
• Don't Make Me Destroy You
• Evil Laugh
• Gloved Fist of Doom
• Hannibal Lecture
• I Have You Now, My Pretty
• I Lied
• Just Between You and Me (where the villain has the hero captured and at their mercy)
• Kneel Before Zod
• Laugh with Me
• Motive Rant
• Nothing Can Stop Us Now
• No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine
• Post-Rape Taunt
• Prepare to Die (uttered prior to simply shooting the hero)
• Story-Boarding the Apocalypse
• Taking You with Me
• Talk to the Fist
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech
• The War Has Just Begun
• This Cannot Be!
• To the Pain
• Unwitting Pawn ("in my scheme all along!")
• We Can Rule Together
• We Meet Again
• We Will Meet Again! (Villain Exit Stage Left)
• Would You Like to Hear How They Died?
• You Have No Chance to Survive (you are on the way to destruction... sooner or later)
• You Will Be Spared (you will be killed last)
• You'll Pay For This!

Examples of Evil Gloating include:

Anime and Manga

• Death Note: "Sayonara, Raye Penber."
  • "I am Kira." Just so he could see the look on Naomi Misora's face moments before his Artifact of Doom kicked in.
  • Light also gloats evilly at the end of the penultimate episode. While it wouldn't have changed the outcome had he not done so, it was pretty reckless of him, and he only did it as a matter of pride to show how confident he was that he had successfully tied up all remaining loose ends.
  • The look on his face when L dies.
  • And then in the manga Light gloats one last time when he thinks Ryuk is writing his enemies names down. It backfires badly.
• Averted hilariously in episode 5 of the first season of Birdy the Mighty: Decode, in which Birdy punches Kinzel's mecha, the Amubis 777 (yes, like Anubis) in the middle of his explanation of why it is so awesome and will own her (to which he responds, "You oughta listen until I'm finished!").
• While the manga and anime adaption of Chrono Crusade disagree on quite a few things, there's one thing on which they agree: Aion loves to gloat.
• When Tomoe confronts Arika in Mai-Otome after acquiring her new battle suit, she wastes no time bragging about her involvement in Miya's disappearance, Erstin's leg injury, and Arika's costume damage right before she and three of her companions attack. However, she was only supposed to capture Mashiro and get back to base as quickly as possible to avoid drawing attention.
• In both the anime and manga versions of Bleach, the 9th Espada, Aaroniero Arruruerie, fights Rukia, breaks her sword, and skewers her with his trident. He pulls her closer so that he can gloat effectively. This is when Rukia pulls out her third Shikai which reforms her sword through Aaroniero's head instantly killing him. Sure, Rukia's sword reforming and her subsequent rescuing are major Deus Ex Machinas, but in Bleach, we lost count long ago anyway.
  • And that's not even going into Sousuke Aizen, who just loves to listen to himself talk, going by the fact that he has on a few occasions taken the time to fill the good guys in on every little detail regarding exactly how bad he's screwed them over.
  • To be fair to his villainous willpower, he will wait years for the opportunity for these gloatings. His Un Clarking monologue was stored up over well over a hundred years of playing the nice guy. Of course, he did get to let it out sometimes, so long as he was sure whoever it was was about to die. Letting Urahara and Shinji and company get away alive had better bite him hard in future.
  • In the recent Fullbring arc, Giriko breaks into this when Drunk with Power...which gets him killed by Kenpachi.
• Quattro, Smug Snake that she is, did some big time gloating as she forced the main character of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha to fight against her daughter. In retrospect, this probably wasn't a very good idea.
• Mahou Sensei Negima has Chao doing this to Negi's friends after sending them a week into the future when she'd already won the battle by sticking a note gloating about her victory on the side of Eva's resort.
  • Evangeline is also fond of evil gloating, especially when she isn't doing anything evil. She probably wants to remind everyone she most definitely has not gone soft.
• The villains in One Piece love this trope. Somewhat subverted in that their gloating usually doesn't bring about their fall, Luffy's endless willpower does.
• One example from Umineko no Naku Koro ni's Banquet of the golden witch, "And for you, just as expected, it's 'tears please,' and you're down!! I~diot, what a truly simple person!!" That said, it's not a good idea to make the person you're trying to get to sign something feel like crap. It's used far more effectively in the arc just before it. "You are incompetent!"
• Okay... so you have a hostage and PE#1 trapped in an airtight cable car, which you just flooded with water, leaving them without a way to breathe. To add insult to injury, you summon your pet shark and sic it on them, only for PE#1 to summon a metal rhino to break its teeth off. Of course, they still don't have a way to breathe. Do you...
  • [A] Keep an eye on them to make certain they don't do stupid shit or have a game plan if they do?
  • [B] Sit there and go into full-on gloating as your shark's teeth pop back out?
  • or [C] have your summoned pets knock the last remnants of air out of them just to be sure?
  • If you picked B, congratulations, Ark! You just won an ass-kicking from Sapphire, who used those teeth to cut open the glass and drain all the water while you were gloating! Enjoy your dirt nap, sucker!
• Pretty much everybody does this in the Liar Game, after they believed to have successfully tricked their opponents, particularly if it was the protagonists Nao and Akiyama. However, usually once they do this, they better be prepared to have a Hannibal Lecture or to be Out-Gambitted seconds later in a humilating defeat.
• Envy absolutely loves using this to make people squirm, unfortunately he admits to killing Hughes in front of Roy Mustang of all people. Not terribly hard to guess what happened after that.
  • Frankly, this is a pretty common behavior of the homunculi, due to their massive arrogance. Greed and Lust both did Explaining Your Power to the Enemy (the latter because she didn't plan to leave them alive anyway), Wrath often monologues about humans being weak, and Pride is a Smug Snake because of his habit of threatening people and bragging about his superiority.
    • Unlike most examples of Explaining Your Power to the Enemy, they didn't really say anything that could make the good guys pick up on a weakness. They had to figure that stuff out on their own.
• In the first season of The Familiar of Zero, Cromwell, the villain behind it all, starts to gloat about how he'll never be defeated as long as he has the ring. Before he can finish the sentence, Guiche sneaks up behind him and hits him on the head with a big stick. "So, who is this guy?"
• Despite being a very intelligent and shrewd man, Kabuto Yakushi from Naruto has a terrible habit of gloating before fallen enemies when he thinks (and usually does) he has the upper hand in a battle.
  • A good example is when he fought Tsunade in order to "convince" her to heal Orochimaru's soulless arms. He began kicking her while she was in her hemophobia-trauma-shock and taunting her for "bringing shame to the name of Sannin. Which Orochimaru has brought glory and power to!" (or something along those lines).
  • He also seems to do this whenever he and Naruto manage to meet up in battle. Since Naruto has a short fuse on anything involving Sasuke, it's not even a challenge to get him riled up by Kabuto's taunts.
• Grings Kodai, the Big Bad from Pokémon: Zoroark: Master of Illusions, is shown to have a massive ego, so it's only natural that once he thinks he's won by absorbing the Time Ripple, he proceeds to give a Nothing Can Stop Me Now speech, believing he's won and there's nothing Ash can do to stop him now. Then time starts reversing and he discovers that not only was the Time Ripple he just absorbed an illusion created by Zoroark but that Karl, a reporter traveling with Ash's group, has caught his entire Evil Gloating session on tape. Cue start of Humiliation Conga ending with that same footage airing on the TV network that HE owned.
• In Hellsing, Zorin Blitz really likes doing this. However, it proves to be her undoing when she calls Pip Bernadotte an 'insect' and mocks him and the Wild Geese, while a blind and mutilated Seras is crying over his body. Understandably, Seras doesn't take it very well. To the extent that she paints the walls with Zorin's head.

Comic Books

• Watchmen plays this straight, but with a nod to the oft-fatal habit of monologuing, but adds the already infamous twist to the end. When confronted by Rorschach and Night Owl, Ozymandias coolly explains his master plan to them. The heroes expect to be able to stop him yet, but he bluntly tells them his plan is already complete.
• In the pages of Grant Morrison's JLA, the Key rants (basically to no one, since only his nonsentient robots are around to hear him) for about a page about how brilliant he's made himself through the use of brain-altering chemicals, and how it's allowed him to finally beat the JLA. It ends with this immortal aside:

The Key: Oh, and make a note of an interesting side effect of my expanding consciousness. I can't stop talking to myself.

• In All Fall Down, AIQ Squared lays out his entire scheme to the confused and outraged IQ Squared.
• The Big Bad in the album about oil in Oklahoma (because Lucky Luke missed him with the last bullet, and he is going to kill him now). If he hadn't done it, he could've succeeded.

Fan Works

• Played straight, then Lampshaded during the "J" plot in DC Nation.

Eric Forrester: Nice of Mr. Good Wilson to deliver you guys to me and my friends here like a pizza! You know, ten years is a long time to wait for revenge with a side of resurrection, even if seeing what happened to you guys after the whole Wildebeest thing was the greatest show on earth. It was funnier then shit watching all you kids self-destruct after that. So tell me, Titans, is that little black bird of yours still a virgin? No wait! I think I'll just download myself into Cyborg and then see what I can do about finding out personally! Meanwhile, say hello to my little friends!

• • Later, after the Titans have put Forrester back on a hard drive.

Nightwing: Jericho, come in...Good news, Forrester cleared you with a villain monologue so the door on the van is unlocked now.

Film

• Masters of the Universe: Frank Langella, by far the best thing about this movie, gives "the best damn villain monologue I've ever heard. In fact, if you ever watch this film, just watch the parts with Frank in it, the man is at the height of his craft and does it right.
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: a vengeful man catches up with Tuco ("the ugly" of the title) while Tuco is taking a bath. The pursuer starts ranting about tracking his quarry for weeks, and Tuco shoots him dead with the gun he has hidden under the soap-foam: "When you have to shoot.... shoot, don't talk!"
  • Same in Die Hard ("Thanks for the advice!).
• "Do you know what your sin is?"
  • This actually is what causes The Operative's defeat the last time he tries it on Captain Malcolm Reynolds, who pulls an epic Shut UP, Hannibal on him.
• Palpatine in Return of the Jedi. "Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design!"
• In The Mechanic, The Mole Steve does this after he poisons the main character and watches him die. He gets punished for it.
• The Untouchables: Eliot Ness has chased Al Capone's hitman Frank Nitti to a rooftop.

Ness: I'm going to see you burn, you son of a bitch, because you killed my friend! Nitti: He died like a pig. Ness: What did you say? Nitti: I said your friend died screaming like a stuck Irish pig. Now you think about that when I beat the rap. starts to walk away when Ness grabs him and pushes him off the roof Ness: [shouting] Did it sound anything like THAT?!

• In Last of the Mohicans Magua, before eating his heart proclaims:

Magua: Before you die, know that I will put under the knife your children, so your seed are wiped out from the earth forever.

• In The Princess Bride Count Rugen, (the Six Fingered Man) briefly has Inigo at his mercy after hitting Inigo with a throwing dagger.

Rugen: You must be that little Spanish brat I taught a lesson to all those years ago. You've been chasing me your whole life only to fail now? I think that's the worst thing I've ever heard. *Beat* How marvelous.

• In GoldenEye, following an intense fist fight, Trevelyan is armed, James Bond is at gunpoint... and he stops to breathe and then say "You know, James? I was always better" before shooting - and he misses, as Bond kicks a trapdoor and goes down a staircase. (James Rolfe used this as an example for Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him on his "10 Worst Clichés" list.)
• In Spaceballs, Stephen Toblowsky's character gloats over the captured heroes. Unfortunately for him, it turns out they captured their stunt doubles.
• Discussed in The Incredibles by Frozone and Mr. Incredible when recounting stories of their glory days:

Frozone: One more shot from his death ray, and I'm toast. Eventually, I manage to find cover, and what does he do? Mr. Incredible: (laughing) He starts monologuing? Frozone: He starts monologuing! He keeps going on about how inferior I am! How inevitable my defeat is! How the World! Will soon! Be his! Mr. Incredible: Yammerin'! Frozone: Yammering! I mean, the guy has me on a platter and he won't shut up!

• • Main villain Syndrome grew wise to the same ploy when Mr. Incredible meets him.

Syndrome:...How do you think I got rich? I invented weapons. And now I've made a weapon that only I can defeat, and once I unleash it I'll- (Mr. Incredible hurls a log at him. Syndrome dodges it and immobilizes him.) Syndrome: You sly dog! You got me Monologuing!

• In Matilda, the main villain gloats, just before the title character gets her final revenge: "In this classroom, in this school, I AM GOD!"
• The Avengers: Loki loves to gloat, though he has a tendency to underestimate his audience.

Live Action TV

• The Red Baron in Blackadder goes forth does this. Subverted when Blackadder would rather be humiliated than die, lampshaded by Combat Pragmatist and all-round cad Lord Flasheart simply cries "what a poof!" and shoots him on the spot.
  • Ludwig also qualifies, as Blackadder says:

Blackadder: Typical master criminal; loves the sound of his own voice.

• Done successfully by Londo Mollari in the Babylon 5 episode "The Rock Cried Out No Hiding Place" He explains to Lord Refa, via recording, his entire Evil Plan for no reason other than to grind Refa's face into his failure and imminent demise. Of course Refa is then horribly murdered by a mob of angry Narns and framed posthumously for treason, fulfilling the rant and the gambit both.
• Ethan Rayne from Buffy the Vampire Slayer likes doing this. And its the only thing The First Evil ever really did, being intangible. Angelus was good at it too.
  • It's never a good idea to do this in the Buffyverse, however, as it tends to signal a villain's defeat, usually because speechifying leaves them open to attack or buys the hero time to recoil. Villains like Rayne are aware of this, but can't seem to help themselves: "I really got to learn to just do the damage and get out of town. It's the stay-and-gloat that gets me every time."
    • The First could pull this off because of the whole incorporeal thing. Though It was also an expert in Mind Rape
• iCarly:Missy does this, allowing Carly to overhear and finally figured out that Missy was trying to get rid of Sam.
• In the 6th season premiere of Stargate SG-1, Anubis does this when he finds a way to overload the Earth stargate.
  • Hell, the Goa'uld as a whole love this. Not one of them ever passed up an opportunity to force SG-1 to their knees and make with the claims to Godhood. Anubis was really prone to it though. Even Apophis would probably regard announcing that "Your end of days approaches! You shall bow to my awesome power!" as a bit much.

O'Neill: Oh please. McKay: Hello, Anubis? Your agent called, you're playing it way over the top."

• • And the Goa'uld wonder why the Tau'ri refuse to take them seriously.
• In the first season finale of Supernatural, the Yellow Eyed Demon does this. Dean lampshades it with "Just kill us, 'cuz I just can't take the monologuing." This just fuels the Demon's Hannibal Lecture. It should be noted that Demons are practically the only type of evil the brothers face who pull this one. Occasionally some other malevolent beastie will indulge but every single demon does it when most creatures just get right to the killing, or at least attempted killing, of the brothers.
  • In later seasons, the angels, fallen and otherwise, demonstrate that they can't resist monologuing either.
• In the episode of The Big Bang Theory entitled "The Vengeance Formulation," Sheldon makes foam fall on Kripke from the ceiling tiles in his office to get back at him. The plan goes horribly wrong when the president of the university and the board of directors are drenched with the foam too. Then, to make matters even worse, a pre-recorded video comes on to Kripke's monitor. It contains Sheldon gloating about the "classic prank" that Kripke has just fallen prey to. He also gives congratulations to Leonard and Raj for helping him with his plan.
• Inverted in The West Wing when Secret Service agent Donovan is so busy gloating about how stupid a crook was to try to rob a store when the Secret Service was in town, that he doesn't notice the store clerk's very obvious eye rolling, trying to indicate that the guy he's caught has a partner.
• Crichton may be the hero of Farscape, but his speech in the season 4 finale bears a close enough resemblance to a villainous monologue that it elicits a reaction of You're Insane! from one of the bystanders.
• Subverted at the end of the Doctor Who episode "Utopia", when Professor Yana transforms into the Master and begins to run away with the TARDIS. He says "Now, then, Doctor! Oooh, new voice. Hello, hellooo, helllloooo! Anyway... why don't we sit down and have a nice little chat where I can tell you all my plans and you can work out a way to stop me, I don't think!" Then he zooms back into the past leaving the Doctor, Martha Jones and Captain Jack at The End of the World as We Know It End of the Universe.
• "Boston" Rob Mariano had a tendency to do this on The Amazing Race, during pretty much every episode he was on, on both Seasons 7 and All-Stars, a carryover from his time on Survivor.

Literature

• The Duumvirate does this to Osama Bin Laden.
• The Tad Williams book The War of the Flowers features Lord Hellebore explaining to his rivals their imminent destruction through a Magitek television. Lampshaded when the Remover complains about him wasting valuable resources to send them the message for no reason other than to gloat.
• Williams also pulls this in Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn in the part of Evil Sorcerer Pryrates, who spends half of the climactic chapter gleefully explaining his plans to the now-helpless protagonists so everyone involved will know exactly how thoroughly they failed to stop him. For bonus style points, he works some of it into the summoning ritual for the Storm King—and true to the trope, said villain promptly cuts off the gloating by demonstrating that Evil Is Not a Toy.
• At the climax of Darkness Visible, the traitor who Lewis and Marsh have been chasing for weeks gives a Hannibal Lecture gloating over the destruction of London.
• In Discworld this is a common feature of villains. Commander Vimes considers that an evil man always likes their enemy to know they've been beaten, thus giving them a chance to turn the tables, while a good man will kill you with hardly a word.
  • Cats and witches also prefer an enemy who knows they're beaten. A key difference is that cats and witches know the dangers of monologuing, so they instead just make sure their opponent is so good and beat that there's no question.
• Coraline gets out of the Other Mother's clutches by fake-guessing that her parents are hidden behind the door that leads out of the world, causing the beldam to open it so that she can gloat about Coraline being wrong.
• In the Thursday Next novel The Eyre Affair, Big Bad Acheron Hades launches into a gloating soliloquy right when he has Thursday cornered. In the time it takes him to gloat, Thursday is able to figure out his one weakness (silver) and shoot him dead with a silver bullet.
• In The Goose Girl, by Shannon Hale, Selia gloats for a few PAGES about how she's a better princess, how Falada died, and so on, and how no one will believe poor Ani.
  • she should have double checked behind the tapestries, though.
• Harry Potter villains just love this trope. Voldemort himself is easily the biggest offender, though nearly every major villainous character monologues at least once in the series.
  • Finally inverted with Harry himself monologuing Voldemort at the very end. Of course Harry is in the lucky position of finally holding all the cards - to the point where it doesn't even matter that he tells Voldemort exactly how his shiny new weapon works.
• The Witch-King in The Lord of the Rings.

Witch-King: "Old fool!" he said. "Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!" And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade. Witch-King: A cold voice answered: "Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye." Witch-King: Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me Eowyn: But no living man am I!

• In Robert E. Howard's "Rogues in the House" Nabonidus gloats about his use of Exact Words—long enough for Conan the Barbarian to brain him with a stool.
  • In "A Witch Shall Be Born", Salome opens the story with explaining her plot and her powers to her sister the queen and gloating over her.
• Harry Dresden frequently notes the tendency of villains to do this, and thinks that it must be part of his training. He usually uses the opportunity to seize the initiative in combat, but sometimes is tempted to do the same himself, usually to his cost.
  • In Ghost Story, a villain actually uses this to their advantage -When she continually gloats about the situation in the middle of a fight with Dresden, he just thinks she's being stupid and attacks. He realizes a bit too late she was actually trying to trick him into Cast From Hit Pointing himself to death.

Radio

• Satan likes his Evil Gloating in Old Harrys Game. Several episodes have him place a bet with the Professor about how horrible humanity is, with the stakes simply being that if Satan's proved right, he gets to gloat about it.

Tabletop Games

• Infernal. Exalted. They can reduce their Torment meters by doing something their Yozi patrons like. As it happens, She Who Lives In Her Name enjoys an impressive feat of Evil Gloating, meaning that a Green Sun Prince who wants to pursue his own agendas without losing control may well have to rant like a B-movie supervillain.
• Being built on Mad Scientist tropes, monologuing to a bound captive is a way to regain Mania in Genius: The Transgression.

Video Games

• In Wolfenstein, Blazkowicz comes across a Nazi officer standing in front of a Veil portal. His gloating is interrupted when he is rather violently Killed Mid-Sentence by a giant, mutated abomination that telefrags him.
• Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories has Marluxia mocking Sora and Co. before one of their final fights:

Imbeciles...You would knowingly shackle your heart with a chain of memories born of lies? You would be one who has a heart, yet cast aside your heart's freedom? You turn from the truth because your heart is weak--You will never defeat me!

• In Mass Effect, it turns out that even the machine gods aren't immune to evil gloating. Sovereign tells you that there's nothing you can do to stop him and the other Reapers from wiping out all sentient life in the galaxy. It also claims that you're just a tiny insect compared to it and that you have no way of understanding its nature, and yet there it is delivering its evil speech.
• Lord Crump, of course, does this in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, not realizing you've been Cursed with Awesome at your last destination, and can therefore escape his silly prison. (Of course, now you have to free the others...)
• Zero Wing has the rather infamous scene with Cats phoning into the heroes' ship's huge viewscreen to gloat about how all their base are belong to him, and that they are on the way to destruction.
• Kane does this to the player midway through the GDI campaign of Command & Conquer, completely unaware probably aware that GDI is Faking the Dead.
  • Kane also gives a good one to Mike McNeil after breaking through the Hammerfest defenses in Tiberian Sun and stealing the sonic crystals, leaving behind a broadcast in which he glibly informs him that the sonic tank "will make an excellent addition to my collection", and that he is sorry to hear that McNeil's brother died a slow and painful death in the raid.
• Subverted in Ratchet and Clank 3 where Ratchet throws a wrench at the big bad as soon as he opens his mouth to gloat.
  • Strictly speaking, he throws his wrench at the remote control for his uber weapon just about to target Veldin. Nefarious just stood in the way.
• In Soul Nomad and The World Eaters, ALL the villains do this. Gig also does this from time to time, despite being on your side. The best example of Evil Gloating comes from Levin, aka Raksha the World Eater.

Levin: You don't like that I've learned all these fancy new words? Well tough shit! I'm feeling verbose!

• Pious Agustus does this all the time. Even to Mantorok!
• SHODAN does this a lot in the System Shock series. In both games she taunts the player that she is superior to you in every way because as an AI construct, SHODAN has access to more human information and more control over machinery that any human on Earth could ever even conceive. She also explains how being an organic life form makes you inferior and in the second game, she says that the only thing she likes about you are the cybernetic implants she gave you. She especially does this as you traverse the levels trying to find her, but when you show up for your showdowns with SHODAN her taunting amounts to nothing more than mere Boss Banter.
• In one of the last stages of Jedi Outcast Fyyar goes off on a monologue, while Kyle casually finishes the objective he was performing before he was interrupted.
• Several World of Warcraft raid bosses do this, especially if you start wiping. Kael'thas and Malygos have raised it to an art form.
  • Arthas is so incredibly fond of this that it prevents him from actually accomplishing anything. He shows up and gloats at you,then just goes away and lets you interfere with his plan.
    • He is allowing the players to advance themselves and even allow them to interfere with the Scourge's plans all to get them stronger so he can kill the players once they reach him in Icecrown Citidel and raise them as uberpowerful generals and use them to overpower all resistance and take over the world.
    • And after he succesfully does the above... He proceeds to gloat enough to allow Tirion Fordring to summon Heroic Willpower and ruin all his plans in one strike.
• Keal'thas also does this in the Frozen Throne Campaign, where he tells Arthas exactly what his and Illidan's plans are, though in that case he is far less of a villain. It does, though, help cause the plan to fail in a similar manner as other villains. Once Arthas knows the plan, he takes a faster route to the Lich King, and arrives in time to organize the forces and fight back.
• In the last quarter of Resident Evil 5, Wesker's speeches are pretty much nothing but this, intermixed with his truly epic Villainous Breakdown.
  • Wesker truly is the epitome of this. He's got it so bad, it's to the point where he literally has a gun pointed straight at Chris' head, and had a perfect opportunity to just off him right there. Except... he ends up just gloating and trying to convince Chris exactly how wonderful of a God he will be.
• Gravemind. 50% Eldritch Abomination, 50% Evil Gloating. 100% Magnificent Bastard.

"Now the gate has been unlatched, headstones pushed aside; corpses shift and offer room, a fate you must ABIDE!"

• Awwww, what did they do, Jackie? What did they do to Jenny?
• In the third Ace Attorney game, Dahlia Hawthorne lays bare the sheer contempt she feels about the Fey clan and Phoenix; she's dead, having been channeled by a medium, so she believes she's beyond punishmment. Boy, is she wrong.
• In Clive Barker's Undying, Jeremiah attempts this, but is interrupted. By a scythe.
• As the resident Evil Genius in, well, Evil Genius, you can naturally do this while your enemies are being tortured. Be warned that super agents can escape as you gloat over their misfortune.
  • In the Facebook game based on the above, the Loading Screen says "Monologuing..."
• Pretty much everything NEXUS says in Warzone 2100 is some sort of gloating.

NEXUS: "You have five minutes, Commander, and then it's frying time! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

• In Jak 3 Veger taunts Jak right after Damas dies, taking exceptional glee in telling Jak that he was his father and that he died without knowing.

Web Original

• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog has both Captain Hammer's gloating to the Doctor that he is going to sleep with the girl of his dreams, and later on, Horrible's awesomely gloating counter in the form of "Slipping."
  • Also subverted earlier, as Dr. Horrible tries to get his gloat on but gets sidetracked by his romantic problems:

All right. The wait is over. This, my friends, is my freeze ray, which, with the addition of the Wonderflonium I obtained at my famously successful heist last week... I say successful in that I achieved my objective. It was less successful in that I inadvertently introduced my arch-nemesis to the girl of my dreams, and now he's taking her out on dates, and they're probably going to...French kiss or something. She called him sweet? How is he sweet? [long pause] Right, freeze ray!

• Another suspension-of-disbelief moment in Lonelygirl15, when Edward Salinas broadcasts a video straight to TAAG's IP address for this purpose.
  • The LG15: the resistance finale features a memorable instance of this: "Hello, McFly? I'm EVIL!"
• Pretty much every villain from the web fiction serial Dimension Heroes displays this trait to some degree.
• Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do In An RPG

411. It is bad form to shoot a god while he's monologuing.

• In the Reincarnation Fantasy Isekai web novel Tori Transmigrated by "Aila Aurie", Tori prods the true villain of the setting into gloating about the size of the forces at his command -- confirming for her that she has them all accounted for before she springs her trap.

Web Comics

• In The Order of the Stick, after Elan defeats Lord Kubota and is about to bring him to trial, Kubota proceeds to gloat that he will never be charged, and that he will get off scot-free due to being an apparently Magnificent Bastard. Vaarsuvius disagrees.
  • Subverted earlier with Elan's Evil Twin Nale: after Elan catches him with Haley in a compromising position, Nale proceeds to gloat at Elan's stupidity at not seeing that Haley is evil and has been selling out the Order of the Stick. The catch is that none of it is true, and Nale is gloating about something that never happened, but since Haley is afflicted with aphasia at the moment, she can't defend herself against the evidence at first.
  • Nale even lampshades it earlier. He did gloat out all his plan. Only he did it securely alone, to the mirror, in order to get the urge out of his system.
• Girl Genius takes a stellar use of this trope when Lucrezia Mongfish, in Agatha's body, turns Klaus Wulfenbach into one of her slaves and gloats about a wonderful Heterodyne-Wulfenbach alliance to come. Klaus even says, "Heard you gloat too many times." However, the self-congratulater is undone by her own pride. Watch it here.
  • One of the previous Heterodynes was apparently plagued by the habit of gloating prematurely or decided to leave some advice to future generations and inscribed onto the stairs a list of things that must be taken care of before it's safe to gloat.
• In this Nodwick strip, a captive explains that he knows the entire plan because the villain has gloated about it. Over and over and over and over and. . . .
• In Sluggy Freelance Evil!Aylee likes to do this now and then.
  • So does Jane.
  • For some reason, in the chapter "bROKEN", Bun-bun goes curiously Genre Blind and does this to Oasis after trapping her, even though he's not even the villain in that situation. Of course, right then something new is revealed that makes it backfire.
• In SSDD future Norman once went into a full explanation of how the "heroes" were all acting according to plan, so he could distract Tessa until he had his gun pointed straight at her head.

"Haha! That little routine gets them EVERY damn time! I swear it turns on a stupid switch in people's brains!"

• • And subverted later on (chronologically earlier) by the Oracle.

Central: "So, aren't you going to tell me your plan in a long, self gratifying monologue? The Oracle: "No."

• In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja Frans Rayner did this when he invoked a certain trope by repeatedly cloning a clone of Dr. McNinja.

Frans: Did I hear one of you ask how this glory can be real? I remember... when you stormed my mansion, and you alone cut through my army of ninjas... And I kept hearing... "He's just one man! He's just one man!" I didn't realize it until then, but that was how I defeated all of your peoples in the 80's. I was just one man. And now I am just one man again! And I'm killing you! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

• In The Dreamland Chronicles, telling the dwarven king that his forebearers did support the other side, and he killed them for it.
• Concession: probably not a good idea to tell someone you're trying to kill that they have powers. I thought you knew better than that Joel
• Subverted in Schlock Mercenary by the Gatekeepers when they captured Tagon and Brad's gate-clones.[1]

"I'm under standing orders not to revel in the details of any nefarious plans."

• Darths and Droids: When the DM's latest villain is monologuing never interrupt!
• Underling invoked
• Pibgorn Offers to explain all before crushing his head.
  • Don't you want to bask in your trickery, to gloat about it, revel in your superiority?
• In Nip and Tuck, to be eliminated.
• In Endstone, describing how her siblings died.
• In Minion Comics, Von Gernsbach is challenged to reveal his evil plans, or at least gloat about how smart he is for not revealing them. Calling it the "Circle of Cliches, he opts for "the ranting. The ranting, it is my greatest love."

Western Animation

• Boondocks character Colnel H Stinkmeaner is quite possibly the king of this trope. Every single word he says is evil gloating. At one point he even dies goes to hell and basically gloats that he is more evil than the Satan to which Satan readily admits
• Even good guys gone bad suffer from this. In an episode of Beast Wars where Rhinox is turned into a Predacon and nearly takes over, this is what trips him up:

Megatron: Even now, Rhinox, you're teaching me a valuable lesson... Rhinox: Yeah? What's that? Megatron: Sometimes Predacons gloat too much! * ZAP*

• "Nice working with you, Danny! Ahahahahaha!"
• Endlessly parodied in Kim Possible, where Dr. Drakken just can't quit gloating, no matter how many times the Genre Savvy Shego warns him about it. Of course, the otherwise Dangerously Genre Savvy Shego lost when she was Evil Overlord because she gloated herself, pressing Ron Stoppable's Berserk Button.
• Lampshaded and averted in Superman: The Animated Series "In Brightest Day":

Kyle Rayner: "Wait! Don't you want to talk first? You know, banter back and forth to show me your innate superiority?" Sinestro: "No."

• When Starscream of Transformers Animated wanted to destroy Megatron by using his clones as bomb decoys, he just had to gloat instead of detonating the damn things, giving Megatron and crew time to get clear and let the Autobots save the city. In fact, in this series Starscream is addicted to evil gloating, spending time bragging instead of offing the people he wants to off, like Megatron.
  • This is averted with Megatron (the only TF canon where it is averted, come to think of it), who stands over Optimus and gloats that he's going to finally destroy the person who left him as a head for fifty years before turning right around and blasting the slag out of Starscream, the guy who actually did it.
  • This guy takes his evil gloating really seriously. He got pissed off when Bumblebee interrupts him. "YOU...INTERRUPTED...MY...SPEEEEEEEEEECH!"
  • At one point, he gets cloned, each one of which represents a bit of his personality. One, Thundercracker, speaks entirely in evil gloating.
• In The Great Mouse Detective, Ratigan causes Basil to have a Heroic BSOD by gloating about how he led Basil right into his trap, then describing his overly complex Death Trap.
  • Said Death Trap including a recording of Ratigan gloating through song.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: The Delightful Children love doing this to their victims/enemies, especially to Numbuh 1.
• At the end of The Lion King, when Simba, still blaming himself for his father's death, is dangling from the edge of a cliff, Scar can't resist doing some Evil Gloating and says "I killed Mufasa." Big mistake.
• At the end of ReBoot Megabyte gives a short speech to the entire city after taking over again. He even lampshades the expectation of evil speeches from the Big Bad.

Attention. As you are no doubt aware, the Principal Office is now under my complete control. You're probably looking forward to one of my erudite speeches about me, Megaframe, the new viral dawn, et cetera et cetera. But I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you. There is no grand scheme here. This is about revenge. Viruses are predatory by design, and it is time for me to follow my function. Prepare yourselves... for the hunt!

• In Spider-Man: The Animated Series, Episode "Venom Returns", Cletus Cassidy gloats briefly about how everyone is going to die in 30 seconds due to a bomb he strapped to his belly, only Spidey takes advantage of this by taking the bomb off his stomach by force (and surprise) and throwing it at the sky, saving everyone.
• In The Simpsons, Mr. Burns is known for doing this, (Springfield's organized crime community is relatively less prone to it) but an especially sickening example is in Who Shot Mr. Burns part 1. At the town hall meeting about Burns' plan to block out the sun, Bart is telling the people at the meeting about how his dog was crippled by Burns' oil drilling operation; Bart shows the town the dog's cast and everything, and Burns walks in at this exact moment and says "oh, those wheels are squeaking a bit; perhaps I could sell him a little oil!"
  • Subverted when Homer ends up owner of the power plant:

Homer: Mr. Burns reign of terror is over! And today begins my reign of terr... Crowd: GASP! Homer: ..iffic management! Lenny: Man, I thought he was going to say "terror"! Carl: I didn't think he was going that way.

• Maleficent is malevolently magnificent at this in Sleeping Beauty once she's imprisoned Prince Phillip in her stronghold. Rubbing her victory in his face, along with her plan to keep him locked away for a hundred years and then set him free when he's ancient and wizened, probably helped his Heroic Resolve a great deal.
• A couple of examples from The Emperors New Groove: Kuzco turns back to gloat at Pacha as the latter hangs from the remains of a Rope Bridge, and promptly ends up in the same predicament, while later Yzma's Ironic Echo gloat is ruined by her lackey Kronk's Captain Obvious lampshading.
• South Park: Eric Cartman. Usually a sign that he's taking a giant leap over the Moral Event Horizon rather than just being a Bratty Half-Pint.

Cartman: Hahahaha ha I made you eat your parents.