Favorite Villains #3--Handsome Jack

Generally when I think of villains I think of a malformed, ugly, monstrosity who epitomizes evil.  But what happens when the villain is actually a good-looking and hilarious narcissist?

Favorite Villain #3--Handsome Jack

Borderlands 2 features one of my favorite villains, Handsome Jack.  Jack is the president of the ultra-evil Hyperion Corporation.  Hyperion has become a powerful organization thanks to the discovery of eridium, an alien mineral found on Pandora, that can be used in a variety of power augmenting ways.  Players first become acquainted with Jack in the very first scene.  Jack has been luring vault hunters to Pandora only to sabotage their trains and kill them off.  Your chosen character manages to survive but has to wade through the corpses of all the other vault hunters that Jack has killed.

As you follow Claptrap throughout Pandora, Jack periodically calls in to torment you.  In one series of recordings you listen as he insults Helena Pierce, a character from the original  Borderlands, and then murders her. But he doesn't simply murder her, he laughs about it.  It's easy to hate Jack from that point on.  He holds his own daughter prisoner to use her powers for his own means!  The rest of the game is composed of Jack sending his lackeys (innumerable bots) to kill you until you finally confront him in another hidden vault.

A unique part of Jack's villainy is his narcissism.  At one point in Borderlands 2 you visit the Hyperion city known as opportunity.  The city is filled with statues of Jack, cardboard cutouts of Jack, and propaganda that promotes him as a conquering hero on Pandora.  He's known as "handsome" because of the mask that he wears that makes his features perfect.  The reason for the mask is never explained in the game.  Did he suffer some sort of plastic surgery accident?  Was he deformed in a freak chemical spell?  It's not really explained.