I think LC was suppised to be hateble, but the creators made him THAT cool (which did'nt stop me from hating him in season 1, at least). Not sure about Invictus though..

@TheWhiteHawk00

I am not sure if he was supposed to be hateable. He seems to me like a generic galactic tyrant who has a lot of cool and badass powers and a lot of moments where the story itself makes a joke out of him (because this is a comedy series after all) and the audience is clearly supposed to find those moments funny. I at least didn't hate him but maybe the reason for that is because I am not a person who easily hates on fictional characters.

I mean, tbf, hate sinks can have "evil is cool" moments. I mean, Muzan Kibutsuji and Micah Bell are rly awful characters and do get a lot of hate, especially the latter, but they do have some coolness and charisma to them, Muzan with his design and his suave demeanor and Micah with his bravery and lack of fear.

Lord Commander can stay as a hate sink, although he has evil is cool moments he is portrayed as highly sadistic and merciless, however if something comes up that proves he wasn't made to be hated we will have to remove him from that category.

Invictus tho, yeah honestly I'm convinced he isn't a hate sink anymore. He mostly isn't portrayed as a hate sink and the one thing that made him count as such (him being a karma houdini) technically speaking wasn't intentional since it wasn't like they wanted to cancel the show before he could possibly get defeated.

What defines a “hate sink” seems rather nebulous and fickle to me at this point. Are they by definition one‐dimensional and written solely to be despised, or is their despicability their most overbearing trait such that it undermines whatever character dimensions or personality they may otherwise exhibit? Does it depend more on author intent or audience reaction? In the former case, do characters whose reception is at odds with author intent qualify, even if they’re less despicable than certain non–hate sinks?

Take Patrick Bateman for instance, who I think would’ve made Vukmir seem tame in terms of repulsiveness if his primary targets were children or infants rather than women. If one‐dimensionality is indeed a requisite, I will concede that his character depth disqualifies him; if not, then he was indeed written to be despised since he is both a caricatural demonization of yuppie culture and a sort of shadow archetype to Bret Easton Ellis personally, yet even he has entertaining/ridiculous moments, and seeing as the novel traps you in his mind as the protagonist and narrator—which makes some room for mild humanization, e.g. glimpses into his thoughts, feelings, mental state, depersonalization—I imagine it’d be hard to despise him completely. Does he truly count?

…then there’s the whole mess with Frollo and his seemingly conflicting author intents, but we’ve been through that I believe.

There's also this thing about there being "FAR more intentionally cool villains in the work" which does bring up another issue how do we know the "evil is cool" is intentional without word of god? Difference between revisions of "Lord Cutler Beckett" | Pure Evil Wiki | Fandom

I get where you are coming from but another problem I have with the Lord Commander being listed as a Hate Sink is that I really don't understand what makes him so hateable for some people. I don't think he is intended to be more hateable than your typical galactic tyrant. This is like listing Palpatine as a Hate Sink because he was written to be more evil than the Devil itself (these are not my words) and because he is smug, arrogant, destroys democracy and replaces it with dictatorship, betrays and kills all his allies including his apprentice, Count Dooku, and emotionally manipulates Anaking into thinking the Jedi are evil and that he can save his wife by joining the Dark Side and tries to electrocute Luke to death on screen while he is enjoying himself and grins widely.

Personally, I think Palpatine is overrated both in terms of evil and character quality, but personal feelings aside, it's pretty clear that the creators intended him to be a despicable character but he is not listed as a Hate Sink for being too cool. If Palpatine is not a Hate Sink, I don't think the Lord Commander should be either.

But I will stop arguing because I guess this is something that really depends on the point of view and for one person a particular character might be a Hate Sink while for another, they don't count for the trope.

As @Obluda511 said, "What defines a “hate sink” seems rather nebulous and fickle to me at this point".

I mean palpatine does have some laughably evil moments and if lord commander does as well you make a good point

I think the most logical course of action to take for this category is to define it as either simply author intent (which is objective) regardless of reception (which is subjective), or a combination of both—and in either case, character dimensionality/depth should probably be irrelevant lest we remove characters like Lotso.

I am by no means a fan of or greatly familiar with Fullmetal Alchemist or Harry Potter (nor do I really intend to be), so I’ll be basing this on my surface‐level knowledge of both franchises in the following examples of those who are obviously eligible:

1. Shou Tucker, an unfeelingly psychopathic experimenter whose family means less to him than a license, is (rather unsubtly) hated by the author, and overall has very few fans—unambiguously a hate sink;

2. Dolores Umbridge, a mundanely evil oppressor whose personality and aesthetic appear to make for a conventionally (and deliberately) obnoxious combination and like whom general audiences are reminded of having dealt with in real life—unambiguously a hate sink;

3. Joffrey Baratheon, an inbred sadist and coward who embodies disproportionate retribution, is a misogynist who relishes the torture and murder of women, would kill children younger than himself, and has a spoiled and whiny personality—unambiguously a hate sink;

4. Alan Yates, a sadistic rapist and murderer with little characterization who is essentially another mundane depiction of depravity and was presumably intended to be hated—unambiguously a hate sink;

5. Lots‐o’‐Huggin’ Bear (for a less extreme example), a cowardly dictator who expresses no qualms with manipulating and abusing an infant (well, a mental toddler at most) before condemning his own saviors to death all behind a nihilistic rationalization, having also had his cruelty ramped up to minimize viewer sympathy—unambiguously a hate sink, in spite of his tragic side.

Notice a pattern? What all of these characters have in common is their mundanity, simplicity, and/or (relative) realism; they possess no magic powers (barring Umbridge) or awe‐inspiring weaponry, they aren’t very hammy aside from being verbally abusive, they aren’t particularly intelligent aside from maybe Shou Tucker and Lotso and thus aren’t likely to dazzle the audience with a compelling master plan, and they typically have few traits beyond an inclination towards cruelty—said other traits generally being what constitutes an unlikable personality, even if these characters weren’t also outright evil. At the same time, exceptions such as Lotso demonstrate that such characters can still have dimensions while (successfully) intended to be hated.

In essence, I think anyone like the above examples would easily count.

@StockingFan15 The problem I have with that is that hate sinks aren't supposed to have any coolness or entertaining on them. They are simply just there to be hated. And many villains, I would even say nearly all, are sadistic and merciless (best example is Michael Myers), so are they all hate sinks? No, definitely not.

So yeah, tbh there are so much weird cases of characters being listed as hate sinks, where I don't get how people come with this thought from.