The Sword and Laser discussion

What villain do you think has done the most amount of damage to a universe? I say Palestine from Star Wars, he caused 2 major wars, destroyed a planet and decades later he’s still inspiring people to kill billions keeping his legacy alive.

Nice idea...

I am afraid Palpatine is a rank amateur when it comes to destruction on a cosmic scale.

The 'go to works' for this type of discussion are space opera.

E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen series have the Eddorians who work for millennia purging civilisations in an attempt to have two Galaxies full of servants. (If we look at the The Skylark of Space series we get the "good" guys eliminating a galaxy worth of Chlorans because they were an inimical threat to all human type life.... An entire galaxy in a few hours.... Smith was a monster).

In this vein you have intergalactic wars in Iain Banks Culture which basically mow through space destroying multiple worlds (Consider Phlebas). Alastair Reynolds has machine intelligences building machines to create super nova to cleanse entire areas of a Galaxy of intelligent life in one go (they probably do not count as villains).

Cixin Liu has alien monitoring stations changing the nature of spec time (from 3 dimensions to 2 dimensions) just in case a species may be a threat one day (and accidentally leading to the heat death of the entire Universe)....

The Daleks are far more destructive than the Empire, destroying civilisations, planets and entire races.

Christos wrote: "What villain do you think has done the most amount of damage to a universe? I say Palestine from Star Wars, "

“Palestine” is an awkward autocorrect.

Iain wrote: "Nice idea...

I am afraid Palpatine is a rank amateur when it comes to destruction on a cosmic scale. "

Troofs. Thanos in the MCU literally murdered half of all life. Not just half of all people, half of everything. Half the dogs, half the birds, half the insects, maybe even half the trees. How many millions of struggling species across the universe did he drive to extinction by that snap? Species which will never recover even after the unsnap.

But even that pales by comparison to the destruction wrought in DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths where the Anti-Monitor destroys all other universes in the multiverse. Infinite universes are wiped out, leaving only one. There’s the biggest bad guy of all time, right there. He caused so much damage we can’t even comprehend it, nevermind count it.

Crisis was a great story too.

Maybe he meant this one ;-)

https://swfanon.fandom.com/wiki/Pales...

I'm fairly sure it's fan boy satire, but who knows with the amount of SW EU stuff out there.

Just FWIW, my brain skipped right over the typo and read "Palpatine."

Cthulu, if he ever wakes up. All reality will be destroyed when he stops dreaming. Of course, who knows when that will be.

Another interesting candidate is the Beyonder from the Marvel Universe. He did not destroy our galaxy, but he was a galaxy, so probably all life in his galaxy was destroyed when he became a sentient being.

If you consider the old Expanded Universe, I don't think Palpatine is even the most damaging in his own universe. You have Darth Nihilus draining Force energy from entire planets worth of beings, or Lord Vitiate destroying an entire planet to give himself immortality and leading or causing centuries (if not millennia) of warfare in the known galaxy, or the Yuuzhan Vong who terraformed hundreds of planets and nearly conquered the entire galaxy.