Some of anime’s most manipulative villains don’t need power to be major threats. Many of them get by on their smarts and their ruthless, manipulative personalities. Whether working in the background or deceiving everyone right under the heroes’ noses, they are running the show and influencing everyone to act in their favor.
The best of these characters make viewers understand very clearly why they have gotten their way for so long: sometimes longer than the heroes have been alive! They are not only smart, but charismatic and convincing, understanding exactly what makes other people tick. Often, they are older than the rest of the cast and have a better understanding of the world they live in, which they use to their advantage.
10 Sousuke Aizen – Bleach (2004 – 2012)
Aizen is introduced as a kind and noble hero of Soul Society, who is murdered trying to investigate corruption in the organization. The reveal that he engineered both that corruption and his faked death for his own ends is just the beginning of all the ways he jerks his former comrades around. Even outside of his skills in battle, he has an unfortunate talent for giving breaking speeches that enrage or demoralize his opponents too much to fight.
Naturally, his zanpakuto’s powers of illusion are perfectly suited for manipulation, and they make him an enormous pain to fight. Favorite tactics of his include tricking his opponents into attacking their allies, thinking they’re him, and letting them believe they’ve landed a fatal blow so they’ll let their guards down. Aizen’s intelligence and arrogance might be his eventual downfall, but they go a long way to getting him what he wants first.
9 Naraku – Inuyasha (2000 – 2004)
Befitting his motif of a massive spider hanging back in a web, Naraku is the type of villain who rarely faces the heroes head-on. He usually prefers to send his minions out after them, and even in actual battle is better at misdirection than swordplay. However, this doesn’t mean he doesn’t have ways of breaking his enemies.
All bonds of love and trust suddenly become endangered when Naraku opens his mouth. Rather than make him compassionate, his intricate understanding of human relationships only makes him more skilled at corrupting the good and turning friends against each other. Naraku doesn’t even know what he’ll do when he secures the Shikon Jewel he’s been causing all this chaos for, only that he’s having a lot of fun doing it.
8 Black Zetsu – Naruto (2002 – 2017)
Naruto has no shortage of extremely intelligent villains. Often, they can be found trying to one-up each other in the diabolical machinations department. But in the final arcs, a surprising dark horse appears to reveal that all the events of the show have happened by his design — Black Zetsu!
Zetsu has been in the background for the entirety of Shippuden, his true origins and intentions unclear. He’s smart enough to pretend to be other villains’ mindless servant until the very last second, when the time is right to backstab them all and kick off his actual plan. He has been manipulating events since the days of the Sage of Six Paths to ensure the revival of his true master, Kaguya, from turning the Sage’s sons against each other to keeping the enmity between their descendants alive.
7 Izaya Orihara – Durarara!! (2010 – 2016)
Izaya is Ikebukuro’s top information broker, and he loves what he does. The knowledge he gathers about all the district’s most colorful and corrupt figures allows him to pit them against each other to his liking. He almost never gets involved in the action himself: despite his ruthlessness, he is far from the strongest fighter in the show and is highly vulnerable to knives and flying trash cans.
Outside of his actual schemes, Izaya’s manipulative personality is most clearly shown in the board game he plays in the episode “Out of Your Control.” It’s a game of his own invention played with pieces from several different games on a chessboard, the rules of which are comprehensible only to him. The goal isn’t even to win: at the end of the game, Izaya sets the entire board on fire.
6 Kyubey – Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011)
As an alien, Kyubey has a very different view on what counts as manipulation, deceit, and even right and wrong than humans do. However, as humans, fans of Madoka are horrified by the way he promises young girls a bright future, only to take advantage of them to the point where they all inevitably die young. His true intentions make Madoka a must-watch darker take on the magical girl genre.
Kyubey has a face that is impossible to read, a perpetually calm voice, and a soft, small feline form: all factors enticing his targets to trust him. He plays on the teenagers’ deepest insecurities and desires to get them to accept his deal and become magical girls. When he’s accused of deliberately withholding the actual consequences of that deal, he simply claims it’s their own fault for not asking something he gave them no indication they ought to ask.
5 Ren Gyokuen – Magi: The Labyrinth Of Magic (2012 – 2014)
Gyokuen installed herself in the upper echelons of the militaristic country Kou centuries ago, knowing exactly where to go to sow chaos throughout the world. Staying alive by swapping out her soul into her children’s bodies every few decades, she made her way onto the throne and uses Kou’s army and her own cult of magicians to further her plans for the apocalypse.
She doesn’t need to control every person in the empire to get what she wants: just the royal family. To stay in power, she murders her husband and oldest sons, putting her nephews in a position where they could not depose her without harming the empire. Gyokuen’s one mistake is underestimating the determination that her surviving son, Hakuryuu, and her kidnapped Magi, Judal, have to make her pay for what she did in one of anime’s best revenge plots.
4 Johan Liebert – Monster (2004 – 2005)
It’s up in the air exactly how Johan manages to make everybody who comes in contact with him dance to his tune. Whether it was the experimentation performed on him and his sister Nina as children or a sinister aspect of Johan’s own nature, it’s chillingly effective. All Johan needs to do is open his mouth, and he gets exactly what he wants from everyone he encounters.
Being one of anime’s most evil siblings is only the tip of the iceberg with this guy. He commands a cult following around himself without trying, influences children to die for him just by speaking to them, and talks a recovered alcoholic back into his addiction for his own amusement. His inhuman qualities allow him to escape detection from even genius investigators and pass blame for his crimes into innocent people.
3 Makima – Chainsaw Man (2022)
One of the most recent additions to the ranks of manipulative villains, Makima doesn’t waste an ounce of the power her position with the Public Safety Devil Hunters Bureau gives her. The minute she meets Denji, she immediately understands how easy it will be to command his loyalty. Denji craves not just food and safety, but human connection and comfort as well, and Makima uses these desires to keep him on a short leash.
Denji is far from the only person she exploits, however. Makima detests having anything outside of her control and goes to great lengths to keep everyone she can under her thumb. She’s not given to outright lying, but prefers deception through giving very limited information or vague answers to direct questions.
Father existed long before Amestris did — was in fact instrumental in shaping the country — and has long controlled every move its government made. He schemes from the shadows while sending out his Homunculi offspring to do his will, from acting as puppet dictators to committing murders that spark genocidal wars. Even Amestrian alchemy is nothing but a tool in his hands: not only did he give it to Amestris in hopes of creating sacrifices, but because it came from him, he can turn it off if it’s ever being used against him.
His origins also center around his manipulating Van Hohenheim, then a nameless slave of the kingdom of Xerxes, into freeing him from his flask. He uses this friendship to get all the way to the ear of Xerxes’ king, managing to dupe him into annihilating the entire country so he can obtain a human body. Doing the same to Amestris is his attempt to achieve true godhood.
1 Light Yagami – Death Note (2006 – 2007)
Light certainly wouldn’t consider himself a villain, but he checks off all the boxes as other villains of his type. He has worked all his life to perfect the image of a model student and citizen he presents, in order to hide his intense god complex and resentment for a world he deems corrupt and inferior to himself. He knows what people expect of him, and he is scarily good at predicting what others will do.
L proves very quickly that he is more than a match for Light, and fairly manipulative himself. But Light still manages to keep his head above water as he infiltrates the investigation team hunting him. He’s even willing to put himself at a disadvantage to divert suspicion from himself, trusting that he’s got Misa and their Shinigami wrapped around his finger enough that they will do what he needs even while he’s lost his memories.
Anime’s most manipulative villainsare all living proof that in the contest between brains versus brawn, brains tend to win out more often than not.
