Most Compelling Villains

 

This is the final of the three blogs I am making analyzing the metrics I judge villains by and giving the characters I rate the highest tier in each of the metrics. This blog is about the metric Compelling. Compelling refers to how realistic and sympathetic the character is. The degree to which I feel the character could exist (at least allowing for whatever weird physics or powers exist in the fictional universe), the degree to which the character's motives are understandable, and the degree to which they are relatable.

A villain who's Low in Compelling is a character who's motives are shallow and stereotypical villain motives or worse lack motivation entirely or have a personality that feels internally inconsistent or do things because the plot needs them to do rather than the natural result of what they would do given their motive and experiences. Not all good villains need to be compelling. Having a mustache-twirling evil villain is not the worst, especially in something aimed at children if they're menacing or entertaining or best cast scenario both. Even in adult media, sometimes a villain doesn't need to have a particularly a deep motivation. A Gangster villain who just wants money but has a lot of style and prestige and threat can be cool. A Demon who just likes to sadistically torture people but is built up well and has entertainingly devious schemes and is tricky can be fun. A mad killer clown whose motive is just insanity can be funny to watch if they are entertainingly insane. However, a Compelling villain has a certain conceptual endurance, a humanity to them that makes them more universal and gives the viewer a greater ability to learn from them. 

A villain who is High in Compelling is a villain I find personally very relatable, their motive is understandable and something I feel I can learn from. For me, they're often fantastical exaggerations of a real psychological phenomena I've found tricky to deal with. As such this category is probably the most personal. But these are the villains I gave the maximum Compelling score too.

Mimi (Flip Flappers): Mimi was an introverted psychic girl kept in a blank room. She was given friends Salt and Papikana and while slow to warm up to them due to her anti-social introverted nature, eventually befriended them as they grew into adults formed a relationship with and had a child with Salt. Desperate to not let her child be taken by the people trapping her, she and her friends made a desperate escape attempt, and when they were caught and were all to be killed, Mimi had a psychic break, splitting into the overprotective dictatorial spirit Mimi and her normal self. Mimi's motivations are some of the most understandable and clear of any villain I can imagine. She was a shy introverted girl who was introduced to the world and what good it could have through her friends, and didn't want to drag her daughter into the same lifeless world she had know, becoming overprotective and stifling, but it is that very love that eventually allowed them to defeat Mimi. 

Deep Blue (Tokyo Mew Mew): Deep Blue is a villain characterized by a sense of social alienation and anger at the world for its ingratitude. He never felt like a human, he felt eternally like an outsider watching them from without, watching them take advantage and abuse the beautiful world they had been given. That's really understandable to me; the feeling of alienation from other people as though humanity was a different species, the sense of isolation and putting on a show of emotions you don't feel because it's what normal people feel, the anger at people for not appreciating the wonderful things they have. Deep Blue's motivation and his subsequent love for Ichigo, the girl that made him feel like a human, that showed him the value of humanity is such a sweet and compelling story to me. 

Magneto (Marvel Comics): Magneto is a villain characterized by loyalty and fear. Magneto was a mutant child during the Holocaust, who lost his parents to the Nazi Regime. Seeing the human fear of mutants, Magneto feared that humans would try to genocide them as they did to any group that seemed different. Magneto talks often about the superiority of mutant kind and performs despicable actions, but in his heart, he's trying to act for the safety of his people; for his friends and children, for his community. He's even at times reformed himself of his own accord or temporarily taken on a more moral behavior particularly when Charles Xavier seemed dead solely out of respect for his old friend. Magneto is a supervillain but is in an instantly understand one in his motives and no one can doubt his loyalty to his own. 

Grimnir (Magicka): Grimnir is so compelling that even the developers of the game have said Grimnir isn't actually a villain, he's just misunderstood. Grimnir is a wizard who sought after knowledge, who loved to learn, and saw a better future for Midgard. Midgard is a world where people randomly die and get rezzed all the time, a mindless meaningless chaos. Grimnir is the Dark Wizard because he is the opposite of what Wizards stand for normally in Magicka; he's orderly, academic, rational, sane, focused, and serious. I can be accused of being a bit of a stick in the mud sometimes, I don't like chaos and meaninglessness. Grimnir's desire to bring peace and order to Midgard, his love for learning, his disdain for the meaningless violence is all immediately relatable to me and truthfully he didn't even really go that far. He was tempted into using a weapon that could warp reality to bring about peace for everyone. They weren't supposed but how many of us if given that chance would truly resist the temptation, or use it for something as noble in goal as that? After that Grimnir was just a studious wizard who even tried to make amends with Vlad but was imprisoned by the other wizards for nothing else than his love of knowledge and past actions. He made a deal with Assatur after an unknown of time chained away alone at world's end. Grimnir's fall is very understandable from his point of view and his motive very relatable.

Freya (God of War): Freya is compelling for similar reasons as Mimi and Magneto above. Freya's primary goal initially was the preservation of her child Baldur and the reconciliation with him. Aside from that and after Baldur's death her goals become vengeance on Kratos for Baldur's death and the preservation of her people, the Vanir. Freya's every action in the game is instantly understandable and she shows great kindness even to people she has no reason to trust and she was unwilling to kill Atreus even though that would be truly eye for an eye. Her blaming Kratos for Baldur's death is perhaps the one unjust thing she does, but the fact that he killed her son, even if it was to save her, makes her hatred completely understandable and that her love of her people eventually allows her to forgive Kratos is a very compelling character arc. 

Sailor Galaxia (Sailor Moon): Galaxia's arc is complicated and one I went through in my Sailor Moon Acts review but basically Galaxia represents the Gnostic Impulse within people, the sense that the flawed and temporal world should be rejected in favor of the pursuit of the eternal and the spiritual shown by Galaxia literally rejecting and destroying worlds trying to find the perfect eternal world worthy of her. I understand the impulse greatly and while her actions are extreme, they really are just the extreme version of a decision we make everyday, rejecting a material reality because we don't feel like it's somehow good enough for us. Her arc's ending is beautifully tragic as she sees finally the eternal she was seeking but can't reach it and dies with it ever just out of grasp. Galaxia's Gnosticism is very and deeply compelling for me as I understand the search for meaning, the disdain for the shallow, the desire to seek out the eternal. But I also understood what her arc is meant to show about that impulse, that if you reject all things flawed in the world you will find nothing at all, but if you embrace the world in spite of its flaws will you find the eternal existence called love. 

Brainiac (DC Comics): Brainiac's personality and story are deliberately inhuman and yet despite this he functions very well as an exaggeration of an impulse within humanity I know well. Brainiac is a cyborg mind that lives solely aboard his ship, only interacting with the outside world through intermediaries, spending all his time collecting, classifying and organizing outside information into neat orderly bubbles, with shrunken cities from many worlds kept unaging and pristine aboard his ship. Brainiac is the love of order, the disdain for chaos. Brainiac is the knowledge of things abstractly but not experientially. He's detachment from the world, knowing it solely through simulation. Brainiac and Superman are both supergeniuses with supersenses but when exposed to the world Brainiac can't handle it, it overloads his mind, he can't deal with the experience of Chaos. The difference between Brainiac and Superman is that Superman loves the worlds, trusts in the world, and through that can deal with it, while Brainiac has disdain for the chaos of being and needs everything neat and orderly. Brainiac's love for order and willingness to remain detached from the world to avoid interacting with the messy chaotic parts of it are very relatable to me. Superman's statement that Brainiac doesn't know these worlds, only knows his safe static versions of them removed from the realness of "life" hits kinda close to home. Obviously not in a literal sense but in the sense that knowing things is so much easier and more comfortable when they are static and have the same predictable properties but such ignores the beauty of life, it's dynamic changing, growing quality. Brainiac is relatable not insofar as his actions are anything I could or would do but in that he is an archetypal exaggeration of a trait I understand well. 

Most Entertaining Villains

 

This is my second of three blogs analyzing the three metrics I judge villains by and listing the characters I rated as the top tiers of each category. This blog is about being Entertaining. Entertaining is not the same as "Funny" though often that's how it's used. Entertaining as a villain metric refers to how much fun or interesting the villain is to watch in action. It's a combination of how unpredictable their actions are and how much fun the consequences are to watch.

A villain who's not very Entertaining is a villain who can't really hold a scene by herself or himself. They're rather predictable or the ways they're unpredictable don't create many fun story opportunities. Not all good villains need to be personally entertaining. If you have an evil Dark Lord who sits in their castle menacing they don't need to be personally very interesting so long as they are menacing, especially if their minions are of the more Entertaining type. However, being entertaining means a villain can be a lot more memorable and has a lot more potential things you can do with them. It gives them a certain versatility. 

A villain who is High in Entertaining is a villain with a lot of stage presence, as opposed to the narrative presence of Threatening. They are captivating to watch and can easily hold a scene by themselves. Even watching them do normally mundane actions like making breakfast or going to sleep would be entertaining due to the style in which they do so. So these are the seven villains I gave a maximum Entertaining score, in no particular order.

Harley Quinn (DC Comics): Harley Quinn is a really fun villainess as she has a similar versatility as the Joker yet is more sympathetic in both her motive and means. As a result, even when she was a villain she was much more light-hearted to read or watch about than the Joker, yet has similar versatility as an insane manipulative trickster villain. I think Harley is funny and fun to watch, especially because most of her schemes do make a bizarre sort of sense in the pursuit of love, just a very impulsive love and without regard to legal or ethical standards, but it's this that allowed her to eventually have a redemption arc. 

GLaDOS (Portal): GLaDOS is another really funny villainess, though in an entirely different way, through sarcastic snarky wit, a mixture of extreme intelligence and control with a lack of understanding of humans. She's almost entertaining in the exact opposite way of Harley. She has twisted Rogue AI motives and incredible intellectual and physical capabilities, but her manipulation and insults are so blatant despite their attempted passive-aggressiveness. This dichotomy is funny in the same way despite being the opposite of the cuteness of seeing a small innocent thing try to do something big and impressive.  It's seeing something grand and murderous try and fail to do something human and petty while you interact with her. 

Sailor Galaxia (Sailor Moon): I mentioned Galaxia's my favorite villain because she's the only villain who is top tier in all three regards. Galaxia is entertaining in her sheer larger-than-life scope and cosmic grandiosity and ego. Galaxia roams around blowing up planets to boring her and proving unworthy, speaks in a cosmic grandiose tone, and is constantly unpredictable, breaking all the conventions of the story so far, and arguably the genre. She's got a regal and exaggerated air to her that fits the feel of a cosmic royalty villainess and ultimate enemy to a cosmic superhero story. 

Sensui (Yu Yu Hakusho): Sensui is a wonderfully complex villain, and probably my favorite example of the "villain being a shadow of the hero" trope. Sensui brings with him a ton of interesting philosophical questions, representing an extreme and total nihilism and cynicism yet is full of interesting contradictions. And he feels it, his actions are constantly unpredictable yet make immediate sense both literally and thematically, whether it be sacrificing one of his seven minions to see if Yusuke is willing to kill, or retreating from a fight into a crowded city street so Kurama can't fight without risk of harming civilians. And yet despite all this, he's also weirdly vulnerable both physically and emotionally, with Yusuke actually being stronger than him at first and his insults actually angering Sensui, a level of vulnerability diametrically opposed to the prior enemy Toguro. Sensui is such a dynamic and interesting villain. 

Drosselmeyer (Princess Tutu): Drosselmeyer is a very engaging villain for the same reason in and out of universe, his desire to create a good story. His machinations are the dynamic force of the story as he manipulates the events to create his tragedy, but he is very fallible as his psychological manipulation more often fails due to his detachment from reality and the desires of others. Drosselmeyer's tragedy-loving spirit bleeds into the very story as he directs it and is unpredictable yet when exercised is instantly recognized in the tragic effects it causes on the story. 

Seto Kaiba (Yu-Gi-Oh!): Probably my favorite "Rival" character in fiction, depending on who you count, Seto Kaiba is a hilarious extreme ego, mixed with just the right amount of actual competence and power, a mixture of financial power, social power, and dueling skill (Which is the symbol of power in-universe.) Mixed with his grey morality and his status as a villain slowly turning into an anti-heroic figure over the course of the story means that whenever he's on screen, he's a break from the usual black and white morality of the story. He's also just so fun to watch with his arrogant declarations that destiny and God mean nothing to him, matched in his game strategies focused on pure and raw overwhelming power without tricks or frills. 

The Narrator (The Stanley Parable): Similar to Drosselmeyer, the Narrator is functionally the only character in the Stanley Parable being the narrator of the story the player is trapped in, yet is so entertaining that he can maintain the story and fill it with humorous delight, artistic complexity, and memorable moments, purely through the force of his personality. The Narrator is a fun personality that's exaggerated to just the right extent that he can alternate in different playthroughs from horrendous villain to compelling and understandable persona to an egotistical pretentious artist stereotype all while keeping the same style and cohesion. 

Most Threatening Villains

 

Recently I was ranking a large number of villains in the three categories that I enjoy villains on, and I noticed that in each of the three categories, there was a collection of 7 villains I gave the maximum. So I wanted to make a quick series of three blogs, with each one showing the villains I considered the best in that regard showing what I would value in a villain. These aren't necessarily my favorite villains as it's possible they have a low score in the other two, but it demonstrates the qualities I would consider commendable.

The first of the three metrics I use is how threatening they are. Threatening refers to how large of a presence the character has on the narrative and how much strain they put the other characters under with their actions. A villain who's not threatening is a villain who doesn't cause the heroes to really sacrifice much to fight and who you are relatively confident won't cause that much damage. Not all good villains need to be threatening. Joke villains by definition are not and they can still be funny or endearing or more. Most villains that are for children naturally aren't that threatening with a few exceptions yet there are some excellently written villains in series aimed at children. However, being threatening can make a villain memorable and enjoyable purely from the way they force the Heroes to rise to a new level or show a different side to them. 

A villain that is extremely threatening is a seemingly inescapable presence, one who feels unstoppable and who both has goals that are malevolent towards the protagonist and regularly achieves them. They make both the character and the reader worry when they appear. So with that said, here are the seven villains I gave the maximum threatening score to, not in any particular order.

Lord Dominator (Wander over Yonder): While definitely the character on this list that's played for comedy the most, for the entire section of the story Dominator is the primary villain in she is presented as an unstoppable force and danger to the galaxy and treated as vastly more evil and competent, regularly wiping out the galaxy's greatest heroes and villains. What's particularly good about Dominator is how season 1 sets up the status quo of the galaxy and season 2 demonstrates Dominator as someone who destroys the current conventions. The characters of WoY are relatively archetype and Dominator is a force that breaks them making Wander rethink his pacifist beliefs and breaking Hater from his egotistical hatred. Despite being a primarily comedic series, Dominator is regularly treated with menace and gravitas, with her showing up signaling in most episodes the cessation of the humor and the beginning of sheer panic. 

Bonesaw (Worm): Bonesaw is a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine, a group of psychopathic serial killer supervillains that in the Worm universe are treated as the scariest threat outside the literal cosmic horrors. While both Jack Slash and Bonesaw were the two most threatening villains in the series for me I think Bonesaw is just a head above due to the gruesome-ness of her displays. Bonesaw is a child tinker who was traumatized by the Nine killing her parents and given a warped understanding of morality. Her powers allow her to control the biology of people, with her ghastly torture of them being one of the most frightening scenes in a relatively dark series. Her persona of acting like a cutesy innocent child while it could across as detracting from her threatening-ness is written well enough to enhance it.

Isabeau de Baviere (Puella Magi): Puella Magi has three species usually; Humans, Witches, and Incubators and Isabeau is a combination of the worst parts of all three mixed with a terrifying power making her a terrifying humanoid abomination. She has this constant barely contained insanity around her, and her presence drives people insane or kills them outright. She has a huge presence on the plot that is somehow both subtle yet extremely graphic and overt. The manga does a really good job making her seem freaky and cementing how terrified everyone is of her.

Darth Vader (Star Wars): The classic modern dark knight, Darth Vader combines extreme gravitas with a terrifying amount of power and a machinelike efficiency. He's such a presence that even his famous breathing is considered iconic and disturbing and he has arguably the single biggest influence on the entire Star Wars series. Despite being relatively quiet and subdued his presence is felt not just in every scene he's in but across the entire original trilogy and in the few times he becomes directly involved in a fight he becomes a terrifying unstoppable force killing Luke's mentor, cutting off his arm, and representing the spiritual threat to Luke's morality. 

Sailor Galaxia (Sailor Moon): I have an entire blog series going through each SM act with a lot of Stars devoted to talking about Galaxia. Plus she's SPOILERS going to come up in the next two blogs as well so I won't try and explain everything here. However, Galaxia represents a metafictional destruction of Usagi's worldview and ideals starting with killing off the second most important character in the series in the first arc she's in and regularly attacking Usagi in new unexpected ways to break her emotionally and torment her. 

Darkseid (DC Comics): Darkseid like any long-running comic character has some notable discrepancies in terms of depiction but for the most part Darkseid is arguably the closest thing the DCU has to a central overarching antagonist. Darkseid is not just a character but a representation of evil itself, especially in Final Crisis and represents a threat on all levels, physically, mentally, spiritually, and narratively. His personal power is both overwhelming and theatrical yet his plans are far-reaching and he acts generally with such composure and clarity that it's hard not to believe he's always in control. Darkseid is the archetype of the "Supervillain", a villain of archetypal power and malevolence, a threat that requires a "Superhero" to fight, a representation of pure calm, composed, focused malice. 

Cthulhu (The Cthulhu Mythos): Quite possibly the single most threatening villain on this list held back only by his relative lack of canonical appearances, Cthulhu is the expression of pure cosmic dread, an expression of the vague and inexpressible anxiety at the infinity of Being and our own awareness of our limitations in comprehending it. Cthulhu is a cosmic horror, he is THE cosmic horror, and while nowhere near the most powerful of them, that's almost the point of the terror of Cthulhu, that he is the gateway to understanding the impossible horrors humanity is unable to grasp, the end of human awareness. His presence in the story is infinite with the one about him being the doomed venture to stop him with the humans being seemingly unnoticed by him, dying or going mad purely from his presence. The entire story is focused around him alone and the entire world of the story is his domain. 

Gnosticism

 I've used the term Gnosticism or Gnostic to describe several characters or plotlines within some of my favorite series, including Sailor Moon, DC Comics, and Shamanic Princess mostly because some are directly referencing the concept. Because of that and the term's relative obscurity I wanted to create a quick blog explaining what Gnosticism is. 

There is a difference between Gnosticism Proper, a Christian Heretical cult of the late 1st Century AD and Gnostic as a general term that is used as a descriptor of something having the most notable trait of Gnosticism. So let me start by explaining the original cult.

Gnosticism essentially took the notion of the material world being fallen to a logical extreme. Its proponents believed in a cosmology with a pure and good spiritual deity presiding over everything, The Monad, and a malevolent lesser entity called the Demiurge that created the material universe, creating a binary duality of spiritual = good and physical = evil. Gnosticism's goal was to attain a spiritual existence devoid of physicality or the acquisition of spiritual enlightenment. (Gnosis) The belief system had a lot of specific beliefs with it often being thought that the God of the Hebrew Bible actually being the malevolent Demiurge and that Jesus was either a normal human who attained spiritual enlightenment or was actually a benevolent spiritual entity who took the guise of a physical body, but wasn't actually physically present because the material was sinful. While Gnosticism was condemned as heresy and was destroyed, the background elements of its philosophy seeped into Western Occult traditions, such as the notion that the material universe was illusory and that attaining enlightenment would allow one to control it. 

Indeed Gnostic today can simply be used as a synonym for arcane or occult. However, when used more specifically it refers to the binary notion of the physical world as inherently corrupt and the spiritual world as being inherently pure. In this sense, it is obviously contradictory to Christianity as a religion that preaches that God incarnated as a physical human and that our physically substantiated bodies are good, as well as of spiritual powers that are evil. (Demons) Gnosticism indeed could be said and has been analyzed to actually have more notable parallels to Buddhism with the notion that the physical world is illusory and lesser, and with the goal of attaining spiritual enlightenment. 

However, any religion can and will have people tending towards Gnosticism and the reason I believe is Gnosticism is an impulse that is in all people to a greater or lesser extent that is characterized by a fixation on the flaws of things that are particular or material, things, as well as a fixation on the perfection of the universal or immaterial. Someone who is spiritual but with a Gnostic tendency might pray and deny themselves but would be judgmental towards others and not give to charity because they're valuing the religious ideals and not the particular people and situations that present themselves. In this way, you can even imagine a hypothetical Secular Gnosticism as paradoxical as that sounds. Such a person wouldn't be religious but would fixate on a philosophical or political ideal but not the people that actually comprise that ideal, it's a focus on the universal and a disdain for the particular, a love for the perfection of the metaphysical and disdain for the imperfection of the physical.

Having the term I have found it to be very helpful as it's a good way to express the problem in some forms of thinking that are otherwise hard to express. There's another reason I think having a term for this human impulse is good. I have to be honest, I have a particularly strong Gnostic Impulse in myself, I love thinking of things in the abstract where they are pure and lacking the little flaws of actual living things. I love humanity in general and will tear up at expressions in fiction about the triumph of the human spirit but I don't generally like being around specific persons with their foibles and little eccentricities. I love fully the beauty of meaning, perfect unto itself, and I dislike the arbitrary parts of things that aren't meant to express meaning. But having a term for this impulse has helped me to identify and work on it. This is why my favorite series often enough deal with Gnostic themes, because I understand the conflict that they're expressing. 

If you're not especially Gnostic and want to identify Gnostic thinking in fiction or in real life, look for a disdain for the material and mundane as somehow morally lesser or wrong. If you too have a strong Gnostic impulse and recognize it as a flaw I would suggest trying to remember to be gracious for the beauty of small things, to understand how many of the greatest wonders of the universe can be seen even in day-to-day life. 

How they Compare: Xaphrael (Misfile)

 

Spoilers for Misfile below.

At the beginning of time, God assigned angels to watch over the universe. The lowest-ranked angels, referred to as simply "angels" had difficulty in keeping up with the overseeing all the tiny mundane parts of the universe and keeping it orderly. So in order to keep it all organized, they created a celestial bureaucracy and a celestial filing system. The universe and the angels that ran it could be kept orderly and organized.

But with any bureaucracy comes inefficiencies, and the angel Xaphrael in frustration as God's commands were, not disobeyed, but delayed, put on hold, watered down as it made its way through a cosmic game of telephone. Xaphrael was an avenging angel and one day he and the angels he served with; Ramael and his captain Vashiel were given orders not to lay waste to a sinful city. In frustration at the endlessly delaying commands of the bureaucracy, the three angels destroyed the city regardless. 

For this their captain Vashiel was punished. Xaphrael could take himself being punished, but seeing his captain punished for them simply doing their divine duty, that only his captain was punished when all three partook in the destruction, drove him furious with resentment at the injustice. He began a plan to take control of the Celestial Bureaucracy over hundreds of years and gain control over the entire universe so he could re-order it into something more efficient, more just in his mind. 

Lower ranked Angels in Misfile are generally around the upper limits of humans physically or slightly superhuman. The Angel Rumisiel was able to lift a full filing cabinet in each hand and hurl them at Xaphrael. A full filing cabinet weight over 100 kilograms when full. In 2020 James Spurgin set the world record for one-handed lift, lifting over 300 kilograms. Rumisiel did 1/3rd that feat casually and was able to casually throw that weight. Rumisiel and Cassiel were both able to survive being flung "50 feet" (~15.25 meters hitting a wall or the floor across a room without significant injury and Rumisiel withstood without serious injury falling down a cliff a couple times his own height. These feats support them being on the upper end of human level. However, these two are considered significantly weaker than Xaphrael, with Cassiel saying they stood no chance against Xaphrael because they were "paper-pushers" while he was an avenging angel. Overall Xaphrael should be likely superhuman in physical power, consistent with some minor exaggerated human feats such as Tom comedically throwing Ash out of his room done by characters far weaker than Xaphrael. 

Speed's much clearer. Xaphrael easily scales to Rumisiel who seemed to keep pace with a car while flying and blitzed Ash across a room, putting him easily at superhuman speed. Technically there's a weird gag in one strip where Ash punches his reflection which would be FTL, but that's a vast outlier as well both a gag and probably meant to be in Ash's head. 

However far more notable than physical stats is Xaphrael's abilities. While Xaphrael doesn't demonstrate that many abilities himself, he should very easily scale to the abilities of most weaker angels. Xaphrael and other angels can warp reality. Xaphrael and two other angels in their backstory destroyed an entire city. This is consistent with Rumisiel believing a weaker angel, Cassiel, could create a storm with her power, though she couldn't because "weather isn't (her) thing." Almost all of Xaphrael's other abilities are a function of his reality-warping power. This is done purely through his own power. If he has access to the Celestial Filing System such as fighting there or traveling there mid-combat, he can hypothetically use it to reality-warp the universe, with it being implied that with control of it one would be a threat to the entire universe. 

Even outside the physical prowess gained from their lifespan over centuries or longer, Angels have supernatural physical abilities. They can both levitate themselves and others, as well as render themselves and others invisible or disguise themselves as normal humans when they are in the human realm. As an angel, Xaphrael is immortal and conventionally unkillable, though regenerating from a dramatic injury such as castration would take a long time and be very painful. Angels can and often have to in their line of business physically interact with incorporeal entities with Vashiel able to chain the dark spirit of Kate's deceased sister lingering in Kate's resentful hatred and Rumisiel able to physically grapple with Browwyn's spiritual darkness. Xaphrael also demonstrated the ability to create an omnidirectional wave of force that flung Cassiel and Rumisiel away from him. 

Angels also have a number of psychic abilities, especially sensing. Angels can sense the presences of others within "a few miles" and Rumisiel was able to sense a storm was unnatural in origin. As an Angel of the Second Circle, Xaphrael may have Vashiel's ability to sense the truth. When Cassiel was disguising Ash and Emily as Angels to infiltrate Heaven, she had to give them layers of scents and auras imperceptible to humans suggesting that Angels have enhanced smell and aura-sensing, consistent with spiritually sensitive humans being able to see auras. Xaphrael's sensory abilities are particularly good, being able to sense Cassiel, an angel who is a master of disguise and stealth, though she does decieve him on another instance. Angels also regularly demonstrate telekinesis strong enough to lift cars or knock over trees but precise enough that Cassiel was able to pop Heather's top with her telekinesis and Rumisiel was able to use it to make himself look good at volleyball with no one there noticing. They also have several lesser-used psychic abilities. Cassiel was able to show a level of mild suggestion to convince Eponine she never left when she actually had (which Ash explicitly says is because of Cassiel's angel powers), was able to give Ash particular types of dreams, and threatened to erase Ash's memories, though Ash was unsure whether she could really do that.

Angels are also proficient at spatial manipulation which they use to get around. Rumisiel was able to teleport himself and a car he was in to a distant house and Cassiel was able to send Ash and Emily to Heaven past the dimensional gap. Because dimensions move at different time rates this can be used as a form of pseudo-temporal bfr. Most Angels, Xaphrael included, can travel the dimensional gap themselves in their role of going between Heaven and Earth. 

Angels have numerous feats of weather manipulation, with it being stated that Angels "nudge" the weather into being a certain kind, though lack the ability to make subtler changes. Vashiel of the same circle as Xaphrael was able to create hail but not a subtle temperature change. Rumisiel was able to create a clearing in the rain and a cold breeze. He also could make it VERY cold in the garage if he wanted and lower the temperature in 10-15 feet bubble through concentration but when he let go of his concentration it snapped back into being much hotter as the universe corrected itself. 

Angels have numerous times shown control over matter in general. Angels can heal the sick or give leprosy, with Rumisiel worried about accidentally doing the latter in an attempt towards the former due to his lack of practice. Cassiel forced a plant to reproduce through several generations in an instant. This is biological manipulation and potentially time manipulation though I would think not as time is explicitly one of the things the higher ranked angels are in charge of controlling. They also have physical erasure, being able to "un-make things" with Cassiel threatening to unmake some mosquitos and Rumisiel disintegrating the body of a dead Angel. 

Finally there are some feats where it's not really clear what ability is being used. Rumisiel was able to snap his fingers and cause a car to crash into a telephone pole. It's possible this is telekinesis though it didn't look like other instances of Angelic telekinesis, and is possibly probability manipulation. Cassiel used her powers to seal off the glass walkway between two parts of a school and fill it with water and fish which may be either creation or a bigger teleportation feat than seen elsewhere. The fish it is known she got from somewhere else. Rumisiel claimed he could make Ash very fast in a street race and Cassiel thought she could have fixed Ash and James' street race, though the method by which they would do this is unclear. 

Outside of his magic, Xaphrael like all Avenging Angels has a flaming sword, which can negate the immortality of angels, permanently killing them. Xaphrael can manifest his sword at any time he needs to or make it seemingly disappear. 

Mentally just as Angels can reach inhuman levels of physical prowess over the centuries, so too can they gain inhuman levels of mental capability. Xaphrael has explicitly been combat training for centuries, and while he commanded his skills as a commander, dismissed Vashiel's skill in combat, Vashiel being another Avenging Angel. Mentally Xaphrael is a master planner who masterminded a plan to gain control over the entire universe, hiding his tracks after assassinating the Archons, the leaders of the lower-ranked Angels, and keeping himself from being found out. 

In terms of weaknesses, Xaphrael's biggest in universe and part of the source of his resentment is that he is a lower ranged angel, a relatively small cog in the machine. He doesn't understand the deeper universe and in a fight against the real metahumans of the verse, the higher-ranked angels he'd get absolutely stomped. The difference in power between a normal angel and a Cherubim is such that a fight between them would be like a fight between "a snowball and a Hot Summer's day" let alone a Seraphim, the supreme overseers of universal stability. Xaphrael is physically a peak human supervillain in a world with powerful superhumans and his arrogance and lack of understanding is seen in his attempt to control all and presumption to know all. Normal angels also can't create life and without the Celestial Filing System can't transmute people from one state to another.

Name: Xaphrael

Origin: Misfile

Powers and Abilities: Immortality, Reality-Warping, Flight/Levitation, Invisibility, Illusions (Disguises), Anti-Intangibility (Spiritual), Force Projection, Supernatural Sensing, Telekinesis, Mild Mental Manipulation, Dream Manipulation, Dimensional Teleportation/BFR, Limited Temporal BFR, Weather/Temperature Manipulation, Biological Manipulation, Existence Erasure, Summoning (Flaming Sword), and Anti-Immortality. (Flaming Sword can kill other Angels) Potentially Memory Erasure, Time Manipulation, Probability Manipulation, Creation, and Kinetic Energy Manipulation. (Rumisiel could make cars go faster through an unknown method)

Weaknesses: Physically only somewhat stronger than humans, Pride, Can't create life or transmute matter without the Celestial Filing System.

Destructive Capacity: Likely Superhuman physically, City Level with his powers normally, up to Universal with Celestial Filing System

Range: City-wide scale normally, Universal with Celestial Filing System. Can travel between dimensions.

Speed: Superhuman

Durability: Likely Superhuman

Stamina: Unknown

Standard Equipment: Flaming Sword

Intelligence: Likely Peak Human or Superhuman. Has hundreds of years of experience in combat training and planning. Deceived many angels searching for him and nearly overthrew the Celestial Bureaucracy. 

In both the Marvel and DC Universes, Xaphrael would do very poorly. He's horribly outgunned with not only normal humans having better feats than Misfile-verse Angels, but arguably having better feats than Misfile-verse Cherubim. And while that's basically the norm for Xaphrael and he could still potentially fight with his reality-warping the bigger problem is that both universes have a ton of hypergeniuses characters who can mentally compete with and create technology on the range of Type 4 to Type 5 civilizations. 

In Marvel he'd at least do slightly better because there are fewer mystical type characters that can travel to other planes of reality, though there are still plenty, and angels are less prevalent on Earth but even street tier heroes and villains would probably just physically beat him up normally. In DC where Heaven is directly and often interfering with normal Earths with normal angels having sensory powers on a cosmic scale Xaphrael would be found out pretty much instantly. This isn't really much of a surprise, Marvel/DC are just really strong verses in general.

In the Kampfer-verse, Xaphrael would probably solo the verse, though it's a bit more complicated. Kampferinnin are stronger and have better reaction times than normal Misfile-verse Angels being able to punch people into the horizon comedically and being able to bullet-time. That said in combat they don't move faster than Xaphrael does and two of the three weapon types Kampferinnin use; swords and bullets probably wouldn't be very effective against an immortal regenerating angel, with the one able to really encompass his entire body at once being flame users. Xaphrael should be able to match the low level superhuman skill seen in the verse like blocking bullets with his centuries of experience and should be easily able to outmatch the teenager warriors with his extreme intelligence.

The Kampferinnen do have abilities but most of them are fairly low key like superleaping and aren't likely to do anything to Xaphrael while he could easily mess with them just with simpler abilities like invisibility. The only Kampferinnin with an ability that might work on Xaphrael would be Kaede's brainwashing however not only is she unlikely to use it on Xaphrael for in-character reasons but Natsuru was able to resist Kade's brainwashing via willpower and through love. Xaphrael is an extremely willful character to the point of wanting to change the laws of the universe and while it was platonic and not romantic, part of his motivation was love for his captain Vashiel. Kaede's mental manipulation doesn't seem that much stronger than Cassiel and Cassiel thought she and Rumisiel stood no chance against Xaphrael.

Kampfer technically also has the Moderators, the super advanced civilization that created the Kampferinnin and while they might be able to beat Xaphrael in a direct fight being a massively advanced civilization vs a single person, overtime Xaphrael would probably be able to undermine and defeat them as they haven't shown anything through technology that the Angels couldn't do with their powers and Xaphrael's plan would probably work.

In the Good Omens-verse, Xaphrael's would fit in rather normally. His reality-warping is not as strong normally as most of the Angels in the verse who can do things like create nebula, but his reality-warping with the Celestial Filing System is much higher, on par with the top tiers of the series who can reality-warp the universe, plus Xaphrael's physical abilities are much higher as physically Angels and Demons are basically normal humans. 

Xaphrael would also have a mental advantage against any angel or demon but Aziraphale and Crowley not through intelligence but in creativity and skill having been actively combat training for centuries which there's no evidence Good Omens-verse Angels do and having the ability to be creative that most Angels and Demons don't. Combined with him having generally similar powers as Good Omens-verse Angels and Demons, if not quite as potent, means he'd probably be able to beat any normal angel or demon in a direct fight.

Against higher tier characters or against Aziraphale or Crowley themselves, he'd have a much harder time since they could think similarly to him and have their own power advantages, with Crowley having a pretty easy way to get around Xaphrael's immortality through sealing him in technology the way he did to Hastur. Xaphrael would still be able to threaten them through planning and if he does his usual MO would probably be quite successful though the top tiers like Death or Satan could stop him at anytime.

In xxxHolic, Xaphrael would fit in quite well powerwise, even if aesthetically and thematically he'd stick out like a sore thumb. Most characters in xxxHolic scale off feats of exaggerated human capability like surviving long falls or moving at blurry speed as a joke, a level of stats that Xaphrael can more than keep up with if not surpass. He'd also have an unparalleled level of combat skill and a high degree of intelligence. Against most common spirits, Xaphrael would feel right at home punishing and exorcising them just as angels do in Misfile, and while more characters than normal would be able to see him via their spiritual senses, Xaphrael's versatile reality-warping powers would allow him to easily beat even most characters with supernatural powers like Doumeki or Kudagitsu just because they have far more specific and limited arsenals of abilities. 

Against some of the bigger powerhouses of the verse like Ame-Warashi or Jorogumo, Xaphrael has the raw power to compete, with similar scale feats such as storm creation on both sides. The bigger threat to him is their speed advantage scaling to lightning timing and arguably light-timing feats. That said these characters in particular are prone to prideful thinking and underestimating their opponents and especially without knowledge of Angelic immorality or the threat level of angels through things like existence erasure and dimensional BFR, Xaphrael could potentially beat them, especially overtime. It would be somewhat like Xaphrael vs a Cherubim-tier opponent...technically possible depending on mindsight but a major struggle.

However, Xaphrael would obviously be beaten by top tiers like Yuuko herself. Yuuko has reality-warping resistance strong enough to resist the power of the collector ghost who had an entire universe in one of his rooms, meaning even the Celestial Filing System would do nothing and is smart enough to mentally battle Fei Wong Reed over the multiverse, being dramatically smarter than even Xaphrael. Yuuko would in Misfile being consider a Seraph Tier opponent and Xaphrael would have literally nothing he could do against her.

Xaphrael in Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan would be both hilarious and cool to see. Angels in Dokuro-chan are superhuman clearly in excess of Xaphrael with feats like turning people to red mist with one strike, running fast enough to run on water, and getting into splash fights intense enough to create sonic booms. However they, or at least Dokuro-chan especially, are violent impulsive children that are insane and fight without much tactics. Xaphrael's stats are higher than most humans and with his extreme competence for the verse along with his versatile arsenal he would be able to fight Dokuro-chan angels directly with high difficulty. I could only describe it as a soldier with a gun in an enclose with a bunch of silverback gorillas. 

In terms of abilities, Dokuro-chan verse Angels have some of the same powers as Xaphrael like immorality, bfr, and existence erasure, and can freely transmute people without a Celestial Filing System, that said they lack the more subtle powers of Misfile-verse angels like invisibility, supernatural sensing, and subtle suggestion.

Xaphrael could potentially die any moment from the crazy shockwaves of Dokuro-chan-verse angels' attacks or could potentially take over the entire verse as the shadowy relative supergenius running everything behind the scenes unless God sends Angel Assassins like Dokuro-chan after Xaphrael until ones get a hit in. That said he would definitely have his own funny niche of the relatively weak but smart Angel who's the overtime threat compared to the most immediate threat of the other angels.