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Curated playlist

Fictional sole survivors

  • SupermanThe first Superman was a homeless man tricked into taking a drug. Jerry Siegel wrote him as a villain in 1933.
  • PalpatinePalpatine's first name stayed off screen for decades. Fans learned it was Sheev only in the 2014 novel Tarkin.
  • Chris RedfieldChris Redfield, the hero of Capcom's Resident Evil series, stands inside an active volcano and punches a giant boulder until it drops into the lava. That moment from Resident Evil 5 in 2009 turned into one of the most repeated jokes in…
  • Jill ValentineJill Valentine is a character in Capcom's Resident Evil series, and her name is forever tied to a sandwich. In the 1996 original game, a falling ceiling trap almost crushes her. Her partner Barry Burton then says, in stiff and awkward…
  • Guts (Berserk)Guts, the hero of the manga Berserk, was born from his hanged mother's corpse. His adoptive father later sold him.
  • PunisherIn 2011, an editor at Marvel Comics revealed that the Punisher had killed 48,502 people on the page since the mid-1970s. That body count belongs to a character whom writer Gerry Conway meant as a second-tier figure. Conway has said the…
  • Jessica JonesJessica Jones is a Marvel Comics superhero who spends much of her story trying not to be one. She runs a detective agency called Alias Private Investigations, and she is usually its only employee. Yet Marvel eventually placed her in a high…
  • AangAang is twelve years old by the count of his body and 112 by the count of the calendar. That gap is the first strange fact about the hero of Nickelodeon's animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. Two young people named Katara and Sokka…
  • F.A.N.G. (Street Fighter)F.A.N.G promised to beat his opponent in exactly two minutes. The Street Fighter V villain still ranked near the bottom.
  • Nico RobinNico Robin, a fictional character in the One Piece franchise created by Eiichiro Oda, is known to the world's authorities as the "Devil Child". The name sounds like a warning about a monster. The woman behind it is an archaeologist and…
  • Madelyne PryorMadelyne Pryor first appeared in Uncanny X-Men #168, cover-dated April 1983, and nobody planned for her to become a villain. Writer Chris Claremont once summed up her opening storyline with a single exchange. Scott Summers, the X-Men's…
  • Lobo (character)Lobo is a DC Comics antihero whose name, in his alien tongue, roughly means he who devours your entrails and thoroughly enjoys it. The name is not a boast. He comes from a planet called Czarnia, and he roams the galaxy as a mercenary and…

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