It's all too common for villains, anti-heroes, and other unsympathetic characters to be proud and vain at least in some form, and in turn, many follow the best-known variant of vanity by being overly proud of their appearance and eager to enshrine it above all other things.
Some just want their beauty to be presented the best so everyone can see it; some want to make themselves even more beautiful; some want to erase an unsightly scar or imperfection; some want to return to the beauty they were so proud of in their younger days; and some want to preserve their beauty for all time...and it's very common for this vanity and their pursuit of it to blow up in their face.
Here, the pursuit of beauty and self-admiration is a direct contributing factor to the character's death — or if they're lucky, a humiliating defeat that they're forced to learn from and be humbled by. This can take many forms: perhaps the magic potion of beauty is poisonous, perhaps the Deal with the Devil they made to regain their youthful good looks has horrific caveats, or maybe the villain's need to preen and admire is an Achilles' Heel that the heroes can exploit — especially if seeing their face damaged is a Berserk Button.
Whatever the case, 'twas beauty killed the beast.
A possible fate of the Vain Sorceress and the Immortality Seeker.
Compare Pride Before a Fall and Humiliation Conga. May overlap with Vanity-Induced Monstrosity, but not always.
WARNING: as this is both a death trope and a trope concerning endings, unmarked spoilers are found beyond this point. You have been warned.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Ichi the Witch: Invoked by Uruwashi, the Hisame Majik. She is obsessed with looking as gorgeous as possible despite being a flying ice shark. Due to being a Magik, she has Resurrective Immortality and can only be slain for an extended period if one completes her trial, which involves making her beautiful enough to meet her own impossible standards. Due to Ichi's lack of fashion sense from being a Wild Child, he accomplishes this by diving into her mouth and cutting her into a gruesomely beautiful sashimi platter. As if to emphasize the point, even her name means "beautiful".
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency: Despite being a powerful Hamon-wielding Silver Fox, Straizo is ashamed of his increasing age. As a result, he can't help himself but take the opportunity to become a vampire, even though this puts him on a collision course with Joseph and eventually leads to his doom...at which point, he says he's willing to accept death so long as he does so in his prime.
Comic Books
- Plain Jane and the Mermaid: Loreley, a mermaid who eats handsome men to remain beautiful, kidnaps local pretty young man Peter — Jane Brown's crush — all to marry him and eat him and restore her continued beauty. This leads Jane to chase Peter down to rescue him, as she sees him as the only way out of being homeless. In the final confrontation, Jane doesn't take the bait when Loreley first calls her fat, then drags her into her Hall of Mirrors to try and make her feel ugly; Jane instead turns the tables on her, saying Loreley's desperate to be beautiful and is empty inside from it. Loreley has a complete breakdown, shattering the mirrors, then demanding her sisters tell her who's prettier; when they avoid answering, Loreley breaks down even more and attempts to shove Jane into the volcanic vent, saying she's a fat piggy to be cooked. Jane stuffs her sinking stone in Loreley's mouth at the last minute, sending Loreley sinking to her death in the same vent.
- The Twilight Zone: In "Specter of Youth", corrupt antiques dealer and all-around ripoff artist Max Tiberias is unexpectedly presented with an amphora that turns out to contain the Fountain of Youth. Envious of young lovers and eager to regain his youthful good looks so he can enjoy his wealth properly, he takes a dose of the elixir — but not before shortchanging the diver who found it, of course. It works, making him young and handsome once more... but unfortunately for him, it doesn't stop there, regressing him to adolescence, childhood, and finally infancy. On the upside, the regression stops there; on the downside, Max has lost all traces of his previous identity, and thanks to his refusal to donate to his local orphanage, he's going to be brought up as the ward and future slave of yet another mean-spirited businessman.
Fan Works
- In Lockhart's Blunder
, Lockhart accidentally publicizes the existence of a beauty-enhancing spell common among Purebloods, by using it on Snape at his attempt at a dueling club. Using this spell to excess can have such consequences as infertility for the user (as Narcissa Malfoy learns), reductions in intelligence/magical ability for those nearby (happened to Crabbe and Goyle "thanks" to their mothers), or personality alterations (such as Snape). Most people can be easily enough sorted out with the correct counter-spell but Lockhart's mistake of casting the spell on another person had horrendous consequences for him. He wound up as a Dementor.
Films — Animation
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Queen's desire to secure her place as the Fairest of Them All eventually results in her deliberately making herself appear old and ugly to kill Snow White with the poison apple... only to be tracked down and cornered on a cliff edge by the vengeful Dwarfs soon after, ultimately falling to her death.
Films — Live-Action
- Brazil (1985): Played with; Mrs Lowry and Mrs Terrain both ignore the suffering of others while reveling in what their connections to the dystopian government can afford them — including surgeries to restore their youthful beauty. However, Mrs Terrain experiences a "complication" that forces her to attend a fancy party with a bandage around her head; then, her complication has a complication that leaves her in a wheelchair, completely swathed in bandages, hooked up to an IV, and wearing sunglasses... and in the climax, Sam attends her funeral, and finds that her coffin is found to be occupied by nothing but liquefied meat and loose bones. However, Mrs Lowry — the more unpleasant of the two — finds that her surgery goes off without a hitch, to the point that she spends the party getting hit on by younger men, and at the funeral, she looks so young she's played by the same actress as Jill. However, the climax all turns out to be a hallucination Sam is suffering while being tortured by Information Retrieval, so the results probably weren't that dramatic in reality.
- The Dark Crystal: The Skeksis not only glory in ludicrously decadent robes to conceal their withered frames but restore their youth by draining the essence of their Podling slaves, though it's noted that the effects lasted longer with Gelfling essence. As such, when the Skeksis capture Kira — one of the last two remaining Gelflings and a possible candidate for fulfilling the prophecy that could undo Skeksis rule — they opt to drain her essence before killing her. Unfortunately, Kira uses her Beast Master skills to turn SkekTek's test subjects against him and break out of the lab, allowing her to buy Jen enough time to return the shard to the Dark Crystal, fulfilling the prophecy and ending Skeksis rule once and for all.
- The Substance: By the climax of the film, Sue is no longer Elisabeth's alter ego but an independent Split Personality embodying the vanity of her Glory Days, eventually leading her to murder Elisabeth. However, without Elisabeth around for Sue to harvest fluid from, Sue's body begins to rapidly deteriorate. But because Sue still has a New Year's Eve show to attend, she goes so far as to inject herself with the already-used one-use-only Substance injector in the desperate hope of birthing another, more beautiful self that she can wear to the party. The result is a hideously deformed merger of Sue and Elisabeth that not only completely screws up the New Year's Eve show but ultimately collapses into a pile of gore on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
- Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: As with the original musical, Judge Turpin is a Dirty Old Man who lusts after the teenage daughter of his rape victim and seeks out the services of Sweeney Todd to make himself look handsome enough to seduce her. However, the film adds an additional note of vanity by having Turpin wear the same fine clothes he wore when he was young and handsome, despite them being out of fashion and quite shabby by now, making him appear obsessed with his youth. As such, he succumbs even more readily when it looks like he'll be getting the makeover he needs to make him handsome enough to marry Johanna — allowing Todd to finally corner him and carve him up in the barber's chair.
Literature
- Aesop's Fables: In "The Stag At The Pool", the stag admires himself in a pool of water, taking great pride in his impressive antlers and how big he's let them grow, but at the same time, wishes he didn't have such slender legs. Presently, a hunter note arrives on the scene, and the stag's slender legs allow him to easily evade his pursuer. However, while fleeing through the forest, the antlers he was so proud of get tangled up in the low-hanging branches of a tree, allowing the hunter to catch up and kill him.
- Snow White: The Queen is obsessively jealous of her stepdaughter Snow White's beauty and tries to get her out of the way so she can reclaim her status as Fairest of Them All. She gets away clean after feeding Snow White a poisoned apple, but soon after, hears of a newlywed princess who is also more beautiful than her. The Queen goes to check it out, presumably planning to murder the bride, too... only to find out that she's a Not Quite Dead Snow White, and her new husband forces the Queen to wear hot iron shoes and dance until she drops dead. She likely would've gotten away scot-free if her vanity hadn't driven her to attend the wedding to do the same thing again.
- Wear Your Soul Round Your Neck: Thyssa cuts Mignon's eye. Used to being perfect, Mignon is furious and follows Thyssa into the Land Of Monsters, and only narrowly escapes when Thyssa's pack attack her. Having very nearly lost her life, she then goes back to the Land Of Monsters to sow discord among them in another attempt to get Thyssa killed. This time, she's killed and eaten, all because she couldn't accept the loss of her eye. There's no sign she even regrets her suicidal decision.
Live-Action TV
- 1000 Ways to Die: "Corset Killed Him" features a narcissistic tango dancer attempting to hide his growing paunch with the aid of a corset. It worked just long enough to give the man an opportunity to be an even bigger asshole to his dance partner...up until the tightly laced corset put too much pressure on his ribs, breaking one of them and spearing him in the heart, resulting in his death from internal bleeding.
- American Horror Story: Coven: Played with in the backstory; Madame Delphine LaLaurie took to harvesting blood from her slaves and using it as a facial treatment she believed would restore her youth. However, when Voodoo queen Marie Laveau showed up on her doorstep, she cut right to the source of Delphine's vanity — namely her fear of her husband having affairs — by offering her a "love potion" that would make her irresistible to her husband again. Unknown to the slaveowner, the Voodoo Queen was out for revenge for the torture of her lover, and the potion almost immediately knocked her out; when Delphine regained consciousness, her entire family had been hanged in a slave uprising, and a grave was being dug for her. In a final irony, the potion made Delphine immortal — meaning that she's still alive when Fiona Goode unearths her two hundred years later.
- Doctor Who:
- In "The End Of The World," the Lady Cassandra O'Brian.Δ17 has essentially reduced herself to a "bitchy trampoline" of skin in her obsessive pursuit of beauty and "purity", requiring her attendants to regularly moisturize her. She's arranged the sabotage of Platform One as part of a scam to pay for her next round of surgeries — only for the Doctor to save the day and undo her attempt to teleport herself to safety... and because Cassandra was teleported back without her attendants, she can't be moisturized: in the enhanced heat of the crisis she engineered, her "thin and dainty" form begins to rapidly dry out until it literally tears itself apart. It's later revealed in "New Earth" that she survived but had to be psychografted into a secondary skin taken from her... backside.
- Throughout "Planet Of The Ood," the balding Mr Halpern is continuously downing shots of hair tonic in the hope of restoring his departed hairline, albeit when he's not presiding over the mutilation and enslavement of the Ood. However, the finale reveals that his servant, Ood Sigma, has been secretly dosing the tonic with Ood DNA, resulting in Halpern being horrifically transformed into another Ood.
- Grimm: In "Skin Deep", Dr Eugene Forbes has partnered with Malcolm Caulfield, a Musasat Alsh-Shabab wesen, to provide a unique youth-restoring treatment for his clients - namely "Yanbue" extracted from models in Malcolm's fake photoshoots, all of whom later suffered fatal Rapid Aging. Forbes' clinic is a roaring success, with numerous elderly ladies getting their youth back, but unfortunately, Forbes makes the mistake of using the Yanbue on himself despite Malcolm's warnings, and quickly gets addicted to it, forcing Malcolm to harvest even more. Abusing Yanbue drives Forbes insane, disfigures his face, and eventually gets the attention of Nick, resulting in a massive brawl that ends with Forbes stabbing Malcolm to death for spilling a jar of Yanbue, then applying the spilled stuff to his face. As Forbes gloats at the fact that he looks so good at sixty-nine, the Yanbue is absorbed into his skin one last time, distorting his face out of shape and killing him on the spot.
- Hannibal: After being deluded into disfiguring his own handsome face by Hannibal Lecter in season 2, Mason Verger plots revenge with a scheme combining equal parts gluttony and vanity; after capturing Hannibal and Will Graham in season 3, he intends to not only devour Hannibal over several ghastly courses but to have Cordell perform a face transplant so that Mason can have Will's good looks. Though the symbolic revenge on Hannibal already puts him at risk of being killed by the world's deadliest Serial Killer, it's the vanity-fueled threat to Will's life that puts Mason very firmly on Hannibal's shitlist; so, as soon as he's able to charm his way to freedom, the Psycho Psychologist arranges for a final comeuppance: Mason wakes up to find himself wearing Cordell's face, and with his chief henchman dead, he's now defenseless against his long-suffering sister, Margo... and thanks to a little help from Hannibal, she stands to inherit Mason's wealth and no longer has any reason to keep him alive. A long-overdue Cruel and Unusual Death ensues.
- Just Beyond: In "Unfiltered", a nerdy girl named Lily, who’s insecure about her looks, meets a substitute teacher named Miss Fausse, who tells her about an app that she can use to change her appearance. Lily uses it to become beautiful, but it also has side-effects, like making her less smart and turning her vain and conceited. Then, Lily gets greedy and uses the app more, making her look like she got bad plastic surgery. She then finds Miss Fausse’s house to ask her how she can go back to normal, and she learns that Miss Fausse is a Vain Sorceress who uses the app to steal the souls of anybody who uses it, and then keeps the souls trapped in mirrors in her house to keep herself young and beautiful forever. Lily then smashes all the mirrors except the one with her own soul, which frees the souls trapped inside and causes Miss Fausse to rapidly age, making her look like a zombie. Lily then breaks the last mirror to free her own soul, which returns to her body. With all the captured souls gone, Miss Fausse then turns into a pile of dust.
- The Outer Limits (1995): In "The Last Supper," Dr Sinclair was originally attempting to isolate the secret of eternal life from the immortal Jade's blood For Science! during the backstory, but after being badly scarred in Jade's escape from captivity and left to grow old over the last twenty years, his obsession has turned much more personal: he's now out to claim the benefits of a youth serum all for himself. As such, when he finally recaptures Jade, he immediately extracts some blood from her to complete his serum and uses it on himself. For a few seconds, he exalts in his scars being healed and his body being restored to his Glory Days... but unfortunately for Sinclair, the process doesn't stop: as agonizing pain sets in, the out-of-control rejuvenation swiftly regresses him to a teenager, an adolescent, a child, and finally an infant — and then he melts into pre-embryonic goo.
- Round the Twist: In "Pink Bow Tie", the school principal is an obnoxious stuffed shirt with a very dandified fashion sense (hence the bow tie) and a particular sensitivity over his baldness. So, after hearing all the trouble that occurred because of the Age Ranger, and giving Pete, Rabbit, Tiger, and Gribbs hell for "lying", he decides to use the machine on himself, intent on restoring his hair and having a chance to romance his secretary. Unlike the main villains of the episode, though, he doesn't know how to control the Age Ranger, and the episode ends with him as a bawling infant — much to the amusement of the rejuvenated secretary.
Ms Newman: Personally, I'd like to thank you boys... but I think he might still be very touchy about his hair.
Music
- Best Friend (2014): The Villain Protagonist of the music video is a supermodel who has been swallowing other women whole in order to absorb their desired attributes and thus make herself Fairest of Them All — to the point of becoming a Humanoid Abomination. However, she needs to keep on eating women to continue assuming this new ideal form, which becomes more taxing overtime; after reverting backstage just prior to the climactic fashion show, she eats one more hapless model who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and struts off to the runway...only to puke up the woman's dress and choke to death on it, returning to her true form as she dies.
Mythology & Religion
- Classical Mythology: After breaking the hearts of all prospective wives and lovers, Narcissus was cursed by Nemesis to never have his affections returned by the one he truly loved. Naturally, this turned out to be himself, to the point of growing absolutely besotted with his reflection in a pool of water. Depending on the version of the story, some variant of this trope ensues: either Narcissus commits suicide out of despair over being unable to consummate the relationship, withers away into the flower that he lends his name to, or is so consumed with vanity that he drowns trying to embrace his reflection in the water.
Tabletop Games
- Vampire: The Masquerade: Absimiliard, the Nosferatu Antediluvian, is renowned for his vanity — hence why he was first Punished with Ugly and why he's spent the last few thousand years trying to convince Caine to remove the curse by enacting the genocide of his childer. The Gehenna scenario "Crucible of God" features Absimiliard setting out to diablerize his children plus one fellow Antediluvian, not just to escape the Withering, but to take Caine's power and presumably use it to restore his beauty. However, the Withering has weakened his normally godlike powers, and though he's still vastly stronger than most Kindred, it's still possible for savvy players to kill him. For good measure, in one possible variant suggested by the book, Absimiliard's ultimate defeat can be due to his Obfuscate failing him at a critical moment and revealing his true face, leaving him so overwhelmed with shame that he flees, unwittingly allowing players to catch up and deliver the Final Death.
- Warhammer: Sigvald the Magnificent is undeniably The Fighting Narcissist of the setting and so vain he has his bodyguard carry mirror-polished shields so he can admire himself at a moment's notice. It finally backfires on him in the End Times when the undead champion Krell manages to wound his face; Sigvald goes berserk and pounds the wight's skull to dust with his bare hands, leaving him in such a helpless and self-pitying state that he doesn't even notice the Troll-King he'd defeated earlier approaching him — then smashing his brains out with his hammer and pissing on his corpse. He got better.
Theatre
- Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Judge Turpin's cruel henchman Beadle Bamford is vain and occasionally portrayed as something of a dandy; as such, he is ultimately lured to his death by being offered a special appointment with Todd that he promises will make him irresistible to the ladies. As a result, he ends up as a Peek-a-Boo Corpse in Mrs Lovett's bakehouse.
Video Games
- The 7th Guest: In both the original and the remake, Julia desperately wants to regain her youth so she can exploit the beauty she had in her younger days and is fully prepared to play along with Stauf's games in order to have her wish fulfilled as promised, even if it means bringing him a child to be killed in a human sacrifice. In VR remake, the moment she hands over Tad, she is rewarded with the youth she wanted... but unfortunately, she didn't specify how much of it she wanted, resulting in her quickly reaching childhood and begging to be changed back, before shrinking down into her clothes as an infant, then finally vanishing into nothingness.
- Hitman: Absolution: One of the minor targets later in the game is Dr Valentine, a preening weapons scientist on the payroll of Dexter Industries. Suffering from Baldness Angst, he's misusing the labs to create a serum that can theoretically regenerate his hair; it's possible to spike the serum with the friction-activated fire paste prototype also being tested at the lab... and because Valentine can't resist the opportunity to have hair again, he tests it on himself by rubbing it into his bald dome. After a brief Hope Spot, his entire head bursts into flame, sending him on a blind dash through the nearest door, whereupon he bumps into the railing of the stairwell outside and falls thirty feet to his death.
- I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: In Ted's scenario, the main villain is none other than Satan himself, vying with an angel for ownership of Ellen's soul. However, Satan is every bit as vain and self-absorbed as his depictions throughout classic literature: the only way to defeat him is to find Ellen's mirror — the only mirror left in the castle — and show it to him: the Devil is so enraptured by his own reflection that he's drawn inside, allowing Ted to take it to the Witch's summoning circle and break it there, trapping the Devil inside the circle indefinitely.
- Kirby: Triple Deluxe: Queen Sectonia is a power-hungry tyrant obsessed with her own beauty, going as far as to kidnap her subjects — the People of the Sky — and assimilate all of Floralia into her own beauty. However, Sectonia wasn't always this way; her being gifted the Dimension Mirror by Taranza caused her to become self-obsessed and villainous. During her boss battle, she ends up merging with the Dreamstalk to become the most powerful and beautiful being known; this ends up becoming her downfall as, thanks to a Miracle Fruit provided by Taranza, Kirby uses it to defeat Sectonia.
- Little Nightmares: The Lady is indicated to be a Vain Sorceress, given that depictions of her are encountered all over the Maw, the first close-up encounter with her features her continuously brushing her hair until interrupted, and she has Life Drinker powers that are implied to keep her young. However, the end of Secrets of the Maw reveals that the Lady's true self can be seen in mirrors, a sight that she finds so horrific that she's broken the dozens of mirrors that used to decorate her lair... but unfortunately for her, she missed one hidden away in a backroom. As such, Six uses this to counter the Lady's attempts to drink her life over the course of the final boss battle until she finally collapses in horror — allowing Six to go for the jugular.
- Privateer 2: The Darkening: Intergalactic crime lord Kronos has become so obsessed with maintaining his youth and good looks that he's gotten addicted to Revive, an anti-aging drug. However, abuse of it has driven him insane and mutated him so badly that he's sprouted new vital organs from an umbilicus under his robes. As such, his behaviour has become so erratic that his lieutenants have started to turn on him, to the point that they even start offering their support to Lev Arris, eventually leading to a final showdown that ends with Lev crushing Kronos' "ass brain pimple" underfoot — an Achilles' Heel that wouldn't have existed if not for his vanity.
Web Animation
- Revenge Films: In stories starring a female main character and an antagonist of the same gender, the antagonist may pride herself in her good looks and take every moment she can to rub it on the FMC's face. However, her obsession with looking attractive will become her downfall in the end.
- "She told me that they got divorced because they had different values, but in reality...": Sarah always bragged about her beauty to her unattractive cousin Melanie, even after her own husband divorced and sued her for infidelity. A few years later, Sarah worried about losing her good looks and went to a hospital overseas that offered cheap plastic surgery, which backfired as the operation made Sarah look older than she already was, thus destroying any remaining beauty she had. As a result, Sarah destroyed all mirrors in her house and became a shut-in.
- "My twin who looks down on me got a plastic surgery and brings her fiancé over": Melanie bragged about being cuter her twin sister, Catherine, since childhood. She returned from college with an even prettier face. While the sisters' parents were elated that their favorite daughter became prettier, it's all for naught when her face starts swelling and she reveals having gone through plastic surgery. When Melanie brings over her fiancé, John, Catherine takes advantage of this to expose her stuck-up sister in revenge for the abuse she went through because of her, resulting in John ditching Melanie. Even then, Melanie didn't learn her lesson and kept asking her parents for surgery money until they kicked her out. In the epilogue, when she goes to Cath's house for money, her face was disfigured from all the failed surgeries she went under.
- "She told me that they got divorced because they had different values, but in reality..."
Western Animation
- The Mask: Animated Series: In "Little Big Mask", an ad for a youth cream results in the Mask (already a narcissistic antihero) getting obsessed about showing signs of aging and tries to counter them on a whim — first with the advertised cosmetic and then with a prototype of his own design, which he naturally tests on himself. Unfortunately, the youth cream works a little too well: Stanley wakes up to find himself regressed to his teenage years and growing progressively younger as the day goes on, eventually realizing that the Mask's vanity has set off an uncontrollable regression that will result in the two of them ceasing to exist if an antidote can't be found — forcing Stanley to surrender control to the Mask while he goes about creating the antidote and Peggy tries to keep him on track.
