"Cape 106. Ah. Written by Trevor Pooley, pencils by D.J. Chester, near mint, slight crease on the back cover. You want to kill one of them? Have you seen their work in Retro Man? Real crime to lose that talent, but a job is a job, I suppose. A pencil through the eye? Now, that would be ironic."
— Goggles, The Cape, "Goggles and Hicks"
The common nerd is, at worst, a bit annoying. Sure, he might have No Social Skills and be overly fond of telling people about his Pokémon collection, but come on — he wouldn't hurt a fly.
And then there's this jerk (usually but definitely not always a guy). Either his lack of social niceties is caused by a complete disregard for other people, or else his loneliness and constant rejection has turned him bitter and twisted. Either way, he's out to get everything he's ever wanted, by any means necessary, including revenge for any real or imagined slights he's suffered.
He's often an Entitled Bastard who thinks that his superior intelligence (which may or may not be as superior as he imagines) should automatically make him adored and successful, and that the people failing to give him his due deserve some sort of exaggerated punishment for it. He often does suffer from genuine bullying and mistreatment, but by the time he gets to his Motive Rant, he's done so many horrible things that his audience will be less than sympathetic — no matter how many times you were stuffed in a locker or given a wedgie, it just doesn't justify sending demons to rip the living souls out of peoples' bodies. He will also often seek to get a girlfriend, but he fails to seduce a girl due to being unattractive and having a poor fashion sense and No Social Skills. So, he'll usually resort to immoral methods, such as kidnapping the girl or using Mind Control to force her to be his girlfriend.
The Nerdy Bully and Insufferable Genius are this trope's somewhat more benign cousins, who settle for being Jerkasses instead of going straight for outright villainy.note On the flip side, the Evil Genius, Evil Overlord, or Supervillain are what the Evil Nerd often wants to be but can't quite live up to — regardless of his actual intelligence, he's fundamentally too petty and narrow-minded to conceive of a genuinely visionary plan, evil or otherwise. In other words, an Evil Nerd is to an Evil Genius what a Smug Snake is to a Magnificent Bastard.
Since the Evil Nerd is generally not the fittest or best-looking, there is likely to be overlap with Brains Evil, Brawn Good and Beauty Equals Goodness as he faces off against the more attractive and physically capable heroes. Compare the Evil Cripple, whose broken morality is symbolised and/or caused by a more visible handicap, as well as Nerdy Bully, which he may overlap with or have graduated from if he's past his high school years. If the Evil Nerd is also a businessperson, see Tech Bro.
Contrast Nerd in Evil's Helmet, where the villain's nerdiness offsets his evil instead of being the foundation of it. Contrast Abhorrent Alpha Male, for malevolent manly men.
No Real Life Examples, Please! We all know that not all nerds in Real Life are nice people.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- Absolute Green Arrow: Oliver Queen's Evil Former Friend Jubal Slade started off as a harmless dork with No Social Skills, albeit bitter over his lack of success with women. After the duo became billionaire Tech Bros, Slade's sense of entitlement and perceived freedom from consequences led to him becoming a Serial Rapist that would later traffick underage girls to his private island.
- Astro City:
- Simon Says is a Teen Genius who turned to crime after being relentlessly bullied in school.
- The Mecha-Nerds are a group of high school science fair winners who were turned into robots, then decided to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
- Edge of Spider-Verse (2014): Issue 4 features Patton Parnell, a demented teenage version of Peter Parker from an alternate universe who does "science experiments" on bugs and his neighbors' pets (by torturing them), spies on his secret crush and next-door neighbor, Sarah Jane, while she's changing (and plans on stealing underwear from her room), and wishes that his classmates would get incinerated while they're mocking him on the school bus. After he gets bitten by a mutant spider, he gains a craving for flesh and blood, which he satisfies by eating his uncle (who, granted, was an abusive SOB), his school bully, a cat, and a child who owned the cat. He also bites Sarah Jane and tries to kidnap her.
- Firestorm: Cliff Carmichael inverts the usual jock/nerd dynamic common in superhero comics by being the Nerdy Bully that torments the Lovable Jock protagonist, Ronnie Raymond, in high school. As an adult, Cliff becomes a supervillain, the second Thinker, and attempts to murder Ronnie.
- Marvel Adventures: In this incarnation, Rocket Racer, Leapfrog, and Stilt-Man (who appear in Marvel Adventures Spider-Man issue #21) are a bunch of teenage geeks who all have hobbies like playing video games and watching The Outer Limits, Rocket Racer talks with a stutter, and Leapfrog needs an asthma inhaler. They were given their costumes and tech by the Tinkerer (who they met in an online chat-room), and use their gear to become supervillains and commit robberies. They plan on using their stolen loot to buy things like an expensive video game console that jacks into the player's brain, and a plasma-screen TV so big it can be seen from space. Spider-Man remarks that the three villains are even bigger nerds than he is.
- Mega Robo Bros: Basically all of the villains are this, since they are all technology/robotics based.
Comic Strips
- Scary Gary: Leopold grows an evil lab assistant in his lab from a box of store-bought "LAB NERD" mix, though it seems the base nerd isn't inherently evil considering Leopold admits he tried to jazz it up a bit because he had to cut corners after his funds for the project ran out. The resulting nerd claims to be just as evil as Leopold, but the key word here is "claims".
Fan Works
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - Grove Street 4 Life: The fic characterizes Zero's Sitcom Arch-Nemesis Berkely as one of these, possibly as a result of too much bullying. He ends up selling out the Caper Crew to Don Salvatore as in the original game.
[Berkeley's] eyes narrowed, then they just went.... dead, and I realized he wasn't like Zero at all, he was a fucking psychotic, one of those nerds who ends up so broken and pissed off and fucked over that they turn completely in on themselves and end up going crazy and going on a gun rampage.
Films — Animated
- Despicable Me 1: The Big Bad, Vector, is an immature, dorky young man with Nerd Glasses, a nasally voice, a bowl cut, and a potbelly. After stealing a Shrink Ray, he's later shown in his Evil Lair, playing with it like it's a toy. In another part, he's chilling in his lair, playing a video game.
- The Incredibles 1: Syndrome is this, as he showed technical brilliance even as a child. As an adult, he's built an empire from building tech and weapons unlike anything the world's ever seen... though he uses those same groundbreaking pieces of tech to kill off dozens of revered superheroes and attempts to murder an entire family due to a petty grudge.
- Megamind: Tighten, the Big Bad of the movie, is a flabby, bumbling, immature dork with No Social Skills and a bad haircut who likes to play video games. He lucks into getting superpowers and decided to become a supervillain. Roxanne outright calls him a nerd at one point.
Films — Live-Action
- Ghostbusters (2016) has Rowan North, a geeky guy who's spent his whole life being treated like dirt by everyone he's ever met. His misanthropy pushes him to summon an army of evil ghosts and Take Over the World. After he gives a Motive Rant to the Ghostbusters, they sympathize with him but also say that his years of being bullied don’t excuse his actions, telling him that people make fun of them all the time and they don't make evil plans to get revenge on the world.
- The Spirit of '76 has science geek and UFO buff, Rodney Snodgrass, who wants to capture the time travelers and use them for his high school science fair project. He steals part of their time machine and destroys it by accident, almost causing them to be trapped in The '70s forever.
Literature
- The Technical Boy in American Gods is a version of this trope that's actually achieved the elevated stature he craves. Instead of being bitter and resentful, he's smug and conceited about how his intelligence has allowed him to be successful even in the complete absence of any social skills.
- Norman Birdwell in the first of the Blood Books is an odious loser who summons demons in a poorly considered effort to become cool and get girls, not caring that every time he sends the demon out to do a favour for him, it kills an innocent before returning. Even other nerds can't stand him, even aside from the demonology thing — he keeps getting into heated arguments with them about roleplaying games and just generally being a Jerkass.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Lucien, the Big Bad of Portal Through Time, wears a frilly outfit that makes him "look like a villain from a gothic novel" and names his time travel device the Wand of Wells after H. G. Wells, author of The Time Machine.
- Harold Lauder in The Stand is fat, gross, and considers himself the only fully sentient person around. He actually flirts with subverting this trope since his genuine intelligence makes him valuable in the post-apocalyptic world and he finally gets some of the social acceptance he's been lacking, but in the end, he can't overcome his baggage and joins the Big Bad.
Live-Action TV
- The Technical Boy in American Gods (2017) may be the literal embodiment of the trope, being the God of Technology and the Internet who takes the form of the most odious sort of tech-geek. Interestingly, he's even more evil than his book counterpart, reflecting the creators' belief that nerds have gotten eviler since the book was published.
- Robert Daly from the Black Mirror episode "USS Callister" is a nerdy, asocial programmer. He disproportionately takes out his frustrations with his co-workers by creating virtual copies of their minds, placing them in a video game mod, and abusively forcing them to reenact his power fantasies and torturing them as revenge for slights committed against him by their real-world counterparts. He finds it easier to use his technical skills to force clones of his coworkers to act out his sci-fi fantasies than to actually learn how to get along with them in real life.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer fought a few, most notably Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew, who team up to form the Trio in Season 6, with the goal of using technology, magic, and demons to take over Sunnydale, become rich, and get hot women. They called themselves "supervillains", and originally used the basement of Warren’s mom’s house as their Evil Lair, where they also kept their collection of action figures. When they weren't working to take over the town, the villainous geeks would just hang out in their "lair", enjoying nerdy hobbies such as reading comic books, playing video games, and having swordfights with toy lightsabers. They were the least threatening of the show's seasonal Big Bads, with their blundering being mostly used as a backdrop for Buffy's own struggle against depression, and their petty sense of entitlement and failure to consider the ramifications of their actions contrasted against the Evil-with-a-capital-E that she usually fought. Out of the three, Jonathan and Andrew weren't even bad people deep down, and despite wanting to be supervillains, they were both opposed to killing people. Only their leader, Warren, was truly evil. Even then, he was still pretty pathetic.
- Evil Abed from Community is every bit as dorky as the real Abed, but has gone from being bad at relating to people to outright hurting them For the Evulz and exploiting them for his own bizarre plans.
- The Bureau of Normalcy in Doom Patrol (2019) employs the Beard Hunter, who is fat, awkward, and still lives with his mother. Somewhat downplayed in that as dorky and clueless as he is, he's technically less dysfunctional than the heroes.
- Supernatural: In "LARP and the Real Girl", Sam and Dean investigate a weekend LARP game after hearing about two players who were killed through magic. The villain of the episode turns out to be a nerdy, but psychotic, young man named Gerry AKA Boltar the Furious. Gerry used a real book of magic spells (which he bought on eBay) to summon a fairy and enslave her, using her magic to get ahead in the role-playing game, Moondor, by killing other players and cheating (though he argues that it's not cheating since "magic is a part of Moondor"). When asked why he would go to such insane lengths to win at a role-playing game, he answers that Moondor is all he has and that he came there to be a hero and get away from his crappy life, but he was just as much of a loser in the make-believe world of Moondor as he was in the real world. So, he bought his spell book and started using magic to win.
- The Troop: The episode, "No More Master Nice Guy", introduces Gus, a nerdy teenage Bully Magnet who goes to the same high school as the heroes. While running from a Gang of Bullies, Gus finds a monster called a Doulos, which imprints on the first human it sees and obeys their commands. Gus quickly becomes Drunk with Power and uses the Doulos to get revenge on his bullies. He plans on using the Doulos to Take Over the City, but the Troop kills the Doulos. However, Gus returns to cause trouble again in 2 more episodes,note making plans to find and control more monsters so he can use them to rule the city of Lakewood.
- The Big Bad from Season 2 of Veronica Mars, Cassidy Casablancas, initially seems like a sweet, geeky foil to his douche-y older brother, Dick, but turns out to be far more ruthless and psychotic than Dick ever was. Downplayed in that the bullying and abuse he's suffered for being small, brainy, and self-conscious rather than confident and athletic like Dick isn't the direct motivation for his crimes, but it's implied that it is part of what made him cracked enough to be capable of them.
Roleplay
- Hazbin Hotel: Lucifer's Folly: Arcadian is one in spades. While he may appear to be just your stereotypical games and comics-obsessed nerd, he is also an Overlord (being the Overlord of Gaming in fact) and is surprisingly one of the most unpleasant, dangerous, and hated Overlords out there.
Tabletop Games
- One of the sample Heroes in Beast: The Primordial is a man who grew up being praised for his book-smarts but who has found that those don't amount to success and popularity in the real world. He's concluded that that must be the Beasts' fault, somehow, and so goes around hunting them while wearing an ill-fitting Badass Longcoat and a Fedora of Asskicking.
- The sample adventure for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer roleplaying game has as its main villain a teenager named Keith Dicks, who is unpopular, unaccomplished, and spends most of his time watching crappy science-fiction and fantasy shows on TV. Through a wish granted by an evil genie, Keith has gained the power to make the protagonists of his favorite franchises come to life, and is sending them out to kill everyone who's been mean to him.
Video Games
- City of Heroes villain Midnight Master is an evil alternate universe version of friendly loser, Percy Winkley. In Praetoria, he got fed up with being a laughingstock and decided to show them all... and it worked.
- Berdly from Deltarune is a smug insufferable Know-Nothing Know-It-All who constantly acts like a jerk and lords his intelligence over everyone. In Chapter 2, he willingly joins the Big Bad and attacks the protagonist under the pretense of "saving" his Only Friend Noelle, completely ignoring the fact that he is actively hurting her and that the protagonist is defending Noelle from him. He eventually makes a Heel–Face Turn in the Normal route or is frozen to death in the Weird route.
- Giko from Pico's Surprise Party is an antisocial chemistry nerd who resents the fact that Pico is so much more popular than him and that Pico's friends planned a surprise party for Pico but not for him, when his birthday is the same day. So, he decides to ambush Pico's friends at the party with a band of other social outcasts as his minions and wait for Pico to come so they can kill him, too. After Pico takes care of Giko's cronies, Giko drinks a chemical formula he created that turns him into a huge, musclebound monster with laser vision. While Gico puts up a good fight, he meets the same end as everyone else who's gone up against Pico. Pico also rightfully points out that if he wanted people to like him, the normal thing to do was to just come to the party and mingle.
Visual Novels
- Dennis from Double Homework is unattractive to girls, yet is always looking for a way to get into their pants, regarding of morality or even consent.
Western Animation
- The Amazing Spiez!: The Villain of the Week in "Operation: Solo Spy" is Macho Man, a short, scrawny, nerdy man with glasses, a bad haircut, a nasally, high-pitched voice, and an Annoying Laugh. Even his Evil Lair is nerdy, containing a collection of toy robots, a lot of books, and a computer with two monitors. Macho Man invents a foul-smelling body spray he can use to knock people out and teleport them into his lair. After kidnapping a famous bodybuilder, a famous basketball player, and a handsome movie star, Macho Man tells the manly celebrities that all his life, he's been picked on by Jerk Jocks, so he's going to use a machine he invented to copy the manly qualities of his captives and become the strongest, manliest guy in the world. After copying their manliness, he gains a Heroic Build, Super-Strength, a big chin, a mustache and goatee, and a deep voice (though he still has his glasses and bad haircut). He then plans to bully everyone the way he got bullied, and force the world to admire him.
- American Dragon: Jake Long: Siren Says features a rare female example. Vicky Fickling is a geeky teenage girl with Nerd Glasses and an obsession with sci-fi, but secretly, she's also an evil siren. When she bids on Jake in a Bachelor Auction and loses him to another girl named Danika, she decides that if she can’t have Jake, no one can. She then gives Danika her mind-controlling necklace as a present (without telling her about its power) so that Danika will accidentally get Jake killed by obliviously controlling him with the necklace. When that doesn't work, Vicky reclaims her necklace and tries to kill Jake herself by controlling him, Spud, and Fu Dog, and telling them to fight to the death.
- Dexter's Laboratory: The Big Bad of the show is Mandark, a scrawny boy genius with a bowl cut, Nerd Glasses, an office shirt, a necktie, and a hobby of reading comic books. Earlier, he was once the bitter rival of the main character, Dexter. Since Ego Trip, he is now a full-on villain. In his "first meeting" with Dexter, the latter makes fun of him for his long hair, girly hippie attire, and his name, "Susan". This enrages him so much that he changes his appearance to his current look, changes his name to the more evil-sounding "Mandark", and becomes Dexter's Arch-Enemy. From then, he makes plans to destroy Dexter's lab and make Dexter miserable, Take Over the World, and win the heart of Dexter’s sister, Dee-Dee.
- The Powerpuff Girls (1998): The episode, "Collect Her", features a fat, balding geek with pimples, glasses, and buckteeth named Lenny Baxter who's obsessed with the Powerpuff Girls and eventually collects every piece of Powerpuff Girls merchandise ever made. However, even that much PPG merch isn’t enough to satisfy him and he doesn’t know what do now since collecting Powerpuff stuff is his whole life, so he decides to steal stuff from the girls to add to his collection, such as Blossom’s hair clip and a crayon drawing Bubbles made, before collecting the girls themselves.
- Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Purple Dragons are a club of tech nerds who are all prodigies when it comes to computer science... who are also cybercriminals that steal the work of other scientists to aide them in their criminal activities. Their acts are only brought to an end when they trick and steal tech from Donatello, who has a personal vendetta against them for the rest of the series.
- The Simpsons: Comic Book Guy gets this treatment in Treehouse of Horror X. The second segment, "Desperately Xeeking Xena", casts him as the Collector, a supervillain who kidnaps famous actors from shows and movies he enjoys, and collects them like comic books, storing them in plastic bags. He kidnaps Lucy Lawless / Xena to make her the prize jewel of his collection, and his wife. He also uses sci-fi weapons, such as a working Phased Gun and a real double-edged lightsaber.
- Sonic Boom has a bunch of them:
- Dave the Intern is a lanky teenage geek with Goofy Buckteeth and braces, and he's a wannabe supervillain.
- Charlie is a scrawny desert rat with glasses and a nerdy fashion sense who gets his hands on Powered Armor and becomes a supervillain to get revenge on Knuckles for accidentally ruining his life with his stupidity.
- Mark from "The Biggest Fan" is a chubby tapir with glasses, a bad haircut, and a fanatical obsession with Sonic the Hedgehog. He's so obsessed, in fact, that he kidnaps Sonic and tries to hold him captive in his log cabin just so he can hang out with him forever. He also kidnaps Sonic's friends when they come to save him.
- Static Shock: The villain of Now You See Him... is Speedwarp, AKA Eddie Felson, a nerdy teenager who used to go to high school with Static, where he had the unfortunate nickname, "Weird Eddie". Eddie was picked on by almost all the other students, even the other nerds, until he graduated early, went to college, and got a part-time job working as an intern to a scientist. Eddie then stole a high-tech gauntlet the scientist invented which could manipulate time, allowing him to move so fast, everything else appears to be standing still. He then becomes a supervillain and goes on a crime spree, stealing lots of money and goods, before trying to kidnap a girl named Daisy, who he has a crush on.
- Control Freak is a recurring villain in both Teen Titans (2003) and especially Teen Titans Go!. He's a fat, pasty, gonk-faced geek who's completely obsessed with pop culture. He frequently uses his Universal Remote Control to warp reality and make the Titans' lives miserable, usually by placing them inside television programming — including the Teen Titans Go! cartoon itself.
- Totally Spies!: The episode, "Super Nerd Much?", involves the stock unpopular bespectacled nerd, Arnold Jackson, getting his hands on a magic ring that can steal cool genes from people's DNA and give them to its possessor, making Arnold super-cool and turning his victims into nerdsnote . As Arnold was treated like utter crap by nearly all of his peers, his ambition and craving for revenge get the better of him. In the course of less than a day, he turns into a Badass Bishounen by using the ring to drain people's coolness, starting with people he has a grudge against, like Clover (who turned him down for a date a hundred times), a Jerk Jock who picked on him, and the school Alpha Bitch, Mandy. From there, he sets out on a course for world domination.
Arnold: The geek shall inherit the Earth.
- Transformers: Animated: Henry Masterson is a geeky, immature Gadgeteer Genius who uses outdated internet slang (like calling people noobs) and becomes the supervillain, the Headmaster.
- Tobey McCallister of WordGirl. He may not be that strong on his own, but the boy genius' giant robots often pose a threat to the city at large. The fact that he has a crush on WordGirl and a weakness to his mother lead to this being Played for Laughs.