re: Better villain: Gus Fring or Ben Linus

Gus will probably win this one because we never got to see much of a soft side for him like we did with Linus.

Without Ben, dharma is still around. He helped kill women an children he grew up with.

the guy is as cold blooded as they come.

proof of his devious nature is that he was responsible for far more death than Gus, yet some on here still don't think he was a badass.

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Good god that sounds pretentious. All villains are contrived.

saying he died because the writers wrote it that way is plain silly.

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Anyone in that situation would have offed Linus, immediately. Especially a Sawyer or Sayid. But Nooooooo Linus ALWAYS had some SUPER SECRET KNOWLEDGE that no one else knew. Every. Single. Time.

And the characters ALWAYS BELIEVED him and he continued to lie, to the end. He lied. He got captured. He almost died. He revealed he knew a secret. He lived. He lied. He got captured. He was at the point of a gun. He revealed he knew a secret. He lived. He lied. He willfully got captured.... And on and on and on.

It was laughable by the end, and one of my biggest problems with lost. And they did this ONLY BECAUSE PEOPLE "LIKED" Linus. That's it. It wasn't in service to the story.

There are plenty of real villains, with real motivations, who exist in a world where the writer or writers are honest to their audience, their narrative and their characters.

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fring was not smart.

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Fring was arrogant, that was his downfall.

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Without Ben, dharma is still around. He helped kill women an children he grew up with.

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Don't get me wrong, he was one of the orchestrators of it, but I think Widmore is the implied person who planned it. I just think Ben gave them the information they needed to carry it out and then personally killed his father. He killed women, sure, but I think Ben has been implied to have a soft side for children.

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the guy is as cold blooded as they come.

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Ehh, between wiping out Dharma and the Losties crashing on the Island, I don't think Ben really did much of anything completely wrong, aside from keeping Juliet on the Island against her will, and even that was morally grey due to what she had the potential to do. I really think what made him a cold blooded bastard was him being the first person in the history of the Island to get cancer, and thus he knew Jacob had abandoned him for good. Top it off with the fact that one person had his paralysis instantly healed and that person is now set to replace him, and he turns into the Magnificent Bastard pretty instantly.

Great post