User blog:Red Chevalier/PE Proposal: Vulgyre

Here's one that's been a long time coming.

What is the work?
Chikyuu Sentai Fiveman, the 14th installment in the long-running Super Sentai franchise.

Fiveman follows the Hoshikawa siblings, who are the children of two astronauts and scientists who discovered a way to restore life to dead planets. However, for this discovery, they are attacked by the Zone Army, who seek to destroy life on 1000 planets to complete a ritual that would grant their leader, the mysterious Galactic Empress Meadow, immortality. After the Hoshikawa parents are seemingly killed, their five children flee to Earth with help from their robot, Arthur G6. There, they all grow up and become teachers. However, when the Zone arrive at Earth after having destroyed life on 999 planets to make it the 1000th planet destroyed in their ritual, the five Hoshikawa siblings become the Fivemen in order to defend Earth from the Zone and halt their intergalactic campaign of destruction.

Who is the villain?
If you read the above paragraph you probably already suspect that Meadow is the villain who I'm going to be proposing, considering she's the one leading Zone to destroy planets. However, Meadow is not our candidate, well, not technically.

Our actual candidate is none other than Zone's flagship, Vulgyre. Vulgyre as it turns out in the final few episodes is a space beast disguised as a flagship and the true leader of Zone, with Meadow being nothing more than an illusion created by it. (To be fair, Lovecraftian space creatures probably don't attract many followers). Vulgyre's ultimate goal is to complete the destruction of 1000 planets to perform a ritual that would grant him immortality so he could reign as god of the Milky Way.

What does he do?
In the past, Vulgyre lusted after a woman, the actual Empress Meadow, to be his bride, even after she rejected his advances. Vulgyre's pursuit of Meadow eventually led her to take her own life, only for Vulgyre to entomb her body and trap her soul within him to keep her all to himself.

Adopting Meadow's angelic visage, Vulgyre used the illusion of Meadow to recruit aliens across the galaxy to join Zone. These included the ship captain Garoa, the warrior Billion, the scientist Doldora and the merchant Dongoros, who sold weapons to the Zone. After amassing a large enough army of worshippers and pirates, Vulgyre and the Zone began their campaign of planetary destruction, wiping out all life on 999 planets. One of these planets was the planet Sidon, where the Zone first encountered the Hoshikawa siblings who would later become the Fivemen to fight against them.

Eventually, after destroying 999 planets, the Zone arrive on Earth to make it their thousandth, where they encounter the Hoshikawa siblings again as they become the Fivemen to fight against them, kicking off the series. Throughout the show, "Meadow" isn't really shown to particularly cruel beyond the standard fare for a Sentai big bad. However, all this is changed at the start of the show's final arc, where Meadow's true identity is uncovered and Vulgyre reveals his true colors.

After Vulgyre is brought down by the flowers of Sidon, the illusion of Meadow shatters and Vulgyre reveals himself as the true leader of Zone to his subordinates. After Doldora goes crazy from the revelation that the Meadow she had pledged her loyalty to was nothing more than an illusion and declares she was lied to, Vulgyre mutates her and combines her with her subordinate Zaza to them into a monstrous Combined Galactic Warrior as punishment for her refusal to continue serving him. Vulgyre then sends the monster to destroy the flowers of Sidon, which represent his only weakness due to embodying life on a planet he destroyed.

In order to perform a ritual to assume his Galactic Super Beast form, Vulgyre sacrifices his own second-in-command Captain Chevalier in battle against FiveRed so he can absorb the blood of Chevalier's victims. Once he has catalyzed enough blood, Vulgyre reveals his true form as Galactic Super Beast Vulgyre and goes on a destructive rampage throughout the city, seeking to finally destroy Earth and complete the ritual to obtain immortality.

Heinous Standard
Vulgyre caused the mass genocide of life on 999 planets, meaning he's likely responsible for the deaths of billions and possibly even trillions. If we assume that every planet Vulgyre destroyed had a population roughly equivalent to the population of Earth in 1990, which is when Fiveman aired, then that's 5,282,712,000,000 lives killed, meaning Vulgyre probably has one of the highest body counts of any Sentai villain.

Besides that, Vulgyre is frequently shown to disregard the lives of his own followers and has no compunction with sacrificing them to achieve his goals, which is usually a sign of a completely amoral villain. He also drove a woman to suicide because she wouldn't be his bride and locked her soul up within him.

Mitigating Factors
Vulgyre may be an extraterrestrial eldritch horror, but he isn't driven by some alien morality humans can't grasp. Instead, he's a being motivated by pure selfishness who clearly grasps the destruction brought on by his actions yet doesn't care about the countless lives lost. He displays several traits of psychopathy, having a total disregard for the lives of anyone other than himself and even enjoys the mass murders he commits to fulfill his goal, which is nothing less than the complete domination of the galaxy and to be revered as a god. He has no redeeming factors, he obviously never truly loved Meadow and only viewed her as a possession, signified by how he was apathetic to her killing herself and simply kept her body preserved within him.

Final Verdict
A highly definitive yes. Even other Pure Evil Sentai villains are not nearly as outright selfish and amoral as Vulgyre is. Bias and Brajira at least tried to cloak their intentions as being for the greater good and even Bazeu, as cruel as he was, it could be argued was simply abiding by his nature as a planet eater. Vulgyre is a purely vile entity with a fitting name and form to go along with his completely depraved personality.