Will Harangue is a character in Ben 10: Ultimate Alien who first appeared in the episode "Fame". He is a loud-voiced television newscaster who hosts his own show, Harangue Nation (as his last name implies). Firmly convinced that Ben Tennyson is a threat to humanity, Will has launched a smear campaign against him and constantly tries to denounce him including turning the public against him as such.
Appearance
Ultimate Alien
Will Harangue wears a black suit with a black tie. He has brown hair with gray on the side and a square chin.
Omniverse
Will wears a black suit with a red tie and he has a pocket with a blue handkerchief.
Alien Hybrid Form
Will is green with fin-like ears, tendrils on his chin, gills on the back of his neck, tentacles instead of hands, has one eye on his face, two eyes on the sides of his head and another eye on a tendril on his left shoulder. He has lost his hair.
Personality
Will Harangue is the kind of man who would do anything for publicity. This includes constantly denouncing some famous individuals like Ben Tennyson while praising others like Captain Nemesis.[1]
In fact, Will seems to have developed a pathological hatred for Ben, which may have begun when the young hero indirectly embarrassed him on live television when he was 11 years old.[2] This anger caused him to make a direct attempt on Ben's life with a robot designed to counter Ben's aliens, only to end up humiliating himself while bolstering Ben's popularity in the process. He will also deliberately lie to the public and will edit footage to maintain these lies. He's even sided himself with dangerous groups such as the Incursean Empire[3], the Forever Knights[4] and The Vengers[2], despite each of their numerous crimes against humanity, purely due to the fact that they are Ben's enemies.
The only redeeming quality Will seems to have is his stance against massacres, as when he refused to believe Ben when he stated that the Forever Knight's device will murder every alien on the Earth, though he was more worried about his own reputation rather than innocent lives.[4] He disapproved of the Flame Keepers' Circle when they were active,Template:Refn which even Julie had been tricked by.
History
Ultimate Alien
Will Harangue debuted in the first episode of Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, stating in his program that Ben Tennyson is a threat and wanted Bellwood's population to turn against him right after Jimmy Jones revealed Ben's secret identity to the world. His declarations on TV put Ben in a bad mood and cause him to be worried about going to school, thinking that his classmates might hate him. However, when he finally goes, his classmates prove to be more grateful than Harangue (especially JT and Cash), much to Ben's surprise.
In Ultimate Alien.
Will reappeared as the main antagonist in Video Games, where, with the help of Oliver Thompson, he tricks Ben into showing all his aliens' moves for what he think to be a video game, but actually serves to create a spider-like giant robot (referred as "the Stalker") able to counter all of Ben's aliens. He then uses the robot to try to assassinate Ben, even succeeding in defeating him at one point (though he chose to not destroy him immediately because he wanted his public to see Ben's death). The Stalker is eventually destroyed by Nanomech, who had not been scanned because of his size. Way Big then crushed its remains in front of Harangue and "accidentally" dropped it on the anchorman's car. Due to the Stalker's failure, Harangue fired Oliver. To avoid being arrested for attempted murder and vandalism, Harangue later used the footage as more proof of the violence Ben was capable of, angrily referring to the destruction of his vintage car as an act of juvenile delinquency.
Harangue also made an appearance in "Hero Time", working alongside the so-called superhero Captain Nemesis trying to get bad footage of Ben. When Overlord was arrested, he tried to back up Overlord by blaming Ben saying that Overlord did bad things to stop "The Menace of Ben Tennyson".
In "Eye of the Beholder", Harangue makes a cameo appearance on TV. However, his words are clouded by Ben's thoughts.
Will appeared again in "The Big Story" when Jimmy Jones reports that Ben (really Clone Ben) is working for a giant plant monster. Although he acknowledges him for providing photos of Ben as aliens, he does not seem to take him seriously.
Harangue appears on the Burger Shack television briefly seen in "Double or Nothing".
In "The Mother of All Vreedles", Will reported a meteor.
Omniverse
His Human form in Omniverse.
Will Harangue reappeared in "The Frogs Of War: Part 1", when Undertown was exposed to the public because of the residents fleeing Earth due to the incoming Incursean Empire, he uses this discovery to once again make Ben look like a villain.
In "The Frogs Of War: Part 2", after the Incurseans have successfully conquered Earth, with the help of Dr. Psychobos's Way Bads, Will congratulated them on defeating Ben and becoming Earth's new "benevolent" overlords, showing his collaboration with the invaders.
In "Return to Forever, it is revealed that Will's collaboration with the Incursean's had damaged his reputation and his viewership, despite him making a five part special report to explain how he "sabotaged" the invasions.
In order to bolster his reputation and his fanbase, Will secretly worked with Joseph Chadwick and the remnants of the Forever Knights to scan alien DNA to create a device, the Highbreed Pulse Generator, which Harangue thought would turn all the aliens on Earth to humans, but in reality, it would destroy them.
When he became a alien.
After the Forever Knights remnants were stopped, Jury Rigg used the device to permanently change Harangue's DNA into a tentacled alien as payback for all the media harassment he gave to Ben, which he discovered to his shock when he woke up the next morning.
In The Vengers, Will reported about the Vengers' exploits, making his ratings rise even higher. In reality, however, they also doubled as a city-wide smear campaign against Ben in order to boost the credibility of the Vengers, with himself being an unofficial secret partner. After the people realized that the Vengers became what they had always been, super-villains, he betrayed them immediately in an attempt to keep his ratings as high as they were before. He tried to smear both Ben and Billy's team to cover up the fact that Billy had Harangue edit footage of the Vengers' battle with Tennyson to discredit the latter further, all in a semi-vain effort to save face.
Videogame Appearance
Cosmic Destruction
Will Harangue in Cosmic Destruction
Will Harangue appears in one of the commercials for Cosmic Destruction blaming Evil Way Big's (Albedo's) attack on earth on Ben stating "Ben Tennyson has brought upon us the Apocalypse" and providing screen shots of the damage that directly wreaks upon the environment to further enhance his campaign against Ben which was leaked to him by Captain Nemesis. Shockingly he attempts to use the opportunity to sell his book titled Ben 10: Threat or Menace?
Trivia
- According to Derrick J. Wyatt:
- Due to his collaboration with the Incurseans, Will's ratings were way down, but they went up again after his alien transformation.
- The effects of Return to Forever, in which turned Will into an alien, is permanent.
- Will's human appearance and attitude towards Ben is very much like Robert Kelly of X-Men fame.
- The Harangue Nation is a spoof of Steven Colbert's Colbert Nation with similar elements to the various Fox News programs.
- The relationship between Will and Ben strongly resembles the relationship between J. Jonah Jameson and Peter Parker aka Spider-Man. Like Jameson, Harangue is antagonistic and apparently corrupt and has least once tried to kill Ben like how Jameson tried to kill Spider-Man with a Spider-Slayer but Harangue's career as antagonizing Ben started after Ben's identity was revealed to the world. However, Will is a lot worse as he lacks remorse and would cross any line to ruin Ben's life and get what he wants, even if it's murder, alien genocide or harming the Tennyson family. While Jameson cares about others, has a family he loves and won't resort to harming innocent people like Will as Jameson is more of a anti-hero and has teamed-up with Spider-Man on many occasions and doesn't know his true identity.
- Will is very similar to G. Gordon Godfrey from Young Justice, criticizing the Justice League the same way Harangue criticizes Ben and tried to turn the public against them respectively. They both also praise alien invaders. Godfrey is Darkseid's subordinate, when Harange is simply a hypocrite
- In the forum, Dwayne McDuffie confirms that Will is loathed by some for antagonizing Ben. Because of this, his frequent attempts to turn societies against Ben are always unsuccessful.
- Will's last name, Harangue, means mean or nasty speech, much like the way he criticizes Ben.
- He's a hypocrite, because while criticizing Ben as an alien menace, he willingly praises the Incurseans for conquering the Earth and banishing Ben. He also later denounces the inhabitants of Undertown and the Plumbers.
- This is further proven in Return to Forever, as Will categorically denied ever cooperating with the Incurseans.
