#a queue we will reach and our honor someday avenge

[words-writ-in-starlight]

I've just recently re-started reading Temeraire, and I totally get how one gets obsessed with it :D The fandom is not huge, but I love you all already, from the political discussions to the sheer ridiculousness of some crack ideas. ♥

The Temeraire fandom is GREAT, I should reread those books, I adore them with a love that is true and pure.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

Can you give us more examples of villains who will twist the whole world for someone who will never love them back like you did with The Untamed ? ( any kind of media )

KEN! CYR! ATH!

PLEASE GO READ THE KENCYRATH!

Sorry, I was overcome.  But seriously, the Kencyrath are the answer to this question.  Tyrandis, Bane, Pereden, Timmon, Graykin, Brenwyr, Ganth, and the Dreamweaver all come to mind, for varying values of “villain” and “love” and “back”.  If you like Xue Yang, I really cannot emphasize enough how much Bane is going to do it for you.  It’s an entire series about “wow, so, loyalty really fucks a person up, huh?”  And I’ve been writing and unwriting an Untamed AU for like.  A bit.  (Jame as the Yiling Patriarch?  But like?  Does that work?  Who the fuck are the Wen?  I’m not sure.  I’ll get back to you.)

Point is, Bane would be Xue Yang if given half a chance, to the point that he tried to bind Jame, the hero, with unbreakable magic in order to force her to stay with him, but unfortunately for him Jame has other worlds to destroy besides just his, so he is unsuccessful.

Tyrandis, also, facilitated the collapse of his society and the devouring of a hundred worlds into darkness, purely for loyalty to a lord who doesn’t care about him and a lady who doesn’t love him, so.  There’s that.

As for other stuff...hm, let’s see.  I’ll throw in the caveat that I’m working with actual text here, rather than inferred relationships or shipping.  

Visser from the Animorphs, I would say, is a good example of this--Esplin’s relationship with her hosts is pretty fucked up and definitely verges on this dynamic, to say nothing of her relationship with her children.  She’s willing to burn the Yeerk Empire to the ground for them, after all.  Depending on whether you want to call Jonathan Sims the villain of The Magnus Archives (you have to admit! he may be more gun than murderer but there is an argument to be made! for Jon being the villain here!), he spends most of Season 4 in this headspace.  Hannibal and Will Graham throughout the show, and Hannibal and Bedelia, in Season 3, are also a decent example of this trope, although both those relationships are only half the emotional equation--Will, to his profound horror, does love Hannibal back, and Bedelia is under no illusions about whether or not Hannibal genuinely loves her.  Magneto and Xavier, textually speaking, are an excellent platonic example.  

The problem here, the reason it’s not common, is that it’s hard to do “the villain is genuinely in love, or at least so obsessed as to make no difference to them, with the hero, and their first priority is to sway the hero, not stop them” well while still maintaining...interesting conflict?  Because it means that you run an intense risk of either losing the dramatic tension (if the villain is obsessed with turning the hero, obviously they’re not going to kill them) or losing all sight of the plot.  I’ll try and think of some more but these are the ones I came up with offhand.