A To Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! - R Is For Red Skull And Ravonna Renslayer

 Today I am talking about two villains from the MCU. I only know them from the films, not having read those comics in particular, so those are the versions I will discuss. 

Red Skull is the nickname for Nazi officer Johann Schmidt, in the MCU. He first appears in Captain America: The First Avenger, which was set during World War II. He is nicknamed Red Skull because, after taking a super soldier serum, he goes red. 

Schmidt starts HYDRA, an evil Nazi organisation. Although he doesn’t stick around, HYDRA is still there in the present day, taking over the government agency SHIELD. 

He manages to acquire the Tesseract, a blue cube that contains the Space Stone, later used by the villain Thanos as one of six Infinity Stones which he uses to snap half the world out of existence. (And a variant of Loki uses it to escape after his attack on New York). 

He sends a HYDRA agent to kill Dr Erskine, creator of the super soldier serum that turns ninety pound weakling Steve Rogers into Captain America. As he succeeds, there isn’t, for the moment, any more of the serum, leaving Steve Rogers as the sole superhero of his kind. 

Schmidt tries to use a fleet of planes to bomb world cities, but is defeated by Steve. The Tesseract cube breaks up enough to make him touch the Space Stone. He disappears, assumed dead.

However, he ends up on the planet Vormir as guardian of the Soul Stone, another of the Infinity Stones. Anybody who wants it has to sacrifice something he loves. For Thanos, that’s his adoptive daughter Gamora, who’d been snatched from her friends in the Guardians of the Galaxy. 

What happens to Red Skull after that isn’t clear. Anyway, not a nice man! 

Ravonna Renslayer is the villain of the TV series Loki. In the first of two seasons, she is a judge in the Time Variance Authority, an organisation that exists outside of time, to keep a single Sacred Timeline going and wiping out any other. They have analysts, “Minutemen”(the soldiers) and boring old office workers, all of whom believe they were created by beings known as the Timekeepers. They weren’t, of course. They were, as they eventually discover, variants, stolen from their own timelines which were blown up.

Ravonna Renslayer, who had been Rebecca Tourminet, a vice principal on the Sacred Timeline, was a soldier in the TVA before promotion to judge, and led the group that arrested young Sylvie, a Loki variant, as a child while she was playing at being a hero with her toys. When adult Sylvie asks her if she remembers the “nexus event” which resulted  in her arrest, Ravonna smirks and says she doesn’t remember. Judging by that smirk, she is clearly lying; Sylvie was almost certainly arrested for not being interested in being a villain. We don’t get any other hints. 

In the first season of the show, Ravonna kills one of the soldiers, Hunter C-20, for finding out that she - and everyone else - has been lied to by the TVA - and lies about it. When analyst Mobius,  a close friend, says he wants to go home to his old life, she sends him to the Void, at the end of time, along with all those she has sentenced for not following the script. She locks up Hunter B-15, a formerly loyal officer, when she finds out the truth from Sylvie. When Mobius returns, Ravonna packs a bag, saying she is going off in search of free will. 

She returns in Season 2, when we learn that she was one of the two founders of the TVA, who had fought in the multiversal war alongside He Who Remains, a villainous variant of Kang the Conqueror, and then set up the TVA, before he wiped her memory so that she, like everyone else, believed in the Timekeepers. 

No matter what anyone else says to her, nothing persuades her to change her mind. She travels into the past in search of another Kang variant, scientist Victor Timely, to support her in her plans. When he leaves with the good guys, Loki and Mobius, instead, leaving her, she tries other ways. There are people at the TVA who still want to wipe out timelines, but even they realise she just wants to look after her own interests and refuse to join her. She kills them horribly, crushing them to death. 

She ends up in the Void herself - sheer karma! 

There is a skit on YouTube in which Captain America is brought into her courtroom for trying to change history by killing baby Hitler(he fails). He makes an argument as to why what the TVA does is illogical. 

She releases him, embarrassed, and sends him off to be with his beloved Peggy Carter, then complains about Mondays. 

Monday’s  horrible person - Servalan, the villain of Blake’s 7!