25 Best Anime Supervillains Of All Time

The Dwarf in the Flask is your classic example of a super villain whose own inferiority inspires their plans for tyranny, brought on by spending too long in -you guessed it - a flask.

Father, as he would go on to become known in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, is the puppeteer pulling strings from behind the scenes and creator of the Homunculi, who function as his attack dogs of sorts.

It’s harder to explain why The Dwarf in the Flask makes such a great villain, because only through learning his background via flashbacks do we see where its come from, what it really wants and what it’s willing to do to get that (e.g. slaughter civilisations).

But by tracing back to its roots as a trapped thing in a flask, we get to see how pure and genuine its desires are, how vindicated in its distaste for humans. That, combined with the strongest alchemy powers of anyone in the show makes him a very formidable villain.

It’s also a clever touch to have Father, the original Homunculus, modelled as identical to Van Hohenheim, the estranged father of the Elric brothers and another for whom they held contempt.