| “ | Arcturus Mengsk. There's a name that is synonymous with terror, betrayal and violence. A living example of the ends justifying the means. The assassin of the Confederacy of Man. The hero of the blasted world of Korhal IV. King of the universe. A savage barbarian who never let anything or anyone get in his way. And yet, he is charming, erudite and intelligent. When you're in his presence you feel that he's really listening to you, that your opinions matter, that you're someone important if you agree with him. It's amazing. I have often wondered if men like Mengsk don't carry around their own reality-warping bubbles, and all who fall in are suddenly transported to another dimension where the hellish things he says and does suddenly make sense. At least, that's the effect he always had on me. | „ |
| ~ Michael Liberty describing Arcturus Mengsk. |
| “ | I will not be stopped. Not by you, or the Confederates, or the Protoss or anyone! I will rule this sector or see it burnt to ashes around me. | „ |
| ~ Mengsk revealing his true nature. |
Arcturus Mengsk, known simply as Mengsk, is one of the main antagonists of the StarCraft franchise alongside Sarah Kerrigan and the Overmind. He is a major antagonist in the first StarCraft game, the secondary antagonist in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty and the main antagonist in StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm.
He was a terran from planet Korhal who led the Sons of Korhal to overthrow the corrupt Terran Confederacy during the Great War. However, after overthrowing the Confederacy Mengsk forms the totalitarian Terran Dominion and reveals himself to be a power mad dictator only concerned with maintaining his own power and crushing anyone who defies him. So, his rule turned out to be equally, if not worse than the previous tyranny.
He was voiced by James Harper.
His Evil Ranking[]
What Makes Him Close to Being Pure Evil?[]
- He unleashes the Zerg on the planets of Antiga and Tarsonis without giving them a chance to surrender by using psi emitters to lure the Zerg. Him doing it on Tarsonis is very notable because it was the former capital of the Terrans and it had a population of 2 billion people before the Zerg wiped them out.
- It is revealed that he and the Sons of Korhal also used a psi emitter to lure the Zerg to the colony world Mar Sara, so he could "save" some of the colonists to increase his reputation and use the images of the few rescued civilians as propaganda. This way he dooms almost the entire population to be devoured by the Zerg.
- He betrays his lieutenant Sarah Kerrigan and all the soldiers under her command by refusing to evacuate them after Kerrigan speaks out against his plan to lure the Zerg to Tarsonis. This leads to their deaths and in Kerrigan's case to her transformation into the infamous Queen of Blades even if Mengsk didn't know this would happen to her and he expected her to die.
- After Jim Raynor calls him out for what he has done, Mengsk loses his temper, threatens Raynor and angrily proclaims that no one would stop him and that he would either rule over the Koprulu Sector or see it burnt to ashes around him. This further cements that at that point, Mengsk doesn't care about the ideals of his rebellion or about losing his family to the Confederacy and his homeworld being bombed by them and he just wants power at any cost.
- He betrays the ideals of his rebellion and establishes the totalitarian and oppressive Terran Dominion and crowns himself Emperor.
- Not even children are safe from his crimes and tyranny and are just as often subject to Mengsk's horrors. At one point, he kills a group of Confederate teenagers who could be a threat to his power by unleashing some Zerg on the mining planet they were hiding on. Years later, when he learns there were survivors, he sends a team to presumably "rescue" the last remaining 4 children, but in truth orders their execution.
- He orders daily arrests, mass executions of criminals, activists, or civilians who fail to meet his expectations.
- He creates slavery and work camps for criminals, activists, and civilians who fail to meet his expectations. At one point, on the planet of Mar Sara his forces are shown rounding up a group of civilians and forcing them to work in the mines. When one of them tries to escape because his brother had previously "disappeared" after being sent to the mines, the soldiers shoot him down.
- He starves his own people and the Umojans.
- He forces a former convict Tychus Finley to wear an armor he can't remove from his body on his own to force him to kill Sarah Kerrigan. Mengsk has blackmailed Tychus by saying he would remove the armor if Tychus kills Kerrigan.
- He attempts to kill his own son, Valerian, when he believes it would bring him an advantage and would allow him to kill Kerrigan herself.
- Even though he has shown moments of parental feelings and pride for his son in the novel I, Mengsk, he subverts them with this action.
- He funds the creation of an army of Zerg/Protoss hybrids. While he didn't know anything about Amon and Narud's plans and didn't know that the Hybrid would be used to wipe out all life in the universe, he still wanted to use them as weapons against his enemies.
- He continues the tradition of the Confederacy to kidnap children, experiment on them and wipe their memories with a process called neural resocialization to make them the perfect assassins (called Ghosts) for the Terran Dominion. These super soldiers are reconditioned to be loyal to the Terran Dominion and to assassinate any enemies to Mengsk's regime.
- He regularly orders assassinations against his opponents or outright executes them.
- He approves horrible experiments on human and other sentient test subjects.
- He ordered the staff of an entire military lab to be executed after their contracts expired because they knew too much.
- He demonizes his enemies through propaganda and pins crimes they haven't commited on them.
- He extorts and depletes the fringe worlds of resources, so that the citizens of the core worlds where his power base is situated can live better.
- He withdraws his forces from the fringe worlds, allowing the Zerg to easily overrun them, so he could more easily protect the core world since they are more important for his reign.
- He orders his soldiers to turn away refugee ships if they attempt to land on the core worlds despite the fact the refugees are starving and dying due to miserable living conditions and it's heavily indicated that Mengsk's forces would shoot at the ships if they don't comply considering that when one news reporter specifically asks about this, her question is dodged.
- He has his enemy Jim Raynor captured and then uses this to blackmail Sarah Kerrigan who is in love with Raynor. He threatens her that if she comes anywhere near close to Mengsk or to his capital Korhal, he would have Raynor executed.
- When Sarah Kerrigan attacks a highly secured Dominion military station to rescue Raynor, Mengsk attempts to blow up the entire station, not caring about the personnel that is still there and are loyal to him.
- When Sarah Kerrigan attacks his capital planet, Korhal, he nukes areas of the city of Augustgrad, not caring about his soldiers who are caught in the blast and killed or about the potential health dangers for the citizens and even swears that he would turn the city into radioactive ruins if he has to.
- When Sarah Kerrigan comes into his palace to kill him, he attempts to slowly electrocute her to death with the Xel'Naga artifact while gloating over her impending demise and calling her an animal.
- While his death at Kerrigan's hands a bit later is pretty brutal as she first impales him to a wall with monitors by piercing his shoulders with her sharp wings and then she makes his whole body explode from the inside out while he is alive, it's not played for sympathy and he fully deserved it for his actions. Not to mention that even in these last moments of his life when he realizes he is about to die, he doesn't show any regret for what he has done to Kerrigan or any of his other actions and gloats that he has made her into a monster to spite her.
- While he initially did save Sarah Kerrigan from being experimented on by the Confederacy, made her his lieutenant and even forgave her for participating in the assassination of his family and told her she is an awesome person who has given him hope in humanity, he subverts this later by abandoning her to be killed by the Zerg for criticizing his plan to lure the Zerg to Tarsonis and then trying to kill her on multiple other occasions in later games.
- Although he seems to have started his rebellion with genuine intentions to liberate the people from the oppression of the Confederacy, by the end he just replaces the old regime with his own that is just as oppressive as the Confederate regime. He still claims that he is working for the well-being of humanity, but his actions and his speech about how he would burn the entire Koprulu sector to ash if he doesn't get to rule it show that he is just delusional.
- Although in his younger years he displays some moral standards against other people like being disgusted that his father is willing to kill Confederate soldiers to achieve independence for the people of Korhal or being disturbed by some of the practices of the Confederacy like forcing miners to leave locations with valuable minerals against their will and give them to the Confederacy, later in his life Mengsk himself is perfectly willing to kill people and do things that are just as bad as what the Confederacy has done, thus he subverts his moral standards.
What Prevents Him from Being Pure Evil?[]
- Some of the canon prequel novels reveal that he cares about certain people in his life:
- Though he subverts his care for his son, he genuinely cares about the rest of his family, most notably his mother, his sister and even his father despite his constant arguments with him, and is motivated by their deaths at least in the beginning and his care for them is never explicitly subverted. He has a very good relationship with his little sister, even nicknaming her "Little Dot" and is shown to be protective towards her and get along with her well, he respects his mother and doesn't want to disappoint her which is the only reason why he graduates from academy despite his disinterest in the subjects there because he knows this is what she would want and even though he constantly has arguments with his father, he still misses him and eventually, years after his father is killed, he admits he has come to understand where his father was coming from with his ideas.
- He seems to have a good relationship with the chief of security for his father as he has friendly conversations with him, he considers his advice that if he leaves his family after he has just had an argument with his father, he would come to regret it and he specifically mentions him as one of the people he has lost to the Confederacy after his death during the bombings of the planet.
- He feels a sense of companionship towards his fellow citizens of his home planet Korhal and he even mentions it in his own thoughts at one point how much he loves his home planet and part of the reason why he hates the Confederacy is because they bombed Korhal with nuclear weapons and killed millions of people.
- He cares about the soldiers from his squad Dominion Section during his service in the army of the Confederacy as he gets angry when their lives are put in danger and he acts friendly with them. He seems saddened and shocked when one of them dies right in front of him and when said soldier gives him his favored weapon right before he dies because it means a lot to him, Mengsk takes the weapon out of respect and makes sure to clean it up regularly because he knows this is what the man would have wanted. When one of his other soldiers lives long enough to leave the army and get married, Mengsk is relieved that he had survived and wishes for him to have a happy marriage life.
- During one of the battles in which he participates, when a random soldier driving a Vulture saves his life, Mengsk feels gratitude towards the man, and when he later sees a Vulture being blown up during the battle, he hopes in his thoughts that it isn’t the man who had just saved his life.
- He suffers from a genuine tragedy because both his parents and his little sister were assassinated by Confederate agents due to his father, who is a senator from Korhal, constantly speaking out against the corruption of the Confederacy and wanting Korhal to be independent from the regime and later Mengsk's entire home planet Korhal is bombed with nuclear weapons by the Confederacy which kills millions of people. These events are played for sympathy and they cause Mengsk to start an uprising against the Confederacy which eventually culminates in him condemning their capital planet Tarsonis to be overrun by the Zerg with its billions of inhabitants to exact his revenge on them and the trauma from losing the people he loves has caused him to become a lot more ruthless and unscrupulous compared to before. However, it's not too much for him to be Near Pure Evil because a lot of his negative qualities like limited empathy for others or ruthlessness were present in him even before his tragedy and said tragedy is only presented and played for sympathy in some of the prequel canon novels and not in the games themselves.
External Links[]
- Arcturus Mengsk on the Villains Wiki.
- Arcturus Mengsk on the Starcraft Wiki
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 Near Pure Evils
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