This Inconsistently Heinous was Headlined on August 2024.
“
I am the swarm. Armies will be shattered. Worlds will burn. Now at last, on this world, vengeance shall be mine. For I am the Queen of Blades.
„
~ Kerrigan leading the Zerg.
“
I don't think so, Admiral. You see, at this point... I'm pretty much the Queen Bitch of the Universe. And not all of your little soldiers or space ships will stand in my way again.
„
~ Kerrigan during the last mission of StarCraft: Brood War.
Sarah Louise Kerrigan, usually just called Kerrigan, is one of the main antagonists of the real time strategy video game franchise StarCraft alongside the Overmind and Arcturus Mengsk. She is also one of the main protagonists of the franchise.
In the first StarCraft game, she starts off as a soldier fighting for the Sons of Korhal before her betrayal at the hands of Arcturus Mengsk which causes her transformation into the infamous Queen of Blades. After this, she becomes a major threat to everyone in the Koprulu Sector before her eventual redemption when she saves the universe from the Dark God, Amon.
She is voiced by Glynnis Talken Campbell in the first StarCraft game and its expansion Brood War and by Tricia Helfer in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty and it's two expansions, Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void.
As a Terran, she served as an assassin for both the Confederacy and later the Sons of Korhal, killing whoever her superiors ordered her and even participated in the assassination of Arcturus Mengsk's family.
She started killing Raynor's men as soon as they appeared to rescue her on Char and even destroyed his base.
She killed many Dark Templar when they also came to Char and tried to kill Tassadar.
She pretended to ally with the Protoss, so they could help her deal with the Second Overmind which was taking away control over the Zerg from her but she brainwashed their Matriarch behind their backs. When Aldaris found out the truth, he rebelled against the Matriarch which makes Kerrigan responsible for a mini civil war among the Protoss.
She killed Aldaris when he was about to expose her secret to the other Protoss even though they intended to spare him.
She pretended to ally with Arcturus Mengsk, James Raynor and Fenix against the UED, but in fact she only used them to defeat the UED because they threatened her dominance over the Koprulu Sector. After their victory, she betrayed her allies after they had fulfilled their purpose by launching surprise attacks against their bases, massacred their armies and killed Fenix and General Duke in the process.
She blows up the power grid of the Nerazim capital as a distraction which cost the lives of thousands of Protoss, so she could kidnap her.
Her brainwashing of the Nerazim Matriarch conditioned the latter to be Kerrigan's slave. The Matriarch was deprived her of her free will and was kidnapped by Kerrigan. This is presented as a fate considered worse than death for the Matriarch.
Later, Kerrigan uses the brainwashed Matriarch to order Zeratul to kill the Second Overmind which Zeratul does because he is loyal to his ruler. Kerrigan plays twisted games with Zeratul by promising she would allow the Matriarch to return to her people if Zeratul kills the Second Overmind, only to reveal that the Matriarch is so brainwashed that she doesn't want to go back to her people and instead wants to stay with Kerrigan.
After Zeratul kills the Matriarch to save her from her horrific fate, Kerrigan allows him to leave unharmed but not out of mercy but because she derives sadistic pleasure that he would be forced to live the rest of his life with the thought that he was forced to kill his own Matriarch because of Kerrigan's own actions.
She massacres the entire UED fleet even after they had surrendered. Kerrigan decides to make this more "fun" by allowing them to escape just to see how far they would go and then she unleashes the Zerg after them.
She has killed billions of people by having her Zerg conquer entire planets and then slaughter their population.
She gives her captives to her minion Abathur, who is in charge of perfecting the Zerg units, so he may use the captives for his horrible experiments where they eventually die.
She spreads a Zerg infestation on different planets which infects living people and turns them into zombies that suffer and are deprived of their free will. They can only serve Kerrigan and fulfill her demands.
She attempts to commit complete genocide on the Human and Protoss races.
At some point she kidnapped a human girl, infested her body and merged her legs with the walls of her Leviathan, so that Kerrigan could have someone she could store her memories into.
She tries to kill Zeratul when he goes to Ulaan to take the fragments of a prophecy she wants from him and wipes out High Templar Karass and all his warriors when they stand in her way to give Zeratul time to escape.
She tries to kill all of Jim Raynor's men as well as Valerian Mengsk's men when they launch an assault against her on Char to cure her and stop her rampage.
She wipes out an entire Protoss colony where she kills thousands of Protoss because she is afraid that if they inform the Golden Armada about her, they would kill her.
She infects one of the captured Protoss with a larva which bursts from the belly and kills the host in a painful way. Kerrigan uses said larva to infiltrate a Protoss ship, making it burst open the body of the female Protoss once she is onboard the ship. Then, the larva grows to be a Zerg Queen and she massacre the entire crew of the vessel in Kerrigan's name.
She kills a wounded Dominion General Horace Warfield by driving a beam sticking from his body all the way through even though his torso even though he had previously participated in her rescue operation where she gets deinfested and turned into human because he angers her when he mentions Jim Raynor and asks her what he would think of her. Granted, the reason why she battled him and his army was because he served Arcturus Mengsk, but still, he is portrayed as an honorable man who cares about his soldiers unlike Mengsk and he was at her mercy when she kills him.
On one occasion, she infests several garrisons of Dominion soldiers and sends them against their comrades, using them as cannon fodder.
What Makes Her Inconsistent?[]
Her worst crimes happen while she was corrupted by the Zerg and transformed into the Queen of Blades which means she has moral agency issues. She also has moral agency issues during the time when she assassinates people for the Confederacy because they had subjected her to neural resocialization and also regularly drugged her to keep her loyal and unable to resist their orders.
She has an extremely tragic backstory and has suffered so much throughout her life to the point she qualifies as a Scapegoat.
She was psionically gifted which caused a lot of problems for her from a young age. She was able to read all the private thoughts of other people which caused her to be disgusted by them in general and as a result became introverted and withdrawn and had a hard time making new friends.
Because she possessed such tremendous powers that she couldn't properly control them, her mother died and her father was left with a permanent brain damage, which caused him to eventually die as well, when Kerrigan accidentally unleashed her powers at the age of 7 which left her heartbroken and guilt-ridden.
She is then captured by the government to be abused, tortured, experimented upon, drugged and trained as a merciless assassin. One of her instructors would even go so far as to bring Kerrigan's father and threaten the young girl that he would inject her father with a tumor-causing chemical that would slowly kill him if she doesn't display her psionic powers for him. She was also neurally resocialized, which means she is physically incapable of refusing a direct order from a superior, and her memory was regularly mind-wiped, so that she would remain loyal to the Confederacy.
She was then released by Arcturus Mengsk and his rebel group, the Sons of Korhal. She served him faithfully for years but on one mission, she gets betrayed by him and is left to be killed by the Zerg, after she speaks out against his plan to lure the Zerg to the inhabited planet of Tarsonis. The Zerg transform her into the Queen of Blades against her will through painful mutations, corrupting her mind which causes her to think like a Zerg rather than like a human and to become callous, cruel and genocidal.
After her boyfriend Jim Raynor manages to save her and she is transformed back to human, the two of them plan to start a new life together. However, Arcturus Mengsk's Dominion forces attack the facility where the two of them reside and while Kerrigan escapes, Raynor is captured. Later, Mengsk decides to lie on the news that Jim Raynor had been executed on his orders which causes Kerrigan to despair when she watches the broadcast and she returns back to the Zerg and takes control of them to seek revenge against Mengsk for supposedly killing her boyfriend and for abandoning her to the Zerg, even transforming herself into the Primal Queen of Blades to gain enough power to kill Mengsk. Even though during that time period she is nowhere near as bad as she used to be while she was infested by the Zerg and had an impaired moral agency and the story treats her more as an Anti-Hero than an outright Villain, she still performs some ruthless actions in her quest to get revenge on Arcturus Mengsk.
She cares about some people in her life:
She loves her parents and that love is never subverted and her losing them both has left her heartbroken.
She has a friendship with a fellow rebel Somo Hung before he is killed by Confederate soldiers because she admires him and thinks he is genuine and good. The two of them even have romantic feelings for each other. When he dies in her arms after being shot by Lieutenant Rumm, she gets enraged and brutally ends the life of Somo's killer.
She genuinely loves Jim Raynor and on several occasions risks her own life to protect him and is deeply hurt when he rejects her after she had rescued him because she had chosen to become the Queen of Blades yet again, though the two of them still fix their relationship in the end. It's heavily implied that by the end of the series she has come to take him with her after becoming a Xel'Naga and that she ends up being with him.
She has many moments where she displays moral standards or has Pet the Dog moments when her mind is not corrupted by the Zerg:
She is disgusted by Mengsk's plan to use psi emitters to lure the Zerg to a planet as populous as Tarsonis, and tries to change his mind about it which is what actually leads to Mengsk betraying her and abandoning her to the Zerg.
When she is kept inside a facility by Valerian Mengsk and studied to see how much of the Zerg infestation she still has, Kerrigan is displeased with how careless Valerian is with keeping the Zerg and she decides to make a point that Valerian is foolish to think he can control the Zerg. She takes command of a number of Zerg kept in the facility, frees them and uses to to trash huge parts of the laboratory. However, she specifically ensures that none of the human staff at the facility are harmed in any way and she only has the Zerg destroy non-sentient security bots. After she makes her point to Valerian about him being foolish to think he can control the Zerg and not be worried, she orders all the Zerg to return back to their cells.
When Abathur tells her that as the Queen of Blades she had given him living test subjects to experiment on, Kerrigan tells him that they won't be doing any more experiments on people.
When some of her Zerg ask her for permission to slaughter the crew of the Terran ship Hyperion after they have finished cooperating with them, she refuses them.
When Abathur suggests that Alexei Stukov should be killed since he is of no use to them, Kerrigan, who sees some similarities between herself and Stukov as they were both betrayed, experimented on and transformed against their will, is angry and refuses Abathur's request.
She allows wounded enemy soldiers to be evacuated by stopping her Zerg from chasing them after their General Horace Warfield begs her to let them go and tries to keep her Zerg away from civilian centers in order to limit the casualties among the civilian population.
When one of her minions, Zagara, expresses a desire to sadistically torture the captive Protoss Lasarra, Kerrigan forbids her to do it.
Even though she implanted the Protoss Lasarra with a Parasyte which burst from her body and killed her, so Kerrigan could infiltrate a Protoss ship and kill its inhabitants, Kerrigan only did it because she believed she had no other choice to survive and she apologises to Lasarra before implanting her with the Parasyte. In addition, she later defends Lasarra's memory in front of her Zerg minions, stating that Lasarra has died bravely by attempting to warn her comrades and Kerrigan also proclaims she would kill anyone who stands in her way but that doesn't mean she would enjoy it.
She feels remorse for her actions after being cured from the Zerg mutations and influence on her mind, redeems herself and performs some heroic actions like freeing the Terran Dominion from the oppression of Arcturus Mengsk and later saving the entire universe from the Dark God, Amon, by becoming a Xel'Naga and using her new powers to kill him. She later uses her powers to help grow life on previously barren planets in the Koprulu Sector.
Kerrigan shows clear insecurities and is introverted and withdrawn and displays vulnerabilities about people not trusting her and about her dark past which are played for sympathy. The fact that she is a telepath and is able to read people's thoughts doesn't help matters with finding more friends because her ability to see people's deepest secrets makes her disgusted with them most of the time. She has troubles making friends and the only people she becomes close with in her entire life are Jim Raynor and Somo Hung because they are the only people she trusts.
Trivia[]
She and the Zerg Overmind are the only Inconsistently Heinous villains from StarCraft.
She and Sylvanas Windrunner are the only two female Inconsistently Heinous villains to come from a Blizzard Entertainment franchise.
Her family name "Kerrigan" was chosen because the character was named after the American former figure skater Nancy Kerrigan.
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Inconsistently Heinous
