Ricol was an opponent to Grayson who he later worked with to get the Helm core out, but I would not call him a villain because he was a Drac. While Falcons are my favorite foe I only really see one as a villain and have a great respect for Noritomo Helmer who has been getting the stinky end of the stick for . . . IRL 15 years?
I don't call him evil because he's a Drac.
I say he's a villain because he hired pirates & his own thugs to invade a neighboring world & kill a bunch of people in a false flag type operation & then brought in his own troops to appear to be the savior while again attacking the actual defending troops of that world.
And he did it all to increase his own personal wealth/power & not at the request of his lord Takashi.
That same Helm Core he held onto & did not turn over to his lord & nation for a decade? or so & only did so to gain advancement for himself & get out of the very bad situation he was in IIRC.
He's selfish & power hungry. So he's a villain. That said, he is one of my favorites. I just don't like him the way I do the above mentioned non-BT villains.
I don't know this Helmer person, I would have thought Malvina was the biggest Falcon "bad guy". Another one I may have to look up.
Because of my personal philosophy, the two biggest villians to me are ComStar-Word of Blake and the Cameron.
Blake/Toyama set the rest of a humanity on a path that caused untold suffering for a couple of centuries, and did it intentionally for 'mankind's good.' The worst sort of power is one who acts for what they perceive is the best interest of others whether the others want them to or not, because unlike other power-users they are active rather than letting the populace be through at least benign neglect. I think its too bad they abandoned the Lenin/Stalin model of Blake/Toyama, I thought it was a great story development that Blake was mostly benign while Toyama (who might have helped Blake fall down the stairs) twisted the organization into a religious organization intent on ruling all mankind.
The next would be the Cameron who formed the Star League, forcing the periphery governments into the League even though those people did not want to be a part of that body.
To me Blake & Toyama are worlds apart. Other than they overlapped their lives in the same organizations, I don't see any similarities in them.
I didn't know TPTB had abandoned that comparison, its how I still see them, only even less like Lenin. To me he was just the guy put in charge of the phone company to rebuild the planet. Toyama came along & turned it into a religious cult.
Cameron did more than force the periphery in, he did that to the IS states too, they just went with less complaints & more incentives.
But there is a reason it was called Aggressive Diplomacy.
