User blog:CITRONtanker/Why I think villains are important (and why many forms of media are squandering them)

So, today's blog is going to be a bit different. What I have for you chums today is somewhat of an essay. I doubt it's the first time I've done something like this, but I wanted to converse on a topic I know very well- villains. You all know me well as a villain-happy roleplayer- in fact, you might be consider my Inksona somewhat of a villain himself, in some ways. Yet the inspiration I had to create Galaximus and my other baddies stems from the villains I grew up seeing in media. I always love seeing villains in new forms of media I take in, because, to me at least, they can be just as interesting as the heroes.

But lately, I've been noticing something- nowadays, villains have not been utilized to the full potential they are capable of, in my eyes. It's because modern villains fall into some unfortunate tropes- ones we will talk about today. I'll try not to let my evil nerdiness get in the way, but settle in. And I hope you can learn something!

What is a villain?
(Reading music added for enhancement of reading: Like so!)

So, what is a villain? Well, a quick Google search tells us this- ''"A villain is a character whose evil actions or motives are important to the plot." ''That on its own is a simple concept to grasp. And although all villains want to accomplish some evil goal, they all desire vastly different things, and are willing to do what is needed to attain them- kidnap a princess, destroy swaths of land, form a corrupt government, commit an act of terrorism, and so on and so forth. We could fill a book with all the things one could do to be labled a "villain". Now, if we want to get even more in depth, we could talk anti-heroes (Shadow the Hedgehog comes to mind), anti-villains, and deuteragonists, but for the sake of keeping this blog a tad shorter, let us focus on the more traditional villains.

Some villains are ones that everyone knows- Bowser, Ganon, Thanos, Dr. Robotnik, Maleficent, Plankton, Mojo Jojo, I could go on for days. All of them are beloved almost as much as the heroes of their respective franchises of origin. This is because all of these characters, and many other villains I love, have fleshed out characterizations, clear motives, and can even be humorous when it fits most. But lets explore this a bit more....

Crafting a villain
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So, how does one go about creating a villain? We've established that they must be evil, and the evil they intend to commit should serve as a key point in the plot. We've also learned they must be fleshed out, not just some force of nature. A great example of this is Bowser in the Mario RPG games- he's meant to be a bad guy, make no mistake, but he also has a more comical edge that truly makes him memorable, not to mention incredibly quotable. Another example is Hades from Disney's Hercules- Hades is not the most destructive evil in the movie (that would be the Titans) but his charisma easily put him up there with Disney's best villains. Both him and RPG Bowser serve a rare, but wonderful role- a mix of a villain and a comic relief. They do just more than commit evil, and have a mindset beyond being a ruthless madman who only wants to get his way. I could also lump Hades from Kid Icarus Uprising in this too, only take everything I said about these other two and multiply it by a hundred. Man, he's just too good a villain!

Lets look at a different example- making a more dark and sinister villain. In franchises such as Metroid which focus on a more story driven atmosphere, featuring a character with a poignant, at times tragic backstory, having a villain who is cold-hearted, emotionless, and at times never talks can make the mood hit hard. Think of a villain like Mother Brain- while she clearly shows some kind of resentment towards Samus, she is mostly a lifeless husk of an individual. I would be tempted to lump GLaDOS into Mother Brain's camp, but GLaDOS is a bit different. Actually, not just a bit. She's a villain who is tough to label- she's serious and ruthless, make no mistake, but she has some personality as well. She's probably one of the most complete villains out there, if I'm being honest. And to think she's an AI....

How are modern villains doing?
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So, I mentioned how more modern villains are falling into traps that are causing my enjoyment of them to falter. But does that mean they're all bad? No, of course not! Lets talk about some good villains that the recent years have brought us, and then get into some.... lesser efforts.

I think a great place to start when we talk about more modern villains is with the Ice King. Simon ended up being my favorite character in Adventure Time for a lot of the reasons I liked RPG Bowser and Hades- his character. He was always short tempered, but he was never actually viewed as a serious threat- in fact, as the series went on, he satrted to get worked out of his main antagonist role, and is shown to have a more humorous edge. I think a lot of the more modern shows took at a least a couple pages out of his book.

Talking about modern villains is actually quite diffcult because they're so polarizing- they're either way too complex or have little to nothing to them. And nowadays, we almost never meet the main villain of a cartton or movie early on. Look at Bill Cipher- one of the most iconic villains of any cartoon. He wasn't introduced until the end of Season 1. RWBY took it a step further, by not introducing Salem until the end of Volume 3 (okay, she did narrate in the pilot episode, but we're not gonna count that, are we?) Cipher's late introduction was perfectly okay, mainly because after he appeared, they never really tried to trick you that there was a greater evil in the show- many of the villains in Gravity Falls were one offs, like .GIFfany. And he didn't even appear a ton of times, either, for a main antagonist, yet he ended up being so memorable and beloved by a great many. Salem, on the other hand, is pushing it a bit. Waiting three whole seasons to show the face of your big bad means that you had better deliver on the buildup you generated, especially in such a story-driven show such as RWBY. At least her villain song is an absolute banger- seriously, if you have not listened to Divide, I beg you to go do so right now.

In movies, what do you get? Well, this opens up a can of worms, which I think is the main problem with villaisn nowadays. And I'm sure you all saw this talk coming....

What a twist!
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Twist villains.... hoo boy. I don't know why this trend has taken such a hold as of late, but, my word, does it annoy me. A twist villain, to the ill informed, is a character who is intially introduced as a good guy, but later on reveals that they were evil the entire time. I'm gonna go for round two of this rapid fire: Waternoose, Stinky Pete, King Candy, Commander Tartar, Wheatley, Mustache Kid, and Daisy in my lifestyle.

Twist villains can work in movies. Take Waternoose adn Stinky Pete for instance- their motives made sense for their scenarios- moreover Waternoose, who wanted to do it for the business of his company above all. He even showed remorse for banishing Sulley in order to achieve his goals. But something else that made them work is that both Monsters Inc. and Toy Story 2 had two villains- one more traditional villain, who is established as a villain, and is consistent the whole way through, and a twist villain.

How are twist villains done poorly? Why don't you ask the people who wrote the scripts for Frozen and Zootopia. These movies both share a fatal flaw- it's not that they introduced a twist villain, it was the fact that they introduced said villain ''in the dying minutes of the film. ''We don't have any time to process the information, and the twists are so horribly done that I can't take either of them seriously. Like, dear lord, how could you make Frozen, a movie I already hate, even worse? Make that prince you introduced at the start magically come back and give Olaf plot relavance! Man, why could you not have stayed with the idea of Elsa being the villain? And this is from a company that made villains like Scar. And even then, Syndrome is an infintely better twist than Hans could ever dream.

And what I hate about this most of all is that it's bleeding into video games. Take Tartar, for instance- I will admit that the fact Tartar was evil really threw me for a loop, because, speaking honestly, I really didn't expect the Octo Expansion to have a villain going in. Rather, I thought eh conflict would arise of Agent 8 discovering who he/she was, and dealing with some experiments gone wrong. Tartar did help advance the plot, but I felt, on rewrite, you could tinker it to remove Tartar altogether. I do question why Splatoon was the franchise Nintendo chose to introduce such a bloodthirsty villain in though. So Tartar worked for a twist villain. And I vowed to never be tricked about a twist villain in video games again.

And I never have.

A Hat in Time. I love how they do everything in their heart to convince you that Snatcher is the main antagonist, but it turns out that wierdo girl with the mustache (whose design will always bother me) is actually the main villain. Honestly, I think the only thing that saved Mustache Girl is that her ambitions were actually quite interesting to me, trying to eliminate anyone she saw as a villain. And it's kinda impossible to hate any character in A Hat in Time, so there's that. Chairman Rose fell flat as a twist villain, too. I knew he'd be the bad guy going in- Team Yell was such a joke of an evil team you pretty much knew someone else had to be the bad guy.

W.I.P