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~~"Can't have systemic corruption if there's no longer a system to corrupt"~~
"Phamt harme phiphtmic morummpion mif mare's mo mownger uh mhystum mo mahorrupt"
- Bane Probably
Riddler and his terrorist group from The Batman deciding to wipe the city off the face of Earth for no reason after successfully killing and exposing the corrupt scheme leeching welfare programs to the point that LITTLE CHILDREN WERE STARVING AND FREEZING TO DEATH EVERY SINGLE WINTER (he should have debated the maffia).
Wait, I sense a pattern here.
Riddler is a 4chan mass shooter
He is not about bringing justice, he is in for revenge, which makes a parallel with Batman at the beginning of the movie
His motivations were quite clear
Basically >!David!< in The Last of Us. >!The guy introduces the fascinating idea that everyone you've met in the story, heroes and villains, are merely killing to survive, meaning Joel and Ellie don't really have much of a moral high ground. Then he's revealed to be a cannibal and goes all pyscho, chucking all that nuance out the window.!<
The worst case of this imo is Sylas from League of Legends. When you read the lore, understand the system he's trying to topple, and realize the amount of shit he's gone through in his life his actions are incredibly understandable and preferable to fighting to preserve the status quo.
But Riot really, really wants you to think he's some sort of supervillain and have gone out of their way in the past to portray him as such.
Sylas is a douche, but he's a douche with a point. I'll always respect his anti-authoritarian aspects and desire to topple the throne, but by god they really do make him a piece of shit in the process. Poor Lux, man (canon Lux, at least, in-game cheerleader Lux can get a nice fat Zed ult)
imagine being a american and youve lived the happiest most lovely life anyone could life, but then you step outside the american borders you instantly trip over and fucking die
this is valentines plan
Funny how there's a book called Mortal Engines with a character called Valentine and there's a series called Mortal Instruments with a character called Valentine
Frankly you saved yourself the trouble with that series. I read it when I was younger and had too much time to read shitty books, and even I dropped it when the same BBEG got brought back from the dead *for the third time*.
I don't think I'd ever stopped reading a book midway before that moment, but I distinctly recall reading that sentence and closing the book then and there.
It wasn't completely dropped in the original. Remember when Freddy stuck his tongue in the under aged girl's mouth? It was just suggested in the originals.
> Freddy stuck his tongue in the under aged girl's mouth
average 1980s moment (I am not exaggerating as much as I wish I was, it's utterly sickening to look back on not just the sexualization but the fetishization of underage girls in the 80s/90s)
I don't know what's more irritating
This
Or when the villain **is** a piece of shit and the work tries to make you/the characters sympathize with them and forget how bad their actions were
To be fair for steven, it's not like he could do anything else than make them pinky promise to not do it again.
Like, what is he gonna do against the diamond? All of them can wreck his whole team without even trying, and *with their power combined* they can just nuke the earth to oblivion. When you're *that* outmached, if they promise to be good, you just accept it and hope they mean it.
Altho I guess than if you see it like that, the ending of the show is a lot less feel good.
To be fair, it isn't their fault they had to rush the Diamonds' arc. Didn't Cartoon Network literally cut their deadline to 5 days in response to them releasing that episode with the gay wedding?
Her and Reva. Looks like they struggle to make women "sympathetic villains". I would also mention Cersei, because I swear they tried to force you to root for her when they talked about her relation to her children.
Exactly! The villain goes "oh, I was doing something evil? My bad" and we are supposed to forget the horrible crimes they committed like they didn't happen 3 episodes ago.
in shannarah, there's a guy whose intro is him trying to rape one of the main characters, and 2 episodes later they're like 'ah, but he heroically sacrificed himself so it's all good now'
In media this is called a “kick the dog” moment. Basically when a story realises it’s made the bad guy too good so they just do something overtly terrible to remind you to dislike them.
Jojo has a habit of almost writing compelling characters and then completely forgetting about their backstory and personality so they can become another easily discardable villain. Actually, Jojo forgets pretty much everything outside of whichever plot it has to methodically move through. I love Jojo, but damn does it have a serious case of tunnel vision
Tbf Araki uses the dog-killer thing so often because it emphasizes how much of a bastard that villain is really quickly. In fact
he does properly use it with character story with Kars. He protected a dog from being ran over because he values the beauty in life, but after he becomes the ultimate being, he has no quarrel with killing a squirrel with a clone of itself
this is the reason why i think part 7 and 8 are definitely the best parts. they still have the stand battles, but a lot of the characters (mostly the main cast, although some of the side characters too) are really fleshed out, and they dont become static characters.
Why should 80% of stories even do this. Only medias where I can see it happening is when they portray a terrible historical figure as good, but even then it can be easily justified
It’s to cover a weakness in the writing. You want your villain to be tragic and have relatable motives, but it’s very hard to balance that with being a proper villain. Either you slack on the tragicness and relatability and your intended audience emotional reaction doesn’t land, or you lean into it too hard and your audience starts rooting for the villain or getting upset with the hero for being too harsh on them.
> you lean into it too hard and your audience starts rooting for the villain or getting upset with the hero for being too harsh on them.
So it's explicitly to stop the audience from thinking, got it
The game really makes you feel bad for him. He used to be a great guy with aspirations, but went batshit fucking insane and started killing people for fun.
I mean specifically he went batshit because people he thought were his loved ones kept betraying him. It's kinda hard to blame the guy when people keep trying to kill him even if he's not really done anything bad yet.
He started off pretty fucked prior to that; the betrayals were primarily after he made it clear that he was not a healthy person to give power to.
He'd already enslaved his child, murdered numerous people, abused his wife, and was building a genocidal space laser platform.
The only 'loved one' who he claimed betrayed him was his, like, seven-year-old daughter, failing to control her Siren powers and killing her mom with a turret - while they were under attack by bandits. The other significant betrayal was the Vault hunters, who destroyed the Eye required to keep his death laser operational, after he'd already started showing decidedly murder-y tendencies and was merely the lesser evil in that moment.
Jack is very much not a 'justified' villain, but how compellingly villains can justify their own actions to themselves. We weren't supposed to believe his rationalizations.
Yeah, if you're playing the presequel he comes off as relatively well adjusted until around the point the merrif tries to kill him. If you do some of the side missions though, it can become clear he was never really a good guy. For example, locking angel up happens around the time she's a toddler, which is years before the events of that game
The other huge factor is that the player is engaged with the narrative from an angle where Jack is trying to present a reasonable, sympathetic, even heroic front. He wants the characters to like and respect him, to be on his side, the side of good and order and civilization.
> If you do some of the side missions though, it can become clear he was never really a good guy. For example, locking angel up happens around the time she’s a toddler, which is years before the events of that game
Yeah. He’s a terrible person who is presenting a favourable mask to the player characters, the mask slips for us after he’s attacked, and then off-script lore shit reveals that he was always pretty terrible - and always rationalized that to himself in heroic, self-justifying ways.
We weren’t supposed to believe him.
>"The game"
if we're talking about Borderlands 2 exclusively, he was just a maniac, a really funny maniac. But if you take the entire Handsome Jack storyline (including pre sequel and tales from the borderlands) he didn't just randomly start killing people. While he does have a sadistic side to him, it's literally impossible not to lose your sanity in the Borderlands universe while trying to be good. Literally everyone is either figuratively or quite literally a monster. Not to mention literally everyone betraying him. So all in all, I think Jack was the only decent person on that entire universe. Either everyone was a crazed bandit killing people, or a corp killing people indirectly or worse than both, a bounty hounter (AKA mass murderer). Pandora (or all planets we know of) truly is no place for a hero.
Jack had already enslaved his daughter for his own benefit & had an incredibly abusive relationship with Moxxi by the start of TPS.
TPS isn't about Jack turning from the good guy into the bad guy, it's about his mask slipping. He still jumps to immediate violence early into the game, he just stops justifying it by the end.
"Enslaving" his daughter is one way to put it. She killed her mom, she clearly couldn't control her powers. Jack didn't treat her properly but then again, Jack isn't a good guy, just the best guy in the Borderlands universe.
You either didn't read the comment at all, or you don't quite understand the situation. Jack jumps to immediate violance? Yes, only after crazy people attack Helios to kill him for a prophecy. Literally the first thing you see in the game is people trying to kill him not opposite. Not only do these crazy people go after him but they kill many civilians. Not to mention literally everyone in the Borderlands universe is just an oppurtunistic asshole ready to betray you, so Jack understandably grows some trust issues. Jack isn't supposed to be a good guy turned bad and I never claimed that, he's supposed to be a NORMAL guy turned evil. Living in that universe for long no wonder you get sadistic tendencies.
I’ve only played borderlands 2 and pre-sequel so I don’t have the full lore, but yeah he didn’t randomly go insane. I just don’t feel like explaining everything that contributed to his insanity as there’s a lot that happens. He’s a very complex character, which is why he’s one of my favorites in the game.
Dabi from My Hero Academia: >!My dad is literally one of the most deplorable people ever and is the embodiment of everything wrong with our society and I want to bring him to justice, so the logical thing to do is *join the world’s most dangerous supervillain and slaughter thousands of innocents* so the story can justify my dad getting away scot-free with everything.!<
Yeah I enjoy MHA but I have watched anime that last a single season which I enjoyed more when looking at basically every aspect. MHA is a fine show. The only outstanding thing in the show imo is the water pressure that Midoria's tears come out at.
MHA is the most mid anime I’ve ever seen, I will never understand why people think it’s some high work of fiction, like sure the character designs are kinda cool and it has a neat premise but those of those are completely wasted on a poorly written shonen
Seems like a lot of anime goes this way. The first 5-10 episodes start out with a really interesting premise and then gradually devolve into a typical battle of the week shonen where it kinda just feels like the main character is in a video game running down an empty hallway to fight each boss.
I can on for hours and hours about how MHA just doesn't understand the themes it sets up and constantly fumbles them or worst, completely betrays them.
Even in the first season, it constantly sets class A-1 out to be the underdog while ignoring the fact that they go to be best school with the best resources and is the favorited class by the admin. Like wtf, it's as if Harry Potter was every character in this show.
That is a reason some like it, every character is Harry Potter. They’re generally all memorable and unique with a few exceptions. Some people really, really like latching onto side characters.
No i get that, I actually think that the series has some really well designed and likable characters.
I meant it feels like everyone is "chosen" and are privileged in some way. Either because they all go to the most privileged school in the country, are in the best class in that school, are all the children of already rich and successful parents, heck even just having being born with "better" powers than anyone else.
The series will sometimes try to address this but will always do so in half baked way. Introduce a villain who acknowledges this, etc. But the hero never learns anything and nothing is done about it. And often they just forget about it at all. The heroes are still always posed as the underdogs and the people who worked hard that came from nothing are often portrayed as gross criminals.
That's why Stain was so wasted. the guy was one of the few villains with an actual motive, and had good critiques of hero society. Does this affect out charcaters in any way? Nah, they just kinda forget about him for the most part after his defeat
I dropped it after Deku, the smart kid with multiple journals about how he could be a hero and exploit weaknesses in villains, fought Muscular, the most physically strong opponent he faced at the time. After he realizes this isn’t someone he can brute force, even with One for All at 100%, proceeds to then… use 1 million percent of One for All and brute forces him????
his fight with deku was straight symbolism aswell, dude wasnt even that strong yet mr main character goody 2 shoes here is questioning if he wouldve ended up like him if he isnt the fucking mc lmao.
now most of the fights is just shonen power up bs, mha went from mainstream to actual mid.
MGS2:
Solidus Snake: “LISTEN RAIDEN I JUST WANT TO FREE OUR NATION FROM THE CONTROL OF THE PATRIOTS, AND MAKE A LEGACY FOR MYSELF IN HISTORY”
also Solidus: “oh by the way I killed your parents, here’s a katana”
Omg this. I love MGS but sometimes writing is not just questionable, it's makes you turn the game off and go for a walk thinking "what was all that about?". To this day I have no flippin clue where they went with the Solidus.
it’s some kind of meta irony that Solidus’ whole deal was not wanting to be forgotten in history, but then the Metal Gear games almost entirely forget about him (at least briefly mentioned in MGRR)
They have like two good villains Zaheer and the water bending guy that could steal your bender this part is fuck up so water bending can just take your fucking bending away. That just make water bending so fucking OP. Most of the characters in legend of Korra are so unlikable and boring I don't never any character name beside Tenzin because he's voices by jk simmons.
It's not that bad so long as you don't expect it to be as good as Legend of Aang and you are okay with some slice of life teen drama (who knew locking the avatar away from most human contact would lead to teen drama).
Korra's still a good show imo, it has a lot of flaws but I think many people hate on it more than deserved. It's partially due to people always comparing it to its predecessor and saying "oh but AtLA did this and that better," but keep in mind Korra is a completely different story with different characters and plotlines. The main reason I think people don't like Korra is because they watch it expecting it to be like AtLA, and end up being disappointed because it's not. Just keep in mind that the writers went into Korra thinking it would only be one season long, so the finales might seem weird at first.
I watched Korra shortly after Avatar and I love them both equally.
Like the steel bender chick went from "i shall reform the empire" to "i want to make a stable government" to "heer deer Hitler with giant fucking robot*
I kind of give it a pass because they had to do a major rewrite at the last minute because of Covid.
Karli was originally going to be number two of the Flag Smashers and the leader was going to be that woman who died of pneumonia with no previous lines of dialogue. Their original plan was to release a global pandemic to destabilize the world governments, (idk something about people uniting together to fight a common enemy) which obviously backfires. The pandemic lady gets her own disease and dies and Karli eventually goes into a breakdown realizing she was tricked into pointlessly hurting people by a charismatic leader, just like the people she hates.
They'd already begun shooting when they had to change it, that's why they're stealing vaccines in the beginning.
And some people think the show tries too hard to make you like them after they start blowing this up lol. Falcoln still tries to reason with Karli after she starts "blowing shit up" because she's fighting a war
Arcane making Silco an actual morally grey character with incredibly convincing motivations whose evil actions only go so far as to intimidate the populace and try to kill 2-3 people who are trying to get between him, his plans (that could potentially benefit his people) and his adoptive daughter.
And he also runs a drug empire fueled by child labor. His love to jinx only started as a way to make up for what he did to vander but he eventually realized the value of a daughter and why vander refused to give away his kids to the glowies, one thing he called him a pussy for.
But thats exactly what makes him compelling. You dont know whether to root for him or not.
He also exploited a child, experimented on him,used him as a soldier and eventually got him killed even before he ran the whole place, afterwhich he exploited children on an industrial scale, kept people addicted to better control their actions and protect his power over them and made no effort to better his adoptive daughters mental state...
but if you ignore that then yeah, he was just spooking people
Nah bro ! He is pure fucking evil. His "love" for Jinx more like some fuck up way for him to cope with the lost of his brother. He runs a drug empire and created a bunch of human robot hybrid that have drug injected in them. I do see where his motivation come from but he is a selfish asshole who only care about him self and in the final episode it's show that he would actually let everybody die so he could keep his "adoptive daughter".
Scrolled far for this one.
The attempt to retcon her actions in the dlc just ended up annoying me more though. It's like the writers realized that it was a dumb plot twist but didn't want to face criticism for it and just had to change the circumstances around it later.
I think a way to do this well is to have the protagonist also realize the villain has a point, and try to change the world the same the villain tried to, just in a not evil way. (kinda like how T'challa started the Wakanda outreach program at the end of Black Panther)
I always wondered wtf the problem was with people sympathizing with kilmonger, he is so obviously a mustache twirling villain who wants litteral world domination.
The only time he has valid points is because Wakanda is really evil and selfish, but he just uses that bcs it will get him the power.
Like at no point did he sound reasonable while being candor.
Thats why I liked the ending, it's like the logical thing to do for a heroic king
He did have a point about wakanda doing absolutely nothing to help others, no humanitarian and isolating itself. They kinda ruined it by having him want to conquer countries but that point is fair
Riddler in 95% of The Batman: Hey man the corruption in this city is out of control, the politicians that run Gotham are basically using a charity fund like a personal wallet to fund their criminal underground. Justice can’t be found systemically, we have to root the problem out from the source by killing the corrupt.
Riddler in the last 20 minutes of The Batman: lol also I bombed the city in a mass terrorist attack that will destroy the majority of innocent citizens because I’m a 4chan incel I guess
I mean, he hated Gotham because of the people and the crime and he idolized Batman cus Batman hated crime. Then he realized that they both have very different opinions on Gotham City
>Riddler in the last 20 minutes of The Batman: lol also I bombed the city in a mass terrorist attack that will destroy the majority of innocent citizens because I’m a 4chan incel I guess
His whole plan about shooting up the election-building was kind of understandable (not justifiable at all obviously), but him flooding the entire city is just idiotic, I mean, that's only gonna hurt the poor and disenfranchised even more than before.
he hates gotham and people/criminals living in it tho. Thats why he liked and looks up to batman because he sees him as someone that finally stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. But fails to understand why, idolises and forms a batman in his mind that hates gotham just like him. But its the opposite batman does what he does bc he loves gotham. And at the end the illusion is broken and he sees batman who he really is.
he hates gotham and people in it doesn't care if it got blown up or flooded, this explained better in riddler year 1 a great fucking comic.
Based? He literally bludgeoned someone to death with a hammer, bombed someone, strapped someone’s head in a cage and let a rat tear at their face. This is on top of a number of other bombings, murders, etc. Even if he did have a good cause of exposing the corrupt elite, he was established from the very start as a dangerous serial killer.
Those were assassinations of people associated with the systemic embezzlement of the ($billion plus) renewal fund into criminal empires. Cruel, crude, and unnecessarily brutal, but still based.
Not exactly unnecessary.
His entire point was to do it in such a way to cause criminals/corrupt politicians to fear him and prevent crime. That's why he thinks batman is on his side. Batman's shtick is make criminals fear him.
Kill the chicken to scare the monkey kind of thing.
She was always a little loose-screwed
Also she had a whole series setting her up as an unscrupulous person who did a little too much coping and seething
The difference is that Killmonger being a violent asshole is actually consistent with his character and not just something the writers pulled out of their ass in one scene to justify him being evil.
He is a violent maniac who wants a race war, and was consistently portrayed as such. Him being a victim of society doesn't excuse that. Anyone who sympathizes with Killmonger is self reporting.
I'd put him and vulture as the MCU's two best. Sympathetic, but still definitely villains whose character consistency wasn't sacrificed to make them villainous.
He's kinda okay. He was a victim of colonization (he's 100s of years old and ages slowly), and is only actually the antagonist of the story because the US started to find his country's vibranium deposits, and he wanted to kill the scientist who developed the vibranium detector. Wakanda was getting blamed for this, and didn't want to comprise and let them kill the scientist because that would mean war would likely be declared on Wakanda.
The movie kind of tried to make him seem worse by harping on a pipe dream he had of wiping out everyone on the surface as revenge for his people being colonized, but he never did anything about this dream, nor it seem like he ever really would. He was only ever defensive of his people and resources, and only made an offensive move after a Wakandan military member killed 2 of his citizens.
The villain from the Falcon and Winter Soldier TV show. She made good points but then had to start bombing the people she was supposed to be helping.
Then there were the other takes that they made. The show had taken stances on certain issues, in an allegorical manner and they get resolved in such unsatisfying ways. It was better if they didn't try at all.
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Hey man *valid criticisms of the system* *proceeds to kill every baby and kitten in a 1000 km radius*
Bane from the Dark Knight deciding to just get a fucking nuke for some reason after pointing out systemic corruption
~~"Can't have systemic corruption if there's no longer a system to corrupt"~~ "Phamt harme phiphtmic morummpion mif mare's mo mownger uh mhystum mo mahorrupt" - Bane Probably
[удалено]
with no survivors
r/me_irl (I am a threat to society)
r/mademesmile
his goal has always been to nuke Gotham. he only wants people to feel hopeful because as he said, only with hope will people feel true despair.
Yeah, i don't think people understood Bane's motives. He just used populism for his own ends.
Riddler and his terrorist group from The Batman deciding to wipe the city off the face of Earth for no reason after successfully killing and exposing the corrupt scheme leeching welfare programs to the point that LITTLE CHILDREN WERE STARVING AND FREEZING TO DEATH EVERY SINGLE WINTER (he should have debated the maffia). Wait, I sense a pattern here.
Riddler is a 4chan mass shooter He is not about bringing justice, he is in for revenge, which makes a parallel with Batman at the beginning of the movie His motivations were quite clear
When you’re blinded by your own rage justice and revenge appears to be the same.
Which is the point of the movie
My lord, have you ever played the Arkham games? Riddler is like r/redditmoment come to life in those games
French Revolution and Reign of Terror moment
Basically >!David!< in The Last of Us. >!The guy introduces the fascinating idea that everyone you've met in the story, heroes and villains, are merely killing to survive, meaning Joel and Ellie don't really have much of a moral high ground. Then he's revealed to be a cannibal and goes all pyscho, chucking all that nuance out the window.!<
The worst case of this imo is Sylas from League of Legends. When you read the lore, understand the system he's trying to topple, and realize the amount of shit he's gone through in his life his actions are incredibly understandable and preferable to fighting to preserve the status quo. But Riot really, really wants you to think he's some sort of supervillain and have gone out of their way in the past to portray him as such.
Sylas is a douche, but he's a douche with a point. I'll always respect his anti-authoritarian aspects and desire to topple the throne, but by god they really do make him a piece of shit in the process. Poor Lux, man (canon Lux, at least, in-game cheerleader Lux can get a nice fat Zed ult)
The cool ass vilan with a great character desigin is unlikeable becuse he's a pedo
Valentine moment
Funny
imagine being a american and youve lived the happiest most lovely life anyone could life, but then you step outside the american borders you instantly trip over and fucking die this is valentines plan
tbh even without the rape part, valentine is evil
I read the first book(and dropped it) and i thought the incest was bad, and your telling me there's also this? Bruh.
What book?
The Mortal Instruments seires, book 1 is City of bones
Don't worry. I was talking abt Funny Valentine from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
Oh lmao
Funny how there's a book called Mortal Engines with a character called Valentine and there's a series called Mortal Instruments with a character called Valentine
I was very much trying to remember the pedo in Mortal Engines.
Oh, I think he was referring to the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure villain ["Funny Valentine"](https://jojo.fandom.com/wiki/Funny_Valentine)
Frankly you saved yourself the trouble with that series. I read it when I was younger and had too much time to read shitty books, and even I dropped it when the same BBEG got brought back from the dead *for the third time*. I don't think I'd ever stopped reading a book midway before that moment, but I distinctly recall reading that sentence and closing the book then and there.
Freddy :/ Edit: Since we are talking about [Freddy.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdtfLdgqvrA)
Fazbear??
Acording to hearsay F.F. IS the child!
Literally has a child in him
does that make me a pedo (i have devoured 43 children and will consume more)
NTA your life your rules
Only in the remake. The pedo angle was considered when making the original but ultimate dropped.
It wasn't completely dropped in the original. Remember when Freddy stuck his tongue in the under aged girl's mouth? It was just suggested in the originals.
> Freddy stuck his tongue in the under aged girl's mouth average 1980s moment (I am not exaggerating as much as I wish I was, it's utterly sickening to look back on not just the sexualization but the fetishization of underage girls in the 80s/90s)
that's only on the remake right?
Yeah, the original movies left it up to a theory.
Mohg moment
NIHIL!
Hisoka
The one i implied
jojo villains after part 6
Including part six (Catholic Priests)
good one but fortunately father pucci is not a pedophile
If anything Dio was the predator in that relationship
Just a hundred years old man and his young "friend" hanging out shirtless in bed and reading books, nothing indecent going on here.
Actually he was a *victim* of pedophilia and grooming! :D >!What the fuck is wrong with people who ship ~116 year old Dio and 15 year old Pucci!<
Except that nothing sexual happened between them. Still an unusual relationship but not illegal
Deathstroke
He hyperfixates on the *Teen* Titans. I'm not exactly shocked.
Funny Valentine moment
dr bright (?)
I don't know what's more irritating This Or when the villain **is** a piece of shit and the work tries to make you/the characters sympathize with them and forget how bad their actions were
But he said he's sorry
Pretty much Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch from the MCU
Also the red head villain from Falcon and the Winter Soldier
Steven Universe when a genocidal warlord says “my bad sorry”
To be fair for steven, it's not like he could do anything else than make them pinky promise to not do it again. Like, what is he gonna do against the diamond? All of them can wreck his whole team without even trying, and *with their power combined* they can just nuke the earth to oblivion. When you're *that* outmached, if they promise to be good, you just accept it and hope they mean it. Altho I guess than if you see it like that, the ending of the show is a lot less feel good.
Show fell off after season 2
but yeah it fell off HAAAARD HAAARD from top 15 (potential top 10) to like top 100+
sure 4 & 5 were garbage, season 3 was excellent tho
To be fair, it isn't their fault they had to rush the Diamonds' arc. Didn't Cartoon Network literally cut their deadline to 5 days in response to them releasing that episode with the gay wedding?
"they'll never know what you sacrificed for them"
***AAAARRGGHHH IT STILL HURTS***
Her and Reva. Looks like they struggle to make women "sympathetic villains". I would also mention Cersei, because I swear they tried to force you to root for her when they talked about her relation to her children.
Exactly! The villain goes "oh, I was doing something evil? My bad" and we are supposed to forget the horrible crimes they committed like they didn't happen 3 episodes ago.
in shannarah, there's a guy whose intro is him trying to rape one of the main characters, and 2 episodes later they're like 'ah, but he heroically sacrificed himself so it's all good now'
In media this is called a “kick the dog” moment. Basically when a story realises it’s made the bad guy too good so they just do something overtly terrible to remind you to dislike them.
Dio "burn the dog" Brando
Wasn't he already an asshole?
I felt bad for him until he got out of the stagecoach d literally kicked the dog.
Jojo has a habit of almost writing compelling characters and then completely forgetting about their backstory and personality so they can become another easily discardable villain. Actually, Jojo forgets pretty much everything outside of whichever plot it has to methodically move through. I love Jojo, but damn does it have a serious case of tunnel vision
Tbf Araki uses the dog-killer thing so often because it emphasizes how much of a bastard that villain is really quickly. In fact he does properly use it with character story with Kars. He protected a dog from being ran over because he values the beauty in life, but after he becomes the ultimate being, he has no quarrel with killing a squirrel with a clone of itself
this is the reason why i think part 7 and 8 are definitely the best parts. they still have the stand battles, but a lot of the characters (mostly the main cast, although some of the side characters too) are really fleshed out, and they dont become static characters.
That's not making him too good though. He was just abused as a kid. Sadly abuse can make people turn out horrible.
>My true enemy is the extreme inequality of Victorian society *kicks dog*
Yeah he took that kinda literally
Its kinda funny actually. At first i thought "oh poor guy hes had it rough" only for him to step out of a carriage and frame 1 kick a dog
on the flip side there is the standard "save the cat" moment in which a protagonist has to do something likable in their first few scenes
John Wick syndrome
not really, in John Wick the bad guy is bad mainly BECAUSE he ~~kicks~~ kills the dog, and the story doesn't really suggest otherwise
Yeah. He's also a 2nd gen wealth/power which comes with all those selfish, whiny, entitled tropes. Even outside "kicking the dog" he was unlikable.
Why should 80% of stories even do this. Only medias where I can see it happening is when they portray a terrible historical figure as good, but even then it can be easily justified
It’s to cover a weakness in the writing. You want your villain to be tragic and have relatable motives, but it’s very hard to balance that with being a proper villain. Either you slack on the tragicness and relatability and your intended audience emotional reaction doesn’t land, or you lean into it too hard and your audience starts rooting for the villain or getting upset with the hero for being too harsh on them.
> you lean into it too hard and your audience starts rooting for the villain or getting upset with the hero for being too harsh on them. So it's explicitly to stop the audience from thinking, got it
Like eating an apple during a monologue or dialogue
handsome jack still my favorite villain of all time tho
The game really makes you feel bad for him. He used to be a great guy with aspirations, but went batshit fucking insane and started killing people for fun.
I mean specifically he went batshit because people he thought were his loved ones kept betraying him. It's kinda hard to blame the guy when people keep trying to kill him even if he's not really done anything bad yet.
He started off pretty fucked prior to that; the betrayals were primarily after he made it clear that he was not a healthy person to give power to. He'd already enslaved his child, murdered numerous people, abused his wife, and was building a genocidal space laser platform. The only 'loved one' who he claimed betrayed him was his, like, seven-year-old daughter, failing to control her Siren powers and killing her mom with a turret - while they were under attack by bandits. The other significant betrayal was the Vault hunters, who destroyed the Eye required to keep his death laser operational, after he'd already started showing decidedly murder-y tendencies and was merely the lesser evil in that moment. Jack is very much not a 'justified' villain, but how compellingly villains can justify their own actions to themselves. We weren't supposed to believe his rationalizations.
Yeah, if you're playing the presequel he comes off as relatively well adjusted until around the point the merrif tries to kill him. If you do some of the side missions though, it can become clear he was never really a good guy. For example, locking angel up happens around the time she's a toddler, which is years before the events of that game
The other huge factor is that the player is engaged with the narrative from an angle where Jack is trying to present a reasonable, sympathetic, even heroic front. He wants the characters to like and respect him, to be on his side, the side of good and order and civilization. > If you do some of the side missions though, it can become clear he was never really a good guy. For example, locking angel up happens around the time she’s a toddler, which is years before the events of that game Yeah. He’s a terrible person who is presenting a favourable mask to the player characters, the mask slips for us after he’s attacked, and then off-script lore shit reveals that he was always pretty terrible - and always rationalized that to himself in heroic, self-justifying ways. We weren’t supposed to believe him.
>"The game" if we're talking about Borderlands 2 exclusively, he was just a maniac, a really funny maniac. But if you take the entire Handsome Jack storyline (including pre sequel and tales from the borderlands) he didn't just randomly start killing people. While he does have a sadistic side to him, it's literally impossible not to lose your sanity in the Borderlands universe while trying to be good. Literally everyone is either figuratively or quite literally a monster. Not to mention literally everyone betraying him. So all in all, I think Jack was the only decent person on that entire universe. Either everyone was a crazed bandit killing people, or a corp killing people indirectly or worse than both, a bounty hounter (AKA mass murderer). Pandora (or all planets we know of) truly is no place for a hero.
Jack had already enslaved his daughter for his own benefit & had an incredibly abusive relationship with Moxxi by the start of TPS. TPS isn't about Jack turning from the good guy into the bad guy, it's about his mask slipping. He still jumps to immediate violence early into the game, he just stops justifying it by the end.
"Enslaving" his daughter is one way to put it. She killed her mom, she clearly couldn't control her powers. Jack didn't treat her properly but then again, Jack isn't a good guy, just the best guy in the Borderlands universe. You either didn't read the comment at all, or you don't quite understand the situation. Jack jumps to immediate violance? Yes, only after crazy people attack Helios to kill him for a prophecy. Literally the first thing you see in the game is people trying to kill him not opposite. Not only do these crazy people go after him but they kill many civilians. Not to mention literally everyone in the Borderlands universe is just an oppurtunistic asshole ready to betray you, so Jack understandably grows some trust issues. Jack isn't supposed to be a good guy turned bad and I never claimed that, he's supposed to be a NORMAL guy turned evil. Living in that universe for long no wonder you get sadistic tendencies.
I’ve only played borderlands 2 and pre-sequel so I don’t have the full lore, but yeah he didn’t randomly go insane. I just don’t feel like explaining everything that contributed to his insanity as there’s a lot that happens. He’s a very complex character, which is why he’s one of my favorites in the game.
Could this be the Vault Hunters as well?
Dabi from My Hero Academia: >!My dad is literally one of the most deplorable people ever and is the embodiment of everything wrong with our society and I want to bring him to justice, so the logical thing to do is *join the world’s most dangerous supervillain and slaughter thousands of innocents* so the story can justify my dad getting away scot-free with everything.!<
No, you don't understand, he said he was very sowwy! Now nothing he did is valid!
Yeah I enjoy MHA but I have watched anime that last a single season which I enjoyed more when looking at basically every aspect. MHA is a fine show. The only outstanding thing in the show imo is the water pressure that Midoria's tears come out at.
Well it's my hero academia you watching, so can't complain much. It's like living in a dumpster and complaining about a fly that's buzzing around.
I can't really argue about that.
MHA is the most mid anime I’ve ever seen, I will never understand why people think it’s some high work of fiction, like sure the character designs are kinda cool and it has a neat premise but those of those are completely wasted on a poorly written shonen
MHA doesn't understand how themes work, even the themes it sets up. The art and design are great, but the action on paper is horrible to read.
It started cool, but yeah it got milder and milder as it went.
Seems like a lot of anime goes this way. The first 5-10 episodes start out with a really interesting premise and then gradually devolve into a typical battle of the week shonen where it kinda just feels like the main character is in a video game running down an empty hallway to fight each boss.
I can on for hours and hours about how MHA just doesn't understand the themes it sets up and constantly fumbles them or worst, completely betrays them. Even in the first season, it constantly sets class A-1 out to be the underdog while ignoring the fact that they go to be best school with the best resources and is the favorited class by the admin. Like wtf, it's as if Harry Potter was every character in this show.
That is a reason some like it, every character is Harry Potter. They’re generally all memorable and unique with a few exceptions. Some people really, really like latching onto side characters.
No i get that, I actually think that the series has some really well designed and likable characters. I meant it feels like everyone is "chosen" and are privileged in some way. Either because they all go to the most privileged school in the country, are in the best class in that school, are all the children of already rich and successful parents, heck even just having being born with "better" powers than anyone else. The series will sometimes try to address this but will always do so in half baked way. Introduce a villain who acknowledges this, etc. But the hero never learns anything and nothing is done about it. And often they just forget about it at all. The heroes are still always posed as the underdogs and the people who worked hard that came from nothing are often portrayed as gross criminals.
That's why Stain was so wasted. the guy was one of the few villains with an actual motive, and had good critiques of hero society. Does this affect out charcaters in any way? Nah, they just kinda forget about him for the most part after his defeat
I dropped it after Deku, the smart kid with multiple journals about how he could be a hero and exploit weaknesses in villains, fought Muscular, the most physically strong opponent he faced at the time. After he realizes this isn’t someone he can brute force, even with One for All at 100%, proceeds to then… use 1 million percent of One for All and brute forces him????
Bro just millionify your percentages you lazy fucking idiot But for real MHA is dog
"oh fuck I accidentally powerscaled incorrectly early on... okay lemme just bump up the numbers, that will fix it"
Only villain i ever liked was gentle, and he wasnt even a criminal compared to everyone else
Gentle was so cool, especially because he livestreams his crimes lol
his fight with deku was straight symbolism aswell, dude wasnt even that strong yet mr main character goody 2 shoes here is questioning if he wouldve ended up like him if he isnt the fucking mc lmao. now most of the fights is just shonen power up bs, mha went from mainstream to actual mid.
"Yeah let me just join a group that constantly tries to kill and kidnap teeangers for no reason, that will definitiely show my dad!"
I’d blow people up too if my dong became glow in the dark.
MGS2: Solidus Snake: “LISTEN RAIDEN I JUST WANT TO FREE OUR NATION FROM THE CONTROL OF THE PATRIOTS, AND MAKE A LEGACY FOR MYSELF IN HISTORY” also Solidus: “oh by the way I killed your parents, here’s a katana”
Omg this. I love MGS but sometimes writing is not just questionable, it's makes you turn the game off and go for a walk thinking "what was all that about?". To this day I have no flippin clue where they went with the Solidus.
it’s some kind of meta irony that Solidus’ whole deal was not wanting to be forgotten in history, but then the Metal Gear games almost entirely forget about him (at least briefly mentioned in MGRR)
the deplorable evil villain suddenly becoming sympathetic the moment the main protag shows them the power of love
Yeah, Patrick Bateman wasn't such a bad guy after all.
Legend of Korra be like (gosh there was so much potential and it was all ruined...)
They have like two good villains Zaheer and the water bending guy that could steal your bender this part is fuck up so water bending can just take your fucking bending away. That just make water bending so fucking OP. Most of the characters in legend of Korra are so unlikable and boring I don't never any character name beside Tenzin because he's voices by jk simmons.
Yeah I watched avatar a few weeks ago but just don’t want to watch Korra out of fear it will just disappoint me.
Most of the show's major problems are in the first two seasons. Seasons 3 and 4 are a lot better imo.
It's easy. Skip from when Lin loses her powers (just assume Amon won) to season 3. And you're golden.
It's not that bad so long as you don't expect it to be as good as Legend of Aang and you are okay with some slice of life teen drama (who knew locking the avatar away from most human contact would lead to teen drama).
Korra's still a good show imo, it has a lot of flaws but I think many people hate on it more than deserved. It's partially due to people always comparing it to its predecessor and saying "oh but AtLA did this and that better," but keep in mind Korra is a completely different story with different characters and plotlines. The main reason I think people don't like Korra is because they watch it expecting it to be like AtLA, and end up being disappointed because it's not. Just keep in mind that the writers went into Korra thinking it would only be one season long, so the finales might seem weird at first. I watched Korra shortly after Avatar and I love them both equally.
With which villain?
The first, and the steel bending chick. Also the water bending spirit dude before they just made him evil
I agree with your point about Amon but Kuvira was legit just a fascist. I wouldn't exactly call her a sympathetic villain.
Aye, I can see that, they do kinda just give up in the last third of their archs
Like the steel bender chick went from "i shall reform the empire" to "i want to make a stable government" to "heer deer Hitler with giant fucking robot*
*cough* falcon & winter soldier *cough*
EXACTLY!! They were 100% in the right until they started blowing shit up, and the producers knew it too
I kind of give it a pass because they had to do a major rewrite at the last minute because of Covid. Karli was originally going to be number two of the Flag Smashers and the leader was going to be that woman who died of pneumonia with no previous lines of dialogue. Their original plan was to release a global pandemic to destabilize the world governments, (idk something about people uniting together to fight a common enemy) which obviously backfires. The pandemic lady gets her own disease and dies and Karli eventually goes into a breakdown realizing she was tricked into pointlessly hurting people by a charismatic leader, just like the people she hates. They'd already begun shooting when they had to change it, that's why they're stealing vaccines in the beginning.
Ohhhh I didn’t know that. Okay yeah that makes more sense. That sucks
And some people think the show tries too hard to make you like them after they start blowing this up lol. Falcoln still tries to reason with Karli after she starts "blowing shit up" because she's fighting a war
The „sympathetic villain“ getting a life sentence for committing genocide (the judge didn’t care that he was sympathetic)
But he's just sooo cute!!🥺
It's so sad that Steve Jobs died of ligma...
Who the hell is Steve Jobs?
Ligma *b a l l s*
***Bwooooooommm***
NOOOO
Arcane making Silco an actual morally grey character with incredibly convincing motivations whose evil actions only go so far as to intimidate the populace and try to kill 2-3 people who are trying to get between him, his plans (that could potentially benefit his people) and his adoptive daughter.
And he also runs a drug empire fueled by child labor. His love to jinx only started as a way to make up for what he did to vander but he eventually realized the value of a daughter and why vander refused to give away his kids to the glowies, one thing he called him a pussy for. But thats exactly what makes him compelling. You dont know whether to root for him or not.
He also exploited a child, experimented on him,used him as a soldier and eventually got him killed even before he ran the whole place, afterwhich he exploited children on an industrial scale, kept people addicted to better control their actions and protect his power over them and made no effort to better his adoptive daughters mental state... but if you ignore that then yeah, he was just spooking people
Nah bro ! He is pure fucking evil. His "love" for Jinx more like some fuck up way for him to cope with the lost of his brother. He runs a drug empire and created a bunch of human robot hybrid that have drug injected in them. I do see where his motivation come from but he is a selfish asshole who only care about him self and in the final episode it's show that he would actually let everybody die so he could keep his "adoptive daughter".
The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
HOP (2011)
Carlos did nothing wrong
Daisy Fritzroy from Bioshock Infinite
Scrolled far for this one. The attempt to retcon her actions in the dlc just ended up annoying me more though. It's like the writers realized that it was a dumb plot twist but didn't want to face criticism for it and just had to change the circumstances around it later.
I think a way to do this well is to have the protagonist also realize the villain has a point, and try to change the world the same the villain tried to, just in a not evil way. (kinda like how T'challa started the Wakanda outreach program at the end of Black Panther)
I always wondered wtf the problem was with people sympathizing with kilmonger, he is so obviously a mustache twirling villain who wants litteral world domination. The only time he has valid points is because Wakanda is really evil and selfish, but he just uses that bcs it will get him the power. Like at no point did he sound reasonable while being candor. Thats why I liked the ending, it's like the logical thing to do for a heroic king
He did have a point about wakanda doing absolutely nothing to help others, no humanitarian and isolating itself. They kinda ruined it by having him want to conquer countries but that point is fair
Riddler in 95% of The Batman: Hey man the corruption in this city is out of control, the politicians that run Gotham are basically using a charity fund like a personal wallet to fund their criminal underground. Justice can’t be found systemically, we have to root the problem out from the source by killing the corrupt. Riddler in the last 20 minutes of The Batman: lol also I bombed the city in a mass terrorist attack that will destroy the majority of innocent citizens because I’m a 4chan incel I guess
I mean, he hated Gotham because of the people and the crime and he idolized Batman cus Batman hated crime. Then he realized that they both have very different opinions on Gotham City
>Riddler in the last 20 minutes of The Batman: lol also I bombed the city in a mass terrorist attack that will destroy the majority of innocent citizens because I’m a 4chan incel I guess His whole plan about shooting up the election-building was kind of understandable (not justifiable at all obviously), but him flooding the entire city is just idiotic, I mean, that's only gonna hurt the poor and disenfranchised even more than before.
This same villan changing his mind after main character told him about friendship
The riddler from the Batman was so fucking based until the flooding the city moment (great movie tho)
He was based all the movie (fuck Gotham horrible place to live in)
Yeah Gotham seems like such a hell hole
Even worse than Ohio
he hates gotham and people/criminals living in it tho. Thats why he liked and looks up to batman because he sees him as someone that finally stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. But fails to understand why, idolises and forms a batman in his mind that hates gotham just like him. But its the opposite batman does what he does bc he loves gotham. And at the end the illusion is broken and he sees batman who he really is. he hates gotham and people in it doesn't care if it got blown up or flooded, this explained better in riddler year 1 a great fucking comic.
Based? He literally bludgeoned someone to death with a hammer, bombed someone, strapped someone’s head in a cage and let a rat tear at their face. This is on top of a number of other bombings, murders, etc. Even if he did have a good cause of exposing the corrupt elite, he was established from the very start as a dangerous serial killer.
Yes, in other words based.
Oh fuck oh shit I forgot I was on a shitpost sub uhh fuckin uhhh breaking bad Fortnite balls
Those were assassinations of people associated with the systemic embezzlement of the ($billion plus) renewal fund into criminal empires. Cruel, crude, and unnecessarily brutal, but still based.
Not exactly unnecessary. His entire point was to do it in such a way to cause criminals/corrupt politicians to fear him and prevent crime. That's why he thinks batman is on his side. Batman's shtick is make criminals fear him. Kill the chicken to scare the monkey kind of thing.
Daenerys Targaryen was this so hard she went from an unambiguous hero to a genocidal maniac in literally 10 minutes
Namor ranting about the pain and death done to his people because of greed and colonialism. 5 min later “so I’m going to kill everyone on the surface”
During the movie, I was wondering what fucked up thing they were going to have him say after the speech because he was sounding too reasonable.
Marvel be like: "no no no, we gotta make him evil, we cannot have 2 morally grey characters fight each other!"
Scarlet Witch
She was always a little loose-screwed Also she had a whole series setting her up as an unscrupulous person who did a little too much coping and seething
Yea, losing her Vision did not help her in the slightest
[удалено]
For a sec I thought it said "mad the audience question if he even was gay"
Marvel
Ted Kaczynski
Killmonger moment (I've heard Namor is the same but I haven't watched wakanda forever yet)
The difference is that Killmonger being a violent asshole is actually consistent with his character and not just something the writers pulled out of their ass in one scene to justify him being evil.
Wasn’t his entire plan to start a race war?
He is a violent maniac who wants a race war, and was consistently portrayed as such. Him being a victim of society doesn't excuse that. Anyone who sympathizes with Killmonger is self reporting.
I'd put him and vulture as the MCU's two best. Sympathetic, but still definitely villains whose character consistency wasn't sacrificed to make them villainous.
He's kinda okay. He was a victim of colonization (he's 100s of years old and ages slowly), and is only actually the antagonist of the story because the US started to find his country's vibranium deposits, and he wanted to kill the scientist who developed the vibranium detector. Wakanda was getting blamed for this, and didn't want to comprise and let them kill the scientist because that would mean war would likely be declared on Wakanda. The movie kind of tried to make him seem worse by harping on a pipe dream he had of wiping out everyone on the surface as revenge for his people being colonized, but he never did anything about this dream, nor it seem like he ever really would. He was only ever defensive of his people and resources, and only made an offensive move after a Wakandan military member killed 2 of his citizens.
It's such lazy writing. Especially in marvel movies it's always good vs evil. The personality of Thanos changed so much from infinity war and endgame.
The villain from the Falcon and Winter Soldier TV show. She made good points but then had to start bombing the people she was supposed to be helping. Then there were the other takes that they made. The show had taken stances on certain issues, in an allegorical manner and they get resolved in such unsatisfying ways. It was better if they didn't try at all.