Nothing kills my motivation for stopping a villain harder then when their end goal isn't villainous.
:wojak-nooo: noooo humanity has to reach its potential naturally! you can't just cheat your way there!
:gigachad: I'm going to turn everyone into godsNatural is a construct and if I can cheat into godhood, then godhood is part of human nature :edgeworth-shrug:
I see so much writing advice saying that the villain is supposed to have believable and interesting motivations, and the hero is supposed to have a reason to be invested in the plot, and this "good idea vs reason to maintain status quo" stuff falls right out of it.
Make a proactive hero for once, cowards.
I hate the idea that “interesting/plausible/human” is considered by some to be synonymous with “sympathetic/noble”. Plenty of evil or amoral personalities with long backgrounds and complex/contradicting personalities can be found within our own history. The rise of Fascism, for example, has so much more to it than “people in black shirts doing bad things for shits and giggles”.
Yeah, exactly. I dislike the tragic/sympathetic villain trope. I want a good reason to defeat them outside of "oh but they're a little extreme"
Make villains villainous again.
It's even worse when they make the hero team up with a shitty person who happens to be on your side.
Villain: Has a point, but murders puppies for no reason.
Hero: Kills villain.
Hero to villain's second in command: "Hey, you don't murder puppies for no reason, do you?"
Second: "Uh, no, why?"
Hero: "Great, you're in charge now. Also I'm joining you."
At least make a sympathetic backstory that makes the villain irrational and insane, ffs
Yeah there are so many of these, especially in jrpgs.
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Wilhelm from Xenosaga: Corporate CEO who uses time travel to fix what he regards as human imperfections. Confusing because he's an evil CEO which I understand, but he also time travels to save people's lives and end wars and stuff like in Quantum Leap. He's considered in the wrong because he shouldn't have unilateral time powers so you kill his dudes with your giant robots. Well, ok.
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Ghaleon from Lunar: Wizard who lost his friend in a war, then swore he'd end all pointless conflicts and bring peace...which he does through declaring himself Magic Emperor and enslaving millions of people. Ok.
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Delita Heiral from Final Fantasy Tactics: Peasant boy becomes a knight and rises up through the ranks, only to be betrayed and his sister is killed in a Byzantine power grab. He swears vengeance against the whole system that led to his sister's death and swears to make the world better. He stages a grand revolution against the monarchy and church, seizes total power and...becomes an evil dictator. Oh, ok.
GOOD jrpg villain is Kefka from Final Fantasy VI. He's an magical gay clown who likes doing mischief, and that's it, that's his whole story. :joker-troll:
Wilhelm from Xenosaga: Corporate CEO who uses time travel to fix what he regards as human imperfections. Confusing because he’s an evil CEO which I understand, but he also time travels to save people’s lives and end wars and stuff like in Quantum Leap. He’s considered in the wrong because he shouldn’t have unilateral time powers so you kill his dudes with your giant robots. Well, ok.
This makes sense because there are no good CEOs. Any CEO claiming to be good is lying.
Yeah, he's also a cult leader who explicitly worships Jesus. Xenosaga goes places, I talk shit but honestly I love those games.
Kefka Palazzo was given magic powers through an abominable, torturous black magic program which drove him to despair, and then put in command of an army by a guy who didn’t give a fuck so he could do war crimes. He’s the living embodiment of The Consequences of My Actions.
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What if you had a villain who wanted to create a new better world without injustice except the injustice is westerners not being able to have treats
Lmao
"Hero, do you ever feel that life is cruel and unfair? Well, I seek to create a new world. A fair world where there isn't just a Walmart on every corner, the whole planet will be a Walmart. Don't you see how grand my vision is? No longer will people have to suffer the injustice of driving to purchase a bulk bag of Doritos! But you see, to create my new world, the old must be destroyed. Say goodbye to your forests and your lakes, a new world has begun! A Walmart world!"
"There's nothing more American than shooting a man in this Walmart of a world."
:data-laughing:
Iove the running gag in this video where Raiden, who is not American, cannot comprehend Wal-Mart or firearms
It's hilarious when he just shows up at the end out of nowhere. Like in FF9 you go from fighting a Super-Saiyan monkey femboy to suddenly having to defend yourself against the god of apocalyptic destruction, who was just, idk, chilling? Just looked at his watch and was all "oh look at the time, better reduce all of reality to nothingness" and now it's up to Six Year Old Girl, Frog Chef, Monkey Twink, and Large Rat to face down against annihilation itself.
And then in the epilogue it's just cute scenes of the characters doing stuff and living happy lives despite their tragedies and losses. No mention of Death Itself being fought in an epic battle. Just rats on a date and an abundance of black mage children. Which, to be clear, I love, but still, why have Necron there at all?
Often power escalation memes, but occassionally to symbolize the destruction of an existing power structure
kill god
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KillTheGod
It's the most explicit in FFX, where the being widely believed to be God is actually an alien parasite that harvests human life by the cityload in order to survive and the church actively aids him in this by being run by a bunch of ghosts and zombies who don't want to give up their power and prestige.
But in most games it's more visual. Kefka becomes godlike because he just kept getting more powerful, Necron represents... something that isn't told to the player, FFXIV has gods that are both allies and enemies and the final boss is a magical creature with godlike powers going through a goth phase.
Japan was ahead of the west, somewhat, when it came to "wanting to improve society somewhat always goes too far liberalism." :pathetic:
How about the hero wants to do Marxist-Leninism with Dengist characteristics and the villain wants to do market socialism with Georgist land tax integration with public real estate trusts
Japan has some weird unprocessed trauma about people coming with technology they can't comprehend and fucking their shit all up claiming it is progress.
:godzilla:
In FFXIV, I maintain that Nidhogg was a better villain than Emet-Selch. The former was straight up an embodiment of anger and spite meant to demonstrate the dangers and cruelty of clinging to anger and vengeance over a pursuit of justice and closure. The latter? well...
Sassy Hitler wants to bring back his Utopia is treated as a fallen hero, a tragic character. Sometimes evil people and characters aren't just straight psycopaths with bad childhoods or traumas that deformed their capacity to build human connections, with themselves and others, but that doesn't qualify them as redeemable or admirable.
I think the lack of imagination in having two characters, antagonist and protagonist, have competing ideologies to address these grievances and injustices of the world, that permeate media and video games is due to capitalist realism inhibiting said imagination. Even in medieval fantasy, it's not like the hero is often an agent of a Levelers or Diggers equivalent. They often are solo mercenaries, work for the king, or are just plain defensive forces.
And then endwalker is like "we gave reality-warping powers to a child that can't process grief"
That's the best one. Endsinger is a little bit of a character, but what you're actually fighting in the final boss fight isn't her - it's despair itself. Fighting a concept like that is the perfect ending for such a long running fantasy story.
Then you have to beat whatshisface, a fight that has almost no meaning besides "this rich kid can't get erect if he isn't fighting someone as strong as he is".
The whole expansion is literally vibes-based lol. Like it feels so good, there's so many good character moments, and I do actually like the general theme of "everyone lives on through the people they've changed"
Except when you look at any individual bad actor you see they're being a huge dipshit for no real reason
There are two JRPGs in recent memory where one of the final bosses is against an irredeemably corrupt politician thats basically a surrogate for Abe/ the LDP so really not all of them.
spoiler
Like a Dragon
Persona 5
I need to play Like a Dragon
spoiler
Persona 5 Royal makes the final boss Maruki, a guy who wants to end all suffering by forcing reality to be a utopia using his persona. Honestly this is a big reason as to why I enjoyed Persona 5 vanillas ending better
I mean, I guess. Theres a debate to be had about the details but the overall message seemed to be "a good world is bad. Suffering makes you strong"
At least that's what I got from it. Maybe I was reading it wrong though.
I finished it a few months ago and that was my read as well.
The guy's own trauma led to him wanting to cure everyone else's trauma. The people caught up in it were genuinely happy and it was only ever shown to be completely real. IIRC, it was never shown to be "evil" like the characters real bodies were trapped somewhere or their loved ones were shadows in disguise. He created an actual utopia, but Joker and Co decided that people need to suffer because it isn't reality as they know it.
I guess thats why I like fire emblem 3 houses since it basically runs 3 timelines where one timeline's deuteragonist become the villain of another timeline, and it's purely a matter of perspective. Of course theres only one correct perspective and that's the black eagle perspective, but hey at least you have the choice to choose to be a theocrat, a monarchist, or a liberal as an alternative to being a feudal revolutionary
They’ve been getting more politically progressive over time. Slightly less racist too.
This trope
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RestartTheWorld
To be fair it's not just Jrpgs and Japanese media that does this but I notice it the most in their media.
Also lol in the real world examples of the trope page it lists posadism. I did not expect that lol
Posadism, an offshoot of Trotskyism, has been noted, alongside other peculiarities (such as an interest in UFOs), for advocating nuclear war as a means of bringing about a socialist revolution.
Wot Spoiler
Are you thinking of when Rand looked into the future to see what would happen if he killed shai'tan?
spoiler
I believe the final revelation Rand has is that The Dark One isn't the source of evil within the world, merely a power source that evil people tap to facilitate their own ends.
Thus, expunging it by bringing it into the Pattern carried huge risks/costs while doing very little to actually discourage future calamities.
In the end, Shai'tan is an alien and unknowable thing. But its not an actual source of humanity's problems. Just a vector for them.
i think it was pokemon black/white where the villains goal was liberating pokemon from being forced to fight each other :deeper-sadness:
when it came out i was friends with this dude and we were both rlly into pokemon. i mentioned that the villains of that game had some really good points and he would just relentlessly argue against it. we arent friends anymore lol, he grew up to be a right wing freak
Usually Pokemon is surprisingly good with its "philosophy", but Ghetsis was basically an Ayn Rand villain.
He was a bad person sure, but he wasn't really bad for his true motivations, otherwise he would simply be a Giovanni clone. No, he was evil because he PRETENDED to be good. Now that good thing he pretended to be is wrong.
Sorry to hear about your friend, tho.
oh its been a while and black/white is when i was starting to slow down my pokemon playing so i didnt remember he was just pretending to want to liberate pokemon, good point
