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Evil will triumph because good is dumb!
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Where do you draw the line between distinct cultures and behaving/believing differently within the same culture? And why does that distinction matter?
Only because of the amount of forcing our government is able to do. I mean shit, Civil War. Many other cultures/governments aren't nearly as good at keeping different values from clashing in explosive ways. The West is an incredibly peaceful place to live, but only recently.
You can still have an incredibly huge gap between people in the same family though... wars between brothers are quite classic.
I'm not really sure what any of this matters.
We tend to attach importance based on proximity, but that doesn't mean as much when you have teleporters and warp speed.
I loved the Emperor for the same reason I love Irenicus. The actor has brilliant voice control and his lines are iconic. I don't know if it is the same actor in 1, 2and 3, but when that actor goes into "emperor" mode in 3, his voice suddenly becomes memorable.
My little green friend.
People were discussing Borg morality well before I made a single post. So singling me out as posting off-topic is silly. Also, I think a large part of what goes into good antagonists and protagonists are their moral perspectives. For instance, I wouldn't find Battlestar Galactica half as interesting as I do if different moral perspectives weren't being thrown around, tried, and challenged throughout the series. Don't differing moral frameworks account for much of the tension that exists in fantasy and, especially, sci-fi (i.e. constructing a new framework for situations that may exist in the future but don't today)?
I mean, take Star Wars. Is the empire a collective villain? The movies are shown from that perspective, but I'm not really sure I agree if I zoom out.
Anyway, all I'm saying is that moral perspective plays a large role in what makes a good and believable villain.
Not quite!
Also, I always preferred Jarlaxle as a villian in those series. He's fairly complex, and is rarely the typical evil drow.
Edit: Also V from "V for Vendetta" has several villian themes, more so in the comic. He is working towards creating a better society, but it's a better society that he has envisioned and he doesn't really have any issues with killing to create it.
McDiarmid did in fact play Palpatine in all six episodes.
Awesome.
Five, four originally. He doesn't make an appearance in Episode IV and in the original Episode V someone else played the part.
But yeah, he's a good villain. Though I dislike calling him a villain, from a certain perspective he's the good guy of the story, what with plotting to take out a poorly functioning, corrupt government and replacing it with something more effective.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/248ipzbt.asp
It's just a personal line, no amount of good justifies the old electric cackle party.
Most villiany is about being effective. Killing a lot of people is very effective form of population control. It's not good.
I dunno, that's the same reason why villains are often Machiavellian to the extreme. Effectiveness does not imply a moral high road unless one is purely utilitarian.
And this may sound silly, but I was also pretty consistently impressed with Voldemort as a villain. He's the only villain I can think of that manages to simultaneously embody the Sauron-like dark-overlord-at-a-distance vibe while at the same time being a real character with a believable life history. I thought Voldemort made some silly and less-than-badass decisions in HP7, but I was impressed with his philosophy.
Also, Robert DiNero in the movie "Heat" is maybe my favorite film villain.
Edit: the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica are the best villains ever.
I'm not even sure who the villains are in ASOIAF.
I also love Orochimaru from Naruto for the same reasons you cited about Voldemort.
Hell, with their snake things and everything the two are fucking identical.
But will you find it funny ten years from now?????
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
I'm a nihilist with an English degree.
Hell I'll probably be recruited to help them get around their programming.
Fear the mighty Incenjuborg!
Say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.
I just want to echo this.
Villain =/= evil.
Dexter is totally not a villain but he's evil as shit. Mr.Brooks is evil as shit and a villain. Hannibal Lecter, Evil, crazy and a villain. I'm trying to think of a good villain but having a hard time, I guess maybe the Empire is imo not all that bad but villainy.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
Wait, are you talking after Servant of the Shard?
*go go Gadget Google!*
Huh, I'll be damned. According to Wikipedia I need to hit up the bookstore sometime soon.
N, wait; Mazikeen. That is really all.
edit; oh, and Franciska von Karma, because she had actual motivations and that.
On the topic of Sandman characters, Loki is an incredible villain, in the comic as well as basically every time he appears in Norse mythology. He's so good at what he does that he manages to become good enough friends with Odin that Odin declares him an honorary god. For no particular reason he kills one of the other gods, then Odin has him bound in a cave in the middle of the earth, tied up with the entrails of his son, with a snake hanging from a stalactite dripping poison into his eyes. Odin didn't do this for revenge, it was just the only way they could keep that motherfucker from figuring out a way of escaping.
That is some good shit.
Also Dr. Breen from Half-Life 2. He's an aloof intellectual who takes it upon himself to "save" the human race by allowing an alien empire to take over Earth more or less unhindered. He really believes that what he's doing is right.
Also also, the Fishes from Children of Men. In the same vein as Dr. Breen, they did a bunch of repugnant shit because they thought that was the only way to make things better.
So basically, there are two kinds of villains I like: there's the kind that, for whatever reason, just fucks with people in really nasty ways, and is really good at it. Then there's the kind that truly believe that their actions are for the best.
hitting hot metal with hammers
I'm pretty sure that destroying an entire planet because it's filled with rebel sympathizers counts as evil. I mean, if the USA decided to cleanse Iraq of all human life because it's filled with al Quaeda supporters, and you check off the box marked "Not all that bad" then you should probably sterilize yourself as a precautionary measure.
In what way is he really the villain in that?
hitting hot metal with hammers
I know that's not what you said, but it struck me as going in that direction.
I just want to make this absolutely clear. Not hero.
There's always a place for the kind of "villain" that you love to hate, but my taste has gone toward more complex characterizations. I'm finally reading the Harry Potter series, which actually has a good mix of all kinds of characters. I know it's not the point, but it bugs me that the Dursleys are always portrayed as simply hideous people - I would have liked to see something that tells us they're only acting that way because they don't want Harry to share his parents' fate and just show it incredibly badly. Whereas finding out more about Snape and James Potter and their respective "likeability" is completely the opposite - lots more depth.
And I'm a huge fan of Dexter, but also House, who is in a lot of ways exactly the same kind of "villain" that the oft-mischaracterized "bad guy" of Watchmen or Civil War is, just on a smaller but more frequent scale.
Basically, stories where one guy has to do anything he can to push a button because he knows for sure that it's the only way to save the world, and another guy has to do anything he can to stop that guy because HE knows that pushing the button will actually doom everyone. Except, you know, better...
Also, I know its a little cheesy, but Magneto, can be a great example of a villain who is just "on the other side". There are times when his motivations are quite understandable.
A lot of writers of the tie-ins made Iron Man into a scapegoat to push their own thinly disguised commentary on the Bush Administration onto readers. JMS and Paul Jenkins were the two largest offenders in this regard.
Civil War: The Confession absolutely humanizes Iron Man and anyone who reads that and thinks he's a bad guy has no soul.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Humanity.
In all of his wisdom, our dear Dr. Wallace Breen offered the human race to the Combine to do with as the Combine saw fit. He would've observed and participated in the creation of Stalkers, twisted shells of people that are only still human by genetics rather than form or mind. The Overwatch, brainwashed and augmented beyond belief, would in all likelihood have been created with his input, as they serve as his main military force. The suppression field is something else he would've had to have been implicit in instituting. This all had to be done knowing that the Combine could exterminate humanity with the greatest of ease if he fucked up any more than once.
He's an amazing character because he's been driven mad by the dichotomy of what he's been forced to do. He wants to save humanity, but the only way of doing it is completely fucking humanity over. On the one hand he delights in his power, on the other he looks for any way to get out of the Hell he's had no choice but to create. By the time of Half-Life 2, it's clear that he's one of the most evil psychopaths to have ever risen to power, but it's unnerving to remember that without him there wouldn't even be humanity anymore.
Is Dr. Wallace Breen irredeemable? Absolutely, without any doubt. But it is fascinating to see the result of putting so many Faustian decisions in front of an otherwise normal man. Even as corrupt and wicked as he was, he was still ultimately a human character with human behaviour. He raises the horrifying question of whether any person could've done better in his position.
True, but I think Marvel was overall going for shades of grey where you weren't quite sure who to side with. Maybe it was just me, but even though I really like Iron Man, something just felt wrong about siding against Captain America. I think it would have been easier to accept if the second ant/pro-tagonist was not Capt. America.
<puts on silly structuralist hat>For what it's worth, the protagonist is not necessarily the good guy and the antagonist is not necessarily the bad guy. Almost always one or the other is the main character, however. The protagonist is the one that undergoes some change in the story, (peripeteia) from high to low in a tragedy and low to high in a comedy.
The easiest example of how the bad guy can be the protagonist is almost every James Bond movie. The evil guy sets up a plan, starts out rich and steadily gaining speed as an evil overlord, but then James gets wind of it and starts opposing the actions of the bad guy, and eventually succeeds in stopping whatever evil plan he had, reducing him to nothing or killing him. (usually killing him. I mean, he's licensed, why not snuff that motherfucker?) The bad guy goes from high status to low status and then death, but James is still the same smarmy, bad-pun making, womanizing, badass duechebag he always was, and his purpose in the story was to antagonize (literally work against) the bad guy and bring him to his knees.
The Greeks were total dickholes about it, of course, and usually had only one protagonist, and very rarely allowed protagonists to antagonize each other, which is what is done all the time in stories like Marvel Civil War. </silly structuralist hat>
Civil War was hampered by the Marvel writers' cowardly love of their universe, and turned out to be a bubbly pile of crap.
It could have been so much more.