Can we talk about villains?

it may sound a bit obvious or simplistic,but I find myself enjoying villains more when they have a clear and simple motivation to justify what they are doing to begin with. this doesn't mean that they don't have more character traits besides that motivation, but it should be a big part of what defines them, specially if that villain is commiting atrocities left and right.The reasoning behind it may be selfish, unrelatable and even ,borderline insane, but the desire itself must be something very human at its core

bonus points if they 'own' their wickedness instead of backpedalling or trying to justify it with 'muh circunstances'. if you are going to be a villain might as well not be a bitch about it. Daigo in Dororo is a good recent example of all of this: just a smug motherfucker that sold his son for power and prestige.

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Villians are love.

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I think that's fair. There certainly seem to be a lot of villains who have some half-baked philosophy stemming from a tragic past that compels them to do some grandiose thing like destroy the world or fuse everyone's souls or whatever. It's not that it can't be done well, it's just that it rarely is.

I think there's a balance in a show. If there's only one villain in a show you need a mix of both, but if there's only one villain then stick to either a tragic past that makes you this way or just that you love killing.

A villain only needs two things:
1) having a presence
2) being a credible obstacle for the protagonists

What do you mean by presence ? Charisma ?

They should have badassery, cool looks and some sort of a fun quirk in their personality or in the way they do things. Pretty much all popular and great villains share that.

The big factors are having some kind of understandable goal without being right (okay I can see why they're doing that but the ends definitely don't justify these means) and their acts have to impact the protagonist(s) on a personal level.
Not anime, but there's a very good reason people constantly cream themselves over Noximilien and it's not the dadbod.

Post less famous/underrated villains.

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>Pretty much all popular and great villains share that.
Sounds like a No-True-Scotsman.

It really depends on the genre and their role in the story. If we're talking about a rival in a romance, he should be relatable and likeable, so that we understand why there's tension and conflict, and so that we don't feel like the protagonist is just getting NTR'd by a generic ugly fat bastard for no reason other than to generate drama. If it's a chuuni battle story like pic related then they have to be really awe inspiring, and their character should be connected with the protagonist. What I mean by that is that it should be written in a way where the battle is more than just two dudes going at it. It should be a battle of ideals, world-views, or something else. Something more than brute strength that ties into the theme of the story.

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Basically the villain must 'haunt' the story. The idea behind haunted houses is that even though one can't see the ghost, the 'idea' of the ghost is constantly influencing one's thoughts and actions no matter how subtly. That's why the greatest villains don't have to appear often in order to be effective, they continue to participate in the story indirectly through things other than themselves.

A great villain should be utterly alien to the reader/watcher such that they could never even empathize with them.

But that's not true at all? Can you name a few examples?

I disagree hard the villain never needs to affect anything meaning in the world at large as long as they oppose the hero that is enough.

Hard disagree a villain can just be doing what they naturally do or even just exist and that can be enough.

>I'm so interested in villains yet never understand why the great villains are so great, they are almost always what stands out in a show for me if they are done right.
You are forced to follow the MC all the time whereas the villains get the great, threatening scenes to feel dangerous and mighty, that alone already makes them better by default. Nobody gives a shit about endless slice of life scenes of some generic MC dude.
The other reason is just that, MCs are almost always generic by default because they can't have character traits that are too radical or evil or questionable or too unusual, otherwise the normalfag audience isn't able to root and selfinsert.

But this is true. Can you name a popular villain who isn't somewhat powerful and doesn't provide a threat to the protagonist(which gives him badassery, as powerful and threatening things are usually badass), cool looking(and I don't mean precisely attractive in a conventional way, one can look cool despite having an appearance of a hobo), who has a boring quirkless personality? All three things should be in place for a villain to be likeable imo.

I just feel like their personalities and designs are almost always just better too. That makes me more curious about them too.

>The other reason is just that, MCs are almost always generic by default because they can't have character traits that are too radical or evil or questionable or too unusual, otherwise the normalfag audience isn't able to root and selfinsert.
Completely agree, and even when they do have unique character flaws/peculiarities, they are just reshaped into good things (every single one of the Isekais with the NEET self insert protags who thanks to their unhealthy NEET lifestyle now know everything about their fantasy world and do extremely well on it)

While I know it's a very low punch to mention JoJo's (no matter whether you like it or not, the one thing you'd never be able to accuse JoJo's of is being tropey or unoriginal) is that the protagonists a lot of the time do morally questionable things (especially after Part 4) which is something most Shonen series don't dare to do, and if they do, it's just to teach the protagonist a lesson they will learn from and making them repent from having done such a thing in the first place.

Yeah, for the same reasons. I generally can't stand typical humans anymore. I was never a fan of it to begin with but the older I get the more I hate it.
As said above though, MCs need to either pander the masses (i.e. cute girls or bishounen and stuff) or/and they have to be relatable for normalfags, so MCs are almost always doomed to be some typical guys and girls whereas the villains can be the craziest guys, be it scarred, older guys, lichs, actual aliens, robots or whatever. That makes them interest and even relatale, at least for me, because they have an individual story to tell and you can already assume certain things by just looking at them. It's just ten times more interesting than the billionth generic school boy or the typical hero who just wants to maintain the status quo and waste his time working and making kids just because. The villains have actual amitions, at least usually, and want to change the world. Many of their plans may be morally questionable, but so is everything else everybody does to some degree.

100 Percent agreed buddy.

I dunno, Kiritsugu is not that and yet normalfags loved him.

I won't say about great villains, because I'm not sure what you mean by that, but from what I've seen likeable ones despite doing evil things usually have admirable traits about them. My favorite villains for example all have great confidence and fearless personality, some of them even have some sort of a code they are following and never betray. That's an alpha behaviour many people would like to emulate. Our society considers traits like confidence and bravery to be desirable, and villains are often more likely to showcase them in fullness without being restricted in their ways. Basically, I think a great villain should be admirable in some ways.

Well there are exceptions and I think that MCs can be dark or complicated to some degree and still be well liked. But most authors don't have the balls for that. They want their show to be popular so they either pander willingly or are just bad writers that are unable to create anything and have to resort to the most common stereotypes.

>and even when they do have unique character flaws/peculiarities, they are just reshaped into good things
This is what I hate the most. It's the most terrible form of writing. They are either the most cringe form of selfinsert wishfulfillment or they are terrible bait that will make you mad. LIke all those cases in which a character is portrayed as having a problematic trait or having done something terrible in the past only to reveal later that said thing never happened (like the guys that say they "killed their sister" when in reality they were just playing with them as four year olds and the sister was retarded and fell of a cliff) or MCs have misinterpreted the past or the character trait is actually something good or neutral and it was the evil bullies who called it bad or the evil power MC has is actually useful as fuck and so on.

>the world at large
You misunderstand the word world. It is not the same as planet.
If the manga is all about card games, then those card games are the world of the manga.
>a villain can just be doing what they naturally do or even just exist
>There is some bad guy. He's not doing anything bad though. Maybe the protagonist could do something about him, but whatever.
What you are thinking of is below joke villains.

>most authors don't have the balls for that
That is not true.
Most WN authors just randomly write up whatever they can think of.
Most LN/manga authors keep writing up interesting premises until one sticks. They'll try whatever they can think of if they can just get the magazine to give the go ahead and the editor to give the okay as well.
It's mostly writers for expensive projects (anime or live-action television or games) that have serious pressure like what you are thinking of on them. Editors work similarly to them, but that's more because they are trained to trim things in a certain way.

That reminds me of a friend of mine who drops almost everything he watches because he considers it to be too boring and generic but then he started a webthing that literally started with some fat sack anime fan getting teleported into a fantasy world and every isekai and cartoon cliché you can imagine and when I tried to hint that his story wasn't more creative than the stuff he drops for not being creative enough he stopped talking to me. WN and webcomic authors are AIDS.

I think that generally speaking, villains occupy a wider design space than most protags, just because they are expected to be holding onto and embrace more intense negative emotions and qualities, as well as otherwise positive ones. Maybe this just naturally results in more interesting characters if they are approached this way.

What makes a great villain so great is that your simian instincts tell you they are a powerful alpha that must be respected and you instinctively follow their lead, paying them much attention, almost obsessing over them.

You're bred to be the loyal lackey of a great villain.

So? Herofags adore their heroes, there is no difference. Also, many rather want to be a bit like the villains instead of serving them and even if you consider the people who just have a crush on the villain/ess it's still more logical to go for a strong partner than a wimpy one, like most MCs and main girls, especially in anime.

Got a link?

I feel like people in this thread are talking about what they think makes for a compelling character. That's different from a villain, because a villain has a very specific narrative purpose.

Isn't online anymore, or not that I knew. At least it's not on the homepage he used to have.
Nobody ever read it though. Most people just looked at the first few pages and said welp and moved on. I mean that are bazillion of webnovels and webcomics out there these days, I read it too but the more there are the pickier people get for good reasons. Most series are fucking horrible and samey and the unplanned writing is especially horrible. I guess everybody knows about these webcomics that start as some 4koma daily life parody and end up being some grim multidimensional alien wars a few years later that want to be taken seriously.

It depends. I know a shitton of villains that were supposed to be villains but to which I could relate with more than with any hero I knew. Not because they are evil though, so you are right in that regard, but more because they are often kinda autistic (in the actual sense, not the Nagisa-retarded tier sense) or broken, misunderstood or are actually evil but are manipulated themselves. Heroes are mostly too normal. Some very normal people might relate with them but I feel like most people got fucked over too often or are too weird, lonely or outcast themselves to relate to the typical manga or hollywood hero who won't stop shouting about justice and ends up having a billion friends later in the series.

Do you like a villain that starts off powerful and imposing (e.g. freiza)? Or do you like a villain that climbs his way to power over the course of the story (e.g. garou, Griffith)?

I unironically love the villain type the most that starts off powerful and gets fucked by a lot of things over the course of the series until he ends up as nobody or broken and developes to some degree. Not them turning into a good guy, but maybe either becoming a hobo or at least some different type of guy who is still immoral to some degree but gives up his former grand plan and sets with something else that has actually a chance of making him happy. If I had to choose from the two types you mentioned though, then it would be the Griffith type.
Characters getting handed everything to them on a silver platter are one of the main reasons for why I hate so many MCs. See the whole "chosen one" trope or isekai.

The only villain I can think of that does that and doesn't become an anti-hero is Buggy from OP, but even then he's not all powerful. Care to share an example?

I can't even do it. I know I have seen this a few times but can't remember where. It's more of a thing I wish I could see more often in fiction, especially because it's rare as hell.
Out of the top of my head I can only come up with fallen villains like Breaking Boss from Casshern Sins who wandered around as a hobo after his evil empire has fallen, but I can't come up with the second type - the guy who gets a bit better and searches for other means of happiness. I wish someone would do this.

>I guess everybody knows about these webcomics that start as some 4koma daily life parody and end up being some grim multidimensional alien wars a few years later that want to be taken seriously.
I think you are overestimating the average age of the modern Yea Forumsnon.
Unless I've missed some grand revival, the age of webcomics has long passed.

>Unless I've missed some grand revival, the age of webcomics has long passed.
That might be true. What's even the big thing nowadays, other than twitch and youtube? I never got into any of these.

The rate of producers of content and consumers has shifted dramatically. And even the people who create stuff don't have their own websites anymore. It's all on facebook and twitter now.

>people who create stuff don't have their own websites anymore
This is so frustrating to me. With secretclub being in the sorry state it is, I often have to try to find other sources. But since no one has their own website anymore, I end up having to make use of mangadex. Either I read online (which I don't want to do), or I rip the comic, which is generally bad for the website.
If mangadex at least had download buttons, they could offer me stuff at the same rate as dynastyscans, 50 KB/s and no more than 8 downloads per day. And everything would be fine. I see no reason to artificially limit myself when I have to use brute force anyway.

Is FB even still alive? Not even the normalfags I know talk about it as far as I know. I think most people are on these damn chaotic shit sites like Instagram and whatever their names are.
Twitter is still the most tolerable of these I think, at least if you are only following (fan)artists you like but finding stuff on there is terrible due to the lack of tags and everything. And people who make too many art unrelated posts can be annoying as well.

I have seen no hints that they were crumbling at all. People think that recent activities have hurt them. But people are not going to leave because of bad publicity - because there are too many people on facebook. It's a monopoly.
And the new laws? Most of them are beneficial to facebook to the point that plenty of people suspect that facebook has indirectly lobbied for them to be written.

bump

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Shitty villian

too bad that "DESTRIY EVERYTHING BECAUSE I SAID SO" has been literally brainwashed into it by the big baddy.
It was implied that Shigaraki murdering his family as a result of his quirk was, if not caused, at least guided by AFO who needed him as his successor.
And shut up, those League of Villains chapters we are getting are waaay better than anything that revolved around Deku in the last 9 months.
His motives might be silly, but the interaction between the members makes them entertaining, and that's enough to keep people interested.

desty is besty

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There isn't one single criteria. Ignore the Yea Forumstards and their tier lists, motivations have almost nothing to do with a villain's overall quality. A villain who's and written well is a good villain regardless of their aims and backstory. A villain who's written poorly is terrible even if they have an in-depth backstory and there's a ton of page space devoted to explaining why they're doing what they do

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this is some buckley-tier word salad

For me, more than any goal or character design it's the mindset.
A good example would be Yoshikage Kira from Jojo because if you exclude the murdersand the fetish he has the perfect mindset of a shonen MC. Compared to the main cast his power is not particularly strong (surely not compared to other Jojo villains), but he never surrenders and always finds a way.
Guys like Dio crumble the moment something goes wrong, they may be iconic but that's it for me. A good villain makes you be scared even at its lowest.

>great villains
>pic unrelated

The best villains are the chaotic evil madmen. The Joker (Batman), Hisoka (Hunter x Hunter), Orochimaru (Naruto). They are powerful, merciless, yet extremely unpredictable due to their complex personalities.