I need an example of a badly written antagonist...

[pulse2]

Sephiroth, so what if your mother was a monster.....okay nevermind I take that back, obviously the children bullied him as a child, its only right he slaughter them all and turn the world into a hollow shell filled with mother's evil children

 

[Orcus The Ultimate]

oh... and Sauron from Lord of the Rings! Why is he evil... who knows?!

Everyone who read the appendices knows. All three of them.

and the Silmarillion.

 

[Arehexes]

Orphan from FFXIII.


Orphan wants to die so that Cocoon, the very thing it created and nurtured, would fall with it and awaken the Maker. The most this did for me was cause me to furrow my brow and say "What?"

I've only played a few Final Fantasies. XIII did not help raise my opinion of it.

And then there's a sequel to it coming out. Ugh.

Now I beat FFXIII and reading this made me again go "wat"?

 

[Mallefunction]

Team Rocket :3 Seriously....these guys are pretty much just the same joke repeated over EVERY episode and have never once posed a threat outside of the movies where Giovanni appears to be "evil generic rich guy stroking the villain cat" and even then, these fuckers just fail epically at their job.

Really, they are there just to be constant punching bags for the heroes.

 

[pulse2]

Can I say Kratos?

Yes yes I know that he killed his wife and daughter and wants to escape the memories blah blah blah, but to go as far as killing all the same gods who only wanted the best for you, killing every tree, every single plant, every insect, every bacteria is just a litttttleeee teeeniiieee weeeeny bit excessive, especially considering it was kind of his own fault and all :/

He's not really a hero, he's more of a villian for killing so many innocents for his own problems.

 

[artanis_neravar]

Ummm that General guy from MW2

He betrays you and goes kill crazy with some private army he pulled out of his ass for no reason whatsoever. Maybe i need to replay it but i don't think it was ever properly explained. He just went into some semantics over the nature of war to cover up the fact that the writers couldn't think of an actual reason for his actions

Was still pretty entertaining, a "so bad it's good" type thing.

Maybe it's been said, but he went crazy after the nuke went off in the first game killing tens of thousands of his troops. When he saw that the world wasn't going to do anything about it he decided to take control and do something himself

 

[Mallefunction]

Actually, I'm going to add Gnasty Gnorc to this list (Spyro the Dragon) At least Cortex in Crash Bandicoot gets some personality and background, but Gnorc just decides to up and turn all the dragons to crystal just because they said he was no threat to them....and that's the only time he speaks in game EVER. XD And you only ever see him at the end...

 

[Orcus The Ultimate]

the worst badly written antagonist i've seen until now should be

Spoiler

Syndrome !

 

[Orcus The Ultimate]

(Please disregard if this ends up as a double post. My internet's acting up and it looks like my first attempt at posting this did work. Thanks for understanding)
Well, after my original example was destroyed in a different post, I now need a poorly written antagonist. I need someone whose motives come down to "Just cause" or something like that. Someone who acts without reason. This can be from movies or books.

The Enclave from Fallout 3. They make no sense what so ever.

Edit: in Fallout 3 it doesn't make sense, in Fallout 2 it does.

 

[PekoponTAS]

How about "The Cornstalker" from Touch Detective 2 1/2 for the DS? He has no real motivation, he has no defining character traits, he's not threatening, he isn't really all that evil, they set up this thing about how he steals valuable artifacts and then in his normal everyday clothes he runs an antique shop in town, but they never really explain it to you, do anything with it, or resolve it, he has a stupid costume, and he has absolutely no backstory whatsoever.

From what it seems, his thing is to steal valuable treasures and then sell them in his antique shop, but it makes no sense because a) his cover is instantly blown since having a priceless stolen artifact in your store is sure to raise some eyebrows, and b) if it's just some elaborate scheme to sell priceless valuables for large amounts of cash, why doesn't he just, you know, rob a bank or something?

 

[Katana314]

I'd say Sephiroth, from Final Fantasy 7.
See, for the most part I actually thought the game's writing wasn't bad. It's one of my favorite RPGs. But Sephiroth was an underdeveloped character who went from being somewhat calm, to deciding to destroy the world, for little to no reason. Furthermore, the question of his existence during the game is constantly debated. He definitely kills someone very physically by stabbing them through with a sword. Yet, when we reach the crater, we see it's something about visions of him, etc.

For the record, if I were asked to help with the FF7 remake, I would REWRITE Sephiroth. There is no reason to keep his dialog when it will make no sense to anyone.

 

[PurePareidolia]

Harbinger from Mass Effect 2 - not only is his dialogue ridiculous but his plan makes no sense.

 

[pulse2]

(Please disregard if this ends up as a double post. My internet's acting up and it looks like my first attempt at posting this did work. Thanks for understanding)
Well, after my original example was destroyed in a different post, I now need a poorly written antagonist. I need someone whose motives come down to "Just cause" or something like that. Someone who acts without reason. This can be from movies or books.

The Enclave from Fallout 3. They make no sense what so ever.

I actually liked the enclave, I thought they were pretty awesome, typical capitalist attitude gone wrong.

So my list so far is:

Sephiroth for being awesome as a character, but having a pretty terrible motive :/
Kratos for taking out his rage all everything that exists because of his own mistakes

Now I'm adding Ultimicia for coming out of nowhere with some lame reasoning, Seymour because he was pretty annoying for no good reason and most if not all evil final bosses at the end of fighting games ¬_¬

 

[Greatjusticeman]

Almost any antagonist from a Stephen King book / movie (excluding Kathy Bates in Misery, she rocked). More like the bullies in It, Stand By Me, Sometimes They Come Back, the nerdy guy in The Stand, or the religious characters from The Mist. Nostalgia Critic on thatguywiththeglasses.com goes over it pretty well in his reviews. Stephen King bullies / religious nuts are just crazy and sadistic for no apparent reason or motivation. In The Stand, we're supposed to assume the nerd builds a bomb and kills dozens of people because the devil's girlfriend blew him.

Another example might be some of the non-zombie from the original 1960s Night of the Living Dead. Rifftrax had a commentary on it as well. There's a lot of irrational behavior and yelling that feels unrealistic when cannibals lurk outside. It's thought that it's a commentary on racism, but the movie itself never addresses this and George Romero has said that they didn't cast the lead based on his race and that the role wasn't written necessarily for a black man.

Really? I thought the antagonists in most of Stephen King's novels are the best written out of most.

Also, I don't think you have read The Stand since you clearly don't understand the motivations behind the "nerd" - Harold Lauder - at all. If you did, you should maybe go and read it, and not scan over it like you did last time.

His antagonists are sadistic, and maybe sometimes even over the top. But they are morphed that way, they weren't made that way. There are also sadistic people in this world, so it's not hard to believe some of the things they do as well.

 

[BrownGaijin]

Has anyone said Anubus from Yu Gi Oh the movie?

Spoiler: Five minutes and thrity seconds into the video...

 

[Orcus The Ultimate]

(Please disregard if this ends up as a double post. My internet's acting up and it looks like my first attempt at posting this did work. Thanks for understanding)
Well, after my original example was destroyed in a different post, I now need a poorly written antagonist. I need someone whose motives come down to "Just cause" or something like that. Someone who acts without reason. This can be from movies or books.

The Enclave from Fallout 3. They make no sense what so ever.

what fallout games have you played?

Fallout 1-3, tactics, and New vegas. The enclave was on the oil rig, and all was killed when modified FEV was released into the vents causing explosive death before the reactor exploded. Nevarro was just a refuel point, not a major base. In fallout 3 they have unlimited amounts of soldiers, when the Enclave are just a shell now. Hell, the Enclave numbers that died on the Oil Rig numbered in the thousands. It follows Modern Warfare logic, not Fallout logic.

a shell in the western part of the country, not in the mainland i guess... plus it doesn't mean they don't have other vaults for recruits.

 

[SeaCalMaster]

Sephiroth.

And cue Flame War.

not really dude. what always interested me about sephiroth was the fact that he WAS a good guy- and then he found out about his mam and went nuts.he's interesting because he's a dude who is practically unstoppable physically, but so fragile mentally.he's a well written villian because it actually seems like its impossible to beat him.he's a good villian because EVERY SINGLE TIME he appeared, i thought to myself OH SHIT.

maybe not the most original villian- but a good one nevertheless.

He was well written? How? Just because he was powerful and well respected and went crazy because he found out he was a experiment? If that is the case what about Kefka? He had more or less the same back story (Great rise to the top but went crazy due to a crazy experiment to power up the soldiers, which caused a mental break down which lead said person to destroy the world). Well I agree sephi isn't "bad" he is still a poorly done, I mean there isn't a really good written villain from the Final Fantasy games. Garland wants to live forever, Empoirer wanted power, CoD wanted to return the world to the darkness/Xian wanted revenge for getting the gift of mortal from master Noah, Zeromas wanted to wipe human life on earth for his people on the moon, Exdeath wants to return the world to the void, Kefka wants to destroy happiness and hope from peoples, Sephiroth wants to destroy the world for his "mother", Ultimicia wants to compress time to live for ever (I think I really don't remember), and I don't remember the rest. The FF villains aren't written well at all.

Kuja. That is all.

OT: I'm surprised no one's said Jafar yet. He's pretty much as cliched as you can get along the power-hungry chancellor type, and he is completely without any back-story or a motive more complex than "POWER OM NOM."

EDIT: A lot of people are saying Kratos. I feel obligated to point out that "antagonist" and "villain" do not mean the same thing; Kratos might be the latter but he certainly is not the former.

 

[artanis_neravar]

(Please disregard if this ends up as a double post. My internet's acting up and it looks like my first attempt at posting this did work. Thanks for understanding)
Well, after my original example was destroyed in a different post, I now need a poorly written antagonist. I need someone whose motives come down to "Just cause" or something like that. Someone who acts without reason. This can be from movies or books.

Well people seem to mistake antagonists that don't explain their motives to the player for poorly written ones.

Let's say Kerrigan from StarCraft, you don't play as her why would she ever explain her motives to an underling? She would be a poorly written antagonist if she did explain it.

So an example of a bad antagonist would be.

Spoiler: Any James Bond Villain

They always explain their entire plan to Bond and then leave the room before he is dead.

Compared to a good one

Spoiler: Ender's Game

The main antagonist are the Buggers, and insectoid alien race that has invaded Human space twice, both times almost succeeding in destroying humanity. Why? No one knows, that's what makes them so terrifying and such a good antagonist. All they know is they tried twice, we can't talk to them, whose to say they won't try again.

Spoiler: book spoilers

It isn't until after the title character succeeds in destroying them all that he finds out they didn't understand that humans were individuals (as apposed to a hive mind like the buggers) and once they realized this it was to late and they knew humans wouldn't forgive them