Villains.

[thejboy88]

For those of you who have seen my gaming discussion topic of "video game villains" this will be familiar territory. For those of you who did not, you should know that I hold agreat disdain for one-dimensional villains. Characters who do evil or villainous things for seemingly no reason, have no legitimate motivation, no depth and no stated backstory.

They are a blight on any medium they soil their presence with.

One of the most terrible examples of a villain in my books is the character of Colonel Quaritch from James Cameron's Avatar. This guy commits near-genocide with no real reason for his hatred of the enemy given. True, he may be imposing and threatening in combat, but nothing we've seen of this guys provides any explanation as to why he does what he does. So terrible and cartoonish was this character that I have even taken to referring to using his name as a term to describe any one-dimesnional villain I have seen since 2009.

How about all of you?

What examples of truly terrible villains can you think of?

Please explain why you think they are terrible.

 

[GiantRaven]

I thought that the Illusive Man was a pretty terrible villain. I see people posting about how badass he was but I just didn't see it at all.

 

[Woodsey]

I thought that the Illusive Man was a pretty terrible villain. I see people posting about how badass he was but I just didn't see it at all.

What?

He's not written as a villian (not yet anyway), so of course he's not a good one.

You might as well call Darth Vader a terrible hero before seeing anything other than A New Hope.

 

[GiantRaven]

What?

He's not written as a villian (not yet anyway), so of course he's not a good one.

You might as well call Darth Vader a terrible hero before seeing anything other than A New Hope.

He isn't a villain? Personally he felt like the primary antagonist of Mass Effect 2. If he wasn't intended to be then maybe I'm selling his character a little short because it's cool that I can get that impression with other people seeing things differently.

 

[erandure]

Personally I don't mind one dimensional villains if they are used properly. A good example is the darkspawn in Dragon Age Origins, they were mindless baddies motivated by pure evil but were used to great effect. They were an unarguably evil force which served as a backdrop for the player to make moral choices on. The enemy was evil and you decide on the lengths you would go to stop them. Having a morally understandable character on both sides just leads to annoyance when you sympathise more with the adversary than the protagonist.

 

[PunkyMcGee]

What?

He's not written as a villian (not yet anyway), so of course he's not a good one.

You might as well call Darth Vader a terrible hero before seeing anything other than A New Hope.

He isn't a villain? Personally he felt like the primary antagonist of Mass Effect 2. If he wasn't intended to be then maybe I'm selling his character a little short because it's cool that I can get that impression with other people seeing things differently.

no i wouldn't say he's a villain...not yet any way. more of a dickish contact.

Spoiler

maybe next game since at the end, you either betray him or give him a giant kill-bot to play with

 

[Woodsey]

What?

He's not written as a villian (not yet anyway), so of course he's not a good one.

You might as well call Darth Vader a terrible hero before seeing anything other than A New Hope.

He isn't a villain? Personally he felt like the primary antagonist of Mass Effect 2. If he wasn't intended to be then maybe I'm selling his character a little short because it's cool that I can get that impression with other people seeing things differently.

Well he's not a villain-villain.

You might disagree with his politics (I do) but he has the same roundabout goal that Shepard does.

 

[bobdonkey]

Actually, I kind of liked the Colonel from Avatar. Alright, he wasn't the deepest character ever portrayed in Cinema, but I found him entirely believable. Moreover, you can find reasons for what he did. Part of it is just him doing what he was paid to do without showing any respect for the natives. He probably doesn't see what he is doing as evil, he just doesn't really care if some natives die as he does what he thinks he has to do. He doesn't see them as being worth his concern; he just sees them as savages. I guess he represents the whole "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" thing.

Plus, I think you can see a genuine motive for him. He does all the bad stuff that he does in defense of the humans in the base. He tries to destroy the tree at the end because he thinks it will disperse the gathering natives and save the lives of the humans that he actually seems to care about. I dunno if I'm reading too much into it, but there are moments when he expresses genuine warmth toward the soldiers under his command. In a way, his motive for all of the stuff he does is to protect what he sees as his team against a savage horde that he has zero empathy with.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into it and he's just a psycho who's mad at Pandora in general because one of its beasties scratched him.


Anyway, I'd say Nero from the Star Trek movie was a little under-developed. He had a decent enough backing story I guess, but the crazy-angry thing just didn't really feel all that fleshed out. Basically it was the old "MY FAMILY IS DEAD AND NOW IM GOING TO KILL EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE" chestnut.

 

[ConvincingJohn]

The way I see it, the Darkspawn and the MNU(the Distict 9 guys) fill the same role. They are the big baddies that provide the external conflict to serve as backdrop for the more "internal" confilict. They are not that important compared to the conflict between (for example) Wikus and the alien. Or the Warden and well...all the more human barstards in Dragon Age. In this kind of thing, the villain is more like a part of the setting or mood, than an actual person. This ultimate evil serves well enough sometimes, especially in fantasy or sci-fi, but i does get a bit to much sometimes. It annoys me to no end, when a movie treats a villain character as some kind of end-of-level-boss. Or when the the villain does something moronic for the sake of just being evil.

Personally Rasputin, from the Hellboy movie, always kind of pissed me of. He takes the most one-dimensinal characteristics from both nazis and demon-worshippers, combining them to something so evil, that it kind of makes me wonder why the cut out the puppy-kicking scene. That being said I did enjoy the movie.

Uh..or Bowser.