Villain Decay - Television Tropes & Idioms

"For me, the interesting relationship is the one between Mario and Bowser; I mean on some days they fight to the death in fiery climactic showdowns, while on other days they go go-karting together, play tennis, even team up in some of the RPGs. Sure, he kidnaps the Princess a whole bunch, but no one seems to begrudge him for that anymore, it's just what he does. It's like begrudging a dog for licking its own balls."

-- Zero Punctuation on Super Mario Galaxy.

The process by which a villain who is extremely scary on first appearance becomes a total joke after a few more appearances.

In most shows, Failure Is The Only Option for the Villains, because success would mean that the villains conquer the world, kill all the good guys, and otherwise do things that make future episodes impossible. Inevitably, the viewers start to wonder why the heroes act concerned about an enemy that they've beaten six times already. Note that this does not apply to shows where the villains are supposed to be incompetent jokes from the start.

Most writers will try to stop this, which sometimes helps and sometimes only makes the Villain Decay worse. Standard tricks include:

Begin Spikeification, in the hopes that this will make the villain interesting even when losing threat value.
Have a Ratings Stunt where the villain kills off a character, and thus becomes scary again.
Give the villain a new weapon or power. This gets old fast unless it becomes the basis of the show (see My Kung Fu Is Stronger Than Yours).
Bring in a new, stronger villain, and downgrade the old one to a flunky of the new one or a secondary threat. Repeating this leads to the Sorting Algorithm Of Evil.
Turn the villain into a comic-relief pest.
Escalate the villain's crimes. Win or lose, a villain who plants nuclear bombs is scarier than one who robs banks, at least, in theory.
Force hero and villain into an Enemy Mine scenario against a greater threat, then restore the status quo, as this allows the villains to technically win for once and show off their talents.
Show an Alternate Universe where the villain has won.
Make sure the hero's victory is only by the narrowest of margins. Generally a preventive measure rather than a corrective one.
Put them in a situation where the villains can temporarily be Anti Hero protagonists to show how powerful and skilled they are in a way that the audience will accept. The obvious example is in The DCU, where villains could be secretly recruited by the US government for a mission with the Suicide Squad. Thus, the gang of supervillains will take on other supervillains with the reader comfortably cheering them as he sees how tough they really are.
Trapping the villain in some kind of containment field, forcing him to rely on agents to do his bidding.
The last-ditch resort: let the villain get more pathetic, and do a Lampshade Hanging about it every episode.

But the fastest way to decay a villain is to make him switch sides.

Of course, you can prevent this by not having failure be the only option for the villain; let them win battles, but not the war, or let their evil plan come closer and closer to completion while the heroes race to prevent its final success.

Examples:

Live Action TV:

The Ferengi from Star Trek were downgraded from serious threats to comic-relief pests after only two appearances. To be fair, the Ferengi were intended to be major recurring villains, but over the course of several makeup revisions, the Ferengi went from impressive to goofy-looking.
The Borg went from super once-a-season menace to routine problem over the course of Star Trek Voyager.
After seeing how much respect the Borg lost during his writing stint on Voyager, Ronald D. Moore rather neatly avoided the trope in his remake of Battlestar Galactica. The villainous Cylons are only sparingly used as a direct threat to the heroes, and typically when the heroes do beat them there's some kind of price.
Almost every season of Power Rangers begins with the villain being replaced by a new one -- because after twelve episodes of losing, the old villain doesn't look so cool. (And of course, a new villain means more merchandise.)
Arguably, this was the fate that befell the Daleks of Doctor Who after 16 television stories, four cameos and countless appearances in other adaptations, especially when their creator, Davros, began to dominate the stories. They were later made more menacing again; in 1988 they were given the ability to fly, and for their 2005 return in "Dalek", they were given new abilities, such as a force field and the ability to crush a man's head using the plunger arm. However, they may be falling back into this, going in their more recent appearances from one being defeated by its own self-loathing, to a fleet being defeated by a Deus Ex Machina, to millions being defeated by reversing the polarity. Mind you, to be fair, four Daleks/three Daleks and a Dalek/Human hybrid take two episodes to destroy.
- Also in Doctor Who, the Master particularly suffered from this, with many writers simply using him as a convenient bad guy with little motivation beyond being "eeeevil". The trend arguably started from his very first appearances, since he appeared as the Big Bad in every episode of Season Eight of the classic series, which arguably diluted his effectiveness right from the off. Over his many appearances in both classic and new series, writers have tried most of the tricks above to avert Villain Decay, including threat escalation, frequent Enemy Mine plots, Alternate Universe victories, and having him murder the family members of series regulars. Probably for the same reasons that the series itself has been so long-lived, despite succumbing to Villain Decay several times over, the character somehow keeps bouncing back as a Magnificent Bastard. The new series attempted to correct this both by giving him a plausible motivation - complete insanity - and by showing how Bad Ass he could be; not least by stranding the Doctor at the end of time itself, becoming Prime Minister of Great Britain, massacring a tenth of the population of Earth and all in all being a rather Magnificent Bastard before the Doctor managed to undo everything.
- The Cybermen were Doctor Who's most egregious victim of this trope. In Second Doctor Cybermen stories, they were powerful, some might say too powerful. That may be a good reason they weren't used for the entire Third Doctor run. When they were brought back at the beginning of the Fourth Doctor era, they were given a weakness: gold dust would clog their chest units and suffocate them. All well and good, until someone misinterpreted that to mean that gold itself was their weakness. Thus, we were treated to the wonderful sight of Ace killing Cybermen with gold coins fired from a slingshot. The Cybermen seen in the revival (the ones from a parallel Earth) do not have this weakness.
During the early seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, when Joss Whedon was more heavily involved in the show, efforts were made to avoid this. The first season had The Master, a powerful vampire, sealed inside a magic circle, forcing him to rely on his minions. The second season had the true Big Bad appear in the middle of the season and gave him a reason for keeping Buffy alive - he wanted to drive her insane (he also killed off a recurring character). The third and fourth seasons had the Big Bad mostly unaware of Buffy and her crew. However, the fifth and seventh seasons suffered heavily from Villain Decay, with talky baddies who did very little. The sixth had joke bad guys until the last couple of episodes. However, the series' attempts to avoid Villain Decay tended to lead it to the Sorting Algorithm Of Evil - but that's a story for another entry.
Nicole Wallace of Law and Order: Criminal Intent started off as Moriarty to Bobby Goren's Sherlock Holmes, which made her getting nailed in her return appearance so satisfying. Then she was brought back in increasingly ridiculous ways, to the point where she was closer to a supervillain than her original anti-Goren persona.

Western Animation

Nearly every children's cartoon ever has Villain Decay. Some, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, used heavy Lampshade Hanging ("at last, Shredder, you've done something right!"). Others just let the Villain Decay happen. Some are more careful about this than others, but by the nature of the show, it more or less has to happen. Do bear in mind, though, that the definition is "less threatening", rather than "No longer a threat".
- Some actually manage to avoid this by escalating their threat level over the course of the series. (It helps not to have a very long series.) See the 2003 Shredder, who had a definite habit of topping himself.
Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons escalated his plans at every appearance, until he was threatening to blow up all of Springfield. His most recent appearance was one long Lampshade Hanging about his constant failures.
On Kids Next Door, it took an age-ified Nigel and the rest of the team to take Father down in his first appearance (Op GROW-UP). Then a few cadets took him down in his next appearance (Op TRAINING), making him more of a comic-relief pest. Then the writers escalated his crimes by turning the KND into animals (Op GRADUATES), and after that was taken care of, they had him extend school hours to 8:25pm (a big deal, since the protagonists are school-hating children - Op PRESIDENT). In Operation ZERO, he was reduced to being completely ineffectual when faced with his father.
In Xiaolin Showdown, Jack Spicer became full-on comic relief with the emergence of Chase Young. Chase himself became less of a threat to the Xiaolin monks when Hannibal Roy Bean was released, moving more into Eviler Than Thou and Enemy Mine plots against Bean.
Valmont in Jackie Chan Adventures. Just look at the guy. In the early seasons, he was a charismatic, refined, rich-out-his-ass leader of a world wide criminal organization whom could very well be mistaken for a Magnificent Bastard. Then take a gander at the later seasons... knocking over convenience stores, living in an apartment no bigger than your bathroom (seriously), and leaning on the three goons he has left to pay for the bill at a pancake shop... Perhaps justified considering how crippling the setbacks he's faced were.
Kim Possible wisely decided not to bother, and started Kim out with a wide Rogue's Gallery of already decayed villains.
The Decepticons of Transformers suffer this in most version. Beast Wars and Animated each had different methods to avoid them becoming ineffectual:
- Beast Wars avoided it by being more arc-based with the Predacons often winning or the Maximals falling victim to a Xanatos Gambit.
- Animated on the other hand doesn't always have them as the villains. They also reverse the Took A Level In Badass the Autobots as a whole went through by having a crew that was never meant for battle with tools that had primarily non-combat purpose in mind, so it takes the whole team to take down just one or two of the armed-to-the-teeth Decepticons.
Avatar The Last Airbender has this for Zuko, who in the first few episodes was a credible (if impetuous) threat, but after which he acquired Team Rocket-like incompetence in his attempts to capture ~~Pikachu~~ the Avatar. Avoided in the second season by having him simply not interact with the heroes.

Video Games

The main villains in both the Super Mario Bros and Sonic The Hedgehog series (Bowser and Robotnik, respectively) have lost a lot of power and have often fallen to the level of comic relief. The latter's decline has not been helped by the reversion from his Western name of "Robotnik" to his original Japanese-given name of "Eggman", which just doesn't carry as much an air of menace to English speakers. Bowser has recently taken a back seat to new villains, to his annoyance, but Bowser had always been a more 'storybook' villain by comparison. It also depends on the game; most RPG Mario games have Bowser being only a minor threat, comic relief or even performing a temporary Heel Face Turn, but in normal Mario games he is almost always the main antagonist. Eggman on the other hand is almost always usurped as Big Bad in recent Sonic games by some other, much more powerful threat.
- Bowser and Robotnik were both jokes to begin with.
- Even before the reversion to "Eggman", Robotnik was treated as a ridiculous joke in one of the Cartoon spin-offs and still used for humor, though to a lesser degree, in the Sat AM continuity. The Archie comics where much of the American continuity comes from also played him up for laughs for several years of its run before switching gears and writing the stories a lot straighter.
- Bowser's Villain Decay probably reached its peak in Super Mario Sunshine, in which he only appeared at the very end, lying around in a hot tub in a volcano and talking in a ridiculous voice about how Mario ruined his vacation. Thankfully, this sort of "sitcom dad" style Bowser was dropped after that game, and in Super Mario Galaxy he actually seemed pretty intimidating, and had much bigger evil plans too. (He still wasn't smart enough to not let Mario fool him into hurting himself though.)
Wily and Sigma of the Megaman series, of course. They started at world domination and thus couldn't up the ante, they were obligated to never win a single token victory except perhaps during the intro mission, every game had them unleash a new wave of greatest minions ever who would fall like dominoes, and of course the biggie is that they used roughly the same approach (8 robot masters and a fortress, give myself a robot body, and maybe try to make it look like someone else is the villain at first) in every game in the entire series and were defeated singlehandedly by the same person every time. On the plus side, they got a new "more evil" true form every time.
- In X6, this trope is interpreted quite literally, as Sigma can barely string together coherent sentences, (JUSDIE, Zelllllllloooooo!!!!!) and is more of a robotic hunched-over zombie who can actually be knocked down, not just back.
The Prophet of Truth, the spiritual leader of the Covenant made his debut in Halo 2 as a stoic, calm, Machiavellian Magnificent Bastard who managed to put the wool over the Covenant's eyes and manipulate the Elites (the co-founders of the Covenant) out of their power and then secretly order an Order 66 style genocide of the Elites, all while being an excellent orator and a gift for words. By Halo 3, however, he has become a ranting, ineffectual lunatic, although it could be argued he changed to appeal to the Brutes.
At first, the villain of The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess was Zant, who appeared even more menacing than Majora thanks to his his enigmatically statuesque mask and flowing robes, surrounded by vaguely Cthulhu-like twilight beasts. Portrayed as nearly unstoppable, he repeatedly comes out of nowhere to harass the player and remains just beyond Link's grasp. About half-way through the game, he is stripped of all dignity and reduced to a raving lunatic, and his background is revealed as a simpering hanger-onner to the Twili royalty turned second banana for Ganon.
The Mario & Luigi games bring us Fawful. Right hand of the main villain in the first game, in the second... he sells badges in a semi-secret shop ranting about how he'll have his revenge on Mario and Luigi one day, not realizing that he is selling badges to their younger selves.
Warboss Gorgutz 'Ead 'Unter of Dawn Of War has since been reduced to a comic relief character who despite losing the conflicts in the games still somehow manages to escape to be in the next game. Then again as an Ork he was never really meant to be a serious villain.
Sephiroth in the Final Fantasy VII compilation manages to continue coming off as an impossibly badass Big Bad even though in AC he falls for the same dumb finishing move Cloud killed him with last time. He is however, not immune to Motive Decay and Flanderization, and if he continues to show up without any real villainous plan beyond 'hand Cloud's ass to him' in the ever-expanding sequels, true Villain Decay will no doubt sink its teeth in for good.
- Of course the Advent Children version of said finishing move was significantly more powerful than it was the last time they fought and even had a new name. Plus, Sephiroth had not upgraded to GOD form this time before Cloud took care of him.
Dracula in the Castlevania series has been thrashed by the Belmonts and their friends more times than can be Counted (vun hundred and fifty two! Vun hundred and fifty three! Vlah ah ah...), usually only a brief time after his resurrection, meaning he rarely has time to do anything particularly evil. He was finally, perhaps wisely, retired in the Sorrow series...and ironically replaced with new villains who seem a whole lot more inept and ineffectual than Dracula himself ever did.

Anime

Even in Pokemon, Team Rocket started out being more dangerous and effective before they became... well... Team Rocket.
- The games have actively tried to avoid this. Team Rocket only appeared in the first two sets of the main series of games. Since then, every spin-off and main-series game that includes criminal organizations includes entirely different ones. They've also up the ante for their plans each time. Team Rocket in the first just wanted to make money, The Undefeated members in the second wanted to rebuild, the team in the third tried to modify the landscape of the earth (or at least the area they were in), and the leader in the fourth wanted to use the powers of a legendary mon to become god.
Beck from The Big O is the world champ of Villain Decay: the writers put him through almost every one of the gimmicks mentioned above. First he got a cool new weapon, then he got played as a buffoon (complete with a comically grotesque hairdo), then the hero was put into an Alternate Universe where Beck was a real threat, before he finally ended up just being an underling working for Big Bad Alex and his Psycho For Hire, Alan Gabriel.
Justified in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Viral from was designed for this trope. In his first appearance, he nearly hands the heroes their asses, but every in every further appearance he's defeated with less effort. This is despite showing up with a new upgraded mecha each time, He's eventually beaten by the human's mass-produced mecha who's pilots don't even break a sweat. The reason for this, in-show, is because non-evolving beastman can never match constantly the power of the spiral-powered humans. He gets better after his Heel-Face turn.
Interesting metaexample: in Sailor Moon the Quirky Miniboss Squads grow less menacing and more comedic with each passing season.

Literature

Count Olaf of A Series Of Unfortunate Events devolved from a "clever, drunken, unsavory brute" in the first few books to babbling about being "king of Olaf-land" in the last book.
Demetria the Demoness from the Xanth series, started off as a fairly malevolent seductress, but with each subsequent appearence became less threatening, to the point that by the time she was "replaced" by her insane doppleganger, Dementia, she was basically Xanth's version of Mr. Mxyzptlk (The Superfriends version, at that).

Spikeification

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