Basic Trope: The main antagonist has little to nothing to do with the main plot of the work, usually because the work has an entirely different conflict.
- Straight: The plot of Alice and Bob: The Movie is about the titular characters trying to reconcile their friendship (or relationship). Meanwhile, the main antagonist Emperor Evulz is attempting to take over the world.
- Exaggerated:
- Literally every single scene with Emperor Evulz is just a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, to the point that Alice and Bob: The Movie almost seems like two movies stitched together.
- Emperor Evulz's screentime barely gets for a single minute and is a Harmless Villain.
- No Antagonist
- Downplayed:
- Emperor Evulz's plot to take over the world becomes an important subplot, but is still a bit randomly added.
- Emperor Evulz is just a one-time villain who serves as a brief source of conflict for the main characters. After his defeat, the rest of the film simply has No Antagonist.
- Bit Part Bad Guys
- Justified:
- Alice and Bob have never interacted with Evulz until just now, so there's no need for them to introduce Evulz so quickly.
- Alice and Bob is an interquel to the Charlie vs Evulz franchise, focusing on the two most popular side-characters. The Evulz scenes are merely to tell the audience when in relation to the main series the events happen.
- Inverted:
- Evulz is the main villain of every story in the franchise, even the ones that have no relevance to his plot, occur millions of years before or after he exists or had no hint of him being involved for 99.9999% of the runtime.
- Evulz is the Villain Protagonist, but every now and then, we cut to Alice and Bob trying to reconcile their friendship. To put it short: Plot Irrelevant Hero.
- Subverted: Although Evulz seems like he has nothing to do with the plot, he ends up becoming an important character (or at least a Brick Joke).
- Double Subverted: Who later returns in the sequel to have almost nothing else to do with the plot.
- Parodied: The encounter with Evulz is a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment in the most literal sense of the definition of the trope, even more out-of-nowhere and psychedelic than the sequence that defined it, to the point that Alice and Bob spend a couple of minutes after it ends looking off into the distance and going all "what the hell was that!?".
- Zig-Zagged: Sometimes Evulz is very important to the plot, but other times he isn't.
- Averted: The villain is very important to the plot.
- Enforced:
- Even though the conflict simply revolved around the heroes' problems, Executive Meddling demanded there should be a villain anyway, and there was no time to add the villain to the plot more smoothly.
- The writers added Evulz to illustrate that there is a bigger world out there beyond the conflict between Alice, Bob and Jerry.
- The writers added the Evulz scenes (some of them lifted from the other movies) in order to properly connect Alice and Bob to the greater franchise.
- Lampshaded: "How this kind of bad guy came out of nowhere?"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: Abagnale utilizes the unwitting distraction Evulz is providing to advance in his schemes.
- Defied:
- The In-Universe writers of Alice and Bob: The Movie refuse to add any kind of antagonist to their project's plot unless the character has some kind of plot importance.
- Evulz makes damned sure he is plot-relevant, come hell or high water.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "I feel like if you take Evulz out of the movie, the plot would be nearly the same."
- Played for Horror: The encounter with Evulz is a five-minute segue into dealing with a Serial Killer in the midst of a story that most definitely was not dealing with serial killers in any way, shape or form up until then. For further horror points, Evulz's scene is completely inappropriate to the story's apparent target demographic.
Back to Plot-Irrelevant Villain.
