Villain Ball / Anime & Manga

• Light in Death Note does this a high amount of times:
  • He kills Lind L. Tailor on national television purely out of spite because Tailor insulted him, telling him outright that what he was doing was evil, allowing the real L to significantly narrow down where he could be.
  • He spends a predominant amount of time trying to play cat-and-mouse with L for the sake of "answering his challenge." While L's initial gambit and some guesses about the schedule managed to narrow things down somewhat, there was still a massive pool of millions of possible suspects to sift through. Light makes L's job much easier by performing kills with the insider information he's obtained—narrowing down the selection from millions of people to hundreds and then dozens, until L can investigate suspects one by one. He does provide an explanation for this, but it's nakedly obvious that he's doing what he does because he thinks anything but facing L head-on and trying to get as close to him as possible would be admitting defeat.
  • He kills the FBI agent Raye Penber, not knowing that the agent already came to believe that Light was innocent.
  • He admits he is Kira to Naomi Misora, when he's written down her name in the notebook in front of her, in broad daylight on a city street, purely to see the look on her face before she dies. Had Aizawa been paying slightly more attention before he walked out of earshot, or had he not been using an umbrella due to the providencial rain, Light would've been caught.
  • The final time leads to his downfall: when he believes that the SPK task force are about to die because Mikami has written their names in his notebook, he gloats that he's won... except, unfortunately for him, they don't.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind is less of a story of Giorno overthrowing a really superior villain and more of Passione's boss Diavolo starting from an unassailable position and then digging a hole for himself:
  • In his attempts to make his drugs the only drugs on the market, he alienates some of his followers, including Bucciarati, which starts the plot.
  • Brutally killing Sorbet and Gelato as a message of how he didn't want anyone finding out his identity. This led to La Squadra, a very competent and dangerous assassin team, rebelling two years before the plot. Their leader, Risotto Nero, basically has an "Instant Death" Radius. He also ends up doing something similar with Bucciarati's group.
  • Instead of simply waiting for Trish to be delivered to him and then killing her behind Bucciarati's back, letting him think she had started a new life somewhere... The Boss thought it was a good idea to snatch her from him, knowing full well that: Bucciarati is an altruistic man, that he's an experienced Stand user, and that his friends are literally down the street and nothing is stopping them from entering the building and finding them. Granted, the sheer brokenness of his Stand meant none of them would be a real threat to him, but still.
  • His entire plan to bring Trish to him so he can kill her qualifies, since the entire situation was his own fault. The only enemies he was shown to have that even knew she existed were ex-Passione members who he drove out of the organization with his Bad Boss tendencies, and pretty much the only reason Trish became a liability was that because his roping her into his affairs for his plan made her one. Up until he dragged her into his business, she had absolutely no connection to him that anyone could trace back to him, her physical resemblance to him would only be a problem if his aim to hide his own appearance had already failed, Spice Girl's resemblance to King Crimson only even became a potential problem because his dragging her into danger awakened it, and she knew pretty much nothing about him until the revelation that he wanted to kill her spurred her to look into his past.
  • The six or seven times that the Mundane Solution of using the tank-destroying strength of King Crimson and its ability to erase time was avoided usually because of his rampant paranoia. If he wasn't so desperate to never show himself, the show would have ended about midway through.
  • For that matter, he could have killed Nero in seconds if he wasn't so determined to wait until the last minute to show himself. If Aerosmith hadn't come in when it did, The Boss would be dead five volumes before Part 5 actually ended. By the secondary antagonist of the part, no less.
  • His lack of foresight in the decision to give away all, but one of the Arrows to others after gaining a Stand, keeping it for Stand User recruitment, without testing the limitations of its capabilities. It leads to him trying to utilize it again years later with people- including ones he failed to kill in the past- hindering him to the point he becomes the victim of the power he could've used on himself years back to avoid his convoluted plan to get it back.
  • In spite of his paranoia of thoroughly erasing his past as well as any potential opposition to come back to haunt him, he doesn't check if Polnareff is dead after defeating him, leading him to come back to hinder him years later by preventing the Boss from utilizing the Arrow for his own ends- leading to the body-swap scenario that ultimately causes his defeat due to him making assumptions without checking thoroughly.
• Naruto:
  • Sasuke Uchiha during the Five Kage Summit Arc. Instead of acting like a shinobi and staying hidden, he decides to meet the investigating Samurai head on and brutally kill most of them. When the Raikage and his bodyguards C and Darui arrive, he tries to take on three powerful ninjas alone. He gets soaked and electrocuted, then caught in C's blinding genjutsu. Even though he can see through it, A and Darui nearly blitz him, and Suigetsu and Jugo have to save him. Later on, he acts similarly when Karin was taken hostage by Danzo. Instead of going for a headshot, he decides to shoot through Karin to kill Danzo, because he reasons that Karin has outlived her usefulness.
  • Pain, during his climactic fight against Naruto. When he has Naruto at his mercy, he proceeds to blow up Konoha and then almost kill Hinata right in front of him instead of just taking him to the Akatsuki. This causes Naruto to snap and give in to the Kyuubi, and his six-tailed and eight-tailed forms proceed to kick Pain's ass.
  • Orochimaru had a tendency to do things that were counterproductive towards his goals for no real reason other than that he likes being a dick. An example is when he killed the Kazekage... after the Kazekage had agreed to help him attack Konoha, which means getting his help was pointless. Later, during his fight with the Third Hokage, he deliberately dragged the fight out purely to make the Third psychologically suffer; this allowed the Third to cast a jutsu that cost Orochimaru the use of his arms.
  • Madara Uchiha catches it when trying to get his second eye back. He tries to convince Obito to give the Rinnegan back voluntarily and is surprised when Obito refuses both verbally and by stabbing him in the chest. This is despite Obito saying he never considered them allies, had already betrayed Madara's plan by becoming the Ten-Tails Jinchuuriki, and had just been forced by Madara and Black Zetsu to revive the former from undeath with a jutsu that's Cast from Lifespan. And later, he wastes time fighting Guy instead of trying to retrieve his eye and prevent Obito from resurrecting Naruto.
  • Black Zetsu during the revival of Kaguya. After activating the Infinite Tsukuyomi, he backstabs Madara and uses him as fodder for Kaguya's resurrection, but also showed that he knows about the seals on Naruto and Sasuke's hands that will seal Kaguya if they touch her together. It would make a lot more sense to just wait for Madara to kill Naruto and Sasuke, which was likely to happen, leaving no one physically able to stop Kaguya.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: Given Yugi's Duel Monsters track record, just shooting him sure would be an easier way of killing him than challenging him to a duel every time! They would also accomplish any other goals like destroying/ taking over the world much faster if they didn't let it all rest on a one-on-one duel with him, a tradition Saiou/Sartorius finally breaks in GX.
  • The series do what they can in terms of justifying it; most of the MacGuffin collections can only change hands in a duel and so forth. Then there was that time one of the "Player Killers" in the Duelist Kingdom arc decided to protest his defeat by Yugi... using a pair of flamethrowers. It didn't work. Yami's Mind Crush on the other hand worked just fine.
    • This is how Saiou breaks the tradition. He pretends to be playing along with this, and then while the hero is bound in the fight, he sets off The Plan. Because all he needs to do is press a button, he can do it during the match. Judai/Jaden and his duel spirits can't leave the match. Of course, he started to break it when Judai first challenged him to the duel and Saiou's reaction was, paraphrased, "No. I've got what I need. I don't need to duel you." The only reason he did duel Judai was because Neos manifested to keep Saiou from getting the keys to the SORA satellite. *THEN* he used the duel in order to weaken Neos, which allowed him to steal the satellite keys and give them to his nearest brainwashed flunky, who could and did run off to get the satellite going while Judai was tied up in the duel. Saiou (or more precisely, the Light of Ruin/Destruction) didn't count on Kenzan/Hassleberry and Mizuchi/Serena, Saiou's own sister, teaming up to put a halt to things.
  • Naturally, Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series has a field day with this issue.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, all Jean has to do to defeat Yusei after a long and extensive duel is end his turn since Yusei has no cards left in his deck and would automatically lose once his turn began, however he gets caught up in the thrill of the duel and attacks Yusei who defends with a card in his hand and depletes Jean's life points.
• Ojamajo Doremi: Incumbent Tamaki and Masaharu are contesting the class election. This divides the class into two. Masaharu can't stand it and decides to concede the election to Tamaki. In response she says, "How can a candidate back out? We need to have a righteous contest, right? I'd rather you do that." Her (main) reasoning comes across as even more idiotic: "My pride won't allow a win without a fight", rather than "No one will vote for someone who wants us to clean the room 3 times a day ^note not when my policy is to clean once every 3 days". It's supposedly awesome that Tamaki's attempt to whitewash Masaharu in the election ends up backfiring, but then he announces his intention to have a neighborhood cleanup, and that has everyone freaking.
• Dragon Ball Z had Cell intentionally hold the villain ball during his fight with Gohan. After cryptic words from Goku, describing Gohan's hidden potential, Cell goes through extreme measures to draw it out for the sake of having a challenge. This included creating clones of himself to beat the living hell out of Gohan's True Companions and finally killing Android 16 in front of him. Considering how much of a Martial Pacifist Gohan had become now since his year-in-a-day in the Room of Spirit and Time, this could be considered a Deconstruction of this trope because of everything Cell had to do to finally push him past his Rage Breaking Point. Unfortunately for Cell, he got exactly what he wanted.
  • Garlic Jr. holds one of these in the movie Dead Zone. He obtains the Dragon Balls and successfully uses them to wish for immortality, allowing him to utterly dominate the heroes in combat since they can't kill him. Instead of just killing them like this, Garlic Jr. opens a portal to the Dead Zone, hoping to suck the heroes in. Of course, the heroes instead knock him into the portal, trapping him forever. At least until an anime filler arc where he escapes...and makes the exact same mistake again, this time removing any hope of return. Of course Garlic Jr. is completely off his rocker, which "might" have been contributing factor.
  • This is essentially how Frieza was defeated. After surviving the Spirit Bomb, Frieza, instead of just killing the exhausted Goku right then and there, shoots Piccolo and leaves him near-death, blows up Krillin, and then explicitly threatens Gohan's life, all right in front of Goku himself. He ends up pissing Goku off enough to make him go Super Saiyan for the first time, leading directly to Frieza's undoing.
    • In the anime, he does try to shoot Goku immediately, only for Piccolo to push Goku out of the way, after which Frieza lets his sadism (his Fatal Flaw) get the better of him.
  • Frieza picks it up again after becoming Mecha-Frieza and going to Earth with his father, King Cold. While Cold originally planned for them to just blow up the planet from space and be done with it, Frieza insists on landing and personally killing everyone to make Goku suffer. Within minutes of landing, they're met with Future Trunks, who slaughters them both effortlessly.
  • And once again Frieza grabs it in the Resurrection 'F' movie and its corresponding Dragon Ball Super arc. When he is restored to life, he spends two months in training until he achieves a form that has power comparable to Goku's. Rather than continue to train in order to master this form and its power, and build up his empire to its former glory, Frieza impatiently rushes to Earth in order to get his revenge. As a result, his soldiers are decimated and, after going toe to toe with Goku for a while, his new form burns itself out of energy and leaves Frieza vulnerable to another humiliating defeat. Thankfully, when he's revived again at the end of the Tournament of Power arc, he decides to put down the ball and goes off to rebuild his empire.
  • Freiza holds this ball even when it comes to his ignorant attitude towards training and obtaining more power. Due to his condescension towards the Saiyan race, as well as his own arrogance and ego, he believes he never needs to train very hard or put any effort into a fight to overcome his enemies in battle. He just assumes his natural ability and superiority will pull through. In more recent times, this is starting to bite him in the ass. As of the end of Super, he is at best on par with Super Saiyan Blue Goku and Vegeta when in his golden form (the result of the one occasion where he actually decided to train for a short period of time, which resulted in a phenomenal power boost). Because he doesn't train anywhere near as hard as Goku or Vegeta, he is unable to defeat them, therefore preventing him from regaining his dominion over the universe. If he actually decided to train half as hard as someone like Vegeta does, he likely could easily overwhelm his enemies. Instead, he has found himself on the receiving end of serious beatings from the likes of Toppo, Jiren and Broly thanks to his inability to put his arrogance aside and realise he needs to train harder to become stronger.
  • Both King Piccolo and the current Piccolo flew to the sky and wanted to kill Goku with a dramatic attack. Both times, Goku got the time to prepare the final blow or to escape. Then he won. In the case of King Piccolo, he succeeded in breaking Goku's legs and left arm... but forgot to take out his right arm as well, leading to his demise.
  • Cooler, after being reasonably smart in his first outing, grabbed a colossal one and never let go in his second. In his quest to drain worlds of life, he inexplicably decides to conquer New Namek, a planet with no real resources and only a few dozen people living on it under the protection of the protagonists, and doesn't even make use of its Dragon Balls. He has a giant mechanical space thing that lets him produce hundreds of Meta-Coolers that are individually stronger than the strongest protagonists. With that in mind, he spends most of the runtime instead utilizing much weaker robots so that the other characters can have something to fight, and initially sends in just one Meta-Cooler that Goku and Vegeta manage to take down. After his Meta-Coolers have thrashed the protagonists, he decides to take them to right in front of his vulnerable core, and tries to drain their power despite the fact that they're weaker than he is (and somehow, they still manage to overload him).
  • In Dragon Ball GT, Naturon Shenron has Goku on the ropes for most of their fight after assimilating Pan. By the end, he decides to rub his seeming victory in Goku's face by showing him Pan while he's apparently beaten before killing him; as it turns out, Goku was just pulling off a Wounded Gazelle Gambit and saves Pan before blowing Naturon away.
• The antagonists of Ookami Kakushi have a tendency to incapacitate their victims in a manner that would guarantee death within minutes, then leave them alive long enough to warn someone else of their plans. Ironically, it's what one, Sakaki, does to the other, Kasai. Afterwards, it is now Sakaki's turn to carry the Villain Ball around like a child carries a lollipop. From the aforementioned leaving his victim alive long enough to warn someone of his plan, to leaving the control station unguarded right after doing what he came to do, to his sudden inability to shoot anyone while also gaining the ability to rant and rave and just stand there...
• The Devil is a Part-Timer!: After seemingly killing a powerless Maou, Lucifer decides to get flashy before he kills Emi by blowing up a bridge and terrifying countless innocent people; said fear recharges Maou's powers and enables him to squash Lucifer like a bug. Especially idiotic since, as a Fallen Angel and a demon himself, Lucifer knew that the fear generated by the people on Earth is the source of both his and Maou's powers.
• Byaku at the end of the Kekkaishi anime. Yoshimori had willingly come to the Kokoboro and was demanding they bring him Kaguro. Byaku had never shown any particular loyalty to his lieutenants thus far, and had particular reason not to be attached to Kaguro. But instead of trying to make a deal with Yoshimori, he orders Shion to try to break Yoshimori's spirit and weaken his powers.
• Mobile Suit Gundam SEED For all the dog-kicking Muruta Azrael did up to that point, he was completely in the right when he pointed out to Natarle that ZAFT's G.E.N.E.S.I.S. superweapon was a threat to Earth and had to be destroyed ASAP. So instead of using the Enemy Mine moment to make peace with his embattled ship captain, he instead decides to launch the Alliance's nuclear missiles at the PLANT colonies, which would have done absolutely nothing about G.E.N.E.S.I.S.
• Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny Lord Djibril just had to send the Destroy Gundam to attack Europe to make an example of anyone who dares to defy Blue Cosmos. Durandal later exposes Blue Cosmos attack and the rest of their crimes to the world, which made the nations of the Earth to turn against and turning the war to Durandal's favor.
• Code Geass's Lelouch tends to juggle a lot of balls. As a result, every once in a while, he grabs his villain ball and behaves in an excessively evil manner.
  • In the last arc of the series, Lelouch makes himself look a like a villain and kidnaps the heads of the UFN. In truth, this is to use himself as a human shield, while everyone tries to fight him. The real point is to convince the actual villain, Schneizel, to grab his own villain ball, help out the people trying to kill Lelouch, and fire his super-weapons at the battlefield. What this does is open a big hole in his invincible, space-worthy, battlefortress. If he didn't do that, he would have been able to move into orbit, well outside of the reach of anyone else, able to bombard the world at will, which was his goal all along. He changes it just to get a shot against Lelouch, which, as you can guess, resulted in Lelouch's forces developing a countermeasure, boarding the battlecruiser, taking control of it, and capturing Schneizel.
• InuYasha:
  • When he has Inuyasha on the ropes thanks to his impenetrable Deflector Shield, Taigokumaru proceeds to gloat to Shiori, the one powering said shield, about how he killed her father, which gives Shiori the incentive she needs to expel him from the barrier and leave him open to Inuyasha's attacks.
  • Hakudoshi picks up the ball when he decides to brag to Inuyasha and co. about how he intends to betray Naraku... right in front of Naraku himself. As a result, Naraku disables his barrier and recalls the Saimyosho, giving Miroku free rein to suck Hakudoshi into the Wind Tunnel.
  • Naraku himself is prone to this despite being a Manipulative Bastard. During Sango's introduction, he dupes her into thinking that Inuyasha had attacked her village and slaughtered everyone in order to get her to fight him to the death. It almost worked... but then Inuyasha subdues her and tracks down Naraku, who, when questioned, freely admits that he was the one who destroyed her village.
• In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Gyokko the Upper-5 kizuki's demonic personality is entirely based around his desire to have his artistic performances, which involve killing people, appreciated. Such an abominable concept is completely alien to the human demon slayers and so Gyokko's attempts at being praised for his actions all fall flat. However, when Gyokko feels irreparably insulted by someone who he begrudgingly perceives as being a better artist than he is, the demon actually delays any chance of outright killing said person whom he could kill at any second and instead takes his sweet time trying to take their focus away from working. That's exactly what happened when Gyokko saw how focused Haganezuka was with working on Tanjiro's newest blade; that insulted Gyokko to his very core to the point of him wasting time with just pestering Haganezuka with light attacks, which was the beginning of his downfall against Muichiro.
• Rosario + Vampire: Tamao Ichinose initially has the upper hand against Inner Moka, because mermaids are stronger in water and water happens to be a vampire's weakness. However, she is easily tricked into jumping out of the water after Inner Moka and losing her advantage; thus, Moka K.O.'s her with a single kick to the face.
• Blood-C: The Last Dark: Kuto boasts to Saya that she can't kill humans and thus can't touch him... and then turns himself into an Elder Bairn, giving Saya the perfect opportunity to tear him apart.
• Pokémon: The Series: Team Rocket, always. Nine times out of ten, it will be that they almost got away with the Pokémon/item/food, but then decided to grab Pikachu as well, which always triggers Ash's interference and their defeat.
• In Negima! Magister Negi Magi main antagonist Fate captured Asuna while Negi was distracted and replaced her with a perfect copy. Negi's group didn't even notice, nor did any of his allies, even Jack Rakan. At this point, Fate had everything he needed to accomplish his goal of destroying the Magic World and taking all of its inhabitants to an inescapable dream world but apparently "winning" isn't enough, so he attacked the Governor's Ball where Negi was currently embroiled with an apparent new enemy, Kurt Godel. Though he does successfully eliminate Jack Rakan and a couple minor allies he completely reveals his hand in the process, including blowing the secret that Asuna was captured long ago and used to power a series of potent artifacts. If his group hadn't felt the need to pick a pointless fight, they would have won before anyone even noticed them.
• Fairy Tail:
  • The ONLY reason Vidaldus doesn't ultimately win is because he'd rather use his powers to watch a Cat Fight between Lucy and Juvia rather than hypnotizing them both.
  • Invoked by Azuma, who's so eager to face off against Erza Scarlet that he not only refuses to drain her magic power when he uses his magic to usurp control of the Sirius Tree and drain the rest of Fairy Tail's power to let his guild Grimoire Heart win, but swears to give it all back if she can beat him in combat just so he can force her to come at him with everything she's got. Luckily for the heroes and unluckily for his team, Azuma holds to that deal when he loses, which leads to Grimoire Heart's defeat.
• In My Hero Academia, Smug Snake Seiji Shishikura spends much of his encounter with Bakugo, Kirishima, and Kaminari waxing poetic on his agreement with the more stringent rules of the Provisional Hero Licensing Exam. In fact, he agrees so much that he would much rather take his time as a participant in the first portion of the exam separating the wheat from the chaff rather than actually passing the test, which he could easily do as he'd already incapacitated several rival students beforehand. Between this and his arrogance making him underestimate his opponents from U.A., Shishikura is taken out within a chapter.
• Sword Art Online: When he has Kirito pinned down in ALO, rather than just finish him off and be done with it, Sugou/Oberon decides to indulge his sadism by slowly decreasing the Pain Absorber to "give him something to look forward to", and then make him watch while he sexually assaults Asuna. This buys Kayaba's Virtual Ghost time to save Kirito and grant him admin privileges, leading to the Pain Absorber being used against Sugou himself and Sugou being chopped up and left with permanent injuries IRL. Though Sugou had no way of foreseeing Kayaba's intervention, deciding to torment Kirito before killing him was still a stupid move.
• Gleipnir: Hikawa needs a special coin under Clair's possession in order to regain her human form, but decides the best way to get the coin is to steal it and kill Shuichi and Clair should they resist. Unfortunately, she badly underestimates the protagonists and ends up getting killed in the ensuing fight. She didn't even need to steal the coin, she could have just asked the protagonists about it, since they are on the same boat and they could have searched for more coins together. It's just that her desperation to regain her humanity got the better of her and she went into attack mode. The story needed a Starter Villain for the protagonists to defeat and poor Hikawa got drafted.
• In the Kirby: Right Back at Ya! episode "Mumbies Madness", Dedede’s latest monster, the titular Mumbies, is easily winning its fight with Kirby. However, Dedede then decides to throw a bomb wrapped up like Mumbies at Kirby to finish him off himself. Kirby inhales the bomb and transforms, allowing him to turn the tide and defeat Mumbies. Naturally, Escargoon calls Dedede out on this stupid move.
• In the first season finale of Sailor Moon, the Sailor Guardians have been successfully eliminated, leaving Sailor Moon to face Queen Beryl alone. Beryl could've saved herself the trouble and eliminated Moon right then and there, but the plan just wasn't evil or sadistic enough. Queen Beryl instead decides to teleport Moon to her lair to force her to fight the brainwashed Prince Endymion. It inevitably blows up in her face when Sailor Moon snaps Endymion out of his brainwashing, who attacks her and forces her to retreat.

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