Villain Decay / Anime & Manga

• Attack on Titan:
  • Downplayed so very much with the Warriors, particularly Reiner Braun and Annie Leonhart. While they start off as the antagonists that kickstarted the Fall of Shinganshina and opposed the Paradis military, they are nothing more that tragic child soldiers serving under a tyrannical regime that oppresses their race — as such, they mentally deteriorate due to their relationships with the Paradis Eldians conflicting with their loyalty towards Marley. The events of the time skip has Reiner becoming more and more of a tragic hero who eventually allies with the remaining protagonists (remnants of the Survey Corps, the Warrior Program, and Zeke's Anti-Marleyan Volunteers) alongside Annie.
  • While Zeke Yeager is far less sympathetic, continuing his antagonistic role with his ultimate plan of euthanizing all Eldians being shed to light, he is eventually outclassed by his younger brother, Eren, who betrays Zeke when they meet in the paths and manages to persuade Ymir Fritz to side with him. With Eren unleashing the Rumbling and becoming the main target for the remaining heroes, Zeke is reduced to nothing more than a puppet trapped in the Paths, and ultimately sides with the alliance in his final moments in an effort to stop his brother.
  • Marley themselves fall into this after spending hundreds of years abusing Eldians leading up into the main events of the story. Their efforts in trying to seize Paradis's natural resources and steal the Founding Titan bite them in the ass when Eren becomes a much bigger threat than anyone could have imagined. Eren becoming the final antagonist of the series puts Marley in a position of what appears to be a damsel-in-distress victim in which the remaining Survey Corps and the Warriors put aside their differences to team up and save the nation from complete destruction.
• Black Butler: A particularly jarring example is the Shinigami Grell Sutcliffe. Starts off as a supernatural serial killer with a magic chainsaw who also happens to be Jack The Ripper’s sidekick. But once they took away her chainsaw she quickly devolved into the Butt-Monkey. So much so that after a handful of episodes none of the characters view Grell Sutcliffe any differently from the rest of the comic relief. Grell is still just as dangerous in the manga during the Zombie Apocalypse on the ship; it probably helps that she still has the chainsaw.
• Bleach:
  • When a Menos Grande first appeared, Rukia said she'd read in textbooks that only the Royal Guard can fight them. Ichigo could barely scratch it. Now it's been confirmed that was a Gillian, the lowest level of Menos, and that the textbooks were wrong; any high-seated Shinigami can handle Menos if they're Gillian level. As the power levels of the main characters develop to lieutenant and captain levels, the Gillians have accordingly become regarded as mook-level threats. Even the Adjuchas level of Menos becomes easier to handle as the story progresses.
  • Aizen picks this up in a different way than the Hollows do; when he first appears, he is a bona fide genius manipulator, having played everyone for over a century to get his hands on the MacGuffin and pulverizing all opposition easily once it's time for him to make his move. Once the Fake Karakura arc rolls around, Aizen becomes a Smug Snake who relies mainly on brute strength, a Healing Factor supplied by the aforementioned MacGuffin and using his own forces as cannon fodder while he sits around in the background. Once Ichigo gains enough power to completely outclass him, Aizen still relies solely on raw power instead of his story breaking illusion powers, and the intelligence he had demonstrated early in the story.
• Bubblegum Crisis: In a meta-sense, MegaCorp GENOM. In the OVA, multiple consecutive strikes on major offices didn't even slow them down. In the Parasite Dolls OVA, a terrorist attack is all it takes to bring them down.
• Case Closed: Inverted by Gin to an extreme. Gin gets progressively more evil and intelligent the longer the series goes on.
• Code Geass R2: The Knights of the Rounds. In their first appearance, they were shown as Britannia's elite force. Lelouch and the Black Knights were struggling when fighting only three of them (Suzaku, Gino, and Anya). But as episodes passed, they became easier and easier to incapacitate. Then, the show introduced more Knights, and after that, one of them is killed. Later, when Suzaku does a Heel–Face Turn and gets a stronger robot, he becomes able to slice down his superiors in mere seconds. However, it's probably justified due to the Lensman Arms Race being in effect, where the Super Prototypes quickly become reverse-engineered and dated in the space of a few episodes. The Knights' demise could be explained because they didn't upgrade their Knightmares enough, but the fact that Tamaki was shown to be more competent and badass, however, is not justified.
  • This is an ironic example, as the rest of Code Geass is quite good at avoiding Villain Decay. Any given battle is generally a toss-up, with the protagonists winning and losing a roughly equal number of battles, and almost every major villain getting in a victory or two. Cornelia is portrayed as both a highly competent tactician and fighter, the Glaston Knights are a force to be reckoned with, and Suzaku manages to win a ton of battles and lose very few. The climactic battle at the end of the first season is in fact won by the villains of the series, while the protagonist is defeated, captured, and has his memories erased.
• Hit Monaca Towa hard in Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School. In Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls, she was a legitimately intelligent Manipulative Bastard who has the entire cast around her finger, pulling off an Evil Plan that is possibly the closest any villain in the franchise to actually winning. In the anime she's reduced to a Bratty Half-Pint and Big Bad Wannabe who just kinda gives up and leaves to become a NEET halfway through.
  • The Big Bad Junko Enoshima was also affected by this. In the games she's portrayed as a master manipulator able to bring over anyone to her side and turn them into someone willing and eager to commit evil. However, while she has her moments the anime retcons it so that virtually everything she accomplished was through a Mind-Control Device with no real effort or skill on her part.
• Death Note: Misa Amane starts out as a typical Genki Girl Moe Yandere Perky Female Minion with moments of sinister Ax-Crazy creepiness. After she has her Death Note stolen (twice), she becomes a Genki Girl Moe Yandere Perky Female Minion without any moments of Ax-Crazy creepiness, and stays that way for the rest of the series. Justified in that having one's Death Note taken away erases all memories that the owner had ever since owning it.
• Digimon Adventure:
  • The Kuwagamon that the kids meet in the first episode is a terror, hounding them for most of the episode and taking seven simultaneous attacks from their Rookie-level partners without lasting damage. The next time they encounter him, in the second arc, he menaces Tai and Agumon for a few seconds before being effortlessly destroyed by Piximon. That said, Pixiemon is a well trained Ultimate and the seven Rookie-level parters were newly digivolved at the time. Perhaps a better example would be the second Digimon the kids face: Shellmon. In his first appearance it takes Greymon, a champion Digimon, to take him down, and even then it's a struggle; when Shellmon comes back three arcs later, a few partner Rookies took him down with little effort.
  • Bakemon goes from the main enemy of an episode that required multiple Champion-level Digimon to defeat even after being weakened by sutras in the first arc to disposable mooks that can easily be one-shot by a single Rookie near the end of the third arc.
  • Etemon is an interesting case: he's certainly much stronger and borderline invulnerable when he returns during the Dark Masters arc as Metal-Etemon, but most of his time is spent either chasing Joe and Mimi or getting into a scrap with Puppetmon, and most of the fight with him at the end is him shrugging off attacks and boasting about his power. Though he did also kill Leomon in an attack intended for Mimi.
  • Archnemon from 02 started out as a mysteriously sinister human who nearly defeated the heroes several times. Once she revealed herself as a Digimon and joined up with Mummymon to form a Goldfish Poop Gang however, this almost completely disappeared. Depending on the Writer, they could range from silly foes who were still somewhat dangerous to completely harmless buffoons.
  • Myotismon/Vamdemon was a Knight of Cerebus in his first appearances, who regularly schooled the entire group and seemed almost unstoppable, on top of being a cunning genius manipulator. He was only defeated after thirteen episodes when the newly-created Angewomon pulled a Combined Energy Attack that was pretty much designed to kill him. Fortunately for him, he Came Back Strong no less than twice... and unfortunately for him, despite being much stronger on paper, his actual performance became laughable. When he came back as VenomVamdemon/VenomMyotismon, he was killed in two episodes by a fairly standard (albeit powerful) attack to his weak point... which, as it turned out, was his crotch. When he came back for 02 as the final boss, he was played as The Man Behind the Man for the entire events of the series, which in theory should have restored his cred and then some... but then he spent one episode standing still and getting pummeled by everyone, then one episode briefly getting the upper hand before being almost completely depowered by children announcing what they wanted to be when they grew up before Imperialdramon incinerated what was left of him. His decay reached its height when, for the finale to Digimon Xros Wars: The Young Hunters Who Leapt Through Time, he was reduced to a Degraded Boss, of all things, with an entire army of him and his upgraded forms being little more than cannon fodder.
• Dragon Ball has this trope, and it has happened within the series on numerous occasions to the point that it's practically procedural after a villain's initial defeat. Within the span of episodes, villains can fall from being ridiculously lethal and dire threats to being utterly outclassed in every possible way. Likely justified by the fact that the protagonists' strength grows enormously throughout the series, while most other characters stay at around the same level. A rule of thumb is that after a villain has been defeated once before, they're chopped liver. It's taken to its extreme twice: once in the movie Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn, and again during the Super 17 arc of GT. Both times, entire scores of previously-killed villains from the original and Dragon Ball Z (and a couple from the movies!) manage to escape from Hell and are effortlessly defeated by the much more powerful cast. Even Frieza, who was offed in a single attack.
  • Frieza and Cell get hit the hardest by this trope in filler episodes after their sagas and the non-canon Dragon Ball GT. Each of them took a saga to be defeated, and at the time they were more threatening and powerful than the rest of the cast by a ridiculously large margin. But after their time in the story's limelight ended and new threats took their place, Freeza and Cell would become laughable at best. Frieza ate vicious curbstomp defeats on FOUR separate occasions, two of which were decided by a single devastating strike. Cell fares slightly better, but not by much; Pikkon one-shot him in Hell, and Goku (after being reverted to his child form) effortlessly and simultaneously made Cell and Freeza look like clowns.
  • Cooler's an odd case of this. In his first appearance, he was a very cunning and canny opponent, but despite a good scrap, he didn't stand much chance against Super Saiyan Goku. In The Return of Cooler, he merged with the Big Gete Star and gained a legion of superpowered android bodies that could overwhelm even Super Saiyans in one-on-one combat (and were conspicuously not subject to the Inverse Ninja Law). However, in the process, he Took a Level in Dumbass and became a swaggering idiot who directly caused his own downfall.
  • Fellow movie villain Broly (before his canonization in a Super movie) also suffers from this. First appearance? Singlehandedly flattens the Cell Saga's protagonists without even taking visible damage, and it requires the power of all the Z-Fighters transferred into Goku to put him down. Second? Stays fairly physically dominant (only being fought somewhat evenly by Gohan, and only due to holding back), but spends about half the movie somehow failing to kill the Tagalong Kids and gets beaten by a few Kamehamehas firing him into the sun. Third? Gets brought back as a clone that degenerates into a walking sludge pile that those same kids can now seriously injure, and is ultimately killed by water. On top of that, his personality also degraded. In his first outing, he was a sadistic brute with some mental issues, in his second, he's completely inarticulate and crazy, and in the third, he has exactly one line in the film and it's screaming Goku's name. Dragon Ball Super: Broly drastically undoes this with Broly’s nigh-unstoppable threat from the 90s being re-established in canon and brought to even higher levels thanks to Serial Escalation.
  • Resurrection 'F' downplays Freeza's decay and even reverses some of it: He is shown to be able to overwhelm Goku post-Battle of Gods after being wished back to life, is actually feared by a good deal of the lesser cast, and is shown to actually be clever enough to come up with a back-up scheme in spite of his confidence. All of this gets lessened, however, as between the constant presence of Beerus and Whis, his iron grip on the Villain Ball, and Goku and Vegeta having more than enough power to defeat him if they had bothered to work together, Frieza does not manage to be quite as menacing as he was in the Namek arc. However, the fact that the heroes don't take him as seriously as they should winds nearly bringing about the planet's destruction, with Frieza arguably comming closer to reaching his goal than he did on Namek.
    • His decay is fully reversed when he returns in Dragon Ball Super, as he has fully mastered his golden form and its power, and become a more pragmatic, manipulative villain who actively tries to avoid making the same mistakes he did on Namek and Earth before. In the end, he even earns his life back and returns to ruling his galactic empire. Then Dragon Ball Super: Broly happens.
  • It should be noted that most of Frieza's above-mentoined decay is exclusive to anime-only Filler and the non-Canon GT and does not apply to the Frieza that appears in most modern Dragon Ball media. In the original manga, which all of Frieza's post-Resurrection F appearances are based on, Frieza only lost to Goku on Namek and was used in a meaningful form of The Worf Effect against Future Trunks before disappearing from the plot completely.
  • Canon Frieza does still slide back into his villainous Smug Snake Butt-Monkey decay from the anime during the aforementioned Super: Broly, when the titular berserker Saiyan reduces him to a squealing punching bag for a full hour; so, even post-Namek it’s extremely hard for Frieza to catch a break in both canon and non-canon. In fact, it took until the Super manga for Frieza to finally score a certified win against both Goku and Vegeta in their strongest forms using his own Next Tier Power-Up “Black Frieza” which rectifies the decay for now.
• Frieren: Beyond Journey's End has a justified example in Qual, a demon who was sealed away 80 years ago infamous for a spell that could kill anyone in a single hit. By the time he was unsealed however, the spell that he was known for, Zoltraak, has been studied extensively by humans to the point that it's now considered a standard offensive spell that can be reliably defended against. As such, he's a lot less dangerous and Frieren allowed his seal to fade because he can now be killed without issue by her student Fern.
• Fullmetal Alchemist has Envy, who killed Hughes and generally made life miserable for every protagonist; they've kicked Ed's ass at least once. Their last two fights are against Marcoh, who uses his knowledge of philosopher's stones to decompose them (and before that they were just getting jerked around by May Chang, including getting a rock hand shoved between their ass cheeks), and Roy, who puts them through one of the most vicious curb stompings in manga history. Justified in that they're more of a manipulator with their Shapeshifting than a fighter. When the heroes figure out how to outwit them, they're unable to fall back on anything else.
• Haruhi-chan: Played for Laughs with Ryoko Asakura. In canon a terrifyingly emotionless Uncanny Valley Girl who tries to kill Kyon just to see how Haruhi will react, she wakes up suddenly having been shrunk to the size of a newborn baby, and is cared for by Yuki Nagato as if she were one. Much of the humor comes from how harmless the once scary villainess has become. In episode 3, for example. Asakura, now Achakura, leaves Nagato's apartment to kill Kyon, only to be stopped by a cat chasing her.
• Inuyasha: Kagura nearly overwhelms Inuyasha on her own in his first two fights with her, but a big contributor to that was his inability to use his Wind Scar supermove on her because she could control the air. When he gained the ability to use it whenever he wanted, he could take her easily. She was, however, still a tough enemy for the rest of the cast. What really killed her as a threat was the constant popping up of villains stronger then her.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders: Hol Horse was introduced as an enigmatic and boisterous Great White Hunter-like figure riding into town on various animals and seemingly killing Avdol in his first fight. Though his stand was one of the weaker ones (being a gun with magical bullets he could control), it's the way he used it that made him one of the more dangerous foes in said Part, especially alongside the depraved J. Geil. Subsequent appearances have stripped him of his charisma and mystique, as he's subjected to The Worf Effect by Enya and forced into a brief Enemy Mine with the heroes, and later teams up with the deeply ineffectual Boingo and barely manages to get the heroes to notice his antics. His decay is especially prominent with how he's Hoist by His Own Petard. In his second appearance, Enya controls his arm and makes him shoot himself in the face; but he thinks quickly enough to demanifest his Stand -and thus the bullet- saving his life. In his third appearance, he's completely oblivious to the bullets he just fired off; and when they go haywire he doesn't bother paying attention, which ends up with him getting nailed in the head.
• Kinnikuman: Kinkotsuman starts out as a legitimate threat, but eventually becomes little more than a comic relief character, watching Suguru's matches against more evil opponents from the sidelines.
• Kirby: Right Back at Ya!: King Dedede started as a cruel dictator looking for all kinds of ways (mostly by purchasing monsters from Nightmare Enterprises) to either eliminate Kirby or make him look bad, not to mention screwing with his subjects out of pettiness. His maliciousness seemed to have lessened as the episodes went by.
• Macross Plus: The X-9 Ghost Unmanned Fighter is a terrifying threat, capable of fighting off two Ace Pilots, even though each is using their respective Super Prototype against it. When the mass-production model of the X-9, the Ghost V-9 shows up in the Grand Finale of Macross Frontier, under the control of the Galaxy fleet, they are reduced to mere Elite Mooks, which can easily be taken on one on one by SMS's Ace Pilots. They do slaughter the Redshirt Army however. It helps that the VF-25 is far, far more advanced than the YF-21 and YF-19. Also the V-9s were under Slave control of the Battle Galaxy (that is, Grace herself). When Luca released his own V-9 escort drones via the JUDAH System, he made specific mention of them having become just as deadly as the prototype Ghost X-9.
• Omega Red gets hit by this in Marvel Anime: Wolverine. When Omega Red first appears, Wolverine spends an episode fighting him (in a series that is only 12 episodes long) and has to finish the fight at the start of the next episode. Logan only wins because he catches a lucky break and a vital part of Omega Red's equipment malfunctions. Omega Red is repaired and made better than ever with a new arm and sent after Wolverine again, and gets killed in about ten seconds.
• Mobile Fighter G Gundam has Wong Yun Fat, the Neo Hong Kong Premier and sponsor of the Gundam Fight. He's an intelligent Affably Evil villain with dashes of The Chessmaster, but as the plot advances and we get into the Battle Royale arc, he gets two very undignified deaths that reduce his coolness points so he can give space for the true mastermind, The Starscream Urube Ishikawa.
• The Trinity Siblings in Mobile Suit Gundam 00. Their first appearance sets the group up as a very skilled fighting force, with them single-handedly rescuing the other Meisters from certain capture, and obliterating most of the Union's and Human Reform League's ranks. However, following this, they're systematically defeated time after time, even, in part, by faceless Elite Mooks, until it culminates in the resident monster shooting one of them dead and effortlessly defeating the second, the third being handily saved by a timely intervention of her enemy. This can, somewhat, be justified, as they were caught off guard by both the Trial System's effects and the GN-X models, which were on par with Gundams, but the fact that they put up so little of a fight is still surprising.
  • The other antagonists of the second season decay pretty badly by its second half. First, A-LAWS and then Ribbons's personal squad of personality-lacking bishonen initially appear as very threatening antagonists, repeatedly pushing the Celestial Being to the brink of destruction, but then decay to Elite Mooks, with A-LAWS eventually being demoted all the way to the status of normal Mooks that die ineffectually by the dozens in the final episodes.
  • Ali Al-Saachez in Season 2, despite having become The Dragon to Ribbons. It culminates in him getting shot in the face while attempting to pull an I Surrender, Suckers on Lockon II. This actually makes sense though, as most of the people he defeated in Season 1 were fighting at some sort of disadvantage, or, in Setsuna's case, were trained by Ali.
• In My Hero Academia, Re-Destro gets hit hard with this after the Curbstomp Battle inflicted by Tomura, which leads to the Meta Liberation Army being rebranded to the Paranormal Liberation Front under the League of Villains' banner. This causes Re-Destro to become far sillier by becoming a giggling enforcer in fear of Tomura. His closest allies even point out how disgusting it is to see their leader become such a mess. This fall from grace is so egregious that he is eventually defeated off-screen in the following arc.
• Naruto: Orochimaru, the first Big Bad, suffers from some Villain Decay over time. In the Chunin Exam arc, he's too strong for any of the heroes to defeat, forcing the Third Hokage to sacrifice himself to save the village (which doesn't even kill him entirely). Then it's revealed that he lost to Itachi in the past while trying to claim his body, and in most of the battles after that, he's defeated easily or forced to retreat. This is partly because he wasn't at full strength when he fought, but it shows that he's lost much of his original threat. The worst instance of this was when he fought against Itachi (while fighting Sasuke) in the manga, and was defeated in merely a few pages.
  • His minions from the Sound Village suffer from this as well. In Part 1, even the weakest of them, including a Filler Villain, were a serious threat, and the Sound Four were so powerful that it took two of their opponents to give everything they had to kill them; in fact, their leader was so strong that he would've won his fight if not for a terminal disease. When Part 2 comes around, most of them (excluding those who joined Hebi) are whiny wimps dependent on Kabuto. Then in the Spin-Off Rock Lee's Springtime of Youth, Orochimaru and Kabuto are reduced to a Boke and Tsukkomi Routine.
• One Piece:
  • Buggy the Clown and his crew spent their first appearance as a serious threat. In the manga, Buggy's first scene has him brutally killing one of his own crew members (he actually spares the guy in the anime). After Buggy's defeat, however, all of his subsequent appearances portray him as incompetent and having lost much of the "monster" in his status as a Monster Clown. A lampshade is hung on this when Luffy and the group of big-name former prisoners he was with him finally escaped Impel Down. At about this point, Buggy's past on the Roger Pirates was revealed, causing Emporio Ivankov to muse that Buggy is likely the "disgrace" of the Roger Pirates.
  • Sir Crocodile, on the other hand, averts this. He is defeated by Luffy fairly early in the story, and despite the Straw Hats having become significantly more powerful since then, he remains a very dangerous and powerful man throughout — even in spite of being removed from Alabasta, where his element, sand, was abundant; as he was able to clash evenly with Doflamingo. His Number Two, Daz Bones, counts as well.
  • Mihawk also averts this. His first appearance has him cutting ships in half with his BFS, and blocking Zoro's katanas with a pocket knife and handing him a devastating defeat with the aformentioned BFS while lecturing how Zoro's a weakling who doesn't know how much stronger are those in the Grand Line. The next time we see him, he has a brief fight with Luffy which Luffy quickly runs away from seeing that Mihawk is still too strong for him. Then again, he has not suffered a single loss so far in the series...
  • Played straight with Caesar Clown. He’s introduced in Punk Hazard as a fairly significant threat being able to KO Luffy, Robin, Franky and Smoker with his gas logia. After a while, it becomes clear he’s really a Boisterous Weakling who is easy prey for Luffy when left without any tricks up his sleeve. His following appearances have him carted around by the Straw Hats like luggage, used as a hostage by Sanji to allow Nami, Chopper and Brook to escape, and spends most of the latter part of Whole Cake Island being bullied into helping the heroes.
  • Big Mom comes close to this but ultimately averts it. Compared to Kaido, she suffers far more humiliations and gets matched more frequently with Luffy and Sanji blocking her attacks, Nami and Pedro blowing her around, Jinbei punching her off the Sunny, getting knocked off a waterfall by King, essentially knocked out by Queen (whom Sanji later beats), knocked over by Franky and rolled out of the room by Robin. However, it is reaffirmed in the rooftop battle and in her fight with Law and Kid in Onigashima that she’s a Yonko for a damn good reason and it takes the combined full might of both Supernovas to blow her into an active magma chamber which ultimately counts as a win.
  • The CP9 members, now CP0 dip into this despite their best efforts. When first introduced, they (especially Lucci) delivered a Curb-Stomp Battle to Luffy, Zoro, Sanji, Chopper and Franky and it took all the crewmates who fought them getting a Next Tier Power-Up to defeat them; and being the Secret Police, they were for the most part effortlessly in control of the situation even when the Buster Call was accidentally ordered (by their weakling of a boss, no less). In the Reverie, on the other hand, Jabra and Kalifa fail to prevent Wapol from escaping with Vivi; and in Egghead, Lucci and Kaku are mostly beaten up by Luffy and Zoro respectively —despite having Awakened their Devil Fruit powers— before Stussy reveals to a Double Agent and knocks them out. Probably not helping matters is that they are forced to pull a Enemy Mine with the Straw Hats against the Seraphim. Lucci at least fares better than Kaku as he not only does decently against Luffy’s Gear 5 (even if Luffy does not take the battle seriously and proves to be superior in terms of improvement), but one-shots Sentomaru and clashes evenly with Zoro twice; whereas Kaku gets incapacitated again before he can do anything when Combat Pragmatist Sanji traps him in a Sea Energy bubble. However, Saint Saturn’s arrival in head-popping One-Winged Angel mode inevitably makes Lucci and even Kizaru (who gave Luffy a tougher fight even while in Gear 5) look like mere Mooks in comparison.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • The Team Rocket trio started out being more dangerous and effective before they became... well... Team Rocket (although this may have been intentional, since the writers likely didn't know what direction to take the characters in the beginning, and chose the more comical route). In Best Wishes, they briefly went back to being more dangerous, leaving all of their comical Pokémon at the base similar to Ash leaving his team. Half the time, they didn't even bug Ash and co. anymore due to their missions. By the time of XY, they suffered another Villain Decay and reverted to their comical Pikachu-napping schemes, though remain slightly more threatening than pre-Unova, and they've gotten more competent again by Sun and Moon.
    • This is also an in-universe example. Judging by the fact that they had wanted posters in their first episode, the trio was apparently pretty good at their jobs before they began targeting Ash, which is where everything began going wrong for them.
  • Butch and Cassidy were originally the competent counterparts to Jessie and James, but by the time you get to their appearances in Pokémon Chronicles, they've become a pair of Suspiciously Similar Substitutes to the main trio.
  • The games have actively tried to avoid this — Team Rocket only appeared in the first two sets of the main series of games, decaying in the second one due to their leader, Giovanni, not organizing them. Since then, every main-series game and spin-off that includes criminal organizations includes entirely different ones, and each one has upped the ante for their master plans each time.
• Pretty Cure All Stars DX 3 gives all the movie bad guys this as they're all struck down by weaker attacks than they were in their movie appearances. The worst of this was Shadow, the villain for the first Yes! Pretty Cure 5 movie, who is taken down by the fairies shining lights on his mirrors.
• Ranma ½: Kuno, in the very earliest portions of the story, is represented as some sort of deadly, even lethal threat to Ranma... up until his first defeat, after which he was little more than a Butt-Monkey even on his best of days, with Ranma Badass Back attacks leveling him. They don't even mention Kuno as being in any way threatening even to the untrained civilians of the cast. In fact, Kuno actually managing to disrupt the status quo and gain the advantage over Ranma via some Plot Device is usually such a big deal as to be the focus of the episode.
• Rurouni Kenshin:
  • Isurugi Raijuta, as admitted by the author himself. A fearsome swordsman possessed of "macho intelligence" and a belief that's on the opposite spectrum of the hero's... but in the final battle, he's revealed to be a cowardly fake who's never actually killed anyone and gets taken out with one blow (and completely broken afterwards).
  • Another one is Enishi Yukishiro, who despite being an Evil Counterpart to Kenshin (even in a more personal level than Shishio, and with the perfect swordsmanship style to counter his), becomes less calm as the story goes on. Watsuki calls him the opposite of Makoto Shishio (the other Big Bad Evil Counterpart to Kenshin), who ended becoming one of the most threatening villains he ever wrote.
• Interesting metaexample: in the original Sailor Moon anime, the Quirky Miniboss Squads and monsters grow less menacing and more comedic with each passing season. This did not hold to the manga.
  • Starter Villain Jadeite started off a competent threat. He had powerful minions, curb-stomped Sailor Moon during their first meeting, and actually managed to succeed in getting away with human energy in one scheme, earning Queen Beryl's compliments. But right after that last event, things began to go downhill for Jadeite. Very downhill, as he stubbornly refused to evolve his plans and strategies even when they clearly weren't working. Once he got Hoist by His Own Petard for the last time, Queen Beryl "decommissioned" him for good. The rest of the Shiten'nou avoided the trope, with Nephrite and Kunzite never ceasing to be threats (though Kunzite slips when he gets his own arc, there is more of a justified in-story reason for it), and Zoisite being more bark and dirty tricks than bite until the last few episodes of his arc.
  • Queen Beryl actually comes off as weaker than Kunzite in the anime, and a number of her plans end failing due to her sending the brainwashed Endymion out with him, compared to the manga where she was shown to stronger than him.
  • The Ayakashi Sisters in the manga are murderous maniacs, while in the anime they were merely misled and are granted a chance to live free in modern day Tokyo. The manga also had them capable of killing the Sailor Senshi with ease, something they struggled with in the anime. Having said that, the Akayashi sisters did display the ability to form plans in the anime, in the manga, all they did was show, beat their Senshi counterpart and then get killed by Usagi. They never seemed to pick up the fact they should AVOID fighting her when she kept killing them.
  • Queen Nehellenia was still evil in the anime and still a threat, but only because she was misled, and she was eventually redeemed and granted a second chance at life in Stars. In the manga, she was evil incarnate (a spawn of Chaos), responsible for the death of the Moon Kingdom and the current calamity, and was destroyed by Usagi and Mamoru.
  • Inverted from manga to anime with the side-story villain Princess Kaguya. In the manga, she's briefly beaten after a fight that lasts one panel; in the movie adaption of the side story, she nearly annihilates the Sailor Senshi and actually beats Usagi's Super Mode.
• In SD Gundam Force, each member of the Quirky Miniboss Squad initially appears threatening when they first come on the scene. Unfortunately, in spite of some near-successes early on, they quickly become regulated to Goldfish Poop Gang, and in the second half of the series are barely able to survive. This is lampshaded by their Commander;
  "But time after time you have failed. Instead of warriors, we are becoming laughingstocks!"
• Serial Experiments Lain: All those evil corporations, organizations and elite hacker groups seem pretty daunting at first. The knights were particularly presented as being high-level hackers. It has you rather worried for Lain, that is until we find out that Lain has complete control of the Wired, which, in its merging state with the real world, makes her God, and thus neither the Knights nor Masami Eiri himself pose any real threat to her.
• Hao from Shaman King gets hit by this hard at the very end. He is a thousand years-old (by virtue of special reincarnation) Shaman and Onmyoji who controls the fundamental spirit of fire (which eats souls), willing to wait a long time for his plans to succeed and very calm and calculating. There was no way for our heroes to succeed in the final showdown, even with superior numbers. So at the end he loses his cool, calm and collected demeanor and loses largely because of that. This only happens in the 2001 anime, though, as Hao in the manga (and 2021 anime) actually was unbeatable and became the titular Shaman King. The first anime had to pull a stock shonen ending instead of that, though, since the manga ending hadn't come out at the time, so they needed to make him lose, somehow.
• Giriko from Soul Eater. The idea of a mad git with a chainsaw as a Weapon form does start out as a dangerous prospect, especially when he defeats the kids with no effort whatsoever, prompting Justin Law to step in (cue convenient example of the skill of a Death Scythe). Afterwards, he spends too much time getting drunk and womanizing to be any kind of threat, up until Chapter 75 where he shows up in the book of Eibon to beat seven shades out of the recently Death Scythe'd Soul Eater.
• Tenchi Muyo! GXP: Tarant Shank, the initial Big Bad, decays very fast. In his first appearance he's portrayed as an extremely dangerous and unstable villain who nearly kills Seina, Mitoto, and Kiriko, and leaves Seina traumatized from the experience. However, his next appearance has him appear with a broken arm (revealed later to be from fighting Tenchi and company off screen) and he quickly goes downhill from there; his plans are easily foiled by Seina's group, his ship is utterly destroyed, and his role as Big Bad is supplanted by Seiryo of all people. He makes a minor comeback in the final few episodes, but never quite manages to regain the same threat level he had in his original appearance.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Viral was designed for this trope. In his first appearance, he nearly hands the heroes their asses, but in every further appearance he's defeated with less effort. Despite showing up with a new upgraded mecha each time, he's eventually beaten by the humans' mass-produced mecha whose pilots don't even break a sweat. The reason for this, in-show, is because non-evolving beastmen can never match the constantly growing power of the spiral-powered humans. He gets better after his Heel–Face Turn.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: Subverted with Dark Bakura. Initially he's really just a side-villain, nowhere near a main threat, and no one really spends a lot of time on him — in fact, in the first season he's defeated by the sidekick in a sideplot while Yugi is busy with the Big Bad. As it turns out, this works to his advantage, since it allows him to lurk around setting up his evil plans with no one noticing. By the time the final season rolls around, he puts all those puzzle pieces to work and becomes the season's Big Bad.
  • In the original manga, Bakura was the main villain through a volume; he was introduced in the last chapter of volume 6 and defeated in the second-to-last chapter in volume 7, just before the Duelist Kingdom Arc. When he showed up, he was the greatest threat to Yugi and his friends ever, coming close to killing them in his deadly Table Top RPG and secretly set his plan in motion in the background. Also, the psychotic level and danger of Dark Bakura was pretty clear early. His prominence and screentime is significantly reduced in the anime, however, likely due to Ryo Bakura's lack of screentime as well as having little to no screentime in the filler arcs. His reasons from helping Honda/Tristan change from faking a Heel–Face Turn to having an unclear reason, other than getting a new host (which was dub-only). This likely correlates with the fact that the anime is completely focused on the Duel Monsters card game, and in the manga Bakura plays a fully-explained and playable tabletop RPG which is clearly shown in the last arc, whereas the RPG in the anime is vague, focuses on Duel Monsters more, and has his past self turn from being as psychotic as his Millennium Ring self into a weak-willed person.
• Zatch Bell!:
  • Rodeaux of the Faudo Cult is initially introduced as a powerful demon with sufficient strength to match his proud personality and scary looks. He manages to hold the upper hand against Rein, one of the strongest demons in the competition, though he eventually loses. Later, he easily holds his own against Wonrei in a short stand-off. Fast-forward to the assault on Faudo, a powered-up Rodeaux is repeatedly bested by several members of the main cast in quick succession, only managing to "win" on technicalities and outside interference, before finally staying down after a Curb-Stomp Battle at the hands of Gash and Kiyomaro (which is Playedfor Laughs). Though he managed to leave the competition in his own terms after turning on Zeon, the truth is that despite his pursuit to be the strongest, Rodeaux lost every real fight he had in the series, more than any other character, and it is made very clear that if he was allowed to actually fight Zeon, he stood no chance against him either.
  • Rodeaux's boss Riou/Leo is also built up as a cruel and powerful antagonist who has no problems with using his clan's curse technique to force unwitting demon children to do his bidding by threatening their loved ones. He even gets to kill Kiyomaro, though he eventually gets better. He is, however, unceremoniously disposed of when Big Bad Zeon suddenly appears before him and utterly humiliates him in a Curb-Stomp Battle, proceeding to seize control of the operation he's spent his entire life planning and making it very clear that he never even stood a chance at becoming Demon King.

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