Seems to be three different tropes: Villain Corner

One trope is when a character slowly becomes more evil. Another is when a character slowly reveals the fact that he's evil. A third is when a character commits more and more questionable actions while still being portrayed as good. We've already got a trope that's pretty close to the third, though I'm not sure how we divide the other two.

Actually, I always understood this in a fourth way - morally ambiguous character commits increasingly questionable actions to set up him or her becoming a morally unambiguous villain.

Villain Corner found in: 14 articles, excluding discussions.

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Trope definitely needs something. I tend to suspect that too-clever and obscure name is a factor, but I'm not sure. How long ago was this launched?

What this looks like is when a story drops hints through a characters actions that said character is going to do a Face–Heel Turn

The description could be a little better, it mostly needs a new name though. That name is really opaque on first glance.

How about "Face Heel Slide"?

That's pretty good actually.

Heck, even if it were just something like Painted Into The Villain Corner, that would make a lot more sense. That's what the description says the name is supposed to mean, but for some reason, it wasn't just called that.

Not that I object to other, possibly better, suggestions, of course. But I think merely adding those three missing words would vastly improve the clarity of the name. "Painted into a corner" is an common idiom that most people will be familiar with, I suspect.

I dislike Face Heel Slide for some reason. Inching Down The Slippery Slope?

I think Painted Into The Villain Corner is okay for trope 2.

In addition to the issues that feotakahari mentioned, I am confused about whether this trope is supposed to direct or not.

The first sentence of the description says that "[w]hen a certain (allegedly) non-villainous character starts getting explicitly dark character development, they are being painted into the Villain Corner." However, a later sentence explains that "[t]he problem is that the on-screen/in-print characterization clearly points to a hidden evil side (or, at best, hidden agenda) long before we're supposed to suspect such." I could definitely be missing something here, but those two sentences seem kind of contradictory to me.

As for the issues at hand, I believe that the first trope mentioned is what Villain Corner should be about as Noir Grimoir mentioned.

In terms of crowners, I can make page action one if other people would like one, but I am not totally sure what options to include right now.

Part of it is the page is pretty negative. it pretty much says this tropes is a bad tactic because then everyone will see it coming. Which actually isn't even inherently bad. We don't judge tropes, we just present them, it needs to be more neutral.

edited 24th Aug '11 2:58:23 PM by NoirGrimoir

I took out the ""[t]he problem is that the on-screen/in-print characterization clearly points to a hidden evil side (or, at best, hidden agenda) long before we're supposed to suspect such" line in hopes that will make the trope description a bit more neutral. I figure that the part at the end about a clever audience is not really that negative so I did not edit it out, but I welcome feedback on the change to the description.