Unclear Description: The Heavy

Is this trope a duplicate of Villains Act, Heroes React or a subtrope of The Dragon? I have used it in the latter sense: The Dragon is not more dangerous than the Big Bad but yet does more of direct plot relevance.

edited 23rd Jul '12 2:38:44 PM by Lophotrochozoa

I use The Heavy to refer to the villain that gets the most face-time and development (and the top-billed villain in a film or play). This can be the Big Bad or The Dragon, or even someone else. It's mostly about how the work presents the characters, rather than who's in charge. For Dragons who are more dangerous than their bosses, that's Dragon-in-Chief, who is likely to also be The Heavy, but isn't the same concept.

That is what I have in mind. The reason why I wrote that it's a subtrope of The Dragon is that I thought the Big Bad would be The Heavy by default.

It can only be a subtrope of The Dragon if every example is also an example of The Dragon.

Big Bads are shadowy manipulatorsat least as oftn as they are direct threats. Some Big Bads are The Heavy, some aren't. For example, Emperor Palpatine is the Big Bad of Star Wars, but is only The Heavy in Revenge of the Sith and Return of the Jedi. On the other hand, the Joker is both Big Bad and The Heavy of The Dark Knight. So the Big Bad is not The Heavy by default, though some certainly are. The Heavy can be any villain, so long as they're the most featured, top-billed villain. It's not a subtrope of another villain archetype.

Outside the wiki, I think the term is most commonly used to refer to someone who "throws his weight around"—that is, someone who tries to pressure or intimidate people. It's not about being the big boss or not—The Heavy is the person who most naturally issues the threats. It might be the boss, the dragon, or simply the big guy. Or even, the small, fast, heavily armed guy. Or the Amoral Attorney.

Being The Heavy (as the rest of the world uses the term) is about using your (figurative, not literal) weight to get what you want. It's not even necessarily limited to villains. It could be your superior trying to get you to shape up, or to forget about the one that got away and focus on your current case.

Clocking as inactive.

I Thought It Meant either some guy who is fat, or that explosives dude from Team Fortress...

Here's what the dictionary has to say, under noun, which is the category that concerns us:

n. pl. heav·ies
1. a. A serious or tragic role in a play. b. An actor playing such a role.
2. Slang A villain in a story or play.
3. Slang A mobster.
4. Slang One that is very important or influential: a media heavy.

I suspect they may be overlooking some nuance in the slang meanings (not uncommon), but even so, the name seems like it may just be too ambiguous, especially in a media context like TV Tropes.

edited 12th Sep '12 8:26:29 PM by Xtifr

The explosives guy is the Demoman. The Heavy is the huge russian with the minigun.

So it's a pre-existing term.

How about Heavy Role? Heavy Antagonist? Heavy Villain? Or a combination of the first or latter two.

edited 13th Sep '12 7:52:22 AM by KingZeal

People using the term the same way we're using it:

in a bestselling book on screen-writing.

in a book by Paul Mooney (less authoratative, but he is a writer)

and more.

That was just a few minutes of searching. Can we treat renaming this as a last resort? They're are other things to be fixed before it comes to that.

edited 13th Sep '12 8:50:19 AM by abk0100

And I can also post numerous links to people using the term in another way than we do. What exactly does that prove, either way?

I still think a pre-existing term is far better than one we make up. Is there another pre-existing term that doesn't cause any confusion?

edited 13th Sep '12 11:10:49 AM by abk0100

The problem is that this is an adjective which has been "nouned" in a variety of ways over the centuries, so there is no single "pre-existing use" we can point to. As I pointed out, the dictionary has four definitions of it as a noun. And it's pretty vague. The OED would probably give us a lot more, with a lot more detail on each one.

I'm most used to seeing it in Hardboiled Detective fiction (a genre I like so much that I ended up writing the trope), where it's generally used as I described above. But other genres and other eras may use it differently, and therein lies the problem.

I suggest the names Active Villain, Most Active Villain as possible substitutes. And I agree that The Heavy is way too ambiguous to be effective since the word "heavy" is used in a variety of ways today that have little to do with the trope's definition, which is definitely not helped by the presence of Team Fortress 2.

*bump*

Agreeing that the current name has way too many possible meanings. The adjective "heavy" has many different meanings and connotations that could be hypothetically nouned.

I've personally never heard the term used for the trope, for what it's worth, and never would have guessed that "The Heavy" meant "the main mover-and-shaker in the work (who is always a villain because Villains Act, Heroes React)".

edited 30th Nov '12 9:12:08 PM by Pig_catapult

Is it misused or underused?

...so this is supposed to be something like the Advertised Antagonist? :P

Unclear description (which is something we should fix in any case), combined with a possibly misleading name. We'd need a wick-check to declare actual misuse and really justify a rename, but I think there's a good case for saying that a wick check should be done.

Just going by a scan of the links, I notice that two Team Fortress 2 pages link to "The Heavy" — I hope that isn't representative of a good sample.

@Noaqiyeum: The Heavy has nothing to do with advertising.

Well, so are there any other names we could potentially use to replace The Heavy?