Examples on trope pages such as: "Big Bad" and "Final Battle"

Should there even be examples on trope pages like these where there are so many to even name? Almost every action-oriented movie and video game will have these tropes, and the "Big Bad" slot is absent only on occasion for any genre of work. Should the trope pages be there solely to describe the trope such as the "Boss Battle" page without including examples?

If a trope is omnipresent, this not needs examples and their aversion can be listed. Question: Final Battle is "the Climax of the story is a battle", right? Or is merely "the last battle of the story"? If this is the latter, this not sounds tropeworthy and not deserves examples or trope page.

Not all works have a Big Bad, heck not all works have a Hero or Villain too. It is good to label these in a story Big Bad, The Dragon The Heavy The Hero, it is the role they serve in the story.

There is no such thing as "too many examples". Recording examples is part of our purpose, no matter how many.

Now, there are some tropes that appear in literally almost every work, the Omnipresent Tropes, like Conflict and Plot. These don't merit examples, really.

I don't think that either Big Bad or Final Battle qualify as OT.

Mag Bas, as long as the "final fight of the story" in question is the highest point of the story (that is the definition of "climax"), such as where the entire plot could be resolved if The Hero wins, then it is The Climax (or at least part of The Climax).

On the other hand, if it is just some fight thrown in there for good measure and does not really have any huge plot significance, then I don't think it would qualify as a true "climax"

Normally, we do not list examples of Omnipresent Tropes like The Hero, Big Bad, The Climax, Final Battle, etc., because they're so fundamental that they don't make for interesting reading.

edited 29th Dec '14 5:44:18 PM by Fighteer

they are not quite 'Omnipresent', they are only that in certain genres. A Slice of Life show for example will usually not have a Big Bad, The Hero The Climax or even an Antagonist.

Each one serves a role in a story though and Big Bad for example can be quite interesting in a lot of ways such as why and how they are the Big Bad, what made them the target of the hero, do they control a corporation of underlings and such. Stuff like The Climax though I agree.

What normally happens is that those tropes get used inline with other examples. "Evil Sorcerer: The Big Bad, Bob, is ..."

I actually feel like all of the mentioned tropes are able to have examples, in the sense that you can actually write them up in detail (as opposed to something like The Protagonist, where it's hard to write anything but "[Name] is the main character").

^Well that would be the exact same thing for Big Bad as well.

Only because people commonly conflate the meaning of Big Bad with villain.

Exactly, The Big Bad is just one type of villain, there are many other types such as The Heavy, Bigger Bad, Goldfish Poop Gang, The Dragon, Mooks etc. There is a Villain Hierarchy that writers follow.

edited 31st Dec '14 2:37:22 PM by Memers

That is a good point. Villain may be too universal to trope, but Big Bad is a more concrete trope that has specific criteria to be met.

edited 31st Dec '14 2:52:23 PM by Fighteer

Agreeing with the others. Big Bad does NOT mean "main antagonist". It means "Villain (or Anti-Villain) who causes the main conflict (or at least one of the main conflicts)".

Not a Big Bad: Gaston from Beauty And The Beast. While he is the primary antagonist, the main conflict of the movie is the curse that affects the Beast, which Gaston has nothing to do with. He just serves as an annoyance throughout the movie and his only role as a villain is in the final act of the story.

Big Bad: Rourke from Atlantis The Lost Empire. Sure, he may not have much to do with Atlantis' exact situation and only has a villainous role in the last act (like Gaston). But he has one important role: leading Milo down to Atlantis in the first place. Without Rourke, the plot wouldn't have happened, and Milo wouldn't have been down in Atlantis.

The main conflict can also be partitioned into smaller conflicts, each of which are due to the Big Bad's influence. Big Bad isn't the same as Antagonist, either.

edited 1st Jan '15 7:38:36 AM by crazysamaritan

Big Bad and Final Battle are defined by their examples, they do not represent the whole of anything but are specific ideas. Antagonist and Denouement is maybe a little closer to the "so broad examples are meaningless" but there is still a lot you can gain from seeing examples in relation to the definition.

It is Omnipresent Tropes that tend to be defined better by other tropes rather than examples.

I think tropes like The Protagonist and The Antagonist are still interesting to list because they describe (if written properly) who in the whole work fit those tropes, and why. I also think context-less examples are particularly bad with those.