Discussion Main / NotSoHarmlessVillain

A lot of these examples are either villains who were always serious but didn't seem so at first, which is Beware the Silly Ones, or villains who were a joke in another work but are serious in this version, which is Adaptational Badass. I think there needs to be a mass clean-up and removal of these erroneous examples.

I pulled this:

• The Auditors of Reality of Discworld. While they are Obstructive Bureaucrat Eldritch Abominations, much of the time, they are presented as pretty ridiculous and played for laughs. However, when they get a plan into action to cause The End of the World as We Know It, they don't seem so funny anymore.

The auditors have appeared in four books. While in all of them, the fact they could be destroyed just by using personal pronouns was Played for Laughs, this didn't initially reduce their threat, since there's a theoretically infinite number of them. When they first appeared in Reaper Man, they successfully got Death removed and replaced by a much crueller figure, and were only defeated by the intervention of one of the Old High Ones. In their second appearance in Hogfather they came very close to removing imagination from the world, which would have essentially stopped humans being human, and their Omnicidal Maniac qualities were emphasised in Death's conversation with Susan. The third appearance in Thief Of Time is the one described above.

... and then we got The Science Of Discworld III where their Weaksauce Weakness from Thief of Time (which only worked in that book because of very specific circumstances) is emphasised and - once the wizards realise they're behind things - they don't really seem to be a serious threat at all.

Putting this here per Fast Eddie's recommendation on ATT. It's very very interesting; it just doesn't belong on the main page.

• This change in personality is usually explained by saying that Joker has Multiple Personality Disorder (maybe) and that every few years he can go from harmless to mildly evil to pure evil on a whim (though the real reason is because The Comic Code was imposed on The Joker for 20 years).
• The de-fanging of Batman's villains began some years before, mostly due to a general shift in tone brought on by Dick Sprang's cartoonier style and the typically crazy plot twists of the late Golden Age. As Mark Waid notes in the afterward to The Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told, by the mid-40s the Joker was far less likely to kill. As a trade-off, the stories tended to be much more clever and colorful.
• While it may or may not be canon, the Joker's Cerebus Rollercoaster tendencies are generally considered to be very much in character: someone so chaotic would go from making smiley fish in one story to making the streets run red the next. Standard crazy would Poke the Poodle consistently or be Ax-Crazy consistently depending on what his Freudian Excuse had him thinking he should do: the Condiment King is never going to nuke a city; Ra's al Ghul is never going to commit petty theft. The Joker's mindset is so far from that of the next-most-messed-up guy that ''madness is his superpower," so don't count on him to make that much sense. "Never give 'em what they expect."
• This is so much in his character now that when he faced off against the Midnighter, the latter didn't do his normal "I've already fought our battle a million times in the supercomputer in my head and know everything you could possibly do" Badass Boast but was paralyzed because he had no idea how to fight the Joker. This is a guy who routinely and nonchalantly takes on superhumans multiple times more powerful than he is, while the Joker, aside from his insanity, is at best a mediocre physical combatant with normal human capabilities.

Added Tetsuo to this even though he's also on From Nobody to Nightmare because a kid in a biker gang who bashes someone's head in with a crowbar is far from being heroic. He probably belongs on both pages due to the fact that, at least through Kaneda's perspective, a bunch of psychopathic kids trying to murder each other on the streets are the good guys.