History Main / VillainsActHeroesReact

# Most heroes are [[{{Protectorate}} protectors]] of some kind (cops, doctors [in medical dramas], or the parents of children who are being threatened by some [possibly supernatural] evil) and the villain's plans are a threat to the hero's {{Protectorate}}, thus making it impossible for them to be unusually proactive before the story starts.

* Comedy
* Slice of Life
* Romance

[[quoteright:320:[[VideoGame/{{Bomberman}} https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/bomberman_arcade_story.png]]]]

# If the hero actively opposes the villain before the latter has done anything evil, all the audience sees is a DesignatedHero harassing a DesignatedVillain for no reason. Less of a problem for running series where the villain earned his reputation in previous stories, though that can be seen as a belated heroic reaction to the villain's past actions. Alternatively, this dynamic may be more troubling, as it can be a symptom of SeasonalRot, where writers struggling for ideas may turn to simply having the hero pick on a character whose sole reason for being picked on is simply because they oppose the protagonist in some way, with the intention being to drum up conflict which might interest the viewer, regardless of how much sense it makes for the protagonist to act in such a way.

# If the hero actively opposes the villain before the latter has done anything evil, all the audience sees is a DesignatedHero harassing a DesignatedVillain for no reason. Less of a problem for running series where the villain earned his reputation in previous stories, though that can be seen as a belated heroic reaction to the villain's past actions. Alternatively, this dynamic may be more troubling, as it can be a symptom of SeasonalRot, where writers struggling for ideas may turn to simply having the hero pick on a character whose sole reason for being picked on is simply because they oppose the protagonist in some way, regardless of how serious this opposition actually is.

# If the hero actively opposes the villain before the latter has done anything evil, all the audience sees is a DesignatedHero harassing a DesignatedVillain for no reason. Less of a problem for running series where the villain earned his reputation in previous stories, though that can be seen as a belated heroic reaction to the villain's past actions.

An odd fact about the nature of [[SlidingScaleOfProactiveness initiative]] in fiction: If somebody has a {{plan}} at the start of the story, that character is [[AmbitionIsEvil probably a villain]].

# Stories tend to seek to be epic. It is easy to invent the story with epic threat and hero trying to stop it but it is very problematic to invent hero who would try to bring some epic good and villain trying to spoil it. Hero can be active in small stories, where hero try to do something small for comunity and faces greedy villain, but it is hard to imagine story where hero makes epic plan for absolute everlasting good as good relay in things of daily life and it would be hard to come up with idea for something universally good, although one may think about some type of invention for example. If there is some hero like this in fiction, he often ends up as fanatical villain or it is the story of propaganda.

Aversion of this, HeroesActVillainsHinder, comes from stories centering on the actions or emotions of the hero:

** They may be against the HeroAntagonist which is this trope from a different viewpoint.

* Variations on ToBeAMaster which require the hero to go beat up the other masters to claim the title. A variation in that the "villains" are not necessarily evil, and may simply be fellow competitors who want the same title the hero does.

* TheQuest

* Any story set in a world where TheBadGuyWins and the hero must reverse this outcome.

* The VillainProtagonist, obviously because they are the ones with the EvilPlan but this can vary