History VillainDecay / Literature

** Lucius Malfoy. He is introduced as a sinister and cunning master-manipulator, who, while maintaining a benevolent and charitable public image, actively and ruthlessly pursued his ambitious goals, descending to threatening whole families and unleashing an ancient monster on a school. Next time he's just TheDragon, and after his failure and consequent fall-from-grace, he's reduced to an unnerved bystander with little to no involvement in the action.

** ''Literature/TheSilmarillion'': This is explicitly canon for [[GodOfEvil Melkor/Morgoth]]. He starts out out-powering everything else in the universe except for {{God}} and being quite cunning to boot, but as the book progresses he is drastically weakened after squandering his power on evil creations and getting {{Shapeshifter Mode Lock}}ed, and his cunning goes down the drain as he goes increasingly AxCrazy and ends up as OrcusOnHisThrone. He ends up being permanently wounded in a fight with the Elf Fingolfin, despite killing Fingolfin, then has his face scarred by an eagle, and never takes the field again.

** Sauron begins as one of the most powerful Maiar, but puts most of his power in his RingOfPower. And when he is caught in the destruction of Numenor, he is left unable to take [[ShapeshifterModeLock a fair form]].

** In the main book series, Ser Criston Cole is remembered as having been simultaneously Lord Commander of the Kingsguard and Hand of the King, and in that role having made the decision to crown King Aegon II over the named heir, his older sister Rhaenyra, which triggered the Dance of the Dragons and is cited as a reason why the two roles should never be combined. In ''Literature/FireAndBlood'', Cole plays a major role in the Small Council meeting which chooses to crown Aegon - including killing Rhaenyra loyalist Lord Beesbury - but is not the driving force behind the decision, and also is not Hand at the time, onyl being named to that role during the war. In ''Series/HouseOfTheDragon'', Cole is neither Lord Commander nor Hand at the time, and only plays a small role in the Small Council meeting. Unlike in ''Fire and Blood', where his killing of Beesbury is clearly deliberate, in the show it appears somewhat accidental.

** Draco's example is a bit more complex. From the start, he was Harry's greatest rival in school, and the source of most of Harry's non-Voldemort-related troubles. He's even called Harry's arch-nemesis in Book 2. However, once Harry starts facing down Voldemort more, he starts to see Draco less as a menace and more of a nuisance. He basically laughs in Draco's face when the latter threatens him at the end of Book 5. So the trope gets played straight, and then get inverted as mentioned above. It then zig zags in the other direction in Book 7, where Draco is still trying to act like he's a big threat to Harry but no-one, not even his NotSoHarmless [[ThoseTwoBadGuys sidekicks]], actually take him seriously. He becomes such an IneffectualSympatheticVillain that Harry and his friends save him ''twice'' during the final battle even though [[SaveTheVillain he's supposed to be on the other side]].

** Draco's example is a bit more complex. From the start, he was Harry's greatest rival in school, and the source of most of Harry's non-Voldemort-related troubles. He's even called Harry's arch-nemesis in Book 2. However, once Harry starts facing down Voldemort more, he starts to see Draco less as a menace and more of a nuisance. He basically laughs in Draco's face when the latter threatens him at the end of Book 5. So the trope gets played straight, and then get inverted as mentioned above.

** ''Literature/TheSilmarillion'': This is explicitly canon for [[GodOfEvil Melkor/Morgoth]]. He starts out out-powering everything else in the universe except for {{God}} and being quite cunning to boot, but as the book progresses he is drastically weakened after squandering his power on evil creations and getting {{Shapeshifter Mode Lock}}ed, and his cunning goes down the drain as he goes increasingly AxCrazy and ends up as OrcusOnHisThrone. He ends up being permanently wounded in a fight with the Elf Fingolfin, despite killing Fingolfin, then has his face scarred by an eagle.
** That said he still proves to be a really terrible villain who is responsible for much of the troubles of the First Age while in his Fortress. Eventually it takes the Valar to defeat him.
** Sauron begins as one of the most powerful Maia but puts most of their power in their RingOfPower. And when he is caught in the destruction of Numenor he is left unable to take [[ShapeshifterModeLock a fair form]]. That said, despite not having the ring Sauron still comes very close to taking over Middle-Earth and would have succeeded if not for Gollum's unlucky slip.
** One consistent theme is that while the ''power'' of evil drops, the actual ''threat'' remains constant as far as Middle Earth is concerned. The Valar, Mair, and Elves retreat across the sea over time, leaving only the few free Men and the Hobbits to make the last stand with only a single Wizard supporting them.
** {{Inverted}} with the Balrogs as Tolkien worked on his mythology. In ''The Fall of Gondolin'', the first story Tolkien wrote, they're basically thousand-strong EliteMooks who die in the dozens, with the mortal Tuor killing five of them in a single battle. Later he reduced the number to a ''"3 or at most 7"'' and ramped them up to HeroKiller and TheDreaded who drove off [[EldritchAbomination Ungoliant]] and slew the Elf kings Fëanor and Fingon. Only three heroes, Ecthelion, Glorfindel, and Gandalf, successfully defeated a Balrog in one-on-one combat and each case ended in a MutualKill. Although Glorfindel and Gandalf got better.

** Fans have also noted that he seemed a lot more sneaky and clever in the {{Prequels}}. There's a bit of FridgeBrilliance there: when he was just a mid-ranking sub-visser with a Hork-Bajir body, he had to be smart. Once he got Alloran's body and could morph into any nightmarish monster that he wanted, his overreliance on it made him TheBrute.

* ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'':
** Visser Three:
*** He's completely immoral and monstrous, but as a consequence of appearing in almost every book and not killing the Animorphs, he quickly starts to come across as a blundering clod. Visser One even acknowledges this in ''The Visser Chronicles'', comparing him less-than-favorably to the Helmacrons - an egomaniacal alien race who never rise beyond a joke due their self-defeating tendencies. While he does get promoted to Visser One towards the end, he still doesn't undo a lot of this.
*** It becomes funny when even Visser Three starts noticing the effect. "Would it be too much to ask for one of you to actually HIT SOMETHING?!?!"

** But the classic example of villain decay is balrogs - in Lord of the Rings, the Balrog is a terrifying implacable opponent; in the Silmarillion a match for the most powerful elves; but in The Fall of Gondolin a vanilla mortal, Tuor, kills six of them in a single battle.

* Visser Three from ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}''. He's completely immoral and monstrous, but as a consequence of appearing in almost every book and not killing the Animorphs, he quickly starts to come across as a blundering clod. Visser One even acknowledges this in ''The Visser Chronicles'', comparing him less-than-favorably to the Helmacrons. While he does get promoted to Visser One towards the end, he still doesn't undo a lot of this.
** It becomes funny when even Visser Three starts noticing the effect. "Would it be too much to ask for one of you to actually HIT SOMETHING?!?!"

* In the final book of ''Literature/TheDarkTower'' series, [[{{Archenemy}} Walter o'Dim/Randall Flagg]] and the [[BigBad Crimson King]], the two main villains up until that point, are reduced to almost non-entities. In particular Flagg, who had once been considered King's 'ubervillain', is easily dispatched in one chapter by a newly introduced character, who finds him pathetic. This is especially troublesome to some fans, since Flagg has been especially troublesome to numerous Creator/StephenKing characters over the years, even surviving (or, more accurately, respawning after) a nuclear blast. Having Mordred kill him is obviously to establish Mordred as even more sinister and dangerous than Flagg, but that's a bit hard, if not impossible, after developing the Flagg character for decades and across numerous books. Made worse by the fact that Mordred's death is very anticlimactic (weakened by food poisoning due to eating the disease-ridden corpse of Lippy the horse, Roland kills him with one shot).

* Section 31 in the Franchise/StarTrekNovelVerse has been getting hit hard with this lately. In their original television appearances, Section 31 agents could dance circles around other foreign intelligence services and had some truly devious, if extremely morally questionable, {{Batman Gambit}}s going on. Now, their operations are routinely foiled by Julian Bashir and his allies. In fact, despite Bashir ruining several of their master plans, Section 31 remains absolutely obsessed with recruiting him to the extent that it borders on StalkerWithACrush territory. They're portrayed as so incompetent at their mission of protecting the Federation that they fail to prevent [[spoiler:the assassination of President Nanietta Bacco]] but also [[spoiler:don't know that her successor is a Cardassian mole.]] It seems David Mack realized this and ''Literature/StarTrekSection31Control'' undid this, [[TheBadGuyWins hard]]. [[spoiler:All those failures? The AI controlling Section 31 planned for them and recruited Bashir to help take down the agency.]]

* Rat and Jolly U in ''Literature/AliceGirlFromTheFuture''. When they appear for the first few times, they are cold-blooded murderers who don't shy away from torture, but then, as a preteen girl continues to defeat them again, and again, and again (and the fans grow used to them), things change. In ''A Girl From Earth'', everyone is frozen with horror at the idea of two space pirates still on the loose, and in the later stories, it's more like: "[[FriendlyEnemy Alice's friends]] Rat and Jolly U are running around somewhere – oh well".

* For a slightly less deadly kind of enemy, by the last ''Bridget Jones'' book, the arch cad and menace to happy relationships Daniel Cleaver has been demoted to eccentric friend who babysit's Bridget's children.