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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
The three elements that make up a good villain, in my opinion, are:
1. A Sympathetic backstory. Generic Doomsday Villains get boring after a while, and... well, everyone knows why an Anti-Villain is good. They raise (though don't necessarily provide the solution to) nice moral dilemmas, and are generally much more fun to watch and root for if the story spends a significant amount of time on them.
2. Depravity. While Generic Doomsday Villains can get boring, so can grey morality. Sometimes it's just fun to watch a hammy bastard try and murder everyone for shits and giggles.
3. Good execution. For instance, ![]()
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Hela wasn't a very complex person, but Cate Blanchett's performance and Taika Waititi's script made her instantly more memorable than Ronan or Yellowjacket.
Thanos managed to get a good blend of all of these traits (sympathetic and understandable motives, an utterly insane plan that mostly existed to feed his ego, good performance by Josh Brolin), so he was memorable. Doom naturally has the first two, so as long as they get a good actor and don't make one of the first two traits dominate the other he should continue to be awesome and terrifying.
I guess I'm in the small minority that likes Ronan as a villain, even if he's rather one-dimensional.
I kinda wished he had a bigger role in Captain Marvel (2019), mostly so we could see how he descended from a high-ranking member of the Kree army to a radical terrorist.
Agreed, that was probably what I liked least about Captain Marvel.
"Oh, sweet! Ronan's back! Maybe we can actually learn about his motives and descent into genocidal insanity!"
"Holy shit, Coulson's appearing in another movie? Fuck yes!"
"Wow, it's... uh... Djimon Hounsou's character. Okay, that's cool."
Aaaaand they did nothing with them.
Edited by EmeraldEmperor on Dec 16th 2020 at 6:35:48 AM
I agree that Hela could have used more focus, but I feel like part of the reason she is so memorable is because her scenes are limited. She hams it up in every moment she's on screen- taking down entire armies and the main heroes without even batting an eye.
She's just a bad bitch who's fun to watch. She even fits the theme of family drama that was prevalent in the other Thor movies.
Captain Marvel's most important villain is Yonn-Rogg (sp?). That's whom she wins a moral victory over. The rest are window dressing — or red herrings, like Talos. Ronan isn't someone whose motives we need to worry about. He represents the implacable, destructive power of the Kree empire, and it's a bonus because we already recognize him as a villain. Recycling him saves the film the effort of explaining that he's a bad guy, and it also foreshadows that the Kree themselves are bad (for the viewers who didn't already know).
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 16th 2020 at 9:41:17 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I know, I know, but it's still feels like a waste to bring back these characters and do absolutely nothing with them. And the sequel is confirmed to be in the present, so the Sequel Hook of Ronan being interested in Carol is similarly useless.
Ronan is interesting because of his narrative circumstances.
He had to share his film with five heroes' origin stories. A lot of villains (Kaecillius, Yellowjacket, ect.) struggle to make an impression just sharing a film with one hero's. The fact that he came out decently memorable for a character who's ultimately just a final exam for the heroes to prove their teamwork against is impressive.
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!Really, he has it way better than Korath.
I like how Captain Marvel almost gave Korath a personality, but not really. He's got exactly two character traits (takes the name Star Lord seriously, never laughs) across two entire movies.
I like Ronan. Separate from the conversation we just had about motivations, I"ve always felt that he makes a good counter to Malekith on how a relatable motivation can help otherwise two dimensional antagonists.
Not to say a motive can't be silly (just look at Thanos). But that, sure, if you're going to do a villain who's kind of throwaway and isn't going to be going through much in the story, you should give them a motivation or backstory that's easy for the audience to latch onto so that they're can follow them pretty easy. But if you're going to give a villain a batshit crazy motivation ("I hate light, and want to destroy it!") that's fine, but commit to it. Silly motivations die when your villain doesn't get much screentime or development. Make us believe that ridiculous motivation, otherwise they're just going to attract jokes.
Like Ego. This is a guy who thinks he is so perfect that all other life in the universe needs to die. That's nuts. So Ego got lots of focus so that they could sell that motivation anyway.
Malekith has basically nothing, which isn't helped by the fact that what he's trying to do is vague and doesn't make a lot of sense. Ronan has very little as well, but at the very least the audience can understand "a zealot from a war, who turned to terrorism when the war ended" and can plug into the guy right away.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Dec 17th 2020 at 12:58:49 PM
Of course, that's pretty much self-inflicted since he's also so full of himself (it's right there in the name "Ego" after all) that when he first met other people, he found them "disappointing". Presumably because they weren't also giant god-like brain monsters.
Edited by M84 on Dec 17th 2020 at 5:22:17 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedHow is this an example of hypocrisy?
His plan to wipe out half the population of the universe is still there just for different reasons. It's still a cosmic story in that regard and he isn't any less of a threat.
Much of what Thanos does involves taking away people's ability to fight against him or removing their freedom of choice, while crowing about he's the only one willing to truly fight for what he believes in.
The most obvious example of this is his confrontation with Star-Lord, but most of what he does involves him creatively interpreting situations so that he can say he's the only person in them whose fighting is actually worthwhile.
His treatment of Etri, especially - breaking the deal he coerced, in order to ensure that nobody else will ever have a power that rivals his own - is a pretty nasty indicator of the kind of person he really is.
Both motivations are kind of petty when you think about it. In the comics, he wanted to kill off half the universe to impress a woman. In the movies, he wanted to kill off half the universe (and later the entire universe) because he's trying to prove he was right to his dead peers.
Disgusted, but not surprisedWhat did you expect from The Mad Titan? He may be sympathetic but then again, so was Ganondorf in The Wind Waker. It doesn't make them less evil, only more pitiful since you can see their potential to be good and yet they let themselves go down the dark path and there's no hope of convincing them otherwise.
Edited by Shadao on Dec 17th 2020 at 2:02:15 AM

I don't know if I posted this before, but here's some scans
of Scott Lang beating the shit out of Doom while giving him a "The Reason You Suck" Speech. I don't know the full context of the scene, but I think it gets across some of the points brought up in this discussion.