Misused: Arc Villain

@19: Which is why merging in Arc Villain is much easier.

Brother Blood was a Filler Villain. Nobody ever mentioned him after those four episodes. Same with the Brain.

Arc Villain is supposed to be "The prime villain of one story arc", whereas Big Bad is "prime villain through the Myth Arc."

Unfortunately, Big Bad is used for Arc Villain so much that I think it's just easier to merge the two. It's a useful distinction, but that train left the station ages ago.

I've opposed just giving up in the past, but I think in this case, it might be the best move. :P

Look at Mass Effect. I highly doubt Balak, the villain for a DLC, counts as a Big Bad in the same way that Sovereign did.

That's what Arc Villain is for.

edited 2nd May '13 9:50:21 AM by Sledgesaul

That's a distinction I hadn't really thought of before. Arc Villain is really for villains that were important for just one arc. I think we're clear about that. If we include villains who are there for multiple arcs like with Crocodile under Big Bad that could probably let us keep rather a lot of the examples from Big Bad. It would also match our current trend of usage better and therefore would be more likely to stay clean.

I think Arc Villain would actually be improved by pulling away from connecting it to the Big Bad, as just because you are the villain of an arc doesn't mean you are the driving force behind the conflict. For example before Sela came along Admiral Tomalok from Star Trek The Next Generation sort of represented the Romulan conflict but he wasn't the reason there was a conflict.

I guess in that way Big Bad is often misused as the Final Boss even if they weren't responsible for the stuff in the main story, such as the claims of Dark Willow being the Big Bad of Buffy Season Six.

edited 2nd May '13 10:58:12 AM by KJMackley

I think that, given the size of Big Bad, it is wildly impractical to list what you think the distinction should be between Big Bad and Arc Villain, because apparently the hundreds of tropers who populated both pages did not agree with you.

Practically speaking, we either have to consensually agree on a split THEN make this clear to the entire wiki somehow THEN do a boatload of cleanup work, OR we have to merge these pages.

Like I said, the current distinction is real and useful... and also completely confusable and unenforceable.

Thus my throwing in the towel and advocating a merge. :)

I keep seeing this term used to mean "bad guy who is a leader in some manner", such as numerous listings of "The Big Bad of the episode"

This seems...very, very wrong.

Then maybe we need to relax the definition of Big Bad in general.

ETA: Unless someone is volunteering to catch the more egregious/subtle misuses not covered under another trope, as in .

edited 2nd May '13 2:52:04 PM by Leaper

I'm not sure how I feel about "Big Bad of the episode," but "Final Boss = Big Bad" is definitely wrong. Haven't encountered too much of that myself, though.

Barring Giant Space Flea from Nowhere or a more threatening The Dragon, you want the Big Bad to be the Final Boss, so it's easy to see the confusion there. A great deal of overlap, but not the same.

I can easily think of examples where the Big Bad isn't the final fight.

No one's arguing elsewise.

It usually is, though.

^^ Then I must have misunderstood. It sounded like you were saying that apart from the space fleas and Dragon Their Feet the big bad is the final fight. Guess you were actually saying that that's just how people perceive it.

edited 2nd May '13 5:49:41 PM by Arha

More or less. Specifically that both as a game designer and as a player you want the Big Bad to be the Final Boss, because that makes for a good and natural climax. And when tropers want a trope to fit, hammers are applied. And if you don't look up the difference, it's not a hard mistake to make, as with most similar tropes.

@21:

Not "the" story per se, but "a" story. So whether the "story" in question happens to be a standalone work, or one season of an ongoing production run is effectively irrelevant to how it's used in practice.

edited 3rd May '13 6:52:27 AM by Stratadrake

Yes.

After all, it is a pretty large Super-Trope so claiming that a given example doesn't belong because it's "covered by a Sub-Trope" (whichever subtrope that may be aside) just doesn't make any sense.

I agree with Stratadrake. To put it in book terms, a character can still be a Big Bad even if he is only the Big Bad of a one book out of a series or a handful of books out of a series. He need not necessarily be the Big Bad of EVERY book in the series.

I would say in principle for an episodic tv show a one-episode villain doesn't qualify because you don't have the time to establish them with the over-arcing driving force that a Big Bad needs to be, instead they are simply a Villain of the Week. There might be some exceptions but we need to be careful not to think the Big Bad is the supertrope to all other "main villain" tropes.

A book series is different because those are like movies and you do have the time to establish and build up a character.

Compare "book" with "season" and "chapter" with "episode"

I agree that you wouldn't exactly refer to a Monster of the Week as a Big Bad in pretty much any context.

I think part of the problem is that Big Bad was originally supposed to be Arc Villain, but has been used as the counterpoint to The Hero for so long it's fallen well out of focus.

I'm hesitant to simply let Big Bad mean "main villain" or "the villain", though, even though that's how it's used in thousands and thousands of pages. It's way too much of a neologism for such a universal trope, betraying its origins as something more specific.

edited 3rd May '13 8:11:05 PM by MorganWick