Misused: Arc Villain

The term Big Bad originates from Buffy The Vampire Slayer which didn't have a single villain driving the plot of the whole series, instead having a different main villain each season. A definition of Big Bad that would exclude the Buffy examples doesn't seem right.

I think I know where the confusion came from. There are a lot of Shōnen manga/anime examples on the Arc Villain page, more than for any other kind of media. And those series tend to be made up almost exclusively on Story Arc episodes, with Standalone Episodes only cropping up near the beginning of the series, and occasionally as a Breather Episode later on. In that context, a Story Arc whose villain isn't related to anything outside that Story Arc serves pretty much the same purpose as a Monster of the Week episode would in a less serialized show.

For instance, in Naruto the villain Gato is the main instigator of events for a thirteen episode Story Arc. If he were on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that'd qualify him as a Big Bad, no question; Buffy's first Big Bad was only around for twelve episodes, and half of those were Monster of the Week eps that had nothing to do with him. However, Naruto would later go on to have Story Arcs that would last hundreds of episodes; given that, calling Gato one of the show's Big Bads seems kinda odd.

Okay, so if I'm getting this right, Monster of the Week, Arc Villain and Big Bad are The Heavy of a particular plot within a series.

• The Monster of the Week is simply the Heavy for a single episode (at most, a two-part episode) but is no more or less important than any other Heavy that appears on the show. What distinguishes this character is that there are many, many like him/her of roughly equal importance.
• An Arc Villain is a Heavy that drives or controls the plot for any arc which is below the Myth Arc. It requires an entire story arc to resolve their threat. However, if the Myth Arc lacks a Heavy, this character can also be considered one of several Big Bads, perhaps stretching from season to season. But only if they were acting of their own whims and not directly under the authority of a true Big Bad.
• The true Big Bad is the Heavy behind the overall Myth Arc—for the most part, they're the reason the show exists or continues to exist. Defeating them may not end the story, but the repercussions they set in motion still continue to be a driving force in the plot.

Examples of each, taken from Bleach:

• Monster of the Week: Hollows like Shrieker, Bulbous G, Fishbone D, and the Grand Fisher.
• Arc Villain: Soul Society Arc: Renji & Byakuya; Arrancar Arc: Grimmjow and Ulquiorra; Lost Agent Arc: Tsukishima & Ginjo (also overlaps with Big Bad); Blood War arc: Yhwach (also overlaps with Big Bad)
• Big Bad: Aizen; Ginjou; Yhwach

Or, from Stargate SG-1:

• Arc Villain: Col. Simmons, who acts as an antagonist between the fall of Apophis and the rise of Anubis, but doesn't drive the overall Myth Arc. Also Sokar, who overthrows Apophis for a few episodes then gets knocked off and Apophis returns.
• Big Bad: Apophis and Anubis, major story-driving villains for several seasons at a time.

edited 6th May '13 9:04:49 AM by StarSword

Ideally, then, we'd appropriate The Heavy for the usage most uses of Big Bad are going for, use Big Bad for the villain of a particular plot line, Arc Villain for a multi-episode Monster of the Week, and create a new trope for the villain of the whole series. But I can understand if people don't want to mess with one of the two most-linked pages on the entire wiki.

I'm not quite sure how what the best solution is to this discussion, but just to make life more complicated:

See also Bigger Bad.

That's what I was thinking, but, we'd have to come up with REALLY FRAKKING GOOD trope if we're going to supplant the Troper subconscious of Big Bad meaning "THE Villain". Further, that would lead us right back to where we started with a bunch of Big Bad wicks to fix.

edited 6th May '13 10:11:57 AM by KingZeal

I think it is interesting how The Heavy has gotten much less use.

While I imagine it is a preexiting term, the defintion we are using is not the defintion I would think of going by the title.

I would think of The Heavy as being a Dumb Muscle or The Big Guy sort of character that is more likely to be a bruiser sidekick mook than the head badguy. He would be the big heavy guy that hangs around the mob boss and lays the beat down on whoever he the mob boss tells him to.

We actually have a separate TRS thread that tackles that very issue. It's just that the definition of The Heavy apparently has become somewhat tied into this issue right now.

EDIT: Courtesy link.

edited 6th May '13 10:38:11 AM by WaxingName

@Catbert: Bigger Bad is a different concept. It's when the work's Big Bad has a boss, basically: a villainous presence who is more prominent in the setting, but not the work itself. So, for example, Emperor Palpatine during Episodes IV and V. He's the man running The Empire and the guy the Rebellion wants to get rid of, but the villain driving the plot of the film is Wilhuff Tarkin in IV with Darth Vader as The Dragon, with Vader replacing him in V. Palps doesn't take center stage until Return of the Jedi.

edited 6th May '13 11:10:02 AM by StarSword

The Heavy is a pre-exiting term that comes down to the person who has to play the antagonist role in a story, not necessarily the villain of the story but the person who makes the hero's issues more difficult. The basic example is the Bad Boss who fires the hero and the hero has to struggle finding another job. Yes they are the bad guy but the hero struggling against the bad boss isn't what the story is about.

So I guess if we broke it down:

• Arc Villain: Villain for a story arc
• The Heavy: Someone who brings a villainous role to the story
• Big Bad: Villain who is responsible for the overarching conflict and whose defeat is crucial to ending the story
• Bigger Bad: Villain who is revealed as being a greater force above that of another Big Bad

How would The Man Behind the Man fit into that?

Man Behind the Man is more of a plot trope than a character trope, where you have a decoy villain and it is revealed that there is someone behind their actions. It typically involves following a chain of command that leads to the Big Bad. It differs from Bigger Bad in that they are always directly in charge of what the previous person was doing.

edited 6th May '13 12:32:12 PM by KJMackley

Once again, let me try to break it down.

The Heavy: The main villainous force in a particular story, whether it be an entire franchise, a work, an arc, or an episode.

Best example I can think of: Darth Vader of Star Wars, except for Episodes III & VI.

Monster of the Week: The Heavy in a single disposable conflict such as one skirmish, case, or caper within a much larger mythos.

Best example I can think of: Voltron Ro-Beasts.

Arc Villain: The Heavy in a much larger conflict which involves some sort of journey for the hero. However, this villain is NOT The Heavy of the Myth Arc. Their influence does not control or perpetuate the central conflict.

Best example I can think of: President Shinra of Final Fantasy VII

Big Bad: The Heavy of the Myth Arc, series, work, or franchise as a whole. The villain whose influence controls, perpetuates, or instigates the major conflict which the entire series drives around. Even if defeated at some point, the conflicts they've started continue on without them.

Best example I can think of: Sosuke Aizen of Bleach

Bigger Bad: Some sort of guiding force for the Big Bad. They are NOT The Heavy, because the Heavy was the one whose hand wrought the conflict. Even if tricked or manipulated, the Big Bad is the man to beat. Stopping him (at least before a certain point) will end the problem which he started. However, the Bigger Bad may become the final threat after the Big Bad has unsealed its can or something. The Bigger Bad can be considered the foundation upon which the Big Bad sits, while the Big Bad is the actual castle you need to siege.

Best example I can think of: The Aldmeri Dominion of Skyrim

edited 6th May '13 12:35:53 PM by KingZeal

I'm starting to think if we don't cut Arc Villain, we're gonna have to rename it. Otherwise it might be impossible to not make the Trope Namer of Big Bad no longer an example of it.

edited 6th May '13 12:51:34 PM by MorganWick

About Bigger Bad, here is the distinction created by Master Ghandalf in the discussion page: "In a more general sense, the Big Bad is at the heart of the story as much as The Hero is, because they're directly causing things to happen. A Bigger Bad is more of a background presence that adds depth to the setting (and in some cases foreshadows the next step up on the Sorting Algorithm of Evil) but is only tangentally involved at most with the matter at hand. "

See, the problem is that it's easy to write up a hypothetical distinction between a group of related/overlapping tropes, but it's extremely hard to get most of the wiki to agree on this. In practice, hypothetical distinctions don't help us much.

Morgan: I fail to see the problem here. I like King Zeal's set of distinctions.

I could set up a crowner, but I don't even know how I could set it up in such a way that verifies if the tropers think they are distinct or not.

It would be a crowner for how we think Big Bad is defined, I think. That's kind of the key point here.

This thread is about Arc Villain, so we should have a page action crowner that decides whether we want to rename, redefine, or merge that page.

But we basically know what Arc Villain means. What we don't know is what Big Bad means.

@Spark 9: Made a crowner. This one's all about what we should do, then after we decide, we can have another crowner that decides how we should do it.

I'm going to lock this one up. It was made under a fundamental misunderstanding of how tropes work, namely the idea that tropes can in fact overlap. There's a little cleaning to be done as villains get promoted and demoted in the course of a long running series, but that doesn't require a TRS thread.