These look like they're using Overarching Villain as intended: the villain who, being attached to the Myth Arc, spans the work because of their role in the overarching conflict.

AgentsOfSHIELD.Tropes A To E

• Big Bad: The show typically uses a big bad shuffle throughout the season, often correlating with a particular Myth Arc at the time, and every season but the first has had more than one singular big bad. However, the Overarching Villain for most of the show is HYDRA, and the only season where HYDRA isn't directly related to the Big Bad of the season or responsible for the conflict is Season 6.

BigBad.Video Games I To Q

• Mega Man Battle Network, as explained above, has Dr. Wily (or Lord Wily in this continuity) as the Overarching Villain, being the main antagonist of 1, 3, and 6 (attempting to unleash the Life Virus, Alpha, and the Cybeasts respectively). Even if he isn't the antagonist of the other games, he still has some connection to the villains of those games.

Characters.Alex Rider Scorpia

• Overarching Villain: They are the most recurring threat opposing Alex Rider during his missions and they play a major part in the series’ backstory as well as being The Man Behind the Man in the first book.

Characters.My Hero Academia Tomura Shigaraki

• Overarching Villain: He is this for most of the series as most arcs tend to involve him or his subordinates, even in ones where he's not the main threat, like the Internship Arc.

Characters.Trollhunters Gumm Gumms

• Overarching Villain: He is the central antagonist of Trollhunters, being connected to every antagonist and is involved in every major conflict. The protagonists' goal series-wide is to kill him. Even after Morgana usurps him as the Big Bad, the protagonists are still focused on defeating him.

Characters.Ultra Series Ultraman Tregear

• Overarching Villain: Of all of the Ultra Series instalments from Ultraman R/B up to Ultraman Taiga The Movie: New Generation Climax alongside the source of his power, Grimdo, with him either directly antagonizing the heroes or being directly but secretly responsible for the hardships faced by the heroes.

Context Indicates Correct Use (42.9% / 12%)

These look like they're using Overarching Villain as intended: the villain who, being attached to the Myth Arc, spans the work because of their role in the overarching conflict.

Post-Script Season

• Guild Wars:
  • The Myth Arc of the original game covered the first three campaigns and decisively ended in Nightfall with the death of Abaddon. Eye of the North was largely disconnected from the original story and introduced new enemies, races, and massive paradigm shifts for two pre-existing races, serving as an obvious setup for the sequel.

Monster.Digimon

• Digimon World & related games: Analogman is a hacker who arrived in the Digital World and attempted to conquer it. He enslaved multiple Digimon to make living weapons that serve him unwillingly, viewing them as things to use and abuse. After being defeated by Mameo, Analogman tries to blow up the child. Returning as a ghost in Digital Card Battle, he hijacks and kills VenomMyotismon's mind and uses his body as a suit in an attempt to enact vengeance on the protagonist for defeating him before. Analogman's final appearance is in -next 0rder-, where he possesses Tsuzuki Shoma and unleashes a worldwide virus that painfully turns Digimon into violent Machinedramon clones. The process can also be enhanced by torturing the victims. His ultimate goal is to erase the entire Digimon multiverse from existence, just to see what happens next.

Monster.Terminator

• Terminator series: Skynet is a malevolent, megalomaniacal AI, who managed to gain sapience and became paranoid, thinking of humanity as a threat. Taking control over the nuclear warheads, Skynet launched them upon the world, killing billions and reducing the world to ruins. Creating the killer machines, Skynet used them to hunt down and kill any survivors as well as try to destroy the human resistance. Constantly sending Terminators to the past to kill John Connor, the future leader of the human resistance, Skynet tries to keep the future of the Earth as a post-apocalyptic nightmare, leading to the divergence in timelines after the first two films:

Sandbox.Monster Anime And Manga G To N

• Kiba no Tabishounin – The Arms Peddler:
  • Hydra leads a brutal mercenary gang and intends to spread his reputation across the world. His method to do so entails selecting whatever village or caravan he can find and massacring all but one survivor, who he burns his symbol into a body part of choice. His infamy reaches the point he's enlisted by Mayor Browman of Hemden to slaughter Ronel's family, branding and letting his men rape her. When a demonically transformed Ronel rampages, Hydra flees by taking the most congested route, letting innocents and his own men be caught in the crossfire, intent on escaping to become his own king.

TheSociopath.Kamen Rider

• Kamen Rider:
  • The Great Leader of Shocker, the franchise's most iconic villain, is a classic example. Suffering from an intense case of A God Am I, the Great Leader is responsible for founding terrorist organizations and trying to exterminate the population of Japan on numerous occasions and at times is a Bad Boss to several of his followers. His ego is so fragile that he even attempted to kill his own son for defying him.

YMMV.The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt

• Complete Monster:
  • Eredin Bréacc Glas, King of The Wild Hunt, is the ultimate villain of The Witcher saga, the Big Bad of this game, and the Arch-Enemy of Geralt of Rivia. Leader of the "Dearg Ruadhri" (red riders) cavalry, Eredin has led his armies to the genocide of humans on the Aen Elle elf worlds. Able to cross over into other worlds, Eredin participates in massacres of anyone not sufficiently Aen Elle and takes innocents as slaves, even children, until they are "empty" inside and broken. Eredin murders his king Auberon and attempts to capture Ciri to control her Elder Blood and allow him to invade all the worlds he wishes. Chasing Ciri, the Hunt regularly slaughters all those who might help her, and at one point forcibly conscripts Geralt into their ranks, brainwashing him to take part in numerous atrocities. When he encounters Geralt at the end of the third game, Eredin mocks him with how he'll torture Ciri when he no longer needs her. While Eredin wants to escape the coming apocalypse, his sadism, racism, attempted genocide, and cruelty eliminate any sympathy or good intentions and make Eredin without doubt the most evil monster in the worlds of The Witcher.

Context Indicates Misuse (14.3% / 4%)

These look like they're not using Overarching Villain as intended (the villain who, being attached to the Myth Arc, spans the work because of their role in the overarching conflict).

Instead, these look like they're another trope, such as Greater-Scope Villain, Arc Villain, The Man Behind the Man, etc.

Characters.Monster Hunter Spinoff Monsters

• Hijacked by Ganon: Initially, Makili Pietru is set up to be the source of the Black Blight that drives monsters insane. However, once it is purified just like any other monster, returning it to Versa Pietru, it turns out the true source of the Black Blight was Fatalis.

Pantheon.Main House

• Portfolio: Sorcerous Overlord, Those Modeled After The Devil, The Greatest Of The Valar Turned The First Dark Lord, Source of All Malady, Made of Evil, Evil Is Deathly Cold And Burning Hot, The Dark Side Will Make You Forget, Casts A Shadow Over Arda, Creative Sterility, A God Am I, Dark Is Evil, Villains Want Mercy, Lord Of All Discord and Malady, Corruption, Omnicidal Maniac, The Dark Enemy Of Arda And Sure As Hell Lives Up To That Title
  • Added here because it's potholing Overarching Villain and Greater-Scope Villain at the same time, suggesting that one of the two tropes is misuse.

Context is ZCE (21.4% / 6%)

This is a straight pothole, and the rest of the entry doesn't clarify what kind of villain the character really is.

Chaotic Evil

• On the Dream SMP, Dream is described as this, desiring to disrupt the status quo, and has a tendency to do things For the Evulz at times. Despite being a Well-Intentioned Extremist who wants to reunite his server (under his rule), he tends to use extreme methods to do so, having no qualms about destroying countries and gaslighting and manipulating minors, once to the point of suicidality, among many other things.

Cold Ham

• Vicious from Cowboy Bebop. He never raises his voice yet manages to chew the scenery with the best of them.

YMMV.Blade And Soul

• The Scrappy:
  • Ryu is instantly hated after it's revealed he's a double agent, betraying Cricket and the Hongmoon Students and killing off Bunyang. He's also given flak for not being as charismatic as the other antagonists before him, having to contend with Mushin, Jinsoyun, and Zulia.

Context is Uncertain (21.4% / 6%)

There's plenty of information about the type of villain the character is, but not enough context for how they are established within the overarching conflict, especially as compared to other villains that may exist within the work.

Sandbox.Monster Live Action TVP To Z

• Taken: Owen Crawford is a Colonel of the United States Air Force and the head of their secret UFO Project. Ruthless and ambitious, Owen used his charming demeanor to convince his superior's daughter, Anne, to marry him in order to further his career and gain control of the UFO Project, blackmailing him with an alien artifact found by his girlfriend Sue who he beats to death to keep quiet. When trying to reverse-engineer the spaceship they found, he has a pair of psychic twins attempt to pilot the craft, leaving them in there longer than humanly safe which leads to their deaths, remarking that they were already dead when they arrived. Owen then goes after the half-alien child Jacob Clarke, having an affair with Jacob's mother Sally, using her loneliness to get to Jacob so he can have him fly the ship and then kill and dissect him to discover the source of his powers. He is also a cruel and horrible leader, husband and father, threatening to send his wife to an asylum for her alcoholism and treating his son Eric with little respect or love, and forsakes the life of Dr. Kreutz. When Anne reveals his secrets to their sons, Owen has her sent away to a hospital, only to kill her and Bowen and frame their deaths on the latter. A cruel and unfeeling sociopath, Owen would do anything to learn the aliens' secrets, even sacrificing his own family and loved ones to do so.

YMMV.Ben10Omniverse

• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Attea is the princess of the Incurseon empire and daughter of Emperor Milleous. After being thwarted in her first attempt to usurp her father, she is made a general of his army and invades several planets including an assassination attempt on Vilgax. Acquiring mind control serum made from harvested Amber ogia, she uses it to create an army of Way Bads. Attea and Milleous launch a full-scale invasion on Earth, succeeding in taking it over and exiling Ben Tennyson. However Ben manages to escape and returns as Bullfrag and helps to defeat the Incurseon and Way Bad armies. Upon Milleous being arrested, Attea reveals she was the one who freed Ben and that the entire war was one elaborate ploy to get her father removed so she could take over the empire.

YMMV.Five Nights At Candys

• Complete Monster: RAT was a callous, violent alcoholic in life, until one of his coworkers killed him in self-defense after he tried to strangle him to death for demanding he go home after showing up to work drunk. Since he was playing hide-and-seek with Mary Schmidt at the time of his death, he blamed her for it and retaliated by mutilating her brother in front of her and a crowd of people when he possessed his old costume. This results in Mary having terrifying nightmares, which then enters as Shadow RAT to torture her mentally. When Mary became a security guard at Candy's years later, he gleefully attempted to kill her then but failed. After Mary was fired, RAT brutally ripped apart Chester, one of his fellow animatronics, for opening the door to his room. He then killed a night guard and got Candy framed for the deed, resulting in the sapient Animatronics being left to rot in their old robotics factory. When Marylin, Mary's daughter, arrived at the factory on a dare, he attempts to kill her too. If he gets her, her wounds would be considered those of a bear attack.

These look like they're not using Overarching Villain as intended (the villain who, being attached to the Myth Arc, spans the work because of their role in the overarching conflict).

Instead, these look like they're either just "recurring villain" or they're another trope, such as Greater-Scope Villain, Arc Villain, The Man Behind the Man, etc.

Big Bad Slippage

• In Live A Live, the Wham Episode Medieval chapter focuses on this. Your Player Character Oersted starts off as a generic Heroic Mime Knight in Shining Armor. However, repeatedly being betrayed and abandoned by his friends begins to do a number on his sanity. When his Love Interest Alicia professes her love for the man responsible for orchestrating Oersted's downfall and commits suicide, Oersted finally snaps and transforms into the game's Overarching Villain Odio.

Characters.Captain Underpants Villains Of The CU Universe

• Overarching Villain: The most recurring villain of the books.

Characters.Codex Alera Other Races

• Overarching Villain:
  • She or the threat of her was something brought up in most every book before her major assault on Alera. Her presence in the first book was only as a larval creature Tavi had just woken up by accident.
  • Tavi plans on using the last Canea Queen as this in a Genghis Gambit to help bring together the good races of Alera into a better and stronger union.

Characters.Gintama Kiheitai

• Overarching Villain: He’s the most recurring villain in the series alongside Kamui, though he only appears in the series’ "serious arcs" and he comes into the spotlight more as the series moves closer to its conclusion.

Characters.MCU Criminals Terrorists New York

• Overarching Villain: He is the only villain, let alone character to appear in all the Netflix MCU shows, with each of his appearance having some influence to the shows plots.

Characters.MCU Loki

• Overarching Villain: While he isn't always a straight up villain, due to his habit of going through the Heel–Face Revolving Door, Loki is the one villain who sticks around for every Thor film and never truly goes away.

Characters.Mortal Kombat Shao Kahn

• Overarching Villain: He’s the most recurring villain of the series and the canonical winner of Armegeddon.

Characters.Pastamonsters The Main Trio

• Overarching Villain: If you flat-out consider him a villain, then he's easily the most recurring villain in the series. He serves as the Big Bad of the "Proxyland" three-parter and many one-shot episodes. If he isn't the sole Big Bad he either apart of a Big Bad Ensemble, a Big Bad Duumvirate, The Dragon for the Big Bad, a Villain Protagonist, a Jerkass, or at the very least a Nominal Hero. One thing is certain however he is staying a Proxy whether his friends like him or not.

Characters.Preacher

• Overarching Villain: God is the Big Bad of the work as a whole and while some arcs place him as either The Man Behind the Man or a Greater-Scope Villain, finding him and making him answer for his crimes never leaves Jesse's mind.

Characters.Skulduggery Pleasant

• Overarching Villain: While their relevance to the immediate story waxes and wanes, the Faceless Ones remain the ultimate source of conflict and greatest evils in the setting. They're eventually revealed to be the ancestors of Darquesse and Abyssinia, tying them into every subsequent major Arc Villain with the exception of Lord Vile.

Characters.Soulcalibur VI 2

• Overarching Villain: The wielders of Soul Edge throughout the game's history are often the Big Bad, but Inferno is always the source behind them and as long as Soul Edge exists, he will continue to endure long after his hosts are gone.

Characters.Star Wars Wilhuff Tarkin

• Overarching Villain: Tarkin is this for the pre-Battle of Yavin Era, who serves as the main antagonist in the chronological timespan between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope.

Characters.The Forsaken Children

• Overarching Villain: Not only was he the bearer of the Necronomicon, he also founded the college as a front to hold his cult meetings in peace.

Characters.The Simpsons Government Judges Lawyers Police Criminals

• Overarching Villain: Starting with the very fact that he is Bart's most personal enemy whose attempts to kill him go back more than 20 years... our time, anyway. He is also the most active threat to the Simpson family.

Characters.The Spartan Legacy Miscellaneous

• Overarching Villain: Of all installments in the Lifebringer Saga. While not the first villain to appear in multiple installments, she is the first to return after her initial defeat.

Characters.Torchwood

• Overarching Villain: It turns out she was responsible for preventing Orr's death via exploding necklace in their first episode. It also turns out she isn't actually a villain.

Characters.We Have All Become Pokemon Villains

• Overarching Villain: Only comparable to Belladonna so far, Perigo is the most frequently appearing villain as of writing, appearing arc after arc.

LetsPlay.The Hohenzollern Empire

• Overarching Villain:
  • The Triple Alliance was the main antagonist of Parts 1-2. Part 1's plot revolved around the Reich leading military campaigns against the Aztecs and liberating the British Isles, Norway, and Iceland from them. Most of Part 2 focused on the Reich building up a large navy to take the fight to the New World, culminating in the Sunrise Invasion and the crippling of the Triple Alliance. On Part 2's supernatural side, Raphael manipulated historical events, including killing a Kaiser, to start the Apocalypse, and Wilhelm constantly fought against him.
  • In Part 3, with the Triple Alliance's decline, China filled in the role of the Reich's antagonist, as it steadily gained power over the course of Part 3 before challenging the Reich for world hegemony in World War I. On the supernatural side, the demons became the main threats to the Inquisition in the first half.
  • In Part 4, the Angeloi rampaged across Europe and slaughtered millions of innocents, while on the supernatural side, Wilhelm rallied surviving angels under his banner to fight against Gabriel, who had taken over Heaven and planned to replace God.
  • In Part 5, the Soviets were the main villain until their defeat in 1986, after which they were replaced by the Syndicate/Sentinel in the X-Division arc and then Elias Anhorn in 2030.

Sandbox.Monster Live Action TVG To O

• The Girl Who Sees Smells/Sensory Couple (2015 series): Kwon Jae-hee, the true identity of the Barcode Killer, is the Overarching Villain of the show. Afflicted by a cognitive disorder that leaves him unable to recognize faces, Kwon is suspected to have murdered his adoptive American parents in an "accident" when their RV caught fire with them inside. After dropping out of Harvard Medical School when a psychological test deemed him unfit to be a doctor, Kwon returned to Korea and became a famous chef, solely because his profession allowed him to kill living things without reprimand, abandoning his future in medicine when he couldn't see himself saving lives instead of killing. Harboring a twisted idea that he could own human lives, Kwon began forcing people to chronicle their lives in empty books before suffocating them to death and carving barcodes onto their wrists as his way of reducing them to mere covers for his books, repeating this process in a 12-month cycle and collecting the books as morbid trophies. Starting with the ex-wife of a police detective, Kwon murdered Oh Cho-rim's biological parents and then, in a failed to attempt to eliminate the witness, slashed the throat of a girl who shared her original name, Choi Moo-gak's sister. Years later, Kwon murdered his own girlfriend and then the closest friend that he had to cover his tracks, "owning" their lives as well; when Kwon is baited into kidnapping Lieutenant Yeom Mi, Kwon tries to kill her anyway and is almost successful. Escaping custody when the van that was transporting him suspiciously fell into a river, taking the lives of innocent policemen, Kwon kidnapped Cho-rim on the day of her wedding with Moo-gak to kill them both, even after the latter showed him mercy.

Series.The Vampire Diaries Universe

• Overarching Villain: Klaus Mikaelson is one of the most recurring characters and antagonists in the verse. In The Vampire Diaries, he is the main antagonist of the second season, seeking to break the curse keeping him from accessing his werewolf side. In the third season he is The Heavy, seeking to build a hybrid army though he eventually teams up with the heroes to stop his mother, Esther. In the fourth season he is an Anti-Hero, though still not above manipulating everyone to get what he wants. In The Originals he is the Villain Protagonist, willing to do anything to protect his daughter. While dead by the time of Legacies, he continues to have a huge impact on the life of his daughter, Hope, even destroying the world in an alternate timeline where she wasn't born.

VideoGame.Hunters Moon

• Overarching Villain: Hell, as its threat will be still there even if the Tamers are banished.

WesternAnimation.The Star

• Big Bad: King Herod, for obvious reasons. Though he's more of an Overarching Villain, while his Dragon, the "royal dog walker," acts as the primary threat to the protagonists.

YMMV.Runaways 2017

• Arc Fatigue: Jonah acted as an Overarching Villain, with the Runaway's primary goal being to stop his Evil Plan and try to make their parents pay for their crimes. Having this be the plot for the first season is fine. Two seasons maybe. Two seasons and nearly half of the third and it's exhausting. By the time Morgan Le Fay takes over as the Big Bad five episodes into Season 3, the sudden shift from Science Fiction to Dark Fantasy makes it feel like a different show. The fact that the final battle between Jonah's evil family and Morgan's rise to power happens before and after a time skip certainly doesn't help.

The entry doesn't clarify what the character's true scope as a villain. For example "main villain" could be Arc Villain or Big Bad rather than Overarching Villain.

Characters.A Nightmare On Elm Street Freddy Krueger

• Overarching Villain: He's the main villain of this series.

Characters.My Life As A Teenage Robot

• Overarching Villain: She is present for the entire show, appearing every season and always hatching some scheme to enslave humanity.

Characters.The Simpsons Nuclear Power Plant Shopkeepers

• Overarching Villain: Especially in the earlier seasons.

LukeIAmYourFather.Fan Works

• In The Lion King Adventures, it's revealed in Series 3 that Hago — Simba's Arch-Enemy and the Overarching Villain of the series — is actually Nala's father.

There's plenty of information about the type of villain the character is, but not enough context for how they are established within the overarching conflict, especially as compared to other villains that may exist within the work.

Characters.Red Dead Redemption Dutch Van Der Linde

• Overarching Villain: He's the most important villain to both games even if whether or not he's actually evil is left open to interpretation. He manages to be the Deuteragonist and the Arc Villain of Chapter 6 in the second game, and part of the Big Bad Ensemble in the first game. In II the more direct villains are the Pinkertons and Micah Bell but it's ultimately Dutch's descent into madness that dooms pretty much everyone in his gang. Right before the start of the game, the gang steals $100,000 (worth a little over $4,000,000 today when adjusted for inflation) off a banking ferry as their One Last Job. All two dozen or so in his gang were going to use the money to go straight but Dutch gets goaded into killing a girl in cold blood on the ferry, which got the attention of the law. In their haste to escape the scene, he has to stash the money while the rest of the gang flees into the mountains. Dutch spends the rest of the game getting them into worse and worse straights in his attempt to replace the take even though the more logical decision would have been to do odd jobs for a year or so to live off of and then go back for the money once the trail's gone cold. They eventually find themselves in conflict with the Army as a means to escape. Needless to say by the end of the story, everyone realizes the money is , for all intents and purposes, gone for good and he doesn't actually want the money, he just wants to cause chaos. Arthur, the protagonist of II would have died eventually because he had TB but him losing favor to Micah makes Dutch see less and less reason. His actions lead to the deaths of himself, John, Uncle, Bill, and Javier in I as well as those of Jenny, the Callender brothers, Sean, Hosea, Lenny, Susan, Molly, and Micah in II. By the end of I , Charles and Sadie are the only active members of the gang at the beginning of II who aren't confirmed to have died by the end of I. In many ways, Dutch is an essential part of the major conflicts in the series.

Characters.Supernatural Archangels

• Overarching Villain: He initially only appeared in Season 5, but was nevertheless The Man Behind the Man to all the previous major villains. And even after his defeat, he continued to hold this role: The events of Season 6 were caused by the angel Raphael wanting to free Lucifer once again (and Michael) and thus restart the Apocalypse. In Season 7, an imprint of him tormented Sam (and later Castiel) for several episodes. In Season 8, his crypts come into play, as it's revealed he had hidden powerful artifacts in them, and the existence of these artifacts (the angel tablet in particular) fuels the plot for the rest of the season. In addition, Abaddon is introduced, who is a Knight of Hell created by Lucifer himself, and trained by Cain, who himself had made a deal with Lucifer (and later became a demon) to save his brother. In Season 9, we find out that Gadreel was tricked by Lucifer, allowing him into the Garden of Eden, causing Gadreel to be so filled with guilt that he's easily manipulated by one of Season 9's main antagonists, Metatron. (The other antagonist being the previously mentioned Abaddon.) In Season 10, it's revealed that Lucifer originally possessed the Mark of Cain, which caused him to become spiteful towards humanity, before giving the Mark to Cain as part of their deal. The Mark itself is the main driving force of the season. In Season 11, he finally fully returns, manipulating Sam and Castiel into freeing him, leading to him possessing Castiel for half the season, in order to team up against the Darkness. And in Season 12, he returns to his antagonist role, causing havoc for the fun of it and siring a Nephilhim. This continues into Season 13, where he takes advantage of the pending threat of the Alternate Universe version of Michael invading the main reality to try and trick everyone into trusting and obeying him and in the finale goes full Omnicidal Maniac, planning to wipe out the universe, before Dean manages to finally kill him. Even then, his influence is still felt in Season 14 as Lucifer's former vessel Nick spends the entire season trying to bring the dead Lucifer back from the eternal void outside reality, only to be stopped at the last second by Jack.

Characters.Teppen

• Overarching Villain: Ada is responsible for the entire plot of TEPPEN. While Wesker and Akuma do more damage, she is the one that directs everyone, regardless of allegiance or loyalties, to the Land of Illusion. Just what she hopes to achieve remains to be seen.