Editorial: Sometimes In Animation You Need A Purely Evil Villain

[wonderfly]

The News Team's "The Overlord" has a new editorial up on the front page of AnimeSuperhero.com:

"Editorial: Sometimes In Animation You Need A Purely Evil Villain"​

"I have been in the online animation community for a couple of decades, and I remember in the 2000s it was a common belief that only sympathetic villains were realistic villains associated with mature storytelling, while evil villains were silly and childish.

I think that is not quite correct. The 2000s were not far off from the 80s, where you had villains like Skeletor, Shredder, or Cobra Commander brag about how evil they were. But they did not actually do anything truly evil, and they were not very menacing. That was the type of villain that was being mocked by the 2000s, with characters like Dr. Draken from Kim Possible. But by the 90s and 2000s, we started not only seeing sympathetic villains, but truly evil ones as well.

For every tragic villain like Mr. Freeze from Batman: The Animated Series and Magneto from X-Men: The Animated Series, you have darker rogues, like Joker, a psychopathic nihilist who hurts people for fun or Apocalypse, a monstrous mutant with a god complex who thinks himself superior to other people. With Mr. Freeze or Magneto, the heroes can talk them down, and the conflict can be gray, with the viewer rooting for both hero and villain. But with guys like Joker and Apocalypse? They will never back down, and the viewer is thrilled to see the hero overcome this monstrous threat. Mr. Freeze is sympathetic because his life was destroyed by a corporate tycoon. You are not supposed to sympathize with Ferris Boyle, the architect of Freeze’s misfortune. A sympathetic villain can come off as more sympathetic if contrasted with an evil villain. It was interesting to see Magneto and Apocalypse clash in X-Men: The Animated Series due to their conflicting attitudes and personalities."

Read the full article here.

 

[Christopher Glennon]

It's weird going back to an 80's cartoon and thinking Skeletor was terrifying only for him not to do anything really evil.

I like evil villains every now and then. Sometimes a situation calls for diplomacy, but other times, you need a huge battle for a climax, and there needs to be a villain defeated at the end of it. Steven Universe certainly could've used something like that.

 

[Frontier]

It's weird going back to an 80's cartoon and thinking Skeletor was terrifying only for him not to do anything really evil.

It's always surreal for me growing up with remakes of classic cartoons because they tended to take their villains more seriously than the original did .

 

[The Overlord]

It's weird going back to an 80's cartoon and thinking Skeletor was terrifying only for him not to do anything really evil.

I like evil villains every now and then. Sometimes a situation calls for diplomacy, but other times, you need a huge battle for a climax, and there needs to be a villain defeated at the end of it. Steven Universe certainly could've used something like that.

It's always surreal for me growing up with remakes of classic cartoons because they tended to take their villains more seriously than the original did .

It's kind of interesting that almost every "evil" 80s villain was later reimagined as an actual evil psychopath.

It seems like Skeletor's default personality nowadays is to combine the campy elements from the Filmation series with the more serious elements from the original Mattel mini comics and the live-action film, where in modern incarnations, Skeletor's sense of humour underlines his sinister nature.

Utrom Shredder is a violent psychopath, he is an on-screen mass murderer, one of the worst bosses in animation in how he treats his employees, and someone who was willing to destroy reality just to get revenge on the Turtles.

There was a GI Joe animated movie in 2009 where Cobra Commander wiped out Moscow and started murdering his underlings on screen.

I think 80s Megatron might have been an evil villain. In the 1986 movie, he kills several characters onscreen.