There arent enough hero antagonist in fantasy. We need a guy/girl who is morally sound and reasonable...

>Superman fight Batman

Reminder Snyder's Batman was basically a villain.

>PoV's of two sides in a war
done

Every one of those stories go full retard with anime-levels of misunderstanding and fighting for the sake of fighting.

Better idea, let's all just forget it exists so in 7 years they try again and maybe It'll be better.

>Cast the best possible actor to play Batman since Michael Keaton
>Put him under the direction of a guy who watched the Dark Knight and thought Batman was a giant pussy for not snapping the Joker's neck

I always liked the idea of the Dark Knight Returns story line for Batman Versus Superman where they are essentially fighting over ideological differences in government. Or Marvel's Civil War scenario. There are legitimate ways for Heroes to come into conflict with each other.

I don't know much about Comic Civil War other than apparently it relied on Tony Stark acting like a complete tool for no real reason.

Movie Civil War handled it pretty well though. Like I actually understood why these guys were fighting each other, and they ended it in a way that made sense.

Comics Civil War made no sense, though. Marvel didn't even bother hammering out what SHRA, the whole crux of the event, was about except "freedums"

Ehhh. Comic Civil War was really a lot more "both sides are idiots and things escalate rather quickly" deal.

In point form :

- a bunch of teen superheroes decide to film themselves stopping crime ala Jersey Shore
- they try to tackle Nitro (the exploding man!), and do so... into a school bus full of children. The resulting explosion kills about 60 kids, and 600 civilians (Nitro has a big blast radius)
- government basically says "Fuck this, you need regulations", it's happening one way or the other
- Tony vs Cap similar to the movie, Tony says if it's happening anyways, he wants to make it easy as possible
- Cap says fuck you, forms a super posse to resist registration, which then results in Tony forming a super posse to arrest them for resisting registration
- eventually Tony and friends clone a Thor
- the Thor Clone kills some heroes when trying to arrest them
- the Red Skull was secretly pulling strings to make the whole thing happen and Cap gets assassinated
- Tony is sad
- Registration still a thing (until it gets retconned out later with magic shenanigans and other garbage)

Are you saying you want to remember the movie that had no less than 5 dream sequences (one inside another no less) that desperately wants to make connections to other movies that haven't released yet with a bonkers plot and nonsensical story? Cause I don't.

>Tony and friends clone a Thor

>(Nitro has a big blast radius)
Nitro has a very small blast radius, actually. He was just hopped on an enhancing drug nobody knew about

Also, I think his uncontrolled explosion was large enough to destroy the entire city, so it didn't really matter what they did. It's pretty deep in the "unforeseeable consequences" category.

I actually was super underwhelmed by the whole thing because cap's objection sound too much like the lead up to the second us iraq war and the movie still is unwilling to address that this might be morally questionable, not evil but questionable

It wasn't all that big even after upgrade

What was the solution besides using the Avengers in the MCU again? Oh right! Nuke New York.

Gee, the government really shouldn't have left things to those vigilantes and instead should have enacted its plan because there would have been fewer casualties from the ensuing nuclear holocaust.

After that captain America acted against the SHIELD agency. That's so bad! If he hadn't committed such unjustifiable acts of vigilantism then hydra would have achieved world peace by killing hundreds of millions in America alone.

Wait, who would be in charge of the Avengers after the zarkovian accords? General "Thunderbolt" "Kill or weaponize the hulk" Ross?

That's totes obviously the correct course of action and could not have gone badly in any way, there were clearly two coherent sides to the conflict in Captain America Civil War.

You realize that world history is jam-packed with people who did bad things for reasons they considered good right? Like, every war ever.

It's not rocket surgery to figure out an alternative to cartoon villains.

Have your antagonist be acting on someone else's orders, or just have different priorities than the players.

>No, freedom is more important!
>No, the greater good is more important!
>RAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH

>you're playing with the big boys now

I read that in Steve Martin's singing voice.

>BvS
>not ridiculous

>Civil War
>not just misunderstandings

>both of these movies
>not just shitty excuses to have superheroes fight eachother because that gets our dicks hard

Civil War I gave a pass to because I genuinely bought the idea Tony and Cap reached a breaking point. Ever since they were put in the same movie together, the writers did a good job communicating how they had a lot of friction. Right at the ending fight, even after it's all revealed it was a misunderstanding, Tony still starts throwing punches because he's still completely fed up with Bucky.

BvS has no excuse though. Batman is just a kill-happy creep who has a hateboner for Superman cause he knocked down his building. It's a movie about a colossal asshole with no regard for collateral damage targeting a slightly lesser asshole for having no regard for collateral damage.

And then he does a total 180 because of his mommy issues.

They do it for their god and country.
Lots of sane, morally sound, and reasonable people fought for that. Fighting for your people is fucking universal.

You got me wrong, I liked Civil War too. In fact I think it's the best superhero movie in a long time.

However, that doesn't mean that the friction was not based on misunderstandings and misinformation between the two. Yes, there was clashing in ideology, but the main reason they actually fought was because Tony didn't get the info that Cap had/didn't believe it due to lack of evidence. It's still a scenario of misunderstandings/misinformation, something the other guy claimed wasn't the case.

That, and the fact that the audience really wanted to see them dish it out to eachother.

Civil War was still a pretty great movie

Civil War is a good movie that had a lot of build-up for the conflict and convincing motivations for each side

Batman vs Superman is a movie about two super"heroes" sperging out at each other to then instantly solve all their issues just in time for the climax because Superman says "Martha"

See

While I usually hate the "lol misunderstandings" justification for friction they actually handled it really well in Civil War. Cap really did have no proof Bucky was innocent, and all signs pointed to him. If the movie hadn't explicitly shown it then even the audience would be in the dark on that.

Oh shit, is dat sum Asha'man

I try to make my D&D archvillains have basically reasonable motivations.

>campaign arc 1: a bounty hunter tasked with killing or capturing the PCs for failing to do something they promised they'd do
>campaign arc 2: a high elf whose homeland is almost completely overrun by orcs wants to stop their advance and save his race by casting a WMD spell.
>campaign arc 3: a king wakes up as an undead to find that everything he spent his life to build has been destroyed by a usurper who didn't have a really good reason to take over other than lust for power. Starts a war to bring him to justice.

These actually are very reasonable motivations.

I wouldn't really call a bounty hunter as an archvillain though. He'd at best be a Dragon for the party to fight on their way to handle the real villain.

I gotta hand it to Marvel, it's really ballsy to make Captain America the main villain in his own film.

"I should be able to go anywhere at any time wearing the flag of a sovereign state and attack people for any reason because I believe that I'm moral and right."

That's a villain motivation if I've ever heard one. Hell, that's more bad guy than most comic book movie bad guys. Captain America just wants to have the freedom to fight whoever he thinks is the current bad guy.

Sounds pretty CN/CE to me

> I need to wring my hands more, smiling smugly as I lick my cheetos-dusted lips and shouting "X was rii-IIiGht!!"

olelele

That would be villainous, if it wasn't for the fact you can basically count on Cap to always do the right thing no matter what.

Usually if he decides to throw his hat in somewhere, it's because they genuinely need his help.

A costume is not an endowment of power

Not him, but in the movie they make a good point to Cap that he's a commissioned Army officer running around beating up anyone he thinks deserves it while wearing the Stars and Stripes and calling himself "Captain America". The US government isn't too crazy about those international legal implications.

I was going to have a completely different plot based around the party actually doing what they agreed to do in the first session, but they went off the rails and I had to improvise. By the end they certainly didn't think of this guy as a mid-boss. He managed to kill two PCs, and he was actually a retired PC himself, one who belonged to a player who never showed up again after the first session.

There aren't enough villain antagonists in fantasy. Everyone is morally sound, reasonable, justified in his actions and/or has a sad traumatic past these days. Whatever happened to dark lords, black spiky armor and evil for the sake of evil? Whatever happened to actually being heroes for once, instead of being forced to beat up morally sound and reasonable antiheroes and feeling like an asshole afterwards?

No, you make a villain who does short term evil for a long term good.
Like if the nazis were right

I absolutely hate it when writers create some half-baked "grey-aligned" villain who does a host of terrible things while paying lip service to some Greater Good.

Yeah, there are a lot of real world examples of bad people doing bad things because they thought it was the right thing to do. But rarely is it "I'm gonna do this terrible thing for a good reason". It's "I'm gonna do this good thing for a great reason!"

People who commit genocide rarely shed tears for their victims.

>whatever happened to dark lords, black spiky armor and evil for the sake of evil?

>Whatever happened to actually being heroes for once, instead of being forced to beat up morally sound and reasonable antiheroes and feeling like an asshole afterwards?

Are you serious? I understand that everyone has different tastes but is this person actually asking for cartoon villains? Just evilevilevilevilevilevilevil all the time just because?

It's a common kneejerk reaction here where people bitch about muh shades of grey as if it's some new phenomenon then pine for the days when you could just "rescue a princess from a dragon".

That's the difference between the characters. Captain America has lived seeing groups being corrupted, as totalitarian powers needing individuals to keep it in check. Tony has pretty much only seen individuals corrupted and needing a group larger than themselves to keep them in check.

Man, that X must be some good shit.

From our perspective, sure, Cap is always doing the right thing.

In universe, they can't be so sure. Sure, he's gone after some real dangerous people, but he also does so in foreign states without the authorization of any government, and as pointed out, he is a commissioned Army officer.

He's a lot like American foreign policy over the past few decades.
>"This isn't an invasion, it's an occupation. We're here fighting for your own good. You can thank us later."

>tfw two (You)'s

It does reinforce the main form of drama Cap creates. We the audience always know he's doing the right thing (a certain recent "twist" aside) but his superiors don't. And given he literally represents the US, it makes sense they might want to put him on a leash.

Even though keeping Cap from doing what Cap does almost always causes more problems than it solves.

Which probably makes the recent twist even more jarring, because Captain America is the guy we always expect to do what's right. There's no ambiguity in his character, he's all ideal, and his ideals are never depicted as wrong.

Personally, I'm not a fan of him already, due to that. I prefer a hero who has to actually grapple with the decisions they're making and their internal beliefs, that there's a conflict within as well as without.

Also, the man solves all his problems with violence, despite assertions to the contrary. He never tries to talk it out, because he doesn't trust the system to listen to him (to be fair, they usually don't). Instead, he just punches people until they stop coming.

Two (You)'s, huh? So what are you doing later?

>the humans in avatar

I can't believe the bad guys won in that movie
Those poor marines signed up to help earth and to get money for college.
Thanks to backwards primitives and ridiculous superstition, earth's galaxy-spanning techno future is doomed.

"You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war."

Civil war movie did have build-up and was generally believable as more of a personal conflict between Steve Rogers and Tony Stark.

Civil war comics did the conflict better, struggling with practicality and idealism, as well as the notion of power over and responsibility to others. The Dark Knight Returns did something similar, if perhaps a little ham-fisted in execution.

The BvS movie was just garbage in general and should not be used in this discussion.

To further the overall discussion, I ran two games centered on roughly the same 50 years of history in my setting once. The players played through a war and won, then the next campaign played as the children of the losers. It was similar to playing Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, and then Radiant Dawn back-to-back.

In my next campaign I plan to have my players potentially accidentally start a devastating civil war among the dwarves. To get the dwarven faction they're going to encounter to help them they will need to empower the faction, causing them to attempt a coup after the game finishes and changing the setting permanently for the next campaign. I like to have at least one potentially world-changing decision per campaign.

Yeah, because the average tabletop game is a deep, nuanced work of art, the absolute pinnacle of storytelling. Let's not pretend that fights fought solely for the sake of fighting or silly plots that only exist because we want them to exist are somehow beneath us as gamers.

Any GM that can wrangle a story that comes close to the level of even the most mediocre comic plotline is a fucking miracle in this hobby. People need to stop looking down their noses at perfectly entertaining storylines just because they're not the best thing that ever existed.

>Implying it's impossible for two genuinely good people with good intentions to find themselves in conflict with each other

cap is hydra

:^)

>it relied on Tony Stark acting like a complete tool for no real reason.
Because there was literally no reasonable objection to be made against his position, so the writers turned him into almost a literal Stalin.

This ass hat

really the ending is horrible, if that mineral is essential on earth, wouldn't that mean everyone on earth is fucked? Wouldn't it also mean everyone on earth would freakout since they don't want to die?
That could lead to the na'vi getting fucked out of proportion to what they actually did.
All because the MC wouldn't do his job and wanted a waifu