How do you make a truly tragic and sympathetic BBEG?

Worlds runs on death but the party would never believe that considering how "full of life" the world looks. If there isn't enough death at any given time the world compensates on a large scale. BBGG compensates by starting wars and shit between nations or something.

Not like that.
We all hate that piece of shit show and fandom.

This is the sad reality of all long-running TV shows; they're putting it to rest in a season or two.

Still hasn't decayed as badly as some network darlings.

The tightest writing is always attached to limited series anyway.

I remember comming back from school in a good mood, turning TV for some funny kid cartoons, I stumbled upon BTAS and this was one of the first episodes I've ever seen. It made me cry, I did NOT expect it to hit me with that ammount of feels when I was like 10.

I miss BTAS badly. It was a perfect mix of relatable and well written characters, action, drama and a bit of goofiness not to make it over the top dark. I watch an episode or two occasionally. It still holds up.

Did it? I was wondering if I should try and get into it. What seasons should I watch?

>if I should try and get into it.
I'd say first four or five seasons are well worth watching. It's been ages since I watched it though. I remember the progression on the first four seasons being: first one is decent, second is great, third is just REALLY weird and has some really questionable episodes, fourth and I think fifth too were the peaks of the show.

But yeah, it does gradually go to shit. Not quite as aggressively as most similar long running shows had, there are still good episodes even in the later series, but it just somehow stops being appealing enough to keep coming back to. Which is a shame because at least SOME of the craziness and creativity and the strange mix of dark and lighthearted still remains in the show.

You know we didn't always, but damn did the show crash and burn when Penn left.

Penn left? Damn, I did not even know that. Explains a lot though. Shame, because a lot of what made the show great were promises and hints of things that were unresolved.

I essentially stopped watching after the lich shows up and it goes suuuuuuuuper dark out of fucking nowhere.

That is a shame because that I think is where the show actually shines most. And it never goes FULL dark, it kinda skittes on verge of something really dark, and the lighthearted tone. The tension between dark and fun is actually the best thing about the whole show.

I think that it starts to go really wrong around the time Fin's relationship drama emerges and you'll start to realize you are stopping to like the character.
In later seasons, I also started to realize that the balance is going off: having one dark or serious moment for every few light hearted is fine, but it felt like in the later seasons every second episode has some deeply melancholic or dark element and it becomes predictable and tiring eventually.
Also, there is a weird lack of commitment to the serious aspects in the later seasons. The show has a tendency of introducing some really interesting themes and then suddenly dropping them again for no reason.

I used to have Heart of Ice and the Manbat episodes on VHS. Eventually I watched it until the tape wore off and snapped during a viewing. Then I proceeded to watch the movie with Freeze in it and it was equally feels when
freeze is watching the TV of a research station in North Pole, if i remember correctly that is, without his suit with his polar bear pets and then news come up of Bruce Wayne starting research on curing Freeze's wife's disease and any other who suffer from it and Freeze popping the first smile in years and crying tears of happiness as he hobbles with a crutch into the frozen wastes for one last time

Evil old general bent on purging all nonhumans. Players later learn that the old man lost his only friend in an alien ambush decades ago and it utterly broke him and made him decide that all must die.

There is nothing more relatable than the loss of a friend/family member.

Are you me? I also had that VHS. I remember that I kept rewatching Heart of Ice since the transformation scene in the manbat episode was too much for me.

I can't be you because the transformation scene and the raid on batman scenes from Manbat were the highlights for me.

Admittedly, it feels like the Christmas episode revelation about OP pic was the big jumps-the-shark moment.

My last antagonist used to be a brave hero, sent to fight back the darkness that was threatening the peace of the realm, but he realised that he would never be strong enough to defeat it. He kept holding it back, doing things he knew were wrong knowing that one day a hero would rise up and defeat him, and if they could defeat him then they might have a chance at doing what he couldn't.

So Fantasy Revan?

Maybe? Never played Kotor

You pretty much explained Revan as a character in the SWTOR MMO.

Make him cool. If they like his looks and style it will be easier for the characters to relate and empathize with him, because first impressions matter.

How about something like this?

youtube.com/watch?v=JjvnawR-cqk

Reminds me of the villains guild concept. The villains organize together because they've learned that the god's watch humanity for entertainment. So they take on the mantel of villains to give heroes something to fight against. If they didn't, the gods would grow bored and let the 'play' end.

Except Ace is more a victim of circumstance than a villain. Antagonist yes, but antagonist necessarily doesn't need to be a villain.

I finally found out how, at least for my group. For the last six months they've been learning about the party that wrecked a major demon they've been working to stop back when he first started messing with the mortal plane two generations ago. It's very Order of the Phoenix. I've been dropping hints about the absent leader of them for awhile in folktales and references when they research topics but the surviving members of the old party only recently came clean that the badass they've been reading was tortured till he turned traitor in madness. Now he's returned to end the survivors of the old party and the players are seriously freaking out that their favorite background character is not only just as badass as they heard but completely ruthlessly evil

That's the issue at hand, user.

Holy crap I need to rewatch this show.

Ooh I've done that. So the secondary villain was a disgruntled hobgoblin captain who started fighting for the big bad to save his people from a society where the heads of his people were worth gold. The crazy part is this major demon prince had convinced one of the players that their god gave him a sacred mission to exterminate goblinoids. When the reveal was made it was almost too late for them to work together to defeat the big bad. Made for a cool twist

>Step one
The end justify the means
>Step 2
Make that end legitimately noble and something everyone else could get behind if not for those means.
>Step 3
Those ends better be within sight. And not just the baddie's.
>Step 4
Deep down everyone knows they won't truly achieve their goal.
>Step 5
Have the villain be a person and not just solely the be. A great way for this to shine through from time to time is hesitation. Perhaps they don't need to be killed, they're clearly still human, they can be reasoned with (though we all know it's too late for that).
>Step 6
Give them flaws. They don't even have to be big ones. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time. Even mecha satan.
>Step 7
Don't fucking steal screen time for any of this. Know what ruins the fun of overcoming a baddie and triumph? Fucking wah wah abloo bloo bloo I'm sad. Let this shit emerge. It's just there. It has always been there.

He had the greatest villain motivation ever. You could not fault his motive and method. And then that moment he realises he fucked up, that he was never going to see his family again and that he had killed thousands of people for nothing

Here eyes close once.

The problem from then on was the typical having your cake and eating it too
>let's do it anthology style, but let's also have continuity
>let's play it loose with the worldbuilding, but let's also stablish a hard lore
>let's have character development, but let's reset back to status quo
>let's have our main character age in real time, but let's keep his design exactly the same
>let's have long story arcs that conclude at the season finale, but let"s reset back to status quo
>let's have big events that change the world and the way characters interact with each other, but let'd reset back to status quo

So what you get is a schizophrenic show that doesn't know what it wants to be and never commits to anything.

Make it a noble goal that will ultimately hurt a whole hell of a lot of people but bring good into the world. IE: The world is an industrial smoggy wasteland where you pretty much gotta pay to breathe. BBEG uses eldritch super magic to turn all of the inhabitants in a continent into trees. Something like that.

Basically pic related. Not making him evil, but just having goals that bring him into opposition with the heroes and said goals are in fact noble and in some cases, more good than the PC goals. In addition, give him a background that makes him more human instead of "that guy we need to defeat" whether it is a keepsake from a dead loved one that set him on his path or a pet dog or anything really.

For example, my planned BBEG is a mage who after a great war, is planning on starting a revolution to topple the aristocracy and institute a democratic rule of the people because he sees the monarchies as the reason why the world is mired in as much conflict as it is. He's lost his family in terrorist attacks caused in part by the royal family scheming to take some land to the north and it backfiring horribly and then being conscripted into a genocide that broke him as a person. The problem here is that the PCs work as explorers and mercenaries for the royal family and some of them have become nobles in their own right. Also the PCs have worked with him before so they would see this as him betraying them. So the PCs have already interacted with him a lot and he's a character they know rather than a far off evil bad guy that they need to get to and kill eventually.

Except Funny was evil, he was charismatic and understandable evil.He sent people into other dimensions wantonly, he viewed people below him and generally used evil tactics and people to aid in his endeavors. He is a true Lawful Evil if any.

He just wanted to Make America Great Again and keep it great at any cause. Ultimately a noble goal. His patriotism was genuine.

*at any cost

Valentine was evil as fuck and his goals weren't even noble, what are you on about?

See

He wanted to make the nation powerful at the expense of it's people, for which he didn't care. Otherwise he wouldn't have gone out of his way to kill and otherwise hurt anybody who was not himself.

He wanted to make America great again, not it's people or even the government, just his idea of America.

youtube.com/watch?v=Z9dNrmGD7mU

three notes are all it takes for the feels to start

No, he wanted to make America and it's people great at the cost of the rest of the world. Did you not pay attention? We would use the corpse parts and Love Train to deflect all the bad things that would have happened to America to other countries.

The saddest part is you realize that even after that he kills one more person

*He would

Reasonable goal, unreasonable means for accomplishing that goal. That last part is a hard balancing act, especially given your average party whose solution to everything is murder. Have them go too reasonable, and the players might switch sides; have them go too unreasonable, and the players will lose any sympathy they might have.

I think I nicely hit on this myself; world is being torn apart by war. Main villain wants to foster unity to prevent this. Unfortunately, goes for religious unity of the "become the only god and everyone worships me" variety. Murdering all the current gods is a very, very bad idea, since the villain would have to take over their jobs and has little idea how. The trial and error of learning would be catastrophic to the world, but not fatal, and maybe even the original goal would be achieved. For the surviving population, anyway.

That's still pretty evil.

Explain.

But it's ultimately a more noble and selfless goal than the heroes (money and fixing their legs).

Go watch Wakfu

No he wasn't. He killed thousands of people and exterminated an entire species for 20 minutes of time travel, and those 20 minutes of forcing the clock back damaged local spacetime. If he actually had succeeded, he'd have shattered the entire planet.

This was my first thought.

Nox is a broken man after his plan fails. I like to think he feels true remorse for all he has done in the moments before his death.

Finn's arm regrowing was the shark for me.
Scars don't heal. They fade, but they don't heal. None of the character drama or development or, hell, anything matters if every scar gets healed with no problems.

He didn't even get that sweet mechanical arm they used to always allude to early on, just some stupid plant thing.

I know, right?
I fucking love characters with robot arms.
And it could have been symbolic and shit, of what he's lost and how he's grown.
But nope, gotta have a bee fuck him and a new arm ejaculate from his stump or something.
What does it mean? I dunno, puberty?
What does it entail in the narrative? STATUS QUO IS GOD.

>He killed thousands of people and exterminated an entire species for 20 minutes of time travel
He was trying to go back years in time, he had no idea that the life energy of that many people could only power the cube long enough to go back 20 minutes.
If it had worked the way he thought it would, he could have saved his family and thus he would never need to kill all those people and everyone would have been fine.

>Shows that went to shit over time
What are they, Veeky Forums?

Code Lyoko
The Avatar series, with the start of Korra

The worst part about all of this was the way they alluded to a very dark unhappy future in setting for pretty much everyone earlier on.

Can't even possibly see that happening now with how much everything just stays the same, shit they literally had a song that was essentially "nothing has changed, except minor details"

>Code Lyoko
I remember catching bits and pieces of 5 head when I was younger. That was good at one point?

Early on I felt it was fairly good; really went to shit once the submarine arc started.

He genuinely held onto that belife that he could travel back in time with enough. And once he did all the harm and damage he did could be undone. It would have never happened in the first place. When that last hope is shattered and he learns that everything he did is perminent, he breaks under the weight of sins he cannot escape, the despaire of knowing all he did was less then worthless and his goals failed before he even started

The arm thing came up in the latest season ender, big cliffhanger where the grass arm just ups and leaves his body and takes his Finn Sword with it, leaving him with his stump again

I'll be honest the bulk of my memory can be summed up as cyber bugs getting shot in cgi land. A hatch in the woods by a school that lead to all the cyber jacking in things, and maybe an ai or something.

And that cafeteria episode.

First season is alright, second season is pretty amazing.

Yeah the show gives me the impression of long term ideas being vetoed by higher ups, so they have to squeeze what they can in the subtle details and try to make this small things feel importaint

>And that cafeteria episode.
Which one? The collapse, the electrocution, or the zombie one?

Yeah and I'm sure another bee will come and grow him another arm or something stupid instead of it actually meaning anything.

Zombie one. Glad my brain wasn't just making that up. Used to watch it on the small crt my gram kept in the blue room after school. Bout the same time I watched the bulk of tng. Nice jog down memory lane, this.

The show isn't being renewed after its next season, maybe the writers will get bold again and try some more perminent stuff this time

Maybe, though I doubt it.

My only hope is the Lich returns to fuck shit up and actually do something.

As long as it deflects the bad shit to france it's fine

Yes, exactly. If he was right - but he wasn't. Rather than accepting that turning back time was a feat beyond Xelor himself, he pressed forward hoping he was right and the rest of the universe was wrong. But he wasn't. He was completely wrong about the metaphysics of the universe, and slaughtered countless people for what turned out to be no reason at all.

Honestly it's just about adding emotion to the character. As long as the character isn't dastardly for the sake of it you can make the villain sympathetic. Barring a few cases where the emotional leap is retarded like "an elf killed my brother, so obviously genecide" or "you guys thought, perfectly reasonabley that I was dead, but the fact that you failed to find me means I'm gonna kill an entire space city". The whole justified villain thing is bs and needs to stop. Tragedy can be a trigger but shouldn't be used as justification (pic related).

Supprime ça

Basically he used to be a struggling inventor with a loving wife and kids, then he stumbles on a powerful artifact called the Eliacube and becomes obsessed with studying it. His wife eventually leaves him and takes the kids with her, and Nox later finds out that they were killed in a flood, he goes kind of insane from the grief and vows to find a way to undo his mistake. For around 200 years, Nox went around draining every scrap of wakfu (basically lifeforce energy) he could find and eventually sets his sights on the Tree of Life (which would kill an entire race of people if destroyed) justifying it with "If I reverse time, none of the harm I cause will have happened." He eventually is successful in stealing the tree's energy and reverses time...by about 20 minutes, after which he pretty much just gives up and disappears.

Korra's first season was alright, the show wasn't comfirmed garbage until
>muh dark avatar

I think part of the blame goes to the network for constantly making them write each season as if it were the last, ruined coherency

If the world compensates on a large scale anyway, why bother doing the work yourself?

not to mention it was his OWN fault that his family died, blinded by power he pushed them to the brink of starvation so his wife had to escape to her family to survive. Then a disaster happened.

This villain is overrated as fuck.

I know those feels mate. btas wasn't afraid to treat kids like people. To be able to handle some of the heaver elements. It was a level of respect that I took to heart. And made me question a lot about motivation, and whether 'it's because he's evil' is really true. No one wakes up and decides to just be the bad guy. Everyone is the protag of their own story.

Even when the motivation was just greed or pride, at least those had a real start. Hate is cheap.

Doing it right

None of that would have mattered if it had worked, he could destroy the world and it wouldn't have mattered.

The trick wasn't that he was evil, it was that he was wrong.

Hubris of man stick

It's why the Joker is such a lame villain now, all he's got is trying to outdo himself in how depraved he can be

That's kind of the point. He puts so much time and energy into this project he becomes blinded as to how he's becoming a supervillain, because none of his actions will have consequences if everything goes right. If the time travel had worked, the heroes would have been more villains, as they would have ensured that the dead remained just that, while that was never Nox's intentions. This doesn't make him a good person, but it affirms that he doesn't see himself as a bad person, he has very legitimate reasons for doing what he's doing, and if it worked the ends may have justified the means.
But it didn't work, where he thought he would go back in time 200 years he only time travelled 20 minutes. It was enough to reverse the single largest of his war crimes, but he's still a mass murderer. He only realises this after he calms down, that every one of the people he killed weren't just temporary speed bumps, but atrocities. The only thing he can bring himself to do after realising that he's a horrible waste of a human is to go and die on his wife's grave.
It's not "Lol Nox dindu nuffin wrong", it's that he's a three-dimensional character who's the opposite of a moustache-twirling villain. He sees himself as totally morally justified and one could imagine themselves in his place if you went batshit crazy and were handed a time machine powered by blood.

Pretty much though I would point out that while he believes he will undo his evil acts. He does at one point state something to the effect of "if I'm wrong than I don't really care about the world, it's not worth living in".

I mean, I liked to think he was like that before watching his origins story, in there he clearly is just blinded by power, almost tortures his family to death and he didn't know shit about time travel before that, so it really is just his fault. And I can't relate at all to someone the had a perfect family in every sense of the word, and throws it away because of a shiny thing.

For me he will remain the most despicable bad guy in that series, someone I would never be able to relate and if a villain someone I would smite without hesitating.

You only get away with the villian is so mysterious before it becomes bothersome. when you have little substance you use shock

For what it's worth The Dark Knight had an interesting take with it's implied Joker is scared veteran idea.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Start out with a good man who genuinely wants to bring about positive reform. Introduce opponents, highly dangerous opponents. Have the would-be BBEG deal with them in neccessary but less than savory ways. Have this create opposition. Create a vicious cycle of risk and elimination because the now-BBEG simply sticks to his convictions, which are at heart noble.

That motherfucker really went off the deep end, didn't he?