Most Compelling Villains

 

This is the final of the three blogs I am making analyzing the metrics I judge villains by and giving the characters I rate the highest tier in each of the metrics. This blog is about the metric Compelling. Compelling refers to how realistic and sympathetic the character is. The degree to which I feel the character could exist (at least allowing for whatever weird physics or powers exist in the fictional universe), the degree to which the character's motives are understandable, and the degree to which they are relatable.

A villain who's Low in Compelling is a character who's motives are shallow and stereotypical villain motives or worse lack motivation entirely or have a personality that feels internally inconsistent or do things because the plot needs them to do rather than the natural result of what they would do given their motive and experiences. Not all good villains need to be compelling. Having a mustache-twirling evil villain is not the worst, especially in something aimed at children if they're menacing or entertaining or best cast scenario both. Even in adult media, sometimes a villain doesn't need to have a particularly a deep motivation. A Gangster villain who just wants money but has a lot of style and prestige and threat can be cool. A Demon who just likes to sadistically torture people but is built up well and has entertainingly devious schemes and is tricky can be fun. A mad killer clown whose motive is just insanity can be funny to watch if they are entertainingly insane. However, a Compelling villain has a certain conceptual endurance, a humanity to them that makes them more universal and gives the viewer a greater ability to learn from them. 

A villain who is High in Compelling is a villain I find personally very relatable, their motive is understandable and something I feel I can learn from. For me, they're often fantastical exaggerations of a real psychological phenomena I've found tricky to deal with. As such this category is probably the most personal. But these are the villains I gave the maximum Compelling score too.

Mimi (Flip Flappers): Mimi was an introverted psychic girl kept in a blank room. She was given friends Salt and Papikana and while slow to warm up to them due to her anti-social introverted nature, eventually befriended them as they grew into adults formed a relationship with and had a child with Salt. Desperate to not let her child be taken by the people trapping her, she and her friends made a desperate escape attempt, and when they were caught and were all to be killed, Mimi had a psychic break, splitting into the overprotective dictatorial spirit Mimi and her normal self. Mimi's motivations are some of the most understandable and clear of any villain I can imagine. She was a shy introverted girl who was introduced to the world and what good it could have through her friends, and didn't want to drag her daughter into the same lifeless world she had know, becoming overprotective and stifling, but it is that very love that eventually allowed them to defeat Mimi. 

Deep Blue (Tokyo Mew Mew): Deep Blue is a villain characterized by a sense of social alienation and anger at the world for its ingratitude. He never felt like a human, he felt eternally like an outsider watching them from without, watching them take advantage and abuse the beautiful world they had been given. That's really understandable to me; the feeling of alienation from other people as though humanity was a different species, the sense of isolation and putting on a show of emotions you don't feel because it's what normal people feel, the anger at people for not appreciating the wonderful things they have. Deep Blue's motivation and his subsequent love for Ichigo, the girl that made him feel like a human, that showed him the value of humanity is such a sweet and compelling story to me. 

Magneto (Marvel Comics): Magneto is a villain characterized by loyalty and fear. Magneto was a mutant child during the Holocaust, who lost his parents to the Nazi Regime. Seeing the human fear of mutants, Magneto feared that humans would try to genocide them as they did to any group that seemed different. Magneto talks often about the superiority of mutant kind and performs despicable actions, but in his heart, he's trying to act for the safety of his people; for his friends and children, for his community. He's even at times reformed himself of his own accord or temporarily taken on a more moral behavior particularly when Charles Xavier seemed dead solely out of respect for his old friend. Magneto is a supervillain but is in an instantly understand one in his motives and no one can doubt his loyalty to his own. 

Grimnir (Magicka): Grimnir is so compelling that even the developers of the game have said Grimnir isn't actually a villain, he's just misunderstood. Grimnir is a wizard who sought after knowledge, who loved to learn, and saw a better future for Midgard. Midgard is a world where people randomly die and get rezzed all the time, a mindless meaningless chaos. Grimnir is the Dark Wizard because he is the opposite of what Wizards stand for normally in Magicka; he's orderly, academic, rational, sane, focused, and serious. I can be accused of being a bit of a stick in the mud sometimes, I don't like chaos and meaninglessness. Grimnir's desire to bring peace and order to Midgard, his love for learning, his disdain for the meaningless violence is all immediately relatable to me and truthfully he didn't even really go that far. He was tempted into using a weapon that could warp reality to bring about peace for everyone. They weren't supposed but how many of us if given that chance would truly resist the temptation, or use it for something as noble in goal as that? After that Grimnir was just a studious wizard who even tried to make amends with Vlad but was imprisoned by the other wizards for nothing else than his love of knowledge and past actions. He made a deal with Assatur after an unknown of time chained away alone at world's end. Grimnir's fall is very understandable from his point of view and his motive very relatable.

Freya (God of War): Freya is compelling for similar reasons as Mimi and Magneto above. Freya's primary goal initially was the preservation of her child Baldur and the reconciliation with him. Aside from that and after Baldur's death her goals become vengeance on Kratos for Baldur's death and the preservation of her people, the Vanir. Freya's every action in the game is instantly understandable and she shows great kindness even to people she has no reason to trust and she was unwilling to kill Atreus even though that would be truly eye for an eye. Her blaming Kratos for Baldur's death is perhaps the one unjust thing she does, but the fact that he killed her son, even if it was to save her, makes her hatred completely understandable and that her love of her people eventually allows her to forgive Kratos is a very compelling character arc. 

Sailor Galaxia (Sailor Moon): Galaxia's arc is complicated and one I went through in my Sailor Moon Acts review but basically Galaxia represents the Gnostic Impulse within people, the sense that the flawed and temporal world should be rejected in favor of the pursuit of the eternal and the spiritual shown by Galaxia literally rejecting and destroying worlds trying to find the perfect eternal world worthy of her. I understand the impulse greatly and while her actions are extreme, they really are just the extreme version of a decision we make everyday, rejecting a material reality because we don't feel like it's somehow good enough for us. Her arc's ending is beautifully tragic as she sees finally the eternal she was seeking but can't reach it and dies with it ever just out of grasp. Galaxia's Gnosticism is very and deeply compelling for me as I understand the search for meaning, the disdain for the shallow, the desire to seek out the eternal. But I also understood what her arc is meant to show about that impulse, that if you reject all things flawed in the world you will find nothing at all, but if you embrace the world in spite of its flaws will you find the eternal existence called love. 

Brainiac (DC Comics): Brainiac's personality and story are deliberately inhuman and yet despite this he functions very well as an exaggeration of an impulse within humanity I know well. Brainiac is a cyborg mind that lives solely aboard his ship, only interacting with the outside world through intermediaries, spending all his time collecting, classifying and organizing outside information into neat orderly bubbles, with shrunken cities from many worlds kept unaging and pristine aboard his ship. Brainiac is the love of order, the disdain for chaos. Brainiac is the knowledge of things abstractly but not experientially. He's detachment from the world, knowing it solely through simulation. Brainiac and Superman are both supergeniuses with supersenses but when exposed to the world Brainiac can't handle it, it overloads his mind, he can't deal with the experience of Chaos. The difference between Brainiac and Superman is that Superman loves the worlds, trusts in the world, and through that can deal with it, while Brainiac has disdain for the chaos of being and needs everything neat and orderly. Brainiac's love for order and willingness to remain detached from the world to avoid interacting with the messy chaotic parts of it are very relatable to me. Superman's statement that Brainiac doesn't know these worlds, only knows his safe static versions of them removed from the realness of "life" hits kinda close to home. Obviously not in a literal sense but in the sense that knowing things is so much easier and more comfortable when they are static and have the same predictable properties but such ignores the beauty of life, it's dynamic changing, growing quality. Brainiac is relatable not insofar as his actions are anything I could or would do but in that he is an archetypal exaggeration of a trait I understand well.