Shen's mistake wasn't failing to account for Inner Peace. He did that by "killing Po's Parents" (they escaped but Po doesn't know that until the next movie). His real mistake was failing to account for the ability to heal from grievous scars to one's mind, as he was entirely unable to let go of his own scars. After all his bewilderment at the end isn't directed at how Po redirected the cannon fire, but at how Po was able to find Inner Peace in the first place
THIS is the correct reading of Shen’s arc, and the main message of the movie. Po’s journey is about healing from the wounds inflicted upon him by Shen, and Shen’s journey is about his INABILITY to heal, move on, and become stronger.
@kiritotheabridgedgod4178 How much do you think of that is pure arrogance? Smart people taking credit for their "hard work" vs stupid people having "good luck". Same deal really. But we all recognize bad luck.
@heavenlysenju9948 i disagree with this All of us,either smart or dumb,have the same level of bad luck and smart people just get too focused on such shit losing sight and focus on the answer to your problem Other than that,we share the same level of good and bad luck because of the enviroment being the same with just different developement of each
To be fair with Shen - I think no one can predict that panda can catch and deflect cannonballs (especially after master Rhino's death and Poe's near death)
Just to add to this. Rather than it being Shens over reliance on his cannons being his undoing (but this is still true), but instead I believe the whole root of it really Shens emotions getting the better of him. We see earlier in the film how he's hyper focused on his future on how things must be a certain way, we see the maddened look on his face when he destroys his family home, and in the factory we see that Shen is hurt by his relationship with his parents. Shen lost not because of Po catching the first cannon shot but because Shen finally lost control of the situation and rather than stop firing, he panicked and kept firing. And I think thats the point, we saw Po struggling to fight Shen because of him being emotionally unbalanced, its only until he achieved inner peace he could defeat Shen.
@jammygamer8961 I'd say, to be fair with Shen, he trusted real life to apply. I mean, there is no way in real life anybody not even a panda could catch a cannonball with barehands. A lot of hero win because law of physics dont work as supposed anymore and survive thing they shouldn't have been able to.
@arashoon7246 Should we try to apply real world physics to a universe that doesn't follow ours? In KFP 1 and 2 alone we saw characters pull of crazy moves. With enough training you can do anything in KFP Edit: Like when we saw Shen fighting Master Ox and Croc, he actually physically over powered Ox keeping his axes on the ground while kicking Croc away. No way does a peacock have that much strength
@jammygamer8961I think he firgot to mention a detail. Before Po achieved inner oeace abd got to know of his past, Po got hit by a cannon. As a result, Shen thought Po is dead and thus did he try it over and over, bc it worked once
The problem with capes isn't that it's a cape, It's that they're too strong. A cape shouldn't be strong enough to pull you anywhere, and if it does pull you it needs to be able to rip itself off of you.
Was actually thinking that, that if a character MUST have a cape then it should be easy to detach in the event of an emergency (any time I picture my own characters having a cape I imagine it having a built in “failsafe” like that)
Not entirely true. It's not about the author having intelligence to write a good character or not. It's about the quality of writing. You first have to make a good foundation of the character. You need to root their intelligence to make it believable. Have a history of the character BEING intelligent, having them go through the steps to make believe they're intelligent. Do more show than tell. The author doesn't necessarily need to be intelligent themselves to pull that off. They do however need to be a good writer to make that character believable. This is coming from a self proclaimed intelligent person.... I'm not a writer. My writing is dog water.
You could have a workaround where the writer gathers a bunch of people together and brainstorms a plan for like months, then they have the genius character "think of" that plan in just a few hours Im sure there are other better workarounds to do it too
I heard a writer give advice on how to write characters that are smarter than the person writing them. Give the character a difficult problem, then give yourself a week to figure out the best solution to that problem, then write the character figuring out the solution in a few minutes.
The problem with smart villains is that they are stuck in stupid stories for kids and therefore must defeat themselves somehow because the hero is almost always both dumb and deeply absorbed in his internal conflicts, so he does not pose any sort of challenge as long, as you as can think of a way to bypass or neutralize his combat stats. And that self-defeat contradicts the "smart" part.
Not true. If i recall rightly, Sherlocke Holmes was vastly smarter than his original writer. But look at how incredibly intelligent he was on top of his observation skills.
To be fair, de la Cruz was able to hold the lie his entire life, even with the movie on TV and all. How could he have known that this will be revealed by chance in the afterlife?
As if he could foresee that the great-great-grandson of his former friend, who, by a tragic coincidence, turned out to be his big fan, would suddenly find himself in the world of the dead, meet this former friend (who literally has a couple of weeks left to live), reveal his death and the theft of songs together with him, and upon returning to the world of the living, convey the truth to the whole world🤣
Let's be honest. His legend was perfect, and he hid the truth on the most visible place. So any suspision would be taken as a "that movie thing". Boy was really, really lucky to have heard familiar lines AND connect the dots right. He could have easily believed La Cruse a little more and just get upset over him not taking things seriously and quoting his own film, and his actual accestor - to be a madman. But the boy had the heart and listened to it good enough.
I can't forget the fact that Vector ate a cookie-robot, he bit into that peice of steel and acted like nothing happened. Man, he must have the teeth of a rhino
Ik it's so annoying I like Shen but they're Overrating him heavy here Opportunists are entertaining Villains they don't all have be a 🤓 to be a good Character! - Matt
Just realized Another reason for Syndrome’s downfall is he programmed the Omnidroid a little *too* well It quickly realized that his remote was a threat and acted accordingly… because he forgot to program it to let him win, and so it saw him as an enemy to be defeated just like all the other superheroes
@RadekCrazy1Not exactly. Syndrome is excellent at technological and scientific research and development, as well as long term planning and manipulation. The omnidroid is an entity created with the sole purpose of winning fights against superheroes. All its programming is entirely focused on one task. It isn't exactly "intelligent" nor does it gain sentience. It just observes and adjusts to win the battle.
@samuelwallace2782 my thoughts exactly From what we little see of its thought process, it quickly realizes that the remote is a threat and takes it out It wasn't rebelling against its master, it was just doing as it was told, as Syndrome apparently didn't think to program it to take a dive and let him win (likely too confident that he could beat it and/or underestimating its capabilities), leading it to see him as just another enemy to defeat
The funny thing is Ernesto never came as far as he did because he was a genius, it was because the family of hector, the man he killed, thought he left them and spend decades forgetting and hating him, not bothering looking into what happened. It was all thanks to Miguel, a boy who wanted to break free from his family’s petty hatred, that the truth came out at last and Ernesto was exposed as the murderous scam that he is.
Hear me out: Breakaway capes. They are strong enough to stay attached during normal operation, but when they get snagged, they break off of their mooring to the suit without issue.
Syndrome would've still gotten sucked in unless those clips were designed to account for sustained and low force, the final snag could have also tipped him over, not guaranteed but not a nice gamble for him :3
@call-fj2mp No, you're right. If it was a slow and sustained pull, it would be on the super to pull forward with enough force on their part, but once it got caught by the turbine, it would most likely be enough force. Keep in mind, I'm not talking about just Syndrome (who was a super, because those inventions required super genius, which is noted as a super power in many comic books), but every super that had a cape.
I think it‘s important for genius villains to have flaws. Both because they need to have a weakness the heroes can exploit to win and to emphasize a important message to the audience: That even with high intelligence, you are just as human as all of us and this gives you no right to control other people‘s lives.
@jjfrenzy789Agreed, and I’m not against learning how to write villains, but if that’s all your doing and only including a different topic to make everyone think it’s balanced? We might as well have Toon’s team work with HISHE for their Villain Pub episodes.
I always love to see the variety in how intelligence is presented in villains. It reminds me of the Howard Gardner’s eight intelligences which varies from intrapersonal intelligence to naturalistic intelligence. Great video as always. If you could I would love to see a “How to write a great teen protagonist,” Video.
Syndrome is an *incredibly* stupid villain, but I think that's the point. He devotes his life to revenge over a man being kind of rude to him, fails to use his best inventions to become one of the most legendary people in human history by giving them to the world, designs a robot that can defeat any super that he tries to fight himself without programming it to not hurt him and then turns his back on it to show off for a crowd, thinks that his plan to sell his inventions will somehow result in zero-point energy beams and rocket boots being on grocery store shelves so everyone can buy them, and attempts to kidnap a baby and raise it himself as revenge without consideration for just how hard it will be to raise a child. That's all probably meant to show just how ridiculous someone can get when they choose pettiness over all else and make it their life's focus. It's not meant to be impressive.
no no, he is incredible smart, yet incredible unwise, all you describe is unwise behaviour, not stupid Like when Dr Robotnick made a virus that was so sucessful that could not be stopped by the heroes, but not accounted for the virus to mutate and never developed a cure if that got out of hand
He is also incredibly delusional. Something I didn't notice until someone online pointed out, if you rewatch the movie, you notice that Syndrome actually completely forgot Bomb Voyage was even there when he's remembering Mr. Incredible saying "Fly Home Buddy, I work alone." I never actually noticed it UNTIL someone pointed it out and it was an incredible piece of storytelling because it's something you won't notice right away that he's actually remembering the start of the movie differently.
I think all of this is a result of his pride. He is obsessed with revenge because his pride was hurt, he dedicates his whole life to hunting heroes because he wants to hurt them the way he was hurt by them, and of course he shows off to the crowd because of his ego. The baby thing is probably just him being desperate, and the fact that the writers couldn't show him killing a baby on screen.
This probably explains why Darth Vader is such a memorable villain. He shows up, the room practically bows to his presence, he barks his orders and then leaves. His total screen time in the OT was like half an hour* or something like that. Yet he is one of the most impactful and memorable villains
@DrTracer22 Google says it was about 37 minutes. I think his total speaking lines was one and a half minutes. That might be what I had backwards. Anyway, I fixed it.
@alexanderliu9376 half the time he’s calling the shots that are catching the heroes off guard and when he isn’t it’s because his own teammates are so dumb he has to address the problem himself.
Tai Lung should of been included on this list, mastered every single kung fu secret known to man, escapes a high security prison in a matter of seconds, knows the correct tactics to strike fear into his opponents as well as piss them off, uses his opponents environment to his advantage, was able to analyse the furious fives strengths and weaknesses to beat them quickly, and when fighting Po at first hes tunnel visioned onto the scroll but then he realises his mistake and targets Po before he gets the scroll. Tai Lung is a Genuis villian and it's blasphemy of the highest order that he wasn't included on this list.
This would be a question of intelligence versus emotional intelligence, or, for the purposes of the film, yin and yang, strength and spirit. Despite his incredible strength and combat knowledge, in the end, his entire world revolved around being the Dragon Warrior. When he was told no, what did he do? He threw a tantrum, disrupted a village that had nothing to do with it, and tried to take the role by force. And when he fought Po? He only had eyes for the scroll and attributed all of Po's power to it. And when he saw his reflection in the scroll, he saw nothing, and that's when he lost the battle, because he couldn't accept that everything he fought for was for nothing.
Every smart villian has a flaw, and like i mentioned tai lung did tunnel vision onto tje scroll before he realised his mistake and went for Po, and combat knowledge and emotional intelligence count as been smart. So yeah Tai Lung is a Genuis.
And tai lung is smart in the sense of been street smart because he literally figured out how to break out of a tortoise shell using a mere feather and forcing the rhino guards to use their arrows not only to free him from his chains but as monkey bars to elevate hismself onto the next level.
12:22 Death in puss and boots is NOT A VILLAIN, Death is a warning, a teacher. Death already knows how puss’n’boots life will end because he is Death, so Death GIVES puss’n’boots the opportunity to rectify it. The actual villain is Jack Horner.
@ArethaAnimate I never got the feeling that it was serious about killing him. It seemed more like it was taking its frustration out on him and at the same time scaring him to see if he'd learn his lesson. Especially in the final confrontation. Yes, Death was angry, but when he sees that Puss decides to face him, valuing his last life, he smiles and retreats. I mean, he IS Death. If he really wanted to kill him, he would have done it in a matter of seconds, even in their first encounter. This also confirms the comment you're replying to: he also acts as a teacher, a mentor. Perhaps he acted impulsively out of anger, intervening prematurely when perhaps he shouldn't have, but certainly not with malicious intent.
@raynkp6135 All villains aren’t even antagonists tbh. There are plenty of times where villain characters don’t oppose the protagonist when the protag isn’t heroic or good leaning.
Oh shut up. He is evil exactly because he wants to "teach" everyone to fear him. He loves being feared and admits it literally. Also, he's death and it's not like anyone wants to die. He forces himself on people and then, apperently, wants everyone to like him (which is also not true) and that is supposed to be a good thing?
5:55 capes are fine as long as they have safety releases. Meaning the cape pops off either by the push of a button or something & it also auto releases when enough force is applied to it, preventing them from pulling their wearer to their demise in a pinch.
Rather than it being Shens over reliance on his cannons being his undoing (but this is still true), but instead I believe the whole root of it really Shens emotions getting the better of him. We see earlier in the film how he's hyper focused on his future on how things must be a certain way, we see the maddened look on his face when he destroys his family home, and in the factory we see that Shen is hurt by his relationship with his parents. Shen lost not because of Po catching the first cannon shot but because Shen finally lost control of the situation and rather than stop firing, he panicked and kept firing. And I think thats the point, we saw Po struggling to fight Shen because of him being emotionally unbalanced, its only until he achieved inner peace he could defeat Shen. And thats why Shen was surprised at the end, because he couldn't believe that despite what he did to Po, Po was able to move on from what Shen did to him.
Wait, Syndrome is a villain who is an eccentric richman that owns an island. Who lures people to that island. Mmmh I'm reallising some uncomfortable parallel's here
It's an old trope to be fair. Island of Circe. Island of Dr. Moreau. James Bond. Etc. I think it's more to do with Epstein having a dark sense of humor and an inflated ego comparing himself to famous villains than vice versa
Not everything is about Epstein. Syndrome was killing off supers who had been forced into anonymity, which is the opposite of making connections with rich and influential people.
20:07 To be fair, Hans was the thirteenth son of the reigning monarch of the Southern Isles. Likely insignificant enough for no one else to have any clue who he is or how long he's been in contact with Anna. They have no reason not to trust him after the princess put him in charge
plus that, he literally said he planned to marrying Anna and in one point, to "accidentally" kill Elsa. But at the moment Anna let him in charge, he actively tried to erased them both. When the guardians at the castle shoot their arrows to Elsa, Hans looked up to the big ice thing upon her, and move the target to that to get it down. He had quick thinking.
5:46 for all I know the "Capes accidents" were ""accidents"" caused by syndrome because it was easy to cover them up with the excuse of "Capes are dangerous". But then he died in an actual accident involving the actual danger of the capes probably because of his pride blinding him from the fact that even if he faked those accidents with capes it doesn't mean they aren't dangerous, so it's even more ironic of a death.
@ateshcamurdan5403 I thought they happened shortly after their ban since even when banned many of them kept trying to do superhero stuff despite it and also many people still liked seeing the ocasional superhero, some hated them and others didn't, much like with real life minorities. (I heard some guy say something about a theory of the superhero of the hurricane was either using it as an excuse for retirement underwater since his superpower was apparently something related to water or it was just a murder covered up with the hurricane)
Fun fact: 3:32 in most star wars live action films, they take the capes off at the start of the duel. (Usially so they dont get caught on the saber) (look at the dooku vs obi wan and Anakin in episode 3 for example
off topic but magnetic capes. they would just detach under stress and the magnets can be inside the fabric so they are invisible and you could have more on standby if you still wanna look cool
Friendly recommendation of a video: How to Write contaginists A contaginist is a member of the main cast that intentionally causes problems or conflicts in the group or often stands in the main characters way. They aren’t inherently evil, as they only follow their own twisted ideals on morality or how the world works, nor are they truly enemies with the heroes, they are more like the devil on the main character’s shoulders, Always trying to purchase them into following the wrong path, viewing it as the right path to help the hero archive their goals. (Good examples being Jax from the amazing digital circus, kaworu nagisa from neon genesis evangelion and the trouble-makers from danganronpa) I don’t know if that’s the right way to describe them, as I’m just trying to explain what contaginists are as easy as possible, as describing them is pretty difficult, as they are pretty hard and complex characters to explain in words.
While I haven't heard that archetype before it seems similar or at least tends to be filled by anti heroes. So would this be something along the lines of megatron in transformers one or potentially cell saga Vegeta or am I missing something that makes em different entirely.
@dragonmaster3030 In a way yes, Megatron was the contagonist of the movie. He and Optimus were on the same side till the end and wanted to punish and expose sentinel for his crimes and bring order back in cybertron. But where’s Optimus still wanted to do it the peaceful way, Megatron wanted to pave the future with violence and tried to convince Optimus to follow that path too, which is why they broke up in the end: Because Optimus didn’t succumb to his inner demons in the form of Megatron.
I'm glad you went out of your way to explain what a contaginist is, because I've never heard of them until now... And understandably so. If a Contaginist is a character that's unintentionally a negative influence on the Protagonist, that would make this archetype a lot less flexible. From my understanding, a Protagonist is the main character. The Antagonist is someone who's against the main character. A villain can still be a protagonist if the story is about them, and a hero would very likely be the Antagonist of said villain. So if the Protagonist is already a villainous or immoral character, would a sidekick that's unintentionally leading the villain to be a better person still count as a Contaginist? Or does that only apply to negatively influencing characters with moral standards? Furthermore, it sounds to me like a Contaginist can only work for Protagonists that doesn't know the difference between good and evil. Most Protagonists already have a solid foundation of "Right and Wrong" before they even become heroes.
In the web novel "Worm" there is a separate type of super "Techies" - those who can make high-tech from improvised means, well, in short, Tony Stark type.
As smart as they are, even genius villains need a flaw. But the key is that the flaw has to actually make a sense. If you make your villain suddenly start making stupid decisions or failing a skill they practiced for years, it will feel forced and inconsistent. But if they fail because they really couldn't predict something, or if they lose focus because the hero manages to trigger a weak point in his personality, then it will make sense.
It is obvious that smart villains lose because they are prideful, egotistical and so blinded by obsession that they are the reasons their downfalls happen in the first place. But smart heroes, they show at least a little bit of heart and that is why they win, and it's all thanks to the trust they put for their friends.
And this is where the problem comes in for perfect villains. No matter how strong, calculating, manipulating, or influential they are, they will always lose to some Deus Ex Machina crap.
@azurewhitetail9091 It is the job of the antagonist to lose. There are sometimes exceptions to this, but they are notable exceptions because they are so very rare. In most stories, the antagonist is synonymous with villain. Again, exceptions are notable because they are rare. This is just because these are the story structure that a human audience finds most appealing. Anything else creates a dissonance.
@vylbird8014 Understandable. But it'd be nice to see villains "victorious" more often, even if their victory is short-lived. In the first Kung Fu Panda, the villain technically achieved his goal, but his victory was far less satisfying than he anticipated, causing him to continue fighting in a fit of rage rather than fighting towards a particular goal. He won, but his victory ultimately meant nothing in the end. I also remember watching this one Transformers movie where the Autobots pretty much faked their deaths just to prove to the humans that the Decepticons will never stop terrorizing them, even if they give them what they want. All we need is that brief moment where the story is like "The villain has achieved his ultimate goal! What is he going to do NOW?" Megamind is a comical version of what I have in mind, but it'd be nice to see movies do this on a serious note more often.
@azurewhitetail9091 One of the best subversions has to be Watchmen, where the villain deliberately plays into all the cliches before the final epic showdown. Then informs the heroes that he is not some cheap villain from a pulp radio play, to gloat out his grand scheme out of hubris. No, he was indulging in a little gloating because his doomsday machine had completed operation twenty minutes ago, and he had already achieved his aim. His greatest victory comes soon after, when even the heroes have to admit - much to their disgust - that they need to actually let him win. His scheme may be the only way to avert the deaths of billions of people, even if it required sacrificing millions. Those millions are dead now, and exposing the plan would just make their deaths pointless. And like all the best villains, Veidt believes himself to be the hero, because he was willing to make the hard call: He saw the trolley problem and pulled the lever, willingly killing millions to avert a disaster that would have potentially killed the entire planet, while all the 'heroes' were too busy wasting time ignoring the problem or desperately hoping for another solution because they didn't have the stomach to do what had to be done.
@azurewhitetail9091 There's also a silly version in one of the old Marvel What-If stories, considering what happens if Dr Doom succeeds in taking over the world. Doom is a megalomaniacal tyrant, but he is also super-intelligent and bound by his own absolute code of ethics which binds him to do the best job of can of providing for those people he rules. They owe him a duty of obedience and worship, but he in turn owes them a duty to be the best tyrant he can be and ensure those under his authority are ruled with competence and care. Once he takes over the world he does demand absolute obedience and flattery of his ego - but he also ends all war straight away, diverts the resources thus freed into humanitarian efforts, greatly increases the standard of living and education across the globe, optimises food distribution to end hunger and poverty, and is on his way to curing all disease by the time the heroes rise up and overthrow him.
I actually just watched this last night. Pretty good movie. I will say, it did feel a bit too much like a speedrun through character development, but it’s still a good movie for what it is.
@CalebForslund it’s a really good movie, in my opinion. Even though some characters you might think are rushed, well i actually don’t think the characters were rushed at all.
To be fair, if a villain was ment to be defeated, making them too perfect will make the hero’s victory makes less sense. I believe a villain should have only one defect that causes their fall in the end.
22:00 you should do a video on opportunistic villains. Because while Hans definitely ain’t it opportunism is a great trait for a villain to have when done right
Another good way to write genius villains is to show that despite their intelligence, they too struggle like the main characters to achieve their goals. Good examples like that are Light yagami(death note) and Blackbeard(one piece) Light yagami: Light has to consistently matches his wits with the world’s greatest detective to achieve his goal of a crime free world. And to escape his clutches, Light has to come up with one intelligent gambit after another to win. Blackbeard: Unlike most other villains we see Blackbeard working his way up to power while still facing challenges of his own to get there. It makes him like his archenemy Luffy: they both go through adventures and challenges to get closer to become king of the pirates. It makes them not only more human as the have to work hard to achieve their dreams like us but also more interesting as we have to see and guess what new sceam they have to come up with to win the day.
Death Note is an interesting example because it doesn't go with your classic hero and villain roles. It has a protagonist and antagonist, yes. In almost any story those roles align with the traditional moral placement of the hero and villain. But not Death Note, where it's made very clear that both of the leads are heroes in their story, and villains to each other. Which one is in the moral right is purely a matter of perspective. Yagami is a power-drunk mass murderer, but also represents the common vigilante fantasy - the idea of a hero with the power and strength of character to fix the world. And L is a great detective intent upon solving crimes and stopping murderers, but he doesn't do it because he has some heroic drive to protect the innocent. He does it because he is bored, because he wants someone to match wits with, and he isn't above breaking the law himself to win the game.
Don Hidalgo character at Ernesto´s movie wasn´t played by him, but he actually played the other character who got poisoned or close to get poisoned by him, so he actually wrote the script and characters for the story, but he played what would have been Hector´s role if he had been able to avoid getting all fully poisoned as it had happened to him, thus Ernesto´s role on pride about getting away on what he did was actually also mocking Hector for falling on that issue, whereas his character is able to discover it on proper time and fight back Don Hidalgo i.e. Ernesto´s original role on it.
I feel like this video leads you to believe that these weaknesses make them bad villains when that isn't true. I mean Shen had tested his weapon against many formidable martial artists and they lost miserably so its reasonable to begin to assume there is no counter. Plus how would he even counter that? Or even know of its existence? Syndrome talking too much is a part of his character and, while a critical flaw for him, makes him far more interesting of a character than I would think he would be without it. It showed his desire to be seen as something greater. As something more worthy. A villain who works hard to negate or minimize his flaws can be really interesting but I don't think purely having a flaw makes a villain bad.
Death was certainly an antagonist, but I've never seen Death as a villain. Puss in Boots merely stood out to Death, despite Puss sharing the same inevitable fate any other mortal being has.
In deaths defense, he doesn't even have to kill puss in boots, as something else will eventually do it for him, he is just mad that puss in boots is treating life as meaningless. He doesn't even lose at the end, he just lets the hero live.
Sigh. This is a problem solved in five seconds if not for the anti-intellectualism and lazy writing that permeates the modern era. You know...Just make villains and heroes both smart and dynamically competitive. The villain doesn't need to be five steps ahead of everyone, let their plans get foiled by heroes, and let the readers see them develop new ones in real time. That "developing new plans" IS the part where the readers can testify themselves that the villains are smart.
Works. But also remember that much of the audience doesn't want any sort of complex moral narrative. Some people like such a story, yes - but a lot of people find it much more satisfying if they know who to root for. That's why true crime and copaganda shows thrive. To write such a story it's important the villain must be wrong. They can be smart, they can be charismatic - but they also have to be wrong about whatever they are trying to achieve, so the audience can cheer when the hero gets to beat them up.
My favorite solution for smart villains is having them succeed in their plan, only to discover that they had made a mistake somewhere that brings the whole thing down. The trick is to have the hero involved in it without making the supposedly smart villain an idiot.
Shen actually understood that inner peace could flip over his entire plan that's why he kept po in the dark about the night his parents died and only fed him tantalizing little traces of the truth
The best way to write a smart villain if you're not smart, is to write them like how you view those smarter than yourself. As in, you don't know what's going on in their heads, or what they did before they revealed their solution, but somehow it's already done, finished, ready, and you're just left there scratching your head.
Hans did have a plan. He was going to marry his way to the throne. His problem wasn't being lucky, it was giving up his cover too soon. If he would have waited until the end of the second film he would be king.
@chlorophyll1415 True. Hef got rich, threw wild parties with celebs, and lived with seven centerfold model girlfriends, without hurting anyone, that I know of!
Hans should have just kept pretending to be in love with Anna until she froze and died. Then he could blame Elsa and have everyone after her (she would likely be banished and leave the kingdom)
Gaston actually had Class and Acted unlike Hans from Frozen who sat by and Bided his Time for Anna to never Return OR had people leave the Room so that he could Reveal his Plans to take over the Kingdom by Forging a Lie and Anna Freezes into an Icy Statue on the Couch and Dies. Gaston on the other hand was doing Work, he Acted, and he was more Charismatic. Getting people to Sing a Song about him, he literally had a lot of Strength, and was Smart to an Extent.
little finger at his end was really dumb to be honest, Bran proved to him he can see what happened in the past by saying to him things he shouldn't know about Peter past then Peter think he can still manipulate Bran sister, like she wouldn't trust Bran over somebody she know is very manipulative. And thats just one of his dumb decision at the last season, he made a lot more dumb decision.
I think its awesome when a villian is smart, for example, in technology But they aren't just predicting EVERYTHING, i don't think that making an engine by your own at 7 years old doesn't mean you won't make dumb decissions at times
It’s the reason people who invented the tank aren’t the ones directing how tanks are deployed on the battlefield. Edit: another example being how the Chinese were technologically superior to the Mongols yet the mongols were able to defeat them as well as employ Chinese engineers for future campaigns.
I think for syndrome,it was cause he got cocky,he got too comfortable with how his plan was going and how it did in the past that when Jack Jack got involved he was completely thrown off which led to him making an obvious and simple mistake which led to his death
19:45 Regarding Hans, the line that schocked me the most in the entire Frozen movie was from one of his exhanges with Anna in the "Love is an open door" song. In one part of the song, they had a funny dialogue that went : H : "We finish each other's ..." A : "... sandwiches!" H : "That's what I was gonna say!" Everyone would think he meant to say "sentences", and he just pretended otherwise when Anna screamed sandwiches out of nowhere. But then, they really did synch with each other when they went "Jinx! Jinx again!" in tandem literally in the next line about "someone who thinks so much like me". So when you're listening the song for the first time, the thought of him pretending doesn't even come across your mind. Like you don't even have the time to think about it and he shuts if off. So either: -Hans really was about to say "sandwiches" out of nowhere, which I highly doubt, but that would mean he made a 100% accurate profiling of the way Anna thinks and talks from a single conversation. -He meant to say "sentences" but, then, after realizing she was a nerve frozen lunatic, he adjusted his profiling of her mid song and somehow guessed she would be the type to say "jinx" twice in a split second after. And that actually is far more impressive. Like yeah, Anna is not the sharpest tool in the shed but, sometimes, Hans feels like a Sherlock Holmes tier sorcerer who's so intelligent his deductive abilities are indistinguishable from magic spells. Like an incredibly smart dude written by an average person.
Possibly there was some event that happened offscreen that brought sandwiches to the forefront of their minds, it's still impressive to realize that she would say this, but it would be significantly more plausible if such an event occurred.
I could make an argument about how smart villains lose because of pride, monologue, or small weaknesses or I could say this. Smart villains lose because they are villains and thus the story demands it.
5:38 Do not disrespect Doctor Doom. He is Doctor Doom. He doesn’t care if others have died to a cape getting caught, because he knows that he won’t die from getting his cape caught.
Me personally, I think it's hugely important to emphasise that villain after villain after villain tend to always have some variant of the same Achilles' heel: ego. Just like in real life, nasty, unpleasant and, for lack of a better term, evil people come undone for their ego's sake. The reason villains so frequently are hugely cocksure and arrogant isn't just to make them unlikeable, but to display the inherent danger of letting petty, frail self-delusions of grandeur run your life. Being brittle, self-aggrandising and without emotional control over yourself makes all other forms of intellect useless. What good is genius if a dumb insult from someone who can do nothing to you can turn it off entirely? Very few things could be scarier than a villain with thick skin and control of their emotions, 'cause they can't be taunted into doing something dumb.
Indeed. Look at "Kakegurui" characters, "Youjo Senki" protagonist, doctor Unohana, Aizen, some of the embezzling pervs from the "CSI" shows, "TDK" Joker...Those specific villains can border volatility sometimes, but at the end of the day, they have complete trust in their personal habilities and knowlege, allowing them to control themselves completely and their reactions to their emotions. Those are the kind of villains I emulate in my videogames for my protagonists.
The problem with smart heroes is, one, that they have to lose. Two, they have to look like they're about to win until the last moment, so the victory feels more dramatic. The easiest way for that to work is for the villain to have some glaring weak point, and it's hard to justify a smart villain ignoring that.
To be honest, Death is, in cannon to that wishing star movie, is meant to be the embodiment OF death itself, not really a "villain" in a sense because he is the being to be seen by those who are near death or to warn them, such as Puss In Boots, because his reckless acts that costed him those 8 lives made Death furious. He hated that Puss wasted those lives carelessly. He only set an example that no being with multiple lives should be wasting them. Take SceneShift's video about it, how he describes the story of The Last Wish breaking the rules that normal movies had set before it.
Shen's mistake wasn't failing to account for Inner Peace. He did that by "killing Po's Parents" (they escaped but Po doesn't know that until the next movie). His real mistake was failing to account for the ability to heal from grievous scars to one's mind, as he was entirely unable to let go of his own scars. After all his bewilderment at the end isn't directed at how Po redirected the cannon fire, but at how Po was able to find Inner Peace in the first place
THIS is the correct reading of Shen’s arc, and the main message of the movie. Po’s journey is about healing from the wounds inflicted upon him by Shen, and Shen’s journey is about his INABILITY to heal, move on, and become stronger.
Top comment right here
Yes exactly which just reinforces how well written shen was
Basically: smart villains' downfall is that they can't predict bullshit
Aka, they don't have plot armor
@Fredosauz We have that in real life. "God loves babies and fools" and such. Being smart seems to come with a base debuff to luck
@heavenlysenju9948 eh, I'd say it's more that the smarter you are, the more you notice the bad luck and less you notice the good luck."
@kiritotheabridgedgod4178 How much do you think of that is pure arrogance? Smart people taking credit for their "hard work" vs stupid people having "good luck". Same deal really. But we all recognize bad luck.
@heavenlysenju9948 i disagree with this
All of us,either smart or dumb,have the same level of bad luck and smart people just get too focused on such shit losing sight and focus on the answer to your problem
Other than that,we share the same level of good and bad luck because of the enviroment being the same with just different developement of each
To be fair with Shen - I think no one can predict that panda can catch and deflect cannonballs (especially after master Rhino's death and Poe's near death)
Just to add to this.
Rather than it being Shens over reliance on his cannons being his undoing (but this is still true), but instead I believe the whole root of it really Shens emotions getting the better of him.
We see earlier in the film how he's hyper focused on his future on how things must be a certain way, we see the maddened look on his face when he destroys his family home, and in the factory we see that Shen is hurt by his relationship with his parents.
Shen lost not because of Po catching the first cannon shot but because Shen finally lost control of the situation and rather than stop firing, he panicked and kept firing.
And I think thats the point, we saw Po struggling to fight Shen because of him being emotionally unbalanced, its only until he achieved inner peace he could defeat Shen.
@jammygamer8961 I'd say, to be fair with Shen, he trusted real life to apply. I mean, there is no way in real life anybody not even a panda could catch a cannonball with barehands. A lot of hero win because law of physics dont work as supposed anymore and survive thing they shouldn't have been able to.
@arashoon7246 Should we try to apply real world physics to a universe that doesn't follow ours?
In KFP 1 and 2 alone we saw characters pull of crazy moves. With enough training you can do anything in KFP
Edit: Like when we saw Shen fighting Master Ox and Croc, he actually physically over powered Ox keeping his axes on the ground while kicking Croc away.
No way does a peacock have that much strength
@jammygamer8961I think he firgot to mention a detail.
Before Po achieved inner oeace abd got to know of his past, Po got hit by a cannon. As a result, Shen thought Po is dead and thus did he try it over and over, bc it worked once
@f00l.0f.a.g0d True but then Po comes back and disproves this.
But I get what your saying :)
The problem with capes isn't that it's a cape, It's that they're too strong. A cape shouldn't be strong enough to pull you anywhere, and if it does pull you it needs to be able to rip itself off of you.
Most capes are also too long.
Or be like lemillion from my hero academia and just have intangibility as your power
doesn't megamind have a detachable cape for this exact reason, or is that just a rumor? sounds like something he'd do to keep his "PRESENTATION!"
@jjfrenzy789or just be indestructible like supes
Was actually thinking that, that if a character MUST have a cape then it should be easy to detach in the event of an emergency (any time I picture my own characters having a cape I imagine it having a built in “failsafe” like that)
The problem with smart villains is you have to be smart yourself to be able to write them. Otherwise you get forced fake intelligence
Not entirely true. It's not about the author having intelligence to write a good character or not. It's about the quality of writing.
You first have to make a good foundation of the character. You need to root their intelligence to make it believable. Have a history of the character BEING intelligent, having them go through the steps to make believe they're intelligent. Do more show than tell. The author doesn't necessarily need to be intelligent themselves to pull that off. They do however need to be a good writer to make that character believable.
This is coming from a self proclaimed intelligent person.... I'm not a writer. My writing is dog water.
You could have a workaround where the writer gathers a bunch of people together and brainstorms a plan for like months, then they have the genius character "think of" that plan in just a few hours
Im sure there are other better workarounds to do it too
I heard a writer give advice on how to write characters that are smarter than the person writing them.
Give the character a difficult problem, then give yourself a week to figure out the best solution to that problem, then write the character figuring out the solution in a few minutes.
The problem with smart villains is that they are stuck in stupid stories for kids and therefore must defeat themselves somehow because the hero is almost always both dumb and deeply absorbed in his internal conflicts, so he does not pose any sort of challenge as long, as you as can think of a way to bypass or neutralize his combat stats. And that self-defeat contradicts the "smart" part.
Not true. If i recall rightly, Sherlocke Holmes was vastly smarter than his original writer. But look at how incredibly intelligent he was on top of his observation skills.
To be fair, de la Cruz was able to hold the lie his entire life, even with the movie on TV and all. How could he have known that this will be revealed by chance in the afterlife?
or the fact that it would even have an effect in the afterlife lmao
As if he could foresee that the great-great-grandson of his former friend, who, by a tragic coincidence, turned out to be his big fan, would suddenly find himself in the world of the dead, meet this former friend (who literally has a couple of weeks left to live), reveal his death and the theft of songs together with him, and upon returning to the world of the living, convey the truth to the whole world🤣
@someoneman1737 and that the whole world would believe the word of some random kid from the boonies over that of a famous and well-loved super star
Let's be honest. His legend was perfect, and he hid the truth on the most visible place. So any suspision would be taken as a "that movie thing". Boy was really, really lucky to have heard familiar lines AND connect the dots right. He could have easily believed La Cruse a little more and just get upset over him not taking things seriously and quoting his own film, and his actual accestor - to be a madman. But the boy had the heart and listened to it good enough.
I can't forget the fact that Vector ate a cookie-robot, he bit into that peice of steel and acted like nothing happened. Man, he must have the teeth of a rhino
He actually looked at the circuitry inside of the cookie he just ate and then simply shrugged it off
They were micro-chip cookies
Aura
Obviously he has prosthetic cybernetic teeth of his own invention
I love that basically every single example in this video is immediately followed by "see, Lord Shen from Kung Fu Panda 2 doesn't have this problem"
Lord Shen is just the GOAT. Absolutely deserved.
"Aside from Gojo Shenatoru of course" type of glaze
Ik it's so annoying I like Shen but they're Overrating him heavy here Opportunists are entertaining Villains they don't all have be a 🤓 to be a good Character! - Matt
Just realized
Another reason for Syndrome’s downfall is he programmed the Omnidroid a little *too* well
It quickly realized that his remote was a threat and acted accordingly… because he forgot to program it to let him win, and so it saw him as an enemy to be defeated just like all the other superheroes
Syndrome was so smart that he invented a robot that was smarter than him 🤣
@3nertia definitely 🤣🤣
Or at least it wasn’t blinded by arrogance the way he was. While he was busy showing off it was busy calculating its next move
He made him way too smart that it regained self consciousness and did not want to serve him.
@RadekCrazy1Not exactly. Syndrome is excellent at technological and scientific research and development, as well as long term planning and manipulation. The omnidroid is an entity created with the sole purpose of winning fights against superheroes. All its programming is entirely focused on one task. It isn't exactly "intelligent" nor does it gain sentience. It just observes and adjusts to win the battle.
@samuelwallace2782 my thoughts exactly
From what we little see of its thought process, it quickly realizes that the remote is a threat and takes it out
It wasn't rebelling against its master, it was just doing as it was told, as Syndrome apparently didn't think to program it to take a dive and let him win (likely too confident that he could beat it and/or underestimating its capabilities), leading it to see him as just another enemy to defeat
The funny thing is Ernesto never came as far as he did because he was a genius, it was because the family of hector, the man he killed, thought he left them and spend decades forgetting and hating him, not bothering looking into what happened.
It was all thanks to Miguel, a boy who wanted to break free from his family’s petty hatred,
that the truth came out at last and Ernesto was exposed as the murderous scam that he is.
I was curious about the Movie name "El Camino A Casa" and it translates to The Way Home which fitting cause Hector just wanted to go home.
I headcanon Ernesto told Imelda that Hector ran away.
Hear me out: Breakaway capes. They are strong enough to stay attached during normal operation, but when they get snagged, they break off of their mooring to the suit without issue.
Syndrome would've still gotten sucked in unless those clips were designed to account for sustained and low force, the final snag could have also tipped him over, not guaranteed but not a nice gamble for him :3
@call-fj2mp No, you're right. If it was a slow and sustained pull, it would be on the super to pull forward with enough force on their part, but once it got caught by the turbine, it would most likely be enough force.
Keep in mind, I'm not talking about just Syndrome (who was a super, because those inventions required super genius, which is noted as a super power in many comic books), but every super that had a cape.
We see this with General Grievous in Clone wars 2000s
Break away capes can also be used effectively as a weapon. Hero grabs your cape? Spin and use it to bind their hands or cover their face.
Ever heard of Velcro?? 😂
I think it‘s important for genius villains to have flaws.
Both because they need to have a weakness the heroes can exploit to win and to emphasize a important message to the audience:
That even with high intelligence, you are just as human as all of us and this gives you no right to control other people‘s lives.
It does give you a right to control other people’s lives actually
@LOLOJOJObus he's right abt the part abt being flawed tho
David Xanatos disagrees.
Exactly! Syndrome being prideful is not a problem that you need to fix as a writer, it's a feature and an integral part of his character.
It's like how all demons were originally angels, if they can be tempted what chance do we have?
0:23 The Writers.
bad guys always win in real life
@varsouu Not always, sometimes they are defeated by even-worse guys or just-as-bad guys
@diablo.the.cheater so your saying no, bad guys don't always win because another bad guy defeats the previous bad guy? Basically bad guys always win?
@varsouu
Can't know that for sure. No matter what how good someone is, someone somewhere would think they are bad. It's also true the opposite way.
Literally said that exact thing at that exact moment 😂
Alternate Title: Why Shen is the greatest villain in cartoon history
So true ❤
How To Write Romantic Relationships (for Valentine’s Day)❌
How To Create Another Character for The Villain Pub ✅
Honestly I’m all for the first one. Especially considering how many women write smut and manage to call it literature.
Same thing.
@jjfrenzy789Agreed, and I’m not against learning how to write villains, but if that’s all your doing and only including a different topic to make everyone think it’s balanced? We might as well have Toon’s team work with HISHE for their Villain Pub episodes.
I always love to see the variety in how intelligence is presented in villains. It reminds me of the Howard Gardner’s eight intelligences which varies from intrapersonal intelligence to naturalistic intelligence.
Great video as always. If you could I would love to see a “How to write a great teen protagonist,” Video.
Syndrome is an *incredibly* stupid villain, but I think that's the point.
He devotes his life to revenge over a man being kind of rude to him, fails to use his best inventions to become one of the most legendary people in human history by giving them to the world, designs a robot that can defeat any super that he tries to fight himself without programming it to not hurt him and then turns his back on it to show off for a crowd, thinks that his plan to sell his inventions will somehow result in zero-point energy beams and rocket boots being on grocery store shelves so everyone can buy them, and attempts to kidnap a baby and raise it himself as revenge without consideration for just how hard it will be to raise a child.
That's all probably meant to show just how ridiculous someone can get when they choose pettiness over all else and make it their life's focus. It's not meant to be impressive.
THAT iS TRUE, BUT HE STiLL PUT UP POiNTZ WHEN iT KAME TO GETTiNG SHiT DONE !
no no, he is incredible smart, yet incredible unwise, all you describe is unwise behaviour, not stupid
Like when Dr Robotnick made a virus that was so sucessful that could not be stopped by the heroes, but not accounted for the virus to mutate and never developed a cure if that got out of hand
@alejotassile6441 YUP ! & GOT iT 4 THE LiKE, U OR WHOEVER LEFT iT !
He is also incredibly delusional. Something I didn't notice until someone online pointed out, if you rewatch the movie, you notice that Syndrome actually completely forgot Bomb Voyage was even there when he's remembering Mr. Incredible saying "Fly Home Buddy, I work alone."
I never actually noticed it UNTIL someone pointed it out and it was an incredible piece of storytelling because it's something you won't notice right away that he's actually remembering the start of the movie differently.
I think all of this is a result of his pride. He is obsessed with revenge because his pride was hurt, he dedicates his whole life to hunting heroes because he wants to hurt them the way he was hurt by them, and of course he shows off to the crowd because of his ego.
The baby thing is probably just him being desperate, and the fact that the writers couldn't show him killing a baby on screen.
This probably explains why Darth Vader is such a memorable villain.
He shows up, the room practically bows to his presence, he barks his orders and then leaves.
His total screen time in the OT was like half an hour* or something like that.
Yet he is one of the most impactful and memorable villains
It was around either 13 or 30 minutes.
@DrTracer22 Google says it was about 37 minutes.
I think his total speaking lines was one and a half minutes.
That might be what I had backwards.
Anyway, I fixed it.
aura > smarts i guess
@alexanderliu9376 The thing is, Vader IS smart. He's intelligent, ruthless, intimidating, powerful, and deadly. THAT'S why he is so iconic.
@alexanderliu9376 half the time he’s calling the shots that are catching the heroes off guard and when he isn’t it’s because his own teammates are so dumb he has to address the problem himself.
18:38 nah imma stop you there. Frozen had a villain? 😂
As you see
Elsa was the villain and hero, the other dude was just some psycho
@Siriusblck3real
Tai Lung should of been included on this list, mastered every single kung fu secret known to man, escapes a high security prison in a matter of seconds, knows the correct tactics to strike fear into his opponents as well as piss them off, uses his opponents environment to his advantage, was able to analyse the furious fives strengths and weaknesses to beat them quickly, and when fighting Po at first hes tunnel visioned onto the scroll but then he realises his mistake and targets Po before he gets the scroll. Tai Lung is a Genuis villian and it's blasphemy of the highest order that he wasn't included on this list.
This would be a question of intelligence versus emotional intelligence, or, for the purposes of the film, yin and yang, strength and spirit.
Despite his incredible strength and combat knowledge, in the end, his entire world revolved around being the Dragon Warrior. When he was told no, what did he do? He threw a tantrum, disrupted a village that had nothing to do with it, and tried to take the role by force. And when he fought Po? He only had eyes for the scroll and attributed all of Po's power to it.
And when he saw his reflection in the scroll, he saw nothing, and that's when he lost the battle, because he couldn't accept that everything he fought for was for nothing.
Every smart villian has a flaw, and like i mentioned tai lung did tunnel vision onto tje scroll before he realised his mistake and went for Po, and combat knowledge and emotional intelligence count as been smart. So yeah Tai Lung is a Genuis.
And tai lung is smart in the sense of been street smart because he literally figured out how to break out of a tortoise shell using a mere feather and forcing the rhino guards to use their arrows not only to free him from his chains but as monkey bars to elevate hismself onto the next level.
He seems more like a brute tbh.
He is a brute
12:22 Death in puss and boots is NOT A VILLAIN, Death is a warning, a teacher. Death already knows how puss’n’boots life will end because he is Death, so Death GIVES puss’n’boots the opportunity to rectify it. The actual villain is Jack Horner.
I somewhat agree but death came for puss before he even died. He hunted puss before he was supposed to because of his anger
Yeah, Death isn't a villain, it's an antagonist. They're not the same thing. All villains are antagonists, but not all antagonists are villains.
@ArethaAnimate I never got the feeling that it was serious about killing him. It seemed more like it was taking its frustration out on him and at the same time scaring him to see if he'd learn his lesson.
Especially in the final confrontation. Yes, Death was angry, but when he sees that Puss decides to face him, valuing his last life, he smiles and retreats. I mean, he IS Death. If he really wanted to kill him, he would have done it in a matter of seconds, even in their first encounter.
This also confirms the comment you're replying to: he also acts as a teacher, a mentor. Perhaps he acted impulsively out of anger, intervening prematurely when perhaps he shouldn't have, but certainly not with malicious intent.
@raynkp6135 All villains aren’t even antagonists tbh. There are plenty of times where villain characters don’t oppose the protagonist when the protag isn’t heroic or good leaning.
Oh shut up. He is evil exactly because he wants to "teach" everyone to fear him. He loves being feared and admits it literally. Also, he's death and it's not like anyone wants to die. He forces himself on people and then, apperently, wants everyone to like him (which is also not true) and that is supposed to be a good thing?
0:45 Syndrome death wasn't funny, it was gruesome as f
... gruesome?
@vyor8837 I would consider being torn apart by a jet engine gruesome
@sniiiper3d645 but they don't show anything except an explosion of flame.
@vyor8837 and? That’s still a gruesome death, even if they didn’t show it he did STILL die in a gruesome way (being shredded in a jet engine)
@sniiiper3d645 gruesome means grotesque and disturbing. If it only becomes that way when you think about it deeply, it doesn't count.
5:55 capes are fine as long as they have safety releases. Meaning the cape pops off either by the push of a button or something & it also auto releases when enough force is applied to it, preventing them from pulling their wearer to their demise in a pinch.
Rather than it being Shens over reliance on his cannons being his undoing (but this is still true), but instead I believe the whole root of it really Shens emotions getting the better of him.
We see earlier in the film how he's hyper focused on his future on how things must be a certain way, we see the maddened look on his face when he destroys his family home, and in the factory we see that Shen is hurt by his relationship with his parents.
Shen lost not because of Po catching the first cannon shot but because Shen finally lost control of the situation and rather than stop firing, he panicked and kept firing.
And I think thats the point, we saw Po struggling to fight Shen because of him being emotionally unbalanced, its only until he achieved inner peace he could defeat Shen. And thats why Shen was surprised at the end, because he couldn't believe that despite what he did to Po, Po was able to move on from what Shen did to him.
Wait, Syndrome is a villain who is an eccentric richman that owns an island. Who lures people to that island. Mmmh I'm reallising some uncomfortable parallel's here
Wait a fucking minute
😳
It's an old trope to be fair. Island of Circe. Island of Dr. Moreau. James Bond. Etc. I think it's more to do with Epstein having a dark sense of humor and an inflated ego comparing himself to famous villains than vice versa
Not everything is about Epstein. Syndrome was killing off supers who had been forced into anonymity, which is the opposite of making connections with rich and influential people.
"And when everyone is pedo, no one will be"
20:07 To be fair, Hans was the thirteenth son of the reigning monarch of the Southern Isles. Likely insignificant enough for no one else to have any clue who he is or how long he's been in contact with Anna. They have no reason not to trust him after the princess put him in charge
plus that, he literally said he planned to marrying Anna and in one point, to "accidentally" kill Elsa. But at the moment Anna let him in charge, he actively tried to erased them both. When the guardians at the castle shoot their arrows to Elsa, Hans looked up to the big ice thing upon her, and move the target to that to get it down. He had quick thinking.
5:46 for all I know the "Capes accidents" were ""accidents"" caused by syndrome because it was easy to cover them up with the excuse of "Capes are dangerous". But then he died in an actual accident involving the actual danger of the capes probably because of his pride blinding him from the fact that even if he faked those accidents with capes it doesn't mean they aren't dangerous, so it's even more ironic of a death.
Many of those cape deaths were before Syndrome was even born. He didn’t start genociding supers until their ban
@ateshcamurdan5403 I thought they happened shortly after their ban since even when banned many of them kept trying to do superhero stuff despite it and also many people still liked seeing the ocasional superhero, some hated them and others didn't, much like with real life minorities. (I heard some guy say something about a theory of the superhero of the hurricane was either using it as an excuse for retirement underwater since his superpower was apparently something related to water or it was just a murder covered up with the hurricane)
I’m thinking that he had nothing to do with them, but Edna has ptsd from indirectly causing them
I’d argue that for Death, he doesn’t actually even want to kill Puss. He literally wants to put the fear of death back in him, and fully succeeds
5:33 actually he became Darth Vader cause Anakin was, is and will be the chosen one
Fun fact: 3:32 in most star wars live action films, they take the capes off at the start of the duel. (Usially so they dont get caught on the saber) (look at the dooku vs obi wan and Anakin in episode 3 for example
Even common cloth can be pretty strong, it would have to be purpose designed to break.
@novkorova2774 oh how I wish my t-shirts had that quality.
off topic but magnetic capes. they would just detach under stress and the magnets can be inside the fabric so they are invisible and you could have more on standby if you still wanna look cool
Narcissism and EGO, underestimating the enemy can easily turn the game around!!
Friendly recommendation of a video: How to Write contaginists
A contaginist is a member of the main cast that intentionally causes problems or conflicts in the group or often stands in the main characters way.
They aren’t inherently evil, as they only follow their own twisted ideals on morality or how the world works, nor are they truly enemies with the heroes, they are more like the devil on the main character’s shoulders,
Always trying to purchase them into following the wrong path, viewing it as the right path to help the hero archive their goals.
(Good examples being Jax from the amazing digital circus, kaworu nagisa from neon genesis evangelion and the trouble-makers from danganronpa)
I don’t know if that’s the right way to describe them, as I’m just trying to explain what contaginists are as easy as possible, as describing them is pretty difficult, as they are pretty hard and complex characters to explain in words.
Oh never heard of that kind of character before good suggestion
While I haven't heard that archetype before it seems similar or at least tends to be filled by anti heroes. So would this be something along the lines of megatron in transformers one or potentially cell saga Vegeta or am I missing something that makes em different entirely.
@dragonmaster3030 In a way yes, Megatron was the contagonist of the movie.
He and Optimus were on the same side till the end and wanted to punish and expose sentinel for his crimes and bring order back in cybertron.
But where’s Optimus still wanted to do it the peaceful way, Megatron wanted to pave the future with violence and tried to convince Optimus to follow that path too, which is why they broke up in the end:
Because Optimus didn’t succumb to his inner demons in the form of Megatron.
I'm glad you went out of your way to explain what a contaginist is, because I've never heard of them until now... And understandably so.
If a Contaginist is a character that's unintentionally a negative influence on the Protagonist, that would make this archetype a lot less flexible. From my understanding, a Protagonist is the main character. The Antagonist is someone who's against the main character. A villain can still be a protagonist if the story is about them, and a hero would very likely be the Antagonist of said villain. So if the Protagonist is already a villainous or immoral character, would a sidekick that's unintentionally leading the villain to be a better person still count as a Contaginist? Or does that only apply to negatively influencing characters with moral standards?
Furthermore, it sounds to me like a Contaginist can only work for Protagonists that doesn't know the difference between good and evil. Most Protagonists already have a solid foundation of "Right and Wrong" before they even become heroes.
Contagonist is not a term
It doesn't matter how smart or intelligent you are, it's human nature to make selfish and ignorant choices.
3:47 When you were about to comment Syndrone is aware of his monologing and that makes him so much cooler.
Dude! I did the same thing 😂
2:26 - That was an incredible chain of puns though.
16:38 In fairness, it's not just ego, no better way to write a story than to source it from real events!
0:56 no way he didn’t have a superpower, it’s gotta be like super intelligence.
No kid is making functioning rocket boots and other gadgets.
there are hints that bob is syndrome's father and that snugg is violet's father
In the web novel "Worm" there is a separate type of super "Techies" - those who can make high-tech from improvised means, well, in short, Tony Stark type.
As smart as they are, even genius villains need a flaw. But the key is that the flaw has to actually make a sense. If you make your villain suddenly start making stupid decisions or failing a skill they practiced for years, it will feel forced and inconsistent. But if they fail because they really couldn't predict something, or if they lose focus because the hero manages to trigger a weak point in his personality, then it will make sense.
It is obvious that smart villains lose because they are prideful, egotistical and so blinded by obsession that they are the reasons their downfalls happen in the first place. But smart heroes, they show at least a little bit of heart and that is why they win, and it's all thanks to the trust they put for their friends.
And this is where the problem comes in for perfect villains. No matter how strong, calculating, manipulating, or influential they are, they will always lose to some Deus Ex Machina crap.
@azurewhitetail9091 It is the job of the antagonist to lose. There are sometimes exceptions to this, but they are notable exceptions because they are so very rare. In most stories, the antagonist is synonymous with villain. Again, exceptions are notable because they are rare.
This is just because these are the story structure that a human audience finds most appealing. Anything else creates a dissonance.
@vylbird8014
Understandable. But it'd be nice to see villains "victorious" more often, even if their victory is short-lived. In the first Kung Fu Panda, the villain technically achieved his goal, but his victory was far less satisfying than he anticipated, causing him to continue fighting in a fit of rage rather than fighting towards a particular goal. He won, but his victory ultimately meant nothing in the end.
I also remember watching this one Transformers movie where the Autobots pretty much faked their deaths just to prove to the humans that the Decepticons will never stop terrorizing them, even if they give them what they want.
All we need is that brief moment where the story is like "The villain has achieved his ultimate goal! What is he going to do NOW?" Megamind is a comical version of what I have in mind, but it'd be nice to see movies do this on a serious note more often.
@azurewhitetail9091 One of the best subversions has to be Watchmen, where the villain deliberately plays into all the cliches before the final epic showdown. Then informs the heroes that he is not some cheap villain from a pulp radio play, to gloat out his grand scheme out of hubris. No, he was indulging in a little gloating because his doomsday machine had completed operation twenty minutes ago, and he had already achieved his aim.
His greatest victory comes soon after, when even the heroes have to admit - much to their disgust - that they need to actually let him win. His scheme may be the only way to avert the deaths of billions of people, even if it required sacrificing millions. Those millions are dead now, and exposing the plan would just make their deaths pointless.
And like all the best villains, Veidt believes himself to be the hero, because he was willing to make the hard call: He saw the trolley problem and pulled the lever, willingly killing millions to avert a disaster that would have potentially killed the entire planet, while all the 'heroes' were too busy wasting time ignoring the problem or desperately hoping for another solution because they didn't have the stomach to do what had to be done.
@azurewhitetail9091 There's also a silly version in one of the old Marvel What-If stories, considering what happens if Dr Doom succeeds in taking over the world.
Doom is a megalomaniacal tyrant, but he is also super-intelligent and bound by his own absolute code of ethics which binds him to do the best job of can of providing for those people he rules. They owe him a duty of obedience and worship, but he in turn owes them a duty to be the best tyrant he can be and ensure those under his authority are ruled with competence and care. Once he takes over the world he does demand absolute obedience and flattery of his ego - but he also ends all war straight away, diverts the resources thus freed into humanitarian efforts, greatly increases the standard of living and education across the globe, optimises food distribution to end hunger and poverty, and is on his way to curing all disease by the time the heroes rise up and overthrow him.
I have an idea! You should review Sentinel Prime from Transformers One.
I actually just watched this last night. Pretty good movie. I will say, it did feel a bit too much like a speedrun through character development, but it’s still a good movie for what it is.
@CalebForslund it’s a really good movie, in my opinion. Even though some characters you might think are rushed, well i actually don’t think the characters were rushed at all.
To be fair, if a villain was ment to be defeated, making them too perfect will make the hero’s victory makes less sense.
I believe a villain should have only one defect that causes their fall in the end.
Intelligent villains are human to
Pretty sure one of them was a peacock.
The private island thing sounds so different now
The cape thing feels questionable.
22:00 you should do a video on opportunistic villains. Because while Hans definitely ain’t it opportunism is a great trait for a villain to have when done right
"Talk less, smile more?"
Another good way to write genius villains is to show that despite their intelligence, they too struggle like the main characters to achieve their goals. Good examples like that are Light yagami(death note) and Blackbeard(one piece)
Light yagami: Light has to consistently matches his wits with the world’s greatest detective to achieve his goal of a crime free world. And to escape his clutches, Light has to come up with one intelligent gambit after another to win.
Blackbeard: Unlike most other villains we see Blackbeard working his way up to power while still facing challenges of his own to get there. It makes him like his archenemy Luffy: they both go through adventures and challenges to get closer to become king of the pirates.
It makes them not only more human as the have to work hard to achieve their dreams like us but also more interesting as we have to see and guess what new sceam they have to come up with to win the day.
I think your trying to say “achieve” as in make an accomplishment not “archive” like the storage
@ultimateumbreon929 Thanks for correcting me 😅
Death Note is an interesting example because it doesn't go with your classic hero and villain roles. It has a protagonist and antagonist, yes. In almost any story those roles align with the traditional moral placement of the hero and villain. But not Death Note, where it's made very clear that both of the leads are heroes in their story, and villains to each other. Which one is in the moral right is purely a matter of perspective. Yagami is a power-drunk mass murderer, but also represents the common vigilante fantasy - the idea of a hero with the power and strength of character to fix the world. And L is a great detective intent upon solving crimes and stopping murderers, but he doesn't do it because he has some heroic drive to protect the innocent. He does it because he is bored, because he wants someone to match wits with, and he isn't above breaking the law himself to win the game.
0:01 clock strikes twelve, midnight arrives
Don Hidalgo character at Ernesto´s movie wasn´t played by him, but he actually played the other character who got poisoned or close to get poisoned by him, so he actually wrote the script and characters for the story, but he played what would have been Hector´s role if he had been able to avoid getting all fully poisoned as it had happened to him, thus Ernesto´s role on pride about getting away on what he did was actually also mocking Hector for falling on that issue, whereas his character is able to discover it on proper time and fight back Don Hidalgo i.e. Ernesto´s original role on it.
I feel like this video leads you to believe that these weaknesses make them bad villains when that isn't true. I mean Shen had tested his weapon against many formidable martial artists and they lost miserably so its reasonable to begin to assume there is no counter. Plus how would he even counter that? Or even know of its existence?
Syndrome talking too much is a part of his character and, while a critical flaw for him, makes him far more interesting of a character than I would think he would be without it. It showed his desire to be seen as something greater. As something more worthy.
A villain who works hard to negate or minimize his flaws can be really interesting but I don't think purely having a flaw makes a villain bad.
Death was certainly an antagonist, but I've never seen Death as a villain. Puss in Boots merely stood out to Death, despite Puss sharing the same inevitable fate any other mortal being has.
I love smart villains but I hate how they always get killed off in dumb or simple ways since they can’t have the hero lose
This isn't about the video its self but I love how the video is titled the problem with smart villains but the thumbnail shows 2 of the best villains
1:10 Reminds me of someone
Who?
@ambivilent2Jeffery…
@Brownie_Editzzz_Yt…
You mean John hammond right??😃 Right….? HEY WHATS THAT LOOK FO-
@justasillylilsushi No, obviously, I was referring to Morris Chang and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
Smart villains vs Plot armor
2:12 all of those puns were needed
In deaths defense, he doesn't even have to kill puss in boots, as something else will eventually do it for him, he is just mad that puss in boots is treating life as meaningless.
He doesn't even lose at the end, he just lets the hero live.
Sigh.
This is a problem solved in five seconds if not for the anti-intellectualism and lazy writing that permeates the modern era.
You know...Just make villains and heroes both smart and dynamically competitive. The villain doesn't need to be five steps ahead of everyone, let their plans get foiled by heroes, and let the readers see them develop new ones in real time. That "developing new plans" IS the part where the readers can testify themselves that the villains are smart.
Works. But also remember that much of the audience doesn't want any sort of complex moral narrative. Some people like such a story, yes - but a lot of people find it much more satisfying if they know who to root for. That's why true crime and copaganda shows thrive. To write such a story it's important the villain must be wrong. They can be smart, they can be charismatic - but they also have to be wrong about whatever they are trying to achieve, so the audience can cheer when the hero gets to beat them up.
22:45 Just rename the video to "the problem with villains" at this point lmao
The worst part about hans is that king candy is just him but better in almost every way
My favorite solution for smart villains is having them succeed in their plan, only to discover that they had made a mistake somewhere that brings the whole thing down. The trick is to have the hero involved in it without making the supposedly smart villain an idiot.
1:09 I know someone else who had an empire on a private island
The comment I was looking for 💀
I was looking for this
Shen actually understood that inner peace could flip over his entire plan that's why he kept po in the dark about the night his parents died and only fed him tantalizing little traces of the truth
The best way to write a smart villain if you're not smart, is to write them like how you view those smarter than yourself. As in, you don't know what's going on in their heads, or what they did before they revealed their solution, but somehow it's already done, finished, ready, and you're just left there scratching your head.
19:25 Damn... that's a hilarious double entendre.
Hans did have a plan. He was going to marry his way to the throne. His problem wasn't being lucky, it was giving up his cover too soon. If he would have waited until the end of the second film he would be king.
Lul, you don't have to be a villain to fulfill your selfish plans)
@chlorophyll1415 True. Hef got rich, threw wild parties with celebs, and lived with seven centerfold model girlfriends, without hurting anyone, that I know of!
Hans should have just kept pretending to be in love with Anna until she froze and died. Then he could blame Elsa and have everyone after her (she would likely be banished and leave the kingdom)
Pride. Self exaltation. If villains were humble they could defeat heroes out right.
Gaston actually had Class and Acted unlike Hans from Frozen who sat by and Bided his Time for Anna to never Return OR had people leave the Room so that he could Reveal his Plans to take over the Kingdom by Forging a Lie and Anna Freezes into an Icy Statue on the Couch and Dies.
Gaston on the other hand was doing Work, he Acted, and he was more Charismatic. Getting people to Sing a Song about him, he literally had a lot of Strength, and was Smart to an Extent.
Not everyone can write a Tyrion or Littlefinger. 😞
little finger at his end was really dumb to be honest, Bran proved to him he can see what happened in the past by saying to him things he shouldn't know about Peter past then Peter think he can still manipulate Bran sister, like she wouldn't trust Bran over somebody she know is very manipulative. And thats just one of his dumb decision at the last season, he made a lot more dumb decision.
I think its awesome when a villian is smart, for example, in technology
But they aren't just predicting EVERYTHING, i don't think that making an engine by your own at 7 years old doesn't mean you won't make dumb decissions at times
It’s the reason people who invented the tank aren’t the ones directing how tanks are deployed on the battlefield.
Edit: another example being how the Chinese were technologically superior to the Mongols yet the mongols were able to defeat them as well as employ Chinese engineers for future campaigns.
I think for syndrome,it was cause he got cocky,he got too comfortable with how his plan was going and how it did in the past that when Jack Jack got involved he was completely thrown off which led to him making an obvious and simple mistake which led to his death
Seems pretty realistic to irl geniuses. All pride no bite
19:45 Regarding Hans, the line that schocked me the most in the entire Frozen movie was from one of his exhanges with Anna in the "Love is an open door" song.
In one part of the song, they had a funny dialogue that went :
H : "We finish each other's ..."
A : "... sandwiches!"
H : "That's what I was gonna say!"
Everyone would think he meant to say "sentences", and he just pretended otherwise when Anna screamed sandwiches out of nowhere.
But then, they really did synch with each other when they went "Jinx! Jinx again!" in tandem literally in the next line about "someone who thinks so much like me". So when you're listening the song for the first time, the thought of him pretending doesn't even come across your mind. Like you don't even have the time to think about it and he shuts if off.
So either:
-Hans really was about to say "sandwiches" out of nowhere, which I highly doubt, but that would mean he made a 100% accurate profiling of the way Anna thinks and talks from a single conversation.
-He meant to say "sentences" but, then, after realizing she was a nerve frozen lunatic, he adjusted his profiling of her mid song and somehow guessed she would be the type to say "jinx" twice in a split second after. And that actually is far more impressive.
Like yeah, Anna is not the sharpest tool in the shed but, sometimes, Hans feels like a Sherlock Holmes tier sorcerer who's so intelligent his deductive abilities are indistinguishable from magic spells.
Like an incredibly smart dude written by an average person.
Possibly there was some event that happened offscreen that brought sandwiches to the forefront of their minds, it's still impressive to realize that she would say this, but it would be significantly more plausible if such an event occurred.
If not for his personal trauma, Syndrome could have been a *HUGE* benefit to supers and the entire planet technology wise.
1:11 I know another villain who did something like that
Why can't they both be intelligent but also emotional, like smart but have more ego than IQ
What if the cape had a breakaway seam?
The pm sound always trips me up
Nice video, nice thesis, good monad.
I could make an argument about how smart villains lose because of pride, monologue, or small weaknesses or I could say this. Smart villains lose because they are villains and thus the story demands it.
If a villain is smart you must also be capable of doing the same thing wait.....
“You sly dog, you caught me monologuing” 😂😂😂😂
1:10 syndrome looks very different now
11:20 don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. -vader
5:38 Do not disrespect Doctor Doom. He is Doctor Doom. He doesn’t care if others have died to a cape getting caught, because he knows that he won’t die from getting his cape caught.
remember that one time an alternate universe doom(good guy) said Dr. Doom's Suit is outdated and silly he just destroyed that entire universe
1:12 A rich guy with an empire and a private island. I don't like where that's going.
genius autistic kid to super genius adult with autism
I mean to be fair id be confused and terrified if someone caught a cannonball and threw it back at me 😂
Hans never should have been a villain he was not set up or portrayed correctly
Me personally, I think it's hugely important to emphasise that villain after villain after villain tend to always have some variant of the same Achilles' heel: ego.
Just like in real life, nasty, unpleasant and, for lack of a better term, evil people come undone for their ego's sake.
The reason villains so frequently are hugely cocksure and arrogant isn't just to make them unlikeable, but to display the inherent danger of letting petty, frail self-delusions of grandeur run your life.
Being brittle, self-aggrandising and without emotional control over yourself makes all other forms of intellect useless.
What good is genius if a dumb insult from someone who can do nothing to you can turn it off entirely?
Very few things could be scarier than a villain with thick skin and control of their emotions, 'cause they can't be taunted into doing something dumb.
Indeed. Look at "Kakegurui" characters, "Youjo Senki" protagonist, doctor Unohana, Aizen, some of the embezzling pervs from the "CSI" shows, "TDK" Joker...Those specific villains can border volatility sometimes, but at the end of the day, they have complete trust in their personal habilities and knowlege, allowing them to control themselves completely and their reactions to their emotions.
Those are the kind of villains I emulate in my videogames for my protagonists.
8:50 seeing Gru being eaten by shark always loled me
Syndrome definitely didnt monologue to heroes other than mr incredible because in his eyes - he made syndrome
the hat from meet the robinson seem pretty smart tho
As for Sindrome, Count Duku himself said "Double the pride, Double the fall" (sorry about the spelling)
Their only mistake is that they never use sniper rifles ☠️
The problem with smart heroes is, one, that they have to lose. Two, they have to look like they're about to win until the last moment, so the victory feels more dramatic. The easiest way for that to work is for the villain to have some glaring weak point, and it's hard to justify a smart villain ignoring that.
To be honest, Death is, in cannon to that wishing star movie, is meant to be the embodiment OF death itself, not really a "villain" in a sense because he is the being to be seen by those who are near death or to warn them, such as Puss In Boots, because his reckless acts that costed him those 8 lives made Death furious. He hated that Puss wasted those lives carelessly. He only set an example that no being with multiple lives should be wasting them. Take SceneShift's video about it, how he describes the story of The Last Wish breaking the rules that normal movies had set before it.
1:13 private island you say...