There are exceptions but it seems to be very common in anime for a character to have stupid reasons for their villainy. For example “There is suffering in the world, therefore I am going to kill everyone so they don’t have to suffer any more.” or “If I don’t have a purpose then there is no point to living, the only purpose I can come up with is killing people.” or “I was an orphan and then the bad guy took me off the street therefore I will do anything that guy tells me to do even though I know it’s wrong.”
Why do these emo characters think they have depth if they can use spaghetti logic to show why their justified in their actions? Often times the hero’s even think they have a point or question their own actions because of the villain’s speech.
It’s hard to come up with unusual motivations?
I was watching My Hero Academia, I was a little puzzled by the argument between the two main villains. The one villain seems to hate heroes just because, while the other villain hates heroes because reasons which they don’t really make clear. (Basically it seems to be “How dare those guys call themselves heroes!”)
The problem of antagonists with weak characterization and poor motivations isn’t unique to anime. It happens all the time in western entertainment too.
As to why it happens, it’s because it’s a lot more work just to come up with interesting villainous motivations, and then even more work to incorporate it into the plot in a way that the reveals of the motivations mesh well with the rest of the plot. Unfortunately, there are a lot of writers doing popular entertainment who don’t have the chops to pull this off, so they punt.
Also, when you do give your villain coherent motivations, you risk making your villain too sympathetic. Some stories need a flatter, conventionally evil antagonist for the hero to defeat. For example, I think that Avatar: The Last Airbender was well served by having straightforward villains in The Fire Lord Ozai and Azula (of course, they also had Zuko, who had a complex and evolving set of motivations to round things out).
Well, “anime” is a very broad rubric, but gauging your complaints (some actual examples would help), you’re watching stuff that wants to be taken as serious, if not profound. It’s likely just the writer’s philosophical reach exceeding their grasp, i.e., it’s pretentious. As noted, that’s not limited to Japan.
Honestly, in my experience anime villains are pretty much the opposite- they just want to take over the world/ City/ Dojo because they like having power. Or in some cases because they just happen to eat humans. Most anime I’ve watched follows this tired cliché. An anime where the villain is enacting some sort of nihilistic crusade, like in the OP’s instances, would be more interesting to me.
As I remember, when anime/manga was just starting to break into US media consciousness, it was commented favorably that the villains/antagonists could be sympathetic/charismatic or at least not total cardboard caricatures being evil for the sake of evil (and stupid, to boot). Of course, at the time the points of comparison were American 1970s/80s Saturday-morning cartoons so the threshold was damn low.
Once you began getting more abundant material into the market, and indeed began having an actual demand for it, Sturgeon’s Law kicked in and yeah, it is a problem with all genres.
The monk, who wanted to kill the forest spirit for a shit-load of the Emperor’s gold. Everyone else was acting to protect someone they cared about in some fashion. That guy was just a greedy prick.
OK, yes, he was a prick all right, but he also wasn’t a part of the main conflict of the movie, and defeating him (satisfying though it might be) didn’t really resolve anything.
And the industrial woman in the village was sheltering a number of sick folks, but I can’t remember if what they had was leprosy specifically.
I don’t mean to be a threads**tter, by being too literal in a cafe thread, but real criminals have crappy motivations too.
I hear about people being shot over disputes on turtle soup recipes, disrespect and keeping it real.
Not to mention greed, sports teams, shiftless women and Facebook posts. Let’s also not forget the wonderful property line/fence/tree trimming arguments.:smack:
I know these are real world, but art imitates life…stupid is as stupid does etc.
Unless the OP is fluent in Japanese then it may be unfair to blame the writers – the problem could be with the translation. While I’m sure there’s badly written anime (just as there are badly written American cartoons), Japanese doesn’t translate very cleanly into English so even brilliant dialogue is likely to lose something.
BobBitchin’, while those might be real motivations for individual acts, it takes more than just one act to make a villain. Have you ever seen those sorts of things as motivation for an entire nefarious scheme that needs heroes to foil it?
I don’t know about that - the show kind of foundered looking for a pure villain. Zuko was the original villain, and his motivations were “reclaiming his honor” and epic Daddy issues/abandonment issues, so he was sort of sympathetic. Azula also had similar problems (which I hated - I preferred her as just a dutiful daughter who didn’t question their father’s goals). And remember that originally the Fire Nation was simply misguided in attempting to civilize the other tribes to usher in a new golden age, though Ozai was just a straight up jerk.
If we’re counting Avatar: TLAB, how about Kung Fu Panda. McShane’s character felt slighted and betrayed, so was a sympathetic but still excellent villain.
But yeah, villains are often poorly motivated. By the 3rd movie, no one knew what Agent Smith was on about. And from Skynet to Ultron, every AI decides humans must be destroyed because… reasons.
Nitpick - Admiral Zhao (a straightforward ambitious and merciless would-be conqueror) was the villain of Season 1 of Avatar. Zuko was always more of an antihero. I don’t know about you, but I was waiting for his heel-face turn from the moment I first saw him.
Also, there’s a direct connection between Zuko’s and Azula’s epic Daddy issues/abandonment issues and the fact that Ozai was just a straight up jerk. I mean, It would have been weird if they had been well-adjusted people, wouldn’t it? Ozai was indirefctly the main villain from the beginning - his kids’ bad qualities were just a reflection of his behavior.
I was watching One Piece: Gold and I honestly couldn’t see the reason why they decided to make the villain sympathetic other than to pad the running time of the movie.