A Little Context...
This
is a faux capstone project for a superhero college RPG on Pro-boards.
Originally, the webcomic authors for Sidekick Girl planned to use the
fan's characters for a massive cameo of heroes and villains (minions
and sidekicks were also welcome.) However, the story arc fell through
for multiple reasons.
Jump
forward a few years and I'm brushing off the digital dust on this
rambling, over-wordy fluff piece. It has a slightly pompous tone and
a complete lack of academic format. Oddly enough, people have asked
me if this was a real school assignment.
It
is however an excellent example of how I over-analyze everything,
storytelling trophes and cliches included. This also saves me trying
to type with one of my fingers in a brace. (The right-hand middle
finger is NOT a good finger to injury.)
For
your enjoyment, Common Causes of Downfall ;)
Common Causes of Downfall: A Comparative Analysis
by Twitch (Sidekick Undergraduate)
Metro City Community College Superhero Correspondence Program
Winter Semester 2014
Metro City Community College Superhero Correspondence Program
Winter Semester 2014
Why
do villains fail? Their schemes are elaborate and their powers often
greater than those of the hero opposing them. Victory seems assured.
So do plans keep failing and the villains themselves often perish?
The answer can be found by examining a wide range of villains and
their downfalls. Three reoccurring elements quickly become apparent:
fatal character flaws; poor strategy; and chaos. This paper will
compare these elements and describe their effects on evil plans and
villains.
No
single element causes a villain's downfall. All three play a part in
each instance, but their comparative influences vary from case to
case. The most common of the three is human nature. Fatal character
flaws on the part of the villain cause some of the most famous and
spectacular downfalls. Poor strategies are often co-dependent on
fatal character flaws, but can be viewed as a separate element.
Situational awareness and resource management often decide a
conflict's outcome before it begins. The final element that can cause
downfall is chaos. Theoretically, a omnipotent and all-powerful being
would not experience chaos. However, since such villain has yet to
appear in literature or reality, chaos will be defined as
unpredictable forces which can not be overcome by preparation.
Now
that the three elements of downfall have been defined, it is time to
examine them more closely. Human nature is the primary reason
villains fail. Pride, greed, and laziness are character flaws that
cloud judgment and lead to fatal mistakes, hence the term fatal flaw.
A villain who is afflicted by pride will be too sure of his or her
power. In Star Wars IV, the pride of the Empire lost them the
Death Star, a powerful weapon and a technological marvel. However,
the officers' overconfidence prevented them from responding seriously
to the Rebel Alliance. The Empire failed to fix the known weak point
before making an attack on the forewarned Alliance, and it cost them
a key battle.
Another
example of pride bringing about a downfall is monologuing during a
fight. In addition to giving away the speaker's location in combat, a monologue just helps the hero. In comic books, heroes never fail to get
a second wind or finish setting up a final attack while the villain
is boasting. At the end of the Pixar movie, The Incredibles,
the villain, thinking himself safe in the air, stops for an angry
monologue. If he hadn't been staying in one place, Mr. Incredible
wouldn't have been able to throw a car into his jet. Pride goeth
before the fall - literally in some stories.
While
pride causes fatal overconfidence, greed causes fatal overreaching.
Countless villains in B-grade action films die in tombs and temples
because they were too busy shoveling gold into their pockets. To
illustrate the effect of this overreaching in a scheme, this paper
will refer to Dodie Smith's book 101 Dalmatians. In
the story, the villain Cruella de Vil is crazy for fur. When she sees
the Dalmatian couple Pongo and Missis Pongo with their fifteen new
puppies she decides to make a spotted coat from puppy fur. Although
she gathers eighty-two other puppies, the spots on the Pongos'
puppies are too perfect to pass up. However, after she steals them,
the angry dogs track her across England, take all the puppies back,
trash her manor and have their humans call the police on her. Moral
issues of fur aside, Cruella could have gotten away with her dog-skin
coat scheme if she had not needed to use the Pongos' puppies. While
the encounter was not fatal, she let greed push her plan too far.
The
third fatal flaw, laziness, produces downfalls through assumption.
The Disney animated movie The Lion King
provides several good illustrations. The henchmen hyenas assumed the
desert would kill the lion cub Simba instead of finishing him off in
person. Several years later, Simba grows into a full lion and
reclaims the kingdom. Despite his guile, Scar, the mastermind, was
also quite lazy. He assumed that the title of king would keep him
safe. However, his misrule of the kingdom would have eventually
caused either the lions or hyenas to assassinate him. Assumptions can
kill just as easily as pride or greed.
The three fatal flaws and poor strategies are often linked. A fatal
flaw clouds a villain's judgment and so it becomes impossible to make
and execute a good tactics. Whether fighting in a volcanic crater or
ordering hundreds of soldiers, the basics of tactical planning will
decide the outcome ninety-nine percent of the time. Situational
awareness deals with how much accurate and pertinent knowledge a
villain has about him or herself, the opponents, and the battlefield.
Resource management is critical because there is always a limiting
element in a conflict, such as materials or time. Improperly
prioritizing goals and resources can quickly leave the villain with
neither a way to move the plan forward or a way to escape the
fallout.
Classical
literature provides a good example of all these elements at once. In
the series Lord of the Rings,
the white wizard Saurman joins forces with the Dark Lord. He quickly
converts his tower into a monster making factory. The forges run
non-stop to equip his army of orcs and soon the land around Isangaurd
is a charred strip mine. Running out of fuel, Saurman turns his eyes
to the neighboring forest of Fangon. The wizard was aware the ancient
race of Ents live in Fangorn – he has even spoken with a few; but
he didn't view them a threat to his fortress. However, the
historically pacifistic race held a hasty counsel of war and
unanimously decide to go to battle. When they run out of things to
break by smashing, they quickly dig a channel up to the river and
flood Isangarud. The downfall of Saurman was due to a lack of
situational awareness; he misjudged the philosophy and power of the
Ents. Pride slanted his observations. Greed and laziness also payed a
part in this tale. Saurman mismanaged his resources building an army
and then rushed into stealing and looting without gathering proper
intelligence. This was a poor strategy on multiple levels.
While fatal flaws and poor strategy cause most downfalls, some are
caused by simple chaos. In the introduction of this paper, chaos was
defined as unpredictable forces which can not be overcome by
preparation. However, there is one point to bear in mind. Available
knowledge plays large part in determining if the downfall was chaos
or simply poor strategy In feudal Europe, cardiovascular technologies
were limited. There truly was no way to check the electrical function
of a heart or examine the blood-markers. The Black Knight's sudden
heart-attack on the jousting field could not have been predicted and
or treated with the contemporary medical equipment. However, in first
world cities of the twentieth-first century, the resources and
facilities are common. Most of the population knows that the tests
exist. If a modern super villain has a sudden heart-attack, it is
often because they didn't or couldn't take the time to have those
tests run. As humanity's field of knowledge changes, chaos' areas of
influence change – modern examples include traffic accidents and
food poisoning. Theoretically, omnipotence would remove chaos, but
until and if someone like that appears, all plans and people are
susceptible to chaos.
In conclusion, all downfalls share similar causes. The tandem factors
of fatal flaws and poor strategy leave the villain vulnerable to
opposition from a hero also well as environmental hazards. Chaos can
bypass all schemes with an unpredictable event. With all these
elements in play, it is easy to see why downfalls are commonplace.
