Villain Groups and my inevitably shattered expectations

[Present 2.0]

So I've a certain Problem, when a Group of ca. 5-8 Villains gets introduced.

I always get really hyped up. I always expect to get several Antagonists, who'll all have a purpose in the story and will all have a satisfying death/defeat and will have interesting interactions with each other.

And then most of them, but the main one are just fodder, they all get just worked off one after the other and most of them could be written out of the story and they barely interact with each other.

This has little to do with character depth and more with Purpose. A dumb Brute, that'll kill the muggle friends and has to be defeated by the heroes learning to work together would be more important to me in this scenario than a guy with great backstory, who's just another obstacle between the heroes and the main bad guy.

Am I the Problem and expecting too much, when I expect for eight characters to all have their own Arc or does anyone know any good exceptions to this.

Exceptions, that I can think of, are the Chimera Ants in HXH, a few Fire Emblem-Villain Groups like the Grado Empire in Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones and maybe a few Power Rangers Villain Groups(but I haven't actually seen many Power Rangers Seasons and go by Linkaras History of Power Rangers here. The Lost Galaxy Villains seem to be a great excample, but I can't really get into Power Rangers).

I'm not sure, if I'm good here at conveying what I want.

[Tvtyrant]

So I've a certain Problem, when a Group of ca. 5-8 Villains get introduced.

I always get really hyped up. I always expect to get several Antagonists, who'll all have a purpose in the story and will all have a satisfying death/defeat and will have interesting interactions with each other.

And then most of them, but the main one are just fodder, they all get just worked off one after the other and most of them could be written out of the story and they barely interact with each other.

This has little to do with character depth and more with Purpose. A dumb Brute, that'll kill the muggle friends and has to be defeated by the heroes learning to work together would be more important to me in this scenario than a guy with great backstory, who's just another obstacle between the heroes and the main bad guy.

Am I the Problem and expecting too much, when I expect for eight characters to all have their own Arc or does anyone know any good exceptions to this.

Exceptions, that I can think of, are the Chimera Ants in HXH, a few Fire Emblem-Villain Groups like the Grado Empire in Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones and maybe a few Power Rangers Villain Groups(but I haven't actually seen many Power Rangers Seasons and go by Linkaras History of Power Rangers here. The Lost Galaxy Villains seem to be a great excample, but I can't really get into Power Rangers).

I'm not sure, if I'm good here at conveying what I want.
Essentially you are hoping for a permanent group of villains, and not something to be worked through?

I think that is very popular in Western Comics (Legion of Doom, the Flash's villain club, etc) but uncommon in shonen. The line I think is that in Western Comics power levels stay fairly static, with powerups and depowering being retconned out fairly quickly to status quo.

Shonen is almost always a ladder climb, so bad guys who stick around stop being threats after a while. Groups like the Akatsuki, Visorlords, Spirit World Captains or Baroque Works are often numbered or ranked so we can know how much better the hero is getting.

Having the bad guys simply scale up makes the hero's upgrades feel stagnant, so in a ladder series that is going to be very rare or the time between match's very long.

[Cheesegear]

I always get really hyped up. I always expect to get several Antagonists, who'll all have a purpose in the story and will all have a satisfying death/defeat and will have interesting interactions with each other.

That is the intent of the Suicide Squad. Except then the movie botches it.

It was also a major DC arc in The New 52, Forever Evil, which created the Injustice League.

[Dienekes]

You might want to read Worm. Which is about such a group of mid-tier villains.

But as to your problem. Well, one of the problems is that villains are usually set up as an obstacle for the protagonists. They are there to create drama, but the focus usually remains on the heroes. This limits just how much interaction the villain team can get without drawing the spotlight from the heroes and the Big Bad. So usually things with a well developed line of B villains and villain groups have the opportunity to be more sprawling. 1.5-2 hour movies, little to no chance. But full book runs or comic series can.

I don't watch a lot of anime, however, one that comes to mind is My Hero Academia. Of which alongside the heroes is the league of villains which has a core group of villains that interact with each other. It starts off kind of rocky though, with their first introduction just throwing a bunch of one-shot villains at the protagonists. However, from that point a core group of about 5 villains make up a distinct team.

[Razade]

So I've a certain Problem, when a Group of ca. 5-8 Villains get introduced.

I always get really hyped up. I always expect to get several Antagonists, who'll all have a purpose in the story and will all have a satisfying death/defeat and will have interesting interactions with each other.

And then most of them, but the main one are just fodder, they all get just worked off one after the other and most of them could be written out of the story and they barely interact with each other.

This has little to do with character depth and more with Purpose. A dumb Brute, that'll kill the muggle friends and has to be defeated by the heroes learning to work together would be more important to me in this scenario than a guy with great backstory, who's just another obstacle between the heroes and the main bad guy.

Am I the Problem and expecting too much, when I expect for eight characters to all have their own Arc or does anyone know any good exceptions to this.

Exceptions, that I can think of, are the Chimera Ants in HXH, a few Fire Emblem-Villain Groups like the Grado Empire in Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones and maybe a few Power Rangers Villain Groups(but I haven't actually seen many Power Rangers Seasons and go by Linkaras History of Power Rangers here. The Lost Galaxy Villains seem to be a great excample, but I can't really get into Power Rangers).

I'm not sure, if I'm good here at conveying what I want.

Read One Piece.

[JBPuffin]

You want groups of villains to work more like the groups of heroes do - not be the protags, per se, but seem like actual characters rather than power sets glued to bodies and vague personalities except for maybe two or three "main" villains? May not be easy, but certainly achievable and not unreasonable. 's why some of the RPGs I've played recently have felt like slogs.

[Present 2.0]

That is the intent of the Suicide Squad. Except then the movie botches it.


You might want to read Worm. Which is about such a group of mid-tier villains.

I mean a Group of Antagonists, not just Villains. Elsewhise I wouldn't have mentioned satisfying Defeats. Sorry, if I was unclear.

I've read Worm and it was the most awesome Thing, I've ever read, but it was also what prompted me to open this Thread.

Especially the S9-Arc.

When every Member got introduced in their own Interlude, I thought, I'd get what I wanted.

Then Things happened like Burnscar just being there with Bonesaw and Jack, while Grue had his second trigger and dying without anything about her character being important to her death.

[DataNinja]

From what I've heard and gathered, Transformers Prime does this sort of thing exceptionally well, with episodes focusing as much on the antagonist as the protagonists, with each getting their share of development and days in the limelight (as well as victories and defeats). And, from what snippets I've seen of it, the characters do seem to be well done. I'm not sure what sort of media or whatnot you're searching for, but, if your interested, I might recommend searching it out. I've heard it be highly praised.

[Present 2.0]

Maybe I can give a good excample and a bad excample of what I mean.

Well, let's go with Power Rangers: Lost Galaxy.

There are 4 Main Villains. The Emperor, the Princess, the evil General and the Honorable General.

The Emperor dies in the Middle of the Series and wants the Princess to be his successor, while the evil General wants to be the Successor himself. The honorable General trains the Princess, so she can be a strong and worthy Successor and the Princess develops from a spoiled Brat into a Leader. She has a small Civil War with the evil General. Later the Princess absorbs the evil General and becomes more evil because of that. After the honorable General protects a human child from one of her suicide Soldiers, he sees, that she isn't his student any more and goes against her and dies for that. She is then the Final Opponent for the Power Rangers.

Yeah, the absorbing evil-Thing is maybe a bit stupid, but my Point is, that every one of these Villains has their own Purpose within the story, every death of one of the villains changes the dynamic between the rest of the Villains and writing one of them out would be difficult.

Now let's go to a bad Example with Rurouni Kenshin. In the Final of the Shishio Makoto-Arc Himura Kenshin and his Friends have to go though 5 Rooms. In every one of these Rooms is one of the Main Members of the Villain Group. They go through one Room, and one of the Heroes defeats the Villain there, while learning about his Backstory and then they go on.

Every Main Villain gets reduced to a frigging Room. Where is your Pride. Do you really want to be nothing more than a Room?