Villainous Big Bang Admin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
villainousbigbang) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
villainous_big_bang2020-01-31 10:44 am
villainousbigbang) wrote in villainous_big_bang2020-01-31 10:44 am
Entry tags:
The Eligibility Roast Post
This is the official Eligibility Roast Post! (I did not do that on purpose, but why change a good thing?)
This will open officially on February 15th, but there's definitely some folks already excited - so from now until Feb 15th, comments will be screened. This means you can post your roast, but rebuttals and confirmations of eligibility won't start happening until the 15th.
Comments are unscreened! You can still post new comments, but now you can respond as well - let the counter-roasting BEGIN!
This post closes for comments on the 29th.
Here's how this works. Comment below with your argument concerning a villain from any piece of media - anime, video game, concept album, group of advertisements, any fictional medium with something resembling a Story - and why they are, in fact, a villain. You can be as daring as you want, but here are the main things your argument needs to cover.
1) Does the story seem to think this character is a villain?
2) Is the character villainous from the perspective of other characters?
3) Is the character villainous from the perspective of readers?
The format is pretty loose, but here's an example for one of the villains already on the list.
TITLE: ENVY (FMA 2003) ROAST
"Envy from Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) is a villain of the worst kind - he's cruel, sadistic and self-centered. He's most known for the murder of a beloved fan-favourite, but he also taunts the main characters with their own mistakes and uses his shape-shifting powers to get into people's heads. He never shows any remorse, and while he has a sympathetic backstory, it only shows up at the end and doesn't excuse any of his actions. He also beats the crap out of a ten-year-old, more than once, which just solidifies the case for him being a Grade-A Asshole."
Please include the specific franchise they're from (if you want to make a case for Envy from FMA; Brotherhood that's a new post!), list some of their misdeeds and in general keep in mind that the mods have not seen or read most of the franchises you'll likely be referencing.
If you would like to REBUT somebody's villain roast, just reply to their comment and explain why the character is - in your view - not a villain! Keep in mind that while Serious Meta is entertaining in its own right, this is largely just for fun. If you start getting really, truly personally invested in whether we do or don't see a character as a villain, take a moment to go catch your breath.
What villain is NOT code for:
'ethically wrong to like' character
pedophile
monster with no redeeming qualities (it's true for some of them, but not all!)
unredeemable
unlikeable
What eligibility roasts should NOT do:
'This is why [X] was justified'
'Sure, it was genocide, but it wasn't THAT bad.'
Otherwise downplay the villainous deeds - that's the exact opposite of what we want!
As villains are approved, they'll appear on the eligibility list.
Comments are unscreened! You can still post new comments, but now you can respond as well - let the counter-roasting BEGIN!
This post closes for comments on the 29th.
Here's how this works. Comment below with your argument concerning a villain from any piece of media - anime, video game, concept album, group of advertisements, any fictional medium with something resembling a Story - and why they are, in fact, a villain. You can be as daring as you want, but here are the main things your argument needs to cover.
1) Does the story seem to think this character is a villain?
2) Is the character villainous from the perspective of other characters?
3) Is the character villainous from the perspective of readers?
The format is pretty loose, but here's an example for one of the villains already on the list.
TITLE: ENVY (FMA 2003) ROAST
"Envy from Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) is a villain of the worst kind - he's cruel, sadistic and self-centered. He's most known for the murder of a beloved fan-favourite, but he also taunts the main characters with their own mistakes and uses his shape-shifting powers to get into people's heads. He never shows any remorse, and while he has a sympathetic backstory, it only shows up at the end and doesn't excuse any of his actions. He also beats the crap out of a ten-year-old, more than once, which just solidifies the case for him being a Grade-A Asshole."
Please include the specific franchise they're from (if you want to make a case for Envy from FMA; Brotherhood that's a new post!), list some of their misdeeds and in general keep in mind that the mods have not seen or read most of the franchises you'll likely be referencing.
If you would like to REBUT somebody's villain roast, just reply to their comment and explain why the character is - in your view - not a villain! Keep in mind that while Serious Meta is entertaining in its own right, this is largely just for fun. If you start getting really, truly personally invested in whether we do or don't see a character as a villain, take a moment to go catch your breath.
What villain is NOT code for:
'ethically wrong to like' character
pedophile
monster with no redeeming qualities (it's true for some of them, but not all!)
unredeemable
unlikeable
What eligibility roasts should NOT do:
'This is why [X] was justified'
'Sure, it was genocide, but it wasn't THAT bad.'
Otherwise downplay the villainous deeds - that's the exact opposite of what we want!
As villains are approved, they'll appear on the eligibility list.
Sarazanmai (anime, 2019) - Niiboshi Reo
(Anonymous) 2020-02-26 06:26 am (UTC)(link)Pros: Reo does a lot of reprehensible stuff in canon and is firmly positioned as an antagonist for the first half of the anime. He's a cop that serial murders civilians, almost always for pretty bogus reasons, and the timeline of Sarazanmai implies that he does this for over a decade. These civilians turn into Kappa Zombies, which then cause problems for (at the very least) all of Asakusa, up to and including mind controlling women to be sacrificed. He is also shown to mind control people who witness him committing crimes, which allows him to get away with it. The fate of the people he kills is worse than death - after the protagonists fight the Kappa Zombies, the Zombies are entirely erased from existence, with nobody able to remember them at all. Reo shows no restraint when it comes to who he is willing to target for murder - he kidnaps a prepubescent child with the intent to murder him, and also shoots a teenager to further his own needs, and proceeds to laugh in the teenager's face more than once. ("Oh, you're the kid I shot? Sucks to be you!") The narrative does not show these actions as good or justified, and his love interest/partner in crime calls him out on using children as going overboard. He also emotionally and verbally abuses his resurrected love interest, which is also shown as not justified. He is so focused on his own goal that he doesn't see anything else, and is willing to stoop to any level to make sure it becomes a reality. A smaller thing: he kicks children and animals.
Cons: While I would argue that the show didn't agree with what he was doing (word of God more or less said that he was being stupid and thoughtless), and that he went above and beyond in terms of cruelty, he was more or less a prisoner of war to Otter (the Big Bad) and was emotionally compromised due to the death of his love interest. Also, the "erasing people from existence" thing isn't necessarily his fault and more the rules of the universe, even if he could have prevented it by not killing people. The light novels are more sympathetic to him than the anime, as they show flashback scenes that show his emotional point of view a little bit better and explore backstory that make it more obvious that his love interest is the only person who has consistently humanized him, so he's kind of a hot mess without him - and his goal in the anime is to bring his love interest back to his pre-death state. I could go into the details of that if you need more info but their whole relationship is pretty complex. Another con is that there is a brief text scroll that says something like "I don't know why Reo and Mabu are doing the things they're doing, but I can't believe they're actually bad people" around the halfway point in the anime, which comes from the point of view of the "Greek Chorus" character (although this character is also their in-canon daughter, so keep that into consideration too).
In terms of fandom, he's an extremely polarizing character - people usually either love him and think he did nothing wrong since it was all for love, or people hate him. I think it's hard to not be sympathetic to him by the end of the anime due to a combination of an emotional redemption arc and being shown how much he went through to become the person he was in the anime, but at the same time... the show was pretty adamant on saying "Wow this asshole tried to kill kids, and abusing your authority to kill people/isolate people isn't great" in my opinion. That said, this show is pretty abstract/symbolic so YMMV.
Re: Sarazanmai (anime, 2019) - Niiboshi Reo