I’ll go first. Mine is the instant knockout drug. Like Dexter’s intramuscular injection that causes someone to immediately lose consciousness. Or in the movie Split where there’s the aerosol spray in your face that makes you instantly unconscious. Or pretty much any time someone uses chloroform.
Lazy villain characterization. Someone dresses in black or snarls a lot or is albino or has some physical marker that makes them different from others, therefore they are the villain.
I want villains with understandable goals. Evil for evil’s sake has struck me as stupid since adulthood.
Thanos was a great villain by this standard. He had lived through the suffering and collapse of his homeworld due to overpopulation, so his motivations actually made sense.
His plan was childishly idiotic which ruined any good will his motivation had
Funnily enough I watched Avengers yesterday and was reminded of the sheer stupidity of Thanos’ plan.
Kill half the living beings. Great. After a traumatic event, people typically nstart banging like bunnies and you’ll get a great amount of offspring and within 30 years things will be worse than before because of what you did.
Instead, bring the miracle of contraception and improve living standards for everyone and watch a miracle unfold with so much less resources required than maintaining huge armies to cause suffering
He could have just made half the people born ever again sterile
Idiotic, yeah, but at least it’s more thought out than “because fuck you, that’s why” which is all we get a lot of the time.
I would prefer an honest fuck you then an idea that doesn’t actually make sense and is pretty obviously flawed.
That’s not the taking into account hours much effort it took to pull off
Meh, there are plenty of people in the real world who just want power and money for themselves, who will shit on anybody and anything to get it and teach others to hate on people for just being different in order to gain power. I don’t think it’s at all implausible that absurdly nasty and selfish people exist.
That can be tricky, though. Done well and you get a villain like Gul Dukat. Done slightly less well, such as with Killmonger and the villains from both Incredibles movies, and you have to make them at least resort to “for the evulz” methods to prevent the audience from sympathizing with them, and even then you may be left with a broken Aesop at the end.
It is almost impossible for a character in a Hollywood film to speak with a Slavic accent and smoke a cigarette without also being some sort of asshole.