Overthinking: Why Villains Fail, Frequentally

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

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.