Your favorite heroes and villains?

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IamLEAM1983
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Your favorite heroes and villains?

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

Just out of curiosity, I figured we could list our favourite non-Hope characters in a few categories, as well as why they fit.

Here's my pick.

Best Serious Hero : I'm not a big fan of the DC-verse, seeing as Batman's lost the fun and slightly campy edge it used to have. I appreciate what the Nolan-verse has done for the character and I obviously do appreciate the Arkham games, but protagonists with mantles of sheer negativity they carry around like body armor kind of turn me off. I'm just surprised Bruce Wayne doesn't seem to find the slightest ounce of fun in what he does, and is completely consumed by the task of avenging his parents and cleaning Gotham of all criminals.

Considering that, my money's on Spider-Man. In all of his incarnations, he's the type who realizes just how weird being able to do what he does actually is, and who understands that it's kind of hard to be a wall-crawler that takes everything at face value. How are you supposed to take a concept like this seriously, anyway?

Even with that in mind, Peter Parker/Miles Morales/Ben Riley/etc tends to go through a lot of pathos and general drama. There's plenty in the lore to appropriately seat him and give him motivation – without drowning him in a ton of angst.

Best Silly Hero : this would be a tie between The Tick and Earthworm Jim, considering both protagonists tend to slather their pages or video games with tons of non-sequitur humour. It takes a parody of a super hero to take down a parody of a Dick Tracy supervillain, I guess. I love how the Tick is convinced of his own worth as a superhero despite how occasionally ineffectual he might be, and Earthworm Jim isn't so much ineffectual as he seems to be powered by pure, liquid absurdity.

Runners-Up : there's a ton of those. Deadpool, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the X-Men's entire roster of good guys – and I still have a bit of a soft spot for The Mask, although I'm not sure you could call Mister Bighead a good guy...

Best Serious Villain : Iago is – pretty fucking hard to beat. Shakespeare isn't afraid to design a character who's wholly and entirely committed to malevolence and to do that centuries before we'd get our guiltless Saturday morning villains who don't need much in the way of impetus. The difference is most modern bad guys either have a logical motive or have deluded themselves into thinking that pursuing Evil with a capital E is a worthwhile endeavour. It's so rare to find someone who feels like tinkering around in the dregs of morality to find out what's hidden in the deepest, darkest corners, in comparison. Iago feels like he's more interested in the roots of Evil, as opposed to being bad because Bad is somehow Good.

Best Silly Villain : honestly? There's a ton of those. Leave Classic literature and you'll find tons of antagonists who do what they do out of some utterly bonkers set of ideals. I don't count the Joker as one of the silly ones – despite Mark Hamill's performance – because there's some palpable roots to his madness.

Rather, the best honestly silly baddie out there has to be the Tick's own nemesis, Chairface Chippendale. Guy's a parody of Dick Tracy-esque kingpins in that his and his goons' names all end with the suffix -face, and his one and only ambition is to carve his name on the Moon's surface using a set of powerful light-focusing lenses.

As to why he'd do that? Well, he's been bullied all his life and he quite literally has a chair for a face. He's normally suave and debonair enough to maybe pass the Bond Villain initial try-outs, and definitely seems to be a wordly sort – but could you honestly take him seriously? Dude has a chair for a head.

What makes the tragedy sink in a little more is that he's voiced by the immortal Tony Jay. Guy has the class and he has the pipes – but he's destined to be one of the biggest jokes in an already joke-oriented universe where the best available superhero is some overgrown moron who styles himself after a blood-sucking parasite.

In the comics, he eventually ends up down in the pits, drunk off his ass and stuck with trying to piss his name in the snow. Something so simple and so pathetic, which the Tick also denies him. It's almost tragic.

Runners-Up : the villains stable is ginormous. The serious side of things obviously has to start with Darth Vader, while the not-so-serious has to contain Mark Hamill's Joker. I have to fit a few video game villains in there, too, such as Vaas Montenegro, Handsome Jack, Emperor Zinyak, practically every named baddie in the Uncharted series, Dorian Gray, Professor Moriarty, Padraig Ratigan (these two are interchangeable but come on – Vincent Price!), Edward Hyde...

There's too many to count, from far too many sources. A good villain can hold up an entire piece of fictiton and a bad one can cause it to crumble.
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