so by now we've probably all heard of anti-heroes right the dark gritty version of the hero the one
who doesn't mind kicking the dog or stealing candy from a baby If It ultimately gets them
what they want when you think about it they really look like bad guys it's just that what
they want happens to be a good thing which from an audience perspective makes them insanely complex
to think about we even did a whole video about it just trying to untangle the line between where
anti-hero and villain is but there's another side to this too one that I rarely see explored
what would you call the opposite of that the bright soft version of the villain
the one who doesn't mind saving the cat or helping an old lady across the street what
happens when for all intents and purposes a character seems like a good guy but they
still want to blow up the city that my friends is what we call an anti-villain
and if you thought anti-heroes were complex I promise you you haven't seen anything yet
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thank you it can be pretty hard to find Opportunities to do really experimental
stuff as a content creator usually that kind of thing is pretty risky and can end up costing a
lot of money nevertheless we have managed to do some pretty weird stuff like this video about
a fantasy setting that basically has gigantic Geographic genitalia or this video about crafting
living beings with magic but the coolest thing we've ever done hands down our six part original
series worldsmiths which explores some of the most unique fiction by some of the most unique authors
junji ito's weirdly Pleasant psychological world of horror Neil gaiman's Darkly honest approach
to writing children's stories and a bunch of others we put so much effort into that series
and we are just so proud of it and the reason we got to do all of that this stuff that would
just be a bit too risky to try here on YouTube our streaming platform nebula we literally get
paid to do experiments over there so if you want to see us try more weird and interesting
stuff visit go.nebula.tv tailfoundry and sign up for just 250 a month there are a ton of other
creators experimenting over there too so once you're done with our stuff you'll have plenty
left to explore but definitely look at our stuff first again visit go.nebula.tv tailfoundry and go
watch our original series worldsmiths now back to the video the first thing we want to do is
draw some boundaries for what a villain even is first of all the villain is not the antagonist
I mean it usually is but it doesn't have to be where an antagonist is just a villain that
gets in the way a villain is importantly a bad guy they aren't just an obstacle or a jerk the
thing that they want is actually morally wrong to that kid who the protagonist is competing with in
the baseball playoffs antagonist not villain on the other hand criminal mastermind who wants to
take over the world villain of course but these days very few villains are just that the rise
of the anti-hero is occurring in concert with the rise of the anti-villain in fact some of the only
places you really see these pure evil villains these days are in high fantasy where they're
often some kind of mysterious force of Darkness or in Works made for children that need a more
generic mustache twirling Baddie outside of that they're most often found in comedies where they're
lampooned for the utter unrealisticness of having no positive traits whatsoever at one point in the
recent movie Puss in Boots the last wish which is fantastic by the way please watch it the villain
Big Jack Horner gets his hand on a magical talking bug that introduces itself as his conscience
a fun little parody of Jiminy Cricket from Disney's adaptation of Pinocchio throughout the
movie the little bug makes increasingly desperate attempts to find some shred of goodness in the
irredeemable Jack until eventually he is forced to admit that no such thing exists Jack is just
genuinely bad person it's honestly so much fun to watch if the movie didn't take advantage of Jack's
moral bankruptcy to make a lot of really great irreverent jokes this character would probably
just be incredibly boring Evil all by itself is just one note it can be hard to make compelling
without some way to add Intrigue like a good sense of humor these characters just feel like cardboard
cutouts painted the color evil fortunately it's not an either or situation you can have a villain
that is just a villain and also give them some fun depth of character you can even make the audience
like them there's a throwaway character in the show Rick and Morty named crumbopulus Michael
who is impossible not to like even though he's an alien assassin nice to meet you Morty listen
if you ever need anybody murdered please give me a call no code of ethics I will kill anyone anywhere
children animals old people doesn't matter I just love killing he only has a couple of minutes of
screen time in the entire series but he's still an audience favorite oh boy here I go kill him again
because a villain is likable or funny doesn't make them not a villain just as good doesn't
necessarily mean nice nice doesn't necessarily mean good perhaps the most common type of likable
villain is what tvtropes.org calls the wooby villain the idea is that if you attach enough
tragic history to a character it will soften all their sharp edges and make them feel less like a
villain and fair enough I guess that does work but it doesn't change the fact that they're a villain
yes it's tragic that your family was murdered by Penguins no that doesn't mean your penguin
genocide Revenge plot is okay okay so antagonists comedically dark villains villains with depth
villains we like villains we feel sorry for these are all fun approaches to giving our villains a
bit of depth but they aren't anti-villains at the start of the video I gave a pretty basic
description of anti-heroes and anti-villains the anti-hero might be dark and gritty they might do
bad things but they ultimately want something good and strive to get it which makes them Heroes on
the other hand although they may be pleasant may even do good things anti-villains ultimately want
something bad which makes them villains really what it comes down to is goals the methods and
motivations behind those goals can change but at the end of the day it's the net result of what
the character does or tries to do which decides their morality Thanos from the Marvel Cinematic
Universe is actually a really great example of this his ultimate motivation is to bring balance
to a cosmos that he sees as overpopulated he wants to save it his method for pursuing this motivation
is ruthlessly tearing apart every world he comes to In Search of the tools that will enable him to
do the work and his goal his goal in playing terms is to murder half of all living beings
in the universe at the same time so he may be motivated by a good ideal but his ultimate goal is
evil he's a villain despite a weirdly altruistic core ethos this is what an anti-villain looks like
although it's also probably like the most vanilla version you can possibly find big purple evil man
wants to murder half of all the people but you know it might help the ecosystem not a huge
moral quandary there like I said earlier this gets far more complex if a villain is a character with
goals that we understand to be bad then there are two types of anti-villains one with an evil goal
but good motives and another with an evil goal but good methods and certainly be easier if they had
names wouldn't it luckily we have tvtropes.org to help us that is when we aren't getting hopelessly
lost in article browsing that site is so addictive the noble anti villain is basically just a villain
with some kind of code of ethics or code of honor that they follow for them the end does not always
justify the means their goal may be evil but their methods are more scrupulous more honorable
than those of other villains this is sometimes as simple as an honor among Thieves Dynamic think of
the Thieves Guild in the Elder Scrolls games which has a strict no killing policy useful
absolutely these rules serve a valuable role in helping these villains do what they do but I think
the villains who do this for their own personal reasons fit that Noble title a little bit better
in the 1987 movie Predator an Alien Game Hunter comes to Earth in search of worthy prey the movie
follows a band of jacked testosterone-fueled Green Berets on a mission that takes them deep into the
Vietnamese Wilderness it doesn't take long before the alien identifies them as a good Target and
stealthily begins to pick them off one by one but eventually near the movie's climax one of
the veterans proves to be a match for him and when challenged to combat the alien meets the
man Warrior to Warrior discarding its futuristic weapons and armor a ruthless killer Yes but one
with a code of honor it will only fight a worthy adversary but that still kind of rulesy right I
would consider it anti-villain Behavior sure but just barely I think I like it a bit more when a
character who we take to be a ruthless villain encounters an ethical boundary they just don't
have the heart to cross in Disney's Treasure Planet the notorious pirate Long John Silver
gives up his chance to abscond with a bow load of treasure in order to save Jim Hawkins the
teenage Cabin Boy he had bonded with earlier in the movie although he had betrayed Jim and held
him hostage only a few minutes earlier apparently for him no amount of treasure is worth Jim's life
this is always a meaningful Revelation for us as an audience seeing this new dimension of our
villain sometimes it even signals that they're heading for a Redemption Arc and at some point
will either join the good guys or make some heroic self-sacrifice that's supposed to absolve them of
their evil Deeds so that's what happens when you have a character with a villainous goal but a not
so villainous method for achieving it but what does it look like when both the method and the
goal are bad but the motivation is good that's the territory of the other anti-villain type the
well-intentioned extremist Thanos technically fits this role but I think there's another villain who
demonstrates it in a far more nuanced fashion in the first season of the show The Legend of
Korra were introduced to the big bad an enigmatic powerful mask wearing villain called Amon who's
threatening to destroy the status quo and he kind of has a point see the world they live in has two
kinds of people in it Benders and non-benders people who can magically manipulate the elements
of earth wind fire and water and people who can't as you can imagine Benders have a bit
of an inherent edge here Amman is the leader of the equalists a political faction seeking to make
Benders and non-benders equal he wants everyone to feel safe from each other and have the same
opportunities a noble cause right but like Thanos that's just his motive his actual goal is to
forcibly strip every single Bender of their powers and if that goal weren't bad enough by itself
his method of achieving it is equally villainous kidnapping people terrorizing the population and
arming his own dangerous paramilitary Terry force and with that context he becomes a pretty clear
villain right he wants something bad he's willing to do bad things to get it but his idealistic and
virtuous motivation technically makes him an anti-villain and we can see how delicate
that balance is if we tweak things just a little what if he wanted something good like if instead
of forcibly stripping Benders of their powers what if his goal was to pass laws to protect
non-benders and give them equal rights and what if he used the same dark methods to achieve that
goal kidnapping and terrorism well all of a sudden he actually becomes an anti-hero right
this brings me to another interesting point the domains of anti-hero and anti-villain are so close
that sometimes it just seems to be a simple matter of perspective someone you took to be an anti-hero
can very much appear to be an anti-villain if you just change the angle from which you're
looking at them in stranger things season 4 the character Jason is out for revenge against Eddie
Munson the sadist who ritualistically murdered his girlfriend Chrissy except we as the audience
know that Chrissy was actually murdered by an interdimensional monster that's not as believable
as the satanic sacrifice excuse though so good luck trying to convince him of that it's easy to
see Jason as an anti villain in this scenario but what if we thought the same thing that he did what
if we really did believe Eddie was responsible for the murder wouldn't that make Jason an anti-hero
one piece of information changes the narrative completely Jason probably wouldn't be doing any
of this if he knew the truth so can he really be considered the bad guy he's an anti-villain
purely because of what we know about the situation not actually anything he's done
this is an issue you'll run into all the time with these roles Severus Snape skulls
and motivations are a mystery throughout most of the Harry Potter series but unless you've been in
a coma since 2005 you probably know that he kills Dumbledore and unless you've been in a coma since
2007 you probably know that he was a good guy the whole time but what if you were in that comma if
you only had access to the first six books you would almost definitely still classify him as an
anti villain similarly what if the scene in book 7 where Harry discovers the truth about Snape hadn't
happened nothing about Snape himself would have changed but Harry's opinion of him would have been
drastically different and as we experience the book through Harry's eyes so it ours
so we have hopefully a pretty good definition for an anti-villain is here which is great but our
goal is not necessarily to lock down definitions for these things it's to find new lenses through
which we can look at the fiction we love these labels are less useful as rigid categories than
they are as lenses there's a reason people love to argue about their favorite villains morality could
kylo Ren ever have been redeemed when does Walter White make the switch from hapless anti-hero into
full-on villain is Tyler Durden a demon that tried to drag the hero under or the necessary Shadow he
had to face for growth when you're having these conversations you're not really discussing the
morality of fictional characters you're discussing your own morality and these words hero anti-hero
villain anti-villain are just the language you use to do it the complexity here is wonderful and
we honestly don't actually want to undo all of it hopefully this definition can help you to explore
it speaking of complexity this video is just a taste of all the interesting stuff we want to do
with video creation there are so many boundaries we haven't pushed yet that we are just aching to
unfortunately experiments can be pretty costly unlike regular content you really have no idea
how something experimental is going to perform and doing something new with content creation almost
always forces you to dig a little deeper into your wallet nevertheless we have managed to do
some pretty weird stuff over the last few years by this video about a fantasy setting that basically
has gigantic Geographic genitalia or this video about crafting living beings with magic but the
coolest thing we've ever done hands down our six part original series worldsmiths which explores
some of the most unique fiction by some of the most unique authors junjitos weirdly Pleasant
psychological world of horror Neil gaiman's Darkly honest approach to writing children's stories and
a bunch of others we put so much effort into that series and we are just so proud of it and
the reason we got to do all of that this stuff that would just be a bit too risky to try here
on YouTube well we actually have a completely different streaming platform for it called
nebula it's amazing we literally get paid due to experiments over there all of our videos upload
on nebula a whole week before they upload here on YouTube without any ads and like I said all
the weird stuff that were just not able to risk making for YouTube goes up there too in fact it's
the only place you can see a lot of it and we're not the only ones who have been posting there the
same is true for so many other amazing creators the entire platform was built by creators for
creators every time you watch a video over there a Creator you love is getting paid and far more
than they would ever get paid on YouTube for a lot of us over there it's become the single best way
to fund our more experimental ambitious content like our original series worldsmiths and here's
the really fun part you can get nebula for cheaper than almost any other streaming platform on the
internet like 250 per month that cheap we want you to have access to our nebula content so we've
managed to get hail Foundry fans who sign up using our link a whole 40 off the usual rate all you
have to do is click the link in the description or go to go.nebula.tv tailboundary and sign up
for one year that's it and with our discount on that first year the whole year is only going to be
thirty dollars which again comes out to just 250 per month frankly I'm not quite sure how they can
afford to do this for us but I'm definitely not complaining seriously take advantage of this offer
while it's still going I don't think a better one exists in the world of streaming [Music] anyway
that's all for this one thanks for watching and keep making stuff up I'll see you next week bye
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