#to have your entire hero idenity based on him

[just-a-lil-critter]

It's come to my attention that Bakugo's belt? pouch?? idk could be a fanny pack for all I care

is really similar to the one Deku wears on his hero costume helpwhatdoimakeofthis-

this means Bakugou either gave it to Izuku/ let him borrow it or Izuku went out and got the exact same kind and Bakugo said nothing at all

the same Bakugo who called Izuku a stalker and hates when he copies him but never stops him outright aND NOW THIS???

[whet-ones-write]

Random Denki Kaminari Headcanons SFW

Here’s the next one on my list! Requests: Open Headcanons: Open See the entire My Hero Masterlist here - And see My Rules here if there’s someone or something you want to see! I also do writings for Haikyuu!! See that here!

So I hope you all enjoy these! Also @heauxzenji​ Enjoy your Denki husband <3

🔌 - If this man didn’t make it as a Pro-hero. He would become the worlds best DJ and no one can change my mind. He would use a different name than his pro hero name as someone he could hire and wear a costume to cover his idenity but he pumps out the base nice and heavy, shaking it to your very core.

🔌 - He would also be responcible for Slient Raves and other such events so no matter where he goes he can appeal to all around the world.

🔌 - He doesn’t make it as a ‘Pro-Hero’ in a sense but he the perfect Pro-RESCUE hero. Purely because he can in fact with enough control, will power and concentration he can at as a defibrillator machine with his Quirk and save countless lives by being on the scene. Starting hearts, keeping hospital machines running in a crisis and I would like to think if he didn’t go over board with his quirk so often, he would be a lot smarter but it is also his achilles heel.

🔌 - Compared to some of the other guys he has a very hard time of controling his impusles. Wither it comes to actions or food he very easily gains weight so he has to watch what he eats with a lot of care.

🔌 - Although a lot of people refer to him as Pikachu I see him more as a Shinx. Something as young he’s sweet innocent, growing into a mightly creature and one to look out for or it’ll take you by surpise in the worst ways.

🔌  - He has the BEST sense in fashion. He knows what’s in, what’s old news and what’s up and coming. If someone asks him for a make over he knows excatly what to get someone to match them the best for their style and personality.

🔌 - He’s the worst for Horror movies. He acts all tough saying that. “Psh, I’ve seen that before it isn’t that scary.” But in  the end is the clinging to you shaking but oddly he doesn’t get nightmares. He drools and snores as normal as you’re there desperatly trying to wake him up for comfort.

🔌 - He’s a Tiktok Addict and has thousands of followers, renacting some in his spare time, and even asks you to join in. Doing some couple dances and answering some questions that they provide in some sides of Tiktok.

🔌 - He chews on ice cubes and un-popped popcorn kurnels. No one can change my mind. He likes the crunch and cause chaos with it because he knows it drives people the wall.

🔌 - He’s a wine kind of guy. He dislikes the tastes of beer and Whiskey and would rather have a sweet wine no matter how much he’s teased for it, for it being a ‘girly’ drink. He likes the taste but fuck him if he knows the difference without tasting them first.

[gffa]

Hey! Long time reader, first time asker but I read your post yesterday about supplementary material enriching experience. I’ve seen all the movies, I’m loving The Clone Wars and I enjoy playing Swtor but that’s all I have experienced. Do you have any recommendations as to where to start with supplementary material? Are the graphic novels you reference on that marvel comic subscription do you know? Thank you for your posts, they are always so interesting!

Hi!  Thank you for the kind words, I’m glad you’re enjoying the blog!  And I love doing “where to start” posts!  Keep in mind that a lot depends on what you happen to like (if you’re more of an OT fan or a PT fan or an ST fan, if you like certain characters more than others, etc.) but I think the basic places to start when moving on from the movies are:- The Clone Wars TV show.  As you’ve said, you’re already watching this one but it’s still my #1 recommendation, because it sets up so much of the galaxy and the way things operate in the Republic and is just really good.  Finish this one first, as it introduces you to so much you’ll need down the road–a lot of the Jedi characters that will then break your heart when you watch Order 66 happening in Revenge of the Sith, getting invested in Ahsoka Tano and her role in Anakin’s life, getting more time spent with characters like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Padme Amidala, some trippy arcs like the Mortis arc that are fascinating for Force Woo, and a lot of stuff will come up in other shows, comics, and books!- Star Wars Rebels TV show.  While it’s about an entirely new group of characters, it has a lot of recurring familiar characters–like James Earl Jones reprises his role in voicing Darth Vader, you learn the fate of Ahsoka Tano here, you get to see some of the clones again, you get a look at what it’s like for Jedi under the thumb of the Empire, you’re introduced to the Inquisitors, you get to see the politics of the Rebellion as the show goes along, you get a better look at Mandalore, etc.  This is another show that will help form the foundations of other stuff.- Star Wars Battlefront II game.  You can play it or just watch a movie version of it on YouTube.  Yeah, the game got a lot of crap for the shit EA tried to pull with it, but it’s turned into a really great piece of media and the story itself is absolutely fantastic and will only take about 2 hours to get through, but a) it’s a great story with great characters (I LOVE IDEN VERSIO SO MUCH) and b) it does a great job at showing a lot of what happened after Return of the Jedi but before the Empire truly gave up.  This establishes a lot of the final fight stuff, like the Battle of Jakku and its importance (aka, that’s all those ships that Rey is scavenging at the beginning of The Force Awakens) and what Operation Cinder is and the epilogue helps lead into what the First Order is.- The Star Wars��titular comic + Darth Vader volume 1 (by Kieron Gillen) comics.  These two are meant to be read concurrently, so I recommend them together, and they do an absolutely incredible job of filling out the space between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back.  They’re telling fantastic stories (including some really powerful stuff about Vader finding out the name of the Death Star pilot is Skywalker) while also giving some really great insights into the characters, adding depth to the story of the movies, and made me fall in love with the characters all over again.  This Vader tends to be a little more mysterious, Gillen liked keeping the mystique to him (which appeals more to some, so if that’s your jam, read these first!), the feeling is very much in tune with the original trilogy in that sense.  Same for the heroes, they feel very OT!- Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith by Charles Soule comics.  You can read the Vader comics in either order, but I generally like suggesting this one to go second (release order is always good, imo) despite that this is my favorite of the comics.  Set not long after Revenge of the Sith, this is a comic about Darth Vader adjusting to his new life and about the bigger, overarching story of the psychological look at a character who cannot admit what he’s done wrong.  On the surface, it’s about him hunting down Jedi and trying to raise his wife from the dead, but in the macro sense, it’s about this guy who cannot admit that he had other choices, even when the Force is literally throwing those other paths in his face.  Great Vader content for him being powerful and terrifying, while also being an absolute human disaster garbage bag.- Age of the Republic comics by Jodie Houser.  If you like the prequels at all, these comics are stellar.  There are eight of them, four for the main heroes, four for the main villains, and they’re a single issue each, where there’s a short look into their lives at various points, all which illustrate really thoughtful things about the characters, whether through their actions or even sometimes comparisons with other issues in the series.  (ie, reading the Obi-Wan one and Jango Fett one really highlighted how each of them dealt with this young person they were taking care of.)  They were just REALLY GOOD STORIES, too.- Star Wars Adventures by IDW Comics.  These are cuter stories and set all across various eras, from the PT to the OT to the ST to occasionally other areas, but they’re always just absolutely CHARMING.  They’re pure delight to read, they tend to focus on moments that are just really fun, so it’s easy to think of it as a kids’ comic, but instead I think they work best at showing some of the more hopeful moments of Star Wars without being too fluffy.- Poe Dameron by Charles Soule comics.  These are SO GOOD, they really add so much to Poe’s character and they also do a great job of fleshing out that time between the New Republic still working to stabilize itself and when we know the First Order is coming.  But mostly it just really makes you like Poe as a character, it captures his sense of charm and swagger while giving him an actual character arc, as he learns to be a leader.- Kanan: The Last Padawan comics.  You need to see Rebels first (or at least the first two seasons, enough to make you care about Kanan as a character) but then this is a gorgeous, beautifully told story.  It’s half about the current days with his new found family the Ghost crew (the cast of Rebels) and half about his history as a Padawan in the Jedi Order, how he was apprenticed to Depa Billaba, how he watched her die, how he had to live in the galaxy that wanted him dead just for being born the way he was, how he was being hunted for it, and how he survived.  It’s really, really good!- Forces of Destiny animated shorts.  You can find them all on Disney’s YouTube channel, they’re these 2-3 minute long stories about the women of the galaxy far, far away (with occasional appearances by others) and they’re pretty light-hearted fare, they’re meant to impart messages to kids or just be bite-sized content, but they’re pretty wonderful and it’s nice to see the women of SW get some attention.- From a Certain Point of View book.  For the 40th Anniversary of A New Hope they put out an anthology of short stories, telling the various points of view of different side characters and adding depth to everything that was going on.  Not all of them are super great, you can feel free to skip ones if you’re getting bored, but there are some MUST READ ones, especially the Qui-Gon, Yoda, and Obi-Wan ones.  And the Admiral Motti story had me in absolute tears from cry-laughing while reading it.- Bloodline by Claudia Gray book.  It’s a really good Leia story, but it’s also a book that does a lot to cover what’s going on with the New Republic still struggling to establish itself, why Leia isn’t part of it by TFA, and more on how the First Order came to be and why people stuck their heads in the sand about it.- Thrawn by Timothy Zahn book.  While there’s some dissonance between Zahn’s version of the character and the character from Rebels, I think you can make them fit together, and this book really is one of the best of canon material.  It’s fun and zips right along and introduces some new characters and sets up some really interesting backstories and just fleshes out the Imperial stuff and gives us Eli Vanto.  ALL THINGS I LOVED.FINALLY:  The above is aimed at a general list of things that I thin pretty much anyone would enjoy, it’s meant to cover most of the bases as best I can, but if you have a favorite era or a favorite character, feel free to run straight to anything that involves them.  There’s a lot of good Legends stuff (as always it’s hard not to recommend the Revenge of the Sith novelization or Wild Space, but that’d just muddle the line between canon and Legends), but I’m sticking with canon right now because it’s easier and there’s so much good stuff and it’s less confusing that way.All the comics are available on Comixology (and there’s never been a comic I hated by any means, though, admittedly some of the mini series can be kind of bland, anything that ran for at least 20 issues is a good bet, and most of the comics are THE BEST of the supplementary material), and if you don’t mind waiting a couple of months for Disney+ (or Googling for streaming sites) the animated properties are all really worth watching.  Sometimes they take a bit to get going, but I’ve fallen in love with every single one.These might not end up being your favorites (some of my favorites–like the Aftermath books or the Join the Resistance books–are ones that I wouldn’t put on a list for new-to-supplementary-material fans, because they’re a little too distanced from established characters) but they’re great places to start getting a feel for whether or not you like this kind of thing!  :D

[sugavicc]

Chapter 8: If You Give A Cat A Cane

Taehyung quickly took the stairs down from the secret base to the "official" top floor. He then took the very, very slow elevator down and ran out the door. Since he was still officially wanted by the cops, he had to be extra careful. He took alleyways and back streets to carefully avoid any cops or crowds all the way to where the team members were. He still carefully hid as he was told to remain back at the base. When he peaked around the corner his vision came true. The members were barely hanging on.

"Come on sis, let's finish off these so called heroes and get them out of our hair for good."

The twin sisters both let out an evil laugh. They made a formation and a bomb created from both of their powers emerged. It then started to increasingly grow in size. They were going to wipe out the entire city block.

"What am I going to do? I don't even have real powers like the rest but I have to do something. They're gonna die!"

Taehyung's heart raced. He had to do something. Anything. He finally mustered the little bit of courage he could find and charged from out the allie way. His hands lit up with light and he jumped into the air. He then directed the light towards the duos eyes blinding them and making the bomb to dissappear.

"What are you doing here?" Proteus question.

"I- look out!"

One of the sisters blindly threw a bomb directly towards Proteus. Proteus froze while Taehyung without thinking jumped infront of Proteus pushing him out the way, making them both land with a hard thud. Proteus rubbed the back of his head then opened his eyes while Taehyung raised himself up from off of him.

"You... you saved me." Proteus said before giving him a small smile.

"I- ill get up now." Taehyung said as he hurriedly got up. He then helped Proteus up as well.

"Well I'm glad you came, remember, don't get yourself killed." Breaker said bluntly.

"Come on everyone. Lets do this." J hop said as his face filled with determination.

The team also readied themselves for another fight.

_______

.

_______

The heros have once again, destroyed the city, atleast thats what the media said. But in other words, they defeated T and T and tied them up to a post, leaving before the authorities could arrive to arrest them all. They retreated back to the base to log reports and bandage wounds.

" I fought a villian... I fought a villian! How cool!" Taehyung whispered with an happy voice.

"Yeah you did! You were so cool! With your light power going pew pew pew and blinding them! So cool!"

Taehyung jumped. He didn't realize there was someone else who heard him."

"Oh hi, Its hard to introduce yourself well when... you're getting bombs thrown at you. Im Phoenix! Its nice to meet you...?"

"Im taehyung."

Phoenix gasped.

"You're not supposed to tell me your real name! You're idenity is supposed to be a secret otherwise you risk your personal life and all youre family and friends and stuff!"

"I- i-" taehyung was at a lost of words. He didn't have a family anymore and he never made any friends so he didn't even think about it twice.

"He just got here yesterday Phoenix. He helped Stone, Rm and me out yesterday and helped us escape the cops. But his identity got leaked so we had to keep him like a stowaway here."

"So he didn't even audition to be a hero?" Phoenix said surprised.

"Yeah, and look at what a good decision we made! He's a natural born hero! What he did out there was incredibly brave-" Proteus was cut off.

"What he did out there was incredibly stupid!" Breaker interjected. The room went silent.

"Uh oh." Phoenix whispered to Proteus.

"Taehyung what were you thinking! How could you? Do you know how much danger you could've gotten yourself into? We could've lost you-"

Breaker tried to stand up but falls back in his chair.

"Stop moving Breaker, im trying to wrap the wound." J hop exclaims.

Taehyung put his head down. It wasn't even 24 hours and he made someone upset.

"See Breaker you made him sad. Shame." J hop scolded.

"Its true!"

"Its true but you have to remember to say your honest feelings in a way that doesn't hurt others. Come on you know this."

Breaker sighed. He knew that J hop was right.

"Im sorry taehyung, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. I just c-"

"Come on say it" J hop lightly teased.

"I... I care about you taehyung."

"Awwwwww" Proteus, J hop and Phoenix cheered.

Breaker covered his face to his his annoyance or really, to hide his now very pink flushed face.

"I care about you taehyung" J hop giggled.

"I should've gotten that on camera I can't believe he said that."

"Taehyung been here for just one day and he already worked his way into Breakers heart." Phoenix claimed.

"Are you mad at me." Taehyung asked guiltily. Ignoring all of the others remarks and causing a sudden emptiness to the room.

"No, I'm not mad at you. Just don't get yourself killed trying to be a hero okay."

"... okay sir." Taehyung said innocently.

Proteus choked back a laugh. But when he looked at Phoenix they both fell out laughing.

"Taehyung please don't call me sir! You make me feel like an old man." Breaker whined.

"But sir-"

The two laughed even more.

"You are an old man, old and brittle too." Phoenix chuckled.

"We should get him a cane." J hop giggled.

"Not you too J hop. Whatever just finish wrapping my leg so I can finally go to sleep." Breaker said playfully annoyed.

[frasier-crane-style]

Star Wars: Battlefront 2

This actually reminded me of the last movie I saw, Justice League. Workable, competent, but not anything special or even particularly ambitious. Definitely less than the sum of its parts. And when you’re spending millions upon millions of dollars, and calling on some of the most popular stories imaginable, shouldn’t you be able to show something for it?

As I said, half the campaign ditches our ostensible protagonists and their journey to focus on OT heroes like Luke, Leia, Han, and Lando. They have next to nothing to do with the plot and generally just seem to be there to sell the player on the multiplayer and add to the shared universe stuff. One chapter is focused entirely on Luke Skywalker finding a compass, and I’m sure there’s going to be a scene in The Last Jedi where he has a compass, so I guess everyone in the audience will be going “where’d he get a compass?” and only the chosen few will be like “oh, I know.”

(More likely, everyone will go “okay, he has a compass.”)

There’s actually the germ of a good idea here, because the Luke chapter has him as something of a pacifist, having a philosophical conversation with a member of Inferno Squad that leads to their turn later on. But it’s like, after coming up with that one good idea for a non-Inferno chapter, EA just stopped bothering and had you play as, say, Han Solo getting intelligence to free Kashyyyk. Do you actually go to Kashyyyk and free the Wookies? No. Is Inferno Squad involved? No, unless you count Iden being one of the Starfighter pilots at the end. That’s right—the hero cameos in her own game.

 And you know what? I actually wouldn’t mind a Star Wars game along the lines of Battlefront 1 or Modern Warfare, where you play through a campaign that has you seeing the battle to free some space sector from multiple sets of eyes. You could play as Luke fighting darksiders, or as Wedge piloting an X-wing, Han flying the Millennium Falcon. Something like a full game of “Han, Leia, and Luke have to blow up the shield generator on Endor so Lando can get the Death Star.” But you can’t really do that, and at the same time have one ‘lead’ character going through their own personal journey and character arc, at least not without totally short-changing them.

And that’s the game you get. This whole Inferno Squad thing is just totally half-assed. Everything about it the least imaginative, most generic choice possible. So our villain—he’s something who doesn’t go over to the Rebellion with Iden, he stays with the Empire, and she becomes determined to both defeat him and redeem him. Oh, how about her father (who is white, natch)? Yeah, in Star Wars, the series with the most famous evil dad redemption arc in existence, we’re going to do the exact same thing. Maybe it could be Iden’s husband? Or maybe a brother or sister? It could be just a best friend. Or even her child, if we age her up some. That could be an interesting twist on the ‘tell your sister you were right’ plot. Or no, we could just—do that again.

Oh, and Iden has two male compatriots in Inferno Squad. What’s their dynamic like? Maybe they’re in a love triangle and one of them defects with her and she falls in love with him and the other stays with the Empire and becomes a villain? Yeah, that’ll work. What if she’s in love with the guy who stays with the Empire and just doesn’t have feelings for the Rebel and it’s kind of an unrequired love thing and it’s all a little complicated and messy? No? She falls in love with the good guy and hates the bad guy. Okay. I just thought we could do something different.

Well, okay, now we’ve spent a few chapters playing as the Empire, which was the entire selling point of this game—now it’s time for our heroes to defect to the Rebellion. What would cause them to do that? Maybe seeing the Empire commit an atrocity? Yeah, sure, let’s go with that.

Wait… don’t they know about the Death Star blowing up Alderaan? They’re pretty high-ranking Imperials. It seems like they would have some idea. Hell, in the first level they’re fighting to protect the Death Star II. Do they not know what it’s for? Seems like they would be okay, at least on some level, with the Empire blowing up planets, which is about as atrocity as it gets. What, does the Empire come out with the Rape Star and that’s just too much for them?

Well, maybe we could have them slowly start to have misgivings about the Empire and question it in different ways? Kind of a story arc? No? Just a thought.

Okay, here’s where the game truly loses me. We’re told about Operation Cinder, which is Emperor Palpatine’s plan for the Empire after he dies. That sounds pretty cool, right? It makes sense that Palpatine would have a contingency plan for that. In the Legends continuity, he transferred his mind into a cloned body and he put a psychic compulsion in Mara Jade to kill Luke Skywalker, so if this is the new continuity’s version of that, it must be something pretty good.

Or it could be just using weather satellites to destroy his own planets.

Let’s break this down:

1.      Weather satellites that cause massive storms seems a little prosaic for the Star Wars universe. I mean, that’s something your average Bond villain comes up with. In the realm of Imperial superweapons, couldn’t we come up with something a little more fantastical? Even Starkiller Base had good presentation. These are just satellites that shoot beams down and you have to blow ‘em up.

2.      Why would you blow up a loyal Imperial world? Those are the guys you’re getting Stormtroopers from, the guys building TIE fighters, the guys paying for your war. Newsflash, dumbass: you’re destroying your own power base! You’re doing the Rebels’ own job for them!

3.      Especially when you could blow up a ‘purple state’ like Kashyyyk or Dac, which would be full of people ready to join the Rebellion (y’know, seeing as they’re slaves). Just evacuate your own Imperials and fry the rest. It’s evil, but at least it makes sense.

4.      I mean, I’ll even grant you that Palpatine would be pure dag nasty evil enough to want to take the universe with him if he went down, but this is such a stupid way to go about it. I thought Palpatine was a master manipulator who enacted a decades… if not centuries… long plan to raise to power. If he really wants to screw over the galaxy, couldn’t there be some subtle, insidious way to go about it? It seems like the ‘blowing up your own planets’ plan would just drive people to the Rebellion and give them an easier time of it. Maybe he could give Inferno Squad posthumous orders to stir up regional conflicts and sabotage agriculture to create famines and just salt the earth in the wake of the Empire? No? That sounds too hard? Fine, he wants to blow up his own planets.

5.      Besides being a power-hungry dictator, it seemed like Palpatine’s other big note was being a Sith. So if nothing else, he’d want to see the Sith ascendant and screw over the Jedi. So maybe he has another Sith that he brings out of cryo-freeze or some ancient Sith spirit that can possess people and now that he’s gone, he lets it cause trouble, that could be interesting. No? Blowing up his own planets? Okay.

Most disappointing of all, that’s really it for Operation Cinder. You could hang a whole game around enacting or stopping the Emperor’s revenge from beyond the grave, but no, the very next level, it’s stopped. The entire threat is introduced and resolved as quickly as Starkiller Base was in TFA, but even they knew enough to put that at the end of the story. Here you stop the Empire’s last-ditch superweapon at the midpoint of the game, so afterward you’re just… going to Cloud City and Jakku, mopping up Star Destroyers and shutting down factories.

But anyway, now this whole Operation Cinder thing has caused Inferno Squad to turn away from the Empire. What now? Do they become mercenaries? Maybe they join one faction of the splintering Empire that’s fighting against a different faction and we can see the seeds for the First Order being laid? Or they could become bounty hunters, or smugglers, or pirates. Maybe they could just try to stop Cinder on their own, because they don’t trust either the Empire or the Rebellion? I mean, just because they’ve fallen out with the Empire, does that mean they’ve stopped hating the Rebel Alliance? Apparently so, because they just join up and immediately get put into uniforms and assigned Starfighters.

Hell, why not just start with them as Rebels, if you’re that uncomfortable with them being Imperials? At least it wouldn’t be so disappointing.

[jurakan]

On Stupid Evil

So several times I’ve considered adapting the Notes I release every Saturday on Facebook for Tumblr. Here’s another Saturday Note, from this week, that I thought I’d post here.

I imagine absolutely no one will read it/care, but if that’s the case I’ll just go back to playing Fable III and move on with my life.

---

On Stupid Evil

You’ve heard of Character Alignments? Chaotic Evil? And Lawful Evil? And Neutral Evil? And I did a Note about Lawful Good? Well now we’re talking about Stupid Evil. This describes a character who isn’t just evil, they’re stupid about it. And it’s all too common.

The example that struck me most recently was the recently released Star Wars: Battlefront II. No, I’m not referring to the whole scandal with paid content (though sure, that could also count), but in the story mode, we are introduced to the Empire’s Inferno Squadron, led by Iden Versio. She serves the Empire faithfully even after the Battle of Endor, but leaves to join the Rebellion after seeing the horrors of Operation Cinder. What is Operation Cinder? Well it’s this plan that the Emperor had in place in case he died, which called for having these satellite superweapons go around to planets and raze everything on the surface. First on the list were highly-populated Imperial planets. Because if the Emperor can’t have them, no one can.

And yeah, people went along with it.

Alright, what actual benefit does this serve? Other than to convince our heroes that the Empire is irredeemably evil. These aren’t planets that hold Rebel bases, they’re Imperially-aligned planets. But they’re being destroyed for...reasons.

Star Wars has this problem, especially of late, in that it cannot seem to understand why anyone would join the villains. I’m not saying that villains have to be sympathetic, but they have to be understandable to a degree (unless we’re talking like, alien god monster things that don’t work on human ideas of morality, but even then you have to do something other than just ‘they don’t think like us’). The Empire, and the later First Order, is Evil with a capital ‘E’ and that’s it. People join up because they’re forced, I guess, and it’s not clear how or why the whole thing falls apart.

George Lucas’s Prequel Trilogy and Star Wars: Rebels tries to rectify this by showing that the public support of the Jedi was waning, that people wanted a strong leadership in their government to fight the inaction of the rotting Republic, and that most everyday people in the galaxy don’t really understand the whole Jedi/Sith thing going on. But then we have Rebels, which has only one sympathetic Imperial character who turns traitor and joins the Rebellion (Kallus), one Imperial officer who isn’t needlessly cruel for its own sake (Grand Admiral Thrawn), but the rest are glory hounds, violent nutjobs, and raging douchebags.

The Sequel Trilogy takes this even further by introducing the First Order, the “remnants of the Empire” that popped right the flip out of nowhere, have the resources to keep an entire fleet full of warships ready and troops to occupy several systems. Oh, and also have the engineering know-how to make an entire planet into a superweapon. It’s never explained how, but they just do. Nor do we know why anyone supports them. There is some sort of fanatical loyalty to the Supreme Leader, Snoke, but since no one has told us what his deal is, we don’t know why. All we know is they serve him and revere him for...reasons. It’s not even brainwashing, as Finn breaks away from it.

It’s just...Stupid Evil. There’s no reason behind their fanaticism, they just are evil and that’s their thing. There are pretty shallow allusions to the Third Reich, North Korea and the Islamic State, but nothing that really develops the antagonists other than Kylo Ren.

That’s...pretty inexcusable, considering how far into the saga we are.

And it’s becoming more and more common to paint villains this way. Gone are the days of the Assassin’s Creed franchise when the Templar villains have sympathetic motivations and understandable backstories. The main villain of Assassin’s Creed: Origins, Flavius, loudly brags about how happy he is that he killed a child and how racist he is against Egyptians. Compare this to Governor Torres, the villain of Black Flag that actively rallies against the slave trade and talks about uniting all people regardless of nationality or religion. At no point is it even clear what the heck the Order of the Ancients actually wants; after they find the ancient treasure they’re been after the entire game, the audience never finds out what they were planning to do with it other than vaguely “take over Egypt,” and the heroes aren’t particularly worried about getting it back out of their hands.

Fallout 4 has the Institute, who at least have the motivation of wanting to make the world a better place with their science. But they’re so stupid that they can’t work out that sending a bunch of androids to the surface impersonating people and killing anyone who gets in their way might actually make people see them as the bad guys. This is handwaved as ‘they’re a bunch of hard science types who don’t understand the need for PR’ but, like...there are people throughout the Commonwealth screaming about how synths (androids) could be anywhere, impersonating anyone, shooting anyone suspected of being a synth, and they don’t think that maybe they need to rethink their strategy? That’s just stupid.

And there are ways around this! It’s so easy to not make stupid villains.

Like I mentioned above, I played a lot of Fable III this week, and in it the main plot is to overthrow your character’s brother, the king of Albion, who is a tyrant taxing the people to death, executing people who protest against him, and giving industry over to a sadist who makes a ton of coin regardless of the unsafe working conditions. But you find out after deposing him that the reason he did so was because he had witnessed an evil slime monster thing from beyond our reality attacking his people, and had been informed that this unspeakable evil was coming back to Albion. He was a horrible tyrant, yes, but he was doing so because he was driven mad trying to raise funds and resources to defend his homeland an evil that he knows he won’t be able to beat. His decisions are bad, but he’s not in a right state of mind, and it makes sense given what he’s been through.

There’s also Reaver, who’s evil and a jerk about it for no reason though, so I guess we shouldn’t give the game that much credit when it comes to villains.

Remember Thrawn, I mentioned earlier? The Grand Admiral in Star Wars: Rebels that is actually competent and not needlessly cruel. Oh, he’s cruel, and he doesn’t care one whit about the average person. But he also realizes that it’s much more useful to get people to work with you than against you, and to extract information from every action, even a defeat. He quickly deduces Hera’s identity as a Rebel officer the first time he meets her in disguise by the context of where she is and what she’s doing. He frequently lets spies live when he knows about them, because he knows he can extract more information out of them if he lets them think they’re undetected. He always runs his battles so that he learns something about the enemy, whether he wins or loses. It’s about the long game, not the momentary victory. He’s a really good villain that way. Too bad the Empire decides that the Death Star should get more funding than his own schemes.

Lord, I really hope that he doesn’t get killed on this show.

I know that it might be difficult to gift every character with a well-rounded personality, especially when it comes to villains. And that’s fine! But there’s a difference between not being able to develop a villainous character, and making them just stupidly evil for no reason. Especially don’t make me sit and question why anyone would go along with these villains.