Thread:TornadoMan.EXE/@comment-1672596-20200824004738/@comment-1672596-20200824025435

TornadoMan.EXE wrote: The point ultimately being, is that Pride's actions and her mentality behind it make her a villain. She joined Gopsel to spare her country from their wrath and tried to kill for them out of revenge because Creamland was left in the dust when the cyberworld rose to what it is. When confronted about what she was doing, she had no remorse over her actions and tried to see them through to the end no matter what. Case closed.

As for the others; Prometheus and Pandora are understandably psychotic and their main goal is to be free from the hell they are in. Lumine is just Sigma 2.0. "You are not needed in our new world.". Gate was externally driven crazy. Angry as he was, his actions were no completely his own. MegaMan Juno was only following his programming, he basically had no intentions that were "his own" per se. I don't know Sera, I never got to finish MML2. Berkana has no real backstory to her, she's just sort of there. Frost Walrus...he's just a brute? Don't put much thought into him. Vile is simply insane. He indeed knows what he does is wrong and doesn't care. BUT. That was due to his flawed programming. Had he been created correctly, would this have been different?

Takeo is just an a-hole. Other antagonists in the BN series have more depth to them. Dave and Anetta wanted to save the environment. Sean hated the world because of its cruelty. And so on and so forth. Gauss also has his "reasons" for being evil. Him and Jack were part of a very poor family and no one helped them. When his parents died, he wa slept all alone while Jack was taken in by the Zap family.

Regal, as awesome of a villain as he is with just how dangerous and threatening he is, is just a badly written character. He suddenly turned evil, and then there's that awful speech at the end of BN4, and all of it is just bad. No, Regal is just evil, correct. You don't like him for his character you like him because is just a straight up threat.

Mr. King is just a villain. He's just there. The main goal of SF3 was Geo's dad.

Regarding Cream and whether or not she's a pure villain or an anti-villain, there was a similar case with Mr. Freeze in the DCAU episode Heart of Ice, had a similar character arc to her as well, and committed several similar villainous acts as well, including leaving one of his minions to die just because he caught a cold, and willfully recklessly endangering everyone just to get revenge on Ferris Boyle for ruining his life. Despite that, he's not only considered an anti-villain, he's practically the posterboy for the trope. Heck, in the Cold, Cold Heart DLC for Arkham Origins, he was arguably even WORSE there, as he not only sided with Penguin's group and was indirectly responsible for nearly getting Wayne Manor torched as a result, possibly harming countless innocent civilians (not to mention explicitly launched a guy and froze him solid, likely killing him), but also sold ice guns onto the streets, and even when Batman clearly was siding with Fries after learning the true circumstances of why he was doing his actions, he still decided to fight Batman ANYWAY. And again, he's still depicted as an anti-villain (and also like Cream, in his next game appearance, he's not even a villain, and if anything is one of Batman's allies). In that sense, she's more like Mr. Freeze there. Hence anti-villain.

Okay, I'll give you Prometheus and Pandora (though by the time of ZX Advent, they pretty much no longer cared about being free from their hell, and if anything just wanted to destroy the world as a last act of spite against Albert), also Gate. I'm not entirely sure about Juno, though, especially when the fact that Master was against that goal as well and if he could reprogram Trigger to halt the de-Carbon program, I'm pretty sure Juno would have undergone the same thing. I guess you've got a point about Vile since he's literally brain-damaged.

I didn't mention Dave and Anetta (if anything, I excluded them from my examples precisely BECAUSE they at least had altruistic pretenses for their actions), or Sean for that matter (and he was pretty much manipulated, even ignoring his... other issues). And fair point about Gauss, though I'd consider that to be pretty petty of him overall, not really all that sympathetic. I definitely know that Mr. Match didn't have any sympathetic or altruistic reasons for being evil, simply being a pyromaniac. I'm actually a bit surprised that he actually cleaned up his act in MMBN6 and became a genuine ally to Lan Hikari. Even you have to admit he arguably had even LESS of a reason to turn good than Cream did (especially after the stunt he pulled in MMBN3).

As far as Regal, the closest he has to an excuse is that he was effectively raised in what amounts to the MMBN equivalent of North Korea. But yeah, he's pretty bad. Of course, that said, I'm hesitant to consider him badly written since... well, there were real world people who actually are like that (like Marquis de Sade, or Michel Foucault, or even Karl Marx, who based on his writings was more concerned with trying to make a gorier remake of the Reign of Terror than in actually HELPING his fellow man).

If I must be honest, I'm not exactly fond of gray morality storylines, largely because they generally end up making BOTH sides look bad or otherwise have completely badly written morals. It's one reason why, despite The Boss from Snake Eater being a genuinely likeable character overall, she was simply badly written IMO, since she essentially did exactly the same stuff as Colonel Volgin, the big bad, regarding the Davy Crockett, and had a fairly similar reaction to it (calling the loss of life beautiful right after nuking Groznyj Grad AND Graniny Gorky). And she pretty much stated that morality was completely meaningless and a soldier should never use morality for being a soldier, or hold to any attachments, not even camaraderie. Now, don't get me wrong, Mega Man generally does a better job at doing gray morality than Metal Gear does (I know with MGS2, I actually couldn't sympathize with Solid Snake at all, seeing him as just a scumbag with his actions that made him a huge hypocrite compared to MGS1, and not much better than the Patriots, the actual main villains of that game). And don't get me started on that Maleficent movie, or the Prequel Trilogy of Star Wars which pretty much ruined the Jedi as characters. In fact, how they handled The Boss and Colonel Volgin is pretty much one of the reasons why I can no longer take the criteria for Complete Monster all that seriously. Besides, I tend to adhere to black and white morality, largely because God himself does, and it's not like there aren't real life equivalents to Dr. Weil for example. I think the only real instances of characters with grays who are actually written well besides the Mega Man characters are Noah Bennet from Heroes and MAYBE the Rebel Alliance from Rogue One (and the latter's only because they are a bit closer to actually acting like their explicit real-world analogues, the Vietcong, in terms of committing horrific actions. I'm not exactly happy with George Lucas deciding to model them after the VC, let's leave it at that.). Speaking of which, I'd consider the likes of Maleficent to be closer to that of Dr. Weil in overall characterization, and certainly view her as being much closer to a Complete Monster than Judge Claude Frollo despite what some other Disney fans claim (actually, if anything, I liken Frollo as being more comparable to the likes of Copy X, and that guy's not even CLOSE to a Complete Monster DESPITE his actions). But I digress... Basically, I use the likes of Dr. Weil as being a threshold for Complete Monsterdom.