The rival.
Especially the douchebag Machiavellian type rivals that the main character ends up friends or teaming up with after the main character ‘proves their worth’ to them by being stronger. No character growth outside of now they work with the protagonist.
I really want this trope to be subverted one day, like the douchey rival shows up and everyone is just like “Wow what a dickhead” and just relentlessly bullies him until he goes away.
It is kinda subverted in Death Note.
Two Machiavellian rivals team up together and on the surface they’re chasing another enemy, but in reality they both know that it’s all a farce and they’re both the real enemy. Light infiltrates an investigation on him with fake friendship but real ego :keikaku:
When they find out who Light was and what he did, one of his own ‘friends’ immediately killed him
Lights death is so fucking good.
Here he is, self-proclaimed god, dying alone in an ally like a rat, crying shidding and farding.
Also, bless Matsuda.
How about Gary Oaks? Huge douchebags, but ultimately harmless, and the respect they gain for the main character is more a slow growth rather than one defeat.
He follows the arc of Blue, in which he just grows up and gets a fucking job. Meanwhile Red is like a hermit I dunno.
“A volcano erupts, and just like that, a whole town disappears. We can go on winning and losing in Pokémon, but if nature so much as twitches, we can be overwhelmed in a second…” -Blue in Gold/Silver/Crystal
That’s a hell of a character arc from “Smell ya later!” ~jaunty music~
Counterpoint: I will never get tired of watching the protagonist and their rival team up to defeat the greater villain
Goku and Frieza fighting together for just one episode of the last fight in Dragon Ball Super was :chefs-kiss:
Also, for the old heads out there, Anubis teaming up with Ryo in Samurai Troopers/Ronin Warriors was so good.
The anti-hero becoming a reluctant ally is my favorite trope.
I agree it was super wholesome when Goku teamed up with Space Hitler
Freiza does genocides purely for profit as a galactic landlord/ real estate guy.
You joke, but the creator went on record to say that Frieza was inspired by real estate investors because they are “the worst types of people.”
Toriyama rocks.
i think that’s a genuine cultural misalignment, rivalry in like kids sports or whatever isn’t designed to be hateful like they are in the US and i assume most of the commonwealth has similar brainworms.
you’re supposed to push eachother to do better, not throw eggs or drop a toilet off at the highschool across town.
Yeah but so often the rival in these stories is an outright horrible person.
Like Vegeta for example, he was an outright fascist. He never stopped being an outright fash.
Like he would straight up abuse his kid ‘to make him stronger’.
My whole generation grew up thinking “wow, he’s so cool!”
not defending being the seat of power in a fascist warrior society, but uh, he was raised in a tank without parenting on a fascist warrior planet, did you expect him to be a good dad?
No, but I also don’t expect him to be welcomed by the heroes with open arms and be treated with kid gloves for the rest of the series.
it’s been a minute but i don’t think vegeta really fits the rivals thing in the first arc at least, he’s just straight up enemy until… i forget how they get from that first fight into the android saga. i know they kinda let him off the hook later but that could just be liberalism.
i always thought he kinda sucked, i think at my school we liked piccolo and gotenks.
vegeta was forced to team up with goku and the bois to fight frieza on namek and after he died and was wished back along with all the nemekians, then he just kind of moves in with bulma I think??
counterpoint; dio
Dio gets a pass because he’s treated as an irredeemable villain which exactly how I wish this type of character was treated more often
Jonathan doesn’t treat Dio as an irredeemable villian. Literally everyone else (including Dio) sees him as an irredeemable villian which is hilarious as Dio basically does everything he could possibly do to make him being victim of this trope be comically silly only to succeed not because Jonathan gave up on him but because he fucking died. Leaving him to cope with absorbing his friend’s body and starting a cult in Egypt. Actually thats kinda the reverse of this trope isn’t it? Yeah we need more Dios.
