Thread:Lucentstar/@comment-27032473-20190516020429/@comment-32766427-20190518023339

No need to apologise. You are not being ungrateful. :) I'm sorry that I have done such a poor job of understanding your question and answering it. You raised some more points here which I haven't yet answered; let me do so. Many villains lose to and get defeated by the heroes, despite seeming pretty smart and sometimes even like good people. This happens because they either underestimate the heroes and intentionally bait the heroes to come after them, or because they completely ignore the heroes and go about doing whatever they feel like, unintentionally causing the hero to come after them. Either course of action results in the hero coming after the villain and, generally, defeating the villain. So, you wonder, why? Part of this is that to be a "villain", the character in question must be at odds with the "hero", that is, must have done something the hero feels is worth coming after for. If the character in question never intentionally or unintentionally caused the hero to come after them, then the character by definition isn't a villain. Once the hero is coming after the villain, either because the villain wanted the hero to come or not, why does the hero win in their fight? I think this does get back to my initial answer, that a story wherein the hero wins is by its nature more interesting than one in which the villain wins, so the group of stories you see will feature far more villains with bad luck or fatal flaws than probably would exist in real life. (If the story is well written, the hero will win not because of any unlikely shortcoming of the villain's, but because of some extraordinary cleverness or heroic effort on the part of the hero.) On a different note, you mention that not all villains have selfish aims. You're right. I suppose one could divide villains into four main categories: "Cruel Villains", who want to hurt people and see the world burn; "Selfish Villains", who want to gain power and don't care about anyone else; "Idealistic Villains", who think they are doing something selflessly good but are in fact gravely mistaken; and "Misunderstood Villains", who are only the villains because the hero of the story they are in is actually trying to do something bad. Does this help you at all?