![]() ![]() Hinting towards a greater enemy is a common method of foreshadowing who the next Big Bad is going to be, if the current Big Bad is defeated and the Sorting Algorithm of Evil kicks in to provide a bigger threat for the heroes to face. For instance, Morgoth is the Big Bad of The Silmarillion, but becomes the Greater-Scope Villain in The Lord of the Rings, in which his right-hand man Sauron takes over as main villain.Ī Greater-Scope Villain doesn't always have to remain a Greater-Scope Villain. Inversely, the Big Bad of the prequel or original installment becomes the Greater-Scope Villain of the sequel after their defeat, while a loyal minion becomes the new Big Bad in their stead.This happens when the authors still want a villain that can be defeated or avoid conflict with a Foregone Conclusion. The latter is then promoted to Greater-Scope Villain. Sometimes with prequels or interquels, the Big Bad is a servant or creation of the main villain of the previously released work, who does not appear or is only mentioned briefly.An entity that wronged the other villain(s) and kicked off their initial evil.An Outside-Context Problem that wasn't accounted for by either the hero or the previous villains but may have been subtly foreshadowed to emerge as a distant consequence of their actions.A Sentient Cosmic Force (e.g., The Dark Side) that can't, by any realistic stretch of the imagination, be considered a character.The apparent lack of a centralized leadership or location makes it difficult to identify what they are trying to accomplish or if they even exist as an organized committee. Superpower or Nebulous Evil Organisation that is aware of and possibly sponsoring/employing the Big Bad but has little connection to the story's specific conflict. For example, Adolf Hitler would play this role in a World War II story in which the Big Bad is a Nazi general the conflict of the story is merely one aspect of Hitler's immense war machine. The Evil Overlord, The Emperor, The Generalissimo, the Evil Chancellor, or President Evil in a dystopia or war/spy story that focuses on a specific conflict within a much larger military or political situation.This furthers the idea that they are on a different level of villainy. A Dreaded Warlord who inspires immense fear (or even admiration) from the Big Bad, with much deeper resources, but neither they or the heroes are yet on each other's radar. ![]() ![]() Whatever the relationship between the Big Bad and Greater-Scope Villain, the Greater-Scope Villain is always Out of Focus - the threat they pose is general and in the background, while the threat posed by the Big Bad is specific and immediate. ![]() A Greater-Scope Villain may be the Big Bad's superior, but just as often they're completely unrelated - indeed, a Greater-Scope Villain may threaten the Big Bad just as much as they threaten the heroes. They are just responsible for anything evil or fueling at least a part of the fictional setting (how much of it depends on the scale of the Greater-Scope Villain's influence) in which the story takes place. While the Big Bad is directly responsible for the current story - the Big Bad is the villain that the heroes are attempting to defeat - a Greater-Scope Villain isn't a major force in the plot, only a major force in the background. A Greater-Scope Villain is a threat/villainous presence that's more dangerous, affects more people, or is more significant than the story's current Big Bad in the setting as a whole, but isn't causing the conflict of the immediate story (and may have little to do with it at all). ![]()
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