Ultra Villain Breakdown
Feb. 26th, 2020 08:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akinoameSomething's been bothering me about Tregear from Taiga since his introduction in the R/B movie, and I finally, FINALLY put my finger on it.
He's just a dick.
That's it. That's his entire character motivation. He's that pretentious asshole who thinks he's a philosopher because he's magically come to the conclusion that good and evil don't exist, therefore, it gives him free reign to be a total douche and hurt people because ~it's all the same.~ And then he doesn't understand why everyone doesn't just accept his philosophy, after he's hurt them all.
I mean, let's break down the rest of the villains and antagonists from Zero through R/B, just to show the difference:
Belial in Zero and Geed is actually fairly complex, although elements of that were forgotten until probably the last minutes of the Geed finale. He's much like what Zero was--a talented young warrior who got it into his head that he should take ultimate power, ignoring the fact that 1) he wasn't ready for it, and 2) it would kill everyone on his planet. All this because he was passed over for a promotion, although Tatsuomi Hamada--Riku's actor--theorizes that the real reason is that Belial couldn't deal with Father of Ultra treating him like a friend, implying that Belial probably WOULD have let that power go to his head, and both couldn't understand that not everyone might do the same thing under those circumstances and also that his best friend was determined to stay that way and also see him as worth something. He's exiled from his homeworld, and in grief and some implied insanity from being injured by the Plasma Spark's apparent self-defenses, Reiblood took advantage and possessed him. Belial's in control, but to an extent. He's got all of his darkest emotions brought to the surface, and he just hurts others because he's been hurt--it's something that Riku says to him in the finale: "You must have been so lonely. It's okay. You can let go." And Belial rejects even his son's unconditional love for him because what does he know? Riku was only genetically engineered to be a tool for Belial's resurrection and triumph, to be thrown away whenever the plan changed, abandoned as a helpless human baby, never grew up knowing parental love. Yeah, that kid doesn't know about "loneliness." Belial's true tragedy is that he's so wrapped up in feeling bad for himself that he doesn't see that everyone else is hurting around him, and even through that, they are willing to give him a second chance.
Related to that is Kei Fukuide from Geed. He's possibly the last survivor of his home planet, after it was destroyed by war. It seems like Belial finished everyone off, but he spared Kei because he was pathetic and submitted to him. Kei is embittered toward the rest of the universe, and he truly believes that Belial's way is the only way--partly because of his own experiences, and partly because he's in a definitely abusive relationship with him. Belial puts him down, tells him to use attacks that will gravely injure or kill him, emotionally manipulates him, and finally eats his internal organs, and even Belial can't understand why Kei would remain loyal to him through that. Much like how Belial is a foil to Zero and Riku, Kei is Laiha's foil, showing that sometimes people don't rise from tragedy to become heroes, but just become worse because of it.
Moving over to Ginga, while it doesn't explain a whole lot, it eventually says that Dark Lugiel was once part of the same being as Ultraman Ginga. But they split apart over a difference in opinion, where Lugiel thought that time should stop and all life be frozen in suspended animation, and Ginga thought that was a horrible, awful thing. Rude. Lugiel still believes in that, but he's also got a grudge against Ginga for not agreeing with him and standing against him. And since he doesn't see a difference between Ginga and Hikaru, that grudge extends to Hikaru as well.
Exceller in Ginga S was a scientist cut from a similar cloth as Tregear--he thought he was smart enough that little things like morality didn't apply to him. He wanted Victorium, and he was going to take it. It's good that he didn't stay the final villain, with Lugiel usurping him in the finale, but I think he was also meant to be a safe villain--he's exploiting resources and hurting people because he thinks he has the right to. It's a very 21st century villain.
Greeza in X...well, this season will always have a special place in my heart for being my first Ultraman, but it didn't explain shit and the characters weren't well developed. Greeza was no exception. But I always got the feeling that he wasn't so much a person as much as a force of nature--something that could not be understood by the heroes and who could not understand them. It just couldn't see why it couldn't just...not exterminate life. It took such joy in doing that. Greeza was creepy, and that was what worked with him.
Orb had Juggler, and dear god he's the fucking jewel of the franchise. He's multifaceted, with various points to his personality that a lot of the others lack. We see that he was once a heroic warrior, who lost faith in himself after literally being rejected by the Light (though, honestly, with how many people whose lives were ruined by Warrior's Peak on O-50, he could start a club). He couldn't understand why Gai was chosen--Gai, the softhearted idiot who describes himself as sometimes Juggler's friend and sometimes his rival. And over the course of their disastrous first mission together, he realizes, shit, the real question isn't "why Gai" but "why not me?" He realizes he's betrayed his own principles, following rules he doesn't agree with--a person like that probably wouldn't be able to become an Ultra. He starts distancing himself from Gai as he starts feeling slighted by all of the attention Gai's paying to everyone else on the mission with them. And then the one person who looks up to him and makes it clear that she wants to learn from him and no one else--she's killed, retrieving his sword. And that's what pushes him into darkness finally. But he's still not a bad guy, even though just about everyone ostracizes him. He still tries to save Gai, still tries to do the right thing, but in his own way. But many, MANY years pass, and he becomes jaded. Darkness accepted him, where the warriors of light turned their backs on him. Everything he's tried to make better, he's broken. Yeah, you can see where he'll start going "Well, fuck it, I'll break everything." But more than that, he starts forming this association between Gai and the Light, since Gai represents light. If the Light rejected him, then surely Gai did too. Juggler has to prove himself, prove that darkness is right and that Gai is wrong, and he needs Gai to acknowledge that. To acknowledge HIM. Even though he can't extinguish the last sparks of light inside himself. Juggler's able to make a turn toward being a better person because he acknowledges his own light and he gets Gai's acknowledgment as well--not that he's a better warrior or the darkness is better, no, but that Juggler is worth more than he thinks he is, no matter what the Light says. Does it make up for everything Juggler's done in the past? Hell, no, but to be honest, he doesn't really seem to care about that. He's creating his own path.
And that's a hell of a way to segue into the R/B antagonists, but...okay. So there are three: Makoto Aizen, who is secretly the gaseous alien Cereza, possessing some poor hapless dude; Saki Mitsurugi, who is really Grigio, the younger sister of the original Ultramen Rosso and Blu; and Leugocyte, the gaseous monster that started all this shit in the first place.
Aizen would not in any way characterize himself as a villain. He is a wannabe hero who is trying to emulate Ultraman Orb, and goes about it in the absolute worst possible ways--in that he drains the energy from random people who sorta kinda remind him of Gai in order to create his own Orb Ring (that looks like a pizza cutter, but whatever), he criticizes the Minato brothers for not being cool heroes (despite Gai actually being the furthest thing from cool, if you know anything about Orb), and he stages attacks to make himself look strong. Honestly, Juggler would tell him to fucking chill and get over Gai and find someone else already. Aizen is a hoot, but he's also really the embodiment of a bad fan. He doesn't need to be complex because he wants everything to be simple, ignoring that the perfect, pure ideal he has is not the reality. Gai is everything that Aizen complains about, and he would never condone any of the shit that Aizen pulled.
But Aizen also makes a poor long-term villain, and that's where the other two come in. Mitsurugi--or Tsuru-chan, as Asahi calls her--also gives the new R/B brothers a hard time, but that's because she sees them as unworthy successors to her brothers' legacy. Tsuru was also rejected by O-50's light, to some extent, only being granted the ability to transform into a kaiju rather than an Ultra because this mountain likes fucking with people. Her backstory states that she was kinder and more compassionate than either of her brothers, and they only went to Warrior's Peak because they wanted to protect her when she insisted on it. But they became aware of Leugocyte and went to Earth to stop him. But when it became clear that they couldn't, Rosso and Blu stepped in front of their little sister and took a fatal blast, dying right in front of her. Tsuru spent the next 1300 years traveling the planet, making friends with eventual historic figures like Oscar Wilde and Florence Nightingale, all while setting into place a plan that would destroy Leugocyte but at the cost of the Earth. It's through her reluctant friendship with the new R/B's little sister, Asahi, that she stops pretending there's nothing she cares about. It starts with her begging Asahi to leave the planet, to realizing that Asahi wouldn't leave her family and thus begging her to take her parents and idiot brothers and find a safe planet somewhere far away, and then realizing that the Minatos will make the exact same choice that her family made--Katsumi and Isami are willing to die to protect Asahi and everyone else on Earth, and the rest of the Minato family is determined to ensure that everyone lives, and the family has decided that Tsuru is one of the people they are going to protect. Tsuru sees her own brothers in their place when they try to step in front of an attack to save her, so she sacrifices her life instead, passing along her R/B Gyro to Asahi and telling her her real name, while admitting that Asahi made her happy for the first time in many, many years.
Leugocyte itself was, like Greeza before it, an incomprehensible force of nature. Backstory reveals that it is essentially a white blood cell that some asshole reprogrammed to treat planets as infectious cells that need to be consumed and destroyed. There is no way to appeal to such a creature--it has no consciousness. The only thing that can be done is to destroy it before it destroys anything else.
Which brings us to the aforementioned asshole who created it in the first place: Tregear.
When we first meet Tregear, it's in the R/B movie, where he preys on Katsumi's insecurities regarding his future and traps him on another planet, while also manipulating Katsumi's friend's nihilism and creating a kaiju to destroy everything. His next canonical appearance is in Ultra Galaxy Fight, where he orchestrates the kidnapping of Asahi, now Ultrawoman Grigio, to prevent her and her brothers from fusing into their ultimate form. At the same time, he resurrects several past enemies that the Ultras fought and sics them on the New Generation Heroes and Zero, creating Darkness Copies of them. Zero, the New Generation Heroes, Ribut, and Taro defeat his armies, but he gets away and targets the Land of Light, leaving it to the New Gens and Taro to protect the Ultra homeworld, leading directly to the Taiga opening, where Taiga, Titas, and Fuma are disintegrated in their battle against him. It's hard to say just what he does in those twelve years before Hiroyuki becomes aware of Taiga's presence inside him and starts fighting, but we know that he does take on a human persona, Kirisaki, and starts fucking with the alien immigrants in hiding on Earth, provoking them against the humans. He seems to want to prove that everyone is just as bad as he is, since he's so bewildered when the humans and aliens help one another in the finale, as well that Taiga uses his own attack to help defeat the out-of-control creature that Tregear's manipulated this time, providing it a merciful death. And that Taiga thanks him and affirms that he is still an Ultraman, regardless of whatever happened between Tregear and Taro. Oh yeah, that's another thing--apparently Tregear and Taro used to be friends and had a falling out, but we literally only learn that in a blink-and-miss-it shot in Ultra Galaxy Fight with no explanation as to what happened. And apparently this leads to him being obsessed with trying to corrupt Taro's son, with very uncomfortable visuals?
I bring this all up because we'll be getting the Taiga movie soon: New Generations Climax. It features Tregear fucking with Taro and Taiga one more time by turning Taro evil and sending him to Earth to fight Taiga, while also apparently being the one stalking Hiroyuki in the meantime because as Kirisaki he definitely had an unhealthy obsession with him there too. This movie gathers every Ultra from Ginga through, and I'm guessing that Zero will probably figure out how to make an appearance too, since he's also a mainstay of New Generation era movies, only missing out on R/B. And with a cast that big, I worry we're still going not going to get a satisfactory answer on what Tregear's deal is. What motivates him? What gives him this belief that there is no good or evil, thus it doesn't matter what he does? We got a good idea of that from Belial, Kei, Juggler, and Tsuru. We got a good idea of why Juggler and Lugiel were obsessed with their respective heroes. Why does Tregear still bother with Taro and his family? Seriously, Belial was best friends with Taro's dad before their falling out, and he just...doesn't give a shit about Taro, other than he's a heroic Ultra and in his way. Taro sacrificed himself to protect the last flame from the Plasma Spark, and that is the extent of how personal it got between them. And Taiga only had to deal with one of Belial's clones, and even then Zero was the main one fighting him--while also not rising to any of Tregear's bait and failing to let him get under his skin in any way.
When I finished the R/B movie, I sat there wondering why Tsuburaya felt like he was a good candidate to be the next Belial, to return in the next season and basically be the face of Reiwa bad guys. I'm still not getting why, and I feel like there's nothing even connecting his appearance in R/B to his appearance and what passes for his history in Taiga. I hope there will be, and I hope that the new movie will fill in some gaps and give me a better appreciation for him. But I guess I'll just have to wait and see again.
He's just a dick.
That's it. That's his entire character motivation. He's that pretentious asshole who thinks he's a philosopher because he's magically come to the conclusion that good and evil don't exist, therefore, it gives him free reign to be a total douche and hurt people because ~it's all the same.~ And then he doesn't understand why everyone doesn't just accept his philosophy, after he's hurt them all.
I mean, let's break down the rest of the villains and antagonists from Zero through R/B, just to show the difference:
Belial in Zero and Geed is actually fairly complex, although elements of that were forgotten until probably the last minutes of the Geed finale. He's much like what Zero was--a talented young warrior who got it into his head that he should take ultimate power, ignoring the fact that 1) he wasn't ready for it, and 2) it would kill everyone on his planet. All this because he was passed over for a promotion, although Tatsuomi Hamada--Riku's actor--theorizes that the real reason is that Belial couldn't deal with Father of Ultra treating him like a friend, implying that Belial probably WOULD have let that power go to his head, and both couldn't understand that not everyone might do the same thing under those circumstances and also that his best friend was determined to stay that way and also see him as worth something. He's exiled from his homeworld, and in grief and some implied insanity from being injured by the Plasma Spark's apparent self-defenses, Reiblood took advantage and possessed him. Belial's in control, but to an extent. He's got all of his darkest emotions brought to the surface, and he just hurts others because he's been hurt--it's something that Riku says to him in the finale: "You must have been so lonely. It's okay. You can let go." And Belial rejects even his son's unconditional love for him because what does he know? Riku was only genetically engineered to be a tool for Belial's resurrection and triumph, to be thrown away whenever the plan changed, abandoned as a helpless human baby, never grew up knowing parental love. Yeah, that kid doesn't know about "loneliness." Belial's true tragedy is that he's so wrapped up in feeling bad for himself that he doesn't see that everyone else is hurting around him, and even through that, they are willing to give him a second chance.
Related to that is Kei Fukuide from Geed. He's possibly the last survivor of his home planet, after it was destroyed by war. It seems like Belial finished everyone off, but he spared Kei because he was pathetic and submitted to him. Kei is embittered toward the rest of the universe, and he truly believes that Belial's way is the only way--partly because of his own experiences, and partly because he's in a definitely abusive relationship with him. Belial puts him down, tells him to use attacks that will gravely injure or kill him, emotionally manipulates him, and finally eats his internal organs, and even Belial can't understand why Kei would remain loyal to him through that. Much like how Belial is a foil to Zero and Riku, Kei is Laiha's foil, showing that sometimes people don't rise from tragedy to become heroes, but just become worse because of it.
Moving over to Ginga, while it doesn't explain a whole lot, it eventually says that Dark Lugiel was once part of the same being as Ultraman Ginga. But they split apart over a difference in opinion, where Lugiel thought that time should stop and all life be frozen in suspended animation, and Ginga thought that was a horrible, awful thing. Rude. Lugiel still believes in that, but he's also got a grudge against Ginga for not agreeing with him and standing against him. And since he doesn't see a difference between Ginga and Hikaru, that grudge extends to Hikaru as well.
Exceller in Ginga S was a scientist cut from a similar cloth as Tregear--he thought he was smart enough that little things like morality didn't apply to him. He wanted Victorium, and he was going to take it. It's good that he didn't stay the final villain, with Lugiel usurping him in the finale, but I think he was also meant to be a safe villain--he's exploiting resources and hurting people because he thinks he has the right to. It's a very 21st century villain.
Greeza in X...well, this season will always have a special place in my heart for being my first Ultraman, but it didn't explain shit and the characters weren't well developed. Greeza was no exception. But I always got the feeling that he wasn't so much a person as much as a force of nature--something that could not be understood by the heroes and who could not understand them. It just couldn't see why it couldn't just...not exterminate life. It took such joy in doing that. Greeza was creepy, and that was what worked with him.
Orb had Juggler, and dear god he's the fucking jewel of the franchise. He's multifaceted, with various points to his personality that a lot of the others lack. We see that he was once a heroic warrior, who lost faith in himself after literally being rejected by the Light (though, honestly, with how many people whose lives were ruined by Warrior's Peak on O-50, he could start a club). He couldn't understand why Gai was chosen--Gai, the softhearted idiot who describes himself as sometimes Juggler's friend and sometimes his rival. And over the course of their disastrous first mission together, he realizes, shit, the real question isn't "why Gai" but "why not me?" He realizes he's betrayed his own principles, following rules he doesn't agree with--a person like that probably wouldn't be able to become an Ultra. He starts distancing himself from Gai as he starts feeling slighted by all of the attention Gai's paying to everyone else on the mission with them. And then the one person who looks up to him and makes it clear that she wants to learn from him and no one else--she's killed, retrieving his sword. And that's what pushes him into darkness finally. But he's still not a bad guy, even though just about everyone ostracizes him. He still tries to save Gai, still tries to do the right thing, but in his own way. But many, MANY years pass, and he becomes jaded. Darkness accepted him, where the warriors of light turned their backs on him. Everything he's tried to make better, he's broken. Yeah, you can see where he'll start going "Well, fuck it, I'll break everything." But more than that, he starts forming this association between Gai and the Light, since Gai represents light. If the Light rejected him, then surely Gai did too. Juggler has to prove himself, prove that darkness is right and that Gai is wrong, and he needs Gai to acknowledge that. To acknowledge HIM. Even though he can't extinguish the last sparks of light inside himself. Juggler's able to make a turn toward being a better person because he acknowledges his own light and he gets Gai's acknowledgment as well--not that he's a better warrior or the darkness is better, no, but that Juggler is worth more than he thinks he is, no matter what the Light says. Does it make up for everything Juggler's done in the past? Hell, no, but to be honest, he doesn't really seem to care about that. He's creating his own path.
And that's a hell of a way to segue into the R/B antagonists, but...okay. So there are three: Makoto Aizen, who is secretly the gaseous alien Cereza, possessing some poor hapless dude; Saki Mitsurugi, who is really Grigio, the younger sister of the original Ultramen Rosso and Blu; and Leugocyte, the gaseous monster that started all this shit in the first place.
Aizen would not in any way characterize himself as a villain. He is a wannabe hero who is trying to emulate Ultraman Orb, and goes about it in the absolute worst possible ways--in that he drains the energy from random people who sorta kinda remind him of Gai in order to create his own Orb Ring (that looks like a pizza cutter, but whatever), he criticizes the Minato brothers for not being cool heroes (despite Gai actually being the furthest thing from cool, if you know anything about Orb), and he stages attacks to make himself look strong. Honestly, Juggler would tell him to fucking chill and get over Gai and find someone else already. Aizen is a hoot, but he's also really the embodiment of a bad fan. He doesn't need to be complex because he wants everything to be simple, ignoring that the perfect, pure ideal he has is not the reality. Gai is everything that Aizen complains about, and he would never condone any of the shit that Aizen pulled.
But Aizen also makes a poor long-term villain, and that's where the other two come in. Mitsurugi--or Tsuru-chan, as Asahi calls her--also gives the new R/B brothers a hard time, but that's because she sees them as unworthy successors to her brothers' legacy. Tsuru was also rejected by O-50's light, to some extent, only being granted the ability to transform into a kaiju rather than an Ultra because this mountain likes fucking with people. Her backstory states that she was kinder and more compassionate than either of her brothers, and they only went to Warrior's Peak because they wanted to protect her when she insisted on it. But they became aware of Leugocyte and went to Earth to stop him. But when it became clear that they couldn't, Rosso and Blu stepped in front of their little sister and took a fatal blast, dying right in front of her. Tsuru spent the next 1300 years traveling the planet, making friends with eventual historic figures like Oscar Wilde and Florence Nightingale, all while setting into place a plan that would destroy Leugocyte but at the cost of the Earth. It's through her reluctant friendship with the new R/B's little sister, Asahi, that she stops pretending there's nothing she cares about. It starts with her begging Asahi to leave the planet, to realizing that Asahi wouldn't leave her family and thus begging her to take her parents and idiot brothers and find a safe planet somewhere far away, and then realizing that the Minatos will make the exact same choice that her family made--Katsumi and Isami are willing to die to protect Asahi and everyone else on Earth, and the rest of the Minato family is determined to ensure that everyone lives, and the family has decided that Tsuru is one of the people they are going to protect. Tsuru sees her own brothers in their place when they try to step in front of an attack to save her, so she sacrifices her life instead, passing along her R/B Gyro to Asahi and telling her her real name, while admitting that Asahi made her happy for the first time in many, many years.
Leugocyte itself was, like Greeza before it, an incomprehensible force of nature. Backstory reveals that it is essentially a white blood cell that some asshole reprogrammed to treat planets as infectious cells that need to be consumed and destroyed. There is no way to appeal to such a creature--it has no consciousness. The only thing that can be done is to destroy it before it destroys anything else.
Which brings us to the aforementioned asshole who created it in the first place: Tregear.
When we first meet Tregear, it's in the R/B movie, where he preys on Katsumi's insecurities regarding his future and traps him on another planet, while also manipulating Katsumi's friend's nihilism and creating a kaiju to destroy everything. His next canonical appearance is in Ultra Galaxy Fight, where he orchestrates the kidnapping of Asahi, now Ultrawoman Grigio, to prevent her and her brothers from fusing into their ultimate form. At the same time, he resurrects several past enemies that the Ultras fought and sics them on the New Generation Heroes and Zero, creating Darkness Copies of them. Zero, the New Generation Heroes, Ribut, and Taro defeat his armies, but he gets away and targets the Land of Light, leaving it to the New Gens and Taro to protect the Ultra homeworld, leading directly to the Taiga opening, where Taiga, Titas, and Fuma are disintegrated in their battle against him. It's hard to say just what he does in those twelve years before Hiroyuki becomes aware of Taiga's presence inside him and starts fighting, but we know that he does take on a human persona, Kirisaki, and starts fucking with the alien immigrants in hiding on Earth, provoking them against the humans. He seems to want to prove that everyone is just as bad as he is, since he's so bewildered when the humans and aliens help one another in the finale, as well that Taiga uses his own attack to help defeat the out-of-control creature that Tregear's manipulated this time, providing it a merciful death. And that Taiga thanks him and affirms that he is still an Ultraman, regardless of whatever happened between Tregear and Taro. Oh yeah, that's another thing--apparently Tregear and Taro used to be friends and had a falling out, but we literally only learn that in a blink-and-miss-it shot in Ultra Galaxy Fight with no explanation as to what happened. And apparently this leads to him being obsessed with trying to corrupt Taro's son, with very uncomfortable visuals?
I bring this all up because we'll be getting the Taiga movie soon: New Generations Climax. It features Tregear fucking with Taro and Taiga one more time by turning Taro evil and sending him to Earth to fight Taiga, while also apparently being the one stalking Hiroyuki in the meantime because as Kirisaki he definitely had an unhealthy obsession with him there too. This movie gathers every Ultra from Ginga through, and I'm guessing that Zero will probably figure out how to make an appearance too, since he's also a mainstay of New Generation era movies, only missing out on R/B. And with a cast that big, I worry we're still going not going to get a satisfactory answer on what Tregear's deal is. What motivates him? What gives him this belief that there is no good or evil, thus it doesn't matter what he does? We got a good idea of that from Belial, Kei, Juggler, and Tsuru. We got a good idea of why Juggler and Lugiel were obsessed with their respective heroes. Why does Tregear still bother with Taro and his family? Seriously, Belial was best friends with Taro's dad before their falling out, and he just...doesn't give a shit about Taro, other than he's a heroic Ultra and in his way. Taro sacrificed himself to protect the last flame from the Plasma Spark, and that is the extent of how personal it got between them. And Taiga only had to deal with one of Belial's clones, and even then Zero was the main one fighting him--while also not rising to any of Tregear's bait and failing to let him get under his skin in any way.
When I finished the R/B movie, I sat there wondering why Tsuburaya felt like he was a good candidate to be the next Belial, to return in the next season and basically be the face of Reiwa bad guys. I'm still not getting why, and I feel like there's nothing even connecting his appearance in R/B to his appearance and what passes for his history in Taiga. I hope there will be, and I hope that the new movie will fill in some gaps and give me a better appreciation for him. But I guess I'll just have to wait and see again.