This video was sponsored by Campfire Blaze.  Or maybe it's Campfire Blaze'sÂ
edgy pallet-swapped alter ego! This may come as a shock to many of you……
but I watched a lot of anime in high school. I know, I know. Please withhold all affronted
gasps til the end. But it’s true! And if there’s one trope anime loves more
than giant swords, uncosplayable hairstyles, and underage girls with quintuple-G-cups,
it’s superpowered evil sides. It’s gotten a little less popular since the rise of what
I like to call the soft boi shonen anime, the subgenre pioneered by My Hero Academia
where the shonen protagonist is also a total soft boi, but for a while there, you couldn’t
turn around without smacking into an anime with a superpowered evil side in it.
The concept of the superpowered evil side is simple. Our protagonist is generally a
pretty nice guy - standard hero, maybe a little bit cranky but overall reliably protagonist-y.
But it’s also standard shonen anime law that the hero probably gets their ass kicked
on the regular, since every villain needs to win at least one establishing fight to
prove that they are indeed a Bad Enough Dude To Threaten The Protagonist. Emotion powerups
and friendship speeches can only take your hero so far - sometimes they need a serious
boost to get through a particularly bombastic anime fight scene. And thisÂ
is where the superpowered evil side comes in. The protagonist develops a conveniently-timed powerup just in time
to save their life, but unlike your garden variety powerups, this oneÂ
comes with a personality shift. The hero is moreÂ
aggressive, more malicious, more unhinged; sometimes they might even seem
like a completely different person - they go from being on the ropes to having the bad
guy on the ropes, and they usually almost seem to be reveling in it. Our hero is winning,
sure - but they aren’t really themselves, and they could even end up being more dangerous
to the other heroes than the bad guy they’re currently using as a kickball. This is the
superpowered evil side: it’s superpowered, it’s evil. Exactly what it says on the tin,
and satisfaction guaranteed. The superpowered evil side is very useful
for two reasons: one, the superpowered part. Powerups are very convenient because they
let your hero win, and since most shonen anime fights are basically just mashing two action
figures together until one of them buckles or a limb drops off, a powerup is a nice way
to escalate the mashing with some loud glowy auras and a lot more environmental damage.
The other useful feature is, unsurprisingly, the evilness. See, this helps counter the
inherent busted-ness of the powerup. Because having a powerup in reserve usually totally
unbalances a good hero-villain matchup, most powerups come with some kind of price to still
give the bad guy a chance post-powerup - maybe the hero can’t do it on command, or it makes
the hero weaker in some other way, or it’s got some kind of time limit before it becomes
too physically taxing to sustain, or it completely debilitates them afterwards so they’ll be
totally helpless if they don’t win - but with the superpowered evil side, the trade-off
is that the hero straight-up becomes evil. This lets the powerup part be as strong as
the writer needs it to be, because the hero can’t just use it willy-nilly, since they’ll
fully lose control and potentially end up becoming more of a problem than the original
problem. Now, the exact nature of the superpowered
evil side varies a lot from story to story. While they’re all both superpowered and
evil, those can mean a lot of different things. For instance, some superpowered evil sides
are pretty reliable and consistent and don’t change much with repeated use, but a lot of
them aren’t, and instead grow stronger every time they’re used. While this would be pretty
broken for any other powerup, the evilness helps balance this out by also getting stronger
every time. The risk/reward ratio stays pretty much constant as the risk of getting stuck
all evil and stuff rises alongside the reward of kicking the bad guy’s butt. Two notable
classic Shonen anime leaned on this option - first Inuyasha, and then Bleach. Both featured
protagonists whose superpowered evil side was almost its own split personality that
got stronger and stronger every time the hero lost control.
In Inuyasha’s case, when the half-demon protagonist’s magic sword is broken in the
creatively-titled episode “Tetsusaiga Breaks”, it turns out it was actually working as a
restraining bolt to keep his powerful demon blood in check, and with it destroyed, he
gets way the hell stronger and scarier and unleashes a very cathartically satisfying
can of whoop-ass on the demon who’d been wiping the floor with him for the last fifteen
minutes. The problem is, the demon blood is actually corruptive - like it’s physically
too strong for his human side, and every time he transforms, it takes another nibble out
of his human soul. This isn’t just flavor text - each time he transforms, he’s noticeably
more volatile, even losing the ability to speak after a while. It basically turns into
a chronic medical condition that the bad guys start leveraging to screw with the heroes,
since after a while, a sufficiently evil vibe in the area is enough to overwhelm the sword’s
power and force him to transform, turning him into a mindless, feral living weapon against his friends. Very dramatic,Â
very cool! Unsurprisingly it’s weak to the power of love and hugs,
but Inuyasha’s a romance first and a shonen anime second, so that’s not really a surprise.
Meanwhile in the case of Bleach, Ichigo’s “hollow” side is introduced fairly early
on as a super-strong, super-violent maniacal asshole with a really sweet-looking facemask
who mostly just shows up to effortlessly curbstomp the bad guy until Ichigo musters enough heroic
willpower to dramatically rip his mask off and go back to getting his butt kicked. He
gets progressively stronger and harder to suppress as the story progresses - although
after a fairly standard-issue battle in the center of the mind, the hollow side chills
out enough to turn into a non-evil powerup, with one minor relapse laterÂ
on where a particularly dramatic near-death experience turns him into a crazy strong superpowered evil side for
a little while. But it’s actually not uncommon for superpowered
evil sides to lose the evil over time! Lots of people forget this thanks to pop culture
osmosis and narrative drift, but the first time Dragon Ball Z showed us a super-saiyan,
it was pretty solidly a superpowered evil side. When Goku first transforms during the
Frieza arc, it’s in a moment of uncharacteristic pure rage, and the first sign that he’s
not exactly himself is that he doesn’t seem to be having a good time fighting. This is
Goku we’re talking about. He’s got, like, two braincells, and one of them spends all
its time pinging between the three receptors for Food, Fighting and Friendship. But no,
this Goku is silent, stoic, and completely unfazed by all of Frieza’s sassing. He even
toys with Frieza, who up to this point has spent several episodes kicking the ever-loving
crap out of him, his friends and his family. The fight suddenly goes from a desperate uphill
struggle just to survive to being completely unbalanced in the other direction. Even the
narrator calls it an “unsettling transformation”, and the peanut gallery wastes no time in pointing
out that Goku is really not acting like himself, and that this fun-loving goober who can’t
help but enjoy himself even when fighting for his life and the survival of his planet
is now completely focused on making Frieza suffer for killing his friend. It was cool
as hell, and a fantastic payoff for the season’s buildup of this mysterious, alien prophecy
of an ultimate deadly Saiyan warrior and the only thing frieza truly feared.
And then, well, the Android saga starts, we meet Trunks minute one, and suddenly Super
Saiyan is the powerup du jour - everyone and their six-year-old can do it by the end of
the arc with zero personality shift or negative consequences. It’s explained as basically
just being a matter of training - once you get used to it, it stops being all evil and
stuff - but it also strips away all the coolness factor and officially heralds DBZ’s long,
slow, painful slide into power creep, where every new transformation is essentially one
use only before it becomes outstripped by the next villain and renderedÂ
completely pointless. Now, Power Creep is a broader trope that can affects anything with an escalating power
level - while it’s mostly discussed in context of anime, its original use was in games, where
it was pretty common for the average strength of the stuff in the game to go up over time,
with every new release being incrementally stronger than the previous ones. This helped
appeal to the people buying those new releases, but had the side effect of gradually rendering
older game features weaker by comparison, and eventually obsolete. For an example that’s
a game and a show, Yugioh - or Duel Monsters - has some serious power creep. In its first
appearances, the coolest thing you could do in a game was draw the strongest monster and
summon it. Then it was fuse monsters together to make an even STRONGER monster. Then after
a while it turned into summon the coolest legendary god card, and now it’s, like…
chain fourteen highly specific monster and spell effects to instantly summon your apex
monster on the first turn and win. Pretty sure that kind of deck-building never made
it into the anime, cuz while it’s basically a guaranteed win, it’s also super boring
to watch. And that’s actually the biggest problem with power creep - boredom. Which
is ironic, because it only exists to combat boredom. Games and shows alike thrive on dropping
in cool new stuff for the audience to keep them interested, and sometimes they drop in
cool new stuff that’s so cool, or at least strong, that it retroactively invalidates
all the previous cool stuff. And that loops back around to being not cool, because it
makes all the earlier stuff feel pointless. Like… imagine your hero is questing for
Excalibur, right? This amazing, legendary blade wielded by King Arthur Pendragon, destined
only for the hand of its chosen and the One True King. And after half a season of trials
and tribulations and proving themselves, the hero finally gets excalibur, proves themselves
worthy, draws the sword from the stone, gets a sweet-looking makeover and turns the tables
on the season antagonist in one glorious stroke. And then next season they’re like “hey,
uh, bad news - this new bad guy put up his Excalibur-Proof Shield, so now you need to
get, uhhhh… Caliburn. It’s… like Excalibur…… but WAY cooler. And maybe just to be sure
you’re gonna do it, we’re - we’re gonna break excalibur. Just so, you know, you don’t
get TOO comfortable. But don’t worry! Caliburn is JUST as cool! We promise!” But it’s
not just as cool. Because even if the sword is new, the story isn’t. The first time
your hero proves themself worthy and gets an amazing magical weapon, we’re all very
impressed. The second time, we’re a lot less impressed. You’d think two magic swords
would be twice as cool, but in practice you’re just telling us we shouldn’t have valued
that first one so much. Why get invested in a powerup if we know the story is gonna make
it obsolete in one fight? Power creep afflicts a lot of powerups, but
superpowered evil sides are a lot less vulnerable to it than more benevolent powerups, since
a normal powerup usually gets nerfed after one use so it doesn’t become the Instant
Win Button, but the inherent tradeoff of the superpowered evil side means you can use it
for drama more than once before putting it on the shelf. Plus, power creep exists to
combat boredom and stagnation, but the drama inherent in the evilness can do that pretty
well on its own. The Superpowered Evil Side popping up doesn’t mean the hero’s gonna
win and everything’ll be fine - it just means we’ve swapped out one problem for another problem thatÂ
significantly more complicated to fix. But it’s still not immune to power
creep, and can sometimes end up disappointingly nerfed by it. After all, if the superpowered
part loses its luster, then the risk/reward ratio skyrockets, since then you’re just…
turning evil for no reason, which is more of a danger than a complex narrative tradeoff.
Because of this, power-creep-weakened superpowered evil sides usually lose either the superpower
or the evil after a while - sometimes both, leading to them just… fully losing all narrative
relevance and oomph. Though they do sometimes get replaced by new superpowered evil sides
afterwards! Jumping back to dragonball again, in the original series, gokuÂ
had another superpowered evil side in the form of the Oozaru - if he looked at the moon he’d turn into a rampaging
giant monkey. This happened enough times to go from “cataclysmically dangerous” to
“ah jeez, not again” and eventually they just… stopped having his tail grow back
so they wouldn’t need to remember that plot point. Then when Super Saiyan became old hat
in the Cell Saga, they started incrementing the numbers and gave Gohan a superpowered
evil side when he went super-saiyan nuclear to beat Cell. This was a very cool, iconic
moment everybody remembers and loves, and then they never let Gohan do anything cool
again. See, there’s this unspoken - or possibly
spoken and I just haven’t been paying attention - rule in fighting anime that no two fights
can ever be the same. If the first fight had your hero on the ropes before they unleashed
their superpowered evil side and wiped the floor with the enemy, then the next fight
cannot go the same way. Maybe they do the superpowered evil side, but oh no, this time
it’s too evil and they have to put it back! Or the power-creep solution,Â
they do the superpowered evil side thing, but this villain is just too strong and the superpowers are useless
against them! Or the villain has some kind of control over the superpowered evil side,
and using it against them is exactly what they want! Or, in more boring cases, they
just wait an unreasonably long time before activating the superpowered evil side. Etcetera
etcetera. There’s usually a watsonian reason the same trick can never work more than once,
but the real reason is just that… well… the writer thinks that’d be boring. And… most of the time they're right! Jumping back to Bleach real quick, there was aÂ
fairly early appearance of the Superpowered Evil  Side that was very dramatic where it popped upÂ
in the middle of a very dramatic fight and then  Ichigo heroically fought it off and apologizedÂ
to his enemy for the interruption in… possibly  the funniest moment in the show, and then in aÂ
FILLER arc like thirty episodes later the EXACTÂ Â SAME THING happened beat for beat. It evenÂ
starts with him catching the bad guy's sword  and then looking up all "ohhh look I'm evil nowÂ
lookit my mask" - and the number of people who  like Bleach and really like that first moment butÂ
felt it got really cheap because then it happened  exactly the same again but WORSE… kindaÂ
demonstrates that this trope really does  need to be mixed up on every useÂ
or it just ends up getting tired. Anyway, most of the actualÂ
interesting development comes from the other side of the trope - the evil bit.
Because a superpowered evil side can be evil in a lot of different ways.
Some of them are functionally split personalities that are internally at war with the protagonist,
and resolving that might involve some kind of character development or personal growth,
or just a symbolic battle in the center of the mind where they haveÂ
a swordfight or something. These split personalities also sometimes get up to stuff that the main personality doesn’t
know about - it was actually surprisingly common for a while to give supervillains innocent
alter egos who literally didn’t know about their own supervillainy. It’s also surprisingly
common for characters with amnesia to end up with their original memories and personality
serving as a superpowered evil side - where they find out they used to be really badass
but also totally morally bankrupt and end up struggling with basically their original
version for control. Some stories take this split to its logical conclusion and make the
superpowered evil side some kind of totally separate possessing entity that basically
has a timeshare on the hero’s brain, and the hero gets a sweet powerup at the expense
of having to try and kick them out when they start making themselves at home in their brain.
But some of these superpowered evil sides are more like… just the regular character,
but way angrier and with zero inhibitions. These versions will usually share the character’s
most basic priorities - a love interest showing up might dissuade them from further evil,
for instance - but the tradeoff is any kind of carefully-curated personal code or whatever
that might matter to the character probably goes straight out the window.Â
If your happy-go-lucky hero very specifically doesn’t kill, they might have a doozy of aÂ
time restraining themselves when the powerup fairy visits and switches that off for the day - and even if the character
doesn’t have any, like, deeply-held personal creeds for the superpowered evil side to ignore,
an otherwise chill and usually nice hero can still end up dishing out a startling amount
of damage when they drop the chill- and nice-ness for a minute.
And some superpowered evil sides are basically feral - instead of being “the character,
but meaner”, it’s more like “the character’s not home right now, can their primal instincts
take a message?” This is, like, the werewolf approach to the superpowered evil side - kind
of a “beast within” scenario. In some cases, a split-personality superpowered evil
side might temporarily get repurposes as one of these if the hero nearly dies, and they
transform as a survival mechanism. Once again, the most popular fix for this is the power
of love. A conveniently-placed love interest can often convince the rampaging protagonist
to chill out and calm down. And the drama of a completely uncontrollable rampaging force
of nature turning back into a good guy to avoid hurting their one true love is the kind
of narrative play that really gets the shippers out in force. It’s good for drama, is what
I’m saying. One popular non-anime example of a superpowered
evil side is a spider-man classic you’re probably familiar with, the venom symbiote.
What Peter initially thinks is just a fancy black suit with infiniteÂ
webbing and a quick-change feature turns out to actually be a sentient alien parasite influencing his personality
for evil. While the symbiote is a character in their own right and has been portrayed
many different ways across different media, the symbiote is usually at least a little
bit evil, though how that manifests varies a lot from story to story. Usually the way
the story goes is the symbiote starts off working as a superpowered evil side for generally
heroic nice dude Peter Parker before escalating in villainy and getting kicked out of his
brain in a dramatic battle in the center of the mind and slinking off to bond with Peter’s
estranged former friend Eddie Brock, becoming the supervillain Venom. In the legendary work
of cinema that is Spider-Man 3, the symbiote initially functions as a type 2 superpowered
evil side, lowering Peter’s inhibitions and making him angrier and more of a dick,
although this Peter is also a huge dork so the symbiote just kinda makes him an even
bigger dork. But in some versions, like the one in Spectacular Spider-Man, it’s more
of a type one, where the symbiote starts off pretty much mindless but develops a personality
of its own and starts acting out more and more, leading to one very noteworthy fight
where Spider-Man takes out the entire sinister six with terrifying efficiency, all while
completely silent - and then we find out that Peter was actually asleep the whole time, and the symbiote took hisÂ
body out for a crimefighting joyride. That’s spooky! Peter no likey!
Now while it may seem a bit redundant, some villains actually have superpowered evil sides.
In rare cases, the villain is usually actually pretty nice, maybe even heroic - but right
now the superpowered evil side is in charge, and that’s the one you gotta watch out for.
But sometimes this is more like a second form in a boss fight - the relatively manageable
bad guy you were dealing with just whipped out a backup personality with a totally different
moveset and now you’re in a world of trouble. So this trope has a few corollary tropes that
show up wherever it does. By far the most relevant one is fighting from the inside,
a catch-all trope for a character under some kind of control using heroic willpower to
resist it. This can be subtle, like a Single Dramatic Tear falling from their otherwise
dispassionate face - or it can be really unsubtle, which usually means a lot ofÂ
yelling and head-clutching. Hell, sometimes we actually zoom into their head to see them symbolically fighting the
superpowered evil side for control - typically known as a battle in the center of the mind.
This gets used with every Superpowered Evil Side variant, but it sees the most mileage
with the Split Personality and the Feral variants, since those are the ones where you can most
easily make the argument that the hero is trapped in their own mind. If nothing seems
to be working to snap them out of it, that usually just means a love interest is about
to tearfully drop a love confession that the hero may or may not remember when they instantly
snap out of it. Remember, it’s all about the drama. <aside> Just once I wanna see the
hero’s non-love-interest bestie who just got their ass kicked to show how Out Of Control
they are get really cranky that their desperate plea to their humanity wasn’t enough to
get them to stop being evil. Anyway, sometimes the fighting from the inside
thing gets some outside help with the good old-fashioned “I know you’re in there
somewhere” fight, where the other heroes kick the crap out of the superpowered evil
side until it goes away. This is harder than most “I know you’re in there somewhere”
fights because the superpowered evil side is still superpowered, and typically strong
enough to take out whatever bad guy was kicking the good guys around before, so it might end
up being a bit more of a… token effort to guilt the currently-evil character into fighting
from the inside even harder. Or sometimes a more noble antagonist might showÂ
up and be like "ahh, the hero is not themselves"Â Â and then kick their ass until they stop and thenÂ
leave. It's pretty funny whenever that happens. And, for the benefit of the audience, sometimes
we get an actual look inside said character’s head and get to see someÂ
mildly symbolic representation of their inner turmoil. This is usually pretty… hamfisted. Like, we’re not exactly gonna
be surprised to see our hero fighting a scary pallet-swapped version of themselvesÂ
or some kind of beast. Still, this whole trope is built on drama, and nothing’s better for drama than just physically showing
us someone’s deep-seated internal struggle in a literal, visual representation. No…
no, wait, I read that wrong. Plenty of things are better for drama than that. But there’s
nothing wrong with a little hamfisted-ness once in a while. Anyway! The main difficulty with this trope
is power creep, but more than that, there are two contrasting problems that can really
hurt this trope - the Superpowered Evil Side can just get tired from repeated use, but
it can also become unreliable or boring if it’s constantly being reworked or discarded
in favor of some new powerup. The overuse problem is obvious - the first time your hero
heroically fights off their superpowered evil side and trades the powerup for keeping their
humanity, that’s really cool! But the second time it plays out the exact same way, it’s
a lot less cool. This trope, like all tropes, is a tool, and if you use it the exact same
way twice, it can lose the impact. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be changed every time! Lots of writers keepÂ
evolving the superpowered evil side so it never manifests the same way
twice, which is theoretically workable, but can also result in a Super Saiyan scenario,
where it just gets totally nerfed after its debut and loses all potentialÂ
drama and future exploration. The superpowered evil side CAN evolve over time - but it can also just be a consistent
character trait like any other ability or flaw. Like any character trait, while it can
change and develop, it doesn’t need to in order to keep the character interesting - we
just need to see how it works in different situations. Like, maybe we’ve seen how it
works in a straight fight - it takes over, kicks ass, then goes away again. But what
about if the heroes are trapped, and suddenly the superpowered evil side kicks in from the
stress, and now the heroes are locked in with it? That’s a whole different ball game!
Or this new villain wants to draw out the superpowered evil side, so it’s not the
automatic win condition for the fight! There’s all kinds of ways to play with this trope
without having to constantly upgrade or rework it that don’t involve dulling it with repeated
use. It’s a difficult balance to strike, but when done right, it can make for some
really fun character drama.
So… yeah! And thanks again to Campfire Blaze forÂ
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CĂş Chulainns warp spasm totally counts, right?
I love this trope.
One aspect that I think Red didn't go into as deep was the extent that some stories will let a hero get away with a dodgy choice or unhelpful behavior because "oh that wasn't ME, that was my super-evil side that I have no control over!"
The only issue I see is how prevalent this trope is with post fight handwaving.
Often in order to move the story they avoid the character development.
I’ve been doing something like this with my DnD character Grey. He’s a fighter who was unable to use magic his whole life despite getting training from the best wizard in the kingdom. Time goes on, the kingdoms gets destroyed, he escapes and feels like a failure because he couldn’t save his family. Early in his adventures the party fights a shadow demon and he injects himself with a single drop of blood in an attempt to gain power (I multi classed into Shadow Sorcerer). After a bit of time the fragment of the demon, Sliver, starts to manifest. It starts small by tinkering with Grey’s weapons while he’s asleep. After a time Sliver took controle and tried to attack a party member.
Now Grey and Sliver have a tenuous agreement that Grey will provide Sliver with magic items/souls for sustenance and Sliver will only take over one night a week to tinker with weapons.
There is also the conflict and mistrust between Grey and the party cleric Fastolf. His player has brought up the banishment and remove cures spells but it hasn’t come up in gam yet. Our DM has been vague about what either of those might do.
TL/DR: Character willingly takes on a Super Powered Evil Side to gain said power with the intent of getting revenge gets more than they bargained for when SPES asserts dominance. Will the character keep SEPS, find a balance, try to get rid of it, dominate it or loose himself to it?