Note: This document is inspired by the Trope Talk video of the same name by Overly Sarcastic Productions. I highly recommend watching that video before reading this doc. In fact, you should watch some of their other videos too. They're all great!

It's kind of weird that we tend to make villains likable. Right? Like, just on a basic on-paper level. It's one thing to have an antagonist who's opposing the protagonists but fundamentally has a sympathetic and understandable motivation, or a future redemption-arc recipient being given plenty of redeeming qualities in advance of that, but it's very weird that we take pure dag-nasty evil villains and make people like them. Seems kind of counterproductive, right? That's the bad guy. We want the audience to root for the good guy.

So it's only natural that plenty of villains are sprinkled with that is known as "Kick the Dog" moments, where to prove how evil they are, the villain does something that makes them instantly unlikable, like kicking a dog, stealing candy from a baby, or some other dastardly scheme designed only to remind us of how bad they are. And yet plenty of villains are written with the opposite approach. Instead of constantly driving home how cruel and irredeemable they are, we get regular reminders that they have some set of admirable traits the audience is drawn to respect. These villains are definitely villains, doing bad things for bad reasons, and yet the story goes out of its way to convince us to like them on some level.

This produces the archetype known as the Magnificent Bastard, the official trope designation for the kind of villain who makes you stand up and shout "Oh, you magnificent bastard!" when they do stuff. The Magnificent Bastard is a difficult trope to classify, because so much of what makes it work is raw charisma, which is basically just a step up from je ne sais quoi in the vagueness department. A Magnificent Bastard is a villain you can't help but admire-and the problem there is that that is an entirely subjective judgment. People find different things admirable. So a villain who comes across as a magnificent bastard to one audience might come across as just a garden variety bastard to another audience. It's tricky. But there are some concrete characteristics we can fall back on. A magnificent bastard isn't just a matter of charisma.

Magnificent Bastards… Um… D-do you think I should shorten that? MBs? MagBasts? I don't know, I just feel like neither of these words are gonna feel like words by the time I'm done with them. And I don't know if I really want to say this five million times. Let me see if I can find some alternatives.

*David puts on a visor and a digital screen ends up in front of him as he starts searching*

Alright, let's see… Glamtagonists… Rays of Sinshine… Charismaniacs… Yeah, that one's good.

*David disperses the screen and takes off his visor*

So, charismaniacs, as a rule, have a very specific base set of character traits that vary from "totally objective" to "totally subjective". We've already mentioned charisma, so that's covered. Next on the list is intelligence. Magnificent Bastards are typically tactical geniuses and at minimum are cunning adversaries, not easily trapped or misled by the heroes. They might be facing off against an equally brilliant protagonist in a game of high-stakes chess, or, more commonly, they might be the brains while their heroic nemesis is more the brawn, opposing their strength with cunning multi-layered plans to outwit and confound them.

As a general rule, the charismaniac will always make the best possible decision they can make given the information they have. If they know enough to put together something, they'll probably figure it out. If they could conceivably know something, they probably know it. Now this trait is actually a bit risky, because if you take this too far, you end up with the Magical Genius, a character who is allegedly smart but functionally just knows exactly what the writer needs them to know for the plot to happen. Rather than put the pieces together or deducting something in a way the audience can follow, they're just magically right. This is, on paper, the easiest way to write a smart character, since it doesn't involve the writer doing any actual work to make their train of thought make sense, but it never actually works, because part of what makes a smart character admirable to the audience is seeing them figure things out-not just magically know stuff. The audience needs to be able to follow along, because otherwise you'll be making apparently arbitrary logical leaps, which will lose your audience, and if the audience gets lost, they'll feel disconnected from this character they're supposed to like and sympathize with. If a smart character doesn't figure things out in a way the audience can see, we won't appreciate it.

This is why so many well-written detectives have partners who aren't genius detectives who need the play-by-play explained to them so we can recognize the skill and cleverness that went into the deduction. If it's just a smart guy magically realizing things that we never had a chance to notice, the whole situation feels unfair to the audience. And that's something you want to avoid, because when things feel unfair, the audience becomes aware of the hand of the author making things unfair. If the Magnificent Bastard is basically just omniscient, that's not fair to the audience or the characters. We need to be able to understand what this character knows and how they're putting it together or we'll just feel like the author is jerking us around. This is one of the reasons villains have a tendency to monologue their evil plans just to make sure we're up to speed.

And speaking of fairness, another key quality of the charismaniac is standards. Charismaniacs frequently have some kind of personal code or creed to follow. This is the most unconditionally admirable trait these characters can have. Without standards, anything goes. The plot basically turns into a brawl. But if your character is a genius master manipulator with standards, that gives us rules, and the whole situation resolves into something more like a game. The most sympathetic charismaniacs do treat their villainous schemes as games, and tend to react pretty well to losing, because it was fair. This basic concept of fairness and fair play elevates the charismaniac above many of their evil peers and automatically makes us like and respect them more. They're not interested in winning at all costs-they have rules, and some sort of personal honor code that they adhere to.

Now, while broadly unconditionally admirable, this trait is not actually one hundred percent necessary for a charismaniac. Classic Die Hard villain Hans Gruber is an iconic charismaniac, and his personal standards are actually quite low-the only code he seems particularly interested in is the dress code. But he almost makes up for it through his combo very brilliant plan and extremely good performance by Alan Rickman. He's pretty sneaky and dishonorable, but honestly that just makes him seem smarter, and that makes up the difference so we end up admiring him more. He's very good, and we as an audience can admire extreme competence just as much as we could admire personal standards.

Now what actually seems to be the rule is that the lower the standards of the charismaniac, the more driven they have to be towards accomplishing their overarching goal. Because most charismaniacs have a goal, but they don't all want them that badly. In fact, I think we can actually subdivide here into two categories: goal-driven and code-driven. If a charismaniac cares more about their endgame than their principles, we get a type one, a little heavier on the "bastard" than the magnificence. If they care more about their personal standards than any individual victory, we get a type two, usually significantly more principled and overall less villainous.

Type ones are usually very pragmatic-and frankly, pragmatism is its own kind of standard. Where the practical end goal is prioritized over anything more superficial, like a personal code. So, I guess… They're ALL sort of code-driven? Ahh, that's too complicated. Anyway! So for instance, Magneto would generally be written as a type one-he has a personal code, but his number one priority is protecting mutantkind, and he will do almost anything to further that goal, even sacrifice other mutants or manipulating his oldest friend. He's still very regal and principled, which is the charisma factor, but he's willing to go pretty far to make his goals happen. So he's functionally more pragmatic.

And then there's characters like the '90s version of Carmen Sandiego, a total type two who was committing massive crimes left and right, but treated the whole thing as a game and had some very strong principles about what was and wasn't fair-strictly never using violence, respecting the heroes trying to hunt her down, and even going out of her way to rescue them if no one else is going to save them first. She's in it for the kicks, and it's no fun if anyone gets hurt-so the individual heists matter a lot less than sticking to her principles.

There's also some charismaniacs who fall into a kind of middle ground, where they have a personal code but they also have a goal they prioritize over anything else, and depending on which more is more immediately relevant, they might oscillate somewhat between the two. For instance, Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada is a fairly unique Magnificent Bastard who prioritizes her career and her fashion magazine over any of her personal relationships and even the careers of her closest friends, which is utterly ruthless and goal-oriented, but she also has a surprisingly ironclad personal code when it comes to who she respects and how she treats the people in her life-she has basically no respect for the butt-kissers, but she recognizes effort and when people actually try-and, more importantly, succeed-she favors them. She clearly doesn't like it when people just try to please her, because then they're not actually taking her job seriously, they're just starstruck and/or power-hungry. Ultimately, only the job matters to her, which is why she tosses people out when they're not doing well and sacrifices whatever she needs to guarantee the future of her business. In a sense, this is the ultimate marriage between principles and goals-the only principle is to further the goal. Of course, she is still an absolute nightmare to deal with because of those principles but that's what makes her such a good antagonist.

Code-driven charismaniacs are, as a rule, more sympathetic than goal-driven charismaniacs, for the simple reason that they're more likely to side with the good guys on a case-by-case basis. A goal-driven character will pursue their objective relentlessly, which in the case of a villain is usually bad for the heroes. A code-driven character will abandon an evil scheme the minute it betrays one of their principles, which can sometimes involve actually turning on the other bad guys and siding with the good guys.

But this is only one side of the definition. This gives us some core traits of what a charismaniac is-but we haven't yet explored what they aren't. A Magnificent Bastard is kind of a complex balance to strike, and there are some tropes they just can't do without losing either their magnificence or their bastardness. For instance, charismaniacs cannot betray their goals or principles for petty reasons. They can still be petty in tangential ways-in fact, that can help cement their bastardness in the eyes of the audience- but they cannot trip themselves up on the grand scale for small reasons. They can't indulge their personal whims to the detriment of the actual plan. Charismaniacs need to be able to look at the bigger picture.

Some villains, usually the chaotic or incoherent ones, have a habit of dropping their plans the minute something more interesting comes up, which is a very respectable branch of villainy, but it takes away that bigger picture aspect. They let themselves get distracted. The charismaniac might abandon their current goal because they've found an even bigger picture to prioritize, but they'll usually avoid their current plans for anything as petty as, for example, revenge, or personally screwing with the protagonists. A nemesis might drop their scheming to prioritize messing with their arch-foe, but a proper charismaniac would just have "messing with the arch-foe" penciled in for six o'clock while the rest of their machinations continue unchanged. Nothing makes a villain more incompetent than actively sabotaging their own plans for personal reasons. Pettiness puts a ding in the perception of intelligence. An audience that thinks your bad guy is too petty to pull off any real scheming won't care how brilliant they are on paper or how much magical knowledge the writer gives them-they'll come across as too easily distracted to be the scary genius we're supposed to respect.

And that's actually another key trait-charasmaniacs should not be notable vulnerable to leverage. If your villain is emotionally unstable and prone to violent outbursts or rage, they don't really come across as in control. We get the feeling the good guys could just push a few of their buttons and they'd be totally coming apart at the seams. That doesn't leave the audience wondering how the heroes are going to prompt the standard villainous third-act breakdown, they're just wondering when the heroes are gonna push that big red "obvious insecurity" button and switch the bad guy into meltdown mode. That takes away a lot of the battle-of-wits side of things, which is an invaluable part of the Magnificent Bastard archetype. So while a charismaniac can still have insecurities-even ones that do eventually get exploited for the ol' third-act breakdown-they need to be largely unflappable, and any vulnerabilities they do have should be closely guarded and/or something the good guys would not willingly exploit. They usually need to be self-aware enough to know their own weaknesses so they can anticipate attacks and defend against them. All this plays into making this character seem very clever and very difficult to oppose-key factors of the Magnificent Bastard. If they're easy to take down, they're not that magnificent.

On the flip side, they can't be totally indestructible. If the villain is functionally omnipotent and/or omniscient, that scuttles the whole "fairness" aspect of the conflict and destroys the "battle of wits" element from the other side of things, since the heroes cannot beat a villain who's written to be unbeatable. In order to sell us on the actual conflict, the heroes need to have a chance, even if it's just a slim one. The villain might initially appear unbeatable, but that means the heroes need to find their weaknesses-and it's not fun if the villain just doesn't have any. Those villains suffer from the same problem as the Magical Genius archetype-the audience knows the writer is just giving them what they need to win.

Probably the ultimate example of a really well-done Magnificent Bastard is David Xanatos, one of the primary antagonists of the 90s show Gargoyles, an improbably excellent show that is highly recommended, so please check it out when you have the chance. Peruseres of TVTropes might already be familiar with his name, since he's the trope namer of the "Xanatos Gambit", a plan where every foreseeable outcome benefits the planner somehow. He's really good at this. Pretty much any time he's participating in the plot, it's because he has at least one plan in play, and no matter what the good guys do, he's gonna end up benefiting somehow. He has a few overarching goals, most notably obtaining immortality so he and his wife can enjoy fabulous wealth and power forever, but he really doesn't care about any of his individual small-scale goals, which is why his plans always at least partially succeed. As long as one of them comes to fruition, he considers it a win. He's also very charismatic and charming, and surprisingly principled. For one thing, the protagonist gargoyles are basically his biggest recurring antagonists, not least of which because he continually antagonizes or manipulates them-but the thing is, they all turn to stone during the day, and it's been pointed out how easy it would be to just destroy them during that stone sleep. And Xanatos deliberately doesn't do that, even though he totally could, because he thinks it'd be a waste. Fundamentally, Xanatos' main interests are general curiosity and furthering his wealth and technological supremacy and having an interesting time while he does it. Taking the easy way out would be boring. And the thing about having no really exploitable vulnerabilities is actually addressed in a specific episode where Xanatos proposes to his future wife and fellow supervillain with a magical artifact that accidentally turns her into a werewolf. Hey, these things happen. When it becomes clear to him that he can't deal with the situation on his own, he tries to manipulate the gargoyles into helping him out before the transformation kills her, but unfortunately they know him a little too well by now and go to leave the minute they realize he's playing them. He's forced to admit that the monster they're hunting is the love of his life and he really, really needs their help to save her. They're still suspicious, "the boy who cried wolf" and all that-he does have a history of manipulating them by saying he needs their help-but on the off-chance that a sort-of-innocent person is actually at risk, they do eventually help him out, and they learn that he was actually being fully honest with them. No tricks, no ploys, just genuine desperation. He's clearly pretty galled by having to open up like this, and doesn't like the idea that his perennial nemeses know his weakness-but of course, they're good guys who don't think of "having a love interest" as a weakness, so this never gets exploited, because that'd be a real dick move. After this point, basically whenever Xanatos' loved ones are in danger, the good guys help him out with no manipulation involved. And after a while, he kind of mellows out and stops all the bad guy stuff and just becomes their rich dickheaded acquaintance.

And that's not actually too uncommon for type two charismaniacs. If their principles matter strongly enough, they end up skirting the edge of Anti-Villain territory, and might even hit the Hero of Another Story zone-which, admittedly, does somewhat diminish the long-term villainy of the character archetype. In the ideal scenario, if and when this character flips to being a good guy, they don't really lose their brilliance or their principles-they just swap their goals to somewhat more heroic ones and become a terrifyingly effective threat to the bad guys on par with the threat they used to pose to the good guys.

In fact, it's pretty obvious the Magnificent Bastards aren't always villains, because in most well-written versions of his character, Batman is kind of a Magnificent Bastard. He's got all the key elements-intelligent, charismatic, fiercely principled and goal-oriented, while not allowing personal vulnerabilities or petty ideas to distract him from his crusade. Heroes and villains alike are intimidated and frustrated by his scheming and occasionally manipulative tendencies, and he's a living nightmare for the villains he matches wits with. He's a full-on type 2 charismaniac, prioritizing his principles over everything else-his no-killing policy is ironclad and he's clearly uncomfortable with the near-omnipotence of the Justice League, refusing to properly join and routinely calling the others out on getting a little too cozy with having a big space-cannon on their flying base. Heroic charismaniacs are comparatively rare, but they are loads of fun when they're done right-all the coolness factor of a standard charismaniac, plus you can actively root for them without feeling morally dubious.

But plenty of Magnificent Bastards stay villains right to the very end-and in those cases, it's not uncommon for them to have a classic third-act breakdown where their magnificence is tarnished somewhat as the heroes manage to genuinely get under their skin somehow. Some Magnificent Bastards are magnificent right down to their bones, and take defeat with dignity, but others are a little more insecure in their magnificence and might start to crack when one of their vulnerabilities is located. The third-act breakdown is an integral part of the villain's defeat, where the heroes take an emotional victory alongside a literal one. If a magnificent bastard finally cracks, we get to appreciate the magnitude of the events that cracked them, since in most proper cases, we don't really see them properly flustered before the grand finale-and if they don't have a third-act breakdown and instead take their defeat in stride, they reaffirm their magnificence by denying the audience and the heroes that catharsis factor. Their defeat is incomplete because their character is preserved-so this is fairly common with recurring bad guys who don't want to lose their punch on the first defeat.

A third-act breakdown isn't always quick, either. Some charismaniacs get thrown off their game by an unexpected development and begin a slow slide into the breakdown zone, gradually getting more and more tilted before losing it entirely. This is fairly common with classic Disney villains specifically, who almost always start out suave and charismatic, pulling the strings on the plot before something happens to surprise them-and once they're officially off their game, their defeat is only a matter of time. Magnificent Bastards, as a rule, are only as successful as they are confident. If they seem fine, it's because the heroes are playing right into their hands, no matter how well it looks like they might be doing. But if the villain looks actually shocked or angry or otherwise uncharacteristically emotional, that usually means we're outside the planning zone, and they have to start improvising. Some villains are actually pretty good at improvisation, but the ones with more ironclad plans tend to crack the minute they even get slightly outsmarted.

But that's actually part of the delicate balance of writing a Magnificent Bastard. We need to see them established and consistent before we start throwing in surprises like unexpected nobility or emotional instability. And if we throw those curveballs too often, that starts being what we expect from the character. If your charismaniac is constantly getting tilted and thrown off their game by the heroes, that really diminishes their magnificence. But if the heroes only manage that very infrequently, it reinforces the idea that this is an actual struggle. And on the flip side, if your charismaniac is constantly doing surprisingly heroic or noble things because of their personal code or whatever, they also slip out of the Magnificent Bastard zone because at that point they're basically just a secondary protagonist who occasionally does schemes on the side. It's all about balancing the magnificence with the bastard-ness; the audience needs to be sold on both.

And like any character archetype built on charisma and coolness factor, if the character doesn't sell the charisma, the whole concept falls flat. This is the biggest hurdle with a Magnificent Bastard-if they don't actually come across as magnificent, the audience instead sees the writer waving their favorite character around going "Ooooh look! Aren't they so COOL? Look at all the nice suits I put them in! See, they're monologuing in a creepy yet classy way! Ah, they're just so COOL!" and there's nothing LESS cool than someone desperately trying to convince you that they ARE cool.

Thank you so much for listening. If you have any requests, let me know in the comments, and I hope you enjoyed.