Offstage Villainy

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"Why the hell do my plans always work when the camera isn't rolling?" —Bowser Koopa, Super Mario Bros the Parody Series

It's natural for works to follow the Point of View of The Hero, considering that the story revolves around them. Of course, that means that anything that the hero doesn't see isn't portrayed directly. This includes the villain's actions that don't occur in front of the hero.

The Chessmaster may be moving pieces that the viewpoint character(s) don't even know about (yet), or the Evil Plan could have been in motion long before the hero shows up to fight against it. Either way, a lot of the villainous actions that play a role in the plot aren't visibly apparent, although their long term consequences might be. Usually The Reveal of it is handled through Expospeak, which raises the question of whether or not it's actually believable that these villainous acts happened.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. If handled well, it makes the Big Bad more credible, showing off the depth of the villain's effort and planning. A good villain is that much more appreciable as a threat, and the audience picks up on it.

This goes hand in hand with Villains Act, Heroes React quite often. May result in a Spanner in the Works for either side, depending on the outcome.

Compare and contrast Gory Discretion Shot, which may overlap with this. Contrast Designated Villain, where the "villain" doesn't actually do anything truly bad, either on-screen or off.

Examples of Offstage Villainy include:

Anime and Manga

• Mahou Sensei Negima has this in spades in-story, concerning Evangeline. She has a 600 year long history of evil and bloodshed resulting a 6 million dollar bounty and essentially acting as the boogeyman of the magic world (eat your peas, or Evangeline will come and eat you). Despite all of this, she only does a few villainous things on-screen: sucking blood from students and attacking Negi. Other than that, she regularly helps out the heroes, going so far as to train them and let them use her magical resort for vacation. It's even hinted that her evil reputation is an exaggeration, and that she acted the part so that people would leave her alone. She still constantly tries to claim she's evil, but everyone who actually knows her claims that she's not that bad.
  • The way she tells her backstory suggests that her reputation as a deadly murderer is because people kept hunting her and getting killed in self-defense. Being a vampire in medieval Europe wasn't exactly the best situation for living a peaceful life. Eva, for her part, thinks that these excuses are flimsy and anyone who thinks she's not evil due to this is an idiot.
• In One Piece, Trafalgar Law, aka The Surgeon of Death, gets hit with this trope. Thus far we have seen him act very calm, insightful, reserved, and healing Luffy. None of that screams villainy. It might be played with; between how he acts and the reason for the bounties on Luffy and Zoro, he might be similarly wanted for actions that are, at the very least, justifiable. In which case, the offscreen behavior that is villainous is only towards the corrupt World Government (or a misunderstanding). And now that he's a Warlord of the Sea, his darker side is being hinted at once again. How did he become one? By removing the hearts of 100 pirates and sending them to the world government.
  • Gold Roger also applies, in a sense. Every flashback featuring him always seems to present him positively. By contrast, pretty much every villainous act he's done is always presented via word of mouth of his victims.
• Any of the villains in Pokémon are a lot more effective when not sharing screen-time with the heroes.

Film

• Douglas Milroy explored this (and the Designated Hero) in his review of The Beast:

"In one fell swoop the movie has its would-be hero mocking and yelling at an essentially innocent villain. If a large number of truly despicable actions by Graves had been shown, perhaps we could accept our hero calling him names, or mocking his education. As it is, how many actual representations of villainy by Graves do we see or hear about: one. Raines and Marcus are discussing the position of harbor master, when Rains says "Schuyler Graves has expanded its scope. It's got a lot of people angry around here". And that, oh my Brothers, is it. Based upon that, we are to take him as a villain."

• Repo! The Genetic Opera has Luigi and Pavi, brothers stated to be a murderer and a rapist, respectively. While we see Luigi stab several people to death, all the girls we see with Pavi are quite willing. This could be because while violence is always fun, it's really hard to joke about rape.
  • It's arguable that we do at least see the results of the Offstage Villainy—it's hard to imagine Pavi's flesh masks came from willing donors. Plus the first time he meets Shilo, he's creepy to the point of Luigi actually trying to rescue her from him. Luigi!
• Frank Miller for most of High Noon. The hero Kane threw him in prison for unspecified charges before the start of the film, but Miller gets pardoned and decides to take revenge on Kane. Kane runs around town insisting that Miller is a menace to them all, but people refuse to stand with him. Some even sympathize with Miller and insist that Kane is trying to drag them into a personal feud. When Miller finally arrives, he sports some evil scars to prove his villainy, but he still doesn't do anything except go after Kane.
• An interesting example is Richard B. Riddick who, despite being the protaginist, is considered by all to be evil incarnate. While in Pitch Black he certainly starts off as sinister character, in all of his screen time across the number of games and movies he appears in, he never really does anything explicitly evil. Most of it can easily be recognised as a man with a strong survival instinct who just wants people to leave him the fuck alone.
• Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs, at least for the first half or so. We hear that he's a psycho, sure, we hear that he shot a bunch of civilians, but whenever we actually see him, he's calm and cool and affable. The only evidence we have for his villainy is the word of Mr.'s Pink and White. Then the ear scene happens.
• The library scene in Star Trek: Insurrection really goes out of its way to make the Son'a unlikeable, with records of conquering and enslaving worlds, drug dealing, and possessing illegal weapons. It makes the Federation look really stupid to have ever turned to them.

Literature

• The Goblin Reservation, a sci-fi novel by Clifford D. Simak, takes this to the greatest extreme ever seen, with a single remark about rumors of atrocities, combined with a hideous appearance, is enough to condemn the entire species of the Wheelers as Exclusively Evil.
• In Professor Moriarty's first appearance, we never actually read about anything he did; he just "has his hands" in villainy. This was remedied in the later The Valley of Fear. Granted, his villainy is still technically offscreen, but it's one hell of a punch in the gut all the same.
• One of the most common complaints about the The Inheritance Cycle is that for the longest time the reader was never actually shown Evil Overlord Galbatorix doing anything particularly evil to the people of Alagaesia other than raising taxes and fighting the Varden rebels, neither of which are inherently particularly heinous. Indeed, it's acknowledged by Eragon at one point that most of the people of the Empire get along perfectly well under his rule. Just the fact that he successfully overthrew the Dragon Riders seems to be enough justification for the war waged by the Varden, the elves, and the dwarves in the series. This is despite the fact that the Dragon Riders were stated to have been corrupt and fighting each other anyway, meaning that Galby's crime was...winning. Rather belatedly he was given some unquestionably villainous actions, such as in Brisingr (the third book) where it's stated that he enslaved the souls of the dragons he killed, and magically enslaves many of his soldiers. Though by this time a sizeable chunk of the reader base had started Rooting for the Empire.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, whilst Gregor "The Mountain that Rides" Clegane is one of the cruelest villains in the series, the reader only hears about the great majority of his deeds from other characters, rather than witnessing them directly (though there are often enough details included and enough reason to believe the various narrators to be reliable that it still gets the effect across, showing that this trope is not inherently flawed).
  • The same with Lord Roose Bolton and Ramsay Bolton, who like to flay the skin off their captives' fingers until the captives beg for the fingers to be chopped off due to the pain. Poor Theon Greyjoy, while not the nicest person, gets this treatment. For obvious reasons, this isn't directly shown to the reader.
• Very much in effect in the novel From Outer Space. The villain only actually appears in the last ten or so pages and, although he is indeed both a collosal Jerkass and a Dirty Coward, he doesn't come off as being anywhere near as evil as the Hunter claims him to be.
• A common trait of villains in Septimus Heap is that most of their evil deeds are never shown, just discussed or narrated.
• Sisterhood series by Fern Michaels: The author mishandles this trope a number of times. This results in stories where the villains are just not as terrible as they're claimed to be, causing their punishments to come off as Disproportionate Retribution, and causing the protagonists inflicting said punishments to look like the actual villains of the series instead!

Live Action TV

• This was a problem faced by the writers of Star Trek Deep Space Nine with the villain Gul Dukat in the first few seasons. He was, in essence, a space nazi who directly oversaw the slave labour camps of the Bajoran people for years, and was by all accounts not a good employer. By the time the series begins however the Bajorans are free, and Gul Dukat comes across as a witty, intelligent (but admittedly egotistical), three dimensional Anti-Villain, despite the characters (more or less correctly) insisting that he's Satan's bastard offspring.
  • He is, however, VERY quick to have people killed. He is also one of very few characters in any media to actually embrace his Heel Realization.
• A completely offstage example is Maris from Frasier, Niles Crane's abrasive, manipulative, controlling, hysterical, nigh-sociopathic Jerkass wife. None of the outlandishly horrible things she does are ever actually seen onscreen, as she was The Ghost, but they had a major impact on the series all the same. The writers averted vilifying Maris via Unreliable Narrator by making Niles genuinely in love with her and often oblivious to her faults, as well as making sure that when the characters described her actions, they described them factually and in detail rather than complaining about what a lousy person she was. In fact, the act of describing her actions out loud to the other characters was often what made Niles realize just how nasty some of the things she did really were.
  • As the series went on, Maris became less of an offstage villain and more of an offstage abomination; not only was she increasingly portrayed as a narcissistic sociopath, some of the physical descriptions of her make you wonder if she was even human. The characters don't always seem to be joking when they talk about her this way.
• On Heroes, Noah "HRG" Bennet spent 17 years personally participating in the kidnapping, experimentation and mind-wiping of people with special abilities. He also lied to his family the entire time (for their own protection, but still putting them in danger without their knowledge or consent). However, this mostly took place before the pilot episode. This, plus the fact that Bennet was frequently shown onscreen being a Papa Wolf to Claire, caused many fans to be unsympathetic when his family (especially Claire) reacted with revulsion and horror to the revelations about his not-so-distant past.

Newspaper Comics

• What little mischief Dennis the Menace US still gets up to anymore is almost entirely reduced to this. Most of the time we don't even get to learn what he did to land himself in the time-out chair.

Video Games

• Jabless Adventure pushes this to the point of parody. The final boss of the game is King Squid, who readily identifies himself as a villain and boasts that Jables is too late to stop his evil scheme. However, until the pre-boss-fight cutscene, there is literally no mention or foreshadowing of King Squid or his evil plan—until the boss fight, Jables doesn't even know the game has a villain.
• This happens a lot in video games, since the hero is usually the Player Character, we don't see a whole lot of the villain's actual villainy—though we will usually see the fallout of such—unless either the heroes are there to witness it, or the game opts to show a cutscene.

Web Comics

• Other than the fact that he created a game company despite already owning a game reviewing magazine, participating in a Scooby-Doo ripoff, and being unable to see Skull (which apparently only happens to the "extremely self-centered"), we are forever kept in the dark why the PvP crew, especially Cole, hates Max Powers. Especially considering practically EVERYONE in the magazine has done far worse things. Laid out quite nicely here.
  • Finally explained in a storyline where Cole reveals he hates Max out of pure jealousy of the fact that Max is a much better person than him.
  • And later on, Max can see Skull, though it's not clear why he couldn't before.
• Evil Diva is freaked out by sitting on a human. The Big Guy tells her she wouldn't think so if she knew what he did to get there.
• Shaenon K. Garrity loves this trope:
  • Helen Narbon regularly calls herself evil, but tends to come off as a Noble Demon. Only the supplemental materials make it clear that she's killed innocents For Science!.
  • Mel from the same comic starts as a case of this, then turns out to be genuinely dangerous when not under tight control. Then she's forced to work for Helen again, and it's like that entire incident never happened.
  • Unity of Skin Horse takes this trope about as far as it can reasonably go. She Eats Babies, steals body parts to replace her own, and got onto the team because there was a position available after she killed two previous members. In-panel, we have never seen her kill or seriously injure someone who wasn't already attacking the group.

Web Original

• Few of the Neopets villains are actually seen doing anything bad. Deliberately invoked for Jhudora, who is free to do as she pleases because she's never been caught at anything.
• For the first two years of The Questport Chronicles, the villains never appear until the final showdown, and the heroes learn of their misdeeds second-hand.
• Brutally and brilliantly Subverted in Eliezer Yudkowsky's The Sword of Good, in which the in-universe Designated Villain, the Lord of Darkness, turns out to be trying to gain Unlimited Power so that he can fix the broken world and save the countless innocents who are suffering and dieing under the existing "balance" between "good and evil". Said Lord of Darkness actually asks The Hero to touch him with the titular Sword of Good, which kills anyone with bad intentions, in the final moments before he ascends.

Western Animation

• Magneto, in the 1990s X-Men animated series, is consistently presented as the heroes' Arch Enemy, especially in the intro. However, it's only in his first few appearances (and the last episode) that he is actually doing evil and acting at odds with the X-Men. In every other appearance, he is just trying to find a peaceful place for mutants to live, and ends up working with the X-Men against a greater evil.
• Tuma, his Skrall legion, and the Bone Hunters in Bionicle: The Legend Reborn. Everyone makes them out to be deadly threats, but when they are on-screen, they are revealed to be a bunch of goofy Mooks and a dumb Dragon, and are easily defeated. The only bad thing they do is plundering a village and beating up a good guy, however we never see them do it, and only two villagers react with shock to the destruction of their home (even the Village Leader doesn't seem to care).
  • Keep in mind this only applies to Legend Reborn. In other media, the Bone Hunters raided trade caravans and attacked the city of Vulcanus; while Tuma was a full Evil Overlord, manipulating the Bone Hunters and protagonist tribes and having the Skrall subvert the impending Tournament Arc by razing the stadium instead.
• Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles has the Bugs successfully destroying the White House, the Eiffel Tower and several other targets in an All Your Base Are Belong to Us moment. We don't actually see this, however, as that would probably have been a bit traumatic for a kids' show.
  • Rather shockingly averted with the first appearance of a Brain Bug, though. The psychic "replay" we get shows quite clearly what it does to prisoners. The only thing we don't see is the man's skull actually being pierced; we see the proboscis rise and fall and watch the soldier's body twitching with his head just offscreen.