The rival.
Especially the douchebag Machiavellian type rivals that the main character ends up friends or teaming up with after the main character 'proves their worth' to them by being stronger. No character growth outside of now they work with the protagonist.
I really want this trope to be subverted one day, like the douchey rival shows up and everyone is just like "Wow what a dickhead" and just relentlessly bullies him until he goes away.
Counterpoint: I will never get tired of watching the protagonist and their rival team up to defeat the greater villain
Goku and Frieza fighting together for just one episode of the last fight in Dragon Ball Super was :chefs-kiss:
Also, for the old heads out there, Anubis teaming up with Ryo in Samurai Troopers/Ronin Warriors was so good.
The anti-hero becoming a reluctant ally is my favorite trope.
I agree it was super wholesome when Goku teamed up with Space Hitler
I mean you have a superpowered derelict father/husband and ubermensch with a god complex teaming up with an arch-capitalist corporation to galavant across time and space to do a colonialism and steal artifacts, but did you know he talks like a farmer, hee-yuck.
:joker-troll:
Yeah I was more thinking the Namekian Dragon Balls. I'm also a big Dragon Ball fan. I'm just taking the piss out of it.
Freiza does genocides purely for profit as a galactic landlord/ real estate guy.
You joke, but the creator went on record to say that Frieza was inspired by real estate investors because they are "the worst types of people."
Isn't this meant to teach a lesson to kids? Like, "the people who bitterly resent you can change and they have reasons (however misguided) for their actions."
I don't watch a ton of anime, and watch very little shonen (where I'm guessing this trope is most popular), which is probably why I have a different reaction.
I think an example of the inverse (subversion?) of this trope is Guts and Griffith's relationship in Berserk.
Isn’t this meant to teach a lesson to kids? Like, “the people who bitterly resent you can change and they have reasons (however misguided) for their actions."
⭕ピンポン ! This is it.
I think an example of the inverse (subversion?) of this trope is Guts and Griffith’s relationship in Berserk.
Yeah, but Griffith gets his comeuppance for his pride by getting his life ruined due to his own actions while Guts continues to grow before coming back to rescue him. I haven't finished the Golden Age arc yet, but I'm sure they must learn to be best friends and equals as Guts helps Griffith come to terms with his new life as a shell of his former self, right? I can't wait to see what wacky hijinks they get up to next!
I can't comment without major spoilers. When you finish the golden age arc you'll see what I mean.
I've read all of Berserk, I'm just seeing how many "oofs" I could collect from people reading that.
No character growth outside of now they work with the protagonist.
Unironically one of the best rivals is also one of the originals: Gary Motherfucking Oak. Starts off as an asshole rich kid, but after getting life experience he gets over himself. More of a character arc than Ash had in twenty five years lmao.
lol goddammit i just finished saying this. should have checked the thread fully
Gary gets a pass because he has legit growth and stops being a douche
i think that's a genuine cultural misalignment, rivalry in like kids sports or whatever isn't designed to be hateful like they are in the US and i assume most of the commonwealth has similar brainworms.
you're supposed to push eachother to do better, not throw eggs or drop a toilet off at the highschool across town.
Yeah but so often the rival in these stories is an outright horrible person.
Like Vegeta for example, he was an outright fascist. He never stopped being an outright fash.
Like he would straight up abuse his kid 'to make him stronger'.
My whole generation grew up thinking "wow, he's so cool!"
Like he would straight up abuse his kid ‘to make him stronger’.
Saiyan's advocate: tbf, average saiyan children can tank bullets to the face, AND getting your ass whooped does actually make you stronger in this setting. Those two things considered, you have to understand that a warrior race's approach to raising children is going to be pretty freaky.
He's definitely done a few genocides though so he should probably be executed for that
I'm gen Z. I swear the majority of my generation saw Dio and thought he was cool as shit, and thus replicated his personality. Hence why American politics is nothing but chanbrains running the show, LARPing as various anime villains.
not defending being the seat of power in a fascist warrior society, but uh, he was raised in a tank without parenting on a fascist warrior planet, did you expect him to be a good dad?
No, but I also don't expect him to be welcomed by the heroes with open arms and be treated with kid gloves for the rest of the series.
it's been a minute but i don't think vegeta really fits the rivals thing in the first arc at least, he's just straight up enemy until... i forget how they get from that first fight into the android saga. i know they kinda let him off the hook later but that could just be liberalism.
i always thought he kinda sucked, i think at my school we liked piccolo and gotenks.
vegeta was forced to team up with goku and the bois to fight frieza on namek and after he died and was wished back along with all the nemekians, then he just kind of moves in with bulma I think??
You know what I hate? When the rival is portrayed as being evil because they spend more time practicing and training than the hero. Apparently the only moral way to be good at something is dumb luck and innate talent.
That's not such a common use of the trope, though? Usually it's the natural genius born to a rich and powerful family who's the rival, and the MC is the underdog.
I'm sure it exists, just don't know if it's common or representative of the trope. Of course, I've not watched anime in a decade so...
Decade old anime knowledge vs two decade old anime knowledge trying to guess what the current state of anime is.
Go team!
The rival in Hikaru no Go is definitely not portrayed as being evil. In fact the entire reason that he becomes the rival is that Hikaru makes a careless remark about being a Go champion (because at this point he's never worked hard to win), and the other character rightfully admonishes him for underestimating how much work it takes to be a top level pro. In the end, Hikaru's character arc is completed when he falls in love with the game and wants to work hard to become good at it himself, and Sai's character arc is accepting that it's finally time to move on and let his student play, rather than selfishly wanting to keep playing himself.
Come to think of it, the only people in HNG who get portrayed as evil are the cheaters and the assholes, but even then the story makes it clear that they had to work hard to get a ton of game knowledge to be competitive.
Yeah but without this trope we wouldn't have Char Aznable and his cool sunglasses
Char gets a pass for being invented in the 70s or whatever
I didn't like my hero academia either. I didn't like that the bully was given character growth or that Midoriya was so reverent to them.
Conversely, I think Naruto handled Sasuke well. Until Shippuden.
Sasuke
I liked his edginess in Shippuden, but I hated how unbelievably Gary Stu he was post-Itachi. I was begging for him to get knocked down a peg with actual consequences, but they kept bailing his ass out with other characters, but didn't give him an ounce of humility.
I didn’t like that the bully was given character growth or that Midoriya was so reverent to them.
Bakugo still seems pretty heartless to me.
It used to be that the rival character was just... some other dude, whose personality clashed with the MC (if the MC was hot-blooded, the rival was cool/calculating and vice versa) and basically be a source of drama/narrative tension, with each characters narrative arcs being to gradually realize that they were basically on the same page, and to overcome their differences to work together and beat the bad guys. But while the generic shonen MC's character has been relatively static action cool guy (the biggest shift is that shonen MC's nowadays are REALLY REALLY REALLY empathetic and emotionally open/in-touch), Rival character's just have gotten more and more extreme in order to be memorable... so you get ridiculousness like Accelerator from Index and stuff like that.
Although now that I think about it I can't think of any recent shonen outside of My Hero Academia that even has a rival character anymore. It's all usually Trio's (hot-head/cool guy/girl) nowadays.
Dio gets a pass because he's treated as an irredeemable villain which exactly how I wish this type of character was treated more often
Jonathan doesn't treat Dio as an irredeemable villian. Literally everyone else (including Dio) sees him as an irredeemable villian which is hilarious as Dio basically does everything he could possibly do to make him being victim of this trope be comically silly only to succeed not because Jonathan gave up on him but because he fucking died. Leaving him to cope with absorbing his friend's body and starting a cult in Egypt. Actually thats kinda the reverse of this trope isn't it? Yeah we need more Dios.
It is kinda subverted in Death Note.
Two Machiavellian rivals team up together and on the surface they’re chasing another enemy, but in reality they both know that it’s all a farce and they’re both the real enemy. Light infiltrates an investigation on him with fake friendship but real ego :keikaku:
When they find out who Light was and what he did, one of his own ‘friends’ immediately killed him
Lights death is so fucking good.
Here he is, self-proclaimed god, dying alone in an ally like a rat, crying shidding and farding.
Also, bless Matsuda.
How about Gary Oaks? Huge douchebags, but ultimately harmless, and the respect they gain for the main character is more a slow growth rather than one defeat.
i feel like gary is a great example of this trope working relatively well bc he's such a profound little shit at first and then he eventually matures and stops being a dickhead
you know, like teens do sometimes.
He follows the arc of Blue, in which he just grows up and gets a fucking job. Meanwhile Red is like a hermit I dunno.
"A volcano erupts, and just like that, a whole town disappears. We can go on winning and losing in Pokémon, but if nature so much as twitches, we can be overwhelmed in a second…" -Blue in Gold/Silver/Crystal
That's a hell of a character arc from "Smell ya later!" ~jaunty music~
Especially the douchebag Machiavellian type rivals that the main character ends up friends or teaming up with after the main character ‘proves their worth’ to them by being stronger. No character growth outside of now they work with the protagonist.
A Rival is someone who wants to achieve the same goal as the mc, but competes with the mc for that goal. Which is the opposite of an antagonist which is someone who works against the mc.
I think this trope is used a lot because it teaches viewers (mostly children and teenagers) that they can work out their differences and work together to achieve a goal.
This trope is not unique to Japan, there are some American shows with this btw.
I think it's important to also teach kids that there are some people you shouldn't work together with. That the lesser of two evils is still evil.
I feel like that reversal happens in Fate/Stay Night.
The bully is a creep and everyone kind of blows him off and he ends up teaming up with the villain.
Noooooo don't you'll regret it, F/SN is full of tropes that have aged horribly.
Edit: If you really have to, Unlimited Blade Works (2014) is the least problematic, although personally I'd say Fate/Zero is more interesting... if still problematic.
not anime but it's japanese media: feel like pokemon rivals are generally good, and they run the gamut from dickish (Silver) to warm and friendly (Hau) to clearly having romantic feelings for the protagonist (Brendan/May). I guess they never cross the line into actual bullying or evil (and the majority are sincerely friendly anyway) and that's why they're fine
unlike many fans I actually like the friendly rivalsYeah, fuck Pokemon fans, I think the rivals in Pokemon are great too.
Have you played Scarlet/Violet? One of the rivals stories in that will legit make you cri
With how good emulators are these days I doubt it will take them long.
Thank god for pirates.
yeah, pirates are fantastic. I really didn't expect to be able to reliable emulate all the way up to swsh tbh, and I can't wait to try scarlet/violet for the story and characters.
And on the topic of the fanbase I feel like this old meme would unironically be their ideal rival character
this meme
The funny thing is that Gladion was basically this
Nah, I don't think Gladion reaches that level of edge, and neither is he actually hostile. He's also got a very good reason for acting the way he does as well.
Pretty sure you're just talking about like 12 shonen manga/anime that do this.
Jrpgs do it too.
[spoilers for Persona 5] Persona 5 had Goro Akechi. Dude is a murderous psychopath that almost succeeds in killing the main character but at the end everyone gives him a 'but you can change! Come be our friend!' speech. And then in Royal, he comes back as a comrade for the final dungeon.
