"Cheap hack of a writer's guide to creating a morally ambigous antagonist:"
>Have a character be a smug self-centered asshole for 80% of the story
>Have him ally with the main baddie and commit some war crimes
>Have him turn on the main baddie after realising that the main baddie had killed their favorite dog (or is going to kill their favorite dog soon)
>Help the main characters for one or two scenes and then be killed by the main baddie
>The main characters in the epilogue are shown standing besides his grave and musing "He wasn't a bad person, after all. Such a tragedy!"
Post examples of this which had annoyed you the most. Shounen genre specifically is ripe with them, isn't it?
>>29965also the monk/teacher trope with this and their backstory being tied to the main character
i don't know what this trope is called but it's so common and lazy
>>29969Vegeta isnt really a morally ambiguous character, he is by any measure an evil person, just has a couple people he personally cares about.
>>29969It's still more work to redeem an evil character through efforts rather than kill him off to do it instantly, the worst part of stories is having the payoff immediately after the setup with nothing in between
>>29969it was fine then because dragon ball isn't that serious. it also directly influenced the entertaining moral insanity of hunterxhunter. it's really when shonen writers started being for better or for worse the dickenses of our age that shit started going downhill