{"id":638,"date":"2006-09-19T07:05:48","date_gmt":"2006-09-19T12:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=638"},"modified":"2006-09-20T06:26:06","modified_gmt":"2006-09-20T11:26:06","slug":"full-metal-panic-gauron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=638","title":{"rendered":"Full Metal Panic: Gauron"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steven<\/a> was talking about anime villians yesterday and he singled out Gauron from Full Metal Panic as a good example of a terrible bad guy:<\/p>\n

Gauron […] is close to the worst villain ever IMHO. He’s a cartoon, in the worst meaning of that term. He’s the distillation of unfeeling brutality, but there’s no obvious reason why he became what he is. He’s an icon, a contrivance, a caricature.<\/div>\n

Full Metal Panic: Gauron<\/td><\/tr>
Gauron has two facial expressions: Evil Sneer, and Evil Sneer 2. I like the spoilers on his eyebrows.<\/td><\/tr><\/table>Which is spot-on. There is nothing to this guy. I complained about him as well when I finished the series<\/a>. One thing about Gauron is that he could<\/em> have been a great villian, and they wouldn’t have needed to re-write the series. The overall plot could have remained, all they needed to do was replace his boilerplate bad-guy talk with something interesting. We spent enough time watching him sneer and taunt that he could have told us his life story if he had one.<\/p>\n

At the end we finally learn his “big secret”, which is that he isn’t working for the bad guys, or for a government, or for himself: He’s just trying to commit suicide. He wants to die in a glorious conflagration of twisted metal and burning fuel, and he wants to take as many people with him as he can. I actually think that’s a good hook for a character. That was a good place to start<\/em>, not end! He was all premise and stubble. <\/p>\n

Full Metal Panic: Gauron’s Mech<\/td><\/tr>
Some days Gauron’s mech just can’t do a thing with it’s hair, and he’s forced to pull it back ino a polytail. One of these days he’s been meaning to get a perm. If he could just get the budget increase he wants, he could go through with his plan to have his mech fully decked out with a fearsome beehive hairdo!<\/td><\/tr><\/table>A writer who knew what he was doing and who cared about his work would have taken that idea and built a character on top of it. What made him want to die? The fact that he wanted to die suggests that at some point in the past he had something to live for, something he cared about. What was it and how did he lose it? What made him want to go out with a bang like this instead of just jumping off a cliff? Why did he choose Sousuke as his rival? What was he doing before he began his suicide quest? How did he feel about being defeated repeatedly yet miraculously surviving? Did he see the humor in it, or was he just frustrated? The writer wouldn’t need to answer all of these in the show, but he should at least<\/em> have the answers in mind when writing. It was clear that were no answers. Gauron had no history, no backstory, no motivation. <\/p>\n

Like the series itself, Gauron was a great idea that was never really developed or explored. <\/p>\n

UPDATE: Lots of great comments below, and a great post on the villian from Xenogears at Criminally Weird<\/a>. I didn’t play console games between 1985 and 2002. Since this game fits into that very wide gap, I missed it. I gather that it is one of those games people talk about when they reflect on the greatness of Final Fantasy VII and start looking for something to fill that particular void.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steven was talking about anime villians yesterday and he singled out Gauron from Full Metal Panic as a good example of a terrible bad guy: Gauron […] is close to the worst villain ever IMHO. He’s a cartoon, in the worst meaning of that term. He’s the distillation of unfeeling brutality, but there’s no obvious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}