Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1705775-20170901162345/@comment-28278646-20171019195327

Love Robin wrote:

Gojira92 wrote: This particular topic has probably been settled by now, but I figured I'd add my two cents. I sincerely hope Tom and Jerry remain on this site, as both have taken things beyond simple antagonism and resorted to outright sadistic methods of fighting each other over the years. Now, this is inconsistent, but that's why you have the "On & Off" category, right? Do you mean someone other than Tom the Cat and Jerry the Mouse? No, I mean them. For the sake of rambling, let's differentiate antagonism from villainy.

Antagonism is when there is a clash; villainy is where one of the clashers (or sometimes more) goes above and beyond simple antagonism. Let's say two starving animals are fighting over the same food. That in and of itself is antagonism. However, if one wins, eats the food while forcing the defeated party to watch, laughs in his/her face, cripples him/her so he/she will be too weak to get another source of food later just for fun, and walks off laughing, THAT is villainy.

Tom and Jerry veer into the "villain" territory whenever they go out of their way to hurt one another for fun. "Year of the Mouse" was Jerry entering full-blown villain territory: he tricked Tom into thinking he was attempting suicide in his sleep solely for his own entertainment. Tom is unquestionably villainous in the fishing episode: he uses Jerry as live bait even though he has plenty of lures--in an area that explicitly prohibits fishing.