Thread:Valkerone/@comment-4708882-20200214204441/@comment-14660436-20200214210441

The current definition of the category still heavily contradicts the original meaning of the term (which in turn doesn't exclusively originate from TV Tropes, mind you): villains in theater may or may not have the "heaviest" script due to how many lines they get, thus making them just as much of a prominent character as the hero. They are villains who do the most stuff in a work, aka the driving force, and thus, usually have the most screen time.

To compare with the original definition, Joe Chill is not a Heavy as he is not a persistent antagonist in Batman: he's simply a snowball that causes an avalanche. The Heavy's definition was never all about irreplaceable villains to a story: you've already got Big Bads (main antagonist of a franchise) and Bigger Bads (greater force that indirectly causes everything to go wrong in a story) for those kind of villains. As it stands now, the Heavy is just a weird mishmash between the two categories when it really shouldn't be.