Thread:LucidPigeons/@comment-961279-20160318155339

I stopped by to do some more cleanup of the so-called "plots" and "misinformation campaigns" that say one character is more of an antagonist/villain than another and came across a similar phrase: "Character A was the main antagonist until they were outranked by the true main antagonist".

That seems to be just a different way of saying the same thing. Instead of saying there is a "plot to" replace one character, you say they were "outranked by" another character. The question becomes, who made that decision that one character is a main antagonist and not another? The fans? Some official source involved in the movie or story? Someone else?

But beyond that, saying that someone was a main character until outranked by another one seems to go against what you laid out in your Antagonistic Scale blog: someone doesn't stop being one level of antagonist or villain simply because a climax villain shows up at the end.

I have removed several of the "outranked" statements when it was apparent it was just a different way of saying it was a "plot" or "misinformation campaign", but there are quite a few I left because I wanted clarification that a climax villain showing up isn't reason enough to demote the main antagonist/villain. But it may be better to remove such statements altogether due to what I found on the page for the Stray Dogs. As shown in the edit history, I've removed something that was clearly ridiculous. Seriously? Not only do people want to define characters down to a 4th- or 5th-level status, but they want to say that there are "true 4th-level characters" that replaced other 4th-level characters in some obscure and undefined ranking system? That was on that page for almost a year.

It's hard enough to get people to agree where a character is on the antagonistic scale, so unless you want to formalize and define the process of how one character could outrank another, I think the only use for that word should be in the military sense: a general outranks a corporal.

Going along with that, one other phrase I've seen used in the past is that one character "fought to replace" another character as a particular antagonist level. Unless it's something like where Jack Nicholson's Joker guns down Carl Grissom in the 1989 Batman film to take over Grissom's gang, saying there was a fight to be some kind of antagonist is right up there with the unsupported claims that there are "claims" and "plots" and "misinformation campaigns" to make one character more of an antagonist than another.

Be on the lookout for that to help cut down on some of the ridiculousness and in-fighting regarding the antagonistic scale. 