There are anime villains who blow you away with their nuanced backstories and reasonable if regrettable choices – and then there are anime villains with stupid motivations.
Sometimes, this seems to be intentional on the creators’ part – there’s no way that Commander Red of Dragon Ball’s desire to use the Dragon Balls to increase his height wasn’t meant to be absurd. At other times, though, it seems like it’s merely the result of bad writing. Akihiko Kayaba of Sword Art Online had a motivation that left many fans frustrated rather than enlightened.
1. Mizuki Wishes He Had Iruka’s Problems In ‘Naruto’
Naruto has a lot of villains, and while some villains have motives that are fully sympathetic, others are kind of ridiculous. While the fandom doesn’t always agree on which is which, most people can agree that Mizuki’s motives were flat out ridiculous – that is, if they can be bothered to remember that he exists.
Mizuki wanted power, which is something everyone wants and isn’t particularly noteworthy. Trusting Orochimaru with the means of getting it was dumb as hell, but that’s more method than motivation. Rather than looking at his power grab attempts, let’s turn our attention to his motivation for being the world’s worst friend.
Mizuki and Iruka Umino were classmates, and eventually became coworkers. Mizuki loathed Iruka with every fiber of his being. Why? Because after Iruka lost his parents in the Kyuubi attacks, Mizuki was furious that Iruka was getting sympathy from their classmates. Even though nothing terrible had happened to Mizuki, he wanted that attention for himself! To rectify the situation, he buddied up to Iruka and set about surreptiously trying to make his life miserable through everything from subtle negging to actively sabotaging his career.
2. Broly Can’t Stand Crying Babies In ‘The Broly Triple Threat Saga’
There are actually two different versions of Broly, and the one that’s actually considered canon doesn’t possess such a ridiculous motivation. But just the Broly Triple Threat saga is no longer official Dragon Ball canon doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist out there in the anime-verse – it just means that the current Broly can’t be held responsible for the first one’s idiocy.
Broly absolutely despises Goku. Why? Because when both of them were babies, he was enraged by Goku’s constant crying. Nobody loves listening to a crying baby, but the idea that another baby would not only remember this but hold onto resentment until they were both adults strains plausibility. Apparently this happened because Broly unconsciously associated the terrible things that happened in his childhood with Goku’s wailing – which is fine logic for a little kid, but by adulthood, he really ought to have figured out that blaming Goku made no sense.
3. Majhal Would Rather Take Lives Than Accept His Girlfriend’s Wrinkles In ‘Fullmetal Alchemist’
Leave it to filler villains to have some of the most absurd motivations out there. According to Mahjal, if a woman no longer sparkles with youthful beauty, she may as well not even be alive. Despite what he implies, his former girlfriend Karin hasn’t passed away – she just got older. Mahjal is so obsessed with her former appearance that he not only can’t appreciate her mature beauty, he also starts binding young women’s souls to dolls that look like Karin used to. So not only is he a misogynist, but he’s also taking innocent lives. Good job, Mahjal, you truly are an idiot.
4. Maximillion Pegasus Just Wants A Hologram In ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!’
A lot of people think that the reason Maximillion Pegasus kidnapped Yugi’s grandfather and Kaiba’s little brother is that he was trying to acquire the technology necesssary to bring his late girlfriend Cecilia back to life. This might have been reasonable, but it’s actually not true – it was a change made by the 4Kids dub. In the original series, all he was trying to do was create a hologram of Cecilia.
Not only is this not worth hurting anybody over, but Pegasus could have easily gotten the hologram made by simply asking Kaiba, one of his buisness partners, for early access to the technology. If Kaiba refused to do it for free, he could have paid him. But instead he just resorted to kidnapping for pretty much no reason, destroying any potential goodwill between himself and the person who could have helped him achieve his goal.
5. Daphne Takes Her Dragon Obsession Too Far In ‘Fairy Tail’
When Daphne was a little girl, she saw a dragon. None of the adults who she relayed this experience to believed her, which was understandably upsetting. What wasn’t understandable was what happened next. Daphne became so dragon-obsessed that she devoted her life to building artificial dragons. Had she not also forced a ton of other people into participating and put their lives at risk in the process, this would have been eccentric but harmless – but as it is, she’s pretty much ruining everyone else’s lives. In fact, her town finds her so annoying that they literally try to escape her by using an invisibility spell. Daphe is incensed by this, so she forces them to stay invisible as punishment. What’s more, she forces her creations to destroy each other in combat, because why not?
6. Commander Red Has A Napoleon Complex In ‘Dragon Ball’
ost of the characters in Dragon Ball who want to get their hands on the Dragon Balls want to use them for something meaningful, like wishing back a dead loved one. This isn’t true of Commander Red, who wants to be “as tall as a mountain.” This vain and silly goal wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t sabotage the plans he told them to carry out, and refuse to listen to their feedback, and even randomly take their lives for no reason. He’s a terrible leader who doesn’t care about anyone except his own vanity.
7. Ren Sohma Is Jealous Of A Baby In ‘Fruits Basket’
If you’re not up to date with the Fruits Basket manga, keep scrolling – this whole thing is full of spoilers.
Ren Sohma is Akito’s mother, and she’s the driving force behind her daughter’s horrifically abusive treatment of the rest of the Sohma family. When Akito was born, Ren was horrified by the idea of having to share the affection of Akira, her husband and Akito’s father. Not only was Akito a literal god due to the family’s strange curse, she was also a girl – which meant that she would be the ‘other woman’ in Akira’s life. Ren responded to this by not only raising Akito as a boy but also by filling her head with lies about how much everyone hated her and how terrible and dangerous the world around her was. This led to her becoming codependent with and violent towards the other members of the family.
Ren certainly had her own psychological issues that were informing her terrible parenting, but at a base level, she was motivated by feelings of envy toward her own child.
8. Aizawa Made Everything Worse In ‘Sukisho’
Aizawa is a mad scientist whose goal is to understand and cure Disassociative Identity Disorder, a condition that his friend Shinichiro suffers from. This sounds like a pretty good motivation until you get to his methods, which are absolute nonsense. He kidnaps Shinichiro and has sex with him, using DNA he pilfers in the process to create a test tube baby – then later sexually assaults Shinichiro’s boyfriend Nanami and does the same thing. He also kidnaps Sora and Sunao, torturing them until they develop DID from the trauma. While wanting to help his friend is laudable, none of what he did comes anywhere near accomplishing that goal – rather, all it does is risk worsening Shinichiro’s mental illness and inflicting it on others.
Most of this backstory doesn’t make it into the anime adaptation of Sukisyo, so if you’re anime-only his motivations are even more ridiculous, as they pretty much don’t exist.
9. Takaaki Kakinuma Torments Shinichi Gotou For Appreciating His Singing In ‘Oldboy’
Most people have something from their past that stays upsetting for years on end. But most people are probably not going to track down the personal they hold responsible decades later, kidnap them, keep them in solitary confinement, and psychologically torment them for ten years.
Takaaki Kakinuma is not most people. As a child, Shinichi Goto was moved to tears by Takaaki’s singing. This made Takaaki feel like Goto had seen into his emotional core, which forced him to confront himself in a way that made him deeply uncomfortable. Instead of telling his mother or writing about it in a journal or something, he grows up and totally destroys Goto’s life because he appreciated his singing.