Basic Trope: A villain without believable motivation, goals and plans, defined solely by the threat they pose.
- Straight: Emperor Evulz is the Big Bad and an all-powerful Evil Overlord who wants to Take Over the World and/or destroy it, but he is never given a personality or concrete reason, and he never does anything particularly evil, or even much of anything.
- Exaggerated:
- Emperor Evulz does random villain things for no reason whatsoever.
- Emperor Evulz's entire screentime consist of him doing random crimes.
- Emperor Evulz spontaneously appears from thin air whenever things are going good for people for the sole purpose of wrenching their moment of triumph away from them for no reason whatsoever.
- Downplayed:
- Emperor Evulz is merely the second-in-command to the Dark God, who is a fully-developed character.
- Evulz has a personality and motive, but compared to the other villains is under-developed.
- Evulz was created by someone with proper motives and reasons to be the muscle behind their plan.
- Justified:
- Emperor Evulz is a practically mindless robot/force of nature/other, so it doesn't really have a personality.
- Emperor Evulz is an Empty Shell who's had personality stripped away a long time ago.
- Emperor Evulz is an Eldritch Abomination; everything about them is beyond our comprehension.
- Emperor Evulz is Made of Evil, so it's his nature to be Always Chaotic Evil even without reason.
- Emperor Evulz is an Almighty Idiot.
- Emperor Evulz found out the hard way that With Great Power Comes Great Insanity.
- Emperor Evulz was created by a being for no other purpose than to destroy and cause harm towards others.
- Emperor Evulz has a motivation, but Nothing Is Scarier, so almost nothing is revealed about him or his motivation, just that he’s a threat.
- The series has No Fourth Wall and Emperor Evulz was created as a deliberate In-Universe comment about how Villains Act, Heroes React but oftentimes it's the biggest victim of lazy writing.
- Evulz came out of nowhere and the heroes still know little to nothing about him, other than the (admittedly not that informative) evil he has committed.
- Starter Villain
- Inverted:
- Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain.
- Visionary Villain.
- Emperor Evulz has a very clearly-defined and complex personality, and a concrete motivation.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist
- Vanilla Protagonist
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds
- The heroes are the ones with no motivation behind stopping him.
- Good Is Boring
- Subverted:
- Emperor Evulz seems, at first, like a pointless force of destruction. Until somebody demands to know why he does the things he does. He has an answer he eagerly shares.
- Emperor Evulz is a Silent Antagonist, but piecing together the Jigsaw Puzzle Plot reveals Hidden Depths that gives his actions context.
- Evulz appears to have no motifs, but during Hiro's call out, be it a "The Villain Sucks" Song, "Reason You Suck" Speech, or Armor-Piercing Question/Response, he unwittingly triggers Evulz's Trauma Button, which creates some cracks in his facade.
- Double Subverted:
- That turns out to be just an excuse to do whatever he wants.
- Emperor Evulz was complicated. After being broken, he isn't anymore.
- Then he underwent Flanderization and became a generic evil emperor.
- Parodied:
- The characters point out how one-note and completely unremarkable he is.
- Emperor Evulz is the Big Bad, yet every other villain working for him has a fully developed personality and ambitions. The joke is from General Dusk's inability to have any relationship with his master.
- Emperor Evulz’s motivation is people calling him uncreative, generic, and forgettable. Everyone just knows him as the guy trying to take over the world.
- Zig Zagged: His complexity varies between episodes.
- Averted: He's actually a very complex villain.
- Enforced:
- The writers are lazy.
- The writers are portraying Evulz as a force of nature instead of an individual, but he ends up coming off as so minimal a character that they might as well have had a literal force of nature threatening the heroes.
- The writers are focusing on some other detail (such as The Hero Bob's reaction to his father dying) and decide to make the Monster of the Week as vanilla as possible so Evulz won't get in the way of the more plot-important, Character Development-creating drama.
- Evulz is a Filler Villain, and the writers decide to make him as vanilla as possible so he won't get in the way of the more plot-important arcs and mess up the continuity.
- Lampshaded: "Okay, why are you doing what you're doing, Emperor Evulz? Why do you want to destroy/Take Over the World? Seriously, you must have some motive!"
- Invoked: Emperor Evulz wants to be seen as an implacable force of nature because he feels that it demoralizes his opponents.
- Exploited: The heroes defeat Emperor Evulz by asking him what his motivation is. Upon realizing that he has nothing to gain by doing what he does and nothing to lose by not doing it, Evulz keels over on the spot.
- Defied:
- Emperor Evulz will go on Motive Rants when people assume he has no purpose.
- Emperor Evulz is a villain in a Show Within a Show, and his actor ad-libs several lines to give him more personality.
- Discussed: "The emperor is not like you or I; his evil is without purpose, without motivation, done more as if by some physical law than by conscious action on his part. But perhaps...it is better that way. It is better, then, than malice, born from a very understandable cause..."
- Conversed: "Why does he want to conquer/destroy the world? Because the hero upset him. Why does the hero upset him? Because he wanted to destroy the world! We have some circular writing here, folks!"
- Implied: When Evulz is asked what his goal is, he shrugs and continues his wave of conquering/destruction.
- Deconstructed:
- It turns out Emperor Evulz was created for the express purpose of conquering/destruction, and when called on it, will start to question why he does stuff like this.
- Emperor Evulz is ordained by fate to cause as much death and destruction as possible with him having no say in the matter. His lack of personality is a result of Emotion Suppression, come about as a coping mechanism to deal with the pain of what he is forced to do.
- Emperor Evulz becomes an In-Universe example of The Scrappy, with the protagonists and other antagonists losing care about Evulz's place in the grand scheme of things. The destruction Evulz leaves behind is cleaned up and dealt with, and quickly forgotten afterwards.
- Reconstructed:
- He simply decides that if someone has to be evil, it has to be him.
- He's reprogrammed only with that destructive state of mind, with no sentience to balance it out. Or because he's been lobotomized by The Dark God and/or driven completely mad, resulting in the Empty Shell we see today.
- Maybe the greater players of the grand game between Good and Evil don't care about Evulz because of how "generic" and "unimaginative" he is, but for the common people on the street who are about to fall victim to his mayhem, it's not really a reassuring thought.
- With little to understandable motivation, Evulz is less a villain and more a malevolent force of nature, or even an Eldritch Abomination. This actually makes him even more terrifying as a villain, as he cannot be reasoned or negotiated with.
- Played For Laughs: Evulz doesn't even understand what a motive IS, and is confounded by the hero asking him why he does what he does.
- Played For Drama: Emperor Evulz is an incredibly powerful psychopath who's decided to do as much harm as possible, not because of understandable motivations such as ambition, zeal, greed, pride, envy, lust, wrath, fear, love, hatred, bigotry, revenge, misery, jealousy, resentment, selfishness, anguish, misanthropy, good intentions, a troubled childhood, the desire for utopia/dystopia, fame, and other warped "ideals" or twisted philosophical views. It's not even because of basic sadism or some dark compulsion caused by the the nature of his existence. He's just an Empty Shell who kills people in creative and horrible ways. His lack of proper motivation is so inhuman that it makes him far more effective at being terrifying than any stated motive could've done.
- Played For Horror: The Lower-Deck Episode focuses on the poor people who are massacred without hesitation nor mercy by a man that has as much of reason to kill them all as a hurricane has to wreck their homes, a flash flood to drown them, an eclipse to darken their skies, a sinkhole to destroy their gardens or a crack in the sidewalk to make them trip. They are all going to die because Evulz wants to kill them all, because Evulz wants to kill them all, because Evulz wants to kill them all (it's redundant and circular, sure, but try to be the guy who has to comprehend this is absolutely all there is to Evulz, right before being killed).
- Plotted a Perfectly Good Waste: In a series where almost all antagonists are Anti Villains, or otherwise very human and comprehensible, Emperor Evulz is a one-shot Eldritch Abomination villain that refuses to play by the series' rules. Nobody knows what it is or why it does the things it does, and because it isn't allowed to overstay its welcome, that mystery makes it memorable and terrifying.
Back to Generic Doomsday Villain.
