Basic Trope: A villain thinks they're cultured, but they're not.
- Straight: Emperor Evulz misunderstands philosophy, falls asleep at the opera, and can't distinguish between high and low-quality wine.
- Exaggerated: Emperor Evulz dresses in ostentatious Victorian robes and speaks in Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe to seem more cultured, but it doesn't work at all.
- Downplayed: Emperor Evulz is decently cultured, but despite his pretensions, he's not about to get invited to the Ritz.
- Justified:
- Evulz is Nouveau Riche and hasn't fully assimilated.
- Alternatively, Evulz is a member of The Upper Crass.
- Inverted:
- Evulz is genuinely Wicked Cultured, but is wracked with Imposter Syndrome.
- Hiro has unearned pretensions of being a Cultured Badass.
- Subverted: Evulz is mocked by the rest of high society for not being cultured, but then he murders them all while correctly quoting Nietzsche.
- Double Subverted: With their dying breath, one of the society people mocks Evulz's tacky outfit.
- Parodied: Evulz is a Upper-Class Twit, and supervillainy is just his hobby.
- Zig-Zagged: Evulz's pretensions sometimes seem earned and sometimes not.
- Averted:
- Evulz is truly Wicked Cultured.
- Evulz has no pretensions of being cultured.
- Despite his name, Evulz isn't a villain; whether he's faking his appreciation of higher art or not is an exercise for the reader.
- Enforced: A popular villain in a rival franchise is Wicked Cultured and Evulz is created to be a spiteful parody.
- Lampshaded: "Well, we can't all be Hannibal Lecter, I guess."
- Invoked: People tell Evulz that good villains are cultured, but they don't give him good enough advice about how to do this.
- Exploited: Hiro gets Evulz to agree to let him go by defeating him in a philosophical debate.
- Defied: Evulz manages to become genuinely cultured to avoid being mocked.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Evulz mainly seems to be Wicked Cultured, but he slips up a couple of times, suggesting it might not be genuine.
- Played for Laughs: Evulz is an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain who is very sad that no one will listen to his Breaking Speech about the pointlessness of life.
- Played for Drama: Evulz is an intellectual poseur who turned to supervillainy because nobody took him seriously as an intellectual or tried to mentor him.
- Played for Horror: Just because Evulz is a pretentious twit does not mean he'll let others live if they point this out. Quite the contrary: he makes Hiro watch him torture and eviscerate Alice and Bob, two heroes whom he captured and who mocked him for his misunderstandings of philosophy, literature, and science.
To quote Friedrich Nietzsche, you should head back to Wicked Pretentious now.
