Talk:Claude Frollo/@comment-24708279-20140711214544/@comment-1672596-20150131132248

"To be honest, I think having him thinking he was acting out for the greater good made him a more complex and believable character. If he was a devil worshipper, he'd come off as a bland, one-dimensional character who was basically evil for evil's sake. Life just isn't that black and white."

Except there actually ARE people in real life who truly are like that (one dimensional, as you put it), and in fact making him one-dimensional, if done right, actually MAKES him scarily realistic. There's the Marquis de Sade, who pretty much is a card-carrying villain in every way and certainly one-dimensional. I could give a full description of the depraved things he's done, but I think I'll just let him do the talking on how he's a card-carrying villain and sum up his villainy: "Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change." (http://thinkexist.com/quotation/imperious-choleric-irascible-extreme_in/346903.html) And had this not actually been a real life person who said this, you probably WOULD have thought he was a cartoonish supervillain from that quote. Besides, need I really remind you of Red Skull? That guy was intended by the Captain America writers to be a cartoonish supervillain and a caricature of the Nazis, yet it turned out, not only was the stuff Red Skull did eerily similar to some stuff actual Nazi officials did (in particular, his espionage exploits had parallels with both SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich and SS-Brigadeführer Walther Schellenberg, and his sadism and insanity, heck, even his physical appearance is eerily reflected with SS-Oberführer Oskar Dirlewanger), but it can even be argued that what Red Skull did wasn't even the tip of the iceberg of what the Nazis did. He's actually one of the most popular and well received villains as well, basically Marvel's equivalent of the Joker.

Besides, who says a villain needs to have moral complexity to be believable or three-dimensional? Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars made very clear from his words and actions that he was pure evil, made no secret about his being a Dark Side worshipper (well, to his allies, at least. To his enemies, he basically posed as a good guy), was pretty much a card-carrying villain overall, yet even TVTropes noted that despite all of that, he was so well-done that he was considered three-dimensional despite that and, while not quite reaching Darth Vader's popularity and iconic status, he was a very popular villain nonetheless (in fact, aside from Darth Maul and Obi Wan, he was actually one of the few characters who WASN'T received unfavorably by the audience in the Prequel Trilogy). And there's also the Joker. He makes absolutely no secret about his villainy and insanity, yet he is considered one of the more popular and believable villains despite that. Heck, Dr. Weil from Mega Man Zero is actually a pure villain, made no secret about his being a villain or evil (heck, before fighting Zero, he even explicitly referred to himself as the devil), yet not only is he considered one of the most evil villains, he was also played very seriously and was even one of the scariest villains. In fact, making a villain morally complex actually has the risk of actually ruining a villain's role (take Maleficent in the recent film, for example. There are complaints that Maleficent was basically ruined with that film).