The perfect antagonist for The Final Season?
Throughout the series of Telltale's The Walking Dead we have seen a variety of colorfully deranged baddies that have hunted down and stood in the way of our beloved survivors. Cannibals, social darwinists and bitchy old ladies are just some examples of the kinds of villains that we have encountered in these games. Naturally there's no doubt that we will see new (or maybe even familiar) survivors that have been pitted against Clementine in the final installment of her journey.
So as the title suggests, I want to hear your opinion. What kind of antagonist would you like to see featured in The Final Season? What are their characteristics? Their motives? History? Reasons for being hostile towards Clementine?
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I would love to see a Negan-like villain in the final season. Basically someone who is dangerous but has morals as well along with some comedy added to his character.
I just hope the villain isn't Joan or Clint again, depending on who goes missing in your game. It'll be such a let down not to mention Joan's character is trash.
Personally, I'd go with The Whisperers as my 2nd go to villains.
Probably someone who's an overall bigger threat to the world. That can use walkers to wipe out large groups of people and is a pioneer of an unstoppable evil type. Someone you know if succeeds will bring more death and destruction to the world as a whole
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TTG TWD isn't really known for its villains, one of its high points is its portrayal of consequences and the emotions that brings with it. I'd like to see a Man v Himself type of conflict here, an example is where Clem could be a huge asshole and steals AJ from a family or a community of some sorts and it either pisses of the group that she is with or that family/community which ended up saving her but still has beef with Clem which ended up screwing her sooner or later. Seeing as this as the last season, making it a more personal story could go really well with the players.
How the hell Clem will have a chance against this kind of villain.
plot armor
An amazing idea.
Choices should be the antagonist.
Someone that is not terribly written like Joan and has more screentime than Carver.
Maybe some kind of distorted mirror reflection of Lee Everett would be a neat way of bringing the series "full circle." Even better: Dave Fennoy could provide the voice. He's already proved with Bluebeard that he can do frightening, charismatic villains like nobody's business.
In my opinion Telltale's TWD has had some of the best villains/antagonists in video games.
The stranger was great because he represented consequence of action. He wasn't evil but his was Lee's enemy as a result of choices each of them made.
The saint John's dairy cannibals were tragic villains. They sold their morals in exchange for their survival and lost everything because of it. Note the biblical undertones of it.
Larry was a brilliant antagonist because despite the fact that we hated his guts (or at least most of us did) you couldn't just kill him. This would go against what Lee stood for, we just had to deal with him.
Walkers represent an unstoppable force that will always be present and a threat, although they should be made to be a little more dangerous. I understand that the theme of TWD is that man vs man conflict is more important than man vs nature (walkers).
Carver was a well made villain because he represented the "dark side". He is what any survivor could and would become if they completely rejected morals. There was a duality between him and Clem because Clem in season 2 is very much like Carver: logical and resourceful, however the difference is that Carver operated solely on what was logical and Clem focused more on what was morally right.
Jane was a great antagonist depending on your choices. Jane was manipulative and self centered. I also dont mean to turn this into a Kenny vs Jane argument. Kenny had flaws as well. Jane put the needs of the one before the needs of the many. Unlike Craver who put the needs of the many before the needs of the one but did so ruthlessly.
Joan was by far one of the most terrible written villains, unless that was intentional, I'll explain. Joan is the most irrational illogical and unintelligent villains. She always acts outside of her own interests. She lets her emotions rule her decisions. If she was well written she could have represented the chaos that comes out of incompetence.
As for all the villains/antagonists in ANF, due to poor writing, their characters constantly flipped personalities.
David was a poorly written character but in my opinion the best poorly written character. The main problem was that he was a forced antagonist despite the fact that we had the choice to side with him at times.
As for season 4, I'd like to see two major villains. One would be a mix of Carver's character and Clem's character. A young kid survivor who went from being like Clem to accepting the "dark side" that Carver has. He would be a member of Clem's group but he would tear it appart from the inside. He would also have some sort of aspect to him that would make us sympathetic to him. The second villain would be a better written Joan. More like the joker. Not evil out of choice but evil out of nature as a result of being insane. Unintentionally destructive (basically Nate).
Give us a Nate character who is off the walls crazy and just looking for tail
Messed up choices that make us question if we're actually the antagonist.
I think it would totally awesome if through the first one or two episodes theirs this group of bandits that are after Clementine or Clem/group and as a perfect ending for either the first episode or the 2nd episode we see their leader and it ends up being Lily.
You're onto something there. Reverse Lee would be perfect. If Clementine sees parallels between this reverse Lee character and AJ it would make it extremely difficult for her to know what to do.
I don't really care what they do as long as it isn't Nate, Nate 2.0, Carver 2.0, Jane 2.0, or Negan. I just want proper closure on Joan/Clint. I think it would be interesting if they realized they fucked up (Clint for letting Joan go as far as she did and Joan for what she did) and then tried to apologize to Clem (and Javi if he's in it, which I hope he is). It could even be choice based if people don't like the idea of a redeemed Joan/Clint. If Joan is alive, then Clem has a choice to shoot her. If Clint, then she doesn't. I just don't want season 3 to be the red-headed step child of Clem's story. It needs to have SOME meaning/continuation. They don't need to be around all season. I say at most three episodes, depending on how long the episodes are....
I LOVE the idea of Clem stealing AJ away from the McCarrol Ranch and then the people there go after her for it.
That's what I'm thinking as well. After all, if you're gonna go out, you go out with a bang!
Oh, so Carlos or the Stranger.
Personally, I'd rather finally have an Evil!Clementine.
What does this even mean? I hear the word all the time, but have no real concept of what that mean.
Eh, true. In a way.
That's because they blatantly went against how her character(personality, motivation, goals, and standards) was established in Above the Law.
Eh, true, but I honestly think it would've been a little better if they would've had it possible to talk him down for those who always sided with him.
But alas, dat Drama for drama's sake.
Again, Max and initially Joan had understandable/logical reasons for their behavior, with clearly established worldviews, motivations, and goals. It's just that Thicker Than Water was completely rewriting before release and thus Joan's character was dramatically shifted to have more antagonistic characterization while Max was simply left out of the plot unless David killed him.
Badger, on the otherhand, was just intentionally bad. And Lonnie was an unnecessary return.
So Becca or Jane?
Naw, but seriously, the mole idea does have some promise.
I might just be playing devil's advocate here, but Joan was NOTHING like the joker. That implies she was supposed to be funny, over the top, or chaotic, things she wasn't supposed to be. At least in her inception.
Sounds like Badger too, to be honest.
Vengeful Translation: I wanna see Clementine get porked!
Since this is supposed to be "Clementine's story," what we need is to finally have proper personal rival/antagonist for Clementine. Maybe combine Becca, Michelle, Jane, Arvo, and/or Ava into one complex antagonist that legitimately challenges Clementine at her core.
I was originally on the boat of wanting Arvo to return as a more effectual, true villain in "Season 3," but that's changed for a number of reasons.
Becca was way past obsolete before ANF came out and would need such a drastic revamp that you might as well make an original character.
Or maybe, just maybe, Huckleberry can have his time in the moon.
The bar is already so low from Joan that it would really be embarrassing if Telltales next "big" antagonist is even worse than her.
I don't think it'd be embarrassing, it'd be an achievement if you could do an antagonist worse than Joan. Like how can you do worse than her, is it even possible?
May I ask what made her so bad?
A renegade out to destroy all of the walkers at all costs
We have no real motive to care about what she does at all, except "oh one of her guys killed Mariana who we didnt even get a chance to truly bond, and I mean if anything, Badger was the one who was disobeying Joan and calling all these shots, so why should we be mad at Joan, when Badger was the one who was truly responsible?
That plus, why should we fucking care about the places she raided? We dont know anyone in Richmond why should we care? We dont know any of these random groups she raided, why should we care. Why should we care they raided Prescott, we were barely there.
That plus she has about 5 mins of her "not being the bad guy yet" and then we get 5 mins of her in ep 3 going, 'Yes it was ME all along! HAHA you dont even KNOW anything about me to care!" Then she shows up for 2 mins at the start of ep 4, and then has a 10 min part, where she either dies or is never seen again. So basically ANF's "BIG BAD" never really did shit to us for us to truly hate her until the end of ep 4 when she kills Ava or Tripp, but it doesnt MATTER because she is either dead or DISAPPEARS right after so no more screentime, making her basically a bad guy who had no character development besides "I am bad lol" for a whole 14 minutes of "I am the main antagonist" for the whole season.
Okay, those are all actually very good observations. Just like to make sure where the attention of comments like yours lie ever once in a while for the sake of discussion.
Really, what I personally liked about Joan is indeed a major problem that the writers of Thicker than Water(if not the writing team of the game series as a whole) has trouble with: antagonists that aren't really villainous. Indeed, Joan's worldview, motivations, and standards made her very sympathetic, but the issue is that as the apparent main villain she lacked proper menace beyond enabling a few chaotic thugs to do more than the required dirty work for a good cause. So she was better suited for a story where the focus is convincing her that her methods are indeed the problem or if there was another more vile character to either hijack the plot or further push her down the slippery slope, the biggest candidate of which (and the cause of most of the personal pain) was already killed off after arguably less screentime before the reveal.
So instead of properly developing her in a way that felt more natural to both the characters and the plot, they instead dramatically shifted her character into acting like she got a Titan-fueled blood transfusion from Carver between episodes--which isn't that much time, mind you. So thus, no one really wins: people who wanted to see how her gray conflict would be resolved are left disappointed, while those who might'e preferred her to be more openly corrupt have it hamfisted in for a brief period of time.
You just made me realize that if Nate does come back in TFS through some cosmic intervention then Nate x Clem will probably become a thing. ugh
Unless it already is a thing in which case i wouldn't be surprised.
Hmmm nope I just want Nate back! Weirdo.
Ah, a rival for Badgianna then!
Yes, that exists.
That doesn't really sound relevant to your comment, though. Outside of more Ron-focused Flanderization, of course. Because we needed more of that.
Sounds like a lovely double date to me!
Seriously tho if the pairs were swapped into the same gender that would possibly be a pair of ships I could get behind
Oh, you meant Nate instead of Kate! That is an admittedly easy to make typo.
lol Well gotta say as much shit I give to Gabentine, at least it's not condoning pedophilia, so it's got that going for it at least.
How are these two "mirror" reflections of Lee? Besides using the same character model because Telltale was lazy and loves to recycle animations?.. Both were fathers like Lee wanted to be.. but yet Lee biologically wasn't to Clem..? Care for a Shakespearean inspired shakedown of an elaboration?
She wasn't close enough to being evil in New Frontier at times? Flippantly ending a dudes life over bad bullets then demanding me to cover her ass for it and threatening to shoot me and take my van anyway if I didn't agree to her offer of directions in exchange for my only known shelter for my family. If not evil then atleast far more cold and vicious than season 2 Clem ever was. Not sure if I like this or not yet though. She went through allot yes but so has others and they haven't changed that drastically I don't believe.
The Stranger was intentionally modeled to look like the turning Lee because he was the culmination of the game's themes that were also built up through Hershel, Kenny, and Vernon. The encounter with him was essentially Lee sitting down in front of a mirror, judging his choices throughout the story, and most importantly, chastising himself for his mistakes in looking after Clementine and considering the possibility that he ultimately failed to be a good guardian for her and thus should let her go.
Carlos, on the other hand, was meant to invoke what Lee would've been like without Chuck's influence: while still somewhat intelligent and well-respected enough by his group that his word carries weight despite not being the official leader, his deal was basically thinking he knows what's best in taking care of Clementine and believing he can completely shield her from the post-outbreak world. His most likely intended character arc had him gradually trust a more independent Clementine to do right by the group and help him realize that his extreme precaution wasn't a permanent solution. Mind you, he wasn't evil or really even bad, of course, but he sorta fills the basic idea of having Clementine deal with an alternate version of Lee.
No, I mean finally giving Clementine her own character-specific version of The Stranger or Carver and having her deal with them.
True. I just wish they stuck to their guns on their apparent stance instead of the backtracked copout they fell back on in the last two episodes.