Evil Is Bigger

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

The David Versus Goliath plot is where the hero is the underdog in comparison to the villain. One of the easiest ways to have this come across visually to audiences is to literally make the villain physically larger.

Aside from the villainous characters themselves being big, their tools and resources also tend to be bigger. If the hero has Powered Armor, the villain has a Humongous Mecha. If the good guys come from The Kingdom, the bad guys come from The Empire. If the hero has an average-sized Cool Sword, the villain has a BFS. At the climax of a Speculative Fiction work, the villain may go One-Winged Angel to increase his size and strength. In High School settings the local Alpha Bitch tends to be taller than the Cool Loser heroine (and she usually wears heels, so she tends to look even taller). The list goes on and on.

This is the reason why Large and In Charge is more common among villains.

For when this is taken Up To Eleven, compare That's No Moon, Genius Loci (assuming it's evil), and Colossus Climb

Examples of Evil Is Bigger include:

Anime and Manga

  • In One Piece, most of the evil guys tend to be veritable behemoths of muscle or fat, or at least very tall and imposing. Our heroes, except for Franky and Brook, are average sized.
  • Bleach. Almost all Soul Reapers are human size, while most hollows are larger than human size (some of them are a lot larger than human size.
    • Many Arrancar hollows have Resurreccion forms that are much larger than their normal human-like forms.
  • The climactic battles Goku faces against both Demon King Piccolo and his Reincarnation namesake in Dragon Ball involve the latter supersizing themselves - and Goku wasn't all that big to start with.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam The Federation focuses its resources on producing one kind of mobile suit. The Principality of Zeon, in contrast, squanders its resources on the construction of a number of huge mobile armours, including the Brau Bro, the Elmeth, and the colossal Big Zam (itself piloted by seven-foot tall Admiral Dozle Zabi).
    • In Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, the Titans are the ones who build the Psyco Gundam and the Psyco Gundam Mark II, both of which stand the height of a small skyscraper. Those mobile suits designed by Paptimus Scirocco, while not as huge, still tend to be larger than average, with his final ride, the PMX-003 The O being a hulking Lightning Bruiser taller than any AEUG mobile suit and two or three times as wide.
    • In Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny the Destroy Gundam is put into action by Blue Cosmos, the coalition of racist groups behind the Atlantic Federation. An Expy of the aforementioned Psyco Gundam, the Destroy is a walking Weapon of Mass Destruction that burns its way across Eurasia before being halted in downtown Berlin.

Comic Books

  • Galactus, Devourer of Worlds and Fantastic Four villain; Depending on the Writer, his size varies anywhere from 50 feet to 100 feet, to the size of actual planets (often for dramatic effect on the last one), but he's a giant to any writer.
  • Ego, the Living Planet, a Marvel villain who gained popularity from the movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. According to the most reliable source [1] the Living Planet has a diameter of 6779 km, making him about the size of Mars.

Film

  • Star Wars has Darth Vader, who stands over 2 meters. (though the good guys have Chewbacca, who's even taller) The Empire also has much larger war machines; the largest Rebel ship, the Mon Calamari cruiser, is absolutely dwarfed by the largest Imperial ship, the Death Star.
  • Ego from the second Guardians of the Galaxy movie is slightly smaller than his comic book counterpart, but is still easily the size of Earth's moon.
  • Candyman. The eponymous killer is a 6-foot-five-inch tall Scary Black Man, with a hook for a right hand.

Literature

  • Sunday, from The Man Who Was Thursday is described as "too big to process." He's not more than eight feet tall, however, but his terrifyingly jolly personality can't possibly hurt...
  • Gregor Clegane from A Song of Ice and Fire, AKA "The Mountain that Rides", known to some fans as "The Mountain that Rapes", possibly the worse ordinary human in the series, and also the largest.
  • In Redwall, Vermin are invariably larger than Redwallers, though badgers tower above all others (and are good guys).
  • Most of the abominations detailed in the Cthulhu Mythos. The size of monsters like Azathoth, Shub-Niggurath, and Cthulhu itself vary depending on the author, but they're always giants, often the size of planets.

Live-Action TV

  • In Stargate, bad guys always have big armies, big ships, big empires, and big egos.
  • Pure Demons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. According to Anya, these ancient fiends are much larger physically than typical demons. This is proven when Olvikan (the demon the Mayor assumes the form of in the Season Finale) finally appears - it's huge.

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

  • Norse Mythology:
    • The Arch Enemies of the Norse gods are the jotuns, frost giants. Their size varies, but they're always huge, some the size of mountains.
    • The first jotun, Ymir, was so huge that when Odin and his brothers slew him, they used his body to build the world.
    • The Midgard Serpent is so huge that it encircles the Earth and clasps its tail with its mouth.
    • Its brother, the wolf known as Fenris (or Fenrir), is almost always depicted as gigantic too.

Tabletop Games

  • Most of the factions in Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000 are taller than humans: the Elves / Eldar, Orcs / Orks, the forces of Chaos (especially Khornates), Lizardmen, Kroot... An exception in 40K is the Tau, who are shorter and less physically capable than humans (which is why they prefer to shoot their enemies from miles away) - but by the standards of the setting, they tend to be a bit nicer than humans. The Skaven are also smaller but have far, far greater numbers... and definitely count as evil.

Video Games

  • Ganon of The Legend of Zelda is always bigger than Link and Zelda combined. Even in his human form, he can be up to twice as tall as them.
    • The fact that Ganon is an adult while Link and Zelda are children in most of the games could somewhat account for this.
    • Being 7 and a half feet tall probably helps too.
  • Archimonde in the final level in Warcraft III is far larger than any other unit and is basically invincible. In addition, all the demonic units have far more health than the player's units or his computer allies', are physically larger, and do "chaos damage" which is resisted by none of the armor types.
  • In Infinity Blade, almost everything is bigger than you, except the final boss.
  • M. Bison of Street Fighter is a man of very large stature.
  • In the 2D Final Fantasy games, enemy sprites were always bigger than the player sprites.
  • In Bayonetta, the bosses are huge. In fact, as you go through the game, they get progressively bigger until the final boss is as big as a planet.
  • Think Bayonetta has it bad? In Asura's Wrath, even the first boss is as big as a planet!
  • In Super Mario Bowser's actual size depends on the game, but he's always bigger than Mario. Or most other characters.
  • God of War is another franchise known for humungous bosses, which is ironic, seeing as Kratos himself is huge when compared to most humans, canonically 7 feet 6 inches tall. Pandora’s Guardian (a 20 foot tall undead, armored minotaur) in the original game, Poseidon from God of War III (a giant about a hundred feet tall literally made of water, mounted on a just-as-big three-headed sea monster made of stone and water), the Kraken from God of War II (ironically, not as big as the one in Clash of the Titans, but about 150 feet long, give or take), the Hydra King from the original game relaunch (forget measuring this one, suffice to say it’s as big as the sailing vessel Kratos fights it on), the Colossus of Rhodes from the second game (naturally), Aegaeon the Hecatonchires (this boss is not only the size of a city, it is the city, a case where the boss and the level you fight it in are one and the same), and of course, Cronos from the third game, a practical living mountain and likely, relatively speaking, the most gigantic boss in video game history (what do you expect from a Titan?), whose Boss Battle combines the elements of a Colossus Climb and a Womb Level.
    • Ares, the Big Bad of the first game Zigzags the Trope; while he is a giant, Kratos fights him using magic that makes himself just as big.
    • In the 2018 sequel series, the bosses are usually closer to Kratos' size, but Hræzlyr the Mountain Dragon is as big as, well, a dragon, probably a throwback to the giant bosses in the original series.

Western Animation

  • In the Looney Tunes short "Bye-Bye Bluebeard", the eponymous killer is a giant of a man, standing six feet eleven inches tall.
  • Justified in the various versions of Transformers, as most of the Decepticons tend to favor larger military vehicles for their alt-modes as opposed to the smaller civilian vehicles favored by most of the Autobots.
    • One exception is the movies, which in attempt to keep a realistic scale, lead protagonist Optimus Prime (whose alternate mode is a HUGE truck) to be taller than most Decepticons.
    • Plus, Unicron - the Bigger Bad in most versions - is the size of a planet. Lampshaded here.
  • In Samurai Jack, the hero's Arch Enemy Aku is a shapeshifter, but almost always bigger than Jack.
  • In Codename: Kids Next Door , the heroes are children who fight evil adults, so this Trope is usually applied by default, except in the cases of child villains. And even then, some of them, like the Delightful Children, have adult-sized Mooks.
  • The Smurfs are really small, so pretty much every villain in the cartoon is bigger than they are. But then, so are most of their allies.
  • Adventures of the Gummi Bears takes this a step further. Not only is the Big Bad (and most humans in general) bigger than the heroes, but the villains' Mooks are a group of ogres bigger than he is, which he is somehow able to keep in line.