I like the King from Kiva. Just an incredible combination of pathos and great strength with an offended whiny cuckold. Especially his conversation with his wife:
"I don't care about your infidelities, so I'll kill your lover.
- Um, maybe then they still worry you?
"No, they don't care at all!"
Such a stupid guy!
Speaking of Kiva, it seemed to me that Queen Fangaya actually changed children and in the final it would turn out that Wataru is the son of the King, and Taiga is the son of Otoya. And then everyone will understand that the main thing is not genes, but upbringing, and peace will come between people and Fangaya. But the show took a different path.

...

You're really reaching a bit about humans dark impulses and all this strictly good and evil stuff you say when topics like this get brought up, you know that?

Mostly cause like, when it comes to entertainment... I feel like there should be some level of enjoyment for the audience. There's no fun in watching the heroes achieve their goals when the main villain their facing is boring/lacking some sort of charm that really wants you to see the heroes win.

Personally, I love interesting villains, but they really aren't necessary for a good story and/or entertainment. And even more so, it is not necessary to empathize with them. There are those who are just nice to hate. Even a boring and banal villain can work if the story is hero-focused. The MCU will not let you lie here. Not to mention that there are shows like Blade where the villain is basically not needed.

I'm looking at maybe getting a Shout Factory feed on Amazon Prime
to watch the Rider shows in February and Jet Man.

I would like to start with the 1st Rider series which Shout has for
streaminng.

97 episodes will take 3 months to watch for the first Rider series.

Yeah, villains like Cronus and ZAIA work for me because they do take something real and rather than try and make it empathetic, they instead have it boosted to comically hilarious levels; which then goes on to motivate drama between other characters

"Part of his plan" or not I still find it to all be a piece of incredibly lackluster writing, and does nothing to solve the heart of the problem: He's boring and he gets everything easy. Even if you wanna focus on programming, he's somehow able to program and reprogram the sorts of things in mere moments that takes Kuroto entire episodes, and this is long after it's been established that Kuroto is in all ways better at programming and game development than what Masamune is.

Except that Empathy/Sympathy points isn't at all what En-chan was getting at. He was simply saying that in order for an antagonist to be engaging, he thinks they should also be interesting, of which he does not find Masamune to be.

And on a personal note, man, I friggen WISH I could find anything Masamune did to be at all funny or real. Dude was far too busy making me bored out of my mind whenever the plot contrivances weren't making me angry. He wasn't even needed to push the plot along either, given that up until the point he shows up, most of the focus was going towards Parado, Poppy, and the divide between Humans and Bugsters, which was far more interesting to me. Then Masamune shows up and that plot and character work is almost straight up abandoned outside of a few select scenes. Scenes of which Masamune has almost no influence on either, making him even more pointless.

Give me a Showa villain over Masamune any day. Way more fun to be had with them.

Even Archbishop Wing?

I haven't seen V3 yet, so at least I'd get a new experience out of that.

I guess sorry, to specify better, humans' dark impulses seems to be one of the factors - mainly about "forbidden fruit" (fascination with forbidden things) and villains being a fantasy for the audience to be rebellious and wild.

But I feel that charming villains can make some people root for villains instead, or even worse, excusing their behavior (also painting the heroes opposing them as bad) so it feels right to root for them to win. Extremely hateable villains to audience's eyes like Micchy, Banno, or Gai (both of them :cool:) seems to be more likely to get the audience really want to see what's coming to them (and get satisfied for that).

Yeah, this'd be fair to want to see the divide of humans and Bugsters. Parado was announced as the main antagonist in the preview after all, but Kuroto served that role for longer time before Parado actually got that starting from ep. 23. L̶e̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶ ̶h̶o̶w̶ ̶G̶e̶a̶t̶s̶ ̶p̶u̶l̶l̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶,̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶A̶r̶c̶h̶i̶m̶e̶d̶e̶l̶ ̶b̶e̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶n̶n̶o̶y̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶J̶a̶m̶a̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶a̶d̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶l̶o̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶h̶u̶m̶a̶n̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶g̶a̶m̶e̶,̶ ̶j̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶P̶a̶r̶a̶d̶o̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶B̶u̶g̶s̶t̶e̶r̶s̶.̶̶̶