questdrag0n

[questdrag0n]

Thoughts on Dark Might

Spoilers for You're Next below

So I just went back and watched the movie for the second time yesterday and I noticed some things.

Wanna preface by saying I loved the villain for this Movie. Dark Might was absolutely hysterical and flamboyant in a way that not a lot of serious villains are in this show, closest being Gentle Criminal who was meant to be a sympathetic villain who barely even qualified as a villain. Dark Might was a lot of fun to watch and a breath of fresh air, creepy scenes with Anna aside.

That said, there's something I noticed about him: The man has no original ideas. His entire villain plan was to try and recreate All Might's legacy, but in his own way. His fortress is plastered in All Might statues. While he did technically created his own villain name, he didn't do so until All Might said something that accidentally inspired it. His monsters? Clearly inspired by Nomu. Even his home base probably wasn't his own design, likely based on the Scervino home if his comment to Anna was anything to go by ("Do you like it? It was inspired by you" or something like that). Even that conversation with the erasure villain where he promises to "remember that for next time" is him taking something someone else said and planning to use it for the future to boost his own image. The only time where he appears to design something of his own was that horrendously bad outfit with the purple face paint, and then he gets mocked for it and never wears it again. Not even his face is his.

But this isn't bad writing or bad character design; rather it's actually genius. Here is a character who's quirk is the ability to create borderline anything (we don't really know the limits of his quirk without Anna), and yet he is unable to create something new; he instead plagiarizes from the world around him. It's deeply ironic, and is part of what makes the final face reveal so good. Once you strip him down to his own limits and his own ideas, all you have is a sad, pathetic man, with no original ideas who's power and money was handed to him on a silver platter. It's not just part of his character, it's the entire point of his character.

Tldr: Dark Might, while delightful to watch, has no original ideas and copies everything from those around him and it's genius writing for reasons I struggle to articulate