#piece of media that looks cool on a surface level but is actually fundamentally broken when you ->

[lune-redd]

Honestly if PPGD did get adapted into a show (which some people have wished for despite it being very unlikely) it would be the Netflixvania of Powerpuff Girls (derogatory)

[howtohero]

Seasonal Big Bads

Tired of having to fight so many different individual supervillains week to week? Not yet ready for a longterm nemesis? Want to fight someone at a snail’s pace over a period of many months? Then it sounds like you need a seasonal big bad! 

In order to qualify for a seasonal big bad you and your friends need to begin having strictly episodic adventures. If a villain can’t be defeated in the course of a day, leave them to somebody else to fight. Fight just one, unique, villain a week. You should try to make sure that each of these adventures follow the same formula. Begin your day by stopping a regular crime. A crime that you normally wouldn’t even bother with. One that the police could have easily dealt with. I’m thinking like a pick pocket or maybe a mail fraudster. Once you’ve done that your main baddie for the day will reveal themselves. Even though you’ve fought villains stronger than them or perhaps even with the exact same powers many times before, this new bad guy will somehow catch you off guard and elude you, having successfully committed some nefarious crime like vending machine larceny or bird kidnapping. Then instead of chasing after them, which would be laughably easy to do thanks to the faster than light engine you -for some reason- installed on your super dune buggy, you need to go back to your base. Once there you can chat amicably with your support-squad, find out what interpersonal dramas they’re dealing with that particular week. Maybe your engineer is going on a blind date. Perhaps your doctor is having an icy reconciliation with their estranged mother. It is imperative that you give these stories and issues your full undivided attention. You can deal with that bad guy later, it literally will not take you longer than five minutes to deal with them when you get around to it. So there’s no rush. After you help your friends resolve their issues you can then go out and stop this new villain from committing the exact same crime a second time in one day. There will be zero significant differences between this time and the last time you encountered them. But this time you need to beat them, using your powers, which for some reason you didn’t do before. Happy endings all around. If you have enough adventures like this eventually you’ll get your very own seasonal big bad.

Seasonal big bads are the most dangerous villain you’ll ever face... until next season when you have to fight an even bigger big bad that takes you the exact same amount of time to successfully defeat! A seasonal big bad will lurk in the shadows for a while, sending out goons and decoys to keep you distracted as they slowly slowly move the pieces in place for their grand evil scheme. So, since they’re keeping to themselves for the earlier parts of the year you have to work especially hard to recognize that you’re not facing a series of unrelated lower-level villains but that you are instead facing someone with an actual agenda that goes beyond “turning into a sand monster and scaring movie fans at the annual movie-at-the-park night.” 

One surefire way to know if you’re being targeted by a seasonal big bad is if you’re suddenly facing a whole bunch of new superpowered supervillains that you weren’t even aware of before. It’s not every day that a whole bunch of new superhumans come out of the woodwork at once. Unless you live in Super-Arkansas, an invisible state in between Arkansas and Oklahoma in which the birth-rate is pretty high and everybody is born with a random superpower. But for the rest of the world any influx of brand new superhumans should raise some eyebrows. Only seasonal big bads can create superhumans en masse, or at least they’re the only people who regularly have reason to do so. If you’re too busy stopping and investigating a whole new slew of super-crimes you’re much less likely to notice that random pieces of lab equipment keep going missing from labs across the city. 

About halfway through your year though, (to be clear this is not the January-December year. Seasonal big bad cycles tend to run on a September-May year so just go ahead and circle January 27th on your calendar and say that’s the date we’re talking about) you’ll finally uncover the conspiracy and come face to face with your seasonal big bad. While on the surface they may seem like just another madman bent on world domination, like the ones you deal with every Tuesday, this one is special. This one drank like extra evil juice. Maybe they’ll have the same powers as you, but stronger. Maybe they’ll be smarter than you. Maybe they’ll actually have a long standing one-sided grudge against you because their father was a supervillain and you stopped his evil schemes by tossing him into a fish truck that was leaving the city and he was directionally challenged and was never able to find his way back to town and also he smells like fish now so nobody wants him to come back anyway. Whatever their deal is, prepare to get absolutely thrashed by them. You’re going to get the actual snot out of you. They’re going to beat you up so bad that your immune system just collapses and you catch a really bad cold and start sneezing all the time. You’re going to get completely dismantled and it’s going to be very embarrassing. But do not despair. It’s all part of the process. If you were able to win the first fight you ever had with your seasonal big bad then they wouldn’t be very good seasonal big bads now would they? 

Don’t worry though, your seasonal big bad won’t kill you. They won’t even really try. For some reason they’ll assume that if they beat you up really badly, but then leave you alive, that you’ll just give up and retire or something. I guess they don’t get just how personally superheroes take things. When a super powerful person is so used to winning, one defeat isn’t going to make them pack up and go home, the only thing that defeat will do will cause them to vow to do whatever it takes to take the person who beat them off of the board. So good job seasonal big bad, you’ve just sealed your own fate. 

The rest of your year will be spent trying every hair brained scheme you can think of to regain dominance over your seasonal big bad. You’ll clone yourself, travel through time, trigger an alien invasion even going so far as to team up with your actual long-term nemesis who is actually very jealous of this seasonal big bad for taking up all your time. You’ll train harder, recruit new allies to your cause, blast them on social media. You’ll try to steal their powers, their followers, you’ll even try to turn their own wife against them. No tactic is too dirty or unhanded in pursuit of this noble goal of yours. To get revenge on the person made you look like a real goober on national television. You know who watches national television? Attractive people. Now what are they going to think of you. Good luck getting a date now guy who got wedgied on live television by a death cultist. 

Of course though, nothing you attempt will even come close to working until May, maaaaaybe mid-April if you’re lucky. It’s almost not even worth the effort. At times you’ll think about giving up and just letting your city fall to this heinous villain. Anybody who spends an entire school year meticulously carrying out a plot to take over your city kind of deserves to win no? Only your spite and anger will fuel you through those long middle months. Thankfully, the seasonal big bad will continue to make a fool of you every time you meet so there will be no shortage of spite coursing through your veins. 

And then, finally, the final conflict will arrive. One big final scuff up between you and your allies and the big bad and their little bad minions. (Not little in the sense that they are less evil, little in the sense that they are physically shorter than the main bad guy. He’s very tall that guy.) It will take everything you’ve got to finally beat this villain. May as well even bust out some fancy new duds for the occasion. Not to mention the latest in bad guy fighting technology that just happened to take your lead engineer nine months to develop. Convenient! Well, not for all the people who died in the bad guy’s rampage. But convenient for you that the weapon was finished just in time for the grand finale! Then you’ll come face to face with the villain who has been tormenting you for almost but not quite an entire year. Finally the hour of their reckoning has arrived. You can take revenge for your past humiliation. Avenge all of those that have fallen to their villainous schemes. You’ve been training non-stop for this moment. You’ve broken several fundamental laws of both physics and also your township in pursuit of this goal. Everything from the past just about a year has been leading up this moment. 

You might die.

But don’t worry it’s fine you’ll come back. And when you come back you’ll be more powerful than ever before and you’ll be able to finally end the threat of this terrible turnip that’s been terrorizing your neighborhood. Get pumped (and get amped!) for them to say something like “No! How it can be! They’re even more powerful than I ever could have imagined!” It’s gonna be so vindicating. So awesome. You’re gonna be great you got this! Make sure you’ve got a cool one-liner planned for when you finally take care of this big bad. Something like “Ha! You have been defeated and it is I who is the one who has been the one to defeat you!” Something cool and smooth like that. Try to make a pun if you can. Then, you can just relax. Your city will be completely safe. For like three or four whole months. Then, the cycle will begin anew. Have fun! This is your life now!

(Be wary though, of the big bad switcheroo. Where you think one of the bad guys you’re fighting is your big bad for the year only for them to be unceremoniously defeated at some point. When this happens, don’t start patting yourself on the back just yet. It’s not that you’re so great at fighting crime that you were able to beat your big bad in record time. It’s very likely that some even more powerful and evil villain is going to take their place and serve as the big bad for the rest of the year. So stay alert for any like evil nieces or henchmen that seem to actively be taking notes whenever your big bad is doing things. They might turn out to be the true villain of this saga in your life!)