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Sorting Algorithm of Evil - TV Tropes

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SortingAlgorithmOfEvil

Villains will appear in strictly ascending order by menace.

This trope has ancient roots. Possibly the earliest example available in the English language is the Older Than Print epic Beowulf. It just makes good sense that as our heroes fight the forces of evil, they should get better at fighting the forces of evil. So as the story progresses, the fights should get easier and easier. Of course, having an overly easy fight is just bad drama, so you have to consistently increase the threat the heroes face. This results in the Sorting Algorithm of Evil. The first villain you meet is the weakest, and the last is the strongest. As the heroes get strong enough to defeat their current enemy, a new enemy will emerge that forces them to reach another skill level. It would be an Anti-Climax if the hero defeated the Baddest Ass and spent the remaining time contending with not-quite-as-Bad Asses.

There are several ways to justify this; due to Monster Threat Expiration, the current villain usually Forgot To Level Grind while the heroes are out collecting 20 Bear Asses and are Gonna Fly Now thereby outclassing him. This at least provides an in-story explanation for the Lamarckian evolution of evil from one bad guy to the next. In some cases the Big Bad the heroes defeated last time was actually a mere member of a powerful organization. The others can show up to avenge their fallen comrade, so now we have the previous big bad times two or more. One of the more realistic possibilities, albeit one that's hard to justify in many stories, is a tournament structure, where the opponents become more formidable the closer the heroes get to the championship. In a series centering around military technology this can be explained by technological progress. The heroes will get new weapons, strategies, and better technology, but so will the enemy. This can apply not just to technology, but also knowledge: if a hero has a Rogues Gallery of foes they fight constantly, and a surprise new Outside-Context Problem enters the mix later in the series, they'll be more difficult to handle due to unfamiliarity with how they work. In some cases, particularly the Shōnen genre, it could be that an earlier Big Bad who presented a powerful threat is now dead and can no longer grow anymore in power and by the time the heroes face the latest Big Bad, the new villain (and subsequently the heroes themselves) will have had that much more time to become stronger that the previous villain. Another example would be that the Big Bad has been defeated but lesser villains are forced to fill the power vacuum by becoming even more evil.

Occasionally, a particularly strong villain will ignore this trope and arrive early to beat the hell out of the heroes, only to leave them alive because they're Not Worth Killing.

A problem comes up if a long-running show goes past its first Grand Finale. We may believe that the ultimate Evil Overlord is enough of a tactical dunce to think that sending his henchmen out in ascending order was a valid strategy. But why should the new, unrelated, Big Bad happen to be even stronger? Sometimes the Big Bads might form a string of Men Behind The Men, making this structure more sensible. Although this leads to new Fridge Logic issues: why doesn't the Man Most Behind use the unimaginable power of his position to just wipe all the heroes out instead of just sitting there? If the first Big Bad is only a local terror, bigger bads may not have even been aware of the heroes. The increasing threats they face are a reflection of the threat they pose to the ultimate boss. And then there's the Fridge Logic that can rise when one wonders why later, more powerful villains would tolerate the earlier, weaker ones hatching plots of their own. If the villain of Season Three wants to destroy the world, and the villain of Season Four wants to conquer it, why would the Season Four villain tolerate his predecessor's attempts to destroy it? One way to address these issues is to make the later villain a Sealed Evil in a Can who only gets released after the earlier villain is defeated.

Another downside of this trope is viewers who get into a show later may find early villains lame by comparison when they go back to catch up — "pshaw — we're supposed to be worried about this guy? He can't even blow up a galaxy!"

This trope is particularly common in Roleplay Games and Video Games: the more and stronger enemies you fight, the more experience and power you get. You also get the magical weapons and armors they drop. You have no chance against mid-game monsters with a starting character, but by the time you get to them, you are ready. That makes this the perfect trope for a Small Steps Hero, since they can clean up the world one bad guy at a time.

Related to Convenient Questing where ascending menace is laid out geographically, and the player must proceed through these regions in strictly ascending order by menace. (Mount Doom? It's right over there, but you have to go through the Hills of Moderate Evil, which are themselves on the far side of the Forest of Inconvenience, reachable via the Ghibli Hills.)

When this happens involving entire breeds/species of villains, it's changing the Villain Pedigree. If it's because various villains were sealed away it's Sealed Cast in a Multipack. If a particularly powerful villain remains on screen for too long and can't keep up, compare Monster Threat Expiration. If one of the weak, foolish villains encountered early turns out to have been faking it, they might be a Not-So-Harmless Villain using Obfuscating Stupidity to camouflage their true sorting order. If a villain starts out low and rapidly climbs higher, that's probably a Snowballing Threat.

See also Sliding Scale of Villain Threat, which breaks down the scales of villainy. Contrast Evil Evolves. Compare Always a Bigger Fish, Lensman Arms Race, So Last Season, Sequel Escalation, Rule of Escalating Threat, Rank Scales with Asskicking.

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    Comic Books 

• The Authority: Warren Ellis' run consists of three four-issue storylines. In the first, the Authority fight a supervillain. In the second, they fight an alternative Earth. In the third, they fight what could be described as God. When Mark Millar took over the writing, he went back to various kinds of supervillains again.
• The Avengers: During his tenure as the writer, Jim Shooter pitted the team against a series of progressively more powerful and more dangerous opponents, all of whom had powers that bordered on invincibility. They faced the genetically enhanced Atlantean Tyrak (who had superhuman strength), the robot Ultron (who was equipped with an "encephalo-ray" which could place his enemies in a death-like state and possessed an indestructible adamantium body), the mad scientist Graviton (who had the ability to control one of the fundamental forces of the universe), Count Nefaria (a Flying Brick), and eventually Korvac (a would-be warlord from the 31st century who had obtained godlike powers by absorbing part of the Power Cosmic from Galactus's abandoned starship). The first four typically took down Thor and Wonder Man (the strongest members of the team) with a single attack, while Korvac actually managed to kill the entire team in battle before being driven to despair by the apparent betrayal of his similarly cosmically-empowered wife and restoring the team to life with his final breath.
• Batman: Year One reintroduces The Detective as being principally concerned with cleaning up Gotham City's mobster problem; its nominal sequels such as The Man Who Laughs, The Long Halloween and Dark Victory concern the gradual emergence and rise of the supervillain threat, and by the end of Halloween and Victory nearly all the principal mobsters are either incarcerated or dead, and the supervillains have taken over. Afterwards, though, this trope is zig-zagged and subverted since, while Batman does deal with global, even genocidal villains as his career moves on, and as part of the Justice League takes on intergalactic menaces and otherworldly threats, those same supervillains still pose as much or even more trouble for him as they ever have, though under Grant Morrison there was / is a tendency to make the city-based threats part of larger international conspiracies, to the point where prior to the lastest Cosmic Retcon Batman had decided to start his own multinational crimefighting franchise to tackle crime everywhere.
• The Reverse-Flashes from The Flash follow this in terms of power:
  • Edward Clariss/The Rival was an enemy of Jay Garrick who despite his best efforts, could not match the latter's speed.
  • Eobard Thawne/Professor Zoom was not only just as fast as Barry Allen, but he learned how to gain Time Travel and Me's a Crowd abilities from his speed.
  • Rather than being a traditional speedster, Hunter Zolomon/Zoom had the power to slow down time. Even Wally Wast, the fastest of the Flashes, had a hard time stopping him.
  • Thaddeus Thawne is not only a powerful speedster, but he stole Zoom's powers for himself and he has complete control over the individual timelines of other people.
• Justified in Lilith: for every time travel the protagonist does she comes closer to the source of the Triacanto, so the Thistles defending the original carriers of the various infection strains are closer to their source (no matter the place in the timeline), going from a few guys unable to properly manifest during the siege of Wilusa to the small army of Elite Mooks defending Emin Pasha.
  • Subverted in issue 9, where the Thistles are much stronger than ever before or after until the Grand Finale, and in issue 11, where the Thistles are at their weakest. Both exceptions have good reasons: in issue 11 the carrier was dying of bubonic plague and that interfered with the Thistles' ability to manifest, while in issue 9 Lilith, looking for the infection strain of that era, had come very close to the still immature source of the Triacanto, and the Thistles there were at their strongest and the same ones that would be fought in the final battle.
• In Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers (Boom! Studios) issue 45, the Omega Rangers launch an assault on the moon palace that ends with Lord Zedd's minions on the run and Zedd himself imprisoned. Zordon, however, is far from happy, pointing out to the Red Omega Ranger that something is going to replace Zedd and the Omegas won't be around next time.
• Subverted in Scott Pilgrim: Matthew Patel, the first member of the League of Evil Exes to appear, is the most pathetic, and the second one, Lucas Lee, gives Scott a hard time... Then the third, Todd Ingram, is by far the most powerful (enough to punch a hole in the Moon-twice), and is only defeated due what Scott himself calls "some kind of last minute, poorly set-up Deus ex Machina" taking away his psychic powers. After that, Roxy Richter is stronger than Lucas Lee, the Katayanagi Twins are individually weaker than Lee but fight together and prove at least as formidable as Roxy, and Gideon is second only to Todd in terms of power.
• Spider-Girl: A subtle example occurs with the villains Earthshaker, Mr. Abnormal, and Killerwatt. All three of them were defeated by Spider-Girl early in the first series, and don't reappear for several years real-time. When they finally reappear, they've been drafted to serve in a government super-team, but do a pretty poor job of it. While they were credible threats to Spider-Girl early in her career, their ineffectiveness is now lampshaded by everyone from Carnage to Agent Maria Hill of S.H.I.E.L.D. to Spider-Girl herself.
• Subverted in W.I.T.C.H., with the power of the enemies spiking up and down all the time: the first Big Bad, Phobos, is not a threat as Nerissa from the second arc but is the Greater-Scope Villain, with the various competing villains of the third arc competing for the spot as the weakest (and indeed would have been easily wiped out had the Guardians not had reasons to not go the direct route). The fourth story arc has a more dangerous villain than ever but he's not a physical threat as Nerissa, who would be topped only by Dark Mother in the New Power arc (the seventh), with the villains of the following arc being again lesser threats than Nerissa (the one possible exception being the Runic Wizards, but their storyline was dropped).
  • Interestingly, Phobos is faced at his normal state only in the very end: in the first arc he's powered up by the magic he stole from the planet Metamoor, he's in a stolen body for most of the fourth arc, and in the final confrontation he's using a spell to immobilize the Guardians and circumstances to make himself invulnerable. When his safeties fail in the middle of the final fight he has barely enough time to realize he's doomed before Will disintegrates his soul.

    Fan Works 

• Children of an Elder God:
  • Played straight. The first enemies were weaker and less mind-screwing, and one or two giant robots could take them without too much trouble. The last enemies fought by the main characters were ancient eldritch horrors which could obliterate planets with a mere gesture.
  • Gendo invoked the trope in the first chapter when the first Angel (a giant spider) came along, and he said it will likely be the weakest since it is the first one. He also said several times that their first enemies were -comparatively- weak and dumb, but their future adversaries would be more dangerous.
• HERZ: Played straight. The first enemies fought by HERZ were human soldiers and foot troops. Later they had to deploy several Evangelions to destroy a Robeast. Finally the main characters fought other Evangelions.
• A Moon and World Apart: Discussed in chapter 18, when Celestia and Luna inform Cadance that one of the reasons Discord is still around rather than having been destroyed is that if he's gone, there's a risk that something even worse could take his place.
• Notably subverted in Ultimate Sleepwalker: The New Dreams and Ultimate Spider-Woman: Change with the Light. Villains who appear early in the series have continued to remain deadly threats to the protagonists throughout the entire series, and in some cases outright beat them and actually succeed in their evil plots. Even when they don't, they often manage to defeat other villains, sometimes in an Enemy Mine situation with their heroic nemesis.
• Referenced and discussed in Yesterday Upon The Stair during the Sports Festival Arc. Ochako bemoans her and Izuku's bad luck having faced off against strong opponents (and subsequently lost) early on in the one-on-one fights. Izuku counters that the real world doesn't work like a video game and villains won't be giving them a learning curve.
• Discussed and Justified in the Oppai Dragon Show Within a Show in Beyond The Outer Gate Lies A High School Library: when Harry suggests that the show's Big Bad, "Darkness Knight Fang", be The Mole, Azazel considers it a good plot twist to explain the Sorting Algorithm In-Universe, with "Fang" deliberately throwing increasingly stronger henchmen at Oppai Dragon to train him.
• I Woke Up As a Dungeon, Now What? has this on both sides of the dungeon/adventurer conflict.
  • It is a well-known rule that a dungeon's monsters and other defenses rise in effectiveness every five levels. The first five levels will always be weak monsters that are only a real challenge for newbies, the next five levels will be moderately more dangerous, and so on. Taylor has yet to grow sufficient levels to see this effect herself, but she suspects that this is due to dungeons getting an upkeep rebate on lower floors, so that they cannot afford to put high-level monsters on their top floors.
  • Conversely, one of the quirks of the drop system is that the higher a hero's level relative to the monsters he's fighting, the lower the chance of getting drops. A high-level adventurer like Ulric could slaughter everything on Taylor's first floor and get nothing, while if a complete newbie like Horzel managed the feat he'd be flush with bug bits.

    Films — Animated 

• The Kung Fu Panda franchise's main antagonists follow this pattern:
  • The first film has Tai Lung, Master Shifu's former disciple and a One-Man Army capable of plowing through a few dozen rhinos, the Furious Five, and Shifu himself with little effort. But he is still only one guy and his focus is solely on the Dragon Scroll, making him a complete non-issue to anyone outside the Valley of Peace (at least in the short term). This makes him the perfect Starter Villain, but he pales quite a bit compared to the following antagonists.
  • Kung Fu Panda 2 brings Lord Shen, who controls a large army, invented a weapon powerful enough to render kung fu obsolete, and seeks nothing less than to conquer all of China. He's not as physically imposing as Tai Lung, but he's a far greater threat, and with a more personal connection to The Hero to boot.
  • Then Kung Fu Panda 3 cranks it up with Kai the Collector, an absurdly powerful master of chi who completely eclipses the previous villains in scale and threat level. For perspective, he's the first villain to actually beat Po in a straight fight, and rather easily at that. Even his minions are more threatening, being Elite Mooks formed from other kung fu masters that can go toe-to-toe with most of the cast individually.
• The My Little Pony: Equestria Girls movies play it straight in comparison to the flagship enterprise.
  • The first villain's movie is Sunset Shimmer, a former student of Celestia turned traitor who has become the Alpha Bitch of the high school version of Equestria, stealing Twilight's Element of Magic in an effort to gain greater power. Even though she gains a Superpowered Evil Side from the crown at the climax, complete with fireball magic and the ability to create a Zombie Apocalypse, she's really just a bully with a domineering personality and a somewhat savvy brain, and Twilight and the human versions of her friends quickly and rather anti-climatically finish her off with the Power of Friendship at the end. She also pulls a Heel–Face Turn.
  • The sequel's villains, the Dazzlings, however, are extremely old and powerful beings, despite their teenage appearance and occasional temperaments, who still have access to their magic, which they use via singing to create Hate Plagues and feed off the conflicts to grow stronger. Their leader, Adagio Dazzle, is essentially an even more Jerkass version of Sunset with actual threatening powers and a true scheming attitude thrown in for good measure. The final battle between them and the Rainbooms requires not only the aid from another outsider, Vinyl Scratch, but also the help of a reformed Sunset Shimmer, who successfully proves her Heel–Face Turn from the first movie was truly genuine. In the end, they don't pull a Heel–Face Turn but simply run off, now powerless.
  • Zig-Zagged in My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Friendship Games. The actual Big Bad, Crystal Prep's Principal Abacus Cinch is a Non-Action Big Bad who just wants to preserve her school's winning streak whatever the cost. However, Human Twilight Sparkle, the one who actually drives the plot, originally starts out as a very polite young lady on the opposing Shadowbolt's team whose desire to understand the magic she's been sensing around Canterlot High causes problems for everyone. When Cinch and the other Shadowbolts convince her to unleash the magic she's gathered despite having little clue of how to use it, she transforms into Midnight Sparkle, a Reality Warper-level threat whose desire to understand magic is so strong that she nearly destroys the human world without a care to get to Equestria, something no other antagonist has ever gone to the lengths to do, and forces Sunset to absorb her friends' magic and become Daydream Shimmer to fight her alone (with timely assistance from Spike). In the end, Twilight and the other Shadowbolts pull a Heel–Face Turn, but Cinch refuses to even take responsibility.
  • Averted in My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Legend of Everfree. The Big Bad Gaea Everfree also known as camp director Gloriosa Daisy is much weaker than Midnight Sparkle was, likely more on demon Sunset Shimmer or the Dazzlings' level, and the stakes are much lower as well being less about world domination or destruction and more about an obsession with ensuring that Camp Everfree doesn't get shut down and turned into a spa. However, the threat is compounded by Human Twilight dealing with the fact Midnight Sparkle isn't completely gone and the girls in general coming to terms with their own burgeoning magical powers manifesting at random. Even once Gloriosa goes off the deep end completely, the Humane Five are able to hold her off decently by themselves with their powers and once Twilight overcomes Midnight with Sunset's help, the seven quickly defeat Gaea Everfree without much trouble.

    Films — Live-Action 

• Subverted in 300. After his first wave of Mooks fails, God-King Xerxes sends his best troops, the Immortals, to kill the Spartans. While the Immortals make quite a few casualties among the Spartans, it ultimately fails because, as the narrator claims, the Spartans were not yet weakened by fatigue.
• In the first Alien film, just one Xenomorph Drone manages to kill off all but one crew member of the USCSS Nostromo, Ellen Ripley. In Aliens, she has to face off against a whole entire hive of them, even including the First Acheron Queen. Then averted when compared to the first film and also inverted when compared to the second film in Alien³ since it, much like the very first film in the series, only has one Xenomorph Runner stalking and killing off our entirely unarmed human protagonists one-by-one in addition to a Royal Chestburster maturing within Ripley's thorax, and finally played half-straight in Alien: Resurrection when a hive of them is being faced off agianst again, but this one consists of no more than 12 individual Drones in addition to their Cloned Queen as well as the Newborn Xenomorph specimen near the end.
• The Dark Knight Trilogy makes use of this trope, with each main villain becoming more competent. Alluded to in The Dark Knight where the first time we see Batman he handily arrests Scarecrow. In addition, the first two movies have Gotham City at risk of losing hope or sanity. The third movie has the city at risk of every person in it dying.
  • Batman Begins has Batman first fight the mob, then Scarecrow and his fear toxin and finally Batman must defeat Ra's al Ghul who nearly drives all of Gotham insane with fear toxin, before Batman defeats his army and leaves Ra's to die. Scarecrow appears briefly in the sequels having gone through Villain Decay, making him the weakest of any leading villain.
  • Then in The Dark Knight, The Joker manages to put all of Gotham into panic without the vast resources and army that Ra's al Ghul had in Batman Begins and creates another villain, Two-Face, by causing Harvey Dent to become a Fallen Hero. The Joker also nearly succeeds in making Gotham lose all hope.
  • In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane at first seems to be just a robber who attacks the stock market. Very quickly, Bane is shown to be a huge threat, especially when he defeats Batman and traps him in a prison halfway around the world. After that, Bane forcibly takes over Gotham for months, and is secretly working with Talia al Ghul. Both want revenge for Ra's death, and want it by nuking Gotham.
• From Dusk Till Dawn has an unusual inverted example. When the vampires reveal their true nature, the named ones with actual character and personality are all killed before the climax, including Santanico Pandemonium, who was seemingly being set up as the leader of the vampires and the Big Bad. The climax ends up involving several waves of no-name Mook vampires, alongside three converted allies.
• Bruce Lee's last film Game of Death is practically the Trope Codifier as it had him climbing a pagoda where each level had a progressively harder fighter.
• Used briefly in the first Gamera series. In Gamera vs. Gyaos, Gamera takes the entire film to kill Gyaos. Then, for Gamera vs. Guiron, Guiron is introduced as he's effortlessly killing a Space Gyaos. This wasn't entirely intentional on the filmmaker's part, as they'd originally intended for Space Gyaos' role to be filled by a completely different, new kaiju—they only reused the Gyaos costume because they couldn't make the new monster in time.
• James Bond movies frequently have the main villain's henchman reappear after the main villain has died and his plot has been foiled. Bond will then dispatch them, often by forcing a backfire of their trademark gimmick, averting this trope. On a larger scale, however, Sean Connery and Daniel Craig's movies (at least the ones involving SPECTRE tend to play this trope straight on a larger scale:
  • Connery's films start out with Bond confronting lower ranking members of SPECTRE with comparatively small-scale plots (toppling American space rockets, tricking the British and Soviets into fighting over a stolen decoder). In Thunderball, the villain is now the organization's second in command, Emilio Largo, who threatens to set off a stolen nuclear weapon in an unnamed Western city unless paid an enormous ransom. It's not until You Only Live Twice that we finally meet the organization's leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, face to face, with its current scheme being nothing less than to incite a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union that will leave the Western and Eastern alliances of nations utterly destroyed. "This is the big one, 007," indeed.
  • In Daniel Craig's first movie, Bond is assigned to capture an underworld banker who launders money for terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and the Lord's Resistance Army. By the end of the movie, he's discovered another one of the man's clients, a secretive but powerful criminal organization, which eliminates him before he can be brought in. In the next film, he continues to track this organization, eventually discovering its name (Quantum), identifying some of its senior leaders, and derailing its plot to overthrow a South American government and obtain a monopoly on the country's water resources. Two films later, we finally meet the boss of Quantum - now renamed Spectre - as he schemes to have the entire Western intelligence apparatus privatized and placed under his control. And then there's the last movie, in which Blofeld and all of Spectre are eliminated by Safin, an earlier rival of theirs, whose scheme is to create an army of nanobots that can be assigned to kill anyone in the world, ranging from individuals to entire ethnic groups.
• The Karate Kid series has a pattern in which he must use a new technique that the previous final boss proves immune to, thus suggesting that each opponent is tougher than the previous.
• Kung Fu Hustle has a rather clearly evident Algorithm, starting with basic Axe Gang members that are countered by the Pig Sty Alley's three martial artists, who are then countered by the Axe Gang's hired Musical Assassins, who are then countered by the Landlord and Landlady, who are in turn countered by the Made of Iron and superhumanly-fast Beast, who is in turn countered by the Heel–Face Turn-ed Unsympathetic Comedy Villain Protagonist. In a slightly jarring subversion, the Beast attempted to use a pile of basic Axe Gang members to soften up the hero before properly fighting him.
• The opposition in Legion gets increasingly stronger: Old lady > an ice cream man (bummer) > about 100 angels > another 500 angels > an uber angel.
• The Lord of the Rings breaks from the trope, with the power level of the foes waxing and waning, depending on on the part of the war and the extent of the power that the Dark Lord decided to display. For example, the first few villains they face are his most terrifying servants the supernatural Nazgul, then they encounter a colony of weak but numerous goblins and a hulking cave troll, and split just before dealing with Saruman's super-orc Uruk-Hai. In the second film they face mostly rank-and-file orcs. In the third, however, the Nazgûl come back with tougher mounts, the colossal mumakills appear, the king of the Nazgûl shows up, and Aragorn ends up dueling an armored troll.
• MonsterVerse: Not in release order, but if the franchise's film installments are put in chronological order, this trope is in full effect until Godzilla vs. Kong. In Kong: Skull Island, the Skullcrawlers are relatively small by Kaiju standards, and Kong who isn't even fully mature yet can beat back hordes of them. In Godzilla (2014), the MUTOs are nearly the size of Godzilla, they create an EMP around themselves which does a lot to cripple the entire U.S. Navy's efforts to track and stop them, and the pair make Godzilla work quite a bit to kill them both and it looks like they nearly win the fight against him. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), Ghidorah is roughly twice the size of Godzilla, he's powerful enough that Godzilla is considered the only force on Earth that can truly rival him (and even then, in a fair fight without Mothra's assistance or watery terrain, Godzilla despite himself does seem to be the underdog), Ghidorah generates an intensifying electricity-filled hurricane around himself merely by being active, and he gains command of all the other Kaiju on the planet except Mothra when Godzilla is briefly incapacitated. Overall Zig-Zagged in Godzilla vs. Kong, where the Big Bad Mechagodzilla is essentially Ghidorah's reincarnation, but is implicitly not quite as powerful as Ghidorah was: lacking Ghidorah's Healing Factor, Energy Absorption and apocalyptic Weather Manipulation, with Word of God and the novelization suggesting the Mecha only succeeded in curb-stomping Godzilla because the latter was already heavily weakened before their fight, and with the heroes successfully killing Mechagodzilla before it can take control of any other Titans.
• Justified in Pacific Rim. The first Kaiju to arrive on Earth are scouts sent to cause as much mayhem as possible. Once humanity began to show resistance, the Precursors responded by sending more advanced and larger Kaiju to deal with the Jaegers. And once the plan of wiping out all Jaegers succeeded, an extermination wave of deadly Kaiju would come to destroy humanity once and for all.
• Pirates of the Caribbean began with the enemies being a crew of cursed undead pirates. The second movie had them facing against primarily the mythological Davy Jones. The third was a battle royal against Davy Jones and the entire East India Company navy, with the God of the Ocean thrown in for good measure. Good thing Elizabeth Took a Level in Badass.
• Subtly toyed with in Point Blank — the hero keeps killing his way up the chain of command without truly getting anywhere.
• In Spider-Man, Flash Thompson is designed as the primary antagonistic character during the beginning of the film, which quickly graduates to Uncle Ben's killer for a short period and then, at long last, the Green Goblin.
  • The Amazing Spider-Man does more-or-less the same thing, though it replaces the Green Goblin with The Lizard.
• Star Wars: Stormtroopers board the Tantive IV in the beginning of A New Hope and several of them promptly get gunned down. Then, Darth Vader enters and lets everyone know who is in charge. It's not until the sequel that we are introduced to Emperor Palpatine, leader of the Galactic Empire.
• Each of the Terminator sequels introduced a more advanced Terminator model as the antagonist. There are plot reasons for this, since Skynet is sending Terminators back into the past from increasingly later points in the future, thus the models are stronger than the previous ones.
  • The T-800 Terminator in The Terminator is a Super Tough hulking Implacable Man Immune to Bullets, pitted against human fighters.
  • The T-1000 model in Terminator 2: Judgment Day looks less physically imposing than the previous one, but it's an illusion. This foe possesses Voluntary Shapeshifting, allowing it to create melee weapons from its own body, impersonate anyone, and will recover from anything to the point of being Nigh-Invulnerable. Not to worry, the humans now have a reprogrammed T-800 on their side.
  • The T-X in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines combines the best traits of both previous models, being a Super Tough solid Terminator skeleton with a liquid metal shapeshifter skin. It also has an in-built plasma cannon in one of its arms, and can hack into most mechanical systems and operate them remotely. The odds are tipped even more in the machines' favor, since the friendly T-850 fully admits that it's a depleted model compared to the T-X.
  • Terminator Salvation, as it's set during the future Robot War, showcases Skynet's entire army, with numerous models of different designs, including gigantic Harvester mechs, regular warriors, and infiltrator prototypes. The movie does play it both ways however, since while the Terminator threat is larger than ever, the Terminators themselves actually seem less efficient than in previous movies because they uncharacteristically hold back during fights due to the protagonists' Plot Armor.
  • Terminator Genisys introduces two new Terminator models, the T-3000 and the T-5000. The T-3000 is even more difficult to destroy than the T-1000 since it's actually a colony of nanomachines taking on a human shape that can shrug off just about anything. It's even more dangerous because it's a roboticized John Connor and thus knows how its targets think. The heroes are at a disadvantage since the Terminator on their side, the Guardian aka "Pops", has suffered wear and tear due to age. The T-5000 is the most advanced Terminator seen so far, being an avatar of Skynet itself. In its brief screen-time it effortlessly kills John Connor by transforming him into a T-3000 and wipes out an entire roomful of Resistance soldiers.

    Gamebooks 

• Oddly subverted in the Lone Wolf gamebooks, then played straight. Lone Wolf actually manages to kill two of the Darklords in the first five books; each was the leader of the Darklords at the time of their deaths. Later, Lone Wolf goes on to fight more powerful opponents. Book 12 justifies the subversion by stating that the Darklords are severely weakened by clean air; they could only fight at full strength in utterly corrupted environments. After the Darklords are defeated, the trope is played straight, as Lone Wolf's victory managed to piss off Naar, the god that created the Darklords in the first place, who if encountered in the first book, results in a Non-Standard Game Over instantly.

    Literature 

• The Beginning After the End mostly plays this straight. While there are more powerful villains who appear ahead of time, in terms of the enemies whom Arthur ends up fighting it starts off with Vritra-backed cultists and mana beasts during the attack on Xyrus Academy. Then once the War Arc begins, Arthur begins fighting Retainers, Vritra-blooded individuals who are able to give even the Lances The Worf Effect. To say nothing of the Scythes, the actual Evil Counterparts to the Lances and the strongest Vritra-blooded mages who are able to participate in the war. However, Arthur does not actually fight any of the Scythes until the end of the war, and even then he barely survives the encounter. Following Arthur Re-Powering himself in his time in the Relictombs and Coming Back Strong, the tables have turned and he is able to easily defeat Scythes. In turn, this coincides with the introduction of even stronger enemies as the Asuras themselves, not just the Vritra Clan, turn out to be the true antagonists. Case in point, Arthur ends up going against an Asuran warrior who in spite of being a boy by Asuran standards was able to overpower the remaining Lances. Then he manages to slaughter a squad of Wraiths, who are Vritra-blooded Asura-killers stronger than the Scythes and viewed as semi-mythical bogeymen by the Alacryans. Following that, Arthur returns to Alacrya in order to take down the Sovereigns, the full-blooded members of the Vritra Clan, as well as the Legacy, a Person of Mass Destruction whose complete mastery over mana makes her an Asura-killing weapon.
• Ciaphas Cain doesn't have the usual progression from one installment to another — they aren't even in chronological order anyway — but instead has a variant where nearly every individual novel starts with facing the threat of one enemy faction, only for it to turn out that an even more dangerous enemy is coming from behind the scenes. This allows ranking them all in an order based on who's the more dangerous enemy (in this series) that can be the hidden threat behind someone else: Tau/Orks < Tyranids < Chaos < Necrons.
• The Camp Half-Blood Series: The Lightning Thief (the first book of Percy Jackson and the Olympians) sets up Ares to be the main bad guy, but this is a ruse, because the titan Kronos was behind it all along! The rest of Percy Jackson and the Olympians is spent trying to stop the ancient titan from coming back and taking over the world, and they end up doing that. In the Sequel Series The Heroes of Olympus, the heroes face off against the primordial Gaia and try to stop her from waking up and wiping out mankind, which they succeed in. In the other Sequel Series The Trials of Apollo, the heroes fight a Corporate Conspiracy of immortal Roman emperors called Triumverate Holdings, who turned out to be the financial backers of Kronos and Gaia.
• In the Codex Alera also by Jim Butcher, the Vord have this as a superpower, which when coupled with the raw intellect of their Queens is just as scary as it sounds. Even though the Vord are defeated in the early books, this just taught the Queen new tricks to use to modify future generations of her children, so that when they come back they're far more formidable. The only way to stop the Vord for good without this happening seems to be to kill the Queen.
  • Also played generally straight in Alera with the three successive invading forces. The Marat are Proud Warrior Race Guy barbarian elves who are very individually formidable but don't really have the logistics to take and hold much of Alera; it also turns out that it's mostly one particularly bloodthirsty leader who wants them fighting Alera in the first place, and once he's removed other leaders are willing to talk things out. Next, the Canim are highly disciplined, technologically advanced wolfmen who succeed in waging a prolonged war along the Aleran coast- at least until it turns out they're only there to try and escape from the even more formidable enemy that assaulted their homeland, which turns out to be the Vord, mentioned above, who nearly destroy the world.
• The Cowboy and the Cossack: The first threat faced by the protagonists is a mere Corrupt Bureaucrat out to shake down the cowboys who has a few goons but is easily beaten and humiliated. Then there is a pack of Savage Wolves, a lot more dangerous, but just doing what comes naturally to wolves. Afterward, they run into a group of Tsarist Cossacks (Rostov and his men belong to a rebellious faction) who terrorize a small region but can be bluffed down from a fight. The final act involves going through Tartar territory and facing an army of perhaps a thousand Blood Knights who kill several members of the party.
• The Dresden Files: Intially played straight, but later averted. After fighting an evil wizard with more ambition and enjoyment for kicking puppies than actual power or brains in the 1st book, Harry Dresden fights werewolves, ghosts, vampires and the faerie queens by the 4th book... and back down to vampires in the 6th. While there's plenty of fighting and Harry and the other protagonists are powerful in their own ways, the drama generally comes from scheming and Harry's personal stake in the matter. The faeries in Proven Guilty would have been no problem for Harry even back in book 1, but the problem was that now he had to handle the person who summoned them as well.
  • Also, the most dangerous antagonists are not always the ones with the greatest raw power. Villains like Nicodemus and Mavra are significant threats not because of their admittedly considerable powers, but because they are cunning, patient, and pragmatic. Tactics and Flaw Exploitation win out over brute force more often than not.
  • Lampshaded when, caught in the middle of a Gambit Pileup between several supernatural heavy hitters, Harry reminisces about Bianca St. Claire, a "mere" high-ranking vampire and powerful sorceress. However much she might have terrified him at the time, she was just peanuts compared to the Physical Gods and Eldritch Abominations he'd tangle with in later books.
• Dungeon of Undeath: Justified by the RPG Mechanics 'Verse. Dungeons grow new floors by leveling up; each new floor raises the base strength of all monsters on that floor at no extra cost. Moreover, Dungeon Crawling is the main source of XP for the dungeon, so it's best for them to provide a slowly escalating threat where any adventurer can delve as deep as their skills allow.
• Harry Potter. Voldemort starts off as a powerless relic of his former glory in the first book and slowly works his way back up to Big Bad over the course of the series. Thus, the threat Harry faces grows without the villain changing. Voldemort also tries to defy this trope at Harry's birth: he set out himself to destroy him.
• Her Majesty's Swarm: The countries the Arachnea goes against conveniently go in the increasing order of resistance strength and atrocities, aside of small factions mixed in, with the Nyrnal Empire having Take Over the World ambitions and strongest units. Then in the middle of Volume 4 Grevillea learns there's another continent even The Empire is afraid of, confirmed to be conquered by the Necrophage faction.
• Justified in the Honor Harrington series. The People's Navy starts out the war with Manticore commanded by a bunch of inept bureaucrats and politically-appointed admirals, but the Committee of Public Safety's coup kicks most of the garbage out of the system and allows the best Havenite admirals to rise to the top...in a purge that also happens to remove their most experienced admirals before they ever come into play. They also implement a system that prevents their best admirals from showing any strategic initiative, including commissars with the authority to override admirals and executions for anyone who fails "pour encourager les autres". It isn't until Esther McQueen becomes Secretary of War and reorganizes the system that they manage any significant strategic victories. When Thomas Theisman overthrows Chairman Saint-Just and restores the original Republic, the State Sec apparatus and political commissars are cleared out entirely, and the finest generals Haven has available can use whatever means they have at their disposal to fight the war with everything they learned in the first war. The second war does not start out well for Manticore.
• The Laundry Files both inverts this and plays it straight, since the villains get progressively less powerful but progressively more dangerous. The villain of the first book was a cosmic-scale Eldritch Abomination that eats universes, but it ended up being defeated without causing any damage to our universe, and without a single casualty. The next villain was an insane millionaire with vast resources trying to reactivate an ancient biological superweapon, both of whom ended up dying before they could do anything beyond killing a few people. Then there was a fairly generic cult of (mostly) ordinary people, who cause the hero far more suffering than any other threat so far, and come within a hairsbreadth of killing him and summoning a demon to destroy the world, necessitating a full-out military operation to defeat, AND they had already horribly murdered countless people. The latest villain was a Sinister Minister and his Corrupt Church, armed only with money, religious fervor, and a few Puppeteer Parasites...who pretty much took over a large chunk of Colorado and tried to summon one of the most powerful and evil forces in the multiverse and (partially) SUCCEEDED. The sixth Laundry Files novel, "The Annihilation Score," uses this trope name as the title for the second section of the book.
• The Legend of Drizzt: Advertising copy for The Ghost King: "When the Spellplague ravages Faerun, Catti-brie falls into a deathlike trance, taking Regis with her. Drizzt, with the most unlikely ally of all at his side, seeks the help of Cadderly — the hero of the recently reissued series The Cleric Quintet. But even as his beloved's life hangs by a thread, Drizzt finds himself facing his most powerful and elusive foe, the twisted Crenshinibon, the demonic Crystal Shard he believed had been destroyed years ago. And the dragon he thought was destroyed along with it. And the mind flayer. And the seven liches that created the Crystal Shard in the first place. All in one godlike entity that calls itself the Ghost King." To calibrate the algorithm, it is the last book in R.A. Salvatore's eighth Forgotten Realms series. But then, Drizzt is a D&D hero, with complete stats — and quite strong enough to face a squid thingy and a dragon and a group of liches.
• Lensman works up from interplanetary gangsters to an evil older than the formation of the solar system whose goal was domination of all intelligent life in the universe. These books justified the algorithm by revealing in each book that the Big Bad of this book was The Man Behind the Man of last book's Big Bad. Then again, the nesting that would be present in the beginning is somewhat mind-boggling. ^note The prologue of the first book describes it. This is a Retcon. The original Lensman series consisted of Galactic Patrol, Gray Lensman, Second Stage Lensman, and Children of the Lens, all originally published in Astounding Stories magazine. In this version, the Eddorians weren't revealed as The Men Behind the Men Behind the Men Behind the Men until the last set of stories. When E. E. "Doc" Smith sold the rights to a book publisher, his editor felt the lack of foreshadowing made the series a bit silly and asked Smith to write a prequel introducing the Eddorians from the beginning. Smith took an old, unrelated novel of his, Triplanetary, added the prologue and tweaked the plot to fit the Lensman universe. He then wrote First Lensman to bridge Triplanetary with the original series.
• Zig-Zagged in Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, by Tamsyn Muir. The aversion is that the witch that created the titular tower candidly says that she prefers to put the strongest enemy first, which means the first floor of the tower contains a diamond-encrusted dragon; as a result, every prince who tries to save the titular princess dies immediately. The zig-zag comes from the fact that this means the princess has to save herself by making her way down through the tower from the top, resulting in the actual story playing this trope straight as she fights enemies in roughly ascending order of threat.
• In Septimus Heap, the threats the protagonists are up to against increse with progressing story, from the inefficient DomDaniel of Magyk over Queen Etheldredda to Tertius Fume and the Darke Domaine in Darke.
  • Although, at the same time this is also sort of inverted: DomDaniel was actually the most powerful villain faced in the series, being an ultra-powerful undead sorcerer trying to conquer the world, but due to being mostly killed before the series started, he has little of his old power and has to act through his less-capable apprentices. Etheldredda and Fume were not only ghosts, but were also just ordinary jerks acting on petty grudges who happened to have found great powers. Finally, the true villain of Darke was actually Merrin Meredith, a Butt-Monkey and Joke Character, who had happened to find a source of Darke power, but ultimately was just a childish, nasty loser.
• Serge Storms: A typical book will have Anti-Hero Serge spend much of the book getting agitated by and killing strangers or casual acquaintances, like a statutory rapist, a mugger, a Corrupt Corporate Executive, a nasty neighbor, a price gouger during a disaster, a live-in nurse robbing his patient, or an animal abuser, while slowly building up to a confrontation with a gang of hardened killers, a lone Ax-Crazy psychopath, or the mastermind or Dragon-in-Chief of a cartel or a conspiracy of mostly Non Action Guys, with that all coming to a head in a chaotic final battle. Other times, a few books like Atomic Lobster, Nuclear Jellyfish, Gator-a-Go, and Tiger Shrimp Tango instead have Serge mainly focus his wrath on one criminal group throughout the book and start picking off members as he works his way up to the Rank Scales with Asskicking (and cruelty) leader. This actually frequently works out in the villain's favor (not that they often have enough time to realize it): Serge enjoys killing people in painful and elaborate death traps, but in a little over half the books, the villains he faces in the climax get a much quicker death due to all the flying bullets (sometimes being fired by other interested parties like the Girl of the Week, the police, a rival gang, or a Badass Bystander) and nearby witnesses making it difficult for Serge to abduct the main villain and take his time with them.
• The Skulduggery Pleasant series plays this straight for the first three books, and zig-zags it for the rest of the series: Mevolent, the overlord of evil mages who was supposedly the biggest threat the magic world had faced so far, died long before the series began. The villain of the first book, Nefarian Serpine, was just one of his lieutenants, but was also extremely dangerous and managed to get his hands on a source of godlike power. Then came the second of the three lieutenants, Baron Vengeous, who explicitly invokes this trope when Skulduggery claims that if Serpine was a 10/10 on the scale of evil, Vengeous was an 11. The third book Double Subverts this by at first setting up the villain as a trio of Mevolent's minor officers who's leader doesn't even have magic, but then the Faceless Ones, the villains that all the other villains were serving, who are powerful enough to destroy human civilization as easy as stepping on an ant colony, show up. The fourth and fifth books abruptly subvert the Algorithm by putting the heroes up against a gang of minor villains who are out for revenge and a swarm of evil ghosts with Demonic Possession abilities, and then the sixth book plays it straight by including no less than three supervillain Necromancers (The Deathbringer, Lord Vile and Darquesse) with the capacity to destroy the world (although the stronger two, Lord Vile and Darquesse, are not interested in that at this point). The seventh book introduces a new God-like mage, who just wants to make the world a better place by giving everyone magic — even though everyone (including an alternate version of him believes this is a bad idea and the Mortals will use it to kill each other). To make things worse, three mortal teenagers who he gave magic to as an experiment are clear sociopaths, killing people for fun and becoming a serious threat to mages. After they're all defeated, the eighth book introduces a new enemy who has been hinted at since Book 5 — the magical communities in other worlds, who are so fed up with the Mages in Ireland constantly coming close to letting the apocalypse happen that they've decided to take things into their own hands and are trying to take over — in other words, the new enemy is normal mages — hundreds of millions of them. Finally, the ninth book reintroduces Darquesse, who's been occasionally appearing for half the series — but now she's stronger than ever before. So yeah, the series plays with this trope a lot.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The X-Wing Series actually inverts this, which fits with the premise. As the books follow a squadron of starfighter pilots through the Rebel Alliance/New Republic's transformation from a guerrilla movement fighting the galactic government, to a government in its own right trying to pacify the galaxy, it makes sense that their enemies would be less and less powerful as time goes by.
    • In the Rogue Squadron quadrilogy, the enemy is Ysanne Isard, the head of Imperial Intelligence who's outmaneuvered and eliminated all of her rivals in the wake of Palpatine and Darth Vader's death, and now rules as Empress in all but name. The Empire she commands is already much less impressive than the one we saw in the movies, having lost much of its territory to either the Rebels or breakaway warlord factions. Still, at this point she's probably the most powerful individual in the galaxy.
    • In the Wraith Squadron trilogy, the enemy is Warlord Zsinj. He's the most powerful of the warlords that broke away from the Empire, and an enormous thorn in the side of the New Republic, but for all that his fiefdom isn't nearly as powerful as the Empire itself was. (As demonstrated by the fact that he's now begun adopting many of the tactics the Rebels used in their early days, including alliances with the fringe and large but covert financial networks to fund themselves).
    • Isard's Revenge is essentially an epilogue to the Rogue quadrilogy; Isard is the main villain again, but she's a shadow of her former self, allied with another ex-Imperial warlord, Krennel, who's nowhere near as powerful or as smart as Zsinj. Both are disposed of without too much trouble.
    • In Starfighters of Adumar, the stakes are the allegiance of one planet, Adumar, which would be a valuable boon to either side's war effort, but is unlikely to reverse the tide of the civil war itself. The main enemy in this case isn't even the Imperials anymore, but Tomer Darpen, a Rogue Agent of the New Republic colluding with a local tyrant to help him take over the planet.
    • Finally, Mercy Kill, set several decades later with a new generation of Wraiths, has the heroes go up against General Thaal, a corrupt New Republic officer with ties to the Lecersen Conspiracy (a plot by Imperial hard-liners to overthrow the New Republic and Imperial Remnant governments and restore traditional Imperial rule). He might count as a reversal of the trend... except that by the time of the book, the conspiracy has already been exposed and brought down by others (see Fate of the Jedi). At this stage, Thaal's only plan is to take a bunch of his loyal troops and go From Camouflage to Criminal, breaking away from the New Republic in order to reappear under a new identity as a CEO/crime kingpin.
  • The New Jedi Order novel Enemy Lines I: Rebel Dream has Wedge Antilles trying to string along a merely average Yuuzhan Vong commander at Borleias in order to buy time for the rest of the fleet to regroup after the fall of Coruscant. But due to a snafu, they accidentally kill him (prompting Tycho Celchu to snark that "Wedge Antilles was so good he couldn't lose when he tried to."), and Warmaster Tsavong Lah responds by sending his own father Czulkang Lah, a far more effective CO, to command the reinforcements.
• Generally averted in Tolkien's Legendarium — the supernatural powers of evil tend to get weaker, not stronger, as the timeline advances. The supernatural powers of good also get weaker, however (or at least less accessible) in accord with the general transition of Middle-Earth from a mythological world to a more realistic one. If you start with The Hobbit and then go to The Lord of the Rings, however, it's played straight, going from the Big Bad being a dragon (dangerous on his own to be sure, but lacking minions or the ambition to range far from home without proper incentive) to an Evil Overlord with world-conquering ambition.
  • Although at the very end of The Lord of the Rings, the heroes have to face one last battle: a handful of bandits in the Shire. After the climax and death of Sauron, this seems comparatively petty.
• Played Straight (and Justified) in The Wheel of Time. The first Forsaken are Aginor and Balthamael, who are taken care off quite easily. Be'lal proves a bit of a harder challenge, managing to control Tear for a while and shortly having a few characters captured. With Asmodean, Rand only barely wins the struggle, but Asmodean causes no other problems, while Moghedien is also defeated (though not for good). In book 5, Lanfear nearly manages to control Rand before she is defeated, and Caemlyn has to be freed from Rhavin, and in the next book Rand is captured for a while before freed, though his capturers are, strictly spoken, not evil. In book 7, Rand has to free Illian from Sammael, who did put up something of a battle before he was defeated (albeit rather disappointingly). In Path of Daggers a few bad guys manage to scare Rand into hidiing for the next book, and in book 11 Semirhage nearly manages to kill Rand. In book 12, she nearly does so again and does manage to make him near-totally insane until his epiphany. In book 13, Mesaana is inches away from either enslaving Egwene or managing to get Egwene killed in her sleep (though, to be fair, the assassins weren't hers). In book 14, Graendal nearly destroys the armies of the Light by corrupting their commanders to make small, but eventually fatal mistakes and the problems are only barely in time discovered, with heavy losses incurred. Then, Demandred is very nearly victorious against the forces of Light in the Last Battle before he is killed, leaving his army without head while The Cavalry joins the fight (which would not have been enough to turn the tide had Demandred still lived) and Cyndane is literally an arm's length away from stopping Rand at the crucial moment, which would have resulted in a win for the Dark One.
  • Also played straight in The Eye Of The World, where the protagonists first have to put up with a hundred Trolloks then a few hundreds plus Mashadar, and then the Blight plus two Forsaken.
• The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign is a deliberate aversion of this. The main villain, the White Queen, is active in the very first volume and in all subsequent ones. She is always the Man Behind the Man to the human villains of each volume, who also don't follow a linear progression of power. The reason why Kyousuke doesn't get immediately curb-stomped, despite this trope being subverted, is because the White Queen is in love with him and deliberately gives him opportunities to win.
• In Worm, the villains don't strictly follow this, for example the fight with Coil comes well after both Leviathan and the S9, but overall fights get harder, culminating with Golden Morning, the fight with Scion.
• In Wyrm, the dragon variations that the protagonists have to fight get progressively harder, ending with Wyrm itself — although, since they've found Eltanin by then, Wyrm isn't srictly one of the dragons required by the game.

    Live-Action TV 

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • The show generally had a far more dangerous Big Bad each season than the last. Good thing Adam didn't show up in season 1. By the end Buffy faces the personified root of all evil. The entire series is a coming of age story and the threats get bigger as they increase in metaphoric resonance with being grown-up.
  • Also subverted in Season 6. In contrast to demon-god Glory, The Trio does little to stir the Scooby Gang until the latter half of the season. Still, Warren does succeed in killing Tara, even if by accident, which serves as the catalyst to awaken Dark Willow, who comes dangerously close to destroying the Earth.
    • If you consider the Big Bad of each season as the character that causes the most suffering to the Scoobies, then Willow is the Big Bad for Season 6, hands down, being the primary cause of the majority of the suffering endured by all the Scoobies, including herself.
  • In Season 8 the Big Bad was the universe itself!
• Arrowverse
  • Arrow: The first four seasons had each Big Bad stronger than the last, and whose goal became increasingly grandiose in design. The Big Bad for the fifth season was actually the weakest thus far in the series, and his goal was positively minuscule in comparison to the previous four.
    • Season One: Malcolm Merlyn, the Dark Archer, who handed Oliver his ass every time they fought during that season. Later seasons revealed he was just an Elite Mook for the League of Assassins. His goal was to destroy the Glades of Star(ling) City in retaliation for his wife's death twenty years prior.
    • Season Two: Slade Wilson, who was as skilled as Malcolm (if not more so) but was also empowered by the Mirakuru, which enhanced his speed and strength on top of driving him insane. Slade wished to destroy Star(ling) city as revenge for Oliver's role in Shado's death.
    • Season Three: Ra's al Ghul, World's Best Warrior and leader of the League of Assassins. Ra's skill and experience alone was enough to match Mirakuru!Slade, if not surpass him. Ra's main objective was to get Oliver to succeed him as the Demon's Head, and part of the initiation ceremony was the destruction of Star(ling) City through use of the Alpha-Omega Virus.
    • Season Four: Damien Darhk, a contemporary and former rival of Ra's, whose skill as a combatant was actually just a bit below his. However, Darhk was more dangerous, as he had magic at his disposal, meaning that unless you were a meta, you were screwed. His goal was the most grandiose of all — nuking the world.
  • The Flash (2014) has used this for the first three seasons.
    • The first Big Bad was Eobard Thawne/Reverse-Flash, who was able to successfully defeat Barry in their first clashes. However, Thawne's speed is fluctuating and requires constant use of tachyonic technology to keep it stable. He also suffers the drawback of being unable to kill Barry at all, since he needs him to become fast enough to create a breach of the space-time continuum that Thawne can get back home through.
    • In Season Two, Zoom is not only faster than Barry, but manages to successfully steal his speed for a time. He has several abilities unavailable to Thawne, including the ability to toss lightning and create clones of himself through time travel. Finally, Zoom has an entire army of metahumans that he can pit against Team Flash as he pleases.
    • Season Three features Savitar, who spends most of his screen time bound to the Speed Force. He is so impossibly fast that only speedsters like the Flash can see the wisps of light he leaves behind. He can use the powers of the Philospher's Stone to invade the minds of others and pit the members of Team Flash against one another. Finally, he is revealed to be a time remnant of Future Barry Allen, giving him an intimate knowledge of Team Flash that no other villain had. No matter what plan Barry comes up with to stop him, Savitar will simply draw on whatever new memories he gains and plan around it. Only the Heroic Sacrifice of H.R. allows the heroes to disrupt Savitar's plan and kill him once and for all.
• Super Sentai runs on this, with the villains usually finding ways to upgrade or create new and more powerful Monsters of the Week throughout the season.
  • Himitsu Sentai Gorenger: The Black Cross Army's Elite Four generals appear in reverse order of how competent and dangerous they are. Whenever the Black Cross Führer didn't like the way one his current general was running things, he'd summon one next more stronger than them to take their place.
  • Dai Sentai Goggle Five began the tradition of the villains giving their monster-making process a Mid-Season Upgrade so it created even stronger monsters.
  • The villains of Choujuu Sentai Liveman were students at an Academy of Evil who spent the entire series researching ways to make themselves more intelligent and defeat the Liveman, which naturally correlates to the monsters they send out gradually getting stronger as time went on. The mid-season Climax Boss took the Livemen getting two new members to defeat, and Kemp and Mazenda's final Brain Beasts were both far stronger than the ones they'd fought previously.
  • Ninpuu Sentai Hurricaneger makes this easy to keep track of with the Seven Dark Spears, who are ranked weakest-to-strongest and fought in that order. Stronger monsters also get sent out depending on which Spear is in the lead.
  • Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger has a subversion in that one of the villain's strongest monsters, Dragondoran, was the first one to be send out. However, its scheme was to hide among human society and establish itself as a successful human fortune teller. When the time was right, it would execute its plan to sacrifice its customers to resurrect the Big Bad. This is the reason it only appeared near the finale.
  • Mahou Sentai Magiranger has multiple evil commanders succeeding each other, who come with their own category of monsters, with the succeeding group being explicitly stronger than the preceding one. The series starts with General Branken, commanding the mindless Hades Beasts. These are succeeded by Meemy, who commands the sentient Hades Beastmen. Near the end of his run, Meemy summons the insanely strong Hades Beasmen Kings. After Meemy and this group are defeated, they are replaced with the Hades Gods of Infershia.
  • Juken Sentai Gekiranger justifies this by having Rio, the first Big Bad being inexperienced in the evil martial art Rinjuken Akugata. To become stronger, he periodically resurrects long dead masters of said art, who come with their own set of stronger monsters. Rio himself becomes a pupil to these masters, becoming stronger over the course of the series.
  • Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger justifies this by having the Big Bad start off sealed, with the villains getting stronger the more he gets thawed out.
  • Uchu Sentai Kyuranger: The Kyurangers start off fighting Daikaan, Jark Matter officials who govern planets, before facing the Karo, the Jark Matter governors of solar systems. They then fight and defeat the Vice-Shoguns before facing more Karo, who take the place of the Daikaan in Monster of the Week fights, as they're now all competing to become the new Vice-Shoguns by defeating the Kyurangers.
• Power Rangers, being an adaptation of Super Sentai usually uses this as well, with the villains choosing to create/summon progressively stronger monsters as the season goes on and the Rangers grow stronger. Sometimes, they justify this by having found a new magical or technological breakthrough in their monster creation process.
  • The seasons Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers to Power Rangers in Space are very obvious at this with their Big Bads. Whenever a new Big Bad arrives, they are always said to be a bigger threat compared to the previous one, forcing the Rangers to get new powers and Zords.
  • Power Rangers Mystic Force follows a similar formula to Magiranger with the strengths of its monsters, but not to the explicit extent of it, making no real distinction in the groups of monsters.
  • In Power Rangers Jungle Fury, each group of major villains are stronger than the last. The first group were "The five fingers of poison" that although strong were not a match for Dai-shi in Jarrod's body, then the Overlords Jellica and Carnisoar appeared who were stronger than Dai-shi initially, then the Overlord Grizzaka appeared who He was stronger than the previous Overlords, after Grizzaka's defeat the Phantom Beast Generals appeared who were much stronger than Grizzaka, and in the final episode Dai-Shi appears in his original body who is the most powerful villain of the season.
  • Also justified in Power Rangers RPM (which is superb at justifying, or at least lampshading, standard Power Rangers tropes) with the assertion that the evil Venjix computer virus is developing increasingly advanced technology over time. The early monsters relied on their quirks as opposed to raw power and strength. That explains why they were at the front. Not only that, but the entire PR villain formula Venjix had been following was in fact a smokescreen for his real plan of filling Corinth with hybrid sleeper agents.
• Stargate-verse: At first glance it might even seem like the Stargate Program was responsible for Earth being attacked by the Goa'uld — Earth being safely ignored by them until the SGC used the Stargate and wound up killing Ra. However, if the stargate had never been dug up in the first place, then humanity would never have (re)discovered the Goa'uld until humans discovered FTL travel on their own probably hundreds of years from now... and the Goa'uld would probably have been out there waiting for them. So in the case of the overall series' problem itself, the SGC didn't create the villain, just drew their attention prematurely.
  • Stargate SG-1 started with Apophis. When they finally got rid of him, even stronger Goa'uld showed up. But that's okay, the team got good at dispatching Goa'uld. So Anubis shows up, with the full knowledge of the godlike beings who had created the stargates. But they took care of him — though it was a close one. For almost a whole month there is peace. Then the godlike Ori turn up.

    This progression is grounded in the plot by Tok'ra. He says that every time the Tau'ri defeat a System Lord an even worse one inevitably takes his or her place. By killing Ra, and others, SG-1 kept disrupting the Goa'uld balance of power, allowing more aggressive Goa'uld to sweep up now-leaderless forces and rise in threat level. They didn't cause Anubis, but probably sped up his timetable. They did make the Replicators more dangerous, by giving the nanotech precursor of the Replicators to the Asgard, from whom it was then captured. A self-application of Unwanted Assistance, the Ori only found out about the Milky Way galaxy when Daniel Jackson and Vala accidentally warped over to their home galaxy and caused a scene. An unfortunate coincidence, perhaps, but still their doing.

  • The Stargate Atlantis team woke up the Wraith and turned on the Asurans' hostility switch. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero! indeed. The last episode of Atlantis was essentially the concept of when the villains skip a few levels past where the heroes are expecting.
• The first season finale of Heroes has Molly tell us at point-blank range that there is another, much bigger bad than Sylar, who hasn't shown up yet. It turns out that the one Molly's scared of isn't even the Big Bad of Season 2; just the disciple of someone nastier... Adam Monroe, arguably the primary founder of The Company. However, in contrast to Sylar (a power-stealer with a dozen different ways to murder you), Adam is simply an extremely cunning and manipulative man who's very good at getting people to do what he wants. Oh, and who's also got a Healing Factor that makes him nigh-immortal.
  • Also, the algorithm looks to be subverted as of the second season finale: Big Bad Adam becomes Sealed Evil in a Can again, and his successor appears to be none other than Sylar.
  • Volume 3 had Arthur Petrelli, a power-draining Evil Overlord who (after stealing all of Peter's abilities) was essentially a walking Physical God.
  • Out the window with Volume 4, where the Big Bad is a non-powered government agent who leads SWAT teams with dart guns. Then again, Sylar's helping them...
  • Volume 5 has Samuel Sullivan, the superhuman Antichrist, whose Earthbending ability is powered by the number of followers he has and who, with enough followers, is strong enough to crack the Earth in half.
  • Generally speaking, apart from volume 2 and 5, it hasn't mattered who the Big Bad is, given Sylar's tendency to hijack the plot. This was rumoured to supposed to happen in volume 2 as well, but the season was left unfinished due to the 2007 writer's strike.
• 24: The first season is about Drazen's personal vendetta against Jack and Palmer. The second is about a threatened nuclear attack on Los Angeles. This escalates to a successful nuclear attack at the beginning of Season 6. The trope is used within individual seasons as well. In season 1, the main antagonists of the first few hours are a pair of college kids, followed by a local gangster, and building all the way up to a very well-funded international terrorist group, plotting for the release of an ex-dictator with the help of a group of heavily-armed mercenaries. And it happens from season to season, with the Big Bad of season four actually working for the Big Bad of season five, with that Big Bad working for a minor villain in season six... and as it turns out, most of those villains were actually working for the Big Bad of season seven.
• Played with on Charmed, which actually followed a Bell Curve of Evil. At first, the villains grew progressively more powerful, from warlocks, to demons, to the Source of All Evil himself. Once the Source of All Evil was blown to bits three times over halfway through the show's run things went a bit downhill. Later Big Bads included a Well-Intentioned Extremist angel, the Source's slightly less powerful rival, and finally the show's last Big Bad were the heroine's Evil Counterparts, who were roughly at the same power level they were.
• Reversed on Mission: Impossible, largely as a result of plot decay. While in the first few seasons the IMF went up against international terrorists, tyrannical dictators, and the Red Menace, later seasons mostly found them up against the Mob.
• In the first season of Lost, the villains are mainly unseen: the monster in the pilot, then Ethan, about whom not much is known. The main antagonist is arguably "the unknown". The second and third seasons are more about the Others. The fourth season introduced the freighties, who made the Others look more like the "good guys" they've always claimed to be. The fifth season introduced the series' true Big Bad, the immortal, pure evil Man in Black, aka The Monster. His only hindrance was that he couldn't kill the heroes directly, but he racked up a huge body count during the final season and made even master manipulator Ben look weak and powerless.
• The new series of Doctor Who did this with their season finales. In Series 1, a far future Earth is invaded by Daleks. In the second, present day Earth is invaded first by Cyberman and then by the Daleks. In Series 3, the Master's invasion of modern day Earth turns it into a dystopian wasteland. In Series 4, Davros threatens the disintegration of all universes in all of reality. The first season led by Steven Moffat upped the threat again, with all the universes being threatened of having never existed in the first place . After that, though, the series have gone back and forth in terms of seriousness.
• Farscape had an odd way of upping the ante each season while making old villains "join the team". First season had Captain Bialar Crais pursuing the protagonists with his one warship. At the end of the first season, Crais is usurped by Scorpius, a rival commander of the Peacekeeper force, and Crais becomes an increasingly trustworthy ally over the next two seasons. By the start of the fourth season, Scorpius is on the outs due to being spectacularly humiliated by the heroes and the machinations of the more politically powerful Commandant Grayza, so he starts to hitch rides and help out the heroes, although he remains much more evil than Crais. The fourth season then does a switch half-way through and makes the evil reptilian Scarrans the main bad guys, supplanting the Peacekeepers for top evil.
• Supernatural: Seasons 1-2 initially had the Yellow-Eyed Demon as the Big Bad, who gets replaced by the more powerful Lilith in seasons 3-4, and then by the Devil himself in season 5. Lampshaded, along with Villain Pedigree, near the end of season five when Sam asks Dean if he remembers when they just fought things like wendigos. When it comes to the big bads, the usual downside of the Man Behind the Man structure is averted, as the lower-ranking villain usually has to free the higher-ranking villain before they can step in. Yellow-Eyes released Lilith, who went on to release Lucifer. In all, the writers are kind of shameless in using this trope. A brief timeline of the show's enemies by season:
  • In season 1, the Winchesters were fighting regular monsters since way back when Demons were introduced as the ultimate evil that could only be killed by the Colt. The first mini-boss was Meg, a low-ranking manager, and the first Big Bad was a high ranking demon, who doesn't die until the end of season 2.
  • Season 3 introduces Lilith, the highest-ranking demon of them all, but also a magic knife that one-shots any demon that isn't a Big Bad, meaning that by this time, formerly invincible/immortal demons of Meg's rank or sometimes higher would routinely get one-shotted before they can say a full sentence.
  • In season 4, we're introduced to angels, who are at the time understood to be the most powerful beings in the universe other than God Himself, and it's outright stated that nothing can kill them except another angel.
  • By season 5, this trope into overdrive as humans are killing angels wholesale with a different magic knife. It even gets to the point where Sam and Dean can kill low-level gods with relative ease.
  • Season 6 subverted this trope somewhat, but "the mother of all monsters" is still pretty high-ranking. A corrupted angel ascends to becoming a Physical God at the end, but he quickly loses his powers because his virtual omnipotence was too much of a Story-Breaker Power.
  • Season 7 introduced the Leviathans as beings so powerful and dangerous that God locked them away in purgatory to stop them from killing angels. Though this is mostly an Informed Ability because as it turns out, the Leviathans are pretty weak, routinely getting stopped by detergent, thus inverting the trope.
  • By season 8 the show's writers clearly became aware of this problem after the Lucifer arc, so while angels are still getting killed by the thousands off-screen, this trope seems to have slowed down.
  • The Big Bad of Season Eleven is a clear example of this trope, the first completely clear example of a villain powerful enough that she topped Lucifer. Lucifer can't claim to be equal to God (although he might wish he had such a status), and he was defeated without God breaking his usual policy of nonintervention. But The Darkness is God's sister, and truly seems to be as powerful as God. She poses so much more of a threat that God not only decides to fight her with his full power, but accepts that he needs the help of Lucifer (and other similarly untrustworthy allies) in order to do it.
• The Kamen Rider series is no stranger to this trope, although it became more noticeable during the Heisei Era when they started giving the heroes Super Modes at a certain point in the show when a new tier of bad guy showed up.
  • In Kamen Rider Kuuga the villainous Gurongi are a warrior race with a strong class system. It is only honorable that a fight must start with the weakest and after they're finished the next strongest group takes their turn.
  • The 52 Undead in Kamen Rider Blade are sorted in terms of power along the lines of a card deck, with the strongest being the "Royal Club Undead" with face card designations.
  • Kamen Rider Double also pulls this off, but in twist. The Sonozakis don't take on Double one by one, but instead, someone else with ties to the family. One of those ties being in a relationship with Saeko, one of the family members.
  • In Kamen Rider Fourze, the first half of the series revolves around the baddies trying to find potential candidates into becoming one of their own (labelled as a "Horoscope"). One of the main villains gets the power to identify who can evolve from a normal Zodiarts into a Horoscope faster, and so, normal Zodiarts are gone, replaced by Horoscopes as MOTW.
  • Kamen Rider Wizard: The Lesser Phantoms get much stronger after Gremlin steps forward and starts deliberately choosing strong ones to send out, which leads to Medusa choosing stronger ones in an effort to outdo him. It's eventually revealed the Big Bad Wiseman invoked this trope, as he didn't actually want the Phantoms to succeed and only used them to locate successful wizards, as well as grow Haruto's power by having him defeat them. If he had sent his strongest Phantoms out right away, he wouldn't have been able to make Haruto strong enough for his true plans.
  • Kamen Rider Gaim is a strange case in that rather than having a single villain faction, different groups of antagonists show up throughout the show's run and unseat one another. In the initial arc, Rider battles are comparable to Mons games, with Inves occasionally playing Monster of the Week. Then the Yggdrasill Corporation, creator of the Transformation Trinkets, entered the stage with newer, more powerful belts held by their Elite Four who could defeat any of the normal Riders. After that, the Inves's leaders, the Overlords show up with control over Helheim Forest and begin smacking around the New Generation Riders. In the final stretch, several Riders vie for the Golden Fruit, including Ryoma Sengoku and Mitsuzane "Micchy" Kureshima. In the very end it comes down to a battle between The Hero Kouta and The Rival Kaito over who'll get the Fruit and the power to reshape the world in their image. While all this jockeying for position is going on, Helheim Forest just quietly hangs in the background as the biggest threat to the entire planet, with some characters wanting to drop all this petty squabbling and team up to do something about it.
  • Kamen Rider Ex-Aid uses a similar structure to Gaim (successive villains and an overarching background threat), but less complicated. At the start of the show, the Big Bad apparent is Kuroto Dan, Genm Corporation's Corrupt Corporate Executive and owner of a truly staggering God complex, who manipulates both humans and Bugsters to create his "ultimate video game", Kamen Rider Chronicle. Then his Dragon Parado plays his hand, the Bugsters take over Genm Corp, and they release Chronicle with the intent of killing off humanity as payback for their cruelty towards game characters. Then out of nowhere Kuroto's father Masamune Dan, Genm Corp's previous CEO, shows up and reveals that he's had his own plans set into motion since the rest of the cast were children, claiming for himself the power of Chronicle's Game-Breaker character, Kamen Rider Chronus. Kuroto and Parado pull Heel Face Turns (of varying sincerity), and even Chronicle's supposedly invincible Big Bad Gamedeus is nothing more than a bump in the road compared to Masamune...especially after he absorbs Gamedeus when the Kamen Riders start approaching his level of power.
  • Kamen Rider Build plays with this since the Big Bad shows up from the start and is actually far more powerful than the heroes at the start of the show, but he's not as powerful as he could be and needs the heroes to get stronger for his own plan to break that limit, so he instead passes himself off a a Dragon with an Agenda, but otherwise plays it straight. The first villains, the organization Faust, start out sending Smash monsters, with the leaders Night Rogue and Blood Stalk showing up from time to time to challenge the heroes. Eventually, Faust falls apart, but by this point they've already succeeded in their goal of starting a civil war, which leads to the next villains, the Hokuto region, who not only have a Quirky Miniboss Squad made up of humans who can turn into powerful Smash, but also their own Kamen Rider. After they're dealt with, the Seito region throws their hat into the fray and sends in their own even more powerful Kamen Rider along with knockoffs of the villains from the Summer movie, forcing the Hokuto Kamen Rider to team up with the heroes for any of them to stand a chance. However, their military backer Nanba Heavy Industries (who've been a Greater-Scope Villain up to this point), takes over operations once it seems like Seito can't beat the heroes, which leads to not only replacing the Mecha-Mooks with Elite Mooks, but also Blood Stalk returning under their employ, more powerful than ever. It quickly becomes apparent though, that Nanba, along with all the other villains, were all just pawns strung along by Blood Stalk/Evolt as part of his plans. Said plans soon start falling into place, as Evolt becomes the insanely powerful Kamen Rider Evol, and spends the next few episodes drastically spiking in power just when it seems the heroes can stand up to him at his previous level, until he becomes so powerful that he decides Nanba Industries is no longer necessary.
  • Kamen Rider Zi-O has as its Monster of the Week faction the Another Riders, corrupted versions of past Riders’ powers given to people who stand for everything the originals stood against. The hero can defeat them as long as he uses the same power set as they do. After a while, the Big Bad Schwartz gets Genre Savvy and creates Another Riders that can’t have their powers copied by Zi-O, forcing him to get a Super Mode to bypass the restriction… which is what Schwartz was hoping for, intending to raise Zi-O’s powers to a point where he can steal all the Riders’ powers at once and Take Over the World. After this, he returns to sending out the ones who can be defeated easily, and when Zi-O gets all the powers he was collecting, Schwartz becomes an Another Rider of equal power, and sticks to using previous Dark Riders as his minions, since Zi-O’s powers aren’t as curb-stompy against them.
  • Kamen Rider Zero-One starts out with the Magia, out-of-control robots hacked by a terrorist group. Once all the possible Magia have been dealt with, the terrorists face the Riders themselves, getting captured and temporarily killed respectively. Then The Man Behind the Man makes his appearance, not only proving himself stronger than anything the heroes currently possess, but bringing with him a set of Evil Knockoff versions of The Lancer.
  • Kamen Rider Saber: Touma and the gang start off fighting Megid of the week, but as they get more powerful and uncover more of the overarching plot they find themselves faced by stronger and stronger foes, starting with Kamen Rider Calibur. He's followed by more antagonistic Kamen Riders, as well as the Megid executives after they take turns getting upgraded. The power scale eventually gets so skewed that Touma has to unlock a Reality Warper Super Mode to defeat the Big Bad, who ends up being a Disc-One Final Boss.
  • Kamen Rider Revice starts off rather tame, but late into the series the villains get so strong that the heroes practically have to unlock a new Super Mode every other episode to keep up. Even the Mooks they produce end up becoming far stronger than the heroes in their base forms.
  • Kamen Rider Geats has two major antagonist factions: the Jyamato, who are the standard Kamen Rider monsters for this series, and the Desire Grand Prix, the organization that sets up the fights with Jyamato for the sake of the Deadly Game it shares its name with. Both of them generally follow the rule, even though they generally go back and forth in importance. The Jyamato are constantly evolving, not only growing stronger but smarter as well. Meanwhile, the DGP at first is content to sit on the sidelines, and the worst the protagonists have to deal with is backstabbing teammates. However, as the game starts going Off the Rails, the DGP staff start looking to eliminate the protagonists to get the game back on track, starting with bringing in their own Kamen Rider PunkJack. Once it doesn't look like he'll be able to do the job however, the Game Master is revealed to have his own unique Driver, which lets him transform into the much more powerful Kamen Rider Glare. Beyond him, his boss and game producer Niramu also has his own version of the Driver that lets him become the even more powerful Kamen Rider Gazer and his boss Suel can transform into the even more powerful Suel Gazer.
• Seigi No Symbol Condorman: Condorman starts off fighting the monster minions of Satan Gametsku before eventually facing Gametsku himself. Gametsku is just a lower level executive of the Monster Clan and after his defeat, Condorman goes up against several progressively more powerful Monster Clan executives before confronting Salamander, the head of the Monster Clan's East Asia branch and the superior of all the monsters he previously fought. Following Salamander's final defeat, Condorman then has to face his replacement before going up against the Monster Clan's three highest-ranking commanders and then finally King Monster.
• Justified in Seven Star Fighting God Guyferd. Crown spends most of the series researching ways to create stronger monsters, so the foes they send out to fight Guyferd naturally get more and more powerful as Crown makes new breakthroughs. Each Story Arc is usually punctuated by a boss battle against a foe stronger than all the monsters fought previously.
• The Thick of It: Over the three series Malcolm's enemies have become progressively more powerful, and his conflicts with them have become more interesting as a result. In the first series Malcolm only had to contend with incompetent politicians and civil servants. By the third he had gained a genuinely powerful Arch-Enemy.

    Tabletop Games 

• Dungeons & Dragons: This varies from game to game, but the standard setting doesn't really have a Big Bad per se. Instead, the characters are assumed to be adventurers going on adventure after adventure with no real connection between them, and it makes sense they choose adventures that match their abilities.
• Pathfinder: The Giantslayer adventure path gradually ratchets up the threat level posed by the evil humanoids that the party fights. The adventure starts off by pitting the players against orcs, then moves on to ogres and hill giants, then assorted evil giant-kin and stone giants. The next major step has the players raid a frost giant war-camp, followed by an assault against a fire giant fortress. The final installment heads into the Big Bad's floating fortress, where the party faces his cloud and taiga giant minions before the final showdown.
• Warhammer Fantasy: Actively sought out by Dwarf Slayers, dwarfs who committed some unforgivable offense (at least, unforgivable by dwarf law) and atone by finding the biggest, ugliest, meanest monster they can find (something Warhammer has no shortage of) and getting into a Mutual Kill with it. The problem is that dwarfs are stubborn little bastards and more often than not fail at the "mutual" part, and so they move on to the next biggest monster (since they also consider failing to get themselves killed a further act to atone for), hence the presence of Trollslayers, Giantslayers, Dragonslayers, Daemonslayers, etc. If after all that they still haven't succeeded, they end up going north into the Chaos Wastes, which usually does the trick. Usually.
• Warhammer 40,000: The Necrons do this in reaction to strong attacks. If the scouting parties the Necrons send first fail, they send another more powerful one, than another and another till all resistance is dead. Since the Necrons are a race of undead machines, and they are the most advanced in the galaxy, they have yet to meet resistance that would warrant awaking their more powerful weapons of war.

    Webcomics 

• Averted by Demon King Krodin in 4 Cut Hero, who immediately assembles a strike force of his strongest warriors and teleports in to murder heroes the moment he learns about them in order to keep them from getting any stronger.
• Homestuck's major villains follow the Algorithm. Jack Noir is the biggest immediate threat in Acts 4 and 5, and he becomes nearly invincible once he gets Becquerel's powers. Act 5 also introduces Doc Scratch as a manipulator of the story's events, who is literally near-omniscient and has much of Jack's same powers but is much more of an intellectual threat than a physical threat. Act 6's Arc Villain is the Condesce, who lacks Doc Scratch's omniscience and Jack's raw power by herself, but proves to be a bigger threat with her use of Mind Control and animal control on Jade, who also has Jack's First Guardian powers. Then there is Lord English as the overall Big Bad of the whole story, who is far more powerful and eldritch than any of the previous villains and had the Condesce as his servant. Played with in The Homestuck Epilogues, whose main villain can manipulate others through narration but is otherwise not nearly as powerful as Lord English. As said in the author's commentary, each villain (except the Condesce) is also intended to be more meta than the last: Jack is introduced with Leaning on the Fourth Wall where he watches the heroes through screens but has no actual metanarrative powers, Doc Scratch takes over the narrative but he keeps himself out of the main story and narrates over it passively, Lord English's past self actively steals the spotlight away from the heroes to himself and corrupts the narrative with glitches until John fixes them, and in the Epilogues Ultimate Dirk can directly control other people and actions that happen in the story just through his words.
• Inverted in L's Empire. The first Arc Villain was a Physical God who was basically invulnerable. The second one was untouchable under normal circumstances, had powerful followers and an army of Mooks but had no way to harm people by herself. The third one just had an army wielding hammers who only remained a threat because he could dimension hop at will. The fourth was a set of jokes who only got as far as they did because their targets kept beating them up before the main characters could get to them. Played straight with the fifth and final one who was an in-universe case of Only the Author Can Save Them Now. Their plans however played it straight (seeking power for powers sake -> conquering an entire world -> causing a Class X-5 apocalypse (twice) -> Time Stands Still).
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Lampshade hung in the first book Dungeon Crawlin' Fools. The evil lich Xykon orders his minions to be placed throughout the dungeon in order of weakest to strongest as they approach his lair and orders them to be placed in small groups only. He does this expecting to be entertained as he watches the PCs hack their way through the dungeon on his scrying ball. Also, he secretly wants them to reach him. The trope is averted later on: after 600 strips, despite being defeated by an unarmed Fighter and acting like a buffoonish Harmless Villain, Xykon himself proves to be a Not-So-Harmless Villain and remains the most powerful and dangerous foe in the series, with the possible exception of the Monster in the Darkness or the Snarl. Well, the Three Fiends might be more powerful, and are certainly far more cunning, but it's unclear at this stage if they'll take over the role of Big Bad or stay content playing Chessmaster on the side.
  • Interestingly, aside from Team Evil and possibly the Three Fiends (who have yet to show their full hand), this has mostly been played straight thus far. The first notable villains the Order encountered was the Linear Guild, who attacked them twice. Later, they dealt with Kubota, a corrupt aristocrat threatening to kill Lord Hinjo, and Bozzok, the leader of the Greysky City Thieves' Guild. Next, they encounter Tarquin, Elan's father whose team subtly controls the Western Continent with an iron fist. And in book 6, there is the High Priest of Hel, serving the Goddess of Death who wants to bring about The End of the World as We Know It.
• Lampshade hung (yet again) in this RPG World strip.
• This is built in to the world of Tower of God, which is a sort of Role-Playing Game 'Verse without the RPG. For one thing, this means that characters get stronger and stronger, as if they are gaining levels. People climbing the Tower are called Regulars, and they are constantly tested at successively higher floors with higher and higher difficulty. Regulars are ranked from E-class to A-class in order of ascending power, and there's a lot of variation within a class, too. Regulars of higher levels are constantly becoming more powerful, apparently due to a combination of competition and increasing standards for advancement and the use of Shinsu. Those who reach the "top" — the floor of Jahad's palace — become Rankers, who gain even greater powers. They are have a rank that's simply a number indicating how far they are from being number one among Rankers. The top 1% are termed High Rankers. Usually, the higher one's rank, the more powerful that Ranker is. Some of the highest ranks are held by "Irregulars", people so powerful they can basically break all the rules of the Tower and wipe the floor with the lesser Physical Gods. Also at the top are King Jahad and the heads of the Ten Great Families, who rule the Tower. That's to say nothing of the Tower's Guardians/Administrators, who gave those rulers their power. Basically, there's a ready-made roster of individuals ranging from powerless to minor Cosmic Entity for the heroes to confront. Of course, not everyone in the Tower is automatically evil or hostile, but it's not a very nice place, and eventually, the story seems to start building up Jahad as the overall Big Bad. The protagonist Baam starts out as a beginning Regular and starts working his way up with numerous companions. Since Baam has special talents that enable him to become powerful very quickly after he gets past a slow start, he's usually overpowered for his current level — he can Curb Stomp a group of D-class Regulars in seconds after just becoming one himself, for example — so he tends to be pitted against the most powerful individuals available wherever he is. Since much more powerful beings do exist in the Tower, he occasionally has a brush with someone he has absolutely no chance of beating, like the Irregular Urek Mazino, but never really has to fight one of them properly, at least not without having someone equally powerful to help.
• The antagonists of Weak Hero form a hierarchy in their union that is steadily taken down from the weakest to the strongest. First is Jimmy Bae, a low-ranked thug with a personal grudge against the heroes. After him is Forrest, who proves a bigger threat due to his divide-and-conquer strategy. Next is Wolf, who's the first fighter to give Gray a serious run for his money. After all of them is Jake Ji, the second strongest fighter in the series behind the leader of the Union, Donald Na himself, who's so powerful that he beat down Big Ben without taking a single hit.
• Inverted in The Devil King Is Bored; due to his titular boredom, the Devil King immediately appears before the heroes when they arrive in Hell and opens with his ultimate attack, Blood Requiem, beating them instantly.

    Web Originals 

• As the Dimensional Guardians from the web fiction serial Dimension Heroes continue on their journey, the Dark Overlords, despite having equal control over Creturia, seem to escalate in power. Interestingly, their forces do as well.
• Lampshaded in The Legend of Neil. Wizzrobe lures Neil into the first dungeon full of relatively weak monsters, but wonders why he didn't lead him instead to dungeon 7, which is where Ganon's strongest minions dwell.
• The Evil Overlord List averts this trope:

  80. If my weakest troops fail to eliminate a hero, I will send out my best troops instead of wasting time with progressively stronger ones as he gets closer and closer to my fortress.

• Linkara mocks this in a guest appearance on The Isle of Rangoon when he refuses to defeat The Mysterious Malefactor. He points out that his villains have progressed from a semi-incompetent Mad Scientist to a reality-destroying Eldritch Abomination, and advises the characters to be happy with their "mostly-harmless schmuck of a villain".
• Eclipse has one of the quickest escalations on record. The Starter Villain was a bartender who was taken out by both heroines in each of the first two chapters. The second major villain personally eradicated an entire country and singlehandedly wiped out most of the supporting cast by that point.
• RWBY: The first three volumes of the show sees The Heavy enacting a You Can't Thwart Stage One plan for the Big Bad. The first villain introduced is the Starter Villain who introduces the audience to the setting and becomes the window through which the heroes become involved in the villainous plot. Volume 2 sees his boss, The Heavy, who is briefly seen but not identified in the pilot episode, take direct control of the villainous plan, as the threat level for the heroes escalates when they investigate the Fantastic Terrorists being used as mooks. The villainous plan reaches its final stages in Volume 3 with a full-blown invasion and several character deaths; the volumes closes with the formal introduction of the Big Bad declaring this was just the first move in a larger, more horrific plan; from this point on the villains that are faced depend mostly on exactly what the Big Bad is trying to achieve at any given stage. The Big Bad is revealed to be the Female Narrator that introduces the pilot episode with hints of the darker plot line to come.
• SCP-2424 ("Hostile Walrus Cyborg ''research ongoing''"). SCP-2424 is a Video Game Boss Battle opponent who exists in Real Life. He says of himself: "I'm the first, the easiest, I'm supposed to be. I've been destroyed more times than I care to remember." He also refers to other opponents who are stronger.
• Parodied in Reflets d'Acide, with the son "Pom, Pom, Pom", which starts with a bunch of adventurers singing about how they like to go to the forest to slaughter kobolds. As the song progresses, the kobolds are replaced by goblins, which they also slay, and then by orcs, who they prefer to hide from. Finally, trolls arrive, causing them to pull a Screw This, I'm Outta Here!.

    Western Animation 

• Avatar: The Last Airbender is an interesting variation. They started with Anti-Villain Prince Zuko, who was superseded by Admiral Zhao as the main threat. After Zhao's death came Zuko's Dark Action Girl sister Princess Azula, the main threat for the second season, who posed far more of a threat than Zuko and Zhao combined, had none of the noble qualities her older brother had, and whom Zuko rejoined in the season finale. Team Avatar's inability to adjust to her threat level quickly enough led to her dealing them a crushing defeat at the end of Book 2. The variation comes from Fire Lord Ozai being identified as the Big Bad from the very start of the series, both the audience and the protagonists fully aware that no matter how many enemies they face, he would remain their ultimate goal. In addition, Azula remains a massive threat for the rest of the series, even after her father takes a more active role.
• Ben 10
  • Zig-Zagged, but mostly Inverted in Ben 10, where each progressive seasons' Big Bad would actually be less powerful than the previous one (along with having smaller plots and fewer episodes dedicated to their plot arcs). Season 1's Big Bad was Ben's Arch-Enemy, the most feared alien in the galaxy, bent on galactic conquest, who punches mountains apart and bodyslams buildings hard enough to make them explode. The following seasons featured as Big Bads an 11-year-old who shared the hero's superpowers and whose sole goal was getting revenge on the hero, an alien ghost who "only" wanted to Take Over the World, and finally a guy in Powered Armor who only appeared in one episode (albeit a 2-part, 1 hour one), who had to assemble a team of previous secondary villains to do all his fighting for him, and whose big plan was to steal a Applied Phlebotinum battery that allowed his power armor to shoot Eye Beams. However, the battery is stated to be powerful enough to blow up a continent, so for the short time he has it, he does have the most raw power of the four(He just doesn't keep it for very long).
  • Inverted in Ben 10: Alien Force. The first main threat are the Highbreed, a species of seemingly Always Chaotic Evil Space Nazis. Each Highbreed individually is as strong or stronger than most of Ben's heavy-hitting aliens, and their grand plan is to eradicate all life in the universe other than themselves in a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum. The second and final threat, Vilgax is supposedly more powerful than before and has gained a few new tricks from conquering 10 planets, but feels like he's gone through serious Villain Decay. He is only trying to conquer worlds, has no grand master plan to take over the universe. Vilgax's physical strength is only comparable to a single highbreed, and the last threat was a whole army of them.
  • Played mostly straight in Ben 10: Ultimate Alien. The first main villain is Aggregor, a brilliant tactician who is always one step ahead of the heroes. He eventually gains the combined power of five powerful aliens from another galaxy, becomes stronger than most of Ben's ultimate forms, and begins a plan to ascend to godhood. The second main villain is Ultimate Kevin, one of the main heroes turned into a monster of incredible power to stop aggregor after he crossed the Godzilla Threshold. While the scope of Ultimate Kevin's plans are way lower than Aggregor's, his raw power is far superior. Then, the final main villains are Dagon, an Eldritch Abomination of unimaginable power that defeats Ultimate Way Big easily, and Vilgax again, who becomes The Starscream Dragon Ascendant to Dagon and steals the power of Dagon for himself.
  • Zig-Zagged in Ben 10: Omniverse. The first villain, Khyber, is decently strong with a pet who can turn into the natural predators of many of Ben's aliens. The second villain, Malware, is far more threatening, and becomes powerful enough to destroy planets and defeat Way Big with ease. After that come the Incurseans, which are reasonably strong but not even comparable to Khyber's Pet in terms of physical danger. However, they do run a massive interstellar empire, and control an army of evil Way Bigs. After that comes Albedo with the Ultimatrix, which is more powerful than Khyber, his pet, and the incurseans physically, but weaker than the Way Bads and Malware, and only wants to regain his true form and take Azmuth's brain. Then, there is Vilgax and his army of alternate bens. Vilgax is just normal Vilgax, and these Bens don't use any of Ben's strongest aliens. However, Vilgax's true goal here is to destroy the entire multiverse to rule the one world without an omnitrix-wielder, which is definitely a step up from every past villain. And he succeeds. Until he doesn't. After him come the rooters, the weakest and least threatening villains in the series. Then there is Mad Ben, one of the Bens from Vilgax's army, now taking over as the main threat. Individually, he shows more power than he did previously(Actually using Ben's more powerful aliens). However, his threat level and power don't nearly compare to the previous villains. Finally, there is Maltruant, who shows cosmic tier power and time manipulation, and wants to remake the universe in his own image. He has clearly comparable power to Malware, and his plan is almost as high-stakes as Vilgax, so he is probably on average the most threatening villain in the series.
• In Code Lyoko, this is justified as XANA is a Snowballing Threat, whose power increases every time they return to the past. So, though the Lyoko Warriors get better at fighting them, new and tougher monsters appear on Lyoko, and the specters sent to the real world gain greater powers and versatility over time.
• Danny Phantom.
  • In the series, Danny's first major foe was a Lethal Chef who did little more then throw a hissy fit over a changed menu. Slowly, but surely he combats more appropriate villains ranging from a Hunter of Monsters, the Big Bad, a sadistic emotion sucker, and his own Bad Future self. By the last season, he's battling ghosts with godlike powers.
  • In the movies, Danny Phantom played with this one a bit. In each successive movie, the villain's physical power and general imposingness decreased, but their actual threat level increased. The first movie villain, Pariah Dark, was by far the most powerful character in the series (four Dannys in four Humongous Mecha could barely restrain his de-powered form), yet he only managed to control the town for a day. Next came Danny's Magnificent Bastard future self, followed by a frail ringmaster named Freakshow who nonetheless managed to warp the entire country to his liking. The biggest bad of the series ultimately turns out to be an asteroid.
• Surprisingly, The Fairly OddParents!...Timmy first starts off having to deal with mean babysitters and school bullies, eventually upgraded to his crazy fairy-hunting teacher. Now he routinely has to deal with the Evil Plan-loving Pixies and Anti-Fairies who seem to be content with nothing less than the total domination and remaking of both Earth and the magical world. This reflects his getting deeper into the world of magic, where the stakes are higher: later on there is The Darkness, which is a threat to the normal galaxy and the magical universe. Timmy is thrown right into the midst of it.
• Played straight with the epic multi-parters on Gargoyles. "Awakening" had Demona and Xanatos, who are certainly dangerous enemies but weren't really trying to do anything beyond controlling Goliath and his clan for use in their future schemes. In "City of Stone", Demona has acquired a spell that lets her turn the entire human population of New York to stone, making her much more dangerous. In "Avalon", the enemy is the Archmage, who is made even more powerful by the Artifact of Doom he's toting. In "The Gathering", the clan is up against Oberon, a being with godlike powers and no morals beyond his immediate whims. Finally in "Hunter's Moon", Demona's back again, this time with a virus that can destroy all non-gargoyle life on earth, making her even more dangerous than Oberon, even though she's far less powerful. Averted in the bulk of the series, though, where they face enemies of varying power levels throughout.
• Jackie Chan Adventures justifies this by saying that, due to the cosmic Balance of Good and Evil, if one evil is destroyed, it causes another, stronger evil to fill in the gap (the heroes only receive the Old Master's warning right after the villain's been destroyed, which leads to their Sorting Algorithm issues). Other than that, the series more or less kept Shendu as the strongest foe of choice.
• Justice League makes it clear that they formed (and reformed) the League because they anticipated progressively stronger enemies. In a neat inversion, the Legion of Doom was organized specifically because the League was so powerful and the bad guys needed some sort of fraternity to put them on a similar level.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic looked to be heading this way, but then averted it.
  • First, there was Nightmare Moon. Likely more powerful than her sister Princess Celestia, she has done everything in her power to hinder the main cast, but underestimated them and eventually was overcome once they acquired the Elements of Harmony.
  • Then came Discord, a Reality Warper who was so powerful enough that Celestia and Luna had to team up to defeat him last time. Against the main characters he's able to neutralize the Elements of Harmony twice (once by stealing them, and once by breaking the friendship that powered them).
  • This is averted with the next villain however, Queen Chrysalis, who is substantially weaker than Discord and possibly weaker than Nightmare Moon. However, she is also a shapeshifting Emotion Eater who successfully brainwashed the captain of the Royal Guard to expose Canterlot to her invading horde, and who—as a result of absorbing all the love surrounding a wedding—beat Celestia in a fair fight. She’s also clever enough to quickly prevent the main cast from acquiring the Elements of Harmony, thus increasing the tension through denying them most of the resources they previously counted on.
  • The next villain, King Sombra, is hard to place. He's certainly stronger than Chrysalis (who even powered up struggled with Celestia, while King Sombra took both Celestia and Luna to take out), it's unclear just how powerful he actually is as he spends most of the two-parter unable to directly attack the group. However, he's clearly more dangerous than any preceding villain due to being Crazy-Prepared to the point his Near-Villain Victory comes without him actually needing to do anything.
  • Lord Tirek with his ability to drain the powers of others has the potential to become enormously powerful, even if he doesn't start that way, and by the end, he has become more powerful than anyone else in the show so far.
  • Season 5 throws us another straight out aversion in Starlight Glimmer, who's the first major villain to be just another normal pony. A very skilled and smart pony, but at the time of her debut episode only influential enough to threaten one small village (which doesn't make her any less scary). In the Season 5 finale, however, Starlight proves to be a much greater threat. Twilight notes that Starlight is one of the most magically talented ponies she knows: she has rewritten a time travel spell to let her significantly alter time, and has mastered self-levitation magic and can fight Princess Twilight to a standstill in magic, possibly for an eternity. Said time spell causes several apocalyptic futures, the last of which is even worse than every villain before.
  • Season 6 plays with the algorithm. The main villain of the finale is Queen Chrysalis again, but this time, not only does she manage to kidnap most of the heroes and replace them with changeling impersonators before anyone realizes something's wrong, but the heroes that are left are forced to venture into the Changeling Hive, where only changeling magic works. Her plan only falls apart because Starlight Glimmer, who she didn't know about, was out of town when the swap occured and not only caught on to the swap, but managed to gather a handful of other people who Chrysalis didn't know to replace, and even then it's a very Near-Villain Victory.
  • Season 7 has No Antagonist for most of the season, but finale brings in the Pony of Shadows, a threat that required the Pillars of Old Equestria to seal themselves away with it in order to contain it. However, it ends up being an aversion, as the Pony of Shadows ends up being weakened from its long imprisonment, and most of the conflict arround it revolves arround whether it can be redeemed.
  • Season 8 downright inverts this trope with Cozy Glow, who is only a filly, albeit an extremely psychopathic one, and whose scheme almost results in Equestria losing all of its magic.
  • Season 9 introduces Grogar, who is established to be a Monster Progenitor and the most powerful evil force in Equestria, bringing together a Legion of Doom of all non-reformed villains. This then gets subverted with the plot twist that "Grogar" was just Discord impersonating the historic villain, and the villains of the Grand Finale are the already-established Chrysalis, Tirek and Cozy Glow.
• In an aversion, while he's received some upgrades over the years, Megabyte from ReBoot is not only still the main villain, but with the exception of the now-deleted virus Daemon, he seems have become the most powerful virus in existence!
• Teen Titans (2003) both uses and ultimately subverts this with its seasonal Big Bads
  • Season 1: Slade is a very cunning Empowered Badass Normal against a superpowered team. He can take any of them one-on-one, but against the whole team he gets curbstomped badly. As a result, he spends most of his time hiding in the shadows and plotting.
  • Season 2: Slade is back, but this time he's got Terra, one of the most powerful characters in the show, working for him. He loses only when she turns on him.
  • Season 3: Brother Blood has a wide range of Psychic Powers that let him control large groups of minions and handle the entire team with minimal effort. It takes the power of Deus ex Machina to finish him off.
  • Season 4: Trigon is the demonic personification of evil and is every bit as tough as that implies. Once he's out of his can, he causes Hell on Earth in moments and had every intention of conquering the entire universe. He only goes down at all because Raven is his daughter.
  • Season 5: The Brain breaks the pattern. He's very smart but physically helpless. Even with his Quirky Miniboss Squad and Legion of Doom allowing him to present a global threat, he's still not on Trigon's power or danger level.
• The Guild of Calamitous Intent of The Venture Bros. fame. Enrolled villains (and protagonists alike) are ranked in order of their threat level; a low-ranking villain such as The Monarch is a good fit for a wash-up scientist like Doctor Venture, while a full-fledged superhero such as Captain Sunshine needs an equally sinister antagonist to match him. Villains and protagonists can increase (or decrease) in rank if their skills improve (or degenerate). And it's all good for keeping the bureaucracy happy, and making sure there's no (well... fewer...) outright murders of one or the other.
• Subverted in the cartoon adaptation of W.I.T.C.H., where the relative power levels of Big Bads, Dragons, and Mooks seem to spike up and down from time to time. The most powerful evil entity in the series is Prince Phobos, fought by the girls at the end of season one and a bit at the end of season two. He's always dangerous, and always requires the guardians to pull some kind of plan to beat. Season two's villain is Nerissa, less powerful but more cunning than Phobos. Season two's Quirky Miniboss Squads elevate in power throughout the season (from Phobos' former mooks to custom-created elemental monsters and finally to the former Guardians themselves), but despite this, Nerissa's power remains generally the same, even as she absorbs Hearts throughout the season. Nerissa frequently runs from the guardians rather than fight them, as she gets trounced whenever she faces them directly. She's still a threat because of her planning, however. By the end of it all, the final battle of season two is against a bad guy who's as powerful as Phobos and Nerissa combined: Cedric, who has consumed Phobos in order to absorb his and Nerissa's powers, along with the powers of the former Guardians, but because he doesn't know how to shoot elements, he goes down in a few minutes in spectacular fashion.
  • Once again, they never actually fight Phobos at his normal level, as all fights between him and the main characters have been when he's gained some sort of power boost.
• In X-Men: Evolution, the team starts out mostly going up against the Brotherhood, a gang of mutants who are powerful, but not terribly competent (or, for the most part, terribly evil), making them fairly easy opponents. At the end of the first season they meet Magneto, who is far more powerful, cunning, and professional than his pawns, and he only gets later on when he starts being accompanied by his elite Acolytes. In the third and fourth seasons, though, the focus shifts to Apocalypse, the most powerful mutant ever, capable of defeating almost any other character in the show with ease and possessing world-spanning plans.
• Xiaolin Showdown features a strong example of this, here is a list of the big bads as they vary from season to season:
  • S1: Jack Spicer a self-proclaimed "evil boy genius" who, despite being whiny and idiotic, still put up a good fight, and kept the monks on their toes throughout the first season. Ever since then, outside of a few Throw the Dog a Bone ,oments, he's treated as little more than a nuisance, that the monks make short work of, especially in season 3. Although he did get an epic Not-So-Harmless Villain moment in the first part of the Grand Finale when he became a Future Badass ruler of the world, and even captured the other Heylin villains, all just because Omi was gone.
  • S1-S3: Wuya is a sentient Sealed Evil in a Can, remaining a (mostly)-harmless ghost for the majority of the Show's run, but when her true form is finally revealed in the season 1 finale, she's Nigh-Invulnerable and singlehandedly conquers the World. They defeat her by getting a MacGuffin from the last person who beat her, that turns her back into a ghost. She's once again re-fleshed in season 3 albeit with her powers nerfed by another villain for being too untrustworthy. Still she's a worthy foe whenever she's fought.
  • S2: Chase Young is introduced as an unstoppable martial arts master with a taste for dragons, he soon blossoms into the new big bad for season 2, enacting a nefarious scheme to turn one of the heroes to the Heylin Way. He's so competent, he's never been bested in straight 1v1 combat by the main characters. While still playing a very active part in season 3, he eventually gets overshadowed by....
  • S3: Hannibal Roy Bean the show's embodiment of true evil, the only character that has no trace of likability to him. His theoretical victory over the protagonists is described (by Chase Young, no less) as being WORSE than the end of the world. Far...far worse. While not exactly stronger than Chase, he's easily more dangerous.
• Thundercats had a form. While they kept using most of the same major villains later in the show, the mutants became more of a threat under Ratar-o's more competent leadership. Mum-ra gained the Sword of Plun-darr and lost his weakness to mirrors. And we were introduced to a new group of villains in the Luna-taks, who were so powerful as a group they usually only showed up singly or in pairs so the Thundercats would have a chance of winning.
• Star Wars Rebels ultimately uses this formula, at least in its first season. The pilot, Spark of Rebellion, begins with easily-conquered stormtroopers who can't do squat against the rebels. In the midst of the episode, we are introduced to Agent Kallus, a formidable ISB agent. In the third episode of the main series, the Inquisitor makes his first real appearance, and the heroes barely escape with their lives. In the midst of the season, Grand Moff Tarkin appears, and executes his most incompetent soldiers, proving that he means business. And come season's end, the Inquisitor is dead, but he is replaced by Darth Vader. It's unlikely the trope will be played straight from this point on (Darth Vader is the Empire's greatest warrior, after all), but time will tell.
  • Season 2 starts off averting this with Darth Vader curb stomping all the heroes, their Rebellion cell and undoing all their hard work on Lothal. Then played straight with the heroes facing off first against Imperial characters such as Agent Kallus, then the Seventh Sister and Fifth Brother are introduced to replace the Inquisitor. The season switches plays with this for several episodes by switching threats, until the finale re-introduces Maul. Who quickly kills the Inquisitors and proves much more cunning, aiming the seduce Ezra to the Dark Side and blinding Kanan. Last of all, Darth Vader returns near the end, forcing Ahoska to hold the line while the others escape.
  • Season 3 looks to continue this with the introduction of Grand Admiral Thrawn as the new major threat and Maul still around from the previous season's finale.
• Wander over Yonder starts off with Lord Hater as the Big Bad. Despite his power, Hater was childish, incompetent, insecure, short-tempered and overall more of a comedic villain than anything. In fact, by the time Season 2 rolls around, he had been upgraded to Anti-Hero.
  • Then Season 2 brings along a new Big Bad by the name of Lord Dominator. A sadistic Omnicidal Maniac who wants to destroy the galaxy simply For the Evulz. Not only is she the first character to outright murder another sympathetic character onscreen, she also basically succeeds in her plan, destroying every planet in the galaxy save one, though the planets do end up springing back to life after some time.
• In Steven Universe, it first appears that there is no greater threat than the monsters the Crystal Gems fight early on, which are soon revealed to be simply other Gems who have lost their minds. However, once the plot about the Crystal Gems' rebellion against Homeworld is revealed, a Homeworld Gem called Peridot becomes the first major recurring villain. She poses a decent threat for a while but is fairly easily redeemed and befriended once the Gems are able to capture her unarmed and realize that she isn't truly evil, just indoctrinated to Homeworld's views. This leaves Peridot's escort Jasper, who is much more dangerous and personally invested in fighting the Crystal Gems, to fill that role. After her defeat, Topaz and Aquamarine show up and are an even bigger threat. And beyond them, there's the leaders of all the Homeworld Gems, the Great Diamond Authority.

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