Evil Powerlevels?

Music for the Article

The Evil Powerlevels has ancient roots. Possibly the earliest example, at least in the English language, is the 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, an easy fight is just bad drama, so you have to consistently increase the threat the heroes face. This results in the Evil Powerlevels. 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-Climatic if the hero defeated the most powerful and spent the remaining time contending with not-quite-as-Cool.

There are several ways to justify this; due to lowered difficulty, the current villain usually forgot to increase his power while the heroes are out collecting the other villians, thereby outclassing him. This at least provides an in-story explanation for the 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. 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.

Occasionally, a particularly strong or evil villain will ignore this trope and arrive early to beat the hell out of the heroes, only to leave them alive because they aren't entirely evil. Villains who use this as a tool are often Not So Harmless Villains. Sometimes, rather than toss a stronger villain at the heroes the writer might decide to surprise them with a stragedy that uses different tactics than brute force.

Sometimes he's not as powerful as he seems, for example though being the first to exaust the hero to a life threatning extent through brute force, he's actually lower on the power levles than the two previous Big Bads.

A problem comes up if a long-running show goes past its first Grand Finale. We may believe that the 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 Power Behind the Throne, making this structure more sensible.

Here is one musical example to show how powerful some villians become

To start The music was really Cool and different. I never heard that before!!!!!!!!!
The article was good. but most of all I liked the end where you explain the short coming of a long Running show.

Good job