Why was Wario a villain in Brawl's Subspace Emissary?

CM30

CM30

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Or at least, on board with the bad guys for much of it?

Cause he's not really evil, and generally doesn't do anything for shadowy behind the scenes villains in his own games. Indeed, the only time I remember him being evil somewhat close to malicious was in the intro to Mario Power Tennis:



And that's all played in a very comedic way.

This wasn't, and it didn't fit the personality Smash itself gave him either.

So what's going on? Why was Wario a villain in Smash Bros Brawl's single player mode anyway?
 
@CM30 why do you keep making useless threads? Most of what you post could be posted in one big Wario theories thread.
 
Well, simple enough, Wario is a bad guy, always has been, always will be!
And sure, you can say he saves a princess in Wario Land 4 or that he saves a whole world in Wario Land 3 and Wario Land Shake it, but I mean, why did he save them in the first place? Well, again, simple enough: He was in for the money, any saving the world or damsels in distress is just an aftermath of his greed.
I personally like this idea of a bad guy doing great deeds as a side effect of his own demise. Reminds me how Bowser ends up saving the world alongside Mario for the sole purpose of proving Peach his worth and to keep his position as King. It's just so funny and charming!
 
Robin said:
Well, simple enough, Wario is a bad guy, always has been, always will be!
And sure, you can say he saves a princess in Wario Land 4 or that he saves a whole world in Wario Land 3 and Wario Land Shake it, but I mean, why did he save them in the first place? Well, again, simple enough: He was in for the money, any saving the world or damsels in distress is just an aftermath of his greed.
I personally like this idea of a bad guy doing great deeds as a side effect of his own demise. Reminds me how Bowser ends up saving the world alongside Mario for the sole purpose of proving Peach his worth and to keep his position as King. It's just so funny and charming!
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The thing is though that Wario's bad deeds of the past had clear motivations. Wario's actions are driven by his own benefit, he stole Mario's castle because he was jealous and wanted his own, which continues into Wario Land 1, where he wants to retrieve the Peach statue from Captain Syrup, but only so he could demand a ransom, that would pay him a castle.

Wario in Subspace has no shown motivation, he's a bad guy for the sake of it and the scene with him and the Ness trophy in the rain is so generic and ''look at how eviiiiiiiil he is!''' that he doesn't even resemble the goofy anti-Mario from Super Mario Land 2, Mario & Wario or Wario's Woods in any way, then again it's just another example of his Smash characterization being complete shite.

Wario can work as an antagonist, but Subspace has him as a bad guy just to increase the villain roster, he's an anti-hero at the end of the day, he can be a bad guy, but you gotta give him a clear reason to be one or else it just begs the question why he's doing the Smash Browz equivalent of trapping and stealing people's souls, when he could be out hunting for treasure instead, after all that get's him clear profit, which is what Wario actually cares about.
 
warelander said:
The thing is though that Wario's bad deeds of the past had clear motivations. Wario's actions are driven by his own benefit, he stole Mario's castle because he was jealous and wanted his own, which continues into Wario Land 1, where he wants to retrieve the Peach statue from Captain Syrup, but only so he could demand a ransom, that would pay him a castle.

Wario in Subspace has no shown motivation, he's a bad guy for the sake of it and the scene with him and the Ness trophy in the rain is so generic and ''look at how eviiiiiiiil he is!''' that he doesn't even resemble the goofy anti-Mario from Super Mario Land 2, Mario & Wario or Wario's Woods in any way, then again it's just another example of his Smash characterization being complete shite.

Wario can work as an antagonist, but Subspace has him as a bad guy just to increase the villain roster, he's an anti-hero at the end of the day, he can be a bad guy, but you gotta give him a clear reason to be one or else it just begs the question why he's doing the Smash Browz equivalent of trapping and stealing people's souls, when he could be out hunting for treasure instead, after all that get's him clear profit, which is what Wario actually cares about.
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Yes, you're right. I was trying to make a point why Wario is a bad guy in the SSE, but as for his motives, I can't say. Honeslty, as much as I like the SSE and see all characters together, I don't like how empty they feel. It's not just Wario, but all characters seem to not have a true motive, they're just mashed in without reason. I guess they had to make up something to have all characters in.
Okay, true, their personalities match them well and is well represented, but their motives are the problem. If they tried to transmit motive through subtext, then they did a pretty poor job doing it, 'cause I don't see any.
 
Agreed, the lack of a clear motive is the problem.

I could see Wario kidnapping the various trophy-transformed characters if he thought there was money in it for him. Wario's done a number of outright villainous things in the franchise (SML2, Wario's Woods, Mario & Wario) and even in his protagonist appearances he sometimes leans more into thievery than treasure-hunting (Master of Disguise has him robbing museums and cruise liners instead of ancient ruins or pirate ships for example). And in the Mario spinoff games, him and Waluigi sometimes take a sort of "dastardly whiplash" antagonistic bent.

So him being villainous in Smash isn't inherently an issue; Him being villainous without any clear direction is.
 
Wario is just doing a different "kind" of evil in SSE. He is nothing like Bowser or Ganondorf, who seem to be closer to the Master Hand/Tabuu. So while Bowser and Ganondorf are into "greater" evil with cool battleships, armies and such, Wario goes for lesser, "chaotic" evil with just small things. Somebody had to do it.
Or he might not even know what exactly he is doing. He is super easy to provoke/impress, especially if there's profit for him. Somebody said that Trophies = $$$, so Wario is in it. At the end he realises that this work is dumb and goes back to his anti-hero self.
 
Originally, I was going to say because it was written by Sakurai (who seems know very little about Wario), but it turns out it was written by Kazushige Nojima. My guess is that perhaps he wasn't too familiar with Wario's character? I wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Mechano on this one, I think it was kind of dumb that Wario wasn't given any reason to do what he did in SSE.

The only in-universe explanation I can think of is that perhaps the Trophies have slightly different personalities than their "real life" counterparts. For example, Mario seems stuck in a perpetual state of anger, but otherwise retains most of his qualities from the actual Mario. Bowser seemed completely intent with serving Master Hand, whereas canon Bowser is second in command to none. Ganondorf was willing to team up with the rest of the cast to defeat Tabuu, and didn't betray them afterwards, etc.
 
CM30 said:
Or at least, on board with the bad guys for much of it?

Cause he's not really evil, and generally doesn't do anything for shadowy behind the scenes villains in his own games. Indeed, the only time I remember him being evil somewhat close to malicious was in the intro to Mario Power Tennis:



And that's all played in a very comedic way.

This wasn't, and it didn't fit the personality Smash itself gave him either.

So what's going on? Why was Wario a villain in Smash Bros Brawl's single player mode anyway?
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Well, that's who Wario kinda is. In the Subspace, he started a villian. But now then more an anti-hero. That is exactly who Wario became, a jerk but then.... less a jerk. Plus, he's not really bad in it. He's not aiming for anything, but just doing so. Maybe like what @Shoonsh said, there was probably a money profit in it.
 
Wario in SSE still seemed like the Wario I know. He kinda seemed like he wanted to do things for his own benefit, but in this case it's at the cost of others. He's greedy after all. As long as something benefits him, he does it. In the first Wario Land, he steals tresure from captain syrup so that he gets rich, but In Wario Land 3, he helped out the hidden figure once he heard that any treasure he finds is his to keep.
 
He isn't really evil, he's just kinda going around and collecting other characters for his trophy collection.
 
I don't think he was presented as evil. He did evil things, but he most likely did those for his own benifits, like he always does. He wasn't really on anyone's team (not on Tabuus and the bad guys' team), so he probably killed people in order to collect the trophies for riches. As seen in the Wario Land games he does things only for his own goods (throwing away the queen in Shake It to get the coin sack, for instance).

Plus, Brawl had an intentional dark theme, especially in Subspace Emisarry. Mario isn't that serious and angry in his games either, so I think they represented Wario pretty well.
 
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