Exploring the Underlying Reasons Behind the Rare Occurrence of Villain vs Villain Fights

As a child, I loved watching all kinds of various cartoon superheroes, action heroes and movies. However, I sometimes wondered why the TV shows and movies with multiple villains across different episodes or installments, didn't have the villains fight each other very often if they did at all. This would have me curious about how those particular characters would interact. There were some shows and movies where different villains would occasionally fight each other, but there were other shows and movies where basically none of the villains crossed paths at all.

Reasons for villain vs villain fights not occurring more often

After creating my comic series, I realized that as cool as they sound, villain vs villain fights, if not done right, won't always move the plot of the story forward and could risk sidelining the hero making them irrelevant to the story. This is especially true if the story is hero-centric, as most stories usually are. So if the story is a typical hero vs villain story arc, a villain vs villain fight may not always serve the plot effectively.

The story being told may also have limits to what can be allowed especially if space or story pacing is a factor, which again, it often is. And for comic books, unfortunately page count is a thing as well. There are times you can't have something like a full fight without sacrificing pacing or page count. So sometimes, even if you have more than one main villain in a plot, one moment like sudden betrayal or backstabbing is more practical for the structure of the story than an intense three or four pages where the villains fight it out in an epic clash.

Finally, villains sometimes represent certain ideas. Since Zero Hour Epsilon Force is heavily influenced by the Bible, there is one particular villain that ends up representing sin itself. In a scenario like this, it may be better to simply portray evil turning on itself or sin devouring those who think they can control it. Though it's biblical, it also works better for pacing and structural reasons rather than a full-blown fight between the villains, where the overall idea is pride, power and corruption collapsing inward.

While I can't speak to every reason why a particular series may not have different villains fighting each other, this specifically is what I learned from creating my own series. So overall, villain vs villain fights may not happen often not because they aren't cool, but because they're a bit more difficult to get right. And sometimes, if you have two awesome villains that are similar or hypothetically close in power, I imagine it's just fun to leave things up for debate so fans can discuss with each other on who would win rather than the writers outright answering who is stronger and risk undercutting one villain's menace.

Order the comic from Spidercade Studios today

If you want to check out the villains of Zero Hour Epsilon Force in action, you can purchase the series here.