my new metatheory about why the good guys always win in fiction is because the bad guys are subconsciously sabotaging themselves because they, too, actually want to see the good guys win
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this is why one of the most clever things you can do as a bad guy is temporarily wipe your memory so you genuinely become a good guy, then you have a real shot of winning
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actually the most clever thing i've ever seen a bad guy do is realize that they were stuck in a genre in which the good guy always wins and subsequently attempt to *change the genre of the story* to one in which the good guy can lose
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being a bad guy is p good honestly
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yeah i didn't want to spoil which manga and it's a few arcs in but i can DM you
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this makes me wish it was easier to recommend Order of the Stick to people
there's this *brilliant* arc where the villain can't really be 'beaten' because he's genre-savvy enough to accept that he's going to die so he's already lived a kickass life
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a practical guide to evil also
the entire main cast repeatedly pulls that type of ploy
one villain abuses the "first step always works" trope by continually starting new plots
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Huh, I now want to read something that starts out a comic book style superhero story but the villain spends all his time being as forcefully realistic, grounded and disturbing because he's trying to make it a horror so he can win (and then he does)
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sounds like a job for the ol' yudster
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I feel like I now need to plug Practical Guide to Evil, because that's literally a world with heroes and villains in a constant struggle between good and evil, and a lot of their strategies center on narrative-hacking to force the situation into an exploitable trope.