I have to love this guy because he is the essence of our modern
villain. Shows up to a party, steals a queen, then tries killing the hero in
the end? Perfect character trope in the making! You can almost imagine
Meleagent’s armor is black and red whereas Lancelot’s is blue and silver. The best
Darth Vader ever did was kidnap his own princess daughter and try killing his
son (and no, Tarkin was the one to destroy Alderaan so Vader can’t even put
that on his resumé). Nevertheless, child abuse is evil, too, but far less
classy than party crashing.
Plus, I like pretending his name is
secretly an old French pun for "evil-doer." See, the stem
"mal," means evil, and "agent" is someone who does
something.
Like many hated villains, he has an older, wiser advisor. And like
the most evil of those villains, that advisor is his dad. Even he wants Meleagent to
chill before he gets his ass handed to his angsty self by our knight in shining
armor. Our evil-doer is starting to seem less like Vader and more like whiny
Anakin.
George Lucas is the real villain.
So like civilized nobles the hero and villain decide to resolve their conflict by murdering each other! Standard procedure, villain loses his arm gets
punched in face. Yet it’s not very gratifying. And that bugged me! He’s evil
but we don’t get the full impact of hating him like Lancelot hates him. It's because we don't get a good reason to hate him because we only see him as an
actual actor nearing the end. That’s way too late to start a compelling relationship between character and audience.
Still, Meleagent lives up to his villain status in the end by basically yelling,
“I’ll get you for this!” Too bad he can't keep his head to deliver said
revenge. He would’ve won if he were better armed.
Me laughing at my own dumb puns.
