Everyone Else Sucking Worse Than You: A Study Of Perceived Greatness in The Venture Bros. Universe

Contributed by James T.

Juxtaposition is a powerful tool for establishing identity. The qualities of a person can be defined in absolute terms but absolutes are meaningless in establishing what a term is until you have contrasting absolutes to explain what the original term isn’t.

In the cartoon series The Venture Bros. airing on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim lineup, the greatness of characters in the show is established purely as a relative measure between any two characters. Real life is populated with great people, many of whom we take for being great without establishing to what degree, suffice it to say that the people in question simply have to convey greatness beyond which we see ourselves possessing. In the Venture universe, however, characters good and bad all possess greatness to a certain extent as the underlying theme of character establishment in the show. The good guys are all varying degrees of superheroes and powerful scientists. The bad guys are all varying degrees of super villains.

As a reflection of real life, each of the two main groups contains within them a certain caste system, a hierarchy of just how good a superhero is or just how bad a super villain strives to be. For the good guys, you can look at the Venture Family itself for a terrific example of this social layering. Key players in the Venture family are Rusty Venture, his brother Jonas Venture Jr., and their father, the ever-absent but still important Jonas Venture Sr. Looking at those three characters reveals the entire spectrum of goodness. Jonas Venture Sr. is the perceived high-water mark both his sons strive to honor and emulate while between the two sons, we can find the middle ground, Jonas Jr., and the bottom of the barrel, Rusty. Any one of these three men, by contrast to our own real life social circles, could possess greatness by virtue of resources and opportunities afforded them. Upon closer examination in the context of their cartoon world, however, you see such greatness downplayed by ridiculous family squabbles and internal human drama bringing them down from the high horses their lineage afforded them to the realm of normality.

What causes this devaluation? Simply by removing lower levels of society by which their grandeur is established, we lose justification for giving them greatness. In taking away the juxtaposition of the desired greats relative to the world at large, we no longer have a normality for them to have risen above.

The same is true on the bad guy team. In the ranks of super villainy, we can find, of significance, The Monarch and various other shadowy figures comprising competing villains and, more importantly, the political body governing all super villainy (and apparently most super heroism), The Guild. The Guild actually makes establishing greatness among villains easier because it assigns villains to our heroes in supposedly even match-ups. Once we decide the relative greatness of our heroes, we need only look at the villains assigned them to figure out the super villain pecking order.

As Agent Smith bucked the system in The Matrix trilogy, The Monarch presents an interesting case for deciding greatness by rebelling against the established guidelines and rules for “arching” his assigned heroes, remaining purely committed to our friends the Ventures. Greatness in behavior that runs outside established guidelines is far more difficult to judge due in no small part to the absence of a golden standard by which to judge. Without the juxtaposition of established extremes of the greatness spectrum, we likely will have to wait until the end of The Monarch to really be able to assess whether or not his actions constitute greatness. In recent episodes, The Guild conceded a certain degree of understanding towards the Monarch in allowing him to arch Jonas Venture Jr. in light of his inability to remain focused on any non-Venture hero to whom he is assigned.

This bending of a will supposedly far greater to the demands of one villain where other villains have chosen to conform to that greater will serves to provide sufficient juxtaposition between the Monarch and other villains to grant the Monarch some level of greatness while at the same time breaking down the concept of what constitutes a normal spectrum of behavior in villainy thereby taking away from the perceived greatness of that “greater” will. This greater will, The Guild, supposedly runs villainy with an iron fist yet the Monarch has already exerted his will in a way that caused the Guild to bend. This merits closer examination of the nature of the Monarch’s role in the Venture universe.

Before we look at the Monarch more closely, the role of juxtaposition in establishing greatness should first be explained a bit better. The usefulness of juxtaposition, the comparing of two items of opposite or differing value in a set quality or aspect, allows us to establish an identity for the focus of the comparison. In the animated series Neon Genesis Evangelion, the driving conflict of the story is an identity crisis of the main character Shinji Ikari. This crisis of identity and self-worth comes to a head in the final episode when he must comprehend what it means to be an individual when faced with the prospect of total unity of all souls. One scene in particular illustrates the effectiveness of juxtaposition in establishing identity particularly well. Shinji is shown floating through empty space, a world of nothing. As Shinji decides nothingness is rather boring and meaningless, he finds ground to walk upon. In finding ground, he begins to separate himself from the nothingness at the cost of most of the nothingness now being off limits to his non-flying self. Substitute the Monarch for Shinji Ikari and greatness for the nothingness. Below the Monarch’s “ground” is everything less great than him. Above the Monarch’s ground is everything more great than him. In the world of nothingness, we still cannot decide if the Monarch is great or not until we start putting characters into the nothingness. As Jonas Venture Jr. could be argued to be greater than Rusty Venture, the Guild’s assigning Jonas Jr. to the Monarch as an arch nemesis would place Jonas Jr. on the ground with the Monarch and Rusty somewhere below the ground level. As pecking orders on both sides of the good guy/bad guy line shuffle, relative altitudes of greatness also change. This difference in altitudes is the juxtaposition necessary to have an altitude at all. This comparison says very little about the greatness of any character besides the Monarch until you place that character on ground level to see where other heroes and villains land relative to that new focus.

A middle-aged man in a butterfly costume with a severely masculine girlfriend, an army of incompetent and out of shape but boundlessly and enthusiastically loyal henchman, and a flying cocoon hardly embodies the greatness today’s youth demand from their super villains. By picking and choosing what criteria we use to evaluate and compare heroes and villains, the greatness scale can be warped to subjectively favor one character or another, yet as long as a constant criteria is used, as warped as the scale may be, the resulting juxtaposition is no less valid and effective. As long as the same scale is used across the board, juxtaposition will remain the primary and most effective method available for establishing identity and, by way of establishing identity, finding greatness.