Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-28501958-20160704052843

To clarify: this is about characters being made more sympathetic than their opponents within the DB itself, not about characters you feel sympathy for being forced into a DB (though there is certainly room for overlap).

Often, Death Battles (on this wiki and off) make one fighter more sympathetic than the other. This may be the result of a Hero vs Villain fight, or one of the character given a much more sympathetic reason for fighting than the other, or the result of the pre-battle failing to give one of the characters a good reason to fight (Character A: You seem tough.  LET'S FIGHT TO THE DEATH!  Character B: Are you nuts!?). While this is sometimes the results of canon traits of characters and thus difficult to avoid, a lot of this can be influenced by the writer of the DB. While there's certainly nothing wrong with one character being more sympathetic than the other, there is a bit of baggage that can come along with sympathetic characters in DB.

-If the more sympathetic character repeatedly wins in your battles and the losing character is portrayed as more antagonistic, this can kill suspense by leading your readers to believe the Good Guy Always Wins. Of course, when I write my own DBs, I am careful to avoid this. Except in this one. And this one. And this one. Oh, and this one.

-On the other hand, if the more antagonistic characters wins over the more sympathetic character, this can irk the audience, particularly if they're fans of the losing character. Alternately, this can give you battle a rather tragic flavor, which is not necessarily a bad thing, though it may not be what you're shooting for.

-An obvious solution is to make it so neither of the characters is truly in the right or in the wrong, but this can be tricky, and often relies on a tragic misunderstanding, a refusal to back down or a gross failure to communicate.

Thoughts on this? 