I like thinking on inter-villain relationships in Zatanna's rogues gallery. Allura and Tannarak are gossip buddies. Tannarak reins in Ravensong. Allura and Lady White are friends (up until the inevitable backstab). Caligro is really starry-eyed over Allura (possibly even after the inevitable backstab).
Merba gets ignored because he's too small-time. Ravensong threw Hampel out a window because he bragged about being the best villain (he trapped Zatanna for months). Brother Night is tolerated for his power, but the gang still has to keep Lady White from breaking a chair over his head.
There's a lot of potential considering two of the group are nightclub owners, and everyone else seems liable to turn people to frogs/curse out Zatanna/sob about their failing career when drunk.
Random Zatanna villain plots + headcanons + remakes (some cracky, some serious).
I recommend @aboutzatanna's list before reading because I'm about to go into a bunch of ramblings about characters not used since 1960-1970.
||Adam Mk. II Hemoglobin Boogaloo||
-> Caligro (the Great!) and Allura realize they both really hate the Zataras and decide that their respective problems of not having magic and not being able to manifest in the physical realm could get solved with a little Faustian handshake (re: Allura lending Caligro some of her magic in exchange for her being able to hijack him as a vessel).
-> Allura attacked the ol' Hidden City of the Homo Magi because she hated them for hurting Sindella. She hates the Zataras, not Sindella. She's actually grateful to Sindella for separating her 'good' and 'bad' halves and allowing her to exist (per the 2025 run, possibly)-- so she punished Zatara (who lured Sindella away from her pampered Homo Magi life and failed to stop her kidnapping) by cursing him to never see Zatanna, and cursed the Homo Magi once Sindella died.
-> Her grudge against Zatanna is partly her Zatara heritage and partly because she also 'failed' to save Sindella.
-> Poor Zatanna's guilt complex.
-> This means Allura hates Zachary too. Go figure. At least he never failed Sindella, but hurting him is really effective at hurting Zatanna (because he's the only family she has left), so he's actually first on the firing line.
-> Sometime while this is all going on Caligro is using his Allura powers to go throw beer bottles into a beer flood to grow a Dionysus grape garden or something, he's much more of a showsman once empowered than 'evil magic evil magic I hate you Zataras' Allura.
-> Caligro is absolutely starstruck by Allura in general and probably isn't seeing the obvious red flag of her deliberately scouting him out.
-> Caligro's real name is Dmitri Volkov. This is a Zatanna: Jewel of Gravesend reference. Yes, I read around 60% of that.
-> The endgame for the team-up plot is something of a homage to Adam's plot of injecting Homo Magi blood to develop magic power-- Allura and Caligro intend to capture Zachary (who has weaker Homo Magi blood, so Caligro probably won't ascend to insanity like Adam) to do the same repeated injections so that Caligro is 'permanently' magic. After that, he can bring Allura into the regular plane.
-> What entails is a showdown between Zatanna and a partly-manifested Allura + a blood-boiling-- literally-- (turns out Homo Magi blood donations have quite violent rejections) Caligro.
-> Caligro is surprisingly okay with literally dying because at least he got to be 'The Great' in death-- a lil' bit like Zachary wanting magic to indulge himself, eh?
-> Zatanna is disturbed by this, but can't really dwell on it too much, because Caligro's blood rejection kills him completely and Allura steps in (fully manifested!) to go on her motive rant about Sindella.
-> Cue fight, Zatanna win, Zachary recovery, Allura swears eternal vengeance, looming wonder about what she means-- oh hey look Caligro's not so dead after all--
||Merba the Magnificent-ly Bad at Being A Villain||
-> Merba is funny. However, because he's funny, he can't have the stakes raised too hard, because he loses the 'charm' of him being kind of pathetic if he just becomes yet another Zatanna evil dark magic serial killer.
-> Zatanna has so many of these. Lighthearted villains must be like a vacation day.
-> Hence: Merba is a nuisance. Not a terrible, evil, all-powerful rival (that would be Ravensong or Abra Kadabra) but just kind of a jerk that Zatanna has to spend some time blasting with a backwards sentence.
-> Merba's deeply insecure. Borrows from Merlin's more questionable moments in Arthurian mythology. In fact, he tries to 'play' at being a Merlin-lite by emphasizing a British accent (he's not British), and attacking Zatanna through sword in stone/Round Table/knight/Holy Grail/anything Arthurian themed.
-> Deep down, he's latching onto his one defining 'him' trait (being a Merlin descendant) to justify why he should get praise and attention, at contrast to Zatanna, who wants nothing more than to fulfill her father's legacy, not co-opt it.
-> Merba is not really redeemable because of this. His problem isn't the weight of his legacy-- it's him. He's a greedy, selfish, spiteful person, and he wants to be superior, because he thinks his heritage makes him not just a man with Merlin's blood, but a man of magnificence. It's a symptom of his greater ego problems.
-> Zatanna showing him up all the time doesn't break him long-term. He cries, screams, suffers, and then lets back up, because he just can't accept the reality of Zatanna being better because she's skilled and interested and is motivated by a good cause to improve-- he just chalks it up to Zatara nepotism and comes back for more.
-> On the lighter side, this also means that Zatanna's familiarity with him is pretty bad. She barely acknowledges him unless her other priorities (namely, other, more destructive villains) are all clear, and the one time he did try to infiltrate her performance, her stage crew thought he was a senile lost audience member.
-> That left him fuming, but he didn't have enough time to think of an Arthurian-legend themed revenge plot.
-> Oh, also because of Merba's theming, he tries a few times to team up with Nimue Ravensong. This usually ends with Nimue exploiting his limited magical abilities so she can advance one part of her next plan to strangle Zatanna-- then she turns him into whatever animal of the day she feels like.
||Nimue: Lady of the Hate||
-> If Caligro and Allura are the ones evilly cackling about killing Zataras, and Merba is the one begging Zatanna to notice he exists, Nimue is the one throwing rocks through Zatanna's windows.
-> Caligro and Allura hate Zatanna impersonally. Sure, they don't like her because 'oh hey you got your mom killed' and 'oh hey, you took my career' but if you went up to them and asked them to name a personality trait from Zatanna besides 'showsman' and 'self-sacrificial,' they probably couldn't name much about her ticks or small annoyances.
-> Boy can Nimue Ravensong do that.
-> If Nimue is occupying a particular Rogues Gallery niche, it's the lower-level, hate filled villain. The one that makes knowing exactly enough about the protagonist's personal life to ruin it their main personality trait.
-> The way she develops is in escalation: she's no match for Zatanna at first, but give it a few training sessions, some knowledge on what Zatanna's weak to (besides the obvious, which really isn't so obvious because Zatanna can do sign language) and some aid from a certain Zatara-hating elemental whose name starts with A and she's suddenly taken it up a notch, enough to become a regular threat.
-> I enjoy the idea that Allura provided the sword in Zatanna (2025), so if that pans out-- maybe Allura can serve as Nimue's mentor. She gives her the sword, making her the Lady of the Lake holding a sword, and somewhere out there Merba the Magnificent is crying.
||Why is Abra Kadabra Here?||
-> Abra Kadabra semi-regularly attacks Zatanna's shows, but at this point it's more of an excuse to have a giant magic fight than it is to show her up. He's still an applause fiend, but his need to indulge himself in pure spectacle comes first.
-> The first time they fought, it was about applause: Kadabra and Zee threw around real magic and 'magic' spells, and Zee sent them both into a pocket dimension to keep him from hurting anyone else.
-> During the pocket dimension fight she exploited his lack of imagination (blame the clockwork authoritarian upbringing) to overwhelm him with spectacle fight magic. She essentially hit him hard in the face about how he had no real technical skill with magic because all his future tech made up for it.
-> He wants magic for fame, but that fame hounding was partly backlash from his own time's stress of conformity. He sees it as a pretty tool, she sees it as a living thing that must be introduced gently. Magic is beautiful to them both, but in very different ways.
-> Zee did briefly show him how to do a coin trick to display how 'real' magic wasn't just literal magic or future tech-- but despite seemingly being moved, he quickly started swearing vengeance and saying he'd be back, so off to the crocodile pit until his arrest for now.
-> Now Kadabra's gotten into a habit of interrupting shows just to 'show' up Zatanna by getting into increasingly elaborate and excessively long duels/performances against her. Everyone's pretty sure he's doing it just to show that he's been improving his creative efforts over time.
-> Arnie even has an emergency plan developed 'in case of sudden Kadabra' specifically because he pops up a lot.
-> Zatanna would rather fight Backslash eleven times a day than admit that it's a little bit fun to get wrapped up into Kadabra's antics. At least before he crashes a whale through the building.
||Stringleshanks Rewrite||
-> Backslash and Ben Raymond should not get touched with a ten foot pole, and Fuseli is the best, so the only other Dini rogue to really address is Oscar Hampel.
-> I don't dislike Hampel as much as Night or Raymond, but I find him to be-- anticlimatic? Design is good, plot quality meh.
-> I'd like to lean him more into a contrasting performer, someone who used magic for his own ends in the entertainment industry ala Zatara-- but exploitatively, with skill and finesse, but fundamentally someone who would've tainted magic use for many if his actions were known.
-> That's what Zatanna is fighting against: the corruption of the idea of magic by bad faith actors and criminals.
-> Back to Hampel: instead of him getting turned into a puppet, I prefer the concept that he's a puppeteer: a man who always had problems, but his discovery of magic exacerbated those problems, gave him a tempting out that he took and ran with.
-> Someone who doesn't overlook Zatanna or Zatara-- because they're equals, they're like him, they're going through cutthroat times-- but just people who are 'normal.' The staff of the industry. The people who would be afraid of magic.
-> To Hampel again: he's a children's puppet performer. Same as usual. However, it's a struggling industry: he's not the greatest creator, fell out with his mentors (still a delinquent, albeit he didn't target them yet), and is having a tough time breaking into TV.
-> Lo and behold: magic. Not from Allura this time, because everything can't be Allura's fault. Somehow, he gains the ability to curse people into puppets, probably from an old transformation spell or whatnot.
-> Hampbel is at first shocked, disturbed-- but these puppets are so lifelike. Their joints are so easily manipulated. They're perfectly painted, as is, they never waste away, never need repair, never require anything, and their movements are so light-- they're perfect.
-> This is his chance. He'll never get another breakthrough.
-> Hampel, like many, sacrifices morals for fame. He goes at his puppet-creation with a few 'undesirables' who won't get missed, but the network signs a deal: a whole television set. He can't just keep making excuses as to how a disheveled crew came about. That's not marketable.
-> Thus, he goes for something higher yet lower: failing actors who want their shot at stardom or who's career has fallen into the gutter. He thinks they're doing them a favor. They disappear and no one cares enough because it's the Hollywood machine.
-> Hampel has a successful career. Then he meets the Zataras.
-> Zatanna's magical abilities briefly connect her with one of Hampel's victims, but she blots out the memory, leading into her puppet-phobia. Zatara isn't able to pick up on Hampel in this version.
-> Years later Hampel's on a final retirement tour, debuting his last puppet-- and Zatanna gets contacted by a desperate trying-to-find-work actress about her friend going missing from a movie set. Police won't look for her. Zatanna's magic. She can do something, right?
-> This is how Zatanna proves magic has merit. She accepts. She finds Hampel. He explains to her what he's done-- he doesn't regret it. But he doesn't intend to hurt Zatanna.
-> Because she's already famous. She doesn't need it.
-> Hampel is everything Zatanna doesn't want out of magic. In the end, his victims are freed from their puppet traps, and Hampel's own spell is turned against him, turning him into the Stringleshanks puppet that Dini has him as.
- Zatanna is completely harrowed by the experience, but she's happy that at least it's over, the souls are free, and Hampel is gone from his place of power.
- As she walks away, behind her, hey... is Stringleshanks moving?....
||Miscellaneous||
-> Lady White hits Brother Night violently with a brick and takes over his organization. #GirlBoss
"And true to your word, you led an innocent life until you were, as you say, unfairly cursed by my father."
Zatanna looks so awesome here. So cool and in control.
While I like when heroes are compassionate enough to let their opponents say their piece and reveal their perspective, I like it even more when they're smart about it. And Zee had this one in the bag (to an extent), having a back up plan to ensure she wasn't being manipulated while allowing Stringleshanks to make his plea.
Such a shame it all backfires, but so goes magic, amirite?
"It's hard enough trying to protect the world. I'd be out of my mind to try to run it."
Honestly, if I was a powerful sorceress that'd probably be my go-to excuse for not being a conquering tyrant, too. I mean, sheesh, I can't stand people complaining to me when I don't have any control over what they're complaining about. I couldn't imagine being a ruler!
At least Zee has legitimate wisdom for not taking over the world/being a terrible person.
"A wish or curse, for instance, made carelessly and while in contact with one of these items could cast you in an even worse state."
As much as I love fantasy and magical stories, I'm always fixating on the "rules and regulations" behind magic. It doesn't fly with me to use the "it's magic, it doesn't have to explain itself" train of thought. I want to know about the magic's inner workings. Which is one of the reasons I really, really like this series.
Dini does an excellent job of laying down the groundwork for the mechanics of magic in the DCU. And I appreciate that so much!
I find that magic works best in a narrative when it's a metaphor being played with. But that's just me.
Also: is that a familiar rose in a glass on the top shelf? My inner Disney fan is singing~
