He's a clear cut villain in The Avengers. And so is the Predator. And so is The Galactic Empire. I haven't seen the other two films. You don't have to be evil incarnate to be a clear cut villain, and you don't have to be a saint to be a clear cut hero.
I use hero and villain because I forget how to spell protagonist and antagonist at 2AM in the morning (ok and at any other time) It's interesting. I read a book years ago called 'A Woman of Substance' by Barbara Taylor Bransford. In the opening an elderly, rich woman has discovered four of her five children are plotting against her to over throw her and take over her businesses and money. I instantly felt for this poor, lonely old lady and hated her four older children. We also see she has a grand=daughter, Paula who adores her and friends that do also and so that made me feel for her even more. You then go back through her life. As a teen girl living in poverty at her mercury of a very rich family, the fareley's. She starts to believe the lie that money makes you safe and untouchable. So her first obsession is to become a business woman and provide for her two young children - she succeeds. But in the back of her mind, she is building an empire that could eventually take on the fareley's and put them out of business. She succeeds in all her goals but fails with her children miserably. And you start to see why her children feel the way they do. She never had any time for them or showed them any affection. What started off as a well meaning desire to give them the life she never had, became a fierce obsession on revenge. By the end of the book I felt less sorry for Emma. Her children did what they had seen her do many times. Be cold and merciless when it came to business and to people. She cared more about work, revenge and one man than she did for them. I don't think they did want her business, I think they wanted to hurt her and make her feel unloved by them and she'd made them feel. Her youngest child had nothing to do with the plot. Because by the time she was born Emma had achieved her goal of being with the one man she loved, build an empire that couldn't be challenged and took down the Farely's. She was a mother to Daisy. I couldn't say I agreed with her other children but I understood why they felt the way they did, and I now felt less sympathy for Emma. She had personality traits that made her an excellent business woman but those same traits made her a poor mother. She gained wealth and security but lost four of her five children in the process.
I can't honestly say I agree with anything you've said but I do get where you're coming from. They are just labels that make it quick and easy because when you're asking a question on here you don't want to bore people with details that aren't important. Like this: I need help with my plot my hero needs to steal the key from the Villain but... or My character who like everyone else has some bad in him needs to steal the key from a guy who's not all bad but is darker than my hero.... Gets very wordy.
I believe villain or hero categories helps to create characters, but also probably not the right thing to go. Even a hero can do evil actions and just the reason why it does, while a villain being a bad person can the best interest in mind. That depends on how you create a character, motivations, backstory, psychology.
I don't think anyone has argued otherwise. But as Bone2pick pointed out, you don't have to be pure evil to be a villain, and you don't have to be a saint to be a hero. I'm perplexed by this notion that anything less than 100% good or bad means a character isn't a hero/villain. Where on earth did it come from?
