Lately, as I’ve been playing various games, reading various stories, and watching various shows/movies, I’ve been thinking about the lines characters say right before starting a battle. Villains are notoriously fond of their dramatic one-liners, but they don’t have a monopoly on them. Heroes use them plenty as well, as do people engaged in more social-oriented encounters since, no matter who says it, a dramatic one-liner is supposed to represent a blow delivered. Sure, in physical combat scenario, that social blow doesn’t mean much in terms of damage dealt back and forth, but it represents a level of confidence and self-assuredness the speaker is displaying in order to either boost their own morale or to unnerve their foes. Mostly, though, these lines exist in stories for we readers/watchers/players, to tell us something about the encounter that’s either happening or about to happen and the people who are participating in it. After all, the famous “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die” line tells us tons about the person speaking it. Mostly, perhaps, in the context of the broader scene and as an accentuation on a character rather than a defining trait, but that line is the only thing I remember, since I’ve even forogtten the name of the villain who spoke it (I’ve also literally only seen part of that movie once, when I was far too young, when I came down from my bedroom to ask my parents something long after I was supposed to be asleep, so my memory being spotty is fairly reasonable in this case). I feel pretty comfortable saying that, regardless of their original context or what else might have been going on in the story, these kind of memorable one-liners eventually come to define our ideas of these characters more than anything else does.