What villain motivation that is compelling and thought provocative to a point the readers would not hate him. They will hate his circumstance and fate but not the person himself. Whenever a world became too corrupt and decadent my antagonist is born. His sole purpose is to destroy the world but he does not revel in it nor find satisfaction in fulfilling his duty. Is this edgy, cheesy or generic? If it is so then how can I make him less .
Fix your grammar, right now your writing isn't legible. If I am understanding you correctly the antagonist is something like a demon lord, born to destroy the world when it becomes too corrupt. He doesn't revel in the destruction, but still has to do it. Honestly it feels like he is more of a pawn for some unseen force. Like what entity causes him to be born in the first place? The corruption you're talking about seems to be the societal kind not the environmental kind. So that makes me think the entity is not only sapient but also governs the world to some extent. Maybe something like an overgod that manages multiple worlds, and summons people like the antagonist to destroy corrupted worlds them so they can be reset.
A villain that isn't edgy isn't a villain....yeah, most the times antagonism is born from stupid reasons, because other can't say they are conquering a world because they lost their cat and is searching for it, even if they tell the truth no one would believe that.
Amon from Lord of the Mysteries is the epitome of a non-generic non-cheesy villain. That dude is terrifying af even without trying.
It depends on how you frame the villain. For example you can have a villain trying to take over the country, and you can make them a maniacal and unhinged dark lord. Or you could have them be suave and tactically brilliant rebel general. The first could simple want to rule the land, and crush all who oppose him. The second could believe that the current ruling party is corrupt, and overthrowing it is the only option, regardless of the innocent lives lost in the crossfire. Both are definitely villains, but the former is much more edgy.
A villain can just be anyone actually, depending on the plot For example, in Code Geass, Lelouch was seen as villain by the world despite his goal was just making a better world for his sister. Brainiac from dc for example is quite the unusual kind of villain, only pursuing knowledge, he basically comes to a planet, learn their knowledge and destroy the planet before leaving, because as he believes the less people who got access to the information the more valuable that information is Spoiler: A good quote
I guess most of this depends on what you mean by villain is: A) an antagonist of the story B) a bad person, or portrayed in such a way by the story C) an overlap of A & B If it's A, then the villain is not necessarily a morally bad person by most peoples' standards. Maybe it's even the protagonist that's evil. Anyway, I assume this thread was created with the question of "How do I write a villain whose goal is to destroy the world, but not because they want to, without seeming cheesy and generic?" My answer is that...I don't have it! I probably would not write such a character in the first place, since it would need a pretty cheesy-sounding tragic backstory (I mean, most tragic backstories are cheesy). For example, as @Goblin Sleuth said in his first post, the villain could be compelled to do so by an outside force. They could also have lost hope in the world or something and believes that it should be destroyed, or perhaps they never had faith in it to begin with, and was indoctrinated from childhood to believe that it should be destroyed, and whenever the world falls to corruption they are unsealed and released until everything is annihilated, after which they are resealed. It's possible to write this in a not-cheesy way, I assume, but I personally don't know how xD
I can't speak for everyone, but I would find such a villain neither sympathetic nor compelling. Imagine this: I'm playing the villain, and I find that North America is too corrupt, so I plan to depopulate the entire continent. That's something a Bond villain would do, and a particularly heinous one at that. There are a few different ways to think about this character. I think the first step is to examine why it is that you want a sympathetic villain to begin with. Is it something that you just want to try out, or is it supposed to serve a specific purpose in the story? If it's the latter then you should already know what that purpose is and you should be directing the character and the plot in that direction. If it's the former then you should think about whether a sympathetic character would serve your story to begin with. It's certainly not something that is necessary for all stories and it's possible to put too much attention on the villain actively hurt the rest of the book. For the OP itself, the best way to create a thought provoking villain is to humanize him. Have him motivated by primal emotions: out of fear, out of love, out of anger, out of charity, or out of petty jealousy. Not all of these are necessarily signs of a good person, but they can invoke empathy because they are emotions that just about anyone will have familiarity with. A should count as a villain at all. To qualify, said character has to display villainous qualities of some kind and there are tons of antagonists who don't do this. Based on the OP, it doesn't look like this topic is about an antagonist who is actually a good person. Besides, it'd be trivial to make such antagonists sympathetic.
To avoid cheeziness, the only option is quality writing. It doesn't matter how original or generic a villain's motivations are, if either the villain themselves or their motivations are presented in the wrong way, it makes them cheezy by default. Avoiding being "generic" is harder, or more complicated, mostly because what's considered generic and what's not both changes over time and is somewhat subjective. For example, a non-generic reasoning for an antagonist is that they were kicked between the legs one too many times by random chance, and had a mental breakdown that has resulted in their "villainy". They had a happy childhood and reached the point of sustaining themselves before their luck collapsed. It started innocently enough, their place of work closed down due to the owner cheating on their taxes. Fair enough, antagonist went to get a new job. Found one and started a relationship with someone who lived nearby to their new workplace. The relationship ended when the antagonist's partner cheated on them with their boss, who subsequentially fired them. Antagonist collected themselves from the twin betrayals, and tried going into business for themselves, managing to build a successful business out of nothing, only for it all to be lost due to a scammer in partnership with a local political figure (or judge) abused the political figure's power and outright lies to steal the business from them. Their luck continued in this fashion time after time. Moving a stack of plates while working for a local diner? Well, some food thrown on the floor by a literal baby lands right underneath where their foot was about to be placed, making them slip, destroying the plates, causing them to crack their head open on the floor and losing them their job. They get into a new relationship? Well, they tried three times. The first was married and cheating purely to get their spouse to kill the partner for a laugh. The second had severe mental issues, stabbing the antagonist repeatedly, and the relationship ended when they got hauled off or killed due to their mental issues. And the third was kidnapped just before the first date, before being raped. And this is ignoring all the regular minor things, like random people regularly accidentally hitting the antagonist with things they are using, such as brooms while sweeping, or how their last 20 attempts at suicide failed due to someone saving them at the last minute, usually followed by them getting another hefty medical bill to pay off. Basically, life has shat on this person so hard, and has actively prevented suicide from being a way out, that going mad and trying to destroy the world sounds like a good idea, especially since one of the most effective ways to prevent them from succeeding is by killing them. If you want me to add what you were planning (being reincarnated specifically to destroy the world), then make the story I just told that of the antagonist's FIRST life, and every following life repeats the pattern, with minor adjustments. Acceptable childhood for the situation they were born into (eg. regular orphan's childhood), before life and chance starts ripping them a new one as soon as they reach adulthood. Suicide attempts never works, regardless of how, when and where they attempt it, with the only way to temporarily stop their own endless suffering is to put an effort towards the destruction of the world and get killed, so that they can go through a "happy" childhood again. Quotation marks around happy, simply due to some of their childhoods involving situations such as being sacrificed (possibly to themselves) or murdered only to be reincarnated again immediately, or regularly raped throughout their childhood, though they still consider that more positive than the constant suffering that they receive every time they become an adult and aren't actively trying to destroy the world.
OP isn't looking for "evil", they're looking for "actively driven to destroy the world, but doesn't like it". While the protagonists job is to stop the antagonist from destroying the world. Hell, the protagonist can be an actively WORSE person than the antagonist in this situation, to the point of being considered an evil individual who, even should they succeed, can be considered the most evil person who stopped the antagonist from succeeding in their attempts at destroying the world. It would even match the narrative if that's the case, because the antagonist is only born when the world's population gets too corrupt and decadent, and thus needs someone to hit the reset button via slaughter and genocide. So having the protagonist be a decadent and outright corrupt individual who's just plain nasty and trying to save the world for their own enjoyment fits.
Just make your antagonist a protagonist with goals that aren't compatible with your "MC protagonist", let him be the "should have joined the playable party, but.." kind of person