their motivations are a hell of a lot stronger than his (at least given what we know at the moment)
I fear that they even ruined that in their going too hard on making Conrad some sort of an expy to Lucius, because both in the beginning, when they attacked the Colosseum and Conrad mocked Julius for magicless Asta making it into the MKs and, for some reason, proving the institution "had fallen very low", and towards the end( I hope I'm remembering right which battle, the movie looked like one long battle barely changing sceneries), when Conrad overpowered Asta and was kicking him around, mocking him for being a "commoner" and "magicless", yet daring to hold a dream to be WK... these moments made his particular "motivations" less believable than the nastiness he manifested with his plan, and when his flashbacks and reveal about the wife came on, everything became even more confusing. Because there was no proper context to the trauma that made him rage and rebel. Was he a commoner who made it not only into the MKs but up to the WK position, yet was disparaged for his magic like Zara Ideale or Rades Spirito's? Or even more ironically, like someone who basically had to live outside society with a similar magic/curse, like Licita or Henry? Was it his wife who'd been the commoner and whose connection to Conrad persuaded the royalists to turn on the new WK, finding her a catalyst to his desire for reform? Guess we'll never know and we can't even be sure if he has more in common with Asta other than the shoehorned catchphrase, or dream to become WK and reform society, unless we go look for materials outside the movie itself.
For Black Clover, Conrad was the perfect antagonist for Asta. Someone who has not only achieved the goal Asta wanted, but also is a man who sought to accomplish the same things Asta wants to in that role, yet became the antithesis of what that role stood for.
I disagree with this, Lucius is lacking in some ways, but he encompasses many of the issues Asta and his peers have to deal with throughout the story, without being forcefully some retroactive copy of the MC himself. Nope, he at least has the decency to be the evil twin/counterpart of the man whose position Asta wants to inherit more than any other's.
-Lucius and Julius are technically foreigners, in a way even worse than commoners in the eyes of Clover aristocracy( Yami still gets slack for being a foreigner, even if his fellow captains treat that moniker more like an inside joke at this point);
-Lucius is a devil host, so by default he'd get the same negative reactions the Agrippas, Nacht, Asta would get, whether they use their connections to/knowledge of devils for good or bad. It's true that the vast majority of devil hosts do warrant the negative reactions, when they very often align with the nefarious plans of the powerful devils they enter contracts with, but this still makes for a more serious commonality with Asta. And it was explored more in depth than the movie's main antagonist's views and issues. Btw, I've seen some backlash for Conrad being written as a fairly recent WK, yet also as completely ignorant of this particular thing with Asta...or other members of their society...I'm a bit embarrassed that others had to point out to me that the dude seemed to have lived in so much of a bubble, yet was a former WK, that he had no idea devil hosts/contractors exist, and he simply wanted to take Liebe's, not Asta's, power, when it's not even actual magic and it should be more complicated than vacuuming it in, given how even Lucius hasn't tried to strip Asta of his contract with Liebe and tricky little imp Liebe of his power. But numbnuts Conrad wanted it for a hot minute.
But back to the topic, this devil host thing is another commonality Asta and Lucius share, even as they go about it differently and devils are only a means to an end for Lucius. The major issues for Asta are inequity between commoners and royals/the poor and magic weak vs the rich and magic abundant, some even born into positions of power while others, with or without power, struggling to earn theirs, AND the bias against devil hosts or weg touched people, without trying to discern whether those hosts and "cursed" people are dangerous or still functional, decent human(e) beings. Lucius might've started out with the good intentions, but he fully became the antithesis to what Asta is, and this is already established, we didn't need one more villain with almost the same traits but with whose mere awareness of devils and devil contracts was awkwardly deleted/never written in for the sake of making him even the slightest bit different from Lucius
-He wants to reform society/mankind at least on their continent and establish equality, again, going about it the extremely wrong way. He did go for the WK position, just like Conrad did, just like Asta aims, because that's the best angle from which to work on such a plan...though it's a bit contrived that he went exactly for Clover( yes, I know, for plot's sake), when the Zogratis already got Spade under thumb and the other 2 countries were just as valid, while Clover was messier than ever, with nobody yet in Lumiere's range and his only troublesome prediction is seemingly centered on the Spade CP...as the Spade CP, not a CK MK from the boonies.
But they literally had Asta ignore everything Conrad was saying just to keep the show going when, in reality, Asta should have really had a lot to say in response to Conrad's position.
To me it didn't feel like written as ignoring, it felt like, yet again, turning Asta into a broken record with minimal, repetitive comebacks, or portraying him as far less eloquent when in the midst of a battle( he did give a cool speech back in the emergency shelter)...for that matter, so is Yuno a broken record, with that "Not a chance"...Father Orsi, did you drop them one too many times on their heads when they were babies?
They did let a chance go, and again, I think it's because they were trying to hold back from trampling all over future discussions(at least between the mains), and failing big time, with that silent exchange at the very end between Asta and Yuno, where Yuno once again replied with "Not a chance"...yeah, I get what Asta was silently wondering: if, the way he is, with the desperate reliance on a devil's power(this is supposedly before their ritual confrontation where Asta really got to see Liebe and start figuring out, or got any minimal confirmation of his suspicions about the goof) to make up for magic he lacks, as setting him up on a similarly twisted path as Conrad, if he fails to make others see the worth in his work and person.
Forgot to mention, but my conclusion was that, while I would've liked to see the plot of the movie properly developed into a manga arc, it would also take some serious reworking of Conrad for him to be more than some forced hybrid of Lucius and Asta, with the only glaring difference that outs the serious effort of pushing Conrad for an "our evil boss WKs are different" as silly ignorance of devil hosts being a thing. Or I wouldn't mind if he was completely replaced. The other 3 managed to be more safely distanced from the characters, from BC or other franchises, they were more or less a nod to.