On the Subject of Liking Villains

In recent times the idea of being sympathetic towards villains has been called into question by some people, equating liking villains with supporting/condoning their terrible actions.

However, there isn’t anything really wrong with liking villains. Enjoying a character and feeling sympathy for them isn’t necessarily condoning their actions or ideals.

For example, people who dress up like Darth Vader aren’t advocating fascism or torture. He’s still evil, most of everyone agrees on that, BUT he’s also cool as hell. And if you take his backstory into account, he’s also super tragic, so people can feel sympathy for him in that regard, while still agreeing that he’s evil.

Nobody really wants to *hate* villains. They want to love to hate them. Disney Villains, for instance, are a whole brand now.

Having sympathy for the villain does NOT mean supporting each and every one of their actions in real life. People aren’t advocating sexual harassment when they pose with Gaston at Disneyland, or supporting dictatorships when they gleefully sing Be Prepared, or saying kidnapping of princesses is okay when they play as Bowser in Mario Kart.

The Diamonds from Steven Universe, for example, are certainly villains, and awful, awful people, but the show clearly wants the audience to feel some form of sympathy towards them, while at the same time agreeing that they’re terrible. You can feel bad for a villain, and even see emotions in them that you relate to and sympathize with, without supporting them or people like them.

The whole point of sympathetic villains is to see a bit of yourself or people you know in them, so as to recognize that *anyone* could become a villain. Framing them as utter monsters without any redeeming qualities just turns them into The Other, with the audience going “Oh that’s nothing like me, I could never end up like that!”

(Also, redeeming qualities don’t mean a character is redeemed, they just mean they’re more human and therefore nuanced)

By turning villains into something completely unrecognizable or unrelatable, kids end up thinking that they’re incapable of ever becoming bad, and can grow up to have a “whatever I do/agree with is right” mentality because they never considered the possibility that people like them could be bad.

And by framing the conflict as “protagonists are 100% good and antagonists are 100% bad,” kids can develop the worldview that since they are the protagonists of their story (as most people see themselves), then everything they do is right and there’s absolutely no sympathy to be had with their opponents.

“That could never happen to me!” they say, but years later it ends up happening to them without even realizing it.

If, however, they had grown up on a more nuanced portrait of villains, as familiar human beings who were still terrible but also frighteningly relatable, rather than maniacally-laughing cartoon demons, then they would likely be more susceptible to introspection and more readily recognize it in their own lives.

Of course there’s always going to be people who side with the villains. That’s an unfortunate side effect of making them entertaining, especially when they end up being more enjoyable to watch than the heroes (see: Hades from Disney’s Hercules)

Also, people wanting the villains to Not Actually Be Villains, while questionable, is not the same as siding with the villains. It actually supports what I said earlier about the consequences of One-Dimensional Antagonists.

In fiction, villains traditionally have no redeeming qualities, and if they do, then they were Secretly Good All Along. Good Characteristics used to mean someone was a Good Character.

Recent fiction has tried to do away with that due to it not being representative of real life villainy, but since many viewers were brought up with those traditional ideas of good and evil, some end up believing that any villain with Recognizable Good Person Qualities is Secretly Good All Along, despite the more nuanced approach to villainy.

This does not negate said approach, but it does explain why some people see it as reason to support a villain character, despite their villainy.

Sympathy is a spectrum. Only a moron would frame it as “These characters are good and not supporting each and every one of their actions makes you bad” and “These characters are bad and finding sympathy with them in any way makes you bad.”

It’s a lot more complex, since our everyday, real life “villains” are humans like us and therefore just as complicated as we are. The same people who commit terrible deeds and spread awful ideas can be the same people who tuck their kids in at night and walk the dog while smiling at the neighbors. They’re awful, but they’re still people. And they don’t undergo some devilish transformation into some “evil self” either.

I think it’s important for fiction to show us that. Because by removing the humanity from villainy you may end up dooming a perceptive viewer to the belief that villainy is easily spotted and therefore distinct from what they consider to be familiar.

If we grow up on villains being inhuman, unsympathetic monsters, then how are we able to see real life villains as villains, when real life villains are rarely as obvious?