On Villains

And why we love them!

Another subject near and dear to my heart is my beloved villains. Anyone who knows me even slightly will know that I’m kinda a villain fan, and that’s an understatement. Bad guys are my favorite, and they have consumed most of my life with my weird obsessions with them.

This obsession, which started from a young age with Disney villains, was a concern to my parents, and quite rightly too. When you notice your kid getting too deep into dark stuff, it’s responsible to voice some kind of concern. I think they were afraid that because of this love of bad guys, I might end up seeking that out in real life. My dad was afraid I would be one of those women who end up marrying incarcerated serial killers, which I certainly haven’t, and have no intention of so doing. Because I don’t like villains in real life. I don’t like serial killers, or terrorists, or mass murderers. The real world is incredibly complex, and so to have entitled idiots who go around doing obviously stupid, evil things just makes things harder for everyone. I hate these people in real life, these people who think they have the right to inflict pain and suffering on others just because they suffer in their own life and want to pass that responsibility onto everyone else. It’s cowardly and selfish, and I loathe selfish cowards.

There is certainly a place for villainy in the real world, however. I know we don’t like to admit it, since our cardinal virtue in the modern age seems to be worshipping kindness at all costs, but sometimes people need to be unpleasant. People need to go against the grain, and say things people don’t like to hear, and refuse to bow to the whims of tyrants, even those who wear a mask of compassion and kindness. That’s where I see the most villainy these days, in people who pretend they care about others, and yet bully and threaten anyone who disagrees with them under the guise of being nice. I hate these people too, because they’re also selfish cowards – if you want to hurt people, just be brave enough to admit it, don’t pretend you’re doing it for some noble reason. Sometimes the heroic thing to do is to be obstinate and rebel against authority, but that can be mistaken for villainy in reality, because reality, as I said, is complex. In reality, I believe you want the capability to be a monster, and yet choose not to be. That’s what makes someone good – not a lack of evil impulses, but the ability to control them.

Despite my obsession with villains, I don’t think I’ve turned out to be a villainous person in reality. Indeed, I would argue that because of my detailed study of them, I know exactly what not to do to act out villainous behavior in real life, because I can recognize it, even when it’s disguised. I know, for instance, when people start suggesting the “formal deprogramming” of their enemies, that it’s villain speak. I also know when people in authority say, “We will continue to be your single source of truth,” it’s villain speak. Or when people suggest rounding people up and forcibly injecting them with drugs they don’t want to take, that it’s villain speak, even if the people believe they’re doing it for the greater good. Lots of villains believe they do things for the greater good too, but you judge people based on their actions. I’m not saying I’m a saint, because I’m obviously not. I do the wrong thing some of the time, because I’m human, but recognize when I do it that this is bad behavior, and try to be better in future. We have to accept our shadow selves, to use the Jungian terminology, as part of us, and we have to let them loose every once in a while in order to be healthy. It’s why every major religion in the world has the concept of forgiveness, and repentance of sins. No one is a saint in reality, at least not until after they’re dead.

And in fiction, saintly characters are often very dull. It’s the villains who drive the story, and make things happen. The essence of drama is conflict, and conflict can never be initiated by a saint. It has to be initiated by the antagonist – the Garden of Eden story is only a story because the snake makes things happen in it. Otherwise it’s a very boring description of paradise. Paradises are always boring, because paradise is by definition a place without contrast and conflict, a place where nothing happens. George Orwell outlines this problem with Utopian fiction in his essay Can Socialists be Happy? where he comments on Jonathan Swift’s creation of the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses, who are free from human failings: “Like the inhabitants of various other Utopias, they are chiefly concerned with avoiding fuss. They live uneventful, subdued, ‘reasonable’ lives, free not only from quarrels, disorder or insecurity of any kind, but also from ‘passion,’ including physical love…It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, not perhaps imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast.”

Orwell further argues that it’s difficult to imagine what a perfect world would even look like without the contrast of the present corrupted one, and even then, people have had a much easier time describing the torments of hell rather than the delights of heaven. I believe nobody has any sense of what a perfect world would actually be like, because nobody really wants to live in a perfect world. We can only appreciate the good things because we are aware of the existence of the bad. So too with a story, if you want to write a great, good hero, you have to give him an equally evil, corrupted villain to spar with.

People who write stories usually don’t do so in a desire to portray the real world as it actually is, contrary to popular belief. We write things that we hope are true, but that’s not the same as being realistic, as discussed in a previous essay. We also write stories primarily to entertain, not educate – if you can educate people with entertainment, that’s a bonus, but any entertainment that sets out with education as its primary purpose will necessarily fail at being entertaining, because it’s not the primary goal. It’s why so much modern entertainment sucks, because it seeks to lecture people into what they should think. It seeks to preach what the author believes is right and good, but sermons are rarely entertaining.

And the beliefs of modern writers frequently seem to be that no one is ever really evil. These naïve writers seem to believe that people do bad things because they are forced to by the degradation of society, or because they’re victims of circumstance, or because they’re misunderstood. This is obviously not true. In reality, there exist malicious, evil people who get real joy out of bringing harm to others. It’s not pleasant, but it’s true. But I believe this partially explains the lack of great villains in modern entertainment – you can’t have a strong character if you believe they’re just a victim of society, because that denies them agency. You can’t write a good villain if you believe there’s no such thing as a good villain. And you definitely can’t write a good villain if you believe your job is to brainwash your readers into being good people, because what if they liked that villain character better than all your good characters? What if they confused the two somehow, because you’re a terrible writer? Can’t leave the readers to make up their own minds, so we might as well just leave out the villain option altogether, just so people don’t make the wrong choice and emulate the wrong one.

This, I believe, is where the confusion over the love of villains comes from. People might see someone who loves villains and think that this person is trying to emulate their actions – if you see a story as primarily didactic, and the character that you love is bad, it’s logical that you believe the fan of this character embraces its bad teachings. But that’s not how fiction has ever really worked. I know this is a difficult concept for a lot of people, as I’ve written about before, but fiction and reality are two separate things. They can undoubtedly influence one another, but they should never be confused. So people over the years, who have asked me if I like Hitler, or Saddam Hussein, or someone who broke into their car because I like villains, are confusing reality with fiction. It’s not me who can’t tell the difference between the two – it’s them. And it’s a ridiculous question to ask anyone who isn’t certifiably insane. Undoubtedly there are people who act out the story of villains in their own lives, but those people are confusing the villain and the hero.

I came across this line in the Bible recently which I think pretty much sums up those people: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20) You see, there’s nothing wrong with loving villains as villains – just don’t mistake them for the heroes of the piece. There’s a lot of this floating around today, trying to see things from the villain’s perspective and sympathize, and indeed, a good villain should be one whose perspective you can understand. There is nothing wrong with examining a villain’s motivations, and trying to understand where they’re coming from. What’s wrong is to start agreeing with their way of going about this – they’re villainous because of their actions, not their thoughts.

You see this a lot now with characters like Thanos, or Poison Ivy, two characters who want to exterminate humanity for environmental reasons. There’s a lot of “Thanos was right,” people on the internet, or “Poison Ivy is really a hero!” which I think says a lot about how apocalyptic and anti-human the environmentalist movement has become. Of course you can agree it’s important to take care of the earth, and respect Mother Nature, as Poison Ivy does. But any sane person has to disagree with the mass murder of humanity in order to accomplish this. Thanos isn’t wrong in wanting to bring balance to the universe so there’s peace and prosperity for all – he’s wrong in genociding half the universe to do it. (And certainly an argument could be made that any desire to perfect the universe and bring about peace and prosperity for all will inevitably end in genocide, but that’s a topic for another time!) There’s a difference in understanding the perspectives of villains, and condoning their actions. I think the Joker is absolutely right in his philosophy that the world is a madhouse, and all you can do in it is have a laugh and enjoy yourself. But I absolutely disagree that that means you can just go around murdering people for jokes, at least in reality. There’s no one in their right mind who would agree with that in reality. You can explain and understand villains, and even sympathize with them all you want. But you cannot justify their actions in reality, because then you deem what they do to be right and heroic, which means they’re no longer villains by definition.

It's why I hate movies like “Maleficent,” the retconning of a woman so petty that she condemns a baby to death because she was snubbed at a party, into someone who instantly regrets her actions and is just misunderstood, and doesn’t even get to turn into a dragon at the end. That would be bad enough, but the movie seems to want to have its cake and eat it too, which is a hallmark of bad villain writing. The movie clearly intends the audience to sympathize with Maleficent’s tantrum in cursing a baby to die because her boyfriend dumped her and cut off her wings. The movie wants us to go, “You go, girl! Slay the baby, queen!” which is obviously what a strong, empowered woman would do, murder an innocent child to get back at her ex-boyfriend. (This is indeed the core problem with all revisionist feminist nonsense, which ultimately boils down to “reprehensible acts are ok when women do them!” Because oppression or patriarchy or something.) We’re meant to think Maleficent is justified in doing the bad thing, but then simultaneously see her change into a better person. But you can’t change into a better person if you think you were justified in doing the bad thing. You just excuse the bad thing, because you had a good reason to do it - you don’t repent and become a better person. But that’s the story the movie tells us, which is why it’s godawful. Not only do you turn the mistress of evil, and one of my favorite Disney villains, into someone who didn’t really mean to be evil, you take away her agency to even do evil and put it all at the foot of a man. You make her ex-boyfriend the villain, rather than her, which robs her of all agency and responsibility for her actions. Not very empowered, if you ask me!

But that’s all stories of “empowered” female villains now, which is why they’re all boring now. My favorite female villain is obviously Harley Quinn. She is a villain, because she justifies and aids the Joker in his evil because she loves him. A lot of people seem not to want to blame her for that, as if doing things for love automatically excuses them, which is a bizarre notion. Or by saying the Joker tricked her, and it’s not her fault, but she still makes the conscious choice to help him hurt people. She chooses to do the wrong thing over and over again because she loves a villain. She has to bear some responsibility for that. Indeed, I think she bears equal responsibility with the Joker, since she continuously chooses to be with him. They are equally villainous in different ways, and watching them play off each other and egg each other into doing ever more depraved things in their mutually abusive and codependent relationship is what makes them so entertaining. (Rest assured, there will be another essay on my favorite clown couple later!) The “emancipation” of Harley Quinn, which is the modern take on her character, allows her to take no responsibility for her actions, and blames every bad thing she did on Joker. By retconning her into a victim of the Joker, the writers have ironically made her into a victim of the Joker, not a character in her own right with her own motivations. Everything is the Joker’s fault – she was only a villain because of a man. This doesn’t make her into a stronger character, but it’s what constantly happens when people try to make female villains more “empowered.” Nothing can ever be the woman’s fault, because no woman would ever do anything evil on her own. Which is obviously total bullshit, and makes women into weird aliens rather than human beings with flaws and dark sides. It’s the opposite of empowering women.

I love villains because they are villains. Because they’re bad and horrible and evil in a fictional environment, and that’s where the entertainment comes from. That’s why they’re fun, because they’re so awful and irredeemable. I’m not interested in trying to change bad people into good people in fiction. I’m not interested in redeeming villains and turning them into heroes, because then there’s no more villain left. I want them to just enjoy their villainy, because I can’t enjoy mine in reality. I enjoy their vicarious expression of their own dark urges – there’s some comfort in knowing that whatever darkness I think and feel is not alien to the human experience.

Villains are a good way to enjoy indulging your evil impulses, your shadow self, in a safe, fictional environment. Rather than going out and murdering people, you watch the Joker murder someone in an entertaining fashion, and you get the catharsis, the release of that evil impulse. It’s the same enjoyment you get from horror films – people don’t watch those to see how to commit horrible acts of violence. They watch them for the catharsis, the enjoyment of seeing how those horrible actions play out. Then the villain can die instead of you. The villain can be punished instead of you, because the villain will be punished. I truly believe you cannot commit acts of evil in reality without being punished, whether that’s by the law, or your conscience, or some karmatic retribution. The stories tell us that. If you choose the path of the villain in reality, it will end unhappily for you. And it’s usually the same in fiction, although sometimes it’s fun to see the villain get away with it. But it’s pure fantasy. You should enjoy that fantasy, but not confuse it with reality. You should enjoy villains, but don’t confuse them with heroes. It’s ok to love the bad guys, but don’t try to make them into something they’re not. They’re perfect just the way they are.