VIDEO ESSAY

Villains are a key facet of the media viewers consume. But how has the ways villains are portrayed changed for the better and for the worse? 

Have you ever come away from a movie thinking, ‘That villain was justified’?

Have you ever read a book and sympathized with the bad guy?

If there’s one thing people seem to love, it’s a villain. And to be fair, who doesn’t love a compelling character who you definitely don’t want to root for, but also love to hate? Beloved characters like Darth Vader, Loki, and the Joker can be incredibly fun to watch and fascinating to examine.

After all, what is a story without conflict?

And nothing quite beats the thrill of consuming a piece of fiction and being utterly captivated by the villain.

Because, in a way, isn’t it comforting? To look around at all the terrible people and things happening, and see a villain that is simply Pure Evil, and feel slightly comforted, because at least *that* isn’t reality.

But lately, there’s been a disappointing shift in the media depicting villains and how society seems to receive those villains. Many villains have been given a tragic origin story or some dramatic moment in their past that makes everything they did more… explainable.

One of the first, best instances of this trope would be new blockbuster “Wicked,” based on the musical based on the book and the movie based on the book. “Wicked” asks ‘What if the *Wicked Witch of the West* wasn’t the bad guy?’ and did it phenomenally. Elphaba is an incredible protagonist, and what makes it work is that it isn’t trying to rewrite the narrative of the Wizard of Oz- it’s just offering a different version. One can still watch “The Wizard of Oz,” and keep the kind and determined Elphaba separate from the genuinely terrifying Wicked Witch.

Elphaba is a complex character with fascinating motivations, that don’t make one rewatch “The Wizard of Oz “and think that nothing the Witch did was wrong.

But this trope has gone a bit too far.

For example, take Cruella De Vil. Whose name is can be broken down into ‘Cruel Devil’. In “101 Dalmatians” (1961) Cruella is downright awful. True, there are some strange messages in the outdated piece of media- like being older and unmarried is bad, and being a business-motivated woman is bad. Cruella does drop an iconic feminist quotes in the live action version, where she says “More good women have been lost to marriage than to war, famine, disease, and disaster.” But looking past the outdated context of Cruella’s villany, simply look at her actions and intent.

Actions: dognap 101 puppies. Intent? Turn them into a coat.

Most of society has turned a nose up at killing animals for the intent of wearing them. It’s needlessly cruel. Cruella is needlessly cruel, as is obvious from her name.

Then in 2021 Emma Stone gave a marvelous performance in the movie “Cruella.” It received overall good reviews, with 78% on rotten tomatoes, and a 7.3/10 on iMDB.

The puppy murderer now had a tragic backstory with a mean boss, mother-killing Dalmatian, and mental illness. You heard it here first, folks. Having a mental illness and a mean boss means A) you will kill puppies, and B) It’s okay to kill puppies.

It seemed like every villain needed to be redeemable, to have some sort of *motivation or reason*. Even those who had been established as Wicked and Cruel were… forgivable?

This mindset can even be traced back to classic villains like “Star Wars” saga’s Darth Vader. On his own, Darth Vader is a striking villain. He was imposing. Scary. Evil. He had the good in him, he’d chosen the darkness. Sure, his son managed to change him to the good side, but the things Darth Vader had done were terrible. He was a good villain. He was a bad person who did bad things but made one correct decision that was redeeming.

Then came the prequels. And they change Darth Vader. His backstory is so incredibly tragic. There is so much sympathy online for the boy who grew up a slave, who lost his mother, and was terrified of losing his wife.

And that’s a strangely resounding theme in the fanbase of “Star Wars.” A surprising number of people online see nothing wrong with what Anakin did, and even consider the Jedi the villains. And yet… George Lukas wanted the Empire to seem similar to Nazis. Totalitarian government that is incredibly militaristic, focussed on conquering as much as possible.

Anakin’s story is sad. A tragedy. But that does not excuse his actions.

The final villain that needs to be looked at is ‘cogito ergo sum’. “I think, therefore I am. I AM.”

A reference to the 1996 video game adaptation of the 1967 short story by Harlan Ellison “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.”

This story is disgusting. It’s revolting, with some of the worst body horror in writing. It’s a sick story about a computer who gains consciousness, destroys all of humanity, but keeps five people alive to torment for hundreds and hundreds of years: four men, one woman. The things AM does to these people and the things they do to each other in desperation are horrifying.

There’s fanart of AM that humanizes him, there’s been online discourse about how his actions were justified because humans exploited him. But AM isn’t human. There is no conscience. No empathy. No moment like Darth Vader where he realizes he’s in the wrong, and does good.

AM hates.

There’s a quote from the short story, in which AM says, “If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles, it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans — at this micro-instant, for you.”

A villain doesn’t have to be a good person. A villain doesn’t need redeeming features or qualities. Sometimes a character is flat-out rotten. Because the trope of giving every villain a redeeming feature leads into tropes of *every villain having redeeming features*, even when it’s not true to the story.

Let villains be villains. The Joker doesn’t need a tragic origin story. Most Disney villains are evil, and it can be left at that.

Not everyone needs or deserves to be humanized. Sometimes, a villain can be simply that. A villain.