villain anon: honestly it was a spur of the moment question! there are a lot of … opinions out there about enjoying villains and wanting redemption stories for villains and how to Properly Enjoy Them but that frustrating discorce is not the point – it made this anon realize they missed any opinions from you regarding Bad Guys in general! and your thoughts on things are always interesting.

copperbadge:

Oh, how interesting! It’s not discourse I’ve seen, but I tend to curate my dash away from purity wank so perhaps that’s not surprising. In this case I should add on that while I don’t tend to enjoy villains personally, that’s not to say one shouldn’t be allowed to; they are an integral part of most stories, and a well-executed baddie is a great work of writer-craft. 

I think there are people who enjoy villains in ways which make me go “Hm I think I’ll be over here not engaging with you as a person” but that’s actually quite rare. People with extreme ideologies tend to see themselves as heroes (like most villains do) and consequently identify with heroes. It’s why white supremacists don’t tend to choose Red Skull even though he and they are both literal Nazis – they still choose Thor or Captain America. Because heroes in stories may not start with all the power but they tend to end with it, and extremist ideology is usually about power. 

And, sometimes, this is also why marginalized or traumatized people identify with villains – because a lot of the time, a villain is someone who has been stomped so repeatedly that they’ve finally gone out and taken power to stop themselves from being stomped anymore. Whether or not they use that power wisely, whether or not they have at heart wicked motives, the story of someone taking power that society would not otherwise grant them is a heady narrative for someone who feels powerless in our society. 

So I think a lot of the time, someone saying “You’re not liking a villain in the correct way” is really saying “Your identification with someone who has taken power for themselves makes me uncomfortable.” Much of the time, whether or not the villain is heroic or justified or likable or problematic is really a smokescreen for the ways in which we view power, and people who have it, and people who don’t.