I get it The idiotic ways that people project themselves onto their characters is beyond me. What about Darth Maul? He is a terrible man and he knows it.
It's quite stupid indeed when people say that antifa ¨Became the fascists¨. Don't they realise that antifa never changed and that they were always the villains?
You actually pointed out why this is so common in your encanto video. Pain and suffering are things everyone understands so most people will look at a tragic backstory and feel sympathy because the writers are KNOWINGLY baiting our compassion and basic human decency regardless of whether said backstory actually justifies the villains actions. The first failed attempt at a sympathetic villain I actually recognized as such on my own was the MCU's Wanda back in age of Ultron... That's how easily baited I was.
I do actually like Magneto, but he does make a better hero than a villain. If I were a mutant I would probably join Magneto over Xavier as I would recognise the cause he is fighting for as a worthwhile one. Definitely a good example of too sympathetic to be a villain.
What personally kills me is how people think that Villains have to have some dramatic experience in order to be evil. Neglecting that human will do many things out of petty reasons. Freiza was villian because of his superiority complex and how he uses to dominate other. Lilith (owl house) is villain because she's hypocrite in ideas and philosoph a sheep in wolves clothing. lex Luther is villain because he jealous of the man of steel for both his power and people adoration. People can be vile for some the mildest of things so no we don't need complexity for villian to be good.
Right. My favorite villains are the ones that are evil, accept that they’re evil and don’t spend their screentime trying to convince others that they are not evil, instead they lean into that shit.
Ive never heard anyone act like EVERY villain needs to be hyper complex and sympathetic... Many people like it though, but people liking something different from you is not the same as them not understanding it or whatever.
@@FrenkieWest32 maybe not on your side of the internet, but I have heard/seen many a person whine about how they need the backstory of this evil person or that evil person to make them more “realistic” when its like, it is realistic that there are people out there who do evil shit because they just can.
Yeah, and I don’t know if MY villain in my story that I don’t know what to do with follows this trope. He’s a robot, the protagonist is his biohuman brother, but was forgotten, so he decided to murder everyone who though he was stupid, and this was before he was a villain. Then, he was disabled for a while, then hidden by his creator to give him some combat upgrades. Then, the cia of this story killed the creator because of the robot, and then he killed them. Afterwards, he just kinda wanted to be a shit guy and make everyone miserable, then started a nuclear holocaust, then almost wiped out half the earth, then almost released an eldritch horror from another universe, then was on the brim of the power of being a god, then failed.
There's also just being greedy, or lustful, or prideful... or just go down the list of seven deadly sins and have that as their villain motivation. Greed - A greedy landlord, king, or businessman is doing evil shit to make money. Jack up the rent to take someone for all their worth and kick them out when they're broke, or use the key to their room to sneak and steal valuables when their tenants are away. A king who taxes the poor to oblivion or a business guy who buys up politicians to reduce the taxes for the rich while also saving on quality control for their products. Lust - Have a creepy rapist or pervert as the villain. Pride - Someone insists they have to be the one in charge no matter how dangerously incompetent they are and has to put down anyone else who threatens their ego. Wrath - A villain is just a straight up violent person who uses violence at every opportunity and the hero has to stop them. Sloth - Someone is a lazy piece of garbage who got into a position of power for the perks and refuses to do what's required of them. A low-key version of this could be Scar from the Lion King who killed his brother for the throne and apparently spent Simba's whole childhood-to-adulthood loafing around forcing the lionesses to hunt to feed him and the hyenas until the ecosystem was ruined. He didn't even give lip service to the "circle of life" scam Mufasa had going that encouraged prey to come by to watch the ceremonies and not mind getting eaten. Gluttony - Being greedy and wasteful especially while others are starving. Couples nicely with other sins like greed, lust, sloth, etc. Not sure if the Sirens from Equestria Girls Rainbow Rocks would count since they fed on the hatred their songs caused, that could have counted for greed instead. Envy - Being upset at the sight of someone else's good fortune. This could actually be resolved two ways, either by the envious person wanting to tear down the person they envy to feel better about themselves, or they could try to improve their own station to catch up. Imagine a villain who envies the hero's good looks, their status, their family, or maybe their powers or whatever. They could go about resolving in a more benign way and try to earn/get powers or status of their own, or be jealous and combine envy with greed or wrath to steal or destroy the heroe's things. And boom. Seven deadly sins provide seven nasty character traits and motivation to make a villain. No need for traumatic backstory to make a person who wants to make a mess of things. They could just be a greedy bastard who's trying to steal all the heroe's stuff or a lustful creep who won't take no for an answer.
This is why I like Emet-Selch since he's both. The writer made sure that while you can understand his motives and possibly sympathize with him, the only real way he'll ever (as far as we know) realize his goals would be through genocide and I like that there's a hard line like that.
Comic books absolutely love having villains whose "issues with society are correct, but whose methodology is just too much!" While this is not necessarily bad in and of itself, the problem in 99% of stories with villains like this is that... The heroes never get around to addressing the whole "your issues with society are correct" part. They only stop the bad guy, and the injustice they sought to overturn or fix just gets to keep going. No matter how courageous the heroes end up being, the message of the work is ultimately status-quo.
Remembering one of the times comics made Superman evil, because of course, he had a horrific loss of Lois and their child and that was his moment of 'kill someone (the joker) and end all war and suffering by becoming a dictator'. Yeah I have problems with Injustice and that's all I'll say about, Lily covers the trope better already and much if it can apply to that Superman turn evil storyline.
Star Wars did something similar as the entire reason the Sith could start the Clone Wars, as the fact that the republic was a corrupt entity that allowed millions in the mid and outer rim to be exploited and near enslaved, all the while government services like healthcare and security were non-existent despite the fact they were required to pay taxes like everyone else. Once the empire officially forms, very little attention is paid to the fact that the old republic government handed the reigns to Palpatine, the system itself chose death over reform as even during the Clone wars, the issue of their looming bankruptcy was known yet the Senate still pushed for more clones, more star-destroyers-more war and when the bill came due, they decided that fascism was the way to go.
In a way I think black panther did this but with solution? Because even though Killmonger was in the “yea your right but you’re going about it wrong” and then there was an appeal and he denied it and a lot of people were in danger- so when he was fought and then died in a way he got to see a piece of the home he never had but also after he died Wakanda did open up to the world. So the problem did end up resolving
I don’t know what your reading, if that is your belief about comic villains. I can also hardly think of an abundance of villains that have a point, maybe Luther, Magneto and Poison Ivy. Maybe. Besides, the heroes most often aren’t the right ones to make that change. Isn’t it also currently the fucking status quo of the comics that Magneto and Xavier team up to make sure the extinction of mutantdom never happens. So change is occurring, time to examine what that looks like.
@@keg-bear2910 Not sure what you've been reading that showed avaricious opportunistic Lex Luther as a villain 'who sorta had a point', unless it was some elseworld story or Frank Miller comic (I was never much for reading Miller). Lol
You make some damn fine points. You're right, people tend to forget that Chris Claremont, who wrote this revised backstory for Magneto, did it with the specific purpose of eventually turning Magneto into a hero in the first place. He was made more sympathetic so the readers would understand why he eventually joined the X-Men (at least until editorial made him a villain again).
Personally i feel like sympathetic villains CAN work if the reason they are evil is unapologetically emotional and personal. Like not they are doing someting right in the story but a "I can understand why they went down this path." kind of deal.
Reminds me of the Disney Villain 'issue'. For years the general public wanted more nuanced villains. They wanted more mystery and reasons why they became evil. So that's what Disney is now giving us, surprise twist villains who are doing evil to save someone/stick it to racists/get what was stolen from them or some other BS. And they're boring. Now everyone is bemoaning and wondering where the 'good' Disney villains like Maleficent, Ursula and Scar went. The ones who were evil for the heck of it or some kind of greed but had a screen presence. They were fun to watch.
Or when they transform the backstory of said iconic villains, to make them the center of the story, and suddenly they're not the vilains anymore XD I mean, if you know that Maleficient was metaphorically raped by the king in the past, her actions in the movie is not more villain, it's just "why are you attacking the princess, kill the king stupid!" ^^'
I think it's good for storytelling trends to change every once in a while. I was a huge fan of ABC' Once Upon a Time. I think they did the sympathetic villain quite well with the Evil Queen. Snow White accidentally caused the death of the Evil Queen's true love, so the queen wants to kill snow white. It's a simple understandable motive, but it doesn't make her quest for revenge any less evil. Also, sympathetic villains were new and refreshing. Sympathetic villains peaked with Elsa from Frozen and Maleficent imo. Now there's an oversaturation.
@@phadenswandemil4345 I can understand the thought, but it still hurt an innocent for no reason ^^' That's the problem, either you have a sympathetic character, and then he can't hurt babies for any reason, or if your character is willing to hurt babies to achieve their goal.... They're not sympathetic anymore, they're just villains....
New Trope name "Getting in the death robot" When your villain hasn't seemed evil enough so you have them do something so overly evil it out does everything else they've done up to that point
Yep. They did that in Black Panther. “The villain has some good points about how crappy it is that Wakanda is so busy holding up the status quo that it doesn’t see the oppression of the African diaspora… better have him beat up an old woman about it”
I know this was a serious conversation about making the activists seem like the bad guy by making them go way over the line. But for some reason everytime you mentioned them getting into the death robot just made me chuckle.
I personally love villains that have no morals that you can defend, villains that are just evil to be evil are so wonderful because when they eventually are defeated it feels like something actually happened.
I am so glad you finally brought this up. It always frustrated me whenever magneto is made a villain in stories. One really ghoulish example is in the secret wars comic where at one point, wasp compared magneto with Hitler. My only thought was: who the fuck thought that was a good idea!?!?!?
I feel like marvel just needs to have magneto taken away from them. Like oh you wanna compare the holocaust victim to Hitler (not to mention that there was a controversy recently about there being a comic where they burn said holocaust victim) you are no longer allowed to write for this character.
I know it happened in the Ultimate Universe, Professor Xavier said it when Magneto flooded some of the world (I can’t remember how much of it). The conversation ends with Magneto snapping his neck. The Ultimate universe was pretty awful all around.
There is a difference to resiting oppression to wanting to be the oppressor. Also just because you bring down the system don't mean what comes after will be better. A lot of bad regimes were keeping back something so much worse.
Almost went to right a comment asking about your thoughts on “sympathetic villains” that don’t have a backstory of abuse/racism/discrimination, and seeking “justice in the wrong way.” Then I realised I was being stupid and that those sort of sympathetic backstories don’t exist. This honestly makes me feel better as a writer for not ever wanting to bother trying to make my villains “complex”. Sometimes the best villain is the one that is just there, it’s evil, and you can enjoy punching it without any grief.
the best villains are those that are actual threats almost completely non dependent on their personality, which is why sympathetic villains don't really work that well, they are either spend too much time developing their back story and forget to actually have them being villainous so that when they are defeated by the protagonist you as the audience feel more like what did they do to deserve that or they do what's mentioned in this video and they make a character who should by all rights be a hero suddenly do unreasonably evil things that clash with their personality and goals up to that point just so that the protagonist can punch them in the face without a problem
@@michellekeppler982 It's so true. Another important thing that makes a good villain is their presence in the story. It doesn't matter how sympathetic or pure evil they are, they need to actually exist in the narrative for them to be worth punching.
Lachlan Wrigh,and what are you working on?,is it just fanfiction?,and i will let you know a good writer makes his villains more than a obstacle to punch
@@ΠαναγιώταΠοιμενίδου-π8υ No it’s not just fanfiction thank you. And even if it was, it’s completely out of line to suggest something like that, “fan fiction” isn’t any less than an original IP, as it’s still able to be written by very skilled and talented creators as often as original works. A villain needs to fit the situation. In a high fantasy story, a complex villain isn’t a requirement for a good story. Sauron wasn’t nuanced, Voldemort had a backstory but his goal was akin to a Nazi. So yes, non-complex villains that exist purely to be a satisfyingly punchable target are written by good authors (and Rowling). As to what I write, I don’t have any “villains” because they aren’t beneficial to the story.
Lachlan Wright,so you would you mind telling me what are you working on,you didn't tell me Also Sauron and Voldemort still had backstory,Sauron was the most beautiful and powerful maiar,he was eventually corrupted by Morgoth,when his master was defeated,he tried to redeem himself for a time until he returned to his evil ways,even though Tolkien didn't put any of that to his lotr books,he still gave Sauron a backstory in other material,like the Silmarillion,Voldemort was the result of a love potion which made him unable to feel love,which is at the very least a explanation for his villainy You also said there are no sympathetic villains without discrimination/racism/abuse to their backstory,which is false,Dr octopus from spiderman 2 wasn't abused or victim of racism,but he was motivated by his ultimate failure and the death of his wife,and thus to make it all worth it he turned to villainy so he could complete his project,he was also manipulated by his tentacles,or his other version from Marvels Spiderman,while less sympathetic than the Saimi Raimi version he still had understandable reasons to turn evil,he was cheated and wronged by his former partner Norman Osborn,he also suffers from a neurological disorder which will make his body useless,so he wants to take his revenge before his body becomes completely useless. Or how about Wenwu from Shang Chi,he wasn't motivated by Justice,racism or abuse,he was motivated by the loss of his Wife and that he can't move on,or how about Thanos,he still had a reason and wasn't a mindless evil,he genuinely believed the only way to save the universe is to wipe out half of of the population,it wasn't justice,it was a savior complex,he was also sympathetic because he didn't acted like a cartoon villain,like loving Gamora as his daughter and mourning her which brings me to my next point A sympathetic villain isn't just sad backstory,but to also have redeemable qualities or virtues,like the villain being kind to his loved ones or being humble Also the video didn't exactly said that Sympathetic villains suck,but that making someone who fights racism or oppression a villain sucks.
I absolutely love the fact that you brought RWBY into this, because you are absolutely right about the White Fang and Adam. In the Adam trailer you can see that his disdain for humans grew more and more, he hated humans to the point of instead of wanting equality, he wanted revenge, he wanted the Faunus to be above humans. In Volume 1 during an interaction with Blake and Sun, she talks about how the White Fang “Used to be peaceful” until it started growing violent after Ghira stepped down as the High leader and replaced by Sienna. Blake mentions in volume 5 when she’s talking to Sun that a word she would use to describe Adam was spite, he was spiteful towards the humans and hated them for what they did to the Faunus, You can argue and say Blake was the same way in the earlier volumes. In Adams song “Lionize” the lyrics go a bit deeper into Adams intentions with the White Fang. Wasn’t exactly the best trope to go with especially bringing light to racism against the Faunus. Granted, Adam wasn’t a good person all together but to use him to make the White Fang seem like this super violent organization because of racism wasn’t exactly the best trope to use imo.
Okay so while I have many problems with this video I just wanna address one thing if you want a protagonist/hero group who are activists trying to change the status quo, that is what the X-Men are that is what the X-Men have always been. The idea that the X-Men are just centrists who kneel before oppressors and defend the status quo, is made up it's not a real issue in the slightest. People just randomly decided it was a thing. The X-Men literally barged into a government meeting to stop a corrupt authority figure from killing all mutants. They just don't go to the same extremes as magneto, which include, making doomsday devices to wipe out all of humanity. The X-Men are the pro activist heroes people are looking for but, people refuse to acknowledge this because they wanna praise magneto so badly. People who say this have not actusally read any comics, and have at best, seen the movies. And if they have read the comics then they're blatantly missing the point. The X-Men are not defenders of the status quo, they are defenders of the people who continuously try to change the status quo.
I'd like to point out that Chris Claremont didn't portray Magneto as a villain again after giving him the new Holocaust backstory in issue 150. Other writers tried to roll back on editorial mandate after X-Men got bigger than one writer, but Claremont refused to allow it and even killed Magneto off in his last story in 1991 with him basically saying "I'd rather die than be a villain and hurt anyone again," but that got retconned two years after Chris left. So Chris did mean well giving Magneto that origin, and intended it to be part of his reformation.
I think a great example of a sympathetic villain is Pain/Nagato. His goal was to ultimately bring peace to the world, but by force via a weapon of mass destruction and distributing it to the great nations. First he'd demonstrate its power and because of that, the nations of the world would quake in fear and eventually conflicts would cease under the fear of said weapon being used again. He eventually became a villain because growing up, his nation was constantly destroyed due to always being caught in the crossfire between other warring nations which eventually caused him to lose his parents. He ultimately moved on from that after meeting his teacher Jiraiya and two others who would become his best friends and together, they formed an organization dedicated to bringing peace to their nation and rebuilding it. Though later on, his master left and he lost his best friend because him and his two friends were set up to be assassinated and this what fully set him off on the path of bring peace to the world through extreme means. The best part about all this is at the end of the day, he's the one who showed Naruto that just killing him for revenge is just gonna keep the cycle of revenge going and this changed Naruto's way of thinking and dealing with certain villains entirely.
A sympathetic villain is best done by giving the villain an evil motivation, but a sympathetic reason to get there. Demona from Gargoyles wanted to destroy all humans. As motives go, there's no way to be sympathetic with that motive. How she gets there is through repeatedly being betrayed and oppressed and witnessing the near-genocide of her species all at the hands of humans. You can see how she got there. You can see the desire for her to get out of there for her own sake, as well as humans. You can also see that, absent that change of heart, you gotta take her down hard! Similar with Homelander in The Boys. Seeing where he is, you don't have sympathy for his motives. They're evil. They involve dominating and manipulating others for nothing more than a sense of aggrandizement. At the same time, you see how he gets there and you can feel for him... even as you say he's gotta die because there's no other way to stop him.
Okay, but that clip of Xavier trying to talk Magneto down by telling him that he's going to be taking the lives of good people who are just following orders... Just like... BRUH! Didn't we all agree with the Nuremberg Trials that 'just following orders' isn't a defense, it's an indictment!??? Would have been SO much better if after Xavier tells Magneto that he's going to be killing good people who are 'just following orders' for Magneto to just be like, "... Yes? Thanks for the indictment of their actions...? I didn't need you to justify my actions, but thanks, bud!" pROFESSOR X, you should know better than this! Then again, I suppose that you're not a history professor, now are you? :p
The Nuremberg trials didnt conclude that ''just following orders isnt a defense, its an indictment''. Also, they were about individuals committing war crimes. This scene is not necessarily about this.
Worth bearing in mind that part of the reason Xavier says the completely wrong thing there is that he can't read Magneto's mind because of the helmet. He's likely good at finding the right words a lot of the time because he can literally know at a moment's notice what not to say to someone. But he was on the backfoot when confronting Mags in that scene and panicked.
That part in the movie was such a blatant "Lets have xavier do a whoopsie so we can have magneto say the line" that it honestly lowered my opinion of the writers.
One thing that pisses me off really badly about legend of Korra is its villains but I think the villain that pisses me off the most is the third season‘s villain Zaheer (I think that’s his name I forget) mainly because in season four they give him this sort of redemption moment where he helps Korra overcome her trauma… that he fucking caused. And I remember watching it and being like “what is this bullshit?” And it’s treated like this really somber moment like you should feel bad for him and I hate it. To this day I still feel like it’s some sort of victim blaming thing or just a complete misunderstanding of the idea that trauma survivors can heal without having to have a conversation with their abusers (or both) and I fucking hate how it is just a trauma survivor overcoming their trauma with the implication that they had to face the person who traumatized them to do it! To tie this back to the video I think this is a really big issue with Zaheer specifically as sympathetic villain, they have to make them “boil kittens in lava” as you say to get across they are a villain. so they start out with “a bunch of these governments are really oppressive somebody should fix that” and then immediately veer to “ hey let me try to kidnap a literal child get arrested for it and then when I break out torture her with poison” (although it’s entirely possible that the writers just really wanted to get their torture porn in there and didn’t know how else to do it) The reason the fire lord worked well as a villain was because he was just the ultimate baddie that you had to defeat, there was no trying to sympathize with him if anything there seems to be more emphasis on sympathizing with his victims, namely Zuko. Although of course they flobbed that at the very end with the “killing is bad always even when they are an imperialist” bs. I apologize if this comment is a little all over the place it’s just that the part of the script about legend of Korra made me realize that I had some feelings about the show that I didn’t really know I had in regards to their villains.
I didn't watched Legend of Korra, but when you said Zaheer was helping Korra recovering from the trauma he caused and we were expected to feel bad about him, I thought about Bill from Kill Bill. Mainly the scene where he's killing her for leaving him, while saying he's not a sadist, he's really sad in fact and is suffering XD The thing that works well in Kill Bill, is that, well, it's in the title. The plan is to kill Bill for that, not forgive him. Even though the Bride is in tears at the end, and he was a good father for her daughter, he's still dead, because you can't forgive something like that ^^'
Even the first time I watched them poison Korra, I wasn't on board with it as if they wanted her dead, couldn't they have administered the poison in a way she wouldn't have noticed and then fought her? Then when they brought him back in Book 4, I was even more unimpressed as why would she go to him, of all people? Couldn't she ask Katara, or Tenzin, or his daughter who in the previous season demonstrated having the ability to do what Zaheer could do? I was left wondering if the writers felt so bad about screwing up what anarchism actually is that they threw him a bone? I also thought that anarchism was basically Nolen Joker, till I looked it up like I did all the villain's supposed ideologies and saw just how badly they messed it up.
I agree with nearly everything but the not killing the fire lord bit aang is a pacifist who heavily despises killing it’s not so much a “killing is bad” moment and more of aang being a monk and when given an opportunity to not have to take a life he took it
I've watched most of the X-Men movies, and the nasty anti-mutant conspiracies shown across the franchise go WAY past the point where violent revolution would morally qualify as self-defense. "Days of Future Past" even kicked off in a future where people were being imprisoned just for supporting mutant rights. Even if one assumes Magneto was going too far with his stance that peaceful coexistence is impossible, there's no excuse to recognize no middle ground between "politely asking the leaders of a dysfunctional system to stop the oppression" and " unbridled extremism with no regard for collateral damage".
I felt that way too with Magneto. I felt they keep trying to make him evil but his points were valid. I love how you keep referencing the death robot! It felt so out of place in the Avatar world!
Even when I was little, I remember being bothered about these stories because at some point these suppose "villians" should be the heroes. They're trying to overthrow an oppressive system, why are they the bad guys? I always get the impression from these stories that by combating the evils of the world, you might somehow succumb to this evil by acting onto that evil, therefore its best to maintain your virtue rather than potentially succumb your vices which is just... I thought we're already over Christianity, but apparently not.
Yeah, as someone who went to a Catholic school, I was told that doing nothing and not “dirtying your hands” is better than action. We talked about the trolley problem in my theology class and, when presented with the option to save multiple lives by consciously choosing to end one life, we were told it was morally best to do nothing because consciously ending any one life is a bad thing: never mind that doing nothing is still a decision and that consciously standing by while multiple people die… isn’t good?
I think there their the bad guys caues they overthrow the system with eveyone in it. Good, bad don't mater there the enemy an must be destroyed or subjugated. Just because someone is sympathetic don't justifies the evil shit they do
I don't get how everyone in this comment section is so against the idea of not becoming a vengeful monster, just because you were or are wrong doesn't mean you have a free pass to do awful things.
@@marcoaravena130 If it prevents me or someone else from being a victim again I would support Civilization choosing to become a Monster against select targets from within itself
i never got into the x-men movies so seeing that magneto clip is jarring. trying to use a character to make a point about status quo and also be the death robot evil never makes sense, and to see it it so much media is mind boggling. Great video
I think the main problem with how sympathetic villains are portrayed is that the vast majority of the time the legitimate problems and concerns the villains raise are never addressed. Like Harry Potter never addresses all the systemic issues of racism and oppression in the Ministry of Magic for example.
@@LilianOrchard Well, there is a way to thread the needle which is where you do what the Black Panther movie did. Killmonger raises good points, but is so consumed with bitter personal hatred that he is unable to tackle them and then he leaves an impact on the hero who changes their behavior because the villain clearly had an influence on their thinking. I think there is merit to the idea of someone pursuing a morally just end goal but becoming extreme in their methodology to the point they are an opponent of the goal they claim to fight for. Like Magneto (I know you said he sucks) who seeks a morally just goal of protecting mutantkind but becomes just the flipside of the same oppressive coin he claims to oppose. Like I said before, the issue isn't that portraying extremism, even if it pursues goals we all support, is bad. But that even well intentioned authors are unable to answer the questions they raise and thus choose not to.
@Master Imaginariumdooblepopper That is the thermain argument that Lily is talking against for the reason that it excuses a problem of the AUTHOR by using their problematic writing as a defense. The problem with Magneto isn't only that his backstory is of being a holocaust surviver. It's the fact his a holocaust surviver who's goals are to prevent a similar genocide from occurring towards another discriminated group, which is made valid from the fact that in Days of Future Past, the protagonists must go back in time to prevent the creation of Androids specifically created to GENOCIDE mutants which already happened as most mutants are dead and all of humanity is wiped out as the Androids turned against them and yet despite the validity of his fears is made out to be the VILLIAN.
My favourite kind of villain is the ones who start in the giant death robot and never stops until the main characters beat them. Just let villains be evil.
Your summary on each of the Legend of Korra villains and how they all ended up awful made me realise they’re all GREAT examples of when writers don’t know antagonistic forces required for a story isn’t synonymous with a “villain”, the former is needed for story structure and for character arcs, the latter is optional, as evil bad guys with giant death robots aren’t needed unless you always intended for that kind of villain or you totally messed up as a writer and don’t know how to end a story without a hero vs bad guy fight. By making them villains in the end they dodged having to properly confront the antagonist force, which can sometimes be more moral than the main character, as not all main characters are good people or are in the right and need to learn/change. Sometimes a story can acknowledge an injustice in the world and the somber realisation we don’t have an answer/east fix yet but need to keep trying to find one even if it might take generations to achieve. The sudden switch to “completely evil” with all of Korea’s antagonists was basically to try and forcefully undo the accidentally really compelling argument the “villain” presented that was worth exploring. By having them become a villain they can just put the lid back on Pandora’s box and pretend it was never opened in the first place, so none of the real grievances ever have to be discussed again. This is the dangers of writers who try to write about themes they don’t know anything but surface level information on and use it for artificial depth/complexity, a writer touching on themes with such extensive roots in the violent parts of human history, like genocide as that’s a popular one these days, should actually be doing immense amounts of academic-levels of historical research on the subject matter, not cannibalising other works of fiction they’ve seen use it before, making their presentation of it even more cartoony and clueless to the nature of the themes they’re exploring. It’s how they write themselves into a corner, unable to resolve their own plot/story conflict without a cop out of pushing the antagonistic force into cartoon villain mode so the hero is easily justified and the “morally superior” character in the final show down, with the story resolution focusing on their victory and providing no solution to the bigger, serious issue their story had initially seemed to be about. Writers need to stay in their lane where they have the necessary knowledge or lived experienced to write about something or actually get scholarly and commit themselves to being capable to write about their chosen themes, as half arsing it ends up having them create something undeniably worse than the “simplistic” story their ego makes them think they’re out competing with their more “dark” and “complex” story idea.
My favourite example of "sympathetic villian" is surprisingly Fate/Apocrypha. It has some minor villians, but the main antagonist is LITERAL saint. Both sides of the conflict have unquestionably noble motives and both sides acknowledge that.
i was rewatching the x-men show and the arc where beast was jailed for trespassing into a human facility came up. magneto breaks into the jail, telling beast to escape with him, and beast goes "im waiting for my day in court!! see, if i plead my case and show the world our actual cause, they'll listen!!1!" magneto then tells him when the oppressor is the judge, jury, and executioner, there is no justice for them and that professor x is an asshole for forcing him into this martyr role. how in the _world_ am i supposed to hear that and think magneto is the villain? in what neoliberal bubble would magneto's words there be wrong? ik in recent years marvel finally has the mutants working together for a peaceful and just life for themselves, but that's 35 years overdue!
Ive said this 1000 times about RWBY the writers want the white fang to be the brotherhood of evil mutants in the story but from scene to scene they want the white fang to be COBRA from GIJoe just a bunch of faceless mooks to be killed on mass by the hero's with no moral ambiguity
Okay, that "never again" line Magneto said? I honestly thought that was supposed to be a heroic moment, I thought that was supposed to be the beginnings of why Charles views Erik's stance as a solid thing to be considered. Because he's a fucking holocaust survivor, Xavier should be able to understand why Erik (Magneto's real name) is doing the things he's doing. Sure it'd be great if the cursed government could stop being evil and oppressive, but if that was the case, then Erik wouldn't have a reason to attack anyone. This is something so fucking obvious, that how could anyone miss it?!
when I watched the movie back when it came out I thought you were supposed to take both sides of magneto and Dr X as reasonable from their point of view, it never came of as Dr X being one sidedly right just that the two of them were not going to agree, though that may just be because I'm white and blond and hadn't realised that I was in the LGBTQ+ community yet. but even then I thought that Magneto was right.
Yeah even the director ( i think he said in an interview) said magneto was not a full villain and that the audience was more so to be on magnetos side though disquieted when he does something extreme like murder someone while their ally and best friend has put their mind in the villain while he shoves a coin through his skull which their best friend is feeling the entire time
One of the only good examples Ive seen of a sympathetic villain done right is with a children’s book: Percy Jackson series. Where the villain does have a point as in the Greek gods dont take care of their children and place all of their problems on to the remaining parent of the household and basically leave the children to die because they dont claim them fast enough before monsters come after them. The solution? They beat Luke the supposed villain who used his revolution as a army to revive him because they believe Kronos can help them. What happens though is that Luke gets possessed and then forced to be a host for Kronos’ spirit. Luke redeems himself by killing himself by hitting his achille heel and then the heroes, after the war is over make terms of which Luke’s concerns about the children of the gods were integrated sworn upon to be kept and even then, the gods dont keep that promise in later books which shows how effective that was but destroying the gods to replace them with titans would still not fix anything but bring destruction. And Luke was more of a victim of circumstance than a actual villain and he was possessed half the time he was doing villain things like killing people and all that.
To be honest, Amon's story in Legend of Korra would have worked so well if Korra after losing her powers didn't instantly get them back or just had one element that she could bend(albeit badly) and actually started living amongst the people that supported Amon's cause, the non-benders. Maybe even essentially living around them as if she was one of them, or as if she wasn't the Avatar and seeing how hard things are for them and why they'd go to Amon's side. Having to live their lives and see their hardships and realizing that Amon was right and that no one Championed these people or their causes. Then have her Champion them or want to change things. How if/when she becomes the Avatar again by getting her bending back she used whatever status that comes with it to help them the way Amon was trying to. Forcing the people in power to give non-benders opportunities, jobs and opportunities. Again, acknowledging that Amon was correct and that he was going about it the way he was because no one in the positions or rooms that Korra could get into was in any hurry to do anything about it,. But that she never realized it.. till she lived it with them. Korra not knowing what she is without her bending(which she would have been after season 1) and then living amongst the non-benders and not telling them who she is and seeing how they HAVE to live now the way the world has become and then finding herself in the process as well as championing them. The Avatar should be the Champion of those that would feel oppressed or not looked at by the more powerful people in their worlds. Korra being an Avatar that instead of being an instrument to restore status quo and 'stop' the oppressed protesters and instead becoming a champion of theirs and fighting to get rid of that status quo that pushes people to that point.. would have been such an intriguing story. I would prefer Amon live after Season 1, but even if he didn't, it's not like everything he stood for or people he rallied would have just 'gone away' in the first place. Korra basically going "Zuko alone"ing with the people and families that are non-benders in those neighborhoods and seeing what they deal with and finally realizing all the stuff she had been missing while talking with the higher forms of power that never wanted to change it would have been a great story to tell. Even Korra realizing, believing and/or stating "Amon was right." would change everything and be so much more compelling. As you said, the way to do this story right is with the hero realizing the propaganda against the cause and instead standing with them in the end. Korra LOSING HER BENDING(and thus to her, her identity), was the perfect setup for this.. but sadly it didn't happen.
The holocaust is probably the most famous and documented genocide in history, putting "never again" in the mouth of a villain doesn't just seem ignorant it seems like outright mocking because there's no way they didn't know it's a phrase used by actual genocide survivors. Thinking back to LoK, Amon posing himself as an activist for equality when he's actually motivated by a personal vendetta could be seen as the way real bigots try to paint activists as only acting out of personal spite ( like the "not all med" crowd claming that feminists project their experience of having one bad boyfriend onto all men, altough they word it even less elequently than that. It goes for other movements too but feminism was the one I could think of at the top of my head). If they actually bothered to listen to the them they would understand very quickly that they have valid points but hearing that you've enabled or maybe even participated in discrimination against someone else feels like a personal attack so it's just easier to say that the other side is the one feeling personally attacked and not have to think about it.
Reminds me of all the people decrying the protestors in Iran ganging up and kicking the snot out of specific morality police and Basij members even though said members are killing/raping/torturing people. If the punishment for protesting is death then the fight IS to the death.
Part of the problem writers for visual media face is that americans don't understand the difference between "good guy" and protagonist, or "bad guy" and antagonist. As such, they respond poorly to the notion the person working against the antagonist isn't inherently evil, and have a poor understanding of any worl where the protagonist is immoral or amoral.
I'm likely incapable of even writing a 'complex' or 'sympathetic' villain, and I don't mind. My favorite villains have notoriously been the unapologetically evil ones. Queen Chrysalis, Bellatrix LeStrange, most of the villains from Kim Possible, etc. I don't want complex villains, because most of them aren't fun. That said, you likely already know this because you take pride in your work, but! Miles Luna (head writer of most of current RWBY) is half-Latino, but that's only ever brought up when someone criticizes RWBY for being written by two white guys. He's white passing (obviously), but it's no excuse. Not to mention that both he and Kerry Shawcross (other main writer of most of RWBY) did actually state that the White Fang are based on the IRL Black Lives Matter movement and the Black Panther activist group. And for them to say that clearly illustrates how incompetent they truly are.
"I've been at the mercy of men just following orders... never again." Take a good listen to the music playing here, because it really does make a scene. If anyone else was in Magneto's shoes in a scene like this, something triumphant would be playing and make it seem like they were doing something for the greater good, and were defying their hardass leader Charles to do so, but not only does the movie make Magneto a villain for *no reason,* they *want you* to throw out any sympathy and hate him. What a joke.
Fair criticisms that I entirely agree with! The best way to do this is to give the liberation group/Civil rights activists the giant death robot to level the playing field, because it's always fun to kill fascists with 60+ tons of stompy murder. This is literally the centerpiece of one of my worldbuilding projects.
@@FrenkieWest32 No, the complaint lily made that these shows will consistently paint the bashing of the fash as "Too extreme". Also, who does "He" reference in the above?
The only villains we need nowadays in this sea of melodramatic villains are Saturday morning cartoon villains, and actual villains. Or maybe just don't make victims of trauma turn into villains? Is that too much to ask?!
Something that really irks me about Magneto is that on the Days of Future Past movie, he literaly fucking DIES percisely BECAUSE of the Sentinels, robots made specifically to hunt down and exterminate Mutants. A literal fucking genocide happens, which already sits very poorly with him being a Holocaust survivor, and as he lay dying with a spike on his chest, he turns to Xavier and goes "All those years wasted fighting each other, Charles.", with the heavy implication of Erik renouncing his fight. NO! He was right to want to defend his kind, and yet the writers had to put him renouncing to those ideals because they needed him to reconcile with Xavier. It always sat very poorly with me. Overall, the X-Men movies aren't half bad, but that particular scene felt a little off.
Korra had to have done this on purpose because I refuse to believe that not 3 but 4 times did they give their villains good motivation that could’ve lead to real societal change only for it to be a waste of time
One of the things I hate about Magneto in the movies, and in some of the comics (Ultimate Marvel) is that he's a Holocaust survivor that at times wants to commit genocide on humans that aren't mutants. Also speaking of X-Men 3, if a "cure" for being LGBT+ were to be released there would be literal riots on the streets, because that obviously would lead to forcing people to take, criminalizing, discriminating and oppressing those don't. Magneto is completely justified in gathering an army and burning the laboratory to the ground.
I think the only sympathetic villain I've seen done properly is toguro from yyh. For one he doesn't act overtly evil. In fact he's very polite most of the time. And if you look at his actions the only people toguro actually killed were evil rich business men. Yeah he killed genkai but he knew she'd be brought back and he told koenma to keep her body safe. I think sympathetic villains work when their reasons for being bad are personal and aren't affecting the world around them. Toguro just wanted closure. He wasn't trying to destroy the planet or enslave people.
Also the main person telling magneto to roll over and be a good oppressed person is Charles. A man who is born into wealth and doesn’t have any physical mutations allowing him to “pass”. Of course Charles doesn’t want the world to change. He’s doing great
also his power is inerently oppressive : looking into the toughts of others and controlling them could be used as a way to cause psicological trauma and manipulate pepole without leaving a "black eye" so to say ... wich is , idk you could actually swap them as the villain and the hero and the story would work still ...
@@FrenkieWest32 yeah he dose pass. Honestly I said the whole pass thing more in reference to the mutants Charles claims to represent and how he wants them just to blend into non-mutant society as if he isn’t aware that he has a way easier time doing that than someone like night crawler. It was more as his privilege in the mutant community than purely his privilege compared to magneto
@@patchworkgremlin4993 I mean, tellling magneto not to go all mutant-supremacist is not exactly the same as telling mutants to suck it up and do nothing right?
@@FrenkieWest32 I’m sorry did you not watch the video. Okay so let’s strip away the metaphor and challenge this directly. Let’s say your a non-binary person and you are looking to join a LGBTQIA support group. Would you join the one ran by a wealthy gay man who has faced very few issues in life his money couldn’t shield him from who gives out to other members for getting to uppity when faced with violence and discrimination and says if they just wait everyone will get rights eventually Or would you find it more solice in the holocaust survivor who’s determined to stop anything like that happening again and who will help you fight for your rights
What kills me most about this discussion is that there are at least a few ways where "sympathetic villain" COULD be done well, or at least in a way where it doesn't involve the writer shoving their personal biases so far into their mouth that they collapse into a singularity of pretentious posturing, and yet everyone keeps defaulting to another Magneto. Off the top of my head: - Have the protagonist be part of said oppressive regime, only to realize the harm their actions are causing and work to fix it. The "sympathetic villains", then, would be all their former friends and family who refuse to do the same. This is definitely the easiest to screw up, which is probably why She-Ra screwed it up as bad as it did, but I feel like it also has the most potential. (hell, this is basically a plot summary of Schindler's List, and that's a classic for a reason). - Have the protagonists be the oppressed rebels, but then have them win and create a new-and-better status quo, only for a few among them to be unable to handle peacetime after fighting for so long, creating new problems as a result. You'd have to tiptoe a fair bit and be very specific with your criticism, to make sure you're not accidentally vilifying the mentally-ill or trauma victims, but a protag watching their former battle-buddy go ballistic in every sense of the word is a sympathetic antagonist of the highest order. - Make a typical Narmy-as-hell Saturday-Morning-Cartoon villain, but then have them have people they care about. A wife they don't tell about their villany, a son they're raising to take their throne, or even just a pub they go to every friday with their generals to hang out and shoot the shit. Don't make them redeemable (that's best avoided with most SMC-villains, anyway), just give them some kind of life outside their next scheme. Bonus points if they get a Friendship-Fueled Power-Up because "You hurt my bestie, so I'll hurt your everything!" I think the takeaway from all this is that, if you REALLY want to make a sympathetic antagonist, you have options besides "terrible-civil-rights-activist-allegory turned genocidal nutcase."
Magneto is the reason that all of my villians are just differently flavored f!@#$%s. Thank you for all your help Lily. Be safe and give your wife tons of cuddles.
A tangential thing I do like is when a villain misdirects an anti-opression group into their evil plot alongside trying to make change. They probably don't do this one as often because it hits too close to home for liberals
ive noticed that it happens everywhere, for example, in league of legends lore you have this mage that was imprisoned from an early age because he accidentally lashed his powers in a moment of stress againts mageseekers (basically the ss of this world) and was used to seek other mages because of his detecting magic capabilities. He knew the literal genocide that was ocurring for a long time (like 500 years or so), how the mages were killed, made to drink poison that slowly killed them and neutered them, so he wanted to overthrow everything. Manipulated a young adult into getting him knowlegde on how to escape and when he did, he killed the king. He's the main bad guy of the comics. how
Sympathetic villains used to be good sometimes. But most of the time, and even more somehow in this day and age. they are either the worst people getting so called “redeemed” and having their character be replaced by someone that looks and sounds exactly like them and “has their backstory” but their character being fundamentally different in every other aspect aside from it. And usually it isn’t even progressive change if they truly are evil, its fucking instantaneous. As if people with morally questionable robots with a disable evil switch on their back and all you need to do is press it. Or them being seen as wrong people even tho they have clear honest points that make total sense like bismuth from steven universe.
I never saw Magento as a villain, the villain is humanity and their demonization of mutantdom. Charles isn't fighting for the status quo because the status quo is mutant oppression and Charles wants human mutant coexistence and will fight for it and ally with Erik on many an occasion to protect mutants against human oppression. Erik is an antagonist, not a villain, there's a difference; because he's an extremist understandably born specifically out of this experiences from the Holocaust. Him and Charles want similar things, the protection of mutants but because of their experiences, they go about it in very different ways. Charles growing up in privilege brings him to believe that coexistence is possible, that it's not us or them but instead that Humans can be convinced of that due to the few that he's met that have been receptive to the idea. He doesn't believe that reaching humanity is a lost idea. Erik does because he's experienced the worst of humanity. The movies make a point that just because Charles has been in Erik's head doesn't mean he has lived them. The movies even call out that Charles's experience give him some tunnel vision especially in the way that he's a mutant who can pass for human while others like mystique can't not and how difficult it is for him to understand those lived experiences. The movies pull no punches with criticism of both Charles and Erik but what unites them and at times leads them to work together is their fight against the human status quo even if they have different methodologies. So Erik is not a villain but an antagonist
Another great one as always. It never really occurred to me how much Korra really embodies the worst habits of bad cartoon writers until you laid it all out like that. It’s increasingly bizarre how they’ll intentionally evoke the words and imagery of civil rights and portray those characters as villains like they’re fucking Prager U or something
This trope is irritating me so much. There is a thin line between making a complicated villains and victims. Magneto, Malificent are more victims than the bad guy. I once read a story about sirens who are tormenting Sailors and the King of a Kingdom getting tormented by them decides to capture one and make a contract with her. Because she is a siren her morals are indifferent towards humans and she treats them like pets. The female lead can't get through to the siren's morality because it does not apply to humans. And in the end where other sirens get on land to try and torment the kingdom she stops them by telling them the humans of that kingdom are her pets and they should go play somewhere else. It was a good story because we can't judge the siren by human standards because she makes it clear over and over again that she is above humans. And no one can disagree because she is more powerful, lives longer and mystic than humans. She sometimes kills people because they irritate her or uses her power on humans because she is bored. She still does towards the end but she is not as brutal in her ways as she used to be. The human Emperor who was trying to take over the continent was exposed as more evil because he was driven by greed and power.
I know people won't care too much about it, but current X-Men took the entire concept of Xavier dream and shifted it into "fuck humans, we're moving to our own place and taking over Earth's economy", and Erik is absolutely not a villain anymore.
Ultratron had so much potential as a interesting morality challenging character... So they just abandoned it and had him try to destroy the world via sky laser for reasons.
I think I have a metallic age name for this era of television, not the silver age, but the quicksilver, or mercury age. It looks shiny and splendorous, but is slowly poisoning you.
Well hold on he’s not a villain because he wants to kill fascists he’s a villain cause he wants to wipe out every person who isn’t a mutant. In x2 for instance he was willing to force Charles to murder every non mutant.
This one was a long-time coming, especially considering that it ties into your two biggest video essays previously. It's always disappointing to see a writer go down the route of "anti-oppression is bad, actually" because it shows that the writer's true colors and reveals the work for what it always was: drivel. Hopefully said animation "Dork Age" ends soon for us all.
No, its literally about how being anti-opression can lead to a different type of opression! We have INNUMEROUS real life counterparts of this happening, the IRA, USSR, China, the Mujahideen... Hell you can, and should, argue that the fucking Nazis started this way, if Germany didn't get fucked to an oppressive extent after WW1, fascism wouldn't have risen in Germany! We have PROOF of that in Canada, they were monsters during WW1, they killed POWs, they murdered surrendering soldiers, they didn't follow the Christmas Truce, but they didn't get punished after the war ended, no oppressed sentiment rose in Canada, not one hint of anti-opression ideology to turn extremist...
Yep and you nailed the hammer on the head with this one. I've been telling people this sort of stuff for years and I think the main problem is ignorance. I've expressed this before, but I have a serious disdain for villains like Kllmonger and the Flag Smashers group, both which belong to Marvel and both which have been adapted into their cinematic universes as being villains. Except when you actually look at what they're saying they're not really wrong but it's easier to make them villains to keep the status quo that way people don't become uncomfortable when real life situations are brought up in fiction. Even though they had a point, and a good one, you're not allowed to agree with them because they just killed a bunch of people or try to start a race war. Which is nothing any marginalized group wants to do in real life, violence is only ever incited after you've ignored peace for so long. The BLM protests got violent after they've been ignoring previous BLM protests for over a decade. Yeah, because a lot of dumbass people really think that BLM started in 2020 but it didn't, this has been going on since Trayvon Martin, all of which have been peaceful protests yet the only ones that got any attention were the ones during the covid era where people finally had enough and started breaking shit, and guess what? People finally started listening and it incited real conversations. Like in Black Panther. Killmonger was the bad guy, but why? Because he was an allegory for Malcolm X. You know, the very very bad man who made us feel bad because he said things that made people uncomfortable and used some forms of hostility as a way to incite progress. That's the funny thing, is that people will sit here and talk about MLK as if he was some saint but the reality is the only reason why MLK is pushed as hard as he is is because he didn't directly challenge white people often with hostility which made them feel comfortable. That's why they constantly keep on playing that I Have a Dream speech as if he doesn't have a thousand other speeches there are a lot more direct and uncomfortable to white audiences. That's why every time people of color or LGBT people resort to violence and/or uncomfortable conversations directed at the white demographic, it gets shut down in favor of people just saying "Well MLK didn't do that!" and thinking that they just had a mic drop on a far more nuanced argument. But they also seem to tune out the parts were MLK wasn't anti-violence at all he just didn't participate in violent protests himself, and they also forget the part that even though MLK was this very passive man for most of his life, he still got shot in the end. Malcolm and MLK end the same way, regardless about how they went about it because they challenged the status quo. As a black person, villains like Killmonger have always left me with the feeling that a lot of these people are aware that something is wrong with the treatment of the real life people that these characters represent because they unapologetically put it in their films all the time, but they don't want to actually challenge it because it makes them extremely uncomfortable because then that would require them to look back on the actions of their ancestors and how that spills over into affecting people now, and their own actions. They would have to understand where it actually comes from and how they benefit from a system like this intentional or not, how many of these people come from a point of privilege even if they can't completely understand it, and how some of these people would even have to look back on their own past actions, malicious or not, with disdain and criticism. Which is way too personal for a lot of these people. It's why I loved your Steven Universe video so much because it really touches on this subject, especially how you didn't gloss over this very same symbolism with Bismuth because that's exactly what it is. Writing these villains to have a point but then ultimately shut them down because "they go too far". Or painting them as angry irrational people for expressing they're disdain for the system publicly. Because let's be honest, as much as we all love black panther let's not pretend like T'challa and Kilmarger were not references to these two real life people. Because as culturally diverse and beautiful as the film was it still had this underlying message on how to deal with Injustice, except this time MLK didn't get shot. He was welcome to America with open arms. A message that, I could actually talk about all day. Especially since in the movie T'challa didn't even experience the racism and injustice that Killmonger did, yet feels the need to comment on injustices he's never experienced. Using a black man to tell to another black man "You're just too angry." was just the pinnacle of irony to me. Because when you realize that Disney's higher ups are mainly white old men who have never experienced anything on this level of course they would be okay with pushing that message. They are T'challa. Growing up in a level of privilege that none of us could ever imagine and then telling somebody whose life you know very little about that they're just overreacting, especially when you realize is that T'challa's family cause most of Killmonger's problems in the first place. So of course they had to write him like this because anything else would have just been a little too real and on the nose for most people. So T'challa might be a black man in the film but let's not act like they're not using him to relay an underlying message, a message that was approved buy a bunch of white higher-ups, and written by a black man like this because this was the only way this movie was ever going to be approved by them. We wouldn't have the movie the way it's written if it didn't have to go through white approval first and convey a very specific sort of message out of a place of privilege. Using a black man to convey a message like this with that much undertone is more than gross to me. It's disrespectful.
The first thing that came to my mind when thinking about bad people is their detachment to the horrible acts they commit, as they do more and more horrendous shit, they care less and less. Not as an extreme of an example but, weeb get so defensive about child sexualization because they watched so much anime with that content in it that they get desensitised to the point that they see it as something so inconsecuencial and normal that they start thinking is okey to expected or even start DEFEND IT
Exactly, why is Magneto a mass murderer when his core values are morally correct? If there is this strong a counter movement against the status quo, then both the movement itself and the status quo need to be heavily scrutinized bc something is wrong. The problem with writing complex villains of this caliber is it's nearly impossible to avoid all the different pitfalls. You need to be both really smart and very in tone with what you're doing, and I sincerely believe the vast majority of writers just aren't up to snuff, myself included. We have to understand our limitations.
My favourite kind of villians are the one who do bad and evil stuff cause the find it fun a perfect example of this is Maxwell Roth from the assassin's creed syndicate does a bunch of evil shit cause it's fun the villians I like are the ones who go "I like blowing stuff up" and of course they're still the villian of the story but they're just a fun one another example of this is Eris from Sinbad she just wants to make chaos and when the heros stop her she's like "Oh no you have stopped me eh whatever I'm just going to go do the same thing somewhere else bye" I also like villians whos motivation has nothing to do with the heros they just get in their way making it harder for the villian so they end up being the villian of the story. Do I also like the regular old villians who just want to rule the world and all the regular old things yes but most of the "sympathetic" villians make me want to punch my screen.
lily, this video is fantastic! i don't know if i'm imagining things, but it feels like your videos have gotten a lot more concise and. like. fun? over the past year. and i've been following your work for ages, so all i mean to say is that it seems like you're having more fun with your videos nowadays, and yet that doesn't detract from the more serious side of them at all. i feel like you've found exactly how to hit the nail on the head. awesome stuff!
Watching this video makes me long for stories like that of the Authority, at least during the Warren Ellis run. The villains weren't meant to be simpathetic and the heroes actively fought against a stagnant status quo.
The problem is that for many sympathetic villains, the audience isn’t suppose to agree with the villain’s terrible actions, or just forgive and forget those terrible actions just because the villain is sad, however that’s exactly what ends up happing for some villains such as Wanda or Thanos from the MCU.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who's noticed this disturbing trend. Demanding justice for serious, legitimate grievances and taking action on behalf of the oppressed has been written as a "stock supervillain motive" for so many shows and movies in recent years that we're basically being fed a conveyor belt of propaganda about how "resisting tyranny is BAD and only BAD GUYS do it."
heres the thing, you can have a villain TRY and be sympathetic, have them go "eueueu b-but I'VE been through bad things TOO" and the main characters should just go "grow the fuck up" and kill their ass. a very VERY good example is the main villain in space sweepers, a white billionaire who thinks just because hes been through hardship he has the authority to do anything he wants. i recommend the movie a million times over, its a cute found family movie in space with a kickass lesbian, a trans robot, a sad dad, and a gentle giant ex gang member dad. its fucking adorable.
I really do want a hero that kills the villain regardless of how bad the villain may have had it. I don’t want them to be exactly like punisher, but I want a hero who won’t fall for the “it’s not my fault I had a bad childhood, why is everyone scared of me” bullshit after the villain murdered a bunch of people. I’m not sure how many people would like a superhero like that, but I’d love them.
Idk if magneto was ever meant to be sympatheric, more tragic, like a "look at how far he's going even though he just wants equality" maybe that's just how the new writers have done it but others seem to do write it better where he will sit on jenosha and keep peace as long as the world doesnt attack jenosha (edit) and a holocasut survivor can still be a villian just as much as anyone else. minority or otherwise there was a punisher story where a woman was raped by a taxi driver. She responds by killing taxi drivers which results in the punisher killer her. He says he would have gladly helped her kill rapists, she was just targeting the wrong people, the other taxi drivers who did nothing wrong
Ive always seen magneto as in the right, because he eventually said alright my actions are literally getting me nowhere so im just gonna make my own country. So he made his own country were mutants can live without discrimination, but then other countries were basically this dude is the rular of a country....thats not very democratic republic of you, so they start dicking with him and his civilians there. The worst part is THAT THEY WANTED TO BE THERE, when nightcraller asked to leave magneto was like "ok,your ship leaves tomorrow,and you are always welcome back." Qnd its momments were he is protrayed as the hero (and when him and dr. Doom beat the everliving shit out of red skull) where i love his character the most
Not quite the same but I hated how in Venom 2 they needed to have carnage experience child abuse to explain why he was a 'psychopath' when it would have been fine, and in fact better, if they just had him be a guy that enjoys killing and bring a dick.
I mean I do love sympathetic villains done well such as MCU Killmonger and Wen Wu. But I do have my fair share of villains that I love who are straight up evil such as Light Yagami and Yoshikage Kira.
Isn"t Killmonger exactly Magneto? ^^' I've only seen Black Panther once, but from what I can remember, he was the son of an activist who fought for black people, and was killed by the Wakanda to protect status-quo.... Yeah, he wants to take the control of Wakanda, of course he does, they're doing nothing except rpotecting the status-quo that is klling black people XD The fact that T'challa does exactly what Killmonger was trying to do proves that Killmonger was not supposed to be a villain ^^'
@@FrenkieWest32 Yeah, but he still break a milleniar old tradition to bring help to them. In a non-violent way, but how much time before black guys who have enough of being brutalized will require weapons from Wakanda? ^^ Besides, the use of violence is often the main complaint about vilains that do the right thing, and the only thing that separate them from the good guy.
I remember seeing somewhere a criticism of that show The Dragon Prince that the writers used both Moses imagery (specifically of the Jewish people escaping Egypt and also hankering for a homeland they were unjustly expelled from centuries ago) and fascist imagery in their villain and how that was so wildly offensive and inappropriate that it was crazy how nobody thought twice about it and, yeah, this shit is really common even with villains who aren't even intentionally framed as sympathetic.
![เปิดคำทำนาย นอสตราดามุส - บาบา วานก้า ปี 2025 คนทั่วโลกต้องเจออะไรบ้าง? | แฉ 11 ธ.ค. 67 [2/3] |GMM25](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/xmTIKWJUMPM/mqdefault.jpg)
"Oh but Lily he wants to kill all the humans!"
THE.
WRITERS.
CHOSE.
TO.
MAKE.
HIM.
THAT.
WAY.
I get it
The idiotic ways that people project themselves onto their characters is beyond me.
What about Darth Maul?
He is a terrible man and he knows it.
It's quite stupid indeed when people say that antifa ¨Became the fascists¨. Don't they realise that antifa never changed and that they were always the villains?
You actually pointed out why this is so common in your encanto video.
Pain and suffering are things everyone understands so most people will look at a tragic backstory and feel sympathy because the writers are KNOWINGLY baiting our compassion and basic human decency regardless of whether said backstory actually justifies the villains actions.
The first failed attempt at a sympathetic villain I actually recognized as such on my own was the MCU's Wanda back in age of Ultron... That's how easily baited I was.
I do actually like Magneto, but he does make a better hero than a villain. If I were a mutant I would probably join Magneto over Xavier as I would recognise the cause he is fighting for as a worthwhile one.
Definitely a good example of too sympathetic to be a villain.
What personally kills me is how people think that Villains have to have some dramatic experience in order to be evil. Neglecting that human will do many things out of petty reasons.
Freiza was villian because of his superiority complex and how he uses to dominate other. Lilith (owl house) is villain because she's hypocrite in ideas and philosoph a sheep in wolves clothing. lex Luther is villain because he jealous of the man of steel for both his power and people adoration.
People can be vile for some the mildest of things so no we don't need complexity for villian to be good.
Right. My favorite villains are the ones that are evil, accept that they’re evil and don’t spend their screentime trying to convince others that they are not evil, instead they lean into that shit.
Ive never heard anyone act like EVERY villain needs to be hyper complex and sympathetic... Many people like it though, but people liking something different from you is not the same as them not understanding it or whatever.
@@FrenkieWest32 maybe not on your side of the internet, but I have heard/seen many a person whine about how they need the backstory of this evil person or that evil person to make them more “realistic” when its like, it is realistic that there are people out there who do evil shit because they just can.
Yeah, and I don’t know if MY villain in my story that I don’t know what to do with follows this trope. He’s a robot, the protagonist is his biohuman brother, but was forgotten, so he decided to murder everyone who though he was stupid, and this was before he was a villain. Then, he was disabled for a while, then hidden by his creator to give him some combat upgrades. Then, the cia of this story killed the creator because of the robot, and then he killed them. Afterwards, he just kinda wanted to be a shit guy and make everyone miserable, then started a nuclear holocaust, then almost wiped out half the earth, then almost released an eldritch horror from another universe, then was on the brim of the power of being a god, then failed.
There's also just being greedy, or lustful, or prideful... or just go down the list of seven deadly sins and have that as their villain motivation.
Greed - A greedy landlord, king, or businessman is doing evil shit to make money. Jack up the rent to take someone for all their worth and kick them out when they're broke, or use the key to their room to sneak and steal valuables when their tenants are away. A king who taxes the poor to oblivion or a business guy who buys up politicians to reduce the taxes for the rich while also saving on quality control for their products.
Lust - Have a creepy rapist or pervert as the villain.
Pride - Someone insists they have to be the one in charge no matter how dangerously incompetent they are and has to put down anyone else who threatens their ego.
Wrath - A villain is just a straight up violent person who uses violence at every opportunity and the hero has to stop them.
Sloth - Someone is a lazy piece of garbage who got into a position of power for the perks and refuses to do what's required of them. A low-key version of this could be Scar from the Lion King who killed his brother for the throne and apparently spent Simba's whole childhood-to-adulthood loafing around forcing the lionesses to hunt to feed him and the hyenas until the ecosystem was ruined. He didn't even give lip service to the "circle of life" scam Mufasa had going that encouraged prey to come by to watch the ceremonies and not mind getting eaten.
Gluttony - Being greedy and wasteful especially while others are starving. Couples nicely with other sins like greed, lust, sloth, etc.
Not sure if the Sirens from Equestria Girls Rainbow Rocks would count since they fed on the hatred their songs caused, that could have counted for greed instead.
Envy - Being upset at the sight of someone else's good fortune. This could actually be resolved two ways, either by the envious person wanting to tear down the person they envy to feel better about themselves, or they could try to improve their own station to catch up.
Imagine a villain who envies the hero's good looks, their status, their family, or maybe their powers or whatever. They could go about resolving in a more benign way and try to earn/get powers or status of their own, or be jealous and combine envy with greed or wrath to steal or destroy the heroe's things.
And boom. Seven deadly sins provide seven nasty character traits and motivation to make a villain. No need for traumatic backstory to make a person who wants to make a mess of things. They could just be a greedy bastard who's trying to steal all the heroe's stuff or a lustful creep who won't take no for an answer.
Why make a sympathetic villain when its sometimes easier and better to do a charismatic villain. You will hate him, but you will love hating him.
This is why I like Emet-Selch since he's both. The writer made sure that while you can understand his motives and possibly sympathize with him, the only real way he'll ever (as far as we know) realize his goals would be through genocide and I like that there's a hard line like that.
"I'M GOING TO FREE YOU OF YOUR CHAINS."
"Of oppression, right?"
"OF MORTALITY"
Lily would make a great VA for a Saturday morning cartoon villian.
I would agree and also curious what kind of villain she could play, or anti hero
"You're just one bad TV show away from being me"
“Were here to save you”.
“Yay it’s the catholic church”
“FROM YOURSELFS!”
“OH NO IT’S THE CATHOLIC CHURCH!”
Lily would be ok ne of the best VAs ever.
Comic books absolutely love having villains whose "issues with society are correct, but whose methodology is just too much!" While this is not necessarily bad in and of itself, the problem in 99% of stories with villains like this is that... The heroes never get around to addressing the whole "your issues with society are correct" part. They only stop the bad guy, and the injustice they sought to overturn or fix just gets to keep going. No matter how courageous the heroes end up being, the message of the work is ultimately status-quo.
Remembering one of the times comics made Superman evil, because of course, he had a horrific loss of Lois and their child and that was his moment of 'kill someone (the joker) and end all war and suffering by becoming a dictator'. Yeah I have problems with Injustice and that's all I'll say about, Lily covers the trope better already and much if it can apply to that Superman turn evil storyline.
Star Wars did something similar as the entire reason the Sith could start the Clone Wars, as the fact that the republic was a corrupt entity that allowed millions in the mid and outer rim to be exploited and near enslaved, all the while government services like healthcare and security were non-existent despite the fact they were required to pay taxes like everyone else. Once the empire officially forms, very little attention is paid to the fact that the old republic government handed the reigns to Palpatine, the system itself chose death over reform as even during the Clone wars, the issue of their looming bankruptcy was known yet the Senate still pushed for more clones, more star-destroyers-more war and when the bill came due, they decided that fascism was the way to go.
In a way I think black panther did this but with solution? Because even though Killmonger was in the “yea your right but you’re going about it wrong” and then there was an appeal and he denied it and a lot of people were in danger- so when he was fought and then died in a way he got to see a piece of the home he never had but also after he died Wakanda did open up to the world. So the problem did end up resolving
I don’t know what your reading, if that is your belief about comic villains. I can also hardly think of an abundance of villains that have a point, maybe Luther, Magneto and Poison Ivy. Maybe. Besides, the heroes most often aren’t the right ones to make that change.
Isn’t it also currently the fucking status quo of the comics that Magneto and Xavier team up to make sure the extinction of mutantdom never happens. So change is occurring, time to examine what that looks like.
@@keg-bear2910 Not sure what you've been reading that showed avaricious opportunistic Lex Luther as a villain 'who sorta had a point', unless it was some elseworld story or Frank Miller comic (I was never much for reading Miller). Lol
You make some damn fine points. You're right, people tend to forget that Chris Claremont, who wrote this revised backstory for Magneto, did it with the specific purpose of eventually turning Magneto into a hero in the first place. He was made more sympathetic so the readers would understand why he eventually joined the X-Men (at least until editorial made him a villain again).
Personally i feel like sympathetic villains CAN work if the reason they are evil is unapologetically emotional and personal. Like not they are doing someting right in the story but a "I can understand why they went down this path." kind of deal.
Nox from wakfu is a great example
Reminds me of the Disney Villain 'issue'. For years the general public wanted more nuanced villains. They wanted more mystery and reasons why they became evil. So that's what Disney is now giving us, surprise twist villains who are doing evil to save someone/stick it to racists/get what was stolen from them or some other BS. And they're boring. Now everyone is bemoaning and wondering where the 'good' Disney villains like Maleficent, Ursula and Scar went. The ones who were evil for the heck of it or some kind of greed but had a screen presence. They were fun to watch.
Or when they transform the backstory of said iconic villains, to make them the center of the story, and suddenly they're not the vilains anymore XD
I mean, if you know that Maleficient was metaphorically raped by the king in the past, her actions in the movie is not more villain, it's just "why are you attacking the princess, kill the king stupid!" ^^'
I think it's good for storytelling trends to change every once in a while.
I was a huge fan of ABC' Once Upon a Time. I think they did the sympathetic villain quite well with the Evil Queen. Snow White accidentally caused the death of the Evil Queen's true love, so the queen wants to kill snow white. It's a simple understandable motive, but it doesn't make her quest for revenge any less evil.
Also, sympathetic villains were new and refreshing. Sympathetic villains peaked with Elsa from Frozen and Maleficent imo. Now there's an oversaturation.
@@krankarvolund7771 She thought hurting Aurora would've hurt the King more. I don't think it's that unreasonable.
@@phadenswandemil4345 I can understand the thought, but it still hurt an innocent for no reason ^^'
That's the problem, either you have a sympathetic character, and then he can't hurt babies for any reason, or if your character is willing to hurt babies to achieve their goal.... They're not sympathetic anymore, they're just villains....
@@krankarvolund7771 hell Maleficent in the film is the one who also gives the “True Love’s kiss” loophole.
New Trope name
"Getting in the death robot"
When your villain hasn't seemed evil enough so you have them do something so overly evil it out does everything else they've done up to that point
"Getting in the Death Robot."
"Boiling Kitten in Lava."
"Burning the Tree."
Yep. They did that in Black Panther.
“The villain has some good points about how crappy it is that Wakanda is so busy holding up the status quo that it doesn’t see the oppression of the African diaspora… better have him beat up an old woman about it”
I know this was a serious conversation about making the activists seem like the bad guy by making them go way over the line. But for some reason everytime you mentioned them getting into the death robot just made me chuckle.
I'm very sure the humor was intentional, it got me too
Same, I'm gonna use that in my Greek group in out debates.
I personally love villains that have no morals that you can defend, villains that are just evil to be evil are so wonderful because when they eventually are defeated it feels like something actually happened.
I am so glad you finally brought this up. It always frustrated me whenever magneto is made a villain in stories. One really ghoulish example is in the secret wars comic where at one point, wasp compared magneto with Hitler. My only thought was: who the fuck thought that was a good idea!?!?!?
They literally made the "you're becoming lik them" with holocaust? Yikes ^^'
I feel like marvel just needs to have magneto taken away from them. Like oh you wanna compare the holocaust victim to Hitler (not to mention that there was a controversy recently about there being a comic where they burn said holocaust victim) you are no longer allowed to write for this character.
@@krankarvolund7771 in ultimatum it's Xavier saying that to magneto's face
I know it happened in the Ultimate Universe, Professor Xavier said it when Magneto flooded some of the world (I can’t remember how much of it). The conversation ends with Magneto snapping his neck. The Ultimate universe was pretty awful all around.
@@krankarvolund7771 To be fair you could say that to Israel
Oh boy! "Resisting oppression is for naughty", my faaavourite trope ever, I can never get enough of this! /s
There is a difference to resiting oppression to wanting to be the oppressor. Also just because you bring down the system don't mean what comes after will be better. A lot of bad regimes were keeping back something so much worse.
Almost went to right a comment asking about your thoughts on “sympathetic villains” that don’t have a backstory of abuse/racism/discrimination, and seeking “justice in the wrong way.” Then I realised I was being stupid and that those sort of sympathetic backstories don’t exist. This honestly makes me feel better as a writer for not ever wanting to bother trying to make my villains “complex”. Sometimes the best villain is the one that is just there, it’s evil, and you can enjoy punching it without any grief.
the best villains are those that are actual threats almost completely non dependent on their personality, which is why sympathetic villains don't really work that well, they are either spend too much time developing their back story and forget to actually have them being villainous so that when they are defeated by the protagonist you as the audience feel more like what did they do to deserve that or they do what's mentioned in this video and they make a character who should by all rights be a hero suddenly do unreasonably evil things that clash with their personality and goals up to that point just so that the protagonist can punch them in the face without a problem
@@michellekeppler982 It's so true. Another important thing that makes a good villain is their presence in the story. It doesn't matter how sympathetic or pure evil they are, they need to actually exist in the narrative for them to be worth punching.
Lachlan Wrigh,and what are you working on?,is it just fanfiction?,and i will let you know a good writer makes his villains more than a obstacle to punch
@@ΠαναγιώταΠοιμενίδου-π8υ No it’s not just fanfiction thank you. And even if it was, it’s completely out of line to suggest something like that, “fan fiction” isn’t any less than an original IP, as it’s still able to be written by very skilled and talented creators as often as original works. A villain needs to fit the situation. In a high fantasy story, a complex villain isn’t a requirement for a good story. Sauron wasn’t nuanced, Voldemort had a backstory but his goal was akin to a Nazi. So yes, non-complex villains that exist purely to be a satisfyingly punchable target are written by good authors (and Rowling). As to what I write, I don’t have any “villains” because they aren’t beneficial to the story.
Lachlan Wright,so you would you mind telling me what are you working on,you didn't tell me
Also Sauron and Voldemort still had backstory,Sauron was the most beautiful and powerful maiar,he was eventually corrupted by Morgoth,when his master was defeated,he tried to redeem himself for a time until he returned to his evil ways,even though Tolkien didn't put any of that to his lotr books,he still gave Sauron a backstory in other material,like the Silmarillion,Voldemort was the result of a love potion which made him unable to feel love,which is at the very least a explanation for his villainy
You also said there are no sympathetic villains without discrimination/racism/abuse to their backstory,which is false,Dr octopus from spiderman 2 wasn't abused or victim of racism,but he was motivated by his ultimate failure and the death of his wife,and thus to make it all worth it he turned to villainy so he could complete his project,he was also manipulated by his tentacles,or his other version from Marvels Spiderman,while less sympathetic than the Saimi Raimi version he still had understandable reasons to turn evil,he was cheated and wronged by his former partner Norman Osborn,he also suffers from a neurological disorder which will make his body useless,so he wants to take his revenge before his body becomes completely useless.
Or how about Wenwu from Shang Chi,he wasn't motivated by Justice,racism or abuse,he was motivated by the loss of his Wife and that he can't move on,or how about Thanos,he still had a reason and wasn't a mindless evil,he genuinely believed the only way to save the universe is to wipe out half of of the population,it wasn't justice,it was a savior complex,he was also sympathetic because he didn't acted like a cartoon villain,like loving Gamora as his daughter and mourning her which brings me to my next point
A sympathetic villain isn't just sad backstory,but to also have redeemable qualities or virtues,like the villain being kind to his loved ones or being humble
Also the video didn't exactly said that Sympathetic villains suck,but that making someone who fights racism or oppression a villain sucks.
I absolutely love the fact that you brought RWBY into this, because you are absolutely right about the White Fang and Adam. In the Adam trailer you can see that his disdain for humans grew more and more, he hated humans to the point of instead of wanting equality, he wanted revenge, he wanted the Faunus to be above humans. In Volume 1 during an interaction with Blake and Sun, she talks about how the White Fang “Used to be peaceful” until it started growing violent after Ghira stepped down as the High leader and replaced by Sienna. Blake mentions in volume 5 when she’s talking to Sun that a word she would use to describe Adam was spite, he was spiteful towards the humans and hated them for what they did to the Faunus, You can argue and say Blake was the same way in the earlier volumes. In Adams song “Lionize” the lyrics go a bit deeper into Adams intentions with the White Fang. Wasn’t exactly the best trope to go with especially bringing light to racism against the Faunus. Granted, Adam wasn’t a good person all together but to use him to make the White Fang seem like this super violent organization because of racism wasn’t exactly the best trope to use imo.
Okay so while I have many problems with this video I just wanna address one thing
if you want a protagonist/hero group who are activists trying to change the status quo, that is what the X-Men are
that is what the X-Men have always been. The idea that the X-Men are just centrists who kneel before oppressors and defend the status quo, is made up
it's not a real issue in the slightest. People just randomly decided it was a thing. The X-Men literally barged into a government meeting to stop a corrupt authority figure from killing all mutants. They just don't go to the same extremes as magneto, which include, making doomsday devices to wipe out all of humanity. The X-Men are the pro activist heroes people are looking for but, people refuse to acknowledge this because they wanna praise magneto so badly. People who say this have not actusally read any comics, and have at best, seen the movies. And if they have read the comics then they're blatantly missing the point. The X-Men are not defenders of the status quo, they are defenders of the people who continuously try to change the status quo.
I'd like to point out that Chris Claremont didn't portray Magneto as a villain again after giving him the new Holocaust backstory in issue 150. Other writers tried to roll back on editorial mandate after X-Men got bigger than one writer, but Claremont refused to allow it and even killed Magneto off in his last story in 1991 with him basically saying "I'd rather die than be a villain and hurt anyone again," but that got retconned two years after Chris left. So Chris did mean well giving Magneto that origin, and intended it to be part of his reformation.
I think a great example of a sympathetic villain is Pain/Nagato. His goal was to ultimately bring peace to the world, but by force via a weapon of mass destruction and distributing it to the great nations. First he'd demonstrate its power and because of that, the nations of the world would quake in fear and eventually conflicts would cease under the fear of said weapon being used again. He eventually became a villain because growing up, his nation was constantly destroyed due to always being caught in the crossfire between other warring nations which eventually caused him to lose his parents. He ultimately moved on from that after meeting his teacher Jiraiya and two others who would become his best friends and together, they formed an organization dedicated to bringing peace to their nation and rebuilding it. Though later on, his master left and he lost his best friend because him and his two friends were set up to be assassinated and this what fully set him off on the path of bring peace to the world through extreme means. The best part about all this is at the end of the day, he's the one who showed Naruto that just killing him for revenge is just gonna keep the cycle of revenge going and this changed Naruto's way of thinking and dealing with certain villains entirely.
I'm so glad Philip wittebane from the owl house didn't become sympathetic and instead became more heinous
Please pardon my terrible Mark Hammil impression
That bit got a chuckle out of me.
No need to Lily it was fucking beautiful and I smiled hearing that bit, loved it!
I thought you did it well.
I loved it, it sounded deliciously evil
It had the same energy and I feel like that’s all that matters lol
A sympathetic villain is best done by giving the villain an evil motivation, but a sympathetic reason to get there.
Demona from Gargoyles wanted to destroy all humans. As motives go, there's no way to be sympathetic with that motive.
How she gets there is through repeatedly being betrayed and oppressed and witnessing the near-genocide of her species all at the hands of humans. You can see how she got there. You can see the desire for her to get out of there for her own sake, as well as humans. You can also see that, absent that change of heart, you gotta take her down hard!
Similar with Homelander in The Boys. Seeing where he is, you don't have sympathy for his motives. They're evil. They involve dominating and manipulating others for nothing more than a sense of aggrandizement. At the same time, you see how he gets there and you can feel for him... even as you say he's gotta die because there's no other way to stop him.
Okay, but that clip of Xavier trying to talk Magneto down by telling him that he's going to be taking the lives of good people who are just following orders... Just like... BRUH! Didn't we all agree with the Nuremberg Trials that 'just following orders' isn't a defense, it's an indictment!???
Would have been SO much better if after Xavier tells Magneto that he's going to be killing good people who are 'just following orders' for Magneto to just be like, "... Yes? Thanks for the indictment of their actions...? I didn't need you to justify my actions, but thanks, bud!" pROFESSOR X, you should know better than this! Then again, I suppose that you're not a history professor, now are you? :p
…that’s like exactly what he says man
The Nuremberg trials didnt conclude that ''just following orders isnt a defense, its an indictment''.
Also, they were about individuals committing war crimes. This scene is not necessarily about this.
Worth bearing in mind that part of the reason Xavier says the completely wrong thing there is that he can't read Magneto's mind because of the helmet. He's likely good at finding the right words a lot of the time because he can literally know at a moment's notice what not to say to someone. But he was on the backfoot when confronting Mags in that scene and panicked.
That part in the movie was such a blatant "Lets have xavier do a whoopsie so we can have magneto say the line" that it honestly lowered my opinion of the writers.
True.
One thing that pisses me off really badly about legend of Korra is its villains but I think the villain that pisses me off the most is the third season‘s villain Zaheer (I think that’s his name I forget) mainly because in season four they give him this sort of redemption moment where he helps Korra overcome her trauma… that he fucking caused. And I remember watching it and being like “what is this bullshit?” And it’s treated like this really somber moment like you should feel bad for him and I hate it. To this day I still feel like it’s some sort of victim blaming thing or just a complete misunderstanding of the idea that trauma survivors can heal without having to have a conversation with their abusers (or both) and I fucking hate how it is just a trauma survivor overcoming their trauma with the implication that they had to face the person who traumatized them to do it! To tie this back to the video I think this is a really big issue with Zaheer specifically as sympathetic villain, they have to make them “boil kittens in lava” as you say to get across they are a villain. so they start out with “a bunch of these governments are really oppressive somebody should fix that” and then immediately veer to “ hey let me try to kidnap a literal child get arrested for it and then when I break out torture her with poison” (although it’s entirely possible that the writers just really wanted to get their torture porn in there and didn’t know how else to do it) The reason the fire lord worked well as a villain was because he was just the ultimate baddie that you had to defeat, there was no trying to sympathize with him if anything there seems to be more emphasis on sympathizing with his victims, namely Zuko. Although of course they flobbed that at the very end with the “killing is bad always even when they are an imperialist” bs. I apologize if this comment is a little all over the place it’s just that the part of the script about legend of Korra made me realize that I had some feelings about the show that I didn’t really know I had in regards to their villains.
I didn't watched Legend of Korra, but when you said Zaheer was helping Korra recovering from the trauma he caused and we were expected to feel bad about him, I thought about Bill from Kill Bill. Mainly the scene where he's killing her for leaving him, while saying he's not a sadist, he's really sad in fact and is suffering XD
The thing that works well in Kill Bill, is that, well, it's in the title. The plan is to kill Bill for that, not forgive him. Even though the Bride is in tears at the end, and he was a good father for her daughter, he's still dead, because you can't forgive something like that ^^'
Even the first time I watched them poison Korra, I wasn't on board with it as if they wanted her dead, couldn't they have administered the poison in a way she wouldn't have noticed and then fought her? Then when they brought him back in Book 4, I was even more unimpressed as why would she go to him, of all people? Couldn't she ask Katara, or Tenzin, or his daughter who in the previous season demonstrated having the ability to do what Zaheer could do?
I was left wondering if the writers felt so bad about screwing up what anarchism actually is that they threw him a bone? I also thought that anarchism was basically Nolen Joker, till I looked it up like I did all the villain's supposed ideologies and saw just how badly they messed it up.
I agree with nearly everything but the not killing the fire lord bit aang is a pacifist who heavily despises killing it’s not so much a “killing is bad” moment and more of aang being a monk and when given an opportunity to not have to take a life he took it
@@krankarvolund7771 it’s funny because there is a quite believable theory about Beatrix not killing Bill in the end.
@@artyom-ovsepyan It's just a theory ^^
I've always thought having Magneto as a villain was weird but I never knew how wide spread this is
I've always called it the "Bus full of orphans" trope.
I've watched most of the X-Men movies, and the nasty anti-mutant conspiracies shown across the franchise go WAY past the point where violent revolution would morally qualify as self-defense. "Days of Future Past" even kicked off in a future where people were being imprisoned just for supporting mutant rights. Even if one assumes Magneto was going too far with his stance that peaceful coexistence is impossible, there's no excuse to recognize no middle ground between "politely asking the leaders of a dysfunctional system to stop the oppression" and " unbridled extremism with no regard for collateral damage".
I felt that way too with Magneto. I felt they keep trying to make him evil but his points were valid. I love how you keep referencing the death robot! It felt so out of place in the Avatar world!
Even if animation doesn’t seem to fit! It just looks weird and I hate it!
@@thatowllady7276 Same!
So that's why I loves Belos, every chance another show would have taken to make him sympathetic, Owl House uses to make him a bigger twat
Even when I was little, I remember being bothered about these stories because at some point these suppose "villians" should be the heroes. They're trying to overthrow an oppressive system, why are they the bad guys?
I always get the impression from these stories that by combating the evils of the world, you might somehow succumb to this evil by acting onto that evil, therefore its best to maintain your virtue rather than potentially succumb your vices which is just...
I thought we're already over Christianity, but apparently not.
Yeah, as someone who went to a Catholic school, I was told that doing nothing and not “dirtying your hands” is better than action. We talked about the trolley problem in my theology class and, when presented with the option to save multiple lives by consciously choosing to end one life, we were told it was morally best to do nothing because consciously ending any one life is a bad thing: never mind that doing nothing is still a decision and that consciously standing by while multiple people die… isn’t good?
What you resist persist
If you get you get it
If you don't you don't
I think there their the bad guys caues they overthrow the system with eveyone in it. Good, bad don't mater there the enemy an must be destroyed or subjugated. Just because someone is sympathetic don't justifies the evil shit they do
I don't get how everyone in this comment section is so against the idea of not becoming a vengeful monster, just because you were or are wrong doesn't mean you have a free pass to do awful things.
@@marcoaravena130 If it prevents me or someone else from being a victim again I would support Civilization choosing to become a Monster against select targets from within itself
i never got into the x-men movies so seeing that magneto clip is jarring. trying to use a character to make a point about status quo and also be the death robot evil never makes sense, and to see it it so much media is mind boggling. Great video
I think the main problem with how sympathetic villains are portrayed is that the vast majority of the time the legitimate problems and concerns the villains raise are never addressed. Like Harry Potter never addresses all the systemic issues of racism and oppression in the Ministry of Magic for example.
If the writer wanted to address them, they wouldn't have made the character raising those issues a villain in the first place.
@@LilianOrchard Well, there is a way to thread the needle which is where you do what the Black Panther movie did. Killmonger raises good points, but is so consumed with bitter personal hatred that he is unable to tackle them and then he leaves an impact on the hero who changes their behavior because the villain clearly had an influence on their thinking.
I think there is merit to the idea of someone pursuing a morally just end goal but becoming extreme in their methodology to the point they are an opponent of the goal they claim to fight for.
Like Magneto (I know you said he sucks) who seeks a morally just goal of protecting mutantkind but becomes just the flipside of the same oppressive coin he claims to oppose.
Like I said before, the issue isn't that portraying extremism, even if it pursues goals we all support, is bad. But that even well intentioned authors are unable to answer the questions they raise and thus choose not to.
@Master Imaginariumdooblepopper That is the thermain argument that Lily is talking against for the reason that it excuses a problem of the AUTHOR by using their problematic writing as a defense.
The problem with Magneto isn't only that his backstory is of being a holocaust surviver. It's the fact his a holocaust surviver who's goals are to prevent a similar genocide from occurring towards another discriminated group, which is made valid from the fact that in Days of Future Past, the protagonists must go back in time to prevent the creation of Androids specifically created to GENOCIDE mutants which already happened as most mutants are dead and all of humanity is wiped out as the Androids turned against them and yet despite the validity of his fears is made out to be the VILLIAN.
My favourite kind of villain is the ones who start in the giant death robot and never stops until the main characters beat them. Just let villains be evil.
Lily: "When will the animation dork age end?"
Me: "The universe would end before fandom actually adds nuance to... anything"
Your summary on each of the Legend of Korra villains and how they all ended up awful made me realise they’re all GREAT examples of when writers don’t know antagonistic forces required for a story isn’t synonymous with a “villain”, the former is needed for story structure and for character arcs, the latter is optional, as evil bad guys with giant death robots aren’t needed unless you always intended for that kind of villain or you totally messed up as a writer and don’t know how to end a story without a hero vs bad guy fight.
By making them villains in the end they dodged having to properly confront the antagonist force, which can sometimes be more moral than the main character, as not all main characters are good people or are in the right and need to learn/change. Sometimes a story can acknowledge an injustice in the world and the somber realisation we don’t have an answer/east fix yet but need to keep trying to find one even if it might take generations to achieve.
The sudden switch to “completely evil” with all of Korea’s antagonists was basically to try and forcefully undo the accidentally really compelling argument the “villain” presented that was worth exploring.
By having them become a villain they can just put the lid back on Pandora’s box and pretend it was never opened in the first place, so none of the real grievances ever have to be discussed again.
This is the dangers of writers who try to write about themes they don’t know anything but surface level information on and use it for artificial depth/complexity, a writer touching on themes with such extensive roots in the violent parts of human history, like genocide as that’s a popular one these days, should actually be doing immense amounts of academic-levels of historical research on the subject matter, not cannibalising other works of fiction they’ve seen use it before, making their presentation of it even more cartoony and clueless to the nature of the themes they’re exploring.
It’s how they write themselves into a corner, unable to resolve their own plot/story conflict without a cop out of pushing the antagonistic force into cartoon villain mode so the hero is easily justified and the “morally superior” character in the final show down, with the story resolution focusing on their victory and providing no solution to the bigger, serious issue their story had initially seemed to be about.
Writers need to stay in their lane where they have the necessary knowledge or lived experienced to write about something or actually get scholarly and commit themselves to being capable to write about their chosen themes, as half arsing it ends up having them create something undeniably worse than the “simplistic” story their ego makes them think they’re out competing with their more “dark” and “complex” story idea.
My favourite example of "sympathetic villian" is surprisingly Fate/Apocrypha. It has some minor villians, but the main antagonist is LITERAL saint. Both sides of the conflict have unquestionably noble motives and both sides acknowledge that.
"Just following orders" is a sentence that can no longer be said after the establishment of "manifestly illegal orders" and "Superior orders"
It’d be so much easier if every writer and their mother didn’t try to make their villains more “interesting” than the heroes.
they should both be interesting, it is up to the writer decide which one should be more interesting
i was rewatching the x-men show and the arc where beast was jailed for trespassing into a human facility came up. magneto breaks into the jail, telling beast to escape with him, and beast goes "im waiting for my day in court!! see, if i plead my case and show the world our actual cause, they'll listen!!1!" magneto then tells him when the oppressor is the judge, jury, and executioner, there is no justice for them and that professor x is an asshole for forcing him into this martyr role.
how in the _world_ am i supposed to hear that and think magneto is the villain? in what neoliberal bubble would magneto's words there be wrong? ik in recent years marvel finally has the mutants working together for a peaceful and just life for themselves, but that's 35 years overdue!
Ive said this 1000 times about RWBY the writers want the white fang to be the brotherhood of evil mutants in the story but from scene to scene they want the white fang to be COBRA from GIJoe just a bunch of faceless mooks to be killed on mass by the hero's with no moral ambiguity
Okay, that "never again" line Magneto said? I honestly thought that was supposed to be a heroic moment, I thought that was supposed to be the beginnings of why Charles views Erik's stance as a solid thing to be considered. Because he's a fucking holocaust survivor, Xavier should be able to understand why Erik (Magneto's real name) is doing the things he's doing. Sure it'd be great if the cursed government could stop being evil and oppressive, but if that was the case, then Erik wouldn't have a reason to attack anyone. This is something so fucking obvious, that how could anyone miss it?!
when I watched the movie back when it came out I thought you were supposed to take both sides of magneto and Dr X as reasonable from their point of view, it never came of as Dr X being one sidedly right just that the two of them were not going to agree, though that may just be because I'm white and blond and hadn't realised that I was in the LGBTQ+ community yet. but even then I thought that Magneto was right.
Yeah even the director ( i think he said in an interview) said magneto was not a full villain and that the audience was more so to be on magnetos side though disquieted when he does something extreme like murder someone while their ally and best friend has put their mind in the villain while he shoves a coin through his skull which their best friend is feeling the entire time
"I'm going to free you of your chains. Of oppression right? Of MOR TAL ITY." legit made me pause the video to cutely die of laughter.
The one thing is that Charles never experienced the same things Eric did. So he cant really say Eric is wrong
Charles is experiencing it even if it isn't as bad, he is still being oppressed for being a mutant.
One of the only good examples Ive seen of a sympathetic villain done right is with a children’s book: Percy Jackson series. Where the villain does have a point as in the Greek gods dont take care of their children and place all of their problems on to the remaining parent of the household and basically leave the children to die because they dont claim them fast enough before monsters come after them. The solution? They beat Luke the supposed villain who used his revolution as a army to revive him because they believe Kronos can help them. What happens though is that Luke gets possessed and then forced to be a host for Kronos’ spirit. Luke redeems himself by killing himself by hitting his achille heel and then the heroes, after the war is over make terms of which Luke’s concerns about the children of the gods were integrated sworn upon to be kept and even then, the gods dont keep that promise in later books which shows how effective that was but destroying the gods to replace them with titans would still not fix anything but bring destruction. And Luke was more of a victim of circumstance than a actual villain and he was possessed half the time he was doing villain things like killing people and all that.
To be honest, Amon's story in Legend of Korra would have worked so well if Korra after losing her powers didn't instantly get them back or just had one element that she could bend(albeit badly) and actually started living amongst the people that supported Amon's cause, the non-benders. Maybe even essentially living around them as if she was one of them, or as if she wasn't the Avatar and seeing how hard things are for them and why they'd go to Amon's side. Having to live their lives and see their hardships and realizing that Amon was right and that no one Championed these people or their causes.
Then have her Champion them or want to change things. How if/when she becomes the Avatar again by getting her bending back she used whatever status that comes with it to help them the way Amon was trying to. Forcing the people in power to give non-benders opportunities, jobs and opportunities. Again, acknowledging that Amon was correct and that he was going about it the way he was because no one in the positions or rooms that Korra could get into was in any hurry to do anything about it,. But that she never realized it.. till she lived it with them. Korra not knowing what she is without her bending(which she would have been after season 1) and then living amongst the non-benders and not telling them who she is and seeing how they HAVE to live now the way the world has become and then finding herself in the process as well as championing them.
The Avatar should be the Champion of those that would feel oppressed or not looked at by the more powerful people in their worlds. Korra being an Avatar that instead of being an instrument to restore status quo and 'stop' the oppressed protesters and instead becoming a champion of theirs and fighting to get rid of that status quo that pushes people to that point.. would have been such an intriguing story. I would prefer Amon live after Season 1, but even if he didn't, it's not like everything he stood for or people he rallied would have just 'gone away' in the first place.
Korra basically going "Zuko alone"ing with the people and families that are non-benders in those neighborhoods and seeing what they deal with and finally realizing all the stuff she had been missing while talking with the higher forms of power that never wanted to change it would have been a great story to tell. Even Korra realizing, believing and/or stating "Amon was right." would change everything and be so much more compelling.
As you said, the way to do this story right is with the hero realizing the propaganda against the cause and instead standing with them in the end. Korra LOSING HER BENDING(and thus to her, her identity), was the perfect setup for this.. but sadly it didn't happen.
The holocaust is probably the most famous and documented genocide in history, putting "never again" in the mouth of a villain doesn't just seem ignorant it seems like outright mocking because there's no way they didn't know it's a phrase used by actual genocide survivors. Thinking back to LoK, Amon posing himself as an activist for equality when he's actually motivated by a personal vendetta could be seen as the way real bigots try to paint activists as only acting out of personal spite ( like the "not all med" crowd claming that feminists project their experience of having one bad boyfriend onto all men, altough they word it even less elequently than that. It goes for other movements too but feminism was the one I could think of at the top of my head). If they actually bothered to listen to the them they would understand very quickly that they have valid points but hearing that you've enabled or maybe even participated in discrimination against someone else feels like a personal attack so it's just easier to say that the other side is the one feeling personally attacked and not have to think about it.
Reminds me of all the people decrying the protestors in Iran ganging up and kicking the snot out of specific morality police and Basij members even though said members are killing/raping/torturing people.
If the punishment for protesting is death then the fight IS to the death.
“Tacid Supporters of the status quo”
So what you’re saying is…
*Down with the centrists* 🎯
Great timing, I feel sick as shit at one thirty am
Part of the problem writers for visual media face is that americans don't understand the difference between "good guy" and protagonist, or "bad guy" and antagonist. As such, they respond poorly to the notion the person working against the antagonist isn't inherently evil, and have a poor understanding of any worl where the protagonist is immoral or amoral.
Xavier: They're just following orders!
Magneto: ...What did you just say to me?
Xavier: ...Nothing.
Magneto: ...I thought so.
I'm likely incapable of even writing a 'complex' or 'sympathetic' villain, and I don't mind. My favorite villains have notoriously been the unapologetically evil ones. Queen Chrysalis, Bellatrix LeStrange, most of the villains from Kim Possible, etc. I don't want complex villains, because most of them aren't fun.
That said, you likely already know this because you take pride in your work, but! Miles Luna (head writer of most of current RWBY) is half-Latino, but that's only ever brought up when someone criticizes RWBY for being written by two white guys. He's white passing (obviously), but it's no excuse.
Not to mention that both he and Kerry Shawcross (other main writer of most of RWBY) did actually state that the White Fang are based on the IRL Black Lives Matter movement and the Black Panther activist group. And for them to say that clearly illustrates how incompetent they truly are.
"I've been at the mercy of men just following orders... never again."
Take a good listen to the music playing here, because it really does make a scene. If anyone else was in Magneto's shoes in a scene like this, something triumphant would be playing and make it seem like they were doing something for the greater good, and were defying their hardass leader Charles to do so, but not only does the movie make Magneto a villain for *no reason,* they *want you* to throw out any sympathy and hate him. What a joke.
Okay but that "Free you of your chains"-line was fucking great.
Fair criticisms that I entirely agree with! The best way to do this is to give the liberation group/Civil rights activists the giant death robot to level the playing field, because it's always fun to kill fascists with 60+ tons of stompy murder.
This is literally the centerpiece of one of my worldbuilding projects.
Isnt that exactly what Korra did and what he complains about?
@@FrenkieWest32 No, the complaint lily made that these shows will consistently paint the bashing of the fash as
"Too extreme".
Also, who does "He" reference in the above?
The only villains we need nowadays in this sea of melodramatic villains are Saturday morning cartoon villains, and actual villains. Or maybe just don't make victims of trauma turn into villains? Is that too much to ask?!
Literally the first five sentences on Magneto's Wikipedia page would inform any reasonable person that he should not be a villain in any capacity.
I love that animation of your character stumbling into frame after the title card
Something that really irks me about Magneto is that on the Days of Future Past movie, he literaly fucking DIES percisely BECAUSE of the Sentinels, robots made specifically to hunt down and exterminate Mutants. A literal fucking genocide happens, which already sits very poorly with him being a Holocaust survivor, and as he lay dying with a spike on his chest, he turns to Xavier and goes "All those years wasted fighting each other, Charles.", with the heavy implication of Erik renouncing his fight. NO! He was right to want to defend his kind, and yet the writers had to put him renouncing to those ideals because they needed him to reconcile with Xavier. It always sat very poorly with me. Overall, the X-Men movies aren't half bad, but that particular scene felt a little off.
Korra had to have done this on purpose because I refuse to believe that not 3 but 4 times did they give their villains good motivation that could’ve lead to real societal change only for it to be a waste of time
It was on purpose
One of the things I hate about Magneto in the movies, and in some of the comics (Ultimate Marvel) is that he's a Holocaust survivor that at times wants to commit genocide on humans that aren't mutants. Also speaking of X-Men 3, if a "cure" for being LGBT+ were to be released there would be literal riots on the streets, because that obviously would lead to forcing people to take, criminalizing, discriminating and oppressing those don't. Magneto is completely justified in gathering an army and burning the laboratory to the ground.
The hints are subtle, but I think Lily ~may~ have a problem with the Giant Death Robot....
She prefers her Giant Death Robots to stay in Civilization V
I think the only sympathetic villain I've seen done properly is toguro from yyh. For one he doesn't act overtly evil. In fact he's very polite most of the time. And if you look at his actions the only people toguro actually killed were evil rich business men. Yeah he killed genkai but he knew she'd be brought back and he told koenma to keep her body safe. I think sympathetic villains work when their reasons for being bad are personal and aren't affecting the world around them. Toguro just wanted closure. He wasn't trying to destroy the planet or enslave people.
Also the main person telling magneto to roll over and be a good oppressed person is Charles. A man who is born into wealth and doesn’t have any physical mutations allowing him to “pass”. Of course Charles doesn’t want the world to change. He’s doing great
also his power is inerently oppressive : looking into the toughts of others and controlling them could be used as a way to cause psicological trauma and manipulate pepole without leaving a "black eye" so to say ...
wich is , idk you could actually swap them as the villain and the hero and the story would work still ...
Magneto also passes. And Charles is paralyzed (in most of x-men).
@@FrenkieWest32 yeah he dose pass. Honestly I said the whole pass thing more in reference to the mutants Charles claims to represent and how he wants them just to blend into non-mutant society as if he isn’t aware that he has a way easier time doing that than someone like night crawler. It was more as his privilege in the mutant community than purely his privilege compared to magneto
@@patchworkgremlin4993 I mean, tellling magneto not to go all mutant-supremacist is not exactly the same as telling mutants to suck it up and do nothing right?
@@FrenkieWest32 I’m sorry did you not watch the video. Okay so let’s strip away the metaphor and challenge this directly.
Let’s say your a non-binary person and you are looking to join a LGBTQIA support group.
Would you join the one ran by a wealthy gay man who has faced very few issues in life his money couldn’t shield him from who gives out to other members for getting to uppity when faced with violence and discrimination and says if they just wait everyone will get rights eventually
Or would you find it more solice in the holocaust survivor who’s determined to stop anything like that happening again and who will help you fight for your rights
I think I remember watching the script writing stream for this video.
It turned out pretty good.
Good job, Lily. 👍
What kills me most about this discussion is that there are at least a few ways where "sympathetic villain" COULD be done well, or at least in a way where it doesn't involve the writer shoving their personal biases so far into their mouth that they collapse into a singularity of pretentious posturing, and yet everyone keeps defaulting to another Magneto. Off the top of my head:
- Have the protagonist be part of said oppressive regime, only to realize the harm their actions are causing and work to fix it. The "sympathetic villains", then, would be all their former friends and family who refuse to do the same. This is definitely the easiest to screw up, which is probably why She-Ra screwed it up as bad as it did, but I feel like it also has the most potential. (hell, this is basically a plot summary of Schindler's List, and that's a classic for a reason).
- Have the protagonists be the oppressed rebels, but then have them win and create a new-and-better status quo, only for a few among them to be unable to handle peacetime after fighting for so long, creating new problems as a result. You'd have to tiptoe a fair bit and be very specific with your criticism, to make sure you're not accidentally vilifying the mentally-ill or trauma victims, but a protag watching their former battle-buddy go ballistic in every sense of the word is a sympathetic antagonist of the highest order.
- Make a typical Narmy-as-hell Saturday-Morning-Cartoon villain, but then have them have people they care about. A wife they don't tell about their villany, a son they're raising to take their throne, or even just a pub they go to every friday with their generals to hang out and shoot the shit. Don't make them redeemable (that's best avoided with most SMC-villains, anyway), just give them some kind of life outside their next scheme. Bonus points if they get a Friendship-Fueled Power-Up because "You hurt my bestie, so I'll hurt your everything!"
I think the takeaway from all this is that, if you REALLY want to make a sympathetic antagonist, you have options besides "terrible-civil-rights-activist-allegory turned genocidal nutcase."
Magneto is the reason that all of my villians are just differently flavored f!@#$%s. Thank you for all your help Lily. Be safe and give your wife tons of cuddles.
A tangential thing I do like is when a villain misdirects an anti-opression group into their evil plot alongside trying to make change. They probably don't do this one as often because it hits too close to home for liberals
ive noticed that it happens everywhere, for example, in league of legends lore you have this mage that was imprisoned from an early age because he accidentally lashed his powers in a moment of stress againts mageseekers (basically the ss of this world) and was used to seek other mages because of his detecting magic capabilities.
He knew the literal genocide that was ocurring for a long time (like 500 years or so), how the mages were killed, made to drink poison that slowly killed them and neutered them, so he wanted to overthrow everything. Manipulated a young adult into getting him knowlegde on how to escape and when he did, he killed the king.
He's the main bad guy of the comics.
how
Sympathetic villains used to be good sometimes.
But most of the time, and even more somehow in this day and age.
they are either the worst people getting so called “redeemed” and having their character be replaced by someone that looks and sounds exactly like them and “has their backstory” but their character being fundamentally different in every other aspect aside from it.
And usually it isn’t even progressive change if they truly are evil, its fucking instantaneous.
As if people with morally questionable robots with a disable evil switch on their back and all you need to do is press it.
Or them being seen as wrong people even tho they have clear honest points that make total sense like bismuth from steven universe.
I never saw Magento as a villain, the villain is humanity and their demonization of mutantdom. Charles isn't fighting for the status quo because the status quo is mutant oppression and Charles wants human mutant coexistence and will fight for it and ally with Erik on many an occasion to protect mutants against human oppression. Erik is an antagonist, not a villain, there's a difference; because he's an extremist understandably born specifically out of this experiences from the Holocaust. Him and Charles want similar things, the protection of mutants but because of their experiences, they go about it in very different ways. Charles growing up in privilege brings him to believe that coexistence is possible, that it's not us or them but instead that Humans can be convinced of that due to the few that he's met that have been receptive to the idea. He doesn't believe that reaching humanity is a lost idea. Erik does because he's experienced the worst of humanity. The movies make a point that just because Charles has been in Erik's head doesn't mean he has lived them. The movies even call out that Charles's experience give him some tunnel vision especially in the way that he's a mutant who can pass for human while others like mystique can't not and how difficult it is for him to understand those lived experiences. The movies pull no punches with criticism of both Charles and Erik but what unites them and at times leads them to work together is their fight against the human status quo even if they have different methodologies. So Erik is not a villain but an antagonist
This is why All for One works as a villain and why Tomura Shigaraki works as a TRAGIC villain.
Another great one as always. It never really occurred to me how much Korra really embodies the worst habits of bad cartoon writers until you laid it all out like that. It’s increasingly bizarre how they’ll intentionally evoke the words and imagery of civil rights and portray those characters as villains like they’re fucking Prager U or something
Loved the script writing stream for this one! I enjoy your work a lot!
This trope is irritating me so much. There is a thin line between making a complicated villains and victims. Magneto, Malificent are more victims than the bad guy.
I once read a story about sirens who are tormenting Sailors and the King of a Kingdom getting tormented by them decides to capture one and make a contract with her. Because she is a siren her morals are indifferent towards humans and she treats them like pets. The female lead can't get through to the siren's morality because it does not apply to humans. And in the end where other sirens get on land to try and torment the kingdom she stops them by telling them the humans of that kingdom are her pets and they should go play somewhere else.
It was a good story because we can't judge the siren by human standards because she makes it clear over and over again that she is above humans. And no one can disagree because she is more powerful, lives longer and mystic than humans. She sometimes kills people because they irritate her or uses her power on humans because she is bored. She still does towards the end but she is not as brutal in her ways as she used to be.
The human Emperor who was trying to take over the continent was exposed as more evil because he was driven by greed and power.
I know people won't care too much about it, but current X-Men took the entire concept of Xavier dream and shifted it into "fuck humans, we're moving to our own place and taking over Earth's economy", and Erik is absolutely not a villain anymore.
It makes sense considering what wanda did, and what normal people are still doing.
"The Pretender Wanda Maximoff" Persona non grata in the Mutant Nation
Ultratron had so much potential as a interesting morality challenging character... So they just abandoned it and had him try to destroy the world via sky laser for reasons.
Given Blizzard's recent announcement of their new Overwatch character, it seemed apt to come back here.
I think I have a metallic age name for this era of television, not the silver age, but the quicksilver, or mercury age. It looks shiny and splendorous, but is slowly poisoning you.
I never understood how Magneto being a holocaust survivor was the villain and now it makes sense
Well hold on he’s not a villain because he wants to kill fascists he’s a villain cause he wants to wipe out every person who isn’t a mutant. In x2 for instance he was willing to force Charles to murder every non mutant.
Thermian Argument
@MarmitePopsicle this
Great video lily keep up the good work. Your doing great.
You just made me realize a BIG flaw with a villain I’m working on for a story
This one was a long-time coming, especially considering that it ties into your two biggest video essays previously.
It's always disappointing to see a writer go down the route of "anti-oppression is bad, actually" because it shows that the writer's true colors and reveals the work for what it always was: drivel. Hopefully said animation "Dork Age" ends soon for us all.
No, its literally about how being anti-opression can lead to a different type of opression! We have INNUMEROUS real life counterparts of this happening, the IRA, USSR, China, the Mujahideen... Hell you can, and should, argue that the fucking Nazis started this way, if Germany didn't get fucked to an oppressive extent after WW1, fascism wouldn't have risen in Germany! We have PROOF of that in Canada, they were monsters during WW1, they killed POWs, they murdered surrendering soldiers, they didn't follow the Christmas Truce, but they didn't get punished after the war ended, no oppressed sentiment rose in Canada, not one hint of anti-opression ideology to turn extremist...
Yep and you nailed the hammer on the head with this one. I've been telling people this sort of stuff for years and I think the main problem is ignorance. I've expressed this before, but I have a serious disdain for villains like Kllmonger and the Flag Smashers group, both which belong to Marvel and both which have been adapted into their cinematic universes as being villains.
Except when you actually look at what they're saying they're not really wrong but it's easier to make them villains to keep the status quo that way people don't become uncomfortable when real life situations are brought up in fiction. Even though they had a point, and a good one, you're not allowed to agree with them because they just killed a bunch of people or try to start a race war. Which is nothing any marginalized group wants to do in real life, violence is only ever incited after you've ignored peace for so long. The BLM protests got violent after they've been ignoring previous BLM protests for over a decade.
Yeah, because a lot of dumbass people really think that BLM started in 2020 but it didn't, this has been going on since Trayvon Martin, all of which have been peaceful protests yet the only ones that got any attention were the ones during the covid era where people finally had enough and started breaking shit, and guess what? People finally started listening and it incited real conversations.
Like in Black Panther. Killmonger was the bad guy, but why? Because he was an allegory for Malcolm X. You know, the very very bad man who made us feel bad because he said things that made people uncomfortable and used some forms of hostility as a way to incite progress.
That's the funny thing, is that people will sit here and talk about MLK as if he was some saint but the reality is the only reason why MLK is pushed as hard as he is is because he didn't directly challenge white people often with hostility which made them feel comfortable. That's why they constantly keep on playing that I Have a Dream speech as if he doesn't have a thousand other speeches there are a lot more direct and uncomfortable to white audiences.
That's why every time people of color or LGBT people resort to violence and/or uncomfortable conversations directed at the white demographic, it gets shut down in favor of people just saying "Well MLK didn't do that!" and thinking that they just had a mic drop on a far more nuanced argument.
But they also seem to tune out the parts were MLK wasn't anti-violence at all he just didn't participate in violent protests himself, and they also forget the part that even though MLK was this very passive man for most of his life, he still got shot in the end. Malcolm and MLK end the same way, regardless about how they went about it because they challenged the status quo.
As a black person, villains like Killmonger have always left me with the feeling that a lot of these people are aware that something is wrong with the treatment of the real life people that these characters represent because they unapologetically put it in their films all the time, but they don't want to actually challenge it because it makes them extremely uncomfortable because then that would require them to look back on the actions of their ancestors and how that spills over into affecting people now, and their own actions. They would have to understand where it actually comes from and how they benefit from a system like this intentional or not, how many of these people come from a point of privilege even if they can't completely understand it, and how some of these people would even have to look back on their own past actions, malicious or not, with disdain and criticism. Which is way too personal for a lot of these people.
It's why I loved your Steven Universe video so much because it really touches on this subject, especially how you didn't gloss over this very same symbolism with Bismuth because that's exactly what it is. Writing these villains to have a point but then ultimately shut them down because "they go too far". Or painting them as angry irrational people for expressing they're disdain for the system publicly. Because let's be honest, as much as we all love black panther let's not pretend like T'challa and Kilmarger were not references to these two real life people.
Because as culturally diverse and beautiful as the film was it still had this underlying message on how to deal with Injustice, except this time MLK didn't get shot. He was welcome to America with open arms. A message that, I could actually talk about all day. Especially since in the movie T'challa didn't even experience the racism and injustice that Killmonger did, yet feels the need to comment on injustices he's never experienced.
Using a black man to tell to another black man "You're just too angry." was just the pinnacle of irony to me. Because when you realize that Disney's higher ups are mainly white old men who have never experienced anything on this level of course they would be okay with pushing that message. They are T'challa. Growing up in a level of privilege that none of us could ever imagine and then telling somebody whose life you know very little about that they're just overreacting, especially when you realize is that T'challa's family cause most of Killmonger's problems in the first place. So of course they had to write him like this because anything else would have just been a little too real and on the nose for most people.
So T'challa might be a black man in the film but let's not act like they're not using him to relay an underlying message, a message that was approved buy a bunch of white higher-ups, and written by a black man like this because this was the only way this movie was ever going to be approved by them. We wouldn't have the movie the way it's written if it didn't have to go through white approval first and convey a very specific sort of message out of a place of privilege. Using a black man to convey a message like this with that much undertone is more than gross to me. It's disrespectful.
It is weird that it's always the one whose been hurt by the system is the one who's "going to far".
And by "weird" in mean "insidious".
The first thing that came to my mind when thinking about bad people is their detachment to the horrible acts they commit, as they do more and more horrendous shit, they care less and less.
Not as an extreme of an example but, weeb get so defensive about child sexualization because they watched so much anime with that content in it that they get desensitised to the point that they see it as something so inconsecuencial and normal that they start thinking is okey to expected or even start DEFEND IT
I figured if I do write a villain, he'll just be Donald Trump but with a functional brain.
Magneto actually became a good guy in the 80’s from what I heard, he even helped train the New Mutants
@@abam9813 I believe it was stated lately
Exactly, why is Magneto a mass murderer when his core values are morally correct? If there is this strong a counter movement against the status quo, then both the movement itself and the status quo need to be heavily scrutinized bc something is wrong. The problem with writing complex villains of this caliber is it's nearly impossible to avoid all the different pitfalls. You need to be both really smart and very in tone with what you're doing, and I sincerely believe the vast majority of writers just aren't up to snuff, myself included. We have to understand our limitations.
My favourite kind of villians are the one who do bad and evil stuff cause the find it fun a perfect example of this is Maxwell Roth from the assassin's creed syndicate does a bunch of evil shit cause it's fun the villians I like are the ones who go "I like blowing stuff up" and of course they're still the villian of the story but they're just a fun one another example of this is Eris from Sinbad she just wants to make chaos and when the heros stop her she's like "Oh no you have stopped me eh whatever I'm just going to go do the same thing somewhere else bye" I also like villians whos motivation has nothing to do with the heros they just get in their way making it harder for the villian so they end up being the villian of the story. Do I also like the regular old villians who just want to rule the world and all the regular old things yes but most of the "sympathetic" villians make me want to punch my screen.
lily, this video is fantastic! i don't know if i'm imagining things, but it feels like your videos have gotten a lot more concise and. like. fun? over the past year. and i've been following your work for ages, so all i mean to say is that it seems like you're having more fun with your videos nowadays, and yet that doesn't detract from the more serious side of them at all. i feel like you've found exactly how to hit the nail on the head. awesome stuff!
Watching this video makes me long for stories like that of the Authority, at least during the Warren Ellis run. The villains weren't meant to be simpathetic and the heroes actively fought against a stagnant status quo.
The problem is that for many sympathetic villains, the audience isn’t suppose to agree with the villain’s terrible actions, or just forgive and forget those terrible actions just because the villain is sad, however that’s exactly what ends up happing for some villains such as Wanda or Thanos from the MCU.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who's noticed this disturbing trend. Demanding justice for serious, legitimate grievances and taking action on behalf of the oppressed has been written as a "stock supervillain motive" for so many shows and movies in recent years that we're basically being fed a conveyor belt of propaganda about how "resisting tyranny is BAD and only BAD GUYS do it."
We need to make Death Robot Syndrome a term. It’s possibly the funniest way I’ve ever seen this (stupid) character phenomenon described.
Boiling kittens in lava? You mean there's actually a phrase for it???
Great video! Only you speak for the people. Don't ever change!
heres the thing, you can have a villain TRY and be sympathetic, have them go "eueueu b-but I'VE been through bad things TOO" and the main characters should just go "grow the fuck up" and kill their ass. a very VERY good example is the main villain in space sweepers, a white billionaire who thinks just because hes been through hardship he has the authority to do anything he wants. i recommend the movie a million times over, its a cute found family movie in space with a kickass lesbian, a trans robot, a sad dad, and a gentle giant ex gang member dad. its fucking adorable.
I really do want a hero that kills the villain regardless of how bad the villain may have had it. I don’t want them to be exactly like punisher, but I want a hero who won’t fall for the “it’s not my fault I had a bad childhood, why is everyone scared of me” bullshit after the villain murdered a bunch of people.
I’m not sure how many people would like a superhero like that, but I’d love them.
Idk if magneto was ever meant to be sympatheric, more tragic, like a "look at how far he's going even though he just wants equality" maybe that's just how the new writers have done it but others seem to do write it better where he will sit on jenosha and keep peace as long as the world doesnt attack jenosha
(edit) and a holocasut survivor can still be a villian just as much as anyone else. minority or otherwise
there was a punisher story where a woman was raped by a taxi driver. She responds by killing taxi drivers which results in the punisher killer her. He says he would have gladly helped her kill rapists, she was just targeting the wrong people, the other taxi drivers who did nothing wrong
Ive always seen magneto as in the right, because he eventually said alright my actions are literally getting me nowhere so im just gonna make my own country. So he made his own country were mutants can live without discrimination, but then other countries were basically this dude is the rular of a country....thats not very democratic republic of you, so they start dicking with him and his civilians there. The worst part is THAT THEY WANTED TO BE THERE, when nightcraller asked to leave magneto was like "ok,your ship leaves tomorrow,and you are always welcome back." Qnd its momments were he is protrayed as the hero (and when him and dr. Doom beat the everliving shit out of red skull) where i love his character the most
Not quite the same but I hated how in Venom 2 they needed to have carnage experience child abuse to explain why he was a 'psychopath' when it would have been fine, and in fact better, if they just had him be a guy that enjoys killing and bring a dick.
I mean I do love sympathetic villains done well such as MCU Killmonger and Wen Wu. But I do have my fair share of villains that I love who are straight up evil such as Light Yagami and Yoshikage Kira.
Isn"t Killmonger exactly Magneto? ^^'
I've only seen Black Panther once, but from what I can remember, he was the son of an activist who fought for black people, and was killed by the Wakanda to protect status-quo.... Yeah, he wants to take the control of Wakanda, of course he does, they're doing nothing except rpotecting the status-quo that is klling black people XD
The fact that T'challa does exactly what Killmonger was trying to do proves that Killmonger was not supposed to be a villain ^^'
@Xbox One Oh yeah, I forgot about that, I guess they wanted a white character for audience representation, and didn't think through ^^'
@@krankarvolund7771 T'challa does not send superweapons to marginalized black americans...
@@FrenkieWest32 Yeah, but he still break a milleniar old tradition to bring help to them. In a non-violent way, but how much time before black guys who have enough of being brutalized will require weapons from Wakanda? ^^
Besides, the use of violence is often the main complaint about vilains that do the right thing, and the only thing that separate them from the good guy.
@@krankarvolund7771 It's not like Killlmonger is considered a villain for ''breaking tradition''.
I remember seeing somewhere a criticism of that show The Dragon Prince that the writers used both Moses imagery (specifically of the Jewish people escaping Egypt and also hankering for a homeland they were unjustly expelled from centuries ago) and fascist imagery in their villain and how that was so wildly offensive and inappropriate that it was crazy how nobody thought twice about it and, yeah, this shit is really common even with villains who aren't even intentionally framed as sympathetic.