It is really weird to me that exploring a fictional villain’s motivations is automatically seen as defending them.
Like, yes, there are fans who approach it that way, whose faves are precious babies and can do no wrong, I get that, the extremes will always exist, especially in polarizing environments like tumblr fandom that encourage black-and-white thinking, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the snap judgment that if you show interest in understanding what makes a villain a villain, you are defending them and the things they’ve done.
And of course you don’t have to care about that. You can just hate a villain. They’re designed to be hateable! They’re designed to invoke strong feelings in the audience, and so it certainly isn’t wrong to respond strongly, especially when they hit personal chords that remind us of people who’ve hurt us. We’ve all had that experience with characters at some point, villain or otherwise.
What I’m talking about is the idea that the only “acceptable” way to look at a villain is as a terrible, irredeemable Bad Person Who Has Always Been Bad and who never possessed any good qualities to begin with, and that to even look at their backstory constitutes an attempt to absolve them of their actions.
This is silly for a couple of reasons.
Not just because human beings don’t work that way, and not just because if you carry that mindset into original writing you’re going to find yourself in the very strange and counter-intuitive position wherein to write a compelling, well-rounded antagonist would be considered irresponsible, and your story problematic, because a reader might see your antagonist as a flawed human being rather than A Trash Man in a Trash Can.
But because a good exploration of a villain’s motives isn’t just looking for reasons, it’s looking for choices.
A good villain backstory will show you not just a series of circumstances, but a series of choices that made them who and what they are. Because to be a villain (as opposed to just an unpleasant person), a character must act and to act requires choice, and choice carries responsibility.
And given the narrative of a villain’s life as a complex series of choices that, over time, made them what they are, versus the narrative of a bad person who has always been bad and was apparently just born that way, which of those narratives is actually taking responsibility out of the equation, anyway?
The worst part of this pressure to never like villains is that it actively drives people to pretend that villains are not villainous. Tumblr’s obsession with purity causes the exact thing that Tumblr complains about.
QueerGalaxies 