tbh the people i’ve met who really empathize with villains are people who have been villainized in their own lives and unjustly made to feel like they’re bad people by those around them. They doubt themselves and instinctively want to support disliked and obviously flawed characters, characters doomed to fail, and attempt to find the good in those characters that no one in their own lives see in them.
real evil people don’t relate to villains, they see themselves as the hero. :
There’s also some interesting studies about how villains are portrayed as gender nonconforming (read: bad) – feminized men and powerful women. It’s meant to code the character as off-putting because they don’t fit the social code, but being queer, you might just see an ally.
not only that (adding onto the previous point, not disputing or derailing bc it’s absolutely true), but a lot of villains are also:
- 1) mentally ill / neuroatypical and for ages have been almost the only kind of characters you could look to for that even if nearly all of them are portrayed violently or inevitably become victims of their own minds,
- 2) abuse/assault survivors, usually as children
- 3) disenfranchised by other means which drives them to their villainy (living in or have previously lived in poverty, exploited by employers/had their work stolen, experimented on, etc.) which parallels in a way how poverty/racism/institutionalized violence can lead to crime for survival. villains have their initial anger invalidated and further villainized by story narratives, so seeing them fight back against it and come back again and again to keep fighting tbh can be satisying!
QueerGalaxies 