Tag: replies

wingsfreedom
replied to your post

“I saw someone claim to be psychiatrists with degree in psychology made…”

I really like charismatic villains with relatable qualities and have ruthless yet affective morality. I find their dark sides quite fantasting for me to explore, and discover more potential and good sides to them while still enjoying their whole characterization.
but seeing people throw around terms
like “seicopath”, “psychopath”, “pure evil”, “born evil” and tons of
hate, really pisses me off and make feel insecure. They made many great
antagonists seem nothing more than an irredeemable insane piece of shit
the moment they were born who’s just danger and deserve to die.

yeah same, most of my favourite characters have done terrible things lol, and if they’re my faves it’s usually because I find their motives or their thought processes when they do those things sympathetic and/or understandable. Part of the point of fiction is that you can explore dark stuff you can’t explore in real life. There is no safer space to engage w/ some of the darker aspects of the world/humanity because it’s not real, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with sympathizing with people who’ve done terrible things in fiction, because it’s fiction and no one was actually harmed.

It sucks that people make you feel insecure about it when there’s nothing wrong with that, and most of these villains are meant to be complex and interesting and compelling and even likeable. The ppl who flatten those characters are the ones misinterpreting the story, usually.

further thoughts/clarification under cut bc I feel like leaving this reply on “it’s fiction so who cares” opens me up to discourse I might as well nip in the bud

People like to argue this point by saying that fiction can affect reality and perpetuate harmful concepts and ideas. And this is true.

fiction can be harmful when it replicates damaging tropes and when it pushes problematic messages either accidentally or purposefully, and frankly fiction that pushes the message that some people are born irredeemably evil and some people are born good and can do no wrong is imo much more harmful than fiction that explores, say, what would drive a sympathetic person to sacrifice a bunch of his friends. (not that Berserk has no harmful tropes/messages lol, but imo the exploration of morality in Griffith’s narrative isn’t one of them)

like, to use a very well-known and v blatant example lol, harry potter with its kind of badly written black and white morality and oppression metaphors is probably more damaging than a lot of stories with moral greys.

harry potter has its offensive werewolf aids metaphor ft a metaphorical pedophile who deliberately infects children (thx jk), its pure evil villain who is evil because his mother didn’t love him enough to die for him, its magical fantasy racism parallels used to make death eaters irredeemable but also used as a source of cute humour when, eg, it comes to Arthur Weasley’s patronizing attitude towards the fictional oppressed class, its house elf slavery thing that is just weird as fuck, its pure good protagonist who can use the same “unforgiveable” torture curse as the villains and get a shoulder pat for it, etc etc.

People who uncritically sympathize with the good characters in Harry Potter and uncritically hate the bad guys and expect everyone else to do the same are buying into these offensive aspects of the story and not even realizing it.

And basically I think a lot of people just find it easier to say that sympathizing with villains is bad because they do bad things, and to flatten their characters in an attempt to ignore any complexity that leads to sympathy/relatability/empathy/etc, than it is to actually analyze fiction and figure out where the actual problematic messages are coming from.

Like this is how you get people saying Griffith fans are rape apologists in the same breath they use to excuse Guts sexually assaulting Casca. It’s easier to say the problem lies with the fans who sympathize with the antagonist, rather than the story itself, or their own flat conceptions of the characters that don’t allow for sympathy when it comes to Griffith and, conversely and kind of disturbingly, condemnation when it comes to Guts.

Boiling it down to the idea that bad people sympathize with Voldemort or Draco or Griffith or whoever and good people sympathize with Harry or Guts is idiotic. “Bad” people (this is a uselessly vague phrase but w/e) are just as capable of sympathizing with the protagonists, and in fact I think are probably much more likely to relate to the hero rather than the villain because they’d tend to lack the self awareness necessary to see themselves as the villain.