The Depths Of A Villian

Heroes are an existence beloved by almost everyone. In order for a hero to be truly great though, they need a great villain. In the past we’ve gotten plenty of great villains. There’s your classics such as Maleficent and Jafar and your more modern ones like Ultron and the iconic Thanos. However, in recent years we have begun seeing a decline in great or even good villains. As a result these shows and movies that had the potential to be great failed to live up to their potential.

One of the biggest problems with villains lately is that the people behind their creation are focused more on making them sympathetic over outright evil. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a sympathetic villain; Thanos is the perfect example of a sympathetic villain. The problem is that as a result of focusing more on sympathy you lose out on chances to show how evil they actually are. This character that should be evil instead simply becomes someone who occasionally does bad things. This then results in the hero simply redeeming the villain with relative ease instead of truly defeating them. While again there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it does put into question if the person was a villain at all if they could be redeemed so easily.

Of course this is nothing in face of the bigger issue: people nowadays don’t seem to like outright evil villains. It’s very rare when we’ll receive characters who are just straight up evil. Back in the day we received plenty of iconic and vile villains such as the Green Goblin or the Joker. However, now it seems that people feel that villains being evil just for the sake of being evil isn’t enough. Because of this, writers and studios now no longer have any faith in villains just being evil and think that they need something more, thus doing whatever they can to make them more sympathetic.

Villains, however, don’t and in fact shouldn’t be sympathetic. A good villain is one who challenges the hero and their ideals, pushing them to their breaking point. Sure you can make them understandable, however that shouldn’t be your main goal. We shouldn’t be scared of showing villainy on screen as without villains we wouldn’t have heroes. Instead we should be looking to see how this villain can be used to test the hero’s resolve and code. It’s only then will we be able to get back to creating great villains again.

 

 

 

 

Logan Floyd-Mcgee | Writer
POP-COOLEDTURED SPECIALIST
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