LogFAQs > #968347805

hypnox posted...

IMO thats what makes him a good "bad guy", the villain needs believable goals that make sense, even in a twisted way. When they don't, you have bad villains.

Weeeeeell.

People always say that it's better to have a deep and complex character that doesn't actually see themselves as the villain rather than a cardboard one-dimensional moustache-twirling villain who just does evil for the lulz, but it's more complicated than that.

Sure, that type of villain is great, but you also need a bit of contrast. The reason they seemed so refreshing for a while is because they were rare. We'd gotten so used to bad guys who were just assholes for no reason (especially during the Hays Code era when villains had to be 100% unsympathetic and weren't allowed to ever "win"), that having villains who suddenly made sense and who we could sympathize with was kind of interesting. Across multiple genres we started to see heroes who were less and less heroic and more flawed, and villains with more and more understandable motivations, with the lines blurring and the difference becoming less "hero and villain" and more "protagonist and antagonist".

But now it's kind of gone too far the other way.

Marvel's kind of reached a point where nearly every villain is a tragic misunderstood victim who's the mirror of the protagonist in some way. Which is a great villain to use... if you don't use it for every villain. Sometimes you just need to occasional pure monster or utter bastard just to act as a palate cleanser.

Sometimes you just want a villain like Klaw (a dirtbag who is motivated purely by profit) or Red Skull (a crazy bastard who wants to rule the world) or Ronan (who's basically just a racist asshole). The catharsis you get from seeing the heroes beat the shit out of that guy is a nice contrast to the more complex flavor of a villain you can understand and even sort of root for.

It also doesn't help when a writer does the job of making "sympathetic villain" poorly. If a film/show/etc is desperately trying to make you relate to the main villain and trying to push a "not so different" sort of theme, but they've written them as an unlikable shit who wants to do utterly unjustifiable things, it creates a sense of cognitive dissonance where the audience feels frustrated because they hate this villain, but the story is clearly treating them like a tragic figure who the hero is going to forgive or sympathize with.