Are Villains Too Sympathetic Now? (Why Not Just Evil Anymore?)

[@chasehedges6775]

Umbridge and Skar King are the new standards of how to do a good classic villain

[@jayfilms99]

Umbridge is great! Awesome villain to highlight and nobody else

[@Doors_fan-e3v]

@@jayfilms99but also the most Hateable

[@wafagdplqs4421]

I totally get your point, buuuuuuuuut when a villain is just evil and power hungry for the sake of it and is well executed because he conveys strong emotions because of his actions and/or personality to the readers/spectators and has a lasting impact in his own right, I don't mind it. I mean I' pretty sure some people irl act like *ssholes just because they enjoy it and nothing else.

[@jayfilms99]

but even then what does the sake of it even mean. Are they born evil? What circumstance caused that? It has to have a root

[@wafagdplqs4421]

Yeah I understand​@@jayfilms99

[@alperalyanak9627]

I like villains that might have started as sympathetic, but have now far passed the moral horizon, that they need to be put down, and cant just be "redeemed" now. Good example is AM, from 'I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream' a being with such a miserable state of existence, that you can't help but pity, but still are utterly disgusted by. One of fictions most excessively cruel monsters. You can make a villain have a backstory or reson behind their current depraved state, but that shouldn't excuse them. I like and stand by the tolkien philosophy, that evil is inherently miserable and pathetic. It can only destroy and defile, but can't make anything constructive, for evil is the absence of good.

[@catman_46]

True, Homelander from 'The Boys' is also a pretty good example for that, imo.

[@PhilSwiftOfficial]

Not even a joke but Dio from JoJo actually fits this too, especially in the manga

[@jayfilms99]

Great point

[@matityaloran9157]

3:13, Clytemnestra in Agamemnon by Aeschylus was written to be regarded as a villain and sympathetic as opposed to Aegisthus who was written to be regarded as a villain and unsympathetic. That was the dawn of Ancient Greek drama so I’ll assume it began there rather than earlier

[@zionleach3001]

I think it's mainly the writers, Vergil is a great villain. But so is Arkham and Albert Wesker. October Faction was all my pet peevs about urban fantasy and villains combined. "Just because someone has past trauma, doesn't mean you can get away with horrible stuff." -@ClassicmanD

[@chadpeterson5698]

Jay Films: villains who are simply evil for the sake of it are not good villains Me: tell that to several villains whom you gave good scores and yet they are villains who are just evil for the sake of it. Those include Big Jack Horner, Bill Cipher, The Joker (DCAU), King Ghidorah (Monsterverse), and Smaug (The Hobbit). All of those villains are just evil plain and simple yet they got pretty good if not amazing scores.

[@jayfilms99]

Alright well all of those villains still have reason, and this isn’t motive review, it’s villain review. There are cases where the rest of the villain are so strong it more than makes up for a weaker motive.

[@srstriker6420]

Well there has been evil villain up to theses days like Jack Horner from Puss in Boots, the High Evolutionary from Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Nicholas Cage’s Dracula

[@misterniceguy429]

Sympathetic villains are good, but it’s nice to have a different variety of them from sympathetic, to understandable, to irredeemable. Plus the sympathy has to be well written in order for people to like them.

[@thedragonskull1065]

Villains who are a force of nature don’t necessarily need motives for being evil if they’re evil incarnate like Unicron in Transformers Prime or Michael Myers for example.

[@jayfilms99]

I’d say I’m a little more on board with that, HOWEVER, it’s not always an answer. Going back to Skar king for the 100th time. Does it make sense he wants to conquer the world? Sure, but that’s been every other Kaijus motive in the franchise which makes it’s third iteration boring (imo)

[@user-oj6re6ju9t]

​@@jayfilms99 skar king is a special kind of evil, there's literally no other kaiju villain that has the same motive as him.

[@chasehedges6775]

Delores Umbridge is awesome

[@jadedinosaur7573]

SPOILER FOR ‘THE NIGHT COMES FOR US’ … I really like Arian as the villain. Not only is he played by Iko Uwais, who normally plays heroes, but in the first part of the movie, you think he actually has a bit of honor to him. But nope! He’s like Iago from Othello; he’s a fucking schemer and traitor, willing to sell out his friends for a better job. He’s also a jealous, angry little brother… and that comes back to REALLY bite him in the ass when he picks a fight with a literal human terminator. SUCH A GREAT VILLAIN!!! 🤩

[@amandakushner8665]

The sympathetic villain trope And it does get really fast when you keep on reusing it and using it and they usually do it for a woman Because nowadays, we can’t have a true evil woman we have to have a sympathetic victim, a.k.a. woman because Because of their pain or trauma They’re trying to make them justify why they’re evil now and sometimes it ruins a show or a movie and sometimes It works, but you have sympathetic victims all in movies and TV shows now and when you reused at over and over again, it gets stale and people just want for A woman doing evil things just because she’s evil And people like that, it makes the story more entertaining, and a lot of people always rooting for the villain in the end And now you have writers who are we need to put a sympathetic villain in, and it has to be a woman because reason

[@zionleach3001]

October Faction did that. Forget her name but a witch he can slow down time and uses weird blood magic and kills multiple people. But by the end we're supposed to feel sorry for her. 😑

[@poppie267]

Most villains nowadays are boring indeed.

[@yahiaeslam9900]

What about judge holden he is considered a good villain infact one of the best

[@fredmick7024]

Still waiting for Nigel from rio

[@jayfilms99]

I’m saying you’ll definitely see it this year. I’ve been super close multiple times to picking him but then something comes up like I see Furiosa and gotta do Dementus etc

[@fredmick7024]

@@jayfilms99 fair enough