Don't get involved with someone you can't talk about your crushes with.

[captlebubbles]

So one of the things that's really important to me with Hope and the Dark Destroyer is making it clear that with all of my villains, regardless of their motives and their backstories and no matter how sympathetic they are, all of them made the conscious decision that "it doesn't matter how many people get hurt, as long as I get what I want".

Comments

[wolfy_writing]

Yeah, that's a good distinction, although I've seen good For The Greater Good villains, where it's not necessarily that they don't care. (It's usually ego - they think they're entitled to move people like chess pieces, their conclusion about what's best is infallible to stake people's lives on, and they may muster up feeling bad, but then be so taken with their own feelings that they feel it makes up for the harm.)

I've been reading about that! It's cool!

[captlebubbles]

Oh yes, and some of my favorite villains are of that kind. But after the jump from "sympathetic villain" to "actually a woobie victim who didn't do anything wrong ever" so easily and so often these days, I kinda just want to have a bunch of characters who clearly made the decision to be bad.

Not to mention that in many ways Hope/Dark is a coping story for me, and gives me a canvas to unpack my weird relationship with all kinds of concepts, in this case the choice to do good or bad being the most important thing. (Dark, one of the two main characters, starts as the villain, and later joins up with Hope and the other heroes, and he never really gets the hang of wanting to do good and caring about people, but he still makes the choice to do it anyway. For example.)

[wolfy_writing]

Yeah, fandom is really bad at the distinction between liking a character as in finding them appealing to watch, and liking as in thinking they're morally awesome. ( From both directions.)

I can see how that would mean a lot to you, and there needs to be more recognition of the importance of choosing to do the right thing.

[captlebubbles]

Like. Just let me enjoy my garbage faves. I know they're garbage. That's why I like them. (And on the flipside, don't try to make them less garbage so they'll be more palatable to you. Let them be garbage. It's okay. Shhh, it's okay. It's allowed

[wolfy_writing]

Yes! Liking fictional people means you like watching/reading about them as fictional characters. The consequences of their actions aren't the same as in reality because they're narrative consequences, not real-life ones!

I think a lot of people do "The part of me I dislike/feel weird about, written sympathetically." I think other people will enjoy it too.

Ooh, that's cool! Emma was interesting!

[captlebubbles]

All a fictional character needs to be is interesting. I like Felix because he's an irredeemable piece of shit, but also one that doesn't need a sympathetic backstory, and because he's charming. Yeah, he attempted to commit genocide on an entire planet, but he was also charming while he did it. He was an interesting character and I enjoy that. On the flipside, writing a character who is a bastion of incorruptible pure pureness and keeping them interesting is hard. Not that no one should, and not that it's impossible, but it's really easy to make them boringSometimes I think of myself as a what would happen if Hope and Dark fused (Steven Universe reference, but I'm sure you get the basic idea) but sometimes I think a fusion of the two of them would be more stable than me because he wouldn't so caught up in an entanglement of bitter self-loathing. The parts of them that were Hope would help balance the parts that were Dark, instead of constantly having to keep them in check, and vice versa

[wolfy_writing]

Yes! It's okay to enjoy a fictional character as fiction because they're charming! Or awful in a really interesting way! It's okay to feel sympathy for their problems even if they did really awful things, because they're pretend people who pretend-did awful things to other pretend people! As long as no one's literally trying to justify doing harmful things in real life based on pretend people, it's all good!

I think they would probably be less hard on themselves, because if you're used to thinking of that side of yourself as another person, the instinct is to bring the sympathy and understanding you would bring to another person. Like I could see the Hope bits having to keep the Dark bits in check, and still having the bitter and angry thoughts in fused forms, but also not judging or blaming themselves for it? Because "I'm keeping his supervillain side in check, and if that means letting him have the nasty thoughts and feelings but keeping him from acting destructively on them, that's plenty good enough" seems to flow