Does it still count as Draco in Leather Pants ...
...if the villain is genuinely the sort of person that the fan in question likes?
It's an honest question. The official definition of DILP that TVTropes uses is:
"When the fandom takes a controversial or downright villainous character and downplays his flaws..."
And there's the thing. If you're a hybristophiliac who genuinely thinks psychopathic bad guys are attractive or desirable or ideal, then you aren't really "downplaying" their flaws because the flaws are part of what makes them your ideal. At the same time, though, you're professing an attraction to a character who was never meant to be seen as attractive, which is sometimes what DILP is taken to mean (particularly if the fan is un-self-aware enough to actually treat the villain as the real hero because he's so evil). So...is that DILP, or is it something else?
Of course, even if it isn't DILP to treat the evil bad guy as your ideal friend/mate/role model/whatever, it's still every bit as creepy and stupid as true DILP, if not worse.
(I also, for the record, don't think the two are mutually exclusive. I've seen some stories in which fans took morally-dubious characters, downplayed the flaws that they had in canon...only to have them be horrific creeps in some other way, which was treated as perfectly acceptable or even desirable!)
It's an honest question. The official definition of DILP that TVTropes uses is:
"When the fandom takes a controversial or downright villainous character and downplays his flaws..."
And there's the thing. If you're a hybristophiliac who genuinely thinks psychopathic bad guys are attractive or desirable or ideal, then you aren't really "downplaying" their flaws because the flaws are part of what makes them your ideal. At the same time, though, you're professing an attraction to a character who was never meant to be seen as attractive, which is sometimes what DILP is taken to mean (particularly if the fan is un-self-aware enough to actually treat the villain as the real hero because he's so evil). So...is that DILP, or is it something else?
Of course, even if it isn't DILP to treat the evil bad guy as your ideal friend/mate/role model/whatever, it's still every bit as creepy and stupid as true DILP, if not worse.
(I also, for the record, don't think the two are mutually exclusive. I've seen some stories in which fans took morally-dubious characters, downplayed the flaws that they had in canon...only to have them be horrific creeps in some other way, which was treated as perfectly acceptable or even desirable!)