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(Black Panther, Charles and Erik in X-Men, the Infamous games, celebrity culture...) Once you strip away the most cartoonish feel-good heroes and comically-bad “just wanna wreck shit” villains, the difference between heroes and villains is their attitude towards The People
Magneto, when written well, makes a lot of sense. Why should a boy who was tortured in Holocaust concentration camps and then further ostracised by humanity and attacked by them... not strike back? To protect his fellow mutants? Why protect your attackers, too? https://t.co/h2oIPy0QUP
*quick foreshadowing flash-forward about the likely conclusion of this thread* https://t.co/xprODgAAO4
Here’s an idea, and the question I hadn’t thought to ask was - does this make them the heroes? It’s not obvious! There will definitely be characters who think they are the bad guys, like how RBG’s fight for gender equality = “Attack on the American family” https://t.co/MDADIM9Weo
But writers and storytellers often feel some sort of pressure to make the villains more... villainy? To help the viewer/reader be clear. Like, imagine if Killmonger didn’t do dickish things, and instead stuck to his central theme and message - and chose to be more measured
Of course part of the story here is that shitty upbringings create shitty people who do dickish things. So again ultimately the real villain is The People. And yet... if you say this in a straightforward way it’ll still be misinterpreted 🤔
I think the world of stories needs more likeable villains that we can root for, antagonists who have legitimate criticisms of the system they’re in, who are pursuing a legitimate justice that they are being denied I am SO curious to see what happens in Luke Cage S3
I mean S4. I recently watched S3. Bushmaster was another likeable villain with legitimate grievances. Mariah was unlikeable, but her character had been through so much. Again, the question we need to ask is, where do villains come from? Why do we have a world that produces them?
There’s a Punisher comic where the protagonist basically discovers the making of a villain, and he finds himself wanting to get his hands on God himself for designing such a hateful world https://t.co/4MhyvKwUzr
@priya_ebooks There's a really thought provoking Punisher comic where he catches a pair of child abusers. He saves the kids, but sees in one of their eyes that the damage is done and that he's gonna end up hurting others too: Punisher: Max https://t.co/ZDfN1A2b30
Vulture: You don't understand how the world works. Spider-man: But I understand that selling weapons to criminals is wrong! Vulture: How do you think your buddy Stark paid for that tower? Or any of his little toys? https://t.co/dWllFLiJJK
The incredible thing about anime - that western cartoons in the 90s didn’t do - was that it really digs deep into tragic backstories. You really see the suffering and cruelty that villains were subjected to, that inform their beliefs & philosophy. This was so real to me as a kid https://t.co/CSm6lnS4Jq
Love this https://t.co/WBDc4G3ypE https://t.co/5KAYNhoZtD
Y'all ever realize that the X-Men were the bad guys? The 'moderate liberals' MLK wrote about? Imagine updating those stories with modern values. Magneto could be, like a Palestinian refugee whose family was murdered by Israel for protesting for water rights.