Something I’m not 100% sure how to put into words b/c flu but nonetheless woke up thinking about is:
it’s so disappointing when fiction that purports to show the “villain’s side of the story” actually just flips the roles, making the original villain a precious cinnamon roll and the original hero 100% garbage. it’s such a lazy narrative and it makes me wonder if you’ve really thought about *why* you want to tell the story you’re telling.
and like – there’s nothing *wrong* with just writing a power fantasy wherein your villainous fave comes out on top. but it’s always kind of unnerving to me when fandom will jump on those narratives without fully thinking them through, and thus react just as vitriolically to the new villain as an older audience did to the old one.
Maleficent has this problem, Orange Is the New Black has this problem, The Shape of Water to some degree has this problem (though concentrated in the fandom and not necessarily in del Toro’s narrative). it’s really bizarre to me how people will walk into a “villain redeemed” narrative and come out with their hatred intact, just shifted to a new, more “deserving” target. like, do you not see how recursive that is? and are you not just a little bit troubled by the knowledge that your sympathies are that easy to manipulate by a shift in narrator?
again, it’s fine if it’s just a power fantasy, but if you’re trying to make any kind of overarching point about villains and narratives and redemption, it’s at least *prudent* not to just switch the vantage points.
Yeeeaaaaaaaaah…
Part of the problem is: villain fandom is a big-tent coalition. It contains a lot of different groups of people, who are there for very different reasons. Sometimes for directly-opposed reasons. But our vocabulary for distinguishing those groups from each other isn’t very good, they overlap in all sorts of complicated ways, and various people are actively interested in eliding the differences in the name of cementing cultural alliances (or in the name of motte-and-baileying). So when you produce works to appeal to one of those groups, or to advance its cultural agenda, you’re likely to be attacking some of the others.
Some people are into villains because they genuinely see themselves as partaking in Darkness and Badness, whatever those things mean to them. They’re interested in exploring how you live with that, how you make something worthwhile out of your life despite its being inescapably Dark and Bad, and how other “purer” people should engage with you under those circumstances.
And some people are into villains because they believe themselves to be Pure Cinnamon Rolls who are unfairly stigmatized, marginalized, and abominated by the world’s ruling class of self-designated “heroes.” As far as they’re concerned, the Darkness and Badness aren’t real, they’re just cultural attacks from a dominant enemy tribe. So they’re interested in aggressively proud trope-reclaiming stories that say, “nuh-uh, the people who wear the villain hats are the true good guys after all, and in fact you should associate the bright-and-noble stylings of the ‘heroes’ with the true Darkness and Badness.” This is basically just a stronger, slightly-differently-focused version of the more-common narrative lens where “disreputable thief” instantly codes as “good guy” and “justice-oriented cop” codes as “bad guy.”
[And some people are there to fantasize about redeeming the smolderingly sexy bad boy in leather pants. And some people are edgelords who think that black-and-red is a really cool look. And some people are psychopathic sadists who want to be applauded rather than scorned for their interest in hurting people. Like I said, it’s a big tent.]
In my experience, mainstream villainfic that’s intended to be sympathetic will almost always go the Cinnamon Roll route. “The guys in black are actually just misunderstood while the guys in white-and-gold are actually racist thugs!” is a much simpler and more-accessible sort of message than “the monster is truly monstrous but nonetheless deserving of love and understanding.”