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Why are superhero villains portrayd as sympathetic villains when a superhero kills someone they care about despite the villain themself murdering nameless innocents? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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For hypothetical example; Father/son duo are criminals, harming, killing, and stealing innocent civilians. Superhero fights them, resulting in the father dying. Son is now portrayed as a sympathetic villain because all he wants is to avenge his father... despite all the fathers of children they murdered whilst comitting crimes.

Side question; do you feel sympathy for the villains portrayed like this?

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[–] 15 points 3 years ago (1 child)

When it's done right, it's thematically about how violence begets violence, or maybe the writer is making their rivalry more personal. Without specific examples to dissect it's impossible to make that call though

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    It makes sense, I suppose. maybe I'm just a bit jaded about villain writing. I just feel like a lot of the time villain motivation seems to come after the villain themself. Like the villain and their methods was created, and then a motivation for that was created to make it make sense. Rather than creating a motivation and then designing the villain off the motivation. Not all villains, of course. there's some pretty complex and fantastically written ones out there. But sometimes, there's a lot of villains where it seems the writers just REALLY needed some kind of relatable motivation.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I mean, they're writing a comic book. The superhero and every other character started as a concept doodle and a story was written around them.

    I'm now curious why that detail bothers you for only villains.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    It doesn't only bother me for villains, I just had villains in particular on the mind. I get it though. I was just watching TV and Aquaman came on and I've seen a bunch of other superho movies on TV lately, so I was just thinking a lot about the tropes I see a lot, and that particular example was at the front of my mind.

    I'd also recently scene Age of Ultron, where the twins had, in my opinion, a really questionable reason for siding with Ultron.

    I also love writing fiction myself, and I have a terrible habit of disecting just about every plot point I encounter in media to see what "makes them work", or not work, to see what I can learn from them for my own writing. Makes me awful overly critical of some things.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Villains must be tricky. It's hard to make evil motivations relatable to most people. (who I'm assuming are good people)

    We really want to believe that some horrific event caused the downfall of this person, but sometimes "I just wanted to see if I could" is a legitimate, although unsatisfying, evil reason to do something.

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