Comments | captlebubbles: Don't get involved with someone you can't talk about your crushes with.

captlebubbles

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

Dec 05, 2016 22:34

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". ( Read more... )

!original work

Comments 7

wolfy_writing December 6 2016, 17:19:44 UTC

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 December 7 2016, 02:49:44 UTC

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 December 7 2016, 08:22:00 UTC

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 December 10 2016, 03:38:06 UTC

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 ( ... )

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