It’s Okay to Like a Villain
Dracula. Maleficent. Voldemort. Darth Vader. Hannibal Lecter. The Devil, himself…
For funsies, let’s even throw in Zade Meadows.
When John Milton’s Paradise Lost was published in the seventeenth century, audiences were shocked to find themselves sympathizing with Lucifer. Imagine, if you can, being a Christian in the Western World and feeling bad for the Devil, himself! The same guy who contributed to humanity’s Fall, who got us kicked out of the Garden of Eden, and who tempted Jesus Christ in desert? *clutches pearls*
Milton’s Lucifer was not the first, and certainly not the last, time audiences sympathized or even liked a villain. Before the contemporary obsession with dark romance book boyfriends like Zade Meadows, villains have always been well-liked (even with their shirts on).
Audiences of Hitchcock’s Psycho found Norman Bates oddly charming and timid. Anthony Hopkins completely captivated audiences as the brilliant cannibal psychiatrist and won the Oscar for his performance that year. There is even something addictive about mean girls like Regina George that we can’t get enough of: “I spent about 80 percent of my time talking about Regina. And the other 20 percent of the time, I was praying for someone else to bring her up so I could talk about her more!”
Why do we like villains? I have no idea. Maybe we just find them funny, like Freddy Krueger. Maybe we find them handsome or beautiful, like that weird version of Grendel’s Mother played by Angelina Jolie. Or, maybe we see a darker side of ourselves in each of them that we don’t allow others to see, like Feyre Archeron looking into the Ouroboros. (You guys didn’t really think I wasn’t going to make an ACOTAR reference, did you?) Or, perhaps, we know that being a villain is just one bad day away for any of us.
Villains are also usually well-written and complex characters. We look at villains like the proverbial bad car accident: we don’t want to look, but we can’t stop staring. We have to study the accident to know what happened. We know that a car flipping over three times leading to an explosion is not what is supposed to happen, so we ask ourselves what went wrong? I think we do the same with villains. What made Hannibal Lecter a psychotic cannibal?
So, yes, it’s okay to like a villain. My only advice: admit they’re a villain. We shouldn’t try to paint actual villains as “good guys” to justify our love for them. We wind up forfeiting our own moral compass.
