In Defence Of Pure Evil Villains

Pure evil villains are one of my favorite. "Not everyone wants to be good, or is willing to change." is a great lesson.

Everyone loves Zuko. Everyone also forgets that not every villain needs or is supposed to be Zuko.

“I did it because I liked it, I was good at it” Walter is a perfect example of pure evil with a backstory

“Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.“ -Alfred Pennyworth

Wait ... Sauron was evil? But we always found him to be a wise and benevolent leader! In Mordor he had an 83% approval rating. Sure, his foreign policy was a little, let us say, assertive, but that is entirely understandable considering the elves were plotting to use the One Ring against him. That was a critical threat to our national security!

I'd like to add that an evil villain and a sympathetic villain don't even have to be mutually exclusive. My favorite example is Davy Jones from the Pirates franchise: He's got a sympathetic backstory, sure, but that backstory isn't there to give Jones some redeemable quality, instead it serves to show us why he became an unnecessarily cruel and malicious force of nature in the first place.

In contrast to the Joker, Mr. Freeze is a very good sympathetic villain because he's one of the few Batman villains who does evil things for the sake of someone he loves. If every villain had Victor Fries' tragic backstory and relatable motivations, Mr. Freeze wouldn't be nearly as special in the lineup of Batman's Rogues Gallery.

One of the things I like about Nolan's Joker was that he sometimes painted himself as a sympathetic villain to his victims, often before he harms them or kills them (when he tells them how he got his scars) and you only realize he's lying when you hear hs story change.

The point of pure evil villains like the joker is that it doesn’t matter for us to try to understand them. The fact that they would do something so horrible automatically negates any sob story they have.

i would agree that sympathytic villians are becoming a tired cliche but i feel like the real problem lies more or less in uncreative motivations.

Sometimes pure evil is more relatable than a morally complex character. Evil is wanting to get what you want at any cost, and that's a feeling many people grapple with.

Jack Horner even made fun of the sympathetic villain trope. His tragic backstory is that he grew up in an emotionally stable home with a thriving baked goods business to inherit.

I love your "Look Who's Back" example. Someone can be unsympathetic and irredeemable, but still be a product of their environment, acting as commentary on how society encourages some of these villainous traits.

I love Dark Knight’s Joker because they address the lack of “sympathetic backstory” in a way that actually enhances Joker’s character. He first tells one character that he got his scars from an abusive father, which might lead some people to feel at least a little bit sorry for him (and others to roll their eyes and go “oh, great, now he’s just a broken man with a stupid sympathetic back story”). Then to another character later in the movie, he tells a different story about his scars by saying he mutilated himself after his wife was disfigured by loan sharks. Suddenly, we, the audience, realize we were fooled by the Clown Prince! This tells the audience three things: 1) The Joker is absolutely unworthy of sympathy of any sort because he is manipulative and dangerous; 2) telling conflicting stories is right in line with a character whose very nature is disorder, manipulation, and chaos; and 3) his actual backstory is TOTALLY IRRELEVANT as to why he is the way he is. It’s terrifying, and it’s brilliant. Comparing Joaquin Phoenix’s and Heath Ledger’s Jokers is a good way to analyze the cog analogy given in the video. Arthur Fleck is a fascinating villain/protag in his own story (his own cog of a character with the other cogs in that particular movie); but the Arthur Fleck cog does NOT fit nearly as well as Ledger’s Joker with the other narrative cogs of The Dark Knight. Blah blah I think this stuff is really cool

Notes: Pure evil villians are supposed to be symbols of what the protagonist doesn’t want to or should not be! Also anyone wants to add on I would very much appreciate it 😁

I think a big problem is when writers use a sympathetic backstory as an excuse for a villain rather than to show that they've failed to grow out of it and become a better person. I think a good example of a pure evil villain that's also sympathetic is Voldemort. I wont go into the details but he has a backstory that allows the reader to understand why he is the way he is, however, this is never used as an excuse for his actions and is rather there to show how a person that lacks love and is pure evil is made.

Before Hollywood started writing villains poorly with these "sympathetic backstories", they were writing every villain as pure evil no matter what. The writers in Hollywood just follow whatever the latest trends are.

Sympathetic villains are great, but Hollywood definitely has gone too far with them lately. It was one of the reasons why I loved Guardians of the Galaxy 3 so much. James Gunn gave us the most despicable, easy to hate villain in all the MCU. But that's the exact type of villain that works for that specific story.

I love sympathetic villains, but it’s nice to just have the occasional purely evil one. Same with heroes, while I love having morally grey heroes or even antiheroes sometimes it’s nice to just have a straight up good hearted protagonist

Everyone should read Harris' great novel Silence of the Lambs. When Clarice first encounters Hannibal the Cannibal, she tries to get him to fill out this long questionnaire about his background. Clarice encourages him with the goal of understanding what happened to him to become a cannibalistic killer. He scoffs at the notion. "Nothing happened to me, Clarice. I happened."