I sent a guy to Hel in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla; in my defense he absolutely deserved it after deciding to Blood Eagle a dude for kicks and backstabbed a friend of mine. I’m still mad at him, and this happened last Sunday.
Anyhow, I got my first covid vaccine, which is a thing to be thankful for.
I had thoughts on Zack Snyder again, about how he sees his protagonists as mythological heroes rather than superheroes, and thus he takes his characters in a direction that most superhero filmmakers are afraid to go to, but that’s not necessarily a good thing and he doesn’t seem to get that not everyone is onboard for his Hot Take.
Also I think I’ve written something like this before but we’re doing it anyway because that’s what is on my mind and I couldn’t think of anything else. There was going to be a bit on Testament of Loki I think, but I wasn’t sure how to put it in.
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Telling the Story from the Villain’s Perspective
Very often, there come trends of telling stories from the perspective of the villain. The problem with this is that very often these retreads is that they often try to make it so that the villain is actually the hero. This is… not a great way to do these stories.
The main example that leaps to mind here is Maleficent. I said this in my review of Maleficent back after I saw it in theaters, but the main issue with the movie is that it doesn’t want Maleficent to be the villain. The movie turns Maleficent from a villain to a straightforward hero (if one with bad publicity) and doesn’t have her do anything too villainous, lest you decide you don’t like her. Her curse towards Aurora is switched from death to eternal sleep.
Also she doesn’t turn into a dragon which is LAME.
The whole point of telling the villain’s story isn’t to rewrite it so that the villain is actually the hero. It’s to tell the villain’s story--it’s to give us a perspective on the story we already know that we didn’t consider before, adding circumstances and characterization that gives much more context. In an age when stories are much more character-driven, many people don’t like the idea of a villain that’s evil just for the sake of it, a character who acts a certain why because “that’s just the way this person is.”
But Maleficent rearranges the entire story so that not only is Maleficent sympathetic, but she was never really wrong to begin with. She hardly did anything wrong. And the people who don’t like her are mostly jerks anyway, so it’s alright. Her casting a murder curse on a child is wiped from the story, as is her calling on the powers of Hell and having an evil army at her side.
You know what did a great job of telling the villain’s story? Once Upon a Time’s first season.
Look, after season one, Once Upon a Time was… not good, but I still maintain that it’s first season was brilliant and very well done. Everything I’m about to talk about relates to that first season and any complaints from afterward don’t apply here.
[Side note: even after I had publicly given up on this show, and I hated how critics seemed to love it, I never minded its fanbase? Because this show was bonkers, and the fans all knew it, so I couldn’t hold that against them.]
Regina is a terrible person, and the show doesn’t pull back from showing us that. And yet there is an entire episode dedicated to showing how she got there--her abusive mother, how she blames Snow for something bad that happens, and how it all spirals from there. The show doesn’t justify her malice, but it gives that character context that makes you understand why she got the way she did.
Now granted, this is a show and not a movie, and thus has a lot more time to develop characters, but the reveal of why Regina hates Snow so much is in one episode near the end of a season--an episode that’s shorter than a movie’s run time. And given that Sleeping Beauty already exists, I think Maleficent easily could have done a better job.
Telling the villain’s story should give us much more, but it shouldn’t make the villain into a hero (unless it was already a story with moral ambiguity, which is another thing entirely, I think).
I’m thinking about this in part because I recently reread Boxers & Saints which actually starts with the villain perspective, and although Little Bao (a fictional leading character in the Boxer Rebellion) begins the story sympathetic it devolves until he and his followers are essentially a nationalist terrorist movement slaughtering men, women, and children across the Chinese countryside. The author has talked about how he’s writing a protagonist that’s all but said in-story to be a terrorist (and this book came out in the early 2000’s I think??). The story isn’t making him out to be a good guy. Just… a guy with good motives that does some terrible things to try to make it happen.
Very rarely do I like the ‘Villain was actually the hero’ kind of story. There’s Twisted from Team Starkid, but that’s deliberately a parody of Wicked, Aladdin, and also the relationship between Disney and Pixar.
I am very wary of the upcoming Disney Cruella movie, because I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it was another movie doing this exactly the wrong way as outlined above. That, and as is pointed out in Twisted, it’s very difficult to do a sympathetic take on a villain whose stated goal is to skin a bunch of puppies to make clothing out of.
Complex characters are fine. But just switching the villains into being the heroes isn’t the same as having complex characters. It’s just switching the labels and hoping that’s enough to make a new and compelling story. Which it generally isn’t.
Also you know just tell more original stories.
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