I think I figured out my issue with most fic that turns canon villains into the hero

[alias_sqbr]

So. We have a 'villain' character who has done objectively terrible things. In a rigid good-vs-evil dichotomy, they would generally be classified as evil.

And we have a fic where this 'villain' is now the sympathetic protagonist, possibly involving some sort of redemption arc or AU.

There are some villains I just can't read such fic about, but in this case I am open to the idea.

My preference is for the fic to not have a rigid good-vs-evil dichotomy, and instead either see pretty much everyone as having the potential to be good, or cheerfully wallow in shades of grey. There can be some glossing over of the villain's sharper edges, but for the most part I want the moral framework to be consistent with the events of canon, just one which has space for sympathy towards characters as "bad" as the protagonist.

But a great many fics just create a new moral framework with it's own rigid good-vs-evil dichotomy, and set things up so the 'villain' is now on the side of Good, and other canon characters are on the side of evil, even though their actions in canon aren't significantly worse than the villain's.

Which is perfectly valid as an approach, but unless I think canon is wrong about the villain doing bad things, I will not enjoy this kind of narrative at all.

Note that this is about fanfic based on an existing canon. My feelings on original works which turn bad guys into good guys etc are broadly similar, but harder to sum up.

I used to think my problem with these stories was that they were being unfair. Because often they are! The new moral framework often excuses the villain for doing appalling things, yet demonises the new 'bad guys' for much more minor 'badness'. Often, these new 'bad guys' are the villain's canonical victims, since if they're bad then the villain having hurt them seems ok. Instead of acknowledging that these victims have a right to be angry, the narrative portrays them as mean for hurting the poor villain with their 'cruel' and 'whiny' expressions of pain and anger.

Like the other day I read a fic where a character was yelled at by all the other characters for being so cruel as to not want to invite someone to a social event she was running just because he'd recently violently colonised her country.

And I have given up on reading Snape-centric fic because pretty much all of it demonises Lily.

I don't think people are bad for writing this kind of fic, I can see the appeal intellectually, but it has never felt surprising to me that I dislike it.

But yesterday I read a fic which wasn't super unfair, yet still bothered me. It was sympathetic to villain A and set up a moral framework where he shouldn't have murdered two innocent people for fun, and should atone for it, but was still a good person because he felt bad about it, and was capable of unselfish love and kindness. But villain B was a bad person because he murdered people for fun all the time, and never cared about anyone's feelings but his own ever.

And like...that is a canonical difference between those characters, and a consistent moral framework. I'm not a fan of good=capable of love, and some of A's flaws got glossed over. But overall, that's not super unreasonable, as "moral frameworks where it's ok to have murdered people for fun" go.

And I didn't like it! I was fine with A as sympathetic hero, but found myself feeling weirdly defensive of villain B, who is an objectively appalling person I have never been inclined to care about. In fact knowing he has fans has always slightly baffled me, because he's so awful! I have no problem with him being treated like a bad guy in canon or most other kinds of fic.

But when I was in the headspace of being sympathetic enough to villain A for him to be the hero, I was automatically also in a headspace to be somewhat sympathetic to villain B. A might not be generally prone to murdering innocent people just for fun, but is very prone to many other sorts of murder, as well as lying, back-stabbing, etc. He is portrayed as a villain in canon for a reason! And B, for all his awfulness, does have some flickers of sympathetic motivations and actions which aren't entirely unlike A's. The fic liking A more than B was fine, but I found it jarring every time it drew a bright clean line between them.

At the same time, I intellectually understand the appeal of A being told "evil exists, it looks like B, and you are good instead of evil because you are better than that". It just doesn't do much for me.

Thinking about it, I can enjoy stories which still have a good vs evil dichotomy, but have just shifted it so that most characters, including the 'villain', are good. The ones still classified as evil are genuinely much worse than the 'villain', and those in the grey area between are treated with some compassion.

If I'm reading a story with a canon villain being seen as Good, I want an emphasis on compassion and seeing the good in everyone. The narrative and villain should acknowledge the people they hurt, and that they would be justified in being angry/disliking the villain, but I want everyone to end up on moderately good terms. I can roll with a moderate amount of OOC glossing over of the villain's flaws, but only if the narrative is just as generous to everyone else. Steven Universe and She-ra and the Princesses of Power are both canons which take this kind of approach to characters formerly portrayed as villains.

I can also enjoy more morally ambiguous stories with an edge of darkness/dark humour which acknowledge that the villain is still kind of an asshole, but they should be self aware about their moral ambiguity and not act like the villain is Good in a simplistic way. Portal 2 does this for example with the villain of Portal 1, but it doesn't pretend she isn't still murderously terrible, and the new villain for Portal 2 is kinda sympathetic in his own likably terrible way.

So yeah! It feels good to have figured this out, even if it probably won't make finding villain-as-hero stories I like all that much easier.

Comments

Saw this on Latest Things

[nodrog]

There's also the Star Trek “Mirror Universe” approach, where not only are characters’ polarity reversed, there’s a matching shift in what constitutes “good and evil” anyway.  The strong should prevail, the weak should expect to be run over.  Dura lex sed lex - “the Law is tough, but it is the Law.”

As an example, someone worked up the Mirror Romulans as fanon, and they’re the good guys here - the Star Empire is benevolent and its laws light and fair - essentially C Smith’s Instrumentality of Mankind:

“The Instrumentality had the perpetual slogan 'Watch, but do not govern; stop war, but do not wage it; protect, but do not control; and first, survive!'"”

This is a bit of a departure for Romulans as defined - but hey, it’s a Mirror Universe!  Yet note that they are still the “bad guys” here, because they are spineless weakling-coddlers who cause unrest, infecting docile subject races with the awareness that they could be free -!

<===//===//===>
So that’s another possible approach:  Redefine the terms of the debate so that the villain IS considered good!

(Vlad Drăculești, Voivode of Wallachia, is a legendary national hero in Hungary and for good reason - he stopped the seemingly unstoppable Turkish invasion of Islam into Central Europe and saved the Eastern Orthodox Church almost single-handedly.  Yes, like Col Kurtz his methods were unsound - he has come down to us as Vlad Tsepes, “Vlad the Impaler,” and they’re not kidding, but hey, what works is good, right?  So he’s a “good guy.”  Right?)

Re: Saw this on Latest Things

[alias_sqbr]

Oh that's an interesting take on it.

Most examples I've seen have a sort of double awareness: there's the in-universe moral system, and then the quite different assumed moral system of the reader, and the two have an interesting tension. Like a Homestuck fic I read which wrote from the POV of a canon dystopic society where lower caste psychics are turned into the minds of spaceships: on the surface it's a fluffy story of a girl being a Kind and Good spaceship owner. But there is an unstated assumption that the reader thinks people being turned into spaceships against their will is horrifying, which lurks uncomfortably beneath the happy fluffy tone.

...ok wait I found the story again and it's more overtly Stockholm syndromey than I remembered. But I can't think of a better example, so. Imagine it wasn't :) (here's the link https://archiveofourown.org/works/282279)

Anyway, I again can't think of examples but I think I've also seen stories which are less obviously Not In Favour of the new moral system, but still interestingly strange to read for the way they flip things about.

Re: “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream”

[nodrog]

That was an interesting story - but I saw it as the reverse, not “fluffy” at all, but a living nightmare that the main character had dreaded all his life like the flames of Hell and now it’s happened, and the only saving grace is that his mistress is cute and likeable and kind, but it’s still a horrible thing to do to someone against their will.

Thank you:  That gave me a new perspective on a story of my own, to which I hadn’t given proper attention.  Coincidentally it's a Mirror Universe story:  He’s the only son of a famous Starfleet Admiral, and has never been free to make his own life; she is a Vulcan of working class who joined up to get out - plain, flat, looking like a boy gone wrong, her uniform always looks ill-fitting.

Come Ye Olde Transporter Glitch, and O my!  Yet now they are both free as never before, “Free To” and “Free From” :  As Captain of a Terran Empire pirate ship he is free to go and to do whatever he likes, so long as it makes profit and serves the Empire - and as his personal Orion-modified hormone-amplified Gorean hentai cabin slave she is free from the classes she was failing, free from the monastic restrictions of the Vulcan Way, free from fret and worry (and that uniform), free to love him -

Yet as that Homestuck story points out, she would be horrified to the core of her being by this perverted, warped, insane change in her!  Not body-modesty but emotion modesty - these bestial teenage hormones slamming through her new body are horrible!  The first time this female vulcanid, this young girl bursts into tears right in front of him she is shamed to death!

She gets over it.  He helps - for now the Captain of her heart is free to love her, too, as the famous Admiral’s son never could have.  (Sex with a Vulcan girl is…  strange.  ) 

The Frazetta Conan pose: Him standing tall on the bridge of his ship, a naked slave girl curled up at his leg…  Neither would go back even if they could.

…Yeah, I'll have to dig out that story and dust it off:  Something could certainly be done with it.

<===×===>
Updated to add:  I got caught up in that and strayed from the original discussion:  Is what has happened to them, particularly to her, evil?  The hard-core Freudian-warped “Gender Studies” crew would say, Yes!  in jealously bitter tones.  But they’re the only ones who would say so - see the sales figures on romance novels.  That “Freedom From” idea appeals to many, if it is as pleasant as this.  “Good” and “Evil” may not be so easy to define after all.

[lilacsigil]

Well, I'm an X-Men fan where it shifts every five minutes! But the basic idea, that you can make up for what you did by helping others, is a good one for me - along with the idea that the heroes intent may be good, but their effect may not be. What I don't like is where every action the villain took is explained to try to say "they couldn't help it" because almost always, they could! They chose to do things the way they did, and while there may be reasons for that, it's not the same as excuses. A bright, clean line is something that is almost never useful or (worse in fiction!) interesting!

[alias_sqbr]

Ha, yes, agreed: a bright clear line not only makes me uncomfortable, it makes the story far less interesting. And I want to see the story actually grapple with what they did, not a happy ending for some imagined version of them who never did anything wrong.

[waterscroll]

I know you're writing about fanfic, but when I think about otome novel routes it's important to me that in principle anyone could get a route. And they keep adding routes so it is at least theoretically possible that any given character, no matter how evil or marginal, could be a protagonist of one and get a happy ending in which they are the hero. Some routes might never get written because there might be limited market interest in a route for say, Chizuru's dad or that one farmer, but they could be.

That's sort of how I think about fanfic. When I'm looking at a canon and sitting down to write a fixit fic for an antagonist I like to think that in principle I could write a fixit for any of the antagonists, I'm just picking this one to start with because of personal interest. Back in the day when I was much more prolific there were a few fandoms that I would go through systematically - I'd write a fixit for one villain but that would make another villainous character's actions look even worse, so then I'd write them, and keep going like that for a while. I don't really have the bandwidth for that now, but it's still important that in theory I could.

One thing this comes down to for me is that I am most interested in redemption arcs when they are fundamentally unjust. That is, I'm not interested in the question of whether or not a character deserves redemption. If I care about a character that's enough reason for me to write a redemption arc for them, no matter what they did or didn't do. But if I'm going to admit that, I also have to admit that this applies to every other character in canon as well, and that the reason I haven't written them a redemption arc (yet) isn't something in them but something in me - my limited capacity as a writer and my personal needs in terms of what kinds of stories I want to tell right now. I'm not always sure how to make this come through in a story, though. I do like it when other writers somehow make that clear, maybe by hinting at ways that characters other than the ones they are writing fixits for could have fixits of their own even if they're not being written now.

[alias_sqbr]

Oh that's an interesting way of looking at it.

I really like that aspect of otome too, and feel a bit cheated when the way a character is written when acting as an antagonist is inconsistent with their writing as a LI. And yeah, I aim for something similar in my writing, I think of it as everyone being the hero in their own version of the story.

I think we've discussed this before, but the idea of redemption being fundamentally unfair is making me think. I guess it broadly fits under the shades of grey sort I like.

[waterscroll]

ETA:

But when I was in the headspace of being sympathetic enough to villain A for him to be the hero, I was automatically also in a headspace to be somewhat sympathetic to villain B.

I'm now halfway through The Untamed and it's hitting me like this hard. If the whole premise of the show is that the evil necromancer never did anything wrong on purpose to anyone ever, I'm very inclined to extend the same sympathy to every canon antagonist.

I'm liking the show a lot, this is in no way a criticism. It does seem like fandom is coming through with fixit/sympatheric fic for most of the villains, and that canon does some work to make that possible.

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah, even the worst characters have some quasi-understandable motivations, and thus fans writing AUs where they get to achieve them happily and with maybe a little less bloodshed.

[skygiants]

I don't have deep thoughts about this, I just feel like I've guessed who characters A and B are based on context and now I'm really curious if I'm right. >.>

[alias_sqbr]

Considering your icon choice...yeah, probably. I was mostly being vague to avoid spoiling anyone.

[skygiants]

It was extremely artful vagueness! I was impressed! I wouldn't have guessed without having seen quite a lot of fic in this vein also. >.>

[alias_sqbr]

This is the only one I've read in full for this fandom but I have back buttoned from a lot of summaries.

[anghraine]

You know, I've always thought it was what you said above, too—The new moral framework often excuses the villain for doing appalling things, yet demonises the new 'bad guys' for much more minor 'badness'. Often, these new 'bad guys' are the villain's canonical victims, since if they're bad then the villain having hurt them seems ok. Instead of acknowledging that these victims have a right to be angry, the narrative portrays them as mean for hurting the poor villain with their 'cruel' and 'whiny' expressions of pain and anger. And it's not like that isn't very much at play.

But I've liked a lot of villains and written/read a lot of stories that are sympathetic to them and shift things around so that they're the protagonists (sometimes villain protagonists, but also many times not!). And I kind of felt that a lot of it comes down to, well, which villain people have a personal affinity for, because the actual arguments about who does or does not """deserve""" redemption are often so transparent. But I think I have run into cases where I'm "uhhhh" about takes on villains as the Actually That Bad villains even though I don't even like them personally. And there is this sense that there's something fundamentally different about the author's worldview going on.

I do think there's often this underlying logic of who deserves sympathy as well as redemption that has many of the same pitfalls, and that's a factor here. It's not that people have to find all characters equally sympathetic/redeemable! But the underlying assumptions around deservingness are where I feel like I get tripped up.

Anyway, a lot of words to say that I suspect I feel pretty much the same.

[alias_sqbr]

Oh good point, who gets sympathy is a big part of it too. Hmm, now you've got me thinking about the way "they're a bad person" is so often used as an excuse to avoid offering someone sympathy, even for extremely painful experiences unrelated to the bad things they've done.

[anghraine]

Yep—there's that awful "well, some people experience bad things and remain pure and Soft(TM) and are deserving of sympathy, while obviously [villain/anti-hero]'s suffering doesn't count and it's wrong and problematic to sympathize with them" thing. The whole fixation on deserving is just really odd to me.

[lea_hazel]

It's a complicated subject, and I don't really know how to frame my own thoughts on the topic very well. I'm a bit more averse to strict good/evil dichotomies, but it may just be that my aversion is to the word "evil" and the ideas of absoluteness that it implies. I'm okay with stories that "write off" certain antagonists as beyond hope, in principle. Just something about the word "evil" sets me off.

Like I said, I don't know how to word it, and so it doesn't make much sense.

This *did* make me think of a whole ramble I wrote for myself recently, when I was trying to find a non-toxic angle on a very dodgy pairing. Somehow, for some reason, every time I tried to clean it up, it somehow made things worse. And I took that as a sign that I need to accept the inherent greyness of the premise, and accept that any happiness this character finds is stolen.

I will be thinking about this, the next time I notice a discrepancy in how fandom treats two different villains in the same fandom.

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah I'm not a big fan of people being declared "evil", even when I am ok with the narrative having moral judgements in general.

Yes, I've had that too! Too simply happy an ending feels Off, sometimes.

[sylvaine]

Soooooooo much HP fanfic where Evil Character Good Now So Good Characters Evil. Sooooo much. And goodness me, I love good villain fic, I love me some morally grey characters, I love complicated morality, but... yeah! I want it to be more complicated than that! *g*

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah, same.