You don't have to of course, but do you mind elaborating on your Villain statement. I think I get what you feel, but I don't wanna assume. You can answer privately if you prefer.
I may or may not do a video on it eventually. The short end of it is that, growing up Jewish, I’ve been inundated with Holocaust/WWII imagery and history from a very young age. Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t, but I feel like I got an earlier Holocaust education than my non-Jewish friends because it’s basically a part of Hebrew school curriculum.
My mom thinks we went to a JCC Holocaust Remembrance event when I was as young as 6. We didn’t learn about the Holocaust or read even Number The Stars or Diary Of A Young Girl until I was closer to 10 or 11 in public school.
So from as early as 6, but possibly even earlier, I learned that Nazis are bad because they hurt, killed, and abused people like me and my family. There was no room for but maybe some Nazis tried to help or some such nonsense we try to teach kids about slaveholders.
And I think that, in the mind of a very small child, the easiest way to contextualize that kind of inherent evil is through movie villains. Up until recently, Disney movie villains were all pretty much evil and you could tell. All they were is evil - look at Hades, Jafar, Frollo, Gaston (though it’s clear that the townspeople like Gaston, it’s clear to the audience that we are not meant to like him as a person), Ursula, Shan Yu. All of these are villains from my childhood, that I grew up with, and they are all, without a doubt, evil from start to finish.
So I think, in some way, I associated the evil of Nazis with these cartoon villains because it was a pretty easy way for me to also acknowledge first, that the Nazis lost the war and second, that these villains were never successful in the long-run.
For most of my life, I’ve never understood why people romanticize villains (the ones that are wholly evil from start to finish). It wasn’t until I started learning about Queer theory and Queer coding that some of that idealization made sense, and even more it wasn’t until I grew up and got a little more world-weary that I even considered that some villains might be justified in their anger, though not always their actions.
And then She-Ra happened and Scorpia is unapologetically evil but she’s an evil cupcake. She’s a Big Buff Softie who cares about her friends - she proved to me that villains can have friends and I actually bought it??? I’m still confused about how Noelle Stevenson and her team managed to pull that off but they did.
