The Comfort of “Complexity”: How Modern Villain Narratives Still Play It Safe
Using Frollo and Emperor Belos as examples, I will explain in this post how, as far as Disney (and modern narratives as a whole) is concerned, we have refined simplistic villainy opposed to moving past it.
In contemporary animation discourse, “complexity” has become a kind of moral gold standard. Audiences frequently ask for villains who are more nuanced, more layered, more psychologically rich than the flat antagonists of earlier decades. On the surface, shows like The Owl House appear to answer that demand: they offer tragic backstories, ideological justifications, institutional power structures, and villains who speak in the language of righteousness rather than cackling malice. Yet despite this presentation, many of these stories continue to play it remarkably safe. Their complexity is aesthetic, not implicating.
What’s avoided is the most uncomfortable truth of all: cruelty, abuse, and dehumanization are not outside of humanity — they are human capacities.
Instead of confronting that reality, these narratives repeatedly externalize harm, isolating it within singular figures who can be labeled monsters and removed from the moral ecosystem of the story.
This pattern is not new. Disney’s 1996 portrayal of Judge Claude Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame already exemplified it. Despite being inspired by real historical figures, Frollo is denied the banal humanity that makes real perpetrators unsettling. He is cruel without contradiction, abusive without ordinary social context, righteous without recognizable self-deception. The film implicitly defines humanity as synonymous with goodness, kindness, and respect, while cruelty is framed as evidence of inhumanity. The result is a character who feels less like a human capable of atrocity and more like atrocity given human form. Evil is not something people do; it is something monsters are.
The Owl House updates this framework for a modern audience, but it does not meaningfully escape it.
Emperor Belos is frequently praised as a “complex” villain, yet his complexity functions primarily at the level of lore. He has a backstory, an ideology, and a personal narrative of righteousness. But as the series progresses, his humanity is steadily withdrawn rather than interrogated. He becomes increasingly singular, corrupted, and inhuman, ensuring that his refusal to change feels inevitable rather than tragic. His lack of redemption is framed as a bold narrative choice, when in reality it serves the same purpose as Frollo’s monstrosity: it keeps evil contained.
This containment is reinforced structurally. The Coven system — ostensibly an authoritarian institution — is revealed to have never been real at all. Loyalty does not matter. Compliance does not protect anyone. The entire system exists solely to facilitate Belos’s private genocidal plan. Even the chaos of the so-called “Savage Ages,” which justified the system’s creation, is explicitly shown to have been manufactured by Belos himself. In any scenario resembling real history, communities would have eventually recognized that the same figure terrorizing their towns was also offering protection. But the narrative cannot allow that recognition, because recognition would reintroduce shared responsibility.
By making the system fake, the chaos artificial, and the harm entirely centralized, the story evacuates complicity from the world it depicts. Ordinary witches are not participants; they are dupes. Enforcers are not institutional actors; they are either cartoonishly evil or secretly unhappy and therefore redeemable. Once Belos is removed, the moral problem dissolves. Evil had a face, and the face is gone.
This is what “playing it safe” looks like.
When some viewers say they want more complexity, what they often mean is not complexity that implicates them, but complexity that reassures them. They want villains with tragic pasts, darker aesthetics, and ideological rhetoric — not stories that force recognition of how ordinary people sustain harmful systems through fear, convenience, belief, or inertia. They want to feel mature without feeling implicated.
True complexity would ask harder questions. It would allow systems to be real rather than illusory. It would show harm persisting not because of one uniquely evil individual, but because many people made understandable, self-protective, and morally compromising choices. It would refuse to let cruelty be safely labeled as inhuman, insisting instead that it emerges from recognizably human motives: certainty, fear, pride, belonging.
Stories that externalize evil as monstrosity offer moral clarity at the cost of moral insight. They protect the audience by definition, ensuring that harm always looks alien, exaggerated, and distant. But in doing so, they undermine their own warnings. Real atrocities do not require monsters. They require people who believe they are right.
What these narratives ultimately reveal is not that we have moved beyond simplistic villainy, but that we have refined it. The language of complexity has changed, yet the underlying structure remains intact. Evil is still something “they” do — never something we might participate in without realizing it.
And that, more than any lack of redemption arc, is what makes these stories safe.
