tinmunky replied to your post “Beating FC5 just made me love Joseph all the more because even with...”
@sisterfriedes give me a compelling clusterfuck of a character any day of a tidy two dimensional snoozefest. They are all literally on a precipice of good an evil. You can see both sides of the coin from here and that is so so so much more engaging. A push one way into total madness and a push the other into savior. It’s nasty and unhealthy, but damn is it giving me the feels.
Yes!! I even said on the tags of the OG post that this is a Seed-posi blog, which means that I love these characters and love studying them, thinking about them, analyzing them, and trying to understand the monstrous things they do. And that understanding isn’t going to lead me to accepting or approving of their behavior! I just want to understand why they do what they do, say what they say, and imagine ways to correct it, heal it, change it, etc.
And this isn’t even in response to that person who responded to the post (because they weren’t actually saying anything bad about me or Joseph), this is just a generalized statement about my feelings of villains and Tumblr’s reception of them, but--
Villains are great. Villains are fascinating. Villains, and the conflict that they bring, make stories interesting. A lack of conflict, a lack of drama, a lack of... well, anything challenging, is boring. It’s not even what a story is. Even if stories don’t have villains, they have antagonistic elements that drive a story, make it dramatic, challenge both the audience and the characters within it, removing them from places of comfort and forcing them to confront fears or doubts, their own flaws/failures, etc.
Pearl-clutching and condemnation of villains having ~problematic~ behavior is incomprehensible to me because they’re applying judgments that should only be reserved (1) for real life people, and (2) real life injustices and harmful acts. Critiquing a villain for doing what villains do strikes me as a total inability to understand what a villain... means.. or does... And I don’t really understand why these people bother with fiction at all if that’s the stance they take on an integral part of the fictional, dramatic experience.
There are some villains whose acts I personally find really reprehensible and I’ll never actually like the character because of it, but I’m not going to sit here and say that it’s bad/wrong/~problematic for a villain to do bad shit. I can feel that way and also not approve of the things they do! This isn’t an impossible opinion to have!!
(And just so I can have it in the post, this is what I said to your other comments on the previous post about the complicated love that all the Seeds have for the Deputy:
It's such a compelling dynamic of enemies/lovers, which INCLUDES possessiveness that is clearly, in canon, dramatically enhanced bc, yknow, fiction has to be compelling, and I love that it clearly comes from a place OF love, desire, need, etc., that isn't quite yet at a healthy place at all. The fun of such a dynamic is imagining ways it could be, not celebrating it as it is NOW. )
