🔥
@rescuefield
stop neutering villains or the misdeeds.
woobified portrayals serve nothing. i don't like edginess for the sake of edginess, so i'm not advocating for that, or for shock value or excusing abhorrent behavior—it’s about honesty in characterization. when you strip a character down just to make them digestible for tumblr sensibilities or easy romantic beats, it flattens the character. and at that point, it begs the question what you’re even writing for, because you’re no longer engaging with the character as they exist. they're self-insert and it's understandable if people interpret that as uncomfortable because they're not in it for you, they're in it for the muse.
personally, i’m not interested in “nice” versions of muses who were never written to be nice. if the appeal of a character lies in their volatility, their contradictions, their violence—then that’s where the work is. sanding that down into something agreeable defeats the purpose of picking them up in the first place. i promise, it's okay to write villains. some villains just don't serve anything, so I can understand why they would appear on people DNI list.
like stormfront from the boys, for example. i wouldn’t role-play with hereither —not because she’s “too evil,” but because she offers nothing of substance to my muses. she doesn’t create tension that leads anywhere meaningful. she doesn’t reflect or complicate them. she’s static in what she represents, and that representation already exists plainly. but characters like homelander or soldier boy? or wesker or spencer? or palpatine and vader? they’re grotesque, violent, and steeped in propaganda, but they do something. they force organic confrontations. they mirror imperialistic systems. they expose the machinery behind the myths, either blatantly or in more subtle ways.
that’s where the interest is for me. not in softening them, not in redeeming them for comfort, but in interrogating what they are built from. again, if it's characters like homelander or soldier boy, then that's the violence of american propaganda, imperial violence, state power, all of it. i’m not and wouldn't avoid the weight of that. when i write, i’m writing from a place of someone that has lived under it.
so no, i’m not interested in cleaning them up. if anything, i want people to stop looking away from what made them worth writing in the first place. i'm not speaking to individuals, i'm talking to the purity culture of rpc and continuously perpetuates hive-minded-like behavior because people are afraid to touch on subjects they think will get them ostracize.