The problem with villain fandom
It might not be evident from the way I criticize and argue with Kylo Ren and First Order stans, but I’m a longtime fan of villains. I’ve always loved morally complex/redeemed villains and/or self-interested jerks. My fandom activity for the past twenty years focused on characters like Severus Snape (Harry Potter), Seifer Almasy (Final Fantasy VIII), Sesshoumaru (Inuyasha), and Prince Zuko (Avatar: The Last Airbender). Consistent with this pattern I find Kylo Ren fascinating, though of late I’ve come to focus more on heroic characters. (Probably since I started seeing more heroic characters of color, but that’s another subject.)
Of these characters Seifer Almasy probably parallels Kylo Ren most closely: A former member of the heroes’ group who betrayed them when he was lured away by the Big Bad, he later committed atrocities as her right-hand man including torturing the main character Squall and destroying a school by firing missiles at it (a military academy, to be sure, but he knew they had children there). I was part of a group of fans who shipped him with his former instructor, a woman he had imprisoned with the other members of the hero group, so my fannishness was plenty #problematic as it went.
The thing is, though, I don’t think any of us argued that Seifer’s actions were justified or that torture and mass murder were somehow okay. We liked him as a villain, though likely mind-controlled and back to being his old (jerkish) self by the end of the game. If anyone had attempted to justify his actions the rest of us would likely have been horrified. And I was in a section of the fandom that was as friendly to Seifer as it got, with much of the fandom reviling him for perfectly understandable reasons.
I don’t think I ran across villain woobification until the early 10′s when I got into Avatar: The Last Airbender and started seeing justifications for genocide and romanticization of abuse. I don’t know if fandom changed or I had simply managed to dodge the bad parts of it, but this was when I first felt unsafe in fandom spaces as an abuse survivor from a country that had been a target of colonialist aggression for millennia.
So it’s just not true that I think liking a villain is the same thing as rationalizing their actions. What I object to is the argument that their actions aren’t that bad or defending against their aggression is just as bad–the argument, in other words, that they are not actually villains.
Because as much as apologists like to say “It’s just fiction,” you can’t have a villain that doesn’t commit actions that are evil in the real world. Let’s say we have a character whose worst action is turning rabbits purple. That character can’t be an effective villain because we don’t have a frame of reference for understanding the action as evil. In order for this character to actually work as a villain, the logic of the story would have to make purplifying rabbits an analogue to some real-world evil such as refusing to honor personal boundaries, forced assimilation of minorities and so on.
Usually the association of villainous action to real life is much more direct: Mass murder, torture, abuse and more are actual evils that hurt actual people, and disproportionately people who are marginalized in some way. By dismissing the immorality and harm of such actions you dismiss the very real injustices done to victims and survivors and the consequences they are forced to live with.
Yes, it’s just fiction. Yes, it’s absolutely fine to like villains, I would be a hypocrite to say otherwise. What is not fine is to try to wave away murder, war crimes, and even historical atrocities in a campaign to dilute and justify villainous actions. These evils are not “just fiction,” they are real and the people who suffered from them are real. It’s simply wrong to dismiss real people for the sake of enjoying fictional villains who are, after all, just fiction.
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