[ SECRET POST #4849 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4849 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 25 secrets from Secret Submission Post #694.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

01. https://i.imgur.com/YL5HrS4.jpg

[(Anonymous)]

Well, that pretty much depends on a story presents a hero/villain.

+1

[(Anonymous)]

I personally tend to find heroes more interesting, but there are an almost infinite number of completely boring cardboard heroes

SA

[(Anonymous)]

One example that always springs to mind is The Woman In White, which has one of the best heroes and one of the best villains in all of Victorian literature, fantastic memorable awesome characters - but they're the secondary characters and the primary hero, love interest and villain are all much less interesting characters basically straight from central casting with no real depth or points of distinction.

[(Anonymous)]

Villain fan here, most villains aren't very well written at all. However a lot of them are FUN because they have more freedoms to do crazy shit than heroes have, typically.

[(Anonymous)]

Same! I think a lot of villains are fun-- and I think that they can be interesting. But, in the things I've been a fan of which take the time and effort to develop the villains into interesting characters with depth and understandable motivation, they do even more to make the heroes interesting.

Basically... if I can't find the heroes interesting, I'm not likely to find the PROPERTY interesting. Even if I wind up preferring a villain for one reason or another-- be it sympathy or aesthetics-- if I don't like the heroes I don't often find something worth sticking with.

I get being a villain person, there are plenty of reasons to love a good villain, but in most fandoms I don't get saying it's because they're the most interesting character.

[(Anonymous)]

For me, a lot of it has to do with a character being proactive vs. reactive. Villains drive the conflict. Heroes respond to it.

And that's not an opinion as much as a preference.

[philstar22]

It depends on the villain and the canon. In some canons the heroes are really flat and the villains are more complex.

In other canons the villains aren't necessarily all that complex on screen but what is given to us gives a lot of room for interpretation and expansion. And at least for me, there are aspects of villains stories/personalities that are more interesting to explore and expand on than hero stories. So while we may see more of the hero in canon, the villain might intrigue me more because given what is there in canon, exploring the villain is more enjoyable and a better mental exercise.

Basically, I love exploring characterization. I love understanding characters. And more often than not for me villains provide the most interesting avenue for doing that.

[(Anonymous)]

Best villains are the ones who do wrong things for the right reasons. If that's not an interesting dilemma to build a character around I don't know what is.

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed!

[(Anonymous)]

This. I love villains who have genuinely noble goals but are going about them all the wrong ways.

[(Anonymous)]

I think both heroes and villains can be interesting depending on the story. I think the Master in Doctor Who is a great villain, but my favorite incarnation is currently the Gomez Master because she had a lot going on during her character arc.

Doesn't it kind of depend?

[(Anonymous)]

There are some cookie-cutter heroes and pre-fab villains out there, but there are also some compelling heroes and complex villains. Sometimes you get a cookie-cutter hero with a complex villain, sometimes you get a compelling hero with a pre-fab villain. I do agree that you often get much more information about the hero, though whether that information is interesting or not, well. Sometimes not knowing much about the villain makes the story better, sometimes it doesn't.

[feotakahari]

I tend to run into two kinds of villains

1): Better people than the heroes, except the writer doesn’t agree with me, so everyone I like fails and gets punished in the end.

2): Overgrown kindergarteners who hurt civilians for the same reason as kicking over an anthill.

Neither is really something I enjoy reading about.

[(Anonymous)]

A villain with no development is like a minor character: It's free real estate. You can develop them the way you want, create the reasons that fuel their motivations.

Then, there's me. It's easier for me to find the Evil of the Sake of Evil Villain more Realistic than any Hero.

[(Anonymous)]

Like I get this, but I usually find villains to be more interesting simply because I tend to dislike it when the 'hero' is anything less than purely good. Usually they'll try to make the hero interesting by giving them a breaking point or quirks which are then ignored because they're the 'good guys'. A villain can actually be less horrible, or at least conscious of their actions in a why that hero's typically cannot.

[(Anonymous)]

For me, it’s not necessarily which characters we get to know better, and more which characters fit certain types/tropes that are near-guaranteed to interest me? Some of those tend more towards heroes, and some tend more towards villains, and a couple of them were fascinating for being a trope geared towards one and doing the opposite.

Example: I love tricksters/conmen/social engineers/manipulative bastards. Which, depending on genre, can go either way, the spy/heist genres tend to favour them as heroes, other genres lean more on villains. For the ‘manipulative bastard’ type, eg Littlefinger, Palpatine, Lionel Luther, the Devil in Brimstone, several other characters played by John Glover … it does tend more towards villain. BUT! The cdrama Nirvana in Fire had an absolutely stunning main character who ticked every last one of those boxes, went on a tour-de-force monte-christo political revenge scheme that would put Edmund Dantes to shame, and was the hero. Start to finish. And was portrayed as struggling massively with the moral repercussions of several of the fairly awful things he had to do. See also: Discworld’s Vetinari, who is basically a fantasy Bond villain in all particulars, and morally ambiguous to the nth degree, but is broadly considered a good character because a) he’s significantly better than his predecessors, both morally, mentally and professionally, b) because he’s genuinely done a lot of good for his city, and c) because Vimes, our hero, passionately hates him but will also defend him to the death (literally).

I’m also very fond of the whole ‘dignified and honourable’ sort of character, who a lot of the time shows up as the romantic runner up (hi, CotBP James Norrington!), but can also get some antagonist mileage from a) being in a heist story, or b) being the honourable member of a corrupt institution. Star Wars Legends was great for these, with the few honourable Imps running around. They’re also generally considered one of the most bland hero types around, but I usually still love the Lawful Paladin who struggles with a world full of very cynical people.

In summary: I have certain character types that I like and find most interesting, and whether they’re heroes or villains tends to depend on the story.

[(Anonymous)]

+1 these are some VERY good examples

[(Anonymous)]

Sounds like you need to find some better-written canons. I can easily name a half-dozen canons with villains that are complex and well-developed.

[(Anonymous)]

it's true that most villains don't get the same development as their hero counterparts but the villains i have the most fun with are the ones i can speculate about in fanfic. little hints dropped in canon as to why the villain is the way they are and why they're doing what they do can be taken a long way for a writer who likes to theorize and develop the villain further as a character. with heroes, canon tells you how their story begins and ends. with villains, you can take the juiciest hints and run with them to make your own fanfic ideas about how their story begins and ends.

[sparklywalls]

Usually gravitate toward villains but like a lot of heroes... it depends on the hero/villain and the canon.

I don't like villains who are evil "just cos lol" and I draw the line at real life cruelty. I read a book a couple of years ago where the main character was a Samaritans phone line worker who got a kick out of convincing people to go through with it. And she started a personal vendetta against a brother who found her out and she got him too. I HATED her. Normally villain protagonists don't bother me but that book was horrible to read.

[fizzyrose]

For me, the most obvious answer to this is that you can make a villain do pretty much anything and it'd be believable because more often than not their sense of morality is just "whatever I feel like at the moment". And their psychology is interesting to explore because usually the heroes motivations and way of thinking are more relatable and natural to many people in the audience (of course you want to protect people/those close to you, of course you don't want anyone to be hurt, of course you have a moral compass, etc.) but a villain is a way of exploring thinking/living/being villainous/evil without being ethically questionable and such that can only ever be explored through a fictional lens. So it's very alluring to a lot of fandom goers.

Plus, it's a lot easier to either make a villain more evil or put them on the redemption treadmill BUT it's a lot harder to play around with a hero in the same way in transformative fandom (for me at least) because it's much harder to bend them into a worse person and, being the hero, they're usually already pretty good so you can't take them further in that direction either. Sometimes what you can do with them when playing with morality and ethics in fiction is sort of set in stone (if that sort of stuff even interests you). Not the same for villains or even for anti-heroes. (That being said not all villains are good characters to play around with across the board, it depends on how they're written/depicted in canon I guess).

Plus they're just fun and have good aesthetic lol.