Nothing Wrong with Liking Terrible Characters Rant (Oh, and Redemption too, I guess)

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There's a difference between "Thanos was a great villain" vs. "Thanos was right."

Liking a terrible character and recognizing them as such is perfectly fine. The problem rises when someone thinks what they do is perfectly morally alright and justified.

"Poison Ivy is a good person." And already I know it's people who are either heavily simping or just talking about the new Harley show. Because I've known since I was two that Ivy is far, far from good. Also, I'm sick and tired of "I'm good now!" or "The good guys forgive the villain so the audience should too!"

In terms of redemption stories, IT'S OKAY TO HAVE A VILLAIN BE A VILLAIN. It's fine to have a character who doesn't have a sappy backstory or redemption arc. I love it when there's a villain who just loves being bad.

This is probably why I can't hate Stella dispite all the hate she gets from the fandom. Her VA was having so much fun playing the character that even though I'm mixed on how she's written, I can't help but love how much shrew energy she gives off in the show.

I don't think a sympathetic villain is always trying to get the audience to think they're redeemable. Sometimes I think the writer is trying to go for a cautionary tale and that anyone can become a villain if they're raised in a bad environment or they got caught up in the wrong crowd.

Liking a terrible character is fairly common. The characters from It's A Sunny Day at Philadelphia are the prime example of the trope. They are terrible people who did some questionable stuff, yet they are hilariously entertaining and put a lot of personality and charm to them, especially Danny Devito's Frank Reynold.

Theres a worrying trend where minority characters are completely absolved from every bad thing they've ever done, and even have it all be twisted as good actions. Being a group, a human group, comes with the fact that anyone can be a villain or a hero. And you're undermining that humanity by perfecting them. You can choose to ignore bad actions for characters you like and connect with, looooooord knows I've done it before, and I will continue to.

Thing is... its HARD to write terrible characters RIGHT... Also, Jerry from Tamers is a whole CRATE of worms to open, sheesh...

I was more than happy to see Beelzemon here. Always glad to see more digimon appreciation.

Beelzemon is honestly one of the more nuanced villains from the Digimon anime. He starts out as a little nobody who because he had the bad luck of being partner to two immature kids he told himself humans are bad and tried to convince Renamon and Guilmon into ditching their partners and because Digimon in the Tamers series have a survival of the fittest attitude bullied Calumon because he perceived him an easy target. After getting thrashed by one of the Devas and being emotionally manipulated by another into basically becoming a hitman for the Sovereign to kill the Tamers (a thought which actually disgusted him because he'd grown more open to the idea of being friends with them) he only agrees because he thinks there's nothing to go back to in the Human World. As Beelzemon, he allows his new power to go to his head, becoming a cackling monster while he's on top. When he's shown mercy, he doesn't know what to think or do with himself anymore and even allows himself to be attacked and reduced to Impmon again. When he gets back to the Human World, his first choice is to find his Partners and apologize for running away, he calls the Tamers his "friends" when he sees them fighting the D-Reaper and doesn't care if they trust him or not because he wants to protect the kids he's partnered with, and the final few episodes is him trying to rescue the girl he hurt. I guess you could say Ken had an okay redemption arc when he was no longer The Digimon Emperor, or at the very least not all the new DigiDestined immediately want him to join them apart from Davis and Ken doesn't consider himself worthy of forgiveness for what he did even in the final episode.

I'm a simple man, I see Beelzemon, I click. Overall, I really like this vid as I pretty much agree with your take. I would like to see more villain writing reviews or something like that. Or just analyzing why certain villains work and if they are written well.

I think the title “terrible characters” feels kind of misleading. I think it helps if we split it up into “terrible characters” and “terrible people”. Terrible people are terrible people within the context of the story. Terrible characters are just badly written in terms of the story. Loona isn’t even really a terrible character, she’s just rather underdeveloped.

It's fine to show off an Antagonists ideology or backstory. If done right, you can really make a character extremely interesting. By find out their tragic backstory, it doesn't have to make you like them or agree with their actions. The goal is to understand them better, and make them feel more dynamic. Like you still hate what they did, but you know why they did it. Everything in writing is about execution.

I think there is a very fine line between having reasons to explain why your villain is evil and having reasons to EXCUSE a villain's evil. You can show why a villain does something without being obligated to redeem them because of their backstory. Take for example Azula from Avatar the Last Airbender. We can understand her reasons for being evil e.g her father is Hitler, her mother favoured Zuko over her and she is literally 14 in the show. These explain why she is so vindictive and cunning but don't excuse her actions and because of that we can even sympathise with her at the end. This isn't to say redemption arcs are bad, I mean literally look at Zuko from the same show. But, I want to see more nuanced villains that stay evil throughout.

Andrias from Amphibia is actually a good example of a redemption done well. Throughout S3 you see little moments of him regretting his actions and even at one point near the end of S3 you can see that he isn’t even enjoying all the evil stuff that basically his boss is doing. The big flashback episode also helps expand on this and at one point in the second to last episode Andrias has a breakdown when he realizes how far he has fallen yet isn’t sure if he can get back up from it. (btw Keith David’s performance during that scene is just amazing, you can really feel the emotions that Andrias is going through at the moment, this man needs an award I stg) This then leads to two of his best moments (the other during the final episode) that I won’t spoil here, go watch it but make sure to watch the flashback episode The Core & The King first since it helps those said two scenes make sense. Oh and Andrias does still receive some kind of punishment for his actions via the epilogue. He doesn’t get away scott free over the bad stuff he’s done.

In modern media you can't be evil you must be misunderstood but there's no misunderstanding mass genocide

Very happy to know you’ve seen digimon tamers, Impmon was probably my favorite character, and my memories of being traumatized by the D-reaper as a kid still haunt me.

When you talk about how bad when a villain goes "I'm good now! I actually think of Sunset Shimmer who got blasted with Elements of Harmony and realized what she did was wrong. That made that work was that everyone even her new friends were skeptical of her. It was took her helping Twilight and the others defeat the Dazzlings that she proved to everyone including herself she changed for the better.