For hypothetical example; Father/son duo are criminals, harming, killing, and stealing innocent civilians. Superhero fights them, resulting in the father dying. Son is now portrayed as a sympathetic villain because all he wants is to avenge his father… despite all the fathers of children they murdered whilst comitting crimes.

Side question; do you feel sympathy for the villains portrayed like this?

  • WolfyGamer29@lemmy.worldOP
    31·
    1 year ago

    It makes sense, I suppose. maybe I’m just a bit jaded about villain writing. I just feel like a lot of the time villain motivation seems to come after the villain themself. Like the villain and their methods was created, and then a motivation for that was created to make it make sense. Rather than creating a motivation and then designing the villain off the motivation. Not all villains, of course. there’s some pretty complex and fantastically written ones out there. But sometimes, there’s a lot of villains where it seems the writers just REALLY needed some kind of relatable motivation.

    • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      I mean, they’re writing a comic book. The superhero and every other character started as a concept doodle and a story was written around them.

      I’m now curious why that detail bothers you for only villains.

      • WolfyGamer29@lemmy.worldOP
        1·
        1 year ago

        It doesn’t only bother me for villains, I just had villains in particular on the mind. I get it though. I was just watching TV and Aquaman came on and I’ve seen a bunch of other superho movies on TV lately, so I was just thinking a lot about the tropes I see a lot, and that particular example was at the front of my mind.

        I’d also recently scene Age of Ultron, where the twins had, in my opinion, a really questionable reason for siding with Ultron.

        I also love writing fiction myself, and I have a terrible habit of disecting just about every plot point I encounter in media to see what “makes them work”, or not work, to see what I can learn from them for my own writing. Makes me awful overly critical of some things.