Because they often give the villain the lines that are socially subversive but true, in order to get them past the censors.
Which is incidentally what makes villains often far more relatable than heroes.
Ahhhhh I feel so enlightened knowing that Joffrey was more of a compelling and right character over Robb Stark.
The falsehood that all villains are just more relatable and compelling needs to stop.
In the context of the scene, she is just trying to say whatever will get her what she wants. In reality, she’s a horrible boss and a horrible person and would throw anyone out just out of the blue.
The quality of a character is not deemed by their alignment to good or bad, hero or villain, it all just depends on how much effort the writers take, and what they are trying to do with the character. Sometimes a villain is supposed to be a philosopher, other times they are supposed to just be pure evil and Petty.
It’s not about if the character is a villain or hero, it’s about how well they are written and what purpose they were written for.
What you have done is take a brief comment I made about a highly specific example of “relatable villainy” and apply it to an entirely different example, the implications of which are also entirely different.
if you had exercised the courtesy of reading my remark carefully, then you would know this.
The sentence you took, from which you formed your entire forcefully sardonic rebuttal:
“Which is incidentally what makes villains often far more relatable than heroes.”
Here, the word “often” is crucial.
Allow me to elaborate upon my actual point.
Characters like Joffrey, or Kilgrave from Jessica Jones, or Lucifer from Supernatural, fall under a category of villain who stands for the wholly privileged morally bankrupt sadist who is more predator than prey in our society. They are NOT a part of my argument.
The quality of writing, moreover, while a crucial dimension of characterization, is also tangential to the point I was making.
On the other hand, there is a long-established precedent in media, from books to films to comics, and more, in which the villain speaks the inconvenient truths of what is wrong with society. And it’s considered permissible because the narrative can eschew what the villain says as ridiculous or even perverse.
Sometimes this is especially insidious, as in the case with Cruella, because even though Cruella is wrong in THAT specific context/example, there is truth to the patriarchal standard of marriage sometimes being abused in favor of men’s pursuits, at the expense of women’s happiness.
But since a “bitch” (a very weaponized gendered slur originally used by straight men) said it, we can laugh her off as “crazy.”
This is embedded in other forms of problematized social identity/issues: there is an entire history, for instance, of what is called “queercoding” in villainy, so that LGBT identities can be present in the narrative, but are less threatening to a straight cisgender audience because, again, if the message gets too threatening, the villain and the message both can be written off.
And don’t even get me started on things like “the angry black woman” whose rage is WHOLLY justified, but we laugh her off as insane and disruptive to social peace.
I AGREE with you that the idea that a person’s present behavior is “justified” by a tragic backstory MUST STOP. But perhaps before you rush to condemn a character, you might more closely examine the vantage point from which they stand: you just might realize that you’re condemning people who can identify with the socially marginalized. You just might learn that you’re standing on the wrong side of the narrative, when it comes to real-life issues, pointing a finger hatefully.
Please be more discerning in the future, instead of hijacking and over-generalizing the points that I make in my post to grind your axe about a particular fandom (a fandom in which I have long not been part, precisely because Game of Thrones’s writing has repeatedly fetishized problematic actions as “desirable,” such as the rape of women: so you might examine yourself from that angle, as well).
Icarus 