i know this is a difficult concept for a lot of tumblr to grasp but villains can have Reasons for becoming villains (trauma, abuse, etc) and can still be irredeemable for the things they have done because of it lol like….simply not every villain needs to be redeemed just because you like them. you are allowed to just like villains even if they are bad people. having Trauma
™ is not an excuse, it’s just a contextualization.
my exceedingly hot take is that discourse surrounding a few well-known properties (off the top of my head, Steven Universe, She-Ra and Star Wars) as well as the fanfic instinct to turn your favorite bad guy into an uwu smol bean cinnamon roll seems to have poisoned the well on how a lot of people in fandom think about villains.
like you guys know that redemption arcs are the exception and not the rule, right? Like the vast, vast, vast, VAST majority of villains are created with no intention of being redeemed. The key element in writing villains is that even if you think they’re making bad decisions, you have to understand why they’re making them, and this is the purpose that a tragic backstory usually serves. It’s supposed to give the villain a motivation that can make you go “ok, they’re clearly off the rails but I understand why they’re off the rails.”
I mean don’t get me wrong, Zuko is a great character and his arc is super compelling and amazing, and I’m not saying redemption arcs are a bad thing, but I am saying that people need to stop shouting “REDEMPTION ARC?” whenever we see a villain that was an abuse victim or has a soft spot for the hero or whatever other plot elements are supposed to make them three-dimensional and human. This is not a useful lens to view 95% of villains through and if you apply it outside that rare 5% you’re going to dig yourself into some truly stupid posts.
y’all I just came to a realization that is SENDING me rn I’m-
So we all know the whole thing with Aang using outdated slang in the fire nation and all that right? One of the things he says a lot is “flameo, hot man!” and all that. Well in lok after Korra like trashes the police station Lin goes “what the flameo happened here?” Which implies that flameo is a stand in for fuck because it’s a kids show. That’s means one of two things:
Either flameo somehow changed from a greeting a literal curse word over one hundred years and Aang had basically been greeting people by saying “fuck you!” OR Zuko got so viscerally upset by Aang constantly using flameo as a greeting that he somehow rewrote the fire nation lexicon to make flameo an offensive term just to spite him
ifesbob 