Here’s a hot take: villains should be relatable.
Not every villain, not every time, and certainly not to everyone at once, but there should be moments. We should, occasionally, be able to see ourselves in the bad guys, be able to understand how they got there.
Because it reminds us not to fucking go there.
Antis who get upset about villains having relatable qualities (often couched as being “romanticized” or “woobified”) are people who cannot bear to ever think of themselves as having the capability of being wrong.
Every human alive is capable of being a horrible person. Relatable villains remind us to keep an eye on that shit.
If you think you’re not capable of being a horrible person, you likely already are a horrible person and have the self awareness of a dead yak.
I feel the exact same way about the fear of “humanizing Nazis”.
We should absolutely humanize Nazis. By that I of course don’t mean we should excuse their behavior, but the minute we convince ourselves that they’re inhuman monsters is the minute we also convince ourselves that we could never be that because after all we’re not monsters, we’re “normal” people, whatever that means.
During the Nuremberg trials, psychiatrists carefully interviewed many Nazi officers and leaders hoping to find some common psychopathic link between them, but instead what they found was a lot of perfectly rational, normal people who would have no trouble passing psych evals for military or police officers in any other country. Blind profiles couldn’t even find the difference between them and and a many of the noblest and most respected figures out there. It was an uncomfortable realization: You don’t have to have some kind of “evil” brain quirk to do unspeakable things. You can be perfectly, distressingly, human.
Sadly, yes. We have darkness inside us and we, humans, are not pure uwu harmless beings.
