Sympathetic Villains

[The Overlord]

I have heard the argument that Marvel lacks sympathetic villains at this point, that villains are just evil nowadays as not to distract from the hero vs. hero fights and make heroes who have become jerks seem sympathetic in comparison. Is that a fair assessment? I have heard some people complain that say Mystique has become a one dimensional evil psychopath recently and all her sympathetic traits have been ignored, for example.

I think a big problem is, sometimes writers have a sympathetic villain do something so evil, that it makes them seem totally unsympathetic. Like Kingpin's child kidnapping plot from Man Without Fear (which I'm not sure is in canon or not), Magneto trying to commit genocide a couple of times and Doom's actions in Unthinkable.

It seems like writers have an easier time writing a pure evil villain consistently then they do with a sympathetic one, I'm not sure how often Red Skull or Bullseye have been written out of character.

[neonrideraryeh]

I thought people were mostly being upset about the other way around. About how so many villains in Marvel were now sympathetic and end up joining teams even, that we don't have many straight up villains left.

[Inhuman X]

The more sympathetic a villain is the more likely they are to be viewed as an antihero.

[Expletive Deleted]

Marvel just got done with a multi-year storyline involving a very sympathetic portrayal of Doctor Octopus. Loki and Magneto have solo titles and are basically anti-heroes, at this point. Venom, with a new host, is an outright hero these days. Apocalypse, as Genesis, is also on the side of the angels. Dr. Doom is the most positive we've seen in years, playing surrogate father to Valeria and trying to save the world. The Axis inversions were a gimmick, but it sounds like Remender is going to try to make a few of them stick for a while. The Superior Foes of Spider-Man were nothing if not sympathetic.

If you don't want villains, once they've been portrayed positively, to ever revert to real villainy, I don't know what to tell you. Marvel's sympathetic villain roster is pretty strong, at the moment. Almost too strong, really. Aside from the clear psychopaths, they're getting a little low on the truly great villains.

[Iron Maiden]

I prefer Doom backsliding into villainy. IMO he works best as a loose cannon out there and you just are never sure when his self serving interests are at play or not.

I think the problem is just finding something for the villain to do that hasn't been done before. How many ways can you do the "villains scheming to take over the world and losing to the heroes" plot and make it fresh or different? The villain as ally was a novelty in FF #116 but even that can't be considered very unusual any more. I suppose you could argue that Unthinkable met that requirement but Waid gave him some unsavory traits that a lot of fans found OOC, like wearing the leather armor made of his former lover. I can't even argue about him sending Franklin to Hell in that since he did have a sort of grudge against him from Franklin and his avatar messing with his mind in the Doom mini series. He also tried swapping Franklin to Mephisto once during Englehart's Fantastic Four run.

Part of the problem was that the heroes became less purely heroic and so it tends to to lower (or raise it as the case may be) the bar for what a villain is capable of doing. Or if you have heroes fighting heroes then the villain isn't even needed.

[Raye]

Yeah, go read Loki: Agent of Asgard, Magneto or Superior Foes of Spider-Man and get back to me.

Magneto alone has been doing the heel-face revolving door for decades, he has been a hero as often as he has been a villain, and even when in villain mode, he has generally been presented as a well intentioned extremist rather than like, flat out evil or something. There are also a LOT of current heroes running around that used to be villains back in the day.

Basically, sympathetic villains in Marvel are not a new thing, and if anything, they've been becoming more sympathetic with time. that will tend to happen the second you give a character a motivation that people can relate to. To make up for this, Marvel seems to be countering the face turns with some heroes doing heel turns... but of course, since those characters spent years and years as heroes, they are going to be pretty sympathetic as villains.

Personally, I don't think it's too terribly important to have super clear cut good guys and bad guys. i think SOME characters should stay unrepentantly evil and some good guys should remain good to the core. But some interesting stories can be done with a situation where who is right or wrong depends on your perspective, or whatever, and the gray area characters are good for that.

[HaveAtThee]

The lines between hero and villain have become rather blurred recently.

[The Overlord]

Marvel just got done with a multi-year storyline involving a very sympathetic portrayal of Doctor Octopus. Loki and Magneto have solo titles and are basically anti-heroes, at this point. Venom, with a new host, is an outright hero these days. Apocalypse, as Genesis, is also on the side of the angels. Dr. Doom is the most positive we've seen in years, playing surrogate father to Valeria and trying to save the world. The Axis inversions were a gimmick, but it sounds like Remender is going to try to make a few of them stick for a while. The Superior Foes of Spider-Man were nothing if not sympathetic.

If you don't want villains, once they've been portrayed positively, to ever revert to real villainy, I don't know what to tell you. Marvel's sympathetic villain roster is pretty strong, at the moment. Almost too strong, really. Aside from the clear psychopaths, they're getting a little low on the truly great villains.

Fair enough, but if you have a guy switch sides, then he is not a really a villain anymore.

And I like I said, there has been in the past times where a sympathetic villain is doing something really evil and it ruins their sympathetic nature, so it often has to retconned away.

[dragonmp93]

Well, there is also Mystique, who sometimes really looks like she needed a hug, badly.

[Raye]

Fair enough, but if you have a guy switch sides, then he is not a really a villain anymore.

And I like I said, there has been in the past times where a sympathetic villain is doing something really evil and it ruins their sympathetic nature, so it often has to retconned away.

The Superior Foes of Spider-Man are still villains, the series had them as protagonists, and they were sympathetic, but still definitely villains. Magneto is arguably still a villain, he is at least on the dark side of the anti-hero scale, most 'pure' heroes would have serious problems with his actions. Loki is not evil right now, but he's not exactly a hero, either, kinda 'chaotic neutral' and he has backslid a few times. He robbed a casino in his solo series, for instance, and in Young Avengers he was pretty much manipulating everyone from the start (though he had an epiphany at the end and swore to be better).

And for any villain to reform, they kinda have to go through a sympathetic villain phase, barring something like what happened in Axis where there is some sudden switch in their personality. But that kind of change does not typically last, since there's not a lot of emotional drive to the change.

[Habis]

The problem is, since all the heroes are becoming selfish, petty jerks now, if you make the villains too good, you would end with a total inversion of roles.

Think of Rhino. He was made a sympathetic villain some time ago. He wanted to be respected, to have a life that was somehow normal, and always failed and had to go back to be a stupid bruiser who stole backs and got punched by heroes. If you make Iron Man or Hulk or Wolverine stop him when he's robbing a bank and beat him to a pulp, you are reading about a backstabbing fascist millonaire or a psycho who attacked New York with an alien army or a child-killing mass-murderer beating the crap of a poor loser who tries to get his life straight and fails. Who looks like the villain there?

But MU wants, despite all, to keep its heroes as heroes, so the only answer is either to make the villains join the heroes or to make them so evil that even the jerk heroes look good by comparation. And Rhino was made into a genocidal psycho.

[Scott Taylor]

Emma Frost changed from villain to hero, too. Which at the time was a major shift.

From my standpoint, its nice to see some of the ones that have always walked a fine line shift back and forth. Like Emma, Magneto or Dr. Doom. All of them have noble motivations, on some level, but are either misguided, too extreme in their methods, or have a warped sense of right and wrong.

The trend is to show villains as sympathetic. It reflects the times. Not to get political, but some societal groups in our world get a reputation in larger society for doing wrong. Most deservedly so. However somewhere along the way people realized that not all of the people in those societal groups are bad people, in spite of the fact that there are extremists among them. You can depict people in some of those groups as good guys to counter the bad publicity caused by (hopefully) a few bad eggs. And thus fight what would otherwise become bigotry over a belief or philosophic system that is not wrong in and of itself.

Personally I think comics need to be different than reality and to have distinct right and wrong, good and evil. They are meant to be fantasy, and the dualistic approach simply ties into that. Plus its fun when a good guy webs up a bunch of purse-snatchers or when Thor lightning-strikes Thanos, it gives a certain "hell-yah" feeling. So I look forward to the day when villains are more villainous.

[Myetche]

I thought people were mostly being upset about the other way around. About how so many villains in Marvel were now sympathetic and end up joining teams even, that we don't have many straight up villains left.

And those few remaining straight-up villains are nothing but plot devices used to trigger conflicts among the heroes instead of the actual villains.

[Zero Hunter]

Dr. Doom is the most positive we've seen in years, playing surrogate father to Valeria and trying to save the world. The Axis inversions were a gimmick, but it sounds like Remender is going to try to make a few of them stick for a while. The Superior Foes of Spider-Man were nothing if not sympathetic.

I have hated the way they have treated Doom for nearly the last decade. They took everything that was dangerous and interesting about him and pretty much neutered him through massive over use and bad plot lines.