Originally Posted by
godisawesome
You’re right about how there is a risk in making a villain sympathetic with it defusing them as a villain... but at the same time, properly managing that balance is the key to the best villains, so it’s a matter of execution and presentation... usually defined by how in-tune the creator is with the audience when they try to make that work, and how focused they are on their end goal with the villain. For instance, Darth Vader and Kylo Ren are almost literally the same character... yet because Lucas had better focus and a better understanding of the audience, Anakin is much more sympathetic as a person, while Vader is far more effective and focused as a villain. In Batman, nailing that balance can make Mr. Freeze great, Two-Face great, and even Bane to some extent... but all three, like Talia, can suffer from too sympathetic of a view or too blandly villainous a portrayal.
I feel the problem with Talia as written by Morrison isn’t so much the degree of her evil as much as her displaying of her evil, in the same way where I don’t much care for some of Morrison’s other villains.
There are some bad guys who can be operatically over-the-top in their evil, and it’s totally okay for them to either verge on or just straight revel in being gleefully evil. Joker? Yup. Riddler? Yup. The Big Bad Harv part of Two-Face? Yup.
But villains that are supposed to serve as unnervingly understandable villains or seductive attractive villains don’t do well when portrayed in such ostentatiously evil way. Talia’s potential is as someone the audience could see Bruce being drawn towards, suffering heartbreak from, and Damian having extremely complicated feelings towards. Having her be a archetypal cackling villainess doesn’t undo her entire functionality for the story... but it does limit her functionality and total impact.
You want to be able to creep the audience out by having them understand *why* Batman would sleep with Talia beyond the fact she’s hot, why he still believes Harvey Dent is worth saving when he falls off a roof, and why he sometimes approaches Bane with a strange kind of understanding. When their just villainous divas, they kind of become interchangeable.