Re:Pop psychology has killed the villain
by hamburglar on Saturday November 27, 2021 @08:39PM
(#29365408)
Yes, it’s almost as if the author suddenly noticed that grownups have learned that one-dimensional villains aren’t very interesting or realistic. Why this needs to be “blamed” on anything is beyond me. We might as well try to assign blame to the person who decided stories should be more interesting than watching the nth iteration of a good guy just barely saving a damsel that’s tied to the railroad track.
Re:Pop psychology has killed the villain
by romwell on Sunday November 28, 2021 @05:47AM
(#29367887)
>I doubt that any child has ever watched the Wicked Witch of the West and thought, “Huh, what’s her story?”
Also, apparently, I was that child.
Not with Wizard of Oz in particular, but I had a book called "Fairy-Tales Of the People of the World" in pre-K, and I remember being distinctly pissed about most of them having a "good" ending whereby the villain was killed.
I was, like, this doesn't seem necessary. Seems kinda bad from the perspective of the baddie. And the "good" characters became kind of repelling.
My favorite tales were the ones about the Sly Fox and the like, where the stories were about tricking and outwitting.
Wicked wasn't aimed at children.
Nor is it even remotely intended as a friendly to the original explanation of backstory, it is a deliberate inversion that is based as much as anything on the insufficient demonstration that the “good” labelled characters in the original are good as anything else.
This whole piece reads as a messy collection of sloppy arguments directed at tendentious misreadings of art that are undergirded by boiling resentment that people dare explore alternatives to established cartoonishly simple good vs evil narratives.