There's too much sympathy for the devil going around.
It wasn't that long ago that Daniel Penny stood up for innocent people on a subway to protect them from Jordan Neely, a man who had clearly become irate and dangerous. Despite Penny doing everything he should've done, including putting Neely in a recovery position after putting him in a chokehold, Penny became a villain to the Left after Neely died.
Of course, Penny did nothing wrong, and while it was clearly not his intent for the man to die, the fact that it happened isn't on Penny. Yet, the Left sure seemed to want all the villainy to be focused on Penny, and New York prosecutors did their level best to punish him. Even worse, while they were doing that, the media and Democrat politicians were trying to give Neely the Trayvon Martin treatment. They were posting pictures of him as a young, vibrant Michael Jackson impersonator.
Thankfully, Penny won his case against New York's Democrat prosecutors and is a free man, but others aren't so lucky. Derek Chauvin, the man blamed for the death of George Floyd, is still locked up and will be for the foreseeable future. It doesn't help that Democrats and the media turned Floyd into something of a leftist saint despite a lengthy criminal history, including holding a pregnant woman at gunpoint so a friend could rob her.
Fast forward to 2025, and Decarlos Brown Jr. stabs Iryna Zarutska in the neck to the sound of compassionate excuses by the Left.
Read: The Left's 'Compassion' Is a Weapon of Mass Destruction
"Compassion" is the word that I think keeps this cycle of sympathizing for the villain ongoing. In a way, it's a trend for the Left. They ask "Why did he do it?" when a criminal does something atrocious, but not in hopes of coming across the actual reason. They do it because if the conditions are right, they can point the finger at society.
If you want proof that this is a cultural thing for the Left, look no further than Hollywood, the Left's messaging center.
In 2021, Disney released a live-action film that was baffling. The House of Mouse had jumped on the "sympathetic villain" trend that started in earnest with the Broadway sensation Wicked, a retelling of The Wizard of Oz with Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, as the protagonist.
Disney wheeled out its own witch, Maleficent, and with Angelina Jolie's help, created their own sympathetic villain. Still, Disney decided that if a little is good, a lot must be better, and dove back into its vault to find another villain they could rewrite into a character forced into her own villainous role. Weirdly, they emerged from the vault with Cruella.
As many of you may recall, Cruella DeVille is probably the most psychotic and cruel villain in all of Disney history, as her entire aim was to skin 101 Dalmatian puppies to make herself a fur coat. Casting Emma Stone in a live-action version, Disney attempted to give Cruella a backstory that was supposed to make us understand why she wanted to kill those puppies so badly. It didn't really help her image. It's hard to get sympathetic for an unrepentant puppy killer, but if the Left can create an entire movement off a fentanyl using career criminal, then surely they can make millions off a woman whose entire life revolves around skinning baby dogs, right?
The trouble is, like most leftist trends, this is getting innocent people killed. It's always amazing how expensive virtue signals are for everyone but the signaler, and as you can see from the innocent blood being spilled, the signaling isn't going to stop anytime soon. There's too much to gain from it, either politically or monetarily.
If I were to suggest a solution, I would say fine, continue displaying your villains as sympathetic characters, but let's make sure everyone understands that two things can be true at the same time.
A person could have reached this sad state of being due to traumas that aren't their own. It's a cruel world out there, and some of us endure far more scars than others. To borrow a line from The Joker's monologue in The Killing Joke, “All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.”
But, no matter how sympathetic, a person has to be held responsible for their actions. Crime is crime, and the real victims of crimes are the ones the crimes are being committed against, not the person committing the crime. That can all be figured out later. Justice comes first, but the Left isn't too concerned with justice unless "social" comes before it.
