Remember when evil was just evil? We were better off when that was the main thought about it. Evil is bad, and we must fight it. End of story.
Then, at some point in the 90s, evil became a bit more complex. In fact, in many cases, it had a point. Years later, Disney would drive this concept into the ground. You could see this particularly in the Marvel films, where the villains were just villains. They were driven by something that was heartbreaking and even noble from a certain point of view.
I can remember when one character noticed someone had carved "Thanos was right" into a surface. You know, Thanos? The mad alien who wanted to wipe out half of the living things in the universe to save it from what amounted to galactic climate change?
I'm not going to name all the movies that have taken this route because there have been so many that I've forgotten more examples than I remember, but I'll just bring you to the latest "actually the villain is the good guy" example. I talked about it briefly in my last VIP article. It's Netflix's latest movie aimed at girls, called "Steps."
Apparently, the story revolves around Cinderella's evil stepsister, "Lilith." If the name sounds familiar, it's because it comes from a Biblical demon that feminists later turned into a goddess in their pantheon. In any case, Lilith has to team up with Cinderella to save the kingdom, and as usual, Lilith is a villain who's been misunderstood all along.
Here's the description as Netflix describes the film:
Steps tells the story of Cinderella’s “evil” stepsisters, Lilith (Ali Wong), pictured, and Margot (Stephanie Hsu). Tired of living in Cinderella’s shadow, Lilith steals the Fairy Godmother’s (Bette Midler) magic wand and hijacks the Royal Ball with her sister, Margot. This dooms the kingdom to the tyrannical rule of the villainous Priscilla, who swoops in and snatches the throne. Now, Lilith must team up with Cinderella (Seyfried) to fight biker trolls, outrun evil henchmen, and escape the Screaming Woods. Breaking with the Cinderella story as we know it, they go on an epic quest to save the kingdom — but most importantly, they must save their relationship.
The article on the website ends with something so tired that I actually groaned out loud when I read it: "Keep coming back to Tudum to learn more about the magical retelling of the fairy tale we all think we know."
You THINK you know the story of this villain, but you don't know anything because you've been lied to about this person for ages, so let us tell you the REAL story about why this villain isn't actually a villain at all. By the time we're done telling you this tale, you'll realize why you need to have a bit more sympathy for the devil.
How clever.
As I've written in the past, this is a repeated pattern in current-day media. The idea they're trying to sell you is that there's no real evil. Everything is shades of gray. Even the most evil of acts should be searched and understood to find the sad circumstances that caused them. Not to understand the situation better so that it might be stopped before it happens in the future, mind you, but to empathize with the person who did the evil.
The thing is, I notice these films are oftentimes aimed at girls. The villain isn't the villain. Cruella DeVille, the puppy murderer, is actually an abused woman who hates Dalmatians because one killed her mother. The evil demon creature in "Moana" was just angry because a demigod (male) stole her favorite rock. Maleficent was actually a spurned and abused woman who was actually kind and motherly the whole time, and a much better parent to the girl she cursed than her own father.
What kind of mentality does that create when you're young, ignorant, and soaked in it? You can probably see it now.
You see, she's the real victim of a society that doesn't put any importance on women's mental health, not the three children she murdered. You see, he was just a victim of an oppressive system that actively hates him because of his skin color, not the woman he stabbed in the neck three times. He's not a bad guy, he raped that girl because his culture was oppressed by Western nations and he deserves sympathy, not the girl he raped.
We've reached a point in our Western society where our empathy has reached suicidal levels, and we're confused as to how we got there.
We got there because so many have been infected with this idea that there is no real virtue. There's no good or evil. It's all subjective.
But I'll say this by quoting myself from a previous article:
But evil is still evil, and if we pardon evil because we feel sorry for the person who did heinous things because of their circumstance, then justice cannot be served with any kind of fairness or equality. If we can't have fair justice, then we can't have a civilization. Any crime can be pardoned because someone has a sob story that came before they murdered, raped, or severely injured someone. Like water in the cracks, evil will begin seeping into whatever space it can, erode the gaps, and let in more evil.
As my title for that story suggested, we can't make peace with evil. And yes, end of story.
