I’ve been thinking about villains, and especially in the sense of “Marvel’s villain problem.”
What’s the problem? Well
, according to a lot of folks (a couple of friends of mine included), Marvel doesn’t show “enough” of the “motivation” for the villains to take the actions they do. Apparently, Marvel needs to spend more time on the backstory of the villains, or at least giving the viewers an explanation of why they do what they do. Or so the thinking goes.
Well, I’m here to stand up as an outlier and say, out loud and for the record, I don’t care why the villains do what they do.
Regardless of their motivation, they choose to break the social contract(s) that keep(s) us all living reasonably well together. For whatever reason, they rob a bank, kill someone, open a portal to bring invaders to Earth…whatever they do.
It’s then left to good people (or at least, better people than the villains) to stop them, clean up the mess, and restore social order.
Explaining why the villains do what they do is irrelevant to stopping them (once they’ve begun to act), cleaning up after them, etc. Why they do what they do is for the attorneys and psychologists to figure out.
Okay, maybe my view of things is simplistic. What’s wrong with that?
What’s wrong with wanting to watch a movie where the villains are stopped before they destroy the world – without a long and often (usually?) boring (to me
, anyway) story of their boo-hoo life thrown in? (Yes, I’m thinking of a certain movie in the James Bond franchise.)
Absolutely nothing is wrong with it. It’s just out of fashion, and has been for a while.
That’s okay; I’ve been a loner/outsider most of my life. It’s just frustrating when I’m trying to find something fun to watch, and instead I have to endure a psychology lecture.