#Their parents say they're perfect cuz they are feathers

[iwasbored777]

I hate it that whenever I hear a Marinette stan it's always "she's not perfect but she's amazing and she's trying and she's always leaning towards the better and she's getting better and better" - which is how I feel and how they say it in the show too and it's totally ok and true, but for every other character the fans are always like "the most perfect character ever, the best and the only normal character ever in this show", and it sucks cuz no one in this show is perfect nor normal nor flawless and they've all made mistakes and I'm tired of pretending that Marinette is the only one for whom we can say so cuz you don't seem like real stans to me. You either accept both character's wrongs and rights and stan them for their rights only or you stan them for their wrongs only (which is something you do for villains mostly). But I'm sick whenever I hear someone turning a character into a saint who's never done anything wrong just because they like them. Every character is in their story and they do things that are right or wrong in their story and that's how it is. They all fight for their places and you don't have to love them all but stop acting like your favourite is immaculate and everyone else is bad.

[ihopesocomic]

Something I appreciate in a weird sense in IHS is that you've established that, on no uncertain terms, Jasper is abusive to Vicious and his other kids. It really bothered me the way MP tried to paint Quickmane as a loving husband and caring father after all the horrible things he'd done. It made his character writing feel extremely inconsistent. People who commit infant genocide with a sick grin then continue to abuse the child they disabled mercilessly aren't typically loving parents and partners on the side. What felt like an attempt to make him a 3 dimensional villain did the exact opposite and made him flat and inconsistent. Jasper, on the other hand, feels like an actually engaging villain. His interactions with those around him a more complex and the way he emotionally abuses those under his control feels much more real and sinister. Jasper just feels generally more real as a villain and abuser, and as awful of a person as he is he's an engaging villain. It also adds a layer of complexity to Vicious because you can tell Jasper's abuse and control plays a part in influencing her treatment of Hope and her other kids. Ultimately her treatment of them is her choice, and I'm glad you're not going to try to write her some sort of redemption arc, but it's a small detail I appreciate in the way you make your characters complex and multidimensional.

Thank you so much! And I have some complaints about sympathetic villains let me tell you LOL At least modern ones. People probably noticed the trend of movies and shows trying to justify the villain's actions. What that usually ends up doing is trying to get the audience to side with the villain instead of the hero and it either ends up with how the audience feels fighting against what they're "supposed" to feel, or the audience has a fucked up view on what counts as villainy and heroism and end up siding with the villain that way lol Its done so badly so often, I just have a hard time picturing professional productions failing this hard in the writing department.

More competent writing would have their audience feel conflicted, like ugh... this guy makes a good point... but he's clearly wrong. Or they make good points, but for all the wrong reasons. And of course there's good examples of how to make a villain a good parent, you can have a complex villain, but it can't be filled with double standards, like oh he actually loves the people he abused. (Which, if it was used to be manipulative, that sort of thing would get called out by someone at some point.)

But some villains don't need depth. They don't need a "traumatizing backstory" or somebody "comparatively worse" or anything. Like okay, I'm still hung up on him killing babies with a smile on his face, but for the sake of argument, did Quickmane decide he was gonna be a "good husband" immediately after killing Powerstrike's first husband, or was it something he had to learn over time? We have no idea cuz Powerstrike "quickly" had his cubs, he is rightfully pissed at Nothing leaving his cubs alone to potentially die, and by the time he gets killed, his character earned exactly zero sympathy from the audience, and the only thing he had going for him was in this one instance where Nothing had to be written to be stupid for the sake of conflict. And its just hammered into our heads that we're supposed to like him because Feather mourns him (and we're meant to like Feather), and Powerstrike later tells Proudmane to honor Quickmane's decision to allow a couple of lesbians live among them lol (And apparently we're supposed to like her because she stood up for Hover, so naturally what she says is /reasonable/sarcasm.) And don't get me started on how manes "have to do horrible things to survive" like what a fuckin joke.

I especially don't care for the trope of "These two people have similar trauma, but one is good and the other is evil!" It's like the concept of being a perfect victim -gags-

In real life, some people are just terrible people. They don't always have bad upbringings. They don't always have missing parental guidance. Heck, a lot of times they aren't even wronged by society. (There almost always seems to be a sense of entitlement tho.) There's no Hollywood-tier story to tell about them, sometimes they're simply just bad people. Parents included. And justifying why they are the way they are just makes it look like you're trying to win people over even tho what they do is not worthy of sympathy. And we wanted to do keep it fairly simple with Jasper. No tragedy, no nothing. He just is awful and manipulative. No matter how many second chances he's given. And I'm sure alot of us have known someone like that. There's no point in over-explaining him. And I'm glad it worked out. People sure do love hating him and he deserves it haha - Cat