#and she did! she did. she gave me a deliciously cruel and toxic and complicated duo and i WILL continue

[alisaint]

i love all ur posts on snowjanus omg i could hear u talk about them forever.

omg! thank you so much, anon! that's so kind of you to say. 🥹🫶 i've loved snowjanus, both as a ship (romantic & platonic) and separate characters, for a while now and i've been waiting for the movie to drop in hopes that more enthusiasts would roll in, so i've got a lot of pent-up thoughts about them lol. i can't write fics or make art, but i *can* ramble and rant like my life depends on it (as you can already see). i've got an essay about their friendship and the importance of sejanus in snow's life in my drafts and plenty of little headcanons that i plan on posting soon, too. and i'd love to hear your snowjanus thoughts, if you ever feel like sharing! :) if you've loved my posts thus far then i'm sure i'd love your ideas, too. 💙

[neuxue]

Who are some of your favorite villains?

Oh man, that is a question, anon. This is not a comprehensive list, because if I started listing every morally corrupt character who owns my soul, we’d be here all night. I’ve also taken a somewhat flexible definition of villainy at times, because…it’s complicated.

Also, spoilers for uh…most of the things listed; I’ve tried to keep it vague where possible, but the nature of villainous arcs means sometimes that doesn’t work. I’ve listed the work before the commentary, so if you don’t want spoilers for the thing, skip that section.

In no particular order…

Lord Asriel and Marisa Coulter (His Dark Materials): okay, so arguably they’re not villains, per se, but they each serve as antagonists at various points, they’re ambitious and proud beyond belief, and their morality is…well. Complicated. (Did I lose my mind at the ‘corruption and envy and lust for power. Cruelty and coldness. A vicious probing curiosity. Pure, poisonous toxic malice […] you are a cesspit of moral filth’ speech, from a corrupt angel to the one deceiving him? Abso-fucking-lutely. Also ‘I wanted you to come and join me. And I thought you would prefer a lie’). They’re also on this list because they were my Formative Villain Faves from the age of 7, which probably tells you something about who I was as a child and who I am as a person.

Nirai Kujen (Machineries of Empire). You really…could not write a villain more My Type if you tried. I’m not sure I could write a villain more My Type if I tried. Immortal, immoral mathematician who traded empathy for the ability to act on it, reconfigured a universe, and has lost most of his humanity but not his sense of beauty? I am but a simple woman. It helps that there is one hell of an enemies/allies/lovers dynamic going on between him and another character who is a different sort of my type, and it’s precisely my kind of Fucked Up Power Dynamics.

Moridin (Wheel of Time): ’Your logic destroyed you, didn’t it?’ I have a whole…thing about villains who see themselves as a kind of anti-Chosen One. I’ve written about it slightly more coherently elsewhere, but it comes down to a particular kind of despair and perception of inevitability, that they have no choice but to fight and that their role is always to lose, and that they will be cast and remembered as the monster, and so there is not reason not to be monstrous, but that doesn’t help with the self-hatred.

Semirhage (Wheel of Time): I could pick a lot of the Forsaken, and one or two other characters from WoT but I’ll stick to two here. Semirhage is all about pain without emotion, and I’m into it.

Malkar (Doctrine of Labyrinths): okay, he’s sort of in the category of scenery-chewing villain you love to hate, but I do love to hate him. And he causes so much delicious pain for the major characters; it’s almost like he’s running a charity service for those of us who like watching our favourite characters hurt.

Aaravos (The Dragon Prince): Listen. Listen. Trapped in a mirror, lost and alone and yet only letting that show in glimpses, possibly a Prometheus figure, graceful and beautiful and terrible, and that voice. Also the entire aesthetic. He is awful, and he is a delight, and he has that kind of cruelty that you can almost forget about - it’s as though he’s so into the villain aesthetic that you almost think it’s just an aesthetic, almost forget how capable he truly is of horrors, and so when he commits them it’s all the more thrilling.

Astrid & Athos Dane (Shades of Magic): The Dane twins deserved better. And by better I mean more screen time. They were criminally underused as villains and they had such potential. Vicious and cruel in a world where to be otherwise is to die, holding power by blood and pain, and chaining another …well, if not villain then certainly antagonist to their will, forcing him to serve the world he wants to save? Which brings us to…

Holland (Shades of Magic): Holland is…arguably not a villain but as an antagonist he is absolutely my type: powerful and ruthless and broken, and yet somehow still fighting; a character whose defining trait is his extraordinary will (and also self-hatred); a character who, literally in canon on the goddamn page, is told ‘no one suffers as beautifully as you’. (Plus he gets a redemption arc! That lets him remain complicated and doesn’t undermine his competence! And while it falls into redemption-equals-death, his death doesn’t come at the turning point in his arc the way it does for so many villains - he gets a whole road-trip first!)

Melisande Shahrizai (Kushiel): oh man. She’s such an interesting character, and the narrative does an excellent job of creating that link between her and Phedre - a really, really compelling and beautiful form of 'you know it’s a terrible idea but you can’t help yourself’. Also, she and Marisa Coulter should never be allowed to meet (by which I mean, I would read that fic). I’m also always here for a female villain who gets to be complicated, who has depth beyond just the typical 'femme fatale’ (though Melisande could certainly claim that title), and who is truly central to the story rather than there to look pretty.

Azula (Avatar: The Last Airbender): For all that I love Zuko, he doesn’t belong on this list, flexible as my definition of 'villain’ here is. Azula, on the other hand…sharp and vicious and a void of anger and fear inside, and if she has to feel that, then the world should too.

Zhao (Avatar: The Last Airbender): It’s at least 85% the voice, and the other 15% is the way he looks at Zuko (I know, I know, I’m sorry).

Rhaegar (A Song of Ice and Fire): Rhaegar’s villainy is…complicated, but he gets a spot here anyway. I have a niche subtype that can be defined as Sad Harpists (Rhaegar, Maglor, Deth, Morgon, Asmodean), so that’s part of it, as is the way he sets that aside out of what he perceives as necessity. But also most of his draw is how he’s this shadow hanging over the entire narrative and yet is himself a void in it; we see so little of him, know so little of him in truth, catch only glimpses and will never know what’s behind them, and every character sees him differently, and he has defined all their lives but we know almost nothing of his. I’m all about identity and choices, and the fact that his are so thoroughly obfuscated but have such a lasting impact on the entire world really does it for me.

Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade): Does she count as a villain? I suppose it depends entirely on whose point of view you’re watching from, which is kind of the point. Regardless, she is so much of what I want from a character, from an author who doesn’t do things halfway. Intelligent and ambitious and utterly ruthless, to both herself and the world she wants to burn down around her.

Delilah Briarwood (Critical Role Campaign 1): any character whose cry of agony and despair takes the form of 'I broke the world for us!’ is a character I’m going to like.

The Lone Power (Young Wizards): mostly because the traditional greeting, upon encountering them, is ’fairest and fallen, greetings and defiance’, and I am a simple woman. But also because they’re the Lucifer figure, in all senses - evil, perhaps, but mostly a necessary embodiment of entropy, one who must exist and must struggle and must always lose, beautiful and bright and terrible, and oh so proud.

Judas (Christian Mythology): He betrayed a guy with a kiss. What more do you want from me?

Rin (the Poppy War): By the end, she makes a very compelling case for herself as a Villain Protagonist and I, for one, am into it. Also, 'genocidal’ gets tossed around a lot when villains are discussed, often without cause, so uh…points to Rin for actually deserving it? (This book is strongly in the category of Not For Everyone, but if it’s your thing…weaponising gods.)

Loki (Marvel franchise & Norse Mythology): so, I have a complicated relationship with 'trickster’ figures and characters, in that I like the idea of them, but tend only to actually enjoy the ones who fall on the darker side of that line they all dance around. Loki, in pretty much all his incarnations, fits that mould.

Achilles (Greek Mythology): Is Achilles a villain? Depends who you ask. But he’s powerful and proud and doomed, and knows it. I just…heroes who go out in a blaze of glory are all well and good, but villains who step up to the flames of their own damnation?

Ruin (Mistborn): It’s funny; I really enjoy a lot of Sanderson’s stories, but by and large he tends not to write my type of villain (which I will forgive him because he gave me Kelsier). But Ruin…starts off like just another godlike semicorporeal villain with absurd power, as you do, and then gets significantly more interesting – and tragic – when you learn the full story. I have a thing for villains who chose their villainy out of necessity (with a side helping of hubris) and become that which they most hated or feared. The ones who look at a razor’s edge and think 'I can walk that’. Who look at power that will consume them and think 'I can control it’. It’s a very specific kind of… arrogant sacrifice, I suppose, and it never ends well and I’m into it every time.