#donnie pokes a lot of fun at himself mostly in regards to his neurodivergence

[qoldenskies]

You're so right that Leo is the main villain in CL, because like.....dude is already canonically implied to have a fundamental understanding of what makes people tick, and we've seen in that one episode with Big Mama that he is fully petty enough to play the long game of running circles around someone/just genuinely riling them up until he breaks them down or otherwise manages to get a response out of them (which I think was why he kind of fell back into little shit behavior during the movie for a time BUT WE CAN TALK ABOUT THAT LATER). He may not be as in tune with emotions as Mikey is, but he understands people.

And CL explores what would happen if you took the moralistic side of that personality trait away from him. I've always kind of maintained that Leo would genuinely make for a terrifying villain if he had less of a strict moral code, but CL!Leo really......showcases that to an extreme. He's really the first one to be overtly nasty towards Donnie, and even when Donnie questions it he immediately gaslight gatekeep girlbosses the shit out of him in such a ruthless way that it completely undermines his confidence from then on out. Watching him during the curse really was like not being able to tear your eyes away from a car wreck or something, it was beautiful and terrible all at the same time.

(Of course, now he's going to have to live the rest of his life knowing about how easily he could break someone down if he tried hard enough, and that's.....gotta be not entirely fun knowledge to be in possession of.)

YES EXACTLYYYYYYY..... like i know donnie loves villainous aesthetics and is occasionally a deranged little freak for fun but i still posit leo would be a LOT scarier as a villain. donnie may be capable of more but i think leo's opportunism and ability to psychologically profile people he barely knows (because he is not super acquainted with big mama at the point of many unhappy returns! they've met, like. what, twice? maybe three times?) and then use that to outwit and play them, even when big mama is established to be conniving,,, tell me that isnt a guy that would be capable of some utterly evil shit