#let villains be villains

[riverssongs13]

It was already established that Agatha is NOT a morally good character. We've been fed the information that she traded her son's life for the Darkhold, that she is a coven killer, and that she's Jolene, among other things. The Nicky for the Darkhold part may have been false, but that does not diminish the fact that Agatha is an atrocious, terrible person who killed countless people.

Given the knowledge that its presumable she did it to keep Rio busy does not excuse the fact that she did kill them witches. And of course she will have zero remorse over that, because again we're presuming she did it for Nicky.

So why are we suddenly finding issues with how remorseless Agatha is? Did we not spend 8 episodes fawning over the hot lesbian MILF who is unapologetically chaotic and murderous and whose ex is literally Death? Sorry but I don't see where the disconnect is.

"difficult to root for a character who takes advantage of people’s kindness or desperation, and shows zero remorse for it" Uhm again, Agatha is not a good person. She does not need some redemption arc that would cleanse her of centuries scamming and killing all those witches. She's written perfectly as she is.

The montage of Agatha's time with Nicky was not some form of penitence for all the horrible things Agatha has done throughout the centuries. It was just showing how her story started, and how it connects to the events of "now". It even has the "time lapse" of Agatha singing The Ballad with her false covens, which ultimately leads to the basement version. It was not "Agatha is actually not a bad person, see? She loved her son."

"Agatha is a horrible coven killer scammer grifter conman" AND "Agatha loved Nicky so much she pleaded with Death to not take him" are not mutually exclusive statements. They can be and are true at the same time.

Can we please appreciate "bad" characters for who they are? Not everyone needs to be "good". It's okay to like bad characters and its okay for them to be the protagonists. Loving Agatha for being the murderous, remorseless cunt that she is, is okay. Let villains be villains.

[oakthcrn]

When people on the clock app keep calling sauron morally gray, it makes my eye twitch. No. He is evil, he is the master deceiver. He does not care for anything but his own agenda. Booktok girlies are watching it and thinking he can be redeemed, no. He's not fucking Rhysand, he will kill you without a second thought.

[tumbleofdorks]

Plot happens and people really be like, "My villain blorbo is... bad? 🥺 This is lazy writing and the writers should be ashamed!"

Like, babes, what did you think was gonna happen?

[shadowsandshapes]

I don't know who needs to hear this But if you wanna write something that doesn't follow the popular perception of a character do it

One iteration of a character doesn't cease to exist when another is written about

You wanna ✨babygirlify✨ this villain in one fic and then have them burn down society in another? Go for it! Those ideas can coexist~

[kaleidoscope-vol2]

Anytime a thought enters my mind to tune into season 2, the universe sends me a sign not to.

[miss-nerd-alert]

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: sometimes all you need is an edgelord who’s having fun.

How come we can't just have villains anymore

[ditzybat]

i love the headcannon that both tim and cass look scarily alike, to the point they could be twins.

like they both share the same general lithe build, they’re the same short height, cass has a short bob while tim has his baby mullet, their training is similar due to their backgrounds with lady shiva and the loa, and (depending on your headcanon) both waisan- so i can definitely see instances where they’re confused for each other or where they mess with everyone around them.

cass on patrol in red robin gear so tim can go on a date with bernard:

random thugs seconds away from being one hit k.o’d: yo since when did red robin start melting into the shadows like an eldritch horror?

jason: hey tim -

cass: wrong.

jason: no, im pretty sure you’re tim, i gave you that scar right there in your neck

cass: nu-uh, this is from cain

jason:

cass:

jason: well this got awkward…

steph hugging tim from behind: hey babe

tim: wrong wayne

steph: ew, i should’ve known, your ass isnt nearly as —

tim walking away with his fingers in his ears: lalalalala im not listening to you

damian: i think you’re the only one in this family i respect

tim who has been silently hanging out with him for the past 3 hours: aw thanks damian, i’ve come to love you like a brother too

damian: drake? i thought you were cassandra, my apologies, i retract my previous statement

tim: don’t care, you love me, don’t try to deny it

lady shiva hugging both tim and cass: my beautiful twins, such well trained weapons, unfortunate that you both ended up with cain

bruce pulling his children back: tim isnt yours…

shiva: well that cant be right, he’s s the spitting image of my sister carolyn, and that birth was far too painful to only produce one small child

tim: woah full circle, my drag-sona is called caroline, maybe you are my mom, i wouldn’t put it past janet drake to adopt

bruce: tim no, you’re not even the same type of asian

cass: too late, we’re blood

shiva: see!

[novaviella]

Yeah, hi, hello, just a quick note for everyone.

You don’t have to uwu babygirl-ify villains in order to like them.

It’s not a moral failing to like complex (or just plain fucking evil) characters as they are.

Characters in books and in other media aren’t real and are not a reflection of your morals. Fiction is fiction which is not real. You are (presumably) human and are real. It’s fine. Like the villain. Be a villain fucker. Idgaf.

But please, stop watering down characters or just outright changing/denying canon characters to make your liking them “morally correct”.

side note: this does not include changing character(s) for things like fanfiction. Fanfiction is transformative and therefore you can do whatever the fuck you want with the character(s) in that context.

K, bye ✌🏻

[bishy437]

he won

bonus:

[theballadofmars]

I love how mqf's oficial description is something like: a good heart who wants to help others but then you read the novel and his reaction to lqg trapping ten infected men who are crying in panic is "great now I can start to work in my experiments with decomposed people to find a cure" and gets out a lot of needles, which makes the man cry even harder.

Even if we only get bits of the other Cang Qiong sect leader's we can reach the conclusion that no one there is normal, sqq is just biased.

[itzitxou]

Taking care of your spy is not easy but he's trying very hard 🩵🐹❄️

[mielplante]

on a side-quest with the king !

[conquerthenight]

I really don’t understand the whole thing where people feel they have to pretend a villain did absolutely nothing wrong and that they’re a perfect moral example in order to like them. Isn’t the point of liking villains liking them BECAUSE of their misdeeds, not in spite of them? Not saying I like Rebecca, because I really don’t, but if you do like her you don’t have to pretend she was the misunderstood victim.

Every time people try to girlboss-ify Rebecca de Winter it takes 3 years off my life.

[artsymeeshee]

[sweaters-and-vertigo]

i’m bringing this up again because my friend tried to rationalize ward’s actions by saying “john garrett manipulated/indoctrinated him” “ward thought he owed him everything” NAH

the one good thing garrett did for ward was break him out of prison, which certainly wasn’t selfless. anything that garrett does after that inspires no loyalty. leaving him stranded in the forest, ordering him to kill his dog, constantly ridiculing him.

garrett even says repeatedly that ward owes him nothing, that ward earned everything on his own, and that garrett didn’t give him anything. he was completely honest with ward about everything and always gave ward a choice. ward constantly chooses his loyalty to garrett over doing the right thing. and it’s not even blind loyalty, because garrett never lied to him… it’s more like habitual loyalty.

at one point in the show ward literally BEGS garrett to give him an order. any order. that’s pathetic, and i love it.

if ward was smart, he would have taken the dog and left garrett when he had the chance. he proved that he could survive on his own and garrett said that no one was looking for him. he could’ve been free, with a sweet doggy dog, but instead he decided to work for a freaking nazi. this was the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals.

i’m rewatching agents of shield and looking at old media from when it aired and i just gotta say….. ward apologists are some of most annoying people on earth.

like don’t get me wrong, he’s an interesting character. but he’s a villain. let him be a villain and just enjoy it!! stop trying to make him this poor abandoned baby in the woods that needs protection. he dropped fitzsimmons out of a plane, he tortured bobbi. he willingly followed an evil man without caring about the consequences, then blamed him for all of his own actions and choices.

he’s weak minded, sadistic, & arrogant, which makes him a bad person, but a really fun villain.

[sunderwight]

Bingqiu AU where Luo Binghe's the chosen village sacrifice to the evil deity who lives up the mountain.

Normally the village sends maidens, but they've more or less run out of expendable girls of the right age and, ahem, "virtues". So of course Luo Binghe's early life bad luck kicks in. In the wake of his mother's death there's no one to really care about what happens to him, he's fairly pretty, and the village leaders decide that if they dress him up like a girl the teenaged homeless kid should pass well enough. And hey, y'know, he's probably got a hard life ahead for him anyway -- dying in a brothel of some venereal disease or on the streets of exposure or starvation. At least as a sacrifice, everyone else gets to benefit from his loss! And the kid will get added to a shrine and be remembered as a hero! If anything, he should be happy about this!

Binghe is not happy about this.

But he's also a skinny underfed nobody who is easily overpowered, dressed up like a bride, and tied to a post. So. Not much he can do but wait for the evil deity to come and do whatever horrible thing he's gonna do to him.

Meanwhile, Shen Yuan is pretty sure he's been isekai'd into the over-powered hero of some kind of supernatural adventure story? He's not totally sure because he doesn't recognize the setting, but the signs are there. He's got a shrine-like base of operations (though it seems to have become corrupted/ruined, probably he has to restore it somehow), he has a very resilient and handsome new body with spiritual energy of some kind flowing through him, and a very clearly magical sword. Plus lots of neat starter powers! Though it feels like he has other abilities that have been blocked somehow? Probably he has to level up in order to access them.

When he treks out of his "base" and finds what seems to be a distressed maiden, he takes it for his beginner hero mission. The girl claims that she's been doomed to be sacrificed to an evil god. That sounds a little above Shen Yuan's pay grade for dealing with, so he unties her and decides that they had better just get out of the whole region altogether. He already packed up anything useful from his base, anticipating he might get caught up in an adventure once he left, so they follow the river away from the settlement until they reach another one.

While they travel, Luo Binghe tells Shen Yuan about the cursed deity, Shen Qingqiu, who was cast out of the heavens for slaughtering one of his brethren and has apparently being do-who-knows what to maidens from the local village in exchange for his "protection" ever since. Sounds like a real asshole! And also mid-level boss type bad guy at least. Shen Yuan hopes he doesn't have to fight him, but he probably will.

Thank goodness he found Binghe, though! Clearly the helpful little sister type! He's definitely going to require her assistance if he's going to figure out how to navigate this world and level up his skills enough to take on a god.